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we’d spoken, but I didn’t have the heart to push when she was so winded. The troll seemed to have crossed some aging line since I’d seen her last, moving from vigorous middle age into, well, not exactly frailty—she had just run up several hundred stairs—but something considerably less hardy and physically intimidating than when I’d first met her. Before I could figure out what to say, she pointed to an older man coming slowly toward us across the lawn and made a throat-cutting gesture, then ducked down so that only her eyes remained above the level of the parapet.
    With a silent curse, I followed her example. There was something about the man that told me I’d rather he didn’t notice me, especially not at a moment when I was no more than mouse-sized by his standards. He was very lean and very tall, though slightly shorter than our own perch. He seemed strong and vigorous despite deep lines in his face and long gray hair. His clothes were also gray. He had on hiking boots and the kind of zip-off slacks that serious travelers often wear, a button-down shirt with extra pockets, a long, full dusterlike jacket, and a broad-brimmed hat that hid his eyes in shadow.
    He had a trekking pole of the sort that can double for a camera monopod, its bottom tipped with a wicked spike, though he didn’t lean on it until he reached the place where the chaos puddle had burned a hole in the ground. Even then, I didn’t think he really needed its help as he lowered himself to look at the spot. He squatted there so long I thought he might take root, which gave me my first real chance to have a more general look around.
    Behind the man, the lawn stretched southward to a small cottagelike building scaled in proportion to my normal size, the ticket booth of this strange tourist attraction. To the left, where the sun was almost touching the horizon, a large hedge hid most of the nearly empty parking lot. To the right I could see several more buildings, including an inn, some sort of manor, and what appeared to be St. Giles Church—all built to different scales. It was one of the odder vistas I’d ever encountered, especially as I was somewhere in the neighborhood of three inches tall at the moment.
    I was still trying to make sense of it all when the man stood and crossed to examine the silvery cord that continued to slide past. As he did so, the trekking pole seemed to blur for an instant, revealing another shape underneath, a staff or spear perhaps. Who was this guy? With a deep, unhappy sigh, he started to follow the line of the leash, or whatever it was. He was walking fast, and as soon as he’d passed beyond immediate sight, Ahllan stood up.
    “I hoped he’d show up.” She sighed. “We’d better hurry if we want to see the rest of this.”
    “Hang on a second, Ahllan,” said Melchior. “We need to find out what happened to you, why you’re here, all that stuff.”
    “You will,” she said, “but it’s going to have to wait just a little bit longer. In the local scheme of things, that fellow is as important as Zeus is back home, maybe more so. We need to take every opportunity to see what he’s up to. Having him here on my home ground is too good a chance to let slip.”
    Then she whistled a quick bit of pseudobinary that turned the steps into a slide and leaped aboard. Given the choice of remaining behind or following her once again, we followed. When we reached the ground floor, she led the way to an enormous—to us—electrical outlet set in the back wall of the cathedral.
    “Take my hand; we’re going to need to gate.”
    I put Melchior on my shoulder and put my right hand in Ahllan’s left. This time I listened very closely to the code Ahllan whistled. I knew what was coming, some form of gate spell using the local power grid as a substitute for the connection between two points normally provided by the mweb network.
    I still couldn’t make sense of it. The rhythms were right, though the length of the