Imajica

  No sooner thought than done. Her mind sank towards the binding and slipped between the threads into the body’s maze. She had expected darkness, but there was light here, the forms of the body’s innards delineated by the milk-blue she’d come to know as the color of this mystery. There was no foulness, no corruption. It was less a charnel house than a cathedral, the source, she now suspected, of the sacredness that permeated this underground. But, like a cathedral, its substance was quite dead. No blood ran in these veins, no heart pumped, no lungs drew breath. She spread her intention through the stilled anatomy, to feel its length and breadth. The dead woman had been large in life, her hips substantial, her breasts heavy. But the binding bit into her ripeness everywhere, perverting the swell and sweep of her. What terrible last moments she must have known, lying blind in this filth, hearing the wall of her mausoleum being built brick by brick. What kind of crime hung on her, Jude wondered, thatshe’d been condemned to such a death? And who were her executioners, the builders of that wall? Had they sung as they worked, their voices growing dimmer as the brick blotted them out? Or had they been silent, half ashamed of their cruelty?

  There was so much she wished she knew, and none of it answerable. She’d finished her journey as she’d begun it, in fear and confusion. It was time to be gone from the relic, and home. She willed herself to rise out of the dead blue flesh. To her horror, nothing happened. She was bound here, a prisoner within a prisoner. God help her, what had she done? Instructing herself not to panic, she concentrated her mind on the problem, picturing the cell beyond the binding, and the wall she’d passed so effortlessly through, and the lovers, and the passageway that led out to the open sky. But imagining was not enough. She had let her curiosity overtake her, spreading her spirit through the corpse, and now it had claimed that spirit for itself.

  A rage began in her, and she let it come. It was as recognizable a part of her as the nose on her face, and she needed all that she was, every particular, to empower her. If she’d had her own body around her it would have been flushing as her heartbeat caught the rhythm of her fury. She even seemed to hear it—the first sound she’d been aware of since leaving the house—the pump at its hectic work. It was not imagined. She felt it in the body around her, a tremor passing through the long-stilled system as her rage ignited it afresh. In the throne room of its head a sleeping mind woke and knew it was invaded.

  For Jude there was an exquisite moment of shared consciousness, when a mind new to her—yet sweetly familiar—grazed her own. Then she was expelled by its wakefulness. She heard it scream in horror behind her, a sound of mind rather than throat, which went with her as she sped from the cell, out through the wall, past the lovers shaken from their intercourse by falls of dust, out and up, into the rain, and into a night not blue but bitterest black. The din of the woman’s terror accompanied her all the way back to the house, where, to her infinite relief, she found her own body still standing in the candle-lit room. She slid into it with ease, and stood in the middle of the room for a minute or two, sobbing, until she began to shudder with cold. She found her dressing gown and, as she put it on, realized that her wrists and elbows were no longer stained. She went into the bathroom and consulted the mirror. Her face was similarly cleansed.

  Still shivering, she returned to the living room to look for the blue stone. There was a substantial hole in the wall where its impact had gouged out the plaster. The stone itself was unharmed, lying on the rug in front of the hearth. She didn’t pick it up. She’d had enough of its delirium for one night. Avoiding its baleful glance as best she could, she threw a cushion over it. Tomorrow she’d plan some way of ridding herself of the thing. Tonight she needed to tell somebody what she’d experienced, before she began to doubt it. Someone a little crazy, who’d not dismiss her account out of hand; someone already half believing. Gentle, of course.

  Seventeen

  TOWARDS MIDNIGHT, THE TRAFFIC outside Gentle’s studio dwindled to almost nothing. Anybody who was going to a party tonight had arrived. They were deep in drink, debate, or seduction, determined as they celebrated to have in the coming year what the going had denied them.

  Content with his solitude, Gentle sat cross-legged on the floor, a bottle of bourbon between his legs and canvases propped up against the furniture all around him. Most of them were blank, but that suited his meditation. So was the future.

  He’d been sitting in this ring of emptiness for about two hours, drinking from the bottle, and now his bladder needed emptying. He got up and went to the bathroom, using the light from the lounge to go by rather than face his reflection. As he shook the last drops into the bowl, that light went off. He zipped himself up and went back into the studio. The rain lashed against the window, but there was sufficient illumination from the street for him to see that the door out onto the landing stood inches ajar.

  “Who’s there?” he said.

  The room was still for a moment; then he glimpsed a form against the window, and the smell of something burned and cold pricked his nostrils. The whistler! My God, it had found him!

  Fear made him fleet. He broke from his frozen posture and raced to the door. He would have been through it and away down the stairs had he not almost tripped on the dog waiting obediently on the other side. It wagged its tail in pleasure at the sight of him and halted his flight. The whistler was no dog lover. So who was here?

  Turning back, he reached for the light switch and was about to flip it on when the unmistakable voice of Pie ‘oh’ pah said, “Please don’t. I prefer the dark.”

  Gentle’s finger dropped from the switch, his heart hammering for a different reason. “Pie? Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” came the reply. “I heard you wanted to see me, from a friend of yours.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “I was with the dead. Theresa and the children.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  “You lost somebody too,” Pie ‘oh’ pah said.

  It was wise, Gentle now understood, to have this exchange in darkness: to talk, in shadow, of the grave and the lambs it had claimed.

  “I was with the spirits of my children for a time. Your friend found me in the mourning place, spoke to me, told me you wanted to see me again. This surprises me, Gentle.”

  “As much as you talking to Taylor surprises me,” Gentle replied, though after their conversation it shouldn’t have done. “Is he happy?” he asked, knowing the question might be viewed as a banality, but wanting reassurance.

  “No spirit is happy,” Pie replied. “There’s no release for them. Not in this Dominion or any other. They haunt the doors, waiting to leave, but there’s nowhere for them to go.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s a question that’s been asked for many generations, Gentle. And unanswered. As a child I was taught that before the Unbeheld went into the First Dominion there was a place there into which all spirits were received. My people lived in that Dominion then, and watched over that place, but the Unbeheld drove both the spirits and my people out.”

  “So the spirits have nowhere to go?”

  “Exactly. Their numbers swell, and so does their grief.”

  He thought of Taylor, lying on his deathbed, dreaming of release, of the final flight into the Absolute. Instead, if Pie was to be believed, his spirit had entered a place of lost souls, denied both flesh and revelation. What price understanding now, when the end of everything was limbo?

  “Who is this Unbeheld?” Gentle said.

  “Hapexamendios, the God of the Imajica.”

  “Is He a God of this world too?”

  “He was once. But He went out of the Fifth Dominion, through the other worlds, laying their divinities waste, until He reached the Place of Spirits. Then He drew a veil across that Dominion—”

  “And became Unbeheld.”

  “That’s what I was taught.”

  The formality and plainness of Pie ‘oh’ pah’s account lent the story authority, but for
all its elegance it was still a tale of gods and other worlds, very far from this dark room and the cold rain running on the glass.

  “How do I know any of this is true?” Gentle said.

  “You don’t, unless you see it with your own eyes,” Pie ‘oh’ pah replied. His voice when he said this was almost sultry. He spoke like a seducer.

  “And how do I do that?”

  “You must ask me direct questions, and I’ll try to answer them. I can’t reply to generalities.”

  “All right, answer this: Can you take me to the Dominions?”

  “That I can do.”

  “I want to follow in the footsteps of Hapexamendios. Can we do that?”

  “We can try.”

  “I want to see the Unbeheld, Pie ‘oh’ pah. I want to know why Taylor and your children are in Purgatory. I want to understand why they’re suffering.”

  There was no question in this speech, therefore no reply except the other’s quickening breath.

  “Can you take us now?” Gentle said.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “It’s what I want, Pie. Prove what you’ve said is true, or leave me alone forever.”

  It was eighteen minutes to midnight when Jude got into her car to start her journey to Gentle’s house. It was an easy drive, with the roads so clear, and she was several times tempted to jump red lights, but the police were especially vigilant on this night, and any infringement might bring them out of hiding. Though she had no alcohol in her system, she was by no means sure it was innocent of alien influences. She therefore drove as cautiously as at noon, and it took fully fifteen minutes to reach the studio. When she did she found the upper windows dark. Had Gentle decided to drown his sorrows in a night of high life, she wondered, or was he already fast asleep? If the latter, she had news worth waking him for.

  “There are some things you should understand before we leave,” Pie said, tying their wrists together, left to right, with a belt. “This is no easy journey, Gentle. This Dominion, the Fifth, is unreconciled, which means that getting to the Fourth involves risk. It’s not like crossing a bridge. Passing over requires considerable power. And if anything goes wrong, the consequences will be dire.”

  “Tell me the worst.”

  “In between the Reconciled Dominions and the Fifth is a state called the In Ovo. It’s an ether, in which things that have ventured from their worlds are imprisoned. Some of them are innocent. They’re there by accident. Some were dispatched there as a judgment. They’re lethal. I’m hoping we’ll pass through the In Ovo before any of them even notice we’re there. But if we were to become separated—”

  “I get the picture. You’d better tighten that knot. It could still work loose.”

  Pie bent to the task, with Gentle fumbling to help in the darkness.

  “Let’s assume we get through the In Ovo,” Gentle said. “What’s on the other side?”

  “The Fourth Dominion,” Pie replied. “If I’m accurate in my bearings, we’ll arrive near the city of Patashoqua.”

  “And if not?”

  “Who knows? The sea. A swamp.”

  “Shit.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got a good sense of direction. And there’s plenty of power between us. I couldn’t do this on my own. But together . . .”

  “Is this the only way to cross over?”

  “Not at all. There are a number of passing places here in the Fifth: stone circles, hidden away. But most of them were created to carry travelers to some particular location. We want to go as free agents. Unseen, unsuspected.”

  “So why have you chosen Patashoqua?”

  “It has . . . sentimental associations,” Pie replied. “You’ll see for yourself, very soon.” The mystif paused. “You do still want to go?”

  “Of course.”

  “This is as tight as I can get the knot without stopping our blood.”

  “Then why are we delaying?”

  Pie’s fingers touched Gentle’s face. “Close your eyes.”

  Gentle did so. Pie’s fingers sought out Gentle’s free hand and raised it between them.

  “You have to help me,” the mystif said.

  “Tell me what to do.”

  “Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that.”

  He did, from somewhere.

  “Now,” Pie went on. “Put your hand to your face, with your thumb against your chin. There are very few incantations in our workings. No pretty words. Just pneuma like this, and the will behind them.”

  “I’ve got the will, if that’s what you’re asking,” Gentle said.

  “Then one solid breath is all we need. Exhale until it hurts. I’ll do the rest.”

  “Can I take another breath afterwards?”

  “Not in this Dominion.”

  With that reply the enormity of what they were undertaking struck Gentle. They were leaving Earth. Stepping off the edge of the only reality he’d ever known into another state entirely. He grinned in the darkness, the hand bound to Pie’s taking hold of his deliverer’s fingers.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  In the murk ahead of him Pie’s teeth gleamed in a matching smile.

  “Why not?”

  Gentle drew breath.

  Somewhere in the house, he heard a door slamming and footsteps on the stairs leading up to the studio. But it was too late for interruptions. He exhaled through his hand, one solid breath which Pie ‘oh’ pah seemed to snatch from the air between them. Something ignited in the fist the mystif made, bright enough to burn between its clenched fingers. . . .

  At the door, Jude saw Gentle’s painting almost made flesh: two figures, almost nose to nose, with their faces illuminated by some unnatural source, swelling like a slow explosion between them. She had time to recognize them both—to see the smiles on their faces as they met each other’s gaze—then, to her horror, they seemed to turn inside out. She glimpsed wet red surfaces, which folded upon themselves not once but three times in quick succession, each fold diminishing their bodies, until they were slivers of stuff, still folding, and folding, and finally gone.

  She sank back against the doorjamb, shock making her nerves cavort. The dog she’d found waiting at the top of the stairs went fearlessly to the place where they’d stood. There was no further magic there, to snatch him after them. The place was dead. They’d gone, the bastards, wherever such avenues led.

  The realization drew a yell of rage from her, sufficient to send the dog scurrying for cover. She dearly hoped Gentle heard her, wherever he was. Hadn’t she come here to share her revelations with him, so that they could investigate the great unknown together? And all the time he was preparing for his departure without her. Without her!

  “How dare you?” she yelled at the empty space.

  The dog whined in fear, and the sight of its terror mellowed her. She went down on her haunches.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to it. “Come here. I’m not cross with you. It’s that little fucker Gentle.”

  The dog was reluctant at first but came to her after a time, its tail wagging intermittently as it grew more confident of her sanity. She rubbed its head, the contact soothing. All was not lost. What Gentle could do, she could do. He didn’t have the copyright on adventuring. She’d find a way to go where he’d gone, if she had to eat the blue eye grain by grain to do so.

  Church bells began to ring as she sat chewing this over, announcing in their ragged peals the arrival of midnight. Their clamor was accompanied by car horns in the street outside and cheers from a party in an adjacent house.

  “Whoopee,” she said quietly, on her face the distracted look that had obsessed so many of the opposite sex over the years. She’d forgotten most of them. The ones who’d fought over her, the ones who’d lost their wives in their pursuit of her, even those who’d sold their sanity to find her equal: all were forgotten.

  History had never much engaged her. It was
the future that glittered in her mind’s eye, now more than ever.

  The past had been written by men. But the future—pregnant with possibilities—the future was a woman.

  Eighteen

  I

  UNTIL THE RISE OF Yzordderrex, a rise engineered by the Autarch for reasons more political than geographical, the city of Patashoqua, which lay on the edge of the Fourth Dominion, close to where the In Ovo marked the perimeter of the Reconciled worlds, had just claim to be the preeminent city of the Dominions. Its proud inhabitants called it casje au casje, simply meaning the hive of hives, a place of intense and fruitful labor. Its proximity to the Fifth made it particularly prone to influences from that source, and even after Yzordderrex had became the center of power across the Dominions it was to Patashoqua that those at the cutting edge of style and invention looked for the coming thing. Patashoqua had a variation on the motor vehicle in its streets long before Yzordderrex. It had rock and roll in its clubs long before Yzordderrex. It had hamburgers, cinemas, blue jeans, and countless other proofs of modernity long before the great city of the Second. Nor was it simply the trivialities of fashion that Patashoquareinvented from Fifth Dominion models. It was philosophies and belief systems. Indeed, it was said in Patashoqua that you knew a native of Yzordderrex because he looked like you did yesterday and believed what you’d believed the day before.

  As with most cities in love with the modern, however, Patashoqua had deeply conservative roots. Whereas Yzordderrex was a sinful city, notorious for the excesses of its darker Kesparates, the streets of Patashoqua were quiet after nightfall, its occupants in their own beds with their own spouses, plotting vogues. This mingling of chic and conservatism was nowhere more apparent than in architecture. Built as it was in a temperate region, unlike the semitropical Yzordderrex, the buildings did not have to be designed with any climatic extreme in mind. They were either elegantly classical, and built to remain standing until Doomsday, or else functions of some current craze, and likely to be demolished within a week.