All these and a dozen other little dramas were being played out in the picture, and there wasn’t one Pie didn’t remember seeing enacted countless times. But who was the unseen spectator who’d instructed the painters in their craft, so that carriage, girl, soldier, widow, dogs, birds, voyeurs, and all could be set down with such verisimilitude?
Having no solution to the puzzle, the mystif plucked its gaze from the picture and looked back along the immense length of the gallery. Lu ‘chur’ chem had disappeared, spitting as he went. The mystif was alone, the routes ahead and behind similarly deserted. It would miss Lu ‘chur’ chem’s companionship and bitterly regretted that it had lacked the wit to persuade its comrade that it had to go on alone, without causing such offense. But the picture on the wall was proof of secrets here it had not yet fathomed, and when it did so it wanted no witnesses. They too easily became accusers, and Pie was weighed down with enough reproaches already. If the tyrannies of Yzordderrex were in some fashion linked with the house on Gamut Street—and if Pie, by extension, was an unwitting collaborator in those tyrannies—it was important to learn of this guilt unaccompanied.
As prepared as possible for such revelations, the mystif left its place in front of the painting, reminding itself as it went of the promise made to Lu ‘chur’ chem. If it survived this enterprise, it had to return with the eyes of the Autarch. Eyes which it now didn’t doubt had once been laid on Gamut Street, studying it as obsessively as the watcher at the painted window studied his lady love, sitting across the street in thrall to her reflection.