Imajica

‘Do you always calculate the passage of time by your bowels?’

They’re more reliable than your beard,’ Pie replied.

‘Which direction is the light going to come from when it comes?’ Gentle asked, turning in his saddle to scan the horizon. As he craned round to look back the way they’d come a murmur of distress escaped his lips.

‘What is it?’ the mystif said, bringing its beast to a halt, and following Gentle’s gaze.

It didn’t need telling. A column of black smoke was rising from the cradle of the hills, its lower plumes tinged with fire. Gentle was already slipping from his saddle, and now scrambled up the rock face at their side to get a better sense of the fire’s location. He lingered only seconds at the top before scrambling down, sweating and panting.

‘We have to turn back,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Beatrix is burning.’

‘How can you tell from this distance?’ Pie said.

‘I know, damn it! Beatrix is burning! We have to go back.’ He climbed on to his doeki, and started to haul it round on the narrow path.

‘Wait,’ said Pie. ‘Wait, for God’s sake!’

‘We have to help them,’ Gentle said, against the rock face. ‘They were good to us.’

‘Only because they wanted us out!’ Pie replied.

‘Well, now the worst’s happened, and we have to do what we can.’

‘You used to be more rational than this.’

‘What do you mean: used to be? You don’t know anything about me, so don’t start making judgements. If you won’t come with me, fuck you!’

The doeki was fully turned now, and Gentle dug his heels into its flanks to make it pick up speed. There had only been three or four places along the route where the road had divided. He was certain he could retrace their steps back to Beatrix without much problem. And if he was right, and it was the town that was burning up ahead, he would have the column of smoke as a grim marker. Pie followed, after a time, as Gentle knew it must. The mystif was happy to be called a friend, but somewhere in its soul it was a slave.

They didn’t speak as they travelled, which was not surprising given their last exchange. Only once, as they mounted a ridge that laid the vista of foothills before them, with the valley in which Beatrix nestled still out of sight but unequivocally the source of the smoke, did Pie’oh’pah murmur:

‘Why is it always fire?’ and Gentle realized how insensitive he’d been to Pie’s reluctance to return.

The devastation that undoubtedly lay before them was an echo of the fire in which its adopted family had perished - a matter that had gone undiscussed between them since.

‘Shall I go from here without you?’ he asked.

Pie shook its head. Together, or not at all,’ it said.

The route became easier to negotiate from there on. The inclines were mellower and the track itself better kept, but there was also light in the sky, as the long-delayed dawn finally came. By the time they finally laid their eyes on the remains of Beatrix the peacock-tail glory Gentle had first admired in the heavens over Patashoqua was overhead, its glamour making grimmer still the scene laid below. Beatrix was still burning fitfully, but the fire had consumed most of the houses and their birch-bamboo arbours. He brought his doeki to a halt and scoured the place from this vantage-point. There was no sign of Beatrix’s destroyers.

‘On foot from here?’ Gentle said.

‘I think so.’

They tethered the beasts, and descended into the village. The sound of lamentation reached them before they were within its perimeters, the sobbing, emerging as it did from the murk of the smoke, reminding Gentle of the sounds he’d heard while keeping his vigil on the hill. The destruction around them now was somehow a consequence of that sightless encounter, he knew. Though he’d avoided the eye of the watcher in the darkness, his presence had been suspected, and that had been enough to bring this calamity upon Beatrix.

‘I’m responsible …’ he said. ‘God help me … I’m responsible.’

He turned to the mystif, who was standing in the middle of the street, its features drained of blood and expression.

‘Stay here,’ Gentle said. ‘I’m going to find the family.’

Pie didn’t register any response, but Gentle assumed what he’d said had been understood, and headed off in the direction of the Splendids’ house. It wasn’t simply fire that had undone Beatrix. Some of the houses had been toppled unburned, the copses around them uprooted. There was no sign of fatalities, however, and Gentle began to hope that Coaxial Tasko had persuaded the villagers to take to the hills before Beatrix’s violators had appeared out of the night. That hope was dashed when he came to the place where the Splendids’ home had stood. It was rubble, like the others, and the smoke from its burning timbers had concealed from him until now the horror heaped in front of it. Here were the good people of Beatrix, shovelled together in a bleeding pile higher than his head. There were a few sobbing survivors at the heap, looking for their loved ones in the confusion of broken bodies, some clutching at limbs they thought they recognized, others simply kneeling in the bloody dirt, keening.

Gentle walked around the pile, searching amongst the mourners for a face he knew. One fellow he’d seen laughing at the show was cradling in his arms a wife or sister whose body was as lifeless as the puppets he’d taken such pleasure in. Another, a woman, was burrowing in amongst the bodies, yelling somebody’s name. He went to help her, but she screamed at him to stay away. As he retreated he caught sight of Efreet. The boy was in the heap, his eyes open, his mouth - which had been the vehicle for such unalloyed enthusiasms - beaten in by a rifle butt or a boot. At that moment Gentle wanted nothing - not life itself - as much as he wanted the bastard who’d done this, standing in his sights. He felt the killing breath hot in his throat, itching to be merciless.

He turned from the heap, looking for some target, even if it wasn’t the murderer himself. Someone with a gun, or a uniform; a man he could call the enemy. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this way before, but then he’d never possessed the power he had now - or rather, if Pie was to be believed, he’d had it without recognizing the fact - and agonizing as these horrors were, it was salve to his distress, knowing there was such a capacity for cleansing in him; that his lungs, throat and palm could take the guilty out of life with such ease. He headed away from the cairn of flesh, ready to be an executioner at the first invitation.

The street twisted, and he followed its convolutions, turning a corner to find the way ahead blocked by one of the invaders’ war machines. He stopped in his tracks, expecting it to turn its steel eyes upon him. It was a perfect death-bringer, armoured as a crab, its wheels bristling with bloodied scythes, its turret with armaments. But death had found the bringer. Smoke rose from the turret, and the driver lay where the fire had found him, in the act of scrabbling from the machine’s stomach. A small victory, but one that at least proved the machines had frailties. Come another day, that knowledge might be the difference between hope and despair. He was turning his back on the machine when he heard his name called, and Tasko appeared from behind the smoking carcass. Wretched he was, his face bloodied, his clothes filthy with dust.

‘Bad timing, Zacharias,’ he said. ‘You left too late and now you come back, too late again.’

‘Why did they do this?’

‘The Autarch doesn’t need reasons.’

‘He was here?’ Gentle said. The thought that the Butcher of Yzordderrex had stood in Beatrix made his heart beat faster. But Tasko said:

‘Who knows? Nobody’s ever seen his face. Maybe he was here yesterday, counting the children, and nobody even noticed him.’

‘Do you know where Mother Splendid is?’

‘In the heap somewhere.’

‘Jesus

‘She wouldn’t have made a very good witness. She was too crazy with grief. They left alive the ones who’d tell the story best. Atrocities need witnesses, Zacharias. People to spread the word.’

‘They did this as a warning?’ Gentle said.

Tasko shook his huge head. ‘I don’t know how their minds work,’ he said.

‘Maybe we have to learn, so that we can stop them.’

‘I’d prefer to die,’ the man replied, ‘than understand filth like that. If you’ve got the appetite, then go to Yzordderrex. You’ll get your education there.’

‘I want to help here,’ Gentle said. ‘There must be something I can do.’

‘You can leave us to mourn.’

If there was any profounder dismissal, Gentle didn’t know it. He searched for some word of comfort or apology, but in the face of such devastation only silence seemed appropriate. He bowed his head, and left Tasko to the burden of being a witness, returning up the street past the heap of corpses to where Pie’oh’pah was standing. The mystif hadn’t moved an inch, and even when Gentle came abreast of it, and quietly told it they should go, it was a long time before it looked round at him.

‘We shouldn’t have come back,’ it said.

‘Every day we waste, this is going to happen again …

‘You think you can stop it?’ Pie said, with a trace of sarcasm.

‘We won’t go the long way round, we’ll go through the mountains. Save ourselves three weeks.’

‘You do, don’t you?’ Pie said. ‘You think you can stop this.’

‘We won’t die,’ Gentle said, putting his arms around Pie’oh’pah. ‘I won’t let us. I came here to understand and I will.’

‘How much more of this can you take?’

‘As much as I have to.’

‘I may remind you of that.’

‘I’ll remember,’ Gentle said. ‘After this, I’ll remember everything.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

1

The Retreat at the Godolphin Estate had been built in an age of follies, when the oldest sons of the rich and mighty, having no wars to distract them, amused themselves spending the gains of generations on buildings whose only function was to flatter their egos. Most of these lunacies, designed without care for basic architectural principles, were dust before their designers. A few, however, became noteworthy even in neglect, either because somebody associated with them had lived or died in notoriety, or because they were the scene of some drama. The Retreat fell into both categories. Its architect, Geoffrey Light, had died within six months of its completion, choked by a bull’s pizzle in the wilds of West Riding, a grotesquerie which attracted some attention. As did the retirement from the public eye of Light’s patron, Lord Joshua Godolphin, whose decline into insanity was the talk of court and coffee-house for many years. Even at his zenith he’d attracted gossip, mainly because he kept the company of magicians. Cagliostro, the Comte de Saint-Germain, and even Casanova (reputedly no mean thaumaturgist) had spent time on the Estate, as well as a host of lesser-known practitioners.

His Lordship had made no secret of his occult investigations, though the work he was truly undertaking was never known to the gossips. They assumed he kept company with these mountebanks for their entertainment value. Whatever his reasons, the fact that he retired from sight so suddenly drew further attention to his last indulgence, the folly Light had built for him. A diary purported to have belonged to the choked architect appeared a year after his demise, containing an account of the Retreat’s construction. Whether it was the genuine article or not, it made bizarre reading. The foundations had been laid, it said, under stars calculated to be particularly propitious; the masons - sought and hired in a dozen cities - had been sworn to silence with an oath of Arabic ferocity. The stones themselves had been individually baptized in a mixture of milk and frankincense and a lamb been allowed to wander through the half-completed building three times, and the altar and font been placed where it had laid its innocent head.

Of course these details were soon corrupted by repetition, and Satanic purpose ascribed to the building. It became babies’ blood that was used to anoint the stone, and a mad dog’s grave that marked the spot where the altar was built. Sealed up behind the high walls of his sanctum it was doubtful that Lord Godolphin even knew that such rumours were circulating until, two Septembers after his withdrawal, the inhabitants of Yoke, the village closest to the Estate, needing a scapegoat to blame the poor harvest upon, and inflamed by a passage from Ezekiel delivered from the pulpit of the parish church, used the Sunday afternoon to mount a crusade against the Devil’s work, and climbed the gates of the Estate to raze the Retreat to the ground. They found none of the promised blasphemies. No inverted cross; no altar stained with virginal blood. But having trespassed they did what damage they could inflict out of sheer frustration, finally setting a bonfire of baled hay in the middle of the great mosaic. All the flames did was lick the place black, but the Retreat earned its nickname from that afternoon: the Black Chapel; or Godolphin’s Sin.

2

If Jude had known anything about the history of Yoke she might well have looked for signs of its echoes in the village as she drove through. She would have had to look hard, but the signs were there to be found. There was scarcely a house within its bounds that didn’t have a cross carved into the keystone above the door, or a horseshoe cemented into the doorstep. If she’d had time to linger in the churchyard she would have found inscribed on the stones there entreaties to the good Lord that He keep the Devil from the living even as he gathered the dead to His Bosom, and on the board beside the gate a notice announcing that next Sunday’s sermon would be The Lamb in Our Lives’, as though to banish any lingering thought of the infernal goat.

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