Imajica Page 6

  His heart was palpitating, and his body full of jitters. Fearing he’d soon lose control of his functions, he pulled the letter to Estabrook from his pocket and leaned forward to slide the half window between himself and the driver aside.

  “When you’ve dropped me in Clerkenwell I’d like you to deliver a letter for me. Would you be so kind?”

  “Sorry, mate,” the driver said. “I’m going home after this. I’ve a wife waiting for me.”

  Chant dug in his inside pocket and pulled out his wallet, then passed it through the window, letting it drop on the seat beside the driver.

  “What’s this?”

  “All the money I’ve got. This letter has to be delivered.”

  “All the money you’ve got, eh?”

  The driver picked up the wallet and flicked it open, his gaze going between its contents and the road.

  “There’s a lot of dosh in here.”

  “Have it. It’s no good to me.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “And tired,” Chant said. “Take it, why don’t you? Enjoy it.”

  “There’s a Daimler been following us. Somebody you know?”

  There was no purpose served by lying to the man. “Yes,” Chant said. “I don’t suppose you could put some distance between them and us?”

  The man pocketed the wallet and jabbed his foot down on the accelerator. The cab leapt forward like a racehorse from the gate, its jockey’s laugh rising above the guttural din of the engine. Whether it was the cash he was now heavy with or the challenge of outrunning a Daimler that motivated him, he put his cab through its paces, proving it more mobile than its bulk would have suggested. In under a minute they’d made two sharp lefts and a squealing right and were roaring down a back street so narrow the least miscalculation would have taken off handles, hubs, and mirrors. The mazing didn’t stop there. They made another turn, and another, bringing them in a short time to Southwark Bridge. Somewhere along the way, they’d lost the Daimler. Chant might have applauded had he possessed two workable hands, but the flea’s message of corruption was spreading with agonizing speed. While he still had five fingers under his command he went back to the window and dropped Estabrook’s letterthrough, murmuring the address with a tongue that felt disfigured in his mouth.

  “What’s wrong with you?” the cabbie said. “It’s not fucking contagious, is it, ‘cause if it is—”

  “. . . not . . .” Chant said.

  “You look fucking awful,” the cabbie said, glancing in the mirror. “Sure you don’t want a hospital?”

  “No. Gamut Street. I want Gamut Street.”

  “You’ll have to direct me from here.”

  The streets had all changed. Trees gone; rows demolished; austerity in place of elegance, function in place of beauty; the new for old, however poor the exchange rate. It was a decade and more since he’d come here last. Had Gamut Street fallen and a steel phallus risen in its place?

  “Where are we?” he asked the driver.

  “Clerkenwell. That’s where you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “I mean the precise place.”

  The driver looked for a sign. “Flaxen Street. Does it ring a bell?”

  Chant peered out of the window. “Yes! Yes! Go down to the end and turn right.”

  “Used to live around here, did you?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “It’s seen better days.” He turned right. “Now where?”

  “First on the left.”

  “Here it is,” the man said. “Gamut Street. What number was it?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  The cab drew up at the curb. Chant fumbled for the handle, opened the door, and all but fell out onto the pavement. Staggering, he put his weight against the door to close it, and for the first time he and the driver came face to face. Whatever the flea was doing to his system, it must have been horribly apparent, to judge by the look of repugnance on the man’s face.

  “You will deliver the letter?” Chant said.

  “You can trust me, mate.”

  “When you’ve done it, you should go home,” Chant said. “Tell your wife you love her. Give a prayer of thanks.”

  “What for?”

  “That you’re human,” Chant said.

  The cabbie didn’t question this little lunacy. “Whatever you say, mate,” he replied. “I’ll give the missus one and give thanks at the same time, how’s that? Now don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, eh?”

  This advice given, he drove off, leaving his passenger to the silence of the street.

  With failing eyes, Chant scanned the gloom. The houses, built in the middle of Sartori’s century, looked to be mostly deserted; primed for demolition, perhaps. But then Chant knew that sacred places—and Gamut Street was sacred in its way—survived on occasion because they went unseen, even in plain sight. Burnished by magic, they deflected the threatening eye and found unwitting allies in men and women who, all unknowing, knew holiness; became sanctuaries for a secret few.

  He climbed the three steps to the door and pushed at it, but it was securely locked, so he went to the nearest window. There was a filthy shroud of cobweb across it but no curtain beyond. He pressed his face to the glass. Though his eyes were weakening by the moment, his gaze was still more acute than that of the blossoming ape. The room he looked into was stripped of all furniture and decoration; if anybody had occupied this house since Sartori’s time—and it surely hadn’t stood empty for two hundred years—they had gone, taking every trace of their presence. He raised his good arm and struck the glass with his elbow, a single jab which shattered the window. Then, careless of the damage he did himself, he hoisted his bulk onto the sill, beat out the rest of the pieces of glass with his hand, and dropped down into the room on the other side.

  The layout of the house was still clear in his mind. In dreams he’d drifted through these rooms and heard the Maestro’s voice summoning him up the stairs—up! up!—to the room at the top where Sartori had worked his work. It was there Chant wanted to go now, but there were new signs of atrophy in his body with every heartbeat. The hand first invaded by the flea was withered, its nails dropped from their place, its bone showing at the knuckles and wrist. Beneath his jacket he knew his torso to the hip was similarly unmade; he felt pieces of his flesh falling inside his shirt as he moved. He would not be moving for much longer. His legs were increasingly unwilling to bear him up, and his senses were close to flickering out. Like a man whose children were leaving him, he begged as he climbed the stairs.

  “Stay with me. Just a little longer. Please. . . .”

  His cajoling got him as far as the first landing, but then his legs all but gave out, and thereafter he had to climb using his one good arm to haul him onward.

  He was halfway up the final flight when he heard the voiders’ whistle in the street outside, its piercing din unmistakable. They had found him quicker than he’d anticipated, sniffing him out through the darkened streets. The fear that he’d be denied sight of the sanctum at the top of the stairs spurred him on, his body doing its ragged best to accommodate his ambition.

  From below, he heard the door being forced open. Then the whistle again, harder than before, as his pursuers stepped into the house. He began to berate his limbs, his tongue barely able to shape the words.

  “Don’t let me down! Work, will you? Work!”

  And they obliged. He scaled the last few stairs in a spastic fashion, but reached the top flight as he heard the voiders’ soles at the bottom. It was dark up here, though how much of that was blindness and how much night he didn’t know. It scarcely mattered. The route to the door of the sanctum was as familiar to him as the limbs he’d lost. He crawled on hands and knees across the landing, the ancient boards creaking beneath him. A sudden fear seized him: that the door would be locked, and he’d beat his weakness against it and fail to gain access. He reached up for the handle, grasped it, tried to turn it once, failed, tried again, and this time dropped face down over the
threshold as the door swung open.

  There was food for his enfeebled eyes. Shafts of moonlight spilled from the windows in the roof. Though he’d dimly thought it was sentiment that had driven him back here, he saw now it was not. In returning here he came full circle, back to the room which had been his first glimpse of the Fifth Dominion. This was his cradle and his tutoring room. Here he’d smelled the air of England for the first time, the crisp October air; here he’d fed first, drunk first; first had cause for laughter and, later, for tears. Unlike the lower rooms, whose emptiness was a sign of desertion, this space had always been sparely furnished, and sometimes completely empty. He’d danced here on the same legs that now lay dead beneath him, while Sartori had told him how he planned to take this wretched Dominion and build in its midst a city that would shame Babylon; danced for sheer exuberance, knowing his Maestro was a great man and had it in his power to change the world.

  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 Godolphin, 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 I 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 mystif’s 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.”

  “I 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 all
owed. “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 synchronicity 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.