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the table, and left.
    It roused Mokraine, who raised his head, blinked, and focused on me.
    “Babylon.”
    “Mokraine. How are you?”
    “I’m...” he laughed. “I’m bathed in splendour, Babylon. Twomoon is coming, and this is a special Twomoon, a time of intensity, a syzygy of syzygies. How are you?” His eyes were avid, weary, pouched in greyish flesh. He’d been a handsome man, once; still was, if you liked them seriously ravaged, but he’d lost all interest in the pleasures of the flesh long ago.
    “In need of information. What’s a syzygy?”
    “A time when things fall into line. Planets. Planes. Portals.”
    He reached for his glass. I kept my hand out of the way. Touching Mokraine isn’t a good idea.
    He’s a vampire, of sorts. But what he feeds on isn’t blood; it’s the stuff of spirit. Memories. Emotions. It doesn’t kill, but the effects can be disconcerting to say the least.
    He wasn’t born that way. It’s to do with that creature that walks with him; we call it his familiar, but only because there’s no other word for it. Don’t mess with arcane magic when you live on a planar conjunction, that’s my advice. You never know what’s going to leap through the small but perfectly formed portal you just opened and latch onto your soul.
    Because Mokraine had been powerful, once. A First Adept Doctor of the Arcane; students had come from all over to hear his lectures. Apparently he’d known the names and properties of every type of talisman, amulet and phylactery in the Perindi Empire. But his real obsession was portals, and at the time, there was a lot of prestige to be had from studying them. After all, we all live with the things, but understand almost nothing about how they work, why they appear, why some seem permanent and others not. And no-one knew how to create one. Mokraine found a way, but afterwards he couldn’t remember how he’d done it, had lost all his notes, and didn’t care a jot anymore.
    “Since when are you interested in such things, Babylon?”
    “It’s not important. That’s not what I wanted to ask you about. A girl disappeared, from the Hall of Mirrors.”
    I showed him the picture. He glanced at it, then stared into the distance, taking the information in, savouring it. “Ah, this city,” he said, like a man describing a favourite meal... or a favourite whore.
    “Mokraine?”
    “Yes, Babylon, my bright-burning one?”
    “I just want to know if anyone’s seen or heard anything. I don’t want anyone damaged.”
    “Oh, my darling, you know me.”
    “Yes, I do. I think. But overstep, and... well, you know me, too.”
    “I’ll listen, Babylon. It’s what I do.”
    I left feeling thoroughly low. Mokraine has that effect on me; so does Glinchen, these days, and the two of them in one evening were more than enough.
    But you can’t save everyone, I know that.

 
    TIRESANA
     
     
    I WAS SIXTEEN, and we were home in time for the Choosing.
    Kyrl called on various gods when she was playing, and if she knew there was a fight coming up, she’d kiss her blade and mutter a prayer to Babaska. Radan and Sesh both did likewise, without the kissing. I picked up the habit, but what or who I was praying to, I never thought about; it was just what you did.
    We passed whorehouses in the towns, and Sesh sometimes visited; they were dedicated to Babaska, too. There were often little statues of her outside, with bare breasts and a sword.
    And though the gods no longer manifested, their Avatars did. I’d never seen one, but everyone knew someone who had or claimed to have; someone who’d been to a festival at one of the major temples, to ask a special favour, or who’d seen one pick out an acolyte at a Choosing.
    The Avatars were divine beings. Like genies, they were the stuff of gods, and through them and through the priests the will of the gods was made manifest. And since it just might be the will of the gods that you got picked to be an acolyte, and thus made for life,