THE DRAGON LINE

MICHAEL SWANWICK

Driving by the mall in King of Prussia that night, I noticed that between the sky and earth where the horizon used to be is now a jagged-edged region, spangled with bright industrial lights. For a long yearning instant, before the car topped the rise and I had to switch lanes or else be shunted onto the expressway, I wished I could enter that dark zone, dissolve into its airless mystery and cold ethereal beauty. But of course that was impossible: Faerie is no more. It can be glimpsed, but no longer grasped.

At the light, Shikra shoved the mirror up under my nose, and held the cut-down fraction of a McDonald’s straw while I did up a line. A winter flurry of tinkling white powder stung through my head to freeze up at the base of the skull, and the light changed, and off we went. “Burn that rubber, Boss-man,” Shikra laughed. She drew up her knees, balancing the mirror before her chin, and snorted the rest for herself.

There was an opening to the left, and I switched lanes, injecting the Jaguar like a virus into the stream of traffic, looped around, and was headed back toward Germantown. A swirling white pattern of flat crystals grew in my left eye, until it filled my vision. I was only seeing out of the right now. I closed the left and rubbed it, bringing tears, but still the hallucination hovered, floating within the orb of vision. I sniffed, bringing up my mouth to one side. Beside me, Shikra had her butterfly knife out and was chopping more coke.

“Hey, enough of that, okay? We’ve got work to do.”

Shikra turned an angry face my way. Then she hit the window controls and threw the mirror, powder and all, into the wind. Three grams of purest Peruvian offered to the Goddess.

“Happy now, shithead?” Her eyes and teeth flashed, all sinister smile in mulatto skin, and for a second she was beautiful, this petite teenaged monstrosity, in the same way that a copperhead can be beautiful, or a wasp, even as it injects the poison under your skin. I felt a flash of desire and of tender, paternal love, and then we were at the Chemical Road turnoff, and I drifted the Jag through three lanes of traffic to make the turn. Shikra was laughing and excited, and I was too.

It was going to be a dangerous night.

Applied Standard Technologies stood away from the road, a compound of low, sprawling buildings afloat on oceanic lawns. The guard waved us through and I drove up to the Lab B lot. There were few cars there; one had British plates. I looked at that one for a long moment, then stepped out onto the tarmac desert. The sky was close, stained a dull red by reflected halogen lights. Suspended between vastnesses, I was touched by a cool breeze, and shivered. How fine, I thought, to be alive.

I followed Shikra in. She was dressed all in denim, jeans faded to white in little crescents at the creases of her buttocks, trade beads clicking softly in her cornrowed hair. The guards at the desk rose in alarm at the sight of her, eased back down as they saw she was mine.

Miss Lytton was waiting. She stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette, strode briskly forward. “He speaks modern English?” I asked as she handed us our visitors’ badges. “You’ve brought him completely up to date on our history and technology?” I didn’t want to have to deal with culture shock. I’d been present when my people had dug him, groggy and corpse-blue, sticky with white chrysalid fluids, from his cave almost a year ago. Since then, I’d been travelling, hoping I could somehow pull it all together without him.

“You’ll be pleased.” Miss Lytton was a lean, nervous woman, all tweed and elbows. She glanced curiously at Shikra, but was too disciplined to ask questions. “He was a quick study – especially keen on the sciences.” She led us down a long corridor to an unmanned security station, slid a plastic card into the lockslot.

“You showed him around Britain? The slums, the mines, the factories?”

“Yes.” Anticipating me, she said, “He didn’t seem at all perturbed. He asked quite intelligent questions.”

I nodded, not listening. The first set of doors sighed open, and we stepped forward. Surveillance cameras telemetered our images to the front desk for reconfirmation. The doors behind us closed, and those before us began to cycle open. “Well, let’s go see.”

The airlock opened into the secure lab, a vast, overlit room filled with white enamelled fermentation tanks, incubators, autoclaves, refrigerators, workbenches and enough glass plumbing for any four dairies. An ultrafuge whined softly. I had no clear idea what they did here. To me AST was just another blind cell in the maze of interlocking directorships that sheltered me from public view. The corporate labyrinth was my home now, a secure medium in which to change documentation, shift money and create new cover personalities on need. Perhaps other ancient survivals lurked within the catacombs, mermen and skinchangers, prodigies of all sorts, old Grendel himself; there was no way of telling.

“Wait here,” I told Shikra. The lab manager’s office was set halfway up the far wall, with wide glass windows overlooking the floor. Miss Lytton and I climbed the concrete and metal stairs. I opened the door.

He sat, flanked by two very expensive private security operatives, in a chrome swivel chair, and the air itself felt warped out of shape by the force of his presence. The trim white beard and charcoal grey Savile Row pinstripe were petty distractions from a face as wide and solemn and cruel as the moon. I shut my eyes and still it floated before me, wise with corruption. There was a metallic taste on my tongue.

“Get out,” I said to Miss Lytton, the guards.

“Sir, I—”

I shot her a look, and she backed away. Then the old man spoke, and once again I heard that wonderful voice of his, like a subway train rumbling underfoot. “Yes, Amy, allow us to talk in privacy, please.”

When we were alone, the old man and I looked at each other for a long time, unblinking. Finally, I rocked back on my heels. “Well,” I said. After all these centuries, I was at a loss for words. “Well, well, well.”

He said nothing.

“Merlin,” I said, putting a name to it.

“Mordred,” he replied, and the silence closed around us again.

The silence could have gone on forever for all of me; I wanted to see how the old wizard would handle it. Eventually he realized this, and slowly stood, like a thunderhead rising up in the western sky. Bushy, expressive eyebrows clashed together. “Arthur dead, and you alive! Alas, who can trust this world?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve read Malory too.”

Suddenly his left hand gripped my wrist and squeezed. Merlin leaned forward, and his face loomed up in my sight, ruthless grey eyes growing enormous as the pain washed up my arm. He seemed a natural force then, like the sun or wind, and I tumbled away before it.

I was on a nightswept field, leaning on my sword, surrounded by my dead. The veins in my forehead hammered. My ears ached with the confusion of noises, of dying horses and men. It had been butchery, a battle in the modern style in which both sides had fought until all were dead. This was the end of all causes: I stood empty on Salisbury Plain, too disheartened even to weep.

Then I saw Arthur mounted on a black horse. His face all horror and madness, he lowered his spear and charged. I raised my sword and ran to meet him.

He caught me below the shield and drove his spear through my body. The world tilted and I was thrown up into a sky as black as well water. Choking, I fell deep between the stars where the shadows were aswim with all manner of serpents, dragons and wild beasts. The creatures struggled forward to seize my limbs in their talons and claws. In wonder I realized I was about to die.

Then the wheel turned and set me down again. I forced myself up the spear, unmindful of pain. Two-handed, I swung my sword through the side of Arthur’s helmet and felt it bite through bone into the brain beneath.

My sword fell from nerveless fingers, and Arthur dropped his spear. His horse reared and we fell apart. In that last instant our eyes met and in his wondering hurt and innocence I saw, as if staring into an obsidian mirror, the perfect image of myself.

“So,” Merlin said, and released my hand. “He is truly dead, then. Even Arthur could not have survived the breaching of his skull.”

I was horrified and elated: he could still wield power, even in this dim and disenchanted age. The danger he might have killed me out of hand was small price to pay for such knowledge. But I masked my feelings.

“That’s just about enough!” I cried. “You forget yourself, old man. I am still the Pen-dragon, Dux Bellorum Britanniarum and King of all Britain and Amorica and as such your liege lord!”

That got to him. These medieval types were all heavy on rightful authority. He lowered his head on those bullish shoulders and grumbled, “I had no right, perhaps. And yet how was I to know that? The histories all said Arthur might yet live. Were it so, my duty lay with him, and the restoration of Camelot.” There was still a look, a humour, in his eye I did not trust, as if he found our confrontation essentially comic.

“You and your damned Camelot! Your bloody holy and ideal court!” The memories were unexpectedly fresh, and they hurt as only betrayed love can. For I really had loved Camelot when I first came to court, an adolescent true believer in the new myth of the Round Table, of Christian chivalry and glorious quests. Arthur could have sent me after the Grail itself, I was that innocent.

But a castle is too narrow and straight a space for illusions. It holds no secrets. The queen, praised for her virtue by one and all, was a harlot. The king’s best friend, a public paragon of chastity, was betraying him. And everyone knew! There was the heart and exemplar of it all. Those same poetasters who wrote sonnets to the purity of Lodegreaunce’s daughter smirked and gossiped behind their hands. It was Hypocrisy Hall, ruled over by the smiling and genial Good King Cuckold. He knew all, but so long as no one dared speak it aloud, he did not care. And those few who were neither fools nor lackeys, those who spoke openly of what all knew, were exiled or killed. For telling the truth! That was Merlin’s holy and Christian court of Camelot.

Down below, Shikra prowled the crooked aisles dividing the workbenches, prying open a fermenter to take a peek, rifling through desk drawers, elaborately bored. She had that kind of rough, destructive energy that demands she be doing something at all times.

The king’s bastard is like his jester, powerless but immune from criticism. I trafficked with the high and low of the land, tinsmiths and river-gods alike, and I knew their minds. Arthur was hated by his own people. He kept the land in ruin with his constant wars. Taxes went to support the extravagant adventures of his knights. He was expanding his rule, croft by shire, a kingdom here, a chunk of Normandy there, questing after Merlin’s dream of a Paneuropean Empire. All built on the blood of the peasantry; they were just war fodder to him.

I was all but screaming in Merlin’s face. Below, Shikra drifted closer, straining to hear. “That’s why I seized the throne while he was off warring in France – to give the land a taste of peace; as a novelty, if nothing else. To clear away the hypocrisy and cant, to open the windows and let a little fresh air in. The people had prayed for release. When Arthur returned, it was my banner they rallied around. And do you know what the real beauty of it was? It was over a year before he learned he’d been overthrown.”

Merlin shook his head. “You are so like your father! He too was an idealist – I know you find that hard to appreciate – a man who burned for the Right. We should have acknowledged your claim to succession.”

“You haven’t been listening!”

“You have a complaint against us. No one denies that. But, Mordred, you must understand that we didn’t know you were the king’s son. Arthur was . . . not very fertile. He had slept with your mother only once. We thought she was trying to blackmail him.” He sighed piously. “Had we only known, it all could have been different.”

I was suddenly embarrassed for him. What he called my complaint was the old and ugly story of my birth. Fearing the proof of his adultery – Morgawse was nominally his sister, and incest had both religious and dynastic consequences – Arthur had ordered all noble babies born that feast of Beltaine brought to court, and then had them placed in an unmanned boat and set adrift. Days later, a peasant had found the boat run aground with six small corpses. Only I, with my unhuman vigour, survived. But, typical of him, Merlin missed the horror of the story – that six innocents were sacrificed to hide the nature of Arthur’s crime – and saw it only as a denial of my rights of kinship. The sense of futility and resignation that is my curse descended once again. Without understanding between us, we could never make common cause.

“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s go get a drink.”

I picked up 476 to the Schuylkill. Shikra hung over the back seat, fascinated, confused, and aroused by the near-subliminal scent of murder and magic that clung to us both. “You haven’t introduced me to your young friend.” Merlin turned and offered his hand. She didn’t take it.

“Shikra, this is Merlin of the Order of Ambrose, enchanter and master politician.” I found an opening to the right, went up on the shoulder to take advantage of it, and slammed back all the way left, leaving half a dozen citizens leaning on their horns. “I want you to be ready to kill him at an instant’s notice. If I act strange – dazed or in any way unlike myself – slit his throat immediately. He’s capable of seizing control of my mind, and yours too if you hesitate.”

“How ’bout that,” Shikra said.

Merlin scoffed genially. “What lies are you telling this child?”

“The first time I met her, I asked Shikra to cut off one of my fingers.” I held up my little finger for him to see, fresh and pink, not quite grown to full size. “She knows there are strange things astir, and they don’t impress her.”

“Hum.” Merlin stared out at the car lights whipping toward us. We were on the expressway now, concrete crashguards close enough to brush fingertips against. He tried again. “In my first life, I greatly wished to speak with an African, but I had duties that kept me from travelling. It was one of the delights of the modern world to find I could meet your people everywhere, and learn from them.” Shikra made that bug-eyed face the young make when the old condescend; I saw it in the rear-view mirror.

“I don’t have to ask what you’ve been doing while I was . . . asleep,” Merlin said after a while. That wild undercurrent of humour was back in his voice. “You’ve been fighting the same old battles, eh?”

My mind wasn’t wholly on our conversation. I was thinking of the bons hommes of Languedoc, the gentle people today remembered (by those few who do remember) as the Albegensians. In the heart of the thirteenth century, they had reinvented Christianity, leading lives of poverty and chastity. They offered me hope, at a time when I had none. We told no lies, held no wealth, hurt neither man nor animal – we did not even eat cheese. We did not resist our enemies, nor obey them either, we had no leaders and we thought ourselves safe in our poverty. But Innocent III sent his dogs to level our cities, and on their ashes raised the Inquisition. My sweet, harmless comrades were tortured, mutilated, burnt alive. History is a laboratory in which we learn that nothing works, or ever can. “Yes.”

“Why?” Merlin asked. And chuckled to himself when I did not answer.

The Top of Centre Square was your typical bar with a view, a narrow box of a room with mirrored walls and gold foil insets in the ceiling to illusion it larger, and flacid jazz oozing from hidden speakers. “The stools in the centre, by the window,” I told the hostess, and tipped her accordingly. She cleared some businessmen out of our seats and dispatched a waitress to take our orders.

“Boodles martini, very dry, straight up with a twist,” I said.

“Single malt Scotch. Warm.”

“I’d like a Shirley Temple, please.” Shikra smiled so sweetly that the waitress frowned, then raised one cheek from her stool and scratched. If the woman hadn’t fled it might have gotten ugly.

Our drinks arrived. “Here’s to progress,” Merlin said, toasting the urban landscape. Silent traffic clogged the far below streets with red and white beads of light. Over City Hall the buildings sprawled electric-bright from Queen Village up to the Northern Liberties. Tugs and barges crawled slowly upriver. Beyond, Camden crowded light upon light. Floating above the terrestrial galaxy, I felt the old urge to throw myself down. If only there were angels to bear me up.

“I had a hand in the founding of this city.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, the City of Brotherly Love. Will Penn was a Quaker, see, and they believed religious toleration would lead to secular harmony. Very radical for the times. I forget how many times he was thrown in jail for such beliefs before he came into money and had the chance to put them into practice. The Society of Friends not only brought their own people in from England and Wales, but also Episcopalians, Baptists, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, all kinds of crazy German sects – the city became a haven for the outcasts of all the other religious colonies.” How had I gotten started on this? I was suddenly cold with dread. “The Friends formed the social elite. Their idea was that by example and by civil works, they could create a pacifistic society, one in which all men followed their best impulses. All their grand ideals were grounded in a pragmatic set of laws, too; they didn’t rely on goodwill alone. And you know, for a Utopian scheme it was pretty successful. Most of them don’t last a decade. But . . .” I was rambling, wandering further and further away from the point. I felt helpless. How could I make him understand how thoroughly the facts had betrayed the dream? “Shikra was born here.”

“Ahhh.” He smiled knowingly.

Then all the centuries of futility and failure, of striving for first a victory and then a peace I knew was not there to be found, collapsed down upon me like a massive barbiturate crash, and I felt the darkness descend to sink its claws in my shoulders. “Merlin, the world is dying.”

He didn’t look concerned. “Oh?”

“Listen, did my people teach you anything about cybernetics? Feedback mechanisms? Well, never mind. The earth—” I gestured as if holding it cupped in my palm—” is like a living creature. Some say that it is a living creature, the only one, and all life, ourselves included, only component parts. Forget I said that. The important thing is that the earth creates and maintains a delicate balance of gases, temperatures and pressures that all life relies on for survival. If this balance were not maintained, the whole system would cycle out of control and . . . well, die. Us along with it.” His eyes were unreadable, dark with fossil prejudices. I needed another drink. “I’m not explaining this very well.”

“I follow you better than you think.”

“Good. Now, you know about pollution? Okay, well now it seems that there’s some that may not be reversible. You see what that means? A delicate little wisp of the atmosphere is being eaten away, and not replaced. Radiation intake increases. Meanwhile, atmospheric pollutants prevent reradiation of greater and greater amounts of infrared; total heat absorption goes up. The forests begin to die. Each bit of damage influences the whole, and leads to more damage. Earth is not balancing the new influences. Everything is cycling out of control, like a cancer.

“Merlin, I’m on the ropes. I’ve tried everything I can think of, and I’ve failed. The political obstacles to getting anything done are beyond belief. The world is dying, and I can’t save it.”

He looked at me as if I were crazy.

I drained my drink. “’Scuse me,” I said. “Got to hit up in the men’s room.”

In the john I got out the snuffbox and fed myself some sense of wonder. I heard a thrill of distant flutes as it iced my head with artificial calm, and I straightened slightly as the vultures on my shoulders stirred and then flapped away. They would be back, I knew. They always were.

I returned, furious with buzzing energy. Merlin was talking quietly to Shikra, a hand on her knee. “Let’s go,” I said. “This place is getting old.”

We took Passayunk Avenue west, deep into the refineries, heading for no place in particular. A kid in an old Trans Am, painted flat black inside and out, rebel flag flying from the antenna, tried to pass me on the right. I floored the accelerator, held my nose ahead of his, and forced him into the exit lane. Brakes screaming, he drifted away. Asshole. We were surrounded by the great tanks and cracking towers now. To one side, I could make out six smoky flames, waste gases being burnt off in gouts a dozen feet long.

“Pull in there!” Merlin said abruptly, gripping my shoulder and pointing. “Up ahead, where the gate is.”

“Getty Gas isn’t going to let us wander around in their refinery farm.”

“Let me take care of that.” The wizard put his forefingers together, twisted his mouth and bit through his tongue; I heard his teeth snap together. He drew his fingertips apart – it seemed to take all his strength – and the air grew tense. Carefully, he folded open his hands, and then spat blood into the palms. The blood glowed of its own light, and began to bubble and boil. Shikra leaned almost into its steam, grimacing with excitement. When the blood was gone, Merlin closed his hands again and said, “It is done.”

The car was suddenly very silent. The traffic about us made no noise; the wheels spun soundlessly on the pavement. The light shifted to a melange of purples and reds, colour dopplering away from the centre of the spectrum. I felt a pervasive queasiness, as if we were moving at enormous speeds in an unperceived direction. My inner ear spun when I turned my head. “This is the wizard’s world,” Merlin said. “It is from here that we draw our power. There’s our turn.”

I had to lock brakes and spin the car about to keep from overshooting the gate. But the guards in their little hut, though they were looking straight at us, didn’t notice. We drove by them, into a busy tangle of streets and accessways servicing the refineries and storage tanks. There was a nineteenth-century factory town hidden at the foot of the structures, brick warehouses and utility buildings ensnarled in metal, as if caught midway in a transformation from City to Machine. Pipes big enough to stand in looped over the road in sets of three or eight, nightmare vines that detoured over and around the worn brick buildings. A fat indigo moon shone through the clouds.

“Left.” We passed an old metre house with gables, arched windows and brickwork ornate enough for a Balkan railroad station. Workmen were unloading reels of electric cable on the loading dock, forklifting them inside. “Right.” Down a narrow granite block road we drove by a gothic-looking storage tank as large as a cathedral and buttressed by exterior struts with diamond-shaped cutouts. These were among the oldest structures in Point Breeze, left over from the early days of massive construction, when the industrialists weren’t quite sure what they had hold of, but suspected it might be God. “Stop,” Merlin commanded, and I pulled over by the earth-and-cinder containment dike. We got out of the car, doors slamming silently behind us. The road was gritty underfoot. The rich smell of hydrocarbons saturated the air. Nothing grew here, not so much as a weed. I nudged a dead pigeon with the toe of my shoe.

“Hey, what’s this shit?” Shikra pointed at a glimmering grey line running down the middle of the road, cool as ice in its feverish surround. I looked at Merlin’s face. The skin was flushed and I could see through it to a manically detailed lacework of tiny veins. When he blinked, his eyes peered madly through translucent flesh.

“It’s the track of the groundstar,” Merlin said. “In China, or so your paperbacks tell me, such lines are called lung mei, the path of the dragon.”

The name he gave the track of slugsilver light reminded me that all of Merlin’s order called themselves Children of the Sky. When I was a child an Ambrosian had told me that such lines interlaced all lands, and that an ancient race had raised stones and cairns on their interstices, each one dedicated to a specific star (and held to stand directly beneath that star) and positioned in perfect scale to one another, so that all of Europe formed a continent-wide map of the sky in reverse.

“Son of lies,” Merlin said. “The time has come for there to be truth between us. We are not natural allies, and your cause is not mine.” He gestured up at the tank to one side, the clusters of cracking towers, bright and phallic to the other. “Here is the triumph of my Collegium. Are you blind to the beauty of such artifice? This is the living and true symbol of Mankind victorious, and Nature lying helpless and broken at his feet – would you give it up? Would you have us again at the mercy of wolves and tempests, slaves to fear and that which walks the night?”

“For the love of pity, Merlin. If the earth dies, then mankind dies too!”

“I am not afraid of death,” Merlin said. “And if I do not fear mine, why should I dread that of others?” I said nothing. “But do you really think there will be no survivors? I believe the race will continue beyond the death of lands and oceans, in closed and perfect cities or on worlds built by art alone. It has taken the wit and skill of billions to create the technologies that can free us from dependence on earth. Let us then thank the billions, not throw away their good work.”

“Very few of those billions would survive,” I said miserably, knowing that this would not move him. “A very small elite, at best.”

The old devil laughed. “So. We understand each other better now. I had dreams too, before you conspired to have me sealed in a cave. But our aims are not incompatible; my ascendancy does not require that the world die. I will save it, if that is what you wish.” He shrugged as he said it as if promising an inconsequential, a trifle.

“And in return?”

His brows met like thunderstorms coming together; his eyes were glints of frozen lightning beneath. The man was pure theatre. “Mordred, the time has come for you to serve. Arthur served me for the love of righteousness; but you are a patricide and cannot be trusted. You must be bound to me, my will your will, my desires yours, your very thoughts owned and controlled. You must become my familiar.”

I closed my eyes, lowered my head. “Done.”

He owned me now.

We walked the granite block roadway towards the line of cool silver. Under a triple arch of sullen crimson pipes, Merlin abruptly turned to Shikra and asked, “Are you bleeding?”

“Say what?”

“Setting an egg,” I explained. She looked blank. What the hell did the kids say nowadays? “On the rag. That time of month.”

She snorted. “No.” And, “You afraid to say the word menstruation? Carl Jung would’ve had fun with you.”

“Come.” Merlin stepped on the dragon track, and I followed, Shikra after me. The instant my feet touched the silver path, I felt a compulsion to walk, as if the track were moving my legs beneath me. “We must stand in the heart of the groundstar to empower the binding ceremony.” Far, far ahead, I could see a second line cross ours; they met not in a cross but in a circle. “There are requirements: We must approach the place of power on foot, and speaking only the truth. For this reason I ask that you and your bodyguard say as little as possible. Follow, and I will speak of the genesis of kings.

“I remember – listen carefully, for this is important – a stormy night long ago, when a son was born to Uther, then King and bearer of the dragon pennant. The mother was Igraine, wife to the Duke of Tintagel, Uther’s chief rival and a man who, if the truth be told, had a better claim to the crown than Uther himself. Uther begot the child on Igraine while the duke was yet alive, then killed the duke, married the mother, and named that son Arthur. It was a clever piece of statecraft, for Arthur thus had a twofold claim to the throne, that of his true and also his nominal father. He was a good politician, Uther, and no mistake.

“Those were rough and unsteady times, and I convinced the king his son would be safest raised anonymously in a holding distant from the strife of civil war. We agreed he should be raised by Ector, a minor knight and very distant relation. Letters passed back and forth. Oaths were sworn. And on a night, the babe was wrapped in cloth of gold and taken by two lords and two ladies outside of the castle, where I waited disguised as a beggar. I accepted the child, turned and walked into the woods.

“And once out of sight of the castle, I strangled the brat.”

I cried aloud in horror.

“I buried him in the loam, and that was the end of Uther’s line. Some way farther in was a woodcutter’s hut, and there were horses waiting there, and the wetnurse I had hired for my own child.”

“What was the kid’s name?” Shikra asked.

“I called him Arthur,” Merlin said. “It seemed expedient. I took him to a priest who baptized him, and thence to Sir Ector, whose wife suckled him. And in time my son became king, and had a child whose name was Mordred, and in time this child killed his own father. I have told this story to no man or woman before this night. You are my grandson, Mordred, and this is the only reason I have not killed you outright.”

We had arrived. One by one we entered the circle of light.

It was like stepping into a blast furnace. Enormous energies shot up through my body, and filled my lungs with cool, painless flame. My eyes overflowed with light: I looked down and the ground was a devious tangle of silver lines, like a printed circuit multiplied by a kaleidoscope. Shikra and the wizard stood at the other two corners of an equilateral triangle, burning bright as gods. Outside our closed circle, the purples and crimsons had dissolved into a blackness so deep it stirred uneasily, as if great shapes were acrawl in it.

Merlin raised his arms. Was he to my right or left? I could not tell, for his figure shimmered, shifting sometimes into Shikra’s, sometimes into my own, leaving me staring at her breasts, my eyes. He made an extraordinary noise, a groan that rose and fell in strong but unmetred cadence. It wasn’t until he came to the antiphon that I realized he was chanting plainsong. It was a crude form of music – the Gregorian was codified slightly after his day – but one that brought back a rush of memories, of ceremonies performed to the beat of wolfskin drums, and of the last night of boyhood before my mother initiated me into the adult mysteries.

He stopped. “In this ritual, we must each give up a portion of our identities. Are you prepared for that?” He was matter-of-fact, not at all disturbed by our unnatural environment, the consummate technocrat of the occult.

“Yes,” I said.

“Once the bargain is sealed, you will not be able to go against its terms. Your hands will not obey you if you try, your eyes will not see that which offends me, your ears will not hear the words of others, your body will rebel against you. Do you understand?”

“Yes .” Shikra was swaying slightly in the uprushing power, humming to herself. It would be easy to lose oneself in that psychic blast of force.

“You will be more tightly bound than slave ever was. There will be no hope of freedom from your obligation, not ever. Only death will release you. Do you understand?”

“Ye s .”

The old man resumed his chant. I felt as if the back of my skull were melting and my brain softening and yeasting out into the filthy air. Merlin’s words sounded louder now, booming within my bones. I licked my lips, and smelled the rotting flesh of his cynicism permeating my hindbrain. Sweat stung down my sides on millipede feet. He stopped.

“I will need blood,” said Merlin. “Hand me your knife, child.” Shikra looked my way, and I nodded. Her eyes were vague, half-mesmerized. One hand rose. The knife materialized in it. She waved it before her, fascinated by the coloured trails it left behind, the way it pricked sparks from the air, crackling transient energies that rolled along the blade and leapt away to die, then held it out to Merlin.

Numbed by the strength of the man’s will, I was too late realizing what he intended. Merlin stepped forward to accept the knife. Then he took her chin in hand and pushed it back, exposing her long, smooth neck.

“Hey!” I lunged forward, and the light rose up blindingly. Merlin chopped the knife high, swung it down in a flattening curve. Sparks stung through ionized air. The knife giggled and sang.

I was too late. The groundstar fought me, warping up underfoot in a narrowing cone that asymptotically fined down to a slim line yearning infinitely outward toward its unseen patron star. I flung out an arm and saw it foreshorten before me, my body flattening, ribs splaying out in extended fans to either side, stretching tautly vectored membranes made of less than nothing. Lofted up, hesitating, I hung timeless a nanosecond above the conflict and knew it was hopeless, that I could never cross that unreachable centre. Beyond our faint circle of warmth and life, the outer darkness was in motion, mouths opening in the void.

But before the knife could taste Shikra’s throat, she intercepted it with an outhrust hand. The blade transfixed her palm, and she yanked down, jerking it free of Merlin’s grip. Faster than eye could follow, she had the knife in her good hand and – the keen thrill of her smile! – stabbed low into his groin.

The wizard roared in an ecstasy of rage. I felt the skirling agony of the knife as it pierced him. He tried to seize the girl, but she danced back from him. Blood rose like serpents from their wounds, twisting upward and swept away by unseen currents of power. The darkness stooped and banked, air bulging inward, and for an instant I held all the cold formless shapes in my mind and I screamed in terror. Merlin looked up and stumbled backward, breaking the circle.

And all was normal.

We stood in the shadow of an oil tank, under normal evening light, the sound of traffic on Passayunk a gentle background surf. The groundstar had disappeared, and the dragon lines with it. Merlin was clutching his manhood, blood oozing between his fingers. When he straightened, he did so slowly, painfully.

Warily, Shikra eased up from her fighter’s crouch. By degrees she relaxed, then hid away her weapon. I took out my handkerchief and bound up her hand. It wasn’t a serious wound; already the flesh was closing.

For a miracle, the snuffbox was intact. I crushed a crumb on the back of a thumbnail, did it up. A muscle in my lower back was trembling. I’d been up days too long. Shikra shook her head when I offered her some, but Merlin extended a hand and I gave him the box. He took a healthy snort and shuddered.

“I wish you’d told me what you intended,” I said. “We could have worked something out. Something else out.”

“I am unmade,” Merlin groaned. “Your hireling has destroyed me as a wizard.”

It was as a politician that he was needed, but I didn’t point that out. “Oh come on, a little wound like that. It’s already stopped bleeding.”

“No,” Shikra said. “You told me that a magician’s power is grounded in his mental somatype, remember? So a wound to his generative organs renders him impotent on symbolic and magical levels as well. That’s why I tried to lop his balls off.” She winced and stuck her injured hand under its opposite arm. “Shit, this sucker stings!”

Merlin stared. He’d caught me out in an evil he’d not thought me capable of “You’ve taught this . . . chit the inner mysteries of my tradition? In the name of all that the amber rose represents, why?”

“Because she’s my daughter, you dumbfuck!”

Shocked, Merlin said, “When—”

Shikra put an arm around my waist, laid her head on my shoulder, smiled. “She’s seventeen,” I said. “But I only found out a year ago.”

We drove unchallenged through the main gate, and headed back into town. Then I remembered there was nothing there for me anymore, cut across the median strip and headed out for the airport. Time to go somewhere. I snapped on the radio, tuned it to XPN and turned up the volume. Wagner’s valkyries soared and swooped low over my soul, dead meat cast down for their judgment.

Merlin was just charming the pants off his great-granddaughter. It shamed reason how he made her blush, so soon after trying to slice her open. “—make you Empress,” he was saying.

“Shit, I’m not political. I’m some kind of anarchist, if anything.”

“You’ll outgrow that,” he said. “Tell me, sweet child, this dream of your father’s – do you share it?”

“Well, I ain’t here for the food.”

“Then we’ll save your world for you.” He laughed that enormously confident laugh of his that says that nothing is impossible, not if you have the skills and the cunning and the will to use them. “The three of us together.”

Listening to their cheery prattle, I felt so vile and corrupt. The world is sick beyond salvation; I’ve seen the projections. People aren’t going to give up their cars and factories, their VCRs and Styrofoam-packaged hamburgers. No one, not Merlin himself, can pull off that kind of miracle. But I said nothing. When I die and am called to account, I will not be found wanting. “Mordred did his devoir” – even Malory gave me that. I did everything but dig up Merlin, and then I did that too. Because even if the world can’t be saved, we have to try. We have to try.

I floored the accelerator.

For the sake of the children, we must act as if there is hope, though we know there is not. We are under an obligation to do our mortal best, and will not be freed from that obligation while we yet live. We will never be freed until that day when heaven, like some vast and unimaginable mall, opens her legs to receive us all.