Clive Barker - Imajica 01 - The Fifth Dominion

Or at least such had been the case until recently. Now, as if in league with the forces that were destroying his dream below, the drug refused to give him relief. He'd demanded a fresh supply while meditating at the place of the Pivot, only to get back to Yzordderrex to find that his procurers in the Scoriae Kesparate had been murdered. Their killers were reputedly members of the Dearth, an order of renegade shammists—worshipers of the Madonna, he'd heard it rumored—who'd been fulmigating revolution for years and had until now presented so little threat to the status quo that he'd let them be for entertainment's sake. Their pamphlets—a mingling of castration fantasies and bad theology—had made farcical reading, and with their leader Athanasius in prison many of them had retreated to the desert to worship at the margins of the First Dominion, the so-called Erasure, where the solid reality of the Second paled and faded. But Athanasius had escaped his custody and returned to Yzordderrex with fresh calls to arms. His first act of defiance, it seemed, had been the slaughter of the kreauchee pushers. A small deed, but the man was wily enough to know what an inconvenience he'd caused with it. No doubt he was touting it as an act of civil healing, performed in the name of the Madonna.

The Autarch spat out the wad of kreauchee he was chewing and vacated the watchtower, heading off through the monumental labyrinth of the palace towards Quaisoir's quarters in the hope that she had some small supply he could filch. To left and right of him were corridors so immense no human voice would carry along them, each lined than ever. And if she told him all she knew, pleasurable as that unburdening would be, could she be absolutely certain that he wouldn't cleave to his history, at the last, and use what he knew against her? What would Clara's death and Celestine's suffering have been worth then? She was now their only agent in the living world, and she had no right to gamble with their sacrifices.

"What have you done," Oscar said, "besides plot? What

have you done?"

"You haven't been honest with me," she replied. "Why

should I tell you anything?"

"Because I can still take you to Yzordderrex," he said.

"Bribes now?"

"Don't you want to go any longer?"

"I want to know the truth about myself more."

He looked faintly saddened by this. "Ah." He sighed.

"I've been lying for so long I'm not sure I'd know the truth

if 1 tripped over it. Except..,"

"Yes?"

"What we felt for each other," he murmured, "at least,

what I feel for you... that was true, wasn't it?"

"It can't be much," Jude said. "You locked me away.

You left me to Dowd—" "I've already explained—" "Yes, you were distracted. You had other business. So

you forgot me."

"No," he protested, "I never forgot. Never, I swear."

"What then?" "I was afraid."

"Of me?"

"Of everything. You, Dowd, the Society. I started to see plots everywhere. Suddenly the idea of your being in my bed seemed too much of a risk. I was afraid you'd smother

me, or—"

"That's ridiculous."

"Is it? How can I be sure who you belong to?"

"I belong to myself."

He shook his head, his gaze going from her face up to the painting of Joshua Godolphin that hung above the bed.

"How can you know that?" he said. "How can you be certain that what you feel for me comes from your heart?"

"What does it matter where it comes from? It's there. Look at me."

He refused her demand, his eyes still fixed on the Mad Lord.

"He's dead," she said.

"But his legacy—"

"Fuck his legacy!" she said, and suddenly got to her feet, taking hold of the portrait by its heavy, gilded frame and wrenching it from the wall.

Oscar rose to protest, but her vehemence carried the day. The picture came from its hooks with a single pull, and she summarily pitched it across the room. Then she dropped back onto the bed in front of Oscar.

"He's dead and gone," she said. "He can't judge us. He can't control us. Whatever it is we feel for each other—and I don't pretend to know what it is—it's ours." She put her hands to his face, her fingers woven with his beard. "Let go of the fears," she said. "Take hold of me instead."

He put his arms around her.

"You're going to take me to Yzordderrex, Oscar. Not in a week's time, not in a few days: tomorrow. I want to go tomorrow. Or else"—her hands dropped from his face— "let me go now. Out of here. Out of your life. I won't be your prisoner, Oscar. Maybe his mistresses put up with that, but I won't. I'll kill myself before I'll let you lock me up again."

She said all of this dry-eyed. Simple sentiments, simply put. He took hold of her hands and raised them to his cheeks again, as if inviting her to possess him. His face was full of tiny creases she'd not seen before, and they were wet with tears.

"We'll go," he said.

Rooms, lounges, and chapel were a state unto themselves, and he'd long ago sworn to her he would never violate them. She'd decorated the rooms with any lush or luxurious item that pleased her eclectic eye. It was an aesthetic he himself had favored, before his present melancholia. He'd filled the bedrooms now nested by carrion birds with immaculate copies of baroque and rococo furniture, had commissioned the walls to be mirrored like Versailles, and had the toilets gilded. But he'd long since lost his taste for such extravagances, and now the very sight of Quaisoir's rooms nauseated him so much that if he hadn't been driven by need he'd have retreated, appalled by their opulence.

He called his wife's name as he went. First through the lounges, strewn with the leavings of a dozen meals; all were empty. Then into the state room, which was appointed even more grandly than the lounges, but also empty. Finally, to the bedroom. At its threshold, he heard the slap of feet on the marble floor, and Quaisoir's servant Concupis-centia paddled into view. She was naked, as always, her back a field of multicolored extremities each as agile as an ape's tail, her forelimbs withered and boneless things, bred to such vestigial condition over generations. Her large green eyes seeped constantly, the feathery fans to either side of her face dipping to brush the moisture from her rouged cheeks.

"Where's Quaisoir?" he demanded. She drew a coquettish fan of her tails over her lower face and giggled behind them like a geisha. The Autarch had slept with her once, in a kreauchee fugue, and the creature never let him by without a show of flirtation.

"Not now, for Christ's sake," he said, disgusted at the display. "I want my wife! Where is she?"

Concupiscentia shook her head, retreating from his raised voice and fist. He pushed past her into the bedroom. If there was any tiny wad of kreauchee to be had, it would be here, in her boudoir, where she lazed away so many days, listening to Concupiscentia sing hymns and lullabies. The chamber smelled like a harbor bordello, a dozen sickly perfumes draping the air like the veils that hung around the bed.

"I want kreauchee!" he said. "Where is it?"

Again, a great shaking of the head from Concupiscentia, this time accompanied by whimpering.

"Where?" he shouted. "Where?"

The perfume and the veils sickened him, and he began to rip at the silks and gossamers in his rage. The creature didn't intervene until he picked up the Bible lying open on the pillows and threatened to rip out its onion-leaf pages.

"Pleas ep!" she squealed. "Please ep! Shellem beat I if ye taurat the Book. Quaisoir lovat the Book."

It wasn't often he heard the gloss, the pidgin English of the islands, and the sound of it—as misshapen as its source—infuriated him even more. He tore half a dozen pages from the Bible, just to make her squeal again. She obliged.