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husband. He futtered anything that moved, including all my sisters and all the female Taken. Enough. She was about to mate with another of his descendants. Their child would become a vessel into which the old bastard could project his soul.”
    The Limper might have considered all that in whatever he had planned. The rest of us gaped. Excepting the girl. She did not understand a word. The language the Lady spoke was unknown to her.
    Her whole being was focused on what hung in the air, there, though.
    She voided herself. She knew where she was bound.
    Something passed between the Lady and the Limper. The stinky little sorcerer bowed deeply. He moved in on the girl, took hold of her arm, forced her to her feet. He pushed her toward the door he had wrecked.
    The rest of us watched, every man wishing he had the power to stop them, every man knowing that, if the Lady had spoken truly, Tides Elba was a threat to the entire world. She could become the port through which the hideous shadow known as the Dominator could make his return. No doubt she was sought by and beloved of every Resurrectionist cult hoping to free the old evil from his grave. No doubt she was a prophesied messiah of darkness.
    I glanced back. The Lady was gone. The end, here, was almost an anticlimax. But that was because we were out there on the margins, able to see only the local surface of the story. For the Company, the central fact would be we had survived.
    We all went out and watched the Limper get ready to go.
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    He seemed nervous and unhappy. He shoved the girl into a sack. He sewed that shut, then secured it to his carpet with cording. Tides Elba would not evade her fate by rolling off the carpet while it was in flight.
    His liftoff into the late-afternoon light seemed erratic. He wobbled as he headed west.
    I found Hagop in the shadows near where the Limper’s carpet had lain. He gave me a big grin and a thumbs-up. “He spotted it right away. Took it out, looked at it, and jumped like somebody just hit him with a shovel.”
    “He got the message, then.”
    Goblin stared westward, eyes still haunted, but said only, “What a waste of delicious girl flesh.” And then, “Let’s round up Elmo and One-Eye and go tip a few at the Dark Horse. Elmo has got the cards, don’t he?”