sanci’s sudden lunge was blocked by Agrippina, who with ill-concealed relish punched her across the room. The wall and then the floor broke her fall, a sputtering flare of magick announcing the failure of some enchanted knickknack to survive one or other of the impacts. With surprising resilience for so delicate-looking a woman, she bounded to her feet, her face a mask of fury. Rather scaly fury, in fact. Her fine red hair was sloughing out, her nose and ears receding into a sleek, elongated reptilian skull, and a long sinuous tail was attempting to uncoil itself from the confines of her knee-length pencil skirt. It was this latter phenomenon that seemed to alert her to her transformation, since her ire was suddenly displaced by puzzlement and alarm as she glanced down. "Ssssshit," she said, revealing slender fangs and a forked and darting tongue.

Sebek’s mouth dropped open. "Agrippina was right!" he exclaimed in wonder, "She is a snake!" Gladius in hand, Agrippina interposed herself between Asanci and Sebek, but still found time to look at me askance, not to mention more than a little aghast. I rolled my eyes. "How many times do I have to tell you?" I said, "There was never. Anything. Between us." "Damien!" protested Asanci, brows contorting pathetically as she tried to flutter non-existent eyelashes. "How can you sssay that?" she demanded, "After what we had together?" Someone had been passing for human for just a little too long. "We had marshmallows on toast," I said shortly, "which you burnt, as I recall." My initial and abortive attempts to get close to our prime suspect had been foiled by Sebek, for whom the privacy of others took second place to experimental gastronomy. I had perhaps been insufficiently appreciative of this rescue at the time, although I seemed to recall now that her skin had felt rather dry...

It was clear from Agrippina’s expression that the question of any past dalliance with the newly ophidian Miss Asanci was not going to be settled by mere denial. Fortunately, another inadvertent rescue was effected by Jule Kahira, who was attempting to sidle towards the door while the rest of us were distracted by the transmogrification of his fellow felons. I collared him before he could make a break for it. He yelped and struck out ineffectually, permitting me in the process a closer view of his damaged hand. The skin was burnt and bubbled by contact with Ghastman’s corrosive flesh, but more in the manner of latex than of living tissue. Beneath this assumed integument yet more scales glinted, albeit finer and more silvery than Asanci’s squamous complexion. Uh huh. I grabbed his nose, tugged hard, and off it came, along with the rest of his face and hair. Unmasked, he retained the same protuberant eyes, but now they matched the rest of the visage, which was one of the most advanced cases of the Innsmouth Look I’d ever seen, a cross between a toad and a startled piranha. Stubby fingers now manifested stubby claws, so I held him off at arms length, an additional incentive for doing so being provided by the stench of rotting fish and seaweed, no longer masked by his cologne.

No-one else had moved. I pushed Kahira away and surreptitiously wiped my hand on my trenchcoat. "Is there anyone here who isn’t a servitor of the Great Old Ones?" I demanded. Sebek raised his claw. "I’m not," he announced helpfully. Of our guests, however, only Weimar – currently trying to cover everyone with his automatics simultaneously – seemed to have received the invitation that said ‘Come As You Are’. Ghastman, Asanci and Kahira eyed each other dubiously. I snorted. "You’re a fine bunch of lollipops," I informed them, "A Shoggoth Lord, a Valusian and a Deep One, all tricked up to pass for human, and you never even suspected each other?" "You should talk, Lord Mortlake," reproved Ghastman in glutinous tones, "since it is quite evident that you had no more inkling than any of us. However, now that all our cards are on the table..." "I bet Weimar’s just pretending as well," interrupted Sebek, quick to spot the potential for a new and interesting game, "He’s probably a big dormouse. Pull his nose too."

This served mainly to focus Weimar’s wild-eyed attention on a specific member of our company. "You bastard," he snarled, hefting both forty-fives in Sebek’s direction, "Go for your heater!" Sebek glanced uncertainly at the radiator for an instant, and then sniggered. "Stupid dormouse," he said, "I bet you eat cheese and live in a teapot." Weimar however was through playing the dutiful guest at this particular Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. "You bastard," he repeated hotly, "Shoot it out if you’ve got the guts. I’ve taken all the riding from you I’m going to take." Sebek stuck his tongue out at him. "Now, now, Weimar," glubbed Ghastman, his voice too thick and curdled for the paternally admonishing tone it was trying to achieve, "We can’t have any of that. You shouldn’t let yourself attach so much importance to these things. You..." "Make him lay off me then," snarled the gunsel, "I’m going to fog him if he keeps it up and there won’t be anything that’ll stop me from doing it." "Squeak, squeak, squeak," taunted Sebek heedlessly. Weimar opened fire.

I had Wilkes out, cocked and aimed even as he squeezed off the first shot, but my reaction proved to be superfluous. The bullet had gone wide, for the simple reason that Weimar’s outsize trenchcoat was now in open rebellion. Cloth was mutating into oily shoggoth-flesh, seizing and trapping the limbs within. Well, that explained a few things. Weimar hadn’t been wearing the coat – the coat had been wearing him. The expression on his face suggested that this reversal of rôles was a new and unwelcome revelation. Ropes of protoplasm shot out between Ghastman and the treacherous garment, and the hapless youth found himself being reeled in, his skin burning and blistering in an unnecessarily audible manner. "That’s enough," I said, as Weimar took it upon himself to drown out the sound of sizzling by screaming at the top of his lungs, "I think you’ve reasserted your authority. Let him go." "Regretfully," slobbered the Shoggoth Lord, "my young friend’s rash behaviour is putting the statue at risk, and I’m afraid that won’t do, sir. No, that won’t do at all." His face slithered sideways across the surface of his bulk so that he could address his struggling subordinate. "Well, Weimar," said the thing that had once been the Fat Man, "I’m sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn’t be any fonder of you if you were my own spawn; but – well, by Gad! – if you lose a spawn it’s possible to grow another, and there’s only one Memphite Raptor." Weimar’s reaction to this glowing testimonial went unrecorded, as the gelatinous tissue of what had once been his upturned collar flowed up and over his mouth. His eyes briefly met mine in mute appeal, so I put a bullet through his head just as Ghastman rippled open and engulfed him.

"Dormouse in jelly," mused Sebek, who could think of food at the strangest times.

There was another stupefied silence, broken only by a muffled thumping in the walls. Someone in the neighbouring apartment wanted us to keep the noise down. Kahira muttered "Cthulhu fhtagn!" under his fishy breath, and sketched a quick Elder Sign in the air. Asanci’s tongue flickered nervously. Agrippina cleared her throat. "Damien," she remarked, "Are you actually planning on doing anything before he tries that on the rest of us?" "Yes," said Sebek, "They’re all monsters now. Are we going to fight them?" "That," I said, looking at each of the three remaining miscreants in turn, "depends on the monsters."

Kahira still looked ready to bolt, so I wasn’t particularly worried about him. Ghastman had him badly rattled, which wasn’t too surprising, given the Deep Ones’ unhappy experience in trying to use shoggoths as slave labour. They too had got their fingers burned, and these days the policy of the Elders of Dagon was to avoid conflict with their former vassals at all costs – pretty much in common with every other race from the radiates of Antarctica on down who made the mistake of assuming that this most protean of proletariats was only good for heavy lifting.

Asanci was a slightly different matter. The Serpent People of Valusia were few in number and scattered throughout Shadow, and most of them – the so-called Worms of the Earth – had degenerated somewhat since their heyday. However, an undecayed member of the family was not to be trifled with. Expert sorcerers all, and what they didn’t know about toxicology could be safely written the back of a postage stamp, as long as you wore gloves and remembered not to lick it. Fortunately, the Children of Yig were even less given to co-operation than the Children of Oberon, so you rarely had to deal with more than one of them at a time. This one was currently trying to will sinuous reptilehood back into svelte humanity, but with limited success. Valusian shape-shifting generally requires the assistance of drugs, magick, or both, and I suspected that most of her assistance had resided in the broken ring with which she was fiddling. She looked more embarrassed than anything else, but in terms of backstabbing opportunism she could probably see the other two and raise them. Still, Valusians weren’t that hard to kill. It generally took more than a flute, a basket and a big stick, but on the whole I had few qualms about leaving her to Agrippina or Sebek.

No, the problematic one was Kantar Ghastman, Esquire. Bulked out by the reclaimed overcoat and its occupant, he towered almost to the ceiling, a thick roiling column of sarcoplasm, halfway up which a pendulous face nearly two feet across bobbed obscenely. Within the dark and faintly translucent mass, the slowly dissolving outline of Weimar’s corpse could be dimly espied, adding a disagreeable tint of red to the proceedings. This one would be an absolute bugger to put down and keep down if matters escalated to fisticuffs or beyond. Shooting, stabbing or slicing would barely attract his attention, and one would be hard pressed to inflict blunt trauma even with a pile-driver. If you really wanted to go mano e mano with a shoggoth, then you used a blowtorch or an arc-welder, but if you had any sense you stood back and called in an air strike using fuel-air explosives followed up with napalm. Then you did it again, just to make sure. The Hellfire spell that I had hung was actually ideal for dealing with Ghastman’s oleaginous ilk, but it wasn’t the kind of incantation suitable for use indoors and at point blank range. Since he wasn’t making any further hostile moves as yet, and since I had no particular wish to annoy our irritable neighbours further by burning down the entire building, I decided to hold fire until a more suitable moment presented itself.

"Why so concerned to protect the statue?" I asked him instead, "You’ve already pronounced it a fake." Ghastman’s smile was affable, or at least as affable as a hastily moulded pseudopod could be. "I may have spoken in haste," he allowed, "I would be mortified to think, sir, that you supposed me unappreciative of Queen Nitocris’ capacity for subtlety. If the black raptor does not harbour the Clavicle itself, it may yet conceal the secret of its true whereabouts. For seventeen years I have wanted that little item and have been trying to get it. If I must spend another year on the quest – well, sir – that will be an additional expenditure in time of only" – his amorphous lips moved silently as he calculated – "five and fifteen-seventeenths percent." Shoggothoi. Like all intellectual arrivistes, they just love to show off their erudition.

Asanci suddenly sagged under the weight of realisation, and let out a slightly hysterical sibilant titter. "You fool," she said, "Isssn’t it obviousss? She tricked usss! There isss no Clavicle of Biahmu. She got what she wanted from usss and then sssent usss on a wild goossse chassse." Well, that certainly sounded a lot more like the Nitocris I knew. Kahira gulped loudly, his gill-slits flapping in dismay, while Ghastman’s viscous features distorted under the influence of a frown. "Impossible," he declared, "An individual of such fine judgement as myself would hardly rely on the word of a known devotee of the greatest trickster in the Primal Pantheon. The Clavicle of Biahmu is real, and Queen Nitocris did indeed possess it. As you may recall, I was able to corroborate her tale in the Mu’um-Rath Papyrus, the Chorazin Scrolls and the Liber Nigrae Peregrinationis..." "Booksss which she led usss to," hissed Asanci, "How can you be ssso blind? She mussst have had it planned from the very ssstart!"

"Now, Miss Asanci," remonstrated Ghastman, his self-assurance seemingly undented, "That cannot be the case, although I am not surprised to hear you voice so ill-informed an opinion. The Clavicle is well documented in other sources of which you are transparently unaware. The Saracenic Rituals recounted by Herr Prinn in his De Vermis Mysteriis, for instance..." "Which edition?" I interrupted. Ghastman blinked, a gesture that managed to encompass not merely his eyes but his whole face. "The original Zurich edition, of course," he said, once his mouth had reformed. "As opposed to the original Cologne edition?" I enquired innocently, "As in the original edition from the original Shadow?" Now Ghastman was starting to look worried – he must have been aware of the pitfalls of inter-Shadow bibliography, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he would ever stumble into one. "Nevertheless," he countered, "in the Eighth Cryptical Book of Hsan, it clearly alludes..." I glanced at Asanci, who was hissing in open derision. "You tell him," I suggested. "There are Ssseven Cryptical Booksss of Hsssan," she spat, "Ssseven! Isss thisss all you’ve been relying on? Sssecond-hand sssourcesss from sssecond-hand Shadowsss? You amateur!" Ghastman’s amorphous volume bubbled ominously, throwing out and reabsorbing little pseudopods and tentacles. Mocking their intellectual pretensions is always the best way to annoy a Shoggoth Lord.

Sebek, still cradling the contentious statuette, was squinting at the simmering pillar of flesh. "Weimar’s all bones now," he remarked suddenly, "You’re really a big wobbly stomach on legs, aren’t you?" He ducked his head to peer under the table. "A big wobbly stomach not on legs," he amended. This was the kind of insult that Ghastman could shrug off with his usual equanimity. He managed to force a chortle, a sound not unlike gas erupting from a tar-pit. "My felicitations, sir," he gurgled, "That was neatly done. You have a masterful knack for diffusing the most tense situations, that you have." Oddly enough, this was quite often true. Sebek’s mastery of the casual non sequitur had a tendency to derail arguments in their tracks, leaving people unable to remember what they had been fighting about. At other times, however, his tendency to utter the first thing that popped into his head, combined with his complete lack of an inner censor, didn’t so much defuse tense situations as detonate them in an unstoppable chain reaction. Weimar’s broken skull, folding in on itself as Ghastman’s digestive fluids leached away the calcium, seemed to nod in rueful agreement.

The soi-disant Fat Man was all ebullience again as he surveyed our motley gathering. "Come, Miss Asanci," he said, "there’s no need of going on like that. Everybody errs at times and you may be sure that this is every bit as severe a blow to me as to anyone else. Yes, that is Queen Nitocris’ hand, there’s no doubt of it. Well, what do you suggest? Shall we stand here and shed tears and call each other names? Or shall we" – he paused and his smile was a melted wax cherub’s – "go to Shadow Memphis?"

If Kahira’s eyes had bulged any more they would have dragged his brain out through his eye-sockets. "You are..." he croaked in amazement. Greed and hope momentarily overcame fear and racial enmity. "I go with you!" he cried. Asanci was looking intrigued despite herself, although in all honesty I couldn’t see any new alliance lasting any longer than the last one – to whit, five minutes tops. And with whatever limited means of Shadow travel they used, their chances of finding Memphis were miniscule... unless of course they used something like Nitocris’ old trick of casting a scrying spell every few Shadow veils to reset their bearings. It might indeed take them another year, but they might still do it. In which case they either needed to have been there before, which I was inclined to doubt, or they needed an object to focus the ritual, an object that had originated in the very Shadow they sought...

"Mr Sebek," said Ghastman, leaning forwards, "In the light of these new developments, it seems I must request the statue for further perusal." He started to reach a globular pseudopod across the table. Sebek recoiled. "No," he said, "You’ll get slime on it." Ghastman contorted a shapeless eyebrow. "Then might you care to undertake the Shadow Memphis expedition with us?" he inquired, "Because, sir, frankly I’d like to have you along. You’re a velociraptor to my liking, a velociraptor of many resources and nice judgement." "No," I said. "No," said Agrippina. Both of us could see Sebek weighing up the merits of returning to Amber, where he was scheduled to be confined to barracks for the next three weeks, and of gallivanting off to the Nile Valley, where he was worshipped as a god. This was probably not going to be the hardest decision of his life. "Absolutely not," I stressed. No way in hell was I going to let these sorry charlatans loose on the Two Lands. They were just going to have to die. Just as soon as I could put a suitable blast radius between ourselves and Ghastman ...

"Then, sir," said the Shoggoth Lord, still addressing Sebek, "I must ask you for the return of my ten thousand crowns." The pseudopod lunged for the champagne bucket. "My money!" yelped Sebek in alarm, making a grab of his own for the threatened treasure trove. And in that brief instant of distraction, a second tentacle erupted, and with lightning speed snatched the Memphite Raptor from his claws.

Things became merrier from this point onwards. Sebek instinctively jumped back with a squawk, his tail knocking Agrippina off balance. Asanci darted forwards, but the statue was retracted back into Ghastman’s viscous expanse almost immediately. The three bullets I emptied into him concurrently inflicted no more damage than expected and rather less distraction than I’d hoped. Ghastman started rolling backwards towards the nearest window. For want of anything better to do, I shot at him again as I drew Dashwood and ran forwards, only for Kahira to get in my way. Sebek vaulted over the table as the window shattered under the impact of a ton of shoggoth-flesh. "Give me my statue!" he cried. Agrippina grappled Asanci, only to be backhanded over the sofa for her pains. I ran Kahira through, and then belatedly realised that he hadn’t been trying to stop me, but only to get past me to the door again. Oh, well. I pulled the sword out and let him flop onto the carpet. Ghastman flowed and squelched out into the night, pausing only long enough to sprout four puckering nodules in his backside and spit my bullets back at us. "Ow!" said Sebek, as one bounced off his nose. I eluded the other three, and heard a grunt from behind me. I glanced round to see if Agrippina was hit, but she was only swiping at Asanci with her gladius, trying to keep her at a distance whilst fumbling with her other hand for a gun. Asanci, all pretence of humanity gone, reared up like a cobra, head back, mouth agape. "Duck," I suggested. Agrippina ducked. Venom sprayed overhead to dribble down the wood-panelled wall behind her. I turned back, but Ghastman was gone, leaving the rain blowing in through the slime-strewn ruins of the window.

Sebek arrived at the shattered aperture just a second behind him, head jerking from side to side as he gazed wildly into the pluvial darkness. Then he glanced upwards. "Stop thief!" he squawked, and jumped out onto the window ledge. "Sebek..." I began, but he was already springing up and out of sight. Great. Now all I had to do was somehow extract the statue, burn Ghastman to a crisp, and keep Sebek out of the creature’s caustic grasp. "Manage all right?" I enquired of Agrippina as I clambered out after him. "Go after Sebek," said Agrippina, slashing Asanci across the shoulder, and then dodging another jet of venom. She was having fun, at least. Kahira, who presumably wasn’t, was floundering his way across the floor towards the exit, but I didn’t really have time to waste on small fry like him. I stepped out onto the back of the nearest gargoyle, and peered up into the downpour.

A broad glinting trail like that of a snail snaked its way up the side of the building, its author already oozing up and over the final ornamental balustrade and onto the roof. The bastard could certainly move, but then people who assume that shoggoths are as sluggish as they look rarely retain enough of a body afterwards to kick themselves for their stupidity. Sebek, however, wasn’t that far behind him, gouging his way up the stonework with claws like explosive pitons, chips and splinters cascading in his wake. Sheathing sword and holstering pistol, I set off after him, vaulting from gargoyle to window ledge to ornamental something-or-other, trusting mainly to luck to retain a purchase on stone rendered smooth and slippery by the unending rain. But I was still two storeys short when Sebek swarmed onto the roof and was again lost to view.

I reached the summit in time to see him corner Ghastman on the far side of the flat and puddled rooftop, snapping at the flailing pseudopods with which his quarry was endeavouring to repel him. "Sebek, stay where you are!" I commanded as I splashed my way towards them. Sebek hopped back out of range of the burgeoning tentacles. Good boy, I thought. Then he crouched, and snarled something at the looming Shoggoth Lord. Oh bugger, I thought. Over the drumming of the rain, it had sounded like: "This is a raid."

Sebek sprang.

Ghastman slid away, but not quite fast enough. Sebek hit him like a buzz-saw fired from a catapult, hind legs a blur as he ripped into his opponent’s protoplasmic bulk. Knocked back by the impact, Ghastman teetered on the edge of the roof. I threw myself forwards, reaching for the tip of Sebek’s tail, but Sebek wasn’t co-operating, and it twitched away at the last moment. My fingers closed on empty air, and I found myself draped across the balustrade as they toppled over, Sebek tearing and clawing his way into the shifting innards of the Shoggoth Lord even as the latter enfolded itself around him. For an instant Ghastman’s face floated before me on the end of a stubby tentacle, its expression somewhat alarmed. "By Gad, sir," it said, as gravity yanked it away. I watched as they tumbled through the curtain of precipitation like Holmes and Moriarty descending the Reichenbach Falls, although that particular fatal embrace had probably been rather less reminiscent of two cats fighting in a sack of jelly. Then they fell into the darkness of the alley below, and there was a loud and emphatic splat.

I really don’t remember how I got back down to ground level, but the next thing of which I was fully aware was the fact that I was standing in the street, sword and pistol in hand, with a sprained ankle and the shattered remains of a gargoyle strewn around me. Ahead of me in the alley I thought I could sense movement, so I staggered towards it, cursing my recalcitrant tarsus. "Sebek!" I’d gone ten yards when a fire-door burst open in front of me, and an effluvium of putrefied fish gushed out, followed by a battered-looking Kahira, who in his hurry to escape appeared to have thrown himself down stairs and missed. He gulped and goggled as he caught sight of me, and turned to flee in the opposite direction, only to take fright at something he liked the look of even less. Facing me again, he raised his diminutive batrachian fists in a schoolboy’s imitation of a boxer’s fighting stance. Since he was between me and my velociraptor, I shot him down and stepped over him, pushing the door fully ajar so that the light filtered down the rest of the alleyway. The vision before me stopped me dead in my tracks. My most optimistic expectation had been of arriving in time to drag an injured Sebek out of Ghastman’s flabby clutches before the shoggoth’s greater strength and corrosive bile could do their work, but now I knew that my precipitous mission of deliverance had been in vain.

I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. Then I put Wilkes and Dashwood away again, settled myself against the wall, and waited.

Ghastman was spread over some thirty square yards of rubbish-strewn concrete. Bits of him kept on trying to reform, only for Sebek to leap on them and rip them to shreds faster than the Shoggoth Lord could knit himself back together. There is another way of taking down a shoggoth which I had perhaps forgotten to mention – drop them from a great height and then set a velociraptor on them. Although covered from head to sickle-clawed toe in gelatinous goo, Sebek seemed little the worse for wear, but then several hundredweight of protoplasm had been thoughtfully provided to cushion his fall. I was pleased to note that mindful of my earlier reprimand, he was currently reading Ghastman his rights.

"You’re under arrest." Rip. Splatter. "You have the right to remain silent." Squelch. "Anything you say will be taken down and stuck up your bottom in the shower." From somewhere up above I could hear muffled gunshots, which was hopefully Agrippina playing mongoose. I glanced behind me. Kahira was wriggling away in the opposite direction, trying to look inconspicuous. Apart from his native resistance to damage, he presented about as much long term threat as a mackerel, so I dismissed him from my thoughts. Of all the denizens of the undersea realm of Y’ha-nthlei eligible for this assignment, I could only assume that he had been the most expendable, and who was I to take issue with the judgement of the Elders of Dagon? Sebek still wasn’t finished, so I cast a healing spell on my ankle to pass the time. A gobbet of Ghastman landed on my coat, so I brushed it off and ground it under my heel until it stopped wriggling.

After a while, the rest of him stopped wriggling too.

Sebek stood there for a moment in the sea of mangled tissue, and then shook himself vigorously, spraying the alleyway with ropy tendrils of shoggoth-pulp. Casting about, he alighted on one of the larger remaining globules, and ripped his statue free from its phlegm-like embrace. One of Ghastman’s other disjecta membra stirred weakly, as if in protest. Sebek’s head snapped round, and the quivering pseudopod went very, very still. Satisfied, Sebek trotted over to where I was standing. I considered hugging him, on the grounds that I was going to have to change my clothes anyway, but decided against it, on the grounds that I wasn’t planning on doing the same with my epidermis. "Well done," I said instead. Sebek nodded. Praise was always his due. "He got slime on my statue," he said, holding it out for inspection, "It needs a bath." He raised a fore-claw and rubbed at his snout. "And my eyes are stingy," he complained. I wasn’t surprised. His scales were proof against sword, fire and bullet, and so had provided short term protection against Ghastman’s gastric juices, but his eyes were not so invulnerable. I led him over to beneath one of the gargoyles I hadn’t managed to demolish in my semi-controlled plunge down the side of the building. Surrendering my coat, I wiped him down – and, at his insistence, the statue as well – as the weathered stone embouchement vomited rainwater over his head.

I glanced back up the alleyway as I scrubbed. In the light of the open door, I could make out a cautious eyestalk peering furtively out of the Shoggoth Lord’s puréed remains. Time to inscribe Ghastman’s closing paragraphs, then. "Dies irae, dies illa," I said, adding a dismissive gesticulation to accompany the linchpins, "solvet saeclum in favilla." With a reverberant thwumph, sorcerous fire erupted along the length and breadth of the alley. Puddles flashed to steam, refuse to ash, and an oily black smoke began to gush forth, along with a foulness that not even a shipload of Kahira’s chypre could have masked. "Ooh, Hellfire spell," said Sebek, ready and eager for exciting distractions now that his eyes were free of caustic substances. He wandered over to taunt the flames with his statue. I quickly drew him back. I could feel Ghastman trying to undo my spell, but velociraptor-induced exhaustion, not to mention the discomfort of being vaporised, rendered him unequal to the task. A few tentacles thrashed erratically in the searing inferno, but then fell back and were consumed. I tossed my ruined trenchcoat after them and watched it go up as well. Then I cancelled the spell, since the stone walls of our apartment building were starting to char and crack in the heat. Of Kantar Ghastman, Esquire, all that remained was soot, smog and a bad odour.

Sebek cocked his head for a moment, contemplating the final dissolution of the would-be genius of crime, and then glanced up at me. "He was just a big blob," he confided sagely, "And now he’s just a big smell." The eulogy pronounced, we turned to go. Rain continued to sizzle on the red-hot concrete, and between the smoke and the steam, visibility in the alley was virtually nil. "Come on," I said, taking Sebek by the claw and leading him out of the noxious sauna, "Let’s go and find Agrippina."

Agrippina was standing in the middle of the street, an automatic clutched in one hand and a three-foot length of snake-tail in the other. Her coat was in almost as bad a state as mine had been after rubbing down Sebek, and she had a large, ugly-looking bruise on her forehead. She sagged in relief when she caught sight of us, and, as people do in such situations, quickly transmuted worry and concern into vexation and wrath. "Where the fucking Hades have you been?" she shouted. "We were having a bonfire," said Sebek brightly, "Did you bring my umbrella?" Since Agrippina was incapable of even thinking of raising a hand to him, I sensed that she was either going to shoot me or burst into tears. Instinct told me that probability favoured the former, and so I decided that some minor deflection was in order. "Where’s Asanci?" I enquired blandly.

"That bitch!" exploded Agrippina, "Half a clip I emptied into her, and she’s up on her feet again and throwing magick about before I can even blink! I’ve been all over the fucking building trying to finish her off – down the lift shaft, round the boiler room, back up the laundry chute, and all I ended up with was this!" She waved the still wriggling tail in my face. It had been neatly severed between two vertebrae. "And now she’s out there somewhere laughing at us," raved Agrippina, "And she’s got my fucking sword!" This, I knew, meant embedded point first in a gladiators’ death-blow, but for Agrippina the inflicting of a potentially mortal wound was as naught if the weapon in question was not sitting oiled and polished on her bedside table the next morning. A decade of picking up Sebek’s misplaced odds and ends can make you pathological about such things. Sebek meanwhile was eyeing the twitching caudal appendage. "I’m hungry," he announced, "Are we going to chase Miss Hash Panties, then? We should go to a piglet shop. Snakes eat piglets. Then she’ll be all sleepy and fat in the middle and we can cut off her head. I could have a piglet too. Look, I got my statue back."

Agrippina heard this out in silence, and for a horrible moment I thought she really was going to burst into tears. "What happened to Ghastman?" she asked in somewhat strangled tones. "Sebek arrested him," I said. "Yes," agreed Sebek, "He’s dead now. Are we going home now? I’m wet." I looked questioningly at Agrippina. Frankly, the major menace was now a hazard to the olfactory senses only, and I could care less about tracking down the wretched snake woman, but only if I made a special effort. Agrippina sighed. "All right," she said, "but if I ever see her again I’m going to finish the job. And don’t you dare tell me that you’ll buy me a new sword, or I’ll... I’ll..." She looked at the tail she was waving at me and failed to come up with a plausible threat. "Yes," I said to Sebek, "We’re going home." "Good," said Sebek, and leapt across the street to land on top of a manhole cover beneath which a pair of exophthalmic eyes had been watching us fearfully. There was a clang, a crunch and a muffled scream. Kahira was really going to have to find an new line of employment, preferably one where manual dexterity was not at a premium. Sebek looked back at us proudly. "They’re all gone now," he said, "Shall I sing my victory song?"

Neither of us had the heart to deny him, nor the reserves of willpower left to prevent him, and so we marched back into the apartment building with Sebek at our head, and Sebek as he marched sang his victory song:

"My nice obscene thick slurry after gumming up with lard,
We are Trumping out of bin-bags where the Great Soft Rat is stored,
We have lost the fat for lighting up hysterical Swiss hordes,
His droopy Martian gong."

"Glory, glory, half a lawyer,
Glory, glory, half a lawww-yer..."

Most of the other tenants seemed to have barricaded themselves in their apartments, although a few emerged to shake their fists and threaten to call the police. I think this had more to do with the earlier yelling and shooting and wanton destruction of private property than with Sebek’s singing, although it wasn’t easy to tell. Sebek didn’t care. He sang at them anyway. He sang as we packed our belongings, and he sang out the broken window at the local constabulary when they turned up and sealed off the building, initiating a bizarre-sounding duet with the incomprehensible metallic bark of police megaphones.

"... Glory, glory, half a law-aw-yer,
His droopy Martian gong."

"Are you ready to go?" I asked, getting out my Trump of the Priory. "Yes," said Sebek. He was wearing his back pack with his trenchcoat bundled on top, and was cradling his statue, his umbrella and his bucket of loot in his arms. I scrutinised him thoughtfully as we waited for Agrippina to join us. As was usually the case when things were going well, he looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. I was determined, however, that he take something away from the past few days in terms of experience rather than plunder and spoils. "So what have you learned from all this?" I demanded. Sebek thought for a moment. "Fat people are bad," he decided. I sighed, and started concentrating on the Trump. "And don’t you forget it," I said.