"It's not that," he said, "I want to know what the message means. If you're telling the boss it's not safe, does that mean he won't open the Dominions?"

"I don't know."

"But I want to see Patashoqua and L'Himby and Yzordderrex," he said, listing the places like charms.

"I know that," she said. "And believe me, I want the Dominions opened just as much as you do."

She studied his face in the dying firelight, looking for some clue as to whether he was being placated, but for all his youth he was a master of concealment. She'd have to trust that he'd put his duties as a messenger above his desire to see the Imajica and relay the spirit of her warning, if not its precise text.

"You've got got to make Gentle understand the danger he's in," she said, hoping this tack would make him conscientious. to make Gentle understand the danger he's in," she said, hoping this tack would make him conscientious.

"I will," he said, now faintly irritated by her insistence.

She let the subject lie and returned to the business of finding the stones. He didn't offer his a.s.sistance, but retreated to the door, from which he said, "How will you get back?"

She'd found four of the stones already, and the birds on the roof had set up a fresh cacophony, suggesting that they felt some tremor of change below.

"I'll deal with that problem when I get to it," she replied.

The birds suddenly rose up and, unnerved, Monday stepped out of the Retreat altogether. Jude glanced up at him as she dug out another stone. The fire between them had already been fanned into flame, and now its ashes were stirred up, rising in a s.m.u.tty cloud to hide the door from view. She scanned the mosaic, checking to see if she'd missed a stone, but the itches and aches she remembered from her first crossing were already creeping through her body, proof that the pa.s.sing place was about its work.

Oscar had told her, on this very spot, that the discomforts of pa.s.sage diminished with repet.i.tion, and his words proved correct. She had time, as the walls blurred around her, to glimpse the door through the swirling ash and realize, all too late, that she should have looked out at the world one last time before leaving it. Then the Retreat disappeared, and the In Ovo's delirium was oppressing her, its prisoners rising in their legions to claim her. Traveling alone, she went more quickly than she had with Oscar (at least that was her impression), and she was out the other side before the Oviates had time to sniff the heels of her glyph.

The walls of the merchant Peccable's cellar were brighter than she remembered them. The reason: a lamp which burned on the floor a yard from the circle and beyond it a figure, its face a blur, which came at her with a bludgeon and laid her unconscious on the floor before she'd uttered a word of explanation.

54

The mantle of night was falling on the Fifth Dominion, and Gentle found Tick Raw near the summit of the Mount of Lipper Bayak, watching the last dusky colors of day drop from the sky. He was eating while he did so, a bowl each of sausage and pickle between his feet and a large pot of mustard between these, into which meat and vegetable alike were plunged; Though Gentle had come here as a projection-his body left sitting cross-legged in the Meditation Room in Gamut Street-he didn't need nose or palate to appreciate the piquancy of Raw's meal; imagination sufficed.

He looked up when Gentle approached, unperturbed by the phantom watching him eat.

"You're early, aren't you?" he remarked, glancing at his pocket watch, which hung from his coat on a piece of string. "We've got hours yet."

"I know. I just came-"

"-to check up on me," Tick Raw said, the sting of pickle in his voice. "Well, I'm here. Are you ready in the Fifth?"

"We're getting there," Gentle said, somewhat queasily.

Though he'd traveled this way countless times as the Maestro Sartori-his mind, empowered by feits, carrying his image and his voice across the Dominions-and had reacquainted himself with the technique easily enough, the sensation was d.a.m.n strange.

"What do I look like?" he asked Tick Raw, remembering as he spoke how he'd attempted to describe the mystif on these very slopes.

"Insubstantial," Tick Raw replied, squinting up at him, then returning to his meal. "Which is fine by me, because there's not enough sausage for two."

"I'm still getting used to what I'm capable of."

"Well, don't take too long about it," Tick Raw said. "We've got work to do."

"And I should have realized that you were part of that work when I was first here, but I didn't, and for that I apologize."

"Accepted," Tick Raw said.

"You must have thought I was crazy."

"You certainly-how shall I put this?-you certainly confounded confounded me. It took me days to work out why you were so d.a.m.n obstreperous. Pie talked to me, you know, tried to make me understand. But I'd been waiting for somebody to come from the Fifth for so long I was only listening with half an ear." me. It took me days to work out why you were so d.a.m.n obstreperous. Pie talked to me, you know, tried to make me understand. But I'd been waiting for somebody to come from the Fifth for so long I was only listening with half an ear."

"I think Pie probably hoped my meeting with you would make me remember who the h.e.l.l I was."

"How long did it take?"

"Months."

"Was it the mystif who hid you from yourself in the first place?"

"Yes, of course."

"Well, it did too good a job. That'll teach it. Where's your flesh and blood, by the way?"

"Back in the Fifth."

"Take my advice, don't leave it too long. I find the bowels mutiny, and you come back to find you're sitting in s.h.i.te. Of course, that could be a personal weakness."

He selected another sausage and chewed on it as he asked Gentle why the h.e.l.l he'd let the mystif make him forget.

"I was a coward," Gentle replied. "I couldn't face my failure."

"It's hard," Tick Raw said. "I've lived all these years wondering if I could have saved my Maestro, Uter Musky, if I'd been quicker witted. I still miss him."

"I'm responsible for what happened to him, and I've no excuses."

"We've all got our frailties, Maestro: my bowels; your cowardice. None of us is perfect. But I presume your being here means we're finally going to have another try?"

"That's my intention, yes."

Again, Tick Raw looked at his watch, doing a mute calculation as he chewed. "Twenty of your Fifth Dominion hours from now, or thereabouts."

"That's right."

"Well, you'll find me ready," he said, consuming a sizable pickle in one bite.

"Do you have anyone to help you?"

His mouth full, all Tick could manage was: " 'On't 'eed un." He chewed on, then swallowed. "n.o.body even knows I'm here," he explained. "I'm still wanted by the law, even though I hear Yzordderrex is in ruins."

"It's true."

"I also hear the Pivot's quite transformed," Tick Raw said. "Is that right?"

"Into what?"

"n.o.body can get near enough to find out," he replied. "But if you're planning to check on the whole Synod-"

"I am."

"Then maybe you'll see for yourself while you're in the city. There was a Eurhetemec representing the Second, if I remember-"

"He's dead."

"So who's there now?"

"I'm hoping Scopique's found someone."

"He's in the Third, isn't he? At the Pivot pit?"

"That's right."

"And who's at the Erasure?"

"A man called Chicka Jackeen."

"I've never heard of him," Tick Raw said. "Which is odd. I get to hear about most Maestros. Are you sure he's a Maestro?"

"Certainly."

Tick Raw shrugged. "I'll meet him in the Ana then. And don't worry about me, Sartori. I'll be here."

"I'm glad we've made our peace."

"I fight over food and women but never metaphysics," Tick Raw said. "Besides, we've joined in a great mission. This time tomorrow you'll be able to walk home from here!"

Their exchange ended on that optimistic note, and Gentle left Tick to his night watch, heading with a thought towards the Kwem, where he hoped to find Scopique keeping his place beside the site of the Pivot. He would have been there in the time it took to think himself over the border between Dominions, but he allowed his journey to be diverted by memory. His thoughts turned to Beatrix as he left the Mount of Lipper Bayak, and it was there rather than the Kwem his spirit flew to, arriving on the outskirts of the village.

It was night here too, of course. Doeki lowed softly on the dark slopes around him, their neck bells tinkling. Beatrix itself was silent, however, the lamps that had flickered in the groves around the houses gone, and the children who'd tended them gone too: all extinguished. Distressed by this melancholy sight, Gentle almost fled the village there and then, but that he glimpsed a single light in the distance and, advancing a little way, saw a figure he recognized crossing the street, his lamp held high. It was Coaxial Tasko, the hermit of the hill who'd granted Pie and Gentle the means to dare the Jokalaylau. Tasko paused, halfway across the street, and raised his lamp, peering out into the darkness.

"Is somebody there?" he asked.

Gentle wanted to speak-to make his peace, as he had with Tick Raw, and to talk about the promise of tomorrow-but the expression on Tasko's face forbade him. The hermit wouldn't thank him for apologies, Gentle thought, or for talk of a bright new day. Not when there were so many who'd never see it. If Tasko had some inkling of his visitor, he also judged a meeting pointless. He simply shuddered, lowered his lamp, and moved on about his business.

Gentle didn't linger another minute, but turned his face up towards the mountains and thought himself away, not just from Beatrix but from the Dominion. The village vanished, and the dusty daylight of the Kwem appeared around him. Of the four sites where he hoped to find his fellow Maestros-the Mount, the Kwem, the Eurhetemec Kesparate, and the Erasure-this was the only one he hadn't visited in his travels with Pie, and he'd been prepared to have some difficulty locating the spot. But Scopique's presence was a beacon in this wasteland. Though the wind raised blinding clouds of dust, he found the man within a few moments of his arrival, squatting in the shelter of a primitive blind, constructed from a few blankets hung on poles which were stuck in the gray earth.

Uncomfortable though it was, Scopique had suffered worse privations in his life as a seditionist-not least his incarceration in the maison de sante maison de sante-and when he rose to meet Gentle it was with the brio of a fit and contented man. He was dressed immaculately in a three-piece suit and bow tie, and his face, despite the peculiarity of his features (the nose that was barely two holes in his head, the popping eyes), was much less pinched than it had been, his cheeks made florid by the gritty wind. Like Tick Raw, he was expecting his visitor.

"Come in! Come in!" he said. "Not that you're feeling the wind much, eh?"

Though this was true (the wind blew through Gentle in the most curious way, eddying around his navel), he joined Scopique in the lee of his blankets, and there they sat down to talk. As ever, Scopique had a good deal to say and poured his tales and observations out in a seamless monologue. He was ready, he said, to represent this Dominion in the sacred s.p.a.ce of the Ana, though he wondered how the equilibrium of the working would be affected by the absence of the Pivot. It had been set at the center of the Five Dominions, he reminded Gentle, to be a conduit, and perhaps an interpreter, of power through the Imajica. Now it was gone, and the Third was undoubtedly the weaker for its removal.

"Look," he said, standing up and leading his phantom visitor out to the tip of the pit. "I'm left conjuring beside a hole in the ground!"

"And you think that'll affect the working?"

"Who knows? We're all amateurs pretending to be experts. All I can do is cleanse the place of its previous occupant and hope for the best."

He directed Gentle's attention away from the pit, to the smoking sh.e.l.l of a sizable building, which was only occasionally visible through the dust.

"What was that?" Gentle asked.

"The b.a.s.t.a.r.d's palace."

"And who destroyed it?"

"I did, of course," Scopique said. "I didn't want his handiwork looming over our working. This is going to be a delicate operation as it is, without his filthy influence f.u.c.king it up. It looked like a bordello!" He turned his back on it. "We should have had months to prepare for this, not hours."

"I realize that-"

"And then there's the problem of the Second. You know Pie charged me with finding a replacement? I'd have liked to discuss all of this with you, of course, but when we last met you were in a fugue state, and Pie forbade me to acquaint you with who you were, though-may I be honest?"

"Could I stop you?"

"No. I was sorely tempted to slap you out of it." Scopique looked at Gentle fiercely, as though he might have done so now, if Gentle had been material enough. "You caused the mystif so much grief, you know," he said. "And like a d.a.m.ned fool it loved you anyway."

"I had my reasons," Gentle said softly. "But you were talking about this replacement-"

"Ah, yes. Athanasius."

"Athanasius?"

"He's now our man in Yzordderrex, representing the Second. Don't look so appalled. He knows the ceremony, and he's completely committed to it."

"There's not a sane bone in his body, Scopique. He thought I was Hapexamendios' agent."

"Well, of course, that's nonsense-"

"He tried to kill me with Madonnas. He's crazy!"

"We've all had our moments, Sartori."

"Don't call me that."

"Athanasius is one of the most holy men I've ever met."