Lu ‘chur’ chem stopped in his tracks, seeing that Pie had already done so.
“What is it?” he asked.
The mystif stared up at the picture they had come abreast of, its breath quickened by shock.
“Is something wrong?” Lu ‘chur’ chem said.
It took a few moments to find the words. “I don’t think we should go any further,” it said.
“Why not?”
“Not together, at least. The judgment fell on me, and I should finish this alone.”
“What’s wrong with you? I’ve come this far. I want to have the satisfaction.”
“What’s more important?” the mystif asked him, turning from the painting it had been so fixated by. “Your satisfaction, or succeeding in what we came here to do?”
“You know my answer to that.”
“Then trust me. I have to go on alone. Wait for me here if you like.”
Lu ‘chur’ chem made a phlegm-hawking growl, like Culus’ growl, only coarser. “I came here to kill the Autarch,” he said.
“No. You came here to help me, and you’ve done that. It’s my hands that have to dispatch him, not yours. That’s the judgment.”
“Suddenly it’s the judgment, the judgment! I shit on the judgment! I want to see the Autarch dead. I want to look on his face.”
“I’ll bring you his eyes,” Pie said. “That’s the best I can do. I mean it, Lu ‘chur’ chem. We have to part here.”
Lu ‘chur’ chem spat on the ground between them.
“You don’t trust me, do you?” he said.
“If that’s what you want to believe.”
“Mystif shite!” he exploded. “If you come out of this alive, I’ll kill you, I swear, I’ll kill you!”
There was no further argument. He simply spat again and turned his back, stalking off down the gallery, leaving the mystif to return its gaze to the picture which had quickened Us pulse and breath.
Though it was curious to see a rendering of Oxford Street and St. Bartholomew’s Fair in this setting, so far in years and Dominions from the scene that had inspired them, Pie might have suppressed the suspicion—growing in its belly while Lu ‘chur’ chem talked of revolution—that this was no coincidence, had the final image in the cycle not been so unlike those that had preceded it. The rest had been public spectacles, rendered countless times in satirical prints and paintings. This last was not. The rest had been well-known sites and streets, famous across the world. This last was not. It was an unremarkable thoroughfare in Cler-kenwell, almost a backwater, which Pie doubted any artist of the Fifth had ever turned his pen or brush to depicting. But here it was, represented in meticulous detail: Gamut Street, to the brick, to the leaf. And taking pride of place in the center of the picture, number 28, the Maestro Sartori’s house.
It had been lovingly re-created. Birds courted on its roof; on its step, dogs fought. And in between the fighters and wooers stood the house itself, blessed by a dappled sunlight denied the others in the row. The front door was closed, but the upper windows were flung wide, and the artist had painted somebody watching from one of them, his face too deeply shadowed to be recognized. The object of his scrutiny was not in doubt, however: the girl in the window across the street, sitting at her mirror with her dog on her lap, her fingers teasing from its bow the ribbon that would presently unlace her bodice. In the street between this beauty and her doting voyeur were a dozen details that could only have come from firsthand experience. On the pavement beneath the girl’s window a small procession of charity children passed, wards of the parish, dressed all in white and carrying their wands. They marched raggedly behind their beadle, a brute of a man called Willis, whom Sar-tori had once beaten senseless on that very spot for cruelty to his charges. Around the far corner came Roxborough’s carriage, drawn by his favorite bay, Bellamarre, named in honor of the Comte de St. Germain, who had swindled half the women of Venice under that alias a few years before. A dragoon was being ushered out of number 32 by the mistress of that house, who entertained officers of the Prince of Wales regiment—the Tenth, and no other—whenever her husband was away. The widow opposite watched enviously from her step.