Day four.
As he rose past up ninety, the laboratory floor, on his way to the residential floor, Harris heard his name called. He pulled the elevator's lever back to neutral and beyond, bringing the car down level with up ninety.
Jean-Pierre waited there and yanked the exterior cage open. Harris did the same for the interior cage.
Jean-Pierre held a folded paper packet out to him. "Almost missed you. Gods, you stink." He looked over Harris' boxing shorts and the towel around his shoulders. "You're spending far too much time in the gymnasium."
"I just get in the way up here." Harris accepted the packet; it was heavier than he expected. "What's this?"
"You know, there's a shooting range on the same floor."
"I know. Noriko offered to teach me to shoot."
Jean-Pierre beamed. "Did she? I made the same offer to Gaby." His face fell. "Not the only offer I made. I haven't quite persuaded her to bed with me. Do you know the trick?"
Harris glared. "You could kill yourself. Play on her sympathy."
"Ah."
Harris tried to let go of the sudden flush of anger. "So what is this?"
"Your pay, of course."
"Pay?" Harris popped the wax seal on the packet. Out from the folded paper slid a dozen libs, the big silver coins Harris had seen before, plus a few of the smaller silver decs and copper pennies.
"Every half-moon on the chime. Doc pays all his associates and consultants while they're working with him. It doesn't do to accrue indebtedness; there are devisers out there who could take advantage of it. So he pays off as fast as he accrues." He pulled the elevator exterior grate shut again.
Harris hefted the coins. "Well, that settles it. I'm going out."
"Out of the building? Not a good idea."
"You're damned right, it's not. But neither is staying here until I blow up from boredom." Harris pulled the interior grate closed. "I think I need to find a tailor. And do you know where Banwite's Talk-Boxes and, uh, Electrical Eccentricities is?"
Jean-Pierre looked surprised. "Brian Banwite? Doc sometimes uses him for specialty work. Good man. He's on Damablanca in Drakshire. Walk six blocks east, take the uptown underground to the Damablanca station. And look for Brannach the Seamer on the same street. My tailor."
"I'll do that, thanks." Harris sent the elevator into motion again.
Forty-five minutes later, he was clean and presentable, but instead of heading straight for the lobby he descended only one floor. Up ninety-one was where Doc kept his offices . . . and his library. Odds were good that he'd find her there.
Gaby was in her usual place, in the stuffed chair at the end of the smaller of the two long tables, where the light was best, and as usual she had a stack of books beside her. She didn't notice him as he entered; he silently closed the door behind him and studied her.
She was in the jeans she'd worn from the grim world and a flowing yellow blouse they'd given her here. She bent over her books, intent on them, her hair half-concealing her face.
So many times he'd seen her in just that pose. He found that his mouth was dry. It was suddenly impossible to look away from her. Impossible to accept that he couldn't just walk up to her, take her head in his hands, twining his fingers into the glossy heaviness of her hair, tilting up her chin to kiss him . . .
She brushed her hair back from her face and caught sight of him. She looked up, startled. "Hi."
"Hi."
"I haven't seen much of you lately. What have you been up to?"
"Actually, I was just obsessing about your hair."
She winced. "Harris."
"Yeah, I know. I shouldn't. I didn't mean to upset you."
"It's all right." He could tell from her expression that it wasn't. "Jean-Pierre was just looking for you."
"He found me. He forced a small fortune into my unwilling hands."
"So you're all dressed up to go out and spend it?"
He settled into the seat next to her. "Yeah, basically. I'm going to pay off a debt, then find a tailor and commission some blue jeans."
Her eyes got round. "I never thought of that. What a great idea! If I give you some of my money and my measurements—"
"Sure."
She tore a page from the back of the notebook she was writing in and began scribbling. Harris saw that she did already know the measurement system the people of Neckerdam used—a standard value called a "pace" broken down into fifty "fingers."
He glanced over the books she was browsing through. Events of the Reign of Bregon and Gwaeddan in Novimagos, Volume One. The Full History of the World Crisis. "Catching up on history?"
She slid the piece of paper and several of her own coins to him. "Yes, and you should be, too. Noriko told me a little about the recent history of the fair world, and it was too strange—I had to check up on some things."
"Oh, God, the journalist is running amok again." He folded the paper and tucked it and the coins away. "Things such as what?"
"Such as . . . about twenty years ago, in the Old World, which is what they usually call Europe, they had this deal called the Conclave of Masallia. A lot of the kings of the Old World swore undying affection for each other. A mutual protection pact. Then one of them flipped out and invaded his neighbor. Everybody was obliged by the treaty to side with both of them, so they sort of split down the middle and everybody attacked everybody. And since they all owned colonies in the New World and in their versions of Africa and Asia, pretty soon half the planet was at war. Sound familiar?"
"Like World War Two?"
"Well, closer to World War One, actually." She tapped another volume, Mechanics of Systemic Economic Collapse, the first one Harris had seen with a title that wouldn't have looked strange in one of his own college courses. "And here. About five years ago, the economic alliance of the League of Ardree, most of the nations of what should be North America, had a crash. For the last long while, they'd gone increasingly industrial, whole nations turning to production and importing almost all their food. Then there was a trade glut, a repayment problem at the international level, foreclosings, treasuries folding, an economic collapse affecting pretty much the whole world. The fair world is still recovering from it. You see it?"
"History was never my strong point. But you're trying to draw a parallel with the Great Depression."
"I sure am."
"I think you're reaching. A war followed by an economy going bust and you're talking about history repeating itself. That's pretty thin."
"Okay, try this. In the grim world, about the time we were having the Depression, Japan was at war with China."
"So?"
"So Noriko told me yesterday that her people, the Wo, are involved in a pointless war with the nations of Shanga. I looked them up on the map. Any guesses as to what Wo and Shanga correspond to?"
"I already know." Harris frowned.
"So it sounds like another mystery for Doc to go funny about. Like why English and Low Cretanis are the same language. Between that, and the routine with the guns and pepper gas and my wristwatch being all twisted when they got here when nothing else was, he's chewing on the furniture in frustration. How about you?"
"You know I don't chew furniture."
She gave him an exasperated look.
"Okay, okay, it's weird." He rose. "Did you find a Civil War?"
"War of the Schism, eighty years ago. The League of Ardree split into two pieces, basically north against south."
"American Revolution."
"The Great Revolt, about a hundred and fifty years back. When the League of Ardree was formed. The people of Cretanis call it the Ingratitude."
"Jesus."
"The Carpenter Cult."
"I meant, `Jesus H. Christ, you're freaking me out.' Okay?"
"Sorry. I got carried away."
Harris stood. He did some mental calculations. "I don't know whether you ought to tell Doc about this."
"Why not?"
"Because if you're right, events here are sort of following the history of the grim world, and we have a general idea of things that are going to be happening over the next forty or fifty years."
"So?"
"So we can predict the fair world's version of World War Two. Should we?"
She frowned, considering.
"I'll think about it, too. But first I'm going to order us some jeans."
Once he was gone, Gaby finished up with the broader histories and returned to another subject: Duncan Blackletter.
Reports of him appeared occasionally in the newspapers, and Doc's library had scores of bound volumes of crumbling periodicals. Of course, there tended to be a problem figuring out when things happened.
By Novimagos reckoning, the current year was 28 R.B.G.—twenty-eighth year of the reign of Bregon and Gwaeddan, the current king and queen. Before these rulers were Gwaeddan's parents Dallan and Tangwen, who ruled forty-eight years: 1 R.D.T. to 48 R.D.T. Each royal reign reset the year to one, and each sovereign nation had a different chronology. Acadia, to the north, was in its eighteenth year under Jean-Pierre's widower father, King Henri IV—abbreviated 18 H.IV.R. It was maddening.
Still, there were a few benchmarks. Years were often translated to a chronology dated from the union of the nation of Cretanis, 1435 years ago. Most historical volumes translated one date from each reign to this dating system, usually referred to as "Scholars' Years." But not even Cretanis used that dating system routinely; they were currently in year 248 of the reign of their current queen, Maeve X. Gaby marvelled at her longevity.
Duncan Blackletter first showed up in Scholars' Year 1368, nearly seventy years ago. A young man then, leader of a gang, he was tried for the train hijacking of a gold shipment from Neckerdam to Nyrax. The gold was not recovered, and Duncan and some of his men escaped the next year. The dim photographs of him showed a lean, handsome, arrogant face; Gaby could recognize him beneath the years of the face Duncan wore today.
Over the years, Duncan's plans became more ambitious and deadly. He constructed a metal-hulled ship with a ram and used it to pirate shipping routes; it was finally sunk by the navy of Nordland, but he escaped. He exterminated an entire community in Castilia because its rulers would not share their scholarship with him. He used his growing fortune to finance the development of new and bigger explosives, then used them to blackmail entire cities. In Scholars' Year 1398, he nearly bought the kingship of the southern nation of New Acadia through political corruption in its capital, Lackderry. Two years later, he emerged as one of the forces behind the development of glitter-bright, the narcotic liquor that first appeared in the faraway land of Shanga.
It was then that Doc first appeared. Gaby found reports of a brilliant engineer from Cretanis named Desmond MaqqRee building a bridge across the River Madb in the Cretanis capital, Beldon. Doc had uncovered and thwarted a plot by Blackletter to assassinate the Queen. Gaby noted with interest some mild criticism in the newspapers that he had not been knighted for his efforts. This was thirty-five years ago, so she had to revise Doc's estimated age up again, to sixty or higher.
Not long after, there was an obituary notice for a Deirdriu MaqqRee. A suicide, she'd jumped from one of the high towers of Doc's bridge. She was survived only by her husband . . . Desmond. Doc.
There was no explanation, no other account of the death, no hint as to what Deirdriu might have been like or why she killed herself. Gaby fumed over the incomplete picture she was assembling. She kept at it.
Duncan had invested in munitions and reaped big profits during the Colonial War between Castilia and the nations of the New World. A few years later, Scholars' Year 1412, he was at it again. There were hints that he manipulated the kings of the Old World into the war called the World Crisis. The same year, the papers reported Doc refusing a commission in the army of Cretanis and being exiled from that nation; he accepted citizenship in Novimagos.
He was by this time appearing in the news as leader of the Sidhe Foundation, accompanied by an Acadian princess and other like-minded people; they settled disputes, turned the tides of some battles, and followed the trail of Duncan Blackletter across the landscape of the Old World.
Then it was Scholars' Year 1415. Obituaries for Duncan Blackletter, Whiskers Okerry, Micah Cremm, and Siobhan Damvert—the last survived by her grieving prince of a husband, only two years away from becoming king himself, and her grim twelve-year-old son Jean-Pierre.
The end of Duncan Blackletter . . . until his botched plan to kidnap Gaby resulted in Harris finding the fair world.
Gaby sat back from her studies. With so much history between Doc and Duncan, Duncan and Jean-Pierre, there was no way they were all going to emerge from it alive. She feared for Harris and her new friends.
Harris kept his fedora low on his face and left the Monarch Building by one of its side exits. He tried to use reflections in storefront windows to spot anyone who might be following, but couldn't spot anyone. If no one were following now, and if the device in his pocket were working right, then he'd be all right . . . but he felt more secure for having the hard, heavy lump pressed against his kidney, the revolver Noriko had given him.
Jean-Pierre's directions were on target. Damablanca turned out to be a narrow, winding street with two-way traffic moving between tall residential buildings of brown brick; only at street level, where storefronts were crowded with neon and painted signs, was there any color along the street.
And then, a few blocks later, there was Banwite's Talk-Boxes and Electrical Eccentricities, offering enough color and motion for any two normal blocks of storefronts. The shop's name was picked out in gleaming green neon Celtic knotwork letters and surrounded by a gigantic yellow neon oval; just outside the border of that oval ran a bronze model train, upside down when it turned to chug along the underside of the sign, always sending gray fog from its smokestack floating up into the sky. Like most of the ground-floor shops in Neckerdam, Banwite's had no windows at street level, but in the windows up one, Harris glimpsed dozens of talk-boxes and moving mechanical toys.
He shoved his way in through the front door, heard the clang of the cowbell hanging overhead, and walked in on a gadget-freak's vision of paradise. The shop interior was like a repeat of the exterior, only more crowded. In one corner was a gadget that looked like a diving suit's arms and legs sticking out of a water heater. A model aircraft with articulated pterodactyl-like wings hung from the ceiling. A grandfather clock with moving figurines instead of a pendulum behind the glass belled six, hours off from the correct time.
Brian Banwite stood behind the massive black-and-gold cash register at the main counter. "Help you, son?"
"You can take my money." Harris set a lib in front of him.
"Always glad to oblige. But you have to take something for it."
"I did that already." Harris lifted his hat. "Remember, about a week back, I stole a ride in the back of your truck—lorry?"
"That was you!" Banwite scooped up the coin and pocketed it. "Done, then. I knew you were good for it. You seem to have done well for yourself." He shot Harris a suspicious look. "You haven't fallen in with bad eamons, have you? No gangs, no glitter-bright?"
"A sort of gang, yes. The Sidhe Foundation."
Banwite sighed, relieved.
"You have a neat shop. Do you make all this, or just sell it?"
"Half and half. If it's electrical or mechanical, I can make it for you. Ask Doc."
"I'll do that." For politeness' sake, Harris took a walk around the shop, marveling at dioramas of moving figures, flashlights that were so small by fair world standards they looked almost normal to him, folding knives with extra tools like half-hearted Swiss Army knives. Then he tipped his hat to Banwite on the way out and went looking for the tailor's.
It was two blocks further on, much less conspicuous than Banwite's. The owner, Brannach, was a comfortably overweight pale man with bright eyes and big, blindingly bright teeth. He'd never heard of denim, but showed Harris his selection of materials.
One of them, demasalle— "That's more properly serge de Masallia, of course"—was the right stuff, but was available only in red and green.
"Can you dye it blue, like that?" Harris pointed to the one blue garment in the shop.
"With ease." The tailor looked uncomfortable with Harris' color choice, but said nothing about it.
So, half an hour later, poorer by about a third of his coins, Harris left. Three sets of jeans for Gaby, three for himself, ready within a few days; he'd have to pay the other half then.
It was just two errands, but he'd pulled them off without any of Doc's associates leading him around by the hand, without screwing up three ways from Sunday. He smiled at the skyscrapers of Neckerdam and turned back toward the Monarch Building.
Gaby accepted Alastair's proffered hand and stepped up out of the car. She looked dubiously at the mound of a building. "And these guys are supposed to be able to figure me out."
Doc joined them on the sidewalk. "If anyone can."
The building was a mountain of brick. This was no accident of design, no passing similarity. The structure was ten stories tall and took up an entire block. It rose in gradual, irregular curves, slopes, and cliff faces. Bushes grew from outcroppings—and from planters set outside the many lit windows. The shutters across the closed windows blended in with the surrounding brick in color and texture.
At street level, the doorway into the building was flanked by bearded men sitting against the brick front. One was gray haired, the other brown haired and much younger. Both wore stained garments in dull brown and green. Their eyes were focused on some distant point invisible to Gaby; they did not react to her or to the pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk.
The three of them entered the building's dark, low-ceilinged lobby. "What's their problem?" Gaby asked.
"Glitter-bright," Doc said. "Highly addictive, very destructive. It's illegal in most kingdoms, but sold everywhere. That's where crime makes a lot of its coin."
Several old men and women sat on the lobby's sofas, many of them reading newspapers, some playing chess. A set of wooden doors in the far wall vibrated with the music playing beyond. It was much like the music Gaby had heard several times in the fair world, but she had the impression that it was wilder, more powerful.
Doc's hand closed around her arm, bringing her up short. She looked around in surprise. She was halfway across the lobby, halfway to that set of doors, and couldn't remember getting that far.
"We don't want to go in there," Doc said.
Wrong, he was wrong. She could feel something pulling at her from beyond the doors, something very demanding and exciting. "Yes, I do. Why shouldn't I? What's in there?"
"A dance. A dance from the Old Country. Very potent." He drew her toward another doorway; she could see stairs through it.
She hung back, trying to pull free. "What's wrong with just taking a look?"
He smiled thinly. "Nobody just looks, Gaby. You join in. And if we were to join in . . . well, I would have a very good time. Alastair would probably die. And you would become pregnant."
"Oh, not likely. Even if I were interested, which I'm not, I'm on the pill. It's the wrong time of the month anyway."
He shook his head. "None of that matters."
"I'll just take a peek." She tried to pull away, but his grip was like metal. Protesting, she found herself pulled into the narrow stairwell and up dimly lit wooden stairs.
After a couple of flights, she realized that her breathing was slowing. It startled her; she must have been practically panting before. And the appeal of the dance going on beyond those closed doors was suddenly lost on her.
She gulped. "Doc, I'm sorry. I don't know what got into me—"
"I do. Don't concern yourself. It's the usual reaction. One good reason why people with a lot of grimworld blood shouldn't come into neighborhoods where the old customs are kept."
"On the other hand," Alastair said, "when I'm old and I've decided to die, this is the place and that's the way I'll do it."
After eight flights, Gaby swore to herself that she was going to start running again. And that she'd never again wear the damned heeled pumps Noriko had found for her. Her toes felt as though mechanics had been at them with pliers and her back was already giving her trouble.
In the narrow hallway up nine, Doc knocked on an unmarked door. It opened to reveal a woman who couldn't have been more than three and a half feet tall. She was middle-aged and heavily built, with a round, florid, happy face. She wore a bright red shawl and a dark green dress. Gaby decided that she looked like a large rose sprouting from an unusually hefty stem.
She beamed up at them. "Doc."
"Hedda." Doc stooped to kiss her. "I bring you Gabriela Donohue and Doctor Alastair Kornbock."
"Gods' graces on you." She stepped back to allow them entry. "You are the young lady with the troublesome Gift?"
"I'm afraid so." Gaby decided the woman sounded German.
"We will unwrap it for you."
The flat beyond was dim, its inadequate electric lamps illuminating age-darkened walls, but clean. Chairs, tables and sofas were drawn away from the center of the room, and a rug was rolled up against one wall. A dented platter painted with apples sat in the floor's center, loaded down with little pots and jars.
It was all very homey and charming, but there was something about the place. The shadows were thick against the walls and seemed darker than they should have been; Gaby fancied that she saw deeper blackness rising and ebbing within them. She smoothed down the hair on her arms where it tried to stand.
Hedda shut the door behind them. "We will do this very slow, with tradition and care. But first, there is something important I must know."
"What is it?"
"Would you like xioc? Tea? There is fresh pastry."
Kneeling, Gaby read the words aloud, the ones Hedda had spelled out phonetically on the piece of paper before her. She kept her thoughts focused on the words, on the smell of jasmine incense, on her contented state of mind.
Around her was the conjurer's circle she and Hedda had made together. The diminutive woman had told her to hold each piece of chalk, each little pot of paint. Only when Gaby had warmed it in her hands would Hedda take the item and begin working on the circle. The outer circle was of yellow chalk and an unbroken stream of yellow sand; the inner, the same but in red. The symbols between, carefully chalked in by Hedda and then painted by Gaby, each in a different color. It had taken nearly an entire bell to complete.
She reached the end of the last page. "Think of him as a smiling man," Hedda had said. "The eyes of a wise man, the smile of a lover. Light shines from his face. Call to the light. Beg it. Ask for the wisdom behind it."
She did, effortlessly holding the image in her thoughts, relaxed, clear-minded, waiting.
Nothing.
She heard Doc sigh. She opened her eyes. He and Alastair stared at her from their chairs outside the conjuration circle; Doc shook his head.
She looked at Hedda, unhappy. "I did it wrong."
"No, sweet. You did it right. Every step true." The woman looked apologetic. "What confused Doc confuses me. I could feel your strength when we put the circle together. You have Gift. I wish I had your strength. But it does not come out."
"You're having the exact same results someone like Harris or Noriko would," Doc said. "But unlike them, you're full of the Gift. Your well of power just seems somehow capped."
"Sorry."
"Don't be." He rested his chin on his hand and stared morosely at her. "We've learned some things, today and in my tests. We know what you can't do."
"Such as?" Her tone was sharp.
"Don't be annoyed."
"I just don't like being told what I can't do."
"So I gather. Gaby, your Gift doesn't follow the traditional patterns. You have no Good Eye; you can't see the residue of devisements. You don't see the future. You don't see events imbedded in the objects that have experienced them. There's no sign of a cord between you and some twin, real or mystic. You can't melt your flesh and reshape it."
"People do that?"
"Not many. It's a dying art."
Hedda smiled. "Which is sad. It can be such fun."
"Today, we learned that you can't project your voice to the ears of the gods. You make no links between objects or places, even with conjuration circles. You do not weave patterns of your Gift into things you make with your hands. You do not send your sight away from your body. You do not affect fire, water, air, or earth."
"Does that leave anything?"
Doc didn't answer. Alastair said, "Well, yes, countless things. But they are so rare, and often—I will be frank—so irrelevant that there are no tests devised for them." He gave her an apologetic smile. "For example, a few years ago, I tested a woman who showed sign of Gift but didn't follow the usual patterns. I found that her Gift was directed inside her. All her sons grew up to look just like her father. Identical, to the last mole and birthmark. Except for the one who looked like Kiddain Ohawr, the star of stage and screen. You can't imagine the trouble that caused with her family."
She laughed, then sobered. "You're saying that this Gift could be something totally useless."
Doc nodded. "Yes. That would be a waste. You have so much of it. But you should prepare yourself for that possibility. Hedda, I'm sorry. I've taken up your whole afternoon."
"But not wasted. You are always good company. And the young lady likes my pastries."
On one Neckerdam broadcast channel, the talk-box showed square dancing. Not too different from similar stuff he'd seen on the grim world. On the other channel, it was the game they called crackbat—part baseball, part jai alai. Harris settled on it and concentrated on trying to figure out the rules.
The little talk-box, the one that acted as his telephone, rang. He picked up the handset without taking his attention off the screen. The runner in his padded suit, still holding the flat bat with the net at the end, charged the base and whacked the ball out of the net of its defender. He crashed into the defender and both landed on the base. "Hello."
"Goodsir Greene?"
"Yes."
"This is Brannach the Seamer. Three days ago, you brought in an order for demasalle trousers."
"Oh, right. Hi. Grace on you."
"And on you. They're almost finished, but I needed to know if the lady's trousers were also supposed to have buttons for suspenders."
"Suspenders? No, no, no. Belt loops. They're supposed to be worn with belts." Another batter was up. The pitcher threw the ball and hit him with it. The crowd groaned; the batter walked dejectedly away from the base. The next batter up took his place. "Did you put buttons for suspenders on my trousers, too?"
"Of course, sir."
"My fault for not explaining things better. All six pairs need to have loops for belts, but no attachments for suspenders. Is that going to cause any trouble?"
This batter ducked the first pitch. He managed to sway back and catch the second pitch in the net. He spun around, hurling the ball far out beyond the base defenders, and dashed for the first base, his bat still in hand.
"No trouble, sir. I'm afraid I'll have to charge an extra four dec for the additional work. And they probably will not be ready for a couple of bells more. We are open until five bells, though, and they will certainly be ready by then."
"That's great. I'll be by then for them." He hung up, wondering why the runner on third base looked as though he were preparing to hurl his bat at the pitcher.
Harris hadn't felt imprisoned since he'd begun his walks outside the Monarch Building. He did follow Jean-Pierre's advice, not leaving at the same time or by the same door every day, varying his route, staying alert. Nothing ever happened.
It was time to further expand his options.
He stuck his head in the laboratory door. Joseph and Jean-Pierre were there. Joseph was lifting a barbell that looked impossibly heavy. Jean-Pierre, stretched out on a couch, took notes on a pad of paper. Harris waved to get their attention. "Hey, you guys, I'm going out to get my pants. Either of you want anything?"
"Hot xioc," Jean-Pierre said. "Joseph?"
The giant shook his head. He set down the barbell and began adding weights to it.
"Be back soon."
But instead of descending to the lobby, Harris went down two, to the garage. The mechanic, Fergus Bootblack, listened to his request.
"Take the Hutchen," Fergus said. "You can drive, can't you? Good. Are you carrying fire?"
"Fire? Like a cigarette lighter?"
"No, no, no." Fergus pointed his finger, miming a gun.
"Oh, fire. Yeah."
"Good. Oh, and Doc wants you and the lady Donohue to use the faraway ramp whenever you leave the building."
"Use the what?"
Fergus pointed to a shadowy far corner of the garage. There, a dimly lit concrete corner led away from the garage at a right angle to Harris' line of sight. "That leads to a ramp that comes out one block over. Anyone waiting for you outside the Monarch Building will miss you. Come back in the same way."
"Sure thing." He looked around. "What's a Hutchen?"
The Hutchen turned out to be an anonymously boxy dark green two-seater; it had a high clearance and looked a little like pictures of the Model T. Fergus had Harris wait a couple of minutes while he logged the car out on the records in his office, then showed him which button started the ignition. It took Harris a minute to reacquaint himself with the concept of the choke, but fortunately he'd learned to drive on his grandfather's archaic pickup truck and not on a more modern vehicle. He groped around for the seatbelts for a long minute before realizing, dismayed, that there were none for him to find.
He managed to get the Hutchen into gear without embarrassing himself—the gearshift was an H-pattern, floor-mounted stick familiar to him—and carefully guided it into the opening Fergus had pointed out.
A long tunnel, four sides of concrete and bare lightbulbs overhead, it traveled at least a block. Halfway along, Harris was sure that he heard the rush of a subway train beneath him.
The ramp at the far end took him up to where the tunnel terminated in a large warehouse-type door. There had to be unseen operators at work; in the rearview mirror, he saw a similar door slide into place behind him before the exterior door slid open. Beyond, quick and noisy traffic zipped by in both directions. Streetlights gleamed atop Greek-style columns, moths fluttering their lives away around them.
At last, he was vehicular again. It felt pretty good. He eased the Hutchen forward; during a break in traffic, he turned left onto King's Road, staying alert to the simple fact that traffic here ran on the wrong sides of the road. It felt like he was sixteen again, with a freshly minted driver's license, trying to keep all the rules in mind at the same time.
Harris stuck his hand out the window and signaled, bicycle-style, the way the other motorists did it, for his right turn from King's Road onto Damablanca. He passed the glowing green-and-gold sign over Banwite's and threw a salute his one-time benefactor couldn't see.
There was no parking space open in front of Brannach's. Harris sighed and drove on past. Parking was better in Neckerdam than in New York, but he might have to go around the block once or twice before he found a spot for the Hutchen.
Still scanning for a place to park, he continued a block, then turned left onto the two-lane northbound-only avenue labelled Attorcoppe.
A horn blared behind him and he heard a sickening crunch, felt the Hutchen shudder as its right rear quarter slammed into something.
He cringed. He knew, without having to turn and look, what had happened. Coming off Damablanca, distracted, he'd gravitated like an idiot into the right lane. At least on this one-way street it hadn't been a lane full of southbound traffic. He slowed and looked over his shoulder at the car he'd hit, preparing to mouth an apology to its driver, something to tide him over the few seconds it would take to pull the two cars to the side.
In the glare from the streetlights, he saw that the driver of the car was staring at him, cursing. No surprise. Two of the three men in the car with him were also glaring.
The last man, the rear-seat passenger on the left side of the car, was half out of the window, reaching down for something bouncing and teetering on the car's running board. Harris glanced at it.
It was a Klapper autogun, the same sort of brassy submachine gun Alastair had used when the assassins struck at Doc's lab.
The same sort of gun the other two men in the car were now bringing up to aim at Harris.