by Clive Barker
Rested and funded, they’d left Attaboy the following morning, traveling along the River Fefer for a day, then, via Happi and Omootajive, into the province called the Ched Lo Ched, the Flowering Place (now bloomless), and finally to Mai-ké, caught in the twin pincers of poverty and puritanism.
On the platform outside, Gentle heard Pie say, “Good.”
He raised himself from the comfort of the wall and stepped out into the sunshine again. “The train?” he said.
“No. The calculations. I’ve finished them.” The mystif stared down at the marks on the platform at its feet. “This is only an approximation, of course, but I think it’s sound within a day or two. Three at the most.”
“So what day is it?”
“Take a guess.”
“March . . . the tenth.”
“Way off,” said Pie. “By these calculations, and remember this is only an approximation, it’s the seventeenth of May.”
“Impossible.”
“It’s true.”
“Spring’s almost over.”
“Are you wishing you were back there?” Pie asked.
Gentle chewed on this for a while, then said, “Not particularly. I just wish the fucking trains ran on time.”
He wandered to the edge of the platform and stared down the line.
“There’s no sign,” Pie said. “We’d be quicker going by doeki.”
“You keep doing that—”
“Doing what?”
“Saying what’s on the tip of my tongue. Are you reading my mind?”
“No,” said the mystif, rubbing out its calculation with its sole.
“So how did we win all that in Attaboy?”
“You don’t need teaching,” Pie replied.
“Don’t tell me it comes naturally,” Gentle said. “I’ve got through my entire life without winning a thing, and suddenly, when you’re with me, I can do no wrong. That’s no coincidence. Tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth. You don’t need teaching. Reminding, maybe. . . .” Pie gave a little smile.
“And that’s another thing,” Gentle said, snatching at one of the zarzi as he spoke.
Much to his surprise, he actually caught it. He opened his palm. He’d cracked its casing, and the blue mush of its innards was oozing out, but it was still alive. Disgusted, he flicked his wrist, depositing the body on the platform at his feet. He didn’t scrutinize the remains, but pulled up a fistful of the sickly grass that sprouted between the slabs of the platform and set about scrubbing his palm with it.
“What were we talking about?” he said. Pie didn’t reply. “Oh, yes . . . things I’d forgotten.” He looked down at his clean hand. “Pneuma,” he said. “Why would I ever forget having a power like the pneuma?”
“Either because it wasn’t important to you any longer—”
“Which is doubtful.”
“—or you forgot because you wanted to forget.”
There was an oddness in the way the mystif pronounced its reply which grated on Gentle’s ear, but he pursued the argument anyway.
“Why would I want to forget?” he said.
Pie looked back along the line. The distance was obscured by dust, but there were glimpses through it of a clear sky.
“Well?” said Gentle.
“Maybe because remembering hurts too much,” it said, without looking around.
The words were even uglier to Gentle’s ear than the reply that had preceded it. He caught the sense, but only with difficulty.
“Stop this,” he said.
“Stop what?”
“Talking in that damn-fool way. It turns my gut.”
“I’m not doing anything,” the mystif said, its voice still distorted, but now more subtly. “Trust me. I’m doing nothing.”
“So tell me about the pneuma,” Gentle said. “I want to know how I came by a power like that.”
Pie started to reply, but this time the words were so badly disfigured, and the sound itself so ugly, it was like a fist in Gentle’s stomach, stirring the stew there.
“Jesus!” he said, rubbing his belly in a vain attempt to soothe the churning. “Whatever you’re playing at—”
“It’s not me,” Pie protested. “It’s you. You don’t want to hear what I’m saying.”
“Yes, I do,” Gentle said, wiping beads of chilly sweat from around his mouth. “I want answers. I want straight answers!”
Grimly, Pie started to speak again, but immediately the waves of nausea climbed Gentle’s gut with fresh zeal. The pain in his belly was sufficient to bend him double, but he was damned if the mystif was going to keep anything from him. It was a matter of principle now. He studied Pie’s lips through narrowed eyes, but after a few words the mystif stopped speaking.
“Tell me!” Gentle said, determined to have Pie obey him even if he could make no sense of the words. “What have I done that I want to forget so badly? Tell me!”
Its face all reluctance, the mystif once again opened its mouth. The words, when they came, were so hopelessly corrupted Gentle could barely grasp a fraction of their sense. Something about power. Something about death.
Point proved, he waved the source of this excremental din away and turned his eyes in search of a sight to calm his belly. But the scene around him was a convention of little horrors: a graveolent making its wretched nest beneath the rails; the perspective of the track, snatching his eye into the dust; the dead zarzi at his feet, its egg sac split, spattering its unborn onto the stone. This last image, vile as it was, brought food to mind. The harbor meal in Yzordderrex: fish within fish within fish, the littlest filled with eggs. The thought defeated him. He tottered to the edge of the platform and vomited onto the rails, his gut convulsing. He didn’t have that much in his belly, but the heaves went on and on until his abdomen ached and tears of pain ran from his eyes. At last he stepped back from the platform edge, shuddering. The smell of his stomach was still in his nostrils, but the spasms were steadily diminishing. From the corner of his eye he saw Pie approach.
“Don’t come near me!” he said. “I don’t want you touching me!”
He turned his back on the vomit and its cause and retired to the shade of the waiting room, sitting down on the hard wood bench, putting his head against the wall, and closing his eyes. As the pain eased and finally disappeared, his thoughts turned to the purpose behind Pie’s assault. He’d quizzed the mystif several times over the past four and a half months about the problem of power: how it was come by and—more particularly—how he, Gentle, had come to possess it. Pie’s replies had been oblique in the extreme, but Gentle hadn’t felt any great urge to get to the bottom of the question. Perhaps subconsciously he hadn’t really wanted to know. Classically, such gifts had consequences, and he was enjoying his role as getter and wielder of power too much to want it spoiled with talk of hubris. He’d been content to be fobbed off with hints and equivocation, and he might have continued to be content, if he hadn’t been irritated by the zarzi and the lateness of theL’Himby train, bored and ready for an argument. But that was only half the issue. He’d pressed the mystif, certainly, but he’d scarcely goaded it. The attack seemed out of all proportion to the offense. He’d asked an innocent question and been turned inside out for doing so. So much for all that loving talk in the mountains.
“Gentle . . .”
“Fuck you.”
“The train, Gentle . . .”
“What about it?”
“It’s coming.”
He opened his eyes. The mystif was standing in the doorway, looking forlorn.
“I’m sorry that had to happen,” it said.
“It didn’t have to,” Gentle said. “You made it happen.”
“Truly I didn’t.”
“What was it then? Something I ate?”
“No. But there are some questions—”
“That make me sick.”
“—that have answers you don’t want to hear.”
“What do you take me for?�
�� Gentle said, his tone all quiet contempt. “I ask a question, you fill my head with so much shit for an answer that I throw up, and then it’s my fault for asking in the first place? What kind of fucked-up logic is that?”
The mystif raised its hands in mock surrender. “I’m not going to argue,” it said.
“Damn right,” Gentle replied.
Any further exchange would have been impractical anyway, with the sound of the train’s approach steadily getting louder, and its arrival being greeted by cheers and clapping from an audience that had gathered on the platform. Still feeling delicate when he stood, Gentle followed Pie out into the crowd.
It seemed half the inhabitants of Mai-ké had come down to the station. Most, he assumed, were sightseers rather than potential travelers; the train a distraction from hunger and unanswered prayers. There were some families here who planned to board, however, pressing through the crowd with their luggage. What privations they’d endured to purchase their escape from Mai-ké could only be imagined. There was much sobbing as they embraced those they were leaving behind, most of whom were old folk, who to judge by their grief did not expect to see their children and grandchildren again. The journey to L’Himby, which for Gentle and Pie was little more than a jaunt, was for them a departure into memory.
That said, there could be few more spectacular means of departure in the Imajica than the massive locomotive which was only now emerging from a cloud of evaporating steam. Whoever had made blueprints for this roaring, glistening machine knew its earth counterpart—the kind of locomotives outdated in the West but still serving in China and India—very well. Their imitation was not so slavish as to suppress a certain decorative joie de vivre—it had been painted so gaudily it looked like the male of the species in search of a mate—but beneath the daubings was a machine that might have steamed into King’s Cross or Marylebone in the years following the Great War. It drew six carriages and as many freight vehicles again, two of the latter being loaded with the flock of sheep.
Pie had already been down the line of carriages and was now coming back towards Gentle.
“The second. It’s fuller down the other end.”
They got in. The interiors had once been lush, but usage had taken its toll. Most of the seats had been stripped of both padding and headrests, and some were missing backs entirely. The floor was dusty, and the walls—which had once been decorated in the same riot as the engine—were in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. There were only two other occupants, both male, both grotesquely fat, and both wearing frock coats from which elaborately bound limbs emerged, lending them the look of clerics who’d escaped from an accident ward. Their features were minuscule, crowded in the center of each face as if clinging together for fear of drowning in fat. Both were eating nuts, cracking them in their pudgy fists and dropping little rains of pulverized shell on the floor between them.
“Brothers of the Boulevard,” Pie remarked as Gentle took a seat, as far from the nut-crackers as possible.
Pie sat across the aisle from him, the bag containing what few belongings they’d accrued to date alongside. There was then a long delay, while recalcitrant animals were beaten and cajoled into boarding for what they perhaps knew was a ride to the slaughterhouse and those on the platform made their final farewells. It wasn’t just the vows and tears that came in through the windows. So did the stench of the animals, and the inevitable zarzi, though with the Brothers and their meal to attract them the insects were uninterested in Gentle’s flesh.
Wearied by the hours of waiting and wrung out by his nausea, Gentle dozed and finally fell into so deep a sleep that the train’s long-delayed departure didn’t stir him, and when he woke two hours of their journey had already passed. Very little had changed outside the window. Here were the same expanses of gray-brown earth that had stretched around Mai-ké, clusters of dwellings, built from mud in times of water and barely distinguishable from the ground they stood upon, dotted here and there. Occasionally they would pass a plot of land—either blessed with a spring or better irrigated than the ground around it—from which life was rising; even more occasionally saw workers bending to reap a healthy crop. But generally the scene was just as Hairstone Banty had predicted. There would be many hours of dead land, she’d said; then they would travel through the Steppes, and over the Three Rivers, to the province of Bem, of which L’Himby was the capital city. Gentle had doubtedher competence at the time (she’d been smoking a weed too pungent to be simply pleasurable, and wearing something unseen elsewhere in the town: a smile) but dope fiend or no, she knew her geography.
As they traveled, Gentle’s thoughts turned once again to the origins of the power Pie had somehow awakened in him. If, as he suspected, the mystif had touched a hitherto passive portion of his mind and given him access to capabilities dormant in all human beings, why was it so damned reluctant to admit the fact? Hadn’t Gentle proved in the mountains that he was more than willing to accept the notion of mind embracing mind? Or was that comingling now an embarrassment to the mystif, and its assault on the platform a way to reestablish a distance between them? If so, it had succeeded. They traveled half a day without exchanging a single word.
In the heat of the afternoon, the train stopped at a small town and lingered there while the flock from Mai-ké disembarked. No less than four suppliers of refreshments came through the train while it waited, one exclusively carrying pastries and candies, among which Gentle found a variation on the honey and seed cake that had almost kept him in Attaboy. He bought three slices, and then two cups of well-sweetened coffee from another merchant, the combination of which soon enlivened his torpid system. For its part, the mystif bought and ate dried fish, the smell of which drove Gentle even farther from its side.
As the shout came announcing their imminent departure, Pie suddenly sprang up and darted to the door. The thought went through Gentle’s head that the mystif intended to desert him, but it had spotted newspapers for sale on the platform and, having made a hurried purchase, clambered aboard again as the train began to move off. Then it sat down beside the remains of its fish dinner and had no sooner unfolded the paper than it let out a low whistle.
“Gentle. You’d better look at this.”
It passed the newspaper across the aisle. The banner headline was in a language Gentle neither understood nor even recognized, but that scarcely mattered. The photographs below were plain enough. Here was a gallows, with six bodies hanging from it, and, inset, the death portraits of the executed individuals: among them, Hammeryock and Pontiff Farrow, the lawgivers of Vanaeph. Below this rogues’ gallery a finely rendered etching of Tick Raw, the crazy evocator.
“So,” Gentle said, “they got their comeuppance. It’s the best news I’ve had in days.”
“No, it’s not,” Pie replied.
“They tried to kill us, remember?” Gentle said reasonably, determined not to be infuriated by Pie’s contentiousness. “If they got hanged I’m not going to mourn ‘em! What did they do, try and steal the Merrow Ti’Ti’?”
“The Merrow Ti’Ti’ doesn’t exist.”
“That was a joke, Pie,” Gentle said, deadpan.
“I missed the humor of it, I’m sorry,” the mystif said, unsmiling. “Their crime—” It stopped and crossed the aisle to sit opposite Gentle, claiming the paper from his hands before continuing. “Their crime is far more significant,” it went on, its voice lowered. It began to read in the same whisper, précising the text of the paper. “They were executed a week ago for making an attempt on the Autarch’s life while he and his entourage were on their peace mission in Vanaeph—”
“Are you kidding?”
“No joke. That’s what it says.”
“Did they succeed?”
“Of course not.” The mystif fell silent while it scanned the columns. “It says they killed three of his advisers with a bomb and injured eleven soldiers. The device was . . . wait, my Omootajivac is rusty . . . the device was smuggled into his presence by Pontiff Far
row. They were all caught alive, it says, but hanged dead, which means they died under torture but the Autarch made a show of the execution anyway.”
“That’s fucking barbaric.”
“It’s very common, particularly in political trials.”
“What about Tick Raw? Why’s his picture in there?”
“He was named as a co-conspirator, but apparently he escaped. The damn fool!”
“Why’d you call him that?”
“Getting involved in politics when there’s so much more at stake. It’s not the first time, of course, and won’t be the last—”
“I’m not following.”
“People get frustrated with waiting and they end up stooping to politics. But it’s so shortsighted. Stupid sod.”
“How well do you know him?”
“Who? Tick Raw?” The placid features were momentarily confounded. Then Pie said, “He has . . . a certain reputation, shall we say? They’ll find him for certain. There isn’t a sewer in the Dominions he’ll be able to hide his head in.”
“Why should you care?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Answer the question,” Gentle replied, dropping his volume as he spoke.
“He was a Maestro, Gentle. He called himself an evocator, but it amounts to the same thing: he had power.”
“Then why was he living in the middle of a shithole like Vanaeph?”
“Not everybody cares about wealth and women, Gentle. Some souls have higher ambition.”
“Such as?”
“Wisdom. Remember why we came on this journey? To understand. That’s a fine ambition.” Pie looked at Gentle, making eye-to-eye contact for the first time since the episode on the platform. “Your ambition, my friend. You and Tick Raw had a lot in common.”
“And he knew it?”
“Oh, yes. . . .”
“Is that why he was so riled when I wouldn’t sit down and talk with him?”
“I’d say so.”
“Shit!”
“Hammeryock and Farrow must have taken us for spies, come to wheedle out plots laid against the Autarch.”
