"I'm fine,'1 Gentle said. "I've got my talisman."

"What's that?"

Gentle opened his palm and showed Monday the blue stone.

"A f.u.c.kin' egg?"

"An egg, eh?" Gentle said, tossing the stone in his hand. "Maybe it is."

He threw it up into the air a second time, and it rose, far higher than his muscle had propelled it, way up above their heads. At the summit of its ascent it seemed to hover for a beat and then returned into his hand at leisure, defying the claim of gravity. As it descended it brought the faintest drizzle down with it, cooling their upturned faces.

Monday cooed with pleasure. "Rain out of nowhere," he said. "I remember that."

Gentle left him bathing the grime from his face and went to join Chicka Jackeen, who had finished explaining his intentions to his colleagues. They all hung back, watching the Maestros with uneasy stares.

"They think we're going to die," Chicka Jackeen explained.

"They may very well be right," Gentle said quietly. "Are you certain you want to come with me?"

"I was never more certain of anything." - With that they started towards the ambiguous ground that lay between the solidity of the Second and the Erasure's vacancy. As they went, one of Jackeen's friends began to call after him, in distress at his departure. The cry was taken up by several others, their shouts too mingled to be interpreted. Jackeen halted for a moment and glanced back towards the company he was leaving. Gentle made no attempt to urge him on. He ignored the shouts and picked up his speed, the Erasure thickening around him and the smell of the devastation that lay on the other side growing stronger with every step he took. He was prepared for it, however. Instead of holding his breath, he drew the stench of his Father's rot deep into his lungs, defying its pungency. There was another shout from behind him, but this time it wasn't one of Jackeen's friends, it was the Maestro himself, his voice colored more by wonder than alarm. Its tone piqued Gentle's curiosity, and he glanced back over his shoulder to seek Jackeen out, but the nullity had come between them. Unwilling to be delayed, Gentle forged on, a purpose in his stride he didn't comprehend. His enfeebled legs had found strength from somewhere; his heart was urgent in his chest.

Ahead, the blinding murk was stirring, the first vague forms of the First's terrain emerging. And from behind, Jackeen again.

"Maestro? Maestro! Where are you?"

Without slowing his stride, Gentle returned the call.

"Here!"

"Wait for me!" Jackeen gasped. "Wait!" He emerged from the void to lay his hand on Gentle's shoulder.

"What is it?" Gentle said, looking around at Jackeen, who as if in bliss had dropped the toll of years and was once again a young man, sweaty with awe at the way of feits.

"The waters," he said.

"What about them?"

"They've followed you, Maestro. They've followed you!"

And as he spoke, they came. Oh, how they came! They ran to Gentle's feet in glittering rills that broke against his ankles and his shins and leapt like silver snakes towards his hands-or, rather, towards the stone he held in his hands. And seeing their elation and their zeal, he heard Huzzah's laughter and felt again her tiny fingers brushing his arm as she pa.s.sed the blue egg on to him. He didn't doubt for a moment that she'd known what would come of the gift. So, most likely, had Jude. He'd become their agent at the last, just as he'd become his mother's, and the thought of that sweet service brought an echo of the child's laughter to his lips.

From above, the egg was calling down a drizzle to swell the waters swirling underfoot, and in the s.p.a.ce of seconds the patter became a roar, and a deluge descended, violent enough to sluice the murk of the Erasure out of the air. After a few moments, light began to break around the Maestros, the first light this terrain had seen since Hapexamendios had drawn the void over his Dominion. By it, Gentle saw that Jackeen's exhilaration was rapidly turning to panic.

"We're going to drown!" he yelled, fighting to stay on his feet as the water deepened.

Gentle didn't retreat. He knew where his duty lay. As the surf broke against their backs, the tide threatening to drag them under, he raised Huzzah's gift to his lips and kissed it, just as she had done. Then he mustered all his strength and threw the stone out, over the landscape that was being uncovered before them. The egg went from his hand with a momentum that was not his sinews' work but its own ambition, and instantly the waters went in pursuit of it, dividing around the Maestros and taking their tides off into the wasteland of the First.

It would take the waters weeks, perhaps even months, to cover the Dominion from end to end, and most of that work would go unwitnessed. But in the next few hours, standing at their vantage point where the City of G.o.d had once begun, the Maestros were granted a glimpse of their labor. The clouds above the First, which had been as inert as the landscape beneath, now began to churn and roil and shed their anguish in stupendous storms, which in turn swelled the rivers that were driving their cleansing way across the rot.

Hapexamendios' remains were not despised. With the purpose of the G.o.ddesses fueling their every drop, the waters turned the slaughterhouse over and over and over, scouring the matter of its poisons and sweeping it up into mounds, which the exhilarated air festooned with vapors.

The first ground that appeared from this tumult was close to the feet of the Maestros and rapidly became a ragged peninsula that stretched fully a mile into the Dominion. The waters broke against it constantly, bringing with every wave another freight of Hapexamendios' clay to increase its flanks. Gentle was patient for a time and stayed at the border. But he could not resist the invitation forever, and finally, ignoring Jackeen's words of caution, he set off down the spine of land to better see the spectacle visible from the far end. The waters were still draining from the new earth, and here and there lightning still ran on the slopes, but the ground was solid enough, and there were seedlings everywhere, carried, he presumed, from Yzordderrex. If so, there would be abundant life here in a little while.

By the time he'd reached the end of the peninsula the clouds overhead were begining to clear somewhat, lighter for their furies. Farther off, of course, the process he'd been privileged to witness was just beginning, as the storms spread in all directions from their point of origin. By their blazes he glimpsed the snaking rivers, going about their work with undiminished ambition. Here on the promontory, however, there was a more benign light. The First Dominion had a sun, it seemed, and though it wasn't yet warm, Gentle didn't wait for balmier weather to begin his last labors, but took his alb.u.m and his pen from his jacket and sat down on the marshy headland to work. He still had the map of the desert between the gates of Yzordderrex and the Erasure to set down, and though these pages would doubtless be the barest in the alb.u.m, they had to be drawn all the more carefully for that fact: he wanted their very spareness to have a beauty of its own.

After perhaps an hour of concentrated work he heard Jackeen behind him. First a footfall, then a question: "Speaking in tongues, Maestro?"

Gentle hadn't even been aware of the inventory he was rattling off until his attention was drawn to it: a seamless list of names that must have been incomprehensible to anyone other than himself, the stopping places of his pilgrimage, as familiar to his tongue as his many names.

"Are you sketching the new world?" Jackeen asked him, hesitating to come too close to the artist while he worked.

"No, no," said Gentle, "I'm finishing a map." He paused, then corrected himself. "No, not finishing. Starting."

"May I look?"

"If you like."

Jackeen went down on his haunches behind Gentle and peered over his shoulder. The pages that depicted the desert were as complete as Gentle could make them. He was now attempting to delineate the peninsula he was sitting on, and something of the scene in front of him. It would be little more than a line or two, but it was a beginning.

"I wonder, would you fetch Monday for me?"

"Is there something you need?"

"Yes, I want him to take these maps back into the Fifth with him and give them to Clem."

"Who's Clem?"

"An angel."

"Ah."

"Would you bring him here?"

"Now?"

"If you would," Gentle said. "I'm almost done."

Ever dutiful, Jackeen stood up and started back towards the Second, leaving Gentle to work on. There was very little left to do. He finished making his crude rendering of the promontory; then he added a line of dots along it to mark his path and at the headland placed a small cross at the spot where he was sitting. That done, he went back through the alb.u.m, to be certain that the pages were in proper order. It occurred to him as he did so that he'd fashioned a self-portrait. Like its maker, the map was flawed but, he hoped, redeemable: a rudimentary thing that might see finer versions in the fullness of time; be made and remade and made again, perhaps forever.

He was about to set the alb.u.m down beside the pen when he heard a hint of coherence in the surf that was beating against the slope below. Unable to quite make sense of the sound, he ventured to the edge. The ground was too newly made to be solid and threatened to crumble away beneath his weight, but he peered over as far as he could, and what he saw and what he heard were enough to make him retreat from the edge, kneel down in the dirt, and with trembling hands start scribbling a message to accompany the maps.

It was necessarily brief. He could hear the words clearly now, rising from the surge of waves. They distracted him with promises.

"Nisi Nirvana," they said, "Nisi Nirvana,..."

By the time he'd finished his note, laid down the alb.u.m and the pen beside it, and returned to the edge of the promontory, the sun of this Dominion was emerging from the storm clouds overhead to shed its light on the waves below. The beams placated them for a time, soothing their frenzy and piercing them, so that Gentle had a glimpse of the ground they were moving over. It was not, it seemed, an earth at all, but another sky, and in it was a sphere so majestic that to his eyes all the bodies in the heavens of the Imajica-all stars, all moons, all noonday suns-could not in their sum have touched its glory. Here was the door that his Father's city had been built to seal, the door through which his mother's name in fable had been whispered. It had been closed for millenniums, but now it stood open, and through it a music of voices was rising, going on its way to every wandering spirit in Imajica and calling them home to rapture.

In its midst was a voice Gentle knew, and before he'd even glimpsed its source his mind had shaped the face that called him, and his body felt the arms that would wrap him around and bear him up. Then they were there-those arms, that face-rising from the door to claim him, and he needed to imagine them no longer. "Are you finished?" he was asked. "Yes," he replied. "I'm finished."

"Good," said Pie 'oh' pah, smiling. "Then we can begin."

The congregation Chicka Jackeen had left at the perimeter of the First had steadily begun to venture along the peninsula as their courage and curiosity grew. Monday was of course among them, and Jackeen was just about to call the boy and summon him to the Reconciler's side when Monday let out a cry of his own, pointing back along the promontory. Jackeen turned and fixed his eyes-as did they all-on the two figures standing on the headland, embracing. Later there would be much discussion between these witnesses as to what they'd actually seen. All agreed that one of the pair was the Maestro Sartori. As to the other, opinions differed widely. Some said they saw a woman, others a man, still others a cloud with a piece of sun burning in it. But whatever these ambiguities, what followed was not in doubt. Having embraced, the two figures advanced to the limit of the promontory, where they stepped out into the air and were gone.

Two weeks later, on the penultimate day of a cheerless December, Clem was sitting in front of the fire in the dining room of number 28, a spot from which he'd seldom risen since Christmas, when he heard a hectic beating on the front door. He was not wearing a watch-what did time matter now? - but he a.s.sumed it was long after midnight. Anyone calling at such an hour was likely to be either desperate or dangerous, but in his present bleak mood he scarcely cared what harm might await him in the street outside. There was nothing left for him here: in this house, in this life. Gentle had gone, Judy had gone, and so, most recently, had Tay. It was five days since he'd heard his lover whisper his name.

"Clem ... I have to go."

"Go?" he'd replied. "Where to?"

"Somebody opened the door," came Tay's reply. "The dead are being called home. I have to go."

They wept together for a while, tears pouring from Clem's eyes while the sound of Tay's anguish racked him from within. But there was no help for it. The call had come, and though Tay was grief-stricken at the thought of parting from Clem, his existence between conditions had become unbearable, and beneath the sorrow of parting was the joyful knowledge of imminent release. Their strange union was over. It was time for the living and the dead to part.

Clem hadn't known what loss really was until Tay left. The pain of losing his lover's physical body had been acute enough, but losing the spirit that had so miraculously returned to him was immeasurably worse. It was not possible, he thought, to be emptier than this and still be a living being. Several times during those dark days he'd wondered if he should simply kill himself and hope he would be able to follow his lover through whatever door now stood open. That he didn't was more a consequence of the responsibility he felt than from lack of courage. He was the only witness to the miracles of Gamut Street left in this Dominion. If he departed, who would there be to tell the tale?

But such imperatives seemed frail things at an hour like this, and as he rose from the fire and crossed to the front door, he allowed himself the thought that if these midnight callers came with death in their hands perhaps he would not refuse it. Without asking who was on the other side, he slid back the bolts and opened the door. To his surprise he discovered Monday standing in the driving sleet. Beside him stood a shivering stranger, his thinning curls flattened to his skull.

"This is Chicka Jackeen," Monday said as he hauled his sodden guest over the threshold. "Jackie, this is Clem, eighth wonder of the world. Well, am I too wet to get a hug?"

Clem opened his arms to Monday, who embraced him with fervor.

"I thought you and Gentle had gone forever," Clem said.

"Well, one of us has," came the reply.

"I guessed as much," Clem said. "Tay went after him. And the revenants too."

"When was this?"

"Christmas Day."

Jackeen's teeth were chattering, and Clem ushered him through to the fire, which he had been fueling with sticks of furniture. He threw on a couple of chair legs and invited Jackeen to sit by the blaze to thaw out. The man thanked him and did so. Monday, however, was made of sterner stuff. Availing himself of the whisky that sat beside the hearth, he put several mouthfuls into his system, then set about clearing the room, explaining as he dragged the table into the corner that they needed some working s.p.a.ce. With the floor cleared, he opened his jacket and pulled Gentle's gazetteer from beneath his arm, dropping it in front of Clem.

"What's this?"

"It's a map of the Imajica," Monday said.

"Gentle's work?"

"Yep."

Monday went down on his haunches and flipped the alb.u.m open, taking out the loose leaves and handing the cover back up to Clem.

"He wrote a message in it," Monday said.

While Clem read the few words Gentle had scribbled on the cover, Monday began to arrange the sheets side by side on the floor, carefully aligning them so that the maps became an unbroken flow. As he worked, he talked, his enthusiasm as unalloyed as ever.

"You know what he wants us to do, don't you? He wants us to draw this map on every fuekin' wall we can find! On the pavements! On our foreheads! Anywhere and everywhere."

"That's quite a task," said Clem.

"I'm here to help you," Chicka Jackeen said. "In whatever capacity I can."

He got up from the fire and came to stand beside Clem, where he could admire the pattern that was emerging on the floor in front of them.

"That's not the only thing you've come to do, is it?" Monday said. "Be honest."

"Well, no," said Jackeen. "I'd also like to find myself a wife. But that will have to wait."

"d.a.m.n right!" said Monday. "This is our business now."

He stood up and stepped out of the circle which the pages of Gentle's alb.u.m had formed. Here was the Imajica, or rather the tiny part of it which the Reconciler had seen: Patashoqua and Vanaeph; Beatrix and the mountains of the Jokalaylau; Maike, the Cradle, L'Himby, and the Kwem; the Lenten Way, the delta, and Yzordderrex. And then the crossroads outside the city, and the desert beyond, with a single track leading to the borders of the Second Dominion. On the other side of that border, the pages were practically empty. The wanderer had sketched the peninsula he'd sat on, but beyond it he'd simply written: 'This is a new world.

"And this," said Jackeen, stooping to indicate the cross at the end of the promontory, "is where the Maestro's pilgrimage ended."

"Is that where he's buried?" Clem said.

"Oh, no," Jackeen said. "He's gone to places that'll make this life seem like a dream. He's left the circle, you see."

"No, I don't," said Clem. "If he's left the circle, then where's he gone? Where have they all gone?"

"Into it," Jackeen said.

Clem began to smile.

"May I?" said Jackeen, rising and claiming from Clem's fingers the sheet which carried Gentle's last message.

My friends, he'd written, Pie is here. I am found. Will you show these pages to the world, so that every wanderer may find their way home?

"I think our duty is plain, gentlemen," Jackeen said. He stooped again to lay the final page in the middle of the circle, marking the place of spirits to which the Reconciler had gone. "And when we've done that duty, we have here the map that will show us where we must go. We'll follow him. There's nothing more certain. We'll all of us follow him, by and by."

end