"What do we do?" Erwin said.

"We follow," Coker said. "And if they kill him we apologize."

Last time Harry had climbed the Heights, Voight's tattoos had allowed him to reach the very threshold undetected. But the trick hadn't worked this time. He didn't know why, and in truth it didn't matter. He was in the hands of his enemies-Gamaliel the stick-insect, Bartho the crucified, Mutep the runt, and Swanky the obese. There was nothing to be done about it.

He didn't attempt to resist them, in part because he knew it would only invite violence, and in part because after fill he'd come up the slope to see what the Devil looked like an theyweretakinghimtothedoorthroughwhichit-would come, so why resist?

And there was a third reason. These creatures were cousins of the demon that had taken Father Hess's life. He didn't understand the genealogy of it, but he knew by their chatter and their frenzy and their stench that they were somehow connected. Perhaps then, in the final minutes before the lad's arrival, he might learn from one or other of these horrors what the message from Lazy Susan meant.

"I ani you and you are love-"

Even at the end, was love what made the world go round?

Pr FIVE

it wasn't dark in the belly of the lad Uroboros, nor was it light. There was only an absence@f light and dark, of height and depth, of sound and texture-that might have passed for oblivion itself had Joe not been able to list all that it lacked. The oblivion, he was sure, would be a thoughtless condition.

So what was this place, and he in it? was he a ghost of some kind, haunting the Iad's head? Or a soul, trapped in the flesh of the beast, until it puked him up or pefished? He felt no threat to his existence here, but he suspected his hold on who he was would quickly become slippery. it would only be a matter of time before his thoughts lost coherence, and he forgot himself completely.

That prospect had seemed attractive enough when he'd been standing by the pool in the temple. He'd lived his life and was ready to give it up. But now, as he floated (if a thing without substance could be said to float) in the emptiness, he i wondered if perhaps his presence here had been planned or predicted by the Zehrapushu. He remembered how hungrily the first 'shu he'd encountered, on the shore outside Liverpool, had studied him. Had it, or the mind of which it was part, been sizing him up for some role in events to come, peering beyond the flesh of him to see if he'd be worth a damn in the belly of the lad?

if s@if there was indeed a purpose in his being here then it was his duty to the 'shu, whose gaze was without question one of the most wonderful experiences of his travels, to preserve whatever part of him remained-his memory, his spirit, his soul-and not succumb to forgetfulness. Name yourself, he thought. At least remember that. He had no mouth, of course, nor tongue nor lips nor lungs. All he could do was think: I am Joe Flicker. I am Joe Flicker. Doing so had an instant effect. The featureless state convulsed, and forms began to become available to his soul's senses.

He had no way of knowing his true scale here, of course. Perhaps he was tiny in this formless form-like a mote seen in a shaft of sunlight-in which case all that was congealing around him was not titanic, as it seemed, but he, its witness, a fleck. Whichever was true, he felt insignificant in the presence of these cohering shapes. He turned his sight around, and in every direction, rising to the domed darkness above him, where ragged shapes moved as though it were the breeding place for men-o'-war, down to the pit-lined with heaving abstractions-below him, was a latticework of encrusted matter.

He was by no means certain that these sights were real the way the body lying beside the temple pool below had been real. Perhaps they were simply thoughts in the head of lad Uroboros, and he was present in the midst of some ladic vision of heaven and hell: a firmament of unfinished angels, a pit of nonsenses and in between a sprawling and infinitely complex web of knotted and corrupted memories.

There were places, he saw, where the strands seemed to become clotted, forming large, almost egg-shaped masses. His curiosity as to their nature was enough to propel.him; he'd no sooner puzzled over them than his spirit was moving towards the largest in his immediate vicinity. The closer he came to it the more its appearance distressed him. Whereas the encrustations on the web were organic, the surface of the egg was of another order completely. It was a mass of overlapping forms, like the pieces of a lunatic jigsaw, each failing to quite mesh with the one below, and each worked with an obsessively complex design.

Nor was its appearance the only source of distress. A sound was emanating from it; or rather, several sounds, warming together. One was like the whispers of children; was a slow, arrhythmical throb, like the beat of a failing art. And the third was a whine that wormed its way into Joe's thoughts as if to disconnect them.

He was tempted to retreat, but he resisted, and pressed his spirit on, more certain with every moment that there was great pain here; nearly unendurable pain, in fact. The surface of the form was a catalogue of lunatic motions: tics and spasms and twitches, the jigsaws pieces coming away in a hundred places like shed scales, while others, thorny and raw in their budding form, unfurled.

Off to his left, something iridescent caught his eye, and he looked its way to see that the shedding had momentarily revealed what lay beneath this maddened, whispering mass. He moved towards it, and for the first time since approaching the egg had the sense that his presence had been noted. The motions became more fevered the closer to the sliver of iridescence he came, and all around the place the scaly pieces oozed a dark fluid, as if to conceal the spot while they bred a more permanent cover. Joe was not deceived. He closed on the sliver, certain there was some vital mystery here, and in response the motions became more frenzied until suddenly the tremors seemed to reach critical mass and a dozen shapes rose from the surface, surrounding him.

None of them made much literal sense. He could not distinguish a limb, or a head, much less an eye or a mouth. But they gaped and twitched and swelled in ways that evoked a parade of abominations. Something gutted, but living; something aborted, but living; something decayed into muck, but living and living. Though he'd left his body behind him and thought himself free of it, these horrors reminded him of every wound he'd ever suffered, of every sickness, of every weakness.

He had come too close to the iridescence to be frightened off, however. Turning his sight from these manifestations he slipped through their net, and into the midst of whatever secret they concealed.

He was delivered into a curving channel, down which he flew. It rapidly began to narrow, and narrow, as though he were in an ever-closing spiral. The light that had called him here did not diminish as he traveled, but remained steady as the curves tightened, the channel so narrow now he was certain a hair could not have been threaded through it. And still it grew narrower, until he began to think it would wink out of existence completely, and perhaps take him along with it. He'd no sooner formed this thought than his progress seemed to slow, until he was barely moving. Even at a creeping pace, however, the spiral was here so tight he kept turning and turning on himself, until at last all motion ceased. He waited in the gleaming channel, puzzled. And then, slowly, the realization rose in him that he was not alone. He looked ahead, and though he could see nothing, he was aware that something was staring back at him.

He returned the gaze, without fear, and as he did so images began to erupt among his thoughts: beautiful, simple images of the world he'd left behind.