"I want to see Clem here on the step before I make a move," she said.
There was a pause, then Sartori said, "I'm going to trust you."
His words were followed by further sounds from the Oviates that paced in the murk, and Jude saw two of them slope out of the shadows, with Clem between them, his arms in their throats. They came close enough to the pavement for her to see the foam of appetite that rose from their lips; then they literally spat their prisoner free. Clem fell face down on the road, his hands and arms covered in their muck. She wanted to go to his aid there and then, but though the captors had retreated, the tree gouger had turned and lowered its shovel head, its eyes, black as a shark's, flickering back and forth in their bulbous sockets, hungry to have the frail meat on the road. If she moved she feared it would pounce, so she kept her place on the step while Clem hauled himself to his feet. His arms were blistered by the Oviate's spittle, but he was otherwise intact.
"I'm all right, Judy," he murmured. "Go back inside."
She stayed put, however, waiting until he was up and staggering across the pavement before she started down the steps.
"Go back!" he told her again.
She put her arms around him and whispered. "Clem. I don't want you to argue with this. Go into the house and lock the door. I'm not coming with you."
He started to speak, but she hushed him.
"No argument, I said. I want to see him, Clem. I want to ... be with him. Now, please, if you love me, go inside and close the door."
She felt reluctance in his every sinew, but he knew too much about the business of love, especially love that defied orthodoxy, to attempt to reason with her.
"Just remember what he's done," he said, as he let her go.
"That's all part of it, Clem," she said, and slipped past him.
It was easy to leave the light behind. The ache which the currents had woken in her marrow diminished with every yard she put between herself and the house, and the thought of the embrace ahead quickened her step. This was what she wanted, and what he wanted too. Though the first causes of this passion were gone—one to dust, one to divinity—she and the man in the darkness were its embodiments and could not be denied each other.
She glanced back towards the house once only, to see that Clem was lingering on the step. She didn't waste time trying to persuade him to go inside, but simply turned back to the shadows.
"Where are you?" she said.
"Here," her lover replied, and stepped from the folds of his legion.
A single strand of luminescent matter came with him, fine enough to have been woven by Oviate spiders, but clotted here and there with beads like pearls, which swelled and dropped from the filaments, running down his arms and face and mottling the ground where he walked. The light flattered him, but she was too hungry for the truth of his face to be deceived, and piercing the glamour with her stare found him much reduced. The shining dandy she'd first met in Klein's plastic garden had gone. Now his eyes were heavy with despair, his mouth drawn down at the corners, his hair awry. Perhaps he'd always looked like this, and he'd simply used some piffling sway to mask the fact, but she doubted it. He was changed on the outside because something had changed within.
Though she stood before him defenseless, he made no move to touch her, but hung back like a penitent in need of invitation before he approached the altar. She liked this new fastidiousness.
"I didn't hurt the angels," he said softly.
"You shouldn't even have touched them."
"It wasn't supposed to happen like this," he said again.
"The gek-a-gek were clumsy. They dropped some meat from the roof."
"I saw."
"I was going to wait until the power subsided and come for you in style." He paused, then asked, "Would you have let me take you?"
"Yes."
"I wasn't certain. I was a little afraid you'd reject me, and then I'd become cruel. You're my sanity now. I can't go on without you,"
"You went on all those years in Yzordderrex."
"I had you there," he said, "only by a different name."
"And you were still cruel."
"Imagine how much cruder I would have been," he said, as if amazed at the possibility, "if I hadn't had your face to mellow me."
"Is that all I am to you? A face?"
"You know better than that," he said, his voice dropping " to a whisper.
"Tell me," she said, inviting his affections.
He glanced back over his shoulder, towards the legion. If he spoke to them she didn't hear it. They simply retreated, cowed by his glance. When they were gone, he put his hands to her face, his little fingers just beneath the line of her jaw, his thumbs laid lightly at the corners of her mouth. Despite the heat that was still rising from the cooked asphalt, his skin was chilly.
"One way or another," he said, "we don't have very long, so I'll keep this simple. There's no future for us now. Maybe there was yesterday, but tonight..."
"I thought you were going to build a New Yzordderrex."
"I was. I have the perfect model for it, here." His thumbs went from the corners of her mouth to the middle of her lips and stroked them. "A city made in your image, built in place of these miserable streets."
"But now?"
"We don't have the time, love. My brother's about his work up there, and when he's finished"—he sighed, his voice dropping lower still—"when he's finished—"
"What?" she said. There was something he wanted to share, but he was forbidding himself.
"I hear you went back to Yzordderrex," he said.
She wanted to press him to complete his earlier explanation, but she knew better than to push too hard, so she answered him, knowing his earlier doubts could surface again if she was patient. Yes, she said, she had indeed been to Yzordderrex, and she'd found the palace much changed. This sparked his interest.
"Who's taken it over? Not Rosengarten? No. The Dearthers. That damn priest Athanasius—"
"None of those."
"Who then?"
"Goddesses."
The web of luminescence fluttered around his head, shaken by his distress.
"They were always there," she told him. "Or at least one was, a Goddess called Uma Umagammagi. Have you ever heard of Her?"
"Legends—"
"She was in the Pivot."
"That's impossible," he said. "The Pivot belongs to the Unbeheld. The whole of the Imajica belongs to the Unbeheld."
She'd never heard of a breath of subservience in him before, but she heard it now.
"Does He own us too?" she asked him.
"We may escape that," he said. "But it'll be hard, love. He's the Father of us all. He expects to be obeyed, even to the very end." Again an aching pause, but this time a request on its heels. "Will you embrace me?" he asked her.
She answered with her arms. His hands slid from her face and through her hair to clasp behind her.
"I used to think it was a godlike thing to build cities," he murmured. "And if I built one fine enough it would stand forever, and so would I. But everything passes away sooner or later, doesn't it?"
She heard in his words a despair that was the inverse of Gentle's visionary zeal, as though in the time she'd known them they'd exchanged their lives. Gentle the faithless lover had become a dealer in heavens, while Sartori, the sometime maker of hells, was here holding out love as his last salvation.
"What is God's work," she asked him quietly, "if it's not the building of cities?"
"I don't know," he said.