‘What I mean is: he’s your brother. You should be the one to dispatch him.’
Oscar’s eyes widened.
‘Oh my Lord,’ he said.
‘Think what they’d say in Yzordderrex, if you were to tell them.’
‘What? That I killed my own brother? I don’t see much charm in that.’
‘But that you did what you had to do, however unpalatable, to keep the secret safe.’ Dowd paused to let the idea blossom. ‘That sounds heroic to me. Think what they’ll say.’
‘I’m thinking.’
‘It’s your reputation in Yzordderrex you care about. isn’t it, not what happens in the Fifth? You’ve said before this world’s getting duller all the time.’
Oscar pondered this for a while, then said: ‘Maybe I should slip away. Kill them both to make sure nobody ever knows where I’ve gone - ‘
‘Where we’ve gone.’
‘- then slip away and pass into legend. Oscar Godolphin, who left his crazy brother dead beside his wife, and disappeared. Oh yes. That’d make quite a headline in Patashoqua.’ He mused for a few moments more. ‘What’s the classic sibling murder?’ he finally asked.
‘The jaw-bone of an ass.’
‘Ridiculous.’
‘You’ll think of something better.’
‘So I will. Make me a drink, Dowdy. And have one yourself. We’ll drink to escape.’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’ Dowd replied, but the remark was lost on Godolphin, who was already plunged deep into murderous thought.
1
Gentle and Pie were six days on the Patashoquan Highway, days measured not by the watch on Pie’s wrist but by the brightening and darkening of the peacock sky. On the fifth day the watch gave up the ghost anyway, maddened, Pie supposed, by the magnetic field surrounding a city of pyramids they passed. Thereafter, even though Gentle wanted to preserve some sense of how time was proceeding in the Dominion they’d left, it was virtually impossible. Within a few days their bodies were accommodating the rhythm of their new world, and he let his curiosity feast on more pertinent matters; chiefly, the landscape through which they were travelling.
It was diverse. In that first week they passed out of the plain into a region of lagoons - the Cosacosa - which took two days to cross, and thence into tracts of ancient conifers so tall clouds hung in their topmost branches like the nests of ethereal birds. On the other side of this stupendous forest the mountains which Gentle had glimpsed days before came plainly into view. The range was called the Jokalaylau, Pie informed him, and legend had it that after the Mount of Lipper Bayak these heights had been Hapexamendios’s next resting place as He’d crossed through the Dominions. It was no accident, it seemed, that the landscapes they passed through recalled those of the Fifth; they had been chosen for that similarity. The Unbeheld had strode the Imajica dropping seeds of humanity as He went - even to the very edge of His sanctum - in order to give the species He favoured new challenges, and like any good gardener He’d dispersed them where they had the best hope of prospering. Where the native crop could be conquered or accommodated; where the living was hard enough to make sure only the most resilient survived, but the land fertile enough to feed their children; where rain came; where light came; where all the vicissitudes that strengthened a species by occasional calamity - tempest, earthquake, flood - were to hand.
But while there was much that any terrestrial traveller would have recognized, nothing, not to the smallest pebble underfoot, was quite like its counterpart in the Fifth. Some of these disparities were too vast to be missed: the green-gold of the heavens, for instance, or the elephantine snails that grazed beneath the cloud-nested trees. Others were smaller, but equally bizarre, like the wild dogs that ran along the Highway now and then, hairless and shiny as patent leather; or grotesque, like the horned kites which swooped on any animal dead or near-dead on the road, and only rose from their meals, purple wings opening like cloaks, when the vehicle was almost upon them; or absurd, like the bone-white lizards that congregated in their thousands along the edge of the lagoons, the urge to turn somersaults passing through their colonies in waves.
Perhaps finding some new response to these experiences was out of the question when the sheer proliferation of travellers’ tales had all but exhausted the lexicon of discovery. But it nevertheless irritated Gentle to hear himself responding in clichés. The traveller moved by unspoilt beauty, or appalled by native barbarism. The traveller touched by primitive wisdom or caught breathless by undreamt-of modernities. The traveller condescending; the traveller humbled; the traveller hungry for the next horizon, or pining miserably for home. Of all these perhaps only the last response never passed Gentle’s lips. He thought of the Fifth only when it came up in conversation between himself and Pie, and that happened less and less as the practicalities of the moment pressed more heavily upon them. Food and sleeping quarters were easily come by at first, as was fuel for the car. There were small villages and hostelries along the Highway, where Pie, despite an absence of hard cash, always managed to secure them sustenance and beds to sleep in. The mystif had a host of minor feits at its disposal. Gentle realized: ways to use its powers of seduction to make even the most rapacious hosteller pliant. But once they got beyond the forest matters became more problematical. The bulk of the vehicles had turned off at the intersections and the Highway had degenerated from a well-serviced thoroughfare to a two-lane road, with more pot-holes than traffic. The vehicle Pie had stolen had not been designed for the rigours of long-distance travel. It started to show signs of fatigue, and with the mountains looming ahead it was decided they should stop at the next village, and attempt to trade it in for a more reliable model.
‘Perhaps something with breath in its body,’ Pie suggested.
‘Speaking of which,’ Gentle said, ‘you never asked me about the Nullianac.’
‘What was there to ask?’
‘How I killed it.’
‘I presumed you used a pneuma.’
‘You don’t sound very surprised.’
‘How else would you have done it?’ Pie said, quite reasonably. ‘You had the will, and you had the power.’
‘But where did I get it from?’ Gentle said.
‘You’ve always had it,’ Pie replied, which left Gentle nursing as many questions, or more, than he’d begun with. He started to formulate one, but something in the motion of the car began to nauseate him as he did so. ‘I think we’d better stop for a few minutes,’ he said. ‘I think I’m going to puke.’
Pie brought the vehicle to a halt, and Gentle stepped out. The sky was darkening, and some night-blooming flower spiced the cooling air. On the slopes above them herds of pale-flanked beasts, relations of the yak but here called doeki, moved down through the twilight of their dormitory pastures, lowing as they came. The dangers of Vanaeph, and the thronged Highway outside Patashoqua, seemed very remote. Gentle breathed deeply, and the nausea, like his questions, no longer vexed him. He looked up at the first stars. Some were red here, like Mars; others gold: fragments of the noonday sky that refused to be extinguished.
‘Is this Dominion another planet?’ he asked Pie. ‘Are we in some other galaxy?’
‘No. It’s not space that separates the Fifth from the rest of the Dominions, it’s the In Ovo.’
‘So, is the whole of planet Earth the Fifth Dominion, or just part of it?’
‘I don’t know,’ it said. ‘All, I assume. But everyone has a different theory.’
‘What’s