"Look at him." The Autarch glanced back at the captive as he spoke. "He's got seconds 
left to live. But the leech gave him a taste and he wants it back again."
  "A taste of what?"
  "Of the womb, Rosengarten. He said it was like being in the womb. We're all cast out. 
Whatever we build, wherever we hide, we're cast out."
  As he spoke the prisoner gave a last exhausted moan and lay still. The Autarch watched 
the body awhile, the only sound in the vastness of the chamber the weakening motions of 
the leech on the cold floor.
  "Lock the doors and seal them up," the Autarch said, turning to leave without looking 
back at Rosengarten. "I'm going to the Pivot Tower."
  "Yes, sir."
  "Come and find me when it's light. These nights, they're too long. Too long. I wonder, 
sometimes . . ."
  But what he wondered had gone from his head before it could reach his lips, and when he 
left the lovers' tomb it was in silence.
  
  
  36
  
  Gentle's thoughts had not often turned to Taylor as he and Pie journeyed, but when, in 
the streets outside the palace, Nikaetomaas had asked him why he'd come to the Imajica, 
it had been Taylor's death he'd spoken of first, and only then of Judith and the attempt 
upon her life. Now, as he and Nikaetomaas passed through the balmy, benighted courtyards 
and up into the palace itself, he thought of the man again, lying on his final pillow, 
talking about floating and charging Gentle to solve mysteries that he'd not had time to 
solve himself.
  "I had a friend in the Fifth who would have loved this place," Gentle said. "He loved 
desolation."
  It was here, in every courtyard. Gardens had been planted in many of them and left to 
riot. But riot took energy, and nature was weary here, the plants throttling themselves 
after a few spurts and withering back into earth the color of ash. The scene was not so 
different once they got inside, wandering mapless down galleries where the dust was as 
thick as the soil in the dead gardens, into forsaken annexes and chambers laid out for 
guests who had breathed their last decades before. Most of the walls, whether of chambers 
or galleries, were decorated: some with tapestries, many others with immense frescoes, 
and while there were scenes Gentle recognized from his travels-Patashoqua under a 
green-gold sky, with a flight of air balloons rising from the plain outside its walls; a 
festival at the L'Himby temples-the suspicion grew on him that the finest of these images 
were of earth; or, more particularly, of England. Doubtless the pastoral was a universal 
mode, and shepherds wooed nymphs in the Reconciled Dominions just as sonnets described 
them doing in the Fifth, but there were details of these scenes that were indisputably 
English: swallows swooping in mild summer skies; cattle drinking in water meadows while 
their herders slept; the Salisbury spire rising from a bank of oaks; the distant towers 
and domes of London, glimpsed from a slope on which maids and swains made dalliance; even 
Stonehenge, relocated for drama's sake to a hill and set against thunder-heads.
  "England," Gentle said as they went. "Somebody here remembers England."
  Though they passed by these works too fast for him to scrutinize them carefully, he saw 
no signature on any. The artists who'd sketched England, and returned to depict it so 
lovingly, were apparently content to remain anonymous.
  "I think we should start climbing," Nikaetomaas suggested when by chance their 
wanderings brought them to the foot of a monumental staircase. "The higher we are the 
more chance we'll have of grasping the geography."
  The ascent was five flights long-more deserted galleries presenting themselves on every 
floor-but it finally delivered them onto a roof from which they were able to glimpse the 
scale of the labyrinth they were lost in. Towers twice and three times the height of the 
one they'd climbed loomed above them while, below, the courtyards were laid out in all 
directions, some crossed by battalions but most as deserted as every other corridor and 
chamber. Beyond them lay the palace walls, and beyond the walls themselves the 
smoke-shrouded city, the sound of its convulsions dim at such a distance.
  Lulled by the remoteness of this aerie, both Gentle and Nikaetomaas were startled by a 
commotion that erupted much closer by. Almost grateful for signs of life in this 
mausoleum, even if it was the enemy, they headed in pursuit of the din makers, back down 
a flight of stairs and across an enclosed bridge between towers.
  "Hoods!" Nikaetomaas said, tucking her ponytail back into her shirt and pulling the 
crude cowl over her head. Gentle did the same, though he doubted such a disguise would 
offer them much protection if they were discovered.
  Orders were being given in the gallery ahead, and Gentle drew Nikaetomaas into hiding 
to listen. The officer had words of inspiration for his squad, promising every man who 
brought a Eurhetemec down a month's paid leave. Somebody asked him how many there were, 
and he replied that he'd heard six, but he didn't believe it because they'd slaughtered 
ten times that number. However many there are, he said-six, sixty, six hundred-they're 
outnumbered and trapped. They won't get out alive. So saying, he divided his contingent 
and told them to shoot on sight.
  Three soldiers were dispatched in the direction of Nika-etomaas and Gentle's hiding 
place. They had no sooner passed than she stepped out of the shadows and brought two of 
the three down with single blows. The third turned to defend himself, but Gentle-lacking 
the mass or muscle power that made Nikaetomaas so effective-used momentum instead, 
flinging himself against the man with such force he threw both of them to the ground. The 
soldier raised his gun towards Gentle's skull, but Nikaetomaas took hold of both weapon 
and hand, hauling the man up by his arm until he was head to head with her, the gun 
pointing at the roof, the fingers around it too crushed to fire. Then she pulled his 
helmet off with her free hand and peered at
  him.
  "Whereas the Autarch?"
  The man was too pained and too terrified to claim ignorance. "The Pivot Tower," he said.
  "Which is where?"
  "It's the tallest tower," he sobbed, scrabbling at the arm he was dangling by, down 
which blood was running.
  "Take us there," Nikaetomaas said. "Please,"
  Teeth gritted, the man nodded his head, and she let him go. The gun went from his 
pulverized fingers as he struck the ground. She invited him to stand with a hooked finger.
  "What's your name?" she asked him.
  "Yark Lazarevich," he told her, nursing his hand in the crook of his arm.
  "Well, Yark Lazarevich, if you make any attempt-or I choose to interpret any act of 
yours as an attempt-to alert help, I will swat the brains from your pan so fast they'll 
be in Patashoqua before your pants fill. Is that plain?"
  "That's plain."
  "Do you have children?"
  "Yes. I've got two."
  "Think of them fatherless and take care. You have a question?"