"Wonderful stuff," said the doctor, putting a cork stopper on a glass vial, the source of the smell. "My mother gave me the recipe. Good for all kinds of hystericals."

  "I am not given to hysterics," Cadmus said, a trifle archly.

  "No, but you weren't at all well. Bit of mental wandering, sir. Not the done thing in polite society."

  "Oh, that's different, then." Cadmus instantly understood. This doctor fellow seemed a man after his own heart. Perhaps he'd had similar schooling in gentlemanly graces.

  "You said some very interesting things, though. Would you mind explaining them to us?"

  "I should be delighted, sir. And lady." He nodded at Velma. "If you would be so kind as to jog my memory, just the smallest nudge will do." He hoped. Something was stirring in Rumpock. Had to do with a dream or nightmare, only he'd been awake. Overduke Anton was—was . . .

  Cadmus shot to his feet. "Oh, my gawds!"

  * * *

  Darmo House, Botello's Other Black Room

  Terrin had fired up enough candles for a pope's birthday cake. When you're cut off from a culture with electricity all over the place, you miss the truly useful things like lightbulbs. We could have employed a bank of them here, the kind they put in baseball stadiums for night games. It would have made a good stab against the gloom of Botello Darmo's other sanctum. Though not underground, it was just as dark and seemed all the more disturbing for being behind an ordinary door.

  Instead of using a free-standing pavilion, he'd shrouded a small interior room entirely with the trendy black velvet—layers and layers of it. So much that I wanted to own stock in the town's fabric concession and maybe go down in Rumpock history as the dude who invented their first vacuum cleaner. There was enough dust in here to dress an Okie set for a remake of The Grapes of Wrath.

  "Whuuaa—aahhh—choooo!" was my first comment when we all crowded inside. Shankey thoughtfully loaned me a handkerchief. From the crumpling it was the one he'd jammed in the swiveling tunnel door. I used it anyway, so thoroughly that he told me to keep it.

  While I wiped my nose and sneezed, Terrin and Filima got busy at a paper-blanketed formation that might have served as a work desk. It was so buried under books and other office-style clutter I couldn't tell. The dust got worse for their excavations, but I stuck it out until Filima, who already had a head start on nasal problems with her recent crying, called a sniffling retreat.

  Terrin, apparently immune, stayed behind as the rest of us emerged into the hall. Filima and I then had a brief sneezing, nose-blowing contest, which I won, but only because my facial anatomy gave me a larger practice field.

  "What a mess," she complained. "No wonder he forbade me to ever go in there. It wasn't because he had secrets, he just knew the first thing I'd do would be to call in the cleaning maids."

  "He had secrets all right," I said. "Didn't you feel the magical energy?"

  She nodded.

  But Shankey shook his head like a guy trying hard to get a joke. "It gave me the creeps. Is that what magic feels like?"

  "His kind." Meaning Botello, who had a very negative style.

  My nose was clear now, and since Shankey was absolutely unaffected by the dust I got the idea that we'd run into another type of burglar alarm, one directed specifically at those sensitive to magic. Botello was looking to be a little more brainy than I'd estimated, or at least subtle. A non-practitioner would find nothing of interest or sense in the arcane books and papers. The ones who might would be so busy with allergy symptoms times twenty they'd be forced to leave. He'd probably worked a neutralizer into the spell so as to exclude himself. Terrin should have been forced out by now, but he was a special case, being a lot more powerful than Botello to the point of taking advantage of things.

  "Dark magic," Shankey muttered.

  "Don't worry. By the time Terrin's done the room will be sucked clean."

  "But if it's a dark conjuring, won't that be bad for him?"

  "Not Terrin. He's weird that way. Black, white, gray, green with orange polka dots, magic's all the same to him. He's trying to recover what's been drained out of him." Which could amount to a lot of whammy juice. He'd been seriously bad off earlier today. I hoped he'd get enough stored to allow us to split this world, but not so soon that we couldn't help Filima.

  She brushed at dust clinging to her sleeves, but from her expression her mind was on something else. Breaking off in mid-swipe, she fixed Shankey with her gaze. Uh-oh.

  "Captain, I have a very serious request to ask of you."

  He did that coming-to-attention thing again. "My lady."

  "A request, not an order."

  Shankey went to an at-ease posture. "Ma'am?"

  "It's to do with all that I spoke of downstairs in that awful room. I'm asking if you would not say anything about it to anyone until and unless I tell you otherwise. I could order you as your liege-lady, but I'd rather ask you as a friend."

  The look that came over his face was a doozy. Right then and there if she'd asked him to jump off a cliff into a lion pit he'd have done it—as her friend. Heck, I might do it too, and I wasn't at all ready to commit to a relationship.

  "My lady honors me," he said, pretty humble.

  "Will you?"

  "Yes, my lady. What was said in that room stays there. I understand the consequences."

  "It's for Darmo House, not me."

  "It's for all of us," he said, solemn.

  If I hadn't known he was already involved with the house cook I'd have told them to get a room. Speaking of cooks . . . "Now that that's out of the way, how 'bout some food?" I suggested brightly.

  They stared, but what the hey, I hadn't eaten since lunch, just some nibbles from Terrin's tray. Huge as it was, I'd finally used it up, especially in the last hour or so. Trudging through tunnels and listening to harrowing stories about fighting demons does that to me.

  "But we don't have time to eat," said Filima.

  "Where'd you get that?" I wanted to know. Tense lady, but she had good reason. She needed to relax; we all did. I opened the door to the room.

  Terrin was seated before the pile of arcane stuff, focused on paperwork. There was noticeably less dust, and by half-closing my eyes I could make out a thin but steady stream of minute specks swirling into a spot between his shoulder blades. They swirled into it like water down a drain, going right through his Hawaiian shirt and the T-shirt he wore under it. He had a special tattoo on his back, which was linked to his magic, of course, like everything else about him. Some days it was hard to tell if he was dedicated, driven, or just filling in time between techno-raves and getting laid. Right now it was business as usual. "Dude . . . you gonna be awhile?"

  He gave a grouchy grunt that could have meant anything.

  "Ooo-kay. We'll be in the kitchen when you're done."

  Grunt. Of the "don't bother me" variety.

  "Boy, is he in a chatty mood," I said to them, pulling the door shut. "Thought he never would button it. Come on, I need a beer-and-pizza fix."

  "What's pizza?" asked Shankey.

  * * *

  The Overduke's Palace, a Parlor

  "Orders is orders ma'am," said Captain Rockbush stoically. "His lordship is the only one who can revoke 'em."

  "But if what we heard is true, then it was not Lord Anton who gave those orders," Velma patiently argued.

  "I was there, ma'am, I oughter know Lord Anton from Lord Botello, who was a sight shorter and dead these two weeks."

  "But Lord Anton has been possessed by Botello!"

  "Perhaps so, ma'am, but it's not my place to make that judgment. Besides, this here Lord Cadmus might be telling you a tale so as to make an escape. I will afford that it is very original. I've not heard better."

  "But he positively reeks of sulfur—doesn't that tell you something?"

  "Only that Lord Anton was at work in his Black Room. Maybe he had call for sulfur in his magics. Or rotten eggs. Not my place to make inquiries into his business, ma'am."

  Cadmus, sitting on the edge of one of the comfy chairs, buried his head in his hands and groaned. "It's all right, Velma. This is the price of my trusting the wrong man. My gawds, a dead man at that. And they say the dead don't lie."

  The other guard, posted at the door by Rockbush, stifled a snort of reaction. Whether it was amusement or derision was hard to say. Rockbush was rather more conscious of his training in palace deportment and shot him a glare. The doctor stood by a window, looking squintily thoughtful.

  "Perhaps Lord Perdle might be of assistance," he suggested.

  "Maybe," said Velma. "But he's not here in the palace. It would be very hard to convince him that anything was off with Anton, either. Perdle's a good minister, but doesn't have a lot of imagination."

  "I'm really very, very sorry," Cadmus moaned. "I know it won't help, but there it is."

  "I'm sure someone will forgive you," she said, not too consolingly. "But right now we need a way of putting Anton back where he belongs."

  "No question about it. With Botello pretending to be overduke there's all manner of mischief he can get up to."

  "I'm more concerned about getting Anton out of Hell," she snapped.

  Cadmus winced. "Um, yes, sorry. That must be our first course of action."

  "So what do we do?" she demanded.

  He opened his mouth, but no brilliant solution came out. He tried thinking a bit, but came up empty there, as well. Had the few hours he'd spent in a mindlock destroyed his ability to reason? Impossible. Cadmus was fully aware and awake now and trying hard not to shiver as various possibilities about his own immediate future came unbidden to him. Those were gruesomely clear. Nearly all had him wasting away in a dungeon bound up in different kinds of torture devices; the rest had to do with quicker modes of death. It was one thing to hear about the stuff when at a party with a ghost story theme, quite another to face the prospect of learning about them firsthand. Botello would want this inconvenient witness quite thoroughly gone.

  "Logically," said the doctor, "we must confront Lord Anton—that is to say Botello. If he is Botello. Are you sure?"

  "Abundantly so, my dear fellow," Cadmus answered. "He will deny all, though."

  "Certainly he would, whether or not what you told us is true. But the motivation behind the denial will be different for each man. If he is Lord Anton he will have one sort of reaction. If he is Lord Botello, another. But how to determine which is which? Perhaps the lady would be able to shed some light should she be a witness to—"

  "Forget it," said Velma. "Let's just assume he's Botello and take it from there, 'cause if he's really Anton it's gonna be easier to get forgiveness than permission."

  "Permission to do what?"

  "I don't know! Cadmus has all the magic training, ask him."

  Cadmus groaned again. "Magic training, but no magic. He scraped me clean."

  "What?"

  "It's all gone. I can feel it inside, that is, I can't feel it inside. This happened to me once before when I had a really bad cold, was flat on my back for weeks. Though I got well again physically I was still recovering astrally. Took me months to build up to full magical strength again."

  "Indeed," said the doctor. "I've heard the same complaint from other Talents; physical ills and even pregnancy affects their working powers. What about now?"

  "Now?"

  "Recovering what you've lost."

  "That's the dodgy bit; there's no magical energy to be had. Botello's drained it all away."

  "All of it?"

  "Yes! That's why there are no Talents left in Rumpock!"

  "That's not just a rumor?"

  "No! The Talents who were in town the night the Hell-river first rolled through were gone by morning. He never told me what happened to them, but I think they'd been absorbed into it."

  "Absorbed. Uh-hum." The doctor sounded dubious, but lacking Talent himself it was understandable. "No one was reported as missing, though."

  "Because of the river! It did something to nearly everyone's memory. Oh, bother. You believe it, don't you, Velma?"

  "Anton believed it, and I believed him," she hedged. "But back to the main problem. How do we get Botello out of him and Anton back from Hell? Without magic?"

  "We can't."

  "We might come morning."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The dawn meeting of the remaining Talents? You and Anton talked about it at dinner."

  "But I wasn't there. That was Botello in my body, remember?"

  She nodded. "And neither of us noticed any difference in your manner, either. It could be real hard proving Anton's Botello."

  Cadmus looked up, nonplused and annoyed. "You mean you didn't see anything odd about my behavior?"

  "Sorry. It's not the sort of thing you normally have to look out for."

  He bit back a very ungentlemanly word. Bloody Botello. Not only had he done a mindlock and impersonated him, but had been good at it. Cadmus hated the idea of being that easy to mimic.

  "The meeting," reminded Velma. "Just after dawn the Talents are all going to come here. Anton wanted them to focus together and work out a way of getting rid of the Hell-river. They would either talk it all out or he told me something about pooling their power to help him get a really clear vision of a solution. Seemed like a good idea at the time, not so good now, unless they can put Anton back where he belongs."

  "You'll have to warn them off or Botello will scrape them out just like me, then gawd knows what he'll do next. He'll be the only one with magical power, mountains of it."

  "There's not that much left," she pointed out. "And magic's not all that strong."

  He gaped at her. People without Talent just didn't know. It was like explaining music to the tone-deaf. "Not on this side of Reality. It's more subtle here. But on Otherside . . . like in Hell . . . it's beyond imagining."

  And evidently beyond Velma's immediate imagining. "Okay, fine, but Botello's on our side of Reality, so he'll be limited in what he can do."

  "No he won't! I think he's going to have the same impact here as he did when he was in Hell."

  "That's bad, right? So then we've really got to get Anton back. How?"

  Cadmus was about to lose all sense of good manners and bellow out to her face that he didn't know, when a perfectly wonderful, absolutely brilliant thought blossomed in his mind.

  But before Cadmus could voice it, Captain Rockbush clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder. "That's all for now, sir, your lordship's feeling better, and I've got my orders. Come along quietly, there's a good fellow."

  Chapter Thirteen

  In an Undetermined Otherside Location Not Quite in Hell

  Overduke Anton was not a man given to hysteria. Life had taught him the wisdom of calm; it had been decades since his last outburst in childhood. He forgot all about self-control for a whole minute, though, as he tumbled helplessly in a terrifying, smoky abyss the color of blood. At any point in his long fall he expected to be dashed into something unforgivably solid that would silence his voice for good. Panic and shock required expression, so he vented them. Fully.

  Then he had to draw breath, and a distant part of his mind informed him that he should have struck that unknown solidity by now. He risked opening his eyes a tiny crack—the blood-red clouds stinking of sulfur still unnerved him—to ascertain just what had happened to him . . . was happening.

  Nothing pleasant.

  He still seemed to be falling. It felt like falling, yet the clouds remained close, slow-churning about him, so they were either traveling at the same speed, or he was victim to delusion. Gathering his bewildered wits and forcing them to work, he concluded he was floating in some other place than his Black Room. As there were no cloudy red abysses anywhere near Rumpock, he eliminated one possibility after another—including visions, hallucinations, drugged kidnapping, and drunkenness. What remained he did not care for at all, as it meant that Cadmus had managed to shove him into an Otherside place, a not very nice one from the look and smell of things.

  Look . . . by gawds, he could see! Never had his physical vision been so clear before. His circumstance was awful, of course, but the novelty of unblurred sight took away a bit of its edge. But where and how was he? He didn't feel right, not bodily.

  His hands, he noted, were not his own. The fingers and nails were all wrong and the garment clothing him—he'd never worn this drab brown color that he could remember. The same went for the trousers, robe, and boots. He felt his face and hair. Oh, yes, those were wrong. What else? No . . . oh, no . . . not that. . . .

  Fresh horror blooming, he grabbed his crotch, then sighed out gratitude. Everything was there, hopefully in working order. Hastily, he pulled up the hem of his tunic, opened his trousers, and checked their contents. Good gawds. That wasn't his wedding tackle. What in the name of everything had Cadmus done to him?

  Before he could crumble into another bout of panic, there came a decided change in the sulfurous red air. The unforgiving hard surface he anticipated occurred, only he seemed to just be on it instead of smashing into it. That was good. So far as it went.

  He stood upright just as the clouds began to thin and whisk away. Intuition made him do up his trousers again. He be damned if he got caught anywhere with his pants down.

  Dignity restored, Anton looked about him with his sharp new eyesight . . . and promptly wished himself blind.

  Emerging from the retreating clouds before him was a Hell-being. There was no mistaking it, as it looked exactly like the nightmare vision he'd had not so very long past. The eyes were the same; so was the voice, a squalling shriek like all the souls that ever died cried out their torment through its gaping mouth, as though trapped within. The demon was far uglier, larger, and smellier than the vision, and the earth—or whatever it was Anton now stood upon—shook as it walked.

  It loomed over him like a great red mass of growling hate, then bared several rows of needle-sharp teeth, snuffling to get his scent, glowering down with fiery eyes.