They walked off the ship, down the long gangplank, and onto the shore, where they went down some steps, through a long, unlit underpass, and up again. Lamia strode confidently ahead of them. She brought them out in a small, cobbled alley. Gaslights burned and sputtered on the walls.
    "Third door along," she said.
    They stopped in front of the door. There was a brass plate on it, which said:

        THE ROYAL SOCIETY
        FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY
        TO HOUSES

    And beneath that, in smaller letters:

        DOWN STREET. PLEASE KNOCK.

    "You get to the street through the house?" asked Richard.
    "No," said Lamia. "The street is in the house." Richard knocked on the door. Nothing happened. They waited, and they shivered from the early morning cold. Richard knocked again. Finally, he rang the doorbell. The door was opened by a sleepy-looking footman, wearing a powdered, crooked wig and scarlet livery. He looked at the motley rabble on his doorstep with an expression that indicated that they had not been worth getting out of bed for.
    "Can I help you?" said the footman. Richard had been told to fuck off and die with more warmth and good humor.
    "Down Street," said Lamia, imperiously.
    "This way," sighed the footman. "If you'll wipe your feet."
    They walked through an impressive lobby. Then they waited while the footman lit each of the candles on a candelabra. They went down some impressive, richly carpeted stairs. They went down a flight of less impressive, less richly carpeted stairs. They went down a flight of entirely unimpressive stairs carpeted in a threadbare brown sacking, and, finally, they went down a flight of drab wooden stairs with no carpet on them at all.
    At the bottom of those stairs was an antique service elevator, with a sign on it. The sign said:

        OUT OF ORDER

    The footman ignored the sign and pulled open the wire outer door with a metallic thud. Lamia thanked him, politely, and stepped into the elevator. The others followed. The footman turned his back on them. Richard watched him through the wire mesh, clutching his candelabra, going back up the wooden stairs. There was a short row of black buttons on the wall of the elevator. Lamia pressed the bottom-most button. The metal lattice door closed automatically, with a bang. A motor engaged, and the elevator began, slowly, creakily, to descend. The four of them stood packed in the elevator. Richard realized that he could smell each of the women in the elevator with him: Door smelled mostly of curry; Hunter smelled, not unpleasantly, of sweat, in a way that made him think of great cats in cages at zoos; while Lamia smelled, intoxicatingly, of honeysuckle and lily of the valley and musk.
    The elevator continued to descend. Richard was sweating, in a clammy cold sweat, and digging his fingernails deep into his palms. In the most conversational tones he could muster, he said, "Now would be a very bad time to discover that one was claustrophobic, wouldn't it?"
    "Yes," said Door.
    "Then I won't," said Richard. And they went down.
    Finally, there was a jerk, and a clunk, and a ratcheting noise, and the elevator stopped. Hunter pulled open the door, looked about, and then stepped out onto a narrow ledge.
    Richard looked out of the open elevator door. They were hanging in the air, at the top of something that reminded Richard of a painting he had once seen of the Tower of Babel, or rather of how the Tower of Babel might have looked were it inside out. It was an enormous and ornate spiral path, carved out of rock, which went down and down around a central well. Lights flickered dimly, here and there in the walls, beside the paths, and, far, far below them, tiny fires were burning. It was at the top of the central well, a few thousand feet above solid ground, that the elevator was hanging. It swayed a little.
    Richard took a deep breath and followed the others onto the wooden ledge. Then, although he knew it was a bad idea, he looked down. There was nothing but a wooden board between him and the rock floor, thousands of feet below. There was a long plank stretched between the ledge on which they stood and the top of the rocky path, twenty feet away. "And I suppose," he said, with a great deal less insouciance than he imagined, "this wouldn't be a good time to point out that I'm really bad at heights."
    "It's safe," said Lamia. "Or it was the last time I was here. Watch." She walked across the board, a rustle of black velvet. She could have balanced a dozen books on her head and never dropped one. When she reached the stone path at the side, she stopped, and turned, and smiled at them encouragingly. Hunter followed her across, then turned, and waited beside her on the edge.
    "See?" said Door. She reached out a hand, squeezed Richard's arm. "It's fine." Richard nodded, and swallowed. _Fine._ Door walked across. She did not seem to be enjoying herself; but she crossed, nonetheless. The three women waited for Richard, who stood there. Richard noticed after a while that he did not seem to be starring to walk across the wooden plank, despite the "walk!" commands he was sending to his legs.
    Far above them, a button was pressed: Richard heard the _thunk_ and the distant grinding of an elderly electric motor. The door of the elevator slammed closed behind him, leaving Richard standing, precariously, on a narrow wooden platform, no wider than a plank itself.
    "Richard!" shouted Door. "Move!"
    The elevator began to ascend. Richard stepped off the shaking platform, and onto the wooden board; then his legs turned to jelly beneath him, and he found himself on all fours on the plank, holding on for dear life. There was a tiny, rational part of his mind that wondered about the elevator: who had called it back up, and why? The rest of his mind, however, was engaged in telling all his limbs to clutch the plank rigidly, and in screaming, at the top of its mental voice, "I don't want to die." Richard closed his eyes as tightly as he could, certain that if he opened them, and saw the rock wall below him, he would simply let go of the plank, and fall, and fall, and--
    "I'm not scared of falling," he told himself. "The part I'm scared of is where you finish falling." But he knew he was lying to himself. It _was_ the fall he was scared of--afraid of flailing and tumbling helplessly through the air, down to the rock floor far below, knowing there was nothing he could do to save himself, no miracle that would save him . . .
    He slowly became aware that someone was talking to him.
    "Just climb along the plank, Richard," someone was saying.
    "I . . . can't," he whispered.
    "You went through worse than this to get the key, Richard," someone said. It was Door talking.
    "I'm really not very good at heights," he said, obstinately, his face pressed against the wooden board, his teeth chartering. Then, "I want to go home." He felt the wood of the plank pressing against his face. And then the plank began to shake. Hunter's voice said, "I'm really not sure how much weight the board will bear. You two put your weight here." The plank vibrated as someone moved along it, toward him. He clung to it, with his eyes closed. Then Hunter said, quietly, confidently, in his ear, "Richard?"
    "Mm."
    "Just edge forward, Richard. A bit at a time. Come on . . . " Her caramel fingers stroked his white-knuckled hand, clasping the plank. "Come on."
    He took a deep breath, and inched forward. And froze again. "You're doing fine," said Hunter. "That's good. Come on." And, inch by inch, creep by crawl, she talked Richard along the plank, and then, at the end of the plank, she simply picked him up, her hands beneath his arms, and placed him on solid ground.
    "Thank you," he said. He could not think of anything else to say to Hunter that would be big enough to cover what she had just done for him. He said it again. "Thank you." And then he said, to all of them, "I'm sorry."
    Door looked up at him. "It's okay," she said. "You're safe now." Richard looked at the winding spiral road beneath the world, going down, and down; and he looked at Hunter and Door and Lamia; and he laughed until he wept.
    "What," Door demanded, when, at length, he had stopped laughing, "is so funny?"
    _"Safe,"_ he said, simply. Door stared at him, and then she, too, smiled. "So where do we go now?"
    Richard asked.
    "Down," said Lamia. They began to walk down Down Street. Hunter was in the lead, with Door beside her. Richard walked next to Lamia, breathing in the lily-of-the-valley-honeysuckle scent of her, and enjoying her company.
    "I really appreciate you coming with us," he told her. "Being a guide. I hope it's not going to be bad luck for you or anything."
    She fixed him with her foxglove-colored eyes. "Why should it be bad luck?"
    "Do you know who the rat-speakers are?"
    "Of course."
    "There was a rat-speaker girl named Anaesthesia. She. Well, we got to be sort of friends, and she was guiding me somewhere. And then she got stolen. On Night's Bridge. I keep wondering what happened to her."
    She smiled at him sympathetically. "My people have stories about that. Some of them may even be true."
    "You'll have to tell me about them," he said. It was cold. His breath was steaming in the chilly air.
    "One day," she said. Her breath did not steam. "It's very good of you, taking me with you."
    "Least we could do."
    Door and Hunter went around the curve in front of them, and went out of sight. "You know," said Richard, "the other two are getting a bit ahead of us. We might want to hurry."
    "Let them go," she said, gently. "We'll catch up." It was, thought Richard, peculiarly like going to a movie with a girl as a teenager. Or rather, like walking home afterwards: stopping at bus shelters, or beside walls, to snatch a kiss, a hasty fumble of skin and a tangle of tongues, then hurrying on to catch up with your friends . . .
    Lamia ran a cold finger down his cheek. "You're so warm," she said, admiringly. -"It must be wonderful to have so much warmth."
    Richard tried to look modest. "It's not something I think about much, really," he admitted. He heard, distantly, from above, the metallic slam of the elevator door.
    Lamia looked up at him, pleadingly, sweetly. "Would you give me some of your heat, Richard?" she asked. "I'm so cold."
    Richard wondered if he should kiss her. "What? I . . . "
    She looked disappointed. "Don't you like me?" she asked. He hoped, desperately, that he had not hurt her feelings.
    "Of course I like you," he heard his voice saying. "You're very nice."
    "And you aren't using all your heat, are you?" she pointed out, reasonably.
    "I suppose not . . . "
    "And you said you'd pay me for being your guide. And it's what I want, as my payment. Warmth. Can I have some?"
    Anything she wanted. Anything. The honeysuckle and the lily of the valley wrapped around him, and his eyes saw nothing but her pale skin and her dark plum-bloom lips, and her jet black hair. He nodded. Somewhere inside him something was screaming; but whatever it was, it could wait. She reached up her hands to his face and pulled it gently down toward her. Then she kissed him, long and languorously. There was a moment of initial shock at the chill of her lips, and the cold of her tongue, and then he succumbed to her kiss entirely.
    After some time, she pulled back.
    He could feel the ice on his lips. He stumbled back against the wall. He tried to blink, but his eyes felt as if they were frozen open. She looked up at him and smiled delightedly, her skin flushed and pink and her lips, scarlet; her breath steamed in the cold air. She licked her red lips with a warm crimson tongue. His world began to go dark. He thought he saw a black shape at the edge of his vision.
    "More," she said. And she reached out to him.

    He watched the Velvet pull Richard to her for the first kiss, watched the rime and the frost spread over Richard's skin. He watched her pull back, happily. And then he walked up behind her, and, as she moved in to finish what she had begun, he reached out and seized her, hard, by the neck, and lifted her off the ground.
    "Give it back," he rasped in her ear. "Give him back his life." The Velvet reacted like a kitten who had just been dropped into a bathtub, wriggling and hissing and spitting and scratching. It did her no good: she was held tight by the throat.
    "You can't make me," she said, in decidedly unmusical tones............