"There now!" he said. "You killed the thing!"

"Not me!" Abelove said.

"You want to resurrect it?" Joshua murmured to Gentle, his tone conspiratorial.

"With a broken neck and wings?" Gentle mourned. "That wouldn't be very kind."

"But amusing," Godolphin replied with mischief in his puffy eyes.

"I think not," Gentle $aid, and saw his distaste wipe the humor off Joshua's face. He's a little afraid of me, Gentle thought; the power in me makes him nervous.

Joshua headed into the dining room, and Gentle was about to step through the door after him when a young man—eighteen at most, with a plain, long face and chorister's curls—came to his side.

"Maestro?" he said.

Unlike Joshua and the others, these features seemed more familiar to Gentle. Perhaps there was a certain modernity in the languid lidded gaze and the small, almost effeminate, mouth. He didn't look that intelligent, in truth, but his words, when they came, were well turned, despite the boy's nervousness. He barely dared look at Sartori, but with those lids downcast begged the Maestro's indulgence.

"I wondered, sir, if you had perhaps considered the matter of which we spoke?"

Gentle was about to ask, What matter?, when his tongue replied, his intellect seizing the memory as the words spilled out. "I know how eager you are, Lucius."

Lucius Cobbitt was the boy's name. At seventeen he already had the great works by heart, or at least their theses. Ambitious and apt at politics, he'd taken Tyrwhitt as a patron (for what services only his bed knew, but it was surely a hanging offense) and had secured himself a place in the house as a menial. But he wanted more than that, and scarcely an evening went by without his politely plying the Maestro with coy glances and pleas.

"I'm more than eager, sir," he said. "I've studied all the rituals. I've mapped the In Ovo, from what I've read in Flute's Visions. They're just beginnings, I know, but I've also copied all the known glyphs, and I have them by heart."

He had a little skill as an artist, too: something else they shared, besides ambition and dubious morals.

"I can help you, Maestro," he was saying. "You're going to need somebody beside you on the night."

"I commend you on your discipline, Lucius, but the Reconciliation's a dangerous business. I can't take the responsibility—"

"I'll take that, sir."

"Besides, I have my assistant."

The boy's face fell. "You do?" he said.

"Certainly. Pie 'oh' pah."

"You'd trust your life to a familiar?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"Well, because... because it's not even human."

"That's why I trust it, Lucius," Gentle said. "I'm sorry to disappoint you—"

"Could I at least watch, sir? I'll keep my distance, I swear, I swear. Everybody else is going to be there."

This was true enough. As the night of the Reconciliation approached, the size of the audience swelled. His patrons, who'd at first taken their oaths of secrecy very seriously, now sensed triumph and had become indiscreet. In hushed and often embarrassed tones they'd admit to having invited a friend or a relation to witness the rites, and who was he, the performer, to forbid his paymasters their moment of reflected glory? Though he never gave them an easy time when they made these confessions, he didn't much mind. Admiration charged the blood. And when the Reconciliation had been achieved, the more tongues there were to say they'd seen it done, and sanctify the doer, the better.

"I beg you, sir," Lucius was saying. "I'll be in your debt forever."

Gentle nodded, ruffling the youth's ginger hair. "You may watch," he said.

Tears started to the boy's eyes, and he snatched up Gentie's hand, laying his lips to it. "I am the luckiest man in England," he said. "Thank you, sir, thank you."

Quieting the boy's profusions, Gentle left him at the door and stepped through into the dining room. As he did so he wondered if all these events and conversations had actually dovetailed in this fashion, or whether his memory was collecting fragments from different nights and days, knitting them together so that they appeared seamless. If the latter was the case—and he guessed it was—then there were probably clues in these scenes to mysteries yet to be unveiled, and he should try to remember their every detail. But it was difficult. He was both Gentle and Sartori here, both witness and actor. It was hard to live the moments when he was also observing them, and harder still to dig for the seam of their significance when their surface gleamed so fetchingly, and when he was the brightest jewel that shone there. How they had idolized him! He'd been like a divinity among them, his every belch and fart attended to like a sermon, his cosmological pronouncements—of which he was too fond—greeted with reverence and gratitude, even by the mightiest.

Three of those mighty awaited him in the dining room, gathered at one end of a table, set for four but laden with sufficient food to sate the street for a week. Joshua was one of the trio, of course. Roxborough and his long—time foil Oliver McGann were the others, the latter well in his cups, the former, as ever, keeping his counsel, his ascetic features, dominated by the long hook of his nose, always half masked by his hands. He despised his mouth, Gentle thought, because it betrayed his nature, which despite his incalculable wealth and his pretensions to metaphysics was peevish, penurious, and sullen.

"Religion's for the faithful," McGann was loudly opining. "They say their prayers, their prayers aren't answered, and their faith increases. Whereas magic—" He stopped, laying his inebriated gaze on the Maestro at the door. "Ah! The very man! The very man! Tell him, Sartori! Tell him what magic is."

Roxborough had made a pyramid of his fingers, the apex at the bridge of his nose. "Yes, Maestro," he said. "Do tell."

"My pleasure," Gentle replied, taking the glass of wine McGann poured for him and wetting his throat before he provided tonight's profundities. "Magic is the first and last religion of the world," he said. "It has the power to make us whole. To open our eyes to the Dominions and return us to ourselves."

"That sounds very fine," Roxborough said flatly. "But what does it mean?"

"It's obvious what it means," McGann protested.

"Not to me it isn't."

"It means we're born divided, Roxborough," the Maestro replied. "But we long for union."

"Oh, we do, do we?"

"I believe so."

"And why should we seek union with ourselves?" Roxborough said. "Tell me that. I would have thought we're the only company we're certain we have."

There was a riling smugness to the man's tone, but the Maestro had heard these niceties before and had his answers well honed.

"Everything that isn't us is also ourselves," he said. He came to the table and set down his glass, peering through the smoky candle flames at Roxborough's black eyes. "We're joined to everything that was, is, and will be," he said. "From one end of the Imajica to another. From the tiniest mote dancing over this flame to the Godhead Itself."

He'took breath, leaving room for a retort from Roxborough. But none came.

"We'll not be subsumed at our deaths," he went on. "We'll be increased: to the size of Creation."

"Yes..." McGann said, the word coming long and loud from between teeth clenched in a tigerish smile.

"Magic's our means to that Revelation," the Maestro said, "while we're still in our flesh."

"And is it your opinion tnat we are given that Revelation?" Roxborough replied. "Or are we stealing it?"

"We were born to know as much as we can know."

"We were born to suffer in our flesh," Roxborough said.

"You may suffer; I don't."

The reply won a guffaw from McGann.

"The flesh isn't punishment," the Maestro said, "it's there for joy. But it also marks the place where we end and the rest of Creation begins. Or so we believe. It's an illusion, of course."