It was working too, as the poor fella playing opposite her was staring goggle-eyed at the act, his jaw gone slack, looking with a sort of stammering terror like he was toast and he already knew it.

“Come on,” said Tally. “Your daddy ain’t here.”

We passed room after room of Parsnit players deep in concentration, a witch glowering over each table. I never before realized what a collaboration Parsnit is, like it ain’t just the two players dueling, but it’s also the witch making the story come alive too, so that it’s all three of them working together to tell the same story. I passed a fella losing bad to a woman in an ascot and cowboy boots. Her story was the only thing happening in that game, and the best the fella could do was dot the scenery here and there. He just couldn’t make his character matter, and that’s the truth of it. The presiding witch seemed to agree with me, as she let a tiny twitch of a smile show in the corner of her lips, like it was fun to watch this massacre, like she could see straight into his heart and knew he deserved every bit of what was coming to him.

That thought scared me, if you want to know the truth of it. It scared me plenty.

In one room I saw the lawyer from Gentlesburg. I couldn’t believe he’d made it all the way out here, same as I had. He was calm and in his suit, same as before, like he’d just come back from some rich guy board meeting or something. His opponent was a real pretty woman with black hair and a tall top hat with a feather in it. She had a fiddle at the ready. They were about eight cards into the game. It seemed as if they had been dueling for hours and hours.

The woman turned Fire in the Sky and sat rigid and upright. She brought her fiddle to her neck and let it rip, playing a sad low melancholy song, something bright and burning in the night, something far off and lovely, something you felt couldn’t last. It was so beautiful I almost burst into tears right then. Tally grabbed my hand and we stood there in the doorway, listening. All of a sudden the lawyer came in singing a harmony, his voice high and pure, not an ounce of grit to it, and together they sang the song of the high far-off burning thing, a star maybe, that was falling fast and low, already doomed. When they finished both the woman and the lawyer laid their heads on the table and wept, and the witch stretched her plump hands out to each of them, as if in a blessing.

“I guess that’s one you’d call a tie,” said Tally.

“Yeah,” I said. “They both won that one, and that’s the truth of it.”

We kept walking until we ran out of rooms. There was only one door left, and that led to the top floor. We opened the door to a big room, right where the head’s brain would be. It was some kind of restaurant or lounge. There weren’t any windows to the place, so no daylight or starlight or moonlight got in there, just the high gleaming chandeliers and lamps scattered all over, like we were in some kind of cave, like there wasn’t any outside world at all. A small band was playing—a banjo and an accordion and a washboard—with a tiny man like a carnival barker hollering over them, doing a funny little dance in wooden shoes. He had on a bowler hat and every time he took it off the air above his head filled with little glittering sparkles. Folks ate, folks drank, folks argued. Waiters in crisp suits zipped around with plates of food. There must have been a hundred people in that upper room, truth be told.