the only way he could stop her was to seize hold of her arm.
Whatever power had deranged his senses, its bluff was called when he made contact with her. The roiling forms of her face resolved themselves like pieces of a multi-faceted jigsaw, turning and turning as they found their place, concealing countless other configurations - rare, wretched, bestial, dazzling - behind the shell of a congruous reality. He knew the features, now that they’d come to rest. Here were the ringlets, framing a face of exquisite symmetry. Here were the scars that healed with such unnatural speed. Here were the lips that hours before had described their owner as nothing and nobody. It was a lie! This nothing had two functions at least: assassin and whore. This nobody had a name.
‘Pie’oh’pah.’
Gentle let go of the man’s arm as though it were venomous. The form before him didn’t re-dissolve however, for which fact Gentle was only half glad. That hallucinatory chaos had been distressing, but the solid thing it had concealed appalled him more. Whatever sexual imaginings he’d shaped in the darkness - Judith’s face, Judith’s breasts, belly, sex - all of them had been an illusion. The creature he’d coupled with, almost shot his load into, didn’t even share her sex.
He was neither a hypocrite nor a puritan. He loved sex too much to condemn any expression of lust, and though he’d discouraged the homosexual courtships he’d attracted, it was out of indifference not revulsion. So the shock he felt now was fuelled more by the power of the deceit worked upon him than by the sex of the deceiver.
‘What have you done to me?’ was all he could say. ‘What have you done?’
Pie’oh’pah stood his ground, knowing perhaps that his nakedness was his best defence.
‘I wanted to heal you,’ he said. Though it trembled, there was music in his voice.
‘You put some drug in me.’
‘No!’ Pie said.
‘Don’t give me no! I thought you were Judith! You let me think you were Judith!’ He looked down at his hands, then up at the hard, lean body in front of him. ‘I felt her, not you.’ Again, the same complaint. ‘What have you done to me?’
‘I gave you what you wanted,’ Pie said.
Gentle had no retort to this. In its way, it was the truth. Scowling, he sniffed his palms, thinking that there might be traces of some drug in his sweat. But there was only the stench of sex on him; of the heat of the bed behind him.
‘You’ll sleep it off,’ Pie said.
‘Get the fuck out of here,’ Gentle replied. ‘And if you go anywhere near Jude again, I swear … I swear … I’ll take you apart.’
‘You’re obsessed with her, aren’t you?’
‘None of your fucking business.’
‘It’ll do you harm.’
‘Shut up.’
‘It will, I’m telling you.’
‘I told you!’ Gentle yelled. ‘Shut the fuck up!’
‘She doesn’t belong to you,’ came the reply.
The words ignited new fury in Gentle. He reached for Pie and took him by the throat. The bundle of clothes dropped from the assassin’s arm leaving him naked. But he put up no defence; he simply raised his hands and laid them lightly on Gentle’s shoulders. The gesture only infuriated Gentle further. He let out a stream of invective, but the placid face before him took both spittle and spleen without flinching. Gentle shook him, digging his thumbs into the man’s throat to stop his windpipe. Still he neither resisted nor succumbed, but stood in front of his attacker like a saint awaiting martyrdom.
Finally, breathless with rage and exertion, Gentle let go his hold, and threw Pie back, stepping away from the creature with a glimmer of superstition in his eyes. Why hadn’t the fellow fought back, or fallen? Anything but this sickening passivity.
‘Get out,’ Gentle told him.
Pie still stood his ground, watching him with forgiving eyes.
‘Will you get out?’ Gentle said again, more softly, and this time the martyr replied.
‘If you wish.’
‘I wish.’
He watched Pie’oh’pah stoop to pick up the scattered clothes. Tomorrow, this would all come clear in his head, he thought. He’d have shat this delirium out of his system, and these events - Jude, the chase, his near rape at the hands of the assassin - would be a tale to tell Klein and Clem and Taylor when he got back to London. They’d be entertained. Aware now that he was more naked than the other man he turned to the bed, and dragged a sheet off it to cover himself with.
There was a strange moment then, when he knew the bastard was still in the room, still watching him, and all he could do was wait for him to leave. Strange because it reminded him of other bedroom partings: sheets tangled, sweat cooling, confusion and self-reproach keeping glances at bay. He waited, and waited, and finally heard the door close. Even then he didn’t turn, but listened to the room to be certain there was only one breath in it: his own. When he finally looked back, and saw that Pie’oh’pah had gone, he pulled the sheet up around him like a toga, concealing himself from the absence in the room, which stared back at him too much like a reflection for his peace of mind. Then he locked the suite door and stumbled back to bed, listening to his drugged head whine like the empty telephone line.
1
Oscar Esmond Godolphin always recited a little prayer in praise of democracy when, after one of his trips to the Dominions, he stepped back on to English soil. Extraordinary as those visits were - and as warmly welcomed as he found himself in the diverse Kesparates of Yzordderrex - the city state was an autocracy of the most extreme kind, its excesses dwarfing the repressions of the country he’d been born in. Especially of late. Even his great friend and business partner in the Second Dominion, Hebbert Nuits-St-Georges, called Peccable by those who knew him well, a merchant who had made substantial profit from the superstitious and the woebegone in the Second Dominion, regularly remarked that the order of Yzordderrex was less stable by the day, and he would soon take his family out of the city, indeed out of the Dominion entirely, and find a new home where he would not have to smell burning bodies when he opened his windows in the morning. So far, it was only talk. Godolphin knew Peccable well enough to be certain that until he’d exhausted his supply of idols, relics and jujus from the Fifth, and could make no more profit, he’d stay put. And given that it was Godolphin himself who supplied these items -most were simply terrestrial trivia, revered in the Dominions because of their place of origin - and given that he would not cease to do so as long as the fever of collection was upon him and he could exchange such items for artifacts from the Imajica, Peccable’s business would flourish. It was a trade in talismans, and neither man was likely to tire of it soon.
Nor did Godolphon tire of being an Englishman in that most unEnglish of cities. He was instantly recognizable in the small but influential circle he kept. A large man in every way, he was tall and big-bellied; bellicose when fondest, hearty when not. At fifty-two he had long ago found his style, and was more than comfortable with it. True, he concealed his second and third chins beneath a grey-brown beard that only got an efficient trimming at the hands of Peccable’s eldest daughter Hoi-Polloi. True, he attempted to look a little more learned by wearing silver-rimmed spectacles that were dwarfed by his large face but were, he thought, all the more pedagoguish because they didn’t flatter. But these were little deceits. They helped to make him unmistakable, which he liked. He wore his thinning hair short, and his collars long, preferring for dress a clash of tweeds and a striped shirt; always a tie; invariably a waistcoat. All in all, a difficult sight to ignore, which suited him fine. Nothing was more likely to bring a smile to his face than being told he was talked about. It was usually