The store was strangely deserted-or, not so strange, considering the late hour-but the manager came hurrying down the empty aisles when the five of us entered the front door.
He smiled and inclined his head when we showed him the card Deimos had given us. 'Gentlemen's apparel is on the second floor...' He gestured toward the grand-ballroom- style staircase leading up to a sort of elevated courtyard surrounded by several departments or shops on the right.
'Women's evening wear, yes? On the left...' A twin of the first staircase led up to an area the size of a small town, but one where an impatient sorcerer turned every inhabitant into a dressmaker.
There was no balcony or bridge between the two departments: To cross from one to the other required descending one grand staircase, crossing the wealth-crowded aisles of the main salon, and ascending another.
Victor said, 'Leader, I am not sure we should split up.'
Colin said, 'He's right, I mean, you girls might need help tucking your mammary glands into brassieres or something.'
Vanity took me by the elbow. 'We don't want to miss Archer; besides, this is still within screaming distance. And how fast can Victor fly? Mach twenty-two or something?'
I said, 'Just stay alert. Go get your tuxes.' But for some reason, Vanity and I started giggling as we tripped up the stairway to the palace of luxury atop. Here were mannequins in poses of grace, and acres of soft fabric hanging from padded hangers.
Vanity whispered: 'The money! It is still folded up in your fourth dimension.'
But there was a clerk watching. The young lady walked across the shimmering marble floor toward us, the only other person in sight, and it was not the time to pull my energy-shining wings down into this plenum.
A man in purple pulled open the door of my little dressing room. Of course, the way this world works, it was just at the moment when I was wearing nothing but bra and panties, and I was bent over, pulling my toes out of a collapsed skirt.
I should explain how he sneaked up on me: I was not looking. Hyperspace in this area was dark, and I would have had to ring my sphere, sending not-light out in all directions, to keep an eye on what was happening around me, and I was wary of showing a light, not knowing if there were eyes like my eye watching. So, surprise!
I kept a cool head. I straightened like a diver jumping, and jumped a direction at right angles of all directions, neither right nor left, forward nor back, up nor down. My arm should have simply moved 'past' his fingers, but instead he kept his grip. He was like Colin, at least a bit, a creature of passion.
But he did not shut off my powers; perhaps he could not. Instead I reared up into the fourth dimension, and he, keeping his grip, was lifted partway out of the 'plane' of Earth's continuum.
His feet were still in Earthly space, but his upper body was curled into the fourth dimension. To me his body looked like a streamer of bark peeling off a tree.
He had some thickness in the fourth dimension, not so much as Miss Daw and her body, which looked like a wheel of eyes within a wheel of eyes, but there was something feathered with strands of music, serpentine, with scales of alternating gravity and levity rippling down the solids that formed the surface of his snakelike body.
But he was not full, not like I was. I sensed his fourth dimensional extensions were of limited utility; their internal nature was artificial rather than natural. I was looking at some sort of living armor: a thing he wore, not a thing he was.
I screamed then: a loud, sustained, ear-piercing scream. In theory, I should have merely shouted, or struggled in grim silence, as a boy would do. Well, this was no time for theory. I needed help, and it was automatic anyway. Think of this as Nature's siren.
'Hush, Princess!' came the sharp command, which he flicked to me on a strand carrying an essence of meaning.
'The boys are coming!'
'Not unless they can hear sound waves in a volume skewed to the continuum, they aren't. Now, hush, or I'll make your true love a man with a jackass's head.'
He moved his feet and pushed me in the 'blue' direction, so that I landed in the changing room one or two over from where I had been. He was straddling me, pinning me down. He did not look like a snake in three-dimensional cross-section, but like a winged boy, and his vast purple plumes filled the cabinet above and to either side. He was dressed in gold-trimmed purple robes, and on his thick, dark, ambrosia-dripping curls of hair, he wore a diadem of woven poppies and red roses, thorns and all. Slung over one shoulder was a Turkish bow of rosy wood, shaped like a woman's upper lip. At his other shoulder was a quiver of ivory, in which arrows fletched with peacock feathers rattled.
He was strong, and very handsome, and he smelled good. What is wrong with having evil people be ugly guys with wormy features, eh? How come all the Greek gods look like, well, like Greek gods? It seemed unfair.
'You saw me naked,' I said. 'I get to turn you into a stag now, and have your dogs rend you.'
He looked down at my cleavage. I was wearing a lacy black bra. And I started to blush. I am convinced it was a blush of rage, but it was so unfair.
'You're dressed in love's proper hue,' he said dryly. 'It is fitting. Besides, I've seen women with less on at the beach.' But he stood up and-if I were in a good mood, I'd call what he
