"Yes, I have."
  "And your Maestro? He had a long life too?"
  "Yes, he did," Pie said, looking again at the scenes on the walls.
  Though the renderings were relatively unsophisticated, they touched the mystif s 
memories awake, evoking the bustle and din of the crowded thoroughfares it and its 
Maestro had walked in the bright, hopeful days before the Reconciliation. Here were the 
fashionable streets of Mayfair, lined with fine shops and paraded by finer women, abroad 
to buy lavender water and mantua silk and snow-white muslin. Here was the throng of 
Oxford Street, where half a hundred vendors clamored for custom: purveyors of slippers, 
wildfowl, cherries, and gingerbread, all vying for a niche on the pavement and a space in 
the air to raise their cries. Here too was a fair, St. Bartholomew's most likely, where 
there was more sin to be had by daylight than Babylon ever boasted by dark.
  "Who made these?" Pie wondered aloud as they proceeded.
  "Diverse hands, by the look of 'em," Lu 'chur' chem replied. "You can see where one 
style stops and another starts."
  "But somebody directed these painters, gave them the details, the colors. Unless the 
Autarch just stole artists from the Fifth Dominion."
  "Perfectly possible," Lu 'chur' chem said. "He stole architects. He put tribes in 
chains to build the place."
  "And nobody ever challenged him?"
  "People tried to stir up revolutions over and over again, but he suppressed them. Burnt 
down the universities, hanged the theologians and the radicals. He had a stranglehold. 
And he had the Pivot, and most people believe that's the Unbeheld's seal of approval. If 
Hapexamendios didn't want the Autarch to rule Yzordderrex, why did He allow the Pivot to 
be moved here? That's what they said. And I don't-"
  Lu 'chur' chem stopped in his tracks, seeing that Pie had already done so.
  "What is it?" he asked.
  The mystif stared up at the picture they had come abreast of, its breath quickened by 
shock.
  "Is something wrong?" Lu 'chur' chem said.
  It took a few moments to find the words. "I don't think we should go any further," it 
said.
  "Why not?"
  "Not together, at least. The judgment fell on me, and I should finish this alone."
  "What's wrong with you? I've come this far. I want to have the satisfaction."
  "What's more important?" the mystif asked him, turning from the painting it had been so 
fixated by. "Your satisfaction, or succeeding in what we came here to do?"
  "You know my answer to that."
  "Then trust me. I have to go on alone. Wait for me here if you like."
  Lu 'chur' chem made a phlegm-hawking growl, like Culus' growl, only coarser. "I came 
here to kill the Autarch," he said.
  "No. You came here to help me, and you've done that. It's my hands that have to 
dispatch him, not yours. That's the judgment."
  "Suddenly it's the judgment, the judgment! I shit on the judgment! I want to see the 
Autarch dead. I want to look on his face."
  "I'll bring you his eyes," Pie said. "That's the best I can do. I mean it, Lu 'chur' 
chem. We have to part here."
  Lu 'chur' chem spat on the ground between them.
  "You don't trust me, do you?" he said.
  "If that's what you want to believe."
  "Mystif shite!" he exploded. "If you come out of this alive, I'll kill you, I swear, 
I'll kill you!"
  There was no further argument. He simply spat again and turned his back, stalking off 
down the gallery, leaving the mystif to return its gaze to the picture which had 
quickened Us pulse and breath.
  Though it was curious to see a rendering of Oxford Street and St. Bartholomew's Fair in 
this setting, so far in years and Dominions from the scene that had inspired them, Pie 
might have suppressed the suspicion-growing in its belly while Lu 'chur' chem talked of 
revolution-that this was no coincidence, had the final image in the cycle not been so 
unlike those that had preceded it. The rest had been public spectacles, rendered 
countless times in satirical prints and paintings. This last was not. The rest had been 
well-known sites and streets, famous across the world. This last was not. It was an 
unremarkable thoroughfare in Cler-kenwell, almost a backwater, which Pie doubted any 
artist of the Fifth had ever turned his pen or brush to depicting. But here it was, 
represented in meticulous detail: Gamut Street, to the brick, to the leaf. And taking 
pride of place in the center of the picture, number 28, the Maestro Sartori's house.
  It had been lovingly re-created. Birds courted on its roof; on its step, dogs fought. 
And in between the fighters and wooers stood the house itself, blessed by a dappled 
sunlight denied the others in the row. The front door was closed, but the upper windows 
were flung wide, and the artist had painted somebody watching from one of them, his face 
too deeply shadowed to be recognized. The object of his scrutiny was not in doubt, 
however: the girl in the window across the street, sitting at her mirror with her dog on 
her lap, her fingers teasing from its bow the ribbon that would presently unlace her 
bodice. In the street between this beauty and her doting voyeur were a dozen details that 
could only have come from firsthand experience. On the pavement beneath the girl's window 
a small procession of charity children passed, wards of the parish, dressed all in white 
and carrying their wands. They marched raggedly behind their beadle, a brute of a man 
called Willis, whom Sar-tori had once beaten senseless on that very spot for cruelty to 
his charges. Around the far corner came Roxborough's carriage, drawn by his favorite bay, 
Bellamarre, named in honor of the Comte de St. Germain, who had swindled half the women 
of Venice under that alias a few years before. A dragoon was being ushered out of number 
32 by the mistress of that house, who entertained officers of the Prince of Wales 
regiment-the Tenth, and no other-whenever her husband was away. The widow opposite 
watched enviously from her step.
  All these and a dozen other little dramas were being played out in the picture, and 
there wasn't one Pie didn't remember seeing enacted countless times. But who was the 
unseen spectator who'd instructed the painters in their craft, so that carriage, girl, 
soldier, widow, dogs, birds, voyeurs, and all could be set down with such verisimilitude?
  Having no solution to the puzzle, the mystif plucked its gaze from the picture and 
looked back along the immense length of the gallery. Lu 'chur' chem had disappeared, 
spitting as he went. The mystif was alone, the routes ahead and behind similarly 
deserted. It would miss Lu 'chur' chem's companionship and bitterly regretted that it had 
lacked the wit to persuade its comrade that it had to go on alone, without causing such 
offense. But the picture on the wall was proof of secrets here it had not yet fathomed, 
and when it did so it wanted no witnesses. They too easily became accusers, and Pie was 
weighed down with enough reproaches already. If the tyrannies of Yzordderrex were in some 
fashion linked with the house on Gamut Street-and if Pie, by extension, was an unwitting 
collaborator in those tyrannies-it was important to learn of this guilt unaccompanied.
  As prepared as possible for such revelations, the mystif left its place in front of the 
painting, reminding itself as it went of the promise made to Lu 'chur' chem. If it