Imajica

  “Not again,” Gentle murmured.

  The monk was crouching at his side. “Can you stand,” he asked, “or shall I get help?”

  Gentle put his hands beneath him and pushed himself up into a kneeling position, making no reply to the question. With the mystif’s disappearance, the malignant wind that had come after it, and brought such devastation, was dropping away, and as it did so the debris it had been keeping aloft descended in a grim hail. For a second time the monk raised his hands to ward off the descending force. Gentle was barely aware of what was happening. His eyes were on the Erasure, which was rapidly losing its roiling motion. By the time the rain of canvas, stones, and bodies had stopped, every last trace of detail had gone from the divide, and it was once again an absence over which the eye slid, finding no purchase.

  Gentle got to his feet and, turning his eyes from the nullity, scanned the desolation that lay in every other direction but one. The circle of Madonnas he’d glimpsed through the storm was still intact, and sheltering in its midst were half a hundred survivors, some of them on their knees sobbing or praying, many kissing the feet of the statues that had shielded them, still others gazing towards the Erasure from which the destruction that claimed all but these fifty, plus the Maestro and the monk, had come.

  “Do you see Athanasius?” Gentle asked the man at his side.

  “No, but he’s alive somewhere,” came the reply. “He’s like you, Maestro; he’s got too much purpose in him to die.”

  “I don’t think any purpose would have saved me if you hadn’t been here,” Gentle remarked. “You’ve got real power in your bones.”

  “A little, maybe,” the monk replied, with a modest smile. “I had a fine teacher.”

  “So did I,” Gentle said softly. “But I lost it.” Seeing the Maestro’s eyes filling, the monk made to withdraw, but Gentle said, “Don’t worry about the tears. I’ve been running from them too long. Let me ask you something. I’ll quite understand if you say no.”

  “What, Maestro?”

  “When I leave here, I’m going back to the Fifth to prepare for a Reconciliation. Would you trust me enough to join the Synod; to represent the First?”

  The monk’s face broke into bliss, shedding years as he smiled. “It would be my honor, Maestro,” he said.

  “There’s risk in it,” Gentle warned.

  “There always was. But I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re my inspiration, Maestro,” the man replied, inclining his head in deference. “Whatever you require of me, I’ll perform as best I can.”

  “Stay here, then. Watch the Erasure and wait. I’ll find you when the time comes.” He spoke with more certainty than he felt, but then perhaps the illusion of competence was part of every Maestro’s repertoire.

  “I’ll be waiting,” the monk replied.

  “What’s your name?”

  “When I joined the Dearthers they called me Chicka Jackeen.”

  “Jackeen?”

  “It means worthless fellow,” the man replied.

  “Then we’ve got much in common,” Gentle said. He took the man’s hand and shook it. “Remember me, Jackeen.”

  “You’ve never left my mind,” the man replied.

  There was some subtext here Gentle couldn’t grasp, but this was no time to delve. He had two demanding and dangerous journeys ahead of him: the first to Yzordderrex, the second from that city back to the Retreat. Thanking Jackeen for his good offices, Gentle left him at the Erasure and picked his way back through the devastation towards the circle of Madonnas. Some of the survivors were leaving its shelter to begin a search of the site, presumably in the hope—vain, he suspected—of finding others alive. It was a scene of grief and bewilderment he’d witnessed too many times on his journey through the Dominions. Much as he would have liked to believe it was mere happenstance that these scenes of devastation coincided with his presence, he couldn’t afford to indulge such self-delusion. He was as surely wedded to the storm as he was to Pie. More so now, perhaps, with the mystif gone.

  Jackeen’s observation that Athanasius was too purposeful a soul to have perished was confirmed as Gentle drew closer to the circle. The man was standing at the center of a knot of Dearthers, leading a prayer of thanks to the Holy Mother for their survival. As Gentle reached the perimeter, Athanasius raised his head. One eye was closed beneath a scab of blood and dirt, but there was enough hatred in the other to burn in a dozen eyes. Meeting its gaze, Gentle advanced no further, but the priest dropped the volume of his prayer to a whisper anyway, preventing the trespasser from hearing the terms of his devotion. Gentle’s ears were not so dulled by the din he didn’t catch a few of the phrases, however. Though the woman represented in so many modes around the circle was clearly the Virgin Mary, she apparently went by other names here; or else had sisters. He heard her called Uma Umagammagi, Mother Imajica; and heard too the name Huzzah had first whispered to him in her cell beneath the maison de santé:Tishalullé. There was a third, though it took Gentle a little time to be certain he’d understood the naming aright, and that was Jokalaylau. Athanasius prayed that she’d keep a place for them at her side in the snows of paradise, which made Gentle wonder rather sourly if the man had ever trodden those wastes, that he could think them a heavenly place.

  Though the names were strange, the inspiring spirit was not. Athanasius and his forlorn congregation were praying to the same loving Goddess at whose shrines in the Fifth countless candles were lit every day. Even Gentle at his most pagan had conceded the presence of that woman in his life and worshiped her the only way he’d known how: with the seduction and temporary possession of her sex. Had he known a mother or a loving sister he might have learned a better devotion than lust, but he hoped and believed the Holy Woman would forgive him his trespasses, even if Athanasius would not. The thought comforted him. He would need all the protection he could assemble in the battle that lay ahead, and it was no little solace to think that the Mother Imajica had her worshiping places in the Fifth, where that battle would be fought.

  With the ad hoc service over, Athanasius let his congregation go about the business of searching the wreckage. For his part, he stayed in the middle of the circle, where a few survivors who’d made it that far, but perished, lay sprawled.

  “Come here, Maestro,” Athanasius said. “There’s something you should see.”

  Gentle stepped into the circle, expecting Athanasius to show him the corpse of a child or some fragile beauty, broken. But the face at his feet was male, and far from innocent.

  “You knew him, I think.”

  “Yes. His name was Estabrook.”

  Charlie’s eyes were closed, his mouth too: sealed up in the moment of his passing. There was very little sign of physical damage. Perhaps his heart had simply given out in the excitement.

  “Nikaetomaas said you brought him here because you thought he was me.”

  “We thought he was a Messiah,” Athanasius said. “When we realized he wasn’t we kept looking, expecting a miracle. Instead—”

  “You got me. For what it’s worth, you were right. I did bring all this destruction with me. I don’t quite know why, and I don’t expect you to forgive me for it, but I want you to understand that I take no pleasure in it. All I want to do is make good the damage I’ve done.”

  “And how will you do that, Maestro?” Athanasius said. His one good eye brimmed with tears as he surveyed the bodies. “How will you make this good? Can you resurrect them with what’s between your legs? Is that the trick of it? Can you fuck them back into life?”

  Gentle made a guttural sound of disgust.

  “Well, that’s what you Maestros think, isn’t it? You don’t want to suffer, you just want the glory. You lay your rod on the land, and the land bears fruit. That’s what you think. But it doesn’t work that way. It’s your blood the land wants; it’s your sacrifice. And as long as you deny that, others are going to die in your place. Bel
ieve me, I’d cut my throat now if I thought I could raise these people, but I’ve been played a wretched trick. I’ve the will to do it, but my blood’s not worth a damn. Yours is. I don’t know why. I wish it weren’t. But it is.”

  “Would Uma Umagammagi like to see me bleed?” Gentle said. “Or Tishalullé? Or Jokalaylau? Is that what your loving mothers want from this child?”

  “You don’t belong to them. I don’t know who you belong to, but you didn’t come from their sweet bodies.”

  “I must have come from somewhere,” Gentle said, voicing that thought for the first time in his life. “I’ve got a purpose in me, and I think God put it there.”

  “Don’t look too far, Maestro. Your ignorance may be the only defense the rest of us have got against you. Give up your ambition now, before you find out what you’re really capable of.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Oh, but it’s easy,” Athanasius said. “Kill yourself, Maestro. Let the land have your blood. That’s the greatest service you could do the Dominions now.”

  There was the bitterest echo, in these words, of a letter he’d read months ago, in another kind of wilderness.

  Do this for the women of the world, Vanessa had written. Slit your lying throat.

  Had he really traveled the Dominions simply to have the advice he’d been given by a woman whom he’d cheated in love returned to him? After all this striving for comprehension, was he finally as injurious and fraudulent a Maestro as he was a lover?

  Athanasius read the accuracy of this last dart off his target’s face and with a feral grin hammered it home.

  “Do it soon, Maestro,” he said. “There are enough orphans in the Dominions already, without you indulging your ambitions for another day.”

  Gentle let these cruelties go. “You married me to the love of my life, Athanasius,” he said. “I won’t ever forget that kindness.”

  “Poor Pie ‘oh’ pah,” the other man replied, grinding the point home. “Another of your victims. What a poison there must be in you, Maestro.”

  Gentle turned and left the circle without responding, with Athanasius repeating his earlier advice to usher him on his way.

  “Kill yourself soon, Maestro,” he said. “For you, for Pie, for all of us. Kill yourself soon.”

  II

  It took Gentle a quarter of an hour to make his way through the ravagement to open ground, hoping as he went that he’d find some vehicle—Floccus’, perhaps—that he could commandeer for the return journey to Yzordderrex. If he found nothing, it would be a long trek on foot, but that would have to be the way of it. What little illumination the fires behind him proffered soon dwindled, and he was obliged to search by starlight, which would most probably have failed to show him the vehicle had his path not been redirected by the squeals of Floccus Dado’s porcine pet Sighshy, who, along with her litter, was still inside. The car had been thrown over in the storm, and so he went to it simply to let the animals out, planning to go on to find another. But as he struggled with the handle a human face appeared at the steamed-up window. Floccus was inside and greeted Gentle’s appearance with a clamor of relief almost as high-pitched as Sighshy’s. Gentle clambered up onto the side ofthe car and after much swearing and sweating wrenched the door open with brute force.

  “Oh, you’re a sight to behold, Maestro,” Floccus said. “I thought I was going to suffocate in there.”

  The stench was piercing, and it came with Floccus when he clambered out. His clothes were caked in the litter’s excrement, and Mama’s too.

  “How the hell did you get in there?” Gentle asked him.

  Floccus wiped a turd trail off his spectacles and blinked at his savior through them.

  “When Athanasius told me to summon you, I thought, Something’s wrong here, Dado. You’d better go while you can. I’d just got into the car when the storm started, and it was simply turned over, with all of us inside. The windows are unbreakable, and the locks were jammed. I couldn’t get out.”

  “You were lucky to be in there.”

  “So I see,” Floccus observed, surveying the distant vista of destruction. “What happened out here?”

  “Something came out of the First, in pursuit of Pie ‘oh’ pah.”

  “The Unbeheld did this?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Unkind,” Floccus said softly, which was surely the understatement of the night.

  Floccus lifted Sighshy and her litter—two of which had perished when their mother fell on them—out of the vehicle; then he and Gentle set to the task of putting it back on four wheels. It took some doing, but Floccus made up in strength what he lacked in height, and between the two of them the job was done.

  Gentle had made plain his intention to return to Yzordderrex but wasn’t certain of Floccus’ intentions until the engine was running. Then he said, “Are you coming with me?”

  “I should stay,” Floccus replied. There was a fretful pause. “But I’ve never been much good with death.”

  “You said the same thing about sex.”

  “It’s true.”

  “That doesn’t leave much, does it?”

  “Would you prefer to go without me, Maestro?”

  “Not at all. If you want to come, come. But let’s get going. I want to be in Yzordderrex by dawn.”

  “Why, what happens at dawn?” Floccus said, a superstitious flutter in his voice.

  “It’s a new day.”

  “Should we be grateful for that?” the other man inquired, as though he sniffed some profound wisdom in the Maestro’s reply but couldn’t quite grasp it.

  “Indeed we should, Floccus, indeed we should. For the day, and for the chance.”

  “What . . . er . . . what chance would that be exactly?”

  “The chance to change the world.”

  “Ah,” said Floccus. “Of course. To change the world. I’ll make that my prayer from now on.”

  “We’ll compose it together, Floccus. We’ve got to invent everything from now on: who we are, what we believe. There’s been too many old roads taken. Too many old dramas repeated. We’ve got to find a new way by tomorrow.”

  “A new way.”

  “That’s right. We’ll make that our ambition, agreed? To be new men by the time the comet comes up.”

  Floccus’ doubt was visible, even by starlight. “That doesn’t give us very long,” he observed.

  True enough, Gentle thought. In the Fifth, midsummer could not be very far off, and though he didn’t yet comprehend the reasons, he knew the Reconciliation could only be performed on that day. There was a fine irony. Having frittered away lifetimes in pursuit of sensation, the span he had left in which to make good the error of that waste could be measured in terms of hours.

  “There’ll be time,” he said, hoping to answer Floccus’ doubts, and subdue his own, but knowing in his heart of hearts that he was doing neither.

  I

  Jude was stirred from the torpor Quaisoir’s narcotic bed had induced in her not by sound—she’d long since become accustomed to the anarchy that had raged unabated throughout the night—but by a sense of unease too vague to be identified and too insistent to be ignored. Something of consequence had happened in the Dominion, and though her wits were dulled by indulgence, she woke too agitated to return to the comfort of a scented pillow. Head throbbing, she heaved herself up out of the bed and went in search of her sister. Concupiscentia was at the door, with a sly smile on her face. Jude half remembered the creature slipping into one of her drugged dreams, but the details were hazy, and the foreboding she’d woken with was more important now than remembering the fantasies that had gone before. She found Quaisoir in a darkened room, sitting beside the window.

  “Did something wake you, sister?” Quaisoir asked her.

  “I don’t quite know what, but yes. Do you know what it was?”

  “Something in the desert,” Quaisoir replied, turning her head towards the window, though she lacked the eyes to see what lay o
utside. “Something momentous.”

  “Is there any way of finding out what?”

  Quaisoir took a deep breath. “No easy way.”

  “But there is one?”

  “Yes, there’s a place beneath the Pivot Tower . . .”

  Concupiscentia had followed Judith into the room, but now, at the mention of this place, she made to withdraw. She was neither quiet nor fast enough, however. Quaisoir summoned her back.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she told the creature. “We don’t need you with us once we’re inside. But fetch a lamp, will you? And something to eat and drink. We may be there awhile.”

  It was half a day and more since Jude and Quaisoir had taken refuge in the suite of chambers, and in that time any last occupants of the palace had made their escape, doubtless fearing the revolutionary zeal that would want the fortress cleansed of the Autarch’s excesses down to the last bureaucrat. Those bureaucrats had fled, but the zealots hadn’t appeared in their place. Though Jude had heard commotion in the courtyards as she’d dozed, it had never come close. Either the fury that had moved the tide was exhausted, and the insurgents were resting before they began their assault on the palace, or else their fervor had lost its singular purpose altogether, and the commotion she’d heard was factions battling with each other for the right to plunder, which conflicts had destroyed them all, left, right, and center. Whatever, the consequence was the same: a palace built to house many thousands of souls—servants, soldiers, pen pushers, cooks, stewards, messengers, torturers, and majordomos—wasdeserted, and they went through it, Jude led by Concupiscentia’s lamp, Quaisoir led by Jude, like three tiny specks of life lost in a vast and dark machine. The only sounds were their footsteps, and those that said machine made as it ran down: hotwater pipes ticking as the furnaces that fed them guttered out; shutters beating themselves to splinters in empty rooms; guard dogs barking on gnawed leashes, fearful their masters would not come again. Nor would they. The furnaces would cool, the shutters break, and the dogs, trained to bring death, would have it come to them in their turn. The age of the Autarch Sartori was over, and no new age had yet begun.