"Then how were you raised so high?"
"He loved me. From the very beginning, he loved me."
"You did no unholy service to be elevated?" Dowd said.
She hesitated, and he pressed her harder.
"What did you do?" he demanded. "What? What?" There was a distant echo of Oscar in that expletive: the servant speaking with his master's voice.
Intimidated by this fury, Quaisoir replied. "I visited the Bastion of the Banu many times," she confessed. "Even the Annex. I went there too."
"And what's there?"
"Madwomen. Some who killed their spouses, or their children."
"Why did you seek such pitiful creatures out?"
"There are ... powers ... hidden among them."
At this, Jude attended more closely than ever.
"What kind of powers?" Dowd said, voicing the question she was silently asking.
"I did nothing unholy," Quaisoir protested. "I just wanted to be cleansed. The Pivot was in my dreams. Every night, its shadow on me, breaking my back. I only wanted to be cleansed of it."
"And were you?" Dowd asked her. Again she didn't answer at first, until he pressed her, almost harshly. "Were you?"
"I wasn't cleansed, I was changed," she said. "The women polluted me. I have a taint in my flesh and I wish it were out of me." She began to tear at her clothes, till her fingers found her belly and breasts. "I want it driven out!" she said. "It gave me new dreams, worse than before."
"Calm yourself," Dowd said.
"But I want it out! I want it out!" A kind of fit had suddenly taken her, and she flailed so violently in his arms she fell from them. "I can feel it in me now," she said, her nails raking her breasts.
Jude looked at Dowd, willing him to intervene, but he simply stood up, staring at the woman's distress, plainly taking pleasure in it. Quaisoir's self-assault was not theatrics. She was drawing blood from her skin, still yelling that she wanted the taint out of her. In her agony, a subtle change was coming over her flesh, as though she was sweating out the taint she'd spoken of. Her pores were oozing a sheen of iridescence, and the cells of her skin were subtly changing color. Jude knew the blue she saw spreading from her sister's neck, down over her body and up towards her contorted face. It was the blue of the stone eye, the blue of the Goddess.
"What is this?" Dowd demanded of his confessee.
"Out of me! Out of me!"
"Is this the taint?" He went down on his haunches beside her. "Is it?"
"Drive it out of me!" Quaisoir sobbed, and began assaulting her poor body afresh.
Jude could endure it no longer. Allowing her sister to die blissfully in the arms of a surrogate divinity was one thing. This self-mutilation was quite another. She broke her vow of silence.
"Stop her," she said.
Dowd looked up from his study, drawing his thumb across his throat to hush her. But it was too late. Despite her own commotion, Quaisoir had heard her sister speak. Her thrashings slowed, and her blind head turned in Jude's direction.
"Who's there?" she demanded.
There was naked fury on Dowd's face, but he hushed her softly. She would not be placated, however.
"Who's with you, Lord?" she asked him.
With his reply he made an error that unknitted the whole fiction. He lied to her.
"There's nobody," he said.
"I heard a woman's voice. Who's there?"
"I told you," Dowd insisted. "Nobody." He put his hand upon her face. "Now calm yourself. We're alone."
"No, we're not."
"Do you doubt me, child?" Dowd replied, his voice, after the harshness of his last interrogations, modulating with this question, so that he sounded almost wounded by her lack of faith. Quaisoir's reply was to silently take his hand from her face, seizing it tightly in her blue, blood-speckled fingers.
"That's better," he said.
Quaisoir ran her fingers over his palm. Then she said, "No scars."
"There'll always be scars," Dowd said, lavishing his best pontifical manner upon her. But he'd missed the point of her remark.
"There are no scars on your hand," she said.
He retrieved it from her grasp. "Believe in me," he said.
"No," she replied. "You're not the Man of Sorrows." The joy had gone from her voice. It was thick, almost threatening. "You can't save me," she said, suddenly flailing wildly to drive the pretender from her. "Where's my Savior? I want my Savior!"
"He isn't here," Jude told her. "He never was."
Quaisoir turned in Jude's direction. "Who are you?" she said. "I know your voice from somewhere."
"Keep your mouth shut," Dowd said, stabbing his finger in Jude's direction. "Or so help me you'll taste the mites—"
"Don't be afraid of him," Quaisoir said.
"She knows better than that," Dowd replied. "She's seen what I can do."
Eager for some excuse to speak, so that Quaisoir could hear more of the voice she knew but couldn't yet name, Jude spoke up in support of Dowd's conceit.
"What he says is right," she told Quaisoir. "He can hurt us both, badly. He's not the Man of Sorrows, sister."
Whether it was the repetition of words Quaisoir had herself used several times—Man of Sorrows—or the fact that Jude had called her sister, or both, the woman's sightless face slackened, the bafflement going out of it. She lifted herself from the ground.
"What's your name?" she murmured. "Tell me your name."
"She's nothing," Dowd said, echoing Quaisoir's own description of herself minutes earlier. "She's a dead woman." He made a move in Jude's direction. "You understand so little," he said. "And I've forgiven you a lot for that. But I can't indulge you any longer. You've spoiled a fine game. I don't want you spoiling any more."
He put his left hand, its forefinger extended, to his lips.
"I don't have many mites left," he said, "so one will have to do. A slow unraveling. But even a shadow like you can be undone."
"I'm a shadow now, am I?" Jude said to him. "I thought we were the same, you and I? Remember that speech?"
"That was in another life, lovey," Dowd said. "It's different here. You could do me harm here. So I'm afraid it's going to have to be thank you and good night."
She started to back away from him, wondering as she did so how much distance she would have to put between them to be out of range of his wretched mites. He watched her retreat with pity on his face.
"No good, lovey," he said. "I know these streets like the back of my hand."
She ignored his condescension and took another backward step, her eye fixed on his mouth where the mites nested, but aware that Quaisoir had risen and was standing no more than a yard from her defender.
"Sister?" the woman said.
Dowd glanced around, distracted from Jude long enough for her to take to her heels. He let out a shout as she fled, and the blind woman lunged towards the sound, grabbing his arm and neck and dragging him towards her. The noise she made as she did so was like nothing Jude had heard from human lips, and she envied it: a cry to shatter bones like glass and shake color from the air. She was glad not to be closer, or it might have brought her to her knees.
She looked back once, in time to see Dowd spit the lethal mite at Quaisoir's empty sockets, and prayed her sister had better defenses against its harm than the man who'd emptied them. Whether or no, she could do little to help. Better to run while she had the chance, so that at least one of them survived the cataclysm.
She turned the first corner she came to, and kept turning corners thereafter, to put as many decisions between herself and her pursuer. No doubt Dowd's boast was true; he did indeed know these streets, where he claimed he'd once triumphed, like his own hand. It followed that the sooner she was out of them, and into terrain unfamiliar to them both, the more chance she had of losing him. Until then, she had to be swift and as nearly invisible as she could make herself. Like the shadow Dowd had dubbed her: darkness in a deeper dark, flitting and fleeting; seen and gone.