But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords. The card with the dark-haired figure on the sand, the upright swords.

I noticed that I had finished eating; or at least, I didn’t seem to want any more.

By then, the joint was, as they say, jumping. Money, bright and folding, hard and soft, was running in its well-worn channels. Objects and services were passing from one hand to another, and by that alchemy were turned to gold, purifying with each transaction. The streets fizzed like charged water with noise, motion, and change. Here before me was the familiar exercise of my faith, the Deal. The exchange was only its sacrament, the symbol of its larger principles. Nothing Is Free. One way or another, you will pay your debts; better you should arrange the method of payment yourself.

This was what the woman on the tri-wheeler had blasphemed against, and why I feared her. Because she didn’t know the Deal.

The Odeon was open. Under its optimistic, badly lettered sign, block-printed posters taped to the painted-over shop windows promised showings of The Lady Vanishes. I dropped my gaze to the doorway where Huey was sitting in his folding chair, taking tickets, and I shook my head and grinned at him. He rolled his eyes. This was shorthand for (in my case), “Huey, I happen to know that’s a bad third-generation dub of the lousy non-Hitchcock remake that you’re going to show on your crummy nineteen-inch monitor with a misaligned yoke and out-of-whack color,” and (in his case), “So what? You don’t come to no storefront vid parlor, anyhow.” This is a conversation one only needs to have once; after that, it reels out again on fast forward whenever necessary, without further rehearsal.

In front of the Odeon’s shabby blandishments, a herd of nightbabies clumped like a blood clot in the vein of the sidewalk. They weren’t going in, oo dear meee, nooo. Only the crawlers do vid parlors. But it’s sooo Deep ambie, y’knoow?

They were in High Savage, by which I decided they were from the greenkraals at the City’s edge. The tide was going out on Savage; in the towers, Rags was the waxing mode. The nearest nightbaby swayed out in front of me as I came closer. She had a mud-painted face, multicolored mud hair, and an epoxy bone in her nose — or a real one, maybe, but that was considered gauche in some circles.

“Ooo, loook! It’s a preeecious bit of street-meat! Let’s take it hooome and waaash it, and see what it iiis.”

That provoked a unison giggle from the group. I’d probably sold things to their parents. “Cinder in your eye,” I said, held up my palm, and blew across it at her face. She dodged, and I laughed.

She gave me a quick, narrow-eyed look — wondering if she’d been had? She couldn’t have been sure. The blood of the Horsemen had trickled over the continent — still did, though the Horsemen were dead. And where that blood was, where those genes came to rest, a skill might sprout: Sherrea’s mind reading; the placing of a nonexistent cinder in someone’s eye. But I had no inheritance from the wicked riders of the mind.