Imajica Part 82

This was a new tack, Gentle thought. Five minutes before the man had been demanding due respect as an aspirant Messiah; now he was wallowing in self-abnegation.

"I've had so many dreams, brother. Oh, the cities I've imagined! The empires! But I could never quite remove the niggling doubt, you know? The worm at the back of the skull that keeps saying, It'll come to nothing, it'll come to nothing. And you know what? The worm was right. All I ever attempted was doomed from the beginning, because of what we are to each other."

Tragic, Clem had said, describing the look on Sartori's face as he'd fled the cellar. And perhaps in his way he was. But what had he learned, that had brought him so low? It had to be goaded out of him, now or never.

"I saw your empire," Gentle replied. "It didn't fall apart because there was some judgment on it. You built it out of s.h.i.+t. That's why it collapsed."

"But don't you see? That was the judgment. I was the architect, and I was also the judge who found it unworthy. I was set against myself from the beginning, and I never realized it."

"But you realize it now?"

"It couldn't be plainer."

"Why? Do you see yourself in this filth? Is that it?"

"No, brother," Sartori said. "It's when I look at you-"

"At me?"

Sartori stared at him, tears beginning to fill his eyes. "She thought I was you," he murmured.

"Judith?"

"Celestine. She didn't know there were two of us. How could she? So when she saw me she was pleased. At first, anyway."

There was a weight of pain in his speech Gentle hadn't antic.i.p.ated, and it was no pretense. Sartori was suffering like a d.a.m.ned man.

"Then she smelled me," he went on. "She said I stank of evil, and I disgusted her."

"Why should you care?" Gentle said. "You wanted to kill her anyway."

"No," he protested. "That wasn't what I wanted at all. I wouldn't have laid a finger on her if she hadn't attacked me."

"You're suddenly very loving."

"Of course."

"I don't see why."

"Didn't you say we were brothers?"

"Yes."

"Then she's my mother too. Don't I have some right to be loved by her?"

"Mother?"

"Yes. Mother. She's your mother, Gentle. She was raped by the Unbeheld, and you're the consequence."

Gentle was too shocked to reply. His mind was gathering puzzles from far and wide-all of them solved by this revelation-and the solving filled him to br.i.m.m.i.n.g.

Sartori wiped his face with the heels of his hands. "I was born to be the Devil, brother," he said. "h.e.l.l to your Heaven. Do you see? Every plan I ever laid, every ambition I ever had, is a mockery, because the part of me that's you wants love and glory and great works, and the part of me that's our Father knows it's s.h.i.+te and brings it down. I'm my own destroyer, brother. All I can do is live with destruction, until the end of the world."

In the foyer six stories below, Celestine's rescuers had, after much coaxing, persuaded the woman out of the labyrinth and into the light. Weak though she'd been when Clem had entered her cell, she'd resisted his consolations for a good while, telling him that she wanted no part of them. She preferred to remain underground, she said, and perish there.

His experience on the streets had given him a way with such recalcitrance. He didn't argue with her, nor did he leave. He bided his time at the threshold, telling her she was probably right; there was nothing to be gained from seeing the sun. After a while she balked at this, telling him that wasn't her opinion at all and if he had any decency about him he'd give her some comfort in her distress. Did he want her to die like an animal, she said, locked away in the dark? He then allowed that the fault was his, and if she wanted to be taken up into the outside world, he'd do what he could.

With his tactic successful, he sent Monday off to bring Jude's car to the front of the tower and began the business of getting Celestine out. There was a delicate moment at the door of the cell when the woman, setting eyes on Jude, almost recanted her desire to leave, saying she wanted no truck with this tainted creature. Jude kept her silence, and Clem, tact personified, sent her up to fetch blankets from the car while he escorted Celestine to the stairs. It was a slow business, and several times she asked him to stop, holding on to him fiercely and telling him that she wasn't trembling because she was afraid, but because her body was unused to such freedom, and that if anybody, particularly the tainted woman, was to remark on these tremors, he was to hush them.

Thus, clinging to Clem one moment, then demanding he not lean on her the next, slowing at times, then rising up with preternatural strength in her sinews the instant after, Roxborough's captive quit her prison after two centuries of incarceration, and went up to meet the day.

But the tower's sum of surprises, whether above or below, was not yet exhausted. As Clem escorted her across the foyer, he stopped, his eyes on the door ahead, or rather on the sunlight that poured through it. It was laden with motes: pollen and seeds from the trees and plants outside; dust from the road beyond. Though there was scarcely a breeze outside, they were in lively motion.

"We've got a visitor," he remarked.

"Here?" Jude said. "Up ahead."

She looked at the light. Though she could see nothing that resembled a human form in it, the particles were not moving arbitrarily. There was some organizing principle among them, and Gem, it seemed, knew its name.

"Taylor," he said, his voice thick with feeling. "Taylor's here."

He glanced across at Monday, who without being told stepped in to take Celestine's weight. The woman had been hovering on unconsciousness again, but now she raised her head and watched, as did they all, while Clem started to walk towards the light-filled door.

"It's you, isn't it?" he said softly.

In reply, the motion in the light became more agitated.

"I thought so," Clem said, coming to a halt a couple of yards from the edge of the pool.

"What does he want?" Jude said. "Can you tell?"

Clem glanced back at her, his expression both awed and afraid.

"He wants me to let him in," he replied. "He wants to be here." He tapped his chest. "Inside me."

Jude smiled. The day had brought little in the way of good news, but here was some: the possibility of a union she'd never have believed possible. Still Clem hesitated, keeping his distance from the light.

"I don't know if I can do it," he said.

"He's not going to hurt you," Jude said.

"I know," Clem said, glancing back at the light. Its gilded dust was more hectic than ever. "It's not the hurt..."

"What then?"

He shook his head.

"I did it, man," Monday said. "Just close your eyes and think of England."

This earned a little laugh from Clem, who was still staring at the light when Jude voiced the final persuasion.

"You loved him," she said.

The laugh caught in Clem's throat, and in the utter hush that followed he murmured, "I still do."

"Then be with him."

He looked back at her one last time and smiled. Then he stepped into the light.

To Jude's eyes there was nothing so remarkable about the sight. It was just a door, and a man stepping through it into sunlight. But there was significance in it now she'd never understood before, and as she stood witness a warning of Oscar's returned to her head, spoken as they'd prepared to leave for Yzordderrex. She'd come back changed, he'd said, seeing the world she'd left with clearer eyes. Here was proof of that. Perhaps sunlight had always been numinous, and doorways signs of a greater pa.s.sage than that of one room to another. But she'd not seen it, until now.

Clem stood in the beams for perhaps thirty seconds, his hands palm up in front of him. Then he turned back towards her, and she saw that Taylor had come with him. If she'd been asked to name the places where she saw his presence, she couldn't have done so. There was no change in his physiognomy, no particular in which they could be seen, unless it was in signs so subtle-the angle of his head, the fixedness of his mouth-that she couldn't distinguish them. But he was there, no doubt of it. And so was an urgency that had not been in Clem a minute before.

"Take Celestine out of here," he said to Jude and Monday. "There's something terrible going on upstairs."

He left the doorway, heading for the stairs.

"Do you want help?" Jude said.

"No. Stay with her. She needs you."

At this, Celestine uttered her first words since leaving the cell. "I don't need her," she said.

Clem reeled around on one heel, coming back to the woman and putting his nose an inch from hers.

"You know, I'm finding you hard to like, madam!" he snapped.

Jude laughed out loud, hearing Tay's irascible tones so clearly. She'd forgotten how his and Clem's natures had dovetailed, before sickness had taken the p.i.s.s and vinegar out of Tay.

"We're here because of you, remember that," Tay said. "And you'd still be down there picking the fluff from your navel if Judy hadn't brought us."

Celestine narrowed her eyes. "Put me back, then," she said.

"Just for that-" Jude held her breath; he wouldn't, surely? "-I'm going to give you a big kiss and ask you very politely to stop being a cantankerous old bag." He kissed her on the nose. "Now let's get going," he said to Monday, and before Celestine could summon a reply he headed to the stairs and was up them and out of sight.

Exhausted by his outpouring of pain, Sartori turned from Gentle and began to wander back to the chair where he'd been sitting at the start of their interview. He idled as he went, kicking over those servile sc.r.a.ps that came to dote on him and pausing to look up at G.o.dolphin's gutted body, then setting it in motion with a touch, so that its bulk eclipsed and uncovered him by turns, as he went to his little throne. There were peripeteria gathered around in a sycophantic horde, but Gentle didn't wait for him to order them against him. Sartori was no less dangerous for the despair he'd just expressed; all it did was free him from any last hope of peace between them. It freed Gentle too. This had to end in Sartori's dispatch, or the Devil he'd decided to be would undo the Great Work all over again. Gentle drew breath. As soon as his brother turned he'd let the pneuma fly and be done.

"What makes you think you can kill me, brother?" Sartori said, still not turning. "G.o.d's in the First Dominion, and Mother's nearly dead downstairs. You're alone. All you have is your breath."

G.o.dolphin's body continued to swing between them, but the man kept his back turned.

"And if you unknit me, what do you do to yourself in the process? Have you thought about that? Kill me, and maybe you kill yourself."

Gentle knew Sartori was capable of planting such doubts all night. It was the complement to his own lost skill with seduction: dropping these possibilities into promising earth. He wouldn't be delayed by them. His pneuma readied, he started after the man, pausing only for the swing of G.o.dolphin's corpse, then stopping on the other side of it. Sartori still refused to show his face, and Gentle had no option but to waste a little of the killing breath with words.

"Look at me, brother," he said.

He read the intention to do so in Sartori's body, a motion beginning in his heels and torso and head. But before his face came in sight Gentle heard a sound behind him and glanced back to see the third actor here-the dead G.o.dolphin-dropping from his gallows. He had time to glimpse the Oviates in the carca.s.s; then it was upon him. It should have been easy to stand aside, but the beasts had done more than nest in the corpse. They were busy in G.o.dolphin's rotted muscle, engineering the resurrection Sartori had begged Gentle to perform. The corpse's arms s.n.a.t.c.hed hold of him, and its bulk, all the vaster for the weight of parasites, bore him to his knees. The breath went out of him as harmless air, and before he could take another his arms were caught and twisted to breaking point behind his back.

"Never turn your back on a dead man," Sartori said, finally showing his face.

There was no triumph on it, though he'd incapacitated his enemy in one swift maneuver. He turned his sorrowful eyes up to the host of peripeteria that had been G.o.dolphin's gallows and, with the thumb of his left hand, described a tiny circle. They took their cue instantly, the motion appearing in their cloud.

"I'm more superst.i.tious than you, brother," Sartori said, reaching behind him and throwing over his chair. It didn't lie where it fell, but rolled on around the room as though the motion overhead had some correspondence below. "I'm not going to lay a hand on you," he went on. "In case there is is some consequence for a man who takes his other's life." He raised his palms. "Look, I'm blameless," he said, stepping back towards the draped windows. "You're going to die because the world is coming apart." some consequence for a man who takes his other's life." He raised his palms. "Look, I'm blameless," he said, stepping back towards the draped windows. "You're going to die because the world is coming apart."

While he spoke the motion around Gentle increased, as the peripeteria took their summoner's cue. They were insubstantial as individuals, but en ma.s.se they had considerable authority. As their circling speeded up, it generated a current strong enough to lift the chair Sartori had overthrown into the air. The light fixtures were sheared off the walls, taking cobs of plaster with them; the handles were ripped from the doors; and the rest of the chairs s.n.a.t.c.hed up to join the tarantella, smashed to firewood as they collided with each other. Even the table, enormous as it was, began to move. At the eye of this storm Gentle struggled to free himself from G.o.dolphin's cold embrace. He might have done so, given time, but the circle and its freight of shards closed on him too quickly. Unable to protect himself, all he could do was bow his head against the hail of wood, plaster, and gla.s.s, the breath pummeled from him by the a.s.sault. Only once did he lift his eyes to look for Sartori through the storm. His brother stood flat against the wall, his head thrown back as he watched the execution. If there was any feeling on his face, it was that of a man offended by what he saw, a lamb obliged to watch helplessly as his companion was pulped.

It seemed he didn't hear the voice raised in the corridor outside, but Gentle did. It was Clem, calling the Maestro's name and beating on the door. Gentle didn't have the strength left to reply. His body sagged in G.o.dolphin's arms as the fusillade increased, striking his skull and rib cage and thighs. Clem, G.o.d love him, didn't need an answering call. He slammed himself against the door repeatedly, and the lock suddenly burst, throwing both doors open at once.

There was more light outside than in, of course, and just as before it was drawn into the darkened room at a rush, sweeping past the astonished Clem. The peripeteria were as desperate as ever to have a sliver of illumination for themselves, and their swirling ranks fell into confusion at the appearance of the light. Gentle felt the hold on him loosen as those Oviates who'd quickened G.o.dolphin's corpse left off their labors and went to join the melee. With the energies in the room diverted, the circling wreckage began to lose momentum, but not before a piece of the splintered table struck one of the open doors, sheering it off at the hinges. Clem saw the collision coming and retreated before he too was struck, his shout of alarm stirring Sartori.

Gentle looked towards his brother. He'd left off his sham of innocence and was studying the stranger in the hallway with gleaming eyes. He didn't leave his place at the wall, however. A rain of wreckage was falling now, littering the room from end to end, and he clearly had no desire to step into it. Instead he reached up to s.n.a.t.c.h a uredo from his eye, intending to strike Clem down before he could intervene again.

G.o.dolphin's bulk was doubling Gentle over, but he strained to raise himself from beneath it, yelling a warning to Clem, who was back at the threshold now, as he did so. Clem heard the shout and saw Sartori s.n.a.t.c.h at his eye. Though he had no knowledge of what the gesture meant, he was quick to defend himself, ducking behind the surviving door as the killing blow flew his way. In the same instant, Gentle heaved himself to his feet, throwing off G.o.dolphin's body. He glanced in Clem's direction to be certain his friend had survived and, seeing that he had, started towards Sartori. He had breath in his body now, and might easily have dispatched a pneuma at his enemy. But his hands wanted more than air in them. They wanted flesh; they wanted bone.

Careless of the trash that was both underfoot and falling from the air, he ran at his brother, who sensed his approach and turned his way. Gentle had time to see the face before him smile a feral welcome; then he was upon him. His momentum carried them both back against the drapes. The window behind Sartori shattered, and the rail above him broke, bringing the curtain down.

This time the light that filled the room was a blaze, and it felt directly on Gentle's face. He was momentarily blinded, but his body still knew its business. He pushed his brother to the sill and hauled him up over it. Sartori reached for a handhold and s.n.a.t.c.hed at the fallen drape, but its folds were of little use. The cloth tore as he tipped backwards, carried over the sill by his brother's arms. Even then he fought to keep himself from falling, but Gentle gave him no quarter. Sartori flailed for a moment, scrabbling at the air. Then he was gone from Gentle's hands, his scream going with him, down and down and down.

Gentle didn't see the fall and was glad of it. Only when the cry stopped did he retreat from the window and cover his face, while the circle of the sun blazed blue and green and red behind his lids. When he finally opened his eyes, it was to devastation. The only whole thing in the room was Clem, and even he was the worse for wear. He'd picked himself up and was watching the Oviates, who'd fought so vehemently for a piece of light, withering for excess of it. Their matter was drab slough, their skitters and flights reduced to a wretched crawling retreat from the window.

"I've seen prettier t.u.r.ds," Gem remarked.

Then he started around the room, pulling all the rest of the drapes down, the dust he raised making the sun solid as it came and leaving no shadow for the peripeteria to retreat to.

"Taylor's here," he said, when the job was done.

"In the sun?"

"Better than that," Clem replied. "In my head. We think you need guardian angels, Maestro."

"So do I," said Gentle. "Thank you. Both."

He turned back to the window and looked down at the wasteland into which Sartori had fallen. He didn't expect to see a body there; nor did he. Sartori hadn't survived all those years as Autarch without finding a hundred feits to protect his flesh.

They met Monday coming up the stairs as they descended, having heard the window breaking above.

"I thought you was a goner, boss," he said.

"Almost," came the reply.

"What do we do about G.o.dolphin?" Clem said as the trio headed down, together.

"We don't need to do anything," Gentle said. "There's an open window-"

"I don't think he's going to be flying anywhere."

"No, but the birds can get to him," Gentle said lightly. "Better to fatten birds than worms."