“Help me,” he said. The mystif didn’t speak. “Are you there, Pie? I’m afraid. Touch me, will you? Pie?”
The mystif didn’t move. Gentle started to reach out in the darkness, remembering as he did so the sight of Taylor lying on a pillow from which they’d both known he’d never rise again, asking for Gentle to hold his hand. With that memory, the panic became sorrow: for Taylor, for Clem, for every soul sealed from its loved ones by senses born to failure, himself included. He wanted what the child wanted: knowledge of another presence, proved in touch. But he knew it was no real solution. He might find the mystif in the darkness, but he could no more hold on to its flesh forever than he could hold the senses he’d already lost. Nerves decayed, and fingers slipped from fingers at the last.
Knowing this little solace was as hopeless as any other, he withdrew his hand and instead said, “I love you.”
Or did he simply think it? Perhaps it was thought, because it was the idea rather than the syllables that formed in front of him, the iridescence he remembered from Pie’s transforming self shimmering in a darkness that was not, he vaguely understood, the darkness of the starless night but his mind’s darkness; and this seeing not the business of eye and object but his exchange with a creature he loved, and who loved him back.
He let his feelings go to Pie, if there was indeed a going, which he doubted. Space, like time, belonged to the other tale—to the tragedy of separation they’d left behind. Stripped of his senses and their necessities, almost unborn again, he knew the mystif’s comfort as it knew his, and that dissolution he’d woken in terror of so many times stood revealed as the beginning of bliss.
A gust of wind, blowing between the rocks, caught the embers at their side, and their glow became a momentary flame. It brightened the face in front of him, and the sight summoned him back from his unborn state. It was no great hardship to return. The place they’d found together was out of time and could not decay, and the face in front of him, for all its frailty (or perhaps because of it), was beautiful to look at. Pie smiled at him but said nothing.
“We should sleep,” Gentle said. “We’ve got a long way to go tomorrow.”
Another gust came along, and there were flecks of snow in it, stinging Gentle’s face. He pulled the hood of his coat up over his head and got up to check on the welfare of the doeki. It had made a shallow bed for itself in the snow and was asleep. By the time he got back to the fire, which had found some combustible morsel and was devouring it brightly, the mystif was also asleep, its hood pulled up around its head. As he stared down at the visible crescent of Pie’s face, a simple thought came: that though the wind was moaning at the rock, ready to bury them, and there was death in the valley behind and a city of atrocities ahead, he was happy. He lay down on the hard ground beside the mystif. His last thought as sleep came was of Taylor, lying on a pillow which was becoming a snowfield as he drew his final breaths, his face growing translucent and finally disappearing, so that when Gentle slipped from consciousness, it was not into darkness but into the whiteness of that deathbed, turned to untroddensnow.
Twenty-three
I
GENTLE DREAMED THAT THE wind grew harsher and brought snow down off the peaks, fresh minted. He nevertheless rose from the relative comfort of his place beside the ashes, and took off his coat and shirt, took off his boots and socks, took off his trousers and underwear, and naked walked down the narrow corridor of rock, past the sleeping doeki, to face the blast. Even in dreams, the wind threatened to freeze his marrow, but he had his sights set on the glacier, and he had to go to it in all humility, bare-loined, bare-backed, to show due respect for those souls who suffered there. They had endured centuries of pain, the crime against them unrevenged. Beside theirs, his suffering was a minor thing.
There was sufficient light in the wide sky to show him his way, but the wastes seemed endless, and the gusts worsened as he went, several times throwing him over into the snow. His muscles cramped and his breath shortened, coming from between his numbed lips in hard, small clouds. He wanted to weep for the pain of it, but the tears crystallized on the ledge of his eye and would not fall.
Twice he stopped, because he sensed that there was something more than snow on the storm’s back. He remembered Pie’s talk of agents left in this wilderness to guard the murder site and, though he was only dreaming and knew it, he was still afraid. If these entities were charged to keep witnesses from the glacier, they would not simply drive the wakeful off but the sleeping too; and those who came as he came, in reverence, would earn their special ire. He studied the spattered air, looking for some sign of them, and once thought he glimpsed a form overhead that would have been invisible but that it displaced the snow: an eel’s body with a tiny ball of a head. But it was come and gone too quickly for him to be certain he’d even seen it.
The glacier was in sight, however, and his will drove his limbs to motion, until he was standing at its edge. He raised his hands to his face and wiped the snow from his cheeks and forehead, then stepped onto the ice. The women gazed up at him as they had when he’d stood here with Pie ‘oh’ pah, but now, through the dust of snow blowing across the ice, they saw him naked, his manhood shrunk, his body trembling; on his face and lips a question he had half an answer to. Why, if this was indeed the work of Hapexamendios, had the Unbeheld, with all His powers of destruction, not obliterated every last sign of His victims? Was it because they were women or, more particularly, women of power? Had He brought them to ruin as best He could—overturning their altars and unseating their temples—but at the last been unable to wipe them away? And if so, was this ice a grave or merely a prison?
He dropped to his knees and laid his palms on the glacier. This time he definitely heard a sound in the wind, a raw howl somewhere overhead. The invisibles had entertained his dreaming presence long enough. They saw his purpose and were circling in preparation for descent. He blew against his palm and made a fist before the breath could slip, then raised his arm and slammed his hand against the ice, opening it as he did so.
The pneuma went off like a thunderclap. Before the tremors had died he snatched a second breath and broke it against the ice; then a third and fourth in quick succession, striking the steely surface so hard that had the pneuma not cushioned the blow he’d have broken every bone from wrist to fingertip. But his efforts had effect. There were hairline cracks spreading from the point of impact.
Encouraged, he began a second round of blows, but he’d delivered only three when he felt something take hold of his hair, wrenching his head back. A second grip instantly seized his raised arm. He had time to feel the ice splintering beneath his legs; then he was hauled up off the glacier by wrist and hair. He struggled against the claim, knowing that if his assaulters carried him too high death was assured; they’d either tear him apart in the clouds or simply drop him. The hold on his head was the less secure of the two, and his gyrations were sufficient to slip it, though blood ran down his brow.
Freed, he looked up at the entities. There were two, six feet long, their bodies scantily fleshed spines sprouting innumerable ribs, their limbs twelvefold and bereft of bone, their heads vestigial. Only their motion had beauty: a sinuous knotting and unknotting. He reached up and snatched at the closer of the two heads. Though it had no discernible features, it looked tender, and his hand had sufficient echo of the pneumas it had discharged to do harm. He dug his fingers into the flesh of the thing, and it instantly began to writhe, coiling its length around its companion for support, its limbs flailing wildly. He twisted his body to the left and right, the motion violent enough to wrench him free. Then he fell, a mere six feet but hard, onto slivered ice. The breath went from him as the pain came. He had time to see the agents descending upon him, but none in which to escape. Waking or sleeping, this was the end of him, he knew; death by these limbs had jurisdiction in both states.
But before they could find his flesh, and blind him, and unman him, he felt the shattered glacier beneath him shud
der, and with a roar it rose, throwing him off its back into the snow. Shards pelted down upon him, but he peered up through their hail to see that the women were emerging from their graves, clothed in ice. He hauled himself to his feet as the tremors increased, the din of this unshackling echoing off the mountains. Then he turned and ran.
The storm was discreet and quickly drew its veil over the resurrection, so that he fled not knowing how the events he’d begun had finished. Certainly the agents of Hapexamendios made no pursuit; or, if they did, they failed to find him. Their absence comforted him only a little. His adventures had done him harm, and the distance he had to cover to get back to the camp was substantial. His run soon deteriorated into stumbling and staggering, blood marking his route. It was time to be done with this dream of endurance, he thought, and open his eyes; to roll over and put his arms around Pie ‘oh’ pah; to kiss the mystif’s cheek and share this vision with it. But his thoughts were too confounded to take hold of wakefulness long enough for him to rouse himself, and he dared not lie down in the snow in case a dreamed death came to him before morning woke him. All he could do was push himself on, weaker by the step, putting out of his head the possibility that he’d lost his way and that thecamp didn’t lie ahead but off in another direction entirely.
He was looking down at his feet when he heard the shout, and his first instinct was to peer up into the snow above him, expecting one of the Unbeheld’s creatures. But before his eyes reached his zenith they found the shape approaching him from his left. He stopped and studied the figure. It was shaggy and hooded, but its arms were outspread in invitation. He didn’t waste what little energy he had calling Pie’s name. He simply changed his direction and headed towards the mystif as it came to meet him. It was the faster of the two, and as it came it shrugged off its coat and held it open, so that he fell into its luxury. He couldn’t feel it; indeed he could feel little, except relief. Borne up by the mystif he let all conscious thought go, the rest of the journey becoming a blur of snow and snow, and Pie’s voice sometimes, at his side, telling him that it would be over soon.
“Am I awake?” He opened his eyes and sat up, grasping hold of Pie’s coat to do so. “Am I awake?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God! Thank God! I thought I was going to freeze to death.”
He let his head sink back. The fire was burning, fed with fur, and he could feel its warmth on his face and body. It took a few seconds to realize the significance of this. Then he sat up again and realized he was naked: naked and covered with cuts.
“I’m not awake,” he said. “Shit! I’m not awake!”
Pie took the pot of herders’ brew from the fire, and poured a cup.
“You didn’t dream it,” the mystif said. It handed the cup over to Gentle. “You went to the glacier, and you almost didn’t make it back.”
Gentle took the cup in raw fingers. “I must have been out of my mind,” he said. “I remember thinking: I’m dreaming this, then taking off my coat and my clothes . . . why the hell did I do that?”
He could still recall struggling through the snow and reaching the glacier. He remembered pain, and splintering ice, but the rest had receded so far he couldn’t grasp it. Pie read his perplexed look.
“Don’t try and remember now,” the mystif said. “It’ll come back when the moment’s right. Push too hard and you’ll break your heart. You should sleep for a while.”
“I don’t fancy sleeping,” he said. “It’s a little too much like dying.”
“I’ll be here,” Pie told him. “Your body needs rest. Let it do what it needs to do.”
The mystif had been warming Gentle’s shirt in front of the fire, and now helped him put it on, a delicate business. Gentle’s joints were already stiffening. He pulled on his trousers without Pie’s help, however, up over limbs that were a mass of bruises and abrasions.
“Whatever I did out there I certainly made a mess of myself,” he remarked.
“You heal quickly,” Pie said. This was true, though Gentle couldn’t remember sharing that information with the mystif. “Lie down. I’ll wake you when it’s light.”
Gentle put his head on the small heap of hides Pie had made as a pillow and let the mystif pull his coat up over him.
“Dream of sleeping,” Pie said, laying a hand on Gentle’s face. “And wake whole.”
II
When Pie shook him awake, what seemed mere minutes later, the sky visible between the rock faces was still dark, but it was the gloom of snow-bearing cloud rather than the purple black of a Jokalaylaurian night. He sat up feeling wretched, aching in every bone.
“I’d kill for coffee,” he said, resisting the urge to torture his joints by stretching. “And warm pain au chocolat.”
“If they don’t have it in Yzordderrex, we’ll invent it,” Pie said.
“Did you brew up?”
“There’s nothing left to burn.”
“And what’s the weather like?”
“Don’t ask.”
“That bad?”
“We should get a move on. The thicker the snow gets, the more difficult it’ll be to find the pass.”
They roused the doeki, which made plain its disgruntlement at having to breakfast on words of encouragement rather than hay, and, with the meat Pie had prepared the day before loaded, left the shelter of the rock and headed out into the snow. There had been a short debate before they left as to whether they should ride or not, Pie insisting that Gentle should do so, given his present delicacy, but he’d argued that they might need the doeki’s strength to carry them both if they got into worse difficulties, and they should preserve such energies as it still possessed for such an emergency. But he soon began to stumble in snow that was waist high in places, his body, though somewhat healed by sleep, not equal to the demands upon it.
“We’ll go more quickly if you ride,” Pie told him.
He needed little persuasion and mounted the doeki, his fatigue such that he could barely sit upright with the wind so strong, and instead slumped against the beast’s neck. He only occasionally raised himself from that posture, and when he did the scene had scarcely changed.
“Shouldn’t we be in the pass by now?” he murmured to Pie at one point, and the look on the mystif’s face was answer enough. They were lost. Gentle pushed himself into an upright position and, squinting against the gale, looked for some sign of shelter, however small. The world was white in every direction but for them, and even they were being steadily erased as ice clogged the fur of their coats and the snow they were trudging through deepened. Until now, however arduous the journey had become, he hadn’t countenanced the possibility of failure. He’d been his own best convert to the gospel of their indestructibility. But now such confidence seemed self-deception. The white world would strip all color from them, to get to the purity of their bones.
He reached to take hold of Pie’s shoulder, but misjudged the distance and slid from the doeki’s back. Relieved of its burden the beast slumped, its front legs buckling. Had Pie not been swift and pulled Gentle out of harm’s way, he might have been crushed beneath the creature’s bulk. Hauling back his hood and swiping the snow from the back of his neck, he got to his feet and found Pie’s exhausted gaze there to meet him.
“I thought I was leading us right,” the mystif said.
“Of course you did.”
“But we’ve missed the pass somehow. The slope’s getting steeper. I don’t know where the fuck we are, Gentle.”
“In trouble is where we are, and too tired to think our way our of it. We have to rest.”
“Where?”
“Here,” Gentle said. “This blizzard can’t go on forever. There’s only so much snow in the sky, and most of it’s already fallen, right? Right? So if we can just hold on till the storm’s over, and we can see where we are—”
“Suppose by that time it’s night again? We’ll freeze, my friend.”
“Do we have any other choice?” Gentle said. “If we go on w
e’ll kill the beast and probably ourselves. We could march right over a gorge and never know it. But if we stay here . . . together . . . maybe we’re in with a chance.”
“I thought I knew our direction.”
“Maybe you did. Maybe the storm’ll blow over, and we’ll find ourselves on the other side of the mountain.” Gentle put his hands on Pie’s shoulders, sliding them around the back of the mystif’s neck. “We have no choice,” he said slowly.
Pie nodded, and together they settled as best they could in the dubious shelter of the doeki’s body. The beast was still breathing, but not, Gentle thought, for long. He tried to put from his mind what would happen if it died and the storm failed to abate, but what was the use of leaving such plans to the last? If death seemed inevitable, would it not be better for him and Pie to meet it together—to slit their wrists and bleed to death side by side—rather than slowly freeze, pretending to the end that survival was plausible? He was ready to voice that suggestion now, while he still had the energy and focus to do so, but as he turned to the mystif some tremor reached him that was not the wind’s tirade but a voice beneath its harangue, calling him to stand up. He did so.
The gusts would have blown him over had Pie not stood up with him, and his eyes would have missed the figures in the drifts but that the mystif caught his arm and, putting its head close to Gentle’s, said, “How the hell did they get out?”
The women stood a hundred yards from them. Their feet were touching the snow but not impressing themselves upon it. Their bodies were wound with cloth brought from the ice, which billowed around them as the wind filled it. Some held treasures, claimed from the glacier: pieces of their temple, and ark, and altar. One, the young girl whose corpse had moved Gentle so much, held in her arms the head of a Goddess carved in blue stone. It had been badly vandalized. There were cracks in its cheeks, and parts of its nose, and an eye, were missing. But it found light from somewhere and gave off a serene radiance.