After The Cup and The Cup, Part II, and The Cup Part III, and The Cup, Part IV, and The Cup, Part V, The Cup, Part VI, and
The Cup, Part VII, and The Cup, Part VII, in that Order

Cynara was… walking straight up a vertical road.

Pellinore stared at his former Keeper for a moment. This was impossible.

Part of his brain kicked the rest of it. He was looking at a woman who could bend minds and bodies, in a world where gods had destroyed almost everything. Impossible had really lost a great deal of meaning somewhere along the way, and all mere mortals could do was hold on for improbable.

“This is improbable.” JohnWayne had grabbed his hand, though, and he was being dragged onto the strange road along with the two of them.

“So’re you.” His son spared him an exasperated glance. “You complain a lot.”

“It’s my lot in life.” Stepping onto the road felt like getting off a carnival ride; his sinuses tried to fall out of his body for a moment, and then the new gravity of the road asserted itself.

It wasn’t a long walk, as such things went, and it was fine until you looked down. Pellinore caught Cya doing it first, twisting to look and then freezing, her face turning ashen, until she could force her feet to move again. Then JohnWayne. Pellinore held off as long as he could, but when he did, the world was a long, long way down.

“Can we survive that? If we fell?” JohnWayne’s voice was rather small.

“Yes.” Cya’s was clipped, and pitched to carry without her having to turn around again. Pellinore just nodded, though neither of them could see him. “But in that ‘that’s going to suck for a couple centuries’ sort of way. Less chit-chat now. We’re almost there.”

“There,” it appeared, was a cottage a mile above the ground, where the road bent back to “flat” to serve as a driveway.

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