“Then we should go outside right now,” he said. “Get Pie closer to the Erasure.”
“Any closer than this would take more resilience than either you or I possess, Gentle,” Floccus said. “Now follow me, and be respectful of this place.”
He led Gentle through the beast’s tremulous body to a smaller tent, where a dozen plain low beds were set, some occupied, most not. Gentle laid the mystif down in one and proceeded to unbutton its shirt while Floccus went in search of cool water for its now-burning skin and some sustenance for Gentle and himself. While he waited, Gentle examined the spread of the uredo, which was too extensive to be fully examined without stripping Pie completely, which he was loath to do with so many strangers in the vicinity. The mystif had been covetous of its privacy—it had been many weeks before Gentle had glimpsed its beauty naked—and he wanted to respect that modesty, even in Pie’s present condition. In fact, very few of those who passed by even glanced their way, and after a time he began to feel the fear lose its grip on him. There was very little more that he could do. They were at the edge of the known Dominions, where all maps stopped and the enigma of enigmas began. What use was fear in theface of such imponderables? He had to put it aside and proceed with dignity and containment, trusting to the powers that occupied the air here.
When Floccus returned with the means to wash Pie, Gentle asked if he might be left alone to do so.
“Of course,” Floccus replied. “I’ve got friends here. I’d like to seek them out.”
When he left, Gentle began to bathe the suppurating eruptions of the uredo, which oozed not blood but a silvery pus, the smell of which pricked his sinuses like ammonia. The body it fed upon seemed not only enfeebled but somehow unfocused, as though its contours and musculature were about to become a vapor, and the flesh disperse. Whether this was the uredo’s doing or simply the condition of a mystif when life, and therefore its capacity to shape the sight of those gazing upon it, was fading, Gentle didn’t know, but it made him think back over the way this body had appeared to him. As Judith, of course; as an assassin, armored in nakedness; and as the loving androgyne of their wedding night in the Cradle, that had momentarily taken his face and stared back at him like a prophecy of Sartori. Now, finally, it seemed to be a form of burnished mist, receding from his hand even as he touched it.
“Gentle? Is that you? I didn’t know you could see in the dark.”
Gentle looked up from Pie’s body to find that in the time he’d been washing the mystif, half mesmerized by memory, the evening had fallen. There were lights burning at the bedsides of those nearby, but none near Pie ‘oh’ pah. When he returned his gaze to the body he’d been washing, it was barely discernible in the gloom.
“I didn’t know I could either.”
He stood up to greet the newcomer. It was Athanasius, a lamp in his hand. By its flame, which was as subject to the wind’s whim as the canvas overhead, Gentle saw he’d been wounded in the fall of Yzordderrex. There were several cuts on his face and neck and a larger, livid injury on his belly. For a man who’d celebrated Sundays by making himself a new crown of thorns, these were probably welcome discomforts.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to welcome you earlier,” he said. “But with such numbers of casualties coming in I spend a lot of time administering last rites.”
Gentle didn’t remark on this, but the fear crept back up his spine.
“We’ve had a lot of the Autarch’s soldiers find their way here, and that makes me nervous. I’m afraid we’ll let in someone on a suicide mission, and he’ll blow the place apart. That’s the way the bastard thinks. If he’s destroyed, he’ll want to bring everything down with him.”
“I’m sure he’s much more concerned with making his getaway,” Gentle said.
“Where can he go? The word’s already spread across the Imajica. There’s armed uprising in Patashoqua. There’s hand-to-hand combat on the Lenten Way. Every Dominion’s shaking. Even the First.”
“The First? How?”
“Haven’t you seen? No, obviously you haven’t. Come with me.”
Gentle glanced back towards Pie.
“The mystif’s safe here,” Athanasius said. “We won’t be long.”
He led Gentle through the body of the beast to a door that took them out into the deepening dusk. Though Floccus had counseled against what they were doing, hinting that the Erasure’s proximity could do harm, there was no sign of any consequence. He was either protected by Athanasius or resistant to any malign influence on his own account. Either way, he was able to study the spectacle laid before him without ill effect.
There was no wall of fog, or even deeper twilight, to mark the division between the Second Dominion and the haunt of Hapexamendios. The desert simply faded away into nothingness, like a drawing erased by the power on the other side, first becoming unfocused, then losing its color and its detail. This subtle removal of solid reality, the world wiped away and replaced with nothing, was the most distressing sight Gentle had ever set eyes on. Nor was the similarity between what was happening here and the state of Pie’s body lost on him.
“You said the Erasure was moving,” Gentle whispered.
Athanasius scanned the emptiness, looking for some sign, but nothing caught his eye.
“It’s not constant,” he said. “But every now and then ripples appear in it.”
“Is that rare?”
“There are accounts of this happening in earlier times, but this isn’t an area that encourages accurate study. Observers get poetic here. Scientists turn to sonnets. Sometimes literally.” He laughed. “That was a joke, by the way. Just in case you start worrying about your legs rhyming.”
“How does looking at this make you feel?” Gentle asked him.
“Afraid,” Athanasius said. “Because I’m not ready to be there.”
“Nor am I,” Gentle said. “But I’m afraid Pie is. I wish I’d never come, Athanasius. Maybe I should take Pie away now, while I still can.”
“That’s your decision,” Athanasius replied. “But I don’t believe the mystif will survive if you move it. A uredo’s a terrible poison, Gentle. If there’s any chance of Pie being healed, it’s here, close to the First.”
Gentle looked back towards the distressing absence of the Erasure.
“Is going to nothing being healed?” he said. “It seems more like death to me.”
“They may be closer than we think, death and healing,” Athanasius said.
“I don’t want to hear that,” Gentle said. “Are you staying out here?”
“For a while,” Athanasius replied. “If you do decide to go, come and find me first, will you, so that we can say goodbye?”
“Of course.”
He left Athanasius to his void-watching and went back inside, thinking as he did so that this would be a fine time to find a bar and order up a stiff drink. As he started back in the direction of Pie’s bed, he was brought to a halt by a voice too abrasive for this hallowed place, and sufficiently slurred to suggest the speaker had found a bar himself and drunk it dry.
“Gentle, you old bugger!”
Estabrook stepped into view, grinning expansively, though several of his teeth were missing.
“I heard you were here and I didn’t believe it.” He seized Gentle’s hand and shook it. “But here you are, large as life. Who’d have thought it, eh? The two of us, here.”
Life in the encampment had wrought its changes on Charlie. He could scarcely have been further from the grief-wasted plotter Gentle had met on Kite Hill. Indeed, he could almost have passed for a clown, with his motley of pinstripe trousers, tattered braces, and unbuttoned tunic dyed half a dozen colors, all crowned with bald head and gap-toothed smile.
“It’s so good to see you!” he kept saying, his pleasure unalloyed. “We must talk. This is the perfect time. They’re all going outside to meditate on their ignorance, which is fine for a few minutes, but God! it gets drab. Come with me, come on! They’ve given me a little nook
of my own, to keep me out of the way.”
“Maybe later,” Gentle said. “I’ve got a friend here who’s sick.”
“I heard somebody talking about that. A mystif? Is that the word?”
“That’s the word.”
“They’re extraordinary, I heard. Very sexy. Why don’t I come and see the patient with you?”
Gentle had no wish to keep Estabrook’s company for longer than he needed to, but suspected that the man would beat a hasty retreat as soon as he set eyes on Pie and realized the creature he’d come to gawk at was the same he’d hired to assassinate his wife. They went back to Pie’s bedside together. Floccus was there, with a lamp and an ample supply of food. Mouth crammed, he rose to be introduced, but Estabrook barely noticed him. His gaze was on Pie, whose head was turned away from the brightness of the lamp in the direction of the First Dominion.
“You lucky bugger,” he said to Gentle. “She’s beautiful.”
Floccus glanced at Gentle to see if he intended to remark on Estabrook’s error in sexing the patient, but Gentle made a tiny shake of his head. He was surprised that Pie’s power to respond to the gaze of others was still intact, especially as his eyes saw an altogether more distressing sight: the substance of his beloved growing more insubstantial as the hours passed. Was this a sight and understanding reserved for Maestros? He knelt beside the bed and studied the fading features on the pillow. Pie’s eyes were roving beneath the lids.
“Dreaming of me?” Gentle murmured.
“Is she getting better?” Estabrook inquired.
“I don’t know,” Gentle said. “This is supposed to be a healing place, but I’m not so sure.”
“I really think we should talk,” Estabrook said, with the strained nonchalance of a man who had something vital to impart, but was not able to do so in present company. “Why don’t you pop along with me and have a quick drink? I’m sure Floccus will come and find you if anything untoward happens.”
Floccus chewed on, nodding in accord with this, and Gentle agreed to go, hoping Estabrook had some insight into conditions here that would help him to decide whether to go or stay.
“I’ll be five minutes,” he promised Floccus, and let Estabrook lead him off through the lamp-lit passages to what he’d earlier called his nook.
It was off the beaten track somewhat, a little canvas room he’d made his own with what few possessions he’d brought from Earth. A shirt, its bloodstains now brown, hung above the bed like the tattered standard from some noteworthy battle. On the table beside the bed his wallet, his comb, a box of matches, and a roll of mints had been arranged, along several symmetrical columns of change, into an altar to the spirit of the pocket.
“It’s not much,” Estabrook said, “but it’s home.”
“Are you a prisoner here?” Gentle said as he sat in the plain chair at the bottom of the bed.
“Not at all,” Estabrook said.
He brought a small bottle of liquor out from under the pillow. Gentle recognized it from the hours he and Huzzah had lingered in the café in the Oke T’Noon. It was the fermented sap of a swamp flower from the Third Dominion: kloupo. Estabrook took a swig from the bottle, reminding Gentle of how he’d supped brandy from a flask on Kite Hill. He’d refused the man’s liquor that day, but not now.
“I could go anytime I wanted to,” he went on. “But I think to myself, Where would you go, Charlie? And where would I go?”
“Back to the Fifth?”
“In God’s name, why?”
“Don’t you miss it, even a little?”
“A little, maybe. Once in a while I get maudlin, I suppose, and then I get drunk—drunker—and I have dreams.”
“Of what?”
“Mostly childhood things, you know. Odd little details that wouldn’t mean a damn thing to anyone else.” He reclaimed the bottle and drank again. “But you can’t have the past back, so what’s the use of breaking your heart? When things are gone, they’re gone.”
Gentle made a noncommittal noise.
“You don’t agree.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Name one thing that stays.”
“I don’t—”
“No, go on. Name one thing.”
“Love.”
“Ha! Well, that certainly brings us full circle, doesn’t it? Love! You know, I’d have agreed with you half a year ago. I can’t deny that. I couldn’t conceive of ever being out of love with Judith. But I am. When I think back to the way I felt about her, it seems ludicrous. Now, of course, it’s Oscar’s turn to be obsessed by her. First you, then me, then Oscar. But he won’t survive long.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He’s got his fingers in too many pies. It’ll end in tears, you see if it doesn’t. You know about the Tabula Rasa, I suppose?”
“No.”
“Why should you?” Estabrook replied. “You were dragged into this, weren’t you? I feel guilty about that, I really do. Not that my feeling guilty’s going to do either of us much good, but I want you to know I never understood the ramifications of what I was doing. If I had, I swear I’d have left Judith alone.”
“I don’t think either of us would have been capable of that,” Gentle remarked.
“Leaving her alone? No, I don’t suppose we would. Our paths were already beaten for us, eh? I’m not saying I’m a total innocent, mind you. I’m not. I’ve done some pretty wretched things in my time, things I squirm to think about. But compared with the Tabula Rasa, or a mad bastard like Sartori, I’m not so bad. And when I look out every morning, into God’s Nowhere—”
“Is that what they call it?”
“Oh, hell, no; they’re much more reverential. That’s my little nickname. But when I look out at it, I think, Well, it’s going to take us all one of these days, whoever we are: mad bastards, lovers, drunkards, it’s not going to pick and choose. We’ll all go to nothing sooner or later. And you know, maybe it’s my age, but that doesn’t worry me any longer. We all have our time, and when it’s over, it’s over.”
“There must be something on the other side, Charlie,” Gentle said.
Estabrook shook his head. “That’s all guff,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of people get up and walk into the Erasure, praying and carrying on. They take a few steps and they’re gone. It’s like they’d never lived.”
“But people are healed here. You were.”
“Oscar certainly made a mess of me, and I didn’t die. But I don’t know whether being here had much to do with that. Think about it. If God really was on the other side of that wall, and He was so damn eager to heal the sick, don’t you think He’d reach out a little further and stop what’s going on in Yzordderrex? Why would He put up with horrors like that, right under His nose? No, Gentle. I call it God’s Nowhere, but that’s only half-right. God isn’t there. Maybe He was once. . . .”
He trailed away and filled the silence with another throatful of kloupo.
“Thank you for this,” Gentle said.
“What is there to thank me for?”
“You’ve helped me to make up my mind about something.”
“My pleasure,” Estabrook said. “It’s damn difficult to think straight, isn’t it, with this bloody wind blowing all the time? Can you find your way back to that lovely lady of yours, or shall I go with you?”
“I’ll find my way,” Gentle replied.
II
He rapidly regretted declining Estabrook’s offer, discovering after turning a few corners that one lamp-lit passageway looked much like the next, and that not only could he not retrace his steps to Pie’s bedside, he couldn’t be certain of finding his way back to Estabrook either.
One route he tried brought him into a kind of chapel, where several Dearthers were kneeling facing a window that gave onto God’s Nowhere. The Erasure presented in what was now total darkness the same blank face it had by dusk, lighter than the night but shedding none upon it, its nullity more disturbing than the atrocities of Beatrix
or the sealed rooms of the palace.
Turning his back on both window and worshipers, Gentle continued his search for Pie, and accident finally brought him back into what he thought was the room where the mystif lay. The bed was empty, however. Disoriented, he was about to go and quiz one of the other patients to confirm that he had the right room when he caught sight of Floccus’ meal, or what was left of it, on the floor beside the bed: a few crusts, half a dozen well-picked bones. There could be no doubt that this was indeed Pie’s bed. But where was the occupant? He turned to look at the others. They were all either asleep or comatose, but he was determined to have the truth of this, and was crossing to the nearest bed, when he heard Floccus running in pursuit, calling after him.
“There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Pie’s bed is empty, Floccus.”
“I know, I know. I went to empty my bladder—I was away two minutes, no more—and when I got back it had gone. The mystif, not my bladder. I thought maybe you’d come and taken it away.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Don’t get angry. There’s no harm going to come to it here. Trust me.”
After his discussion with Estabrook, Gentle was by no means certain this was true, but he wasn’t going to waste time arguing with Floccus while Pie was wandering unattended.
“Where have you looked?” he asked.
“All around.”
“Can’t you be a little more precise?”
“I got lost,” Floccus said, becoming exasperated. “All the tents look alike.”
“Did you go outside?”
“No, why?” Floccus’ agitation sank from sight. What surfaced instead was deep dismay. “You don’t think it’s gone to the Erasure?”
“We won’t know till we look,” Gentle said. “Which way did Athanasius take me? There was a door—”
“Wait! Wait!” Floccus said, snatching hold of Gentle’s jacket. “You can’t just step out there.”
“Why not? I’m a Maestro, aren’t I?”