Before Dowd could move to stop her, Jude screamed, "Stop!"
The knife was arrested in mid-descent, and all three of Quaisoir's pursuers looked around at Jude. The chiid registered nothing; its face was an imbecilic blank. The knife wielder was equally silent, though his expression was one of disbelief. It was the Oethac that spoke, the words he uttered slurred but ripe with panic.
"You... keep... your distance," he said, his fearful glance going back and forth between the wounded woman and this echo of her, whole and strong.
The blinder found his voice now, and began to hush him, but the Oethac rattled on.
"Look at her!" he said. "What the fuck is this, eh? Look at her."
"Just shut your trap," the blinder said. "She's not going to touch us."
"You don't know that," said the Oethac, picking up the child with one arm and slinging it over his shoulder. "It wasn't me," he went on, as he backed away. "I never laid a finger on her. I swear. On my scars, I swear."
Jude ignored his weaselings and took a step towards Quaisoir. As soon as she moved, the Oethac fled. The blinder, however, held his ground, taking courage from his blade.
"I'll do you the same way," he warned. "I don't care who the fuck you are, I'll do you!"
From behind her, Jude heard Dowd's voice, carrying an authority she'd never heard in it before.
"I'd leave her be if I were you," he said.
His utterance brought a response from Quaisoir. She raised her head and turned in Dowd's direction. Her eyes had not simply been stabbed out but virtually dug from their sockets. Seeing the holes, Jude was ashamed to have been so troubled by the little ache that she felt in sympathy; it was nothing beside Quaisoir's hurt. Yet the woman's voice was almost joyful.
"Lord?" she said. "Sweet Lord, is this punishment enough? Will you forgive me now?"
Neither the nature of the error Quaisoir was making here nor its profound irony was lost on Jude. Dowd was no savior. But he was happy enough to assume that role, it seemed. He replied to Quaisoir with a delicacy as feigned as the sonority he'd affected seconds before.
"Of course I'll forgive you," he said. "That's what I'm here to do."
Jude might have been tempted to disabuse Quaisoir of her illusions there and then, but that the blinder was usefully distracted by Dowd's performance.
"Tell me who you are, child," Dowd said.
"You know who the fuck she is," the blinder spat, "Quaisoir! It's fucking Quaisoir!"
Dowd glanced back at Jude, his expression one of comprehension rather than shock. Then he looked again at the blinder.
"So it is," he said.
"You know what she's done same as me," the man said. "She deserves worse than this."
"Worse, you think?" Dowd said, continuing to advance towards the man, who was nervously passing his knife from hand to hand, as though he sensed that Dowd's capacity for cruelty outstripped his own a hundredfold and was preparing to defend himself if need be.
"What worse would you do?" Dowd said.
"What she's done to others, over and over."
"She did these things personally, you think?"
"I wouldn't put it past her," he said. "Who knows what the fuck goes on up there? People disappear, and get washed up again in pieces... ." He tried a little smile, plainly nervous now. "You know she deserved it."
"And you?" Dowd asked. "What do you deserve?"
"I'm not saying I'm a hero," the blinder replied. "I'm just saying she had it coming."
"I see," said Dowd.
From Jude's vantage point, what happened next was more a matter of conjecture than observation. She saw Quaisoir's maimer take a step away from Dowd, repugnance on his face; then saw him lunge forward as if to stab Dowd through the heart. His attack put him in range of the mites, and before his blade could find Dowd's flesh they must have leapt at the blinder, because he dropped back with a shout of horror, his free hand going up to his face. Jude had seen what followed before. The man scrabbled at his eyes and nostrils and mouth, his legs giving out beneath him as the mites undid his system from the inside. He fell at Dowd's feet and rolled around in a fury of frustration, eventually putting his knife into his mouth and digging bloodily for the things that were unmaking him. The life went out of him as he was doing so, his hand dropping from his face, leaving the blade in his throat as though he'd choked upon it.
"It's over," Dowd said to Quaisoir, who had wrapped her arms around her shuddering body and was lying on the ground a few yards from her tormentor's corpse. "He won't hurt you again."
"Thank you, Lord."
"The things he accused you of, child?"
"Yes,"
"Terrible things."
"Yes."
"Are you guilty of them?"
"I am," Quaisoir said. "I want to confess them before I die. Will you hear me?"
"I wil!," Dowd said, oozing magnanimity.
After being merely a witness to these events as they unraveled, Jude now stepped towards Quaisoir and her confessor, but Dowd heard her approach and turned to shake his head.
"I've sinned, my Lord Jesu," Quaisoir was saying. "I've sinned so many times. I beg you to forgive me."
It was the despair Jude heard in her sister's voice, rather than Dowd's rebuff, that kept her from making her presence known. Quaisoir was in extremis, and given that it was her clear desire to commune with some forgiving spirit, what right did Jude have to intervene? Dowd was not the Christ Quaisoir believed him to be, but did that matter? What would revealing the father confessor's true identity achieve now, besides adding to the sum of her sister's suffering?
Dowd had knelt beside Quaisoir and had taken her up into his arms, demonstrating a capacity for tenderness, or at least for its replication, that Jude would never have believed him capable of. For her part, Quaisoir was in bliss, despite her wounds. She clutched at Dowd's jacket and thanked him over and over for doing her this kindness. He hushed her softly, saying there was no need for her to make a catalogue of her crimes.
"You have them in your heart, and I see them there," he said. "I forgive them. Tell me instead about your husband. Where is he? Why hasn't he also come asking for forgiveness?"
"He didn't believe you were here," Quaisoir said. "I told him I'd seen you down at the harbor, but he has no faith."
"None?"
"Only in himself," she said bitterly. Dowd began to rock backward and forward as he plied her with further questions, his focus so devoted to his victim he didn't notice Jude's approach. She envied Dowd his embrace, wishing it were her arms Quaisoir was lying in instead of his.
"Who is your husband?" Dowd was asking.
"You know who he is," Quaisoir replied. "He's the Autarch. He rules the Imajica."
"But he wasn't always Autarch, was he?"
"No."
"So what was he before?" Dowd wanted to know. "An ordinary man?"
"No," she said. "I don't think he was ever an ordinary man. I don't remember exactly."
He stopped rocking her. "I think you do," he said, his tone subtly shifting. "Tell me," he said. "Tell me: What was he before he ruled Yzordderrex? And what were you?"
"I was nothing," she said simply.
"Then how were you raised so high?"