"Give?"

"For a while. As long as it suits me." She extended a finger: God to Adam. "Let there be life."

He began to laugh in her again.

"And the monk?"

"What about him?"

"Is he still with you?"

The sergeant shook Carys' head.

"I killed him, when he'd taught me everything he could." Her hands reached out and strangled the air. "I just throttled him one night, when he was sleeping. Of course he woke when he felt my grip around his throat. But he didn't struggle; he didn't make the slightest attempt to save himself." The sergeant was leering as he described the act. "He just let me murder him. I could scarcely believe my luck; I'd been planning the thing for weeks, terrified that he'd read my thoughts. When he went so easily, I was ecstatic-" The leer suddenly vanished. "Stupid," he murmured in her throat. "So, so stupid."

"Why?"

"I didn't see the trap he'd set. Didn't see how he'd planned it all along, nurtured me like a son knowing that I'd be his executioner when the time came. I never realized-not once-that I was just his tool. He wanted to die. He wanted to pass his wisdom"-the word was pronounced derisively-"along to me, and then have me put an end to him."

"Why did he want to die?"

"Don't you see how terrible it is to live when everything around you perishes? And the more the years pass the more the. thought of death freezes your bowels, because the longer you avoid it the worse you imagine it must be? And you start to long-oh, how you long-for someone to take pity on you, someone to embrace you and share your terrors. And, at the end, someone to go into the dark with you."

"And you chose Whitehead," Marty said, almost beneath his breath, "the way you were chosen; by chance."

"Everything is chance; and so nothing is," the sleeping man pronounced; then laughed again, at his own expense, bitterly. "Yes, I chose him, with a game of cards. And then I made a bargain with him."

"But he cheated you."

Carys nodded her head, very slowly, her hand inscribing a circle on the air.

"Round and round," she said. "Round and round."

"What will you do now?"

"Find the pilgrim. Wherever he is, find him! Take him with me. I swear won't let him escape me. I'll take him, and show him."

"Show him what?"

No answer came. In its place, she sighed, stretching a little, and moving her head from left to right and back again. With a shock of recognition Marty realized that he was still watching her repeat Mamoulian's movements: that ail the time the European had been asleep, and now, his energies repleted, he was preparing to wake. He snapped his previous question out again, determined to have an answer to his last, vital inquiry.

"Show him what?"

"Hell," Mamoulian said. "He cheated me! He squandered all my teachings, all my knowledge, threw it away for greed's sake, for power's sake, for the life of the body. Appetite! All gone for appetite. All my precious love, wasted!" Marty could hear, in his litany, the voice of the puritan-monk's voice, perhaps?-the rage of a creature who wanted the world purer than it was and lived in torment because it saw only filth and flesh sweating to make more flesh, more filth. What hope of sanity in such a place? Except to find a soul to share the torment, a lover to hate the world with. Whitehead had been such a partner. And now Mamoulian was being true to his lover's soul: wanting, at the end, to g0 into death with the only other creature he had ever trusted. "We'll go to nothing..." he breathed, and the breath was a promise. "All of us, go to nothing. Down! Down!"

He was waking. There was no time left for further questions, however curious Marty was.

"Carys."

"Down! Down!"

"Carys! Can you hear me? Come out of him! Quickly!"

Her head rolled on her neck.

"Carys!"

She grunted.

"Quickly!"

In Mamoulian's head the patterns had begun again, as enchanting as ever. Spurts of light that would become pictures in a while, she knew. What would they be this time? Birds, flowers, trees in blossom. What a wonderland it was.

"Carys."

The voice of someone she had once known was calling her from some very distant place. But so were the lights. They were resolving themselves even now. She waited, expectantly, but this time they weren't memories that burst into view-

"Carys! Quickly!"

-they were the real world, appearing as the European opened his lids. Her body tensed. Marty reached for her hand, and seized it. She exhaled, slowly, the breath coming out as a thin whine between her teeth, and suddenly she was awake to her imminent danger. She flung her thought out of the European's head and back across the miles to Kilburn. For an agonized instant she felt her will falter, and she was falling backward, back into his waiting head. Terrified, she gasped like a stranded fish while her mind fought for propulsion.

Marty dragged her to a standing position, but her legs buckled. He held her up with his arms wrapped around her.

"Don't leave me," he whispered into her hair. "Gentle God, don't leave me."

Suddenly, her eyes flickered open.

"Marty," she mumbled. "Marty."

It was her: he knew her look too well for the European to deceive him.

"You came back," he said.

They didn't speak for several minutes, simply held on to each other. When they did talk, she had no taste for retelling what she'd experienced. Marty held his curiosity in check. It was enough to know they had no Devil on their backs.

Just old humanity, cheated of love, and ready to pull down the world on its head.

So perhaps they had a chance of life after all. Mamoulian was a man, for all his unnatural faculties. He was two hundred years old, perhaps, but what were a few years between friends?

The priority now was to find Papa and warn him of what Mamoulian intended, then plan as best they could against the European's offensive. If Whitehead wouldn't help, that was his prerogative. At least Marty would have tried, for old times' sake. And in the light of the murder of Charmaine and Flynn, Whitehead's crimes against Marty diminished to sins of discourtesy. He was easily the lesser of two evils.

As to the how of finding Whitehead, the only lead Marty had was the strawberries. It had been Pearl who'd told him that Old Man Whitehead had never let a day go by without strawberries. Not in twenty years, she'd claimed. Wasn't it possible, then, that he'd continued to indulge himself, even in hiding? It was a slender line of inquiry. But appetite, as Marty had so recently learned, was at the crux of this conundrum.

He tried to persuade Carys to come with him, but she was wrung out to the point of collapse. Her journeys, she said, were over; she'd seen too much for one day. All she wanted now was the sunshine island, and on that point she would not be moved. Reluctantly, Marty left her to her fix, and went off to discuss strawberries with Mr. Halifax of Holborn.

Left alone, Carys found forgetfulness very quickly. The sights she had witnessed in Mamoulian's head were dismissed to the dim past from which they'd come. The future, if there was to be one, was ignored here, where there was only tranquility. She bathed under a sun of nonsenses, while outside a soft rain began.