Barker, Clive – Imajica 01 – The Fifth Dominion. Part 8

“At the beginning, you talked to me about how you thought you’d hurt me, remember? You kept talking about the station at Mai-ke, and saying you wanted me to forgive you, and I kept thinking there would never be anything between us that couldn’t be forgiven or forgotten, and that when I had the words again I’d say so. But now I don’t know. He saw you naked, Pie. Why him and not me? I think that’s maybe unforgivable, that you granted him the mystery but not me.”

“He saw no mystery,” Pie replied. “He looked at me, and he saw a woman he’d loved and lost in Yzordderrex. A woman who looked like his mother, in fact. That’s what he was obsessing on. An echo of his mother’s echo. And as long as I kept supplying the illusion, discreetly, he was compliant. That seemed more important than my dignity.”

“Not any more,” Gentle said. “If we’re to go from here—together—then I want whatever you are to be mine. I won’t share you, Pie. Not for compliance. Not for life itself.”

“I didn’t know you felt like this. If you’d told me—”

“I couldn’t. Even before we came here, I felt it, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.”

“For what it’s worth, I apologize.”

“I don’t want an apology.”

“What then?”

“A promise. An oath.” He paused. “A marriage.”

The mystif smiled. “Really?”

“More than anything. I asked you once, and you accepted. Do I need to ask again? I will if you want me to.”

“No need,” Pie said. “Nothing would honor me more. But here? Here, of all places?” The mystif s frown became a grin. “Scopique told me about a Dearther who’s locked up in the basement. He could do the honors.”

“What’s his religion?”

“He’s here because he thinks he’s Jesus Christ.”

“Then he can prove it with a miracle.”

“What miracle’s that?”

“He can make an honest man of John Furie Zacharias.”

The marriage of the Eurhetemec mystif and the fugitive John Furie Zacharias, called Gentle, took place that night in the depths of the asylum. Happily, their priest was passing through a period of lucidity and was willing to be addressed by his real name, Father Athanasius. He bore the evidence of his dementia, however: scars on his forehead, where the crowns of thorns he repeatedly fashioned and wore had dug deep, and scabs on his hands where he’d driven nails into his flesh. He was as fond of the frown as Scopique of the grin, though the look of a philosopher sat badly on a face better suited to a comedian: with its blob nose that perpetually ran, its teeth too widely spread, and eyebrows, like hairy caterpillars, that concertinaed when he furrowed his forehead. He was kept, along with twenty or so other prisoners judged exceptionally seditious, in the deepest part of the asylum, his windowless cell guarded more vigorously than those of the prisoners on higher floors. It had thus taken some fancy maneuvering on Sco-pique’s part to get access to him, and the bribed guard, an Oethac, was only willing to turn a hooded eye for a few minutes. The ceremony was therefore short, conducted in an ad hoc mixture of Latin and English, with a few phrases pronounced in the language of Athanasius’ Second Dominion order, the Dearthers, the music of which more than compensated for its unintelligibility. The oaths themselves were necessarily spare, given the constraints of time and the redundance of most of the conventional vocabulary.

“This isn’t done in the sight of Hapexamendios,” Athanasius said, “nor in the sight of any God, or the agent of any God. We pray that the presence of our Lady may however touch this union with Her infinite compassion, and that you go together into the great union at some higher time. Until then, I can only be as a glass held up to your sacrament, which is performed in your sight for your sake.”

The full significance of these words didn’t strike Gentle until later, when, with the oaths made and the ceremony done, he lay down in his cell beside his partner.

“I always said I’d never marry,” he whispered to the mystif.

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