He had come with news and told it plainly. The asylum on the Cradle of Chzercemit had been the scene of a rebellion. Almost all the garrison had been killed, under circumstances which were still under investigation, and the bulk of the prisoners had escaped, led by an individual called Sco-pique.

"How many were there?" the Autarch asked.

"I have a list, sir," Rosengarten replied, opening the file he'd brought with him. "There are fifty-one individuals unaccounted for, most of them religious dissidents."

"Women?"

"None."

"We should have had them executed, not locked them away."

"Several of them would have welcomed martyrdom, sir. The decision to incarcerate them was taken with that in mind."

"So now they'll return to their flocks and preach revolution all over again. This we must stop. How many of them were active in Yzordderrex?"

"Nine. Including Father Athanasius."

"Athanasius? Who was he?"

"The Dearther who claimed he was the Christos. He had a congregation near the harbor."

"Then that's where he'll return, presumably."

"It seems likely."

"All of them'll go back to their flocks, sooner or later.

We must be ready for them. No arrests. No trials. Just have them quietly dispatched."

"Yes, sir."

"I don't want Quaisoir informed of this."

"I think she already knows, sir."

"Then she must be prevented from anything showy."

"I understand."

"Let's do this discreetly."

"There is something else, sir."

"What's that?"

"There were two other individuals on the island before the rebellion—"

"What about them?"

"It's difficult to know exactly what to make of the report. One of them appears to have been a mystif. The description of the other may be of interest."

He passed the report to the Autarch, who scanned it quickly at first, then more intently.

"How reliable is this?" he asked Rosengarten.

"At this juncture I don't know. The descriptions were corroborated, but I haven't interrogated the men personally."

"Do so."

"Yes, sir."

He handed the report back to Rosengarten. "How many people have seen this?"

"I had all other copies destroyed as soon as I read it. I believe only the interrogating officers, their commander, and myself have been party to this information."

"I want every one of the survivors from the garrison silenced. Court-martial them all and throw away the key. The officers and the commander must be instructed that they will be held accountable for any leakage of this information, from any source. Such leakage to be punishable by death." "Yes, sir."

"As for the mystif and the stranger, we must assume they're making way to the Second Dominion. First Beatrix, now the Cradle. Their destination must be Yzordderrex. How many days since this uprising?"

"Eleven, sir."

"Then they'll be in Yzordderrex in a matter of days, even if they're traveling on foot. Track them. I'd like to know as much about them as I can."

He looked out the window at the wastes of the Kwem.

"They probably took the Lenten Way. Probably passed within a few miles of here." There was a subtle agitation in his voice. "That's twice now our paths have come close to crossing. And now the witnesses, describing him so well. What does it mean, Rosengarten? What does it mean?"

When the commander had no answers, as now, he kept his silence: an admirable trait.

"I don't know either," the Autarch said. "Perhaps I should go out and take the air. I feel old today."

The hole from which the Pivot had been uprooted was still visible, though the driving winds of the region had almost healed the scar. Standing on the lips of the hole was a fine place to meditate on absence, the Autarch had discovered. He tried to do so now, his face swathed in silk to keep the stinging gust from his mouth and nostrils, his long fur coat closely buttoned, and his gloved hands driven into his pockets. But the calm he'd always derived from such meditations escaped him now. Absence was a fine discipline for the spirit when the world's bounty was a step away, and boundless. Not so now. Now it reminded him of an emptiness that he both feared and feared to be filled, like the haunted place at the shoulder of a twin who'd lost its other in the womb. However high he built his fortress walls, however tightly he sealed his soul, there was one who would always have access, and that thought brought palpitations. This other knew him as well as he knew himself: his frailties, his desires, his highest ambition. Their business together—most of it bloody—had remained unrevealed and unrevenged for two centuries, but he had never persuaded himself that it would remain so forever. It would be finished at last, and soon.

Though the cold could not reach his flesh through his coat, the Autarch shuddered at the prospect. He had lived for so long like a man who walks perpetually in the noonday sun, his shadow falling neither in front of him nor behind. Prophets could not predict him, nor accusers catch his crimes. He was inviolate. But that would change now. When he and his shadow met—as they inevitably would— the weight of a thousand prophecies and accusations would fall upon them both.

He pulled the silk from his face and let the eroding wind assault him. There was no purpose in staying here any longer. By the time the wind had remade his features he would have lost Yzordderrex, and even though that seemed like a small forfeit now, in the space of hours it might be the only prize he'd be able to preserve from destruction.

If the divine engineers who had raised the Jokalaylau had one night set their most ambitious peak between a desert and an ocean, and returned the next night and for a century of nights thereafter to carve its steeps and sheers from foothills to clouded heights with lowly habitations and magnificent plazas, with streets, bastions, and pavilions—and if, having carved, they had set in the core of that mountain a fire that smoldered but never burned—then their handiwork, when filled to overflowing with every manner of life, might have deserved comparison with Yzordderrex. But given that no such masterwork had ever been devised, the city stood without parallel throughout the Imajica.

The travelers' first sight of it came as they crossed the causeway that skipped like a well-aimed stone across the delta of the River Noy, rushing in twelve white torrents to meet the sea. It was early morning when they arrived, the fog off the river conspiring with the uneasy light of dawn to keep the city from sight until they were so close to it that when the fog was snatched the sky was barely visible, the desert and the sea no more than marginal, and all the world was suddenly Yzordderrex.

As they'd walked the Lenten Way, passing from the Third Dominion into the Second, Huzzah had recited all she'd read about the city from her father's books. One of the writers had described Yzordderrex as a god, she reported, a notion Gentle had thought ludicrous until he set eyes upon it. Then he understood what the urban theologian had been about, deifying this termite hill. Yzordderrex was worthy of worship; and millions were daily performing the ultimate act of veneration, living on or within the body of their Lord. Their dwellings clung like a million panicked climbers to the cliffs above the harbor and teetered on the plateaus that rose, tier on tier, towards the summit, many so crammed with houses that those closest to the edge had to be buttressed from below, the buttresses in turn encrusted with nests of life, winged, perhaps, or else suicidal. Everywhere, the mountain teemed, its streets of steps, le-thafly precipitous, leading the eye from one brimming shelf to another: from leafless boulevards lined with fine mansions to gates that let onto shadowy arcades, then up to the city's six summits, on the highest of which stood the palace of the Autarch of the Imajica. There was an abundance of a different order here, for the palace had more domes and towers than Rome, their obsessive elaboration visible even at this distance. Rising above them all was the Pivot Tower, as plain as its fellows were baroque. And high above that again, hanging in the white sky above the city, the comet that brought the Dominion's long days and languid dusks: Yzordderrex's star, called Giess, the Witherer.