"How long till it's light?" she asked Monday.

The watch he was wearing had been part of the booty he'd brought back to Gamut Street on his first trip. He consulted it with a flourish. "Two and a half hours," he said.

There was so little time to act, and littler still to decide on a course. Returning to Clerkenwell with Monday was a cul-de-sac; that at least was certain. Gentle was the Unbeheld's agent in this, and he wasn't going to be diverted from his Father's business now, especially on the word of a man like Dowd, who'd spent his life a stranger to truth. He'd argue that this confession had been Dowd's revenge on the living: a last desperate attempt to spoil a glory he knew he couldn't share. And maybe that was true; maybe she'd been duped.

"Are we going to collect these stones or what?" Monday said.

"I think we have to," she said, still musing.

"What are they for?"

"They're... like stepping stones," she said, her voice losing momentum as a thought distracted her.

Indeed they were stepping stones. They were a way back to Yzordderrex, which suddenly seemed like an open road, along which she might yet find some guidance, in these last hours, to help her make a choice.

She threw her cigarette down into the embers. "You're going to have to take the stones back to Gamut Street on your own, Monday."

"Where are you going?"

"To Yzordderrex."

"Why?"

"It's too complicated to explain. You just have to swear to me that you'll do exactly as I tell you."

"I'm ready," he said.

"All right. So listen up. When I'm gone I want you to take the stones back to Gamut Street and carry a message along with them. It has to go to Gentle personally, you understand? Don't trust anybody else with it. Even Clem."

"I understand," Monday said, beaming with pleasure at this unlooked—for honor. "What have I got to tell him?"

"Where I've gone, for one thing."

"Yzordderrex."

"That's right."

"Then tell him"—she pondered for a moment—"tell him the Reconciliation isn't safe, and he mustn't start the working until I contact him again."

"It isn't safe, and he mustn't start the working—""—until I contact him again."

"I've got that. Is there any more?"

"That's it," she said. "Now, all I've got to do is find the circle."

She started to scan the mosaic, looking for the subtle differences in tone that marked the stones. From past experience, she knew that once they'd been lifted from their niches the Yzordderrexian Express would be under way, so she told Monday to wait outside until she'd gone. He looked worried now, but she told him she'd come to no harm.

"It's not that," he said, "I want to know what the message means. If you're telling the boss it's not safe, does that mean he won't open the Dominions?"

"I don't know."

"But I want to see Patashoqua and L'Himby and Yzordderrex," he said, listing the places like charms.

"I know that," she said. "And believe me, I want the Dominions opened just as much as you do."

She studied his face in the dying firelight, looking for some clue as to whether he was being placated, but for all his youth he was a master of concealment. She'd have to trust that he'd put his duties as a messenger above his desire to see the Imajica and relay the spirit of her warning, if not its precise text.

"You've got to make Gentle understand the danger he's in," she said, hoping this tack would make him conscientious.

"I will," he said, now faintly irritated by her insistence.

She let the subject lie and returned to the business of finding the stones. He didn't offer his assistance, but retreated to the door, from which he said, "How will you get back?"

She'd found four of the stones already, and the birds on the roof had set up a fresh cacophony, suggesting that they felt some tremor of change below.

"I'll deal with that problem when I get to it," she replied.

The birds suddenly rose up and, unnerved, Monday stepped out of the Retreat altogether. Jude glanced up at him as she dug out another stone. The fire between them had already been fanned into flame, and now its ashes were stirred up, rising in a smutty cloud to hide the door from view. She scanned the mosaic, checking to see if she'd missed a stone, but the itches and aches she remembered from her first crossing were already creeping through her body, proof that the passing place was about its work.

Oscar had told her, on this very spot, that the discomforts of passage diminished with repetition, and his words proved correct. She had time, as the walls blurred around her, to glimpse the door through the swirling ash and realize, all too late, that she should have looked out at the world one last time before leaving it. Then the Retreat disappeared, and the In Ovo's delirium was oppressing her, its prisoners rising in their legions to claim her. Traveling alone, she went more quickly than she had with Oscar (at least that was her impression), and she was out the other side before the Oviates had time to sniff the heels of her glyph.

The walls of the merchant Peccable's cellar were brighter than she remembered them. The reason: a lamp which burned on the floor a yard from the circle and beyond it a figure, its face a blur, which came at her with a bludgeon and laid her unconscious on the floor before she'd uttered a word of explanation.

The mantle of night was falling on the Fifth Dominion, and Gentle found Tick Raw near the summit of the Mount of Lipper Bayak, watching the last dusky colors of day drop from the sky. He was eating while he did so, a bowl each of sausage and pickle between his feet and a large pot of mustard between these, into which meat and vegetable alike were plunged; Though Gentle had come here as a projection—his body left sitting crosslegged in the Meditation Room in Gamut Street—he didn't need nose or palate to appreciate the piquancy of Raw's meal; imagination sufficed.

He looked up when Gentle approached, unperturbed by the phantom watching him eat.

"You're early, aren't you?" he remarked, glancing at his pocket watch, which hung from his coat on a piece of string. "We've got hours yet."

"I know. I just came—"

"—to check up on me," Tick Raw said, the sting of pickle in his voice. "Well, I'm here. Are you ready in the Fifth?"

"We're getting there," Gentle said, somewhat queasily.

Though he'd traveled this way countless times as the Maestro Sartori—his mind, empowered by feits, carrying his image and his voice across the Dominions—and had reacquainted himself with the technique easily enough, the sensation was damn strange.

"What do I look like?" he asked Tick Raw, remembering as he spoke how he'd attempted to describe the mystif on these very slopes.

"Insubstantial," Tick Raw replied, squinting up at him, then returning to his meal. "Which is fine by me, because there's not enough sausage for two."

"I'm still getting used to what I'm capable of."

"Well, don't take too long about it," Tick Raw said. "We've got work to do."

"And I should have realized that you were part of that work when I was first here, but I didn't, and for that I apologize."

"Accepted," Tick Raw said.

"You must have thought I was crazy."

"You certainly—how shall I put this? — you certainly confounded me. It took me days to work out why you were so damn obstreperous. Pie talked to me, you know, tried to make me understand. But I'd been waiting for somebody to come from the Fifth for so long I was only listening with half an ear."

"I think Pie probably hoped my meeting with you would make me remember who the hell I was."

"How long did it take?"