Imajica

"Yes. His name was Estabrook."

Charlie"s eyes were closed, his mouth too: sealed up in the moment of his pa.s.sing. 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 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." 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 f.u.c.k 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 blood the land wants; it"s your sacrifice. And as long as you deny that, others are going to die in your place. Believe 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 d.a.m.n. Yours is." I don"t know why. I wish it weren"t. But it is." the land wants; it"s your sacrifice. And as long as you deny that, others are going to die in your place. Believe 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 d.a.m.n. 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 Tishalulle? 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 G.o.d 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 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 poison there must be in you, Maestro." 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."

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"s 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 of the 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 h.e.l.l did you get in there?" Gentle asked him.

Floccus wiped a t.u.r.d 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"s 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 s.e.x."

"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 superst.i.tious 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 chance would that be exactly?" 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.

42

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 outside. "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 a.s.sault 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-was deserted, 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: hot-water 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.

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 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sage. 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 pa.s.sageway was filled with a quiet commotion, like s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 pa.s.sageway 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 mult.i.tudes 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 G.o.ds are being worshiped besides Him. And what G.o.ddesses, 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.