Imajica

  “Judith . . .” he said, as if astonished.

  “That’s me,” she replied, knowing that to lay claim to that identity was somehow momentous.

  Squatting in the humus a little way from them she saw the other voider. It was idly perusing the body of Skin, running its fingers over the dog’s flank. She looked away, unwilling to have the strange joy she felt soured by morbidity.

  She and Dowd had reached the edge of the wood, where she had an unhindered view of the sky. The sun was sinking, gaining color as it fell and lending a new glamour to the vista of park, terraces, and house.

  “I feel as though I’ve been here before,” she said.

  The thought was strangely soothing. Like the feelings she had towards Oscar, it rose from some place in her she didn’t remember owning, and identifying its source was not for now as important as accepting its presence. That she did, gladly. She’d spent so much of her recent life in the grip of events that lay outside her power to control, it was a pleasure to touch a source of feeling that was so deep, so instinctive, she didn’t need to analyze its intentions. It was part of her, and therefore good. Tomorrow, maybe, or the day after, she’d question its significance more closely.

  “Do you remember anything specific about this place?” Dowd asked her.

  She mused on this for a time, then said, “No. It’s just a feeling of . . . belonging.”

  “Then maybe it’s better not to remember,” came the reply. “You know memory. It can be very treacherous.”

  She didn’t like this man, but there was merit in his observation. She could barely remember ten years of her own span; thinking back beyond that would be near impossible. If the recollections came, in the fullness of time, she’d welcome them. But for now she had a brimming cup of feelings, and perhaps they were all the more attractive for their mystery.

  There were raised voices from the chapel, though the echo within and the distance without made comprehension impossible.

  “A little sibling rivalry,” Dowd remarked. “How does it feel being a woman contested over?”

  “There’s no contest,” she replied.

  “They don’t seem to think so,” he said.

  The voices were shouts now, rising to a pitch, then suddenly subdued. One of them went on talking—Oscar, she thought—interrupted by exhortations from the other. Were they bargaining over her, throwing their bids back and forth? She started to think she should intervene. Go back to the chapel and make her allegiance, irrational as it was, quite plain. Better to tell the truth now than let Charlie bargain away his goods and chattels only to discover the prize wasn’t his to have. She turned and began to walk towards the chapel.

  “What are you doing?” said Dowd.

  “I have to talk to them.”

  “Mr. Godolphin told you—”

  “I heard him. I have to talk to them.”

  Off to her right she saw the voider rise from its haunches, its eyes not on her but on the open door. It sniffed the air, then let out a whistle as plaintive as a whine and started toward the building with a loping, almost bestial, gait. It reached the door before Jude, stepping on its dead brother in its haste to be inside. As she came within a couple of yards of the door she caught the scent that had set it whining. A breeze—too warm for the season and carrying perfumes too strange for this world—came to meet her out of the chapel, and to her horror she realized that history was repeating itself. The train between the Dominions was being boarded inside, and the wind she smelled was blowing along the track from its destination.

  “Oscar!” she yelled, stumbling over the body as she threw herself inside.

  The travelers were already dispatched. She saw them passing from view like Gentle and Pie ‘oh’ pah, except that the voider, desperate to go with them, was pitching itself into the flux of passage. She might have done the same, but that its error was evident. Caught in the flux, but too late to be taken where the travelers had gone, its whistle became a screech as it was unknitted. Its arms and head, thrust into the knot of power which marked the place of departure, began to turn inside out. Its lower half, untouched by the power, convulsed, its legs scrambling for purchase on the mosaic as it tried to retrieve itself. Too late. She saw its head and torso unveiled, saw the skin of its arms stripped and sucked away.

  The power that trapped it quickly died. But it was not so lucky. With its arms still clutching at the world it had perhaps glimpsed as its eyes went from its head, it dropped to the ground, the blue-black stew of its innards spilling across the mosaic. Even then, gutted and blind, its body refused to cease. It thrashed in its coils like the victims of a grand mal.

  Dowd stepped past her, approached the passing place cautiously for fear the flux had left an echo, but, finding none, drew a gun from inside his jacket and, eyeing some vulnerable place in the mess at his feet, fired twice. The voider’s throes slowed, then stopped. Sighing heavily, Dowd stepped away from the body and returned to where Jude stood.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “None of this is for your eyes.”

  “Why not? I know where they’ve gone.”

  “Oh, do you?” he said, raising a quizzical eyebrow. “And where’s that?”

  “To the Imajica,” she said, affecting complete familiarity with the notion, though it still astonished her.

  He made a tiny smile, though she wasn’t sure whether it was one of acceptance or subtle mockery. He watched her study him, almost basking in her scrutiny, taking it, perhaps, for simple admiration.

  “And how do you know about the Imajica?” he inquired.

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I think you know better than that,” he replied. “Though how much better, I’m not entirely sure.”

  She was something of an enigma to him, she suspected, and, as long as she remained so, might hope to keep him friendly.

  “Do you think they made it?” she asked.

  “Who knows? The voider may have spoilt their passage by trying to tag along. They may not have reached Yzordderrex.”

  “So where will they be?”

  “In the In Ovo, of course. Somewhere between here and the Second Dominion.”

  “And how will they get back?”

  “Simple,” he said. “They won’t.”

  IV

  So they waited. Or, rather, she waited, watching the sun disappear behind trees blotted with rookeries, and the evening stars appearing as light bringers in its place. Dowd busied himself dealing with the bodies of the voiders, dragging them out of the chapel, making a simple pyre of dead wood, and burning them upon it. He showed not the least concern that she was witnessing this, which was a lesson and perhaps a warning to her. He apparently assumed she was part of the secret world he and the voiders occupied, not subject to the laws and moralities the rest of the world was bounded by. In seeing all she’d seen, and passing herself off as expert in the ways of the Imajica, she had become a conspirator. There was no way back after this, to the company she’d kept and the life she’d known; she belonged to the secret, every bit as much as the secret belonged to her.

  That of itself would be no great loss if Godolphin returned. He would help her find her way through the mysteries. If he didn’t return, the consequences were less palatable. To be obliged to keep Dowd’s company, simply because they were fellow marginals, would be unbearable. She would surely wither and die. But then if Godolphin was not in her life, what could that matter? From ecstasy to despair in the space of an hour. Was it too much to hope the pendulum would swing back the other way before the day was out?

  The chill was adding to her misery, and—having no other source of warmth—she went over to the pyre, preparing to retreat if the scent or the sight was too offensive. But the smoke, which she’d expected to smell of burning meat, was almost aromatic, and the forms in the fire unrecognizable. Dowd offered her a cigarette, which she accepted, lighting it from a branch plucked from the edge of the fire.

  “What were they?” she asked him,
eyeing the remains.

  “You’ve never heard of voiders?” he said. “They’re the lowest of the low. I brought them through from the In Ovo myself, and I’m no Maestro, so that gives an idea of how gullible they are.”

  “When it smelled the wind—”

  “Yes, that was rather touching, wasn’t it?” Dowd said. “It smelled Yzordderrex.”

  “Maybe it was born there.”

  “Very possibly. I’ve heard it said they’re made of collective desire, but that’s not true. They’re revenge children. Got on women who were working the Way for themselves.”

  “Working the Way isn’t good?”

  “Not for your sex, it isn’t. It’s strictly forbidden.”

  “So somebody who breaks the law’s made pregnant as revenge?”

  “Exactly. You can’t abort voiders, you see. They’re stupid, but they fight, even in the womb. And killing something you gave birth to is strictly against the women’s codes. So they pay to have the voiders thrown into the In Ovo. They can survive there longer than just about anything. They feed on whatever they can find, including each other. And eventually, if they’re lucky, they get summoned by someone in this Dominion.”

  So much to learn, she thought. Perhaps she should cultivate Dowd’s friendship, however charmless he was. He seemed to enjoy parading his knowledge, and the more she knew the better prepared she’d be when she finally stepped through the door into Yzordderrex. She was about to ask him something more about the city when a gust of wind, blowing from out of the chapel, threw a flurry of sparks up between them.

  “They’re coming back,” she said, and started towards the building.

  “Be careful,” Dowd said. “You don’t know it’s them.”

  His warning went unheeded. She went to the door at a run, and reached it as the spicy summer wind died away. The interior of the chapel was gloomy, but she could see a single figure standing in the middle of the mosaic. It staggered towards her, its breathing ragged. The light from the fire caught it as it came within two yards of her. It was Oscar Godolphin, his hand up to his bleeding nose.

  “That bastard,” he said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Dead,” he said plainly. “I had to do it, Judith. He was crazy. God alone knows what he might have said or done. . . .” He put his arm towards her. “Will you help me? He damn near broke my nose.”

  “I’ll take him,” Dowd said possessively. He stepped past her, fetching a handkerchief from his pocket to put to Oscar’s nose. It was waved away.

  “I’ll survive,” Oscar said. “Let’s just get home.” They were out of the chapel now, and Oscar was eyeing the fire.

  “The voiders,” Dowd explained.

  Oscar threw a glance at Judith. “He made you pyre-watch with him?” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He looked back at Dowd, pained.

  “That’s no way to treat a lady,” he said. “We’re going to have to do better in future.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s coming to live with us. Aren’t you, Judith?”

  She hesitated a shamelessly short time; then she said, “Yes, I am.”

  Satisfied, he went over to look at the pyre.

  “Come back tomorrow,” she heard him tell Dowd. “Scatter the ashes and bury the bones. I’ve got a little prayer book Peccable gave me. We’ll find something appropriate in there.”

  While he spoke she stared into the murk of the chapel, trying to imagine the journey that had been taken from here, and the city at the other end from which that tantalizing wind had blown. She would be there one day. She’d lost a husband in pursuit of passage, but from her present perspective that seemed like a negligible loss. There was a new order of feeling in her, founded at the sight of Oscar Godolphin. She didn’t yet know what he would come to mean to her, but perhaps she could persuade him to take her away with him, someday soon.

  Eager as she was to create in her mind’s eye the mysteries that lay beyond the veil of the Fifth, Jude’s imagination, for all its fever, could never have conjured the reality of that journey. Inspired by a few clues from Dowd, she had imagined the In Ovo as a kind of wasteland, where voiders hung like drowned men in deep-sea trenches, and creatures the sun would never see crawled towards her, their paths lit by their own sickly luminescence. But the inhabitants of the In Ovo beggared the bizarreness of any ocean floor. They had forms and appetites that no book had ever set down. They had rages and frustrations that were centuries old.

  And the scenes she’d imagined awaiting her on the other side of that prison were also very different from those she’d created. If she’d traveled on the Yzordderrexian Express she’d would not have been delivered into the middle of a summer city but into a dampish cellar, lined with the merchant Peccable’s forbidden cache of charms and petrifications. In order to reach the open air, she would have had to climb the stairs and pass through the house itself. Once she’d reached the street, she’d have found some of her expectations satisfied at least. The air was warm and spicy there, and the sky was bright. But it was not a sun that blazed overhead, it was a comet, trailing its glory across the Second Dominion. And if she stared at it a moment, then looked down at the street, she’d have found its reflection glittering in a pool of blood. Here was the spot where the brawl between Oscar and Charlie had ended, and where the defeated brother had been left.

  He had not remained there for very long. News of a man dressed in foreign garb and dumped in the gutter had soon spread, and before the last of his blood had drained from his body three individuals never before seen in this Kesparate had come to claim him. They were Dearthers, to judge by their tattoos, and had Jude been standing on Peccable’s step watching the scene, she would have been touched to see how reverently they treated their burden as they spirited it away. How they smiled down at that bruised and lolling face. How one of them wept. She might also have noticed—though in the flurry of the street this detail might have escaped her eye—that though the defeated man lay quite still in the cradle his bearers made of their limbs, his eyes closed, his arms trailing until they were folded across his chest, said chest was not entirely motionless.

  Charles Estabrook, abandoned for dead in the filth of Yzordderrex, left its streets with enough health in his body to be dubbed a loser, not a corpse.

  Twenty-two

  I

  THE DAYS FOLLOWING PIE and Gentle’s second departure from Beatrix seemed to shorten as they climbed, supporting the suspicion that the nights in the Jokalaylau were longer than those in the lowlands. It was impossible to confirm that this was so, because their two timekeepers—Gentle’s beard and Pie’s bowels—became increasingly unreliable as they climbed, the former because Gentle ceased to shave, the latter because the travelers’ desire to eat, and thus their need to defecate, dwindled the higher they went. Far from inspiring appetite, the rarefied air became a feast in itself, and they traveled for hour upon hour without their thoughts once turning to physical need. They had each other’s company, of course, to keep them from completely forgetting their bodies and their purpose, but more reliable still were the beasts on whose shaggy backs they rode. When the doeki grew hungry they simply stopped, and would not be bullied or coaxed into moving from whatever bush or pieceof pasture they’d found until they were sated. At first, this was an irritation, and the riders cursed as they slipped from their saddles on such occasions, knowing they had an idling hour ahead while the animals grazed. But as the days passed and the air grew thinner, they came to depend upon the rhythm of the doekis’ digestive tracts and made such stopping places mealtimes for themselves.

  It soon became apparent that Pie’s calculations as to the length of this journey had been hopelessly optimistic. The only part of the mystif’s predictions that experience was confirming was the hardship. Even before they reached the snow line, both riders and mounts were showing signs of fatigue, and the track they were following became less visible by the mile as the soft earth chilled and froze, refusing the traces
of those who had preceded them. With the prospect of snowfields and glaciers ahead, they rested the doeki for a day and encouraged the beasts to gorge themselves on what would be the last available pasture until they reached the other side of the range.

  Gentle had called his mount Chester, after dear old Klein, with whom it shared a certain ruminative charm. Pie declined to name the other beast, however, claiming it was bad luck to eat anything you knew by name, and circumstances might very well oblige them to dine on doeki meat before they reached the borders of the Third Dominion. That small disagreement aside, they kept their exchanges frictionless when they set off again, both consciously skirting any discussion of the events in Beatrix or their significance. The cold soon became aggressive, the coats they’d been given barely adequate defense against the assault of winds that blew up walls of dusty snow so dense they often obliterated the way ahead. When that happened Pie pulled out the compass—the face of which looked more like a star map to Gentle’s untutored eye—and assessed their direction from that. Only once did Gentle remark that he hoped the mystif knew what it was doing, earning such a withering glance for his troubles it silencedhim utterly on the matter thereafter.

  Despite weather that was worsening by the day—making Gentle think wistfully of an English January—good fortune did not entirely desert them. On the fifth day beyond the snow line, in a lull between gusts, Gentle heard bells ringing, and following the sound they discovered a group of half a dozen mountain men, tending to a flock of a hundred or more cousins to the terrestrial goat, these shaggier by far and purple as crocuses. The herders spoke no English, and only one of them, whose name was Kuthuss and who boasted a beard as shaggy and as purple as his beasts (leading Gentle to wonder what marriages of convenience had occurred in these lonely uplands), had any words in his vocabulary that Pie could comprehend. What he told was grim. The herders were bringing their herds down from the High Pass early because the snow had covered ground the beasts would have grazed for another twenty days in a normal season. This was not, he repeated several times, a normal season. He had never known the snow to comeso early or fall so copiously; never known the winds to be so bitter. In essence, he advised them not to attempt the route ahead. It would be tantamount to suicide. Pie and Gentle talked this advice over. The journey was already taking far longer than they’d anticipated. If they went back down below the snow line, tempting as the prospect of relative warmth and fresh food was, they were wasting yet more time. Days when all manner of horrors could be unfolding: a hundred villages like Beatrix destroyed, and countless lives lost.