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There had been brief flurries of movement. Scuffles.

Fisticuffs. Things had been thrown. Erskine wondered if he’d been one of the throwers, then decided that it was an utterly ludicrous idea. By all the ravaged nuns in Hell, what was he, a barbarian?

‘She’s not here,’ one of the skinny Renewalists said. ‘The witch-woman isn’t here.’

Erskine looked around, dazed. He was moving along Eastern Walk. No, he wasn’t moving, he was being moved.

The people around him were creating a current of urgency, and he was letting himself be dragged along by it.

‘Witch-doctors. Didn’t I tell you? We should never have let the niggers get this close to the town.’

‘The what?’

‘That’s what they call them in the south.’

‘Peter McLeod said there was a whole coven of ‘em.’

‘What’s a coven?’

Damnation, thought Erskine, this was absurd. They were talking about witches and warlocks, things that didn’t exist –

In the labyrinth.

– why didn’t Monroe and the others do something, instead of breeding this pointless medieval hysteria –

In the labyrinth, you walked right through it.

– and where was Monroe, anyway?

As if in answer to his question, a portly hooded shape drew up alongside him. The shape said nothing, just nodded as if they shared some secret understanding, and pressed a wad of sackcloth into Erskine’s hand.

Erskine felt the current pushing him towards the ‘African quarter’ on the north side of town, where the blacks and the outcasts lived in their paper-walled piss-drenched houses. He saw the people, closing ranks around the Renewalists, looking at him with a mixture of fear and respect. He looked at the mask in his hand.

He wondered if people would leave him alone if he put it on.

6

Non-Interventionist Policy (Yeah, Sure) The bodies of three young children had been found in an alleyway near Eastern Walk. Their throats had been slit, the blood drained from their bodies. One of them (or was it all of them?) had been ritualistically disembowelled.

At least, that’s what they were saying on Paris Street.

Nobody seemed to know who these children had been, or where the corpses were now. Those who lived on Eastern Walk might have been puzzled that they hadn’t seen any such bodies, or heard a single word said about their supposed discovery.

One know-it-all from Hazelrow Avenue said he wasn’t at all surprised to hear about the horrific child murders. The Negroes did this sort of thing all the time back in Africa, he said. In fact, witch-doctors in the jungle regularly impaled youngsters and used their blood and intestines in their dark rituals...

By eleven o’clock, the search for the witch-woman had become a little more urgent.

Many things were taught in the lead-lined rooms. caillou artefacts would be revealed to the Shadow Directory’s students. On occasion, pain would be ceremonially inflicted on the initiates, as a test of character or a rite de passage. Agents would be given their new weaponry, and shown the basic arts of scalpel-wielding. The archons of the Directory would visit from their dioceses in Bayern or Philadelphia, giving the students the benefit of their experience.

The most intriguing lectures were those delivered by Professor Hulot of Orléans. It was the Professor’s belief that many of the caillou existed in ‘more than three dimensions’, though how there could possibly be more than three dimensions, nobody but the Professor seemed to know. He claimed that the physical form of a caillou was a mere fragment of its vast ‘multi-dimensional’ form, and that – like the proverbial iceberg – most of it went unseen by the human eye, existing in a mysterious realm he liked to call ‘meta-space’.

The Professor would point out (at great length, as any of his students would testify) that wherever a caillou was found, remarkable coincidences would occur. ‘When a caillou’s life is threatened, or it finds itself in a situation where escape seems impossible, curious episodes transpire as if by chance,’

he’d written in his treatise On the Habits and Occupations of Astral Personages. ‘Weather conditions