"Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pa.s.s through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that."

He did, from somewhere.

"Now," Pie went on. "Put your hand to your face, with your thumb against your chin. There are very few incantations in our workings. No pretty words. Just pneuma like this, and the will behind them."

"I've got the will, if that's what you're asking," Gentle said.

"Then one solid breath is all we need. Exhale until it hurts. I'll do the rest."

"Can I take another breath afterwards?"

"Not in this Dominion."

With that reply the enormity of what they were undertaking struck Gentle. They were leaving Earth. Stepping off the edge of the only reality he'd ever known into another state entirely. He grinned in the darkness, the hand bound to Pie's taking hold of his deliverer's fingers.

"Shall we?" he said.

In the murk ahead of him Pie's teeth gleamed in a matching smile.

"Why not?"

Gentle drew breath.

Somewhere in the house, he heard a door slamming and footsteps on the stairs leading up to the studio. But it was too late for interruptions. He exhaled through his hand, one solid breath which Pie'oh'pah seemed to s.n.a.t.c.h from the air between them. Something ignited in the fist the mystif made, bright enough to burn between its clenched fingers...

At the door, Jude saw Gentle's painting almost made flesh: two figures, almost nose to nose, with their faces illuminated by some unnatural source, swelling like a slow explosion between them. She had time to recognize them both-to see the smiles on their faces as they met each other's gaze-then, to her horror, they seemed to turn inside out. She glimpsed wet red surfaces, which folded upon themselves not once but three times in quick succession, each fold diminishing their bodies, until they were slivers of stuff, still folding, and folding, and finally gone.

She sank back against the doorjamb, shock making her nerves cavort. The dog she'd found waiting at the top of the stairs went fearlessly to the place where they'd stood. There was no further magic there, to s.n.a.t.c.h him after them. The place was dead. They'd gone, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, wherever such avenues led.

The realization drew a yell of rage from her, sufficient to send the dog scurrying for cover. She dearly hoped Gentle heard her, wherever he was. Hadn't she come here to share her revelations with him, so that they could investigate the great unknown together? And all the time he was preparing for his departure without her. Without her!

"How dare you?" she yelled at the empty s.p.a.ce.

The dog whined in fear, and the sight of its terror mellowed her. She went down on her haunches.

"I'm sorry," she said to it. "Come here. I'm not cross with you. It's that little f.u.c.ker Gentle."

The dog was reluctant at first but came to her after a time, its tail wagging intermittently as it grew more confident of her sanity. She rubbed its head, the contact soothing. All was not lost. What Gentle could do, she could do. He didn't have the copyright on adventuring. She'd find a way to go where he'd gone, if she had to eat the blue eye grain by grain to do so.

Church bells began to ring as she sat chewing this over, announcing in their ragged peals the arrival of midnight. Their clamor was accompanied by car horns in the street outside and cheers from a party in an adjacent house.

"Whoopee," she said quietly, on her face the distracted look that had obsessed so many of the opposite s.e.x over the years. She'd forgotten most of them. The ones who'd fought over her; the ones who'd lost their wives in their pursuit of her, even those who'd sold their sanity to find her equal: all were forgotten. History had never much engaged her. It was the future that glittered in her mind's eye, now more than ever.

The past had been written by men. But the future-pregnant with possibilities-the future was a woman.

18

Until the rise of Yzordderrex, a rise engineered by the Autarch for reasons more political than geographical, the city of Patashoqua, which lay on the edge of the Fourth Dominion, close to where the In Ovo marked the perimeter of the Reconciled worlds, had just claim to be the preeminent city of the Dominions. Its proud inhabitants called it casje au casje casje au casje, simply meaning the hive of hives, a place of intense and fruitful labor. Its proximity to the Fifth made it particularly p.r.o.ne to influences from that source, and even after Yzordderrex had became the center of power across the Dominions it was to Patashoqua that those at the cutting edge of style and invention looked for the coming thing. Patashoqua had a variation on the motor vehicle in its streets long before Yzordderrex. It had rock and roll in its clubs long before Yzordderrex. It had hamburgers, cinemas, blue jeans, and countless other proofs of modernity long before the great city of the Second. Nor was it simply the trivialities of fashion that Patashoqua reinvented from Fifth Dominion models. It was philosophies and belief systems. Indeed, it was said in Patashoqua that you knew a native of Yzordderrex because he looked like you did yesterday and believed what you'd believed the day before. As with most cities in love with the modern, however, Patashoqua had deeply conservative roots. Whereas Yzordderrex was a sinful city, notorious for the excesses of its darker Kesparates, the streets of Patashoqua were quiet after nightfall, its occupants in their own beds with their own spouses, plotting vogues. This mingling of chic and conservatism was nowhere more apparent than in architecture. Built as it was in a temperate region, unlike the semi-tropical Yzordderrex, the buildings did not have to be designed with any climatic extreme in mind. They were either elegantly cla.s.sical, and built to remain standing until Doomsday, or else functions of some current craze, and likely to be demolished within a week.

But it was on the borders of the city where the most extraordinary sights were to be seen, because it was here that a second, parasitical city had been created, peopled by inhabitants of the Four Dominions who had fled persecution and had looked to Patashoqua as a place where liberty of thought and action were still possible. How much longer this would remain the case was a debate that dominated every social gathering in the city. The Autarch had moved against other towns, cities, and states which he and his councils judged hotbeds of revolutionary thought. Some of those cities had been razed; others had come under Yzordderrexian edict and all sign of independent thought crushed. The university city of Hezoir, for instance, had been reduced to rubble, the brains of its students literally scooped out of their skulls and heaped up in the streets. In the Azzimulto the inhabitants of an entire province had been decimated, so rumor went, by a disease introduced into that region by the Autarch's representatives. There were tales of atrocity from so many sources that people became almost blase about the newest horror, until, of course, somebody asked how long it would be until the Autarch turned his unforgiving eyes on the hive of hives. Then their faces drained of color, and people talked in whispers of how they planned to escape or defend themselves if that day ever came; and they looked around at their exquisite city, built to stand until Doomsday, and wondered just how near that day was.

Though Pie'oh'pah had briefly described the forces that haunted the In Ovo, Gentle had only the vaguest impression of the dark protean state between the Dominions, occupied as he was by a spectacle much closer to his heart, that of the change that overtook both travelers as their bodies were translated into the common currency of pa.s.sage.

Dizzied by lack of oxygen, he wasn't certain whether these were real phenomena or not. Could bodies open like flowers, and the seeds of an essential self fly from them the way his mind told him they did? And could those same bodies be remade at the other end of the journey, arriving whole despite the trauma they'd undergone? So it seemed. The world Pie had called the Fifth folded up before the travelers' eyes, and they went like transported dreams into another place entirely. As soon as he saw the light, Gentle fell to his knees on the hard rock, drinking the air of this Dominion with grat.i.tude.

"Not bad at all," he heard Pie say. "We did it, Gentle. I didn't think we were going to make it for a moment, but we did it!"

Gentle raised his head, as Pie pulled him to his feet by the strap that joined them.

"Up! Up!" the mystif said. "It's not good to start a journey on your knees."

It was a bright day here, Gentle saw, the sky above his head cloudless, and brilliant as the green-gold sheen of a peac.o.c.k's tail. There was neither sun nor moon in it, but the very air seemed lucid, and by it Gentle had his first true sight of Pie since they'd met in the fire. Perhaps out of remembrance for those it had lost, the mystif was still wearing the clothes it had worn that night, scorched and bloodied though they were. But it had washed the dirt from its face, and its skin gleamed in the clear light.

"Good to see you," Gentle said.

"You too."

Pie started to untie the belt that bound them, while Gentle turned his gaze on the Dominion. They were standing close to the summit of a hill, a quarter of a mile from the perimeters of a sprawling shantytown, from which a din of activity rose. It spread beyond the foot of the hill and halfway across a flat and treeless plain of ocher earth, crossed by a thronged highway that led his eye to the domes and spires of a glittering city.

"Patashoqua?" he said.

"Where else?"

"You were accurate, then."

"More than I dared hope. The hill we're standing on is supposed to be the place where Hapexamendios first rested when He came through from the Fifth. It's called the Mount of Upper Bayak. Don't ask me why."

"Is the city under siege?" Gentle said.

"I don't think so. The gates look open to me."

Gentle scanned the distant walls, and indeed the gates were open wide. "So who are all these people? Refugees?"

"We'll ask in a while," Pie said.

The knot had come undone. Gentle rubbed his wrist, which was indented by the belt, staring down the hill as he did so. Moving between the makeshift dwellings below he glimpsed forms of being that didn't much resemble humanity. And, mingling freely with them, many who did. It wouldn't be difficult to pa.s.s as a local, at least.

"You're going to have to teach me, Pie," he said. "I need to know who's who and what's what. Do they speak English here?"

"It used to be quite a popular language," Pie replied. "I can't believe it's fallen out of fashion. But before we go any farther, I think you should know what you're travelling with. The way people respond to me may confound you otherwise."

"Tell me as we go," Gentle said, eager to see the strangers below up close.

"As you wish." They began to descend. "I'm a mystif; my name's Pie'oh'pah. That much you know. My gender you don't."

"I've made a guess," Gentle said.

"Oh?" said Pie, smiling. "And what's your guess?"

"You're an androgyne. Am I right?"

"That's part of it, certainly."

"But you've got a talent for illusion. I saw that in New York."

"I don't like the word illusion illusion. It makes me a guiser, and I'm not that"

"What then?"

"In New York you wanted Judith, and that's what you saw. It was your your invention, not mine." invention, not mine."

"But you played along."

"Because I wanted to be with you."

"And are you playing along now?"

"I'm not deceiving you, if that's what you mean. What you see is what I am, to you."

"But to other people?"

"I may be something different. A man sometimes. A woman others."

"Could you be white?"

"I might manage it for a moment or two. But if I'd tried to come to your bed in daylight, you'd have known I wasn't Judith. Or if you'd been in love with an eight-year-old, or a dog. I couldn't have accommodated that, except..." the creature glanced around at him, "...under very particular circ.u.mstances."

Gentle wrestled with this notion, questions biological, philosophical, and libidinous filling his head. He stopped walking for a moment and turned to Pie.

"Let me tell you what I see," he said. "Just so you know."

"Good."

"If I pa.s.sed you on the street I believe I'd think you were a woman..." he c.o.c.ked his head "...though maybe not. I suppose it'd depend on the light, and how fast you were walking." He laughed. "Oh, s.h.i.t," he said. "The more I look at you the more I see, and the more I see-"

"-the less you know."

"That's right. You're not a man. That's plain enough. But then..." He shook his head. "Am I seeing you the way you really are? I mean, is this the final version?"

"Of course not. There's stranger sights inside us both. You know that."

"Not until now."

"We can't go too naked in the world. We'd b.u.m out each other's eyes."

"But this is is you." you."

"For the time being."

"For what it's worth, I like it," Gentle said. "I don't know what I'd call you if I saw you in the street, but I'd turn my head. How's that?"

"What more could I ask for?"

"Will I meet others like you?"

"A few, maybe," Pie said. "But mystifs aren't common. When one is born, it's an occasion for great celebration among my people."

"Who are your people?"

"The Eurhetemec."

"Will they be here?" Gentle said, nodding towards the throng below.

"I doubt it. But in Yzordderrex, certainly. They have a Kesparate there."

"What's a Kesparate?"

"A district. My people have a city within the city. Or at least they had one. It's two hundred and twenty-one years since I was there."

"My G.o.d. How old are you?"

"Half that again. I know that sounds like an extraordinary span, but time works slowly on flesh touched by feits."

"Feits?"

"Magical workings. Feits, wantons, sways. They work their miracles even on a wh.o.r.e like me."

"Whoa!" said Gentle.

"Oh, yes. That's something else you should know about me. I was told-a long time ago-that I should spend my life as a wh.o.r.e or an a.s.sa.s.sin, and that's what I've done."

"Until now, maybe. But that's over."

"What will I be from now on?"

"My friend," Gentle said, without hesitation.

The mystif smiled. "Thank you for that."

The round of questions ended there, and side by side they wandered on down the slope.