Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

14

Even though Gentle had known the tribe of the South Bank only a few hours, parting from them wasn't easy. He'd felt more secure in their company for that short time than he'd felt with many men and women he'd known for years. They, for their part, were used to loss—it was the theme of almost every life story he'd heard—so there were no histrionics or accusations, just a heavy silence. Only Monday, whose victimization had first stirred the stranger from his passivity, made any attempt to have Gentle linger.

"We've only got a few more walls to paint," he said, "and we'll have covered them all. A few days. A week at the most."

"I wish I had that long," Gentle told him. "But I can't postpone the work I came back to do."

Monday had of course been asleep while Gentle talked with Tay (and had woken much confounded by the respect he got), but the others, especially Benedict, had new words to add to the vocabulary of miracles.

"So what does a Reconciler do?" he asked Gentle. "If you're goin' off to the Dominions, man, we want to be comin' with you."

"I'm not leaving Earth. But if and when I do, you'll be the first to know about it."

"What if we never see you again?" Irish said.

"Then I'll have failed."

"And you're dead and gone?"

"That's right."

"He won't fuck up," Carol said. "Will you, love?"

"But what do we do with what we know?" Irish said, clearly troubled by this burden of mysteries. "With you gone, it won't make sense to us."

"Yes, it will," Gentle said. "Because you'll be telling other people, and that way the stories will stay alive until the door to the Dominions is open."

"So we should tell people?"

"Anyone who'll listen."

There were murmurs of assent from the assembly. Here at least was a purpose, a connection with the tale they'd heard and its teller.

"If you need us for anything," Benedict purred, "you know where to find us."

"Indeed 1 do," Gentle said, and went with Clem to the gate.

"And what if anybody comes looking for you?" Carol called after them.

"Tell 'em I was a mad bastard and you kicked me over the bridge."

This earned a few grins.

"That's what we'll say, Maestro," Irish said. "But I'm tellin' you, if you don't come back for us one of these days, we're goin' to come lookin' for you."

The farewells over, Clem and Gentle headed up onto Waterloo Bridge hi search of a cab to take them across the city to Jude's place. It wasn't yet six, and though the flow of northbound traffic was beginning to thicken as the first commuters appeared, there were no taxis to be had, so they started across the bridge on foot in the hope of finding a cab on the Strand.

"Of all the company to have found you in," Clem remarked as they went, "that has to be the strangest."

"You came looking for me there," Gentle pointed out, "so you must have had some inkling."

"I suppose I must."

"And believe me, I've kept stranger company. A lot stranger."

"I believe it. I'd like you to tell me about the whole journey one day soon. Will you do that?"

"I'll do my best. But it'll be difficult without a map. I kept telling Pie I'd draw one, so that if I ever passed through the Dominions again and got lost..."

"You'd be found."

"Exactly."

"And did you make a map?"

"No. There was never time, somehow. There always seemed to be something new to distract me."

"Tell me as much as— Whoa! I see a cab!"

Clem stepped out into the street and waved the vehicle down. They both got in and Clem supplied the driver with directions. As he was doing so, the man peered into his mirror.

"Is that someone you know?"

They looked back along the bridge to see Monday pelting towards them. Seconds later the paint-smeared face was at the taxi window, and Monday was begging to join them.

"You've got to let me come with you, boss. It's not fair if you don't. I gave you my colors, didn't I? Where would you be without my colors?"

"I can't risk your getting hurt," Gentle said.

"If I get hurt it's my hurt and it's my fault."

"Are we going, or what?" the driver wanted to know.

"Let me come, boss. Please."

Gentle shrugged, then nodded. The grin, which had gone from Monday's face during his appeal, returned in glory, and he clambered into the cab, rattling his tobacco tin of chalks like a ju-ju as he did so.

"I brought the colors," he said, "just in case we need 'em. You never know when we might have to draw a quick Dominion or something, right?"

Though the journey to Judith's flat was relatively short, there were signs everywhere—mostly small, but so numerous their sum became significant—that the days of venomous heat and uncleansing storm were taking their toll on the city and its occupants. There were vociferous altercations at every other corner, and some in the middle of the street; there were scowls and furrows on every passing face.

"Tay said there was a void coming," Clem remarked as they waited at an intersection for two furious motorists to be stopped from making nooses of each other's neckties. "Is this all part of it?"

"It's bloody madness is what it is," the cabbie chimed in. "There's been more murders in the last five days than in all of last year. I read that somewhere. And it's not just murders, neither, it's people toppin' themselves. A mate of mine, a cabbie like, was up the Arsenal on Tuesday and this woman just throws herself in front of his cab. Straight under the front wheels. Bloody tragic."

The fighters had finally been refereed and were being escorted to opposite pavements.

"I don't know what the world's coming to," the cabbie said. "It's bloody madness."

His piece said, he turned on the radio as the traffic began moving again, and began whistling 3n out-of-tune accompaniment to the ballad that emerged.

"Is this something we can help stop?" Clem asked Gentle. "Or is it just going to get worse?"

"I hope the Reconciliation will put an end to it. But I can't be certain. This Dominion's been sealed up for so long, it's poisoned itself with its own shit."

"So we just have to pull down the sod din' walls," Monday said, with the glee of a born demolisher. He rattled his tin of colors again. "You mark 'em," he said, "and I'll knock 'em down. Easy."

The child, Jude had been told, had more purpose in it than most, and she believed it. But what did that mean, besides the risk of its fury if she tried to unhouse it? Would it grow faster than others? Would she be big with it by dusk, and her water ready to break before morning? She lay in the bedroom now, the day's heat already weighing on her limbs, and hoped the stories she'd heard from radiant mothers were true, that her body would pour palliatives into her bloodstream to ease the traumas of nurturing and expelling another life.

When the doorbell rang her first instinct was to ignore it, but her visitors, whoever they were, kept on ringing and eventually began to shout up at the window. One called for Judy; the other, more oddly, for Jude. She sat up, and for a moment it was as though her anatomy had shifted. Her heart thumped in her head, and her thoughts had to be dragged up out of her belly to form the intention to leave the room and go down to the door. The voices were still summoning her from below, but they petered out as she^ headed down the stairs, and she was ready to find the doorstep empty when she got there. Not so. There was an adolescent there, besmirched with color, who upon sight of her turned and hollered to her other visitors, who were across the street, peering up at her flat.

"She's here!" he yelled. "Boss? She's here!"

They started back across the road towards the step, and as they came her heart, still beating in her head, took up a suicidal tempo. She reached out for some support as the man at Clem's side met her eyes and smiled. This wasn't Gentle. At least it wasn't the egg-thief Gentle who'd left a couple of hours before, his face flawless. This one hadn't shaved for several days and had a brow of scabs.

She backed away from the step, her hand failing to find the door though she wanted to slam it. "Keep away from me," she said.

He stopped a yard or two from the threshold, seeing the panic on her face. The youth had turned to him, and the imposter signaled that he should retreat, which he did, leaving the line of vision between them clear.

"I know.I look like shit," the scabby face said. "But it's me, Jude."

She took two steps back from the blaze in which he stood (How the light liked him! Not like the other, who'd been in shadow every time she'd set eyes on him), her sinews fluttering from toes to fingertips, their motion escalating as though a fit was about to seize her. She reached for the banister and took hold of it to keep herself from falling over.

"It can't be," she said.

This time the man made no reply. It was his accomplice in this deceit—Clem, of all people—who said, "Judy. We have to talk to you. Can I come in?"

"Just you," she said. "Not them. Just you."

"Just me."

He came to the door, approaching her slowly, palms out, "What's happened here?" he said.

"That's not Gentle," she told him. "Gentle's been with me for the last two days. And nights. That's... I don't know who."

The imposter heard what she was telling Clem. She could see his face over the other man's shoulder, so shocked the words might have been blows. The more she tried to explain to Clem what had happened, the more she lost faith with what she was saying. This Gentle, waiting outside, was the man she'd left on the studio step, standing bewildered in the sun as he was now. And if this was he, then the lover who'd come to her, the egg licker and fertilizer, was some other some terrible other.

She saw Gentle make the man's name with his lips: "Sartori,"

Hearing the name and knowing it was true—knowing that the butcher of Yzordderrex had found a place in her bed, heart, and womb—the convulsions threatened to overtake her completely. But she clung to the solid, sweaty world as best she could, determined that these men, his enemies, should know what he'd done.

"Come in," she said to Gentle. "Come in and close the door."

He brought the boy with him, but she didn't have the will to waste on objecting. He also brought a question: "Did he harm you?"

"No," she said. She almost wished he had, wished he'd given her a glimpse of his atrocious self. "You told me he was changed, Gentle," she said. "You said he was a monster; he was corrupted, you said. But he was exactly like you."

She let her rage simmer in her as she spoke, working its alchemy on the abhorrence she felt and turning it into purer, wiser stuff. Gentle had misled her with his descriptions of his other, creating in her mind's eye a man so tainted by his deeds he was barely human. There'd been no malice in his deception; only the desire to be utterly divided from the man who shared his face. But now he knew his error and was plainly ashamed. He hung back, watching her while the tremors in her body slowed. There was steel in her sinew and it held her up, lent her the strength to finish the account. There was no sense in keeping the last part of Sartori's deceit from either Gentle or Clem. It would be apparent soon enough. She laid her hand on her belly.

"I'm pregnant," she said. "His child. Sartori's child."

In a more rational world she might have been able to interpret the expression on Gentle's face as he received the news, but its complexity defied her. There was anger in the maze, certainly, and bafflement too. But was there also a little jealousy? He hadn't wanted her company when they'd returned from the Dominions; his mission as Reconciler had scourged his libido. But now that she'd been touched by his other,pleasured by him (did he see that guilt somewhere on her face, as ineptly buried as his jealousy?) he was feeling pangs of possessiveness. As ever with their story, there was no sentiment untainted by paradox.

It was Clem, dear comforting Clem, who opened his arms now and said, "Any chance of a hug?"

"Oh, God, yes," she said. "Every chance."

He crossed to her and wrapped his embrace around her. They rocked together.

"I should have known, Clem," she said, too quietly for Gentle or the boy to hear.

"Hindsight's easy," he said, kissing her hair. "I'm just glad you're alive."

"He never threatened me. He never laid a finger on me that I didn't..."

"Ask for?"

"I didn't need to ask," she said. "He knew."

The sound of the front door reopening made her raise her head from Clem's shoulder. Gentle was stepping out into the sun again, with the youth following. Once outside, he looked up, cupping his hand over his brow to study the sky at his zenith. Seeing him do so, Jude realized who the sky watcher she'd glimpsed in the Boston Bowl had been. It was a small solving, but she wasn't about to spurn the satisfaction it provided.

"Sartori is Gentle's brother, is that right?" Clem said. "I'm afraid I'm still hazy on the family relations."

"They're not brothers, they're twins," she replied. "Sartori is his perfect double."

"How perfect?" Clem asked, looking at her with a small, almost mischievous smile on his face. "Oh ... very perfect." "So it wasn't so bad, his being here?" She shook her head. "It wasn't bad at all," she replied. Then, after a moment: "He told me he loved me, Clem." "Oh, Lord." "And I believed him."

"How many dozens of men have told you that?" "Yes, but he was different...." "Famous last words."

She looked at the sun watcher for a few seconds, puzzled by the calm that had come over her. Was the mere memory of his commitment to her enough to assuage every dread? "What are you thinking?" Clem asked her. "That he feels something Gentle never did," she replied. "Maybe never could. Before you say it, I know the whole thing's repulsive. He's a destroyer. He's wiped out whole countries. How can I be feeling anything for him?" "You want the cliches?" "Tell me."

"You feel what you feel Some people go for sailors, some people go for men in rubber suits and feather boas. We do what we do. Never explain, never apologize. There. That's all you're getting."

Her hands went to his face. She cupped it, then kissed it. "You are sublime," she said. "We're going to survive, aren't we?"

"Survive and prosper," he said. "But I think we'd better find your beau, for everybody's—"

He stopped as her grip on him tightened. All trace of joy had gone from her face.

"What's wrong?"

"Celestine. I sent him up to Highgate. To Roxborough's tower."

"I'm sorry, I'm not following this."

"It's bad news," she said, leaving his embrace and hurrying to the front door.

Gentle relinquished his zenith watching at her summons and returned to the step as she repeated what she'd just told Clem.

"What's up in Highgate?" he said.

"A woman who wanted to see you. Does the name Nisi Nirvana mean anything to you?"

Gentle puzzled over this for a moment. "It's something from a story," he said.

"No, Gentle. She's real. She's alive. At least she was."

It hadn't been sentiment alone that had moved the Autarch Sartori to have the streets of London depicted in such loving detail on the walls of his palace. Though he'd spent only a little time in this city—no more than weeks, between his birth and his departure for the Reconciled Dominions— Mother London and Father Thames had educated him right royally. Of course the metropolis visible from the summit of Highgate Hill, where he stood now, was vaster and grimmer than the city he'd wandered then, but there were enough signs remaining to stir some poignant and pungent memories. He'd learned sex in these streets, from the professionals around Drury Lane. He'd learned murder at the riverside, watching the bodies washed up in the mud on a Sunday morning after the slaughters of Saturday night. He'd learned law at Lincoln's Inn Field and seen justice done at Tyburn. All fine lessons, that had helped to make him the man he was. The only lesson he couldn't remember learning, whether in these streets or any other, was how to be an architect. He must have had a tutor in that, he presumed, at some time. After all, wasn't he the man whose vision had built a palace that would stand in legend, even though its towers were now rubble? Where, in the furnace of his genes or in his history, was the kindling spark of that genius? Perhaps he'd only discover the answer in the raising of his New Yzordderrex. If he was patient and watchful, the face of his mentor would sooner or later appear in its walls. There would have to be a great demolishing, however, before the foundations were laid, and banalities like the Tabula Rasa's tower, which he now came in sight of, would be the first to be condemned. He crossed the forecourt to the front door, whistling as he went and wondering if the woman Judith had been so insistent he meet—this Celestine—could hear his trill. The door stood open, but he doubted any thief, however opportunist, had dared enter. The air around the threshold fairly pricked with power, putting him in mind of his beloved Pivot Tower.

Still whistling, he crossed the foyer to a second door and stepped through it into a room he knew. He'd walked these ancient boards twice in his life: the first time the day before the Reconciliation, when he'd presented himself to Roxborough here, passing himself off as the Maestro Sartori for the perverse pleasure of shaking the hands of the Reconciler's patrons before the sabotage he'd planned took them to Hell; the second time, the night after the Reconciliation, with storms tearing up the skies from Hadrian's Wall to Land's End. On this occasion he'd come with Chant, his new familiar, intending to kill Lucius Cobbitt, the boy he'd made his unwitting agent in the sabotage. Having searched for him in Gamut Street and found him gone, he'd braved the storm—there were forests uprooted and lifted in the air, and a man struck by lightning burning on Highgate Hill—only to discover that Roxborough's house was empty. He'd never found Cobbitt. Driven from the safety of Gamut Street by his sometime Maestro, the youth had probably fallen prey to the storm, as so many others had that night.

Now the room stood silent, and so did he. The lords who'd built this house, and their children, who'd raised the tower above, were dead. It was a welcome hush; in it, there'd be time for dalliance. He wandered over to the mantelpiece and headed down the stairs, descending into a library he'd never known existed until this moment. He might have been tempted to linger, perusing the laden shelves, but the pricking power he'd— felt at the front door was stronger than ever and drew him on, more intrigued with every yard.

He heard the woman's voice before he set eyes on her, emanating from a place where the restless dust was so thick it was like walking in a delta fog. Barely visible through it; a scene of sheer vandalism: books, scrolls, and manuscripts reduced to shreds or buried in the wreckage of the shelves they'd been laid upon. And beyond the rubble, a hole in the brick; and from the hole, a call.

"Is that Sartori?"

"Yes," he said.

"Come closer. Let me see you."

He presented himself at the bottom of the heap of rubble.

"I thought she'd failed to find you," Celestine said. "Or else you'd refused to come."

"How could I refuse a summons like this?" he said softly.

"Do you think this is some kind of liaison?" she replied. "Some secret tryst?"

Her voice was raw with the dust, and bitter. He liked the sound of it. Women who had anger in them were always so much more interesting than their contented sisters.

"Come in, Maestro," she said to him. "Let me put you to rights."

He clambered up over the stones and peered into the darkness. The cell was a wretched hole, as sordid as anything beneath his palace, but the woman who'd occupied it was no anchorite. Her flesh hadn't been chastened by incarceration, but looked lush, for all the marks upon it. The tendrils that clung to her body extolled her fluency, moving over her thighs and breasts and belly like unctuous snakes. Some clung to her head and paid court at her honey lips; others lay between her legs in bliss. He felt her tender gaze on him and luxuriated in it.

"Handsome," she said.

He took her compliment as an invitation to approach, but as he did so she made a murmur of distress, and he stopped in his tracks.

"What's this shadow in you?" she said.

"Nothing to be afraid of," he told her.

Some of the filaments parted, and longer tendrils, these not courtiers but part of her substance, uncurled from behind her, clinging to the rough wall and hauling her up.

"I've heard that before," she said. "When a man tells you there's nothing to be afraid of, he's lying. Even you, Sartori."

"I won't come any closer if it bothers you," he said.

It wasn't respect for the woman's unease that moved him to compliance, but the sight of the ribbons that had lifted her. Quaisoir had sprouted such appendages, he recalled, after her intimacies with the women of the Bastion of the Banu. They were evidence of some facility in the other sex he had no real comprehension of: a remnant of crafts all but banished from the Reconciled Dominions by Hapexamendios. Perhaps they'd seen a new, poisonous flowering in the Fifth in the time since he'd left. Until he knew the scope of their authority, he'd be circumspect,

"I'd like to ask a question, if I may?" he said.

"Yes?"

"How do you know who I am?"

"First, tell me where you've been all these years."

Oh, the temptation he felt to tell her the truth, then, and parade his achievements in the hope of impressing her. But he'd come here in the guise of his other, and, as with Judith, he'd have to choose the moment of his unmasking carefully.

"I've been wandering," he said. It wasn't so untrue.

"Where?"

"In the Second Dominion, and occasionally the Third."

"Were you ever in Yzordderrex?"

"Sometimes."

"And in the desert outside the city?"

"There too. Why do you ask?"

"I was there once. Before you were born."

"I'm older than I look," he told her. "I know it doesn't show—"

"I know how long you've lived, Sartori," she replied. "To the very day."

Her certainty nourished the discomfort bred by the sight of the tendrils. Could she read his thoughts, this woman? If so—if she knew what he was and all he'd done—why wasn't she in awe of him?

There was no profit in pretending that he didn't care that she seemed to know so much. Plainly but politely, he asked her how', preparing as he spoke a profusion of excuses if she was simply one of the Maestrb's casual conquests and accused him of forgetting her. But the accusation, when it came, was of another kind entirely.

"You've done great harm in your life, haven't you?" she said to him.

"No more than most," he protested mildly. "I've been tempted to a few excesses, certainly. But then hasn't everybody?"

"A few excesses?" she said. "I think you've done more than that. There's evil in you, Sartori. I smell it in your sweat, the way I smelled coitus in the woman."

Her mention of Judith—who else could this venereal woman be? — reminded him of the prophecy he'd made to her two nights before. They would find darkness in each other, he'd said; and that was a perfectly human condition. The argument had proved potent then. Why not now?

"It's just the humanity in me you can sense," he said to Celestine.

She was clearly unpersuaded. "Oh, no," she replied. "I'm the humanity in you."

He was about to laugh this absurdity off, but her stare hushed him.

"What part of me are you?" he murmured.

"Don't you know yet?" she said. "Child, I'm your mother."

Gentle led the way as they stepped into the cool of the tower's foyer. There was no sound from anywhere in the building, above or below,

"Where's Celestine?" he asked Jude. She led him to the door into the Tabula Rasa's meeting room, where he told them all, "This is something for me to do, brother to brother."

"I'm not afraid," Monday piped up.

"No, but I am," Gentle said with a smile. "And I wouldn't want you to see me piss my pants. Stay up here. I'll be out double quick."

"Make sure you are," Clem said. "Or we're coming down to get you."

With that promise as comfort, Gentle slipped through the door into what remained of Roxborough's house. Though he'd felt nothing in the way of memories as he'd entered the tower, he felt them now. They weren't as material as those that visited him in Gamut Street, where the very boards seemed to have recorded the souls that had trodden them. These were vague recollections of the times he'd drunk and debated around the great oak table. He didn't allow nostalgia to delay him, however, but passed through the room like a man vexed by admirers, arms raised against their blandishments, and headed down into the cellar. He'd had this labyrinth and its contents (all spined and skin-bound, whether human or not) described to him by Jude, but the sight still amazed him. All this wisdom, buried in darkness. Was it any wonder the Imajical life of the Fifth had been so anemic in the last two centuries, when all the liquors that might have fortified it had been hidden here?

But he hadn't come to browse, glorious as that prospect was. He'd come for Celestine, who'd trailed, of all things, the name Nisi Nirvana to bring him here. He didn't know why. Though he vaguely remembered the name, and knew there was some story to go with it, he could neither remember the tale nor recall whose knee he'd first heard it at. Perhaps she knew the answer.

There was a wonderful agitation here. Even the dust would not lie down and die, but moved in giddy constellations, which he divided as he strode. He made no false turns, but the route from the steps to the place where Celestine lay was still a long one, and before he'd reached it he heard a cry. It wasn't a woman's cry, he thought, but the echoes disfigured it, and he couldn't be certain. He picked up his speed, turning corner after corner, knowing as he went that his other had preceded him every step of the way. There were no further cries after the first, but as his destination came in view—it looked like a cave, raggedly dug from the wall; an oracle's home—he heard a different sound: that of bricks, grinding their gritty faces together. There were small but constant falls of dried mortar from the ceiling, and a subtle trembling in the ground. He started up over the litter of fallen rock, which was strewn like a battlefield with gutted books, to the inviting crack. As he did so he caught a glimpse of a violent motion inside, which had him to the threshold in a stumbling rush.

"Brother?" he said, even before he'd found Sartori in the gloom. "What are you doing?"

Now he saw his other, closing on the woman in the corner of the cave. She was almost naked, but far from defenseless. Ribbons, like the rags of a bridal train but made of her flesh, were springing from her shoulders and back, their power clearly more substantial than their delicacy implied. Some were clinging to the wall above her head, but the bulk were extended towards Sartori and wrapped around his head like a smothering hood. He clawed at them, working his fingers between them to get a better grip. Fluid ran from the gouged flesh, and cobs of matter came away in his fists. It could only be a matter of time before he released himself, and when he did he'd do her no little harm.

Gentle didn't call to his brother a second time. What was the use? The man was deafened. Instead, he crossed the cave at a stumbling rush and took hold of Sartori from behind, dragging his brother's arms from their maiming work and pinning them to his sides. As he did so he saw Celestine's gaze go between the two figures in front of her, and either the shock of what she was witnessing or her exhaustion took its toll on her strength. The wounded ribbons loosened and fell in wreaths around Sartori's neck, uncovering the other face and confirming Celestine in her distress. She withdrew the ribbons entirely, gathering them into her lap.

With his sight returned, Sartori wrenched his head around to identify his captor. Seeing Gentle, he instantly gave up his struggle to free himself and stood in the Reconciler's arms, quite pacified.

"Why do I always find you doing harm, brother?" Gentle asked him.

"Brother?" said Sartori. "Since when was it brother?"

"That's what we are."

"You tried to kill me in Yzordderrex, or have you forgotten? Has something changed?"

"Yes," said Gentle, "I have."

"Oh?"

"I'm ready to accept our... kinship."

"A fine word."

"In fact, I accept my responsibility for everything I was, am, or will be. I've got your Oviate to thank for that."

"That's good to hear," Sartori said. "Especially in this company."

He looked back at Celestine. She was still standing, though it was plainly the filaments hugging the wall that held her up, not her legs. Her eyes were flickering closed, and there were tremors running through her body. Gentle knew she needed aid, but he could do nothing while he was burdened with Sartori, so he turned and pitched his brother towards the cave door. Sartori went from him like a doll, only raising his arms to break his fall at the very last.

"Help her if you want," he said, staring back at Gentle with slackened features. "It's no skin off my nose."

Then he lifted himself up. For an instant Gentle thought he intended some reprisal, and drew breath to defend himself.

But the other simply said, "I'm on my belly, brother. Would you harm me here?"

As if to prove how low he'd fallen and was willing to stay, he began to slink over the earth, like a snake driven from a hearth.

"You're welcome to her," he said, and disappeared into the brighter murk beyond the door.

Celestine's eyes had closed by the time Gentle looked back, her body hanging limply from the tenacious ribbons. He went towards her, but as he approached her lids flickered open,

"No..." she said. "I don't want... you... near... me."

Could he blame her? One man with his face had already attempted murder, or violation, or both. Why should she trust another? Nor was this any time to be pleading his innocence; she needed help, not apology. The question was, from whom? Jude had made it clear on the way up that she'd been sent from this woman's side the same way he was being sent. Perhaps Clem could nurse the woman.

"I'll send somebody to help you," he said, and headed out into the passageway.

Sartori had disappeared: lifted himself off his belly and taken to his heels. Once again Gentle went in his footsteps, back towards the stairs. He'd covered half that distance when Jude, Clem, and Monday appeared. Their frowns evaporated when they saw Gentle.

"We thought he'd murdered you," Jude said. _ "He didn't touch me. But he's hurt Celestine, and she won't let me near her. Clem, will you see if you can help? But be careful. She may look sick, but she's strong."

"Where is she?"

"Jude'lltake you. I'm going after Sartori."

"He's gone up the tower," Monday said.

"He didn't even look at us," Jude said. She sounded almost offended. "He just stumbled out and up the stairs. What the hell did you dp to him?"

"Nothing."

"I never saw an expression like that on his face before. Or yours, come to that."

"Like what?"

"Tragic," said Clem.

"Maybe we're going to win a quicker victory than I thought," Gentle said, starting past them to the stairs.

"Wait," Jude said. "We can't tend to Celestine here. We need to take her somewhere safer."

"Agreed."

"The studio, maybe?"

"No," Gentle said. "There's a house I know in Clerken—well where we'll be safe. He drove me out of it once. But it's mine, and we're going back to it. AH of us."