“Oh, yes. . . .”
“Is that why he was so riled when I wouldn’t sit down and talk with him?”
“I’d say so.”
“Shit!”
“Hammeryock and Farrow must have taken us for spies, come to wheedle out plots laid against the Autarch.”
“But Tick Raw saw the truth.”
“He did. He was once a great man, Gentle. At least . . . that was the rumor. Now I suppose he’s dead or being tortured. Which is grim news for us.”
“You think he’ll name us?”
“Who knows? Maestros have ways of protecting themselves from torture, but even the strongest man can break under the right kind of pressure.”
“Are you saying we’ve got the Autarch on our tails?”
“I think we’d know it if we had. We’ve come a long way from Vanaeph. The trail’s probably cold by now.”
“And maybe they didn’t arrest Tick, eh? Maybe he escaped.”
“They still caught Hammeryock and the Pontiff. I think we can assume they’ve got a hair-by-hair description of us.”
Gentle laid his head back against the seat. “Shit,” he said. “We’re not making many friends, are we?”
“All the more reason that we don’t lose each other,” the mystif replied. The shadows of passing bamboo flickered on its face, but it looked at him unblinking. “Whatever harm you believe I may have done you, now or in the past, I apologize for it. I’d never wish you any hurt, Gentle. Please believe that. Not the slightest.”
“I know,” Gentle murmured, “and I’m sorry too, truly.”
“Shall we agree to postpone our argument until the only opponents we’ve got left in the Imajica are each other?”
“That may be a very long time.”
“All the better.”
Gentle laughed. “Agreed,” he said, leaning forward and taking the mystif’s hand. “We’ve seen some amazing sights together, haven’t we?”
“Indeed we have.”
“Back there in Mai-ké I was losing my sense of how marvelous all this is.”
“We’ve got a lot more wonders to see.”
“Just promise me one thing?”
“Ask it.”
“Don’t eat raw fish in eyeshot of me again. It’s more than a man can take.”
II
From the yearning way that Hairstone Banty had described L’Himby, Gentle had been expecting some kind of Khatmandu—a city of temples, pilgrims, and free dope. Perhaps it had been that way once, in Banty’s long-lost youth. But when, a few minutes after night had fallen, Gentle and Pie stepped off the train, it was not into an atmosphere of spiritual calm. There were soldiers at the station gates, most of them standing idle, smoking and talking, but a few casting their eyes over the disembarking passengers. As luck had it, however, another train had arrived at an adjacent platform minutes before, and the gateway was choked with passengers, many hugging their life’s belongings. It wasn’t difficult for Pie and Gentle to dig their way through to the densest part of the crowd and pass unnoticed through the turnstiles and out of the station.
There were many more troops in the wide lamplit streets, their presence no less disturbing for the air of lassitude that hung about them. The uncommissioned ranks wore a drab gray, but the officers wore white, which suited the subtropical night. All were conspicuously armed. Gentle made certain not to study either men or weaponry too closely for fear of attracting unwelcome attention, but it was clear from even a furtive glance that both the armaments and the vehicles parked in every other alleyway were of the same elaborately intimidating design as he’d seen in Beatrix. The warlords of Yzordderrex were clearly past masters in the crafts of death, their technology several generations beyond that of the locomotive that had brought the travelers here.
To Gentle’s eye the most fascinating sight was not the tanks or the machine guns, however, it was the presence among these troops of a subspecies he’d not encountered hitherto. Oethacs, Pie called them. They stood no taller than their fellows, but their heads made up a third or more of that height, their squat bodies grotesquely broad to bear the weight of such a massive load of bone. Easy targets, Gentle remarked, but Pie whispered that their brains were small, their skulls thick, and their tolerance for pain heroic, the latter evidenced by the extraordinary array of livid scars and disfigurements they all bore on skin that was as white as the bone it concealed.
It seemed this substantial military presence had been in place for some time, because the populace went about their evening business as if these men and their killing machines were completely commonplace. There was little sign of fraternization, but there was no harassment either.
“Where do we go from here?” Gentle asked Pie once they were clear of the crowds around the station.
“Scopique lives in the northeast part of the city, close to the temples. He’s a doctor. Very well respected.”
“You think he may be still practicing?”
“He doesn’t mend bones, Gentle. He’s a doctor of theology. He used to like the city because it was so sleepy.”
“It’s changed, then.”
“It certainly has. It looks as though it’s got rich.”
There was evidence of L’Himby’s newfound wealth everywhere: in the gleaming buildings, many of them looking as though the paint on their doors was barely dry; in the proliferation of styles among the pedestrians and in the number of elegant automobiles on the street. There were a few signs still remaining of the culture that had existed here before the city’s fortunes had boomed: beasts of burden still wove among the traffic, honked at and cursed; a smattering of façades had been preserved from older buildings and incorporated—usually crudely—into the designs of the newer. And then there were the living façades, the faces of the people Gentle and Pie were mingling with. The natives had a physical peculiarity unique to the region: clusters of small crystalline growths, yellow and purple, on their heads, sometimes arranged like crowns or coxcombs but just as often erupting from the middle of the forehead or irregularly placed around the mouth. To Pie’s knowledge,they had no particular function, but they were clearly viewed as a disfigurement by the sophisticates, many of whom went to extraordinary lengths to disguise their commonality of stock with the undecorated peasants. Some of these stylists wore hats, veils, and makeup to conceal the evidence; others had tried surgery to remove the growths and went proudly about unhatted, wearing their scars as proof of their wealth.
“It’s grotesque,” Pie said when Gentle remarked upon this. “But that’s the pernicious influence of fashion for you. These people want to look like the models they see in the magazines from Patashoqua, and the stylists in Patashoqua have always looked to the Fifth for their inspiration. Damn fools! Look at them! I swear if we were to spread the rumor that everyone in Paris is cutting off their right arms these days, we’d be tripping over hacked-off limbs all the way to Scopique’s house.”
“It wasn’t like this when you were here?”
“Not in L’Himby. As I said, it was a place of meditation. But in Patashoqua, yes, always, because it’s so close to the Fifth, so the influence is very strong. And there’s always been a few minor Maestros, you know, traveling back and forth, bringing styles, bringing ideas. A few of them made a kind of business of it, crossing the In Ovo every few months to get news of the Fifth and selling it to the fashion houses, the architects, and so on. So damn decadent. It revolts me.”
“But you did the same thing, didn’t you? You became part of the Fifth Dominion.”
“Never here,” the mystif said, its fist to its chest. “Never in my heart. My mistake was getting lost in the In Ovo and letting myself be summoned to earth. When I was there I played the human game, but only as much as I had to.”
Despite their baggy and by now well-crumpled clothes, both Pie and Gentle were bare-headed and smooth-skulled, so they attracted a good deal of attention from envious poseurs parading on the pavement. It was far from welcome, of course. If Pie?
??s theory was correct and Hammeryock or Pontiff Farrow had described them to the Autarch’s torturers, their likenesses might very well have appeared in the broadsheets of L’Himby. If so, an envious dandy might have them removed from the competition with a few words in a soldier’s ear. Would it not be wiser, Gentle suggested, if they hailed a taxi, and traveled a little more discreetly? The mystif was reluctant to do so, explaining that it could not remember Scopique’s address, and their only hope of finding it was to go on foot, while Pie followed its nose. They made a point of avoiding the busier parts of the street, however, where café customers were outside enjoying the evening air or, less frequently, where soldiers gathered. Thoughthey continued to attract interest and admiration, nobody challenged them, and after twenty minutes they turned off the main thoroughfare, the well-tended buildings giving way within a couple of blocks to grimier structures, the fops to grimmer souls.
“This feels safer,” Gentle said, a paradoxical remark given that the streets they were wandering through now were the kind they would have instinctively avoided in any city of the Fifth: ill-lit backwaters, where many of the houses had fallen into severe disrepair. Lamps burned in even the most dilapidated, however, and children played in the gloomy streets despite the lateness of the hour. Their games were those of earth, give or take a detail—not filched, but invented by young minds from the same basic materials: a ball and a bat, some chalk and a pavement, a rope and a rhyme. Gentle found it reassuring to walk among them and hear their laughter, which was indistinguishable from that of human children.
Eventually the tenanted houses gave way to total dereliction, and it was clear from the mystif’s disgruntlement that it was no longer sure of its whereabouts. Then, a little noise of pleasure, as it caught sight of a distant structure.
“That’s the temple.” Pie pointed to a monolith some miles from where they stood. It was unlit and seemed forsaken, the ground in its vicinity leveled. “Scopique had that view from his toilet window, I remember. On fine days he said he used to throw open the window and contemplate and defecate simultaneously.”
Smiling at the memory, the mystif turned its back on the sight.
“The bathroom faced the temple, and there were no more streets between the house and the temple. It was common land, for the pilgrims to pitch their tents.”
“So we’re walking in the right direction,” Gentle said. “We just need the last street on our right.”
“That seems logical,” Pie said. “I was beginning to doubt my memory.”
They didn’t have much farther to look. Two more blocks, and the rubble-strewn streets came to an abrupt end.
“This is it.”
There was no triumph in Pie’s voice, which was not surprising, given the scene of devastation before them. While it was time that had undone the splendor of the streets they’d passed through, this last had been prey to more systematic assault. Fires had been set in several of the houses. Others looked as though they’d been used for target practice by a Panzer division.
“Somebody got here before us,” Gentle said.
“So it seems,” Pie replied. “I must say I’m not altogether surprised.”
“So why the hell did you bring us here?”
“I had to see for myself,” Pie said. “Don’t worry, the trail doesn’t end here. He’ll have left a message.”
Gentle didn’t remark on how unlikely he thought this, but followed the mystif along the street until it stopped in front of a building that, while not reduced to a heap of blackened stones, looked ready to succumb. Fire had eaten out its eyes, and the once-fine door had been replaced with partially rotted timbers; all this illuminated not by lamplight (the street had none) but by a scattering of stars.
“Better you stay out here,” Pie ‘oh’ pah said. “Scopique may have left defenses.”
“Like what?”
“The Unbeheld isn’t the only one who can conjure guardians,” Pie replied. “Please, Gentle . . . I’d prefer to do this alone.”
Gentle shrugged. “Do as you wish,” he said. Then, as an afterthought, “You usually do.”
He watched Pie climb the debris-covered steps, pull several of the timbers off the door, and slip out of sight. Rather than wait at the threshold, Gentle wandered farther along the row to get another view of the temple, musing as he went that this Dominion, like the Fourth, had confounded not only his expectations but those of Pie as well. The safe haven of Vanaeph had almost seen their execution, while the murderous wastes of the mountains had offered resurrections. And now L’Himby, a sometime city of meditation, reduced to gaud and rubble. What next? He wondered. Would they arrive in Yzordderrex only to find it had spurned its reputation as the Babylon of the Dominions and become a New Jerusalem?
He stared across at the shadowy temple, his mind straying back to a subject that had occupied him several times on their journey through the Third: how best to address the challenge of making a map of the Dominions, so that when they finally returned to the Fifth Dominion he could give his friends some sense of how the lands lay. They’d traveled on all kinds of roads, from the Patashoquan Highway to the dirt tracks between Happi and Mai-ké; they’d wound through verdant valleys and scaled heights where even the hardiest moss would perish; they’d had the luxury of chariots and the loyalty of doeki; they’d sweated and frozen and gone dreamily, like poets into some place of fancy, doubting their senses and themselves. All this needed setting down: the routes, the cities, the ranges, and the plains all needed laying in two dimensions, to be pored over at leisure. In time, he thought, putting the challenge off yet again; in time.
He looked back towards Scopique’s house. There was no sign of Pie emerging, and he began to wonder if some harm had befallen the mystif inside. He walked back to the steps, climbed them, and—feeling a little guilty—slid through the gap between the timbers. The starlight had more difficulty getting in than he did, and his blindness put a chill in him, bringing to mind the measureless darkness of the ice cathedral. On that occasion the mystif had been behind him; this time, in front. He waited a few seconds at the door, until his eyes began to make out the interior. It was a narrow house, full of narrow places, but there was a voice in its depths, barely above a whisper, which he pursued, stumbling through the murk. After only a few paces he realized it was not Pie speaking but someone hoarse and panicked. Scopique, perhaps, still taking refuge in the ruins?
A glimmer of light, no brighter than the dimmest star, led him to a door through which he had sight of the speaker. Pie was standing in the middle of the blackened room, turned from Gentle. Over the mystif’s shoulder Gentle saw the light’s fading source: a shape hanging in the air, like a web woven by a spider that aspired to portraiture, and held aloft by the merest breeze. Its motion was not arbitrary, however. The gossamer face opened its mouth and whispered its wisdom.
“—no better proof than in these cataclysms. We must hold to that, my friend, hold to it and pray . . . no, better not pray . . . I doubt every God now, especially the Aboriginal. If the children are any measure of the Father, then He’s no lover of justice or goodness.”
“Children?” said Gentle.
The breath the word came upon seemed to flutter in the threads. The face grew long, the mouth tearing.
The mystif glanced behind and shook its head to silence the trespasser. Scopique—for this was surely his message—was talking again.
“Believe me when I say we know only the tenth part of a tenth part of the plots laid in this. Long before the Reconciliation, forces were at work to undo it; that’s my firm belief. And it’s reasonable to assume that those forces have not perished. They’re working in this Dominion, and the Dominion from which you’ve come. They strategize not in terms of decades, but centuries, just as we’ve had to. And they’ve buried their agents deeply. Trust nobody, Pie ‘oh’ pah, not even yourself. Their plots go back before we were born. We could either one of us have been conceived to serve them in some oblique fashion and not know it. They
’re coming for me very soon, probably with voiders. If I’m dead you’ll know it. If I can convince them I’m just a harmless lunatic, they’ll take me off to the Cradle, put me in the maison de santé. Find me there, Pie ‘oh’ pah. Or if you have more pressing business, then forget me; I won’tblame you. But, friend, whether you come for me or not, know that when I think of you I still smile, and in these days that is the rarest comfort.”
Even before he’d finished speaking the gossamer was losing its power to capture his likeness, the features softening, the form sinking in upon itself, until, by the time the last of his message had been uttered, there was little left for it to do but flutter to the ground.
The mystif went down on its haunches and ran its fingers through the inert threads. “Scopique,” it murmured.
“What’s the cradle he talked about?”
“The Cradle of Chzercemit. It’s an inland sea, two or three days’ journey from here.”
“You’ve been there?”
“No. It’s a place of exile. There’s an island in the Cradle which was used as a prison. Mostly for criminals who’d committed atrocities but were too dangerous to execute.”
“I don’t follow that.”
“Ask me another time. The point is, it sounds like it’s been turned into an asylum.” Pie stood up. “Poor Scopique. He always had a terror of insanity—”
“I know the feeling,” Gentle remarked.
“—and now they’ve put him in a madhouse.”
“So we must get him out,” Gentle said very simply.
He couldn’t see Pie’s expression, but he saw the mystif’s hands go up to its face and heard a sob from behind its palms.
“Hey,” Gentle said softly, embracing Pie. “We’ll find him. I know I shouldn’t have come spying like that, but I thought maybe something had happened to you.”
“At least you’ve heard him for yourself. You know it’s not a lie.”
“Why would I think that?”
“Because you don’t trust me,” Pie said.
“I thought we’d agreed,” Gentle said. “We’ve got each other and that’s our best hope of staying alive and sane. Didn’t we agree to that?”