Clive Barker - Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

There was no time left for prevarication. Whatever danger Jude had discovered, or believed she'd discovered, it was notional. This scent, on the other hand, and the entities that oozed it, were not. He could not afford to delay his final preparations any longer. He forsook his watching place and started back toward the house as though these hordes were already on his heels. The revenants scattered as he rounded the comer and raced down the street. Monday was working on the door, but he dropped his colors as he heard the Maestro's summons.

"It's time, boy!" Gentle yelled, mounting the steps in a single bound. "Start bringing the stones upstairs."

"We're starting?"

"We're starting."

Monday grinned, whooped, and ducked into the house, leaving Gentle to pause and admire what now adorned the door. It was just a sketch as yet, but the boy's draftsmanship was sufficient for his purpose. He'd drawn an enormous eye, with beams of light emanating from it in all directions. Gentle stepped into the house, pleased at the thought that this burning gaze would greet anyone, friend or foe, who came to the threshold. Then he closed the door and bolted it. When I next step out, he thought, the work of my Father will be done.

WHATEVER DEBATES AND QUARRELS went on in Uma Umagammagi's temple while Jude waited on the shore, they brought the procession of postulants to a halt. The tide carried no more women or children to the shore, and after a time the waters became subdued and finally becalmed, as if their inspiring forces were so preoccupied that all other matters had become inconsequential. Without a watch Jude could only guess at how long a time passed while she waited, but occasional glances up at the comet showed her that it was to be measured in hours rather than minutes. Did the Goddesses fully comprehend how urgent a business this was, she wondered, or had the ages they'd spent in captivity and exile so slowed their sensibilities that their debate might last days and they not realize how much time had passed?

She blamed herself for not making the urgency .of this more plain to them. The day would be creeping on in the Fifth, and even if Gentle had been persuaded to postpone his preparations for a time, he would not do so indefinitely. Nor could she blame him. All he had was a message— brought by a less than reliable courier—that things were not safe. That wouldn't be enough to make him put the Reconciliation in jeopardy. He hadn't seen the horrors she'd seen in the Boston Bowl, so he had no real comprehension of what was at stake here. He was, in her own words, about his Father's business, and the possibility that such business might mark the end of the Imajica was surely very far from his mind.

She was twice distracted from these melancholy thoughts: the first tune when a young girl came down to the shore to offer her something to eat and drink, which she gratefully accepted; the second when nature called and she was obliged to scout around the island for a sheltered place to squat and empty her bladder. To be shy about passing water in this place was of course absurd and she knew it, but she was still a woman of the Fifth, however many miracles she'd seen. Maybe she'd learn to become blithe about such functions eventually, but it would take time.

As she returned from the place she'd found among the rocks, lighter by a bladderful, the song at the temple door, which had dropped away to a murmur and disappeared a long time before, began again. Instead of going back to her place of vigil, she headed around the temple to the door, her stride lent spring by the sight of the waters in the basin, which were stirring from their inertia and once again breaking against the shore. It seemed the Goddesses had made their decision. She wanted to hear the news as soon as possible, of course, but she couldn't help but feel a little like an accused woman returning into a courtroom.

There was an air of expectancy among those at the door. Some of the women were smiling; others looked grim. If they had any knowledge of the judgment, they were interpreting it in radically different ways.

"Should I go in?" Jude asked the woman who'd brought her food.

The other nodded vigorously, though Jude suspected she simply wanted to expedite a process which had delayed them all. Jude stepped back through the water curtain and into the temple. It had changed. Though the sense that her inner and outer sights were here united was as strong as ever, what they perceived was far less reassuring than it had been. There was no sign of the origami light, nor of the bodies these forms had been derived from. She was, it seemed, the sole representative of the fleshly here, and scrutinized by an incandescence far less tender than Uma Umagammagi's gaze had been. She squinted against it, but her lids and lashes could do little to mellow a light that burned in her head rather than her corneas. Its blaze intimidated her, and she wanted to retreat before it, but the thought that Uma Umagammagi's consolation lay somewhere in its midst kept her from doing so.

"Goddess?" she ventured.

"We're here together," came the reply. "Jokalaylau, Tishalulle, and Myself."

As the roll was called, Jude began to distinguish shapes within the brilliance. They were not the inexhaustible glyphs she'd last seen in this place. What she saw suggested not abstractions but sinuous human forms, hovering in the air above her. This was a strange turnabout, she thought. Why, when she'd previously been able to share the essential natures of Jokalaylau and Uma Umagammagi, was she now being presented with lowlier faces? It didn't augur well for the exchange ahead. Had They clothed Themselves in trivial matter because They'd decided she wasn't worthy to lay eyes on the truth of Them? She concentrated hard to grasp the details of Their appearance, but either her sight wasn't sophisticated enough or They were resisting her. Whichever, she could hold only impressions in her head: that They were naked, that Their eyes were incandescent, that Their bodies ran with water.

"Do you see Us?" Jude heard a voice she didn't recognize—Tishalulle's, she presumed—ask.

"Yes, of course," she said. "But not... not completely."

"Didn't I tell You?" Uma Umagammagi said.

"Tell me what?" Jude wanted to know, then realized the remark wasn't directed at her but at the other Goddesses.

"It's extraordinary," said Tishalull?.

The pliancy of Her voice was seductive, and as Jude attended to it Her nebulous form became more particular, the syllables bringing sight along with them. Her face was Oriental in cast, and without a trace of color in cheek or lip or lash. Yet what should have been bland was instead exquisitely subtle, its symmetry and its curves delineated by the light that flickered in Her eyes. Below its calm, Her body was another matter entirely. Her entire length was covered by what Jude at first took to be tattoos of some kind, following the sweep of Her anatomy. But the more she studied the Goddess-rand she did so without embarrassment—the more she saw movement in these marks. They weren't on Her but in Hef, thousands of tiny flaps opening and closing rhythmically. There were several shoals of them, she saw, each swept by independent waves of motion. One rose up from Her groin, where the inspiration of them all had its place; others swept down Her limbs, out to Her fingertips and toes, the motion of each shoal converging every ten or fifteen seconds, at which point a second substance seemed to spring from these slits, forming the Goddess afresh in front of Jude rs astonished eyes.

"I think you should know that I've met your Gentle," Tishalutle" said. "I embraced him in the Cradle."

"He's not mine any longer," Jude replied.

"Do you care, Judith?"

"Of course she doesn't care," came Jokalaylau's response. "She's got his brother to keep her bed warm. The Autarch. The butcher of Yzordderrex."