Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

16

There was surely no more haunted thoroughfare in London that blistering afternoon than Gamut Street. Neither those locations in the city famous for their phantoms, nor those anonymous spots—known only to psychics and children— where reveuants gathered, boasted more souls eager to debate events in the place of their decease as that backwater in Clerkenwell. While few human eyes, even those ready for the marvelous (and the car that turned into Gamut Street at a little past four o'clock contained several such eyes), could see the phantoms as solid entities, their presence was clear enough, marked by the cold, still places in the shimmering haze rising off the road and by the stray dogs that gathered in such numbers at the corners, drawn by the high whistle some of the dead were wont to make. Thus Gamut Street cooked in a heat of its own, its stew potent with spirits.

Gentle had warned them all that there was no comfort to be had at the house. It was without furniture, water, or electricity. But the past was there, he said, and it would be a comfort to them all, after their time in the enemy's tower.

"I remember this house," Jude said as she emerged from the car.

"We should both be careful," Gentle warned, as he climbed the steps. "Sartori left one of his Oviates inside, and it nearly drove me crazy. I want to get rid of it before we all go in."

"I'm coming with you," Jude said, following him to the door.

"I don't think that's wise," he said. "Let me deal with Little Ease first."

"That's Sartori's beast?"

"Yes."

"Then I'd like to see it. Don't worry, it's not going to hurt me. I've got a little of its Maestro right here, remember?" She laid her hand upon her belly. "I'm safe."

Gentle made no objection but stood aside to let Monday force the door, which he did with the efficiency of a practiced thief. Before the boy had even retreated down the steps again, Jude was over the threshold, braving the stale, cold air.

"Wait up," Gentle said, following her into the hallway,

"What does this creature look like?" she wanted to know.

"Like an ape. Or a baby. I don't know. It talks a lot, I'm certain of that much."

"Little Ease .. — ."

"That's right."

"Perfect name for a place like this."

She'd reached the bottom of the stairs and was staring up towards the Meditation Room.

"Be careful," Gentle said.

"I heard you the first time."

"I don't think you quite understand how powerful—"

"I was born up there, wasn't I?" she said, her tone as chilly as the air. He didn't reply; not until she swung around and asked him again. "Wasn't I?"

"Yes."

Nodding, she returned to her study of the stairs. "You said the past was waiting here," she said.

"Yes."

"My past too?"

"I don't know. Probably."

"I don't feel anything. It's like a bloody graveyard. A few vague recollections, that's all."

"They'll come."

"You're very certain."

"We have to be whole, Jude."

"What do you mean by that?"

"We have to be ... reconciled... with everything we ever were before we can go on."

"Suppose I don't want to be reconciled? Suppose I want to invent myself all over again, starting now?"

"You can't do it," he said simply. "We have to be whole before we can get home."

"If that's home," she said, nodding in the direction of the Meditation Room, "you can keep it."

"I don't mean the cradle."

"What then?"

"The place before the cradle. Heaven."

"Fuck Heaven. I haven't got Earth sorted out yet."

"You don't need to."

"Let me be the judge of that. I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design."

"You can be. As part of—"

"Part of nothing. I want to be me. A law unto myself."

"That isn't you talking. It's Sartori."

"What if it is?"

"You know what he's done," Gentle replied. "The atrocities. What are you doing taking lessons from him?"

"When I should be taking them from you, you mean? Since when were you so damn perfect?" He made no reply, and she took his silence as further sign of his new high-mindedness. "Oh, so you're not going to stoop to mudslinging, is that it?"

"We'll debate it later," he said.

"Debate it?" she mocked. "What are you going to give us, Maestro, an ethics lesson? I want to know what makes you so damn rare."

"I'm Celestine's son," he said quietly.

She stared at him, agog. "You're what?"

"Celestine's son. She was taken from the Fifth—"

"I know where she was taken. Dowd did it. I thought he'd told me the whole story."

"Not this part?"

"Not this part."

"There were kinder ways to tell you. I'm sorry I didn't find one."

"No," she said. "Where better?"

Her gaze went back up the stairs. When she spoke again, which was not for a little time, it was in a whisper.

"You're lucky," she said. "Home and Heaven are the same place."

"Maybe that's true for us all," he murmured.

"I doubt it."

A long silence followed, punctuated only by Monday's forlorn attempts to whistle on the step outside.

At last, Jude said, "I can see now why you're so desperate to get all this right. You're... how does it go? ... you're about your Father's business."

"I hadn't thought of it quite like that...."

"But you are."

"I suppose I am. I just hope I'm equal to it, that's all. One minute I feel it's all possible. The next..."

He studied her, while outside Monday attempted the tune afresh.

"Tell me what you're thinking," he said.

"I'm thinking I wish I'd kept your love letters," she replied.

There was another aching pause; then she turned from him and wandered off towards the back of the house. He lingered at the bottom of the stairs, thinking he should probably go with her, in case Sartori's agent was hiding there, but he was afraid to bruise her further with his scrutiny. He glanced back towards the open door and the sun— " light on the step. Safety wasn't far from her, if she needed it.

"How's it going?" he called to Monday.

"Hot," came the reply. "Clem's gone to fetch some food and beer. Lots of beer. We should have a party, boss. We fuckin' deserve it, don't we?"

"We do. How's Celestine?"

"She's asleep. Is it okay to come in yet?"

"Just a little while longer," Gentle replied. "But keep up the whistling, will you? There's a tune in there somewhere."

Monday laughed, and the sound, which was utterly commonplace of course, yet as unlikely as whale song, pleased him. If Little Ease was still in the house, Gentle thought, his malice could do no great harm on a day as miraculous as this. Comforted, he set off up the stairs, wondering as he went if perhaps the daylight had shooed all the memories into hiding. But before he was halfway up the flight, he had proof that they hadn't. The phantom form of Lucius Cobbitt, conjured in his mind's eye, appeared beside him, snotty, tearful, and desperate for wisdom. Moments later, the sound of his own voice, offering the advice he'd given the boy that last, terrible night.

"Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing..."

But before he'd completed the second dictum, the phrase was taken up by a mellifluous voice from above.

"... except in adoration of your true self. And fear noth—. ing..."

The figment of Lucius Cobbitt faded as Gentle continued to climb, but the voice became louder.

"... except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing."

And with the voice came the realization that the wisdom he'd bestowed on Lucius had not been his at all. It had originated with the mystif. The door to the Meditation Room was open, and Pie was perched on the sill, smiling out of the past.

"When did you invent that?" the Maestro asked.

"I didn't invent it, I learned it," the mystif replied. "From my mother. And she learned it from her mother, or t her father, who knows? Now you can pass it on."

"And what am I?" he asked the mystif. "Your son or ; your daughter?"

— Pie looked almost abashed. "You're my Maestro."

"Is that all? We're still masters and servants here? Don't

— say that."

: "What should I say?" "What you feel."

"Oh." The mystif smiled. "If I told you what I feel we'd be here all day."

The gleam of mischief in its eye was so endearing, and the memory so real, it was all Gentle could do to prevent himself crossing the room and embracing the space where his friend had sat. But there was work to be done—his Father's business, as Jude had called it—and it was more pressing than indulging his memories. When Little Ease had been ousted from the house, then he'd return here and search for a profounder lesson: that of the workings of the Reconciliation. He needed that education quickly, and the echoes here were surely rife with exchanges on the subject.

"I'll be back," he said to the creature on the sill.

"I'll be waiting," it replied.

He glanced back towards it, and the sun, catching the window behind, momentarily ate into its silhouette, showing him not a whole figure but a fragment. His gut turned, as the image called another back to mind, with appalling force: the Erasure, in roiling chaos, and in the air above his head, the howling rags of his beloved, returned into the Second with some words of warning.

"Undone," it had said, as it fought the claim of the Erasure. "We are... undone."

Had he made some placating reply, snatched from his lips by the storm? He didn't remember. But he heard again the mystif telling him to find Sartori, instructing him that his other knew something that he, Gentle, didn't. And then it had gone, been snatched away into the First Dominion and silenced there.

His heart racing, Gentle shook this horror from his head and looked back towards the sill. It was empty now. But — Pie's exhortation to find Sartori was still in his head. Why had that been so important? he wondered. Even if the mystif had somehow discovered the truth of Gentle's origins in the First Dominion and had failed to communicate the fact, it must have known that Sartori was as much in ignorance of the secret as his brother. So what was the knowledge the mystif had believed Sartori possessed, that it had defied the limits of God's Kingdom to spur him into pursuit?

A shout from below had him give up the enigma. Jude was calling out to him. He headed down the stairs at speed, following her voice through the house and into the kitchen, which was targe and chilly. Jude was standing close to the window, which had gone to ruin many years ago, giving access to the convolvulus from the garden behind, which having entered had rotted in a darkness its own abundance had thickened. The sun could only get pencil beams through this snare of foliage and wood, but they were sufficient to illuminate both the woman and the captive whose head she had pinned beneath her foot. It was Little Ease, his oversized mouth drawn down like a tragic mask, his eyes turned up towards Jude.

"Is this it?" she said.

"This is it."

Little Ease set up a round of thin mewling as Gentle approached, which it turned into words. "I didn't do a thing! You ask her, ask her please, ask her did I do a thing? No, I didn't. Just keeping out of harm's way, I was."

"Sartori's not very happy with you," Gentle said.

"Well, I didn't have a hope," it protested. "Not against the likes of you. Not against a Reconciler."

"So you know that much."

"I do now. 'We have to be whole,' " it quoted, catching Gentle's tone perfectly. " 'We have to be reconciled with everything we ever were—' "

"You were listening."

"I can't help it," the creature said. "I was born inquisitive. I didn't understand it, though," it hastened to add. "I'm not spying, I swear."

"Liar," Jude said. Then to Gentle, "How do we kill it?"

"We don't have to," he said. "Are you afraid, Little Ease?"

"What do you think?"

"Would you swear allegiance to me if you were allowed to live?"

"Where do I sign? Show me the place!"

"You'd let this live?" Jude said.

"Yes."

"What for?" she demanded, grinding her heel upon it. "Look at it."

"Don't," Little Ease begged.

"Swear," said Gentle, going down on his haunches beside it.

"I swear! I swear!"

Gentle looked up at Jude. "Lift your foot," he said.

"You trust it?"

"I don't want death here," he said. ''Even this. Let it go, Jude." She didn't move. "I said, let it go."

Reluctance in every sinew, she raised her foot half an inch and Little Ease scrabbled free, instantly taking hold of Gentle's hand.

"I'm yours, Liberatore," it said, touching its clammy brow to Gentle's palm, "My head's in your hands. By Hyo, by Heretea, by Hapexamendios, I commit my heart to you."

"Accepted," Gentle said, and stood up.

"What should I do now, Liberatore?"

"There's a room at the top of the stairs. Wait for me there"

"For ever and ever."

"A few minutes will do."

It backed off to the door, bowing woozily, then took to its heels.

"How can you trust a thing like that?" Jude said.

"I don't. Not yet."

"But you're willing to try."

"You're damned if you can't forgive, Jude."

"Youcould forgive Sartori, could you?" she said.

"He's me, he's my brother, and he's my child," Gentle replied. "How could I not?"

With the house made safe, the rest of the company moved in. Monday, ever the scavenger, went off to scour the neighboring houses and streets in search of whatever he could find to offer some modicum of comfort. He returned three times with bounty, the third time taking Clem off with him. They returned half an hour later with two mattresses and armfuls of bed linen, all too clean to have been found abandoned,

"I missed my vocation," Clem said, with Tay's mischief in his features. "Burglary's much more fun than banking."

At this juncture Monday requested permission to borrow Jude's car and drive back to the South Bank, there to collect the belongings he'd left behind in his haste to follow Gentle. She told him yes, but urged him to return as fast as possible. Though it was still bright on the street outside, they would need as many strong artns and wills as they could muster to defend the house when night fell. Clem had settled Celestine in what had been the dining room, laying the larger of the two mattresses on the floor and sitting with her until she slept. When he emerged Tay's feisty presence was mellowed, and the man who came to join Jude on the step was serene.

"Is she asleep?" Jude asked him.

"I don't know if it's sleep or a coma. Where's Gentle?"

"Upstairs, plotting,"

"You've argued."

"That's nothing new. Everything else changes, but that remains the same."

He opened one of the bottles of beer sitting on the step and drank with gusto.

"You know, I catch myself every now and then wondering if this is all some hallucination. You've probably got a better grasp of it than I have—you've seen the Dominions; you know it's all real—but when I went off with Monday to get the mattresses, there were people just a few streets away, walking around in the sun as though it was just another day, and I thought, There's a woman back there who's been buried alive for two hundred years, and her son whose Father's a God I never heard of—"

"So he told you that."

"Oh, yes. And thinking about it, I wanted to just go home, lock the door, and pretend it wasn't happening."

"What stopped you?"

"Monday, mostly. He just takes everything in stride. And knowing Tay's inside me. Though that feels so natural it's like he was always there."

"Maybe he was," she said. "Is there any more beer?"

"Yep."

He handed over a bottle, and she struck it on the step the way he had. The top flew; the beer foamed.

"So what made you want to run?" she said, when she'd slaked her thirst.

"I don't know," Clem replied. "Fear of what's coming, I suppose. But that's stupid, isn't it? We're here at the beginning of something sublime, just the way Tay promised. Light coming into the world, from a place we never even dreamed existed. It's the Birth of the Unconquered Son, isn't it?"

"Oh, the sons are going to be fine," Jude said. "They usually are."

"But you're not so sure about the daughters?"

"No, I'm not," she said. "Hapexamendios killed the Goddesses throughout the Imajica, Clem, or at least tried to. Now I find He's Gentle's Father. That doesn't make me feel too comfortable about doing His work."

"I can understand that."

"Part of me thinks..." She let her voice trail into the silence, the thought unfinished.

"What?" he asked. "Tell me."

"Part of me thinks we're fools to trust either of them, Hapexamendios or His Reconciler. If He was such a loving L God, why did He do so much harm? And don't tell me He moves in mysterious ways, because that's so much horse shit and we both know it."

"Have you talked to Gentle about this?"

"I've tried, but he's got one thing on his mind—"

"Two," Clem said. "The Reconciliation's one. Pie 'oh' pah's the other."

"Oh, yes, the glorious Pie 'oh' pah."

"Did you know he married it?"

"Yes, he told me."

"It must have been quite a creature."

"I'm a little biased, I'm afraid," she said dryly. "It tried to kill me."

"Gentle said that wasn't Pie's nature."

"No?"

"He told me he ordered it to live its life as an assassin or a whore. It's all his fault, he said. He blames himself for everything."

"Does he blame himself or does he.just take responsibility?" she said. "There's a difference."

"I don't know," Clem said, unwilling to be drawn on such niceties. "He's certainly lost without Pie."

She kept her counsel here, wanting to say that she too : was lost, that she too pined, but not trusting even Clem with this admission.

"He told me Pie's spirit is still alive, like Tay's," Clem was saying. "And when this is all over—"

"He says a lot of things," Jude cut in, weary of hearing Gentle's wisdoms repeated. ; "And you don't believe him?"

"What do I know?" she said, flinty now. "I don't belong • in this Gospel. I'm not his lover, and I won't be his disciple."

A sound behind them, and they turned to find Gentle standing in the hallway, the brightness bouncing up from the step like footlights. There was sweat on his face, and his shirt was stuck to his chest. Clem rose with guilty speed, his heel catching his bottle. It rolled down two steps, spilling frothy beer as it went, before Jude caught it.

"It's hot up there," Gentle said.

"And it's not getting any cooler," Clem observed.

"Can I have a word?"

Jude knew he wanted to speak out of her earshot, but Clem was either too guileless to realize this, which she doubted, or unwilling to play his game. He stayed on the step, obliging Gentle to come to the door.

"When Monday gets back," he said, "I'd like you to go to the estate and bring back the stones in the Retreat. I'm going to perform the Reconciliation upstairs, where I've got my memories to help me."

"Why are you sending Clem?" Jude said, not rising or even turning. "I know the way; he doesn't. I know what the stones look like; he doesn't."

"I think you'd be better off here," Gentle replied.

Now she turned. "What for?" she said. "I'm no use to anyone. Unless you simply want to keep an eye on me."

"Not at all."

"Then let me go," she said. "I'll take Monday to help me. Clem and Tay can stay here. They're your angels, aren't they?"

"If that's the way you'd prefer it," he said, "I don't mind."

"I'll come back, don't worry," she said derisively, raising her beer bottle. "If it's only to toast the miracle."

A little while after this conversation, with the blue tide of dusk rising in the street and lifting the day to the rooftops, Gentle left off his debates with Pie and went to sit with Celestine. Her room was more meditative than the one he'd left, where the memories of Pie had become so easy to conjure it was sometimes hard to believe the mystif wasn't there in the flesh. Clem had lit candles beside the mattress upon which Celestine was sleeping, and their light showed Gentle a woman so deeply asleep that no dreams troubled her. Though she was far from emaciated, her features were stark, as though her flesh was halfway to becoming bone. He studied her for a time, wondering if his own face would one day possess such severity; then he returned to the wall at the bottom of the bed and sat on his haunches there, listening to the slow cadence of her breath.

His mind was reeling with all that he'd learned, or recollected, in the room above. Like so much of the magic he'd become acquainted with, the working of the Reconciliation was not a great ceremonial. Whereas most of the dominant religions of the Fifth wallowed in ritual in order to blind their flocks to the paucity of their understanding—the liturgies and requiems, charts and sacraments all created to amplify those tiny grains of comprehension the holy men actually possessed—such theatrics were redundant when the ministers had truth in their grasp, and with the help of memory he might yet become one such minister.

The principle of the Reconciliation was not very difficult to grasp, he'd discovered. Every two hundred years, it seemed, the In Ovo produced a kind of blossom: a five—petaled lotus which floated for a brief time in those lethal waters, immune to either their poison or their inhabitants. This sanctuary was called by a variety of names but most simply, and most often, the Ana. In it, the Maestros would gather, carrying there analogues of the Dominions they each represented. Once the pieces were assembled, the process had its own momentum. The analogues would fuse and, empowered by the Ana, burgeon, driving the In Ovo back and opening the way between the Reconciled Dominions and the Fifth.

"The flow of things is towards success," the mystif had said, speaking from a better time. "It's the natural instinct of every broken thing to make itself whole. And the Imajica is broken until it's Reconciled."

"Then why have there been so many failures?" Gentle had asked.

"There haven't been that many," Pie had replied. "And they were always destroyed by outside forces. Christos was brought down by politics. Pineo was destroyed by the Vatican. Always people from the outside, destroying the Maestro's best intentions. We don't have such enemies."

Ironic words, with hindsight. Gentle could not afford such complacency again, not with Sartori still alive and the chilling image of Pie's last frantic appearance at the Erasure still in his head.

It was no use dwelling on it. He put the sight away as best he could, settling his gaze on Celestine instead. It was difficult to think of her as his mother. Maybe, among the innumerable memories he'd garnered in this house, there was some faint recollection of being a babe in these arms, of putting his toothless mouth to these breasts and being nourished there. But if it was there, it escaped him. Perhaps there were simply too many years, and lives, and women, between now and that cradling. He could find it in him to be grateful for the life she'd given him, but it was hard to feel much more than that.

After a time the vigil began to depress him. She was too like a corpse, lying there, and he too much a dutiful but loveless mourner. He got up to go, but before he quit the room he halted at her bedside and stooped to touch her cheek. He'd not laid his flesh to hers in twenty-three or — four decades, and perhaps, after this, he wouldn't do so again. She wasn't chilly, as he'd expected her to be, but warm, and he kept his hand upon her longer than he'd intended.

Somewhere in the depths of her slumber she felt his touch and seemed to rise into a dream of him. Her austerity softened, and her pale lips said, "Child?"

He wasn't sure whether to answer, but in the moment of hesitation she spoke again, the same question. This time he replied.

"Yes, Mama?" he said.

"Will you remember what I told you?"

What now? he wondered. "I'm ... not certain," he told her.'Til try."

"Shall I tell you again? I want you to remember, child."

"Yes, Mama," he said. "That would be good. Tell me again."

She smiled an infinitesimal smile and began to repeat a story she'd apparently told many times.

"There was a woman once, called Nisi Nirvana...."

She'd no sooner started, however, than the dream she was having lost its claim on her, and she began to slip back into a deeper place, her voice losing power as she went.

"Don't stop, Mama," Gentle prompted. "I want to hear. There was a woman ..."

"Yes..."

",.. called Nisi Nirvana."

"Yes. And she went to a city full of iniquities, where no ghost was holy and no flesh was whole. And something there did a great hurt to her...."

Her voice was getting stronger again, but the smile, even that tiniest hint, had gone.

"What hurt was this, Mama?"

"You needn't know the hurt, child. You'll learn about it one day, and on that day you'll wish you could forget it. Just understand that it's a hurt only men can do to women."

"And who did this hurt to her?" Gentle asked.

"I told you, child, a man."

"But what man?"

"His name doesn't matter. What matters is that she escaped him, and came back into her own city, and knew she must make a good thing from this bad that had been done to her. And do you know what that good thing was?"

"No, Mama."

"It was a little baby. A perfect little baby. And she loved it so much it grew big after a time, and she knew it would be leaving her, so she said, 'I have a story to tell you before you go.' And do you know what the story was? I want you to remember, child."

"Tell me."

"There was a woman called Nisi Nirvana. And she went into a city of iniquities—"

"That's the same story, Mama."

"—where no ghost was holy—"

"You haven't finished the first story. You've just begun again."

"—and no flesh was whole. And something there—"

"Stop, Mama," Gentle said. "Stop."

"—did a great hurt to her...."

Distressed by this loop, Gentle took his hand from his mother's cheek. She didn't halt her recitation, however; at least not at first. The story went on exactly as it had before: the escape from the city; the good thing made from the bad; the baby, the perfect little baby. But with the hand no longer on her cheek Celestine was sinking back into unthinking slumber, her voice steadily growing more indistinct. Gentle got up and backed away to the door, as the whispered wheel came full circle again.

"So she said: I have a story to tell you before you go."

Gentle reached behind him and opened the door, his eyes fixed on his mother as the words slurred.

"And do you know what the story was?" she said. "I want... you ... to ... remember... child."

He went on watching her as he slipped out into the hallway. The last sounds he heard would have been nonsense to any ear other than this, but he'd heard this story often enough now to know that she was beginning again as she'd dropped into dreamlessness.

"There was a woman once ..."

On that, he closed the door. For some inexplicable reason, he was shaking, and had to stand at the threshold for several seconds before he could control the tremor. When he turned, he found Clem at the bottom of the stairs, sorting through a selection of candles.

"Is she still asleep?" he asked as Gentle approached.

"Yes, Has she talked to you at all, Clem?"

"Very little. Why?"

"I've just been listening to her tell a story in her sleep. Something about a woman called Nisi Nirvana. Do you know what that means?"

"Nisi Nirvana. Unless Heaven. Is that somebody's name?"

"Apparently. And it must mean a lot to her, for some reason. That's the name she sent Jude with to fetch me."

"And what's the story?"

"Damn strange," Gentle said.

"Maybe you liked it better when you were a kid."

"Maybe."

"If I hear her talking again, do you want me to call you down?"

"I don't think so," Gentle said. "I've got it by heart already."

He started up the stairs.

"You're going to need some candles up there," Clem said. "And matches to light 'em with."

"So I am," Gentle said, turning back.

Clem handed over half a dozen candles, thick, stubby, and white. Gentle handed one of them back.

"Five's the magic number," he said.

"I left some food at the top of the stairs," Clem said as Gentle started to climb again. "It's not exactly haute cuisine, but it's sustenance. And if you don't claim it now it'll be gone as soon as the boy gets back."

Gentle called his thanks back down the flight, picked up the bread, strawberries, and bottle of beer waiting at the top, then returned to the Meditation Room, closing the door behind him. Perhaps because he was still preoccupied with what he'd heard from his mother's lips, the memories of Pie were not waiting at the threshold. The room was empty, a cell of the present. It wasn't until Gentle had set the candles on the mantelpiece, and was lighting one of them, that he heard the mystif speaking softly behind him.

"Now I've distressed you," it said.

Gentle turned into the room and found the mystif at the window, where it so often loitered, with a look of deep concern on its face.

"I shouldn't have asked," Pie went on. "It's just idle curiosity. I heard Abelove asking the boy Lucius a day or two ago, and it made me wonder."

"What did Lucius say?"

"He said he remembered being suckled. That was the first thing he could recall: the teat at his mouth."

Only now did Gentle grasp the subject under debate here. Once again his memory had found some fragment of conversation between himself and the mystif pertinent to his present concerns. They'd talked of childhood memories in this very room, and the Maestro had been plunged into the same distress which he felt now; and for the same reason.

"But to remember a story," Pie was saying. "Particularly one you didn't like—"

"It wasn't that I didn't like it," the Maestro said. "At least, it didn't frighten me, the way a ghost story might have done. It was worse than that...."

"We don't have to talk about this," Pie said, and for a moment Gentle thought the conversation was going to fizzle out there. He wasn't altogether certain he'd have minded if it had. But it seemed to have been one of the unwritten rules of this house that no inquiry was ever fled from, however discomfiting.

"No, I want to explain if I can," the Maestro said. "Though what a child fears is sometimes hard to fathom."

"Unless we can listen with a child's heart," Pie said.

"That's harder still."

"We can try, can't we? Tell me the story."

"Well, it always began the same way. My mother would say, I want you to remember, child, and I'd know right away what was going to follow. There was a woman called Nisi Nirvana, and she went into a city full of iniquities...."

Now Gentle heard the story again, this time from his own lips, told to the mystif. The woman; the city; the crime; the child; and then, with a sickening inevitability, the story beginning again with the woman and the city and the crime.

"Rape isn't a very pretty subject for a nursery tale," Pie observed.

"She never used that word."

"But that's what the crime is, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said softly, though he was uncomfortable with the admission. This was his mother's secret, his mother's pain. But yes, of course, Nisi Nirvana was Celestine, and the city of terrors was the First Dominion. She'd told her child her own story, encoded in a grim little fable. But more bizarrely than that, she'd folded the listener into the tale, and even the telling of the tale itself, creating a circle impossible to break because all of its constituent elements were trapped inside. Was it that sense of entrapment that had so distressed him as a child? Pie had another theory, however, and was voicing it from across the years.

"No wonder you were so afraid," the mystif said, "not knowing what the crime was, but knowing it was terrible. I'm sure she meant no harm by it. But your imagination must have run riot."

Gentle didn't reply; or, rather, couldn't. For the first time in these conversations with Pie he knew more than history did, and the discontinuity fractured the glass in which he'd been seeing the past. He felt a bitter sense of loss, adding to the distress he'd carried into this room. It was as though the tale of Nisi Nirvana marked the divide between the self who'd occupied these rooms two hundred years before, ignorant of his divinity, and the man he was now, who knew that the story of Nisi Nirvana was his mother's story, and the crime she'd told him about was the act that had brought him into being. There could be no more dallying in the past after this. He'd learned what he needed to know about the Reconciliation, and he couldn't justify further loitering. It was time to leave the comfort of memory, and Pie with it.

He picked up the bottle of beer and struck off the cap. It probably wasn't wise to be drinking alcohol at this juncture, but he wanted to toast the past before it faded from view entirely. There must have been a time", he thought, when he and Pie had raised a glass to the millennium. Could he conjure such a moment now and join his intention with the past one last time? He raised the bottle to his lips and, as he drank, heard Pie laughing across the room. He looked in the mystlf's direction, and there, fading already, he caught a glimpse of his lover, not with a glass in hand but a carafe, . toasting the future. He lifted the beer bottle to touch the carafe, but the mystif was fading too fast. Before past and present could share the toast, the vision was gone. It was time to begin.

Downstairs, Monday was back, talking excitedly. Setting the bottle down on the mantelpiece, Gentle went out onto the landing to find out what all the furor was about. The boy was at the door, in the middle of describing the state of the city to Clem and Jude. He'd never seen a stranger Saturday night, he said. The streets were practically empty. The only thing that was moving was the traffic lights.

"At least we'll have an easy trip," Jude said.

"Are we going somewhere?"

She told him, and he was well pleased.

"I like it out in the country," he said. "We can do what the fuck we like."

"Let's just make it back alive," she said. "He's relying on us."

"No problem," Monday said cheerily. Then, to Clem: "Look after the boss-man, huh? If things get weird, we can always call on Irish and the rest."

"Did you tell them where we are?" Clem said.

"They're not going to fetch up lookin' for a bed, don't worry," Monday said. "But the way I reckon it, the more friends we got, the better." He turned to Jude. "I'm ready when you are," he said, and headed back outside.

"This shouldn't take more than two or three hours," Jude told Clem. "Look after yourself. And him."

She glanced up the stairs as she spoke, but the candles at the bottom threw too frail a light to reach the top, and she failed to see Gentle there. It was only when she'd gone from the step, and the car was roaring away down the street, that he made his presence known.

"Monday's come back," Clem said.

"I heard."

"Did he disturb you? I'm sorry."

"No, no. I was finished anyway."

"The night's so hot," Clem said, gazing up at the sky.

"Why don't you sleep for a while? I can stand guard."

"Where's that bloody pet of yours?"

"He's called Little Ease, Clem, and he's on the top floor, keeping watch."

"I don't trust him, Gentle."

"He'll do us no harm. Go and lie down."

"Have you finished with Pie?"

"I think I've learned what I can. Now I've got to check on the rest of the Synod."

"How'11 you do that?"

"I'll leave my body upstairs and go traveling."

"That sounds dangerous."

"I've done it before. But my flesh and blood'll be vulnerable while I'm out of it."

"As soon as you're ready to go, wake me. I'll watch over you like a hawk."

"Have an hour's nap first."

Clem picked up one of the candles and went to look for a place to lie down, leaving Gentle to take over his post at the front door. He sat on the step with his head laid against the door frame and enjoyed what little breeze the night could supply. There were no lamps working in the street. It was the light of the moon, and the stars in array around it, that picked out the details in the house opposite and caught the pale undersides of the leaves when the wind lifted them. Lulled, he fell into a doze and missed the shooting stars.

"Oh, how beautiful," the girl said. She couldn't have been more than sixteen, and when she laughed, which her beau had made her do a lot tonight, she sounded even younger. But she wasn't laughing now. She was standing in the darkness staring up at the meteor shower, while Sartori looked on admiringly.

He'd found her three hours earlier, wandering through the Midsummer Fair on Hampstead Heath, and had easily charmed himself into her company. The fair was doing poor business, with so few people out and about, so when the rides closed down, which they did at the first sign of dusk, he talked her into coming into the City with him. They'd buy some wine, he said, and wander; find a place to sit and talk and watch the stars. It was a long time since he'd indulged himself in a seduction—Judith had been another kind of challenge entirely—but the tricks of the trade came back readily enough, and the satisfaction of watching her resistance crumble, plus the wine he imbibed, did much to assuage the pain of recent defeats.

The girl—her name was Monica—was both lovely and compliant. She met his gaze only coyly at first, but that was all part of the game, and it contented him to play it for a while, as a diversion from the coming tragedy. Coy as she was, she didn't reject him when he suggested they take a stroll around the fields of demolished buildings at the back of Shiverick Square, though she made some remark about wanting him to treat her carefully. So he did. They walked together in the darkness until they found a spot where the undergrowth thinned and made a kind of grove. The sky was clear overhead, and she had a fine, swooning sight of the meteor shower.

"It always makes me feel a little bit afraid," she told him in a charmless Cockney. "Looking at the stars, I mean."

"Why's that?"

"Well... we're so small, aren't we?"

He'd asked her earlier to tell him about her life, and she'd volunteered scraps of biography, first about a boy called Trevor, who'd said he loved her but had gone off with her best friend; then about her mother's collection of china frogs, and how much she'd like to live in Spain, because everybody was so much happier there. But now, without prompting, she told him she didn't care about Spain or Trevor or the china frogs. She was happy, she said; and the sight of the stars, which usually scared her, tonight made her want to fly, to which he said that they could indeed fly, together, if she just said the word.

At this she looked away from the sky, with a resigned sigh.

"I know what you want," she said. "You're all the same. Flying. Is that your fancy word for it then?"

He said she'd misunderstood him completely. He hadn't brought her here to fumble and fuss with her. That was beneath them both.

"What then?" she said.

He answered her with his hand, too swiftly to be contradicted. The second primal act, after the one she'd thought he'd brought her here to perform. Her struggles were almost as resigned as her sigh, and she was dead on the ground in less than a minute. Overhead, the stars continued to fall in an abundance he remembered from this time two hundred years before. An unseasonal rain of heavenly bodies, to presage the business of tomorrow night.

He dismembered and disemboweled her with the greatest care and laid the pieces around the grove in time—honored fashion. There was no need to hurry. This working was better completed in the bleak moments before dawn, and they were still some hours away. When they came, and the working was performed, he had high hopes for it. Godolphin's body had been cold when he'd used it, and its owner scarcely an innocent. The creatures he'd tempted from the In Ovo with such unappetizing bait had therefore been primitive. Monica, on the other hand, was warm and had not lived long enough to be much soiled. Her death would open a deeper crack in the In Ovo than Godolphin's, and through it he hoped to draw a particular species of Oviate uniquely suited for the work tomorrow would bring: a sleek, bitter-throated kind, that would help him prove, by tomorrow night, what a child born to destruction could do.