Imajica

"I like it out in the country," he said. "We can do what the f.u.c.k we like."

"Let"s just make it back alive," she said. "He"s relying on us."

"No problem," Monday said cheerily. Then, to Clem: "Look after the Boss-man, huh? If things get weird, we can always call on Irish and the rest."

"Did you tell them where we are?" Clem said.

"They"re not going to fetch up lookin" for a bed, don"t worry," Monday said. "But the way I reckon it, the more friends we got, the better." He turned to Jude. "I"m ready when you are," he said, and headed back outside.

"This shouldn"t take more than two or three hours," Jude told Clem. "Look after yourself. And him."

She glanced up the stairs as she spoke, but the candles at the bottom threw too frail a light to reach the top, and she failed to see Gentle there. It was only when she"d gone from the step, and the car was roaring away down the street, that he made his presence known.

"Monday"s come back," Clem said.

"I heard."

"Did he disturb you? I"m sorry."

"No, no. I was finished anyway."

"The night"s so hot," Clem said, gazing up at the sky.

"Why don"t you sleep for a while? I can stand guard."

"Where"s that b.l.o.o.d.y pet of yours?"

"He"s called Little Ease, Clem, and he"s on the top floor, keeping watch."

"I don"t trust him, Gentle."

"He"ll do us no harm. Go and lie down."

"Have you finished with Pie?"

"I think I"ve learned what I can. Now I"ve got to check on the rest of the Synod."

"How"ll you do that?"

"I"ll leave my body upstairs and go traveling."

"That sounds dangerous."

"I"ve done it before. But my flesh and blood"ll be vulnerable while I"m out of it."

"As soon as you"re ready to go, wake me. I"ll watch over you like a hawk."

"Have an hour"s nap first."

Clem picked up one of the candles and went to look for a place to lie down, leaving Gentle to take over his post at the front door. He sat on the step with his head laid against the door frame and enjoyed what little breeze the night could supply. There were no lamps working in the street. It was the light of the moon, and the stars in array around it, that picked out the details in the house opposite and caught the pale undersides of the leaves when the wind lifted them. Lulled, he fell into a doze and missed the shooting stars.

"Oh, how beautiful," the girl said. She couldn"t have been more than sixteen, and when she laughed, which her beau had made her do a lot tonight, she sounded even younger. But she wasn"t laughing now. She was standing in the darkness staring up at the meteor shower, while Sartori looked on admiringly.

He"d found her three hours earlier, wandering through the Midsummer Fair on Hampstead Heath, and had easily charmed himself into her company. The fair was doing poor business, with so few people out and about, so when the rides closed down, which they did at the first sign of dusk, he talked her into coming into the City with him. They"d buy some wine, he said, and wander; find a place to sit and talk and watch the stars. It was a long time since he"d indulged himself in a seduction-Judith had been another kind of challenge entirely-but the tricks of the trade came back readily enough, and the satisfaction of watching her resistance crumble, plus the wine he imbibed, did much to a.s.suage the pain of recent defeats.

The girl-her name was Monica-was both lovely and compliant. She met his gaze only coyly at first, but that was all part of the game, and it contented him to play it for a while, as a diversion from the coming tragedy. Coy as she was, she didn"t reject him when he suggested they take a stroll around the fields of demolished buildings at the back of Shiverick Square, though she made some remark about wanting him to treat her carefully. So he did. They walked together in the darkness until they found a spot where the undergrowth thinned and made a kind of grove. The sky was clear overhead, and she had a fine, swooning sight of the meteor shower.

"It always makes me feel a little bit afraid," she told him in a charmless c.o.c.kney. "Looking at the stars, I mean."

"Why"s that?"

"Well... we"re so small, aren"t we?"

He"d asked her earlier to tell him about her life, and she"d volunteered sc.r.a.ps of biography, first about a boy called Trevor, who"d said he loved her but had gone off with her best friend; then about her mother"s collection of china frogs, and how much she"d like to live in Spain, because everybody was so much happier there. But now, without prompting, she told him she didn"t care about Spain or Trevor or the china frogs. She was happy, she said; and the sight of the stars, which usually scared her, tonight made her want to fly, to which he said that they could indeed fly, together, if she just said the word.

At this she looked away from the sky, with a resigned sigh.

"I know what you want," she said. "You"re all the same. Flying. Is that your fancy word for it then?"

He said she"d misunderstood him completely. He hadn"t brought her here to fumble and fuss with her. That was beneath them both.

"What then?" she said.

He answered her with his hand, too swiftly to be contradicted. The second primal act, after the one she"d thought he"d brought her here to perform. Her struggles were almost as resigned as her sigh, and she was dead on the ground in less than a minute. Overhead, the stars continued to fall in an abundance he remembered from this time two hundred years before. An unseasonal rain of heavenly bodies, to presage the business of tomorrow night.

He dismembered and disemboweled her with the greatest care and laid the pieces around the grove in time-honored fashion. There was no need to hurry. This working was better completed in the bleak moments before dawn, and they were still some hours away. When they came, and the working was performed, he had high hopes for it. G.o.dolphin"s body had been cold when he"d used it, and its owner scarcely an innocent. The creatures he"d tempted from the In Ovo with such unappetizing bait had therefore been primitive. Monica, on the other hand, was warm and had not lived long enough to be much soiled. Her death would open a deeper crack in the In Ovo than G.o.dolphin"s, and through it he hoped to draw a particular species of Oviate uniquely suited for the work tomorrow would bring: a sleek, bitter-throated kind, that would help him prove, by tomorrow night, what a child born to destruction could do.

53

After all that Monday had said about the state of the city, Jude had expected to find it completely deserted, but this proved not to be the case. In the time between his returning from the South Bank and their setting out for the estate, the streets of London, which were as devoid of romancing tourists and partiers as Monday had claimed, had become the territory of a third and altogether stranger tribe: that of men and women who had simply got up out of their beds and gone wandering. Almost all of them were alone, as though whatever unease had driven them out into the night was too painful to share with their loved ones. Some were dressed for a day at the office: suits and ties, skirts and sensible shoes. Others were wearing the minimum for decency: many barefoot, many more bare-chested. All wandered with the same languid gait, their eyes turned up to scan the sky.

As far as Jude could see, the heavens had nothing untoward to show them. She caught sight of a few shooting stars, but that wasn"t so unusual on a clear summer night. She could only a.s.sume that these people had in their heads the idea that revelation would come from on high and, having woken with the irrational suspicion that such revelation was imminent, had gone out to look for it.

The scene was not so different when they reached the suburbs: ordinary men and women in their nightclothes, standing at street corners or on their front lawns, watching the sky. The phenomenon petered out the farther from the center of London-from Clerkenwell, perhaps-they traveled, only to reappear when they reached the outskirts of the village of Yoke, where, just a few days before, she and Gentle had stood soaked in the post office. Pa.s.sing down the lanes they"d trudged in the rain reminded her of the nave ambition she"d returned into the Fifth bearing: the possibility of some reunion between Gentle and herself. Now she was retracing her route with all such hopes dashed, carrying a child that belonged to his enemy. Her two-hundred-year courtship with Gentle was finally, and irredeemably, over.

The undergrowth around the estate had swelled monstrously, and it took more than the switch Estabrook had wielded to clear a way to the gates. Despite the fact that it was flourishing, the greenery smelled rank, as if it was decaying as quickly as it was growing, and its buds would not be blossoms but rot. Thrashing to left and right with his knife, Monday led the way to the gates and through the corrugated iron into the parkland beyond. Though it was an hour for moths and owls, the park was swarming with all manner of daylight life. Birds circled the air as though misdirected by a change in the poles and blind to their nests. Gnats, bees, dragonflies, and all the mazing species of a summer"s day flitted in desperate confusion through the moonlit gra.s.s. Like the sky gazers in the streets they"d pa.s.sed through, Nature sensed imminence and could not rest.

Jude"s own sense of direction served her well, however. Though the copses scattered ahead of them looked much the same in the blue-gray light, she fixed upon the Retreat, and they trudged towards it, slowed by the muddy ground and the thickness of the gra.s.s. Monday whistled as he went, with that same blissful indifference to melody that Clem had remarked upon a few hours before.

"Do you know what"s going to happen tomorrow?" Jude asked him, almost envious of his strange serenity.

"Yeah, sort of," he said. "There"s these heavens, see? And the boss is going to let us go there. It"s going to be amazin."

"Aren"t you afraid?" she said.

"What of?"

"Everything"s going to change."

"Good," he said. "I"m f.u.c.ked off with the way things are." Then he picked up the thread of his whistle again and headed on through the gra.s.s for another hundred yards, until a sound more insistent than his din silenced him.

"Listen to that."

The activity in the air and the gra.s.s had steadily increased as they approached the copse, but with the wind blowing in the opposite direction the din of such an a.s.sembly as was gathered there had not been audible until now.

"Birds and bees," Monday remarked. "And a f.u.c.k of a lot of "em."

As they continued their advance, the scale of the parliament ahead steadily became more apparent. Though the moonlight did not pierce the foliage very deeply, it was clear that every branch of every tree around the Retreat, to the tiniest twiglet, was occupied with birds. The smell of their ma.s.sing p.r.i.c.ked their nostrils; its din, their ears.

"We"re going to get our heads right royally shat on," Monday said. "Either that or we"ll get stung to death."

The insects were by now a living veil between them and the copse, so thick that they gave up attempting to flail it aside after a few strides and bore the deaths on their brows and cheeks, and the countless flutterings in their hair, in order to pick up speed and dash for their destination. There were birds in the gra.s.s now, commoners among the parliament, denied a seat on the branches. They rose in a squawking cloud before the runners, and their alarm caused consternation in the trees. A thunderous ascent began, the ma.s.s of life so vast that the violence of its motion beat the tender leaves down. By the time Jude and Monday reached the corner of the copse, they were running through a double rain: one green and falling, the other rising and feathered.

Picking up her pace, Jude overtook Monday and headed around the Retreat-the walls of which were black with insects-to the door. At the threshold, she halted. There was a small fire burning inside, built close to the edge of the mosaic.

"Some b.u.g.g.e.r got here first," Monday remarked.

"I don"t see anyone."

He pointed to a bundle lying on the floor beyond the fire. His eyes, more accustomed than hers to seeing life in rags, had found the fire-maker. She stepped into the Retreat, knowing before he raised his head who this creature was. How could she not? Three times before-once here, once in Yzordderrex, and once, most recently, in the Tabula Rasa"s tower-this man had made an unexpected arrival, as though to prove what he"d claimed not so long ago: that their lives would be perpetually interwoven, because they were the same.

"Dowd?"

He didn"t move.

"Knife," she said to Monday.

He pa.s.sed it over and, armed, she advanced across the Retreat towards the bundle. Dowd"s hands were crossed on his chest, as though he expected to expire where he lay. His eyes were closed, but they were the only part of his face that was. Almost every other inch had been laid open by Celestine"s a.s.sault, and despite his legendary powers of recuperation he"d been unable to make good the damage done. He was unmasked to the bone. Yet he breathed, albeit weakly, and moaned to himself now and then, as though dreaming of punishment or revenge. She was half-tempted to kill him in his sleep and have this bitter business brought to an end on the spot. But she was curious to know why he was here. Had he attempted to return to Yzordderrex, and failed, or was he expecting someone to come back this way and meet him here? Either could be significant in these volatile times, and though in her present venomous state she felt perfectly capable of dispatching him, he"d always been an agent in the dealings of greater souls and might still have some fragment of use as a messenger. She went down on her haunches beside him and spoke his name above the din of birds coming back to roost on the roof. He opened his eyes only slowly, adding their glisten to the wetness of his features.

"Look at you," he said. "You"re radiant, lovey." It was a line from a boulevard comedy, and despite his wretched condition he spoke it with elan elan. "I, of course, look like ordure. Will you come closer to me? I don"t have the energy for volume."

She hesitated to comply. Though he was on the verge of extinction, he had boundless capacity for malice in him and, with the Pivot"s sloughings still fixed in his flesh, the power to do harm.

"I can hear you perfectly well where I am," she said.

"I"m good for a hundred words at this volume," he bargained. "Twice that at a whisper."

"What have we got left to say to each other?"

"Ah," he said. "So much. You think you"ve heard everybody"s stories, don"t you? Mine. Sartori"s. G.o.dolphin"s. Even the Reconciler"s, by now. But you"re missing one."

"Oh, am I?" she said, not much caring. "Whose is that?"

"Come closer."

"I"ll hear it from here or not at all."

He looked at her beadily. "You"re a b.i.t.c.h, you really are."

"And you"re wasting words. If you"ve got something to say, say it. Whose story am I missing?"

He bided his time before replying, to squeeze what little drama he could out of this. Finally, he said, "The Father"s."

"What father?"

"Is there more than one? Hapexamendios. The Aboriginal. The Unbeheld. He of the First Dominion."

"You don"t know that story," she said.

He reached up with sudden speed, and his hand was clamped around her arm before she could move out of range. Monday saw the attack and came running, but she halted him before he plowed into Dowd and sent him back to sit by the fire.

"It"s all right," she told him. "He"s not going to hurt me. Are you?" She studied Dowd. "Well, are you?" she said again. "You can"t afford to lose me. I"m the last audience you"ll have, and you know it. If you don"t tell this story to me, you"re not going to tell it to anybody. Not this side of h.e.l.l."

The man quietly conceded her point. "True," he said.

"So tell. Unburden yourself."

He drew a laborious breath; then he began.

"I saw Him once, you know," he said. "The Father of the Imajica. He came to me in the desert."

"He appeared in person, did He?" she said, her skepticism plain.

"Not exactly. I heard Him speaking out of the First. But I saw hints, you know, in the Erasure."

"And what did He look like?"

"Like a man, from what I could see."

"Or what you imagined."

"Maybe I did," Dowd said. "But I didn"t imagine what He told me-"

"That He"d raise you up. Make you His procurer. You"ve told me all this before, Dowd."

"Not all of it," he said. "When I"d seen Him, I came back to the Fifth, using feits He"d whispered to me to cross the In Ovo, and I searched the length and breadth of London for a woman to be blessed among women."

"And you found Celestine?"

"Yes. I found Celestine-at Tyburn, as a matter of fact-watching a hanging. I don"t know why I chose her. Perhaps because she laughed so hard when the man kissed the noose, and I thought, She"s no sentimentalist, this woman; she won"t weep and wail if she"s taken into another Dominion. She wasn"t beautiful, even then, but she had a clarity, you know? Some actresses have it. The great ones, anyway. A face that could carry extremes of emotion and not look bathetic. Maybe I was a little infatuated with her..." He shivered. "I was capable of that when I was younger. So... I made myself known to her, and told her I wanted to show her a living dream, the like of which she"d never forget. She resisted at first, but I could have talked the face off the moon in those days, and she let me drug her with sways and take her away. It was a h.e.l.l of a journey. Four months, across the Dominions. But I got her there eventually, back to the Erasure..."