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life.”
    “Your import licenses are due to expire shortly. I can arrange for another half-year’s extension.”
    “Thank you, patron, but we live in difficult and trying times. Despite the quarantine and the best efforts of the St. Charl Guard, not a night passes without the shrieks of the Ragers, the carniphages, crying from our rooftops, nor morning break without some new poor victim having fallen to them.”
    “You are vulnerable, I understand. I shall have one of my personal wardens remain to guard your workshop by night.”
    “Thank you, Grace, but for the books …”
    “Ah, the books; the books must balance, the gentlemen of the exchequer never sleep. You will be paid fairly for your work, never fear. It is the least I can do for my unfortunate siblings. Now: the automata; there are a few minor changes I wish you to make.”
    * * * *
    Now it is noon, for the carillons of St. Maikannen’s Chantry have rung out the Thirteenth Hour, and in the plaza beneath the bell-keep Dom Perellen takes wine with a few intimate friends from his circle of artists and aesthetes. They drink and laugh and stretch their elegant limbs in the weak autumn sunshine and exchange morsels of malicious gossip. But there is little pleasure in raillery for Dom Perellen for he knows that at other tables in other plazas beneath other bell-keeps other young bucks are lampooning and laughing at him.
    Later they visit the Govannon Academy and fall in with a group of five young Gracious ladies, come like them to view the paintings. Dom Perellen drops a two-forent tip to the human chaperon, and his friends distract the mechanical conscience for the few moments necessary for him to slip aside with the Infanta Phaedra on pretext of showing her the exhibition. Later, at the House Perellen, he will entertain her with some short sonatas of his own composing. On their return from the Academy, with the campaniles sounding Nineteen o’Clock and the starlings flocking and swooping about the spire of St. Severyn’s Cathedral, they are diverted from their course by the St. Charl Guards who have cordoned off an area surrounding a disused trading factor’s warehouse.
    “Ragers, Graces,” says the fat perimeter sergeant. “Carniphages. Traced a chapter of ‘em to this ‘ere warehouse. Soon have ‘em smoked out, rest assured. What you’ve got to do, Graces, bum out the Plague.”
    The Infanta Phaedra presses closer for reassurance and Dom Perellen commands his mechanical quintet to play and quench the sound of the screams. The little boat moves on. Behind, the sun-forged blades of the laser-lances cauterize the alien infection. Soon the cries are lost and all that can be heard is the gentle lilting of the music and the lap of dark water under the bow as the ebbing tide draws them down the confluence of conduits and channels toward Elder Sea.
    * * * *
    Dawn finds Dom Perellen gazing into the ceiling. Confusing ripple-reflections move across plasterwork cherubs and peacocks. The Infanta Phaedra stirs contentedly in her sleep but Dom Perellen does not hear her, for he is far away in the passages of his mind. Dawn is the hour when the death-white corpse-boats slip from their moorings behind the Hall of Weeping and steal away into the sunrise to the funeral grounds. Only the gravely smiling boatmen who crew the water-hearses know the latitude and longitude of the funeral grounds, but in his imagination Dom Perellen can see them slipping the weighted coffins over the stem into fog-shrouded Elder Sea. For this is the vision that haunts him, a corpse-boat making its slow cold passage across the bar into Elder Sea. Between the somber upright figures of the boatmen is a white coffin bearing the crest of a Gracious Family unfamiliar to him. He sees the coffin sinking into the clean cold water without even a ripple, sinking with today’s company of bakers and butchers and lawyers and priests, merchants and traders and lowly playactors, poets and painters and wise