Chapter Nine

"And so spake Zamanda, Priestess of Primane, in that long lifetime of peace that followed the defeat of the Seventh Incursion. Not all that comes from Chaos is foul to the eye, and not all of its deeds can be recognised at a glance. There came a mage, to the Isle of Rund, which lies in the warm sea of Telosk, now in the Southern Kingdoms, a mage whose features were human, whose powers were great and whose deeds were good - or so said all who first saw them.
	"Know that the Isle of Rund lies far out in the ocean, facing onto a dry and desert shore. Alone it lies, and ever have its people striven to grow enough food, whether from the terraced fields or gathered from the oceans around. At that time, it was a green and crowded place, a happy one though it acknowledged no Gods save those it had reared to its fancy. Not a Paladin was on the isle, nor any Temple - though Sorcerers infested the place indeed.
	"The mage named himself Gastaran, and over the years wrought many wonders. Sicknesses and hurts he cured, and none were turned away. The barren he made fruitful, both of talking folk and of beasts, not indeed as our Lady Dhoreen does, but by his sorceries that none could understand - and the other mages of the island wondered how he had gained such great power unknown to any of them, and muttered dark things about driving down the price of their art, by what he gave so freely.
	And so in the years, the folk of the isle grew many, though already they had planted and sown on whatever was not barren rock: even the roofs of their houses were grassed for grazing. Food grew scarce: again they begged Garastan to aid them. And Garastan smiled, though not all liked that smile, when years after they brought it to mind. The crops that folk had grown since the earliest days of their first-mothers, he discarded, and caused to grow new ones by his art: great coiling plants that covered the island, and grew at a speed that none had seen in Nature. Their fruits were tenfold, and so for many a year content ruled once more.
	But the last year of peace ended, and the Chaos hordes gathered for the Eighth Incursion. Long years had passed, yet Garastan grew no older, until the day he came to the market square of their chief city. Then did all folk mourn, when he told that he was oathen bound to rejoin his brethren - and that he hoped they would approve of his deeds. All thought he meant the mages of Law, who were indeed gathering to meet the onslaught - and rich gifts they pressed on him in gratitude as he left, never to be seen again.
	"The isle was given over to the strange plants that he had caused to grow. And when he had gone, they crumbled into a bitter dust, a poison to the soil that slew whatever was planted there for a generation after. And the great nation of Rund starved, for the dust blew into the sea and the fishes avoided it - not one in twenty of that multitude lived to see the next decade, and half the isle is a desert even now. So all knew of Garastan's true allegiance: by his fair deeds he caused more of death and horror than the mightiest Chaos Warrior, and brought not an army but a nation to its knees in the dust."
	(Extract from "So you think you want to be an Atheist?" by the late Jenda of Praaan, released for publication by the Inquisitorial Office.)

"Which all goes to show - if they'd had one Paladin in the area, he wouldn't have lasted a day."
	(Quote from .... any paladin on the planet, actually...)



	Suzuko Hohki stood alone and shivering, in a wide cold street of Dystope-on-the-Delta, the one place in the planet where she felt most wanted. The problem was, she mused - she was Wanted by the arch-mage Ayshalah, for no reason that she could possibly imagine - and she had been condemned to death without a trial on her last visit, even before discovering Ayshalah's secret. The mage held great power in Dystope, both by his rank and his own skills. Suzuko doubted that he would be any too keen on having anyone around who knew that he was in fact an Enterope, one of the Chaos beasts that this culture had evolved for millenia specifically to overthrow.
	The vixen shivered. The head that held that sort of knowledge around here was very liable to end up on a spike. Involuntarily, she looked up at the skies, as the moon broke through a rift in the heavy drizzle, shedding its full radiance over the wet streets and looming canyon-like stone walls that stretched in a wide and lethal maze around her.
	"Oh, Ninja....", she suddenly whimpered to herself, the expletive faithfully translated into the local language as a complex phrase involving one's ancestral stock and a dung-cart. "The moons...." She stared up, her ears flat and trembling under her green waxed hood as she stared up disbelievingly.
	Foxes, like most canines, have a strong lunar bias: on this world she had gone through the double moons' complex astral schedule with a coniseur's delighted concentration. From their relative positions and phases, He-Who-waits and She-who'll-be-ready-soon-honest, provided a far more precise calendar than Earth's solitary satellite.
	"My Goddess." Her eyes went wide in unconscious emulation, hidden in the darkness. For a cold minute she stayed staring up at the revealing heavens, considering becoming Agnostic again while she was on this world. "She's really done it this time."
	What was shining above her right now was the full disc of the yellow moon, He-Who-Waits. But half an hour ago by her body's clock, she had left the safety of Shakarna's tower behind, with Meridy's keen sword and Kazuko's lethal levels of cheerfulness available as backup. Above her, that same moon had been a half crescent, more than a week away from full.
	Suzuko was alone in Dystope. And not only was she separated in space from any possibility of aid, but probably in time as well. Finding a dry corner beneath a tarpaulin-covered cart, she unrolled her sleeping bag and retreated to the farthest corner, to frantically work out her radically revised plans.

	"It'll be easy. Just follow me !" Kazuko had gestured her to join Meridy in the big graven circle of the main Thaumatronic Core, dry beneath the glass dome of Shakarna's upper laboratory. "Just get in the centre with us and - don't be alarmed if anything happens."
	The Sorceress gave a dry cough. "Yes, Kazuko. It's easy for YOU to say. But this level of precision, at this range - I'll have to focus on the aural bands. The physical scrying system might give some - unfortunate effects, if there was even a tiny distortion in the astral flows."
	Suzuko tightened the straps of her weapons belt, and looked around her. She felt naked without her equipment. Now she was dressed only in the plain costume of a Newblood merchant, the easily identifiable webbing set she had carried for so long had been left in Shakarna's safe-keeping, for her to pick up on her return. She looked bleak-eyed at the cupboard it was stored in, and felt hideously homesick.
	Kazuko tugged at her sleeve. "Neat ! We can focus right into town. Aunty's going to sort of home in on the living energies of the folk in Dystope. Look - over there. See ?"
	Vixen ears raised in surprise as she finally understood what the glowing mirror showed, that Shakarna was peering into intently. It looked like a bisected galaxy; a roughly circular array of infinitesimal lights, sheared away totally flat below, and rising to a slight bulge in the centre. But it was not a smoothly curving shape: there were regular breaks, dark patches, and the whole was bounded by angles which she at last realised matched the City Walls.
	"Of course .." she breathed, more fascinated than worried for the moment. "That's the trouble with teleports - making sure you don't come out a hundred feet in the air, or underground." The few successful experiments she knew of on Earth had provided the intrepid travellers with parachutes, and aimed them at a spot in the sky high enough above the target that a kilometre of so of aiming error was of little consequence. "But if she can get a fix on where the ground is - it'll work like a homing beacon. All those people are asleep right now - and not too many folk will be working in cellars to throw the data off..."
	Shakarna nodded. "Quite so. Now then, remember - you have eight days in Dystope. Kazuko, you know the fountain at the exact centre of the Square of the Forest-Queen ? " She gestured at a regular "hole" in the mass of life-glows shining from sleepers in the surrounding houses. "That's the best feature in Dystope to use from this distance. Midnight, eight days time - I can only hold the portal open for ten minutes at a time. If you miss that, I'll try every night for a week."
	The blonde Manga-eyed girl nodded happily. "I know it ! I'll show Suki, first chance I get. See you later, Auntie." Kazuko pulled out a well-thumbed notebook from her pocket, and leafed through it intently.
	"What book-thingy ?" Meridy's eyes were as wide and right as her non-manga genetics would allow.
	Kazuko gave her a playful squeeze. "I LIKE the Capital," she proclaimed. "We'll be staying at the main Temple of Dhoreen - you too, Suki, it's cheaper than a Tavern, and less conspicuous. We try and get in some .... exotics, make them welcome, you might say. Some of these, even I've never met - well, not to ... talk to." She pointed at a page, evidently graphically illustrated, to judge from Meridy's reaction of startled delight.
	Shakarna sighed. "Off ! Now ! Goodbye !" With that, she gestured towards the circle, power manifesting across its intake grids and graduated zones, and things became extremely STRANGE.
	For an instant, all seemed to be very still. But as she watched, seemingly frozen in space by the spell, her vision changed. It was as she had seen when her Goddess took her up from her sleeping form, the everyday world of light fading to a pale translucence, in which shone the aura flames of Life. Without moving her head, she found that she could look around herself, concentrating on one or another of the forms glowing bright around her. Shakarna and Ryko shone bright, their innate magical essence translating as a blue-white glow, higher on whatever wavelength this was, than the normal yellow-gold that she radiated herself, as did the fainter figures working throughout the tower and surrounding fields.
	The room began to fade, and she felt a strange twisting sensation, as if she was a projected image being shone on an increasingly curved screen. She focussed on Meridy, eager to see what difference the equine's spirit had made to the human body she inhabited.
	"A-mazing." The thought sprang to mind. It was as she had seen bach on Earth, with the strange hybrid "Little Brothers" who had managed so well for the Gross Liechtenstein Reich despite inheriting their animal parent's consciousness. Meridy shone bright, a healthy and wholesome glow like clear June sunlight, but her details were different indeed. Where the others resembled the intricate tracery of swirling liquids, endless complexities of fractal flows joining and branching endlessly, here instead was a single fine-grained structure, like a stress X-ray of a perfect crystalline casting, pure and strong without the darker undercurrents that lurk beneath even the noblest sentient souls.
	"Which reminds me ...." she turned to Kazuko for contrast, and for one instant her uncomprehending gaze focussed on what she saw there. But then - her own shape was grabbed, like a floating twig plummeting into a whirlpool, sent hurtling away from its placid flow to a white-water ride into the far unknown.
	Suzuko's viewpoint spun and danced till her bodiless form felt giddy just by sheer association. It was an endless tube of glowing vapours, rushing by infinitely fast - turning from familiar earthly hues to cheerful pink, blue and green pastel colours that tugged at some urgent half-forgotten memory - such as where she had seen those hues before.
	It ended. With a shock like a wave-tossed surfer slamming into the beach, Suzuko suddenly found she was at rest. Dazed, she looked around herself, expecting to see the smoke-stained walls of Dystope around herself.
	"Oh, oh...." the impact of where she was was slow to register to her overloaded senses. The last time she had seen Dystope, it had been remarkably free of pastel clouds and gently looping rainbows frisking across the horizon. This place, however, had quite a different architect.
	HIDY. A squeak that could set the cosmos vibrating came from behind her. The vixen turned, trying to keep her tail and whiskers from visibly drooping as she looked up at the face of her Goddess Incarnate.
	Glad you were passing ! I spotted you leaving, picked you up on the way. Isn't that neat ?  
	The Great And Terrible Goddess Kawaii had taken on the aspect of an incredibly fluffy kitten, of a softness that could bring racing Quasars to a gentle halt. Whiskers several kilometres across twitched cheerfully as she looked down on her Priestess.
	A definite Plus Ten on all Fluffiness-related skills, was the thought that raced irreverently across Suzuko's shocked brain as the lake-sized eyes closed and a biologically improbable anime-style grin beamed down on her.
	"Er ... I WAS a little .... busy." She burst out, and then immediately regretted it as tears the size of Lake Baikal began to pool in the eyes of a disappointed divinity. "But .." she caught herself just in time, "it's all on your business, honest ! We're going back to the capital - if there's anywhere I can, er, influence folk towards you, it'll be there."
	Hokay. That's Neat. I've got something for you, hope you like it. Isn't this Pretty ? In the air before the abashed vixen hung a glittering jewel, a stylised face with eyes of lustrous opal.
	"It's - very nice." Suzuko suddenly wished she was wearing her giant pink ribbons: Kazuko had thought they looked good on her. But she had dressed instead in dull olive-green weathercloth: suitable indeed for cloak-and-dagger operations in the backstreets of Dystope, but hardly a bold statement of Faith in her trusting Goddess. And the gift Kawaii had given her was, indeed, Cute.
	"Cute!" She said aloud wonderingly. "That's the word we've been trying to say back there ! But when we try - it just doesn't seem to ... happen, somehow. Like grasping at shadows of N-Dimensional things, that aren't really here in our spacetime."
	The huge fluffy cheeks appeared to be approaching trans-finite levels of softness, and the giant kitten looked down sorrowfully.
	No, Suzuko realised. This isn't "Like" a kitten, or a young bunny, or whatever. This is HER - when we see kittens, pups or whatever, we see an expression of HER through them. Just as the familiar black-cloaked figure with the scythe literally was Death, Kawaii was the universal personification of Cute.
	Right. All the other Deity-chans round here have special regalia. I made it just for you. Because...... and that huge face looked sorrowful I can't be around here all the time. I've got worlds where I'm around for everyone - it sort of varies. Your Earth, I've hardly started working on. And it's not very nice here - too much Chaos, too much entropy. I have to go away - but I'll leave you this. It's a part of me, you might say.
	"Ah." Suzuko was suddenly worried. "What does it ... do ?"
	The Great and Terrible Goddess of Cute looked down on her. It sort of - shines my Will around the place. Like the Chaos Gods inflict their attributes, you know ? This'll do it for me. It'll work best on the younger folk. You know, I tend to - lose my grip on things as they get older: soon Entropy wears my gifts away.
	Suzuko's ears went flat. She could just imagine what this would do to her: invoking it was liable to inflict Cuteness Features beyond all hope of recovery. But then a thought struck her. Kawaii had been most active in Japan, giving her powers to various deserving people - although "superhero" was an overworked word, the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere had several hundred folk in their early teens who could leave a major class monster spread all over the landscape with a flick of the wrist, despite their wide-eyed innocence. But unlike the "empowered" folk elsewhere in the world, their powers tended to peak an average ten years earlier, and fade by the mid-teens. Even her friend Mae The Psychic Kitten had only refined her existing abilities in the past few years, rather than developing new ones with practice. (Even so, Mae had already won the World's Fluffiest Kitten contest three years running, and was looking forward to the Mid-Galactic Semi-Finals next siderial year on Tau Opuchi Three).
	She held the talisman at arm's length, her expression a mingling of interest and outright fear. "How does it .. go off ?" Her voice came as a whisper.
	Oh. That's easy. You just have to say, "Isn't it Cute?", and it starts to happen. You'll be able to say that, if you're holding it - though nobody else can. I'm not even an idea over here. Tears welled again in those huge sparkling eyes. I can't help folk as I'd like to. Could you help.... Please ?
	Suzuko felt abashed. This was a Goddess who had made Earth a far better place, now entrusting her with the spreading of her word on Mangana's Chaos-tainted homeworld - and after having come to her aid when she asked, helping her friends out of trouble. She steeled herself.
	"Okay." Her teeth were gritted determinedly. "I'll do it for you."
	The face broadened in an anime grin, and ears the size of cricket pitches perked up. Thank you ! I'll put you back - I'm pretty sure I can remember where you were. Over ... there, I think. A swirling pool of pastel formed at Suzuko's feet, and she felt again that dimensional tugging.
	"I'll do my best." She looked up at her patron, a tight knot of fear in her stomach. "For you, I'll do it."
	Thanks ! Kawaii waved cheerfully. Hang on - I've not quite got the hang of this universe, it's not like the others.... bye, have fun !
	The pastel pool surged up to engulf Suzuko, and she dropped back into the tube of racing infinities that led back to the mortal world she had left so unexpectedly. But just as she slipped out of contact with her Goddess, one faintly echoing word reached her ears.
	Ooopsie.

	Cold, hard cobblestones dug into Suzuko's back as she regained consciousness. All was pitch dark under the waggon: only at the far edge of vision could her night-wide eyes spot the dim flickering of a street lantern in the hammering rain.
	She shivered. By her body clock, it felt like two or three in the morning. The rain had turned to thick, porridgy slush, piling up on the waggon covers above and slumping off in liquescent falls to lie around her. A handful had fallen in her sleeping bag's hood: shivering, she fumbled around to scoop the worst of it out. The leather bag was a simple structure without the flaps and baffles of its Earth contemporaries: she felt the meagre shield of warm air vanishing into the frigid darkness.
	When a deity says Ooops, Suzuko told herself - that's the time to get worried.  She considered her position. No, she reminded herself - she first had to find out what, or rather When, her position was. 
	"It could be worse," she reminded herself. "Though it's not too good. I've money, weapons, and I have a way out - if I'm not too late." She shivered anew at the prospect. Kawaii had landed her in the right three spatial dimensions, but slipped up as to time: she recalled Mangana describing how this world was almost a tenth "faster" than Earth. "If I'm not too far out, I might make it yet. But ..." her ears concentrated in the blind night, but she heard nothing except the hiss and spatter of the freezing rain " but ... right now, all I can do is wait till dawn. Then we'll see."
	Curling herself up for warmth like a newborn cub, she tried to relax. Oddly enough, now she had made the decisions, she felt better. Being faced with a clear though daunting task was better than blind worrying - she could make plans, and suit them to her abilities. Then she winced.
	"I hope Kawaii didn't throw Kazuko and Meridy off course, when she pulled me out of the transport spell." Ears dipped instinctively inside the slush-rimmed leather hood. She remembered now what she had seen within the spell field: she had seen the life auras of everybody within at least a thousand paces. But those distant figures were not what had shocked her. When she had looked at Kazuko, she had seen the anime human's aura, a roughly body-shaped glow, bright and healthy as she might have expected. But Suzuko remembered what else she had seen.
	Meridy had a single, simple aura glowing. Shakarna and Ryko had single auras. But Kazuko also had a cluster of tiny specks, like a handful of infinitely precious jewels, too small and too many to count in the instant Suzuko had seen them. At least a dozen, of an aura colour quite different from the human's own - and in the broadest sense of the term, there could be no doubt about what they were.
	"I should have guessed." Suzuko worked her tail round to cover her cold nose, as she curled tighter and forgot her troubles till the daylight came. "There had to be a reason Kazuko's given up alcohol for the duration - and I hadn't noticed her being so fussy about what she eats, till this trip." A smile came to her muzzle, the first in a long while. "She as good as told us - she's set her heart on becoming a Priestess of Dhoreen. You can't do that without a child - and she's working hard on getting her qualifications back."

	The night was long. After several days of the comfortable beds at Shakarna's tower, the cobblestones felt gratuitously hard beneath her, cushioned only by the single woolly layer of her bag and Suzuko's own fur. As blind minutes passed between snatches of sleep, she thought wistfully of the grassy or leaf-strewn camps they had made on their outward journey.
	There is nothing in Nature so unbrokenly bleak or dark as a human city in Winter. Even in the stoniest of deserts or the bitterest Arctic waste, there are drifts of sand or snow, available for the finding. And in a storm-shrouded night, not even the thickest and most tangled forests blot out the ever-present fugitive photons in quite the way that six or ten storeys of brooding gothic masonry manages to.
	"At least ... it's not a pure Human city." Suzuko shivered, only her nose poking out into the wet air. The city stank: crowded populations always did. But at least it was a city that folk with real noses helped to run, keeping the myriad stenches from reaching unbearable levels. Remembering how Mangana and Kazuko had caused her dormitory back in Japan to evacuate in respirators after one particular fry-up of salted black bean and anchovies caused the building's Chemical Warfare alarms to trip, she reminded herself again that it could indeed be worse.
	A scent stole through to her, lying hidden there in the dark. Baking bread: a rich, yeasty aroma that spoke of breakfast, crisp and fresh like the Sanity Rolls her friend Ctuline made for everyone back home. Shoving her twitching snout out of the wet hood, she noticed the growing detail on the opposite wall. Dawn was coming, a wet and damp one, but dawn at last.

	An hour later, her spirits were much higher. She had shaken the worst of the slush off her bag and rolled it up again on the outside of her pack, and set off following her nose in quest of the bakery . Now she sat in the fire-lit warmth of a basement that doubled as shop and snack bar, watching the bakers toiling at loading and unloading brick arched ovens steaming with their fragrant burdens.
	"There ya goes, milady," grinned a scarred brown bear, setting a laden tray down. "Bread, oatcakes, and last night's baked Upriver fish. Fifty Shields, please."
	Suzuko fumbled in her outermost purse, and pulled out a handful of the low-value bronze coins. Shakarna had pointed out that this world had little use for gold: the only currencies were metals immediately reuseable . Bronze, pure iron, nickel and platinum were the currencies, readily exchangeable across the planet. Gold and Silver had been used centuries ago, till a Chaos Mage had the idea of asking his Patrons for the secret of Transforming copper into Gold, and spent the rest of his life enthusiastically doing so. The resulting inflation (previously an unknown concept) had brought a satisfyingly hefty dose of Chaos to the treasuries of the land in a way no armed guards could stop.
	"Ah ... thanks." She said cautiously. "Do you have the, er, Time ?" She had been about to ask him the day, month and year, but caught herself just in "time". Folk who asked that question on Earth were generally suspected of being Illegal Aliens to local spacetime, often rightly so. She would try not to give herself away like that.
	The bear flicked up his pocket sundial, and peered at the glow-in-the-dark markings. (Magic made all sorts of possibilities work, Suzuko told herself.) "Wants ten minutes to six still, Milady. A late night out, eh ?" His deep-set eyes twinkled good-naturedly.
	Suzuko nodded. The city gates, she knew, were closed till dawn. In the countryside she could have excused her bedraggled appearance by claiming to have got lost in the woods and fields, but she must "obviously" have stayed somewhere that night. 
	This is an absolute tightrope, she told herself, fighting down rising panic as she bit into the Upriver fish. (Dystope having a quarter of a million inhabitants and a medieval sewer system, Upriver was definitely the place to be fishing.) There's a million things I don't know, that any pup born here ought to. I could give myself away a hundred times, and not even know till they come to get me.
	She ran a paw through her begrimed ears, feeling the fine mud beginning to dry in the cosy warmth. And then an idea struck her.
	"I'm visiting Dystope for the first time," she forced a light-heartedness into her voice. "Is there anywhere I could find a ... guide ? I'd like to see the sights. I've only got a week, and then it's back to the Southwall foothills. I'd hate to miss anything."
	The bear stopped noisily unstacking chairs, and looked thoughtful. "Well, we don't rightly have a Guide's Guild," he said, looking her up and down. "But you could arrange for an escort. One o' them would know the city well, like."
	Suzuko's ears pricked up. "Ah. And where do I find them ?"
	A strange smile played over the bear's blunt snout as he looked the muddy vixen up and down. She really WAS an innocent country lass, he decided firmly.
	"Oh, any bath house in town should have them," he waved a broad hand out towards the small-paned window, now showing grey light outside. "Sign of the comb and tub: they open at nine, gen'rally."
	Suzuko nodded, and sighed with relief. It would be mixing necessity with pleasure - a bath, was one thing she was again in dire need of.

	Half an hour later, she pulled her waxcloth hood up over her ears again and braved the cold drizzle outside. The streets were crowded with hurrying people of human and Newblood stock, all well muffled and with heads down against the eddying wind that swirled beneath the towering canyon walls of the Southgate side of Dystope.
	As she had been told, it was scarcely an hour before her wanderings brought her to a welcome sign. A thin otter was just opening up the main door of a low, domed building from which the scent of soap and grooming oils wafted invitingly. 
	The otter looked to have seen his share of hard usage. He was young, scarcely in his mid-teens, Suzuko guessed - but half of one ear was missing, and his left hand was a cleanly silver-capped stump, into which he was cheerfully screwing a metal curry-comb.
	"Nice mornin' for it, missy,". She saw the great round eyes light up at the sight of the day's first customer. "Full scrub and groom ? Ye's as wet as that any road, an' ye could stand to be cleaner."
	"I'm AWARE of that." Suzuko looked down at the quick-moving figure, scarcely reaching up to her chest. "How much ?" Her stock of coin was large, she reminded herself - but the demands on it were unguessable right now. She might be here a LONG time.
	Water-beaded whiskers flicked. "Well now ... seeing as ye's me first o' the day, normally I'd say twenty shields fer a nice vixen lassie like yesel'. But seein as ye've brought half o' the country road with ye, ... shall we say, forty ?"
	Suzuko had enough idea of the going rate to give a suitably outraged howl. "Twenty ! Throw in a grooming set and then say thirty, maybe - IF it's good !"
	The otter bowed. "Malsent Sharp's me name, lady - an' if ye'll allow me the honour, ye've a bargain, though a hard one."
	"If you think I'm going to let you ....." Suzuko broke off, and considered. When in Rome, be a Roman Candle, as the old saying went - and certainly she was in professional hands here (hand, she corrected herself as Malsent buffed his steel comb on a towel from one of the long racked on the corridor walls.). Besides, there was something about the outrageous otter, that she found herself hiding a smile.
	"Thirty it is," she raised a russet eyebrow. "And if you say "And you've got nothing I've not seen a thousand times afore", You'll find out just how long you CAN hold your breath held underwater."
	Ten minutes later, the mud and much of the tension of the previous night was flowing away as she scrubbed herself clean under the artfully-directed stream of warm water that Malsent poured over the top of a curtained cubicle. Looking down, she watched in amazement as the visibly discoloured water sorted itself out into a clean flow and a small, sludgy trickle. It was as if Entropy was reversing itself before her eyes.
	"Oh, aye," Malsent nodded from the stepladder outside the booth. "The slopstone's got a permanent Purification spell cast on it. Been working since me Great-Grandfather came up wi' the Delta mud still on him, built the place." His eyes were wistful. "Couldn't build that today, not for no money. The priests used up that much magic in the Wars, just t'ain't the same."
	"Were you in the ... Wars ?" Suzuko asked, delicately. She had avoided looking at the artificial hand, the first actual missing piece she recalled seeing on this trip. 
	There came a muffled snort. "An d'ye think I'd still be missing this if I was ? No, it were a fire, burning beam came down on it. Warrior in battle, like, I could ha' both me legs off, and they'd just have sent in a full priest o' Primane, grown 'em back in a year. But mere folk like me, we have to pay for it. And at thirty shields a time, wi' fuel an' laundry to pay fer on top, me fur's going to be grey before I gets it done in this trade ...."
	Suzuko glanced up - and spotted a faint twinkle in the otter's gaze. She dipped an ear, half invitingly.
	"You may have to pay for your own healing," she gave a mock sigh, massaging foam deep into her tail-root as Malsent gleefully directed the water stream that way, "But your entertainment, I'd say, comes with the job."

	Forty minutes later, she towelled her fur dry vigourously, and waved a fond farewell to Malsent's baths. If I'm staying around here awhile, she told herself - I may very well return. I have to go Somewhere, after all .
	"Now, " she told herself silently. "Immediate worries over. Time to find out what's going on, and what am I going to do about it ?"
	The streets were filling up: nobody more than glanced at her as she crossed squares and wide thoroughfares. Seeing the place in daylight, she understood what had struck her as odd on her first trip through the city.
	"All these main streets - they're as wide as autobahns," she noted, stopping in the shelter of an overhanging balcony. "But - they're in blocks - the internal ones are mazes, narrow ones you can't get a waggon down." Each block was stone-faced, and stood easily forty metres apart: a strange waste of space for a fortified city, she had thought. But these were the fortifications: if the outer wall was breached, each towering block could barricade the narrow entrances to its inner courts and alleyways. She had wondered about the hefty vertical grooves and slots set in the doorways. 
	"It'd be like trying to take a dozen cities at once," she realised. "But someone's had a go, it seems." For as she carried on, she saw a huge site in construction. Despite the driving rain, she stopped to stare at it.
	A great open hexagonal space some two hundred metres across, was swarming with folk on scaffolding frames and wooden cranes, filling the air with shouts and creakings as waggon-loads of stone were hauled about the site. Some of the outer buildings were mostly finished: they were built in the old towering style. And yet ... she stopped, one ear dipped in puzzlement, as she studied the new buildings.
	Every block she had passed had been faced with five and six storey buildings, with only narrow slit-like windows facing the main streets - their main light and air, she knew, came from wide courtyards behind the armoured facings. But this new one was different. It had the same outer materials, as regards colours and textures, but where sections were half-finished, she could see that the hard stone was just a facade, a pawsbredth thickness overlaying bright red brickwork. And the windows - great, wide open glass structures as wide as some of the alleyways in the older structures.
	"This bit, they aren't making defensible." It was obvious, when she looked at it. Passing round the site, she came to a tall red-brick tower, that seemed oddly familiar. Suddenly, she stopped
	She had seen it before. And despite it swarming with hard-working builders, it was at almost the level she had seen it when they had first arrived in Dystope. Her ears twitched as the possibilities sunk in.
	Suzuko had arrived here not too late, but too early. She was two weeks ahead of time, thanks to her less-than-exacting (though transfinitely Cute) Goddess.
	"I wonder...." she murmured, her voice lost in the rumble of carts and the swarming crowds of the street "if I should go over to the inn, and see if I'm there ?"
	Her ears rose as the possibilities flashed before her, both good and bad. Time-travel was theoretically possible, under the infinite-rate branch model of history. Much as Mangana's danger sense looked forward across the branching event-paths where histories divided at the quantum scale and pulled away at ever-increasing rates, so too did time-travellers always return to a different (but often seemingly identical) version of the world they had left. It worked much like Quantum Theory, where the result of an experiment depended on whether or not it was observed: the very fact that a time-traveller had appeared in her own past meant that it was no longer "hers" at all, and she could mess around with her own family history  to her heart's content.
	Just then there was a shout from behind her. Across the street was a tall, regularly-shaped tower, eight or ten sided - a white tower of clean quartzite that somehow resisted the stale smoke of a city full of cooking fires. But it was not the architecture that she was admiring. 
	Suzuko's tail fluffed up in one huge russet furball. She had seen slow-motion films of lasers and particle beams punching through targets - the massive thermal punch smashing material apart even before it reached its melting point. Something on the far side of the was was doing that right now, pointing in her direction - maybe a dozen people had time to see it, just time to fling themselves flat and cover their eyes.....
	Reacting as quickly as a fit young vixen can move, even so, there was scarcely time to do more than turn away. Then, all hell broke loose ! The street flooded with a ripping torrent of immaterial flame, a hybrid rainbow lightning that ripped cobblestones up in some places, and left nothing but an ozone-scented breeze a scant few paces away. 
	"YIIIII !"  Something like an immaterial battering-ram caught Suzuko in mid-dive, and drove her as helpless flotsam towards a towering wall. She had a terrified instant as the hard stone seemed to hurtle towards her, then .... 
	A strange cool calmness seemed to flash out - there was no other way to describe it - from the talisman she wore between her small fluffy breasts. She felt herself floating still, halted inertialessly a scant metre away from the wall she had been about to collide into with bone-shattering force.
	Unfortunately, the Talisman's protection did nothing for the rest of the neighbourhood. A disintegrating wooden fruit-stall, caught up in the sorcerous tsunami, rear-end shunted her with the force of a rugby-playing wooden golem. 
	As she lay flat-out with the debris falling all around, dimly she heard angry, frightened voices from around. Just as consciousness slipped away, Suzuko thought she heard someone growl -
	"That's the third bloody sorcerous meltdown t'Mage Guilds's 'ad this week. Aye, an' it's only Tuesday, an' all."


	There was a timeless time. Images flashed fleetingly, as Suzuko drifted in and out of consciousness. At last, there was a sudden burst of light - as if she was a light-starved plant suddenly brought out again into bright, refreshing daylight.
	Suzuko groaned. This, she thought to herself, was getting to be too much of a regular occurrence. And then she was suddenly awake and fully conscious, lying in a white-sheeted bed in the corner of a white-stone building, that somehow she felt she ought to recognise.
	Two people were bending over her. One, a sloe-eyed lynx woman, her plain green gown adorned only with a rather explicit version of the yin-yang symbol, that Suzuko had seen somewhere before. And the other, a tall, distinguished-looking human with slate-grey hair that somehow seemed wholly untouched by any sign of age.
	The Lynx gave a sigh of relief, when she met Suzuko's gaze. "I've done all I can, Your Eminence, " she bowed reverently to the human, whose grey robes were utterly plain and unadorned. "There was something terribly wrong with her, apart from her obvious injuries - but I prayed to our Lady Dhoreen, and she sent forth her healing."
	The human nodded sagely. "Good show. We can't have tourists getting banged up in our main streets just like that. Fine - I'll call you if the patient needs anything else. And payment - you can charge it to the Treasury."
	The Lynx bowed her way out. "Yes, my Lord Ayshalah."