Barker, Clive – Imajica 01 – The Fifth Dominion. Part 12

“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.

36

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 Reconciled Dominions 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 thunder-heads.

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