Dinner at Deviant's Palace by Tim Powers

there.”
    “Sit by me,” the old man added. “Nigel will sit in the roof behind.”
    “I’d be cautious too,” acknowledged Rivas as he settled himself on the bench Nigel had just vacated. The last of the fog had drifted away down the bay and he savored the smell of eucalyptus on the warming air as the old man flicked the reins and the wagon lurched into motion.
    “If you need to re-stock,” the old man said, “you could sail north to Venice with us too—can always use an extra pair of hands on a boat, and I think this old barge needs some patching up this time. I think the shepherds messed up the keel hinge, and half the line’s shot.”
    “Sure, sounds good,” said Rivas, though reflecting inwardly that no power on earth could ever get him to enter Venice from its seaward side, where the most altered of the city’s denizens limped, hopped and swam about on unimaginable errands in the canals of poisonous Inglewood… on the narrow, ever-shifting beaches whose mulitcolored sand was sown with lumps of fused glass and occasional ancient but undecaying bone fragments… and even in the very shadow of the structure known as Deviant’s Palace.
    Though in his years in Venice Rivas had prided himself on being a particularly wild, nothing-to-lose young man, boating by moonlight down canals sane people shunned even at noon and participating in several foolish duels, he had taken care never to venture within blocks of Deviant’s Palace. But the stories he’d heard about the place still colored his nightmares: stories of fantastic towers and spires that threw dark stains on the sky, so that even at noon stars could be seen twinkling around the warped rib-cage architecture of its upper levels; of nonhuman forms glimpsed weeping in its remoter windows; of what creatures were sometimes found dying in the canals that entered the place through high arches, and what things these creatures some times said; of wooden gargoyles writhing in splintery agony on rainy nights and crying out in voices recognized by passersby as those of departed friends…. The place was supposed to be more a nightclub than anything else, and Rivas remembered one young lady who, after he’d impatiently broken off their romance even more quickly than he’d instigated it, had tearfully told him that she was going to get a waitress job at Deviant’s Palace. He had never permitted himself to believe that she might really have done it, in spite of the evening when a walruslike thing that a gang of fishermen had netted and dragged to shore and were butchering by torchlight rolled its eyes at him and with its expiring breath pronounced the pet name she’d always called him….
    The boat-wagon rattled on southward along the old streets, putting on a little more speed as the sun came up and let the old man see where the potholes and washouts were. For the first half hour of the ride Rivas didn’t ask about the girls his companions had rustled, for he didn’t want to seem too interested in their business; but the thought that Uri might be in the wagon right below him made him unable to consider anything else, and finally forced him to speak. “How many have you got?” he asked with feigned casualness, jerking his wounded thumb downwards.
    “Four,” the old man said. “Or maybe it’s three now. Nigel overthumps them sometimes.”
    “Vermin,” commented Nigel from behind.
    “Nigel doesn’t care for ladies.”
    “’Specially birdy ones,” Nigel explained.
    “I see,” said Rivas, nodding.
    Jesus, he thought, what a pair. If I can think of a way to work them ill before I ditch them, I’ll do it. And if Uri’s in this wagon, I’ll kill them. And if Uri’s in here and dead, I’ll…
    He turned away as if to look at the inland countryside, for he feared that his amiable smile was turning into some less reassuring expression. Several tumbleweeds were rolling across a field parallel to the wagon like skeletons of some spherical species; and as