Imajica 01 - The Fifth Dominion Read online

  Lost ambition; all lost. Before that October had become November Sartori had gone, flitted in the night or murdered by his enemies. Gone, and left his servant stranded in a city he barely knew. How Chant had longed then to return to the ether from where he'd been summoned, to shrug off the body which Sartori had congealed around him and be gone out of this Dominion. But the only voice capable of ordering such a release was that which had conjured him, and with Sartori gone he was exiled on earth forever. He hadn't hated his summoner for that. Sartori had been indulgent for the weeks they'd been together. Were he to appear now, in the moonlit room, Chant would not have accused him of negligence but made proper obeisances and been glad that his inspiration had returned.

  "Maestro..." he murmured, face to the musty boards.

  "Not here," came a voice from behind him. It was not, he knew, one of the voiders. They could whistle but not speak. "You were Sartori's creature, were you? I don't remember that."

  The speaker was precise, cautious and smug. Unable to turn, Chant had to wait until the man walked past his supine body to get a sight of him. He knew better than to judge by appearances: he, whose flesh was not his own but of the Maestro's sculpting. Though the man in front of him looked human enough, he had the voiders in tow and spoke with knowledge of things few humans had access to. His face was an overripe cheese, drooping with jowls and weary folds around the eyes, his expression that of a funereal comic. The smugness in his voice was here too, in the studied way he licked upper and lower lips with his tongue before he spoke, and tapped the fingertips of each hand together as he judged the broken man at his feet. He wore an immaculately tailored three-piece suit, cut from a cloth of apricot cream. Chant would have given a good deal to break the bastard's nose so he bled on it.

  "I never did meet Sartori," he said. "Whatever happened to him?"

  The man went down on his haunches in front of Chant and suddenly snatched hold of a handful of his hair.

  "I asked you what happened to your Maestro," he said. "I'm Dowd, by the way. You never knew my master, the Lord Godotphin, and I never knew yours. But they're gone, and you're scrabbling around for work. Well, you won't have to do it any longer, if you take my meaning."

  "Did you... did you send him to me?"

  "It would help my comprehension if you could be more specific."

  "Estabrook."

  "Oh, yes. Him."

  "You did. Why?"

  "Wheels within wheels, my dove," Dowd said. "I'd tell you the whole bitter story, but you don't have the time to listen and I don't have the patience to explain. I knew of a man who needed an assassin. I knew of another man who dealt in them. Let's leave it at that."

  "But how did you know about me?"

  "You're not discreet," Dowd replied. "You get drunk on the Queen's birthday, and you gab like an Irishman at a wake. Lovey, it draws attention sooner or later."

  "Once in a while—"

  "I know, you get melancholy. We all do, lovey, we all do. But some of us do our weeping in private, and some of us"—he let Chant's head drop—"make fucking public spectacles of ourselves. There are consequences, lovey, didn't Sartori tell you that? There are always consequences. You've begun something with this Estabrook business, for instance, and I'll need to watch it closely, or before we know it there'll be ripples spreading through the Imajica."

  "The Imajica..."

  "That's right. From here to the margin of the First Dominion. To the region of the Unbeheld Himself."

  Chant began to gasp, and Dowd—realizing he'd hit a nerve—leaned towards his victim.

  "Do 1 detect a little anxiety?" he said. "Are you afraid of going into the glory of our Lord Hapexamendios?"

  Chant's voice was frail now. "Yes..." he murmured.

  "Why?" Dowd wanted to know. "Because of your crimes?"

  "Yes."

  "What are your crimes? Do tell me. We needn't bother with the little things. Just the really shameful stuff'll do."

  "I've had dealings with a Eurhetemec."

  "Have you indeed?" Dowd said. "However did you get back to Yzordderrex to do that?"

  "I didn't," Chant replied. "My dealings... were here, in the Fifth."

  "Really," said Dowd softly. "I didn't know there were Eurhetemecs here. You learn something new every day. But, lovey, that's no great crime. The Unbeheld's going to forgive a poxy little trespass like that. Unless..." He stopped for a moment, turning over a new possibility. "Unless, the Eurhetemec was a mystif... ." He trailed the thought, but Chant remained silent. "Oh, my dove," Dowd said. "It wasn't, was it?" Another pause. "Oh, it was. It was." He sounded almost enchanted. "There's a mystif in the Fifth and—what? You're in love with it? You'd better tell me before you run out of breath, lovey. In a few minutes your eternal soul will be waiting at Hapexamendios' door."

  Chant shuddered. "The assassin..." he said.

  "What about the assassin?" came the reply. Then, realizing what he'd just heard, Dowd drew a long, slow breath. "The assassin is a mystif?" he said.

  "Yes."

  "Oh, my sweet Hyo!" he exclaimed. "A mystif!" The enchantment had vanished from his voice now. He was hard and dry. "Do you know what they can do? The deceits they've got at their disposal? This was supposed to be an anonymous piece of shit-stirring, and look what you've done!" His voice softened again. "Was it beautiful?" he asked. "No, no. Don't tell me. Let me have the surprise, when I see it face to face." He turned to the voiders. "Pick the fucker up," he said.

  They stepped forward and raised Chant by his broken arms. There was no strength left in his neck, and his head lolled forward, a solid stream of bilious fluid running from his mouth and nostrils. "How often does the Eurhetemec tribe produce a mystif?" Dowd mused, half to himself. "Every ten years? Every fifty? They're certainly rare. And there you are, blithely hiring one of these little divinities as an assassin. Imagine! How pitiful, that it had fallen so low. I must ask it how that came about." He stepped towards Chant, and at Dowd's order one of the voiders raised Chant's head by the hair. "I need the mystifs whereabouts," Dowd said. "And its name."

  Chant sobbed through his bile. "Please," he said. "I meant... I... meant—"

  "Yes, yes. No harm. You were just doing your duty. The Unbeheld will forgive you, I guarantee it. But the mystif, lovey, I need you to tell me about the mystif. Where can I find it? Just speak the words, and you won't ever have to think about it again. You'll go into the presence of the Unbeheld like a babe."

  "1 will?"

  "You will. Trust me. Just give me its name and tell me the place where I can find it."

  "Name... and... place."

  "That's right. But get to it, lovey, before it's too late!"

  Chant took as deep a breath as his collapsing lungs allowed. "It's called Pie 'oh' pah," he said.

  Dowd stepped back from the dying man as if slapped. "Pie 'oh' pah? Are you sure?"

  "I'm sure...."

  "Pie 'oh' pah is alive? And Estabrook hired it?"

  "Yes."

  Dowd threw off his imitation of a Father Confessor and murmured a fretful question of himself. "What does this mean?" he said.

  Chant made a pained little moan, his system racked by further waves of dissolution. Realizing that time was now very short, Dowd pressed the man afresh.

  "Where is this mystif? Quickly, now! Quickly!"

  Chant's face was decaying, cobs of withered flesh sliding off the slickened bone. When he answered, it was with half a mouth. But answer he did, to be unburdened.

  "I thank you," Dowd said to him, when all the information had been supplied. "I thank you." Then, to the voiders, "Let him go."

  They dropped Chant without ceremony. When he hit the floor his face broke, pieces spattering Dowd's shoe. He viewed the mess with disgust.

  "Clean it off," he said.

  The voiders were at his feet in moments, dutifully removing the scraps of matter from Dowd's handmade shoes.

  "What does this mean?" Dowd murmured again. There was surely synchronici
ty in this turn of events. In a little over half a year's time the anniversary of the Reconciliation would be upon the Imajica. Two hundred years would have passed since the Maestro Sartori had attempted, and failed, to perform the greatest act of magic known to this or any other Dominion. The plans for that ceremony had been laid here, at number 28 Gamut Street, and the mystif, among others, had been there to witness the preparations.

  The ambition of those heady days had ended in tragedy, of course. Rites intended to heal the rift in the Imajica, and reconcile the Fifth Dominion with the other four, had gone disastrously awry. Many great theurgists, shamans, and theologians had been killed. Determined that such a calamity never be repeated, several of the survivors had banded together in order to cleanse the Fifth of all magical knowledge. But however much they scrubbed to erase the past, the slate could never be entirely cleansed. Traces of what had been dreamed and hoped for remained; fragments of poems to Union, written by men whose names had been systematically removed from all record. And as long as such scraps remained, the spirit of the Reconciliation would survive.

  But spirit was not enough. A Maestro was needed, a magician arrogant enough to believe that he could succeed where Christos and innumerable other sorcerers, most lost to history, had failed. Though these were blissless times, Dowd didn't discount the possibility of such a soul appearing. He still encountered in his daily life a few who looked past the empty gaud that distracted lesser minds and longed for a revelation that would burn the tinsel away, an Apocalypse that would show the Fifth the glories it yearned for in its sleep.

  If a Maestro was going to appear, however, he would need to be swift. Another attempt at Reconciliation couldn't be planned overnight, and if the next midsummer went unused, the Imajica would pass another two centuries divided: time enough for the Fifth Dominion to destroy itself out of boredom or frustration and prevent the Reconciliation from ever taking place.

  Dowd perused his newly polished shoes. "Perfect," he said. "Which is more than I can say for the rest of this wretched world."

  He crossed to the door. The voiders lingered by the body, however, bright enough to know they still had some duty to perform with it. But Dowd called them away.

  "We'll leave it here," he said. "Who knows? It may stir a few ghosts."

  5

  Two days after the predawn call from Judith—days in which the water heater in the studio had failed, leaving Gentle the option of bathing in polar waters or not at all (he chose the latter)—Klein summoned him to the house. He had good news. He'd heard of a buyer with a hunger that was not being satisfied through conventional markets, and Klein had allowed it to be known that he might be able to lay his hands on something attractive. Gentle had successfully re-created one Gauguin previously, a small picture which had gone onto the open market and been consumed without any questions being asked. Could he do it again? Gentle replied that he would make a Gauguin so fine the artist himself would have wept to see it. Klein advanced Gentle five hundred pounds to pay the rent on the studio and left him to it, remarking only that Gentle was looking a good deal better than he'd looked previously, though he smelled a good deal worse.

  Gentle didn't much care. Not bathing for two days was no great inconvenience when he only had himself for company; not shaving suited him fine when there was no woman to complain of beard burns. And he'd rediscovered the old private erotics: spit, palm, and fantasy. It sufficed. A man might get used to living this way; might get to like his gut a little ample, his armpits sweaty, his balls the same. It wasn't until the weekend that he started to pine for some entertainment other than the sight of himself in the bathroom mirror. There hadn't been a Friday or Saturday in the last year which hadn't been occupied by some social gathering, where he'd mingled with Vanessa's friends. Their numbers were still listed in his address book, just a phone call away, but he felt squeamish about making contact. However much he may have charmed them, they were her friends, not his, and they'd have inevitably sided with her in this fiasco.

  As for his own peers—the friends he'd had before Vanessa—most had faded. They were a part of his past and, like so many other memories, slippery. While people like Klein recalled events thirty years old in crystalline detail, Gentle had difficulty remembering where he was and with whom even ten years before. Earlier than that still, and his memory banks were empty. It was as though his mind was disposed only to preserve enough details of his history to make the present plausible. The rest it disregarded. He kept this strange fallibility from almost everybody he knew, concocting details if pressed hard. It didn't much bother him. Not knowing what it meant to have a past, he didn't miss it. And he construed from exchanges with others that though they might talk confidentially about their childhood and adolescence, much of it was rumor and conjecture, some of it pure fabrication.

  Nor was he alone in his ignorance. Judith had once confided that she too had an uncertain grasp of the past, though she'd been drunk at the time and had denied it vehemently when he'd raised the subject again. So, between friends lost and friends forgotten, he was very much alone this Saturday night, and he picked up the phone when it rang with some gratitude.

  "Furie here," he said. He felt like a Furie tonight. The line was live, but there was no answer. "Who's there?" he said. Still, silence. Irritated, he put down the receiver. Seconds later, the phone rang again. "Who the hell is this?" he demanded, and this time an impeccably spoken man replied, albeit with another question.

  "Am I speaking to John Zacharias?"

  Gentle didn't hear himself called that too often. "Who is this?" he said again.

  "We've only met once. You probably don't remember me. Charles Estabrook?"

  Some people lingered longer in the memory than others. Estabrook was one. The man who'd caught Jude when she'd dropped from the high wire. A classic inbred Englishman, member of the minor aristocracy, pompous, condescending and—

  "I'd like very much to meet with you, if that's possible."

  "1 don't think we've got anything to say to each other."

  "It's about Judith, Mr. Zacharias. A matter I'm obliged to keep in the strictest confidence but is, I cannot stress too strongly, of the profoundest importance,"

  The tortured syntax made Gentle blunt. "Spit it out, then," he said.

  "Not on the telephone. I realize this request comes without warning, but I beg you to consider it."

  "I have. And no. I'm not interested in meeting you."

  "Even to gloat?"

  "Over what?"

  "Over the fact that I've lost her," Estabrook said. "She left me, Mr. Zacharias, just as she left you. Thirty-three days ago." The precision of that spoke volumes. Was he counting the hours as well as the days? Perhaps the minutes too? "You needn't come to the house if you don't wish to. In fact, to be honest, I'd be happier if you didn't."

  He was speaking as if Gentle would agree to the rendezvous, which, though he hadn't said so yet, he would.

  It was cruel, of course, to bring someone of Estabrook's age out on a cold day and make him climb a hill, but Gentle knew from experience you took whatever satisfactions you could along the way. And Parliament Hill had a fine view of London, even on a day of lowering cloud. The wind was brisk, and as usual on a Sunday the hill had a host of kite flyers on its back, their toys like multicolored candies suspended in the wintry sky. The hike made Estabrook breathless, but he seemed glad that Gentle had picked the spot.

  "I haven't been up here in years. My first wife used to like coming here to see the kites."

  He brought a brandy flask from his pocket, proffering it first to Gentle. Gentle declined.

  "The cold never leaves one's marrow these days. One of the penalties of age. I've yet to discover the advantages. How old are you?"

  Rather than confess to not knowing, Gentle said, "Almost forty."

  "You look younger. In fact, you've scarcely changed since we first met. Do you remember? At the auction? You were with her. I wasn't. That was the world of difference between
us. With; without. I envied you that day the way I'd never envied any other man, just for having her beside you. Later, of course, I saw the same look on other men's faces—"

  "I didn't come here to hear this," Gentle said.

  "No, I realize that. It's just necessary for me to express how very precious she was to me. I count the years 1 had with her as the best of my life. But of course the best can't go on forever, can they, or how are they the best?" He drank again. "You know, she never talked about you," he said. "I tried to provoke her into doing so, but she said she'd put you out of her mind completely—she'd forgotten you, she said—which is nonsense, of course."

  "I believe it."

  "Don't," Estabrook said quickly. "You were her guilty secret."

  "Why are you trying to flatter me?"

  "It's the truth. She still loved you, all through the time she was with me. That's why we're talking now. Because I know it, and I think you do too."

  Not once so far had they mentioned her by name, almost as though from some superstition. She was she, her, the woman: an absolute and invisible power. Her men seemed to have their feet on solid ground, but in truth they drifted like the kites, tethered to reality only by the memory of her.

  "I've done a terrible thing, John," Estabrook said. The flask was at his lips again. He took several gulps before sealing it and pocketing it. "And I regret it bitterly."

  "What?"

  "May we walk a little way?" Estabrook said, glancing towards the kite flyers, who were both too distant and too involved in their sport to be eavesdropping. But he was not comfortable with sharing his secret until he'd put twice the distance between his confession and their ears. When he had, he made it simply and plainly. "I don't know what kind of madness overtook me," he said, "but a little while ago I made a contract with somebody to have her killed."