Imajica

  “They’re protecting what little they’ve got left,” Pie said. “The Autarch’s sent in spies before. There’ve been purges and abductions. Children taken. Heads returned.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Gentle made a small, apologetic shrug. “I’m sorry,” he said, not just to Pie but to them all. “I just wanted to say my piece.”

  “Well, it’s said. Will you leave it to me now? Give me a few hours, and I can convince them we’re sincere.”

  “Of course, if that’s what it’ll take. Huzzah and I can wait around until you’ve worked it all out.”

  “Not here,” Pie said. “I don’t think that would be wise.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t,” Pie said, softly insisting.

  “You’re afraid they’re going to kill us all, aren’t you?”

  “There is . . . some doubt . . . yes.”

  “Then we’ll all leave now.”

  “That’s not an option. I stay and you leave. That’s what they’re offering. It’s not up for negotiation.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ll be all right, Gentle,” Pie said. “Why don’t you go back to the café where we had breakfast? Can you find it again?”

  “I can,” Huzzah said. She’d spent the time of this exchange with downcast eyes. Now that they were raised, they were full of tears.

  “Wait for me there, angel,” Pie said, conferring Gentle’s epithet upon her for the first time. “Both of you angels.”

  “If you’re not with us by twilight we’ll come back and find you,” Gentle said. He threw his gaze wide as he said this, a smile on his lips and threat in his eyes.

  Pie put out a hand to be shaken. Gentle took it, drawing the mystif closer.

  “This is very proper,” he said.

  “Any more would be unwise,” Pie replied. “Trust me.”

  “I always have. I always will.”

  “We’re lucky, Gentle,” Pie said.

  “How so?”

  “To have had this time together.”

  Gentle met the mystif’s gaze, as it spoke, and realized there was a deeper farewell beneath this formality, which he didn’t want to hear. For all its bright talk, the mystif was by no means certain they would be meeting again.

  “I’m going to see you in a few hours, Pie,” Gentle said. “I’m depending on that. Do you understand? We have vows.”

  The mystif nodded and let its hand slip from Gentle’s grasp. Huzzah’s smaller, warmer fingers were there, ready to take its place.

  “We’d better go, angel,” he said, and led Huzzah back towards the gate, leaving Pie in the custody of the squad.

  She glanced back at the mystif twice as they walked, but Gentle resisted the temptation. It would do Pie no good to be sentimental at this juncture. Better just to proceed on the understanding that they’d be reunited in a matter of hours, drinking coffee in the Oke T’Noon. At the gate, however, he couldn’t keep himself from glancing down the street of blossom-laden trees for one last glimpse of the creature he loved. But the execution squad had already disappeared into the chianculi, taking the prodigal with them.

  Thirty-two

  I

  WITH THE LONG YZORDDERREXIAN twilight still many hours from falling, the Autarch had found himself a chamber close to the Pivot Tower where the day could not come. Here the consolations brought by the kreauchee were not spoiled by light. It was easy to believe that everything was a dream and, being a dream, not worth mourning if—or rather when—it passed. In his unerring fashion Rosengarten had discovered the niche, however, and to it he brought news as disruptive as any light. A quiet attempt to eradicate the cell of Dearthers led by Father Athanasius had been turned into a public spectacle by Quaisoir’s arrival. Violence had flared and was already spreading. The troops who had mounted the original siege were thought to have been massacred to a man, though this could not now be verified because the docklands had been sealed off by makeshift barricades.

  “This is the signal the factions have been waiting for,” Rosengarten opined. “If we don’t stamp this out immediately, every little cult in the Dominion’s going to tell its disciples that the Day’s come.”

  “Time for judgment, eh?”

  “That’s what they’ll say.”

  “Perhaps they’re right,” the Autarch replied. “Why don’t we let them run riot for a while? None of them like each other. The Scintillants hate the Dearthers, the Dearthers hate the Zenetics. They can all slit each other’s throats.”

  “But the city, sir.”

  “The city! The city! What about the frigging city? It’s forfeit, Rosengarten. Don’t you see that? I’ve been sitting here thinking, If I could call the comet down on top of it I would. Let it die the way it’s lived: beautifully. Why so tragic, Rosengarten? There’ll be other cities. I can build another Yzordderrex.”

  “Then maybe we should get you out now, before the riots spread.”

  “We’re safe here, aren’t we?” the Autarch said. A silence followed. “You’re not so sure.”

  “There’s such a swell of violence out there.”

  “And you say she started it?”

  “It was in the air.”

  “But she was the inspiring spark?” He sighed. “Oh, damn her, damn her. You’d better fetch the generals.”

  “All of them?”

  “Mattalaus and Racidio. They can turn this place into a fortress.” He got to his feet. “I’m going to speak with my loving wife.”

  “Shall we come and find you there?”

  “Not unless you want to witness murder, no.”

  As before, he found Quaisoir’s chambers empty, but this time Concupiscentia—no longer flirtatious but trembling and dry-eyed, which was like tears to her seeping clan—knew where her mistress was: in her private chapel. He stormed in, to find Quaisoir lighting candles at the altar.

  “I was calling for you,” he said.

  “Yes, I heard,” she replied. Her voice, which had once made every word an incantation, was drab; as was she.

  “Why didn’t you answer?”

  “I was praying,” she said. She blew out the taper she’d lit the candles with and turned from him to face the altar. It was, like her chamber, a study in excess. A carved and painted Christ hung on a gilded cross, surrounded by cherubim and seraphim.

  “Who were you praying for?” he asked her.

  “For myself,” she said simply.

  He took hold of her shoulder, spinning her around. “What about the men who were torn apart by the mob? No prayers for them?”

  “They’ve got people to pray for them. People who loved them. I’ve got nobody.”

  “My heart bleeds,” he said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” she replied. “But the Man of Sorrows bleeds for me.”

  “I doubt that, lady,” he said, more amused by her piety than irritated.

  “I saw Him today,” she said.

  This was a new conceit. He pandered to it. “Where was this?” he asked her, all sincerity.

  “At the harbor. He appeared on a roof, right above me. They tried to shoot Him down, and He was struck. I saw Him struck. But when they looked for the body it had gone.”

  “You know you should go down to the Bastion with the rest of the madwomen,” he told her. “You can wait for the Second Coming there. I’ll have all this transported down there if you’d like.”

  “He’ll come for me here,” she said. “He’s not afraid. You’re the one who’s afraid.”

  The Autarch looked at his palm. “Am I sweating? No. Am I on my knees begging Him to be kind? No. Accuse me of most crimes, and I’m probably guilty. But not fear. You know me better than that.”

  “He’s here, in Yzordderrex.”

  “Then let Him come. I won’t be leaving. He’ll find me if He wants me so badly. He won’t find me praying, you understand. Pissing maybe, if He could bear the sight.” The Autarch took Quaisoir’s hand and tugged it down between his legs. “He might find He’s the one who
’s humbled.” He laughed. “You used to pray to this fellow, lady. Remember? Say you remember.”

  “I confess it.”

  “It’s not a crime. It’s the way we were made. What are we to do but suffer it?” He suddenly drew close. “Don’t think you can desert me for Him. We belong to each other. Whatever harm you do me, you do yourself. Think about that. If our dreams burn, we cook in them together.”

  His message was getting through. She didn’t struggle in his embrace, but shook with terror.

  “I don’t want to take your comforts from you. Have your Man of Sorrows if He helps you sleep. But remember how our flesh is joined. Whatever little sways you learned down in the Bastion, it doesn’t change what you are.”

  “Prayers aren’t enough,” she said, half to herself.

  “Prayers are useless.”

  “Then I have to find Him. Go to Him. Show Him my adoration.”

  “You’re going nowhere.”

  “I have to. It’s the only way. He’s in the city, waiting for me.”

  She pressed him away from her.

  “I’ll go to Him in rags,” she said, starting to tear at her robes. “Or naked! Better naked!”

  The Autarch didn’t attempt to catch hold of her again but withdrew from her, as though her lunacy were contagious, letting her tear at her clothes and draw blood with the violence of her revulsion. As she did so she started to pray aloud, her prayer full of promises to come to Him, on her knees, and beg His forgiveness. As she turned, delivering this exhortation to the altar, the Autarch lost patience with her hysteria and took her by the hair—twin fistfuls of it—drawing her back against him.

  “You’re not listening!” he said, both compassion and disgust overwhelmed by a rage even the kreauchee couldn’t quell. “There’s only one Lord in Yzordderrex!”

  He threw her aside and mounted the steps of the altar in three strides, clearing the candles from it with one backward sweep of his arm. Then he clambered up onto the altar itself to drag down the crucifix. Quaisoir was on her feet to stop him, but neither her appeals nor her fists slowed him. The gilded seraphim came first, wrenched from their carved clouds and pitched behind him to the ground. Then he put his hands behind the Savior’s head and pulled. The crown He wore was meticulously carved, and the thorns punctured his fingers and palms, but the sting only gave fire to his sinews, and a snarl of splintered wood announced his victory. The crucifix came away from the wall, and all he had to do was step aside to let gravity take it. For an instant he thought Quaisoir intended to fling herself beneath its weight, but a heartbeat before it toppled she stumbled back from the steps, and it fell amid the litter of dismembered seraphim, cracking as it struck the stone floor.

  The commotion had of course brought witnesses. From his place on the altar the Autarch saw Rosengarten racing down the aisle, his weapon drawn.

  “It’s all right, Rosengarten!” he panted. “The worst is over.”

  “You’re bleeding, sir.”

  The Autarch sucked at his hand. “Will you have my wife escorted to her chambers?” he said, spitting out the gold-flecked blood. “She’s to be allowed no sharp instruments, nor any object with which she could do herself any harm. I’m afraid she’s very sick. We’ll have to watch over her night and day from now on.”

  Quaisoir was kneeling among the pieces of the crucifix, sobbing there.

  “Please, lady,” the Autarch said, jumping down from the altar to coax her up. “Why waste your tears on a dead man? Worship nothing, lady, except in adoration . . .” He stopped, puzzled by the words; then he took them up again. “In adoration of your True Self.”

  She raised her head, heeling away the tears with her hands to stare at him.

  “I’ll have some kreauchee found for you,” he said. “To calm you a little.”

  “I don’t want kreauchee,” she murmured, her voice washed of all color. “I want forgiveness.”

  “Then I forgive you,” he replied, with flawless sincerity.

  “Not from you,” she said.

  He studied her grief for a time. “We were going to love and live forever,” he said softly. “When did you become so old?”

  She made no reply, so he left her there, kneeling in the debris. Rosengarten’s underling, Seidux, had already arrived to take charge of her.

  “Be considerate,” he told Seidux as they crossed at the door. “She was once a great lady.”

  He didn’t wait to watch her removal but went with Rosengarten to meet Generals Mattalaus and Racidio. He felt better for his exertion. Though like any great Maestro he was untouched by age, his system still became sluggish and needed an occasional stirring up. What better way to do it than by demolishing idols?

  As they passed by a window which gave onto the city the spring went from his step, however, seeing the signs of destruction visible below. For all his defiant talk of building another Yzordderrex, it would be painful to watch this one torn apart, Kesparate by Kesparate. Half a dozen columns of smoke were already rising from conflagrations across the city. Ships were burning in the harbor, and there were bordellos aflame around Lickerish Street. As Rosengarten had predicted, all the apocalyptics in the city would fulfill their prophecies today. Those who’d said corruption came by sea were burning boats; those who railed against sex had lit their torches for the brothels. He glanced back towards Quaisoir’s chapel as his consort’s sobs were raised afresh.

  “It’s best we don’t stop her weeping,” he said. “She has good reason.”

  II

  The full extent of the harm Dowd had done himself in his late boarding of the Yzordderrexian Express did not become apparent until their arrival in the icon-filled cellar beneath the merchant’s house. Though he’d escaped being turned inside out, his trespass had wounded him considerably. He looked as though he’d been dragged face down over a freshly graveled road, the skin on his face and hands shredded and the sinew beneath oozing the meager filth he had in his veins. The last time Jude had seen him bleed, the wound had been self-inflicted and he’d seemed to suffer scarcely at all; but not so now. Though he held on to her wrist with an implacable grip and threatened her with a death that would make Clara’s seem merciful if she attempted to escape him, he was a vulnerable captor, wincing as he hauled her up the stairs into the house above.

  This was not the way she had imagined herself entering Yzordderrex. But then the scene she met at the top of the stairs was not as she’d imagined either. Or rather, it was all too imaginable. The house—which was deserted—was large and bright, its design and decoration almost depressingly recognizable. She reminded herself that this was the house of Oscar’s business partner Peccable, and the influence of Fifth Dominion aesthetics was likely to be strong in a dwelling that had a doorway to Earth in its cellar. But the vision of domestic bliss this interior conjured was depressingly bland. The only touch of exoticism was the parrot sulking on its perch by the window; otherwise this nest was irredeemably suburban, from the row of family photographs beside the clock on the mantelpiece to the drooping tulips in the vase on the well-polished dining room table.

  She was sure there were more remarkable sights in the street outside, but Dowd was in no mood, or indeed condition, to go exploring. He told her they would wait here until he was feeling fitter, and if any of the family returned in the meanwhile she was to keep her silence. He’d do the talking, he said, or else she’d put not only her own life in jeopardy but that of the whole Peccable clan.

  She believed him perfectly capable of such violence, especially in his present pain, which he demanded she help him ameliorate. She dutifully bathed his face, using water and towels from the kitchen. The damage was regrettably more superficial than she’d initially believed, and once the wounds were cleaned he rapidly began to show signs of recovery. She was now presented with a dilemma. Given that he was healing with superhuman speed, if she was going to exploit his vulnerability and escape it had to be soon. But if she did—if she fled the house there and then—she??
?d have turned her back on the only guide to the city she had. And, more importantly, she would be gone from the spot to which she still hoped Oscar would come, following her across the In Ovo. She couldn’t afford to take the risk of his arriving and finding her gone into a city that from all reports was so vast they might search for each other ten lifetimes and never cross paths.

  A wind began to get up after a while, and it carried a member of the Peccable family to the door. A gangling girl in her late teens or early twenties, dressed in a long coat and flower-print dress, who greeted the presence of two strangers in the house, one clearly recovering from injury, in a studiedly sanguine fashion.

  “Are you friends of Papa’s?” she asked, removing her spectacles to reveal eyes that were severely crossed.

  Dowd said they were and began to explain how they’d come to be here, but she politely asked him if he’d hold off his story until the house had been shuttered against the coming storm. She turned to Jude for help in this, and Dowd made no objection, correctly assuming that his captive was not going to venture out into an unknown city as a storm came upon it. So, with the first gusts already rattling the door, Jude followed Hoi-Polloi around the house, locking any windows that were open even an inch, then closing the shutters in case the glass was blown in.

  Even though the sandy wind was already obscuring the distance, Jude got a glimpse of the city outside. It was frustratingly brief, but sufficient to reassure her that when she finally got to walk the streets of Yzordderrex her months of waiting would be rewarded with wonders. There were myriad tiers of streets set on the slopes above the house, leading up to the monumental walls and towers of what Hoi-Polloi identified as the Autarch’s palace, and just visible from the attic room window was the ocean, glittering through the thickening storm. But these were sights—ocean, rooftops, and towers—she might have seen in the Fifth. What marked this place as another Dominion was the people in the streets outside, some human, many not, all retreating from the wind or the commotions it carried. A creature, its head vast, stumbled up the street with what looked to be two sharp-snouted pigs, barking furiously, under each arm. A group of youths, bald and robed, ran in the other direction, swinging smoking censersabove their heads like bolas. A man with a canary-yellow beard and china-doll skin was carried, wounded but yelling furiously, into a house opposite.