The Trickster glanced once at Miranda’s faintly smiling face, nodded as if reassured, and raised a finger, about to tear open a door. “Let’s go see this Mermaid, then.”

They went like hounds questing for a scent, tasting Miranda’s memory as the starting point for their trail but spending no longer than a flicker of a second, more than enough time for the Trickster to perceive the Mermaid’s signature vibration in reality. It was an advantage to have shared the same womb, for Chance knew the Trickster like he knew himself, and they had learned to dance together in and out of times and places with the ease of ink curling through water. The topography of time and place subtly guided the interwoven journeys of the undying to create tapestries far more elaborate than the straight-cut lines of human lives. But limits did exist, and not every path was open to them. Chance saw in an instant that the road to the time of the murder was closed to them; the Trickster saw the same, and together they flashed back to another location that sang deep with portent.

The narrow back alleys of the City, made to admit nothing wider than a rider on horseback or a hand-drawn cart, were further choked with clusters of tumbled debris. They looked like haphazard piles of organic matter in the yellow light of the streetlamps; they were not. They were shelters, tiny lean-tos made of discarded material from roofs and fences and crates. The inhabitants must have had some warning, however brief, of what was to come, for they had taken themselves and what scanty goods they kept in that place to a safer spot. Thus it was that the driver of a small streetsweeper buggy, buzzing and trundling through at the strange and silent hour of four in the morning, was able to pass with an extra-large shovel attachment and a conscience that, though not completely easy, would at least not bear the burden of murder or maiming.

“There she is,” said the Trickster with a jerk of his chin.

The driver could not have seen the smear of blood that trailed behind him, but perhaps he had a good nose to pick out the scent of blood amid the other strong odors of rotting produce, unwashed humanity, and decaying vermin. Or perhaps he had already learned the soft but distinctive strike of machine against live flesh, but either way it was to him that the Mermaid owed her life. Chance and the Trickster watched dispassionately, well used to strange and gory sights, as the man stopped the sweeper and pulled apart a mound of refuse to discover the woman. He ripped his own tunic to shreds and tried to stem the terrible flow of blood, shouting for help as he did so.