by Clive Barker
“You don’t know that,” said the Oethac, picking up the child with one arm and slinging it over his shoulder. “It wasn’t me,” he went on, as he backed away. “I never laid a finger on her. I swear. On my scars, I swear.”
Jude ignored his weaselings and took a step towards Quaisoir. As soon as she moved, the Oethac fled. The blinder, however, held his ground, taking courage from his blade.
“I’ll do you the same way,” he warned. “I don’t care who the fuck you are, I’ll do you!”
From behind her, Jude heard Dowd’s voice, carrying an authority she’d never heard in it before.
“I’d leave her be if I were you,” he said.
His utterance brought a response from Quaisoir. She raised her head and turned in Dowd’s direction. Her eyes had not simply been stabbed out but virtually dug from their sockets. Seeing the holes, Jude was ashamed to have been so troubled by the little ache that she felt in sympathy; it was nothing beside Quaisoir’s hurt. Yet the woman’s voice was almost joyful.
“Lord?” she said. “Sweet Lord, is this punishment enough? Will you forgive me now?”
Neither the nature of the error Quaisoir was making here nor its profound irony was lost on Jude. Dowd was no savior. But he was happy enough to assume that role, it seemed. He replied to Quaisoir with a delicacy as feigned as the sonority he’d affected seconds before.
“Of course I’ll forgive you,” he said. “That’s what I’m here to do.”
Jude might have been tempted to disabuse Quaisoir of her illusions there and then, but that the blinder was usefully distracted by Dowd’s performance.
“Tell me who you are, child,” Dowd said.
“You know who the fuck she is,” the blinder spat, “Quaisoir! It’s fucking Quaisoir!”
Dowd glanced back at Jude, his expression one of comprehension rather than shock. Then he looked again at the blinder.
“So it is,” he said.
“You know what she’s done same as me,” the man said. “She deserves worse than this.”
“Worse, you think?” Dowd said, continuing to advance towards the man, who was nervously passing his knife from hand to hand, as though he sensed that Dowd’s capacity for cruelty outstripped his own a hundredfold and was preparing to defend himself if need be.
“What worse would you do?” Dowd said.
“What she’s done to others, over and over.”
“She did these things personally, you think?”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” he said. “Who knows what the fuck goes on up there? People disappear, and get washed up again in pieces. . . .” He tried a little smile, plainly nervous now. “You know she deserved it.”
“And you?” Dowd asked. “What do you deserve?”
“I’m not saying I’m a hero,” the blinder replied. “I’m just saying she had it coming.”
“I see,” said Dowd.
From Jude’s vantage point, what happened next was more a matter of conjecture than observation. She saw Quaisoir’s maimer take a step away from Dowd, repugnance on his face; then saw him lunge forward as if to stab Dowd through the heart. His attack put him in range of the mites, and before his blade could find Dowd’s flesh they must have leapt at the blinder, because he dropped back with a shout of horror, his free hand going up to his face. Jude had seen what followed before. The man scrabbled at his eyes and nostrils and mouth, his legs giving out beneath him as the mites undid his system from the inside. He fell at Dowd’s feet and rolled around in a fury of frustration, eventually putting his knife into his mouth and digging bloodily for the things that were unmaking him. The life went out of him as he was doing so, his hand dropping from his face, leaving the blade in his throat as though he’d choked upon it.
“It’s over,” Dowd said to Quaisoir, who had wrapped her arms around her shuddering body and was lying on the ground a few yards from her tormentor’s corpse. “He won’t hurt you again.”
“Thank you, Lord.”
“The things he accused you of, child?”
“Yes.”
“Terrible things.”
“Yes.”
“Are you guilty of them?”
“I am,” Quaisoir said. “I want to confess them before I die. Will you hear me?”
“I will,” Dowd said, oozing magnanimity.
After being merely a witness to these events as they unraveled, Jude now stepped towards Quaisoir and her confessor, but Dowd heard her approach and turned to shake his head.
“I’ve sinned, my Lord Jesu,” Quaisoir was saying. “I’ve sinned so many times. I beg you to forgive me.”
It was the despair Jude heard in her sister’s voice, rather than Dowd’s rebuff, that kept her from making her presence known. Quaisoir was in extremis, and given that it was her clear desire to commune with some forgiving spirit, what right did Jude have to intervene? Dowd was not the Christ Quaisoir believed him to be, but did that matter? What would revealing the father confessor’s true identity achieve now, besides adding to the sum of her sister’s suffering?
Dowd had knelt beside Quaisoir and had taken her up into his arms, demonstrating a capacity for tenderness, or at least for its replication, that Jude would never have believed him capable of. For her part, Quaisoir was in bliss, despite her wounds. She clutched at Dowd’s jacket and thanked him over and over for doing her this kindness. He hushed her softly, saying there was no need for her to make a catalogue of her crimes.
“You have them in your heart, and I see them there,” he said. “I forgive them. Tell me instead about your husband. Where is he? Why hasn’t he also come asking for forgiveness?”
“He didn’t believe you were here,” Quaisoir said. “I told him I’d seen you down at the harbor, but he has no faith.”
“None?”
“Only in himself,” she said bitterly.
Dowd began to rock backward and forward as he plied her with further questions, his focus so devoted to his victim he didn’t notice Jude’s approach. She envied Dowd his embrace, wishing it were her arms Quaisoir was lying in instead of his.
“Who is your husband?” Dowd was asking.
“You know who he is,” Quaisoir replied. “He’s the Autarch. He rules the Imajica.”
“But he wasn’t always Autarch, was he?”
“No.”
“So what was he before?” Dowd wanted to know. “An ordinary man?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think he was ever an ordinary man. I don’t remember exactly.”
He stopped rocking her. “I think you do,” he said, his tone subtly shifting. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me: What was he before he ruled Yzordderrex? And what were you?”
“I was nothing,” she said simply.
“Then how were you raised so high?”
“He loved me. From the very beginning, he loved me.”
“You did no unholy service to be elevated?” Dowd said.
She hesitated, and he pressed her harder.
“What did you do?” he demanded. “What? What?” There was a distant echo of Oscar in that expletive: the servant speaking with his master’s voice.
Intimidated by this fury, Quaisoir replied. “I visited the Bastion of the Banu many times,” she confessed. “Even the Annex. I went there, too.”
“And what’s there?”
“Madwomen. Some who killed their spouses, or their children.”
“Why did you seek such pitiful creatures out?”
“There are . . . powers . . . hidden among them.”
At this, Jude attended more closely than ever.
“What kind of powers?” Dowd said, voicing the question she was silently asking.
“I did nothing unholy,” Quaisoir protested. “I just wanted to be cleansed. The Pivot was in my dreams. Every night, its shadow on me, breaking my back. I only wanted to be cleansed of it.”
“And were you?” Dowd asked her. Again she didn’t answer at first, until he pressed her, almost harshly. “Were you?�
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“I wasn’t cleansed, I was changed,” she said. “The women polluted me. I have a taint in my flesh and I wish it were out of me.” She began to tear at her clothes, till her fingers found her belly and breasts. “I want it driven out!” she said. “It gave me new dreams, worse than before.”
“Calm yourself,” Dowd said.
“But I want it out! I want it out!” A kind of fit had suddenly taken her, and she flailed so violently in his arms she fell from them. “I can feel it in me now,” she said, her nails raking her breasts.
Jude looked at Dowd, willing him to intervene, but he simply stood up, staring at the woman’s distress, plainly taking pleasure in it. Quaisoir’s self-assault was not theatrics. She was drawing blood from her skin, still yelling that she wanted the taint out of her. In her agony, a subtle change was coming over her flesh, as though she was sweating out the taint she’d spoken of. Her pores were oozing a sheen of iridescence, and the cells of her skin were subtly changing color. Jude knew the blue she saw spreading from her sister’s neck, down over her body and up towards her contorted face. It was the blue of the stone eye, the blue of the Goddess.
“What is this?” Dowd demanded of his confessee.
“Out of me! Out of me!”
“Is this the taint?” He went down on his haunches beside her. “Is it?”
“Drive it out of me!” Quaisoir sobbed, and began assaulting her poor body afresh.
Jude could endure it no longer. Allowing her sister to die blissfully in the arms of a surrogate divinity was one thing. This self-mutilation was quite another. She broke her vow of silence.
“Stop her,” she said.
Dowd looked up from his study, drawing his thumb across his throat to hush her. But it was too late. Despite her own commotion, Quaisoir had heard her sister speak. Her thrashings slowed, and her blind head turned in Jude’s direction.
“Who’s there?” she demanded.
There was naked fury on Dowd’s face, but he hushed her softly. She would not be placated, however.
“Who’s with you, Lord?” she asked him.
With his reply he made an error that unknitted the whole fiction. He lied to her.
“There’s nobody,” he said.
“I heard a woman’s voice. Who’s there?”
“I told you,” Dowd insisted. “Nobody.” He put his hand upon her face. “Now calm yourself. We’re alone.”
“No, we’re not.”
“Do you doubt me, child?” Dowd replied, his voice, after the harshness of his last interrogations, modulating with this question, so that he sounded almost wounded by her lack of faith. Quaisoir’s reply was to silently take his hand from her face, seizing it tightly in her blue, blood-speckled fingers.
“That’s better,” he said.
Quaisoir ran her fingers over his palm. Then she said, “No scars.”
“There’ll always be scars,” Dowd said, lavishing his best pontifical manner upon her. But he’d missed the point of her remark.
“There are no scars on your hand,” she said.
He retrieved it from her grasp. “Believe in me,” he said.
“No,” she replied. “You’re not the Man of Sorrows.” The joy had gone from her voice. It was thick, almost threatening. “You can’t save me,” she said, suddenly flailing wildly to drive the pretender from her. “Where’s my Savior? I want my Savior!”
“He isn’t here,” Jude told her. “He never was.”
Quaisoir turned in Jude’s direction. “Who are you?” she said. “I know your voice from somewhere.”
“Keep your mouth shut,” Dowd said, stabbing his finger in Jude’s direction. “Or so help me you’ll taste the mites—”
“Don’t be afraid of him,” Quaisoir said.
“She knows better than that,” Dowd replied. “She’s seen what I can do.”
Eager for some excuse to speak, so that Quaisoir could hear more of the voice she knew but couldn’t yet name, Jude spoke up in support of Dowd’s conceit.
“What he says is right,” she told Quaisoir. “He can hurt us both, badly. He’s not the Man of Sorrows, sister.”
Whether it was the repetition of words Quaisoir had herself used several times—Man of Sorrows—or the fact that Jude had called her sister, or both, the woman’s sightless face slackened, the bafflement going out of it. She lifted herself from the ground.
“What’s your name?” she murmured. “Tell me your name.”
“She’s nothing,” Dowd said, echoing Quaisoir’s own description of herself minutes earlier. “She’s a dead woman.” He made a move in Jude’s direction. “You understand so little,” he said. “And I’ve forgiven you a lot for that. But I can’t indulge you any longer. You’ve spoiled a fine game. I don’t want you spoiling any more.”
He put his left hand, its forefinger extended, to his lips.
“I don’t have many mites left,” he said, “so one will have to do. A slow unraveling. But even a shadow like you can be undone.”
“I’m a shadow now, am I?” Jude said to him. “I thought we were the same, you and I? Remember that speech?”
“That was in another life, lovey,” Dowd said. “It’s different here. You could do me harm here. So I’m afraid it’s going to have to be thank you and good night.”
She started to back away from him, wondering as she did so how much distance she would have to put between them to be out of range of his wretched mites. He watched her retreat with pity on his face.
“No good, lovey,” he said. “I know these streets like the back of my hand.”
She ignored his condescension and took another backward step, her eye fixed on his mouth where the mites nested, but aware that Quaisoir had risen and was standing no more than a yard from her defender.
“Sister?” the woman said.
Dowd glanced around, distracted from Jude long enough for her to take to her heels. He let out a shout as she fled, and the blind woman lunged towards the sound, grabbing his arm and neck and dragging him towards her. The noise she made as she did so was like nothing Jude had heard from human lips, and she envied it: a cry to shatter bones like glass and shake color from the air. She was glad not to be closer, or it might have brought her to her knees.
She looked back once, in time to see Dowd spit the lethal mite at Quaisoir’s empty sockets, and prayed her sister had better defenses against its harm than the man who’d emptied them. Whether or no, she could do little to help. Better to run while she had the chance, so that at least one of them survived the cataclysm.
She turned the first corner she came to, and kept turning corners thereafter, to put as many decisions between herself and her pursuer. No doubt Dowd’s boast was true; he did indeed know these streets, where he claimed he’d once triumphed, like his own hand. It followed that the sooner she was out of them, and into terrain unfamiliar to them both, the more chance she had of losing him. Until then, she had to be swift and as nearly invisible as she could make herself. Like the shadow Dowd had dubbed her: darkness in a deeper dark, flitting and fleeting; seen and gone.
But her body didn’t want to oblige. It was weary, beset with aches and shudders. Twin fires had been set in her chest, one in each lung. Invisible hounds ripped her heels bloody. She didn’t allow herself to slow her pace, however, until she’d left the streets of playhouses and brothels behind her and was delivered into a place that might have stood as a set for a Pluthero Quexos tragedy: a circle a hundred yards wide, bounded by a high wall of sleek, black stone. The fires that burned here didn’t rage uncontrolled, as they did in so many other parts of the city, but flickered from the tops of the walls in their dozens; tiny white flames, like night-lights, illuminating the inclined pavement that led down to an opening in the center of the circle. She could only guess at its function. An entrance into the city’s secret underworld, perhaps, or a well? There were flowers everywhere, most of the petals shed and gone to rot, slickening the pavement beneath her feet as she approached thehole
, obliging her to tread with care. The suspicion grew that if this was a well, its water was poisoned with the dead. Obituaries were scrawled on the pavement—names, dates, messages, even crude illustrations—their numbers increasing the closer to the edge she came. Some had even been inscribed on the inner wall of the well, by mourners brave or broken-hearted enough to dare the drop.
Though the hole exercised the same fascination as a cliff edge, inviting her to peer into its depths, she refused its petitions and halted a yard or two from the lip. There was a sickly smell out of the place, though it wasn’t strong. Either the well had not been used of late, or else its occupants lay a very long way down.
Her curiosity satisfied, she looked around to choose the best route out. There were no less than eight exits—nine, including the well—and she went first to the avenue that lay opposite the one she’d come in by. It was dark and smoky, and she might have taken it had there not been signs that it was blocked by rubble some way down its length. She went to the next, and it too was blocked, fires flickering between fallen timbers. She was going to the third door when she heard Dowd’s voice. She turned. He was standing on the far side of the well, with his head slightly cocked and a put-upon expression on his face, like a parent who’d caught up with a truant child.
“Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “I know these streets.”
“I heard you.”
“It isn’t so bad that you came here,” he said, wandering towards her. “It saves me a mite.”
“Why do you want to hurt me?” she said.
“I might ask you the same question,” he said. “You do, don’t you? You’d love to see me hurt. You’d be even happier if you could do the hurting personally. Admit it!”
“I admit it.”
“There. Don’t I make a good confessor after all? And that’s just the beginning. You’ve got some secrets in you I didn’t even know you had.” He raised his hand and described a circle as he spoke. “I begin to see the perfection of all this. Things coming round, coming round, back to the place where it all began. That is: to her. Or to you; it doesn’t matter, really. You’re the same.”
“Twins?” Jude said. “Is that it?”