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Havens they have built? Have you seen the Market Castle of the Lord of Commerce, mighty Mammon's glass tower where fools barter their stocks and bonds, trading in futures of companies that no longer exist beyond the mirrored window-walls of their fortress mart— those mirrors facing inward so the denizens are blinded by the luster of greed in their own eyes? Have you seen the Furnace Factory of Hephaistos, men sweating the salt of sorrows from their skin, washing the oily grime of memory away at the end of each day, so they can live life by the tick and tock of clocks, by the whistle and the bell routine of work, as much machines themselves as machinists?
    Have you seen the hollow creatures lost in the Hinter outside these Havens, shambling simulations of humanity, their names daubed in ocher on their chests or tattooed into their skins, the last vestige of their identity? Have you seen the electronic ghosts, clay golems, plastic robots, armored zombies, all the sylphs and shabtis, all the artifacts more human than these wrecks who made them to sit by their sides and whisper in their ears,
you are a human being?
    We understand you now, a little, we think. But it is twenty years—in one measure of time—since we set out to make your dreamworld, and sometimes we think we do not
really
understand you … not at all.
    So you must teach us, Reynard. You must teach this ink to understand the world it writes in the book you hold now in your hand, the Book of All Hours.
    Begin.

one
HARLEQUIN IN HELL
A TANTRIC TARANTULA
    oom.
    That one's for King Finn, I think as the smoked-glass windows of the brown-brick 19 60s monster of a multistory shatter in a bloom of black smoke and green flame, and I almost flinch—but only almost—as the shock wave blasts across my back, billowing my armored longcoat out in front of me. The reflection in the mirror steel of the Zippo, inscribed with the circle-A of Anarchy, is a peachy sight in the rush-hour night of winter Kentigern, my very own fireworks display. The building was asking for it anyway, I reckon; the only thing the fascists do worse than politics is architecture, and in the Little Black Book of Jack Flash tattooed on my skin, well, bad taste is a fine reason for revolution. I
click
the lighter open,
snik
it lit and suck a hash cheroot into a
fwoosh
of life, then
clunk
the silvery lighter shut and turn, wait.
    One elephant. Two elephants. Three elephants.
    Doom.
    And that's for Anaesthesia.
    Militiamen, their chakras acrackle with the blue-green fire of orgone-fusion chain reactions, come streaming from the building, fleeing, jostling through doorways, diving from windows. I watch them from my magic circle of melted tarmac, square in the center of a business-district crossroads where traffic signals cycle red and green and orange, like lights on a cheap mobile disco. Beams of headlights scythe the halogen-orange sky as aircars veer and buck to avoidme, spinning like ice skaters on their float-rays and crumping into sandstone and brick, Victorian, Georgian, Modern edifices shedding chips, sparks, shards and fireballs. Horns blare like it's the End of Days and Gabriel has a backing section. Ornithopters rise from the rooftop landing pad of Pitt Street pigyard, unbalanced by the panicked blackshirts clinging to their landing gear and to each other, dangling like daisy chains. I flick the flap of my longcoat back and draw my Curzon-Youngblood Mark I chi-gun—favored weapon of the gaijin ninjas— and slowly, methodically, start to pick them off.
    Call it kundalini, call it chi, or call it orgone energy. Call it the mystic life force of the universe, if you want. Me, I leave it to the Cavors and the Reichs to do the blackboard metamaths and pop parapsychology. All I know is that I got the original sex pistol in my hand, charged with the full-on power of all the sex-death lust-terror that just reeks in every fiber of my body. Sex is a weapon, and tonight, baby, I'm hornier than a whore in