“Like what?”
“The Unbeheld isn’t the only one who can conjure guardians,” Pie replied. “Please, Gentle . . . I’d prefer to do this alone.”
Gentle shrugged. “Do as you wish,” he said. Then, as an afterthought, “You usually do.”
He watched Pie climb the debris-covered steps, pull several of the timbers off the door, and slip out of sight. Rather than wait at the threshold, Gentle wandered farther along the row to get another view of the temple, musing as he went that this Dominion, like the Fourth, had confounded not only his expectations but those of Pie as well. The safe haven of Vanaeph had almost seen their execution, while the murderous wastes of the mountains had offered resurrections. And now L’Himby, a sometime city of meditation, reduced to gaud and rubble. What next? He wondered. Would they arrive in Yzordderrex only to find it had spurned its reputation as the Babylon of the Dominions and become a New Jerusalem?
He stared across at the shadowy temple, his mind straying back to a subject that had occupied him several times on their journey through the Third: how best to address the challenge of making a map of the Dominions, so that when they finally returned to the Fifth Dominion he could give his friends some sense of how the lands lay. They’d traveled on all kinds of roads, from the Patashoquan Highway to the dirt tracks between Happi and Mai-ke; they’d wound through verdant valleys and scaled heights where even the hardiest moss would perish; they’d had the luxury of chariots and the loyalty of doeki; they’d sweated and frozen and gone dreamily, like poets into some place of fancy, doubting their senses and themselves. All this needed setting down: the routes, the cities, the ranges, and the plains all needed laying in two dimensions, to be pored over at leisure. In time, he thought, putting the challenge off yet again; in time.
He looked back towards Scopique’s house. There was no sign of Pie emerging, and he began to wonder if some harm had befallen the mystif inside. He walked back to the steps, climbed them, and—feeling a little guilty—slid through the gap between the timbers. The starlight had more difficulty getting in than he did, and his blindness put a chill in him, bringing to mind the measureless darkness of the ice cathedral. On that occasion the mystif had been behind him; this time, in front. He waited a few seconds at the door, until his eyes began to make out the interior. It was a narrow house, full of narrow places, but there was a voice in its depths, barely above a whisper, which he pursued, stumbling through the murk. After only a few paces he realized it was not Pie speaking but someone hoarse and panicked. Scopique, perhaps, still taking refuge in the ruins?
A glimmer of light, no brighter than the dimmest star, led him to a door through which he had sight of the speaker. Pie was standing in the middle of the blackened room, turned from Gentle. Over the mystif s shoulder Gentle saw the light’s fading source: a shape hanging in the air, like a web woven by a spider that aspired to portraiture, and held aloft by the merest breeze. Its motion was not arbitrary, however. The gossamer face opened its mouth and whispered its wisdom.
“—no better proof than in these cataclysms. We must hold to that, my friend, hold to it and pray. . . no, better not pray. . . I doubt every God now, especially the Aboriginal. If the children are any measure of the Father, then He’s no lover of justice or goodness.”
“Children?” said Gentle.
The breath the word came upon seemed to flutter in the threads. The face grew long, the mouth tearing.
The mystif glanced behind and shook its head to silence the trespasser. Scopique—for this was surely his message— was talking again.
“Believe me when I say we know only the tenth part of a tenth part of the plots laid in this. Long before the Reconciliation, forces were at work to undo it; that’s my firm belief. And it’s reasonable to assume that those forces have not perished. They’re working in this Dominion, and the Dominion from which you’ve come. They strategize not in terms of decades, but centuries, just as we’ve had to. And they’ve buried their agents deeply. Trust nobody, Pie ‘oh’ pah, not even yourself. Their plots go back before we were born. We could either one of us have been conceived to serve them in some oblique fashion and not know it. They’re coming for me very soon, probably with voiders. If I’m dead you’ll know it. If I can convince them I’m just a harmless lunatic, they’ll take me off to the Cradle, put me in the maison de sante. Find me there, Pie ‘oh’ pah. Or if you have more pressing business, then forget me; I won’t blame you. But, friend, whether you come for me or not, know that when I think of you I still smile, and in these days that is the rarest comfort.”