I ducked into the old wizard's house.

The heat was ferocious. One-Eye and Gota had trouble keeping warm even in summer. Though summers in southern Hsien seldom become hot.

I stared. "You sure he's in trouble?"

Tobo said, "He tried to tell me something. I didn't understand so I came for you. I was afraid." Him. Afraid.

One-Eye was seated in a rickety chair he had built for himself. He was motionless but things stirred in the corners of the room, usually only visible at the edge of my eye. Snail shells cluttered the floor. Tobo's father, Murgen, calls them brownies after little folk recalled from his youth. There had to be twenty different races of them around, from no bigger than a thumb to half a man high. They really did do work when nobody was looking. That drove Sleepy crazy. It meant she had to work harder to think up chores to keep the Company's villains out of trouble.

An overpowering stench pervaded One-Eye's house. It came from the mash for his still.

The devil himself looked like a shrunken head the shrinker had not bothered to separate from its body. One-Eye was a little bit of a thing. Even in his prime he had not been big. At two hundred and some years old, with both legs and most of one arm in the grave, he looked more like a shriveled monkey than a human being.

I said, "I hear tell you're trying to get some attention again, old man." I knelt. One-Eye's one eye opened. It focused on me. Time had been kind in that respect. His vision remained good.

He opened his toothless mouth. At first nothing came out. He tried to raise a mahogany spider of a hand. He did not have the strength.

Tobo shuffled his feet and muttered at the things in the corners. There are ten thousand strange things infesting Hsien and he knows every one by name. And they all worship him. For me this intersection with the hidden world has been the most troubling development of our stay in the Land of Unknown Shadows.