The next level up was the kitchen, with cabinets with carved doors and a countertop under the windows. The indoor necessary plumbing was on this level, too, but on the opposite side of the room from the windows, where the walls that made it private wouldn’t interfere with the sight lines. The platform above that was the area that in anybody else’s place would be called the living room. This meant you had to go through the kitchen to get to it, but as Tick-Tick pointed out, everyone goes to the kitchen first anyway, so why not design for it? The two levels above that served as library, study, guest bedroom, and whatever. Beyond them were the front windows, and the Ticker’s bed raised like a treehouse in a loft above the window frames.

So the first smell that greeted me as I came in the door was engine oil, and the first sight a disemboweled gear box on her workbench. But beyond that, Tick-Tick, in a red silk kimono that contrasted startlingly with her dandelion-yellow hair, was setting a waffle iron on her gas stove. (The Ticker is one of the few people in B-town I’d trust with a gas stove. Sometimes, touched by the passing of one of the Border’s logic-devouring eddies of magic the gas doesn’t flow, or won’t light. Some people forget to close the gas cock when that happens. A few hours later, they light a cigarette and find out that the gas has come back on. Several blocks in Soho have undergone sudden urban renewal because of that.)

“Waffles would be nice,” I said.

“Fresh out. Will you settle for waffles?”

“Ugh. I’m too tired to keep that up. What can I help with?”

“Wash your hands first, my chick. There’s no saying where they’ve been.”

I went to the kitchen sink. “Where’s the soap?”

“Oh, that’s right, I used it up. Unwrap another bar, do; they’re in the drawer.”

I opened the drawer she’d pointed to and found an impressive stash of soap in about twenty different colors, wrapped in about as many ways, bearing labels from out of the World, the Elflands, and from here in town. The smell was pleasant, but staggering. I took out a pale purple bar. “How about this one?”

The Ticker looked, and sighed. “Not in the kitchen, my dear. That’s lilac. There should be a rather nice lemon in there, somewhere.”

“Why not lilac? It smells nice.”

“Very. But not in the kitchen. Fruit or spice or, possibly, herb for the kitchen. Flowers and the strong perfumes, like patchouli, for the bath.”

I stared at her, and tossed the bar of soap and caught it a couple of times. “There’s supposed to be some kind of internal logic to that, isn’t there?”