the country, introducing all the interesting little changes both he and Sloat desired. And then watch the money roll in. Sloat thought, turning off the freeway into Marina del Rey. Then watch
His client, Asher Dondorf, lived in the bottom half of a new condo in one of the Marina’s narrow, alleylike streets just off the beach. Dondorf was an old character actor who had achieved a surprising level of prominence and visibility in the late seventies through a role on a television series; he’d played the landlord of the young couple—private detectives, and both cute as baby pandas—who were the series’ stars. Dondorf got so much mail from his few appearances in the early episodes that the writers increased his part, making him an unofficial father to the young detectives, letting him solve a murder or two, putting him in danger, etc., etc. His salary doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and when the series was cancelled after six years, he went back into film work. Which was the problem. Dondorf thought he was a star, but the studios and producers still considered him a character actor— popular, but not a serious asset to any project. Dondorf wanted flowers in his dressing room, he wanted his own hairdresser and dialogue coach, he wanted more money, more respect, more love, more everything. Dondorf, in fact, was a putz.
When he pulled his car tight into the parking bay and eased himself out, being careful not to scratch the edge of his door on the brick, Sloat came to a realization: if he learned, or even suspected, sometime in the next few days, that Jack Sawyer had discovered the existence of the Territories, he would kill him. There was such a thing as an unacceptable risk.
Sloat smiled to himself, popping another Di-Gel into his mouth, and rapped on the condo’s door. He knew it already: Asher Dondorf was going to kill himself. He’d do it in the living room in order to create as much mess as possible. A temperamental jerk like his soon-to-be-ex-client would think a really sloppy suicide was revenge on the bank that held his mortgage. When a pale, trembling Dondorf opened the door, the warmth of Sloat’s greeting was quite genuine.
TWO
THE ROAD OF TRIALS
6
The Queen’s Pavillion
1
The saw-toothed blades of grass directly before Jack’s eyes seemed as tall and stiff as sabres. They would cut the wind, not bend to it. Jack groaned as he lifted his head. He did not possess such dignity. His stomach still felt threateningly liquid, his forehead and eyes burned. Jack pushed himself up on his knees and then forced himself to stand. A long horse-drawn cart rumbled toward him down the dusty track, and its driver, a bearded red-faced man roughly the same shape and size as the wooden barrels rattling behind him, was staring at him. Jack nodded and tried to take in as much as he could about the man while giving the appearance of a loafing boy who had perhaps run off for an illicit snooze. Upright, he no longer felt ill; he felt, in fact, better than at any time since leaving Los Angeles, not merely healthy but somehow harmonious, mysteriously in tune with his body. The warm, drifting air of the Territories patted his face with the gentlest, most fragrant of touches—its own delicate and flowery scent quite distinct beneath the stronger odor of raw meat it carried. Jack ran his hands over his face and peeked at the driver of the cart, his first sample of Territories Man.
If the driver addressed him, how should he answer? Did they even speak English here? His kind of English? For a moment Jack imagined himself trying to pass unnoticed in a world where people said “Prithee” and “Dost thou go cross-gartered, yonder varlet?” and decided that if that was how things went, he’d pretend to be a mute.
The driver finally took his eyes off Jack and clucked something decidedly not 1980’s American English to his horses. But perhaps that was just the way you spoke to horses.
Jack’s clothes had changed—he wore coarse, voluminous woolen trousers instead of the corduroy jeans. Above the waist a close-fitting jacket of soft blue fabric covered him. Instead of buttons, the jacket—a jerkin? he speculated—had a row of cloth hooks and eyes. Like the trousers, it was clearly hand-made. The Nikes, too, were gone, replaced by flat leather sandals. The knapsack had been transmogrified into a leather sack held by a thin strap over his shoulder. The cart-driver wore clothing almost exactly similar—his jerkin was of leather stained so deeply and continuously that it showed rings within rings, like an old tree’s heart.
All rattle and dust, the cart pulled past Jack. The barrels radiated a yeasty musk of beer. Behind the barrels stood a triple pile of what Jack unthinkingly took to be truck tires. He smelled the “tires” and noticed that they were perfectly, flawlessly bald in the same moment—it was a creamy odor, full of secret depths and subtle pleasures, that instantly made him hungry. Cheese, but no cheese that he had ever tasted. Behind the wheels of cheese, near the back of the cart, an irregular mound of raw meat—long, peeled-looking sides of beef, big slablike steaks, a heap of ropy internal organs he could not identify—slithered beneath a glistening mat of flies. The powerful smell of the raw meat assailed Jack, killing the hunger evoked by the cheese. He moved into the middle of the track after the cart had passed him and watched it jounce toward the crest of a little rise. A second later he began to follow after, walking north.
He had gone only halfway up the rise when he once again saw the peak of the great tent, rigid in the midst of a rank of narrow fluttering flags. That, he assumed, was his destination. Another few steps past the blackberry bushes where he’d paused the last time (remembering how good they’d been, Jack popped two of the enormous berries in his mouth) and he could see the whole of the tent. It was actually a big rambling pavillion, long wings on each side, with gates and a courtyard. Like the Alhambra, this eccentric structure—a summer palace, Jack’s instincts told him—stood just above the ocean. Little bands of people moved through and around the great pavillion, driven by forces as powerful and invisible as the effect on iron filings of a magnet. The little groups met, divided, poured on again.
Some of the men wore bright, rich-looking clothes, though many seemed to be dressed much as Jack was. A few women in long shining white gowns or robes marched through the courtyard, as purposeful as generals. Outside the gates stood a collection of smaller tents and impromptu-looking wooden huts; here, too, people moved, eating or buying or talking, though more easily and randomly. Somewhere down in that busy crowd he would have to find the man with a scar.
But first he looked behind him, down the length of the rutted track, to see what had happened to Funworld.
When he saw two small dark horses pulling plows, perhaps fifty yards off, he thought that the amusement park had become a farm, but then he noticed the crowd watching the plowing from the top of the field and understood
