them and we
hardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one to
another of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight
golden hair flirting around it, was only the Void.

"All right then," he repeated suddenly. "We're twelve Spiders and two
Ghosts, and we've time for a bit of a talk, and we're all in the same
bloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we'll all know what we're
talking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up
about a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are
off!"

* * * * *

Bruce ripped them out of his belt where they'd been tucked and slammed
them down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back and
forth, and it wasn't funny.

"Because," he went right on, "I've been getting a completely new picture
of what this Spiders' war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it's
jolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a rugged
little party outside both of them when the operation's over. It's sweet
to know there's no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate
or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can't
shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or
gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the
ultimate insatiable hunger, and it's great to be Faust, even in a pack
of other Fausts.

"It's sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man's life
or a culture's, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one,
and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes--hah! killing men
or carrying off women isn't in it for glutting the sense of power. It's
sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts
that were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet to
wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and
look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it
and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and
decide whether he'll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.

"Or he can't stand Resurrection, it fries or freezes him, and you've got
to decide whether to return him to his lifeline and his Zombie dreams,
only they'll be a little grayer and horrider than they were before, or
whether, if she's got that tantalizing something, to bring her shell
along for a Ghostgirl--that's sweet, too. It