About half way between West End and New Citadel the secondary-road hastily joins to the major cart-road and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is the Valley of Ashes—a once treacherous dale where ash monsters would grow like wheat into ridges and hills, but now there are mainly gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a grey caravan line that crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately ash-grey men swarm up with leaden halberds and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak creatures which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Healer Taj Ekelburg. The eyes of Healer Taj Ekelburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an occultist guild summoned him there to fatten their coffers by watching over a monster rich area, and were then be able to reap the rewards of cultivated chi he sent back to them. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many ether-less days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The Valley of Ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting caravans can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tomas Buth-Chanain's mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular tournaments with her and, leaving her at a booth, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New Citadel with Tomas on the caravan one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the cart.

"We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."

I think he'd cycled his chi up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had no chi cycling to do.

I followed him over a low white-washed fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Healer Ekelburg's persistent stare.

The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night tavern approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a smithy—Repairs. GORGERTON WILLSON. Blades Bought and Sold—and I followed Tomas inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only sword visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Zhanmadao—horse-cutting blade—which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a smithy must be a blind glamour and that sumptuous and romantic lodgings were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, anaemic, and faintly handsome but he had an empty spirit - a trait that was rare in humans. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.

"Hello, Willson, old man," said Tomas, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?"

"I can't complain," answered Willson unconvincingly while rubbing his shoulder. "When are you going to sell me that enchanted hammer?"

"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."

"Works pretty slow, don't he?"

“No, he doesn't," said Tomas coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."

"I don't mean that," explained Willson quickly. "I just meant—"

His voice faded off and Tomas glanced impatiently around the smithy. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vital aura about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering with chi. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tomas, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."

"Oh, sure," agreed Willson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair while his absent core veiled everything in the vicinity—even his wife as she moved close to Tomas.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"I want to see you," said Tomas intently. "Get on the next caravan."

"All right."

"I'll meet you by the news-stand at the exit."

She nodded and moved away from him just as George Willson emerged with two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

My aura sense surged through me as we waited and I could tell Tomas had a similar sensation. I looked back down the street to the smithy we had just left and in the direction I felt the danger originated. I peered down the grey street for a long moment, the danger sharp and powerful. The power I felt was that of a demon unbound from a mortal shell and it was one with which I was intimately familiar. Just as quickly as the danger appeared it evaporated. As I moved down the street and shambling figure emerged from around the corner. It was an Ashen Ghoul that radiated a power to place it around the same level of an iron-cored practitioner. Before I finished my next step, Tomas zipped to the creature and dissolved it into motes of cold ash with a single punch.

"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tomas, back at my side and exchanging a frown with Healer Ekelburg.

"Awful."

"It does her good to get away."

"Doesn't her husband object?"

"Willson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New Citadel. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive."

So Tomas Buth-Chanain and his girl and I went up together to New Citadel—or not quite together, for Lady Willson sat discreetly in another cart. Tomas deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Enders who might be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tomas helped her to a platform in New Citadel. At the news-stand she bought a Town Tattle spell tablet that blocked scanning and a dream scroll and, in the station alchemist store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four hackney carriages drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass.

"I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have—a dog."

We moved up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to the legendary John Rock Faller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

"What kind are they?" asked Lady Willson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window.

"All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?"

"I'd like to get one of those sentinel dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?"

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

"That's no police dog," said Tomas.

"No, it's not exactly a police dog," said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an Airdane." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll always help you counter wind and cold chi."

"I think it's cute," said Mrs. Willson enthusiastically. "How much is it?"

"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten coppers."

The Airdane—undoubtedly there was an Airdane concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Lady Willson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately.

"That dog? That dog's a boy."

"It's a bitch," said Tomas decisively. "Here's your silver. Go and buy ten more dogs with it."

We drove over to Quintus Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of greater white sheep turn the corner.

"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here."

"No, you don't," interposed Tomas quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?"

"Come on," she urged. "I'll message my sister Katharina. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know."

"Well, I'd like to, but—"

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Centums. At 158th Street the carriage stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Lady Willson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in.

"I'm going to have the McKeys come up," she announced as we rose in the lift construct. "And of course I got to call upon my sister, too."

The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the tranquil gardens. The only picture was an over-enlarged painting, apparently a dragon sitting on a blurred mountain. Looked at from a distance however the dragon resolved itself into a decorate halo and the countenance of the stout Iron Lady beamed down into the room. Several old Town Tattle spell tablets lay on the table together with a scroll of Far Calling and some of the small scandal zines of Broadsteet concerning the lives of the famous. Lady Willson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant messenger boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tomas brought out a bottle of whisked essence from a locked bureau door. Essence is purified chi energy that can be absorbed without the need to cycle but can come with less-than-desirable side effects.

I have been essence drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tomas's lap Lady Willson called up several people through her scroll; then there were no channeling stones and I went out to buy some at the elixer store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and tried to work the Far Calling scroll—either it was terribly difficult or the essence distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me.