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ring out of the box.
    “What does this do?” he asked. “Do I put it on?”
    “Yes, do put it on,” replied Dr. Scamandros. “In essence, it will tell you the degree to which you have been…ah…tainted with sorcery. It is not exact, of course, and in the case of a mortal, the calibration is uncertain. I would say that if the ring turns more than six partsgold then you will have become irretrievably transformed into a—”
    “Can we move on?” snapped Dame Primus as Dr. Scamandros said, “Denizen.”
    Arthur put on the ring and watched with fascination and growing horror as each silver segment of the crocodile slowly turned from silver to gold.
    One…two…three—
    If he was transformed into a Denizen, he could never go back home. But he needed to use the Keys and the Atlas against the Morrow Days, and that meant more sorcerous contamination.
    Unless it was all too late already.
    Arthur stared at the ring as the tide of gold continued on, flowing into the fourth segment without slowing at all.

Chapter Three
    A rthur kept staring at the ring with dread fascination. After the fourth segment the gold suddenly stopped spreading, and then it slowly ebbed back a little.
    “It’s almost up to the fourth line,” Arthur reported.
    “It is not exact,” said Dr. Scamandros. “But that would concur with my previous examination. Your flesh, blood, and bone are some four-tenths contaminated with sorcery.”
    “And past six-tenths I become a Denizen?”
    “Irrevocably.”
    “Can I get rid of the contamination?” Arthur tried to keep his voice calm. “Does it wear off?”
    “It will reduce with time,” Scamandros replied. “Provided you don’t add to it. I would expect that degree of contamination to lessen in about a century.”
    “A century! It might as well be permanent. But how much would using the Atlas add to the contamination?”
    “Without careful experimentation and observation I should not like to say. Considerably less than the interventions to heal your ailments, or to undo misdirectedapplication of the Keys’ power. Anything not focused on your own body will be less harmful.”
    “It is not harmful to become a Denizen,” said Dame Primus. “It is to become a higher order of being. I cannot understand your reluctance to shed your mortality, Arthur. After all, you are the Rightful Heir of the Architect of Everything. Now can we please return to the Agenda?”
    “I was only chosen because I was about to die and happened to be handy,” said Arthur. “I bet you’ve got a stack of Rightful Heirs noted down somewhere if something happens to me.”
    There was silence in the vast room for a few seconds, until Dame Primus cleared her throat.
    Before she could speak, Arthur raised his voice. “We will go back to the Agenda! After we’ve worked out what to do about the Spirit-eater. I just wish I could remember what might have been taken.”
    “Try to work your way back through everything you did,” Leaf suggested. “Did you drop your inhaler on the oval? Maybe they picked that up? Or did you have something at school when they burned the library?”
    Arthur shook his head. “I don’t think so…Hey, wait a second!”
    He turned to look at Monday’s Dusk. He was slightlyshorter than he had been as Noon and looked rather less severe, though no less handsome. He wore the night-black, undertakerlike costume of Dusk, though he’d taken off his top hat with the long black silk scarf wound around its crown.
    “You sent the Fetchers when you were Noon. Did one of them bring something back, or were they banished straight into Nothing?”
    “They did not return to me,” said Dusk, his once-silver tongue now a shiny ebony, and his voice much softer. “But then I did not raise them in the first place. Mister Monday assigned them to me. I presume he bought them from Grim Tuesday, for he would not have been energetic enough to create them himself. You may recall that I was forced to return to the House