"Sartori?" he said.
"He's dead."
"What about Celestine?"
"Gone," she said.
"But it's over, isn't it?" Hoi-Polloi said. "We're going to live."
"Are we?"
"Yes, we are," said Clem. "Gentle saw Hapexamendios destroyed."
"Where is Gentle?"
"He went outside," Clem said. "He's got enough life in him—"
"For another life?"
"For another twenty, the lucky bugger," came Tay's reply.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she put her arms around Gentle's protectors, then went out onto the step. Gentle was standing in the middle of the street, wrapped in one of Celestine's sheets. Monday was at his side, and he was leaning on the boy as he stared up at the tree that grew outside number 28. Hapexamendios' fire had charred much of its foliage, leaving the branches naked and blackened. But there was a breeze stirring the leaves that had survived, and after such a long motionless time even these shreds of wind were welcome: final, simple proof that the Imajica had survived its perils and was once again drawing breath.
She hesitated to join him, thinking perhaps he'd prefer to have these moments of meditation uninterrupted. But his gaze came her way after half a minute or so, and though there was only starlight and the last guttering flames in the fretwork above to see him by, the smile was as luminous as ever, and as inviting. She left the step but, as she approached, saw that his smile was slender and the wounds he'd sustained deeper than cuts.
"I failed," he said.
"The Imajica's whole," she replied. "That isn't failure."
He looked away from her, down the street. The darkness was full of agitation.
"The ghosts are still here," he said. "I swore to them I'd find a way out, and I failed. That was why I went with Pie in the first place, to find Taylor a way out—"
"Maybe there isn't one," came a third voice.
Clem had appeared on the doorstep, but it was Tay who spoke.
"I promised you an answer," Gentle said.
"And you found one. The Imajica's a circle, and there's no way out of it. We just go round and round. Well, that's not so bad, Gentle, We have what we have."
Gentle lifted his hand from Monday's shoulder and turned away from the tree, and from Jude, and from the angels on the step. As he hobbled out into the middle of the street, his head bowed, he murmured a reply to Tay too quiet for any but an angel's ear. "It's not enough," he said.
25
For the living occupants of Gamut Street, the days that followed the events of that midsummer were as strange in their way as anything that had gone before. The world that returned to life around them seemed to be totally ignorant of the fact that its existence had hung in the balance, and if it now sensed the least change in its condition it concealed its suspicion very well. The monsoons and heat waves that had preceded the Reconciliation were replaced the next morning with the drizzles and tepid sunshine of an English summer, its moderation the model for public behavior in subsequent weeks. The eruptions of irrationality which had turned every junction and street corner into a little battleground summarily ceased; the night walkers Monday and Jude had seen watching for revelation no longer strayed out to peer quizzically at the stars.
In any city other than London, perhaps the mysteries now present in its streets would have been discovered and celebrated. If such fogs as lingered in Clerkenwell had appeared instead in Rome, the Vatican would have been pronouncing on them within a week. Had they appeared in Mexico City, the poor would have been through them in a shorter time still, desperate for a better life in the world beyond. But England: oh! England. It had never had much of a taste for the mystical, and with all but the weakest of its evocators and feit workers murdered by the Tabula Rasa, there was nobody to begin the labor of freeing minds locked up in dogmas and utilities.
The fogs were not entirely ignored, however. The animal life of the city knew something was afoot and came to Clerkenwell to sniff it out. The runaway dogs who'd gathered in the vicinity of Gamut Street when the revenants had come, only to be frightened off by Sartori's horde, now returned, their noses twitching after some piquant scent or other. Cats came too, yowling in the trees at dusk, curious but casual. There were also visitations by bees, and birds, who twice in the three days following midsummer gathered in the same stupefying numbers as Monday and Jude had witnessed at the Retreat. In all these cases the packs, swarms, and flocks disappeared after a time, having discovered the source of the perfumes and poles that had directed them to the district and gone into the Fourth to have a life under different skies.
But if no two-legged traffic passed into the Fourth, there was certainly some in the opposite direction. A little over a week after the Reconciliation, Tick Raw arrived on the doorstep of number 28 and, having introduced himself to Clem and Monday, asked to see the Maestro. He came into a house that was a good deal more comfortable than his quarters in Vanaeph, furnished as it was from a score of recent burglaries by Monday and Clem. But the atmosphere of domesticity was cosmetic. Though the bodies of the gek-a-gek had been removed and buried, along with their summoner, beneath the long grass in Shiverick Square; though the front door had been mended and the bloodstains mopped up; though the Meditation Room had been scoured and the stones of the circle individually wrapped in linen and locked away, the house was charged with all that had happened here: the deaths, the love scenes, the reunions and revelations.
"You're living in the middle of a history lesson," Tick Raw said when he sat himself down beside the bed in which Gentle lay.
The Reconciler was healing, but even with his extraordinary powers of recuperation it would be a lengthy business. He slept twenty hours or more out of every twenty-four and barely ventured from his mattress when he was awake.
"You look as though you've seen some wars, my friend," Tick Raw said.
"More than I'd like," Gentle replied wearily.
"I sniff something Oviate."
"Gek-a-gek," Gentle said. "Don't worry, they're gone."
"Did they break through during the ceremony?"
"No. It's more complicated than that. Ask Clem. He'll tell you the whole story."
"No offense to your friends," Tick Raw said, fetching a jar of pickled sausage from his pocket, "but I'd prefer to hear it from you."
"I've thought about it too much as it is," Gentle said. "I don't want to be reminded."
"But we won the day," Tick Raw said. "Doesn't that merit a little celebration?"
"Celebrate with Clem, Tick. I need to sleep."
"As you like, as you like," Tick Raw said, retreating to the door. "Oh. I wonder? Do you mind if I stay here for a few days? There's a number of parties in Vanaeph who want the grand tour of the Fifth, and I've volunteered to show them the sights. But as I don't yet know them myself—"
"Be my guest," Gentle said. "And forgive me if I don't brim with bonhomie."
"No apology required," Tick Raw said. "I'll leave you to sleep."
That evening, Tick did as Gentle had suggested and plied both Clem and Monday with questions until he had the full story.
"So when do I meet the mesmeric Judith?" he asked when the tale was told.
"I don't know if you ever will," Clem said. "She didn't come back to the house after we buried Sartori."
"Where is she?"
"Wherever she is," Monday said dolefully, "Hoi-Polloi's with her. Just my fuckin' luck."
"Well, now, listen," Tick Raw said. "I've always had a way with the ladies. I'll make you a deal. If you show me this city, inside out, I'll show you a few ladies the same way."