Clive Barker - Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

"Accepted," Gentle said, and stood up.

"What should I do now, Liberatore?"

"There's a room at the top of the stairs. Wait for me there"

"For ever and ever."

"A few minutes will do."

It backed off to the door, bowing woozily, then took to its heels.

"How can you trust a thing like that?" Jude said.

"I don't. Not yet."

"But you're willing to try."

"You're damned if you can't forgive, Jude."

"Youcould forgive Sartori, could you?" she said.

"He's me, he's my brother, and he's my child," Gentle replied. "How could I not?"

With the house made safe, the rest of the company moved in. Monday, ever the scavenger, went off to scour the neighboring houses and streets in search of whatever he could find to offer some modicum of comfort. He returned three times with bounty, the third time taking Clem off with him. They returned half an hour later with two mattresses and armfuls of bed linen, all too clean to have been found abandoned,

"I missed my vocation," Clem said, with Tay's mischief in his features. "Burglary's much more fun than banking."

At this juncture Monday requested permission to borrow Jude's car and drive back to the South Bank, there to collect the belongings he'd left behind in his haste to follow Gentle. She told him yes, but urged him to return as fast as possible. Though it was still bright on the street outside, they would need as many strong artns and wills as they could muster to defend the house when night fell. Clem had settled Celestine in what had been the dining room, laying the larger of the two mattresses on the floor and sitting with her until she slept. When he emerged Tay's feisty presence was mellowed, and the man who came to join Jude on the step was serene.

"Is she asleep?" Jude asked him.

"I don't know if it's sleep or a coma. Where's Gentle?"

"Upstairs, plotting,"

"You've argued."

"That's nothing new. Everything else changes, but that remains the same."

He opened one of the bottles of beer sitting on the step and drank with gusto.

"You know, I catch myself every now and then wondering if this is all some hallucination. You've probably got a better grasp of it than I have—you've seen the Dominions; you know it's all real—but when I went off with Monday to get the mattresses, there were people just a few streets away, walking around in the sun as though it was just another day, and I thought, There's a woman back there who's been buried alive for two hundred years, and her son whose Father's a God I never heard of—"

"So he told you that."

"Oh, yes. And thinking about it, I wanted to just go home, lock the door, and pretend it wasn't happening."

"What stopped you?"

"Monday, mostly. He just takes everything in stride. And knowing Tay's inside me. Though that feels so natural it's like he was always there."

"Maybe he was," she said. "Is there any more beer?"

"Yep."

He handed over a bottle, and she struck it on the step the way he had. The top flew; the beer foamed.

"So what made you want to run?" she said, when she'd slaked her thirst.

"I don't know," Clem replied. "Fear of what's coming, I suppose. But that's stupid, isn't it? We're here at the beginning of something sublime, just the way Tay promised. Light coming into the world, from a place we never even dreamed existed. It's the Birth of the Unconquered Son, isn't it?"

"Oh, the sons are going to be fine," Jude said. "They usually are."

"But you're not so sure about the daughters?"

"No, I'm not," she said. "Hapexamendios killed the Goddesses throughout the Imajica, Clem, or at least tried to. Now I find He's Gentle's Father. That doesn't make me feel too comfortable about doing His work."

"I can understand that."

"Part of me thinks..." She let her voice trail into the silence, the thought unfinished.

"What?" he asked. "Tell me."

"Part of me thinks we're fools to trust either of them, Hapexamendios or His Reconciler. If He was such a loving L God, why did He do so much harm? And don't tell me He moves in mysterious ways, because that's so much horse shit and we both know it."

"Have you talked to Gentle about this?"

"I've tried, but he's got one thing on his mind—"

"Two," Clem said. "The Reconciliation's one. Pie 'oh' pah's the other."

"Oh, yes, the glorious Pie 'oh' pah."

"Did you know he married it?"

"Yes, he told me."

"It must have been quite a creature."

"I'm a little biased, I'm afraid," she said dryly. "It tried to kill me."

"Gentle said that wasn't Pie's nature."

"No?"

"He told me he ordered it to live its life as an assassin or a whore. It's all his fault, he said. He blames himself for everything."

"Does he blame himself or does he.just take responsibility?" she said. "There's a difference."

"I don't know," Clem said, unwilling to be drawn on such niceties. "He's certainly lost without Pie."

She kept her counsel here, wanting to say that she too : was lost, that she too pined, but not trusting even Clem with this admission.

"He told me Pie's spirit is still alive, like Tay's," Clem was saying. "And when this is all over—"

"He says a lot of things," Jude cut in, weary of hearing Gentle's wisdoms repeated. ; "And you don't believe him?"

"What do I know?" she said, flinty now. "I don't belong • in this Gospel. I'm not his lover, and I won't be his disciple."

A sound behind them, and they turned to find Gentle standing in the hallway, the brightness bouncing up from the step like footlights. There was sweat on his face, and his shirt was stuck to his chest. Clem rose with guilty speed, his heel catching his bottle. It rolled down two steps, spilling frothy beer as it went, before Jude caught it.

"It's hot up there," Gentle said.

"And it's not getting any cooler," Clem observed.

"Can I have a word?"

Jude knew he wanted to speak out of her earshot, but Clem was either too guileless to realize this, which she doubted, or unwilling to play his game. He stayed on the step, obliging Gentle to come to the door.

"When Monday gets back," he said, "I'd like you to go to the estate and bring back the stones in the Retreat. I'm going to perform the Reconciliation upstairs, where I've got my memories to help me."

"Why are you sending Clem?" Jude said, not rising or even turning. "I know the way; he doesn't. I know what the stones look like; he doesn't."

"I think you'd be better off here," Gentle replied.

Now she turned. "What for?" she said. "I'm no use to anyone. Unless you simply want to keep an eye on me."

"Not at all."

"Then let me go," she said. "I'll take Monday to help me. Clem and Tay can stay here. They're your angels, aren't they?"

"If that's the way you'd prefer it," he said, "I don't mind."

"I'll come back, don't worry," she said derisively, raising her beer bottle. "If it's only to toast the miracle."

A little while after this conversation, with the blue tide of dusk rising in the street and lifting the day to the rooftops, Gentle left off his debates with Pie and went to sit with Celestine. Her room was more meditative than the one he'd left, where the memories of Pie had become so easy to conjure it was sometimes hard to believe the mystif wasn't there in the flesh. Clem had lit candles beside the mattress upon which Celestine was sleeping, and their light showed Gentle a woman so deeply asleep that no dreams troubled her. Though she was far from emaciated, her features were stark, as though her flesh was halfway to becoming bone. He studied her for a time, wondering if his own face would one day possess such severity; then he returned to the wall at the bottom of the bed and sat on his haunches there, listening to the slow cadence of her breath.

His mind was reeling with all that he'd learned, or recollected, in the room above. Like so much of the magic he'd become acquainted with, the working of the Reconciliation was not a great ceremonial. Whereas most of the dominant religions of the Fifth wallowed in ritual in order to blind their flocks to the paucity of their understanding—the liturgies and requiems, charts and sacraments all created to amplify those tiny grains of comprehension the holy men actually possessed—such theatrics were redundant when the ministers had truth in their grasp, and with the help of memory he might yet become one such minister.