20

The pistol jumped, but his right hand went with it and clung. The explosion rocked his head: his ears felt as though he had dropped fifty feet in a roller coaster. A bit of the blood-spattered ceiling shredded away. All of the room was covered in gore. Directly opposite him the blown-up photograph of a skull was dappled in blood; gouts and puddles of blood covered the bed and other furniture, blood ran and dripped from the ceiling, which had been covered with photographs of owls. 'Del!' Tom howled, and saw on the floor where he had been about to set his foot a partial upper plate from which a single white tooth protruded like a fencepost.

'We are over here, Tom,' Collins' voice said from his right. 'I trust you want to save your friend's life.'

He swung around toward the voice - he heard his breath hissing in his mouth. The gun felt like a barbell. Collins sat in plain view on the owl chair, and Del was on his lap. They too were dappled with red.

'There's one bullet left,' Tom said, trying to steady the gun on the magician's amused face. Del stared at him without recognition. 'Del, get off his lap.'

'He can't hear you. He won't, I should say. He's given up. He's gone inside and locked the door. Now, put down the gun.'

Tom frantically tried to fit his left index finger into the trigger guard.

'I could melt that gun in your hand in a second,' Collins said. 'Or I could kill you by making it explode when you fired. If you had a chance to do it that way, you've lost it. It's time for you to make a sacrifice, Tom. It's time for you to choose. As Speckle John had to choose. The repeat performance isn't over - in fact, it has hardly begun.' Behind him Tom gradually took in another blown-up photograph: Rose Armstrong dressed as a porcelain shepherdess, her high-browed face not a contemporary, not an American face at all, but of another century and place.

Tom lowered the gun.

'To save my nephew's life, will you sacrifice the pistol? Del is in traumatic shock, I must point out. He might die anyhow. But if you do not sacrifice the gun, I will stop his heart. You ought to know that I can do that.'

'Then why don't you just stop mine?'

'Because then I would cheat myself out of the performance. But you have to decide.' He smiled again. 'I will give you yet another choice. The choice of giving up your song. Leave Del. Leave Rose - you will have to do that anyhow. And leave magic. Let me have your gifts. You could just walk out of Shadowland, and be precisely the boy you thought you were when you came here.' Collins spread and lifted his hands: simple. 'That is the best choice I can give you. Sacrifice your song, and use your legs to depart Shadowland for good.'

'Del dies, and you keep Rose here. I leave unharmed, if I can believe you.'

Del sagged on the magician's lap. His face was gray, and he scarcely seemed to be breathing.

'And the other choice?'

'You throw away the gun. Your song against mine. The performance continues until Shadowland has an undisputed master, the new king or the old. What do you say, boy?'

Take my magic and let me out of here, Tom shouted inside himself. He heard movement behind him and snapped his head sideways. Rose stood in the open door. Knives. How often, how many nights, had she been in this room where the owls screamed down from the ceiling? She silently pleaded with him, but she could have been pleading for either choice.

'Song,' Tom said, and flipped the pistol toward the smeared bed. From the side of his eye he saw Rose slipping back out the door. The pistol landed with a squishing sound far out of his reach, and Tom's viscera curled around a block of ice. I fooled you, I fooled you; Lonnie Donegan's mocking chant to the inspectors on the Rock Island line went through him like a spear, and he knew that he had been forced, had forced himself back into the magician's game.

'Good. But of course you remember the salient point about wizards,' Collins said.

I fooled you, I fooled you… got all pig iron!

'They get the house odds - they use their own decks. You should have walked, child.' Collins stood up, his eyes flashed, and the owl chair was empty.

A dazed bird fluttered along the floor, its wing feathers painting the blood into delicate Japanese calligraphy.