Demon

She almost wished she hadn't started the War.

ELEVEN

The origins of the City of Bellinzona were, as so many other things in the wide wheel, mysterious.

The first human explorers to enter Dione had reported a large, empty city made of wood. It stood on sturdy pilings sunk deep in the rock below the waterline, and had freshly carved streets that wound up into the rocky hills on each side of Peppermint Bay. To the south were relatively flat lands, rising to a pass that led to an encircling forest. Dangerous creatures lived in that forest, but they were not as bad as the quicksands, fevers, and poisonous and carnivorous plants. It did not seem like a place where anyone would want to live.

Cirocco Jones had been there long before the "explorers." She simply never bothered to tell anyone about the ghost city which had appeared sometime during the fiftieth year of her Wizardship. She had been as puzzled by it as anyone else. It didn't seem to have any use.

But it was built to human scale. There were large buildings and small. The doorways were rather high, but Titanides usually had to duck to get through them.

After the start of the War and the begi

Cirocco suspected it had been the gremlins. She had no evidence of this. There was no "gremlin style" of architecture. The creatures had put up structures as varied as the Glass Castle and Pharoah Mountain. She often wished she could contact them and ask them a few questions. But not even Titanides had ever seen a gremlin.

Humans had added to the central city in a haphazard and jerry-built fashion. The new piers usually rested on pontoons, and of course there were the jostling flotillas of boats. But despite neglect and misuse, some of the larger buildings of Bellinzona were quite impressive.

Cirocco had to raise an army to fight Gaea. Bellinzona was the only place able to provide that many people, but a rabble would not do for her purposes. She needed discipline, and to get it, she knew she had to civilize the place, to clean it up-and to utterly dominate it.

She chose a big, ornate, warehouse-sized structure on the Slough of Despond. The building was called the Loop by its tenant, a man by the name of Maleski, who came from Chicago. Cirocco had learned quite a bit about Maleski, who was one of the top four or five gang leaders in Bellinzona. It had the flavor of the unreal, but she decided it was just one of those odd things. She was going to go up against a real live gangster from Chicago.

When Cirocco and the five black-clad Titanides entered the building, almost everyone was clustered at the other end, looking out the windows there, staring up at the sky. That was not a coincidence. Cirocco stood there in the middle of the big room in the light of flickering torches, and waited to be noticed.

It did not take long. Surprise changed to consternation. No one was supposed to be able to just walk in to the Loop. It was heavily guarded on the outside. Maleski didn't know it yet, but all those guards were dead.

The ones in the room drew their swords and began to disperse around the walls. Some of them grabbed torches. A tight group of nine made a human shield around Maleski. For a moment, no one moved.

"I've heard of you," Maleski said, finally. "Aren't you Cirocco Jones?"

"Mayor Jones," Cirocco said.

"Mayor Jones," Maleski repeated. He moved forward, out of the group. His eyes went to the gun thrust in the waistband of her black pants, but it didn't seem to worry him. "That's news to me. Some of your people had a run-in with some of my boys a while back. Is this about that?"

"No. I'm taking over this building. I'm declaring a ten-hour amnesty. You're going to need every minute of it, so you'd better go now. All the rest of you, you're free to go as well. You have five minutes to take what you can carry."

For a moment they all seemed too bewildered to say anything. Maleski frowned, then laughed.

"The hell you say. This building is private property."

This time Cirocco laughed.

"Just what planet do you think you're living on, you idiot? Hornpipe, shoot this guy in the knee."

The gun had materialized in Hornpipe's hand when Cirocco said "shoot," and by the time she said "knee" the bullet was already coming out the other side of Maleski's leg.

As Maleski fell, and for a few seconds after he hit the floor, there was a flurry of noise and activity. None of the men who survived it were ever able to recount a sequence of events, except to note that a lot of men stepped forward and neat holes appeared perfectly centered in their foreheads and they fell down and did not move. The rest, some twenty men, stood very, very still, except for Maleski, who was howling and thrashing and ordering his men to kill the goddamn sons of bitches. But each Titanide held a gun in each hand, and most of the men were getting excellent views down the wide barrels. Finally Maleski stopped cursing and just lay there, breathing hard.

"Okay," he finally managed to croak. "Okay, you win. We'll get out." He rolled over heavily.

He was really quite good. The knife was concealed in his sleeve. He got it out as he rolled over, and his arm flicked it with the precision of long practice. It flashed in the air ... and Cirocco reached out and caught it. She just grabbed it, holding it with the point about six inches from her throat, where it was supposed to have been buried. Maleski stared as she flipped it up and got a new grip, and then it flashed again and he screamed as it buried itself up to the hilt in the torn flesh that had been his knee. A man standing to Maleski's left crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.

"Rocky," Cirocco said, "tie a tourniquet around his thigh. Then throw him out. You men, drop your weapons where you stand and walk slowly away from them. All your weapons. Then strip. Carry one pair of trousers to the door and hand them to Valiha-the yellow Titanide. If she finds a weapon in them she will break your neck. Otherwise, you can put them on and leave. You have four minutes left."

It didn't even take one minute. They were all feverishly anxious to leave, and no one tried to cheat.

"Tell your friends what happened here," she called to them, as her own people started arriving.

There were humans and Titanides in her crew. The Titanides were all calm, well-versed in their jobs. Most of the humans were nervous, having been drafted only hours before. There were Free Females among them, and Vigilantes, and others from other communities.

A desk was set up, and Cirocco took her place behind it as the lights were being arranged. She was suffering some reaction, both from the fight and from what she had done to Maleski-and from the close call. She felt she could do that knife trick six times out of ten, but that wasn't nearly enough. She couldn't let it get that close again.

But most of her nervousness was stage fright. Apparently, it wasn't something one could outgrow. She had suffered from it since childhood.

Two men from the Vigilantes who had worked in mass communications before the War were setting up cables and a tripod and a small camera. The lights came blazing on, and Cirocco blinked. A microphone was set before her.

"All this stuff must be a century old," one of the technicians grumbled.

"Just make it work for an hour," Cirocco told him. He didn't seem to be listening, but was studying her face from several angles. He reached out tentatively toward her forehead, and she backed away, alarmed.