Part One

Before Time began there was only the God and the Goddess, and between them the Void. Attracted again as they had been before, the God and the Goddess went to each other and in the going, compressed between them the Void until it became no more than a ball of white fire.

And when the God and Goddess embraced, so powerful was their joining that it compressed the Void into an infinitesimal point.

And when the God and Goddess reached the peak of their pleasure together and were One, the Void burst and passed through them and became the Universe.

—First Book of the Void, CI, v. 1-3

Languid from their lovemaking, the God and Goddess sought to amuse themselves. They created Time and the stars and great clouds and filled the heavens with strings and bubbles, and when it had cooled sufficiently, added to that planets and moons.

And they brought forth that which could bring forth more of itself and named it Life.

And the God and Goddess were greatly amused indeed.

—The Book of life, CI, v. 1-3

The Way of the Samurai is found in Death.

—Yomamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakwe

1

THERE WERE TWO of them, and if it had been summer they probably would have gotten him. But early January in Oregon gave Long advantages—first was the fog and second was his old leather jacket.

The night in the Portland alley was cold, just below freezing, and the mist was dense enough to shroud the building lamps and dim the fuzzy-edged cones of damp light they cast. The cold, gray murk kept them from getting a good look at him. The heavy air also revealed the needle-thick red beam of the first one's laser sight as it flicked on and showed its source.

Long used to wonder why the fog didn't turn to ice and just fall from the air when the temp dropped below thirty, but somewhere he'd heard about crystallization and moving currents, and that had finally explained it. Kind of like running water.

Because he wore his leather jacket, he was able to get to his weapon faster. In the summer, when you were wearing shorts or jeans and a T-shirt in the heat, there wasn't any

place to hide a good-sized handgun. When it was body temp outside, a jacket was a giveaway and real uncomfortable besides. So he wore a belly pouch. When the weather got cold enough, he switched the gun from his pouch into a paddle holster that rode over his right hip. The paddle slipped inside his jeans and a little notch snagged under his waistline. Pull the gun up hard and it came out, but the holster stayed in place. Put a little twist on it, push forward, and the holster and piece came out together. It saved having to thread your belt through it all the time, and if you wanted to take the jacket off in public, you could sneak the holster off with it and nobody would know you were hardwared—

The second shooter's laser sight lit.

Long stopped thinking.

The closer one was four meters away, the farther one a meter past that. Long dropped into a crouch and snatched his revolver. He whipped it out, caught his right hand in his left, lined the three glowing green tritium dots on his sights up on the bright red spot. Pulled the trigger, once, twice—

Swung the gun to his right a hair. The muzzle flashes left a purple afterimage and the other shooter was a blur, but he point-indexed him by feel and—

Shot him twice, too.

Time: Half a second after he made them, a second and a half since he went for his gun. Four shots, two seconds in all, though it felt like hours....

He came up from the crouch, his ears ringing. He didn't really remember hearing the shots, but he knew it must have sounded as if four bombs had gone off in the confines of the alley. And even with the low-flash powder in the shells, the short-barreled S&W .357 had belched and spat like a dragon, shattered the darkness with yellow-orange tongues of fire. The clammy, cold air was now tainted with the chemical stink of burned gunpowder.

He kept the gun pointed in front of him and quick-

stepped to where the first shooter lay. The guy wasn't moving; his gun lay on the dirty concrete, half a meter from his hand. He was pale, blond, maybe twenty-three. He had a tattoo of something on his forehead but Long couldn't make it out in the dark.

He scooted over to check the second shooter. This one was making small bubbling noises in his throat, but he was also out of it. Long kicked away the pistol the shooter still clutched, watched it bounce against a wall. This one must have gotten at least one shot off—smoke curled up from the pistol's muzzle—but Long didn't know where the bullet had gone, hadn't been aware the man had fired. The guy had two holes in his chest, a few centimeters apart, blood welling from them even through the Kevlar vest he wore. He was light-skinned but had Negroid features, and the whites of his eyes showed. About as old as the other one.

"Should have bought the good spidersilk softweave, boys." Long patted his jacket; the leather was lined with the more expensive armor, though he hadn't needed it. "Sorry."

Long stood and looked both ways down the alley. Somebody had surely heard the cannon roars his .357 made, but nobody was brave enough to stick his nose out and risk looking yet. Aside from the two dying shooters, he was alone.

Time to leave.

He holstered the S&W and took off for the street. The cops would find the bodies soon enough. The thieves had been well equipped. Both had carried Glocks with integral laser sights, suppressors, and compensators; the guns were caseless nines or forties. Both wore spookeyes, probably 4-or 5gen military surplus, both wore Kevlar vests that would have stopped most legal civilian handgun rounds. Fairly high tech for a couple of freelance thieves. Maybe they were yak; more likely, Mama's Boys, this was their turf. Mors tua, vita mea: You die so I can live.

Sorry.

He shook his head. It was the high-tech stuff that fucked them up. That and luck. If they'd been mouth-breathing arm breakers with bats or irons and they'd waited until he passed and busted his skull, they'd have done better. But the fog had given him their lasers; his muzzle flashes had probably kicked in their spookeyes' blast shields, effectively blinding them; and the Smith's pencil-point armor-piercing steel-and-Teflon-clad bullets had punched through the Kevlar weave like it was wet paper. That was where the luck came in. Pistol AP wasn't very good as a man stopper, it didn't expand. The .357 had some velocity, so there was a shock-wave effect, but mush-nose lead hollow-point was better. Even so, they were down and he was up. High tech was fine—when it worked and when you knew what you were doing—but low tech had some advantages. A knife didn't run out of ammo, a rock didn't give away your position. Revolvers had been old seventy-five years before his father had bought the one Long carried, and while the Smith wasn't an antique—it was about the same age as he was at forty—it would still kill a man as dead as any freshly minted plasma gun the bright new year, a.d. 2030, had to offer.

There were a few pedestrians out on the cold walks; a dozen electric cars, a bus, and a few gas-alkie burners rolled past as he crossed Burnside and walked toward his own car two blocks away. He strolled as casually as he could so as not to attract any undue attention. At the car, he disarmed the circuit kick-out with the little transmitter. He tapped his code into the keypad and unlocked the door, slid in behind the wheel. The car was a twelve-year-old Saab-Volvo—a Salvo—station wagon, rusty, dirty, and beat up enough so it wouldn't interest a serious car thief. The plastic seat covers were torn, the radio was visibly bead-welded to an extruded frame tie, and not worth the trouble to pry loose; there wasn't a grid computer or a holoproj on board. He tapped in his ignition code, switched on the control-panel lights, saw he had half a charge left in the main battery.

Plenty enough to pass by his place and still get to the Hills-boro Airport in time for his 4 a.m. flight to Seattle. He could plug it into the charger at the port and it would be full by the time he got back tomorrow.

He lit the running lamps, pulled out of the parking slot, and circled through Old Town toward the 405 freeway on-ramp. It was past midnight, traffic was light, he should be able to make it home in half an hour.

It wasn't until he'd pulled onto the freeway and headed west on the Sunset Highway that the reaction finally overcame his defenses and he started to shake. His breathing grew ragged, shuddered into something that neared sobs, and despite the car's heater, he went cold. It had been a while since he'd had to shoot anywhere but the practice range.

Somebody had tried to kill him and he had killed them instead.

It wasn't the first time. Might not be the last, either.

If he'd been a little slower, if it hadn't been foggy, if he'd been wearing the belly pouch, it could be him dead in an alley instead of the two thieves who'd thought to steal his package. At the thought, he reached down and patted the small keeper on his belt, almost an automatic action. It was there, next to his personal comp, locked securely onto his thick belt. He didn't know what was in the sealed keeper, didn't care. Probably diamonds, given his client, but it didn't really matter. Could be computer chips or high-test designer drugs. He didn't see it go in, he wouldn't see it come out. As far as he was concerned, the keeper was a solid block. That was how he'd been taught to think about it.

Once again, he wasn't dead. He had gone up against the would-be assassins and here he was, driving away. There were no witnesses, no way the cops could connect him to it, and it had been self-defense anyway. He could have stayed and legaled it out but it wasn't good business for a courier to spend time in the public eye. He'd get off, even-

tually, but the shooters might have friends or associates who wouldn't be happy with Long. Dead was dead, and if nobody knew he'd done it, that was fine with him.

All reasonable ways of looking at it, but that didn't help the shakes. He wanted to go home, crawl under the bed covers, and sleep until spring.

Before he left for the run to Seattle, he would go home, but not to sleep, only to fix his gun. He'd change the barrel so nobody could get a ballistics match on the fired bullets. Dump the rest of that box of AP, plus what was in the Smith, and there went the metallurgical-lot comparison. Over the years, he'd bought and stocked up a dozen spare barrels for the revolver. You didn't need a license to get that particular part, and he'd used phony names and IDs in four states to make the buys. A different barrel, bore-sighted with a plug-in laser—not perfect but would have to do until he could shoot again—ammo from another lot, and the old Smith became a new gun, a virgin only distantly related to the killing machine it had been. He had bought twelve of the barrels. He had eight of them left. As a civilian, he had shot six men and none of them were around to tell tales. It had been them or him, and so far, it had been them. Two of the fights had been witnessed and the cops had run him through the procedures, but they'd been righteous shootings and he'd been cut loose. Unlikely they could tie him to the two in the alley. It was a common enough caliber, .357, and H. A. Long was a bonded courier, licensed in Washington, Oregon, California, and Idaho, with an application pending in Nevada. A marine veteran of the Castroito conflict in Cuba in the winter of '11, honorably discharged with a Purple Heart and the Silver Star. A hero to his grateful country two decades ago, a taxpaying, credit card-carrying citizen. The cops probably wouldn't come looking for him, and his employer on this run wouldn't have anything to gain by stepping forward. He was in the clear. Maybe someday the bad guys would be faster or smarter and that would be the end of him, but

not this time. Once again, he had looked into Death's yellow eyes, smelled his carrion breath, and lived to be amazed that he had.

Well. What the hell. He'd been living on borrowed time for the last twenty years. It was all gravy anyhow.

His exit was just ahead. He put his blinker on like a good cit, left the slow lane at Murray Boulevard, and headed home.

Blackest of shadows, darkest of nights, deepest of pits, none can withstand the pure light of the Goddess.

—Sun Po, Jhe Book of Heaven

2

MlRANDA MOON BOWED before the statuettes, her hands pressed together in namaste. There were half a dozen of the Manifestations on the mantel above the crackling fireplace: Kali, Nu Kwa, the Morrigan, Songi, Pele, Changing Woman. Throughout the temple were many others, not so much as icons of worship as reminders that the Goddess could wrap Herself in any form she chose, that the Goddess was Essence and not merely shape.

As Moon came out of her bow, divine in saluting the divine of the Goddess, a voice from the next room shrilled loudly, "Yeah, well, fuck that and fuck you!"

Moon sighed. So much for bliss and harmony. Such language from the sweet mouth of a twelve-year-old.

The temple was a Victorian two-story house in northwest Portland, almost all the way out to the warehouse district, and it had seen better decades; in truth, it had seen better centuries. The wooden floorboards creaked as Moon walked down the short hall from the front room to the room across from it. There, below the red-and-blue-and-yellow

tie-dyed parachute silk draped from the ceiling in artful billows by one of Moon's students, stood Dawn and Alyssa. They were two meters apart, glaring at each other. Alyssa, fifteen, had her hands on her slim hips, feet wide. Dawn stood with her arms knotted across her chest. Both wore tight jeans, dark zip-lock sport shoes and colorful cotton sweaters with three-quarter sleeves and stiff collars that stood up like something from an old Dracula movie. Dawn's sweater was blue, Alyssa's purple. Anybody with one working eye could pick them out of a crowd as sisters. They had their father's ash blond hair, his pale blue eyes, his determined chin, his dimples. Moon could never look at her girls without seeing Martin. Despite her attempts at being open-hearted and loving. Martin was her treasured wound and, given her current feelings, the rest of her life wouldn't be enough to heal him. Forgiving Martin was the biggest obstacle she had yet to overcome. She could do it in theory; after all, he had helped make her daughters. That was the theory. Practice was something else. "What's the problem, girls?"

"Alyssa is the problem] She's calling me names again." Moon looked at her older daughter. "Alyssa?" "I didn't say anything that wasn't true." "Mom, she called me 'titless'!"

Moon rolled her eyes and looked at her fifteen-year-old. "Well, flatso, if the bra fits. Or doesn't fit..." "Yeah, well, you're a cunt, too—" "That'll be enough."

"She was listening on the extension while I was having a private conversation," Alyssa said.

"Yeah, playing sugar lips with Django the whango—" "Shut up, you little twat!"

"Enough, I said." Moon shook her head. "Come here, both of you."

It was hard for Moon to keep a straight face then. They knew what was coming. "Ah, jeez, Mom, don't—"