“Ask your questions, have at me,” Mia said. “Just remember, we exist in the other world, too, the one where we’re bound together. We’re lying on a bed in the inn, as if asleep … but we don’t sleep, do we, Susannah? Nay. And when the telephone rings, when my friends call, we leave this place and go to them. If your questions have been asked and answered, fine. If not, that’s also fine. Ask. Or … are you not a gunslinger?” Her lips curved in a disdainful smile. Susannah thought she was pert, yes, pert indeed. Especially for someone who wouldn’t be able to find her way from Forty-sixth Street to Forty-seventh in the world they had to go back to. “So shoot! I should say.”

Susannah looked once more into the darkened, broken well that was the castle’s soft center, where lay its keeps and lists, its barbicans and murder holes, its God-knew-what. She had taken a course in medieval history and knew some of the terms, but that had been long ago. Surely there was a banqueting hall somewhere down there, one that she herself had supplied with food, at least for awhile. But her catering days were done. If Mia tried to push her too hard or too far, she’d find that out for herself.

Meantime, she thought she’d start with something relatively easy.

“If this is the Castle on the Abyss,” she said, “where’s the Abyss? I don’t see anything out that way except for a minefield of rocks. And that red glow on the horizon.”

Mia, her shoulder-length black hair flying out behind her (not a bit of kink in that hair, as there was in Susannah’s; Mia’s was like silk), pointed across the inner chasm below them to the far wall, where the towers rose and the allure continued its curve.

“This is the inner keep,” she said. “Beyond it is the village of Fedic, now deserted, all dead of the Red Death a thousand years ago and more. Beyond that—”

“The Red Death?” Susannah asked, startled (also frightened in spite of herself). “Poe’s Red Death? Like in the story?” And why not? Hadn’t they already wandered into—and then back out of—L. Frank Baum’s Oz? What came next? The White Rabbit and the Red Queen?

“Lady, I know not. All I can tell you is that beyond the deserted village is the outer wall, and beyond the outer wall is a great crack in the earth filled with monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape. Once there was a bridge across, but it fell long ago. ‘In the time before counting,’ as ’tis said. They’re horrors that might drive an ordinary man or woman mad at a glance.”

She favored Susannah with a glance of her own. A decidedly satiric one.

“But not a gunslinger. Surely not one such as thee.”

“Why do you mock me?” Susannah asked quietly.

Mia looked startled, then grim. “Was it my idea to come here? To stand in this miserable cold where the King’s Eye dirties the horizon and sullies the very cheek of the moon with its filthy light? Nay, lady! ’Twas you, so harry me not with your tongue!”