She murmured that she understood my concern and that she would do everything she could for me. I asked after Captain Bastable, the mysterious Englishman, but she shook her head. 'I believe he's engaged elsewhere.'
'So will you, who clearly can come and go at will, lead me out of here?'
'There are dream roads,' she said. 'Finding them isn't difficult. But getting you back to where you came from can sometimes prove impossible.' She raised a hand to forestall my anger. 'I have promised you that you'll have the chance to fight your enemies. Presumably you would like to be as successful as possible?'
'You are telling me to be patient. What else can I be?' I knew she was sincere. I gave her arm an affectionate squeeze. I felt I had known her all my life. She might have been one of my more attractive relatives, a niece perhaps. I recalled her rather odd expectation that I would know her. Now I understood that, in the conflicting time streams of the multiverse, it was possible for something to be both mysterious and familiar. She had no doubt mistaken me for someone else, even one of my myriad 'other selves' who, if she and the Off-Moo were to be believed, proliferated throughout a continuously branching multiverse.
I was not comforted by her assurance that I had not one dop-pelganger but an infinite number. Which reminded me to ask her about the two bizarre figures I had seen earlier. One of them had been my double.
She found my news disturbing, rather than surprising. She asked me precise questions and I did my best to answer. She shook her head. 'I did not know there were such forces at work,' she said. 'Not such great forces. I pray some of them choose to ally their cause with our own. I might have misused or misunderstood my mother's skills.'
'Who were those armored men?'
'Gaynor, if he wears the armor you describe. The other is his mortal enemy, one of the greatest of your avatars, whose destiny is to change the very nature of the multiverse.'
'Not an ancestor, then, but an alter ego?'
'If you like. You say he was asking you for something?'
'My guess.'
'He is desperate.' She spoke affectionately, as if of a very familiar friend. 'What did Fromental see?'
'Nothing. These were glimpses only. But not illusions. At least, not in any sense I understand.'
'Not illusions,' she confirmed. 'Come, we'll confer with Fromental and his friends. They've had long enough without us.'
We crossed a series of canals rather like those of Venice, one narrow bridge after another, following natural gullies and fissures employed as part of the city's water system. I was impressed by how the Off-Moo adapted to the natural formations of the earth. Goethe, for instance, would have been impressed by their evident respect for their surroundings. Ironically, those surroundings, if described in my own world, would have been taken for the fantasies of some opium-addicted Coleridge or Poe. A tribute to the majority's capacity to deny any truth, no matter how monumental, which challenges its narrow understanding of reality.
Eventually we entered a small square and Oona led me into a doorway and up a twisting, asymmetrical staircase until we came into a large room, surprisingly wide for an Off-Moo apartment. The place was furnished more to human taste, with large couches and comfortable chairs, a long table loaded with food and wine. Evidently a meal had been eaten while Fromental conferred with Lord Renyard and the three strangers who rose to greet us as we entered the room.
I had never, outside of a comic opera, seen such a collection of swaggering fantasticoes. Lord Renyard wore the lace and embroidery of a mid-seventeenth-century fop, balancing his slightly unsteady frame on an ornamental 'dandy pole.' A scarlet silk sash over his shoulder held the scabbard of a slender sword. His eyes narrowed in pleasure as he recognized us. 'My dear friends, you are most welcome.' He bowed with an awkward grace. 'May I introduce my fellow citizens of Tanelorn-Baron Blare, Lord Bragg and Duke Bray. They seek to join forces against the common enemy.'
These three were all dressed in the exaggerated uniforms of Napoleonic cavalry officers. Baron Blare had huge side-whiskers and a wide, horsey grin displaying large, uneven teeth. Lord Bragg was a glowering, self- important cockerel, all blazing wattles and comb, while Duke Bray had a solemn, mulish look to his huge face. Although not as distinctly animal-like as Lord Renyard, they all three had a slight air of the farmyard about them. But they were cordial enough.
'These gentlemen have come by a hard and circuitous route to be with us,' Fromental explained. 'They have walked the moonbeam roads between the worlds.'
'Walked?' I thought I had misheard him.
'It's a skill denied to many.' Lord Renyard's voice was a sharp, yapping bark. He spoke perfect classical French but he had to twist his mouth and vocal cords to get some of his pronunciations. 'Those of us who learn it, however, would travel no other way. These are my good friends. When we understood the danger, we all left Tanelorn together. Our Tanelorn, of course. We were separated some while ago, during an alarming adventure. But they came here at last and brought fresh news of Tanelorn's plight.'
'The city is under siege,' said Fromental. 'Gaynor, in another guise, attacks it. He has the Higher Worlds on his side. We fear it will soon fall.'
'If Tanelorn falls, then all falls.' Oona was pacing. She had not expected such dramatic news. 'The doom of the multiverse.'
'Without help Tanelorn will most certainly perish,' said Lord Bragg. His flat, cold voice held little hope. 'The rest of our world is already conquered. Gaynor rules there now in the name of Law. His patron is Lady Miggea the Mad. And he draws on the power of more than one avatar.'
'We came here,' said Duke Bray, 'searching for those avatars in the hope that we could stop them combining. In our world it has happened already. Here, Gaynor has barely begun to test his power.'
I didn't understand. Oona explained. 'Sometimes it is possible, with immortal help, for two or more avatars of one person to be combined. This gives them considerably greater power, but they lose sanity. Indeed, such an unnatural blending threatens the stability of the entire multiverse! The one who draws on the souls of his avatars in this way takes terrible risks and can pay a very great price for the action.'
Something in the way she glanced at me caused me to shudder. The chill went deep into my bones and would not leave me.
'We can't let Mu Ooria be attacked because of us,' I said. 'Why don't we lead an expedition into the Dark Land and strike at them first? It will take Gaynor months to marshal a force.'
Oona smiled grimly. 'We cannot anticipate the rate at which time passes for him.'
'But we know we can defeat him.'
'That depends,' said Lord Renyard, apologetic for interrupting.
'On what?'
'On the quality of help we can summon. I would remind you, dear Count von Bek, that in our world all that remains unconquered is Tanelorn herself. Gaynor has mighty help. The help of at least one goddess.'
'How has Tanelorn resisted up to now?' I asked.
'She is Tanelorn. She is the city of eternal sanctuary. Usually neither Chaos nor Law dare attack here. She is the embodiment of the Grey Fees.'
Oona came to my rescue. 'The Grey Fees are the lifestuff of the multiverse-you could call them the sinews, muscles, bones and sap of the multiverse-the original matter from which all else derives. The original home of the Holy Grail. Although creatures can meet in the Grey Fees, even dwell there if they choose, any attack on them, any fight that takes place within the Fees, is an affront to the very basis of existence. Some would call it an affront to God. Some believe the Grey Fees to be God, if the multiverse itself is not God. I prefer to take a more prosaic view. If the multiverse is a great tree, forever growing, shedding limbs, extending roots and branches in all directions, each root and branch a new reality, a new story being told, then the Fees are something like the soul of the entity. However crucial the struggle, we never attack the Grey Fees.'
'Is attacking Tanelorn the same as attacking the Grey Fees?' I asked.
'Simply call it an alarming precedent,' said Lord Bray, showing more irony than I first suspected in him.
'So Gaynor threatens the fundamental fabric of existence. And if he succeeds?'
'Oblivion. The end of sentience.'
'How might he succeed?' My habits of logic and strategy were returning. Old von Asch had taught me how
