Imajica

  But even such beauty could pall, and after a thousand such streets had slipped by—all as heroically built, all as lushly colored—the sheer excess of it became sickening, and Gentle was glad of the lightning that he saw erupt from one of the nearby streets, its brilliance sufficient to bleach the color from the façades for a flickering time. In search of its source, he redirected himself and came into a square, at the center of which stood a solitary figure, a Nullianac, its head thrown back as it unleashed its silent bolts into the barely glimpsed sky. Its power was many orders of magnitude greater than anything Gentle had witnessed from its like before. It, and presumably its brothers, had a piece of the God’s power between the palms of its face, and its capacity for destruction was now stupendous.

  Sensing the approach of the wanderer, the creature left off its rehearsals and floated up from the square as it searched for this interloper. Gentle didn’t know what harm it could do to him in his present condition. If the Nullianacs were now Hapexamendios’ elite, who knew what authority they’d been lent? But there was no profit in retreat. If he didn’t seek some direction, he might wander here forever and never find his Father.

  The Nullianac was naked, but there was neither sensuality nor vulnerability in that state. Its flesh was almost as bright as its fire, its form without visible means of procreation or evacuation: without hair, without nipples, without navel. It turned and turned and turned again, looking for the entity whose nearness it sensed, but perhaps the new scale of its destructive powers had made it insensitive, because it failed to find Gentle until his spirit hovered a few yards away.

  “Are you looking for me?” he said.

  It found him now. Arcs of energy played back and forth between the palms of its head, and out of their cracklings the creature’s unmelodious voice emerged.

  “Maestro,” it said.

  “You know who I am?”

  “Of course,” it said. “Of course.”

  Its head wove like that of a mesmerized snake as it drew closer to Gentle.

  “Why are you here?” it said.

  “To see my Father.”

  “Ah.”

  “I came here to honor Him.”

  “So do we all.”

  “I’m sure. Can you take me to Him?”

  “He’s everywhere,” the Nullianac said. “This is His city, and He’s in its every mote.”

  “So if I speak to the ground I speak to Him, do I?”

  The Nullianac mused on this for a few moments. “Not the ground,” it said. “Don’t speak to the ground.”

  “Then what? The walls? The sky? You? Is my Father in you?”

  The arcs in the Nullianac’s head grew more excitable. “No,” it said. “I wouldn’t presume—”

  “Then will you take me to where I can do Him devotion? There isn’t much time.”

  It was this remark more than any other which gained the Nullianac’s compliance. It nodded its death-laden head.

  “I’ll take you,” it said, and rose a little higher, turning from Gentle as it did so. “But as you say, we must be swift. His business cannot wait long.”

  II

  Though Jude had been loath to let Celestine climb the stairs above, knowing as she did what lay at the top, she also knew that her presence would only spoil what little chance the woman had of gaining access to the Meditation Room, so she reluctantly stayed below, listening hard—as did they all—for some clue to what was transpiring in the shadows of the landing.

  The first sound they heard was the warning growls of the gek-a-gek, followed by Sartori’s voice, telling trespassers that their lives would be forfeit if they attempted to enter. Celestine answered him, but in a voice so low the sense of what she said was lost before it reached the bottom of the flight, and as the minutes passed—were they minutes? perhaps only dreadful seconds, waiting for another eruption of violence—Jude could resist the temptation no longer and, snuffing out the candles closest to her, started a slow ascent.

  She expected the angels to make some move to stop her, but they were too preoccupied with tending to Gentle’s body, and she climbed unhindered by all but her caution. Celestine was still outside the door, she saw, but the Oviates were no longer blocking her way. At the instruction of the man inside they’d shrunk away and were waiting, bellies to the ground, for a cue to do mischief. Jude was now almost halfway up the flight, and she was able to catch fragments of the exchange that was under way between mother and son. It was Sartori’s voice she heard first; a wasted whisper.

  “It’s over, Mama. . . .”

  “I know, child,” Celestine said. There was conciliation in her tone, not rebuke.

  “He’s going to kill everything. . . .”

  “Yes. I know that too.”

  “I had to hold the circle for Him . . . it’s what He wanted.”

  “And you had to do what He wanted. I understand that, child. Believe me, I do. I served Him too, remember? It’s no great crime.”

  At these words of forgiveness, the door of the Meditation Room clicked open and slowly swung wide. Jude was too far down the staircase to see more than the rafters, lit either by a candle or the halo of Oviate tissue that had attended on Sartori when he was out in the street. With the door open, his voice was much clearer.

  “Will you come in?” he asked Celestine.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Yes, Mama. Please. I’d like us to be together when the end comes.”

  A familiar sentiment, Jude thought. Apparently he didn’t much care what breast he laid his sobbing head on, as long as he wasn’t left to die alone. Celestine put up no further show of ambivalence but accepted her child’s invitation and stepped inside. The door didn’t close, nor did the gek-a-gek creep back into place to block it. Celestine was quickly gone from sight, however. Jude was sorely tempted to continue her ascent and watch what unfolded inside, but she was afraid that any further advance would be sensed by the Oviates, so she gingerly sat down on the stairs, halfway between the Maestro at the top and the body at the bottom. There she waited, listening to the silence of the house; of the street; of the world.

  In her mind, she shaped a prayer.

  Goddess, she thought, this is Your sister, Judith. There’s a fire coming, Goddess. It’s almost upon me, and I’m afraid.

  From above, she heard Sartori speak, his voice now so low she could catch none of his words even with the door open. But she heard the tears that they became, and the sound broke her concentration. The thread of her prayer was lost. No matter. She’d said enough to summarize her feelings.

  The fire’s almost upon me, Goddess. I am afraid.

  What was there left to say?

  III

  The speed at which Gentle and the Nullianac traveled didn’t diminish the scale of the city they were passing through: quite the opposite. As the minutes passed, and the streets continued to flicker by, thousand upon thousand, their buildings all raised from the same ripely colored stone, all built to obscure the sky, all laid to the horizon, the magnitude of this labor began to seem not epic but insane. However alluring its colors were, however satisfying its geometrics and exquisite its details, the city was the work of a collective madness: a compulsive vision that had refused to be placated until it had covered every inch of the Dominion with monuments to its own relentlessness. Nor was there any sign of any life on any street, leading Gentle to a suspicion that he finally voiced, not as a statement but as a question.

  “Who lives here?” he said.

  “Hapexamendios.”

  “And who else?”

  “It’s His city,” the Nullianac said.

  “Are there no citizens?”

  “It’s His city.”

  The answer was plain enough: the place was deserted. The shaking of vines and drapes he’d seen when he’d first arrived had either been caused by his approach or, more likely, been a game of illusion the empty buildings had devised to while away the centuries.

  But at last, after traveling th
rough innumerable streets that were indistinguishable from each other, there were finally subtle signs of change in the structures ahead. Their luscious colors were steadily deepening, the stone so drenched it must soon surely ooze and run. And there was a new elaboration in the façades, and a perfection in their proportions, that made Gentle think that he and the Nullianac were approaching the First Cause, the district of which the streets they’d passed through had been imitations, diluted by repetition.

  Confirming his suspicion that the journey was nearing its end, Gentle’s guide spoke.

  “He knew you’d come,” it said. “He sent some of my brothers to the perimeter to look for you.”

  “Are there many of you?”

  “Many,” the Nullianac said. “Minus one.” It looked in Gentle’s direction. “But you know this, of course. You killed him.”

  “He would have killed me if I hadn’t.”

  “And wouldn’t that have been a proud boast for our tribe,” it said, “to have killed the Son of God?”

  It made a laugh from its lightning, though there was more humor in a death rattle.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” Gentle asked it.

  “Why should I be afraid?”

  “Talking this way when my Father may hear you?”

  “He needs my service,” came the reply. “And I do not need to live.” It paused, then said, “Though I would miss burning the Dominions.”

  Now it was Gentle’s turn to ask why.

  “Because it’s what I was born to do. I’ve lived too long, waiting for this.”

  “How long?”

  “Many thousands of years, Maestro. Many, many thousands.”

  It silenced Gentle, to think that he was traveling beside an entity whose span was so much vaster than his own, and anticipated this imminent destruction as its life’s reward. How far off was that prize? he wondered. His sense of time was impoverished without the tick of breath and heartbeat to aid it, and he had no clue as to whether he’d vacated his body in Gamut Street two minutes before, or five, or ten. It was in truth academic. With the Dominions reconciled, Hapexamendios could choose His moment, and Gentle’s only comfort was the continued presence of his guide, who would be, he suspected, gone from his side at the first call to arms.

  As the street ahead grew denser, the Nullianac’s speed and height dropped, until they were hovering inches above the ground, the buildings around them grotesquely elaborate now, every fraction of their brick and stonework etched and carved and filigreed. There was no beauty in these intricacies, only obsession. Their surfeit was more morbid than lively, like the ceaseless, witless motion of maggots. And the same decadence had overcome the colors, the delicacy and profusion of which he’d so admired in the suburbs. Their nuances were gone. Every color now competed with scarlet, the mingled show not brightening the air but bruising it. Nor was there light here in the same abundance as there’d been at the outskirts of the city. Though seams of brightness still flickered in the stone, the elaboration that surrounded them devoured their glow and left these depths dismal.

  “I can go no farther than this, Reconciler,” the Nullianac said. “From here, you go alone.”

  “Shall I tell my Father who found me?” Gentle said, hoping that the offer might coax a few more tidbits from the creature before he came into Hapexamendios’ presence.

  “I have no name,” the Nullianac replied. “I am my brother and my brother is me.”

  “I see. That’s a pity.”

  “But you offered me a kindness, Reconciler. Let me offer you one.”

  “Yes?”

  “Name me a place to destroy in your name, and I’ll make it my business to do so: a city, a country, whatever.”

  “Why would I want that?” Gentle said.

  “Because you’re your Father’s son,” came the reply. “And what your Father wants, so will you.”

  Despite all his caution, Gentle couldn’t help but give the destroyer a sour look.

  “No?” it said.

  “No.”

  “Then we’re both without gifts to give,” it said and, turning its back, rose and went from Gentle without another word.

  He didn’t call after it for directions. There was only one way to go now, and that was on, into the heart of the metropolis, choked though it was by gaud and elaboration. He had the power to go at the speed of thought, of course, but he wished to do nothing that might alarm the Unbeheld, so took his spirit into the garish gloom like a pedestrian, wandering between edifices so fraught with ornament they could not be far from collapse.

  As the splendors of the suburbs had given way to decadence, so decadence had, in its turn, given way to pathology, a state that drove his sensibilities beyond distaste or antipathy to the borders of panic. That mere excess might squeeze such anguish out of him was revelation in itself. When had he become so rarefied? He, the crass copyist. He, the sybarite who’d never said enough, much less too much. What had he become? A phantom aesthete driven to terror by the sight of his Father’s city.

  Of the Architect Himself, there was no sign, and rather than advance into complete darkness Gentle stopped and simply said, “Father?”

  Though his voice had very little authority here, it was loud in such utter silence, and must surely have gone to every threshold within the radius of a dozen streets. But if Hapexamendios was in residence behind any of these doors, He made no reply.

  Gentle tried again. “Father. I want to see you.”

  As he spoke he peered down the shadowy street ahead, looking for some sign, however vestigial, of the Unbeheld’s whereabouts. There was no murmur, no motion. But his study was rewarded by the slow comprehension that his Father, for all His apparent absence, was in fact here in front of him; and to his left, and to his right, and above his head, and beneath his feet. What were those gleaming folds at the windows, if they weren’t skin? What were those arches, if they weren’t bone? What was this scarlet pavement, and this light-shot stone, if it wasn’t flesh? There was pith and marrow here. There was tooth and lash and nail. The Nullianac hadn’t been speaking of spirit when it had said that Hapexamendios was everywhere in this metropolis. This was the City of God; and God was the city.

  Twice in his life he’d had presentiments of this revelation. The first time when he’d entered Yzordderrex, which had been commonly called a city-god itself and had been, he now understood, his brother’s unwitting attempt to re-create his Father’s masterwork. The second when he’d undertaken the business of similitudes and had realized, as the net of his ambition encompassed London, that there was no part of it, from sewer to dome, that was not somehow analogous to his anatomy.

  Here was that theory proved. The knowledge didn’t strengthen him but, instead, fueled the dread he felt, thinking of his Father’s immensity. He’d crossed a continent and more to get here, and there’d been no part of it that was not made as these streets were made, his Father’s substance replicated in unimaginable quantities to become the raw materials for the masons and carpenters and hod carriers of His will. And yet, for all its magnitude, what was His city? A trap of corporeality, and its architect its prisoner.

  “Oh, Father,” he said, and perhaps because the formality had gone from his voice, and there was sorrow in it, he was finally granted a reply.

  “You’ve done well for me,” the voice said.

  Gentle remembered its monotony well. Here was the same barely discernible modulation he’d first heard as he’d stood in the shadow of the Pivot.

  “You’ve succeeded where all the others failed,” Hapexamendios said. “They went astray or let themselves be crucified. But you, Reconciler, you held to your course.”

  “For your sake, Father.”

  “And that service has earned you a place here,” the God said. “In my city. In my heart.”

  “Thank you,” Gentle replied, fearful that this gift was going to mark the end of the exchange.

  If so, he’d have failed as his mother’s agent. Tell Him you want to se
e His face, she’d said. Distract Him. Flatter Him. Ah, yes, flattery!

  “I want to learn from You now, Father,” he said. “I want to be able to carry Your wisdom back into the Fifth with me.”

  “You’ve done all you need to do, Reconciler,” Hapexamendios said. “You won’t need to go back into the Fifth, for your sake or mine. You’ll stay with me and watch my work.”

  “What work is that?”

  “You know what work,” came the God’s reply. “I heard you speak with the Nullianac. Why are you pretending ignorance?”

  The inflections in His voice were too subtle to be interpreted. Was there genuine inquiry in the question, or a fury at His son’s deceit?

  “I didn’t wish to presume, Father,” Gentle said, cursing himself for this gaffe. “I thought You’d want to tell me Yourself.”

  “Why would I tell you what you already know?” the God said, unwilling to be persuaded from this argument until He had a convincing answer. “You already have every knowledge you need—”

  “Not every one,” Gentle said, seeing now how he might divert the flow.

  “What do you lack?” Hapexamendios said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Your face, Father.”

  “My face? What about my face?”

  “That’s what I lack. The sight of Your face.”

  “You’ve seen my city,” the Unbeheld replied. “That’s my face.”

  “There’s no other? Really, Father? None?”

  “Aren’t you content with that?” Hapexamendios said. “Isn’t it perfect enough? Doesn’t it shine?”

  “Too much, Father. It’s too glorious.”

  “How can a thing be too glorious?”

  “Part of me’s human, Father, and that part’s weak. I look at this city, and I’m agog. It’s a masterwork—”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Genius.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “But Father, grant me a simpler sight. Show a glimpse of the face that made my face, so that I can know the part of me that’s You.”