Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

4

Like galleons turned to the desert wind and in full sail before it, the tents of the Dearthers presented a pretty spectacle from a distance, but Gentle's admiration turned to awe as the car drew closer and their scale became apparent. They were the height of five-story houses and more, billowing towers of ocher and scarlet fabric, the colors all the more vivid given that the desert floor, which had been sand-colored at the outset, was now almost black, and the heavens they rose against were gray, being the wall between the

Second Dominion and the unknown world haunted by Hapexamendios.

Floccus halted the car a quarter of a mile from the perimeter of the encampment. "I should go ahead," he said, "and explain who we are and what we're doing here."

"Make it quick," Gentle told him.

Floccus was away like a gazelle, over ground that was no longer sand but a flinty carpet of stone shards, like the clippings from some stupendous sculpture. Gentle looked at the mystif, lying in his arms as if in a charmed sleep, its brow innocent of frowns. He stroked its cold cheek.

How many friends and loved ones must he have seen pass away in the two centuries and more of his life on earth? Though he'd wiped those griefs from his conscious mind, could he doubt they'd made their mark, fueling his terror of sickness and hardening his heart over the years? Perhaps he'd always been a philanderer and plagiarist, a master of counterfeited emotion, but was that so surprising in a man who knew in his gut that the drama, however soul-searing, was cyclic? The faces changed and changed, but the story remained essentially the same. As Klein had been fond of pointing out, there was no such thing as originality. It had all been said before, suffered before. If a man knew that, was it any wonder love became mechanical and death just a scene to be shunned? There was no absolute knowledge to be gained from either. Just another ride on the merry-go-round, another blurred scene of faces smiling and faces grieved.

But his feelings for the mystif had been no sham, and with good reason. In Pie's self-denials ("I'm nothing and nobody," it had said at the beginning) he'd heard an echo of the anguish he himself felt; and in Pie's gaze, so heavy with the freight of years, seen a comr'ade soul who understood the nameless pain he carried. It had stripped him of his shams and chicanery and given him a taste of the Maestro he'd been and might be again. There was good to be done with such power, he now knew: breaches to be healed, rights to be restored, nations to be roused, and hopes reawakened. He needed his inspiration beside him if he was to be a great Reconciler.

"I love you, Pie 'oh' pah," he murmured.

"Gentle."

The voice was Floccus', calling him from outside the window.

"I've seen Athanasius. He says we're to come straight in."

"Good! Good!" Gentle threw open the door.

"Do you want help?"

"No. I'll carry Pie." He got out, then reached back into the car and picked up the mystif.

"Gentle, you do understand that this is a sacred place?" Floccus said as he led the way towards the tents.

"No singing, dancing, or farting, huh? Don't look so pained, Floccus. I understand."

As they approached, Gentle realized that what he'd taken to be an encampment of closely gathered tents was in fact a continuum, the various pavilions, with their swooping roofs, joined by smaller tents to form a single golden beast of wind and canvas.

Inside its body, the gusts kept everything in motion. Tremors moved through even the most tautly erected walls, and in the heights of the roof swaths of fabric whirled like the skirts of dervishes, giving off a constant sigh. There were people up among the folds, some walking on webs of rope as if they were solid board, others sitting in front of immense windows opened in the roof, their faces turned to the wall of the First World as though they anticipated a summons out of that place at any moment. If such a summons came, there'd be no hectic rush. The atmosphere was as measured and soothing as the motion of the dancing sails above.

"Where do we find the doctor?" Gentle asked Floccus. "There is no doctor," he replied. "Follow me. We've been given a place to lay the mystif down."

"There must be some kind of medical attendants." "There's fresh water and clothes. Maybe some laudanum and the like. But Pie's beyond that. The uredo won't be dislodged with medications. It's the proximity of the First Dominion that'll heal it."

"Then we should go outside right now," he said. "Get Pie closer to the Erasure."

"Any closer than this would take more resilience than either you or I possess, Gentle," Floccus said. "Now follow me, and be respectful of this place."'

He led Gentle through the beast's tremulous body to a smaller tent, where a dozen plain low beds were set, some occupied, most not. Gentle laid the mystif down in one and proceeded to unbutton its shirt while Floccus went in search of cool water for its now-burning skin and some sustenance for Gentle and himself. While he waited, Gentle examined the spread of the uredo, which was too extensive to be fully examined without stripping Pie completely, which he was loath to do with so many strangers in the vicinity. The mystif had been covetous of its privacy—it had been many weeks before Gentle had glimpsed its beauty naked—and he wanted to respect that modesty, even in Pie's present condition. In fact, very few of those who passed by even glanced their way, and after a time he began to feel the fear lose its grip on him. There was very little more that he could do. They were at the edge of the known Dominions, where all maps stopped and the enigma of enigmas began. What use was fear in the face of such imponderables? He had to put it aside and proceed with dignity and containment, trusting to the powers that occupied the air here.

When Floccus returned with the means to wash Pie, Gentle asked if he might be left alone to do so.

"Of course," Floccus replied. "I've got friends here. I'd like to seek them out."

When he left, Gentle began to bathe the suppurating eruptions of the uredo, which oozed not blood but a silvery pus, the smell of which pricked his sinuses like ammonia. The body it fed upon seemed not only enfeebled but somehow unfocused, as though its contours and musculature were about to become a vapor, and the flesh disperse. Whether this was the uredo's doing or simply the condition of a mystif when life, and therefore its capacity to shape the sight of those gazing upon it, was fading, Gentle didn't know, but it made him think back over the way this body had appeared to him. As Judith, of course; as an assassin, armored in nakedness; and as the loving androgyne of their wedding night in the Cradle, that had momentarily taken his face and stared back at him like a prophecy of Sartori. Now, finally, it seemed to be a form of burnished mist, receding from his hand even as he touched it.

"Gentle? Is that you? I didn't know you could see in the dark."

Gentle looked up from Pie's body to find that in the time he'd been washing the mystif, half mesmerized by memory, the evening had fallen. There were lights burning at the bedsides of those nearby, but none near Pie 'oh' pah. When he returned his gaze to the body he'd been washing, it was barely discernible in the gloom.

"I didn't know I could either."

He stood up to greet the newcomer. It was Athanasius, a lamp in his hand. By its flame, which was as subject to the wind's whim as the canvas overhead, Gentle saw he'd been wounded in the fall of Yzordderrex. There were several cuts on his face and neck and a larger, livid injury on his belly. For a man who'd celebrated Sundays by making himself a new crown of thorns, these were probably welcome discomforts.

"I'm sorry I didn't come to welcome you earlier," he said. "But with such numbers of casualties coming in I spend a lot of time administering last rites."

Gentle didn't remark on this, but the fear crept back up his spine.

"We've had a lot of the Autarch's soldiers find their way here, and that makes me nervous. Fm afraid we'll let in someone on a suicide mission, and he'll blow the place apart. That's the way the bastard thinks. If he's destroyed, he'll want to bring everything down with him."

"I'm sure he's much more concerned with making his getaway," Gentle said.

"Where can he go? The word's already spread across the Imajica. There's armed uprising in Patashoqua. There's hand-to-hand combat on the Lenten Way. Every Dominion's shaking. Even the First."

"The First? How?"

"Haven't you seen? No, obviously you haven't. Come with me."

Gentle glanced back towards Pie.

"The mystif's safe here," Athanasius said. "We won't be long."

He led Gentle through the body of the beast to a door that took them out into the deepening dusk. Though Floccus had counseled against what they were doing, hinting that the Erasure's proximity could do harm, there was no sign of any consequence. He was either protected by Athanasius or resistant to any malign influence on his own account. Either way, he was able to study the spectacle laid before him without ill effect.

There was no wall of fog, or even deeper twilight, to mark the division between the Second Dominion and the haunt of Hapexamendios. The desert simply faded away into nothingness, like a drawing erased by the power on the other side, first becoming unfocused, then losing its color and its detail. This subtle removal of solid reality, the world wiped away and replaced with nothing, was the most distressing sight Gentle had ever set eyes on. Nor was the similarity between what was happening here and the state of Pie's body lost on him.

"You said the Erasure was moving," Gentle whispered.

Athanasius scanned the emptiness, looking for some sign, but nothing caught his eye.

"It's not constant," he said. "But every now and then ripples appear in it.""Is that rare?"

"There are accounts of this happening in earlier times, but this isn't an area that encourages accurate study. Observers get poetic here. Scientists turn to sonnets. Sometimes literally." He laughed. "That was a joke, by the way. Just in case you start worrying about your legs rhyming."

"How does looking at this make you feel?" Gentle asked him.

"Afraid," Athanasius said. "Because I'm not ready to be there."

"Nor am I," Gentle said. "But I'm afraid Pie is. I wish I'd never come, Athanasius. Maybe I should take Pie away now, while I still can."

"That's your decision," Athanasius replied. "But I don't believe the mystif will survive if you move it. A uredo's a terrible poison, Gentle. If there's any chance of Pie being healed, it's here, close to the First."

Gentle looked back towards the distressing absence of the Erasure.

"Is going to nothing being healed?" he said. "It seems more like death to me."

"They may be closer than we think, death and healing," Athanasius said.

"I don't want to hear that," Gentle said. "Are you staying out here?"

"For a while," Athanasius replied. "If you do decide to go, come and find me first, will you, so that we can say goodbye?"

"Of course."

He left Athanasius to his void—watching and went back inside, thinking as he did so that this would be a fine time to find a bar and order up a stiff drink. As he started back in the direction of Pie's bed, he was brought to a halt by a voice too abrasive for this hallowed place, and sufficiently slurred to suggest the speaker had found a bar himself and drunk it dry.

"Gentle, you old bugger!"

Estabrook stepped into view, grinning expansively, though several of his teeth were missing.

"I heard you were here and I didn't believe it." He seized Gentle's hand and shook it. "But here you are, large as life. Who'd have thought it, eh? The two of us, here."

Life in the encampment had wrought its changes on Charlie. He could scarcely have been further from the grief-wasted plotter Gentle had met on Kite Hill. Indeed, he could almost have passed for a clown, with his motley of pinstripe trousers, tattered braces, and unbuttoned tunic dyed half a dozen colors, all crowned with bald head and gap-toothed smile.

"It's so good to see you!" he kept saying, his pleasure unalloyed. "We must talk. This is the perfect time. They're all going outside to meditate on their ignorance, which is fine for a few minutes, but God! it gets drab. Come with me, come on! They've given me a little nook of my own, to keep me out of the way."

"Maybe later," Gentle said. "I've got a friend here who's sick."

"I heard somebody talking about that. A mystif? Is that the word?"

"That's the word."

"They're extraordinary, I heard. Very sexy. Why don't I come and see the patient with you?"

Gentle had no wish to keep Estabrook's company for longer than he needed to, but suspected that the man would beat a hasty retreat as soon as he set eyes on Pie and realized the creature he'd come to gawk at was the same he'd hired to assassinate his wife. They went back to Pie's bedside together. Floccus was there, with a lamp and an ample supply of food. Mouth crammed, he rose to be introduced, but Estabrook barely noticed him. His gaze was on Pie, whose head was turned away from the brightness of the lamp in the direction of the First Dominion.

"You lucky bugger," he said to Gentle. "She's beautiful."

Floccus glanced at Gentle to see if he intended to remark on Estabrook's error in sexing the patient, but Gentle made a tiny shake of his head. He was surprised that Pie's power to respond to the gaze of others was still intact, especially as his eyes saw an altogether more distressing sight: the substance of his beloved growing more insubstantial as the hours passed. Was this a sight and understanding reserved for Maestros? He knelt beside the bed and studied the fading features on the pillow. Pie's eyes were roving beneath the lids.

"Dreaming of me?" Gentle murmured.

"Is she getting better?" Estabrook inquired.

"I don't know," Gentle said. "This is supposed to be a healing place, but I'm not so sure."

"I really think we should talk," Estabrook said, with the strained nonchalance of a man who had something vital to impart, but was not able to do so in present company. "Why don't you pop along with me and have a quick drink? I'm sure Floccus will come and find you if anything untoward happens."

Floccus chewed on, nodding in accord with this, and Gentle agreed to go, hoping Estabrook had some insight into conditions here that would help him to decide whether to go or stay.

"I'll be five minutes" he promised Floccus, and let Estabrook lead him off through the lamp-lit passages to what he'd earlier called his nook.

It was off the beaten track somewhat, a little canvas room he'd made his own with what few possessions he'd brought from Earth. A shirt, its bloodstains now brown, hung above the bed like the tattered standard from some noteworthy battle. On the table beside the bed his wallet, his comb, a box of matches, and a roll of mints had been arranged, along several symmetrical columns of change, into an altar to the spirit of the pocket.

"It's not much," Estabrook said, "but it's home."

"Are you a prisoner here?" Gentle said as he sat in the plain chair at the bottom of the bed.

"Not at all," Estabrook said.

He brought a small bottle of liquor out from under the pillow. Gentle recognized it from the hours he and Huzzah had lingered in the cafe" in the Oke T'Noon. It was the fermented sap of a swamp flower from the Third Dominion: kloupo. Estabrook took a swig from the bottle, reminding Gentle of how he'd supped brandy from a flask on Kite Hill. He'd refused the man's liquor that day, but not now.

"I could go anytime I wanted to," he went on. "But I think to myself, Where would you go, Charlie? And where would I go?"

"Back to the Fifth?"

"In God's name, why?"

"Don't you miss it, even a little?"

"A little, maybe. Once in a while I get maudlin, I suppose, and then I get drunk-drunker-and I have dreams."

"Of what?"

"Mostly childhood things, you know. Odd little details that wouldn't mean a damn thing to. anyone else." He reclaimed the bottle and drank again. "But you can't have the past back, so what's the use of breaking your heart? When things are gone, they're gone."

Gentle made a noncommittal noise.

"You don't agree."

"Not necessarily."

"Name one thing that stays."

"I don't—"

"No, go on. Name one thing."

"Love."

"Ha! Well, that certainly brings us full circle, doesn't it? Love! You know, I'd have agreed with you half a year ago. I can't deny that. I couldn't conceive of ever being out of love with Judith. But I am. When I think back to the way I felt about her, it seems ludicrous. Now, of course, it's Oscar's turn to be obsessed by her. First you, then me, then Oscar. But he won't survive long."

"What makes you say that?"

"He's got his fingers in too many pies. It'll end in tears, you see if it doesn't. You know about the Tabula Rasa, I suppose?"

"No."

"Why should you?" Estabrook replied. "You were dragged into this, weren't you? I feel guilty about that, I really do. Not that my feeling guilty's going to do either of us much good, but I want you to know I never understood the ramifications of what I was doing. If I had, I swear I'd have left Judith alone."

"I don't think either of us would have been capable of that," Gentle remarked.

"Leaving her alone? No, I don't suppose we would. Our paths were already beaten for us, eh? I'm not saying I'm a total innocent, mind you. I'm not. I've done some pretty wretched things in my time, things I squirm to think about. But compared with the Tabula Rasa, or a mad bastard like Sartori, I'm not so bad. And when I look out every morning, into God's Nowhere—"

"Is that what they call it?"

"Oh, hell, no; they're much more reverential. That's my little nickname. But when I look out at it, I think, Well, it's going to take us all one of these days, whoever we are: mad bastards, lovers, drunkards, it's not going to pick and choose. We'll all go to nothing sooner or later. And you know, maybe it's my age, but that doesn't worry me any longer. We all have our time, and when it's over, it's over."

"There must be something on the other side, Charlie," Gentle said.

Estabrook shook his head. "That's all guff," he said. "I've seen a lot of people get up and walk into the Erasure, praying and carrying on. They take a few steps and they're gone. It's like they'd never lived."

"But people are healed here. You were."

"Oscar certainly made a mess of me, and I didn't die. But I don't know whether being here had much to do with that. Think about it. If God really was on the other side of that wall, and He was so damn eager to heal the sick, don't you think He'd reach out a little further and stop what's going on in Yzordderrex? Why would He put up with horrors like that, right under His nose? No, Gentle. I call it God's Nowhere, but that's only half-right. God isn't there. Maybe He was once...."

He trailed away and filled the silence with another throatful of kloupo.

"Thank you for this," Gentle said.

"What is there to thank me for?"

"You've helped me to make up my mind about something."

"My pleasure," Estabrook said. "It's damn difficult to think straight, isn't it, with this bloody wind blowing all the time? Can you find your way back to that lovely lady of yours, or shall I go with you?"

"I'll find my way," Gentle replied.

He rapidly regretted declining Estabrook's offer, discovering after turning a few corners that one lamp-lit passageway looked much like the next, and that hot only could he not retrace his steps to Pie's bedside, he couldn't be certain of finding his way back to Estabrook either.

One route he tried brought him into a kind of chapel, where several Dearthers were kneeling facing a window that gave onto God's Nowhere. The Erasure presented in what was now total darkness the same blank face it had by dusk, lighter than the night but shedding none upon it, its nullity more disturbing than the atrocities of Beatrix or the sealed rooms of the palace.

Turning his back on both window and worshipers, Gentle continued his search for Pie, and accident finally brought him back into what he thought was the room where the mystif lay. The bed was empty, however. Disoriented, he was about to go and quiz one of the other patients to confirm that he had the right room when he caught sight of Floccus' meal, or what was left of it, on the floor beside the bed: a few crusts, half a dozen well-picked bones. There could be no doubt that this was indeed Pie's bed. But where was the occupant? He turned to look at the others. They were all either asleep or comatose, but he was determined to have the truth of this, and was crossing to the nearest bed, when he heard Floccus running in pursuit, calling after him.

"There you are! I've been looking all over for you."

"Pie's bed is empty, Floccus."

"I know, I know. I went to empty my bladder—I was away two minutes, no more—and when I got back it had gone. The mystif, not my bladder. I thought maybe you'd come and taken it away."

"Why would I do that?"

"Don't get angry. There's no harm going to come to it here. Trust me."

After his discussion with Estabrook, Gentle was by no means certain this was true, but he wasn't going to waste time arguing with Floccus while Pie was wandering unattended.

"Where have you looked?" he asked—"A1I around,"

"Can't you be a little more precise?"

"I got lost," Floccus said, becoming exasperated. "All the tents look alike."

"Did you go outside?"

"No, why?" Floccus' agitation sank from sight. What surfaced instead was deep dismay. "You don't think it's gone to the Erasure?"

"We won't know till we look," Gentle said. "Which way did Athanasius take me? There was a door—"

"Wait! Wait!" Floccus said, snatching hold of Gentle's jacket. "You can't just step out there."

"Why not? I'm a Maestro, aren't I?"

"There are ceremonies—"

"I don't give a shit," Gentle said, and without waiting for further objections from Floccus, he headed off in what he hoped was the right direction.

Floccus followed, trotting beside Gentle, opening new arguments against what Gentle was planning with every fourth or fifth step. The Erasure was restless tonight, he said, there was talk of ruptures in it; to wander in its vicinity when it was so volatile was dangerous, possibly suicidal; and besides, it was a desecration. Gentle might be a Maestro, but it didn't give him the right to ignore the etiquette of what he was planning. He was a guest, invited in on the understanding that he obey the rules. And rules weren't written for the fun of it. There were good reasons to keep strangers from trespassing there. They were ignorant, and ignorance could bring disaster on everybody.

"What's the use of rules, if nobody really understands what's going on out there?" Gentle said.

"But we do! We understand this place. It's where God begins."

"So if the Erasure kills me, you know what to write in my obituary. 'Gentle ended where God begins.' "

"This isn't funny, Gentle."

"Agreed."

"It's life or death."

"Agreed."

"So why are you doing it?"

"Because wherever Pie is, that's where I belong. And I would have thought even someone as half-sighted and short-witted as you would have seen that!"

"You mean shortsighted and halfwitted."

"You said it."

Ahead lay the door he and Athanasius had stepped through. It was open and unguarded.

"I just want to say—" Floccus began.

"Leave it alone, Floccus."

"—it's been too short a friendship," the man replied, bringing Gentle to a halt, shamed by his outburst.

"Don't mourn me yet," he said softly.

Floccus made no reply, but backed away from the open door, leaving Gentle to step through it alone. The night outside was hushed, the wind having dropped to little more than a breeze. He scanned the terrain, left and right. There were worshipers in both directions, kneeling in the gloom, their heads bowed as they meditated on God's Nowhere. Not wishing to disturb them, he moved as quietly as he could over the uneven ground, but the smaller shards of rock ahead of him skipped and rolled as he approached, as though to announce him with their rattle and clatter. This was not the only response to his presence. The air he exhaled, which he'd turned to killing use so many times now, darkened as it left his lips, the cloud shot through with threads of bright scarlet. They didn't disperse, these breaths, but sank as though weighed down by their own lethality, wrapping around his torso and legs like funeral robes. He made no attempt to shrug them off, even though their folds soon concealed the ground and slowed his step. Nor did he have to puzzle much over their purpose. Now that he was unaccompanied by Athanasius, the air was determined to deny him the defense of walking here as an innocent, as a man in pursuit of an errant lover. Wrapped in black and attended by drums, his profounder nature was here revealed: he was a Maestro with a murderous power at his lips, and there would be no concealing that fact, either from the Erasure or from those who were meditating upon it.

Several of the worshipers had been stirred from their contemplations by the sound of the stones and now looked up to see they had an ominous figure in their midst. One, kneeling alone close to Gentle's path, rose in panic and fled, uttering a prayer of protection. Another fell prostrate, sobbing. Rather than intimidate them further with his gaze, Gentle turned his eyes on God's Nowhere, scouring the ground close to the margin of solid earth and void for some sign of Pie 'oh' pah. The sight of the Erasure no longer distressed him as it had when he'd first stepped out here with Athanasius. Clothed as he was, and thus announced, he came before the void as a man of power. For him to have attempted the rites of Reconciliation, he must have made his peace with this mystery. He had nothing to fear from it.

By the time he set eyes on Pie 'oh' pah he was three or four hundred yards from the door, and the assembly of meditators had thinned to a brave few who'd wandered from the mam knot of the congregation in search of solitude. Some had already retreated, seeing him approach, but a stoical few kept their praying places and let this stranger pass by without so much as glancing up at him. Now so folded in sable breath he feared Pie would not recognize him, Gentle began to call the mystif s name. The call went unacknowledged. Though the mystif's head was no more than a dark blur in the murk, Gentle knew what its hungry eyes were fixed upon: the enigma that was coaxing its steady step the way a cliff edge might coax a suicide. He picked up his pace, his momentum moving steadily larger stones as he went. Though there was no sign that the mystif was in any hurry, he feared that once it was in the equivocal region between solid ground and nothingness, it would be irretrievable.

"Pie!" he yelled as he went. "Can you hear me? Please, stop!"

The words went on clouding and clothing him, but they had no effect upon Pie until Gentle turned his requests into an order.

"Pie 'oh' pah. This is your Maestro. Stop."

The mystif stumbled as Gentle spoke, as though his demand had put an obstacle in its way. A small, almost bestial sound of pain escaped it. But it did as its sometime summoner had ordered and stopped in its tracks like a dutiful servant, waiting until the Maestro reached its side.

Gentle was within ten paces, now, and saw how far advanced the process of unknitting was. The mystif was barely more than a shadow among shadows, its features impossible to read, its body insubstantial. If Gentle needed any further proof that the Erasure was not a place of healing, it was in the sight of the uredo, which was more solid than the body it had fed upon, its livid stains intermittently brightening like embers caught by a gusting wind.

"Why did you leave your bed?" Gentle said, his pace slowed once again as he approached the mystif. Its form seemed so tenuous he feared any violent motion might disperse it entirely. "There's nothing beyond the Erasure you need, Pie. Your life's here, with me."

The mystif took a little time to reply. When it did its voice was as ethereal as its substance, a slender, exhausted plea emerging from a spirit at the edge of total collapse.

"I don't have any life left, Maestro," it said.

"Let me be the judge of that. I swore to myself I wouldn't let you go again, Pie. I want to look after you, make you well. Bringing you here was a mistake, I see that now. I'm sorry if it's brought you pain, but I'll take you away—"

"It wasn't a mistake. You found your way here for your own reasons."

"You're my reason, Pie. I didn't know who I was till you found me, and I'll forget myself again if you go."

"No, you won't," it said, the dubious outline of its head turning in Gentle's direction. Though there was no gleam to mark the place where its eyes had been, Gentle knew it was looking at him. "You're the Maestro Sartori. The Reconciler of the Imajica." It faltered for a long moment. When its voice came again, it was frailer than ever. "And you are also my master, and my husband, and my dearest brother. ... If you order me to stay, then I will stay. But if you love me, Gentle, then please ... let... me ... go."

The request could scarcely have been made more simply or more eloquently, and had Gentle known without question there was an Eden on the other side of the Erasure, ready to receive Pie's spirit, he would have let the mystif go there and then, agonizing as it would be. But he believed differently and was ready to say it, even in such proximity to the void.

"It's not heaven, Pie. Maybe God's there, maybe not.

But until we know—"

"Why not just let me go now and see for myself? I'm not afraid. This is the Dominion where my people were made. I want to see it." In these words there was the first hint of passion Gentle had so far heard. "I'm dying, Maestro. I need to lie down and sleep."

"What if there's nothing there, Pie? What if it's only emptiness?"

"I'd prefer the absence to the pain." The reply defeated Gentle utterly. "Then you'd better go," he said, wishing he could find some more tender way to relinquish his hold, but unable to conceal his desolation with platitudes. However much he wanted to save Pie from suffering, his sympathy could not outweigh the need he felt, nor quite annul the sense of ownership which, however unsavory, was a part of what he felt towards this creature.

"I wish we could have taken this last journey together, Maestro," Pie said. "But you've got work to do, I know. Great work."

"And how do I do it without you?" Gentle said, knowing this was a wretched gambit—and half ashamed of it—but unwilling to let the mystif pass from life without voicing every desire he knew to keep it from going.

"You're not alone," Pie said, "You've met Tick Raw and Scopique. They were both members of the last Synod, and they're ready to work the Reconciliation with you." "They're Maestros?"

"They are now. They were novices the last time, but they're prepared now. They'll work in their Dominions while you work in the Fifth."

"They waited all this time?"

"They knew you'd come. Or, if not you, somebody in your place."

He'd treated them both so badly, he thought, Tick Raw especially.

"Who'll represent the Second?" he said. "And the First?"

"There was a Eurhetemec in Yzordderrex, waiting to work for the Second, but he's dead. He was old the last time, and he couldn't wait. I asked Scopique to find a replacement."

"And here?"

"I'd hoped that honor might fall to me, but now you'll need to find someone in my place. Don't look so lost, Maestro, please. You were a great Reconciler—"

"I failed. How great is that?"

"You won't fail again."

"I don't even know the ceremonies."

"You'll remember, after a time."

"How?"

"All that we did and said and felt is still waiting in Gamut Street. All our preparations, all our debates. Even me."

"Memory isn't enough, Pie."

"I know...."

"I want you real. I want you ... forever."

"Maybe, when the Imajica is whole again and the First Dominion opens, you'll find me."

There was some tiny hope in that, he thought, though whether it would be enough to keep him from despair when the mystif had disappeared he didn't know.

"May I go?" Pie said.

Gentle had never uttered a harder syllable than his next. "Yes," he said.

The mystif raised its hand, which was no more than a five-fingered wisp of smoke, and put it against Gentle's lips.

He felt no physical contact, but his heart jumped in his chest.

"We're not lost," Pie said. "Trust in that." Then the fingers dropped away, and the mystif started from Gentle's side towards the Erasure. There were perhaps a dozen yards to cover, and as the gap diminished Gentle's heart, already pounding after Pie's touch, beat faster, its drum tolling in his head. Even now, knowing he couldn't rescind the freedom he'd granted, it was all he could do not to pursue the mystif and delay it just another moment: to hear its voice, to stand beside it, to be the shadow of its shadow.

It didn't glance back, but stepped with cruel ease into the no-man's-land between solidity and nothingness. Gentle refused to look away but stared on with a steadfastness more defiant than heroic. The place was well named. As the mystif walked it was erased, like a sketch that had served its Creator's purpose and was no longer needed on the page. But unlike the sketch, which however fastidiously erased always left some trace to mark the artist's error, when Pie finally disappeared the vanishing was complete, leaving the spot flawless. If Gentle had not had the mystif in his memory—that unreliable book—it might never have existed.