Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

10

Though Jude's memory of the night before was vivid, she had no recollection of either herself or Gentle taking the telephone off the hook, and it wasn't until nine-thirty the following morning, when she decided to call Clem, that she realized that one of them had done so. She replaced the receiver, only to have the telephone ring seconds later. At the other end of the line was a voice she'd almost given up expecting to hear again: Oscar. At first she thought he was breathless, but after a few stumbling sentences she realized his pantings were barely suppressed sobs.

"Where have you been, my darling? I've rung and rung since I got your note. I thought you were dead."

"The phone was off the hook, that's all. Where are you?"

"At the house. Will you come? Please. I need you here!" He spoke with escalating panic, as though she were punctuating his appeals with refusals. "We don't have much time."

"Of course I'll come," she told him.

"Now," he insisted. "You've got to come now."

She told him she'd be on his doorstep within the hour, and he replied that she'd find him waiting. Putting off her call to Clem and putting on a little makeup, she headed out. Though it wasn't yet midmorning the sun was blazing hot, and as she drove she remembered the monologue that she and Gentle had been treated to on their ride back from the estate. Monsoons and heat waves all through the summer, the doomsayer had predicted; and how he'd relished his prophecies! She'd thought his enthusiasm grotesque at the time, a petty mind indulging in apocalyptic fantasies. But now, after the extraordinary night she'd had with Gentle, she found herself wondering how these bright streets might be made to experience the miracles of the previous midnight: sluiced of vehicles by an almighty rain, then softened in the blaze of sun, so that solid matter flowed like warm treacle and a city divided into public places and private, into wealthy ghettoes and gutters, became a continuum. Was this what Gentle had meant when he'd talked about her sharing his vision? If so, she was ready for more.

Regent's Park Road was quieter than usual. There were no kids playing on the pavement and, though she'd had a hellish time carving her way through the traffic just two streets away, no vehicles parked within half a mile of the house. It stood shunned, but for her. She didn't need to knock. Before she'd even set her heel on the step the door was opening, and there was Oscar, looking harried, beckoning her in. He answered the door dry-eyed, but as soon as it was closed and locked and bolted, he put his arms around her and the tears began, great sobs that racked his bulk. Over and over he told her how much he loved her, missed her, and needed her, now more than ever. She embraced him and calmed him as best she could. After a time he controlled himself and ushered her through to the kitchen. The lights were burning throughout the house, but after the blaze of the day their contribution looked jaundiced and didn't flatter him. His face was pale, where it wasn't discolored with bruises; his hands were puffed and raw. There were other wounds, she guessed, beneath his unpressed clothes. Watching him brew Earl Grey for them, she saw a look of discomfort cross his face when he moved too fast. Their talk, of course, rapidly turned to their parting at the Retreat.

"I was certain Dowd would slit your throat as soon as you got to Yzordderrex."

"He didn't lay a finger on me," she said. Then added, "That's not quite true. He did later. But when we arrived he was too badly hurt." She paused. "So are you."

"I was in a pretty wretched state," he said. "I wanted to follow you, but I could barely stand. I came back here, got a gun, licked my wounds awhile, then crossed over. But by that time you'd gone."

"So you did follow?"

"Of course. Did you think I'd leave you in Yzordderrex?"

He set a large cup of tea in front of her, and honey to sweeten it with. She didn't usually indulge, but she hadn't breakfasted, so she put enough spoonfuls of honey into the tea to turn it into an aromatic syrup.

"By the time I reached Peccable's house," Oscar went on, "it was empty. There were riots going on outside. I didn't know where to start looking for you. It was a nightmare."

"You know the Autarch was deposed?"

"No, I didn't, but I'm not surprised. Every New Year, Peccable would say, He'll go this year, he'll go this year. What happened to Dowd, by the way?"

"He's dead," she said, with a little smile of satisfaction.

"Are you sure? His type is difficult to kill, my dear, let me tell you. I speak from bitter experience."

"You were saying—"

"Yes. What was I saying?"

"That you followed us and found Peccable's house empty."

"And half the city in flames." He sighed. "It was tragic, seeing it like that. All that mindless destruction. The revenge of the proles. Oh, I know, I should be celebrating a victory for democracy, but what's going to be left? My lovely Yzordderrex: rubble. I looked at it and I said, This is the end of an era, Oscar. After this, everything'll be different. Darker." He looked up from the tea into which he'd been staring. "Did Peccable survive, do you know?"

"He was going to leave with Hoi-Poltoi. I assume he did. He emptied the cellar."

"No, that was me. And I'm glad I did it."

He cast a glance towards the windowsill. Nestling among the domestic bric-a-brac were a series of diminutive figurines. Talismans, she guessed: part of the horde from Peccable's cellar. Some were looking into the room, others out. They were all little paradigms of aggression, with positively rabid expressions on their garishly painted faces.

"But you're my best protection," he said. "Just having you here, I feel we've got some chance of surviving this mess." He put his hand over hers. "When I got your note and knew you'd survived, I began to hope a little. Then of course I couldn't get hold of you, and I began to imagine the worst."

She looked up from his hand and saw on his plagued face a family resemblance she'd never glimpsed before. There was an echo of Charlie in him, the Charlie of the Hampstead hospice, sitting at his window talking about bodies being dug up in the rain.

"Why didn't you just come to the flat?" she said.

"I couldn't leave here."

"Are you that badly hurt?"

"It's not what's in here that held me back," he said, putting his hand to his chest. "It's what's out there."

"You still think the Tabula Rasa's going to come after you?"

"God, no. They're the least of our worries. I half thought of warning one or two of them: anonymously, you know. Not Shales or McGann, or that idiot Bloxham. They can fry in Hell. But Lionel was always friendly, even when he was sober. And the ladies. I don't like the idea of their deaths on my conscience."

"So who are you hiding from?"

"The fact is, I don't know," he admitted. "I see images in the bowl, and I can't quite make them out."

She'd forgotten the Boston Bowl, with its blur of prophetic stones. Now Oscar was apparently hanging on its every rattle.

"Something's crossed over from the Dominions, my dear," he said. "I'm certain of that. I saw it coming after you. Trying to smother you...."

He looked as though tears were going to overtake him again, but she reassured him, lightly patting his hand as though he were some addled old man.

"Nothing's going to harm me," she said. "I've survived too much in the last few days."

"You've never seen a power like this," he warned her. "And neither's the Fifth."

"If it came from the Dominions, then it's the Autarch's doing."

"You sound very certain."

"That's because I know who he is."

"You've been listening to Peccable," he said. "He's full of theories, darling, but they're not worth a damn."

His not-so-faint condescension irritated her, and she drew her hand out from under his. "My source is a lot more reliable than Peccable," she said.

"Oh?" He realized he'd caused offense and indulged her. "Who's that?"

"Quaisoir."

"Quaisoir? How the hell did you get to her?" His surprise seemed to be as genuine as his humoring had been feigned.

"Don't you have any idea?" she asked him. "Didn't Dowd ever talk to you about the old days?"

Now his expression became guarded, almost suspicious.

"Dowd served generations of Godolphins," she said. "Surely you knew that? Right back to crazy Joshua. In fact, he was Joshua's right-hand man, if man's the word."

"I was aware of that," Oscar said softly.

"Then you knew about me too?"

He said nothing,

"Did you, Oscar?"

"I didn't debate you with Dowd, if that's what you mean."

"But you knew why you and Charlie kept me in the family?"

Now it was he who was offended; he grimaced at her vocabulary.

"That's what it was, Oscar. You and Charlie, trading me; knowing I was bound to stay with the Godolphins. Maybe I'd wander off for a while and have a few romances, but sooner or later I'd be back in the family."

"We both loved you," he said, his voice as blank as the look he now gave her. "Believe me, neither of us understood the politics of it. We didn't care."

"Oh really?" she said, her doubt plain.

"All I know is: I love you. It's the one certainty left in my life."

She was tempted to sour this saccharine with chapter and verse of his family's conspiracies against her, but what was the use? He was a fractured man, locked away in his house for fear of what the sun might invite over his threshold. Circumstance had already undone him. Any further work on her part would be malice, and though she didn't doubt that there was much in him to despise—his talk of the revenge of the proles had been particularly unattractive—she'd shared too many intimacies with him, and been too comforted by them, to be cruel. Besides, she had something to impart that would be a harder blow than any accusation.

"I'm not staying, Oscar," she said. "I haven't come back here to lock myself away."^

"But it's not safe out there," he replied. "I've seen what's coming. It's in the bowl. You want to see for yourself?" He stood up. "You'll change your mind."

He led her up the stairs to the treasure room, talking as he went.

"The bowl's got a life of its own since this power came into the Fifth. It doesn't need anybody watching, it just goes on repeating the same images. It's panicking. It knows what's coming, and it's panicking."

She could hear it before they even reached the door: a din like the drumming of hailstones on sun-baked earth.

"I don't think it's wise to watch for too long," he warned. "It gets hypnotic."

So saying, he opened the door. The bowl was sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a ring of votive candles, their fat flames jumping as the air was agitated by the spectacle they lit. The prophetic stones were moving like a swarm of enraged bees in and above the bowl, which Oscar had been obliged to set in a small mound of earth to keep it from being thrown over by their violence. The air smelled of what he'd called their panic: a bitter odor mingled with the metallic tang that came before lightning. Though the motion of the stones was reasonably contained, she hung back from the bowl lest a rogue find its way out of the dance and strike her. At the speed they were moving, the smallest of them could have taken out an eye. But even from a distance, with the shelves and their treasures to distract her, the motion of the stones was all consuming. The rest of the room, Oscar included, faded into insignificance as the frenzy drew her in.

"It may take a little time," Oscar was saying. "But the images are there." "I see," she said.

The Retreat had already appeared in the blur, its dome half hidden behind the screen of the copse. Its appearance was brief. The Tabula Rasa's tower took its place a moment after, only to be superseded by a third building, quite different from the pair that had gone before, except that it too was half concealed by foliage, in this case a single tree planted in the pavement.

"What's that house?" she asked Oscar. "I don't know, but it comes up over and over again. It's somewhere in London, I'm certain of that." "How can you be sure?"

The building was unremarkable: three stories, flat-fronted, and, as far as she could judge, in a dilapidated state. It could have stood in any inner city in England or for that matter in Europe.

"London's where the circle's going to close," Oscar replied. "It's where everything began, and it's where everything'll end."

The remark brought echoes: of Dowd at the wall on Pale Hill, talking about history coming around, and of Gentle and herself, mere hours before, devouring each other into perfection.

"There it is again," Oscar said.

The image of the house had briefly flickered out but now reappeared, brightly lit. There was somebody near the step, she saw, with his arms hanging by his sides and his head back as he stared up at the sky. The resolution of the image was not good enough for her to make out his features. Perhaps he was just some anonymous sun worshiper, but she doubted it. Every detail of this parade had its significance.

Now the image decayed again, and the noonday scene, with its gleaming foliage and its pristine sky, gave way to a roiling juggernaut of smoke, all black and gray.

"Here it comes," she heard Oscar say.

There were forms in the smoke, rising, withering, and falling as ash, but their nature defied her interpretation. Scarcely aware of what she was doing, she took a step towards the bowl.

"Don't, darling," Oscar said.

"What are we seeing?" she asked, ignoring his caution.

"The power," he said. "That's what's coming into the Fifth. Or already here."

"But that's not Sartori."

"Sartori?" he said.

"The Autarch."

Defying his own warning, he came to her side and again said, "Sartori? The Maestro?"

She didn't look around at him. The juggernaut demanded her utter devotion. Much as she hated to admit it to herself, Oscar had been right, talking of immeasurable powers. This was no human agency at work. It was a force of stupendous scale, advancing over a landscape she'd first thought covered by a stubble of gray grass but which she now realized was a city, those frail stalks buildings, toppling as the power burned out their foundations and overturned them.

No wonder Oscar was trembling behind locked doors; this was a terrible sight, and one for which she was unprepared. However atrocious Sartori's deeds, he was just a tyrant in a long and squalid history of tyrants, men whose fear of their own frailty made them monstrous. But this was a horror of another order entirely, beyond curing by politics or poisonings: a vast, unforgiving power, capable of sweeping all the Maestros and despots that had carved their names on the face of the world away without pausing to think about it. Had Sartori unleashed this immensity? she wondered. Was he so insane that he thought he could survive such devastation and build his New Yzordderrex on the rubble it left behind? Or was his lunacy profounder still? Was this juggernaut the true city of which he'd dreamed: a metropolis of storm and smoke that would stand to the World's End because that was its true name?

Now the sight was consumed by total darkness, and she let go of the breath she'd been holding.

"It isn't over," Oscar said, his voice close to her ear.

The darkness began to shred in several places, and through the gashes she saw a single figure, lying on a gray floor. It was herself: a crude representation, but recognizable.

"I warned you," Oscar said.

The darkness this image had appeared through didn't entirely evaporate, but lingered like a fog, and out of it a second figure came and sank down beside her. She knew before the action had unraveled that Oscar had made an error, thinking this was a prophecy of harm. The shadow between her legs was no killer. It was Gentle, and this scene was here, in the bowl's report, because the Reconciler stood as a sign of hope to set against the despair that had come before. She heard Oscar moan as the shadow lover reached for her, putting his hand between her legs, then raising her foot to his mouth to begin his devouring.

"It's killing you," Oscar said.

Watched remotely, this was a rational interpretation. But it wasn't death, of course, it was love. And it wasn't prophecy, it was history: the very act they'd performed the night before. Oscar was viewing it like a child, seeing its parents make love and thinking violence was being done in the marital bed. She was glad of his error, in a way, saving her as it did from the problem of explaining this coupling.

She and the Reconciler were quickly intertwined, the veils of darkness attending on the act and deepening their mingled shadows, so that the lovers became a single knot, which shrank and shrank and finally disappeared altogether, leaving the stones to rattle on as an abstraction.

It was a strangely intimate conclusion to the sequence. From temple, tower, and house to the storm had been a grim progression, but from the storm to this vision of love was altogether more optimistic: a sign, perhaps, that union could bring an end to the darkness that had gone before.

"That's all there is," Oscar said. "It just begins again from here. Round and round."

She turned from the bowl as the din of stones, which had quieted as the love scene was sketched, became loud again.

"You see the danger you're in?" he said.

"I think I'm just an afterthought," she said, hoping to steer him away from an analysis of what had been depicted.

"Not to me you're not," he replied, putting his arms around her. For all his wounds, he was not a man to be resisted easily. "I want to protect you," he said. "That's my duty. I see that now. I know you've been mistreated, but I can make reparations for that. I can keep you here, safe and sound."

"So you think we can hole up here and Armageddon will just pass over?"

"Have you got a better idea?"

"Yes. We resist it, at all costs."

"There's no victory to be had against the likes of that," he said.

She could hear the stones' thunder behind her and knew they were picturing the storm again.

"At least we've got some defenses here," he went on. "I've got spirit guards at every door and every window. You saw those in the kitchen? They're the tiniest."

"All male, are they?"

"What's that got to do with it?"

"They're not going to protect you, Oscar."

"They're all we've got."

"Maybe they're all you've got—"

She slipped from his arms and headed for the door. He followed her out onto the landing, demanding to know what she meant by this, and finally, inflamed by his cowardice, she turned back to him.

"There's been a power under your nose for years."

"What power? Where?"

"Sealed up beneath Roxborough's tower."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"You don't know who she is?"

"No," he said, angered now. "This is nonsense."

"I've seen her, Oscar."

"How? Nobody but the Tabula Rasa gets into the tower."

"I could show her to you. Take you to the very place."

She dropped her volume, studying Oscar's anxious, ruddy features as she spoke. "I think maybe she's some kind of Goddess. I've tried to get her out twice and failed. I need help. I need your help."

"It's impossible," he replied. "The tower's a fortress, now more than ever. I tell you, this house is the only safe place left in the city. It would be suicide for me to step out of here."

"Then that's that," she said, not about to debate with such timidity. She started down the stairs, ignoring his calls for her to wait.

"You can't leave me," he said, as though amazed. "I love you. Do you hear me? I love you."

"There's more important things than love," she returned, thinking as she spoke that this was easy to say with Gentle awaiting her at home. But it was also true. She'd seen this city overturned and pitched into dust. Preventing that was indeed more important than love, especially Oscar's spineless variety.

"Don't forget to lock up after me," she said as she reached the bottom of the stairs. "You never know what's going to come knocking on the door."

On the way home she stopped to buy groceries, which had never been her favorite chore but was today elevated into the realms of the surreal by the sense of foreboding she brought with her. Here she was going about the business of purchasing domestic necessities, while the image of the killing cloud turned in her head. But life had to go on, even if oblivion waited in the wings. She needed milk, bread, and toilet paper; she needed deodorant and waste bags to line the bin in the kitchen. It was only in fiction that the daily round of living was ignored so that grand events could take center stage. Her body would hunger, tire, sweat, and digest until the final pall descended. There was peculiar comfort in this thought, and though the darkness gathering at the threshold of her world should have, distracted her from trivialities, its presence had precisely the reverse effect. She was more pernickety than usual about the cheese she bought and sniffed at half a dozen deodorants before she found a scent that pleased her.

The shopping done, she headed home through streets buzzing with the business of a sunlit day, contemplating the problem of Celestine as she went. With Oscar plainly unwilling to aid her, she would have to look for help elsewhere, and with her circle of trusted souls so shrunk, that only left Clem and Gentle. The Reconciler had his own agenda, of course, but after the promises of the night before—the commitments to be with each other, sharing the fears and the visions—he'd surely understand her need to liberate Celestine, if only to put an end to the mystery. She would tell him all she knew about Roxborough's prisoner, she decided, as soon as possible.

He wasn't home when she got back, which was no surprise. He'd warned her that he'd be keeping odd hours as he laid the groundwork for the Reconciliation. She prepared some lunch, then decided she hadn't got an appetite and went to work one up by tidying the bedroom, which was still chaos after the night's traffic. As she straightened the sheets she discovered they had a tiny occupant: the blue stone (or, as she preferred to think of it, the egg), which had been in one of the pockets of her ravaged clothes. The sight of it diverted her from her bed making, and she sat on the edge of the mattress, passing the egg from hand to hand, wondering if perhaps it could deliver her, even briefly, into the cell where Celestine was locked. Itliad of course been much reduced by Dowd's mites, but even when she'd first discovered it in Estabrook's safe it had been a fragment of a greater form and possessed some jurisidiction. Did it still?

"Show me the Goddess," she said, clutching the egg tight. "Show me the Goddess."

Spoken plainly that way, the notion of her mind's removal from the physical world, and its flight, seemed absurd. That wasn't the way the world worked, except perhaps at enchanted midnights. Now it was the middle of the afternoon, and the noise of day rose through the open window. She was loath to go and close it, however. She couldn't exile the world every time she wanted to alter her consciousness. The street and the people in it—the dirt and the din and the summer sky—all had to be made part of the mechanism for transcendence, or else she'd come to grief the way her sister had, bound up and blind long before her eyes went from her head.

As was her wont, she began to talk to herself, coaxing the miracle. "It's happened before," she said. "It can happen again. Be patient, woman."

But the longer she sat, the stronger the sense of her own ludicrousness became. The image of her idiot devotion appeared in her mind's eye. There she was, sitting on the bed, staring at a piece of dead stone: a study in fatuity,

"Fool," she said to herself.

Suddenly weary of the whole fiasco, she got up from the bed. In that rising she realized her error. Her mind's eye showed her the motion as if it was detached from her, hovering near the window. She felt a sudden pang of panic and for the second tune in the space of thirty seconds called herself fool, not for wasting time with the egg but for failing to realize that the image she'd taken as evidence of her own failure, that of herself sitting waiting for something to happen, was in fact proof that it had. Her sight had drifted from her so subtly she'd not even known it had gone.

"The cell," she said, instructing her subtle eye. "Show me the Goddess's cell."

Though it was close to the window, and could have flown from there, her eye instead rose at a sickening speed, till she was looking down at herself from the ceiling. She saw her body rock below her, as the flight giddied her. Then her sight descended. The top of her head loomed like a planet beneath her, and she was plunged into her skull, down, down into the darkness of her body. She felt her own panic on all sides: the frantic labor of her heart, her lungs drawing shallow breaths. There was none of the brightness she'd found in Celestine's body, no hint of that luminous blue the Goddess had shared with the stone. There was only the dark and its turmoil. She wanted to make the egg understand its mistake and draw her mind's eye up out of this pit, but if her lips were making such pleas, which she doubted, they were ignored, and her fall went on, and on, as though her sight h,ad become a fly speck in a well and would fall for hours without reaching its bowels.

And then, below her, a tiny point of light, which grew as she approached, to show itself not a point but a strip of rippling luminescence, like the purest glyph imaginable. What was this doing inside her? Was it some relic of the working that had created her, a fragment of Sartori's feit, like Gentle's signature hidden in the brushwork of his forged canvases? She was upon it now, or rather in it, its brightness a blaze that made her mind's eye squint.

And out of the blaze, images. Such images! She knew neither their origins nor their purpose, but they were exquisite enough to make her forgive the misdirection that had led her here rather than to Celestine. She seemed to be in a paradisiacal city, half overgrown with glorious flora, the profusion of which was fed by waters that rose like arches and colonnades on every side. Flocks of stars flew overhead and made perfect circles at her zenith; mists hung at her ankles, laying their veils beneath her feet to ease her step. She passed through this city like a hallowed daughter and came to rest in a large airy room, where water cascaded in place of doors, and the merest stab of sun brought rainbows. There she sat and with these borrowed eyes saw her own face and breasts, so vast they might have been sculpted for a temple, raised above her. Did milk seep from her nipples, and did she sing a lullaby? She thought so; but her attention strayed too quickly from breasts and face to be sure, her gaze turned towards the far end of the chamber. Somebody had entered: a man, so wounded and ill—mended she didn't recognize him at first. It was only when he was almost upon her that she realized the company she kept. It was Gentle, unshaven and badly fed, but greeting her with tears of joy in his eyes. If words were exchanged she didn't hear them, but he fell to his knees in front of her, and her gaze went between his upturned face and the monumental effigy behind her. It was not, after all, a thing of painted stone, but was in this vision made of living flesh, moving, weeping, even glancing down at the worshiper she was.

AH this was strange enough, but there was stranger still to come, as she looked back towards Gentle and saw him pluck from a hand too tiny to be hers the very stone that had given her this dream. He took it with gratitude, his tears finally abating. Then he rose, and as he made his way back towards the liquid door, the day beyond it blazed, and the scene was washed away in light.

She sensed that the enigma, whatever it signified, was passing away, but she had no power to hold it. The glyph in her core appeared before her, and she rose from it like a diver from some treasure the deep would not relinquish, up through the dark and out into the place she'd left.

Nothing had changed in the room, but a sudden squall was on the world outside, its torrent heavy enough to drop a sheet of water between the raised window and the sill. She stood up, clutching the stone. The journey had left her lightheaded, however, and she knew if she tried to go to the kitchen and put some food in her belly her legs would fold up beneath her, so she lay down and let the pillow have her head awhile.

She didn't think she slept, but it was as difficult to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness as it had been in Quaisoir's bed. The visions she'd seen in the darkness of her own belly were as insistent as some prophetic dream and stayed with her, the music of the rain a perfect accompaniment to the memory. It was only when the clouds moved on, taking their deluge south, and the sun appeared between the sodden curtains, that sleep overcame her.

When she woke, it was to the sound of Gentle's key in the lock. It was night, or close to it, and he switched on the light in the adjacent room. She sat up and was about to call to him when she thought better of it and, instead, watched through the partially open door. She saw his face for only an instant, but the glimpse was enough to make her want him to come in to her with kisses. He didn't. Instead, he paced back and forth next door, massaging his hands as though they ached, working first at the fingers, then at the palms.

Finally, she couldn't be patient any longer and got up, sleepily murmuring his name. He didn't hear her at first, and she had to speak again before he realized it was being called. Only then did he turn and put on a smile for her.

"Still awake?" he said fondly. "You shouldn't have stayed up."

"Are you all right?"

"Yes. Yes, of course." He put his hands to his face. "This is a hard business, you know. I didn't expect it to be so difficult."

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

"Some other tune," he said, approaching the door. She took his hands in hers. "What's this?" he said.

She was still holding the egg, but not for long. He had it from her palm with the ease of a pickpocket. She wanted to snatch it back, but she fought the instinct and let him study his prize.

"Pretty," he said. Then, less lightly: "Where did it come from?"

Why did she hesitate to answer? Because he looked so weary, and she didn't want to burden him with new mysteries when he had a surfeit of his own? It was that in part; but there was another part that was altogether less clear to her. Something to do with the fact that in her vision she'd seen him far more broken that he was at present, wounded and wretched, and somehow that condition had to remain her secret, at least for a time.

He put the egg to his nose and sniffed it. "I smell you," he said.

"No...."

"Yes, I do. Where have you been keeping it?" He put his empty hand between her legs. "In here?"

The thought was not so preposterous. Indeed she might slip it into that pocket, when she had it back, and enjoy its weight.

"No?" he said. "Well, I'm sure it wishes you would. I think half the world would like to creep up there if it could." He pressed his hand against her. "But it's mine, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Nobody goes in there but me."

"No."

She answered mechanically, her thoughts as much on reclaiming the egg as on his proprietorial talk.

"Have you got anything we can get high on?" he said.

"I had some dope...."

"Where is it?""I think I smoked the last of it. I'm not sure. Do you want me to look?"

"Yes, please."

She reached up for the egg, but before her fingers could take hold of it he put it to his lips.

"I want to keep it," he said. "Sniff it for a while. You don't mind, do you?"

"I'd like it back."

"You'll have it back," he said, with a faint air of condescension, as though her possessiveness was childish. "But I need a keepsake, something to remind me of you."

"I'll give you some of my underwear," she said.

"It's not quite the same."

He laid the egg against his tongue and turned it, coating it in his spittle. She watched him, and he watched her back. He knew damn well she wanted her toy, but she wasn't going to stoop to begging him for it.

"You mentioned dope," he said.

She went back into the bedroom, put on the lamp beside the bed, and searched through the top drawer of her dresser where she'd last stashed her marijuana.

"Where did you go today?" he asked her.

"I went to Oscar's house."

"Oscar?"

"Godolphin."

"And how's Oscar? Alive and kicking?"

"I can't find the dope. I must have smoked it all."

"You were telling me about Oscar."

"He's locked himself up in his house."

"Where does he live? Maybe I should call on him. Reassure him." ^

"He won't see you. He won't see anybody. He thinks the world's coming to an end."

"And what do you think?"

She shrugged. She was quietly raging at him, but she wasn't exactly sure why. He'd taken the egg for a while, but that wasn't a capital crime. If the stone afforded him a little protection, why should she be covetous of it? She was being petty, and she wished she could be other, but without the heat of sex shimmering between them he seemed crass. It was not a flaw she expected to find in him. Lord knows she'd accused him of countless deficiencies in her time, but a lack of finesse had never been one of them. If anything, he'd been too much the polished operator, discreet and suave.

"You were telling me about the end of the world," he said.

"Was I?"

"Did Oscar frighten you?"

"No. But I saw something that did."

She told him, briefly, about the bowl and its prophecies. He listened without comment, then said, "The Fifth's teetering. We both know that. But it won't touch us."

She'd heard the same sentiments from Oscar, or near enough. Both these men, wanting to offer her a haven from the storm. She should have been flattered. Gentle looked at his watch.

"I've got to go out again," he said, "You'll be safe here, won't you?"

"I'll be fine."

"You should sleep. Make yourself strong. There's going to be some dark times before it gets light again, and we're going to find some of that darkness in each other. It's perfectly natural. We're not angels, after all." He chuckled. "At least, you may be, but I'm not."

So saying, he pocketed the egg.

"Go back to bed," he said. "I'll be back in the morning. And don't worry, nothing's going to come near you but me. I swear. I'm with you, Judith, all the time. And that's not love talking."

With that, he smiled at her and headed off, leaving her to wonder what indeed had been talking, if it wasn't love.