He reached up from this play to his belt, unbuckling it with one hand. But before he could take hold of his prick, which was becoming painfully hard, the mystif did so, guiding him inside it with an urgency its face still failed to betray. The bath of its sex soothed his ache, immersing him balls and all. He let out a long sigh of pleasure, his nerve endings—starved of this sensation for months—rioting. The mystif had closed its eyes, its mouth open. He put his tongue hard between its lips, and it responded with a passion he had never seen it manifest before. Its hands wrapped around his shoulders, and in possession of them both it fell back against the wall, so hard the breath went from it into Gentle's throat. He drew it down into his lungs, inciting a hunger for more, which the mystif understood without need of words, inhaling from the heated air between them and filling Gentle's chest as though he were a just-drowned man being pumped back to life. He answered its gift with thrusts, its fluids running freely down the inside of his thighs. It gave him another breath, and another. He drank them all, eating the pleasure off its face in the moments between, the breath received as his prick was given. In this exchange they were both entered and enterer: a hint, perhaps, of the third way Pie had spoken of, the coupling between unfixed forces that could not occur until his manhood had been taken from him. Now, as he worked his prick against the warmth of the mystif's sex, the thought of relinquishing it in pursuit of another sensation seemed ludicrous. There could be nothing better than this; only different.

He closed his eyes, no longer afraid that his imagination would put a memory, or some invented perfection, in Pie's place, only that if he looked at the mystif's bliss too much longer he'd lose all control. What his mind's eye pictured, however, was more potent still: the image of them locked together as they were, inside each other, breath and prick swelling inside each other's skins until they could swell no further. He wanted to warn the mystif that he could hold on no longer, but it seemed to have that news already. It grasped his hair, pulling him off its face, the sting of it just another spur now, and the sobs too, coming out of them both. He let his eyes open, wanting to see its face as he came, and in the time it took for his lashes to unknit, the beauty in front of him became a mirror. It was his face he was seeing, his body he was holding. The illusion didn't cool him. Quite the reverse. Before the mirror softened into flesh, its glass becoming the sweat on Pie's sweet face, he passed the point of no return, and it was with that image in his eye—his face mingled with the mystif s—that his body unleashed its little torrent. It was, as ever, exquisite and racking, a short delirium followed by a sense of loss he'd never made peace with.

The mystif began to laugh almost before he was finished, and when Gentle drew his first clear breath it was to ask, "What's so funny?"

"The silence," Pie said, suppressing the music so that Gentle could share the joke.

He'd lain here in this cell hour after hour, unable to make a moan, but he'd never heard a silence such as this. The whole asylum was listening, from the depths where Father Athanasius wove his piercing crowns to N'ashap's office, its carpet indelibly marked with the blood his nose had shed. There was not a waking soul who'd not heard their coupling.

"Such a silence," the mystif said.

As it spoke, the hush was broken by the sound of someone yelling in his cell, a rage of loss and loneliness that went on unchecked for the rest of the night, as if to cleanse the gray stone of the joy that had momentarily tainted it.

27

If pressed, Jude could have named a dozen men—lovers, suitors, slaves—who'd offered her any prize she set her heart on in return for her affections. She'd taken several up on their largesse. But her requests, extravagant as some of them had been, were as nothing beside the gift she'd asked of Oscar Godolpnin. Show me Yzordderrex, she'd said, and watched his face fill with trepidation. He'd not refused her out of hand. To have done so would have crushed in a moment the affection growing between them, and he would never have forgiven himself that loss. He listened to her request, then made no further mention of it, hoping, no doubt, she'd let the subject lie.

She didn't, however. The blossoming of a physical relationship between them had cured her of the strange passivity that had afflicted her when they'd first met. She had knowledge of his vulnerability now. She'd seen him wounded. She'd seen him ashamed of his lack of self-control. She'd seen him in the act of love, tender and sweetly perverse. Though her feelings for him remained strong, this new perspective removed the veil of unthinking acceptance from her eyes. Now, when she saw the desire he felt for her—and he several times displayed that desire in the days following their consummation—it was the old Judith, self-reh'ant and fearless, who watched from behind her smiles; watched and waited, knowing that his devotion empowered her more by the day. The tension between these two selves—the remnants of the compliant mistress his presence had first conjured and the willful, focused woman she'd been (and now was again)—scourged the last dregs of dreaminess from her system, and her appetite for Dominion-hopping returned with fresh intensity. She didn't shrink from reminding him of his promise to her as the days went by, but on the first two occasions he made some polite but spurious excuse so as to avoid talking further about it.

On the third occasion her insistence won her a sigh, and eyes cast to heaven.

"Why is this so important to you?" he asked. "Yzordderrex is an overpopulated cesspit. I don't know a decent man or woman there who wouldn't prefer to be here in England."

"A week ago you were talking about disappearing there forever. But you couldn't you said, because you'd miss the cricket."

"You've got a good memory."

"I hang on your every word," she said, not without a certain sourness.

"Well, the situation's changed. There's most likely going to be revolution. If we went now, we'd probably be executed on sight."

"You've come and gone often enough in the past," she

pointed out. "So have hundreds of others, haven't they?

You're not the only one. That's what magic is for: passing

between Dominions."

He didn't reply.

"I want to see Yzordderrex, Oscar," she said, "and if you won't take me I'll find a magician who will."

"Don't even joke about it."L

"I mean it," she said fiercely. "You can't be the only one

who knows the way."

"Near enough."

"There are others. Til find them if I have to."

"They're all crazy," he told her. "Or dead."

"Murdered?" she said, the word out of her mouth before she'd fully grasped its implication.

The look on his face, however (or rather its absence: the willed blankness), was enough to confirm her suspicion. The bodies she'd seen on the news being carted away from their games were not those of burned-out hippies and sex- ? crazed satanists. They were possessors of true power, men and women who'd maybe walked where she longed to walk: in the Imajica.

"Who's doing it, Oscar? It's somebody you know, isn't it?"

He got up and crossed to where she sat, his motion so : swift she thought for an instant he meant to strike her. But instead he dropped to his knees in front of her, holding her hands tight and staring up at her with almost hypnotic intensity.

"Listen to me carefully," he said. "I have certain familial duties, which I wish to God I didn't have. They make demands upon me I'd willingly shrug off if I could—"