Imajica

by Clive Barker

  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. 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 hotbeds of revolutionary thought. Some of those cities had been razed; 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 rumor 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 blasé 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 color, 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.

  II

  Though Pie ‘oh’ pah had briefly described the forces that haunted the In Ovo, Gentle had only the vaguest impression of the dark protean state between the Dominions, occupied as he was by a spectacle much closer to his heart, that of the change that overtook both travelers as their bodies were translated into the common currency of passage.

  Dizzied by lack of oxygen, he wasn’t certain whether these were real phenomena or not. Could bodies open like flowers, and the seeds of an essential self fly from them the way his mind told him they did? And could those same bodies be remade at the other end of the journey, arriving whole despite the trauma they’d undergone? So it seemed. The world Pie had called the Fifth folded up before the travelers’ eyes, and they went like transported dreams into another place entirely. As soon as he saw the light, Gentle fell to his knees on the hard rock, drinking the air of this Dominion with gratitude.

  “Not bad at all,” he heard Pie say. “We did it, Gentle. I didn’t think we were going to make it for a moment, but we did it!”

  Gentle raised his head, as Pie pulled him to his feet by the strap that joined them.

  “Up! Up!” the mystif said. “It’s not good to start a journey on your knees.”

  It was a bright day here, Gentle saw, the sky above his head cloudless, and brilliant as the green-gold sheen of a peacock’s tail. There was neither sun nor moon in it, but the very air seemed lucid, and by it Gentle had his first true sight of Pie since they’d met in the fire. Perhaps out of remembrance for those it had lost, the mystif was still wearing the clothes it had worn that night, scorched and bloodied though they were. But it had washed the dirt from its face, and its skin gleamed in the clear light.

  “Good to see you,” Gentle said.

  “You, too.”

  Pie started to untie the belt that bound them, while Gentle turned his gaze on the Dominion. They were standing close to the summit of a hill, a quarter of a mile from the perimeters of a sprawling shantytown, from which a din of activity rose. It spread beyond the foot of the hill and halfway across a flat and treeless plain of ocher earth, crossed by a thronged highway that led his eye to the domes and spires of a glittering city.

  “Patashoqua?” he said.

  “Where else?”

  “You were accurate, then.”

  “More than I dared hope. The hill we’re standing on is supposed to be the place where Hapexamendios first rested when He came through from the Fifth. It’s called the Mount of Lipper Bayak. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Is the city under siege?” Gentle said.

  “I don’t think so. The gates look open to me.”

  Gentle scanned the distant walls, and indeed the gates were open wide. “So who are all these people? Refugees?”

  “We’ll ask in a while,” Pie said.

  The knot had come undone. Gentle rubbed his wrist, which was indented by the belt, staring down the hill as he did so. Moving between the makeshift dwellings below he glimpsed forms of being that didn’t much resemble humanity. And, mingling freely with them, many who did. It wouldn’t be difficult to pass as a local, at least.

  “You’re going to have to teach me, Pie,” he said. “I need to know who’s who and what’s what. Do they speak English here?”

  “It used to be quite a popular language,” Pie replied. “I can’t believe it’s fallen out of fashion. But before we go any farther, I think you should know what you’re traveling with. The way people respond to me may confound you otherwise.”

  “Tell me as we go,” Gentle said, eager to see the strangers below up close.

  “As you wish.” They began to descend. “I’m a mystif; my name’s Pie ‘oh’ pah. That much you know. My gender you don’t.”

  “I’ve made a guess,” Gentle said.

  “Oh?” said Pie, smiling. “And what’s your guess?”

  “You’re an androgyne. Am I right?”

  “That’s part of it, certainly.”

  “But you’ve got a talent for illusion. I saw that in New York.”

  “I don’t like the word illusion. It makes me a guiser, and I’m not that.”

  “What then?”

  “In New York you wanted Judith, and that’s what you saw. It was your invention, not mine.”

  “But you played along.”

  “Because I wanted to be with you.”

  “And are you playing along now?”

  “I’m not deceiving you, if that’s what you mean. What you see is what I am, to you.”

  “But to other people?”

  “I may be something different. A man sometimes. A woman others.”

  “Could you be white?”

  “I might manage it for a moment or two. But if I’d tried to come to your bed in daylight, you’d have known I wasn’t Judith. Or if you’d been in love with an eight-year-old, or a dog. I couldn’t have accommodated that, except . . .”—the creature glanced around at him—“. . . under very particular circumstances.”

  Gentle wrestled with this notion, questions biological, philosophical, and libidinous filling his head. He stopped walking for a moment and turned to Pie.

  “Let me tell you what I see,” he said. “Just so you know.”

  “Good.”

  “If I passed you on the street I believe I’d think you were a woman”—he cocked his head—“though maybe not. I suppose it’d depend on the light, and how fast you were walking.” He laughed. “Oh, shit,” he said. “The more I look at you the more I see, and the more I see—”

  “The less you know.”

  “That’s right. You’re not a man. That’s plain enough. But then . . .” He shook his head. “Am I seeing you the way you really are? I mean, is this the final version?”

  “Of course not. There’s stranger sights inside us both. You know that.”

  “Not until now.”

  “We can’t go too naked in the world. We’d burn out each other’s eyes.”

  “But this is you.”

  “For the time being.”

  “For what it’s worth, I like it,” Gentle said. “I don’t know what I’d call you if I saw you in the street, but I’d turn my head. How’s that?”

  “What more could I ask for?”

  “Will I meet others like you?”

  “A few, maybe,” Pie said. “But mystifs aren’t common. When one is born, it’s an occasion for great celebration among my people.”

  “Who are your people?”

  “The Eurhetemec.”

  “Will they be here?” Gentle said, nodding towards the throng below.

  “I doubt it. But in Yzordderrex, certainly. They h
ave a Kesparate there.”

  “What’s a Kesparate?”

  “A district. My people have a city within the city. Or at least they had one. It’s two hundred and twenty-one years since I was there.”

  “My God. How old are you?”

  “Half that again. I know that sounds like an extraordinary span, but time works slowly on flesh touched by feits.”

  “Feits?”

  “Magical workings. Feits, wantons, sways. They work their miracles even on a whore like me.”

  “Whoa!” said Gentle.

  “Oh, yes. That’s something else you should know about me. I was told—a long time ago—that I should spend my life as a whore or an assassin, and that’s what I’ve done.”

  “Until now, maybe. But that’s over.”

  “What will I be from now on?”

  “My friend,” Gentle said, without hesitation.

  The mystif smiled. “Thank you for that.”

  The round of questions ended there, and side by side they wandered on down the slope.

  “Don’t make your interest too apparent,” Pie advised as they approached the edge of this makeshift conurbation. “Pretend you see this sort of sight daily.”

  “That’s going to be difficult,” Gentle predicted.

  So it was. Walking through the narrow spaces between the shanties was like passing through a country in which the very air had evolutionary ambition, and to breathe was to change. A hundred kinds of eye gazed out at them from doorways and windows, while a hundred forms of limb got about the business of the day—cooking, nursing, crafting, conniving, making fires and deals and love—and all glimpsed so briefly that after a few paces Gentle was obliged to look away, to study the muddy gutter they were walking in, lest his mind be overwhelmed by the sheer profusion of sights. Smells, too: aromatic, sickly, sour and sweet; and sounds that made his skull shake and his gut quiver.

  There had been nothing in his life to date, either waking or sleeping, to prepare him for this. He’d studied the masterworks of great imaginers—he’d painted a passable Goya, once, and sold an Ensor for a little fortune—but the difference between paint and reality was vast, a gap whose scale he could not by definition have known until now, when he had around him the other half of the equation. This wasn’t an invented place, its inhabitants variations on experienced phenomena. It was independent of his terms of reference: a place unto and of itself.

  When he looked up again, daring the assault of the strange, he was grateful that he and Pie were now in a quarter occupied by more human entities, though even here there were surprises. What seemed to be a three-legged child skipped across their path only to look back with a face wizened as a desert corpse, its third leg a tail. A woman sitting in a doorway, her hair being combed by her consort, drew her robes around her as Gentle looked her way, but not fast enough to conceal the fact that a second consort, with the skin of a herring and an eye that ran all the way around its skull, was kneeling in front of her, inscribing hieroglyphics on her belly with the sharpened heel of its hand. He heard a range of tongues being spoken, but English seemed to be the commonest parlance, albeit heavily accented or corrupted by the labial anatomy of the speaker. Some seemed to sing their speech; some almost to vomit it up.

  But the voice that called to them from one of the crowded alleyways off to their right might have been heard on any street in London: a lisping, pompous holler demanding they halt in their tracks. They looked in its direction. The throng had divided to allow the speaker and his party of three easy passage.

  “Play dumb,” Pie muttered to Gentle as the lisper, an overfed gargoyle, bald but for an absurd wreath of oiled kiss curls, approached.

  He was finely dressed, his high black boots polished and his canary yellow jacket densely embroidered after what Gentle would come to know as the present Patashoquan fashion. A man much less showily garbed followed, an eye covered by a patch that trailed the tail feathers of a scarlet bird as if echoing the moment of his mutilation. On his shoulders he carried a woman in black, with silvery scales for skin and a cane in her tiny hands with which she tapped her mount’s head to speed him on his way. Still farther behind came the oddest of the four.

  “A Nullianac,” Gentle heard Pie murmur.

  He didn’t need to ask if this was good news or bad. The creature was its own best advertisement, and it was selling harm. Its head resembled nothing so much as praying hands, the thumbs leading and tipped with lobster’s eyes, the gap between the palms wide enough for the sky to be seen through it, but flickering, as arcs of energy passed from side to side. It was without question the ugliest living thing Gentle had ever seen. If Pie had not suggested they obey the edict and halt, Gentle would have taken to his heels there and then, rather than let the Nullianac get one stride closer to them.

  The lisper had halted and now addressed them afresh. “What business have you in Vanaeph?” he wanted to know.

  “We’re just passing through,” Pie said, a reply somewhat lacking in invention, Gentle thought.

  “Who are you?” the man demanded.

  “Who are you?” Gentle returned.

  The patch-eyed mount guffawed and got his head slapped for his troubles.

  “Loitus Hammeryock,” the lisper replied.

  “My name’s Zacharias,” Gentle said, “and this is—”

  “Casanova,” Pie said, which earned him a quizzical glance from Gentle.

  “Zooical!” the woman said. “D’yee speakat te gloss?”

  “Sure,” said Gentle. “I speakat te gloss.”

  “Be careful,” Pie whispered at his side.

  “Bone! Bone!” the woman went on, and proceeded to tell them, in a language which was two parts English, or a variant thereof, one part Latin, and one part some Fourth Dominion dialect that consisted of tongue clicks and teeth tappings, that all strangers to this town, Neo Vanaeph, had to register their origins and intentions before they were allowed access: or, indeed, the right to depart. For all its ramshackle appearance, Vanaeph was no lawless stew, it appeared, but a tightly policed township, and this woman—who introduced herself in this flurry of lexicons as Pontiff Farrow—was a significant authority here.

  When she’d finished, Gentle cast a confounded look in Pie’s direction. This was proving more difficult terrain by the moment. Unconcealed in the Pontiff’s speech was threat of summary execution if they failed to answer their inquiries satisfactorily. The executioner among this party was not hard to spot: he of the prayerful head—the Nullianac—waiting in the rear for his instructions.

  “So,” said Hammeryock. “We need some identification.”

  “I don’t have any,” Gentle said.

  “And you?” he asked the mystif, which also shook its head.

  “Spies,” the Pontiff hissed.

  “No, we’re just . . . tourists,” Gentle said.

  “Tourists?” said Hammeryock.

  “We’ve come to see the sights of Patashoqua.” He turned to Pie for support. “Whatever they are.”

  “The tombs of the Vehement Loki Lobb,” Pie said, clearly scratching around for the glories Patashoqua had to offer, “and the Merrow Ti’ Ti’.”

  That sounded pretty to Gentle’s ears. He faked a broad smile of enthusiasm. “The Merrow Ti’ Ti’!” he said. “Absolutely! I wouldn’t miss the Merrow Ti’ Ti’ for all the tea in China.”

  “China?” said Hammeryock.

  “Did I say China?”

  “You did.”

  “Fifth Dominion,” the Pontiff muttered. “Spiatits from the Fifth Dominion.”

  “I object strongly to that accusation,” said Pie ‘oh’ pah.

  “And so,” said a voice behind the accused, “do I.”

  Both Pie and Gentle turned to take in the sight of a scabrous, bearded individual, dressed in what might generously have been described as motley and less generously as rags, standing on one leg and scraping shit off the heel of his other foot with a stick.

  “It’s the hypocr
isy that turns my stomach, Hammeryock,” he said, his expression a maze of wiles. “You two pontificate,” he went on, eyeing his pun’s target as he spoke, “about keeping the streets free from undesirables, but you do nothing about the dog shite!”

  “This isn’t your business, Tick Raw,” Hammeryock said.

  “Oh, but it is. These are my friends, and you’ve insulted them with your slurs and your suspicions.”

  “Friends, sayat?” the Pontiff murmured.

  “Yes, ma’am. Friends. Some of us still know the difference between conversation and diatribe. I have friends, with whom I talk and exchange ideas. Remember ideas? They’re what make life worth living.”

  Hammeryock could not disguise his unease, hearing his mistress thus addressed, but whoever Tick Raw was he wielded sufficient authority to silence any further objection.

  “My dearlings,” he said to Gentle and Pie, “shall we repair to my home?”

  As a parting gesture he lobbed the stick in Hammeryock’s direction. It landed in the mud between the man’s legs.

  “Clean up, Loitus,” Tick Raw said. “We don’t want the Autarch’s heel sliding in shite, now, do we?”

  The two parties then went their separate ways, Tick Raw leading Pie and Gentle off through the labyrinth.

  “We want to thank you,” Gentle said.

  “What for?” Tick Raw asked him, aiming a kick at a goat that wandered across his path.

  “Talking us out of trouble,” Gentle replied. “We’ll be on our way now.”

  “But you’ve got to come back with me,” Tick Raw said.

  “There’s no need.”

  “Need? There’s every need! Have I got this right?” he said to Pie. “Is there need or isn’t there?”

  “We’d certainly like the benefit of your insights,” Pie said. “We’re strangers here. Both of us.” The mystif spoke in an oddly stilted fashion, as if it wanted to say more, but couldn’t. “We need reeducating,” it said.

  “Oh?” said Tick Raw. “Really?”

  “Who is this Autarch?” Gentle asked.

  “He rules the Reconciled Dominions, from Yzordderrex. He’s the greatest power in the Imajica.”