by Clive Barker
He shook the man, whose mouth fell open, a trickle of saliva dribbling from one corner.
“Listen!” he raged. “I’m giving you my pain here!”
Receiving no response, he stood up and struck his captive across the face so hard the man toppled over, the chair to which he was bound falling with him. The creature clamped to his chest convulsed in sympathy with its host.
“I didn’t bring you here to sleep!” the Autarch said. “I want you to share your pain with me.”
He put his hands on the leech and began to tear it from the man’s chest. The creature’s panic flooded its host, and instantly the man began to writhe, the cords drawing blood as he fought to keep the leech from being stolen. Less than an hour before, when Abelove had been brought out of the shadows and displayed to the prisoner, he’d begged to be spared its touch. Now, finding his tongue again, he pleaded twice as hard not to be separated from it, his pleas swooping into screams when the parasite’s filaments, barbed so as to prevent their removal, were wrenched from the organs they’d pierced. As soon as they broke surface they began to flail wildly, seeking to return to their host or find a new one. But the Autarch was unmoved by the panic of either lover and divided them like death itself, pitching Abelove across the chamber and taking the man’s face in fingers sticky with his infatuate’s blood.
“Now,” he said. “How does it feel?”
“Give it back . . . please . . . give it back.”
“Is this like being born?” the Autarch said.
“Whatever you say! Yes! Yes! Just give it back!”
The Autarch left the man’s side and crossed the chamber to the spot where he’d made the summoning. He picked his way through the spirals of human gut he’d arranged on the floor as bait and snatched up the knife still lying in the blood beside the blindfolded head, returning at no more than an amble to where the victim was lying. There he cut the prisoner’s bonds and stood back to watch the rest of the show. Though he was grievously wounded, his punctured lungs barely able to draw breath, the man fixed his eyes on the object of his desire and began to crawl towards it. Ashen, the Autarch let him crawl, knowing as he went that the distance was too great, and the scene must end in tragedy.
The lover had advanced no more than a couple of yards when there was a rapping on the door.
“Go away!” the Autarch said, but the rapping came again, this time accompanied by Rosengarten’s voice.
“Quaisoir’s gone, sir,” he said.
The Autarch watched the crawling man’s despair and despaired himself. Despite all his indulgences, the woman had deserted him for the Man of Sorrows.
“Come in!” he called.
Rosengarten entered and made his report. Seidux was dead, stabbed and thrown from a window. Quaisoir’s quarters were empty, her servant vanished, her dressing room overturned. A search for her abductors was already under way.
“Abductors?” the Autarch said. “No, Rosengarten. There are no abductors. She’s gone of her own accord.”
Not once as he spoke did he take his eyes off the lover, who had covered a third of the distance between his chair and his darling but was weakening fast.
“It’s over,” the Autarch said. “She’s gone to find her Redeemer, the poor bitch.”
“Then shouldn’t I dispatch troops to find her?” Rosengarten said. “The city’s dangerous.”
“So’s she when she wants to be. The women in the Bastion taught her some unholy stuff.”
“I hope that cesspit’s been burned to the ground,” Rosengarten said, with a rare passion.
“I doubt it is,” the Autarch replied. “They’ve got ways of protecting themselves.”
“Not from me, they haven’t,” Rosengarten boasted.
“Yes, even from you,” the Autarch told him. “Even from me. The power of women can’t be scoured away, however hard we try. The Unbeheld attempted it, but he didn’t succeed. There’s always some corner—”
“Just say the word,” the commander broke in, “and I’ll go down there now. Hang the bitches in the streets.”
“No, you don’t understand,” the Autarch said, his voice almost monotonous, but all the more sorrowful for that. “The corner isn’t out there, it’s in here.” He pointed to his skull. “It’s in our minds. Their mysteries obsess us, even though we put them out of sight. Even me. God knows, I should be free of it. I wasn’t cast out like the rest of you were. How can I yearn for something I never had? But I do.” He sighed. “Oh, I do.”
He looked around at Rosengarten, whose expression was uncomprehending.
“Look at him.” The Autarch glanced back at the captive as he spoke. “He’s got seconds left to live. But the leech gave him a taste and he wants it back again.”
“A taste of what?”
“Of the womb, Rosengarten. He said it was like being in the womb. We’re all cast out. Whatever we build, wherever we hide, we’re cast out.”
As he spoke the prisoner gave a last exhausted moan and lay still. The Autarch watched the body awhile, the only sound in the vastness of the chamber the weakening motions of the leech on the cold floor.
“Lock the doors and seal them up,” the Autarch said, turning to leave without looking back at Rosengarten. “I’m going to the Pivot Tower.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Come and find me when it’s light. These nights, they’re too long. Too long. I wonder, sometimes . . .”
But what he wondered had gone from his head before it could reach his lips, and when he left the lovers’ tomb it was in silence.
Thirty-six
I
GENTLE’S THOUGHTS HAD NOT often turned to Taylor as he and Pie journeyed, but when, in the streets outside the palace, Nikaetomaas had asked him why he’d come to the Imajica, it had been Taylor’s death he’d spoken of first, and only then of Judith and the attempt upon her life. Now, as he and Nikaetomaas passed through the balmy, benighted courtyards and up into the palace itself, he thought of the man again, lying on his final pillow, talking about floating and charging Gentle to solve mysteries that he’d not had time to solve himself.
“I had a friend in the Fifth who would have loved this place,” Gentle said. “He loved desolation.”
It was here, in every courtyard. Gardens had been planted in many of them and left to riot. But riot took energy, and nature was weary here, the plants throttling themselves after a few spurts and withering back into earth the color of ash. The scene was not so different once they got inside, wandering mapless down galleries where the dust was as thick as the soil in the dead gardens, into forsaken annexes and chambers laid out for guests who had breathed their last decades before. Most of the walls, whether of chambers or galleries, were decorated: some with tapestries, many others with immense frescoes, and while there were scenes Gentle recognized from his travels—Patashoqua under a green-gold sky, with a flight of air balloons rising from the plain outside its walls; a festival at the L’Himby temples—the suspicion grew on him that the finest of these images were of earth; or, more particularly, of England. Doubtless the pastoral was a universal mode, and shepherds wooed nymphs in the ReconciledDominions just as sonnets described them doing in the Fifth, but there were details of these scenes that were indisputably English: swallows swooping in mild summer skies; cattle drinking in water meadows while their herders slept; the Salisbury spire rising from a bank of oaks; the distant towers and domes of London, glimpsed from a slope on which maids and swains made dalliance; even Stonehenge, relocated for drama’s sake to a hill and set against thunderheads.
“England,” Gentle said as they went. “Somebody here remembers England.”
Though they passed by these works too fast for him to scrutinize them carefully, he saw no signature on any. The artists who’d sketched England, and returned to depict it so lovingly, were apparently content to remain anonymous.
“I think we should start climbing,” Nikaetomaas suggested when by chance their wanderings brought them to the foot
of a monumental staircase. “The higher we are the more chance we’ll have of grasping the geography.”
The ascent was five flights long—more deserted galleries presenting themselves on every floor—but it finally delivered them onto a roof from which they were able to glimpse the scale of the labyrinth they were lost in. Towers twice and three times the height of the one they’d climbed loomed above them while, below, the courtyards were laid out in all directions, some crossed by battalions but most as deserted as every other corridor and chamber. Beyond them lay the palace walls, and beyond the walls themselves the smoke-shrouded city, the sound of its convulsions dim at such a distance.
Lulled by the remoteness of this aerie, both Gentle and Nikaetomaas were startled by a commotion that erupted much closer by. Almost grateful for signs of life in this mausoleum, even if it was the enemy, they headed in pursuit of the din makers, back down a flight of stairs and across an enclosed bridge between towers.
“Hoods!” Nikaetomaas said, tucking her ponytail back into her shirt and pulling the crude cowl over her head. Gentle did the same, though he doubted such a disguise would offer them much protection if they were discovered.
Orders were being given in the gallery ahead, and Gentle drew Nikaetomaas into hiding to listen. The officer had words of inspiration for his squad, promising every man who brought a Eurhetemec down a month’s paid leave. Somebody asked him how many there were, and he replied that he’d heard six, but he didn’t believe it because they’d slaughtered ten times that number. However many there are, he said—six, sixty, six hundred—they’re outnumbered and trapped. They won’t get out alive. So saying, he divided his contingent and told them to shoot on sight.
Three soldiers were dispatched in the direction of Nikaetomaas and Gentle’s hiding place. They had no sooner passed than she stepped out of the shadows and brought two of the three down with single blows. The third turned to defend himself, but Gentle—lacking the mass or muscle power that made Nikaetomaas so effective—used momentum instead, flinging himself against the man with such force he threw both of them to the ground. The soldier raised his gun towards Gentle’s skull, but Nikaetomaas took hold of both weapon and hand, hauling the man up by his arm until he was head to head with her, the gun pointing at the roof, the fingers around it too crushed to fire. Then she pulled his helmet off with her free hand and peered at him.
“Where’s the Autarch?”
The man was too pained and too terrified to claim ignorance. “The Pivot Tower,” he said.
“Which is where?”
“It’s the tallest tower,” he sobbed, scrabbling at the arm he was dangling by, down which blood was running.
“Take us there,” Nikaetomaas said. “Please.”
Teeth gritted, the man nodded his head, and she let him go. The gun went from his pulverized fingers as he struck the ground. She invited him to stand with a hooked finger.
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Yark Lazarevich,” he told her, nursing his hand in the crook of his arm.
“Well, Yark Lazarevich, if you make any attempt—or I choose to interpret any act of yours as an attempt—to alert help, I will swat the brains from your pan so fast they’ll be in Patashoqua before your pants fill. Is that plain?”
“That’s plain.”
“Do you have children?”
“Yes. I’ve got two.”
“Think of them fatherless and take care. You have a question?”
“No, I just wanted to explain that the tower’s quite a way from here. I don’t want you thinking I’m leading you astray.”
“Be fast, then,” she said, and Lazarevich took her at her word, leading them back across the bridge towards the stairs, explaining as he went that the quickest route to the tower was through the Cesscordium, and that was two floors down.
They had descended perhaps a dozen steps when shots were fired behind them, and one of Lazarevich’s two comrades staggered into view, adding shouts to his gunfire to raise the alarm. Had he not been groggy he might have put a bullet in Nikaetomaas or Gentle, but they were away down the stairs before he’d even reached the top, Lazarevich protesting as he went that none of this was his doing, and he loved his children and all he wanted to do was see them again.
There was the sound of running in the lower gallery, and shouts answering those of the alarm raiser above. Nikaetomaas unleashed a series of expletives which could not have been fouler had Gentle understood them, and reached for Lazarevich, who hared off down the stairs before she could snatch hold of him, meeting a squad of his comrades at the bottom. Nikaetomaas’ pursuit had taken her past Gentle, directly into their line of fire. They didn’t hesitate. Four muzzles flared; four bullets found their mark. Her physique availed her nothing. She dropped where she stood, her body tumbling down the stairs and coming to a halt a few steps from the bottom. Watching her fall, three thoughts went through Gentle’s head. One, that he’d have these bastards for this. Two, that stealth was irrelevant now. And three, that if he brought the roof down on their murderous heads, and word spread that there was another power in the palace besides the Autarch, that would be no bad thing. He’d regrettedthe deaths he’d caused in Lickerish Street, but he would not regret these. All he had to do was get his hand to his face to tear away the cloth before the bullets flew. There were more soldiers converging on the spot from several directions. Come on, he thought, raising his hands in feigned surrender as the others approached: come on, join the jubilee.
One of the gathering number was clearly a man of authority. Heels clicked together as he appeared, salutes were exchanged. He looked up the staircase towards his hooded prisoner.
“General Racidio,” one of the captains said. “We have two of the rebels here.”
“These aren’t Eurhetemecs.” His gaze went from Gentle to the body of Nikaetomaas, then back up to Gentle again. “I think we have two Dearthers here.”
He started up the stairs towards Gentle, who was surreptitiously drawing breath through the open weave of the cloth around his face in preparation for his unveiling. He would have two or three seconds at best. Time perhaps to seize Racidio and use him as a hostage if the pneuma failed to kill every one of the gunmen.
“Let’s see what you look like,” the commander said, and tore the cloth from Gentle’s face.
The instant that should have seen the pneuma loosed instead saw Racidio drop back in stupefaction from the features he’d uncovered. Whatever he saw was missed by the soldiers below, who kept their guns trained on Gentle until Racidio spat an order that they be lowered. Gentle was as confounded as they, but he wasn’t about to question the reprieve. He dropped his hands and, stepping over the body of Nikaetomaas, came to the bottom of the stairs. Racidio retreated further, shaking his head as he did so, and wetting his lips, but apparently unable to find the words to express himself. He looked as though he was expecting the ground to open up beneath him; indeed, was silently willing it to do so. Rather than risk disabusing the man of his error by speaking, Gentle summoned his guide Lazarevich forward with the hooked finger Nikaetomaas had used minutes before. The man had taken refuge behind a shield of soldiers and only came out of hiding reluctantly, glancing at his captain and Racidio in the hope thatGentle’s summons would be countermanded. It was not, however. Gentle went to meet him, and Racidio uttered the first words he’d been able to find since setting eyes on the trespasser’s face.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m mortified.”
Gentle didn’t give him the solace of a response but, with Lazarevich at his side, took a step towards the knot of soldiers at the top of the next flight of stairs. They parted without a word and he headed between their ranks, fighting the urge to pick up his pace, tempting though it was. And he regretted too not being able to say his farewells to Nikaetomaas. But neither impatience nor sentiment would profit him now. He’d been blessed, and maybe in the fullness of time he’d understand why. In the short term, he had to get to the Autarch and
hope that the mystif was there also.
“You still want to go to the Pivot Tower?” Lazarevich said.
“Yes.”
“When I get you there, will you let me go?”
Again he said, “Yes.”
There was a pause, while Lazarevich oriented himself at the bottom of the stairs. Then he said, “Who are you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Gentle replied, his answer as much for his own benefit as that of his guide.
II
There had been six of them at the start. Now there were two. One of the casualties had been Thes ‘reh’ ot, shot down as he etched with a cross a corner they’d turned in the maze of courtyards. It had been his inspiration to mark their route and so facilitate a speedy exit when they’d finished their work.
“It’s only the Autarch’s will that holds these walls up,” he’d said as they’d entered the palace. “Once he’s down, they’ll come too. We need to beat a quick retreat if we’re not to get buried.”
That Thes ‘reh’ ot had volunteered for a mission his laughter had dubbed fatal was surprising enough, but this further show of optimism teetered on the schizophrenic. His sudden death not only robbed Pie of an unlooked-for ally, but also of the chance to ask him why he’d joined the assault. But then several such conundrums had accrued around this endeavor, not least the sense of inevitability that had attended every phase, as though this judgment had been laid down long before Pie and Gentle had ever appeared in Yzordderrex, and any attempt to flout it would defy the wisdom of greater magistrates than Culus. Such inevitability bred fatalism, of course, and though the mystif had encouraged Thes ‘reh’ ot to plot their route of return, it entertained few delusions about making that journey. It willfully kept from its mind the losses that extinction would bring until its remaining comrade, Lu ‘chur’ chem—a purebred Eurhetemec, his skin blue-black, his eyes double-irised—raisedthe subject. They were in a gallery lined with frescoes that evoked the city Pie had once called home: the painted streets of London, depicted as they’d been in the age into which the mystif had been born, replete with pigeon hawkers, mummers, and dandies.
