Imajica

“Promise me you’ll let this subject alone,” he went on.

  “I want to see Yzordderrex, Oscar.”

  “Promise me. No more talk about the tower, in this house or out of it. Say it, Judith.”

  “All right. I won’t talk about the tower.”

  “In this house—”

  “—or out of it. But Oscar—”

  “What, sweet?”

  “I still want to see Yzordderrex.”

  II

  The morning after this exchange she went up to Highgate. It was another rainy day, and failing to find an unoccupied cab she braved the Underground. It was a mistake. She’d never liked traveling by tube at the best of times—it brought out her latent claustrophobia—but she recalled as she rode that two of those murdered in the spate of killings had died in these tunnels: one pushed in front of a crowded train as it drew into Piccadilly station, the other stabbed to death at midnight, somewhere on the Jubilee Line. This was not a safe way to travel for someone who had even the slightest inkling of the prodigies half hidden in the world; and she was one of those few. So it was with no little relief she stepped out into the open air at Archway station (the clouds had cleared) and started up Highgate Hill on foot. She had no difficulty finding the tower itself, though the banality of its design, together with the shield of trees in full leaf in front of it, meant few eyes were likely to look its way.

  Despite the dire warnings issued by Oscar it was difficult to find much intimidating about the place, with the spring sunshine warm enough to make her slip off her jacket, and the grass busy with sparrows quarreling over worms raised by the rain. She scanned the windows, looking for some sign of occupation, but saw none. Avoiding the front door, with its camera trained on the step, she headed down the side of the building, her progress unimpeded by walls or barbed wire. The owners had clearly decided the tower’s best defense lay in its utter lack of character, and the less they did to keep trespassers out the fewer would be attracted in the first place. There was even less to see from the back than the front. There were blinds down over most of the windows, and those few that were not covered let onto empty rooms. She made a complete circuit of the tower, looking for some other way into it, but there was none.

  As she returned to the front of the building she tried to imagine the passageways buried beneath her feet—the books piled in the darkness, and the imprisoned soul lying in a deeper darkness still—hoping her mind might be able to go where her body could not. But that exercise proved as fruitless as her window-watching. The real world was implacable; it wouldn’t shift a particle of soil to let her through. Discouraged, she made one final circuit of the tower, then decided to give up. Maybe she’d come back here at night, she thought, when solid reality didn’t insist on her senses so brutally. Or maybe seek another journey under the influence of the blue eye, though this option made her nervous. She had no real grasp of the mechanism by which the eye induced such flights, and she feared giving it power over her. Oscar already had enough of that.

  She put her jacket back on and headed away from the tower. To judge by the absence of traffic on Hornsey Lane, the hill—which had been clogged with traffic—was still blocked, preventing drivers from making their way in this direction. The gulf usually filled with the din of vehicles was not empty, however. There were footsteps close behind her; and a voice.

  “Who are you?”

  She glanced around, not assuming the question was directed at her, but finding that she and the questioner—a woman in her sixties, shabbily dressed and sickly—were the only people in sight. Moreover, the woman’s stare was fixed upon her with a near manic intensity. Again, the question, coming from a mouth that had about it a spittle-flecked asymmetry that suggested the speaker had suffered a stroke in the past.

  “Who are you?”

  Already irritated by her failure at the tower, Judith was in no mood to humor what was plainly the local schizophrenic and was turning on her heel to walk away when the woman spoke again.

  “Don’t you know they’ll hurt you?”

  “Who will?” she said.

  “The people in the tower. The Tabula Rasa. What were you looking for?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You were looking very hard for nothing.”

  “Are you spying for them?”

  The woman made an ugly sound that Judith took to be a laugh. “They don’t even know I’m alive,” she said. Then, for the third time, “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Judith.”

  “I’m Clara Leash,” the woman said. She cast a glance back in the direction of the tower. “Walk on,” she said. “There’s a church halfway up the hill. I’ll meet you there.”

  “What is all this about?”

  “At the church, not here.”

  So saying, she turned her back on Judith and walked off, her agitation enough to dissuade Judith from following. Two words in their short exchange convinced her she should wait at the church and find out what Clara Leash had to say, however. Those words were Tabula Rasa. She hadn’t heard them spoken since her conversation with Charlie at the estate, when he’d told her how he’d been passed over for membership in favor of Oscar. He’d made light of it at the time, and much of what he’d said had been blotted from her mind by the violence and the revelations that followed. Now she found herself digging for recollections of what he’d said about the organization. Something about the tainted soil of England, and her saying tainted by what?, and Charlie making some comical reply. Now she knew what that taint was: magic. In that bland tower the lives of the men and women whose bodies had been found in shallow graves or scraped from the rails of the Piccadilly Line had been judged and foundcorrupt. No wonder Oscar was losing weight and sobbing in his sleep. He was a member of a Society formed for the express purpose of eradicating a second, and diminishing, society, to which he also belonged. For all his self-possession he was the servant of two masters: magic and its despoiler. It fell to her to help him by whatever means she could. She was his lover, and without her aid he would eventually be crushed between contrary imperatives. And he in his turn was her ticket to Yzordderrex, without whom she would never see the glories of the Imajica. They needed each other, alive and sane.

  She waited at the church for half an hour before Clara Leash appeared, looking fretful.

  “Out here’s no good,” she said. “Inside.”

  They stepped into the gloomy building and sat close to the altar so as not to be overheard by the three noontime supplicants who were at their prayers towards the back. It was not an ideal place in which to have a whispered conversation; their sibilance carried even if the sense did not, its echoes coming back to meet them off the bare walls. Nor was there much trust between them to begin with. To defend herself from Clara’s glare, Judith spent the early part of their exchange with her back half turned to the woman, only facing her fully when they’d disposed of the circumlocutions and she felt confident enough to ask the question most on her mind.

  “What do you know about the Tabula Rasa?”

  “Everything there is to know,” Clara replied. “I was a member of the Society for many years.”

  “But they think you’re dead?”

  “They’re not far wrong. I haven’t got more than a few months left, which is why it’s important I pass along what I know.”

  “To me?”

  “That depends,” she said. “First I want to know what you were doing at the tower.”

  “I was looking for a way in.”

  “Have you ever been inside?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “My mind’s been inside even though my body hasn’t,” Judith said, fully expecting a repeat of Clara’s weird little laugh in response.

  Instead, the woman said, “On the night of December the thirty-first.”

  “How the hell did you know that?”

  Clara put her hand up to Judith’s face. Her fingers were icy cold. “First, you should know how I depar
ted the Tabula Rasa.”

  Though she told her story without embellishments, it took some time, given that so much of what she was explaining required footnotes for Judith to fully comprehend its significance. Clara, like Oscar, was the descendant of one of the Society’s founding members and had been brought up to believe in its basic principles: England, tainted by magic—indeed, almost destroyed by it—had to be protected from any cult or individual who sought to educate new generations in its corrupt practices. When Judith asked how this near destruction had come about, Clara’s answer was a story in itself. Two hundred years ago this coming midsummer, she explained, a ritual had been attempted that had gone tragically awry.

  Its purpose had been to reconcile the reality of earth with those of four other dimensions.

  “The Dominions,” Judith said, dropping her voice, which was already low, lower still.

  “Say it out loud,” Clara replied. “Dominions! Dominions!” She only raised her voice to speaking volume, but after such a time whispering it was shockingly loud. “It’s been a secret for too long,” she said. “And that gives the enemy power.”

  “Who is the enemy?”

  “There are so many,” she said. “In this Dominion, the Tabula Rasa and its servants. And it’s got plenty of those, believe me, in the very highest places.”

  “How?”

  “It’s not difficult, when your members are the descendants of kingmakers. And if influence fails, you can always buy your way past democracy. It’s going on all the time.”

  “And in the other Dominions?”

  “Getting information’s more difficult, especially now. I knew two women who regularly passed between here and the Reconciled Dominions. One of them was found dead a week ago, the other’s disappeared. She may also have been murdered—”

  “By the Tabula Rasa.”

  “You know a good deal, don’t you? What’s your source?”

  Judith had known Clara would ask that question eventually and had been trying to decide how she would answer it. Her belief in Clara Leash’s integrity grew apace, but wouldn’t it be precipitous to share with a woman she’d taken for a bag lady only two hours before a secret that could be Oscar’s death warrant if known to the Tabula Rasa?

  “I can’t tell you my source,” she said. “This person’s in great danger as it is.”

  “And you don’t trust me.” She raised her hand to ward off any protest. “Don’t sweet-talk me!” she said. “You don’t trust me, and why should I blame you? But let me ask this: Is this source of yours a man?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You asked me before who the enemy was, and I said the Tabula Rasa. But we’ve got a more obvious enemy: the opposite sex.”

  “What?”

  “Men, Judith. The destroyers.”

  “Oh, now wait—”

  “There used to be Goddesses throughout the Dominions. Powers that took our sex’s part in the cosmic drama. They’re all dead, Judith. They didn’t just die of old age. They were systematically eradicated by the enemy.”

  “Ordinary men don’t kill Goddesses.”

  “Ordinary men serve extraordinary men. Extraordinary men get their visions from the Gods. And Gods kill Goddesses.”

  “That’s too simple. It sounds like a school lesson.”

  “Learn it, then. And if you can, disprove it. I’d like that, truly I would. I’d like to discover that the Goddesses are all in hiding somewhere—”

  “Like the woman under the tower?”

  For the first time in this dialogue, Clara was lost for words. She simply stared, leaving Jude to fill the silence of her astonishment.

  “When I said I’ve been into the tower in my mind, that isn’t strictly true,” Jude said. “I’ve only been under the tower. There’s a cellar there, like a maze. It’s full of books. And behind one of the walls there’s a woman. I thought she was dead at first, but she isn’t. She’s maybe close to it, but she’s holding on.”

  Clara was visibly shaken by this account. “I thought I was the only one who knew she was there,” she said.

  “More to the point, do you know who she is?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Clara said, and picked up the story she’d been diverted from earlier: the tale of how she’d come to leave the Tabula Rasa.

  The library beneath the tower, she explained, was the most comprehensive collection of manuscripts dealing with the occult sciences—but more particularly the legends and lore of the Imajica—in the world. It had been gathered by the men who’d founded the Society, led by Roxborough and Godolphin, to keep from the hands and minds of innocent Englishmen the stain of things Imajical; but rather than cataloguing the collection—making an index of these forbidden books—generations of the Tabula Rasa had simply left them to fester.

  “I took it upon myself to sort through the collection. Believe it or not, I was once a very ordered woman. I got it from my father. He was in the military. At first I was watched by two other members of the Society. That’s the law. No member of the Society is allowed into the library alone, and if any one judges either of the other two to be in any way unduly interested or influenced by the volumes, they can be tried by the Society and executed. I don’t think it’s ever been done. Half the books are in Latin, and who reads Latin? The other half—you’ve seen for yourself—they’re rotting on their spines, like all of us. But I wanted order, the way Daddy would have liked it. Everything neat and tidy.

  “My companions soon got tired of my obsession and left me to it. And in the middle of the night I felt something . . . or somebody . . . pulling at my thoughts, plucking them out of my scalp one by one, like hairs. Of course I thought it was the books, at first. I thought the words had got some power over me. I tried to leave, but you know I really didn’t want to. I’d been Daddy’s repressed little daughter for fifty years, and I was about ready to crack. Celestine knew it too—”

  “Celestine is the woman in the wall?”

  “I believe it’s her, yes.”

  “But you don’t know who she is?”

  “I’m coming to that,” Clara said. “Roxborough’s house stood on the land where the tower now stands. The cellar is the cellar of that house. Celestine was—indeed, still is—Roxborough’s prisoner. He walled her up because he didn’t dare kill her. She’d seen the face of Hapexamendios, the God of Gods. She was insane, but she’d been touched by divinity, and even Roxborough didn’t dare lay a finger on her.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Roxborough wrote a confession, a few days before he died. He knew the woman he’d walled up would outlive him by centuries, and I suppose he also knew that sooner or later somebody would find her. So the confession was also a warning to whatever poor, victimized man came along, telling him that she was not to be touched. Bury her again, he said, I remember that very clearly. Bury her again, in the deepest abyss your wits may devise—“

  “Where did you find this confession?”

  “In the wall, that night when I was alone. I believe Celestine led me to it, by plucking thoughts out of my head and putting new ones in. But she plucked too hard. My mind gave up. I had a stroke down there. I wasn’t found for three days.”

  “That’s horrible—”

  “My suffering’s nothing compared to hers. Roxborough had found this woman in London, or his spies had, and he knew she was a creature of immense power. He probably realized it more clearly than she did, in fact, because he says in the confession she was a stranger to herself. But she’d seen sights no other human being had ever witnessed. She’d been snatched from the Fifth Dominion, escorted across the Imajica, and taken into the presence of Hapexamendios.”

  “Why?”

  “It gets stranger. When he interrogated her, she told him she’d been brought back into the Fifth Dominion pregnant.”

  “She was having God’s child?”

  “That’s what she told Roxborough.”

  “She could have been inventing it all,
just to keep him from hurting her.”

  “I don’t think he’d have done that. In fact I think he was half in love with her. He said in the confession he felt like his friend Godolphin. I’m broken by a woman’s eye, he wrote.”

  “That’s an odd phrase,” Jude thought, thinking of the stone as she did so: its stare, its authority.

  “Well, Godolphin died obsessing on some mistress he’d loved and lost, claiming he’d been destroyed by her. The men were always the innocents, you see. Victims of female connivings. I daresay Roxborough’d persuaded himself that walling Celestine up was an act of love. Keeping her under his thumb forever.”

  “What happened to the child?” Judith said.

  “Maybe she can tell us herself,” Clara replied.

  “Then we have to get her out.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Do you have any idea how?”

  “Not yet,” Clara said. “Until you appeared I was ready to despair. But between the two of us we’ll find some way to save her.”

  It was getting late, and Jude was anxious that her absence not be noted, so the plans they laid were sketchy in the extreme. A further examination of the tower was clearly in order, this time—Clara proposed—under cover of darkness.

  “Tonight,” she suggested.

  “No, that’s too soon. Give me a day to make up some excuse for being out for the night.”

  “Who’s the watchdog?” Clara said.

  “Just a man.”

  “Suspicious?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, Celestine’s waited a long time to be set free. She can wait another twenty-four hours. But please, no longer. I’m not a well woman.”

  Jude put her hand over Clara’s hand, the first contact between them since the woman had touched her icy fingers to Jude’s cheek. “You’re not going to die,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, I am. It’s no great hardship. But I want to see Celestine’s face before I leave.”

  “We will,” Judith said. “If not tomorrow night, soon after.”

  III

  She didn’t believe what Clara had said about men pertained to Oscar. He was no destroyer of Goddesses, either by hand or proxy. But Dowd was another matter entirely. Though his façade was civilized—almost prissy at times—she would never forget the casual way he’d disposed of the voiders’ bodies, warming his hands at the pyre as though they were branches, not bones, that were cracking in the flames. And, as bad luck would have it, Dowd was back at the house when she returned, and Oscar was not, so it was his questions she was obliged to answer if she wasn’t to arouse his suspicions with silence. When he asked her what she’d done with the day, she told him she’d gone out for a long walk along the Embankment. He then inquired as to whether the tube had been crowded, though she’d not told him she’d traveled that way. She said it was. You should take a cab next time, he said. Or, better still, allow me to drive you. I’m certain Mr. Godolphin wouldprefer you to travel in comfort, he said. She thanked him for his kindness. Will you be planning other trips soon? he asked. She had her story for the following evening already prepared, but Dowd’s manner never failed to throw her off balance, and she was certain any lie she told now would be instantly spotted, so she said she didn’t know, and he let the subject drop.