d twisted the switch all the way over,
and there was the Major Maintainer winking blue about three times a
second as nice as you could want it.

It must have been working as sweet and steady as ever, all the time it
was Inverted, except that, being inside out, it had hocused the
direction finders.

CHAPTER 15

black legged spiders
with red hearts of hell

--marquis

LORD SPIDER

"Jesu!" I turned and Sid's face was sticking through the screen like a
tinted bas-relief hanging on a gray wall and I got the impression he had
peered unexpectedly through a slit in an arras into Queen Elizabeth's
bedroom.

He didn't have any time to linger on the sensation, even if he'd wanted
to, for an elbow with a copper band thrust through the screen and dug
his ribs and Kaby marched Lili in by the neck. Erich, Mark and Illy were
right behind. They caught the blue flashes and stopped dead, staring at
the long-lost. Erich spared me one look which seemed to say, so you did
it, not that it matters. Then he stepped forward and picked it up and
held it solidly to his left side in the double right-angle made by
fingers, forearm and chest, and reached for the Introversion switch with
a look on his face as if he were opening a fifth of whisky.

The blue light died and Change Winds hit me like a stiff drink that had
been a long, long time in coming, like a hot trumpet note out of
nowhere.

I felt the changing pasts blowing through me, and the uncertainties
whistling past, and ice-stiff reality softening with all its duties and
necessities, and the little memories shredding away and dancing off like
autumn leaves, leaving maybe not even ghosts behind, and all the crazy
moods like Mardi Gras dancers pouring down an evening street, and
something inside me had the nerve to say it didn't care whether Greta
Forzane's death was riding in those Winds because they felt so good.

I could tell it was hitting the others the same way. Even battered,
tight-lipped Lili seemed to be saying, you're making me drink the stuff
and I hate you for it, but I do love it. I guess we'd all had the worry
that even finding and Extroverting the Maintainer wouldn't put us back
in touch with the cosmos and give us those Winds we hate and love.

The thing that cut through to us as we stood there glowing was not the
thought of the bomb, though that would have come in a few seconds more,
but Sid's voice. He was still standing in the s