She found his blood first, spattered in the grey slush underfoot, and then, a little way beyond, the assassin himself, reduced to a lumpen form in the gutter. As she came within a few yards of it, however, a shudder passed down its spine, and it rolled over, showing its face to the sleet. Then, impossible though this seemed given the blow it had been struck, the form started to haul itself to its feet. She saw how bloodied it was, but she saw also that it was still essentially whole. It’s not human, she thought, as it stood upright; whatever it is, it’s not human. Marlin groaned with revulsion behind her, and a woman on the pavement screamed. The man’s gaze went to the screamer, wavered, then returned to Jude.
It wasn’t an assassin any longer. Nor was it Gentle. If it had a self, perhaps this was its face: split by wounds and doubt; pitiful; lost. She saw its mouth open and close as if it was attempting to address her. Then Marlin made a move to pursue it, and it ran. How, after such an accident, its limbs managed any speed at all was a miracle, but it was off at a pace that Marlin couldn’t hope to match. He made a show of pursuit, but gave up at the first intersection, returning to Jude breathless.
‘Drugs,’ he said, clearly angered to have missed his chance at heroism. ‘Fucker’s on drugs. He’s not feeling any pain. Wait till he comes down, he’ll drop dead. Fucker! How did he know you?’
‘Did he?’ she said, her whole body trembling now, as relief at her escape and terror at how close she’d come to losing her life both stung tears from her.
‘He called you Judith,’ Marlin said.
In her mind’s eye she saw the assassin’s mouth open and close, and on them read the syllables of her name.
‘Drugs,’ Marlin was saying again, and she didn’t waste words arguing, though she was certain he was wrong. The only drug in the assassin’s system had been purpose, and that would not lay him low, tonight or any other.
1
Eleven days after he had taken Estabrook to the encampment in Streatham, Chant realized he would soon be having a visitor. He lived alone, and anonymously, in a one-room flat on a soon to be condemned estate close to the Elephant and Castle, an address he had given to nobody, not even his employer. Not that his pursuers would be distracted from finding him by such petty secrecy. Unlike homo sapiens, the species his long-dead master Sartori had been wont to call the blossom on the simian tree, Chant’s kind could not hide themselves from oblivion’s agents by closing a door and drawing the blinds. They were like beacons to those that preyed on them.
Men had it so much easier. The creatures that had made meat of them in earlier ages were zoo specimens now, brooding behind bars for the entertainment of the victorious ape. They had no grasp, those apes, of how close they lay to a state where the devouring beasts of Earth’s infancy would be little more than fleas. That state was called the In Ovo, and on the other side of it lay four worlds, the so-called Reconciled Dominions. They teemed with wonders: individuals blessed with attributes that would have made them, in this, the Fifth Dominion, fit for sainthood, or burning, or both; cults possessed of secrets that would overturn in a moment the dogmas of faith and physics alike; beauty that might blind the sun, or set the moon dreaming of fertility. All this, separated from Earth - the unreconciled Fifth - by the abyss of the In Ovo.
It was not, of course, an impossible journey to make. But the power to do so, which was usually - and contemptuously - referred to as magic, had been waning in the Fifth since Chant had first arrived. He’d seen the walls of reason built against it, brick by brick. He’d seen its practitioners hounded and mocked; seen its theories decay into decadence and parody; seen its purpose steadily forgotten. The Fifth was choking in its own certainties, and though he took no pleasure in the thought of losing his life, he would not mourn his removal from this hard and unpoetic Dominion.
He went to his window, and looked down the five storeys into the courtyard. It was empty. He had a few minutes yet, to compose his missive to Estabrook. Returning to his table he began it again, for the ninth or tenth time. There was so much he wanted to communicate, but he knew that Estabrook was utterly ignorant of the involvement his family, whose name he’d abandoned, had with the fate of the Dominions. It was too late now to educate him. A warning would have to suffice. But how to word it so that it didn’t sound like the rambling of a wild man? He set to again, putting the facts as plainly as he could, though doubted that these words would save Estabrook’s life. If the powers that prowled this world tonight wanted him dispatched, nothing short of intervention from the Unbeheld Himself, Hapexamendios, the all-powerful occupant of the First Dominion, would save him.
With the note finished, Chant pocketed it, and headed out into the darkness. Not a moment too soon. In the frosty quiet he heard the sound of an engine too suave to belong to a resident, and peered over the parapet to see the men getting out of the car below. He didn’t doubt that these were his visitors. The only vehicles he’d seen here so polished were hearses. He cursed himself. Fatigue had made him slothful, and now he’d let his enemies get dangerously close. He ducked down the back stairs - glad, for once, that there were so few lights working along the landings - äs his visitors strode towards the front. From the flats he passed, the sound of lives: Christmas pops on the radio, argument, a baby laughing, which became tears, as though it sensed that there was danger near. He knew none of his neighbours, except as furtive faces glimpsed at windows, and now - though it was too late to change that - he regretted it.
He reached ground level unharmed and, discounting the thought of trying to retrieve his car from the courtyard, headed off towards the street most heavily trafficked at this time of night, which was Kennington Park Road. If he was lucky he’d find a cab there, though at this time of night they weren’t frequent. Fares were harder to pick up in this area than in Covent Garden or Oxford Street, and more likely to prove unruly. He allowed himself one backward glance towards the estate, then turned his heels to the task of flight.
2
Though classically it was the light of day which showed a painter the deepest flaws in his handiwork, Gentle worked best at night; the instincts of a lover brought to a simpler art. In the week or so since he’d returned to his studio it had once again become a place of work: the air pungent with the smell of paint and turpentine, the burned-down butts of cigarettes left on every available shelf and plate. Though he’d spoken with Klein daily there was no sign of a commission yet, so he had spent the time re-educating himself. As Klein had so cruelly observed, he was a technician without a vision, and that made these days of meandering difficult. Until he had a style to forge, he felt listless, like some latter-day Adam, born with the power to impersonate but bereft of subjects. So he set himself an exercise. He would paint a canvas in four radically different styles: a cubist North, an impressionist South, an East after Van Gogh, a West after Dali. As his subject he took Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. The challenge drove him to a healthy distraction, and he was still occupied with it at three thirty in the morning, when the telephone rang. The line was watery, and the voice at the other end pained and raw, but it was unmistakably Judith.
‘Is that you, Gentle?’
‘It’s me.’ He was glad the line was so bad. The sound of her voice had shaken him, and he didn’t want her to know. ‘Where you calling from?’
‘New York. I’m just visiting for a few days.’
‘It’s good to hear from you.’
‘I’m not sure why I’m calling. It’s just that today’s been strange and I thought maybe, oh.’ She stopped. Laughed at herself, perhaps a little drunkenly. ‘I don’t know what I thought,’ she went on. ‘It’s stupid. I’m sorry.’
‘When are you coming back?’
‘I don’t know that either.’
‘Maybe