The mystif began to laugh almost before he was finished, and when Gentle drew his first clear breath it was to ask, “What’s so funny?”
“The silence,” Pie said, suppressing the music so that Gentle could share the joke.
He’d lain here in this cell hour after hour, unable to make a moan, but he’d never heard a silence such as this. The whole asylum was listening, from the depths where Father Athanasius wove his piercing crowns to N’ashap’s office, its carpet indelibly marked with the blood his nose had shed. There was not a waking soul who’d not heard their coupling.
“Such a silence,” the mystif said.
As it spoke, the hush was broken by the sound of someone yelling in his cell, a rage of loss and loneliness that went on unchecked for the rest of the night, as if to cleanse the gray stone of the joy that had momentarily tainted it.