Imajica 01 - The Fifth Dominion

33

GENTLE DID AS HE'D PROMISED PIE, and stayed with Huzzah at the cafe where they'd breakfasted until the comet's arc took it behind the mountain and the light of day gave way to twilight. Doing so tried not only his patience but his nerve, because as the afternoon wore on the unrest from the lower Kesparates spread up through the streets, and it became increasingly apparent that the establishment would stand in the middle of a battlefield by evening. Party by party, the customers vacated their tables as the sound of rioting and gunfire crept closer. A slow rain of smuts began to fall, spiraling from a sky which was intermittently darkened now by smoke rising from the burning Kesparates.

As the first wounded began to be carried up the street, indicating that the field of action was now very near, the owners of several nearby shops gathered in the cafe for a short council, debating, presumably, the best way to defend their property. It ended in accusation, the insults an education to both Gentle and Huzzah. Two of the owners returned with weapons a few minutes later, at which point the manager, who introduced himself as Bunyan Blew, asked Gentle if he and his daughter didn't have a home to go to. Gentle replied that they had promised to meet somebody here earlier in the day, and they would be most obliged if they could remain until their friend arrived.

"I remember you," Blew replied. "You came in this morning, didn't you, with a woman?" "That's who we're waiting for." "She put me in mind of somebody I used to know," Blew said. "I hope she's safe out there." "So do we," Gentle replied.

"You'd better stay then. But you'll have to lend me a hand barricading the place."

Bunyan explained that he'd known this was going to happen sooner or later and was prepared for the eventuality. There were timbers to nail over the windows, and a supply of small arms should the mob try to loot his shelves.

In fact, his precautions proved unnecessary. The street became a conduit for ferrying the wounded army from the combat zone, which was moving up the hill one street east of the cafe. There were two nerve-racking hours, however, when the din of shouting and gunfire was coming from all compass points, and the bottles on Slew's shelves tinkled every time the ground shook, which was often. One of the shopkeepers who'd left in high dudgeon earlier came beating at the door during this siege, and stumbled over the threshold with blood streaming from his head and tales of destruction from his mouth. The army had called up heavy artillery in the last hour, he reported, and it had practically leveled the harbor and rendered the causeway impassable, thereby effectively sealing the city. This was all part of the Autarch's plan, he said. Why else were whole neighborhoods being allowed to burn unchecked? The Autarch was leaving the city to consume its own citizens, knowing the conflagration would not be able to break the palace walls.

"He's going to let the mob destroy the city," the man went on, "and he doesn't care what happens to us in the meantime. Selfish bastard! We're all going to burn, and he's not going to lift a finger to help us!"

This scenario certainly fitted the facts. When, at Gentle's suggestion, they went up onto the roof to get a better view of the situation, it seemed to be exactly as described. The ocean was obliterated by a wall of smoke climbing from the embers of the harbor; further flame-shot columns rose from two dozen neighborhoods, near and far; and through the dirty heat coming off the Oke T'Noon's pyre the causeway was just visible, its rubble damming the delta. Clogged by smoke, the comet shed a diminished light on the city, and even that was fading as the long twilight deepened.

"It's time to leave," Gentle told Huzzah.

"Where are we going to go?"

"Back to find Pie 'oh' pah," he replied. "While we still can."

It had been apparent from the roof that there was no safe route back to the mystifs Kesparate. The various factions warring in the streets were moving unpredictably. A street that was empty one moment might be thronged the next, and rubble the moment after that. They would have to go on instinct and a prayer, taking as direct a path back to where they'd left Pie 'oh' pah as circumstance allowed. Dusk in this Dominion usually lasted the length of an English midwinter day—five or six hours—the tail of the comet keeping traces of light in the sky long after its fiery head had dropped beneath the horizon. But the smoke thickened as Gentle and Huzzah traveled, eclipsing the languid light and plunging the city into a filthy gloom. There were still the fires to compensate, of course, but between the conflagration, in streets where the lamps hadn't been lit and the citizens had shuttered their windows and blocked their keyholes to keep any sign of occupation from showing, the darkness was almost impenetrable. In such thoroughfares Gentle hoisted Huzzah onto his shoulders, from which vantage point she was able to snatch sights to steer him by.

It was slow going, however, halting at each intersection to calculate the least dangerous route to follow, and taking refuge at the approach of both governmental and revolutionary troops. But for every soldier in this war there were half a dozen bystanders, people daring the tide of battle like beachcombers, retreating before each wave, only to return to their watching places when it receded: a sometimes lethal game. A similar dance was demanded of Gentle and Huzzah. Driven off course again and again, they were obliged to trust to instinct as to their direction, and inevitably instinct finally deserted them.

In an uncommon hush between clamors and bombardments, Gentle said, "Angel? I don't know where we are any more."

A comprehensive fusillade had brought down most of the Kesparate around them, and there were precious few places of refuge amid the rubble, but Huzzah insisted they find one: a call of nature that could be delayed no longer.

Gentle set her down, and she headed off for the dubious cover of a semidemolished house some yards up the street. He stood guard at the door, calling inside to her and telling her not to venture too far. He'd no sooner offered this warning than the appearance of a small band of armed men drove him back into the shadows of the doorway. But for their weapons, which had presumably been plucked from dead men, they looked ill suited to the role of revolutionaries. The eldest, a barrel of a man in late middle age, still wore the hat and tie he'd most likely gone to work in that morning, while two of his accomplices were barely older than Huzzah. Of the two remaining members, one was an Oethac woman, the other of the tribe to which the executioner in Vanaeph had belonged: a Nullianac, its head like hands joined in prayer.

Gentle glanced back into the darkness, hoping to hush Huzzah before she emerged, but there was no sign of her. He left the step and headed into the ruins. The floor was sticky underfoot, though he couldn't see with what. He did see Huzzah, however, or her silhouette, as she rose from relieving herself. She saw him too and made a little noise of protest, which he hushed as loudly as he dared. A fresh bombardment close by brought shock waves and bursts of light, by which he glimpsed their refuge: a domestic interior, with a table set for the evening meal, and its cook dead beneath it, her blood the stickiness under his heel.

Beckoning Huzzah to him and holding her tight, he ventured back towards the door as a second bombardment began. It drove the looters to the step for cover, and the Oethac caught sight of Gentle before he could retreat into shadow. She let out a shout, and one of the youths fired into the darkness where Gentle and Huzzah had stood, the bullets spattering plaster and wood splinters in all directions. Backing away from the door through which their attackers were bound to come, Gentle ushered Huzzah into the darkest corner and drew a breath. He barely had time to do so before the trigger-happy youth was at the doorway, firing indiscriminately. Gentle unleashed a pneuma from the darkness, and it flew towards the door. He'd underestimated his strength. The gunman was obliterated in an instant, but the pneuma took the door frame and much of the wall to either side of it at the same time.

Before the dust could clear and the survivors come after them, he went to find Huzzah, but the wall against which she'd been crouching was cracked and curling like a stone wave. He yelled her name as it broke. Her shriek answered him, off to his left. The Nullianac had snatched her up, and for a terrifying instant Gentle thought it intended to annihilate her, but instead it drew her to it like a doll and disappeared into the dust clouds.

He started in pursuit without a backward glance, an error that brought him to his knees before he'd covered two yards of ground, as the Oethac woman delivered a stabbing blow to the small of his back. The wound wasn't deep, but the shock drove his breath from him as he fell, and her second blow would have taken out the back of his skull had he not rolled out of its way. The small pick she was wielding, wet with his blood, buried itself in the ground, and before she could pull it free he hauled himself to his feet and started after Huzzah and her abductor. The second youth was moving after the Nullianac, squealing with drugged or drunken glee, and Gentle followed the sound when he lost the sight, the chase taking him out of the wasteland and into a Kesparate that had been left relatively untouched by the conflict.

There was good reason. The trade here was in sexual favors, and business was booming. Though the streets were narrower than in any other district Gentle had passed through, there was plenty of light spilling from the doorways and windows, the lamps and candles arranged to best illuminate the wares lolling on step and sill. Even a passing glance confirmed that there were anatomies and gratifications on offer here that beggared the most dissolute backwaters of Bangkok or Tangiers. Nor was there any paucity of customers. The imminence of death seemed to have whipped up the consensual libido. Even if the flesh pushers and pill pimps who offered their highs as Gentle passed never made it to morning, they'd die rich. Needless to say, the sight of a Nullianac carrying a protesting child barely warranted a look in a street sacred to depravity, and Gentle's calls for the abductor to be stopped went ignored.

The crowd thickened the farther down the street he ventured, and he finally lost both sight and sound of those he was pursuing. There were alleyways off the main thoroughfare (its name—Lickerish Street—daubed on one of the bordello walls), and the darkness of any of them might be concealing the Nullianac. He started to yell Huzzah's name, but in the come-ons and hagglings two shouted syllables were drowned out. He was about to run on when he glimpsed a man backing out of one of the alleyways with distress on his face. He pushed his way through to the man and took hold of his arm, but he shrugged it off and fled before Gentle could ask what he'd seen. Rather than call Huzzah's name again, Gentle saved his breath and headed down the alley.

There was a fire of mattresses burning twenty yards down it, tended by a masked woman. Insects had nested in the ticking and were being driven out by the flames, some attempting to fly on burning wings, only to be swatted by the fire maker. Ducking her wild swings, Gentle asked after the Nullianac, and the woman directed him on down the alley with a nod. The ground was seething with refugees from the mattresses, and he broke a hundred shells with every step until he was well clear of the fumigator's fire. Lickerish Street was now too far behind him to shed any light on the scene, but the bombardment which the crowd behind him had been so indifferent to still continued all around, and explosions farther up the city's slopes briefly but garishly lit the alleyway. It was narrow and filthy, the buildings blinded by brick or boarded up, the road between scarcely more than a gutter, choked with trash and decaying vegetable matter. Its stench was sickening, but he breathed it deeply, hoping the pneuma born of and on that foetid air would be all the more potent for its foulness. The theft of Huzzah had already earned her abductors their deaths, but if they had done the least hurt to her he swore to himself he'd return that hurt a hundredfold before he executed them.

The alleyway twisted and turned, narrowing to a man's width in some places, but the sense that he was closing on them was confirmed when he heard the youth whooping a little way ahead. He slowed his pace a little, advancing through shin-deep refuse, until he came in sight of a light. The alleyway ended a few yards from where he stood, and there, squatting with its back to the wall, was the Nullianac. The light source was neither lamp nor fire but the creature's head, between the sides of which arcs of energy passed back and forth.

By their flickers, Gentle saw his angel, lying on the ground in front of her captor. She was quite still, her body limp, her eyes closed, for which fact Gentle was grateful, given the Nullianac's present labors. It had stripped the lower half of her body, and its long, pale hands were busy upon her. The whooper was standing a little way off from the scene. He was unzipped, his gun in one hand, his half-hard member in the other. Every now and then he aimed the gun at the child's head, and another whoop came from

his lips.

Nothing would have given Gentle more satisfaction at that moment than unleashing a pneuma against them both from where he stood, but he still wielded the power ineptly and feared that he'd do Huzzah some accidental harm, so he crept a little closer, another explosion on the hill throwing its brutal light down on the scene. By it he caught a glimpse of the Nullianac's work, and then, more stomach-turning still, heard Huzzah gasp. The light withered as she did so, leaving the Nullianac's head to shed its flickering gleam on her pain. The whooper was silent now, his eyes fixed on the violation. Looking up, the Nullianac uttered a few syllables shaped out of the chamber between its skulls, and reluctantly the youth obeyed its order, retreating from the scene a little way. Some crisis was near. The arcs in the Nullianac's head were flaring with fresh urgency, its fingers working as if to expose Huzzah to their discharge. Gentle drew breath, realizing he would have to risk hurting Huzzah if he was to prevent the certainty of worse harm. The whooper heard his intake and turned to peer into the darkness. As he did so another lethal brightness dropped around them from on high. By it, Gentle stood revealed.

The youth fired on the instant, but either his ineptitude or his arousal spoiled his aim. The shots went wide. Gentle didn't give him a second chance. Reserving his pneuma for the Nullianac, he threw himself at the youth, striking the weapon from his hand and kicking the legs from under him. The whooper went down within inches of his gun, but before he could reclaim it Gentle drove his foot down on the outstretched fingers, bringing a very different kind of whoop from the kid's throat.

Now he turned back on the Nullianac, in time to see it raising its fireful head, the arcs cracking like slapsticks. Gentle's fist went to his mouth, and he was discharging the pneuma when the whooper seized hold of his leg. The death warrant went from Gentle's hand, but it struck the Nullianac's flank rather than its head, wounding but not dispatching it. The kid hauled on Gentle's leg again, and this time he toppled, falling into the muck where he'd put the whooper seconds before, his punctured back striking the ground hard. The pain blinded him, and when sight returned the youth was up, and rummaging among the arsenal at his belt. Gentle glanced towards the Nullianac. It had dropped against the wall, its head thrown back and spitting darts of fire. Their light was little, but enough for Gentle to catch the gleam of the dropped gun at his side. He reached for it as the delinquent's hand fumbled with another weapon, and he had it leveled before the youth could get his cracked finger on the trigger. He pointed not at the youth's head or heart, but at his groin. A littler target, but one which made the kid drop his gun instantly.

"Don't do that, sirrah!" he said.

"The belt," Gentle said, getting to his feet as the youth unbuckled and unburdened himself of his filched arsenal.

By another blaze from above he saw the boy now full of tics and jitters, pitiful and powerless. There would be no honor in shooting him down, whatever crimes he'd been responsible for.

"Go home," he said. "If I see your face ever again—" "You won't, sirrah!" the boy said. "I swear! I swear you

won't!"

He didn't give Gentle time to change his mind, but fled as the light that had revealed his frailty faded. Gentle turned the gun and his gaze upon the Nullianac. It had raised itself from the ground and slid up the wall into a standing position, its fingers, their tips red with its deed, pressed to the place where the pneuma had struck it. Gentle hoped it was suffering, but he had no way of knowing until it spoke. When it did, when the words came from its wretched head, they were faltering and barely comprehensible.

"Which is it to be," it said, "you or her? I will kill one of

you before I pass. Which is it to be?"

"I'll kill you first," Gentle said, the gun pointed at the

Nullianac's head.

"You could," it said. "I know. You murdered a brother

of mine outside Patashoqua."

"Your brother, huh?"

"We're rare, and know each other's lives," it said.

"So don't get any rarer," Gentle advised, taking a step towards Huzzah as he spoke, but keeping his eyes fixed on

her violator.

"She's alive," it said. "I wouldn't kill a thing so young.

Not quickly. Young deserves slow."

Gentle risked a glance away from the creature. Huzzah's eyes were indeed wide open and fixed upon him in her terror.

"It's all right, angel," he said, "nothing's going to happen to you. Can you move?"

He glanced back at the Nullianac as he spoke, wishing he had some way of interpreting the motions of its little fires. Was it more grievously wounded than he'd thought, and preserving its energies for healing? Or was it biding its time, waiting for its moment to strike?

Huzzah was pulling herself up into a sitting position, the motion bringing little whimpers of pain from her. Gentle longed to cradle and soothe her, but all he'd dared do was drop to his haunches, his eyes fixed on her violator, and reach for the clothes she'd had torn from her,

"Can you walk, angel?"

"I don't know," she sobbed.

"Please try. I'll help you."

He put his hand out to do so but she avoided him, saying no through her tears and pulling herself to her feet.

"That's good, sweetheart," he said. There was a reawakening in the Nullianac's head, the arcs dancing again. "I want you to start walking, angel," Gentle said. "Don't worry about me, I'm coming with you."

She did as he instructed, slowly, the sobs still coming. The Nullianac started to speak again as she went.

"Ah, to see her like that. It makes me ache." The arcs had begun their din again, like distant firecrackers. "What would you do to save her little soul?" it said.

"Just about anything," Gentle replied.

"You deceive yourself," it said. "When you killed my brother, we inquired after you, my kin and I. We know how foul a savior you are. What's my crime beside yours? A small thing, done because my appetite demands it. But you—you—you've laid waste the hopes of generations. You've destroyed the fruit of great men's trees. And still you claim you would give yourself to save her little soul?"

This eloquence startled Gentle, but its essence startled him more. Where had the creature plucked these conceits from, that it could so easily spill them now? They were inventions, of course, but they confounded him nevertheless, and his thoughts strayed from his present jeopardy for a vital moment. The creature saw him drop his guard and acted on the instant. Though it was no more than two yards from him, he heard the sliver of silence between the light and its report, a void confirming how foul a savior he was. Death was on its way towards the child before his warning cry was even in his throat.

He turned to see his angel standing in the alleyway some distance from him. She had either turned in anticipation, orhad been listening to the Nullianac's speech, because she stood full face to the blow coming at her. Still, time ran slow, and Gentle had several aching moments in which to see how her eyes were fixed upon him, her tears all dried, her gaze unblinking. Time too for that warning shout, in acknowledgment of which she closed her eyes, her face becoming a blank upon which he could inscribe any accusation his guilt wished to contrive.

Then the Nullianac's blow was upon her. The force struck her body at speed, but it didn't break her flesh, and for an instant he dared hope she had found some defense against it. But its hurt was more insidious than a bullet or a blow, its light spreading from the point of impact up to her face, where it entered by every means it could, and down to where its dispatcher's fingers had already pried.

He let out another shout, this time of revulsion, and turned back on the Nullianac, raising the gun its words had made him so forgetful of and firing at its heart. It fell back against the wall, its arms slack at its side, the space between its skulls still issuing its lethal light. Then he looked back at Huzzah, to see that it had eaten her away from the inside, and that she was flowing back along the line of her destroyer's gaze, into the chamber from which the stroke had been delivered. Even as he watched, her face collapsed, and her limbs, never substantial, decayed and went the same way. Before she was entirely consumed, however, the harm Gentle's bullet had done the Nullianac took its toll. The stream of power fractured and failed. When it did, darkness descended, and for a time Gentle couldn't even see the creature's body. Then the bombardment on the hill began afresh, its blaze brief but bright enough to show him the Nullianac's corpse, lying in the dirt where it had squatted.

He watched it, expecting some final act of retaliation, but none came. The light died, and left Gentle to retreat along the alleyway, weighed down not only by his failure to save Huzzah's life, but by his lack of comprehension of what had just happened. In plain terms, a child in his care had been slaughtered by her molester, and he'd failed to prevent that slaughter. But he'd been wandering in the Dominions too long to be content with simple assessments. There was more here than stymied lust and sudden death, Words had been uttered more appropriate to pulpit than gutter. Hadn't he himself called Huzzah his angel? Hadn't he seen her grow seraphic at the end, knowing she was about to die and accepting that fate? And hadn't he in his turn been dubbed a deficient savior—and proved that ac- cusation true by failing to deliver her? These were high- flown words, but he badly needed to believe them apt, not so that he could indulge messianic fantasies, but so that the grief welling in him might be softened by the hope that there was a higher purpose here, which in the fullness of time he'd come to know and understand.

A burst of fire threw light down the alleyway, and Gentle's shadow fell across something twitching in the filth. It took him a moment to comprehend what he was seeing, but when he did he loosed a shout. Huzzah had not quite gone. Small scraps of her skin and sinew, dropped when the Nullianac's claim upon her was cut short, moved here in the rot. None were recognizable; indeed, had they not been moving in the folds of her bloodied clothes he'd not even have known them as her flesh. He reached down to touch them, tears stinging his eyes, but before his fingers could make contact, what little life the scraps had owned went out.

He rose raging; rose in horror at the filth beneath his feet, and the dead, empty houses that channeled it, and in disgust at himself, for surviving when his angel had not. Turning his gaze on the nearest wall, he drew breath and put not one hand but two against his lips, intending to do what little he could to bury these remains.

But rage and revulsion were fueling his pneuma, and when it went from him it brought down not one wall but several, passing through the teetering houses like a bullet through a pack of cards. Shards of pulverized stone flew as the houses toppled, the collapse of one initiating the fall of the next, the dust cloud growing in scale as each house added to its sum.

He started up the alleyway in pursuit of the pneuma, fearing that his disgust had given it more purpose than he'd intended. It was heading towards Lickerish Street, where the crowds were still milling, oblivious to its approach. They were not wandering that street innocent of its corruption, of course, but neither did their presence there deserve death. He wished he could draw the breath as he exhaled it, call the pneuma back into himself. But it had its head, and all he could do was run after it as it brought down house after house, hoping it would spend its power before it reached the crowd.

He could see the lights of Lickerish Street through the hail of demolition. He picked up his pace, to try and outrun the pneuma, and was a little ahead of it when he set eyes on the throng itself, thicker than ever. Some had interrupted their window-shopping to watch the spectacle of destruction. He saw their gawking faces, their little smiles, their shaking heads: saw they didn't comprehend for an instant what was coming their way. Knowing any attempt to warn them verbally would be lost in the furor, he raced to the end of the alleyway and flung himself into their midst, intending to scatter them, but his antics only drew a larger audience, who were in turn intrigued by the alleyway's capitulation. One or two had grasped their jeopardy now, their expressions of curiosity become looks of fear; finally, too late, their unease spread to the rest, and a general retreat began.

The pneuma was too quick, however. It broke through the last of the walls in a devastating shower of rock shards and splinters, striking the crowd at its densest place. Had Hapexamendios, in a fit of cleansing ire, delivered a judgment on Lickerish Street He could scarcely have scoured it better. What had seconds before been a crowd of puzzled sightseers was blood and bone in a heartbeat.

Though he stood in the midst of this devastation, Gentle remained unharmed. He was able to watch his terrible weapon at work, its power apparently undecayed despite the fact that it had demolished a string of houses. Nor, having cut a swath through the crowd, was it following the trajectory set at his lips. It had found flesh and clearly intended to busy itself in the midst of living stuff until there was none left to undo.

He was appalled at the prospect. This hadn't been his intention, or anything like it. There seemed to be only one option available to him, and that he instantly took: he stood in the pneuma's path. He'd used the power in his lungs many times now—first against the Nullianac's brother in Vanaeph, then twice in the mountains, and finally on the island, when they were making their escape from Vigor N'ashap's asylum—but in all that time he'd only had the vaguest impression of its appearance. Was it like a fire-breather's belch, or like a bullet made of will and air, nearly invisible until it did its deed?

Perhaps it had been the latter once, but now, as he set himself in its path, he saw that it had gathered dust and blood along its route, and from those- essential elements it had made itself a likeness of its maker. It was his face that was coming at him, albeit roughly sculpted: his brow, his eyes, his open mouth, expelling the very breath it had begun with. It didn't slow as it approached its maker, but struck Gentle's chest the way it had struck so many before him. He felt the blow but was not felled by it. Instead the power, knowing its source, discharged itself through his system, running to his fingertips and coursing across his scalp. Its shock was come and gone in a moment, and he was left standing in the middle of the devastation with his arms spread wide and the dust falling around him.

Silence followed. Distantly, he could hear the wounded sobbing, and half-demolished walls going to rubble, but he was encircled by a hush that was almost reverential. Somebody dropped to his knees nearby, to tend, he thought, to one of the wounded. Then he heard the hallelujahs the man was uttering and saw his hands reaching up towards him. Another of the crowd followed suit, and then another, as though this scene of their deliverance was a sign they'd been waiting for and a long-suppressed flood of devotion was breaking from each of their hearts.

Sickened, Gentle turned his gaze away from their grateful faces, up the dusty length of Lickerish Street. He had only one ambition now: to find Pie and take comfort from this insanity in the mystif s arms. He broke from his ring of devotees and started up the street, ignoring their clinging hands and cries of adoration. He wanted to berate them for their naivete, but what good would that do? Any pronouncement he made now, however self-deprecatory, would probably be taken as the jotting for some gospel. Instead he kept his silence and picked his way over the stones and corpses, his head down, The hosannas followed him, but he didn't once acknowledge them, knowing even as he went that his reluctance might seem like divine humility, but unable to escape the trap circumstance had set.

The wasteland at the head of the street was as daunting as ever, but he started across it not caring what fires might come. Its terrors were nothing beside the memory of Huz-zah's scrap, twitching in the muck, or the hallelujahs he could still hear behind him, raised in ignorance of the fact that he—the savior of Lickerish Street—was also its destroyer, but no less tempting for that.