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wasn’t.
    Next to her a calico cat puffed away at a hubble-bubble. Puss’s watch cost more than his vest, and his vest cost more than his boots, and his boots cost more than a house. If you stripped him naked and sold off his costume, you’d walk away with enough money to retire—though if you left him alive you wouldn’t have long to enjoy it. The only thing that could rival Puss’s vanity was his sadism.
    Puss was rough and Brontë was worse, though as far as Mephetic was concerned neither could hold a candle, in terms of sheer menace, to the last member of the trio, coiled tightly against the back wall. They were his top ranks, the troubleshooters who helped to keep the Gardens running, any one of the three as dangerous as a battalion of rat guard. And if they didn’t quite snap to attention when Mephetic came through the door, well, they weren’t exactly your run-of-the-mill grunts, now were they? And they knew enough at least to pay him his due. Mephetic hadn’t gotten to where he was by being made of tissue paper.
    He laid the situation out for them quickly, with little preamble and no aggrandizement.
    “Well welcomed, as far as I’m concerned,” Puss said. Puss had drawing-room manners, and he was as amoral as a loaded gun. “I haven’t had anything interesting to do since coming to this backwater hellhole.”
    “Not up to the standards of the Old Country?” Brontë asked.
    “Nothing is,” Puss said, doffing his hat regretfully. “Would that father had been willing to overlook my . . . youthful indiscretions.”
    “Which indiscretions were those? Dueling or buggery?”
    Puss mulled this over for a moment. “You know, I can’t quite remember.”
    Puss and Brontë laughed merrily. They were the best of friends. One of them was likely to kill the other before long.
    Brontë turned to face the third of Mephetic’s high commanders. “You worked with them,” she said. “What can we expect?”
    The Quaker had fed recently; you could tell from the fat knot stuck midway down his coil. This was the only reason Brontë had been willing to speak with him, and even so she asked the question from across the room, out of the serpent’s effective range, or so she hoped. The Quaker’s head was perched atop the tight weave of his body, and for a long moment it seemed he had not heard the question or simply didn’t care to answer. But then his ghost-white tail began to rattle, like rain falling against a windowpane, though far less comforting.
    Mephetic nodded to himself. He was ready for the Captain.

Part the Second

Chapter 20: South of the Border
    Angie Weasel was drinking from the trough. She righted herself and blinked twice. It was a hot day, sun beating off dust as far as you’d want to look, and a creature could get to seeing things that weren’t there. She squinted and fanned herself with her hat. She called to Bessie Weasel, her younger sister, slung out on the swinging bench that hung from the roof of the patio, just outside the main house. It was the only structure that remained standing, apart from a large barn rotting a few hundred paces to her rear. Bessie sighed. Bessie listened to the hinges squeal. By the time Bessie had managed to stand several minutes had passed, and the Captain and Cinnabar were clearly within view, and so her effort was altogether wasted.
    A brief word on weasels—it is not a coincidence that their species has entered the popular nomenclature as synonym for duplicity and cheapness of character. No one has ever caressed a lover and said, “You weasel.” A mother does not call her babe a “weasel” as she brings it to breast. A weeping son does not eulogize his newly dead father as “my dearest weasel.” As a rule, they exemplify the sort of low cunning and brute force that is little in demand among the civilized creatures of the world.
    The Weasel sisters were very much emblematic of the species, if perhaps slightly nastier than the norm. They had come down from