“So tell me about the pneuma,” Gentle said. “I want to know how 1 came by a power like that.”
Pie started to reply, but this time the words were so badly disfigured, and the sound itself so ugly, it was like a fist in Gentle’s stomach, stirring the stew there.
“Jesus!” he said, rubbing his belly in a vain attempt to soothe the churning. “Whatever you’re playing at—”
“It’s not me,” Pie protested. “It’s you. You don’t want to hear what I’m saying.”
“Yes, I do,” Gentle said, wiping beads of chilly sweat from around his mouth. “I want answers. I want straight answers!”
Grimly, Pie started to speak again, but immediately the waves of nausea climbed Gentle’s gut with fresh zeal. The pain in his belly was sufficient to bend him double, but he was damned if the mystif was going to keep anything from him. It was a matter of principle now. He studied Pie’s lips through narrowed eyes, but after a few words the mystif stopped speaking.
“Tell me!” Gentle said, determined to have Pie obey him even if he could make no sense of the words. “What have I done that I want to forget so badly? Tell me!”
Its face all reluctance, the mystif once again opened its mouth. The words, when they came, were so hopelessly corrupted Gentle could barely grasp a fraction of their sense. Something about power. Something about death.
Point proved, he waved the source of this excremental din away and turned his eyes in search of a sight to calm his belly. But the scene around him was a convention of little horrors: a graveolent making its wretched nest beneath the rails; the perspective of the track, snatching his eye into the dust; the dead zarzi at his feet, its egg sac split, spattering its unborn onto the stone. This last image, vile as it was, brought food to mind. The harbor meal in Yzordderrex: fish within fish within fish, the littlest filled with eggs. The thought defeated him. He tottered to the edge of the platform and vomited onto the rails, his gut convulsing. He didn’t have that much in his belly, but the heaves went on and on until his abdomen ached and tears of pain ran from his eyes. At last he stepped back from the platform edge, shuddering. The smell of his stomach was still in his nostrils, but the spasms were steadily diminishing. From the corner of his eye he saw Pie approach.
“Don’t come near me!” he said. “I don’t want you touching me!”
He turned his back on the vomit and its cause and retired to the shade of the waiting room, sitting down on the hard wood bench, putting his head against the wall, and closing his eyes. As the pain eased and finally disappeared, his thoughts turned to the purpose behind Pie’s assault. He’d quizzed the mystif several times over the past four and a half months about the problem of power: how it was come by and—more particularly—how he, Gentle, had come to possess it. Pie’s replies had been oblique in the extreme, but Gentle hadn’t felt any great urge to get to the bottom of the question. Perhaps subconsciously he hadn’t really wanted to know. Classically, such gifts had consequences, and he was enjoying his role as getter and wielder of power too much to want it spoiled with talk of hubris. He’d been content to be fobbed off with hints and equivocation, and he might have continued to be content, if he hadn’t been irritated by the zarzi and the lateness of the L’Himby train, bored and ready for an argument. But that was only half the issue. He’d pressed the mystif, certainly, but he’d scarcely goaded it. The attack seemed out of all proportion to the offense. He’d asked an innocent question and been turned inside out for doing so. So much for all that loving talk in the mountains.
“Gentle. . .”
“Fuck you.”
“The train, Gentle. . .”
“What about it?”
“It’s coming.”He opened his eyes. The mystif was standing in the doorway, looking forlorn.
“I’m sorry that had to happen,” it said.
“It didn’t have to,” Gentle said. “You made it happen.”