Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

5

When he returned inside, it was to meet the stares of fifty or more people gathered at the door, all of whom had obviously witnessed what had just happened, albeit at some distance. Nobody so much as coughed until he'd passed; then he heard the whispers rise like the sound of swarming insects. Did they have nothing better to do than gossip about his grief? he thought. The sooner he was away from here, the better. He'd say his farewells to Estabrook and Floccus and leave immediately.

He returned to Pie's bed, hoping the mystif might have left some keepsake for him, but the only sign of its presence was the indentation in the pillow on which its beautiful head had lain. He longed to lie there himself for a little time, but it was too public for such an indulgence. He would grieve when he was away from here.

As he prepared to leave, Floccus appeared, his wiry little body twitching like a boxer anticipating a blow.

"I'm sorry to interrupt," he said.

"I was coming to find you anyway," Gentle said. "Just to say thank you, and goodbye."

"Before you go," Floccus said, blinking maniacally, "I've a message for you." He'd sweated all the color from his face and stumbled over every other word.

"I'm sorry for my behavior," Gentle said, trying to soothe him. "You did all you could have done, and all you got for it was my foul temper,"

"No need to apologize."

"Pie had to go, and I have to stay. That's the way of it."

"It's a pleasure to have you back," Floccus gushed. "Really, Maestro, really."

That Maestro gave Gentle a clue to this performance. "Floccus? Are you afraid of me?" he said. "You are, aren't you?"

"Afraid? Ah, well—ah, yes. In a manner of speaking. Yes. What happened out there, your getting so close to the Erasure and not being claimed, and the way you've changed"—the dark garb still clung about him, he realized, its slow dispersal draping shreds of smoke around his limbs—"it puts a different complexion on things. I hadn't understood; forgive me, it was stupid; I hadn't understood, you know, that I was in the companyof, well, such a power. If I, you know, caused any offense—"

"You didn't."

"I can be frivolous."

"You were fine company, Floccus."

"Thank you, Maestro. Thank you. Thank you."

"Please stop thanking me."

"Yes. I will. Thank you."

"You said you had a message."

"I did? I did."

"Who from?"

"Athanasius. He'd like very much to see you."

Here was the third farewell he owed, Gentle thought. "Then take me to him, if you would," he said, and Floccus, his face flooded with relief that he'd survived this interview, turned and led him from the empty bed.

In the few minutes it took for them to thread their way through the body of the tent, the wind, which had dropped almost to nothing at twilight, began to rise with fresh ferocity. By the time Floccus ushered him into the chamber where Athanasius waited, it was beating at the walls wildly, The lamps on the floor flickered with each gust, and by their panicky light Gentle saw what a melancholy place Athanasius had chosen for their parting. The chamber was a mortuary, its floor littered with bodies wrapped in every kind of rag and shroud, some neatly parceled, most barely covered: further proof—as if it were needed—of how poor a place of healing this was. But that argument was academic now. This was neither the time nor the place to bruise the man's faith, not with the night wind thrashing at the walls and the dead everywhere underfoot.

"Do you want me to stay?" Floccus asked Athanasius, clearly desperate to be shunned.

"No, no. Go by all means," the other replied. Floccus turned to Gentle and made a little bow. "It was an honor, sir," he said, then beat a hasty retreat.

When Gentle looked back towards Athanasius, the man had wandered to the far end of the mortuary and was staring down at one of the shrouded bodies. He had dressed for this somber place, the loose bright garb he'd been wearing earlier discarded in favor of robes so deep a blue they were practically black.

"So, Maestro," he said. "I was looking for a Judas in our midst and I missed you. That was careless, eh?"

His tone was conversational, which made a statement Gentle already found confusing doubly so.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"I mean you tricked your way into our tents, and now you expect to depart without paying a price for your desecration."

"There was no trick," Gentle said. "The mystif was sick, and I thought it could be healed here. If I failed to observe the formalities out there, you'll excuse me. I didn't have time to take a theology lesson."

"The mystif was never sick. Or if it was you sickened it yourself, so you could worm your way in here. Don't even bother to protest. I saw what you did out there. What's the mystif going to do, make some report on us to the Unbeheld?"

"What are you accusing me of exactly?"

"Do you even come from the Fifth, I find myself wondering, or is that also part of the plot?"

"There is no plot."

"Only I've heard that revolution and theology are bad bedfellows there, which of course seems strange to us. How can one ever be separated from the other? If you want to change even a little part of your condition, you must expect the consequences to reach the ears of divinities sooner or later, and then you must have your reasons ready."

Gentle listened to all of this, wondering if it might not be simplest to quit the room and leave Athanasius to ramble. Clearly none of this really made any sense. But he owed the man a little patience, perhaps, if only for the words of wisdom he'd bestowed at the wedding.

"You think I'm involved in some conspiracy," Gentle said. "Is that it?"

"I think you're a murderer, a liar, and an agent of the Autarch," Athanasius said,

"You call me a liar? Who's the one who seduced all these poor fuckers into thinking they could be healed here, you or me? Look at them!" He pointed along the rows. "You call this healing? I don't. And if they had the breath—"

He reached down and snatched the shroud off the corpse closest to him. The face beneath was that of a pretty woman. Her open eyes were glazed. So was her face: painted and glazed. Carved, painted, and glazed. He tugged the sheet farther back, hearing Athanasius' hard, humorless laugh as he did so. The woman had a painted child perched in the crook of her arm. There was a gilded halo around its head, and its tiny hand was raised in benediction.

"She may lie very still," Athanasius said. "But don't be deceived. She's not dead,"

Gentle went to another of the bodies and drew back its covering. Beneath lay a second Madonna, this one more baroque than the first, its eyes turned up in a beatific swoon. He let the shroud drop from between his fingers.

"Feeling weak, Maestro?" Athanasius said. "You conceal your fear very well, but you don't deceive me."

Gentle looked around the room again. There were at least thirty bodies laid out here. "Are all of them Madonnas?" he said.

Reading Gentle's bewilderment as anxiety, Athanasius said, "Now I begin to see the fear. This ground is sacred to the Goddess." "Why?"

"Because tradition says a great crime was committed against Her sex near this spot. A woman from the Fifth Dominion was raped hereabouts, and the spirit of the Holy Mother calls sacred any ground thus marked." He went down on his haunches and uncovered another of the statues, touching it reverentially. "She's with us here," he said. "In every statue. In every stone. In every gust of wind. She blesses us, because we dare to come so close to Her enemy's Dominion."

"What enemy?"

"Are you not allowed to utter his name without dropping to your knees?" Athanasius said. "Hapexamendios. Your Lord, the Unbeheld. You can confess it. Why not? You know my secret now, and I know yours. We're transparent to each other. I do have one question, however, before you leave." "What's that?"

"How did you find out we worship the Goddess? Was it Floccus who told you or Nikaetomaas?"

"Nobody. I didn't know and I don't much care." He started to walk towards the man. "I'm not afraid of your Virgins, Athanasius."

He chose one nearby and unveiled her, from starry crown to cloud-treading toe. Her hands were clasped in prayer. Stooping, just as Athanasius had, Gentle put his hand over the statue's knitted fingers.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I think they're beautiful. I was an artist once myself."

"You're strong. Maestro, I'll say that for you. I expected you to be brought to your knees by Our Lady."

"First I'm supposed to kneel for Hapexamendios; now for the Virgin."

"One in fealty, one in fear."

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my legs are my own. I'll kneel when I choose to. If I choose to."

Athanasius looked puzzled. "I think you half believe that," he said.

"Damn right I do. I don't know what kind of conspiracy you think I'm guilty of, but I swear there's none."

"Maybe you're more His instrument than I thought," Athanasius said. "Maybe you're ignorant of His purpose."

"Oh, no," Gentle said. "I know what work I'm meant to do, and I see no reason to be ashamed of it. If I can reconcile the Fifth I will. I want the Imajica whole, and I'd have thought you would too. You can visit the Vatican. You'll find it's full of Madonnas."

As though inspired to fury by his words, the wind beat at the walls with fresh venom, a gust finding its way into the chamber, raising several of the lighter shrouds into the air and extinguishing one of the lamps.

"He won't save you," Athanasius said, clearly believing this wind had come to carry Gentle away. "Nor will your ignorance, if that's what's kept you from harm."

He looked back towards the bodies he'd been studying as Floccus departed.

"Lady, forgive us," he said, "for doing this in your sight."

The words were a signal, it seemed. Four of the figures moved as he spoke, sitting up and pulling the shrouds from their heads. No Madonnas these. They were men and women of the Dearth, carrying blades like crescent moons. Athanasius looked back at Gentle.

"Will you accept the blessing of Our Lady before you die?" he said.

Somebody had already begun a prayer behind him, Gentle heard, and he glanced around to see that there were another three assassins there, two of them armed in the same lunatic fashion, the third—a girl no more than Huzzah's age, bare—breasted, doe-faced-darting between the rows uncovering statues as she went. No two were alike. There were Virgins of stone, Virgins of wood, Virgins of plaster. There were Virgins so crudely carved they were barely recognizable, and others so finely hewn and finished they looked ready to draw breath. Though minutes before, Gentle had laid his hand on one of this number without harm, the spectacle faintly sickened him. Did Athanasius know something about the condition of Maestros that he, Gentle, didn't? Might he somehow be subjugated by this image, the way in an earlier life he'd been enthralled by the sight of a woman naked, or promising nakedness?

Whatever mystery was here, he wasn't about to let Athanasius murder him while he puzzled it out. He drew breath and put his hand to his mouth as Athanasius drew a weapon of his own and started towards him at speed. The breath proved faster than the blade. Gentle unleashed the pneuma, not at Athanasius directly, but at the ground in front of him. The stones it struck flew into pieces, and Athanasius fell back as the fusillade hit him. He dropped his knife and clamped his hands to his face, yelling as much in rage as in pain. If there was a command in his clamor the assassins missed or ignored it. They kept a respectful distance from Gentle as he walked towards their wounded leader, through an air still gray with motes of pulverized stone. Athanasius was lying on his side, propped on his elbow. Gentle went down on his haunches beside the man and carefully drew Athanasius' hands from his face. There was a deep cut beneath his left eye, and another above his right. Both were bleeding copiously, as were a score of littler cuts. None of them, however, would be calamitous for a man who wore wounds the way others wore jewelry. They would heal and add to his sum of scars.

"Call your assassins off, Athanasius," Gentle told him. "I didn't come here to hurt anybody, but if you press me to k I'll kill every last one of them. Do you understand me?" He put his arm beneath the man and hauled him to his feet. "Now call them off."

Athanasius shrugged himself free of Gentle's hold and scanned his cohorts through a drizzle of blood.

"Let him pass," he said. "There'll be another time."

The assassins between Gentle and the door parted, though none of them lowered or sheathed their weapons. Gentle stood up and left Athanasius' side, passing only to offer one final observation.

"I wouldn't want to kill the man who married me to Pie 'oh' pah," he said, "so before you come after me again, examine the evidence against me, whatever it is. And search your heart. I'm not your enemy. All I want to do is to heal Imajica. Isn't that what your Goddess wants too?"

If Athanasius had wanted to respond, he was too slow. Before he could open his mouth a cry rose from somewhere outside, and a moment later another, then another, then a dozen: all howls of pain and panic, twisted into eardrum—bruising screeches by the gusts that carried them. Gentle turned back to the door, but the wind had hold of the entire chamber, and even as he made to depart, one of the walls rose as if a titanic hand had seized hold of it and lifted it up into the air. The wind, bearing its freight of screams, rushed in, flinging the lamps over, their fuel spilled as they rolled before it. Caught by the very flames it had fed, the oil burst into bright yellow balls, by which light Gentle saw scenes of chaos on all sides. The assassins were being thrown over like the lamps, unable to withstand the power of the wind. One he saw impaled on her own blade. Another was carried into the oil and was instantly consumed by flame.

"What have you summoned?" Athanasius yelled.

"This isn't my doing," Gentle replied.

Athanasius screeched some further accusation, but it was snatched from his lips as the rampage escalated. Another of the chamber's walls was summarily snatched away, its tatters rising into the air like a curtain to unveil a scene of catastrophe. The storm was at work throughout the length of the tents, disemboweling the glorious and scarlet beast Gentle had entered with such awe. Wall after wall was shredded or wrenched from the ground, the ropes and pegs that had held them lethal as they flew. And visible beyond the turmoil, its cause: the once featureless wall of the Erasure, featureless no longer. It roiled the way the sky Gentle had seen beneath the Pivot had roiled, a maelstrom whose place of origin seemed to be a hole torn in the Erasure's fabric. The sight gave substance to Athanasius' charges. Threatened by assassins and Madonnas, had Gentle unwittingly summoned some entity out of the First Dominion to protect him? If so, he had to find it and subdue it before he had more innocent lives to add to the roster of those who'd perished because of him.

With his eyes fixed on the tear, he vacated the chamber and headed towards the Erasure. The route between was the storm's highway. It carried the detritus of its deeds back and forth, returning to places it had already destroyed in its first assault to pick up the survivors and pitch them into the air like sacks of bloody down, tearing them open up above. There was a red rain in the gusts, which spattered Gentle as he went, yet the same authority that was condemning men and women all around left him untouched. It could not so much as knock him off his feet. The reason? His breath, which Pie had once called the source of all magic. Its cloak clung to him as it had before, apparently protecting him from the tumult, and, though it didn't impede his steps, it lent him a mass beyond that of flesh and bone.

With half the distance covered, he glanced back to see if there was any sign of life among the Madonnas. The place was easy to find, even amid this carnage; the fire burned with a wind-fed fervor, and through air thickened by blood and shards Gentle saw that several of the statues had been raised from their stony beds and now formed a circle in which Athanasius and several of his followers were taking shelter. They'd offer little defense against this havoc, he thought, but several other survivors could be seen crawling towards the place, eyes fixed on the Holy Mothers.

Gentle turned his back on the sight and strode on towards the Erasure, catching sight — of another soul here weighty enough to resist the assault: a man in robes the color of the shredded tents, sitting cross-legged on the ground no more than twenty yards from the fury's source. His head was hooded, his face turned towards the maelstrom. Was this monkish creature the force he'd summoned? Gentle wondered. If not, how was this fellow surviving so close to the engine of destruction?

He started to yell to the man as he approached, by no means certain that his voice would carry in the din of wind and screams. But the monk heard. He looked round at Gentle, the hood half eclipsing his face. There was nothing untoward about his placid features. His face was in need of a shave; his nose, which had been broken at some time, in need of resetting; his eyes in need of nothing. They had all they wanted, it seemed, seeing the Maestro approach. A broad grin broke over the monk's face, and he instantly rose to his feet, bowing his head.

"Maestro," he said. "You do me honor." His voice wasn't raised, but it carried through the commotion. "Have you seen the mystif yet?"

"The mystif s gone," Gentle said. He didn't need to yell, he realized. His voice, like his limbs, carried an unnatural weight here.

"Yes, I saw it go," the monk replied, "But it's come back, Maestro. It broke through the Erasure, and the storm came after it."

"Where? Where?" Gentle said, turning full circle. "I don't see it!" He looked accusingly at the man. "It would have found me if it was here," he said.

"Trust me, it's trying," the man replied. He pulled back his hood. His gingery curls were thinning, but there was the vestige of a chorister's charm there. "It's very close, Maestro."

Now it was he who stared into the storm: not to left and right, however, but up into the labyrinthine air. Gentle followed his gaze. There were swaths of tattered canvas on the wind high above them, rising and falling like vast wounded birds. There were pieces of furniture, shredded clothes, and fragments of flesh. And in among these clouds of dross, a darting form darker than either sky or storm, descending even as he set his eyes upon it. The monk drew closer to Gentle.

"That's the mystif," he said. "May I protect you, Maestro?"

"It's my friend," Gentle said. "I don't need protecting." "I think you do," the other replied, and raised his arms above his head, palms out as if to deflect the approaching spirit.

It slowed at the sight of this gesture, and Gentle had time to see the form above him plainly. It was indeed the mystif, or its remains. Either by stealth or sheer force of will it had breached the Erasure. But its escape had brought it no comfort whatsoever. The uredo burned more venomously than ever, almost entirely consuming the shadow body it had fixed upon and poisoned; and from the sufferer's mouth, a howl that could not have been more pained had its guts been drawn out of its belly in front of its eyes.

It had come to a complete halt now and hovered above the two men like a diver arrested in mid-descent, arms outstretched, head, or its traces, thrown back. "Pie?" Gentle said. "Have you done this?" The howl went on. If there were words in its anguish, Gentle couldn't make them out.

"I have to speak to it," Gentle said to his protector. "If you're causing it pain, for God's sake stop."

"It came out of the margin howling like this," the man said.

"At least drop your defenses." "It'll attack us." "I'll take that risk," he replied.

The man let his shunning hands fall to his side. The form above them twisted and turned but did not descend. Another force had a claim upon it, Gentle realized. It was thrashing to resist a summons from the Erasure, which was calling it back into the place from which it had escaped.

"Can you hear me, Pie?" Gentle asked it.

The howl went on, unabated.

"If you can speak, do it!"

"It's already speaking," the monk said.

"I only hear howls," Gentle said.

"Past the howls," came the reply, "there are words."

Drops of fluid fell from the mystif s wounds as its struggles to resist the Erasure's power intensified. They stank of putrescence and burned Gentle's upturned face, but their sting brought comprehension of the words encoded in Pie's screeches.

"Undone," the mystif was saying. "We're... undone...."

"Why did you do this?" Gentle asked.

"It wasn't... me. The storm was sent to claim me back."

"Out of the First?"

"It's... His will," Pie said. "His... will...."

Though the tortured form above him resembled the creature he'd loved and wed scarcely at all, Gentle could still hear fragments of Pie 'oh' pah in these replies and, hearing them, wanted to raise his own voice in anguish at the thought of Pie's pain. The mystif had gone into the First to end its suffering; but here it was, suffering still, and he was powerless to help it or heal it. All he could do by way of comfort was tell it that he understood, which he did. Its message was perfectly clear. In the trauma of their parting Pie had sensed some equivocation in him. But there was none, and he said so.

"I know what I have to do," he told the sufferer. "Trust me, Pie. I understand. I'm the Reconciler. I'm not going to run from that."

At this, the mystif writhed like a fish on a hook, no longer able to keep itself from being hauled in by the fisherman in the First. It started to scrabble at the air, as if it might gain another moment in this Dominion by catching hold of a mote. But the power that had sent such furies in pursuit of it had too strong a hold, and the spirit was drawn back towards the Erasure. Instinctively Gentle reached up towards it, hearing and ignoring a cry of alarm from the man at his side. The mystif reached for his hand, extending its shadowy substance to do so, and curling grotesquely long fingers around Gentle's. The contact sent such a convulsion through his system he would have been thrown to the ground but that his protector took hold of him. As it was his marrow seemed to burn in his bones, and he smelled the stench of rot off his skin, as though death were coming upon him inside and out. It was hard, in that agony, to hold on to the mystif, much less to the words it was trying to say. But he fought the urge to let go, struggling for the sense of the few syllables he was able to grasp. Three of them were his name.

"Sartori..."

"I'm here, Pie," Gentle said, thinking perhaps the thing was blinded now. "I'm still here."

But the mystif wasn't naming its Maestro. "The other," it said. "The other..." "What about him?"

"He knows," Pie murmured. "Find him, Gentle. He knows."

With this command, their fingers separated. The mystif reached to take hold of Gentle again, but with its frail hold lost it was prey to the Erasure and was instantly snatched towards the tear through which it had appeared. Gentle started after it, but his limbs had been more severely traumatized by the convulsion than he'd thought, and his legs simply folded up beneath him. He fell heavily, but raised his head in time to catch sight of the mystif disappearing into the void. Sprawled on the hard ground, he remembered his first pursuit of Pie, through the empty, icy streets of Manhattan. He'd fallen then, too, and looked up as he did now to see the riddle escaping him, unsolved. But it had turned that first time; turned and spoken to him across the river of Fifth Avenue, offering him the hope, however frail, of another meeting. Not so now. It went into the Erasure like smoke through a drafty door, its cry stopping dead.

"Not again," Gentle murmured.

The monk was crouching at his side. "Can you stand," he asked, "or shall I get help?"

Gentle put his hands beneath him and pushed himself up into a kneeling position, making no reply to the question. With the mystif s disappearance, the malignant wind that had come after it, and brought such devastation, was dropping away, and as it did so the debris it had been keeping aloft descended in a grim hail. For a second time the monk raised his hands to ward off the descending force. Gentle was barely aware of what was happening. His eyes were on the Erasure, which was rapidly losing its roiling motion. By the time the rain of canvas, stones, and bodies had stopped, every last trace of detail had gone from the divide, and it was once again an absence over which the eye slid, finding no purchase.

Gentle got to his feet and, turning his eyes from the nullity, scanned the desolation that lay in every other direction but one. The circle of Madonnas he'd glimpsed through the storm was still intact, and sheltering in its midst were half a hundred survivors, some of them on their knees sobbing or praying, many kissing the feet of the statues that had shielded them, still others gazing towards the Erasure from which the destruction that claimed all but these fifty, plus the Maestro and the monk, had come.

"Do you see Athanasius?" Gentle asked the man at his side.

"No, but he's alive somewhere," came the reply. "He's like you, Maestro; he's got too much purpose in him to die."

"I don't think any purpose would have saved me if you hadn't been here," Gentle remarked. "You've got real power in your bones."

"A little, maybe," the monk replied, with a modest smile. "I had a fine teacher."

"So did I," Gentle said softly. "But I lost it." Seeing the Maestro's eyes filling, the monk made to withdraw, but Gentle said, "Don't worry about the tears. I've been running from them too long. Let me ask you something. I'll quite understand if you say no."

"What, Maestro?"

"When I leave here, I'm going back to the Fifth to prepare for a Reconciliation. Would you trust me enough to join the Synod; to represent the First?"

The monk's face broke into bliss, shedding years as he smiled, "It would be my honor, Maestro," he said.

"There's risk in it," Gentle warned.

"There always was. But I wouldn't be here if it weren't for you."

"How so?"

"You're my inspiration, Maestro," the man replied, inclining his head in deference. "Whatever you require of me, I'll perform as best I can."

"Stay here, then. Watch the Erasure and wait. I'll find you when the time comes." He spoke with more certainty than he felt, but then perhaps the illusion of competence was part of every Maestro's repertoire.

"I'll be waiting," the monk replied.

"What's your name?"

"When I joined the Dearthers they called me Chicka Jackeen."

"Jackeen?"

"It means worthless fellow," the man replied.

"Then we've got much in common," Gentle said. He took the man's hand and shook it. "Remember me, Jackeen."

"You've never left my mind," the man replied.

There was some subtext here Gentle couldn't grasp, but this was no time to delve. He had two demanding and dangerous journeys ahead of him: the first to Yzordderrex, the second from that city back to the Retreat. Thanking Jackeen for his good offices, Gentle left him at the Erasure and picked his way back through the devastation towards the circle of Madonnas. Some of the survivors were leaving its shelter to begin a search of the site, presumably in the hope—vain, he suspected—of finding others alive. It was a scene of grief and bewilderment he'd witnessed too many times on his journey through the Dominions. Much as he would have liked to believe it was mere happenstance that these scenes of devastation coincided with his presence, he couldn't afford to indulge such self-delusion. He was as surely wedded to the storm as he was to Pie. More so now, perhaps, with the mystif gone."

Jackeen's observation that Athanasius was too purposeful a soul to have perished was confirmed as Gentle drew closer to the circle. The man was standing at the center of a knot of Dearthers, leading a prayer of thanks to the Holy Mother for their survival. As Gentle reached the perimeter, Athanasius raised his head. One eye was closed beneath a scab of blood and dirt, but there was enough hatred in the other to burn in a dozen eyes. Meeting its gaze, Gentle advanced no further, but the priest dropped the volume of his prayer to a whisper anyway, preventing the trespasser from hearing the terms of his devotion. Gentle's ears were not so dulled by the din he didn't catch a few of the phrases, however. Though the woman represented in so many modes around the circle was clearly the Virgin Mary, she appar—" ently went by other names here; or else had sisters. He heard her called Uma Umagammagi, Mother Imajica; and heard too the name Huzzah had first whispered to him in her cell beneath the maison de sante: Tishalull6. There was a third, though it took Gentle a little time to be certain he'd understood the naming aright, and that was Jokalaylau. Athanasius prayed that she'd keep a place for them at her side in the snows of paradise, which made Gentle wonder rather sourly if the man had ever trodden those wastes, that he could think them a heavenly place.

Though the names were strange, the inspiring spirit was not. Athanasius and his forlorn congregation were praying to the same loving Goddess at whose shrines in the Fifth countless candles were lit every day. Even Gentle at his most pagan had conceded the presence of that woman in his life and worshiped her the only way he'd known how: with the seduction and temporary possession of her sex. Had he known a mother or a loving sister he might have learned a better devotion than lust, but he hoped and believed the Holy Woman would forgive him his trespasses, even if Athanasius would not. The thought comforted him. He would need all the protection he could assemble in the battle that lay ahead, and it was no little solace to think that the Mother Imajica had her worshiping places in the Fifth, where that battle would be fought.

With the ad hoc service over, Athanasius let his congregation go about the business of searching the wreckage. For his part, he stayed in the middle of the circle, where a few survivors who'd made it that far, but perished, lay sprawled.

"Come here, Maestro," Athanasius said. "There's something you should see."

Gentle stepped into the circle, expecting Athanasius to show him the corpse of a child or some fragile beauty, broken. But the face at his feet was male, and far from innocent.

"You knew him, I think."

"Yes. His name was Estabrook."

Charlie's eyes were closed, his mouth too: sealed up in the moment of his passing. There was very little sign of physical damage. Perhaps his heart had simply given out in the excitement.

"Nikaetomaas said you brought him here because you thought he was me."

"We thought he was a Messiah," Athanasius said. "When we realized he wasn't we kept looking, expecting a miracle. Instead—"

"You got me. For what it's worth, you were right. I did bring all this destruction with me. I don't quite know why, and I don't expect you to forgive me for it, but I want you to understand that I take no pleasure in it. All I want to do is make good the damage I've done."

"And how will you do that, Maestro?" Athanasius said. His one good eye brimmed with tears as he surveyed the bodies. "How will you make this good? Can you resurrect them with what's between your legs? Is that the trick of it? Can you fuck them back into life?"

Gentle made a guttural sound of disgust.

"Well, that's what you Maestros think, isn't it? You don't want to suffer, you just want the glory. You lay your rod on the land, and the land bears fruit. That's what you think. But it doesn't work that way. It's your blood the land wants; it's your sacrifice. And as long as you deny that, others are going to die in your place. Believe me, I'd cut my throat now if I thought I could raise these people, but I've been played a wretched trick. I've the will to do it, but my blood's not worth a damn. Yours is.' I don't know why. I wish it weren't. But it is."

"Would Uma Umagammagi like to see me bleed?" Gentle said. "Or Tishalulte? Or Jokalaylau? Is that what your loving mothers want from this child?"

"You don't belong to them. I don't know who you belong to, but you didn't come from their sweet bodies."

"I must have come from somewhere," Gentle said, voicing that thought for the first time in his life. "I've got a purpose in me, and I think God put it there."

"Don't look too far, Maestro. Your ignorance may be the only defense the rest of us have got against you. Give up your ambition now, before you find out what you're really capable of."

"I can't."

"Oh, but it's easy," Athanasius said. "Kill yourself, Maestro. Let the land have your blood. That's the greatest service you could do the Dominions now."

There was the bitterest echo, in these words, of a letter he'd read months ago, in another kind of wilderness.

Do this for the women of the world, Vanessa had written. Slit your lying throat.

Had he really traveled the Dominions simply to have the advice he'd been given by a woman whom he'd cheated in love returned to him? After all this striving for comprehension, was he finally as injurious and fraudulent a Maestro as he was a lover?

Athanasius read the accuracy of this last dart off his target's face and with a feral grin hammered it home.

"Do it soon, Maestro," he said. "There are enough orphans in the Dominions already, without you indulging your ambitions for another day."

Gentle let these cruelties go. "You married me to the love of my life, Athanasius," he said. "I won't ever forget that kindness."

"Poor Pie 'oh' pah," the other man replied, grinding the point home. "Another of your victims. What a poison there must be in you, Maestro."

Gentle turned and left the circle without responding, with Athanasius repeating his earlier advice to usher him on his way.

"Kill yourself soon, Maestro," he said. "For you, for Pie, for all of us. Kill yourself soon."

It took Gentle a quarter of an hour to make his way through the ravagement to open ground, hoping as he went that he'd find some vehicle—Floccus', perhaps—that he could commandeer for the return journey to Yzordderrex. If he found nothing, it would be a long trek on foot, but that would have to be the way of it. What little illumination the fires behind him proffered soon dwindled, and he was obliged to search by starlight, which would most probably have failed to show him the vehicle had his path not been redirected by the squeals of Floccus Dado's porcine pet Sighshy^ who, along with her litter, was still inside. The car had been thrown over in the storm, and so he went to it simply to let the animals out, planning to go on to find another. But as he struggled with the handle a human face appeared at the steamed-up window. Floccus was inside and greeted Gentle's appearance with a clamor of relief almost as high-pitched as Sighshy's. Gentle clambered up onto the side of the car and after much swearing and sweating wrenched the door open with brute force.

"Oh, you're a sight to behold, Maestro," Floccus said. "I thought I was going to suffocate in there."

The stench was piercing, and it came with Floccus when he clambered out. His clothes were caked in the litter's excrement, and Mama's too.

"How the hell did you get in there?" Gentle asked him.

Floccus wiped a turd trail off his spectacles and blinked at his savior through them.

"When Athanasius told me to summon you, I thought, Something's wrong here, Dado. You'd better go while you can. I'd just got into the car when the storm started, and it was simply turned over, with all of us inside. The windows are unbreakable, and the locks were jammed. I couldn't get out."

"You were lucky to be in there."

"So I see," Floccus observed, surveying the distant vista of destruction. "What happened out here?"

"Something came out of the First, in pursuit of Pie 'oh' pah."

"The Unbeheld did this?"

"So it would seem."

"Unkind," Floccus said softly, which was surely the understatement of the night.

Floccus lifted Sighshy and her litter—two of which had perished when their mother fell on them—out of the vehicle; then he and Gentle set to the task of putting it back on four wheels. It took some doing, but Floccus made up in strength what he lacked in height, and between the two of them the job was done.

Gentle had made plain his intention to return to Yzordderrex but wasn't certain of Floccus's intentions until the engine was running. Then he said, "Are you coming with me?"

"I should stay," Floccus replied. There was a fretful pause. "But I've never been much good with death."

"You said the same thing about sex."

"It's true."

"That doesn't leave much, does it?"

"Would you prefer to go without me, Maestro?"

"Not at all. If you want to come, come. But let's get going. I want to be in Yzordderrex by dawn."

"Why, what happens at dawn?" Floccus said, a superstitious flutter in his voice.

"It's a new day."

"Should we be grateful for that?" the other man inquired, as though he sniffed some profound wisdom in the Maestro's reply but couldn't quite grasp it.

"Indeed we should, FIoccus, indeed we should. For the day, and for the chance."

"What... er... what chance would that be exactly?"

"The chance to change the world."

"Ah," said FIoccus. "Of course. To change the world. I'll make that my prayer from now on."

"We'll compose it together, FIoccus. We've got to invent everything from now on: who we are, what we believe. There's been too many old roads taken. Too many old dramas repeated. We've got to find a new way by tomorrow."

"A new way."

"That's right. We'll make that our ambition, agreed? To be new men by the time the comet comes up."

FIoccus' doubt was visible, even by starlight. "That doesn't give us very long," he observed.

True enough, Gentle thought. In the Fifth, midsummer could not be very far off, and though he didn't yet comprehend the reasons, he knew the Reconciliation could only be performed on that day. There was a fine irony. Having frittered away lifetimes in pursuit of sensation, the span he had left in which to make good the error of that waste could be measured in terms of hours.

"There'll be time," he said, hoping to answer FIoccus' doubts, and subdue his own, but knowing in his heart of hearts that he was doing neither.