Imajica

  “There’s riots everywhere,” Hoi-Polloi said. “I wish Papa would come home.”

  “Where is he?” Jude asked.

  “Down at the harbor. He had a shipment coming in from the islands.”

  “Can’t you telephone him?”

  “Telephone?” Hoi-Polloi said.

  “Yes, you know, it’s a—”

  “I know what it is,” Hoi-Polloi said testily. “Uncle Oscar showed me one. But they’re against the law.”

  “Why?”

  Hoi-Polloi shrugged. “The law’s the law,” she said. She peered out into the storm before shuttering the final window. “Papa will be sensible,” she went on. “I’m always telling him, Be sensible, and he always is.”

  She led the way downstairs to find Dowd standing on the front step, with the door flung wide. Hot, gritty air blew in, smelling of spice and distance. Hoi-Polloi ordered Dowd back inside with a sharpness that made Jude fear for her, but Dowd seemed happy to play the erring guest and did as he was asked. She slammed the door and bolted it, then asked if anybody wanted tea. With the lights swinging in every room, and the wind rattling every loose shutter, it was hard to pretend nothing was amiss, but Hoi-Polloi did her best to keep the chat trivial while she brewed a pot of Darjeeling and passed around slices of Madeira cake. The sheer absurdity of the situation began to amuse Jude. Here they were having a tea party while a city of untold strangeness was racked by storm and revolution all around. If Oscar appears now, she thought, he’ll be most entertained. He’ll sit down, dunk his cake in his tea, and talk about cricket like a perfect Englishman.

  “Where’s the rest of your family?” Dowd asked Hoi-Polloi, when the conversation once more returned to her absentee father.

  “Mama and my brothers have gone to the country,” she said, “to be away from the troubles.”

  “Didn’t you want to go with them?”

  “Not with Papa here. Somebody has to look after him. He’s sensible most of the time, but I have to remind him.” A particularly vehement gust brought slates rattling off the roof like gunshots. Hoi-Polloi jumped. “If Papa was here,” she said, “I think he’d suggest we had something to calm our nerves.”

  “What do you have, lovey?” Dowd said. “A little brandy, maybe? That’s what Oscar brings, isn’t it?”

  She said it was and fetched a bottle, dispensing it to all three of them in tiny glasses.

  “He brought us Dotterel too,” she said.

  “Who’s Dotterel?” Jude inquired.

  “The parrot. He was a present to me when I was little. He had a mate but she was eaten by the ragemy next door. The brute! Now Dotterel’s on his own, and he’s not happy. But Oscar’s going to bring me another parrot soon. He said he would. He brought pearls for Mama once. And for Papa he always brings newspapers. Papa loves newspapers.”

  She babbled on in a similar vein with barely a break in the flow. Meanwhile, the three glasses were filled and emptied and filled again several times, the liquor steadily taking its toll on Jude’s concentration. In fact she found the monologue, and the subtle motion of the light overhead, positively soporific and finally asked if she might lie down for a while. Again, Dowd made no objection and let Hoi-Polloi escort Jude up to the guest bedroom, offering only a slurred “sweet dreams, lovey” as she retired.

  She laid her buzzing head down gratefully, thinking as she dozed that it made sense to sleep now, while the storm prevented her from taking to the streets. When it was over her expedition would begin, with or without Dowd. Oscar was not coming for her, that much seemed certain. Either he’d sustained too much injury to follow or else the Express had been somehow damaged by Dowd’s late boarding. Whichever, she could not delay her adventures here any longer. When she woke, she’d emulate the forces rattling the shutters and take Yzordderrex by storm.

  She dreamt she was in a place of great grief: a dark chamber, its shutters closed against the same storm that raged outside the room in which she slept and dreamt—and knew she slept and dreamt even as she did so—and in this chamber was the sound of a woman sobbing. The grief was so palpable it stung her, and she wanted to soothe it, as much for her own sake as that of the griever. She moved through the murk towards the sound, encountering curtain after curtain as she went, all gossamer thin, as though the trousseaus of a hundred brides had been hung in this chamber. Before she could reach the weeping woman, however, a figure moved through the darkness ahead of her, coming to the bed where the woman lay and whispering to her.

  “Kreauchee . . .” the other said, and through the veils Jude glimpsed the lisping speaker.

  No figure as bizarre as this had ever flitted through her dreams before. The creature was pale, even in the gloom, and naked, with a back from which sprawled a garden of tails. Jude advanced a little to see her better, and the creature in her turn saw her, or at least her effect upon the veils, for she looked around the chamber as if she knew there was a haunter here. Her voice carried alarm when it came again.

  “There’s som’ady here, ledy,” it said.

  “I’ll see nobody. Especially Seidux.”

  “It’s notat Seidux. I seeat no’ady, but I feelat som’ady here stell.”

  The weeping diminished. The woman looked up. There were still veils between Jude and the sleeper’s face, and the chamber was indeed dark, but she knew her own features when she saw them, though her hair was plastered to her sweating scalp, and her eyes puffed up with tears. She didn’t recoil at the sight, but stood as still as spirits were able amid gossamer, and watched the woman with her face rise up from the bed. There was bliss in her expression.

  “He’s sent an angel,” she said to the creature at her side. “Concupiscentia . . . He’s sent an angel to summon me.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. For certain. This is a sign. I’m going to be forgiven.”

  A sound at the door drew the woman’s attention. A man in uniform, his face lit only by the cigarette he drew upon, stood watching.

  “Get out,” the woman said.

  “I came only to see that you were comfortable, Ma’am Quaisoir.”

  “I said get out, Seidux.”

  “If you should require anything—”

  Quaisoir got up suddenly and pitched herself through the veils in Seidux’s direction. The suddenness of this assault took Jude by surprise, as it did its target. Though Quaisoir was a head shorter than her captor, she had no fear of him. She slapped the cigarette from his lips.

  “I don’t want you watching me,” she said. “Get out. Hear me? Or shall I scream rape?”

  She began to tear at her already ragged clothes, exposing her breasts. Seidux retreated in confusion, averting his eyes.

  “As you wish!” he said, heading out of the chamber. “As you wish!”

  Quaisoir slammed the door on him and turned her attention back to the haunted room.

  “Where are you, spirit?” she said, moving back through the veils. “Gone? No, not gone.” She turned to Concupiscentia. “Do you feel its presence?” The creature seemed too frightened to speak. “I feel nothing,” Quaisoir said, now standing still amid the shifting veils. “Damn Seidux! The spirit’s been driven out!”

  Without the means to contradict this, all Jude could do was wait beside the bed and hope that the effect of Seidux’s interruption—which had seemingly blinded them to her presence—would wear off now that he’d been exiled from the chamber. She remembered as she waited how Clara had talked about men’s power to destroy. Had she just witnessed an example of that, Seidux’s mere presence enough to poison the contact between a dreaming spirit and a waking one? If so, he’d done it all unknowing: innocent of his power, but no more forgivable for that. How many times in any day did he and the rest of his kind—hadn’t Clara said they were another species?—spoil and mutilate in their unwitting way, Jude wondered, preventing the union of subtler natures?

  Quaisoir sank back down on the bed, giving Jude time to ponder the mystery her face represented. She hadn??
?t doubted from the moment she’d entered this chamber that she was traveling here much as she’d first traveled to the tower, using the freedom of a dream state to move invisibly through the real world. That she no longer needed the blue eye to facilitate such movement was a puzzle for another time. What concerned her now was to find out how this woman came to have her face. Was this Dominion somehow a mirror of the world she’d left? And if not—if she was the only woman in the Fifth to have a perfect twin—what did that echo signify?

  The wind was beginning to abate, and Quaisoir dispatched her servant to the window to remove the shutters. There was still a red dust hanging in the atmosphere, but, moving to the sill beside the creature, Jude was presented with a vista that, had she possessed breath in this state, would have taken it away. They were perched high above the city, in one of the towers she’d briefly glimpsed as she’d gone around the Peccable house with Hoi-Polloi, bolting and shuttering. It was not simply Yzordderrex that lay before her, but signs of the city’s undoing. Fires were raging in a dozen places beyond the palace walls, and within those walls the Autarch’s troops were mustering in the courtyards. Turning her dream gaze back towards Quaisoir, Jude saw for the first time the sumptuousness of the chamber in which she’d found the woman. The walls were tapestries, and there was no stick of furniture that did not compete in its gilding. If this was a prison, then it was fit for royalty.

  Quaisoir now came to the window and looked out at the panorama of fires.

  “I have to find Him,” she said. “He sent an angel to bring me to Him, and Seidux drove the angel out. So I’ll have to go to Him myself. Tonight . . .”

  Jude listened, but distractedly, her mind more occupied by the opulence of the chamber and what it revealed about her twin. It seemed she shared a face with a woman of some significance, a possessor of power, now dispossessed, and planning to break the bonds set upon her. Romance seemed to be her reason. There was a man in the city below with whom she desperately wanted to be reunited, a lover who sent angels to whisper sweet nothings in her ear. What kind of man? she wondered. A Maestro, perhaps, a wielder of magic?

  Having studied the city for a time, Quaisoir left the window and went through to her dressing room.

  “I mustn’t go to Him like this,” she said, starting to undress. “That would be shameful.”

  The woman caught sight of herself in one of the mirrors and sat down in front of it, peering at her reflection with distaste. Her tears had made mud of the kohl around her eyes, and her cheeks and neck were blotchy. She took a piece of linen from the dressing table, sprinkled some fragrant oil upon it, and began to roughly clean her face.

  “I’ll go to Him naked,” she said, smiling in anticipation of that pleasure. “He’ll prefer me that way.”

  This mystery lover intrigued Jude more and more. Hearing her own voice musky with talk of nakedness, she was tantalized. Would it not be a fine thing to see the consummation? The idea of watching herself couple with some Yzordderrexian Maestro had not been among the wonderments she’d anticipated discovering in this city, but the notion carried an erotic frisson she could not deny herself. She studied the reflection of her reflection. Though there were a few cosmetic differences, the essentials were hers, to the last nick and mole. This was no approximation of her face, but the thing exactly, which fact strangely excited her. She had to find a way to speak with this woman tonight. Even if their twinning was simply a freak of nature, they would surely be able to illuminate each other’s lives with an exchange of histories. All she needed was a clue from her doppelgänger as to where in the city she intended to go looking for her Maestro lover.

  With her face cleansed, Quaisoir got up from in front of the mirror and went back into the bedroom. Concupiscentia was sitting by the window. Quaisoir waited until she was within inches of her servant before she spoke, and even then her words were barely audible.

  “We’ll need a knife,” she said.

  The creature shook her head. “They tookat em all,” she said. “You seem how ey lookat and lookat.”

  “Then we must make one,” Quaisoir replied. “Seidux will try to oppose our leaving.”

  “You wishat to kill em?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  This talk chilled Jude. Though Seidux had retreated before Quaisoir when she’d threatened to cry rape, Jude doubted that he’d be so passive if challenged physically. Indeed, what more perfect excuse would he need to regain his dominance than her coming at him with a knife? If she’d had the means, she would have been Clara’s mouthpiece now and echoed her sentiments on man the desolator, in the hope of keeping Quaisoir from harm. It would be an unbearable irony to lose this woman now, having found her way (surely not by accident, though at present it seemed so) across half the Imajica into her very chamber.

  “I cet shapas te knife,” Concupiscentia was saying.

  “Then do it,” Quaisoir replied, leaning still closer to her fellow conspirator.

  Jude missed the next exchange, because somebody called her name. Startled, she looked around the room, but before she’d half scanned it she recognized the voice. It was Hoi-Polloi, and she was rousing the sleeper after the storm.

  “Papa’s here!” Jude heard her say. “Wake up, Papa’s here!”

  There was no time to bid farewell to the scene. It was there in front of her one moment, and replaced the next with the face of Peccable’s daughter, leaning to shake her awake.

  “Papa—” she said again.

  “Yes, all right,” Jude said brusquely, hoping the girl would leave without further exchanges coming between her and the sights sleep had brought. She knew she had scant moments to drag the dream into wakefulness with her, or it would subside and the details become hazy the deeper it sank.

  She was in luck. Hoi-Polloi hurried back down to her father’s side, leaving Jude to recite aloud all she’d seen and heard. Quaisoir and her servant Concupiscentia; Seidux and the plot against him. And the lover, of course. She shouldn’t forget the lover, who was presumably somewhere in the city even now, pining for his mistress who was locked up in her gilded prison. With these facts fixed in her head, she ventured first to the bathroom, then down to meet Peccable.

  Well dressed and better fed, Peccable had a face upon which his present ire sat badly. He looked slightly absurd in his fury, his features too round and his mouth too small for the rhetoric they were producing. Introductions were made, but there was no time for pleasantries. Peccable’s fury needed venting, and he seemed not to care much who his audience was, as long as they sympathized. He had reason for fury. His warehouse near the harbor had been burned to the ground, and he himself had only narrowly escaped death at the hands of a mob that had already taken over three of the Kesparates and declared them independent city-states, thereby issuing a challenge to the Autarch. So far, he said, the palace had done little. Small contingents of troops had been dispatched to the Caramess, to the Oke T’Noon, and the seven Kesparates on the other side of the hill, to suppress any sign of uprisings there. But no offensive had been launched against the insurgents who had taken the harbor.

  “They’re nothing more than rabble,” the merchant said. “They’ve no care for property or person. Indiscriminate destruction, that’s all they’re good for! I’m no great lover of the Autarch, but he’s got to be the voice of decent people like me in times like this! I should have sold my business a year ago. I talked with Oscar about it. We planned to move away from this wretched city. But I hung on and hung on, because I believe in people. That’s my mistake,” he said, throwing his eyes up to the ceiling like a man martyred by his own decency. “I have too much faith.” He looked at Hoi-Polloi. “Don’t I?”

  “You do, Papa, you do.”

  “Well, not any more. You go and pack our belongings, sweet. We’re getting out tonight.”

  “What about the house?” Dowd said. “And all the collectibles downstairs?”

  Peccable cast a glance at Hoi-Polloi. “Why don’t you start packing now?” he sa
id, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of debating his black market activities in front of his daughter.

  He cast a similar glance at Jude, but she pretended not to comprehend its significance and remained seated. He began to talk anyway.

  “When we leave this house we leave it forever,” he said. “There’ll be nothing left to come back to, I’m convinced of that.” The outraged bourgeois of minutes before, appealing for civil stability, was now replaced by an apocalyptic. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. They couldn’t control the cults in perpetuity.”

  “They?” said Jude.

  “The Autarch. And Quaisoir.”

  The sound of the name was like a blow to her heart. “Quaisoir?” she said.

  “His wife. The consort. Our lady of Yzordderrex: Ma’am Quaisoir. She’s been his undoing, if you ask me. He always kept himself hidden away, which was wise; nobody thought about him much as long as trade was good and the streets were lit. The taxes, of course: the taxes have been a burden upon us all, especially family men like myself, but let me tell you we’re better off here than they are in Patashoqua or Iahmandhas. No, I don’t think he’s done badly by us. The stories you hear about the state of things when he first took over: Chaos! Half the Kesparates at war with the other half. He brought stability. People prospered. No, it’s not his policies, it’s her: she’s his undoing. Things were fine until she started to interfere. I suppose she thinks she’s doing us a favor, deigning to appear in public.”

  “Have you . . . seen her then?” Jude asked.

  “Not personally, no. She stays out of sight, even when she attends executions. Though I heard that she showed herself today, out in the open. Somebody said they’d actually seen her face. Ugly, they said. Brutish. I’m not surprised. All these executions were her idea. She enjoys them, apparently. Well, people don’t like that. Taxes, yes. An occasional purge, some political trials—well, yes, those too; we can accept those. But you can’t make the law into a public spectacle. That’s a mockery, and we’ve never mocked the law in Yzordderrex.”