Imajica 01 - The Fifth Dominion

27

If pressed, Jude could have named a dozen men—lovers, suitors, slaves—who'd offered her any prize she set her heart on in return for her affections. She'd taken several up on their largesse. But her requests, extravagant as some of them had been, were as nothing beside the gift she'd asked of Oscar Godolpnin. Show me Yzordderrex, she'd said, and watched his face fill with trepidation. He'd not refused her out of hand. To have done so would have crushed in a moment the affection growing between them, and he would never have forgiven himself that loss. He listened to her request, then made no further mention of it, hoping, no doubt, she'd let the subject lie.

She didn't, however. The blossoming of a physical relationship between them had cured her of the strange passivity that had afflicted her when they'd first met. She had knowledge of his vulnerability now. She'd seen him wounded. She'd seen him ashamed of his lack of self-control. She'd seen him in the act of love, tender and sweetly perverse. Though her feelings for him remained strong, this new perspective removed the veil of unthinking acceptance from her eyes. Now, when she saw the desire he felt for her—and he several times displayed that desire in the days following their consummation—it was the old Judith, self-reh'ant and fearless, who watched from behind her smiles; watched and waited, knowing that his devotion empowered her more by the day. The tension between these two selves—the remnants of the compliant mistress his presence had first conjured and the willful, focused woman she'd been (and now was again)—scourged the last dregs of dreaminess from her system, and her appetite for Dominion-hopping returned with fresh intensity. She didn't shrink from reminding him of his promise to her as the days went by, but on the first two occasions he made some polite but spurious excuse so as to avoid talking further about it.

On the third occasion her insistence won her a sigh, and eyes cast to heaven.

"Why is this so important to you?" he asked. "Yzordderrex is an overpopulated cesspit. I don't know a decent man or woman there who wouldn't prefer to be here in England."

"A week ago you were talking about disappearing there forever. But you couldn't you said, because you'd miss the cricket."

"You've got a good memory."

"I hang on your every word," she said, not without a certain sourness.

"Well, the situation's changed. There's most likely going to be revolution. If we went now, we'd probably be executed on sight."

"You've come and gone often enough in the past," she

pointed out. "So have hundreds of others, haven't they?

You're not the only one. That's what magic is for: passing

between Dominions."

He didn't reply.

"I want to see Yzordderrex, Oscar," she said, "and if you won't take me I'll find a magician who will."

"Don't even joke about it."L

"I mean it," she said fiercely. "You can't be the only one

who knows the way."

"Near enough."

"There are others. Til find them if I have to."

"They're all crazy," he told her. "Or dead."

"Murdered?" she said, the word out of her mouth before she'd fully grasped its implication.

The look on his face, however (or rather its absence: the willed blankness), was enough to confirm her suspicion. The bodies she'd seen on the news being carted away from their games were not those of burned-out hippies and sex- ? crazed satanists. They were possessors of true power, men and women who'd maybe walked where she longed to walk: in the Imajica.

"Who's doing it, Oscar? It's somebody you know, isn't it?"

He got up and crossed to where she sat, his motion so : swift she thought for an instant he meant to strike her. But instead he dropped to his knees in front of her, holding her hands tight and staring up at her with almost hypnotic intensity.

"Listen to me carefully," he said. "I have certain familial duties, which I wish to God I didn't have. They make demands upon me I'd willingly shrug off if I could—"

"This is all to do with the tower, isn't it?"

"I'd prefer not to discuss that."

"We are discussing it, Oscar."

"It's a very private and a very delicate business. I'm dealing with individuals quite without any sense of morality. If they were to know that I've said even this much to you, both our lives would be in the direst jeopardy. I beg you, never utter another word about this to anyone. I

should never have taken you up to the tower."

If its occupants were half as murderous as he was suggesting, she thought, how much more lethal would they be ; if they knew how many of the tower's secrets she'd seen? "Promise me you'll let this subject alone," he went on.

"I want to see Yzordderrex, Oscar."

"Promise me. No more talk about the tower, in this house or out of it. Say it, Judith."

"All right. I won't talk about the tower."

"In this house—"

"—or out of it. But Oscar—"

"What, sweet?"

"I still want to see Yzordderrex."

The morning after this exchange she went up to Highgate. It was another rainy day, and failing to find an unoccupied cab she braved the Underground. It was a mistake. She'd never liked traveling by tube at the best of times—it brought out her latent claustrophobia—but she recalled as she rode that two of those murdered in the spate of killings had died in these tunnels: one pushed in front of a crowded train as it drew into Piccadilly station, the other stabbed to death at midnight, somewhere on the Jubilee Line. This was not a safe way to travel for someone who had even the slightest inkling of the prodigies half hidden in the world; and she was one of those few. So it was with no little relief she stepped out into the open air at Archway station (the clouds had cleared) and started up Highgate Hill on foot. Shie had no difficulty finding the tower itself, though the banality of its design, together with the shield of trees in full leaf in front of it, meant few eyes were likely to look its

way.

Despite the dire warnings issued by Oscar it was difficult to find much intimidating about the place, with the spring sunshine warm enough to make her slip off her jacket, and the grass busy with sparrows quarreling over worms raised by the rain. She scanned the windows, looking for some sign of occupation, but saw none. Avoiding the front door, with its camera trained on the step, she headed down the side of the building, her progress unimpeded by walls or barbed wire. The owners had clearly decided the tower's best defense lay in its utter lack of character, and the less they did to keep trespassers out the fewer would be attracted in the first place. There was even less to see from the back than the front. There were blinds down over most of the windows, and those few that were not covered let onto empty rooms. She made a complete circuit of the tower, looking for some other way into it, but there was none.

As she returned to the front of the building she tried to imagine the passageways buried beneath her feet—the books piled in the darkness, and the imprisoned soul lying in a deeper darkness still—hoping her mind might be able to go where her body could not. But that exercise proved as fruitless as her window-watching. The real world was implacable; it wouldn't shift a particle of soil to let her through. Discouraged, she made one final circuit of the tower, then decided to give up. Maybe she'd come back here at night, she thought, when solid reality didn't insist on her senses so brutally. Or maybe seek another journey under the influence of the blue eye, though this option made her nervous. She had no real grasp of the mechanism by which the eye induced such flights, and she feared giving it power over her. Oscar already had enough of that.

She put her jacket back on and headed away from the tower. To judge by the absence of traffic on Hornsey Lane, the hill—which had been clogged with traffic—was still blocked, preventing drivers from making their way in this direction. The gulf usually filled with the din of vehicles was not empty, however. There were footsteps close behind her; and a voice.

"Who are you?"

She glanced around, not assuming the question was directed at her, but finding that she and the questioner—a woman in her sixties, shabbily dressed and sickly—were the only people in sight. Moreover, the woman's stare was fixed upon her with a near manic intensity. Again, the question, coming from a mouth that had about it a spittle-flecked asymmetry that suggested the speaker had suffered a stroke in the past.

"Who are you?"

Already irritated by her failure at the tower, Judith was in no mood to humor what was plainly the local schizophrenic and was turning on her heel to walk away when the woman spoke again. "Don't you know they'll hurt you?" "Who will?1'she said.

"The people in the tower. The Tabula Rasa. What were you looking for?" "Nothing."

"You were looking very hard for nothing."

"Are you spying for them?"

The woman made an ugly sound that Judith took to be a laugh. "They don't even know I'm alive," she said. Then, for the third time, "Who are you?" "My name's Judith."

"I'm Clara Leash," the woman said. She cast a glance back in the direction of the tower. "Walk on," she said. "There's a church halfway up the hill. I'll meet you there." "What is all this about?" "At the church, not here."

So saying, she turned her back on Judith and walked off, her agitation enough to dissuade Judith from following. Two words in their short exchange convinced her she should wait at the church and find out what Clara Leash had to say, however. Those words were Tabula Rasa. She hadn't heard them spoken since her conversation with Charlie at the estate, when he'd told her how he'd been passed over for membership in favor of Oscar. He'd made light of it at the time, and much of what he'd said had been blotted from her mind by the violence and the revelations that followed. Now she found herself digging for recollections of what he'd said about the organization. Something about the tainted soil of England, and her saying tainted by what?, and Charlie making some comical reply. Now she knew what that taint was: magic. In that bland tower the lives of the men and women whose bodies had been found in shallow graves or scraped from the rails of the Piccadilly Line had been judged and found corrupt. No wonder Oscar was losing weight and sobbing in his sleep. He was a member of a Society formed for the express purpose of eradicating a second, and diminishing, society, to which he also belonged. For all his self-possession he was the servant at two masters: magic and its despoiler. It fell to her to help him by whatever means she could. She was his lover, an without her aid he would eventually be crushed between contrary imperatives. And he in his turn was her ticket to Yzordderrex, without whom she would never see the glories of the Imajica. They needed each other, alive and sane.

She waited at the church for half an hour before Clara Leash appeared, looking fretful.

"Out here's no good," she said. "Inside."

They stepped into the gloomy building and sat close to the altar so as not to be overheard by the three noontime, supplicants who were at their prayers towards the back. It was not an ideal place in which to have a whispered conversation; their sibilance carried even if the sense did not, its echoes corning back to meet them off the bare walls. Nor was there much trust between them to begin with. To defend herself from Clara's glare, Judith spent the early part of their exchange with her back half turned to the woman,; only facing her fully when they'd disposed of the circumlfr-cutions and she felt confident enough to ask the question most on her mind.

"What do you know about the Tabula Rasa?"

"Everything there is to know," Clara replied. "I was a

member of the Society for many years."

"But they think you're dead?"

"They're not far wrong. I haven't got more than a few months left, which is why it's important I pass along what I know."

"To me?"

"That depends," she said. "First I want to know what you were doing at the tower." "I was looking for a way in." "Have you ever been inside?" "Yes and no."

"Meaning what?"

"My mind's been inside even though my body hasn't," Judith said, fully expecting a repeat of Clara's weird little laugh in response.

Instead, the woman said, "On the night of December the thirty-first."

"How the hell did you know that?"

Clara put her hand up to Judith's face. Her fingers were icy cold. "First, you should know how I departed the Tabula Rasa."

Though she told her story without embellishments, it took some time, given that so much of what she was explaining required footnotes for Judith to fully comprehend its significance. Clara, like Oscar, was the descendant of one of the Society's founding members and had been brought up to believe in its basic principles: England, tainted by magic—indeed, almost destroyed by it—had to be protected from any cult or individual who sought to educate new generations in its corrupt practices. When Judith asked how this near destruction had come about, Clara's answer was a story in itself. Two hundred years ago this coming midsummer, she explained, a ritual had been attempted that had gone tragically awry. Its purpose had been to reconcile the reality of earth with those of four other dimensions.

"The Dominions," Judith said, dropping her voice, which was already low, lower still.

"Say it out loud," Clara replied. "Dominions! Dominions!" She only raised her voice to speaking volume, but after such a time whispering it was shockingly loud. "It's been a secret for too long," she said. "And that gives the enemy power."

"Who is the enemy?"

"There are so many," she said. "In this Dominion, the Tabula Rasa and its servants. And it's got plenty of thos -believe me, in the very highest places."

"How?"

"It's not difficult, when your members are the descendants of kingmakers. And if influence fails, you can alwa buy your way past democracy. It's going on all the time."

"And in the other Dominions?"

"Getting information's more difficult, especially now, I knew two women who regularly passed between here an the Reconciled Dominions. One of them was found dead week ago, the other's disappeared. She may also have been murdered—"

"By the Tabula Rasa."

"You know a good deal, don't you? What's your source?"

Judith had known Clara would ask that question eventu-ally and had been trying to decide how she would answer it Her belief in Clara Leash's integrity grew apace, but wouldn't it be precipitous to share with a woman she'd taken for a bag lady only two hours before a secret that could be Oscar's death warrant if known to the Tabula Rasa?

"I can't tell you my source," she said. "This person's ia, great danger as it is."

"And you don't trust me." She raised her hand to ward

off any protest. "Don't sweet-talk me!" she said. "You

don't trust me, and why should I blame you? But let me ask

this: Is this source of yours a man?"

"Yes. Why?"

"You asked me before who the enemy was, and I said. the Tabula Rasa. But we've got a more obvious enemy: the opposite sex."

"What?"

"Men, Judith. The destroyers."

"Oh, now wait—"

"There used to be Goddesses throughout the Dominions, Powers that took our sex's part in the cosmic drama. They're all dead, Judith. They didn't just die of old age. They were systematically eradicated by the enemy."

"Ordinary men don't kill Goddesses."

"Ordinary men serve extraordinary men. Extraordinary men get their visions from the Gods. And Gods kill Goddesses."

"That's too simple. It sounds like a school lesson." "Learn it, then. And if you can, disprove it. I'd like that, truly I would. I'd like to discover that the Goddesses are all in hiding somewhere—"

"Like the woman under the tower?"

For the first time in this dialogue, Clara was lost for words. She simply stared, leaving Jude to fill the silence of her astonishment.

"When I said I've been into the tower in my mind, that isn't strictly true," Jude said. "I've only been under the tower. There's a cellar there, like a maze. It's full of books. And behind one of the walls there's a woman. I thought she was dead at first, but she isn't. She's maybe close to it, but she's holding on."

Clara was visibly shaken by this account. "I thought I was the only one who knew she was there," she said.

"More to the point, do you know who she is?"

"I've got a pretty good idea," Clara said, and picked up the story she'd been diverted from earlier: the tale of how she'd come to leave the Tabula Rasa.

The library beneath the tower, she explained, was the most comprehensive collection of manuscripts dealing with the occult sciences—but more particularly the legends and lore of the Imajica—in the world. It had been gathered by the men who'd founded the Society, led by Roxborough and Godolphin, to keep from the hands and minds of innocent Englishmen the stain of things Imajical; but rather than cataloguing the collection—making an index of these forbidden books—generations of the Tabula Rasa had simply left them to fester.

"I took it upon myself to sort through the collection. Believe it or not, I was once a very ordered woman, I got it from my father. He was in the military. At first I was watched by two other members of the Society. That's the law. No member of the Society is allowed into the library alone, and if any one judges either of the other two to be in any way unduly interested or influenced by the volum they can be tried by the Society and executed. I don't thin it's ever been done. Half the books are in Latin, and who reads Latin? The other half—you've seen for yourself they're rotting on their spines, like all of us. But I wanted order, the way Daddy would have liked it. Everything neat and tidy.

"My companions soon got tired of my obsession and left me to it. And in the middle of the night I felt something... or somebody... pulling at my thoughts, plucking them out of my scalp one by one, like hairs. Of course I thought it was the books, at first. I thought the words had got some power over me. I tried to leave, but you know I really didn't want to. I'd been Daddy's repressed little daughter for fifty years, and I was about ready to crack. Celestine knew it too—"

"Celestine is the woman in the wall?"

"I believe it's her, yes."

"But you don't know who she is?"

"I'm coming to that," Clara said. "Roxborough's house stood on the land where the tower now stands. The cellar is the cellar of that house. Celestine was—indeed, still is— Roxborough's prisoner. He walled her up because he didn't dare kill her. She'd seen the face of Hapexamendios, the God of Gods. She was insane, but she'd been touched" by divinity, and even Roxborough didn't dare lay a finger on her."

"How do you know all this?"

"Roxborough wrote a confession, a few days before he died. He knew the woman he'd walled up would outlive him by centuries, and I suppose he also knew that sooner or later somebody would find her. So the confession was also a warning to whatever poor, victimized man came along, telling him that she was not to be touched. Bury her again, he said, I remember that very clearly. Bury her again, in the deepest abyss your wits may devise—"

"Where did you find this confession?"

"In the wall, that night when I was alone. I believe Celestine led me to it, by plucking thoughts out of my head And putting new ones in. But she plucked too hard. My mind gave up. I had a stroke down there. I wasn't found for three days." "That's horrible—"

"My suffering's nothing compared to hers. Roxborough had found this woman in London, or his spies had, and he knew she was a creature of immense power. He probably realized it more clearly than she did, in fact, because he says in the confession she was a stranger to herself. But she'd seen sights no other human being had ever witnessed. She'd been snatched from the Fifth Dominion, escorted across the Imajica, and taken into the presence of Hapexa-mendios."

"Why?"

"It gets stranger. When he interrogated her, she told him she'd been brought back into the Fifth Dominion preg-nant."

"She was having God's child?"

"That's what she told Roxborough."

'She could have been inventing it all, just to keep him from hurting her."

"I don't think he'd have done that. In fact I think he was half in love with her. He said in the confession he felt like his friend Godolphin. I'm broken by a woman's eye, he wrote."

"That's an odd phrase," Jude thought, thinking of the stone as she did so: its stare, its authority.

"Well, Godolphin died obsessing on some mistress he'd loved and lost, claiming he'd been destroyed by her. The men were always the innocents, you see. Victims of female eonnivings. I daresay Roxborough'd persuaded himself that walling Celestine up was an act of love. Keeping her under his thumb forever."

"What happened to the child?" Judith said.

"Maybe she can tell us herself," Clara replied.

"Then we have to get her out."

"Indeed."

"Do you have any idea how?" "Not yet," Clara said. "Until you appeared I was ready to despair. But between the two of us we'll find some way to save her,"

It was getting late, and Jude was anxious that her absence not be noted, so the plans they laid were sketchy in the extreme. A further examination of the tower was clearly in order, this time—Clara proposed—under cover of darkness.

"Tonight," she suggested.

"No, that's too soon. Give me a day to make up some

excuse for being out for the night,"

"Who's the watchdog?" Clara said.

"Just a man."

"Suspicious?"

"Sometimes."

"Well, Celestine's waited a long time to be set free. She can wait another twenty-four hours. But please, no longer, I'm not a well woman."

Jude put her hand over Clara's hand, the first contact between them since the woman had touched her icy fingers to Jude's cheek. "You're not going to die," she said.

"Oh, yes, I am. It's no great hardship. But I want to see Celestine's face before I leave."

"We will," Judith said. "If not tomorrow night, soon after."

She didn't believe what Clara had said about men pertained to Oscar, He was no destroyer of Goddesses, either by hand or proxy. But Dowd was another matter entirely. Though his facade was civilized—almost prissy at times— she would never forget the casual way he'd disposed of the voiders' bodies, warming his hands at the pyre as though they were branches, not bones, that were cracking in the flames. And, as bad luck would have it, Dowd was back at the house when she returned, and Oscar was not, so it was his questions she was obliged to answer if she wasn't to arouse his suspicions with silence. When he asked her what she'd done with the day, she told him she'd gone out for a long walk along the Embankment. He then inquired as to whether the tube had been crowded, though she'd not told him she'd traveled that way. She said it was. You should take a cab next time, he said. Or, better still, allow me to (hive you. I'm certain Mr. Godolphin would prefer you to travel in comfort, he said. She thanked him for his kindness. Will you be planning other trips soon? he asked. She had her story for the following evening already prepared, but Dowd's manner never failed to throw her off balance, and she was certain any lie she told now would be instantly spotted, so she said she didn't know, and he let the subject drop.

Oscar didn't come home until the middle of the night, slipping into bed beside her as gently as his bulk allowed. She pretended to wake. He murmured a few words of apology for stirring her, and then some of love. Feigning a sleepy tone, she told him she was going to see her friend Clem tomorrow night, and did he mind? He told her she should do whatever she wanted, but keep her beautiful body for him. Then he kissed her shoulder and neck and fell asleep.

She had arranged to meet Clara at eight in the evening, outside the church, but she left for that rendezvous two hours before in order to go via her old flat. She didn't know what place in the scheme of things the carved blue eye had, but she'd decided the night before that it should be with her when they made their attempt to liberate Celestine...he flat felt cold and neglected, and she spent only a few minutes there, first retrieving the eye from her wardrobe, then quickly leafing through the mail—most of it junk— that had arrived since she'd last visited. These tasks completed, she set out for Highgate, taking Dowd's advice and hailing a taxi to do so. It delivered her to the church twenty-five minutes early, only to find that Clara was already there.

"Have you eaten, my girl?" Clara wanted to know.

Jude told her she had.

"Good," Clara said. "We'll need all our strength tonight."

"Before we go any further," Jude said, "I want to show

you something. I don't know what use it can be to us, but I

think you ought to see it." She brought the parcel of cloth

out of her bag. "Remember what you said about Celestine

plucking the thoughts out of your head?"

"Of course."

"This is what did the same to me."

She began to unwrap the eye, a subtle tremor in her fin-gers as she did so. Four months and more had passed since she'd hidden it away with such superstitious care but her , memory of its effect was undimmed, and she half expected it to exercise some power now. It did nothing, though; it lay in the folds of its covering, looking so unremarkable she was almost embarrassed to have made such a show of unveiling it. Clara, however, stared at it with a smile on her lips.

"Where did you get this?" she said.

"I'd rather not say."

"This is no time for secrets," Clara snapped. "How did -you come by it?"•

"I thought we'd agreed—" Clem said."I know It was given to my husband. My ex-husband."

"Who by?"

"His brother."

"And who's his brother?"

She took a deep breath, undecided even as she drew it , whether she'd expel it again as truth or fabrication.

''His name's Oscar Godolphin," she said.

At this reply Clara physically retreated from Judith, almost as though this name was proof of the plague.

"Do you know Oscar Godolphin?" she said, her tone appalled.

"Yes, I do."

"Is he the watchdog?" she said,

"Yes, he is."

"Cover it up," she said, shunning the eye now. "Cover it up and put it away." She turned her back on Judith, running her crabbed hands through her hair. "You and Godolphin?" she said, half to herself. "What does that mean?

What does that mean?"

"It doesn't mean anything," Jude said. "What I feel for him and what we're doing now are completely different issues."

"Don't be naive," Clara replied, glancing back at Jude. "Godolphin's a member of the Tabula Rasa, and a man. You and Celestine are both women, and his prisoners—"

"I'm not his prisoner," Jude said, infuriated by Clara's condescension. "I do what I want when I want."

"Until you defy history," Clara said. "Then you'll see how much he thinks he owns you." She approached Jude again, taking her voice down to a pained whisper. "Understand this," she said. "You can't save Celestine and keep his affections. You're going to be digging at the very foundations—literally, the foundations—of his family and his faith, and when he finds out—and he will, when the Tabula Rasa starts to crumble—whatever's between you will mean nothing. We're not another sex, Judith, we're another spe-ties. What's going on in our bodies and our heads isn't remotely like what's going on in theirs. Our hells are different. So are our heavens. We're enemies, and you can't be on both sides in a war."

"It isn't war," Jude said. "If it was war I'd be angry, and I've never been calmer."

"We'll see how calm you are, when you see how things really stand."

Jude took another deep breath. "Maybe we should stop arguing and do what we came to do," she said. Clara looked at her balefully. "I think stubborn bitch is the phrase you're looking for," Jude remarked.

"I never trust the passive ones," Clara said, betraying a trace of admiration. "I'll remember that."

The tower was in darkness, and the trees clogged the lamp-tight from the street, leaving the forecourt shadowy and the route down the flank of the building virtually lightless. Gara had obviously wandered here by night many times, however, because she went with confidence, leaving Jude : to trail, snared by the brambles and stung by the nettles it had been easy to avoid in the sunshine. By the time she reached the back of the tower, her eyes were better accustomed to the murk and found Clara standing twenty yards from the building, staring at the ground.

"What are you doing back here?" Jude said. "We know

there's only one way in."

"Barred and bolted," she said. "I'm thinking there may

be some other entrance to the cellar under the turf, even if

it's only a ventilation pipe. The first thing we should do is

locate Celestine's cell."

"How do we do that?"

"We use the eye that took you traveling," Clara said. "Come on, come on, give it over."

"I thought it was too tainted to be touched." "Not at all."

"The way you looked at it..."

"It's loot, my girl. That's what repulsed me. It's a piece of women's history traded between two men."

"I'm sure Oscar didn't know what it was," she said, thinking even as she defended him that this was probably untrue.

"It belongs to a great temple—"

"He certainly doesn't loot temples," Jude said, taking

the contentious item from her pocket.

"I'm not saying he does," Clara replied. "The temples

were brought down long before the line of the Godolphins

was even founded. Well, are you going to hand it over or ;

not?"

Jude unwrapped the eye, discovering in herself a reluctance to share it she hadn't anticipated. It was no longer as unremarkable as it had been. It gave off a subtle luminescence, blue and steady, by which she and Clara could see each other, albeit faintly.

Their gazes met, the eye's light gleaming between them like the glance of a third conspirator, a woman wiser than them both, whose presence—despite the dull murmur of traffic, and jets droning through the clouds above—exalted the moment. Jude found herself wondering how many women had gathered in the glow of this light or its like down the ages: gathered, to pray, or make sacrifice, or shelter from the destroyer. Countless numbers, no doubt, dead and forgotten but, in this brief time out of time, reclaimed from anonymity; not named, but at least acknowledged by these new acolytes. She looked away from Clara, towards the eye. The solid world around her suddenly seemed irrelevant—at best a game of veils, at worst a trap in which the spirit struggled and, struggling, gave credence to the lie. There was no need to be bound by its rules. She could fly beyond it with a thought. She looked up again to confirm that Clara was also ready to move, but her companion was glancing out of the circle, towards the corner of the tower.

"What is it?" Jude said, following the direction of Clara's gaze. Somebody was approaching them through the darkness, in the walk a nonchalance she could name in a syllable: "Dowd."

"You know him?" Clara said.

"A little," Dowd said, his voice as casual as his gait. "But really, there's so much she doesn't know."

Clara's hands dropped from Jude's, breaking the charm of three.

"Don't come any closer," Clara said.

Surprisingly, Dowd stopped dead in his tracks, a few yards from the women. There was sufficient light from the eye for Jude to pick out his face. Something, or things, seemed to be crawling around his mouth, as though he'd just eaten a handful of ants and a few had escaped from between his lips.

"I would so love to kill you both," he said, and with the words further mites escaped and ran over his cheeks and chin. "But your time will come, Judith. Very soon. For now, it's just Clara.... It is Clara, isn't it?"

"Go to hell, Dowd," Jude said.

"Step away from the old woman," Dowd replied.

Jude's response was to take hold of Clara's arm. "You're not going to hurt anybody, you little shit," she said.

There was a fury rising in her the like of which she'd not

felt in months. The eye was heavy in her hand; she was

ready to brain the bastard with it if he took a step towards

them.

"Did you not understand me, whore?" he said, moving ,

towards her as he did so. "I told you: Step away!"

In her rage she went to meet his approach, raising her weighted hand as she did so, but in the instant that she let go of Clara he sidestepped her, and she lost sight of him. Realizing that she'd done exactly as he'd planned, she reeled around, intending to take hold of Clara again. But he was there before her. She heard a shout of horror and saw Clara staggering away from her attacker. The mites were at her face already, blinding her. Jude ran to catch hold of her before she fell, but this time Dowd moved to-wards her, not away, and with a single blow struck the , stone from Jude's hand. She didn't turn to reclaim it but went to Clara's aid. The woman's moans were terrible; so were the tremors in her body.

"What have you done to her?" she yelled at Dowd. "Undone, lovely, undone. Let her be. You can't help her now."

Clara's body was light, but when her legs buckled she carried Jude down with her. Her moans had become howls now, as she reached up to her face as if to scratch out her eyes, for there the mites were at some agonizing work. In -desperation Jude tried to feel for the creatures in the darkness, but either they were too fast for her fingers or they'd gone where fingers couldn't follow. All she could do was beg for a reprieve.

"Make them stop," she said to Dowd. "Whatever you want, I'll do, butplease make them stop."

"They're voracious little sods, aren't they?" he said. He was crouching in front of the eye, the blue light illuminating his face, which wore a mask of chilling serenity. As she watched he picked mites from around his mouth and let them drop to the ground.

"I'm afraid they've got no ears, so I can't call them back," he said. "They only know how to unmake. And they'll unmake anything but their maker. In this case, that's me. So I'd leave her alone, if I were you. They're indiscriminate."

She turned her attention back to the woman in her arms. Clara had given up scratching at her eyes, and the tremors in her body were rapidly diminishing.

"Speak to me," Jude said. She reached for Clara's face, a little ashamed of how tentative Dowd's warning had made her.

There was no answer from the body, unless there were words in Clara's dying moans. Jude listened, hoping to find some vestigial sense there, but there was none. She felt a single spasm pass down Clara's spine, as though something in her head had snapped, and then the whole system stopped dead. From the moment when Dowd had first appeared, perhaps ninety seconds had passed. In that time every hope that had gathered here had been undone. She wondered if Celestine had heard this tragedy unfold, another's suffering adding to her own sum.

"Dead, then, lovey," Dowd said.

Jude let Clara's body slip from her arms into the grass.

"We should be going," he went on, his tone so bland they might have been forsaking a picnic instead of a corpse. "Don't worry about Clara. I'll fetch what's left of her later."

She heard the sound of his feet behind her and stood up, rather than be touched by him. Overhead, another jet was roaring in the clouds. She looked towards the eye, but it too had been unmade.

"Destroyer," she said.