Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

6

Jude was stirred from the torpor Quaisoir's narcotic bed had induced in her not by sound—she'd long since become accustomed to the anarchy that had raged unabated throughout the night—but by a sense of unease too vague to be identified and too insistent to be ignored. Something of consequence had happened in the Dominion, and though her wits were dulled by indulgence, she woke too agitated to return to the comfort of a scented pillow. Head throbbing, she heaved herself up out of the bed and went in search of her sister. Concupiscentia was at the door, with a sly smile on her face. Jude half remembered the creature slipping into one of her drugged dreams, but the details were hazy, and the foreboding she'd woken with was more important now than remembering the fantasies that had gone before. She found Quaisoir in a darkened room, sitting beside the window.

"Did something wake you, sister?" Quaisoir asked her.

"I don't quite know what, but yes. Do you know what it was?"

"Something in the desert," Quaisoir replied, turning her head towards the window, though she lacked the eyes to see what lay outside. "Something momentous."

"Is there any way of finding out what?"

Quaisoir took a deep breath. "No easy way."

"But there is one?"

"Yes, there's a place beneath the Pivot Tower..."

Concupiscentia had followed Judith into the room, but now, at the mention of this place, she made to withdraw. She was neither quiet nor fast enough, however. Quaisoir summoned her back.

"Don't be afraid," she told the creature. "We don't need you with us once we're inside. But fetch a lamp, will you? And something to eat and drink. We may be there awhile."

It was half a day and more since Jude and Quaisoir had taken refuge in the suite of chambers, and in that time any last occupants of the palace had made their escape, doubtless fearing the revolutionary zeal that would want the fortress cleansed of the Autarch's excesses down to the last bureaucrat. Those bureaucrats had fled, but the zealots hadn't appeared in their place. Though Jude had heard commotion in the courtyards as she'd dozed, it had never come close. Either the fury that had moved the tide was exhausted, and the insurgents were resting before they began their assault on the palace, or else their fervor had lost its singular purpose altogether, and the commotion she'd heard was factions battling with each other for the right to plunder, which conflicts had destroyed them all, left, right, and center. Whatever, the consequence was the same: a palace built to house many thousands of souls—servants, soldiers, pen pushers, cooks, stewards, messengers, torturers, and majordomos—was deserted, and they went through it, Jude led by Concupiscentia's lamp, Quaisoir led by Jude, like three tiny specks of life lost in a vast and dark machine. The only sounds were their footsteps, and those that said machine made as it ran down: hot-water pipes ticking as the furnaces that fed them guttered out; shutters beating themselves to splinters in empty rooms; guard dogs barking on gnawed leashes, fearful their masters would not come again. Nor would they. The furnaces would cool, the shutters break, and the dogs, trained to bring death, would have it come to them in their turn. The age of the Autarch Sartori was over, and no new age had yet begun.

As they walked Jude asked for an explanation of the place to which they were going, and by way of reply Quaisoir offered first a history of the Pivot. Of all the Autarch's devices to subdue and rule the Reconciled Dominions, she said—subverting the religions and governments of his enemies; setting nation against nation—none would have kept him in power for more than a decade had he not possessed the genius to steal and to set at the center of his empire the greatest symbol of power in the Imajica. The Pivot was

Hapexamendios' marker, and the fact that the Unbeheld had allowed the architect of Yzordderrex to even touch, much less move, his pylon was for many proof that however much they might despise the Autarch, he was touched by divinity and could never be toppled, What powers it had conferred on its possessor even she didn't know.

"Sometimes," she said, "when he was high on kreauchee, he'd talk about the Pivot as though he was married to it, and he was the wife. Even when we made love he'd talk that way. He'd say it was in him the way he was in me. He'd always deny it afterward, of course, but it was in his mind always. It's in every man's mind."

Jude doubted this, and said so.

"But they so want to be possessed," Quaisoir replied. "They want some Holy Spirit inside them. You listen to their prayers."

"That's not something I hear very often."

"You will when the smoke clears," Quaisoir replied. "They'll be afraid, once they realize the Autarch's gone. They may have hated him, but they'll hate his absence more."

"If they're afraid they'll be dangerous," Jude said, realizing as she spoke how well these sentiments might have come from Clara Leash's mouth. "They won't be devout."

Concupiscentia halted, before Quaisoir could take up her account afresh, and began to murmur a little prayer of her own.

"Are we here?" Quaisoir asked.

The creature broke the rhythm of her entreaty to tell her mistress that they were. There was nothing remarkable about the door in front of them, or the staircases that wound out of sight to either side of it. All were monumental, and therefore commonplace. They'd passed through dozens of portals like this as they'd made their way through the place's cooling belly. But Concupiscentia was plainly in terror of it, or rather of what lay on the other side.

"Are we near the Pivot?" Jude said.

"The tower's directly above us," Quaisoir replied.

"That's not where we're going?"

"No. The Pivot would probably kill us both. But there's a chamber below the tower, where the messages the Pivot collects drain away. I've spied there often, though he never knew it."

Jude let go of Quaisoir's arm and went to the door, keeping to herself the irritation she felt at being denied the tower itself. She wanted to see this power, which had reputedly been shaped and planted by God Himself. Quaisoir had talked of it as lethal, and perhaps it was, but how was anyone to know until they'd tested themselves against it? Perhaps its reputation was the Autarch's invention, his way of keeping its gifts for himself. Under its aegis, he'd prospered, no doubt of that. What might others do, if they had its blessing conferred upon them? Turn night to day?

She turned the handle and pushed open the door. Sour and chilly air issued from the darkened space beyond. Jude summoned Concupiscentia to her side, took the lamp from the creature, and held it high. Ahead lay a small inclined corridor, its walls almost burnished.

"Do I wait here, lady?" Concupiscentia asked.

"Give me whatever you brought to eat," Quaisoir replied, "and stay outside the door. If you hear or see anybody, I want you to come and find us. I know you don't like to go in there, but you must be brave. Understand me, dearling?"

"I understand, lady," Concupiscentia replied, handing to her mistress the bundle and the bottle she'd carried with her.

Thus laden, Quaisoir took Jude's arm and they stepped into the passage. One part of the fortress's machine was still operational, it seemed, because as soon as they closed the door after them a circuit, broken as long as the door stood wide, was completed, and the air began to vibrate against their skin: vibrate and whisper.

"Here they are," Quaisoir said. "The intimations."

That was too civilized a word for this sound, Jude thought. The passageway was filled with a quiet commotion, like snatches from a thousand radio stations, all incomprehensible, coming and going as the dial was flipped, and flipped again. Jude raised the lamp to see how much farther they had to travel. The passageway ended ten yards ahead, but with every yard they covered the din increased—not in volume but in complexity—as new stations were added to the number the walls were already tuned into. None of it was music. There were multitudes of voices raised as a single sound, and there were solitary howls; there were sobs, and shouts, and words spoken like a recitation.

"What is this noise?" Jude asked.

"The Pivot hears every piece of magic in the Dominions. Every invocation, every confession, every dying oath. This is the Unbeheld's way of knowing what Gods are being worshiped besides Him. And what Goddesses, too."

"He spies on deathbeds?" Jude said, more than faintly disgusted by the thought.

"On every place where a mortal thing speaks to the divine, whether the divinity exists or not, whether the prayer's answered or not, He's there."

"Here too?" Jude said.

"Not unless you start praying," Quaisoir said.

"I won't."

They were at the end of the passage, and the air was busier than ever; colder, too. The lamp's light illuminated a room shaped like a colander, maybe twenty feet across, its curved walls as polished as those of the passage. In the floor was a grille, like a gutter beneath a butcher's table, through which the detritus of prayers, ripped from the hearts of those in grief or washed up in tears of joy, ran off into the mountain upon which Yzordderrex was built. It was difficult for Jude to grasp the notion of prayer as a solid thing—a kind of matter to be gathered, analyzed, and sluiced away—but she knew her incomprehension was a consequence of living in a world out of love with transformation. There was nothing so solid that it couldn't be abstracted, nothing so ethereal that it couldn't find a place in the material world. Prayer might be substance after a time, and thought (which she'd believed skull—bound until the dream of the blue stone) fly like a bright-eyed bird, seeing the world remote from its sender; a flea might unravel flesh if wise to its code; and flesh in its turn move between worlds as a picture drawn in the mind of passage. All these mysteries were, she knew, part of a single system if she could only grasp it: one form becoming another, and another, and another, in a glorious tapestry of transformations, the sum of which was Being itself.

It was no accident that she embraced that possibility here. Though the sounds that filled the room were incomprehensible as yet, their purpose was known to her, and it raised the ambition of her thoughts. She let go of Quaisoir's arm and walked into the middle of the room, setting the lamp down beside the grille in the floor. They'd come here for a specific reason, and she knew she had to hold fast to that; otherwise her thoughts would be carried away on the swell of sound.

"How do we make sense of it?" she said to Quaisoir.

"It takes time," her sister replied. "Even for me. But I marked the compass points on the walls. Do you see?"

She did. Crude marks, scratched in the surface sheen.

"The Erasure is north-northwest of here. We can narrow the possibilities a little by turning in that direction." She extended her arms, like a haunting spirit. "Will you lead me to the middle?" she said.

Jude obliged, and they both turned in the direction of the Erasure. As far as Jude was concerned, doing so did little good. The din continued in all its complexity. But Quaisoir dropped her hands and listened intently, moving her head slightly from side to side as she did so. Several minutes passed, Jude keeping her silence for fear an inquiry would break her sister's concentration, and was rewarded for her diligence, finally, with some murmured words.

"They're praying to the Madonna," Quaisoir said.

"Who are?"

"Dearthers. Out at the Erasure. They're giving thanks for their deliverance and asking for the souls of the dead to be received into paradise."

She fell silent again for a time, and now, with some clue as to what she had to listen for, Jude attempted to sort through the intimations that filled her head. But although she was refining her focus, and could now snatch words and phrases out of the cpnfusion, she couldn't hold that focus long enough to make any sense of what she heard. After a time Quaisoir's body relaxed, and she shrugged.

"There's just glimpses now," she said. "I think they're finding bodies. I hear little sobs of prayers and little oaths."

"Do you know what happened?"

"This was some time ago," Quaisoir said. "The Pivot's had these prayers for several hours. But it was something calamitous, that's certain," she said. "I think there are a lot of casualties."

"It's as if what happened in, Yzordderrex is spreading," Jude said.

"Maybe it is," Quaisoir said. "Do you want to sit down and eat?"

"In here?"

"Why not? I find it very soothing." Reaching for Jude to help her, Quaisoir squatted down. "You get used to it after a time. Maybe a little addicted. Speaking of which... where's the food?" Jude put the bundle into Quaisoir's outstretched hands. "I hope the child packed kreauchee."

Her fingers were strong and, having scoured the surface of the bundle, dug deep, passing the contents over to Jude one by one. There was fruit, there were three loaves of black bread, there was some meat, and—the finding enough to bring a gleeful yelp from Quaisoira small parcel which she did not pass over to Jude but put to her nose.

"Bright thing," Quaisoir said. "She knows what I need."

"Is it some kind of drug?" Jude said, laying down the food. "I don't want you taking it. I need you here, not drifting off."

"Are you trying to forbid me my pleasure, after the way you dreamed on my pillows?" Quaisoir said. "Oh, yes, I heard your gasping and your groaning. Who were you imagining?"

"That's my business."

"And this is mine," Quaisoir replied, discarding the tissue in which Concupiscentia had fastidiously wrapped the kreauchee. It looked appetizing, like a cube of fudge.

"When you've got no addiction of your own, sister, then you can moralize," Quaisoir said. "I won't listen, but you can moralize."

With that, she put the whole of the kreauchee into her mouth, chewing on it contentedly. Jude, meanwhile, sought more conventional sustenance, choosing among the various fruits one that resembled a diminutive pineapple and peeling it to discover it was just that, its jufce tart but its meat tasty. That eaten, she went on to the bread and slivers of meat, her hunger so stimulated by the first few bites that she steadily devoured the lot, washing it down with bitter water from the bottle. The fall of prayers that had seemed so insistent when she'd first entered the chamber could not compete with the more immediate sensations of fruit, bread, meat, and water; the din became a background burble which she scarcely thought about until she'd finished her meal. By that time, the kreauchee was clearly working in Quaisoir's system. She was swaying back and forth as though in the arms of some invisible tide.

"Can you hear me?" Jude asked her.

She took awhile to reply. "Why don't you join me?" she said. "Kiss me, and we can share the kreauchee. Mouth to mouth. Mind to mind."

"I don't want to kiss you."

"Why not? Do you hate yourself too much to make love?" She smiled to herself, amused by the perverse logic of this. "Have you ever made love to a woman?"

"Not that I remember."

"I have. At the Bastion. It was better than being with a man."

She reached out towards Jude and found her hand with the accuracy of one sighted.

"You're cold," she said.

"No, you're hot," Jude replied, moving to break the contact.

"You know what air makes this place so cold, sister?" Quaisoir said. "It's the pit beneath the city, where the fake Redeemer went."

Jude looked down at the grille and shuddered. The dead were down there somewhere.

"You're cold like the dead are cold," Quaisoir went on. "Icy heart." All this she said in a singsong voice, to the rhythm of her rocking. "Poor sister. To be dead already."

"I don't want to hear any more of .this," Jude said. She'd preserved her equanimity so far, but Quaisoir's fugue talk was beginning to irritate her. "If you don't stop," she said quietly, "I'm going to leave you here."

"Don't do that," Quaisoir replied. "I want you to stay and make love to me."

"I've told you—"

"Mouth to mouth. Mind to mind."

"You're talking in circles."

"That's the way the world was made," she said. "Joined together, round and round." She put her hand to her mouth, as if to cover it, then smiled, with almost fiendish glee. "There's no way in and there's no way out. That's what the Goddess says. When we make love, we go round and round—"

She searched for Jude a second time, with the same unerring ease, and a second time Jude withdrew her hand, realizing as she did so that this repetition was part of her sister's egocentric game. A sealed system of mirrored flesh, moving round and round. Was that truly how the world was made? If so, it sounded like a trap, and she wanted her mind out of it, there and then.

"I can't stay in here," she said to Quaisoir.

"You'll come back?" her sister replied.

"Yes, in a while."

The answer was more repetition. "You'll come back."

This time Jude didn't bother replying, but crossed to the passageway and climbed back up to the door. Concupis-centia was still waiting on the other side, asleep now, her form delineated by the first signs of dawn through the window on the sill of which she rested. The fact that day was breaking surprised Jude; she'd assumed that there were several hours yet before the comet reared its burning head. She was obviously more disoriented than she'd thought, the time she'd spent in the room with Quaisoir—listening to the prayers, eating, and arguing—not minutes but hours. She went to the window and looked down at the dim courtyards. Birds stirred on a ledge somewhere below her and rose suddenly, heading into the brightening sky, taking her eye with them, up towards the tower. Quaisoir had been unequivocal about the dangers of venturing there. But for all her talk of love between women, wasn't she still in thrall to the mythologies of the man who'd made her Queen of Yzordderrex, and therefore bound to believe that the places he kept her from would do her harm? There was no better time to challenge that mythology than now, Jude thought, with a new day beginning, and the power that had uprooted the Pivot and raised such walls around it gone.

She went to the stairs and started to climb. After a few steps their curve took her into utter darkness, and she was obliged to ascend as blind as the sister she'd left below, her palm flat against the cold wall. But after maybe thirty stairs her outstretched arm encountered a door, so heavy she first assumed it to be locked. It required all her strength to open, but her effort was well rewarded. On the other side was a passageway lighter than the staircase she'd climbed, though still gloomy enough to limit her sight to less than ten yards. Hugging the wall, she advanced with great caution, her route bringing her to the corner of a corridor, the door that had once sealed it off from the chamber at its end blown from its hinges and lying, fractured and twisted, on the tiled floor beyond. She paused here, in order to listen for any sign of the wrecker's presence. There was none, so she moved on past the place, her gaze drawn to a flight of stairs that led up to her left. Forsaking the passageway, she began a second ascent, this one also leading into darkness, until she rounded a corner and a sliver of light descended to meet her. Its source was the door at the summit of the stairs, which stood slightly ajar.

Again, she halted a moment. Though there was no overt indication of power here—the atmosphere was almost tranquil—she knew that the force she'd come to confront was undoubtedly waiting in its silo at the top of the stairs, and more than likely sentient. She didn't discount the possibility that this hush was contrived to soothe her, and the light sent to coax. But if it wanted her up there, it must have a reason. And if it didn't—if it was as lifeless as the stone underfoot— she had nothing to lose.

"Let's see what you're made of," she said aloud, the challenge delivered at least as much to herself as the Unbeheld's Pivot. And so saying, she went to the door.

Though there were undoubtedly more direct routes to the Pivot Tower than the one he'd taken with Nikaetomaas, Gentle decided to go the way he half remembered rather than attempt a shortcut and find himself lost in the labyrinth. He parted company with Floccus Dado, Sighshy, and litter at the Gate of Saints and began his climb through the palace, checking on his position relative to the Pivot Tower from every window.

Dawn was in the offing. Birds rose singing from their nests beneath the colonnades and swooped over the courtyards, indifferent to the bitter smoke that passed for mist this morning. Another day was imminent, and his system was badly in need of sleep. He'd dozed a little on the journey from the Erasure, but the effect had been cosmetic. There was a fatigue in his marrow which would bring him to his knees very soon now, and the knowledge of that made him eager to complete the day's business as quickly as possible. He'd come back here for two reasons. First, to finish the task Pie's appearance and wounding had diverted him from: the pursuit and execution of Sartori. Second, whether he found his doppelganger here or not, to make his way back to the Fifth, where Sartori had talked of founding his New Yzordderrex. It wouldn't be difficult to get home, he knew, now that he was alive to his capacities as a Maestro. Even without the mystif to point the way, he'd be able to dig from memory the means to pass between Dominions.

But first, Sartori. Though two days had passed since he'd let the Autarch slip, he nursed the hope that his other would still be haunting his palace. After all, removal from this self-made womb, where his smallest word had been law and his tiniest deed worshipful, would be painful. He'd linger awhile, surely. And if he was going to linger anywhere, it would be close to the object of power that had made him the undisputed master of the Reconciled Dominions: the Pivot.

He was just beginning to curse himself for losing his way when he came upon the spot where Pie had fallen. He recognized it instantly, as he did the distant door that led into the tower. He allowed himself a moment of meditation at the spot where he'd cradled Pie, but it wasn't their fond exchanges here that filled his head, it was the mystif s last words, uttered in anguish as the force behind the Erasure claimed it.

Sartori, Pie had said. Find him... he knows....

Whatever knowledge Sartori possessed—and Gentle guessed it would concern plots laid against the Reconciliation—he, Gentle, was ready to do whatever was required in order to squeeze this information from his other before he delivered the coup de grace. There were no moral niceties here. If he had to break every bone in Sartori's body, it would be a little hurt set beside the crimes he'd committed as Autarch, and Gentle would perform such duties gladly.

Thought of torture, and the pleasure he'd take in it, had tempted him from his meditation entirely, and he gave up on his pursuit of equilibrium. Venom swilling in his belly, he headed down the corridor, through the door, and into the tower. Though the comet was climbing towards midmorning, very little of its light gained access to the tower, but those few beams that did creep in showed him empty passageways in all directions. He still advanced with caution; this was a maze of chambers, any one of which might conceal his enemy. Fatigue left him less light-footed than he'd have liked, but he reached the stairs that curled up towards the silo itself without his stumblings'attracting any attention, and began to climb. The door at the top had been opened, he remembered, with the key of Sartori's thumb, and he'd have to repeat the feit himself in order to enter.

That was no great challenge. They had the same thumbs, to the tiniest whorl.

As it was, he needed no feit. The door was open wide, and somebody was moving about inside. Gentle halted ten steps from the threshold and drew breath. He'd need to incapacitate his other quickly if he was to prevent retaliation: a pneuma to take off his right hand, another for his left. Breath readied, he climbed swiftly to the top of the stairs and stepped into the tower.

His enemy was standing beneath the Pivot, arms raised, reaching for the stone. He was all in shadow, but Gentle caught the motion of his head as he turned towards the door, and before the other could lower his arms in defense, Gentle had his fist to his mouth, the breath rising in his throat. As it filled his palm his enemy spoke, but the voice when it came was not his own, as he'd expected, but that of a woman. Realizing his error, he clamped his fist around the pneuma to quench it, but the power he'd unleashed wasn't about to be cheated of its quarry. It broke from between his fingers, its force fragmented but no less eager for that. The pieces flew off around the silo, some darting up the sides of the Pivot, others entering its shadow and extinguished there. The woman cried out in alarm and retreated from her attacker, backing against the opposite wall. There the light found her perfection. It was Judith; or at least it seemed to be. He'd seen this face in Yzordderrex once already and been mistaken.

"Gentle?" she said. "Is that you?"

It sounded like her too. But then hadn't that been his promise to Roxborough, that he'd fashion a copy indistinguishable from the original?

"It's me," she said. "It's Jude."

Now he began to believe it was, fof there was more proof in that last syllable than sight could ever supply. Nobody in her circle of admirers, besides Gentle, had ever called her Jude. Judy, sometimes; Juju, even; but never Jude. That was his diminution, and to his certain knowledge she'd never suffered another to use it.

He repeated it now, his hand dropping from his mouth as he spoke, and seeing the smile spread across his face she ventured back towards him, returning into the shadow of the Pivot as he came to meet her. The move saved her life, Seconds after she left the wall a slab of rock, blasted from the heights of the silo by the pneuma, fell on the spot where she'd stood. It initiated a hard, lethal rain, shards of stone falling on all sides. There was safety in the shelter of the Pivot, however, and there they met and kissed and embraced as though they'd been parted a lifetime, not weeks, which in a sense was true. The din of falling rock was muted in the shadow, though its thunder was only yards from where they stood. When she cupped his face in her hands and spoke, her whispers were quite audible; as were his.

"I've missed you," she said. There was a welcome warmth in her voice, after the days of anguish and accusation he'd heard. "I even dreamed about you...."

"Tell me," he murmured, his lips close to hers.

"Later, maybe," she said, kissing him again. "I've so much to tell you,"

"Likewise," Gentle said.

"We should find ourselves somewhere safer than this," she said.

"We're out of harm's way here," Gentle said.

"Yes, but for how long?"

The scale of the demolition was increasing, its violence out of all proportion to the force Gentle had unleashed, as though the Pivot had taken the pneuma's power and magnified it. Perhaps it knew—how could it not? — that the man it had been in thrall to had gone and was now about the business of shrugging off the prison Sartori had raised around it. Judging by the size of the slabs falling all around, the process would not take long. They were monumental, their impact sufficient to open cracks in the floor of the tower, the sight of which brought a cry of alarm from Jude.

"Oh, God, Quaisoir!" she said.

"What about her?"

"She's down there!" Jude said, staring at the gaping ground. "There's a chamber below this! She's in it!"

"She'll be out of there by now."

"No, she's high on kreauchee! We have to get down there!"

She left Gentle's side and crossed to the edge of their shelter, but before she could make a dash for the open door a new fall of rubble and dust obliterated the way ahead. It wasn't simply blocks of the tower that were falling now, Gentle saw. There were vast shards of the Pivot itself in this hail. What was it doing? Destroying itself, or shedding skins to uncover its core? Whichever, their place in the shadow was more precarious by the second. The cracks underfoot were already a foot wide and widening, the hovering monolith above them shuddering as if it was about to give up the effort of suspension and drop. They had no choice but to brave the rockfall.

He went to join Jude, searching his wits for a means to survival and picturing Chicka Jackeen at the Erasure, his hands high to ward off the detritus dropped by the storm. Could he do the same? Not giving himself pause to doubt, he lifted his hands above his head as he'd seen the monk do, palms up, and stepped out of the Pivot's shadow. One heavenward glance confirmed both the Pivot's shedding and the scale of his jeopardy. Though the dust was thick, he could see that the monolith was sloughing off scales of stone, the pieces large enough to smash them both to pulp. But his defense held. The slabs shattered two or three feet above his naked head, their smithereens dropping like a fleeting vault around him. He felt the impact nevertheless, as a succession of jolts through his wrists, arms, and shoulders, and knew he lacked the strength to preserve the feit for more than a few seconds. Jude had already grasped the method in his madness, however, and stepped from the shadow to join him beneath this flimsy shield. There were perhaps ten paces between where they stood and the safety of the door.

"Guide me," he told her, unwilling to take his eyes off the rain for fear his concentration slip and the feit lose its potency.

Jude slipped her arm around his waist and navigated for them both, telling him where to step to find clear ground and warning him when the path was so heavily strewn they were obliged to stumble over stone. It was a tortuous business, and Gentle's upturned hands were steadily beaten down until they were barely above his head, but the feit held to the door, and they slid through it together, with the Pivot and its prison throwing down such a hail of debris that neither was now visible.

Then Jude was off at speed, down the murky stairs. The walls were shaking, and laced with cracks as the demolition above took its toll below, but they negotiated both the trembling passageway and the second flight of stairs down to the lower level unharmed. Gentle was startled at the sight and sound of Concupiscentia, who was screeching in the passageway like a terrified ape, unwilling to go in search of her mistress, Jude had no such qualms. She'd already thrown open the door and was heading down an incline into a lamp-lit chamber beyond, calling Quaisoir's name to stir her from her stupor. Gentle followed, but was slowed by the cacophony that greeted him, a mingling of manic whispers and the din of capitulation from above. By the time he reached the room itself, Jude had bullied her sister to her feet. There were substantial cracks in the ceiling and a constant drizzle of dust, but Quaisoir seemed indifferent to the hazard.

"I said you'd come back," she said. "Didn't I? Didn't I say you'd come back? Do you want to kiss me? Please kiss me, sister."

"What's she talking about?" Gentle asked.

The sound of his voice brought a cry from the woman. She flung herself out of Jude's arms.

"What have you done?" she yelled. "Why did you bring him here?"

"He's come to help us," Jude replied.

Quaisoir spat in Gentle's direction. "Leave me alone!" she screeched. "Haven't you done enough? Now you want to take my sister from me! You bastard! I won't let you! We'll die before you touch her!" She reached for Jude, sobbing in panic. "Sister! Sister.'"

"Don't be frightened," Jude said. "He's a friend." She looked at Gentle. "Reassure her," she begged him. "Tell her who you are, so we can get out of here."

"I'm afraid she already knows," Gentle replied.

Jude was mouthing the word what? when Quaisoir's panic boiled up again.

"Sartori!" she screeched, her denunciation echoing around the room. "He's Sartori, sister! Sartori!"

Gentle raised his hands in mock surrender, backing away from the woman. "I'm not going to touch you," he said. "Tell her, Jude. I don't want to hurt her!"

But Quaisoir was in the throes of another outburst. "Stay with me, sister," she said, grabbing hold of Jude. "He can't kill us both!"

"You can't stay in here," Jude said.

"I'm not going out!" Quaisoir said. "He's got soldiers out there! Rosengarten! That's who he's got! And his torturers!"

"It's safer out there than it is in here," Jude said, casting her eyes up at the roof. Several carbuncles had appeared in it, oozing debris. "We have to be quick!"

Still she refused, putting her hand up to Jude's face and stroking her cheek with her clammy palm: short, nervy strokes.

"We'll stay here together," she said. "Mouth to mouth. Mind to mind."

"We can't," Jude told her, speaking as calmly as circumstance allowed. "I don't want to be buried alive, and neither do you."

"If we die, we die," said Quaisoir. "I don't want him touching me again, do you hear?"

"I know. I understand."

"Not ever! Not ever!"

"He won't," Jude said, laying her own hand over Quaisoir's, which was still stroking her face. She laced her fingers through those of her sister and locked them. "He's gone," she said. "He won't be coming near either of us again."

Gentle had indeed retreated as far as the passageway, but even though Jude waved him away he refused to go any further. He'd had too many reunions cut short to risk letting her out of his sight.

"Are you certain he's gone?"

"I'm certain."

"He could still be waiting outside for us."

"No, sister. He was afraid for his life. He's fled."

Quaisoir grinned at this. "He was afraid?" she said.

"Terrified,"

"Didn't I tell you? They're all the same. They talk like heroes, but there's piss in their veins." She began to laugh out loud, as careless now as she'd been in terror moments before. "We'll go back to my bedroom," she said when the outburst subsided, "and sleep for a while."

"Whatever you want to do," Jude said. "But let's do it soon."

Still chuckling to herself, Quaisoir allowed Jude to lift her up and escort her towards the door. They had covered maybe half that distance, Gentle standing aside to let them pass, when one of the carbuncles in the ceiling burst and threw down a rain of wreckage from the tower above. Gentle saw Jude struck and felled by a chunk of stone; then the chamber filled with an almost viscous dust that blotted out both sisters in an instant. With his only point of reference the lamp, the flame of which was just visible through the dirt, he headed into the fog to fetch her, as a thundering from above announced a further escalation of the tower's collapse. There was no time for protective feits or for keeping his silence. If he failed to find her in the next few seconds, they'd all be buried. He started to yell her name through the rising roar and, hearing her call back to him, followed her voice to where she was lying, half buried beneath a cairn of rubble.

"There's time," he said to her as he began to dig. "There's time. We can make it out."

With her arms unpinned she began to speed her own excavation, hauling herself up out of the debris and locking her arms around Gentle's neck. He started to stand, pulling her free of the remaining rocks, but as he did so another commotion began, louder than anything that had preceded it. This was not the din of destruction but a shriek of white fury. The dust above their heads parted, and Quaisoir appeared, floating inches from the fissured ceiling. Jude had seen this transformation before—ribbons of flesh unfurled from her sister's back and bearing her up—but Gentle had not. He gaped at the apparition, distracted from thoughts of escape.

'She's mine!" Quaisoir yelled, swooping towards them with the same sightless but unerring accuracy she'd possessed in more intimate moments, her arms outstretched, her fingers ready to twist the abductor's head from his neck.

But Jude was quick. She stepped in front of Gentle, calling Quaisoir's name. The woman's swoop faltered, the hungry hands inches from her sister's upturned face.

"I don't belong to you!" she yelled back at Quaisoir. "I don't belong to anybody! Hear me?"

Quaisoir threw back her head and loosed a howl of rage at this. It was her undoing. The ceiling shuddered and abandoned its duty at her din, collapsing beneath the weight of nibble heaped behind it. There was, Jude thought, time for Quaisoir to escape the consequences of her cry. She'd seen the woman move like lightning at Pale Hill, when she had the will to do so. But that will had gone. Face to the killing dirt, she let the debris rain upon her, inviting it with her unbroken cry, which didn't become alarm or plea, but remained a solid howl of fury until the rocks broke and buried her. It wasn't quick. She went on calling down destruction as Gentle took Jude's hand and hauled her away from the spot. He'd lost all sense of direction in the chaos, and had it not been for the screeching of Concupiscentia in the passageway beyond they'd never have made it to the door.

But make it they did, emerging with half their senses deadened by dust. Quaisoir's death cry had ceased by now, but the roar behind them was louder than ever and drove them from the door as the canker spread across the roof of the corridor. They outran it, however, Concupiscentia giving up her keening when she knew her mistress was lost and overtaking them, fleeing to some sanctuary where she could raise a song of lamentation.

Jude and Gentle ran until they were out from under any stone, roof, arch, or vault that might collapse upon them, into a courtyard full of bees feasting on bushes that had chosen that day, of all days, to blossom. Only then did they put their arms around each other again, each sobbing for private griefs and gratitudes, while the ground shook under them to the din of the demolition they'd escaped.

In fact the ground didn't stop reverberating until they were well outside the walls of the palace and wandering in the ruins of Yzordderrex. At Jude's suggestion they made their way back at all speed to Peccable's house, where, she explained to Gentle, there was a well-used route between this Dominion and the Fifth. He put up no resistance to this. Though he hadn't exhausted Sartori's hiding places by any means (could he ever, when the palace was so vast?) he had exhausted his limbs, his wits, and his will. If his other was still here in Yzordderrex, he posed very little threat. It was the Fifth that needed to be defended against him: the Fifth, which had forgotten magic and could so easily be his victim.

Though the streets of many Kesparates were little more than bloody valleys between rubble mountains, there were sufficient landmarks for Jude to trace her way back towards the district where Peccable's house had stood. There was no certainty, of course, that it would still be standing after a day and a night of cataclysm, but if they had to dig to reach the cellar, so be it.

They were silent for the first mile or so of the trek, but then they began to talk, begining—inevitably—with an explanation from Gentle as to why Quaisoir, hearing his voice, had taken him for her husband. He prefaced his account with the caveat that he wouldn't mire it in apology or justification but would tell it simply, like some grim fable. Then he went on to do precisely that. But the telling, for all its clarity, contained one significant distortion. When he described his encounter with the Autarch he drew in Jude's mind the portrait of a man to whom he bore only a rudimentary resemblance, a man so steeped in evil that his flesh had been corrupted by his crimes. She didn't question this description, but pictured an individual whose inhumanity seeped from every pore, a monster whose very presence would have induced nausea.

Once he'd unraveled the story of his doubling, she began to supply details of her own. Some were culled from dreams, some from clues she'd had from Quaisoir, yet others from Oscar Godolphin. His entrance into the account brought with it a fresh cycle of revelations. She started to tell Gentle about her romance with Oscar, which in turn led on to the subject of Dowd, living and dying; thence to Clara Leash and the Tabula Rasa.

"They're going to make it very dangerous for you back in London," she told him, having related what little she knew about the purges they'd undertaken in the name of Roxborough's edicts. "They won't have the slightest compunction about murdering you, once they know who you are."

"Let them try," Gentle said flatly. "Whatever they want to throw at me, I'm ready. I've got work to do, and they're not going to stop me."

"Where will you start?"

"In CJerkenwell. I had a house in Gamut Street. Pie says it's still standing. My life's there, ready for the remembering. We both need the past back, Jude."

"Where do I get mine from?" she wondered aloud.

"From me and from Godolphin."

"Thanks for the offer, but I'd like a less partial source. I've lost Clara, and now Quaisoir. I'll have to start looking." She thought of Celestine as she spoke, lying in darkness beneath the Tabula Rasa's tower.

"Have you got somebody in mind?" Gentle asked.

"Maybe," she said, as reluctant as ever to share that secret.

He caught the whiff of evasion. "I'm going to need help, Jude," he said. "I hope, whatever's been between us in the past—good and bad—we can find some way to work together that'll benefit us both."

A welcome sentiment, but not one she was willing to open her heart for. She simply said, "Let's hope so," and left it at that.

He didn't press the issue, but turned the conversation to lighter matters. "What was the dream you had?" he asked her. She looked confounded for a moment. "You said you had a dream about me, remember?"

"Oh, yes," she replied. "It was nothing, really. Past history."

When they reached Peccable's house it was still intact, though several others in the street had been reduced to blackened rubble by missiles or arsonists. The door stood open, and the interior had been comprehensively looted, down to the tulips and the vase on the dining room table. There was no sign of bloodshed, however, except those scabby stains Dowd had left when he'd first arrived, so she presumed that Hoi-Polloi and her father had escaped unharmed. The signs of frantic thieving did not extend to the cellar. Here, though the shelves had been cleared of the icons, talismans, and idols, the removal had been made calmly and systematically. There was not a rosary remaining, or any sign that the thieves had broken a single charm. The only relic of the cellar's life as a trove was set in the floor the ring of stones that echoed that of the Retreat.

"This is where we arrived," Jude said.

Gentle stared down at the design in the floor. "What is it?" he said. "What does it mean?"

"I don't know. Does it matter? As long as it gets us back to the Fifth—"

"We've got to be careful from now on," Gentle replied. "Everything's connected. It's all one system. Until we understand our place in the pecking order, we're vulnerable."

One system; she'd speculated on that possibility in the room beneath the tower: the Imajica as a single, infinitely elaborate pattern of transformation. But just as there were times for such musings, so there were also times for action, and she had no patience with Gentle's anxieties now.

"If you know another way out of here," she said, "let's take it. But this is the only way I know. Godolphin used it for years and it never harmed him, till Dowd screwed it up."

Gentle had gone down on his haunches and was laying his fingers on the stones that bound the mosaic.

"Circles are so powerful," he said.

"Are we going to use it or not?" .

He shrugged. "I don't have a better way," he said, still reluctant. "Do we just step inside?"

"That's all."

He rose. She laid her hand on his shoulder, and he reached up to clasp it.

"We have to hold tight," she said. "I only got a glimpse of the In Ovo, but I wouldn't want to get lost there."

"We won't get lost," he said, and stepped into the circle.

She was with him a heartbeat later, and already the Express was getting up steam. The solid cellar walls and empty shelves began to blur. The forms of their translated selves began to move in their flesh.

The sensation of passage awoke in Gentle memories of the outward journey, when Pie 'oh' pah had stood beside him where Jude was now. Remembering, he felt a stab of inconsolable loss. There were so many people he'd encountered in these Dominions whom he'd never set eyes on again. Some, like Efreet Splendid and his mother, Nikaetomaas, and Huzzah, because they were dead. Others, like Athanasius, because the crimes Sartori had committed were his crimes now, and whatever good he hoped to do in the future would never be enough to expunge them. The hurt of these losses was of course negligible beside the greater grief he'd sustained at the Erasure, but he'd not dared dwell too much upon that, for fear it incapacitated him. Now, however, he thought of it, and the tears started to flow, washing the last glimpse of Peccable's cellar away before the mosaic had removed the travelers from it.

Paradoxically, had he been leaving alone the despair might not have cut so deep. But as Pie had been fond of saying, there was only ever room for three players in any drama, and the woman in the flux beside him, her glyph burning through his tears, would from this moment on remind him that he had departed Yzordderrex with one of those three left behind.