Clive Barker - Imajica

‘It has … sentimental associations,’ Pie replied. ‘You’ll see for yourself, very soon.’ It paused. ‘You do still want to go?’

‘Of course.’

‘This is as tight as I can get the knot without stopping our blood.’

‘Then why are we delaying?’

Pie’s fingers touched Gentle’s face. ‘Close your eyes,’ it said.

Gentle did so. Pie’s fingers sought out Gentle’s free hand and raised it between them.

‘You have to help me,’ he said.

‘Tell me what to do.’

‘Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that.’

He did, from somewhere.

‘Now,’ Pie went on, ‘put your hand to your face, with your thumb against your chin. There are very few incantations in our workings. No pretty words. Just pneuma like this, and the will behind them.’

‘I’ve got the will, if that’s what you’re asking,’ Gentle said.

Then one solid breath is all we need. Exhale until it hurts. I’ll do the rest.’

‘Can I take another breath afterwards?’

‘Not in this Dominion.’

With that reply the enormity of what they were undertaking struck Gentle. They were leaving earth. Stepping off the edge of the only reality he’d ever known into another state entirely. He grinned in the darkness, the hand bound to Pie’s taking hold of his deliverer’s fingers.

‘Shall we?’ he said.

In the murk ahead of him Pie’s teeth gleamed as it matched Gentle’s smile.

‘Why not?’

Gentle drew breath. Somewhere in the house, he heard a door slamming and footsteps on the stairs leading up to the studio. But it was too late for interruptions. He exhaled through his hand, one solid breath which Pie’oh’pah seemed to snatch from the air between them. Something ignited in the fist the mystif made, bright enough to burn between his clenched fingers …

At the door, Jude saw Gentle’s painting almost made flesh. Two figures, almost nose to nose, with their faces illuminated by some unnatural source, swelling like a slow explosion between them. She had time to recognize them both - to see the smiles on their faces as they met each other’s gaze - then, to her horror, they seemed to turn inside out. She glimpsed wet red surfaces, which folded upon themselves not once but three times in quick succession, each fold diminishing their bodies, until they were slivers of stuff, still folding, and folding, and finally gone.

She sank back against the door-jamb, shock making her nerves cavort. The dog she’d found waiting at the top of the stairs went fearlessly to the place where they’d stood. There was no further magic there, to snatch him after them. The place was dead. They’d gone, the bastards, wherever such avenues led.

The realization drew a yell of rage from her, sufficient to send the dog scurrying for cover. She clearly hoped Gentle heard her, wherever he was. Hadn’t she come here to share her revelations with him, so that they could investigate the great unknown together? And all the time he was preparing for his departure without her. Without her!

‘How dare you?’ she yelled at the empty space.

The dog whined in fear, and the sight of its terror mellowed her. She went down on her haunches.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to it. ‘Come here. I’m not cross with you. It’s that little fucker Gentle.’

The dog was reluctant at first, but came to her after a time, its tail wagging intermittently as it grew more confident of her sanity. She rubbed its head, the contact soothing. All was not lost. What Gentle could do, she could do. He didn’t have the copyright on adventuring. She’d find a way to go where he’d gone, if she had to eat the blue eye grain by grain to do so.

Church bells began to ring as she sat chewing this over, announcing in their ragged peals the arrival of midnight. Their clamour was accompanied by car horns in the street outside and cheers from a party in an adjacent house.

‘Whoopee,’ she said quietly, on her face the distracted look that had obsessed so many of the opposite sex over the years. She’d forgotten most of them. The ones who’d fought over her; the ones who’d lost their wives in their pursuit of her; even those who’d sold their sanity to find her equal: all were forgotten. History had never much engaged her. It was the future that glittered in her mind’s eye, now more than ever.

The past had been written by men. But the future -pregnant with possibilities - the future was a woman.

Until the rise of Yzordderrex, a rise engineered by the Autarch for reasons more political than geographical, the city of Patashoqua, which lay on the edge of the Fourth Dominion, close to where the In Ovo marked the perimeter of the reconciled worlds, had just claim to be the pre-eminent City of the Dominions. Its proud inhabitants called it casje au casje, simply meaning the hive of hives, a place of intense and fruitful labour. Its proximity to the Fifth made it particularly prone to influences from that source, and even after Yzordderrex had become the centre of power across the Dominions it was to Patashoqua that those at the cutting edge of style and invention looked for the coming thing. Patashoqua had a variation on the motor vehicle in its streets long before Yzordderrex. It had rock and roll in its clubs long before Yzordderrex. It had hamburgers, cinemas, blue jeans and countless other proofs of modernity long before the great city of the Second. Nor was it simply the trivialities of fashion that Patashoqua reinvented from Fifth Dominion models. It was philosophies and belief-systems. Indeed it was said in Patashoqua that you knew a native of Yzordderrex because he looked like you yesterday, and believed what you’d believed the day before.

But as with most cities in love with the modern, Patashoqua had deeply conservative roots. Whereas Yzordderrex was a sinful city, notorious for the excesses of its darker Kesparates, the streets of Patashoqua were quiet after nightfall, its occupants in their own beds with their own spouses, plotting vogues. This mingling of chic and conservatism was nowhere more apparent than in the city’s architecture. Built as they were in a temperate region, unlike the semi-tropical Yzordderrex, the buildings did not have to be designed with any climatic extreme in mind. They were either elegantly classical, and built to remain standing until Doomsday, or else functions of some current craze, and likely to be demolished within a week.

But it was on the borders of the city where the most extraordinary sights were to be seen, because it was here that a second, parasitical city had been created, peopled by inhabitants of the Four Dominions who had fled persecution and had looked to Patashoqua as a place where liberty of thought and action were still possible. For how much longer this would remain the case was a debate that dominated every social gathering in the city. The Autarch had moved against other towns, cities and states which he and his councils judged hot-beds of revolutionary thought. Some of those cities had been razed to the ground, others had come under Yzordderrexian edict, and all sign of independent thought crushed. The University city of Hezoir, for instance, had been reduced to rubble, the brains of its students literally scooped out of their skulls and heaped up in the streets. In the Azzimulto the inhabitants of an entire province had been decimated, so rumour went, by a disease introduced into that region by the Autarch’s representatives. There were tales of atrocity from so many sources that people became almost blase about the newest horror, until, of course, somebody asked how long it would be until the Autarch turned his unforgiving eyes on the hive of hives. Then their faces drained of colour, and people talked in whispers of how they planned to escape or defend themselves if that day ever came; and they looked around at their exquisite city, built to stand until Doomsday, and wondered just how near that day was.