He heard Pie calling behind him now: “Where the hell are you?”
The mystif was following him into the shadows, he saw.
“Don’t come any further,” he told it.
“Why not?”
“I may need a marker to find my way back.”
“Just turn around.”
“Not till I find her,” Gentle said, forging on with his arms outstretched.
The floor was slick beneath him, and he had to proceed with extreme caution. But without the woman to guide them through the mountain, this maze might prove as fatal as the snows they’d escaped. He had to find her.
“Can you still hear me?” he called back to Pie.
The voice that told him yes was as faint as a long-distance call on a failing line.
“Keep talking,” he yelled.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Anything. Sing a song.”
“I’m tone deaf.”
“Talk about food, then.”
“All right,” said Pie, “I already told you about the ugi-chee and the bellyful of eggs—”
“It’s the foulest thing I ever heard,” Gentle replied.
“You’ll like it once you taste it.”
“As the actress said to the bishop.”
He heard Pie’s muted laughter come his way. Then the mystif said, “You hated me almost as much as you hated fish, remember? And I converted you.”
“I never hated you.”
“In New York you did.”
“Not even then. I was just confused. I’d never slept with a mystif before.”
“How did you like it?”
“It’s better than fish but not as good as chocolate.”
“What did you say?”
“I said—”
“Gentle? I can hardly hear you.”
“I’m still here!” he replied, shouting now. “I’d like to do it again sometime, Pie.”
“Do what?”
“Sleep with you.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“What do you want, a proposal of marriage?”
“That might do it.”
“All right!” Gentle called back. “So marry me!”
There was silence behind him. He stopped and turned. Pie’s form was a blurred shadow against the distant light of the sanctum.
“Did you hear me?” he yelled.
“I’m thinking it over.”
Gentle laughed, despite the darkness and the unease it had wrung from him. “You can’t take forever, Pie,” he hollered. “I need an answer in—” He stopped as his outstretched fingers made contact with something frozen and solid. “Oh, shit”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s a fucking dead end!” he said, stepping right up to the surface he’d encountered and running his palms over the ice. “Just a blank wall.”
But that wasn’t the whole story. The suspicion he’d had that this was nebulous territory was stronger than ever. There was something on the other side of this wall, if he could only reach it.
“Make your way back,” he heard Pie entreating.
“Not yet,” he said to himself, knowing the words wouldn’t reach the mystif. He raised his hand to his mouth and snatched an expelled breath,
“Did you hear me, Gentle?” Pie called.
Without replying he slammed the pneuma against the wall, a technique his palm was now expert in. The sound of the blow was swallowed by the murk, but the force he unleashed shook a freezing hail down from the roof. He didn’t wait for the reverberations to settle but delivered a second blow, and a third, each impact opening further the wounds in his hand, adding blood to the violence of his blows. Perhaps it fueled them. If his breath and spittle did such service, what power might his blood contain, or his semen?
As he stopped to draw a fresh lungful, he heard the mystif yelling, and turned to see it moving towards him across a gulf of frantic shadow. It wasn’t just the wall and the roof above that was shaken by his assault: the very air was in a furor, shaking Pie’s silhouette into fragments. As his eyes fought to fix the image, a vast spear of ice divided the space between them, hitting the ground and shattering. He had time to raise his arms over his face before the shards struck him, but their impact threw him back against the wall.
“You’ll bring the whole place down!” he heard Pie yell as new spears fell.
“It’s too late to change our minds!” Gentle replied. “Move, Pie!”