Some days it’s the other way around. Too many days.

The big brewery stinks even in cold weather, because of the fermentation. The employees and neighbors no longer notice.

This was the mother brewery, the heart of the Weider empire. There are several dozen lesser operations around TunFaire, onetime competitors who surrendered their independence to the Dark Lord of the Hops. The lesser breweries concentrate on local and specialty products.

The queen brewery is a Gothic redbrick behemoth. It looks like a folklore hangout for vampires and werewolves. It is festooned with towers and turrets and odd little gables and dormers and lofts that have no connection with producing nature’s holy elixir.

The towers house swarms of bats. Max thinks bats are cool. He enjoys seeing them swarm out on a summer’s evening.

The whole strange place is Max’s imagination given form, weird because Max wanted it weird. And he could afford to build it that way.

A smaller version faces it from across Delor Street. The Weider family shanty.

Max originally meant that to be his brewery. When it went up it was the biggest beer-making operation in all TunFaire. Two years later it was too small to handle demand. And Max’s wife, Hannah, was pregnant for the third time. So he tossed up the monster across the way.

Max and Hannah produced five children: Tad, Tom, Ty, Kittyjo, and Alyx. Alyx was the baby by half a decade. Tragedy stalked the family, maybe punishing Max for his worldly success. Tad died fighting in the Cantard. Tom and Ty survived—with Tom gone mad and Ty condemned to a wheelchair. Kittyjo and I were an item once upon a time but she was too loony for me.

My pal Morley Dotes says the absolute first rule of life is, don’t get involved with a woman crazier than you are. A rule I haven’t always pursued with due diligence. Because of more immediate distractions.