"Why would I do that?"
"Don't get angry. There's no harm going to come to it here. Trust me."
After his discussion with Estabrook, Gentle was by no means certain this was true, but he wasn't going to waste time arguing with Floccus while Pie was wandering unattended.
"Where have you looked?" he asked—"A1I around,"
"Can't you be a little more precise?"
"I got lost," Floccus said, becoming exasperated. "All the tents look alike."
"Did you go outside?"
"No, why?" Floccus' agitation sank from sight. What surfaced instead was deep dismay. "You don't think it's gone to the Erasure?"
"We won't know till we look," Gentle said. "Which way did Athanasius take me? There was a door—"
"Wait! Wait!" Floccus said, snatching hold of Gentle's jacket. "You can't just step out there."
"Why not? I'm a Maestro, aren't I?"
"There are ceremonies—"
"I don't give a shit," Gentle said, and without waiting for further objections from Floccus, he headed off in what he hoped was the right direction.
Floccus followed, trotting beside Gentle, opening new arguments against what Gentle was planning with every fourth or fifth step. The Erasure was restless tonight, he said, there was talk of ruptures in it; to wander in its vicinity when it was so volatile was dangerous, possibly suicidal; and besides, it was a desecration. Gentle might be a Maestro, but it didn't give him the right to ignore the etiquette of what he was planning. He was a guest, invited in on the understanding that he obey the rules. And rules weren't written for the fun of it. There were good reasons to keep strangers from trespassing there. They were ignorant, and ignorance could bring disaster on everybody.
"What's the use of rules, if nobody really understands what's going on out there?" Gentle said.
"But we do! We understand this place. It's where God begins."
"So if the Erasure kills me, you know what to write in my obituary. 'Gentle ended where God begins.' "
"This isn't funny, Gentle."
"Agreed."
"It's life or death."
"Agreed."
"So why are you doing it?"
"Because wherever Pie is, that's where I belong. And I would have thought even someone as half-sighted and short-witted as you would have seen that!"
"You mean shortsighted and halfwitted."
"You said it."
Ahead lay the door he and Athanasius had stepped through. It was open and unguarded.
"I just want to say—" Floccus began.
"Leave it alone, Floccus."
"—it's been too short a friendship," the man replied, bringing Gentle to a halt, shamed by his outburst.
"Don't mourn me yet," he said softly.
Floccus made no reply, but backed away from the open door, leaving Gentle to step through it alone. The night outside was hushed, the wind having dropped to little more than a breeze. He scanned the terrain, left and right. There were worshipers in both directions, kneeling in the gloom, their heads bowed as they meditated on God's Nowhere. Not wishing to disturb them, he moved as quietly as he could over the uneven ground, but the smaller shards of rock ahead of him skipped and rolled as he approached, as though to announce him with their rattle and clatter. This was not the only response to his presence. The air he exhaled, which he'd turned to killing use so many times now, darkened as it left his lips, the cloud shot through with threads of bright scarlet. They didn't disperse, these breaths, but sank as though weighed down by their own lethality, wrapping around his torso and legs like funeral robes. He made no attempt to shrug them off, even though their folds soon concealed the ground and slowed his step. Nor did he have to puzzle much over their purpose. Now that he was unaccompanied by Athanasius, the air was determined to deny him the defense of walking here as an innocent, as a man in pursuit of an errant lover. Wrapped in black and attended by drums, his profounder nature was here revealed: he was a Maestro with a murderous power at his lips, and there would be no concealing that fact, either from the Erasure or from those who were meditating upon it.
Several of the worshipers had been stirred from their contemplations by the sound of the stones and now looked up to see they had an ominous figure in their midst. One, kneeling alone close to Gentle's path, rose in panic and fled, uttering a prayer of protection. Another fell prostrate, sobbing. Rather than intimidate them further with his gaze, Gentle turned his eyes on God's Nowhere, scouring the ground close to the margin of solid earth and void for some sign of Pie 'oh' pah. The sight of the Erasure no longer distressed him as it had when he'd first stepped out here with Athanasius. Clothed as he was, and thus announced, he came before the void as a man of power. For him to have attempted the rites of Reconciliation, he must have made his peace with this mystery. He had nothing to fear from it.
By the time he set eyes on Pie 'oh' pah he was three or four hundred yards from the door, and the assembly of meditators had thinned to a brave few who'd wandered from the mam knot of the congregation in search of solitude. Some had already retreated, seeing him approach, but a stoical few kept their praying places and let this stranger pass by without so much as glancing up at him. Now so folded in sable breath he feared Pie would not recognize him, Gentle began to call the mystif s name. The call went unacknowledged. Though the mystif's head was no more than a dark blur in the murk, Gentle knew what its hungry eyes were fixed upon: the enigma that was coaxing its steady step the way a cliff edge might coax a suicide. He picked up his pace, his momentum moving steadily larger stones as he went. Though there was no sign that the mystif was in any hurry, he feared that once it was in the equivocal region between solid ground and nothingness, it would be irretrievable.
"Pie!" he yelled as he went. "Can you hear me? Please, stop!"
The words went on clouding and clothing him, but they had no effect upon Pie until Gentle turned his requests into an order.
"Pie 'oh' pah. This is your Maestro. Stop."
The mystif stumbled as Gentle spoke, as though his demand had put an obstacle in its way. A small, almost bestial sound of pain escaped it. But it did as its sometime summoner had ordered and stopped in its tracks like a dutiful servant, waiting until the Maestro reached its side.
Gentle was within ten paces, now, and saw how far advanced the process of unknitting was. The mystif was barely more than a shadow among shadows, its features impossible to read, its body insubstantial. If Gentle needed any further proof that the Erasure was not a place of healing, it was in the sight of the uredo, which was more solid than the body it had fed upon, its livid stains intermittently brightening like embers caught by a gusting wind.
"Why did you leave your bed?" Gentle said, his pace slowed once again as he approached the mystif. Its form seemed so tenuous he feared any violent motion might disperse it entirely. "There's nothing beyond the Erasure you need, Pie. Your life's here, with me."
The mystif took a little time to reply. When it did its voice was as ethereal as its substance, a slender, exhausted plea emerging from a spirit at the edge of total collapse.
"I don't have any life left, Maestro," it said.
"Let me be the judge of that. I swore to myself I wouldn't let you go again, Pie. I want to look after you, make you well. Bringing you here was a mistake, I see that now. I'm sorry if it's brought you pain, but I'll take you away—"
"It wasn't a mistake. You found your way here for your own reasons."
"You're my reason, Pie. I didn't know who I was till you found me, and I'll forget myself again if you go."
"No, you won't," it said, the dubious outline of its head turning in Gentle's direction. Though there was no gleam to mark the place where its eyes had been, Gentle knew it was looking at him. "You're the Maestro Sartori. The Reconciler of the Imajica." It faltered for a long moment. When its voice came again, it was frailer than ever. "And you are also my master, and my husband, and my dearest brother. ... If you order me to stay, then I will stay. But if you love me, Gentle, then please ... let... me ... go."