Clive Barker - Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

At the center of this small sea was an island larger than the rest, its lower shores made up of the half-demolished chambers that had clustered around the Pivot Tower, its rocks the rubble of that tower's upper half, mingled with vast pieces of its tenant, and its height the remains of the tower itself, a ragged but glittering pyramid of rubble in which a white fire seemed to be burning. Looking at the transformation these waters had wrought, eroding in a matter of days, perhaps hours, what the Autarch had taken decades to devise and build, Jude wondered that she'd reached this place intact. The power she'd first encountered on the lower slopes as an innocent, if willful, brook was here revealed as an awesome force for change.

"Were you here when this happened?" she asked Lotti Yap.

"We saw only the end of it," she replied. "But it was quite a sight, let me tell you. Seeing the towers fall—"

"We were afraid for our lives," Paramarola said.

"Speak for yourself," Lotti replied. "The waters didn't set us free just to drown us. We were prisoners in the Annex, you see. Then the floor cracked open, and the waters just bubbled up and washed the walls away."

"We knew the Goddesses would come, didn't we?" Paramarola said. "We always had faith in that."

"So you never believed they were dead?"

"Of course not. Buried alive, maybe. Sleeping. Even lunatic. But never dead."

"What she says is right," Lotti observed. "We knew this day would come."

"Unfortunately, it may be a short victory," Jude said.

"Why do you say that?" Lotti replied. "The Autarch's gone."

"Yes, but his Father hasn't."

"His Father?" said Paramarola. "I thought he was a bastard."

"Who's his father then?" said Lotti.

"Hapexamendios.''

Paramarola laughed at this, but Lotti Yap nudged in her well-padded ribs.

"It's not a joke, Rola.'1

"It has to be," the other protested.

"Do you see the woman laughing?" Then, to Jude: "Do you have any evidence for this?"

"No, I don't."

"Then where'd you get such an idea?"

Jude had guessed it would be difficult to persuade people of Sartori's origins, but she'd optimistically supposed that when the moment came she'd be possessed by a sudden lucidity. Instead she felt a rage of frustration. If she was obliged to unravel the whole sorry history of her involvement with the Autarch Sartori to every soul who stood between her and the Goddesses, the worst would be upon them all before she was halfway there. Then, inspiration.

"The Pivot's the proof," she said.

"How so?" said Lotti, who was now studying this woman the flood had brought to their feet with fresh intensity.

"He could never have moved the Pivot without his Father's collaboration."

"But the Pivot doesn't belong to the Unbeheld," Paramorola said. "It never did."

Jude looked confounded.

"What Rola says is true," Lotti told her. "He may have used it to control a few weak men. But the Pivot was never His."

"Whose then?"

"Uma Umagammagi was in it."

"And who's that?"

"The sister of Tishalulle" and Jokalaylau. Half-sister of the daughters of the Delta."

"There was a Goddess in the Pivot?"

"Yes."

"And the Autarch didn't know it?"

"That's right. She hid Herself there to escape Hapexamendios when He passed through the Imajica. Jokalaylau went into the snow and was lost there. Tishalulle—"

"—in the Cradle of Chzercemit," Jude said.

"Yes indeed," said Lotti, plainly impressed.

"And Uma Umagammagi hid Herself in solid rock," Paramarola went on, telling the tale as though to a child, "thinking He'd pass over the place not seeing Her. But He chose the Pivot as the center of the Imajica and laid His power upon it, sealing Her in."

This was surely the ultimate irony, Jude thought. The architect of Yzordderrex had built his fortress, indeed his entire empire, around an imprisoned Goddess. Nor was the parallel with Celestine lost on her. It seemed Roxborough had been unwittingly working in a grim tradition when he'd sealed Celestine up beneath his house.

"Where are the Goddesses now?" Jude asked Lotti.

"On the island. We'll all be allowed into their presence in time, and we'll be blessed by them. But it'll take days."

"I don't have days," Jude said. "How do I get to the island?"

"You'll be called when your time comes."

"That has to be now,11 Jude said, "or it'll be never." She looked left and right along the passageway. "Thank you for the education," she said. "Maybe I'll see you again."

Choosing right over left she made to leave, but Lotti took hold of her sleeve.

"You don't understand, Judith," she said. "The Goddesses have come to make us safe. Nothing can harm us here. Not even the Unbeheld.""I hope that's true," Jude said. "To the bottom of my heart, I hope that's true. But I have to warn them, in case it isn't."

"Then we'd better come with you," Lotti said, "You'll never find your way otherwise."

"Wait," Paramarola said. "Should we be doing this? She may be dangerous."

"Aren't we all?" Lotti replied. "That's why they locked us away in the first place, remember?"

If the atmosphere of the streets outside the palace had suggested some post—apocalyptic carnival—the waters dancing, the children laughing, the air pavonine—then that sense was a hundred times stronger in the passageways around the rim of the flood-scoured basin. There were children here too, their laughter more musical than ever. None was over five or so, but there were both boys and girls in the throng. They turned the corridors into playgrounds, their din echoing off walls that had not heard such joy since they'd been raised. There was also water, of course. Every inch of ground was blessed by a puddle, a rivulet, or a stream, every arch had a liquid curtain cascading from its keystone, every chamber was refreshed by burbling springs and roof-grazing fountains. And in every tinkling trickle there was the same sentience that Jude had felt in the tide that had brought her up here: water as life, filled to the last drop with the purpose of the Goddesses. Overhead, the comet was at its height and sent its straight white beams through any chink it could find, turning the humblest puddle into an oracular pool and plaiting its light into the gush of every spout.

The women in these glittering corridors came in all shapes and sizes. Many, Lotti explained, were like themselves, former prisoners of the Bastion or its dreaded Annex; others had simply found their way up the hill following their instincts and the streams, leaving their husbands, dead or alive, below.

"Are there no men here at all?"

"Only the little ones," said Lotti.

"They're all little ones," Paramarola observed.

"There was a captain at the Annex who was a brute," Lotti said, "and when the waters came he must have been emptying his bladder, because his body floated by our cell with his trousers unbuttoned."

"And you know, he was still holding on to his manhood," Paramarola said. "He had the choice between that and swimming—"

"—and instead of letting go, he drowned," Lotti said.

This entertained Paramarola no end, and she laughed so hard the baby's mouth was dislodged from her teat. Milk spurted in the child's face, which brought a further round of merriment. Jude didn't ask how Paramarola came to be so nourishing when she was neither the mother of the child nor, presumably, pregnant. It was just one of the many enigmas this journey showed her: like the pool that clung to one of the walls, filled to brimming with luminous fish; or the waters that imitated fire, from which some of the women had made crowns; or the immensely long eel she saw carried past, its gaping head on a child's shoulder, its body looped between half a dozen women, back and forth across their shoulders ten times or more. If she'd requested an explanation for any one of these sights she'd have been obliged to inquire about them all, and they'd never have got more than a few yards down the corridor.