Imajica

  “Which is it to be,” it said, “you or her? I will kill one of you before I pass. Which is it to be?”

  “I’ll kill you first,” Gentle said, the gun pointed at the Nullianac’s head.

  “You could,” it said. “I know. You murdered a brother of mine outside Patashoqua.”

  “Your brother, huh?”

  “We’re rare, and know each other’s lives,” it said.

  “So don’t get any rarer,” Gentle advised, taking a step towards Huzzah as he spoke, but keeping his eyes fixed on her violator.

  “She’s alive,” it said. “I wouldn’t kill a thing so young. Not quickly. Young deserves slow.”

  Gentle risked a glance away from the creature. Huzzah’s eyes were indeed wide open and fixed upon him in her terror.

  “It’s all right, angel,” he said, “nothing’s going to happen to you. Can you move?”

  He glanced back at the Nullianac as he spoke, wishing he had some way of interpreting the motions of its little fires. Was it more grievously wounded than he’d thought, and preserving its energies for healing? Or was it biding its time, waiting for its moment to strike?

  Huzzah was pulling herself up into a sitting position, the motion bringing little whimpers of pain from her. Gentle longed to cradle and soothe her, but all he’d dared do was drop to his haunches, his eyes fixed on her violator, and reach for the clothes she’d had torn from her.

  “Can you walk, angel?”

  “I don’t know,” she sobbed.

  “Please try. I’ll help you.”

  He put his hand out to do so but she avoided him, saying no through her tears and pulling herself to her feet.

  “That’s good, sweetheart,” he said. There was a reawakening in the Nullianac’s head, the arcs dancing again. “I want you to start walking, angel,” Gentle said. “Don’t worry about me, I’m coming with you.”

  She did as he instructed, slowly, the sobs still coming. The Nullianac started to speak again as she went.

  “Ah, to see her like that. It makes me ache.” The arcs had begun their din again, like distant firecrackers. “What would you do to save her little soul?” it said.

  “Just about anything,” Gentle replied.

  “You deceive yourself,” it said. “When you killed my brother, we inquired after you, my kin and I. We know how foul a savior you are. What’s my crime beside yours? A small thing, done because my appetite demands it. But you—you—you’ve laid waste the hopes of generations. You’ve destroyed the fruit of great men’s trees. And still you claim you would give yourself to save her little soul?”

  This eloquence startled Gentle, but its essence startled him more. Where had the creature plucked these conceits from, that it could so easily spill them now? They were inventions, of course, but they confounded him nevertheless, and his thoughts strayed from his present jeopardy for a vital moment. The creature saw him drop his guard and acted on the instant. Though it was no more than two yards from him, he heard the sliver of silence between the light and its report, a void confirming how foul a savior he was. Death was on its way towards the child before his warning cry was even in his throat.

  He turned to see his angel standing in the alleyway some distance from him. She had either turned in anticipation, or had been listening to the Nullianac’s speech, because she stood full face to the blow coming at her. Still, time ran slow, and Gentle had several aching moments in which to see how her eyes were fixed upon him, her tears all dried, her gaze unblinking. Time too for that warning shout, in acknowledgment of which she closed her eyes, her face becoming a blank upon which he could inscribe any accusation his guilt wished to contrive.

  Then the Nullianac’s blow was upon her. The force struck her body at speed, but it didn’t break her flesh, and for an instant he dared hope she had found some defense against it. But its hurt was more insidious than a bullet or a blow, its light spreading from the point of impact up to her face, where it entered by every means it could, and down to where its dispatcher’s fingers had already pried.

  He let out another shout, this time of revulsion, and turned back on the Nullianac, raising the gun its words had made him so forgetful of and firing at its heart. It fell back against the wall, its arms slack at its side, the space between its skulls still issuing its lethal light. Then he looked back at Huzzah, to see that it had eaten her away from the inside, and that she was flowing back along the line of her destroyer’s gaze, into the chamber from which the stroke had been delivered. Even as he watched, her face collapsed, and her limbs, never substantial, decayed and went the same way. Before she was entirely consumed, however, the harm Gentle’s bullet had done the Nullianac took its toll. The stream of power fractured and failed. When it did, darkness descended, and for a time Gentle couldn’t even see the creature’s body. Then the bombardment on the hill began afresh, its blaze brief but bright enough to show him the Nullianac’s corpse, lying in the dirt where it had squatted.

  He watched it, expecting some final act of retaliation, but none came. The light died, and left Gentle to retreat along the alleyway, weighed down not only by his failure to save Huzzah’s life, but by his lack of comprehension of what had just happened. In plain terms, a child in his care had been slaughtered by her molester, and he’d failed to prevent that slaughter. But he’d been wandering in the Dominions too long to be content with simple assessments. There was more here than stymied lust and sudden death. Words had been uttered more appropriate to pulpit than gutter. Hadn’t he himself called Huzzah his angel? Hadn’t he seen her grow seraphic at the end, knowing she was about to die and accepting that fate? And hadn’t he in his turn been dubbed a deficient savior—and proved that accusation true by failing to deliver her? These were high-flown words, but he badly needed to believe them apt, not so that he could indulge messianic fantasies, but so that the grief wellingin him might be softened by the hope that there was a higher purpose here, which in the fullness of time he’d come to know and understand.

  A burst of fire threw light down the alleyway, and Gentle’s shadow fell across something twitching in the filth. It took him a moment to comprehend what he was seeing, but when he did he loosed a shout. Huzzah had not quite gone. Small scraps of her skin and sinew, dropped when the Nullianac’s claim upon her was cut short, moved here in the rot. None were recognizable; indeed, had they not been moving in the folds of her bloodied clothes he’d not even have known them as her flesh. He reached down to touch them, tears stinging his eyes, but before his fingers could make contact, what little life the scraps had owned went out.

  He rose raging; rose in horror at the filth beneath his feet, and the dead, empty houses that channeled it, and in disgust at himself, for surviving when his angel had not. Turning his gaze on the nearest wall, he drew breath and put not one hand but two against his lips, intending to do what little he could to bury these remains.

  But rage and revulsion were fueling his pneuma, and when it went from him it brought down not one wall but several, passing through the teetering houses like a bullet through a pack of cards. Shards of pulverized stone flew as the houses toppled, the collapse of one initiating the fall of the next, the dust cloud growing in scale as each house added to its sum.

  He started up the alleyway in pursuit of the pneuma, fearing that his disgust had given it more purpose than he’d intended. It was heading towards Lickerish Street, where the crowds were still milling, oblivious to its approach. They were not wandering that street innocent of its corruption, of course, but neither did their presence there deserve death. He wished he could draw the breath as he exhaled it, call the pneuma back into himself. But it had its head, and all he could do was run after it as it brought down house after house, hoping it would spend its power before it reached the crowd.

  He could see the lights of Lickerish Street through the hail of demolition. He picked up his pace, to try and outrun the pneuma, and was a little ahead of it when he set eyes on the throng itself, thicker than ever. Some had in
terrupted their window-shopping to watch the spectacle of destruction. He saw their gawking faces, their little smiles, their shaking heads: saw they didn’t comprehend for an instant what was coming their way. Knowing any attempt to warn them verbally would be lost in the furor, he raced to the end of the alleyway and flung himself into their midst, intending to scatter them, but his antics only drew a larger audience, who were in turn intrigued by the alleyway’s capitulation. One or two had grasped their jeopardy now, their expressions of curiosity become looks of fear; finally, too late, their unease spread to the rest, and a general retreat began.

  The pneuma was too quick, however. It broke through the last of the walls in a devastating shower of rock shards and splinters, striking the crowd at its densest place. Had Hapexamendios, in a fit of cleansing ire, delivered a judgment on Lickerish Street He could scarcely have scoured it better. What had seconds before been a crowd of puzzled sightseers was blood and bone in a heartbeat.

  Though he stood in the midst of this devastation, Gentle remained unharmed. He was able to watch his terrible weapon at work, its power apparently undecayed despite the fact that it had demolished a string of houses. Nor, having cut a swath through the crowd, was it following the trajectory set at his lips. It had found flesh and clearly intended to busy itself in the midst of living stuff until there was none left to undo.

  He was appalled at the prospect. This hadn’t been his intention, or anything like it. There seemed to be only one option available to him, and that he instantly took: he stood in the pneuma’s path. He’d used the power in his lungs many times now—first against the Nullianac’s brother in Vanaeph, then twice in the mountains, and finally on the island, when they were making their escape from Vigor N’ashap’s asylum—but in all that time he’d only had the vaguest impression of its appearance. Was it like a fire-breather’s belch, or like a bullet made of will and air, nearly invisible until it did its deed?

  Perhaps it had been the latter once, but now, as he set himself in its path, he saw that it had gathered dust and blood along its route, and from those essential elements it had made itself a likeness of its maker. It was his face that was coming at him, albeit roughly sculpted: his brow, his eyes, his open mouth, expelling the very breath it had begun with. It didn’t slow as it approached its maker, but struck Gentle’s chest the way it had struck so many before him. He felt the blow but was not felled by it. Instead the power, knowing its source, discharged itself through his system, running to his fingertips and coursing across his scalp. Its shock was come and gone in a moment, and he was left standing in the middle of the devastation with his arms spread wide and the dust falling around him.

  Silence followed. Distantly, he could hear the wounded sobbing, and half-demolished walls going to rubble, but he was encircled by a hush that was almost reverential. Somebody dropped to his knees nearby, to tend, he thought, to one of the wounded. Then he heard the hallelujahs the man was uttering and saw his hands reaching up towards him. Another of the crowd followed suit, and then another, as though this scene of their deliverance was a sign they’d been waiting for and a long-suppressed flood of devotion was breaking from each of their hearts.

  Sickened, Gentle turned his gaze away from their grateful faces, up the dusty length of Lickerish Street. He had only one ambition now: to find Pie and take comfort from this insanity in the mystif’s arms. He broke from his ring of devotees and started up the street, ignoring their clinging hands and cries of adoration. He wanted to berate them for their naïveté, but what good would that do? Any pronouncement he made now, however self-deprecatory, would probably be taken as the jotting for some gospel. Instead he kept his silence and picked his way over the stones and corpses, his head down. The hosannas followed him, but he didn’t once acknowledge them, knowing even as he went that his reluctance might seem like divine humility, but unable to escape the trap circumstance had set.

  The wasteland at the head of the street was as daunting as ever, but he started across it not caring what fires might come. Its terrors were nothing beside the memory of Huzzah’s scrap, twitching in the muck, or the hallelujahs he could still hear behind him, raised in ignorance of the fact that he—the savior of Lickerish Street—was also its destroyer, but no less tempting for that.

  Thirty-four

  I

  EVERY TRACE OF THe joy that the vast halls of the chianculi had once seen—no clowns or ponies, but circuses such as any showman in the Fifth would have wept to own—had gone. The echoing halls had become places of mourning and of judgment. Today, the accused was the mystif Pie ‘oh’ pah; its accuser one of the few lawyers in Yzordderrex the Autarch’s purges had left alive, an asthmatic and pinched individual called Thes ‘reh’ ot. He had an audience of two for his prosecution—Pie ‘oh’ pah, and the judge—but he delivered his litany of crimes as if the hall were full to the rafters. The mystif was guilty enough to warrant a dozen executions, he said. It was at very least a traitor and coward, but probably also an informant and a spy. Worse, perhaps, it had abandoned this Dominion for another without the consent of its family or its teachers, denying its people the benefit of its rarity. Had it forgotten in its arrogance that its condition was sacred,and that to prostitute itself in another world (the Fifth, of all places, a mire of unmiraculous souls!) was not only a sin upon itself but upon its species? It had gone from this place clean and dared to return debauched and corrupted, bringing a creature of the Fifth with it and then freely confessing that said creature was its husband.

  Pie had expected to be met with some recriminations upon return—the memories of Eurhetemec were long, and they clung strongly to tradition as the only contact they had with the First Dominion—but the vehemence of this catalogue was still astonishing. The judge, Culus ‘su’ erai, was a woman of great age but diminished physique, who sat bundled in robes as colorless as her skin, listening to the litany of accusations without once looking at either accuser or accused. When Thes ‘reh’ ot had finished, she offered the mystif the chance to defend itself, and it did what it could.

  “I admit I’ve made many errors,” Pie said. “Not least leaving my family—and my people were my family—without telling them where I was going or why. But the simple fact is: I didn’t know. I fully intended to return, after maybe a year or so. I thought it’d be fine to have traveler’s tales to tell. Now, when I finally return, I find there’s nobody to tell them to.”

  “What possessed you to go into the Fifth?” Culus asked.

  “Another error,” Pie said. “I went to Patashoqua and I met a theurgist there who said he could take me over to the Fifth. Just for a jaunt. We’d be back in a day, he said. A day! I thought this was a fine idea. I’d come home having walked in the Fifth Dominion. So I paid him—”

  “In what currency?” said Thes ‘reh’ ot.

  “Cash. And some little favors. I didn’t prostitute myself, if that’s what you’re suggesting. If I had, maybe he’d have kept his promises, Instead, his ritual delivered me into the In Ovo.”

  “And how long were you there?” Culus ‘su’ erai inquired.

  “I don’t know,” the mystif replied. “The suffering there seemed endless and unendurable, but it was perhaps only days.”

  Thes ‘reh’ ot snorted at this. “Its sufferings were of its own making, ma’am. Are they strictly relevant?”

  “Probably not,” Culus ‘su’ erai, conceded. “But you were claimed out of the In Ovo by a Maestro of the Fifth, am I right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. His name was Sartori. He was the Fifth’s representative in the Synod preparing for the Reconciliation.”

  “And you served him?”

  “I did.”

  “In what capacity?”

  “In any way he chose to request. I was his familiar.”

  Thes ‘reh’ ot made a sound of disgust. His response was not feigned, Pie thought. He was genuinely appalled at the thought of one of his people—especially a creature so blessed as a mystif—serving the will of a Homo sap
iens.

  “Was Sartori, in your estimation, a good man?” Culus asked Pie.

  “He was the usual paradox. Compassion when it was least expected. Cruelty the same. He had an extraordinary ego, but then I don’t believe he could have carried the responsibility of the Reconciliation without one.”

  “Was he cruel to you?” Culus inquired.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Do you not understand the question?”

  “Yes. But not its relevance.”

  Culus growled with displeasure. “This court may be much reduced in pomp and ceremony,” she said, “and its officers a little withered, but the authority of both remains undiminished. Do you understand me, mystif? When I ask a question I expect it answered, promptly and truthfully.”

  Pie murmured apologies.

  “So,” said Culus. “I will repeat the question. Was Sartori cruel to you?”

  “Sometimes,” Pie replied.

  “And yet when the Reconciliation failed you didn’t forsake his company and return to this Dominion?”

  “He’d summoned me out of the In Ovo. He’d bound me to him. I had no jurisdiction.”

  “Unlikely,” Thes ‘reh’ ot remarked. “Are you asking us to believe—”

  “Did I hear you ask permission to question the accused again?” Culus snapped.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you request such permission?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Denied,” Culus replied and turned her eye back upon Pie. “I think you learned a great deal in the Fifth Dominion, mystif,” she said. “And you’re the worse for it. You’re arrogant. You’re sly. And you’re probably just as cruel as your Maestro. But I don’t believe you’re a spy. You’re something worse than that. You’re a fool. You turned your back on people who loved you and let yourself be enslaved by a man responsible for the deaths of a great many fine souls across the Imajica. I can tell you’ve got something to say, Thes ‘reh’ ot. Spit it out, before I give judgment.”