Imajica

  As they walked Jude asked for an explanation of the place to which they were going, and by way of reply Quaisoir offered first a history of the Pivot. Of all the Autarch’s devices to subdue and rule the Reconciled Dominions, she said—subverting the religions and governments of his enemies; setting nation against nation—none would have kept him in power for more than a decade had he not possessed the genius to steal and to set at the center of his empire the greatest symbol of power in the Imajica. The Pivot was Hapexamendios’ marker, and the fact that the Unbeheld had allowed the architect of Yzordderrex to even touch, much less move, his pylon was for many proof that however much they might despise the Autarch, he was touched by divinity and could never be toppled. What powers it had conferred on its possessor even she didn’t know.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “when he was high on kreauchee, he’d talk about the Pivot as though he was married to it, and he was the wife. Even when we made love he’d talk that way. He’d say it was in him the way he was in me. He’d always deny it afterward, of course, but it was in his mind always. It’s in every man’s mind.”

  Jude doubted this, and said so.

  “But they so want to be possessed,” Quaisoir replied. “They want some Holy Spirit inside them. You listen to their prayers.”

  “That’s not something I hear very often.”

  “You will when the smoke clears,” Quaisoir replied. “They’ll be afraid, once they realize the Autarch’s gone. They may have hated him, but they’ll hate his absence more.”

  “If they’re afraid they’ll be dangerous,” Jude said, realizing as she spoke how well these sentiments might have come from Clara Leash’s mouth. “They won’t be devout.”

  Concupiscentia halted, before Quaisoir could take up her account afresh, and began to murmur a little prayer of her own.

  “Are we here?” Quaisoir asked.

  The creature broke the rhythm of her entreaty to tell her mistress that they were. There was nothing remarkable about the door in front of them, or the staircases that wound out of sight to either side of it. All were monumental, and therefore commonplace. They’d passed through dozens of portals like this as they’d made their way through the place’s cooling belly. But Concupiscentia was plainly in terror of it, or rather of what lay on the other side.

  “Are we near the Pivot?” Jude said.

  “The tower’s directly above us,” Quaisoir replied.

  “That’s not where we’re going?”

  “No. The Pivot would probably kill us both. But there’s a chamber below the tower, where the messages the Pivot collects drain away. I’ve spied there often, though he never knew it.”

  Jude let go of Quaisoir’s arm and went to the door, keeping to herself the irritation she felt at being denied the tower itself. She wanted to see this power, which had reputedly been shaped and planted by God Himself. Quaisoir had talked of it as lethal, and perhaps it was, but how was anyone to know until they’d tested themselves against it? Perhaps its reputation was the Autarch’s invention, his way of keeping its gifts for himself. Under its aegis, he’d prospered, no doubt of that. What might others do, if they had its blessing conferred upon them? Turn night to day?

  She turned the handle and pushed open the door. Sour and chilly air issued from the darkened space beyond. Jude summoned Concupiscentia to her side, took the lamp from the creature, and held it high. Ahead lay a small inclined corridor, its walls almost burnished.

  “Do I wait here, lady?” Concupiscentia asked.

  “Give me whatever you brought to eat,” Quaisoir replied, “and stay outside the door. If you hear or see anybody, I want you to come and find us. I know you don’t like to go in there, but you must be brave. Understand me, dearling?”

  “I understand, lady,” Concupiscentia replied, handing to her mistress the bundle and the bottle she’d carried with her.

  Thus laden, Quaisoir took Jude’s arm and they stepped into the passage. One part of the fortress’s machine was still operational, it seemed, because as soon as they closed the door after them a circuit, broken as long as the door stood wide, was completed, and the air began to vibrate against their skin: vibrate and whisper.

  “Here they are,” Quaisoir said. “The intimations.”

  That was too civilized a word for this sound, Jude thought. The passageway was filled with a quiet commotion, like snatches from a thousand radio stations, all incomprehensible, coming and going as the dial was flipped, and flipped again. Jude raised the lamp to see how much farther they had to travel. The passageway ended ten yards ahead, but with every yard they covered the din increased—not in volume but in complexity—as new stations were added to the number the walls were already tuned into. None of it was music. There were multitudes of voices raised as a single sound, and there were solitary howls; there were sobs, and shouts, and words spoken like a recitation.

  “What is this noise?” Jude asked.

  “The Pivot hears every piece of magic in the Dominions. Every invocation, every confession, every dying oath. This is the Unbeheld’s way of knowing what Gods are being worshiped besides Him. And what Goddesses, too.”

  “He spies on deathbeds?” Jude said, more than faintly disgusted by the thought.

  “On every place where a mortal thing speaks to the divine, whether the divinity exists or not, whether the prayer’s answered or not, He’s there.”

  “Here, too?” Jude said.

  “Not unless you start praying,” Quaisoir said.

  “I won’t.”

  They were at the end of the passage, and the air was busier than ever; colder, too. The lamp’s light illuminated a room shaped like a colander, maybe twenty feet across, its curved walls as polished as those of the passage. In the floor was a grille, like a gutter beneath a butcher’s table, through which the detritus of prayers, ripped from the hearts of those in grief or washed up in tears of joy, ran off into the mountain upon which Yzordderrex was built. It was difficult for Jude to grasp the notion of prayer as a solid thing—a kind of matter to be gathered, analyzed, and sluiced away—but she knew her incomprehension was a consequence of living in a world out of love with transformation. There was nothing so solid that it couldn’t be abstracted, nothing so ethereal that it couldn’t find a place in the material world. Prayer might be substance after a time, and thought (which she’d believed skull-bound until the dream of the blue stone) fly like a bright-eyed bird, seeingthe world remote from its sender; a flea might unravel flesh if wise to its code; and flesh in its turn move between worlds as a picture drawn in the mind of passage. All these mysteries were, she knew, part of a single system if she could only grasp it: one form becoming another, and another, and another, in a glorious tapestry of transformations, the sum of which was Being itself.

  It was no accident that she embraced that possibility here. Though the sounds that filled the room were incomprehensible as yet, their purpose was known to her, and it raised the ambition of her thoughts. She let go of Quaisoir’s arm and walked into the middle of the room, setting the lamp down beside the grille in the floor. They’d come here for a specific reason, and she knew she had to hold fast to that; otherwise her thoughts would be carried away on the swell of sound.

  “How do we make sense of it?” she said to Quaisoir.

  “It takes time,” her sister replied. “Even for me. But I marked the compass points on the walls. Do you see?”

  She did. Crude marks, scratched in the surface sheen.

  “The Erasure is north-northwest of here. We can narrow the possibilities a little by turning in that direction.” She extended her arms, like a haunting spirit. “Will you lead me to the middle?” she said.

  Jude obliged, and they both turned in the direction of the Erasure. As far as Jude was concerned, doing so did little good. The din continued in all its complexity. But Quaisoir dropped her hands and listened intently, moving her head slightly from side to side as she did so. Several minutes passed, Jude keeping her silence for fear an inquir
y would break her sister’s concentration, and was rewarded for her diligence, finally, with some murmured words.

  “They’re praying to the Madonna,” Quaisoir said.

  “Who are?”

  “Dearthers. Out at the Erasure. They’re giving thanks for their deliverance and asking for the souls of the dead to be received into paradise.”

  She fell silent again for a time, and now, with some clue as to what she had to listen for, Jude attempted to sort through the intimations that filled her head. But although she was refining her focus, and could now snatch words and phrases out of the confusion, she couldn’t hold that focus long enough to make any sense of what she heard. After a time Quaisoir’s body relaxed, and she shrugged.

  “There’s just glimpses now,” she said. “I think they’re finding bodies. I hear little sobs of prayers and little oaths.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “This was some time ago,” Quaisoir said. “The Pivot’s had these prayers for several hours. But it was something calamitous, that’s certain,” she said. “I think there are a lot of casualties.”

  “It’s as if what happened in Yzordderrex is spreading,” Jude said.

  “Maybe it is,” Quaisoir said. “Do you want to sit down and eat?”

  “In here?”

  “Why not? I find it very soothing.” Reaching for Jude to help her, Quaisoir squatted down. “You get used to it after a time. Maybe a little addicted. Speaking of which . . . where’s the food?” Jude put the bundle into Quaisoir’s outstretched hands. “I hope the child packed kreauchee.”

  Her fingers were strong and, having scoured the surface of the bundle, dug deep, passing the contents over to Jude one by one. There was fruit, there were three loaves of black bread, there was some meat, and—the finding enough to bring a gleeful yelp from Quaisoir—a small parcel which she did not pass over to Jude but put to her nose.

  “Bright thing,” Quaisoir said. “She knows what I need.”

  “Is it some kind of drug?” Jude said, laying down the food. “I don’t want you taking it. I need you here, not drifting off.”

  “Are you trying to forbid me my pleasure, after the way you dreamed on my pillows?” Quaisoir said. “Oh, yes, I heard your gasping and your groaning. Who were you imagining?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “And this is mine,” Quaisoir replied, discarding the tissue in which Concupiscentia had fastidiously wrapped the kreauchee. It looked appetizing, like a cube of fudge. “When you’ve got no addiction of your own, sister, then you can moralize,” Quaisoir said. “I won’t listen, but you can moralize.”

  With that, she put the whole of the kreauchee into her mouth, chewing on it contentedly. Jude, meanwhile, sought more conventional sustenance, choosing among the various fruits one that resembled a diminutive pineapple and peeling it to discover it was just that, its juice tart but its meat tasty. That eaten, she went on to the bread and slivers of meat, her hunger so stimulated by the first few bites that she steadily devoured the lot, washing it down with bitter water from the bottle. The fall of prayers that had seemed so insistent when she’d first entered the chamber could not compete with the more immediate sensations of fruit, bread, meat, and water; the din became a background burble which she scarcely thought about until she’d finished her meal. By that time, the kreauchee was clearly working in Quaisoir’s system. She was swaying back and forth as though in the arms of some invisible tide.

  “Can you hear me?” Jude asked her.

  She took awhile to reply. “Why don’t you join me?” she said. “Kiss me, and we can share the kreauchee. Mouth to mouth. Mind to mind.”

  “I don’t want to kiss you.”

  “Why not? Do you hate yourself too much to make love?” She smiled to herself, amused by the perverse logic of this. “Have you ever made love to a woman?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “I have. At the Bastion. It was better than being with a man.”

  She reached out towards Jude and found her hand with the accuracy of one sighted.

  “You’re cold,” she said.

  “No, you’re hot,” Jude replied, moving to break the contact.

  “You know what air makes this place so cold, sister?” Quaisoir said. “It’s the pit beneath the city, where the fake Redeemer went.”

  Jude looked down at the grille and shuddered. The dead were down there somewhere.

  “You’re cold like the dead are cold,” Quaisoir went on. “Icy heart.” All this she said in a singsong voice, to the rhythm of her rocking. “Poor sister. To be dead already.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this,” Jude said. She’d preserved her equanimity so far, but Quaisoir’s fugue talk was beginning to irritate her. “If you don’t stop,” she said quietly, “I’m going to leave you here.”

  “Don’t do that,” Quaisoir replied. “I want you to stay and make love to me.”

  “I’ve told you—”

  “Mouth to mouth. Mind to mind.”

  “You’re talking in circles.”

  “That’s the way the world was made,” she said. “Joined together, round and round.” She put her hand to her mouth, as if to cover it, then smiled, with almost fiendish glee. “There’s no way in and there’s no way out. That’s what the Goddess says. When we make love, we go round and round—”

  She searched for Jude a second time, with the same unerring ease, and a second time Jude withdrew her hand, realizing as she did so that this repetition was part of her sister’s egocentric game. A sealed system of mirrored flesh, moving round and round. Was that truly how the world was made? If so, it sounded like a trap, and she wanted her mind out of it, there and then.

  “I can’t stay in here,” she said to Quaisoir.

  “You’ll come back?” her sister replied.

  “Yes, in a while.”

  The answer was more repetition. “You’ll come back.”

  This time Jude didn’t bother replying, but crossed to the passageway and climbed back up to the door. Concupiscentia was still waiting on the other side, asleep now, her form delineated by the first signs of dawn through the window on the sill of which she rested. The fact that day was breaking surprised Jude; she’d assumed that there were several hours yet before the comet reared its burning head. She was obviously more disoriented than she’d thought, the time she’d spent in the room with Quaisoir—listening to the prayers, eating, and arguing—not minutes but hours. She went to the window and looked down at the dim courtyards. Birds stirred on a ledge somewhere below her and rose suddenly, heading into the brightening sky, taking her eye with them, up towards the tower. Quaisoir had been unequivocal about the dangers of venturing there. But for all her talk of love between women, wasn’t she still in thrall to the mythologies of the man who’d made her Queen of Yzordderrex,and therefore bound to believe that the places he kept her from would do her harm? There was no better time to challenge that mythology than now, Jude thought, with a new day beginning, and the power that had uprooted the Pivot and raised such walls around it gone.

  She went to the stairs and started to climb. After a few steps their curve took her into utter darkness, and she was obliged to ascend as blind as the sister she’d left below, her palm flat against the cold wall. But after maybe thirty stairs her outstretched arm encountered a door, so heavy she first assumed it to be locked. It required all her strength to open, but her effort was well rewarded. On the other side was a passageway lighter than the staircase she’d climbed, though still gloomy enough to limit her sight to less than ten yards. Hugging the wall, she advanced with great caution, her route bringing her to the corner of a corridor, the door that had once sealed it off from the chamber at its end blown from its hinges and lying, fractured and twisted, on the tiled floor beyond. She paused here, in order to listen for any sign of the wrecker’s presence. There was none, so she moved on past the place, her gaze drawn to a flight of stairs that led up to her left. Forsaking the pa
ssageway,she began a second ascent, this one also leading into darkness, until she rounded a corner and a sliver of light descended to meet her. Its source was the door at the summit of the stairs, which stood slightly ajar.

  Again, she halted a moment. Though there was no overt indication of power here—the atmosphere was almost tranquil—she knew that the force she’d come to confront was undoubtedly waiting in its silo at the top of the stairs, and more than likely sentient. She didn’t discount the possibility that this hush was contrived to soothe her, and the light sent to coax. But if it wanted her up there, it must have a reason. And if it didn’t—if it was as lifeless as the stone underfoot—she had nothing to lose.

  “Let’s see what you’re made of,” she said aloud, the challenge delivered at least as much to herself as the Unbeheld’s Pivot. And so saying, she went to the door.

  II

  Though there were undoubtedly more direct routes to the Pivot Tower than the one he’d taken with Nikaetomaas, Gentle decided to go the way he half remembered rather than attempt a shortcut and find himself lost in the labyrinth. He parted company with Floccus Dado, Sighshy, and litter at the Gate of Saints and began his climb through the palace, checking on his position relative to the Pivot Tower from every window.

  Dawn was in the offing. Birds rose singing from their nests beneath the colonnades and swooped over the courtyards, indifferent to the bitter smoke that passed for mist this morning. Another day was imminent, and his system was badly in need of sleep. He’d dozed a little on the journey from the Erasure, but the effect had been cosmetic. There was a fatigue in his marrow which would bring him to his knees very soon now, and the knowledge of that made him eager to complete the day’s business as quickly as possible. He’d come back here for two reasons. First, to finish the task Pie’s appearance and wounding had diverted him from: the pursuit and execution of Sartori. Second, whether he found his doppelgänger here or not, to make his way back to the Fifth, where Sartori had talked of founding his New Yzordderrex. It wouldn’t be difficult to get home, he knew, now that he was alive to his capacities as a Maestro. Even without the mystif to point the way, he’d be able to dig frommemory the means to pass between Dominions.