“Who are you?”
She glanced around, not assuming the question was directed at her, but finding that she and the questioner—a woman in her sixties, shabbily dressed and sickly—were the only people in sight. Moreover, the woman’s stare was fixed upon her with a near manic intensity. Again, the question, coming from a mouth that had about it a spittle-flecked asymmetry that suggested the speaker had suffered a stroke in the past.
“Who are you?”
Already irritated by her failure at the tower, Judith was in no mood to humor what was plainly the local schizophrenic and was turning on her heel to walk away when the woman spoke again. “Don’t you know they’ll hurt you?” “Who will?1’she said.
“The people in the tower. The Tabula Rasa. What were you looking for?” “Nothing.”
“You were looking very hard for nothing.”
“Are you spying for them?”
The woman made an ugly sound that Judith took to be a laugh. “They don’t even know I’m alive,” she said. Then, for the third time, “Who are you?” “My name’s Judith.”
“I’m Clara Leash,” the woman said. She cast a glance back in the direction of the tower. “Walk on,” she said. “There’s a church halfway up the hill. I’ll meet you there.” “What is all this about?” “At the church, not here.”
So saying, she turned her back on Judith and walked off, her agitation enough to dissuade Judith from following. Two words in their short exchange convinced her she should wait at the church and find out what Clara Leash had to say, however. Those words were Tabula Rasa. She hadn’t heard them spoken since her conversation with Charlie at the estate, when he’d told her how he’d been passed over for membership in favor of Oscar. He’d made light of it at the time, and much of what he’d said had been blotted from her mind by the violence and the revelations that followed. Now she found herself digging for recollections of what he’d said about the organization. Something about the tainted soil of England, and her saying tainted by what?, and Charlie making some comical reply. Now she knew what that taint was: magic. In that bland tower the lives of the men and women whose bodies had been found in shallow graves or scraped from the rails of the Piccadilly Line had been judged and found corrupt. No wonder Oscar was losing weight and sobbing in his sleep. He was a member of a Society formed for the express purpose of eradicating a second, and diminishing, society, to which he also belonged. For all his self-possession he was the servant at two masters: magic and its despoiler. It fell to her to help him by whatever means she could. She was his lover, an without her aid he would eventually be crushed between contrary imperatives. And he in his turn was her ticket to Yzordderrex, without whom she would never see the glories of the Imajica. They needed each other, alive and sane.
She waited at the church for half an hour before Clara Leash appeared, looking fretful.
“Out here’s no good,” she said. “Inside.”
They stepped into the gloomy building and sat close to the altar so as not to be overheard by the three noontime, supplicants who were at their prayers towards the back. It was not an ideal place in which to have a whispered conversation; their sibilance carried even if the sense did not, its echoes corning back to meet them off the bare walls. Nor was there much trust between them to begin with. To defend herself from Clara’s glare, Judith spent the early part of their exchange with her back half turned to the woman,; only facing her fully when they’d disposed of the circumlfr-cutions and she felt confident enough to ask the question most on her mind.
“What do you know about the Tabula Rasa?”
“Everything there is to know,” Clara replied. “I was a
member of the Society for many years.”
“But they think you’re dead?”
“They’re not far wrong. I haven’t got more than a few months left, which is why it’s important I pass along what I know.”
“To me?”