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black, a wooden handrail worn down so the knots in the wood stood out like islands.
    She glanced back at the office door. Then she bent, unlaced her boots, shoved them in her bag, and darted up the stairs.
    There were three doors at the top. One opened on a closet containing a balding broom and several grumpy spiders. The other two were locked.
    Eveline never travelled without her picks. These were a rather splendid new set she’d bought from Tall Jimmy in Longacre with some of the money from Charlotte’s jewels. She’d told herself they were an investment against everything going wrong, but as a matter of fact, she just liked having them.
    She looked at the two doors. Both had round brass handles – one of which was tarnished to a dull brown. The other, though it wasn’t polished up like the nameplate outside, had a faint sheen of use.
    That was the one she chose.
    The room beyond was dim, with heavy curtains drawn over the windows, but there was enough light to make out the edges of furniture. Eveline stood still until her eyes adjusted a little. A heavy table, one leg propped with a book. Another book – an old, thick one by the look of it – on the table-top. Not a ledger, something else. Candlesticks and the sort of thick-glassed lantern sailors used. A shelf of buff files bound with red lawyers’ ribbon. Bunches of herbs strung here and there. Ornaments and oddments. A curtained alcove.
    She nodded, backed out, locked the door, slipped down the stairs past the sound of hectoring from the office, and out of the front door.

 
    Ao Guang’s Palace
     
     
    T HE PALACE OF the Dragon King Ao Guang of the East China Sea was, of course, magnificent. It was also under water, but in the way of magical structures, this caused no difficulty for visitors like Liu.
    The palace was of white jade, tiled in pearl, and shimmered like a mirage in the shifting sea-light. It was surrounded by a forest of branching corals twenty feet high, shading from palest flush to deepest blood-red.
    Great glossy seaweeds, jade green and purplish-red, curved elegantly about the tiered roofs like silk shawls. Vast jellyfish, bigger than a man, like huge pale mushrooms, dozens of webby tendrils trailing behind them, swooped overhead. Shoals of fish swirled, glinting, and scattered abruptly before the slow cruising shadow of a shark.
    Liu looked down at his robes. Traditional, but not excessive. He had, after all, been summoned. Too much flamboyance might count against him. He wore his human shape but let his fox-tail hang outside his clothes. Had he been true Folk, he would have had, like his father, several tails to show. He would not attempt to hide what he was – which would be useless – and would not give anyone the excuse to think he was ashamed of it.
    Shame was not an emotion he had much time for.
    Perhaps he should have told Eveline where he was going.
    No. She would undoubtedly quarrel with him. She seemed to have become quarrelsome lately. And besides... he looked up at the towering palace.
    Eveline was sharp, and clever, and altogether quite his favourite human. But despite everything, despite what he had told her about the Folk, despite her own experience (which after all had been more a case of carelessness and lack of human feeling on the part of the Folk than actual threat), he wasn’t convinced she understood how dangerous his father’s people really were.
    Safer that she was kept well away from any involvement at all.
    By his very nature, of course, he linked her to this world, and these beings that given sufficient excuse and an attention span of more than a moment’s duration could destroy her in a thousand imaginatively appalling ways.
    He tried not to think about that. He did not see the point of dwelling on unpleasant things any more than he saw the point of shame, though these days, avoiding either seemed to be annoyingly difficult.
    A summons to the Court was quite unpleasant enough, and potentially a very bad sign.