"With the aid of his draftsmen, the blueprints, and many a fervent oath, Nimrod was able to convince me that the foundations of Babel did nor delve deeply enough to harm my sleeping brides. Indeed, upon reflection, it occurred to me that planting a massive city overtop their sheltering-space only made them all the more secure from harm.
"So I stayed my wrath.
"Now at last my wives' time has come. Sometimes you may feel a tremor that lightly shakes the Tower and makes its steel-beam framework moan. That means that one is experiencing a contraction. Someday—tomorrow, perhaps, or a hundred thousand years from now—they will go into the true labor that takes no time to speak of and is over in a week. Then shall they shake off the weight of stone and mortar that lies atop them, and the Dread Tower shall fall and all those who dwell within it will die. My wives will burrow to the surface and feast on the bodies, and I shall lick my cubs into life. But that happy day is not yet, so I abide I took this job guarding the library, and though the salary is small, my needs are few. It suffices. However long I must endure, I shall. I am patience incarnate."
Will was silent for a while. Then he nodded toward the other lion and said. "And your associate? I assume his story is much the same?"
"Him?" the lion said, surprised. "I wouldn't know. I never asked."
"Ah." Will returned to his reading.
According to the book, hippogriffs ate both grain and flesh. Though there was no shortage of purveyors of each in Babel, Alcyone would doubtless buy from a single provider. Their stables required both access to the open sky and a grassy exercise yard. So there was a second lead as well. A rough-and-tumble elf-girl who could pass as high society shouldn't be as hard to locate as she was turning out to be. So he might want to look for her through her harness-maker. Hippogriffs were far rarer than either the griffins or horses whose crossbreed they were, and thus there were correspondingly fewer artisans catering to the market. Alcyone could be expected to patronize only the best.
It took Will several hours to work his way through to the end of the last book. He put down The Aristocracy of the Air, yawned, stood, and stooped to gather up his stack.
Will had only gone a few steps when a child slammed into his legs.
"Unca Will! Unca Will!" It was Esme. She caught her breath and said, "Pop-Pop says don't go home to our apartment." These days she thought Nat was her grandfather. "He says it's important."
Will stooped so he could speak to Esme eye to eye. "Was this recently?"
She shrugged "I don't know."
"Did he say anything more?"
"Yes, but I forget what."
Will couldn't help but smile. "Of course you do. I—" There was a sudden weight on Will's shoulders and hips. With a strange sense of discontinuity, he realized that he was wearing a rubberized cloth helmet with a plastic visor. He looked down and found himself clothed in a white moon suit with rubber gloves. A waist unit pumped fresh air through PVC. tubing into his helmet.
Inexplicably, Nat Whilk was standing in front of Will. He, too. wore a white biohazard suit. "Whatever you do, don't take off the hood," he said "Or you'll be frozen timeless like everyone else in the city."
Everything felt odd "Nat," Will said, "what the hell am I doing in this thing? What's going on here?"
"Take a look." Nat stepped to the side so he wasn't blocking Will's sight.
All the city was motionless. Traffic had ceased. The crowds of pedestrians on the sidewalk were a petrified forest. Flower petals that the wind had blown from a window box were fossilized in the air, like ants in amber. Esme, caught in mid-hop, balanced on one toe.
Nat took a nickel from his pocket and held out before him. When he snatched his hand out from under it, the nickel did not fall. "Major juju, huh? The Lords of the Mayoralty have frozen an instant of time and moved their police and rescue forces into it. This is world-class stuff. You're lucky to be seeing it. A spell of this magnitude is cast only once in a decade, and even then only under gravest need. It's a real budget-breaker."
Nat snatched the nickel out of the air. "Let's go." "My books..."
"I already returned them. One of the advantages of stopping time is that you've got the opportunity to catch up on all those little chores."
"What about Esme?"
"She'll keep." Will followed Nat down the street, not asking obvious questions but, rather, answering them for himself. How did Nat know about the time-freeze? Nat had connections. Obviously, he had a mole in the Mayoralty or even the Palace of Leaves. Where had he gotten the moon suits? From the same source. What was he planning now? It was extremely unlikely he knew. Nat always said he did his best thinking on the fly.
The city was silent, and beautiful, too.
A scattering of pigeons was a stairway rising from the street. Nat took one from the air and gently folded its wings. After which he stuffed it down the trousers of a nearby boggart. Gleaming droplets of water were a spreading string of bright diamonds pendant beneath an air-conditioner. Nat plucked them one by one. brushed them into a single sphere of water the size of a child's fist, and slipped it inside a policeman's hat. He snatched a blackfly out of the air and placed it in an ogre's nostril.
"That's very childish," Will said.
"I know. But what can I do? As a fully vested master in and past president of the Just and Honorable Guild of Rogues, Swindlers, Cozeners, and knaves, I do have certain obligations."
"Tell me something. This guild of yours—are you by any chance the founder and sole member?"
"How well you know me!" Nat lifted a wallet from a prosperous-looking rock troll and, hoisting up a hulder's skirts, slid a hundred-dollar bill in her thong. "That'll give her something to think about," he chortled. He danced on down the street, stuffing money into the underwear of every sylph and houri he saw. When the wallet was empty, he flipped it away, leaving it hanging over a trash can like a leather seagull.
"You know, this could be a golden opportunity for us," Will said. "Instead of frittering it away like this, we could be walking out of banks with sacks of gold—for charity if you wish, but at least some of it for ourselves."
Unexpectedly, Nat laughed. "That's not what a trickster does. It's not what he is" He lowered his voice in a caricature of confiding charm, and winked. "It's not what were for."
"Suddenly we have a purpose?"
"Absolutely. We keep things stirred up. Without us, the world would grow stale and stagnant. Every life we've touched today has been made richer and stranger."
"The poor bastard whose wallet you took isn't any richer."
"No! Infinitely richer! He was stuck in a rut and he didn't even know it. He had his head stuck so far up his wallet that he was blind to the wonders of the world. An hour from now, he'll be mourning the loss of his money. But later tonight, he'll reflect on what a fool he was. By morning, he'll be rethinking his life."
"And the young ladies?"
"When a lass finds a C-note in her knickers and no idea how it got there, that's a wake-up call. She has only one possible reaction: To resolve to mend her sluttish ways."
"And what if she's chaste? What if she has no sluttish ways?"
"Then she can take them up!" A police car grumbled by tracing a tortuous route through the frozen traffic. "It isn't for me to increase or decrease the total amount of virtue or vice in the world—just to keep things stirred up. To keep us all from dying of predictability."