“Why did your father do that?”
“Because he knew Charlie was unstable, and he’d do the Society more harm than good. I’ve had him under control until now. He’s had his little gifts from the Dominions. He’s had you fawn upon him when he needed something out of the ordinary, like his assassin. This all started with that fucking assassin! Why couldn’t you have just killed the woman yourself?”
“What do you take me for?” Dowd said with distaste. “I couldn’t lay hands on a woman. Especially not a beauty.”
“How do you know she’s a beauty?”
“I’ve heard her talked about.”
“Well, I don’t care what she looks like. I don’t want her meddling in my business. Find out what she’s up to. Then we’ll work out our response.”
Dowd came back a few hours later, with alarming news. “Apparently she’s persuaded him to take her to the estate.”
“What? What?” Oscar bounded from his chair. The parrots rose up squawking in sympathy. “She knows more than she should. Shit! All that heartache to keep the Society out of our hair, and now this bitch conies along and we’re in worse trouble than ever.”
“Nothing’s happened yet.”
“But it will, it will! She’ll wind him around her little finger, and he’ll tell her everything.”
“What do you want to do about it?”
Oscar went to hush the parrots. “Ideally?” he said, as he smoothed their ruffled wings. “Ideally I’d have Charlie vanish off the face of the earth.”
“He had much the same ambition for her,” Dowd observed.
“Meaning what?”
“Just that you’re both quite capable of murder.”
Oscar made a contemptuous grunt. “Charlie was only playing at it,” he said. “He’s got no balls! He’s got no vision!” He returned to his high-backed chair, his expression sullen. “It’s not going to hold, damn it,” he said. “I can feel it in my gut. We’ve kept things neat and tidy so far, but it’s not going to hold. Charlie has to be taken out of the equation.”
“He’s your brother.”
“He’s a burden.”
“What I mean is: he’s your brother. You should be the one to dispatch him.”
Oscar’s eyes widened. “Oh, my Lord,” he said.
“Think what they’d say in Yzordderrex, if you were to tell them.”
“What? That I killed my own brother? I don’t see much charm in that.”
“But that you did what you had to do, however unpalatable, to keep the secret safe.” Dowd paused to let the idea blossom. “That sounds heroic to me. Think what they’ll say.”
“I’m thinking.”
“It’s your reputation in Yzordderrex you care about, isn’t it, not what happens in the Fifth? You’ve said before that this world’s getting duller all the time.”
Oscar pondered this for a while. “Maybe I should slip away. Kill them both to make sure nobody ever knows where I’ve gone—”
“Where we’ve gone.”
“—then slip away and pass into legend. Oscar Godolphin, who left his crazy brother dead beside his wife and disappeared. Oh, yes. That’d make quite a headline in Patashoqua.” He mused a few moments more. “What’s the classic sibling murder weapon?” he finally asked.
“The jawbone of an ass.”
“Ridiculous.”
“You’ll think of something better.!’
“So I will. Make me a drink, Dowdie. And have one yourself. We’ll drink to escape.”
“Doesn’t everybody?” Dowd replied, but the remark was lost on Godolphin, who was already plunged deep into murderous thought.
20
Gentle and Pie were six days on the Patashoquan Highway, days measured not by the watch on Pie’s wrist but by the brightening and darkening of the peacock sky. On the fifth day the watch gave up the ghost anyway, maddened, Pie supposed, by the magnetic field surrounding a city of pyramids they passed. Thereafter, even though Gentle wanted to preserve some sense of how time was proceeding in the Dominion they’d left, it was virtually impossible. Within a few days their bodies were accommodating the rhythm of their new world, and he let his curiosity feast on more pertinent matters: chiefly, the landscape through which they were traveling.
It was diverse. In that first week they passed out of the plain into a region of lagoons—the Cosacosa—which took two days to cross, and thence into tracts of ancient conifers so tall that clouds hung in their topmost branches like the nests of ethereal birds. On the other side of this stupendous forest, the mountains Gentle had glimpsed days before came plainly into view. The range was called the Jokalay-lau, Pie informed him, and legend had it that after the Mount of Lipper Bayak these heights had been Hapexa-mendios’ next resting place as He’d crossed through the Dominions. It was no accident, it seemed, that the landscapes they passed through recalled those of the Fifth; they had been chosen for that similarity. The Unbeheld had strode the Imajica dropping seeds of humanity as He went—even to the very edge of His sanctum—in order to give the species He favored new challenges, and like any good gardener He’d dispersed them where they had the best hope of prospering. Where the native crop could be conquered or accommodated; where the living was hard enough to make sure only the most resilient survived, but the land fertile enough to feed their children; where rain came; where light came; where all the vicissitudes that strengthened a species by occasional calamity—tempest, earthquake, flood—were to hand.