Pain diverted him from these thoughts, and he looked down at his hands to see that in his unease he’d made fists of them and reopened the cuts in his palms. Blood dropped onto the ice underfoot, shockingly red. With the sight of it came a memory he’d consigned to the back of his head.
“What’s wrong?” Pie said.
But Gentle didn’t have the breath to reply. He could hear the frozen river cracking beneath him, and the howl of the Unbeheld’s agents wheeling overhead. He could feel his hand slamming, slamming, slamming against the glacier and the thorns of ice flying up into his face.
The mystif had come to his side. “Gentle,” it said, anxious now. “Speak to me, will you? What’s wrong?”
It put its arms around Gentle’s shoulders, and at its touch Gentle drew breath.
“The women . . .” he said.
“What about them?”
“It was me who freed them.’1
“How?”
“Pneuma. How else?”
“You undid the Unbeheld’s handiwork?” the mystif said, its voice barely audible. “For our sake I hope the women were the only witnesses.”
“There were agents, just as you said there’d be. They almost killed me. But I hurt them back.”
“This is bad news.”
“Why? If I’m going to bleed, let Him bleed a little too.”
“Hapexamendios doesn’t bleed.”
“Everything bleeds, Pie. Even God. Maybe especially God. Or else why did He hide Himself away?”
As he spoke the tinkling bells sounded again, closer than ever, and glancing over Gentle’s shoulder Pie said, “She must have been waiting for that little heresy.”
Gentle turned to see the beckoning woman standing halfway in shadow at the end of the sanctum. The ice that still clung to her body hadn’t melted, suggesting that, like the walls, the flesh it was encrusted upon was still below zero. There were cobs of ice in her hair, and when she moved her head a little, as she did now, they struck each other and tinkled like tiny bells.
“I brought you out of the ice,” Gentle said, stepping past Pie to approach her.
The woman said nothing.
“Do you understand me?” Gentle went on, “Will you lead us out of here? We want to find a way through the mountain.”
The woman took a step backwards, retreating into the shadows.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” Gentle said. “Pie! Help me out here.”
“How?”
“Maybe she doesn’t understand English.”
“She understands you well enough.”
“Just talk to her, will you?” Gentle said.
Ever obedient, Pie began to speak in a tongue Gentle hadn’t heard before, its musicality reassuring even if the words were unintelligible. But neither music nor sense seemed to impress the woman. She continued to retreat into the darkness, Gentle pursuing cautiously, fearful of startling her but more fearful still of losing her entirely. His additions to Pie’s persuasions had dwindled to the basest bargaining.
“One favor deserves another,” he said.
Pie was right, she did indeed understand. Even though she stood in shadow, he could see that a little smile was playing on her sealed lips. Damn her, he thought, why wouldn’t she answer him? The bells still rang in her hair, however, and he kept following them even when the shadows became so heavy she was virtually lost among them. He glanced back towards the mystif, who had by now given up any attempt to communicate with the woman and instead addressed Gentle.
“Don’t go any further,” it said.
Though he was no more than fifty yards from where the mystif stood, its voice sounded unnaturally remote, as though another law besides that of distance and light held sway in the space between them.
“I’m still here. Can you see me?” he called back, and, gratified to hear the mystif reply that it could, he returned his gaze to the shadows.
The woman had disappeared however. Cursing, he plunged on towards the place where she’d last stood, his sense that this was equivocal terrain intensifying. The darkness had a nervous quality, like a bad liar attempting to shoo him off with shrugs. He wouldn’t go. The more it trembled, the more eager he became to see what it was hiding. Sightless though he was, he wasn’t blind to the risk he was taking. Minutes before he’d told Pie that everything was vulnerable. But nobody, not even the Unbeheld, could make darkness bleed. If it closed on him he could claw at it forever and not make a mark on its hideless back.