"If I were told that I had but one hour to live, the first thing I would do would be to kill the man who told me."
—Conrad Bland
"Who are you?" demanded Jericho softly, locking the door behind him.
The girl in white smiled up at him from the bed. "Believe it or not, I'm a friend."
"Not," said Jericho. He crossed the room, closed his window, and turned up the volume on the video.
"Before you kill me," said the girl, obviously unworried, "I should tell you that if you go to Malkuth, as you now plan to do, you'll be killed there."
Jericho stared at her for a long moment. "You've just bought yourself three minutes," he said at last, sitting down on a hard-backed metal chair. "Let's hear what you have to say."
"As I mentioned, going to Malkuth would be a mistake."
"Am I going to Malkuth?"
"Oh yes, Jericho."
"What makes you think my name is Jericho?"
"Actually it isn't," said the girl, smiling again. "It's merely the name you've chosen to use."
"To use for what?"
"For the assassination of Conrad Bland."
"I've never heard of anyone named Conrad Bland," said Jericho. "Why should I wish to kill him?"
"Don't be coy, Jericho. You've already killed Parnell Burnam, Gaston Leroux, and Ibo Ubusuku."
"Who are they?" asked Jericho, his expression never changing.
The girl sighed. "If we can't be honest and straightforward with one another I don't see how I'm going to be able to help you. You killed Leroux and Ubusuku only two hours ago."
Jericho stared at her again for another long minute, then walked across the room and positioned himself in front of the door.
"All right," he said at last. "You haven't told me anything that Sable's department doesn't know or can't find out. I can only assume that you are a member of that department. Perhaps you'd like to tell me why I should let you live?"
"You're a very difficult man to talk to," said the girl, looking mildly amused. "What if I were to tell you that, under a different name, you assassinated Gustav Gagenbach on Sirius V some twelve years ago?"
"I'd say you were guessing," said Jericho. "Or does Sable plan to pin every unsolved murder in the galaxy on me?"
The girl shook her head. "I guess I'll have to be as forthright as I wish you to be." She paused for a moment, then delivered her bombshell. "I know that you killed Benson Rallings on Belore VII."
Jericho almost allowed his surprise to break through his emotionless mask. That had been one of his earliest commissions: Belore VII was an uninhabited mining world, Rallings' body had been completely disposed of, and his employer had died of natural causes before he could report the success of his mission. No one except Jericho knew that a murder had been committed.
"Ah," said the girl, smiling again. "You almost look impressed."
"I am," he said. "How did you find out about that?"
"There are no secrets from the White Lucy."
"You're the White Lucy?"
"Oh, no," said the girl. "I merely serve her. My name is Colas."
"Who or what is she?"
"You'll find out very soon," promised Colas. "She wants to meet you."
"Why should I want to meet her?"
"Because you cannot enter Tifereth without her help," said Colas. "And if you do not enter Tifereth, you cannot kill Conrad Bland."
"Everyone else on this world seems to worship him as some kind of god," said Jericho. "Why do you and this White Lucy want him dead?"
"Because he is the living embodiment of evil," said Colas passionately, "and as such his continued existence is intolerable."
"Do all the white witches on Walpurgis feel that way?" asked Jericho.
"I have no idea," said Colas, shrugging her narrow shoulders. "The White Lucy and her acolytes are a cloistered sect. We have no contact with the white witches. They claim, of course, to work for good rather than for evil, but those are just words. Concepts of good and evil can get very confused on Walpurgis, in case you hadn't noticed."
"Do all the members of your sect have the power to read my mind?" asked Jericho.
"No," said Colas. "However, I don't have to be a mind reader to know what you're thinking, and I must warn you that if you kill me the White Lucy will reveal you to the authorities no matter where you may hide."
"Why hasn't she already done so?" asked Jericho. "It seems to me that if I was this Sable character, the White Lucy would be the first person I'd seek out for information."
"First of all," said Colas, "he doesn't know where to look for her."
"Bad answer," said Jericho. "I'm sure he could find her if he wanted."
"And in the second place, he doesn't know that the White Lucy possesses this power."
"It's a hard thing to keep hidden if she spends her time helping destroy anyone she considers evil," commented Jericho.
"She has never helped anyone before," said Colas. "Good and evil are merely abstract concepts—or at least they were until Conrad Bland came along. We don't care who kills who as long as we are left alone."
"Then why all the fuss about Bland?"
"Because if he remains alive, he will kill every other living thing on Walpurgis," replied Colas. "His philosophy is repugnant to us, to be sure, but no more so than many others that abound on this planet. The difference is that he has the will and the power to put his beliefs into practice."
"I appreciate your concern," said Jericho at last. "But I work alone."
"If you continue to do so, you will also die alone," said Colas with certainty.
"I'll take my chances," said Jericho.
"You will meet with the White Lucy, or you will surely die in Malkuth," said Colas with conviction. "She knew where you were, she knew the combination to your room, she knew what you had done in the past, she knew who you had killed this evening, she knew your plans for approaching Bland, and throughout she has maintained her silence as a show of good faith. She empowered me to reveal some of her power to you, which is also a show of good faith, since only a handful of people know of it."
"I appreciate that," said Jericho.
"Then appreciate this: At any time since your arrival she could have revealed your whereabouts to John Sable, and she did not. She is on your side, Jericho, and she says that you cannot enter Tifereth without her. Is it not in your best interest to meet with her?"
"I'll consider it," he said after some thought.
"Good," said Colas. "About one hundred miles north and west of Amaymon there is a newly constructed bridge across the Styx. Be there tomorrow at sunset and you will be taken to her."
"By you?"
"Probably not," replied Colas. "John Sable has already found the bodies of the two men you killed tonight, and all means of egress from the city have been closed. I may not be able to leave."
"But you expect me to be one hundred miles away by tomorrow afternoon?" asked Jericho with the hint of a smile.
"The White Lucy says that you will not need our help to escape from Amaymon. I would accompany you, but she says that you have things to do that I can't be any part of."
"When did she say that?"
"Just now, as we were speaking," Colas answered calmly.
He stepped aside as she walked to the door and punched out the combination on the lock with swift, sure fingers. The door swung inward, and a moment later she was gone. Jericho considered following her, but decided not to chance discovery while he was still in the guise of the blond man who had been seen at the Church of Satan.
He stood before a mirror, working quickly but carefully, and a few minutes later he had become a balding, slightly paunchy man whose age could have been anywhere from forty to sixty. A change of clothes made him look a little more prosperous, and very flat shoes took about an inch off his height.
He inspected himself carefully, could find no trace of the blond man who would never again be seen, and went out into the cool, dry Amaymon night for the last time, his makeup kit tucked inside his shirt.
The sun would not rise for another two hours, and the streets were almost deserted. This made his task more difficult, but not impossible. He walked, with seeming aimlessness, along the empty avenues of the city until at last he found what he had been looking for.
A pedestrian.
He didn't have time to stalk this one the way he had his first victim. Rather, he turned into an alleyway, raced the length of the block, and positioned himself just out of sight around the corner. When the pedestrian came into view Jericho leaped out, dealt him one swift blow to the neck, and stepped nimbly aside as the body hit the pavement.
He walked almost a mile before he found a second victim, tottering home alone from some tavern. The same procedure brought the same result, and he began walking back toward the center of town.
The next pedestrian he saw was a woman, but he decided to avoid her. He didn't want the police to think this was the work of a sex killer.
He found his third victim almost within the shadow of the Devil's Den, one of the bars he had visited before killing Parnell Burnam. This one he stabbed, leaving Ubusuku's dagger beneath the corpse.
Then he waited for sunrise. When it came, he positioned himself in the lobby of a small office building in the heart of the city. Six uniformed policemen passed in front of the building before he spotted the one he wanted, a slender dark-haired man of approximately his height and weight. He walked out the front door of the building and fell into step behind the policeman, never nearer than fifty feet, never farther than half a block. Within a few minutes the policeman had stopped at a small coffee shop, and Jericho did the same. He sat down next to him, managed to spill a little coffee on his sleeve, and apologized profusely. When the policeman went to the lavatory to clean his hands and dab the sleeve with water, Jericho followed him.
Three minutes later Jericho, dressed as an officer of the Amaymon metropolitan police force, emerged from the washroom, looked around, found a small storage room half filled with canned goods, and a moment later had transferred the naked corpse of the policeman there. His own clothes were dumped into a small disposal unit in the washroom.
He picked up both tabs from the counter, paid for them on his way out, and took a local bus to the end of the line. From there it was only a half-mile walk to the edge of the city, when he found a number of policemen manning an efficient-looking roadblock.
He joined them, turned back a trio of pedestrians in the next half hour, and observed the police as they explained the situation to inbound vehicles before turning them away.
Thereafter he lingered on the far side of the roadblock, and took his turn sending irate drivers on their way. When an intercity bus pulled up just after ten o'clock, it was Jericho who walked out to tell the driver that he could not enter Amaymon. The driver protested, other policemen walked over to press home their point, and finally, amid much muttering and dire warnings about what his company would do to the officials of Amaymon, the driver turned his large, lumbering bus around and went back the way he had come, leaving behind one less uniformed policeman than had been there to meet him.