s on
the dials; Beau's co-pilot besides piano player. Beau's face had that
dead blank look it must have had when every double eagle he owned and
more he didn't were riding on the next card to be turned in the gambling
saloon on one of those wedding-cake Mississippi steamboats.

Doc was soused as usual, sitting at the bar with his top hat pushed back
and his knitted shawl pulled around him, his wide eyes seeing whatever
horrors a life in Nazi-occupied Czarist Russia can add to being a drunk
Demon in the Change World.

Maud, who is the Old Girl, and Lili--the New Girl, of course--were
telling the big beads of their identical pearl necklaces.

You might say that all us Entertainers were a bit edgy; being Demons
doesn't automatically make us brave.

Then the red telltale on the Major Maintainer went out and the Door
began to darken in the Void facing Sid and Beau, and I felt Change Winds
blowing hard and my heart missed a couple of beats, and the next thing
three Soldiers had stepped out of the cosmos and into the Place, their
first three steps hitting the floor hard as they changed times and
weights.

* * * * *

They were dressed as officers of hussars, as we'd been advised,
and--praise the Bonny Dew!--I saw that the first of them was Erich, my
own dear little commandant, the pride of the von Hohenwalds and the
Terror of the Snakes. Behind him was some hard-faced Roman or other, and
beside Erich and shouldering into him as they stamped forward was a new
boy, blond, with a face like a Greek god who's just been touring a
Christian hell.

They were uniformed exactly alike in black--shakos, fur-edged pelisses,
boots, and so forth--with white skull emblems on the shakos. The only
difference between them was that Erich had a Caller on his wrist and the
New Boy had a black-gauntleted glove on his left hand and was clenching
the mate in it, his right hand being bare like both of Erich's and the
Roman's.

"You've made it, lads, hearts of gold," Sid boomed at them, and Beau
twitched a smile and murmured something courtly and Maud began to chant,
"Shut the Door!" and the New Girl copied her and I joined in because the
Change Winds do blow like crazy when the Door is open, even though it
can't ever be shut tight enough to keep them from leaking through.

"Shut it before it blows wrinkles in our faces," Maud called in her
gamin voice to break the ice, looking like a skinny teen-ager in the
tig