The River of No Return

and who we are and what we should aim to become. It’s a place of community, I suppose. It’s been here forever, and it’s got such a strong feeling to it, such a powerful sense of place and belonging and purpose, such a constant flow of feeling outward in every direction, that it’s very easy to jump to. People come and go from here as easily as hopping on and off a bar stool. And for those of us who gather here of an evening—well, we know we’re feeding the atmosphere, keeping it going.” She smiled at him. “Make sense?”
    Nick nodded. “It does. I can almost feel it.”
    Alva put her hand on his arm. “Don’t. Not yet. But . . .” She stepped into the room. “Would you like a beer? I know it’s early. . . .”
    Another morning beer with another powerful time-traveling woman who was about to blow his mind. Nick opened his hands. “How could I possibly refuse?”
    Alva went behind the bar and pulled them each a silver tankard of beer. Nick hooked his leg over a bar stool and watched. “Where does the smoke from the fireplaces go? I don’t remember chimneys sticking up out of Soho Square.”
    She pushed his tapered mug across to him. “We’re not under the square anymore. Our catacombs extend under the surrounding streets. These chimneys are connected to a house up top.” Alva sipped her beer. Behind the bar, with her glasses perched on her nose and her careful coif beginning to slip, she looked, Nick thought, less and less real and more and more like a creature from a dream. She ought to have cat’s whiskers, or wings.
    “What is the Guild?” She asked it as if she didn’t know, as if she were the most innocent of children.
    “Is that a rhetorical question?” He curved his hand around the tankard. It wasn’t silver, he realized. It was pewter. Nick hoped it was twenty-first century pewter and that the Ofan knew about lead poisoning. He lifted it and drank, and enjoyed how gentle the alloy felt against the teeth, how the beer flowing from it tasted smoother. Another set of sensations he’d forgotten.
    Alva propped her elbows on the bar, made a cradle of her interlaced fingers, and rested her chin in it. “I’m waiting for your answer.”
    “The Guild is an organization,” Nick said. “A corporation. A government.”
    “Yes . . . it’s all of those things. But what else?”
    “Alice Gacoki—she is the Alderwoman in the early twenty-first century—”
    “I know who she is.”
    “She said the Guild is gearing up to be at war with the Ofan. So I suppose the Guild is also an army.”
    “War . . .” Alva sighed and all the magic went out of her face. She looked like what she really was—a woman with cares and frustrations. “She used the word war, did she?”
    “Yes.”
    “Alice can be so blind!”
    “She says the same about you, you know. And the rest of them seemed to agree about the coming war. Penture and Ahn and Arkady and the cheese inspector—”
    “The what?”
    Nick held up a hand. “You don’t want to know.”
    “From the look on your face I’m fairly sure I do want to know!”
    “Her name is Marjory Northway.”
    Alva made a sour-milk expression. “She’s a real . . . well. Let’s just say she isn’t nearly warm enough to be the thing I was about to call her.”
    Nick raised his eyebrows. “Wow. You really don’t like her.”
    “That’s an understatement. I’m surprised you do.”
    “I don’t.”
    “But you slept with her.”
    “Oh, my God.” Nick scraped his bar stool back and stood. “You know that, too?”
    Alva laughed and clapped her hands. “I didn’t! I guessed! And you fell into my trap!”
    “You are all crazy. All of you. Guild, Ofan . . . total nutters.” He drank.
    “Yes, probably. But we are crazy in different ways. Shall we sit?” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, picked up her tankard, came round to his side of the bar, and pulled out a chair at a small table.
    Nick took a seat across from her. The tabletop was quarter-sawn oak, and the tiger stripes of the grain shimmered in the firelight. The warmth from the crackling flames enveloped Nick. He could feel the currents and eddies of time all around him, gentle, inviting. “I like it here,” he said, stretching his legs under the table. “If this is insanity, it feels good.”
    “Yes, and we want it to last. It used to last. Before everything changed.” She propped her elbows on the table and leaned toward him. “Have they told