Imajica

  “She was beautiful, but she wasn’t worth losing the Imajica for. That was your big mistake. You should have served your hand and not your rod. Then I’d never have been born, and God would be in His heaven, and you’d be Pope Sartori. Ha! Is that why you came back? To become pope? It’s too late, brother. By tomorrow morning Yzordderrex will be a heap of smoking ash. This is my last night here. I’m going to the Fifth. I’m going to build a new empire there.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you remember the rhyme they used to sing? For glory’s sake.”

  “Haven’t you had enough of that?”

  “You tell me. Whatever’s in my heart was plucked from yours. Don’t tell me you haven’t dreamed of power. You were the greatest Maestro in Europe. There was nobody could touch you. That didn’t all evaporate overnight.”

  He moved towards Gentle for the first time in this exchange, reaching out to lay his steady hand on Gentle’s shoulder.

  “I think you should see the Pivot, brother Gentle,” he said. “That’ll remind you of what power feels like. Are you steady on your feet?”

  “Reasonably.”

  “Come on, then.”

  He led the way back into the passage, to the flight of stairs Gentle had declined to take. Now he did so, following Sartori around the curve of the staircase to a door without a handle.

  “The only eyes laid on the Pivot since the tower was built are mine,” he said. “Which has made it very sensitive to scrutiny.”

  “My eyes are yours,” Gentle reminded him.

  “It’ll know the difference,” Sartori replied. “It’ll want to . . . probe you.” The sexual subtext of this wasn’t lost on him. “You’ll just have to lie back and think of England,” he said. “It’s over quickly.”

  So saying he licked his thumb and laid it on the rectangle of slate-colored stone set in the middle of the door, inscribing a figure in spittle upon it. The door responded to the signal. Its locks began to grind into motion.

  “Spit too, huh?” Gentle said. “I thought it was just breath.”

  “You use pneuma?” Sartori said. “Then I should be able to. But I haven’t got the trick of it. You’ll have to teach me, and I’ll . . . remind you of a few sways in return.”

  “I don’t understand the mechanics of it.”

  “Then we’ll learn together,” Sartori replied. “The principles are simple enough. Matter and mind, mind and matter. Each transforming the other. Maybe that’s what we’re going to do. Transform one another.”

  With that thought, Sartori put his palm on the door and pushed it open. Though it was fully six inches thick it moved without a sound, and with an extended hand Sartori invited Gentle to enter, speaking as he did so.

  “It’s said that Hapexamendios set the Pivot in the middle of the Imajica so that His fertility would flow from it into every Dominion.” He lowered his voice, as if for an indiscretion. “In other words,” he said. “This is the phallus of the Unbeheld.”

  Gentle had seen this tower from the outside, of course; it soared above every other pylon and dome in the palace. But he hadn’t grasped its enormity until now. It was a square stone tower, seventy or eighty feet from side to side and so tall that the lights blazing in the walls to illuminate its sole occupant receded like cat’s eyes in a highway till sheer distance dimmed then erased them. An extraordinary sight: but nothing beside the monolith around which the tower had been constructed. Gentle had been steeling himself for an assault when the door was opened: the tone he’d heard in his skull as he’d crept along the passage below rattling his teeth, the charge burning in his fingers. But there was nothing, not even a murmur, which was in its way more distressing. The Pivot knew he was here in its chamber but was keeping its counsel, silently assessing him as he assessed it.

  There were several shocks. The first, and the least, how beautiful it was, its sides the color of thunderclouds, hewn so that seams of brightness flowed in them like hidden lightning. The second, that it was not set on the ground but hovered, in all its enormity, ten feet from the floor of the tower, casting a shadow so dense that the dark air was almost a plinth.

  “Impressive, huh?” Sartori remarked, his cocky tone as inappropriate as laughter at an altar. “You can walk underneath it. Go on. It’s quite safe.”

  Gentle was reluctant, but he was all too aware that his other was watching for his weaknesses, and any sign of fear now might be used against him later. Sartori had already seen him sickened and down on his knees; he didn’t want the bastard to get another glimpse of frailty.

  “Aren’t you coming with me?” he said, glancing around at the Autarch.

  “It’s a very private moment,” the other replied, and stood back to let Gentle venture into the shadow.

  It was like stepping back into the wastes of the Jokalaylau. Cold cut him to the marrow. His breath was snatched from his lungs and appeared before him in a bitter cloud. Gasping, he turned his face to the power above him, his mind divided between the rational urge to study the phenomenon and the barely controllable desire to drop to his knees and beg it not to crush him. The heaven above him had five sides, he saw. One for each Dominion, perhaps. And like the hewn flanks, flickers of lightning appeared in it here and there. But it wasn’t simply a trick of seam and shadow that gave the stone the look of a thundercloud. There was motion in it, the solid rock roiling above him. He threw a glance towards Sartori, who was standing at the door, casually putting a cigarette between his lips. The flame he struck to light it with was a world away, but Gentle didn’t envy him its warmth. Icy as this shadow was, he wanted the stone sky to unfurl above him and deliver its judgment down; he wanted to see whateverpower the Pivot possessed unleashed, if only to know that such powers and such judgments existed. He looked away from Sartori almost contemptuously, the thought shaping in his head that for all the other’s talk of possessing this monolith, the years it had spent in this tower were moments in its incalculable span, and he and Sartori would have come and gone, their little mark eroded by those that followed, in the time it took the stone to blink its cloudy eye.

  Perhaps it read that thought from his cortex and approved, because the light, when it came, was kind. There was sun in the stone as well as lightning, warmth as well as a killing fire. It brightened the mantle, then fell in shafts, first around him, then upon his upturned face. The moment had antecedents: events in the Fifth that had prophesied this, their parent’s, coming. He’d stood on Highgate Hill once, when the city road was still a muddy track, and looked up to see the clouds drop glory down as they were doing now. He’d gone to the window of his room in Gamut Street and seen the same. He’d watched the smoke clear after a night of bombing—1941, the Blitz at its height—and seeing the sun burn through, had known in some place too tender to be touched that he’d forgotten something momentous, and that if he ever remembered—if a light like this ever burned the veil away—the world would unravel.

  That conviction came again, but this time there was more than a vague unease to support it. The tone that had sounded in his skull had come again, attendant on the light, and in it, described by the subtlest variation in its monotony, he heard words.

  The Pivot was addressing him.

  Reconciler, it said.

  He wanted to cover his ears and shut the word out. Drop to the ground like a prophet begging to be unburdened of some divine duty. But the word was inside as well as out. There was no escaping it.

  The work’s not finished yet, the Pivot said.

  “What work?” he said.

  You know what work.

  He did, of course. But so much pain had come with that labor, and he was ill equipped to bear it again.

  Why deny it? the Pivot said.

  He stared up into the brightness. “I failed before, and so many people died. I can’t do it again. Please. I can’t.”

  What did you come here for? the Pivot asked him, its voice so tenuous he had to hold his breath to catch the shape of the words. The question
took him back to Taylor’s bedside, to that plea for comprehension.

  “To understand . . .” he said.

  To understand what?

  “I can’t put it into words . . . it sounds so pitiful. . . .”

  Say it.

  “To understand why I was born. Why anybody’s born.”

  You know why you were born.

  “No, I don’t. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

  You’re the Reconciler of Dominions. You’re the healer of the Imajica. Hide from that, and you hide from understanding. Maestro, there’s a worse anguish than remembering, and another suffers it because you leave your work unfinished. Go back into the Fifth Dominion and complete what you began. Make the many One. This is the only salvation.

  The stone sky began to roil again, and the clouds closed over the sun. With the darkness, the cold returned, but he didn’t relinquish his place in the Pivot’s shadow for several seconds, still hoping some crack would open and the God speak a last consoling word, a whisper perhaps, of how this onerous duty might be passed to another soul more readily equipped to accomplish it. But there was nothing. The vision had passed, and all he could do was wrap his arms around his shuddering frame and stumble out to where Sartori stood. The other’s cigarette lay smoking at his feet, where it had dropped from his fingers. By the expression on his face it was apparent that even if he’d not comprehended every detail of the exchange that had just taken place, he had the gist.

  “The Unbeheld speaks,” he said, his voice as flat as the God’s.

  “I don’t want this,” Gentle said.

  “I don’t think this is any place to talk about denying Him,” Sartori said, giving the Pivot a queasy glance.

  “I didn’t say I was denying Him,” Gentle replied. “Just that I didn’t want it.”

  “Still better discussed in private,” Sartori whispered, turning to open the door.

  He didn’t lead Gentle back to the mean little room where they’d met, but to a chamber at the other end of the passageway, which boasted the only window he’d seen in the vicinity. It was narrow and dirty, but not as dirty as the sky on the other side. Dawn had begun to touch the clouds, but the smoke that still rose in curling columns from the fires below all but canceled its frail light.

  “This isn’t what I came for,” Gentle said as he stared out at the murk. “I wanted answers.”

  “You’ve had ‘em.”

  “I have to take what’s mine, however foul it is?”

  “Not yours, ours. The responsibility. The pain”—he paused—“and the glory, of course.”

  Gentle glanced at him. “It’s mine,” he said simply.

  Sartori shrugged, as though this were of no consequence to him whatsoever. Gentle saw his own wiles working in that simple gesture. How many times had he shrugged in precisely that fashion—raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips, looked away with feigned indifference? He let Sartori believe the bluff was working.

  “I’m glad you understand,” he said. “The burden’s mine.”

  “You’ve failed before.”

  “But I came close,” Gentle said, feigning access to a memory he didn’t yet have in the hope of coaxing an informative rebuttal.

  “Close isn’t good enough,” Sartori said. “Close is lethal. A tragedy. Look what it did to you. The great Maestro. You crawl back here with half your wits missing.”

  “The Pivot trusts me.”

  That struck a tender place. Suddenly Sartori was shouting.

  “Fuck the Pivot! Why should you be the Reconciler? Huh? Why? One hundred and fifty years I’ve ruled the Imajica. I know how to use power. You don’t.”

  “Is that what you want?” Gentle said, trailing the bait of that possibility. “You want to be the Reconciler in my place?”

  “I’m better equipped than you,” Sartori raged. “All you’re good for is sniffing after women.”

  “And what are you? Impotent?”

  “I know what you’re doing. I’d do the same. You’re stirring me up, so I’ll spill my secrets. I don’t care. There’s nothing you can do I can’t do better. You wasted all those years, hiding away, but I used them. I turned myself into an empire builder. What did you do?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He knew his subject too well. “You’ve learned nothing. If you began the Reconciliation now, you’d make the same mistakes.”

  “And what were they?”

  “It comes down to one,” Sartori said. “Judith. If you hadn’t wanted her—” He stopped, studying his other. “You don’t even remember that, do you?”

  “No,” Gentle said. “Not yet.”

  “Let me tell you, brother,” Sartori said, coming face to face with Gentle. “It’s a sad story.”

  “I don’t weep easily.”

  “She was the most beautiful woman in England. Some people said, in Europe. But she belonged to Joshua Godolphin, and he guarded her like his soul.”

  “They were married?”

  “No. She was his mistress, but he loved her more than any wife. And of course he knew what you felt, you didn’t disguise it, and that made him afraid—oh, God, was he afraid—that sooner or later you were going to seduce her and spirit her away. It’d be easy. You were the Maestro Sartori; you could do anything. But he was one of your patrons, so you bided your time, thinking maybe he’d tire of her, and then you could have her without bad blood between you. It didn’t happen. The months went by, and his devotion was as intense as ever. You’d never waited this long for a woman before. You started to suffer like a lovesick adolescent. You couldn’t sleep. Your heart palpitated at the sound of her voice. This wasn’t good for the Reconciliation, of course, having the Maestro pining away, and Godolphin came to want a solution as badly as you did. So when you found one, he was ready to listen.”

  “What was it?”

  “That you make another Judith, indistinguishable from the first. You had the feits to do it.”

  “Then he’d have one . . .”

  “And so would you. Simple. No, not simple. Very difficult. Very dangerous. But those were heady days. Dominions hidden from human eyes since the beginning of time were just a few ceremonies away. Heaven was possible. Creating another Judith seemed like small potatoes. You put it to him, and he agreed—”

  “Just like that?”

  “You sweetened the pill. You promised him a Judith better than the first. A woman who wouldn’t age, wouldn’t tire of his company or the company of his sons, or the sons of his sons. This Judith would belong to the men of the Godolphin family in perpetuity. She’d be pliant, she’d be modest, she’d be perfect.”

  “And what did the original think of this?”

  “She didn’t know. You drugged her, you took her up to the Meditation room in the house in Gamut Street, you lit a blazing fire, stripped her naked, and began the ritual. You anointed her; you laid her in a circle of sand from the margin of the Second Dominion, the holiest ground in the Imajica. Then you said your prayers, and you waited.” He paused, enjoying this telling. “It is, let me remind you, a long conjuration. Eleven hours at the minimum, watching the doppelgänger grow in the circle beside its source. You’d made sure there was nobody else in the house, of course, not even your precious mystif. This was a very secret ritual. So you were alone, and you soon got bored. And when you got bored, you got drunk. So there you were, sitting in the room with her, watching her perfection in the firelight, obsessing on her beauty. And eventually—half out of your mind with brandy—you made the biggest mistake of your life. You tore off your clothes, you stepped into the circle,and you did about everything a man can do to a woman, even though she was comatose, and you were hallucinating with fasting and drink. You didn’t fuck her once, you did it over and over, as though you wanted to get up inside her. Over and over. Then you fell into a stupor at her side.”

  Gentle began to see the error looming. “I fell asleep in the circle?” he said.

  “In the circle.”

  “And you were the consequence.”
/>
  “I was. And let me tell you, it was quite a birth. People say they don’t remember the moment they came into the world, but I do. I remember opening my eyes in the circle, with her beside me, and these rains of matter coming down on me, congealing around my spirit. Becoming bone. Becoming flesh.” All expression had gone from his face. “I remember,” he said, “at one point she realized she wasn’t alone and she turned and saw me lying beside her. I was unfinished. An anatomy lesson, raw and wet. I’ve never forgotten the noise she made—”

  “I didn’t wake up through any of this?”

  “You’d crawled away downstairs to douse your head, and you’d fallen asleep. I know because I found you, later on, sprawled on the dining room table.”

  “The conjuration still worked, even though I’d left the circle?”

  “You’re quite the technician, aren’t you? Yes, it still worked. You were an easy subject. It took hours to decode Judith and make her doppelgänger. But you were incandescent. The sway read you in minutes and made me in a couple of hours.”

  “You knew who you were from the beginning?”

  “Oh, yes. I was you, in your lust. I was you, full of drunken visions. I was you, wanting to fuck and fuck, and conquer and conquer. But I was also you when you’d done your worst, with your balls empty and your head empty, like death had got in, sitting there between her legs trying to remember what it was you were living for. I was that man too, and it was terrifying to have both those feelings in me at the same time.”

  He paused a moment.

  “It still is, brother.”

  “I would have helped you, surely, if I’d known what I’d done.”

  “Or put me out of my misery,” Sartori said. “Taken me into the garden and shot me like a rabid dog. I didn’t know what you’d do. I went downstairs. You were snoring like a trooper. I watched you for a long while, wanting to wake you, wanting to share the terror I felt, but Godolphin arrived before I got up the courage. It was just before dawn. He’d come to take Judith home. I hid myself. I watched Godolphin wake you; I heard you talk together, I saw you climb the stairs like two expectant fathers and go into the Meditation Room. Then I heard your whoops of celebration, and I knew once and for all that I wasn’t an intended child.”