Imajica

  Perplexed rather than anxious, he went back to the front door and listened again. There were no further sounds, and he was tempted to let the matter alone. But he half hoped some visionary rain had indeed begun to fall, and he was too curious to ignore the mystery. He moved the candle from the door, the wax snuffing the flame as he did so. No matter. There were other candles burning at the bottom of the stairs, and he had sufficient light to find the bolts and slide them back.

  In Celestine’s room, Jude woke and raised her head from the mattress where she’d laid it an hour before. The conversation between the women had continued for some while after their peacemaking, but Jude’s exhaustion had finally caught up with her, and Celestine had suggested she rest for a while, which, reassured by Celestine’s presence, she’d gladly done. Now she stirred to find that Celestine had also succumbed, her head on the mattress, her body on the floor. She was snoring softly, undisturbed by whatever had woken Jude.

  The door was slightly ajar, and a perfume was coming through it, stirring a faint nausea in Jude’s system. She sat up and rubbed at the crick in her neck, then got to her feet. She’d slipped off her shoes before she lay down, but rather than search for them in the darkened room she went out into the hallway barefoot. The smell was much stronger now. It was coming from the street outside, its route plain. The front door was open, and the angels who’d been guarding it were gone.

  Calling Clem’s name, she crossed the hallway, her step slowing as she approached the open door. The candles at the stairs were bright enough to shed some light upon the step. There was something glistening there. She picked up her speed again, asking for the Goddesses to be with her and with Clem. Don’t let this be him, she murmured, seeing that it was tissue glistening, and blood in a pool around it; please don’t let this be him.

  It wasn’t. Now that she was almost at the threshold she saw the remnants of a face there and knew it: Sartori’s agent, Little Ease. Its eyes had been scooped out, and its mouth, which had spewed pleas and flattery in such abundance, was tongueless. But there was no doubting its identity. Only a creature of the In Ovo could still twitch as this did, refusing to give up the semblance of life even if the fact of it had gone.

  She looked beyond the trophy into the murk of the street, calling Clem’s name again. There was no answer at first. Then she heard him, his shout half smothered.

  “Go back inside! For—God’s—sake, go back!”

  “Clem?” She stepped out of the house, bringing new cries of alarm from the darkness.

  “Don’t! Don’t!”

  “I’m not going back without you,” she said, avoiding the Oviate’s head as she advanced.

  She heard something let out a soft sound as she did so, like a creature growling with its maw full of bees.

  “Who’s there?” she said.

  There was no reply at first, but she knew it would come if she waited, and whose voice it would be when it did. She did not anticipate the nature of the reply, however, or its falling note.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” Sartori said.

  “If you’ve hurt Clem—”

  “I’ve no wish to hurt anybody.”

  She knew that was a lie. But she also knew he’d do Clem no harm as long as he needed a hostage.

  “Let Clem go,” she said.

  “Will you come to me if I do?”

  She left a decent pause before replying, so as not to seem too eager. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  “No, Judy!” Clem said. “Don’t. He’s not alone.”

  She could see that now, as her eyes became more accustomed to the darkness. Sleek, ugly beasts prowled back and forth. One was up on its back legs, sharpening its claws on the tree. Another was in the gutter, close enough for her to see its innards through its translucent skin. Their ugliness didn’t distress her. Around the fringes of any drama such detritus was bound to accrue: scraps of discarded characters, soiled costumes, cracked masks. They were irrelevancies, and her lover had taken them for company because he felt a kinship with them. She pitied them. But him, who’d been most high, she pitied more.

  “I want to see Clem here on the step before I make a move,” she said.

  There was a pause, then Sartori said, “I’m going to trust you.”

  His words were followed by further sounds from the Oviates that paced in the murk, and Jude saw two of them slope out of the shadows, with Clem between them, his arms in their throats. They came close enough to the pavement for her to see the foam of appetite that rose from their lips; then they literally spat their prisoner free. Clem fell face down on the road, his hands and arms covered in their muck. She wanted to go to his aid there and then, but though the captors had retreated, the tree gouger had turned and lowered its shovel head, its eyes, black as a shark’s, flickering back and forth in their bulbous sockets, hungry to have the frail meat on the road. If she moved she feared it would pounce, so she kept her place on the step while Clem hauled himself to his feet. His arms were blistered by the Oviate’s spittle, but he was otherwise intact.

  “I’m all right, Judy,” he murmured. “Go back inside.”

  She stayed put, however, waiting until he was up and staggering across the pavement before she started down the steps.

  “Go back!” he told her again.

  She put her arms around him and whispered. “Clem. I don’t want you to argue with this. Go into the house and lock the door. I’m not coming with you.”

  He started to speak, but she hushed him.

  “No argument, I said. I want to see him, Clem. I want to . . . be with him. Now, please, if you love me, go inside and close the door.”

  She felt reluctance in his every sinew, but he knew too much about the business of love, especially love that defied orthodoxy, to attempt to reason with her.

  “Just remember what he’s done,” he said, as he let her go.

  “That’s all part of it, Clem,” she said, and slipped past him.

  It was easy to leave the light behind. The ache which the currents had woken in her marrow diminished with every yard she put between herself and the house, and the thought of the embrace ahead quickened her step. This was what she wanted, and what he wanted, too. Though the first causes of this passion were gone—one to dust, one to divinity—she and the man in the darkness were its embodiments and could not be denied each other.

  She glanced back towards the house once only, to see that Clem was lingering on the step. She didn’t waste time trying to persuade him to go inside, but simply turned back to the shadows.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Here,” her lover replied, and stepped from the folds of his legion.

  A single strand of luminescent matter came with him, fine enough to have been woven by Oviate spiders, but clotted here and there with beads like pearls, which swelled and dropped from the filaments, running down his arms and face and mottling the ground where he walked. The light flattered him, but she was too hungry for the truth of his face to be deceived, and piercing the glamour with her stare found him much reduced. The shining dandy she’d first met in Klein’s plastic garden had gone. Now his eyes were heavy with despair, his mouth drawn down at the corners, his hair awry. Perhaps he’d always looked like this, and he’d simply used some piffling sway to mask the fact, but she doubted it. He was changed on the outside because something had changed within.

  Though she stood before him defenseless, he made no move to touch her, but hung back like a penitent in need of invitation before he approached the altar. She liked this new fastidiousness.

  “I didn’t hurt the angels,” he said softly.

  “You shouldn’t even have touched them.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” he said again. “The gek-a-gek were clumsy. They dropped some meat from the roof.”

  “I saw.”

  “I was going to wait until the power subsided and come for you in style.” He paused, then asked, “Would you have let me
take you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wasn’t certain. I was a little afraid you’d reject me, and then I’d become cruel. You’re my sanity now. I can’t go on without you.”

  “You went on all those years in Yzordderrex.”

  “I had you there,” he said, “only by a different name.”

  “And you were still cruel.”

  “Imagine how much crueler I would have been,” he said, as if amazed at the possibility, “if I hadn’t had your face to mellow me.”

  “Is that all I am to you? A face?”

  “You know better than that,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

  “Tell me,” she said, inviting his affections.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, towards the legion. If he spoke to them she didn’t hear it. They simply retreated, cowed by his glance. When they were gone, he put his hands to her face, his little fingers just beneath the line of her jaw, his thumbs laid lightly at the corners of her mouth. Despite the heat that was still rising from the cooked asphalt, his skin was chilly.

  “One way or another,” he said, “we don’t have very long, so I’ll keep this simple. There’s no future for us now. Maybe there was yesterday, but tonight . . .”

  “I thought you were going to build a New Yzordderrex.”

  “I was. I have the perfect model for it, here.” His thumbs went from the corners of her mouth to the middle of her lips and stroked them. “A city made in your image, built in place of these miserable streets.”

  “But now?”

  “We don’t have the time, love. My brother’s about his work up there, and when he’s finished”—he sighed, his voice dropping lower still—“when he’s finished—”

  “What?” she said. There was something he wanted to share, but he was forbidding himself.

  “I hear you went back to Yzordderrex,” he said.

  She wanted to press him to complete his earlier explanation, but she knew better than to push too hard, so she answered him, knowing his earlier doubts could surface again if she was patient. Yes, she said, she had indeed been to Yzordderrex, and she’d found the palace much changed. This sparked his interest.

  “Who’s taken it over? Not Rosengarten? No. The Dearthers. That damn priest Athanasius—”

  “None of those.”

  “Who then?”

  “Goddesses.”

  The web of luminescence fluttered around his head, shaken by his distress.

  “They were always there,” she told him. “Or at least one was, a Goddess called Uma Umagammagi. Have you ever heard of Her?”

  “Legends—”

  “She was in the Pivot.”

  “That’s impossible,” he said. “The Pivot belongs to the Unbeheld. The whole of the Imajica belongs to the Unbeheld.”

  She’d never heard of a breath of subservience in him before, but she heard it now.

  “Does He own us, too?” she asked him.

  “We may escape that,” he said. “But it’ll be hard, love. He’s the Father of us all. He expects to be obeyed, even to the very end.” Again an aching pause, but this time a request on its heels. “Will you embrace me?” he asked her.

  She answered with her arms. His hands slid from her face and through her hair to clasp behind her.

  “I used to think it was a godlike thing to build cities,” he murmured. “And if I built one fine enough it would stand forever, and so would I. But everything passes away sooner or later, doesn’t it?”

  She heard in his words a despair that was the inverse of Gentle’s visionary zeal, as though in the time she’d known them they’d exchanged their lives. Gentle the faithless lover had become a dealer in heavens, while Sartori, the sometime maker of hells, was here holding out love as his last salvation.

  “What is God’s work,” she asked him quietly, “if it’s not the building of cities?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well . . . maybe it’s none of our business,” she said, pretending a lover’s indifference to matters of moment. “We’ll forget about the Unbeheld. We’ve got each other. We’ve got the child. We can be together for as long as we like.”

  There was enough truth in these sentiments, enough hope in her that this vision might come true, that using it for manipulative purpose sickened her. But having turned her back on the house and all it contained, she could hear in her lover’s whispers echoes of the same doubts that had made her an outcast, and if she had to use the feelings between them as a way to finally solve the enigma, so be it. Her queasiness at her deceit wasn’t soothed by its effectiveness. When Sartori let out a tiny sob, as he did now, she wanted to confess her motives. But she fought the desire and let him suffer, hoping that he’d finally purge himself of all he knew, even though she suspected he’d never dared even shape these thoughts before, much less speak them.

  “There’ll be no child,” he said, “no being together.”

  “Why not?” she said, still striving to keep her tone optimistic. “We can leave now, if you want. We can go anywhere and hide away.”

  “There are no hiding places left,” he said.

  “We’ll find one.”

  “No. There are none.”

  He drew away from her. She was glad of his tears. They were a veil between his gaze and her duplicity.

  “I told the Reconciler I was my own destroyer,” he said. “I said I saw my works, and I conspired against them. But then I asked myself, Whose eyes am I seeing with? And you know what the answer is? My Father’s eyes, Judith. My Father’s eyes. . . .”

  Of all the voices to return into Jude’s head as he spoke, it was Clara Leash’s she heard. Man the destroyer, willfully undoing the world. And what more perfect manhood was there than the God of the First Dominion?

  “If I see my works with these eyes and want to destroy them,” Sartori murmured, “what does He see? What does He want?”

  “Reconciliation,” she said.

  “Yes. But why? It’s not a beginning, Judith. It’s the end. When the Imajica’s whole, He’ll turn it into a wasteland.”

  She drew away from him. “How do you know?”

  “I think I’ve always known.”

  “And you said nothing? All your talk about the future—”

  “I didn’t dare admit it to myself. I didn’t want to believe I was anything but my own man. You understand that. I’ve seen you fight to see with your own eyes. I did the same. I couldn’t admit He had any part of me, until now.”

  “Why now?”

  “Because I see you with my eyes. I love you with my heart. I love you, Judith, and that means I’m free of Him. I can admit . . . what . . . I . . . know.”

  He dissolved in grief, but his hands kept hold of her as he shook.

  “There’s nowhere to hide, love,” he said. “We’ve got a few minutes together, you and I: a few sweet moments. Then it’s over.”

  She heard everything he said, but her thoughts were as much with what was going on in the house behind her. Despite all she’d heard from Uma Umagammagi, despite the zeal of the Maestro, despite all the calamities that would come with her interference, the Reconciliation had to be halted.

  “We can still stop Him,” she said to Sartori.

  “It’s too late,” he replied. “Let Him have His victory. We can defy Him a better way. A purer way.”

  “How?”

  “We can die together.”

  “That’s not defying Him. It’s defeat.”

  “I don’t want to live with His presence in me. I want to lie down with you and die. It won’t hurt, love.”

  He opened his jacket. There were two blades at his belt. They glittered by the light of the floating threads, but his eyes glittered more dangerously still. His tears had dried. He looked almost happy.

  “It’s the only way,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  “If you love me you will.”

  She drew her arm from his grasp. “I want to live,” she said, bac
king away from him.

  “Don’t desert me,” he replied. There was warning in his voice as well as appeal. “Don’t leave me to my Father. Please. If you love me don’t leave me to my Father. Judith!”

  He drew the knives out of his belt and came after her, offering the handle of one as he came, like a merchant selling suicide. She swiped at the proffered blade, and it went from his grasp. As it flew she turned, hoping to the Goddess that Clem had left the door open. He had; and lit every candle he could find, to judge by the spill of light onto the step. She picked up her pace, hearing Sartori’s voice behind her as she went. He only spoke her name, but the threat in it was unmistakable. She didn’t reply—her flight from him was answer enough—but when she reached the pavement she glanced back at him. He was picking up the dropped knife, and rising.

  Again he said, “Judith—”

  But this time it was a warning of a different order. Off to her left a motion drew her glance. One of the gek-a-gek, the sharpener, was coming at her, its flat head now wide as a manhole and toothed to its gut.

  Sartori yelled an order, but the thing was rogue and came on at her unchecked. She raced for the step, and as she did so heard a whoop from the door. Monday was there, naked but for his grimy underwear: in his hand, a homemade bludgeon, which he swung around his head like a man possessed. She ducked beneath its sweep as she made the step. Clem was behind him, ready to haul her in, but she turned to call Monday to retreat, in time to see the gek-a-gek mounting the step in pursuit. Her defender didn’t retreat, but brought the weapon down in a whistling arc, striking the gek-a-gek’s gaping head. The bludgeon shattered, but the blow sheared off one of the beast’s bulbous eyes. Though wounded, its mass was still sufficient to carry it forward, and one of its freshly honed claws found Monday’s back as he turned to dodge it. The boy shrieked and might have fallen beneath the Oviate’s attack if Clem hadn’t grabbed his arms and all but thrown him into the house.