"You were lucky to be in there."

"So I see," Floccus observed, surveying the distant vista of destruction. "What happened out here?"

"Something came out of the First, in pursuit of Pie 'oh' pah."

"The Unbeheld did this?"

"So it would seem."

"Unkind," Floccus said softly, which was surely the understatement of the night.

Floccus lifted Sighshy and her litter—two of which had perished when their mother fell on them—out of the vehicle; then he and Gentle set to the task of putting it back on four wheels. It took some doing, but Floccus made up in strength what he lacked in height, and between the two of them the job was done.

Gentle had made plain his intention to return to Yzordderrex but wasn't certain of Floccus's intentions until the engine was running. Then he said, "Are you coming with me?"

"I should stay," Floccus replied. There was a fretful pause. "But I've never been much good with death."

"You said the same thing about sex."

"It's true."

"That doesn't leave much, does it?"

"Would you prefer to go without me, Maestro?"

"Not at all. If you want to come, come. But let's get going. I want to be in Yzordderrex by dawn."

"Why, what happens at dawn?" Floccus said, a superstitious flutter in his voice.

"It's a new day."

"Should we be grateful for that?" the other man inquired, as though he sniffed some profound wisdom in the Maestro's reply but couldn't quite grasp it.

"Indeed we should, FIoccus, indeed we should. For the day, and for the chance."

"What... er... what chance would that be exactly?"

"The chance to change the world."

"Ah," said FIoccus. "Of course. To change the world. I'll make that my prayer from now on."

"We'll compose it together, FIoccus. We've got to invent everything from now on: who we are, what we believe. There's been too many old roads taken. Too many old dramas repeated. We've got to find a new way by tomorrow."

"A new way."

"That's right. We'll make that our ambition, agreed? To be new men by the time the comet comes up."

FIoccus' doubt was visible, even by starlight. "That doesn't give us very long," he observed.

True enough, Gentle thought. In the Fifth, midsummer could not be very far off, and though he didn't yet comprehend the reasons, he knew the Reconciliation could only be performed on that day. There was a fine irony. Having frittered away lifetimes in pursuit of sensation, the span he had left in which to make good the error of that waste could be measured in terms of hours.

"There'll be time," he said, hoping to answer FIoccus' doubts, and subdue his own, but knowing in his heart of hearts that he was doing neither.

Jude was stirred from the torpor Quaisoir's narcotic bed had induced in her not by sound—she'd long since become accustomed to the anarchy that had raged unabated throughout the night—but by a sense of unease too vague to be identified and too insistent to be ignored. Something of consequence had happened in the Dominion, and though her wits were dulled by indulgence, she woke too agitated to return to the comfort of a scented pillow. Head throbbing, she heaved herself up out of the bed and went in search of her sister. Concupiscentia was at the door, with a sly smile on her face. Jude half remembered the creature slipping into one of her drugged dreams, but the details were hazy, and the foreboding she'd woken with was more important now than remembering the fantasies that had gone before. She found Quaisoir in a darkened room, sitting beside the window.

"Did something wake you, sister?" Quaisoir asked her.

"I don't quite know what, but yes. Do you know what it was?"

"Something in the desert," Quaisoir replied, turning her head towards the window, though she lacked the eyes to see what lay outside. "Something momentous."

"Is there any way of finding out what?"

Quaisoir took a deep breath. "No easy way."

"But there is one?"

"Yes, there's a place beneath the Pivot Tower..."

Concupiscentia had followed Judith into the room, but now, at the mention of this place, she made to withdraw. She was neither quiet nor fast enough, however. Quaisoir summoned her back.

"Don't be afraid," she told the creature. "We don't need you with us once we're inside. But fetch a lamp, will you? And something to eat and drink. We may be there awhile."

It was half a day and more since Jude and Quaisoir had taken refuge in the suite of chambers, and in that time any last occupants of the palace had made their escape, doubtless fearing the revolutionary zeal that would want the fortress cleansed of the Autarch's excesses down to the last bureaucrat. Those bureaucrats had fled, but the zealots hadn't appeared in their place. Though Jude had heard commotion in the courtyards as she'd dozed, it had never come close. Either the fury that had moved the tide was exhausted, and the insurgents were resting before they began their assault on the palace, or else their fervor had lost its singular purpose altogether, and the commotion she'd heard was factions battling with each other for the right to plunder, which conflicts had destroyed them all, left, right, and center. Whatever, the consequence was the same: a palace built to house many thousands of souls—servants, soldiers, pen pushers, cooks, stewards, messengers, torturers, and majordomos—was deserted, and they went through it, Jude led by Concupiscentia's lamp, Quaisoir led by Jude, like three tiny specks of life lost in a vast and dark machine. The only sounds were their footsteps, and those that said machine made as it ran down: hot-water pipes ticking as the furnaces that fed them guttered out; shutters beating themselves to splinters in empty rooms; guard dogs barking on gnawed leashes, fearful their masters would not come again. Nor would they. The furnaces would cool, the shutters break, and the dogs, trained to bring death, would have it come to them in their turn. The age of the Autarch Sartori was over, and no new age had yet begun.

As they walked Jude asked for an explanation of the place to which they were going, and by way of reply Quaisoir offered first a history of the Pivot. Of all the Autarch's devices to subdue and rule the Reconciled Dominions, she said—subverting the religions and governments of his enemies; setting nation against nation—none would have kept him in power for more than a decade had he not possessed the genius to steal and to set at the center of his empire the greatest symbol of power in the Imajica. The Pivot was

Hapexamendios' marker, and the fact that the Unbeheld had allowed the architect of Yzordderrex to even touch, much less move, his pylon was for many proof that however much they might despise the Autarch, he was touched by divinity and could never be toppled, What powers it had conferred on its possessor even she didn't know.

"Sometimes," she said, "when he was high on kreauchee, he'd talk about the Pivot as though he was married to it, and he was the wife. Even when we made love he'd talk that way. He'd say it was in him the way he was in me. He'd always deny it afterward, of course, but it was in his mind always. It's in every man's mind."

Jude doubted this, and said so.

"But they so want to be possessed," Quaisoir replied. "They want some Holy Spirit inside them. You listen to their prayers."

"That's not something I hear very often."

"You will when the smoke clears," Quaisoir replied. "They'll be afraid, once they realize the Autarch's gone. They may have hated him, but they'll hate his absence more."

"If they're afraid they'll be dangerous," Jude said, realizing as she spoke how well these sentiments might have come from Clara Leash's mouth. "They won't be devout."