Harris looked out over what should have been the Brooklyn Bridge.
It stretched across a broad waterway that, lined with lights on both shores, seemed to follow the contours of the East River. But where both of the Brooklyn Bridge's stone support towers had two soaring arches, this bridge's towers had only one apiece . . . and yellow lights shone from windows at the top of each tower, as though the bridge's heights were occupied. Where the Brooklyn Bridge had its elevated pedestrian walkway along the center, between the outbound and inbound roadways, this bridge had two wooden walkways at road level along the sides, overlooking the water. And this bridge seemed darker and heavier than the one he was used to, its support pillars more massive.
It was the right river and the right place . . . but the wrong bridge. Harris limped along its walkway to see more.
The brisk north wind tugged at his clothes and chilled him. His leg ached worse than ever and his hands trembled from exhaustion when he didn't keep them jammed into his pockets. Maybe he should have done what Brian Banwite said—find a doctor, get it bandaged up. But with everything so wrong, he knew deep down that all the doctors had to be wrong, too. Instead, he kept moving. The strangeness of this place wouldn't get him if he kept moving.
An endless stream of antiquated cars roared by, always going the wrong direction on the road. Once there was a motorcycle with a sidecar attached, its helmetless driver not even glancing at Harris through his thick aviator-style goggles.
Harris caught sight of lights moving up in the sky; they floated over the skyline in far too slow, steady and stately a fashion to be an airplane or even a helicopter. He watched, puzzled, until portions of the aircraft were caught in a spotlight shining up from the city, and Harris recognized it as a zeppelin, drifting as serenely as a cloud.
He passed the first of the bridge's two support towers and walked underneath its enormous arch. Far overhead, small spotlights were carefully situated to illuminate the stone gargoyles leering down at him. He numbly shook his head and kept going.
Off to his left, there was no Manhattan Bridge to be seen. To his right, he could see the contours of Governor's Island—better, in fact, than he should have been able to see them at night. The whole island was brilliantly lit, and Harris could only stare at the island's giant wooden roller coaster and Ferris wheel, which had never been there before. Both were in motion, as were other amusement-park rides too distant to make out in detail. Beyond should be the glinting golden point of the Statue of Liberty's torch, but there was no such beacon.
As he reached the center of the bridge, exhaustion finally caught up with him. He sagged against the rail, shutting his eyes against the parade of lights lining the river, and tried to keep his legs from shaking.
And still the cars roared by, each one carrying someone who wasn't hurt, wasn't confused, wasn't totally out of place. Harris felt resentment stir in him. They'd probably enjoy seeing him slip and fall, like the crowd earlier tonight.
He concentrated on taking long, deep breaths; he tried to slip into a calmer, meditative state, the kind he once enjoyed while performing the exercise forms of tae kwon do.
A faint squeal of brakes—Harris heard one of the outbound cars slow to stop just behind him. A cop, had to be a cop; but when he sneaked a glance over his shoulder, it was nothing he could recognize as a police car. It was a beautiful, massive two-tone thing gleaming black and gold in the bridge lights; its passenger compartment was a four-door box, the engine compartment a lower rectangle just as long, its front grille capped by a hood ornament shaped like a dragon in flight.
The far door opened and the driver emerged. Tall for one of these Neckerdam people, he was Harris' height, though he had to weigh forty or fifty pounds less; he was thin-boned and lean-muscled. He was paler in the overhead lights than Harris; this contrasted starkly with his trim, black mustache and beard. His eyes were bright and alert, his features so mobile and full of sympathy that Harris decided he looked like a stand-up comedian who did psychotherapy on the side.
And his clothes—a full tuxedo in the brightest red imaginable, black shirt and white cummerbund, a combination that was eye-hurting even in the dim bridge lights. Harris felt a laugh bubble up inside of him, but managed to choke it before it emerged.
The newcomer walked around the car and up onto the walkway. His voice was a musical, melodious treat: "Son, don't do it."
"Don't do what?"
The tuxedoed man shook his head gravely. "Don't jump. I know things may seem hopeless now, but—"
The laugh Harris had restrained finally emerged, a high-pitched cackle that sounded crazy even to Harris' ears. "Don't jump? Mister, you've come to the wrong place. I wasn't going to jump."
The man took a cautious step forward. "You might not have known that you were. But the moon's full and there's a storm in your heart. You could have hit the water before you knew what you were doing. Come away with me."
Ah, so that was it. This guy wanted something. Was he a smooth-talking mugger or a stubborn homosexual who wouldn't take no for an answer? Harris didn't care; he waved the intruder away. "Scram."
"Is that your name? Scram? I am Jean-Pierre." The man took another careful step forward; he was now within half a dozen feet of Harris. "But if you're not going to jump, you can come away with me. I'll take you somewhere safe. Warm food. We can talk."
Harris gave the man his most knowing smile. "Yeah. Sure. I don't know what you want, man, but you're not getting it from me. And if you don't get in that freak show of a car and get out of my face, I'm going to have to break your head. You got that?"
The man with the French name paused and frowned over that. Then: "Yes. Yes, I do." He started to turn—and then made a sudden lunge for Harris, both hands outstretched.
A bad, clumsy move. Harris stepped sideways and fell into a back stance, keeping his weight mostly off his bad leg; he was surprised to feel himself go off balance from dizziness and he nearly fell over. But he still managed to use his left hand to sweep the man's arms out of line, a hard knifehand block, and brought his right up in a fast uppercut that cracked into Jean-Pierre's jaw. The man in the red tuxedo looked dazed and surprised, as though some six-year-old had walked up and broken a shovel across his face, and took an involuntary step backward.
Which set him up for a follow-through kick. Harris brought his injured leg up in a front straight kick that ended with the ball of his foot cracking into the man's jaw. Harris' extended leg seemed to scream as the move stretched his wound taut, but Jean-Pierre stiffened, spun partway around, and slammed down to the boards of the walkway.
Weakness washed over Harris again; he swayed and heard a roaring in his ears. The exertion had come close to taking him out, too. But, tired and hurt as he was, he'd won.
He'd better leave before Mr. Fashion Disaster woke up, though.
He turned, and there she was.
Not Gaby. This woman was short, beautiful, and Asian. All he had time to register was her face, the somber expression it wore, and the stick she held.
The stick she rapped against his temple.
Suddenly the pain in his leg was gone.
Along with his eyesight. His hearing.
He never even felt the impact when he hit the walkway beside Jean-Pierre.
Sound returned first. Indistinct murmurings that became words: " . . . said he wasn't . . . off-guard . . . stop laughing . . . "
Then, sensation. Warmth. Uncomfortable, lumpy softness under his back. A little pain in his leg. The pain was actually comforting. It meant that the events he was starting to remember had actually occurred.
Light through his eyelids.
He opened his eyes, and for the second time in hours saw a face hovering over his.
It wasn't the beautiful blond man again. This was a large pug nose surrounded by a merry round face and eyes as green as jade; this man's skin and hair were nearly as brown as a pecan shell. He wore a stiff white shirt, undecorated and short-sleeved, and a large, bulky stethoscope around his neck. He glanced back over his shoulder, revealing his ear to be sharply pointed, and called, "Your rescuee is awake, my prince." His voice was surprisingly light, his accent cultivated and not quite American.
"You'll be healing yourself if you keep at me." The voice was Jean-Pierre's, and angry. Harris groggily turned his head to look.
He was in a big room, the size of a low-ceilinged gymnasium, crowded with dozens of large work tables. Some tables were piled high with books, others with burners and glass tubes and complicated glass-and-wood arrays Harris didn't recognize, still others with what looked like mason jars filled with jams and jellies. The walls were paneled in dark, rich wood, and the floor was wooden planking of a lighter tone.
Bright light, the color and warmth of noonday sunlight, glowed from banks of overhead lights that resembled fluorescent light fixtures. Along the far wall, a bank of tall windows looked out over a glittering vista of skyscrapers at night.
Harris found that he was lying on a long paisley sofa in a corner of the room; there was other living-room furniture arranged nearby, including a very large version of the round-screen TVs he'd seen earlier.
On a nearby stuffed chair sat Jean-Pierre, his tuxedo jacket off, a blue bruised spot on his jaw the souvenir of their meeting; he looked irritable. Nearby, curled up in a corner of a divan, sat the woman who'd clobbered Harris. From ten feet away, she seemed tiny, even more dainty than most of the women he'd seen earlier. She wore some sort of pantsuit cut from burgundy silk, the jacket sleeves full and flaring; her expression was serene. Next to Harris, the man with the nut-brown skin sat on a sturdy high-backed wooden chair.
Jean-Pierre rubbed his jaw and the bruise Harris had given him, then narrowed his eyes. "Awake, are we? Then it's time to answer a few questions."
Harris ignored him for the moment; he struggled to sit up and pulled himself back so that the high arm of the sofa supported him. Only then did he realize that under the blanket they'd thrown over his legs he wore only underwear; his pants and shoes were gone. "Hey!"
The moon-faced doctor grinned. "Sorry, son. Had to tend your wound. Your breeches were a loss, torn and bloody." He reached down behind his chair, where a pair of gray trousers lay folded across an old-fashioned doctor's bag. He handed the pants over to Harris. "Try these."
"Thanks." Harris hurriedly pulled the trousers on, barely glancing at the white bandage wrapped around his thigh. His injury wasn't giving him much trouble; the doctor must have given him something for the pain. "Okay. Where am I?"
"The Monarch Building, up ninety. I am Alastair Kornbock. I hear you have already met Jean-Pierre Lamignac and Noriko Nomura; formal introductions are probably moot."
Jean-Pierre picked up something from his lap, a wallet, which he flipped open. "Is your name Harris Greene?"
"Yeah. Hey, that's my wallet." Harris tried to stand, but weariness tugged at him and he thought better of it.
"Yes, it appears to be." Jean-Pierre flipped it shut and negligently tossed it to Harris. "I gather from the way you defended yourself that you really weren't trying to harm yourself on the bridge. So what injured you?"
Harris actually felt himself flinch away from the memory of Adonis. "You'd never believe it."
"Tell me anyway."
"No, you tell me. Tell me what the hell is going on. What all this crap is about Neckerdam. What happened to the Brooklyn Bridge. The streets. The cars, for Christ's sake. Barefoot truck drivers and dwarfs who've filed their teeth. Because, believe me, I was knocking down some pretty good vodka before all this started happening, and I don't want to waste time talking to you if you're just DTs." Harris glanced through his wallet to make sure everything was in place, then pocketed it.
The three of them looked blankly from one to the other before returning their attention to Harris. "So," said Jean-Pierre, his pleasant tone not quite concealing his irritation, "what injured you?"
"You know, that was just about the worst attempted tackle I ever saw. If that's the way you normally try to rescue people, I'd be amazed if most of them didn't make it into the water."
Jean-Pierre flushed red and stood. He grabbed at something on his belt—something that wasn't there, but just where the handle of a hunting knife might protrude under other circumstances. In spite of his exhaustion, Harris stood up and readied himself for the attack he saw in the other man's face. The doctor merely scooted his chair back and got out from between them; he looked from one to the other with interest.
The Asian woman spoke; her speech bore a faint accent that was exotic and appealing to Harris' ears. "Jean-Pierre. Sit down. He is correct; the attack was clumsy. He has suffered more than you today." Harris didn't miss the extra stress she put on the last word, nor that she was communicating something else, but he couldn't read the extra meaning in her statement.
At least Jean-Pierre got himself under control. He sat and angrily drummed his fingers on the arms of the chair. Alastair assumed the same pose and drummed his fingers the same way, a cheerful mockery of Jean-Pierre's motion. Harris sat too, but did not relax.
"Now," Noriko said, "please. We don't know the answers to your questions. We don't even know what they mean. If you tell us the story of how you came to be on the Island Bridge, perhaps we can puzzle it out."
"That's . . . reasonable." For the briefest of moments, Harris saw himself through these peoples' eyes, as he sometimes saw himself from the perspective of his opponents; and this time he was an inexplicable creature, a wounded man who was too big and strange, possibly also dangerous and insane. He didn't like that image. "I guess it started at tonight's fight."
When Harris reached the encounter with the pointy-toothed dwarf in the street, Jean-Pierre jumped up again. Harris tensed, but the other man wasn't angry this time. Even paler than before, he stared in disbelief at Harris. "Angus Powrie," he said.
Alastair shook his head. "There are a lot of redcaps out there, Jean-Pierre. And a lot of hooligans from the Powrie clans."
"Maybe." Jean-Pierre dug around in a jacket pocket and brought out his own wallet. He flipped it open, pulled free a piece of cardstock and shoved it at Harris.
It was a black-and-white photograph, blurry and grainy; it looked like a police photo. The man in it was a little younger than the one who'd chased Harris earlier, but recognizable. Harris nodded. "That's him."
Jean-Pierre took the photograph back and looked numbly at it. "What have you been doing all these years, Angus?"
"Mind telling me why you carry his picture around?"
Jean-Pierre ignored the question. He retreated to his chair and sat, still looking dazed. He fingered the bruise on his jaw. "Kick-boxing, eh?"
"Yeah. It's the professional form of a whole bunch of martial arts."
"Well, I certainly feel as though I've been kick-boxed. Noriko, I know some of the people of Wo and their descendants in the New World fight like that."
Noriko nodded. "Not so much Wo, but Silla and Shanga. I do not think I have ever met a westerner trained in the arts."
Alastair said, "There's more to him than that. He's got an aura. All-asparkle. I see it with my good eye. But it's not like anything I've ever seen before. I'd love to test his Firbolg Valence."
Harris sighed. "It sounds to me like nothing I said means a thing to you. Jesus."
"To speak the truth, it doesn't," said Noriko. "Except one thing. Are you of the Carpenter Cult?"
"The what?"
"I have heard you invoke the Carpenter twice. Once just now."
"Who the hell is the Carpenter?" Then Harris had a sudden suspicion. "Wait a minute. Jesus Christ."
"Yes. Though his followers hesitate to name him as . . . freely as you do."
"Oh." Harris had to think about it. "No, I guess I'm not. I'm not anything that way. My parents are, though. Of the `Carpenter Cult'." He sat back frowning as it came home to him that one of the world's largest religions had suddenly been reduced to the status of cult. But there was a little comfort to that, as well. Noriko had heard of something he knew about. One lonely point in common.
The other three looked helplessly among themselves. Alastair said, "I think we need Doc."
"Who's Doc? I thought you were a doctor."
Alastair beamed. "I am. But I'm not Doc. Doc is Doc. And Doc is due . . . " He reached inelegantly under his shirt and pulled out a large pocket watch. "Two chimes ago. Late, as ever."
"So this Doc can get me figured out?"
Jean-Pierre shrugged. "If anyone can. He's a deviser, you know."
"Ah. Well, that explains everything, doesn't it?" Harris shook his head dubiously . . . and caught sight of what was tacked up on the wall behind him: a map. A map with the recognizable outlines of the continents.
He read some of the names printed there . . . and suddenly found himself standing on his sofa, both palms pressed against the map as he stared disbelievingly at it.
There was Manhattan, but the name Neckerdam was printed next to it, and some of the other boroughs were colored more like park than city. And New York State wasn't outlined with familiar borders. Its boundaries reaching about as far north as Albany should be, and much farther south, to the Philadelphia area ("Nyrax"); the whole area was labelled Novimagos.
Farther north, Nova Scotia and some of whatever province was next to it—New Brunswick? Harris couldn't remember—were labelled Acadia. To the south, much of Central America was labelled Mejicalia, a name that at least looked a little familiar, but few borders were drawn in that area of the map. Southeast of Mejicalia, what was Aluxia?
Things were no better in Europe. Most of central Spain was taken up by Castilia, a name Harris thought he remembered from school. All of England and Ireland were labelled Cretanis. These nations were further broken up into hundreds more small territories with names he didn't know. So was all the rest of Europe.
There was no sign of Hawaii, or most of the islands of the South Pacific, just the words "Many Islands" and a picture of a sea serpent.
Harris turned away from the map, feeling faint and not entirely able to accept what he'd just seen. He sank back down to sit on the sofa, feeling the gaze of the others on him, and didn't bother to ask them if that thing on the wall were a joke.
Nearly a thousand feet below, a dozen men entered the lobby of the Monarch Building. They paid no attention to the doorman who admitted them, to the veined white marble walls and reflective black marble floor, to the bustle of people moving in and out of the building even at this late hour. With the nonchalance of office workers familiar with the building, they moved straight to the elevators and boarded the first available car.
But they weren't office workers. The green-uniformed elevator operator took a look at the large instrument cases they carried, at the cheap red suits they wore, and sighed. Musicians. Rowdy musicians with their bad tips. Still, he adjusted his cap and put on his most professional face, and as the band entered his car he said, "Floor, goodsirs."
The smallest of the musicians, the one who stood right by the door with the trumpet case in his hands, smiled winningly at him. "Roof."
"I'm sorry, this car only goes up eighty-nine. The remaining floors are private property."
The trumpeter frowned. "Private? We have an engagement on the roof. A wedding."
The elevator operator tried not to look as confused as he was. "I don't think so, sir. There's no place up there to have a wedding. A talk-box reception tower and some machinery, I think."
"Then what's that black thing on your uniform?"
The uniformed man looked down at his front and finally showed confusion. "Sir, there's nothing—"
He did not see the other musician wield the blackjack. He did feel blinding pain as the lead shot-filled weapon rapped down on his uniform cap, and that was the last he knew. His legs gave way and he thudded onto the carpeted floor of the elevator car.
The trumpeter tipped his hat at the unconscious elevator operator, then nodded at the sap-wielder. "Now. Take us up."
The big man pocketed the sap. He took the car's control handle. "He was telling the truth. You know whose building this is."
"Yes."
"So this car won't go up past up eighty-nine. You know he has to be higher than that."
"Yes. Take us up eighty-nine." The trumpeter smiled and patted his instrument case. "Everything we need is in here. Trust me. Trust him."
The big man grimaced, then set the car into motion.