“I want to watch,” he murmured.
“Then watch.”
“But the fire’s going out. . ..”
“We don’t need light to see each other,” the mystif whispered. “Hold on to the sight.”
Gentle concentrated, studying the face before him. His eyes ached as he tried to hold onto it, but they were no competition for the swelling darkness.
“Stop looking,” Pie said, in a voice that seemed to rise from the decay of the embers. “Stop looking, and see.”
Gentle fought for the sense of this, but it was no more susceptible to analysis than the darkness in front of him. Two senses were failing him here—one physical, one linguistic—two ways to embrace the world slipping from him at the same moment. It was like a little death, and a panic seized him, like the fear he’d felt some midnights waking in his bed and body and knowing neither: his bones a cage, his blood a gruel, his dissolution the only certainty. At such times he’d turned on all the lights, for their comfort. But there were no lights here. Only bodies, growing colder as the fire died.
“Help me,” he said. The mystif didn’t speak. “Are you there, Pie? I’m afraid. Touch me, will you? Pie?”
The mystif didn’t move. Gentle started to reach out in the darkness, remembering as he did so the sight of Taylor lying on a pillow from which they’d both known he’d never rise again, asking for Gentle to hold his hand. With that memory, the panic became sorrow: for Taylor, for Clem, for every soul sealed from its loved ones by senses born to failure, himself included. He wanted what the child wanted: knowledge of another presence, proved in touch. But he knew it was no real solution. He might find the mystif in the darkness, but he could no more hold on to its flesh forever than he could hold the senses he’d already lost. Nerves decayed, and fingers slipped from fingers at the last.
Knowing this little solace was as hopeless as any other, he withdrew his hand and instead said, “I love you.”
Or did he simply think it? Perhaps it was thought, because it was the idea rather than the syllables that formed in front of him, the iridescence he remembered from Pie’s transforming self shimmering in a darkness that was not, he vaguely understood, the darkness of the starless night but his mind’s darkness; and this seeing not the business of eye and object but his exchange with a creature he loved, and who loved him back.
He let his feelings go to Pie, if there was indeed a going, which he doubted. Space, like time, belonged to the other tale—to the tragedy of separation they’d left behind. Stripped of his senses and their necessities, almost unborn again, he knew the mystif s comfort as it knew his, and that dissolution he’d woken in terror of so many times stood revealed as the beginning of bliss.
A gust of wind, blowing between the rocks, caught the embers at their side, and their glow became a momentary flame. It brightened the face in front of him, and the sight summoned him back from his unborn state. It was no great hardship to return. The place they’d found together was out of time and could not decay, and the face in front of him, for all its frailty (or perhaps because of it), was beautiful to look at. Pie smiled at him but said nothing.
“We’should sleep,” Gentle said. “We’ve got a long way to go tomorrow.”
Another gust came along, and there were flecks of snow in it, stinging Gentle’s face. He pulled the hood of his coat up over his head and got up to check on the welfare of the doeki. It had made a shallow bed for itself in the snow and was asleep. By the time he got back to the fire, which had found some combustible morsel and was devouring it brightly, the mystif was also asleep, its hood pulled up around its head. As he stared down at the visible crescent of Pie’s face, a simple thought came: that though the wind was moaning at the rock, ready to bury them, and there was death in the valley behind and a city of atrocities ahead, he was happy. He lay down on the hard ground beside the mystif. His last thought as sleep came was of Taylor, lying on a pillow which was becoming a snowfield as he drew his final breaths, his face growing translucent and finally disappearing, so that when Gentle slipped from consciousness, it was not into darkness but into the whiteness of that deathbed, turned to untrodden snow.