“That depends,” she said. “First I want to know what you were doing at the tower.” “I was looking for a way in.” “Have you ever been inside?” “Yes and no.”
“Meaning what?”
“My mind’s been inside even though my body hasn’t,” Judith said, fully expecting a repeat of Clara’s weird little laugh in response.
Instead, the woman said, “On the night of December the thirty-first.”
“How the hell did you know that?”
Clara put her hand up to Judith’s face. Her fingers were icy cold. “First, you should know how I departed the Tabula Rasa.”
Though she told her story without embellishments, it took some time, given that so much of what she was explaining required footnotes for Judith to fully comprehend its significance. Clara, like Oscar, was the descendant of one of the Society’s founding members and had been brought up to believe in its basic principles: England, tainted by magic—indeed, almost destroyed by it—had to be protected from any cult or individual who sought to educate new generations in its corrupt practices. When Judith asked how this near destruction had come about, Clara’s answer was a story in itself. Two hundred years ago this coming midsummer, she explained, a ritual had been attempted that had gone tragically awry. Its purpose had been to reconcile the reality of earth with those of four other dimensions.
“The Dominions,” Judith said, dropping her voice, which was already low, lower still.
“Say it out loud,” Clara replied. “Dominions! Dominions!” She only raised her voice to speaking volume, but after such a time whispering it was shockingly loud. “It’s been a secret for too long,” she said. “And that gives the enemy power.”
“Who is the enemy?”
“There are so many,” she said. “In this Dominion, the Tabula Rasa and its servants. And it’s got plenty of thos -believe me, in the very highest places.”
“How?”
“It’s not difficult, when your members are the descendants of kingmakers. And if influence fails, you can alwa buy your way past democracy. It’s going on all the time.”
“And in the other Dominions?”
“Getting information’s more difficult, especially now, I knew two women who regularly passed between here an the Reconciled Dominions. One of them was found dead week ago, the other’s disappeared. She may also have been murdered—”
“By the Tabula Rasa.”
“You know a good deal, don’t you? What’s your source?”
Judith had known Clara would ask that question eventu-ally and had been trying to decide how she would answer it Her belief in Clara Leash’s integrity grew apace, but wouldn’t it be precipitous to share with a woman she’d taken for a bag lady only two hours before a secret that could be Oscar’s death warrant if known to the Tabula Rasa?
“I can’t tell you my source,” she said. “This person’s ia, great danger as it is.”
“And you don’t trust me.” She raised her hand to ward
off any protest. “Don’t sweet-talk me!” she said. “You
don’t trust me, and why should I blame you? But let me ask
this: Is this source of yours a man?”
“Yes. Why?”
“You asked me before who the enemy was, and I said. the Tabula Rasa. But we’ve got a more obvious enemy: the opposite sex.”
“What?”
“Men, Judith. The destroyers.”
“Oh, now wait—”
“There used to be Goddesses throughout the Dominions, Powers that took our sex’s part in the cosmic drama. They’re all dead, Judith. They didn’t just die of old age. They were systematically eradicated by the enemy.”
“Ordinary men don’t kill Goddesses.”
“Ordinary men serve extraordinary men. Extraordinary men get their visions from the Gods. And Gods kill Goddesses.”
“That’s too simple. It sounds like a school lesson.” “Learn it, then. And if you can, disprove it. I’d like that, truly I would. I’d like to discover that the Goddesses are all in hiding somewhere—”
“Like the woman under the tower?”
For the first time in this dialogue, Clara was lost for words. She simply stared, leaving Jude to fill the silence of her astonishment.
“When I said I’ve been into the tower in my mind, that isn’t strictly true,” Jude said. “I’ve only been under the tower. There’s a cellar there, like a maze. It’s full of books. And behind one of the walls there’s a woman. I thought she was dead at first, but she isn’t. She’s maybe close to it, but she’s holding on.”