no sooner closed the door than he heard the two begin to talk inside. There was a good deal of din from the shack opposite - a baby bawling, a mother attempting to hush it with an off-key lullaby - but he caught fragments of the exchange. Tick Raw was still in a fury:
‘Is this some kind of punishment?’ he demanded at one point; then, a few moments later: ‘Patient? How much more frigging patient do I have to be?’
The lullaby blotted out much of what followed, and when it quietened again, the conversation inside Tick Raw’s shack had taken another turn entirely.
‘We’ve got a long way to go …’ Gentle heard Pie saying, ‘…and a lot to learn …’
Tick Raw made some inaudible reply, to which Pie said: ‘He’s a stranger here.’
Again Tick Raw murmured something.
‘I can’t do that,’ Pie replied. ‘He’s my responsibility.’
Now Tick Raw’s persuasions grew loud enough for Gentle to hear.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ the evocator said. ‘Stay here with me. I miss a warm body at night.’
At this Pie’s voice dropped to a whisper. Gentle took a half-step back towards the door, and managed to catch a few of the mystif’s words. It said heart-broken, he was sure; then something about faith. But the rest was a murmur too soft to be interpreted. Deciding he’d given the two of them long enough alone, he announced that he was coming back in, and entered. Both looked up at him; somewhat guiltily, he thought.
‘I want to get out of here,’ he announced.
Tick Raw’s hand was at Pie’s neck, and remained there, like a staked claim.
‘If you go,’ Tick Raw told the mystif, ‘I can’t guarantee your safety. Hammeryock will be wanting your blood.’
‘We can defend ourselves,’ Gentle said, somewhat surprised by his own certainty.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t be quite so hasty,’ Pie put in.
‘We’ve got a journey to make,’ Gentle replied.
‘Let her make up her own mind,’ Tick Raw suggested. ‘She’s not your property.’
At this remark, a curious look crossed Pie’oh’pah’s face. Not guilt now, but a troubled expression, softening into resignation. The mystif’s hand went up to its neck, and brushed off Tick Raw’s hold.
‘He’s right,’ it said to Tick. ‘We do have a journey ahead of us.’
The evocator pursed his lips, as if making up his mind whether to pursue this business any further or not. Then he said: ‘Well then. You’d better go.’
He turned a sour eye on Gentle.
‘May everything be as it seems, stranger.’
‘Thank you,’ said Gentle, and escorted Pie out of the hut into the mud and flurry of Vanaeph.
‘Strange thing to say,’ Gentle observed as they trudged away from Tick Raw’s hut. ‘May everything be as it seems.’
‘It’s the profoundest curse a sway-worker knows,’ Pie replied.
‘I see.’
‘On the contrary,’ Pie said, ‘I don’t think you see very much.’
There was a note of accusation in Pie’s words which Gentle rose to.
‘I certainly saw what you were up to,’ he said. ‘You had half a mind to stay with him. Batting your eyes like a—’ He stopped himself.
‘Go on,’ Pie replied. ‘Say it. Like a whore.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
‘No, please,’ Pie went on, bitterly. ‘You can lay on the insults. Why not? It can be very arousing.’
Gentle shot Pie a look of disgust.
‘You said you wanted education, Gentle. Well let’s start with may everything be as it seems. It’s a curse, because if that were the case we’d all be living just to die, and mud would be King of the Dominions.’
‘I get it,’ Gentle said. ‘And you’d be just a whore.’
‘And you’d be a just a faker, working for-’
Before the rest of the sentence was out of his mouth a pack of animals ran out between two of the dwellings, squealing like pigs, though they looked more like tiny llamas. Gentle looked in the direction from which they’d come, and saw, advancing between the shanties, a sight to bring shudders.
‘The Nullianac!’
‘I see it!’ Pie said.
As the executioner approached, the praying hands of its head opened and closed, as though kindling the energies between the palms to a lethal heat. There were cries of alarm from the houses around. Doors slammed. Shutters closed. A child was snatched from a step, bawling as it went. Gentle had time to see the executioner draw two weapons, with blades that caught the livid light of the arcs, then he was obeying Pie’s instruction to run, the mystif leading the way.
The street they’d been on was no more than a narrow gutter, but it was a well-lit highway by comparison with the narrow alley they ducked into. Pie was light-footed; Gentle was not. Twice the mystif made a turn and Gentle overshot it. The second time he lost Pie entirely in the murk and dirt, and was about to retrace his steps when he heard the executioner’s blade slice through something behind him and glanced back to see one of the frailer houses folding up in a cloud of dust and screams, its demolisher’s shape, lightning-headed, appearing from the chaos and fixing its gaze upon him. Its target sighted, it advanced with a sudden speed, and Gentle darted for cover at the first turn, a route that took him into a swamp of sewage which he barely crossed without falling, and thence into even narrower passages.
It would only be a matter of time before he chanced upon a cul-de-sac, he knew. When he did the game would be up. He felt an itch at the nape of his neck, as though the blades were already there. This wasn’t right! He’d barely been out of the Fifth an hour and he was seconds from death. He glanced back. The Nullianac had closed the distance between them. He picked up his pace, pitching himself around a corner, and into a tunnel of corrugated iron, with no way out at the other end.
‘Shite!’ he said, taking Tick Raw’s favourite word for his complaint. ‘Furie, you’ve killed yourself!’
The walls of the cul-de-sac were slick with filth, and high. Knowing he’d never scale them, he ran to the far end and threw himself against the wall there, hoping it might crack. But its builders (damn them!) had been better craftsmen than most in the vicinity. The wall rocked, and pieces of its foetid mortar fell about him, but all his efforts did was bring the Nullianac straight to him, drawn by the sound of his effort.
Seeing his executioner approaching, Gentle pitched his body against the wall afresh, hoping for some last-minute reprieve. But
