29
The territory that lay between the shores of the Cradle and the limits of the Third Dominion had been, until the Autarch's intervention, the site of a natural wonder universally held to mark the center of the Imajica: a column of perfectly hewn and polished rock to which as many names and powers had been ascribed as there were shamans, poets, and storytellers to be moved by it. There was no community within the Reconciled Dominions that had not enshrined it in their mythology and found an epithet to mark it as their own. But its truest name was also perhaps its plainest: the Pivot. Controversy had raged for centuries about whether the Unbeheld had set it down in the smoky wastes of the Kwem to mark the midpoint between the perimeters of the Imajica, or whether a forest of such columns had once stood in the area, and some later hand (moved, perhaps, by Hapexamendios' wisdom) had leveled all but this one.
Whatever the arguments about its origins, however, nobody had ever contested the power that it had accrued standing at the center of the Dominions. Lines of thought had passed across the Kwem for centuries, carrying a freight of force which the Pivot had drawn to itself with a magnetism that was virtually irresistible. By the time the Autarch came into the Third Dominion, having already established his particular brand of dictatorship in Yzordderrex, the Pivot was the single most powerful object in the Imajica. He laid his plans for it brilliantly, returning to the palace he was still building in Yzordderrex and adding several features, though their purpose did not become apparent until almost two years later, when, acting with the kind of speed that usually attends a coup, he had the Pivot toppled, transported, and set in a tower in his palace before the blood of those who might have raised objections to this sacrilege was dry.
Overnight, the geography of the Imajica was transformed. Yzordderrex became the heart of the Dominions. Thereafter, there would be no power, either secular or sacred, that did not originate in that city; there would be no crossroads sign in any of the Reconciled Dominions that did not carry its name, nor any highway that did not have upon it somewhere a petitioner or penitent who'd turned his eyes towards Yzordderrex in hope of salvation. Prayers were still uttered in the name of the Unbeheld, and blessings murmured in the forbidden names of the Goddesses, but Yzordderrex was the true Lord now, the Autarch its mind and the Pivot its phallus.
One hundred and seventy-nine years had passed since the day the Kwem had lost its great wonder, but the Autarch still made pilgrimages into the wastes when he felt the need for solitude. Some years after the removal of the Pivot he'd had a small palace built close to the place where it had stood, spartan by comparison with the architectural excesses of the folly that crowned Yzordderrex. This was his retreat in confounding times, where he could meditate upon the sorrows of absolute power, leaving his Military High Command, the generals who ruled the Dominions on his behalf, to do so under the eye of his once-beloved Queen, Quaisoir. Lately she had developed a taste for repression that was waning in him, and he'd several times thought of retiring to the palace in the Kwem permanently and leaving her to rule in his stead, given that she took so much more pleasure from it than he. But such dreams were an indulgence, and he knew it. Though he ruled the Imajica invisibly—not one soul, outside the circle of twenty or so who dealt with him daily, would have known him from any other white man with good taste in clothes—his vision had shaped the rise of Yzordderrex, and no other would ever competently replace it.
On days like this, however, with the coid air off the Lenten Way whining in the spires of the Kwem Palace, he wished he could send the mirror he met in the morning back.to Yzordderrex in his place and let his reflection rule. Then he could stay here and think about the distant past: England in midsummer. The streets of London bright with rain when he woke, the fields outside the city peaceful and buzzing with bees. Scenes he pictured longingly when he was in elegiac mood. Such moods seldom lasted long, however. He was too much of a realist, and he demanded truth from his memory. Yes, there had been rain, but it had come with such venom it had bruised every fruit it hadn't beaten from the bough. And the hush of those fields had been a battlefield's hush, the murmur not trees but flies, come to find laying places.
His life had begun that summer, and his early days had been filled with signs not of love and fruitfulness but of Apocalypse. There wasn't a preacher in the park who didn't have Revelation by heart that year, nor a whore in Drury Lane who wouldn't have told you she'd seen the Devil dancing on the midnight roofs. How could those days not have influenced him: filled him with a horror of imminent destruction, given him an appetite for order, for law, for Empire? He was a child of his times, and if they'd made him cruel in his pursuit of system, was that his fault or that of the age?
The tragedy lay not in the suffering that was an inevitable consequence of any social movement, but in the fact that his achievements were now in jeopardy from forces that—if they won the day—would return the Imajica to the chaos from which he had brought it, undoing his work in a fraction of the time it had taken for it to be achieved. If he was to suppress these subversive elements he had a limited number of options, and after the events in Patashoqua, and the uncovering of plots against him, he had retreated to the quiet of the Kwem Palace to decide between them. He could continue to treat the rebellions, strikes, and uprisings as minor irritations, limiting his reprisals to small but eloquent acts of suppression, such as the burning of the village of Beatrix and the trials and executions at Vanaeph. This route had two significant disadvantages. The most recent attempt upon his life, though still inept, was too close for comfort, and until every last radical and revolutionary had been silenced or dissuaded, he would be in danger. Furthermore, when his whole reign had been dotted with episodes that had required some measured brutalities, would this new spate of purges and suppressions make any significant mark? Perhaps it was time for a more ambitious vision: cities put under martial law, tetrarchs imprisoned so that their corruptions could be exposed in the name of a just Yzordderrex, governments toppled, and resistance met with the full might of the Second Dominion's armies. Maybe Patashoqua would have to burn the way Beatrix had. Or L'Himby and its wretched temples.
If such a route were followed successfully, the slate would be wiped clean. If not—if his advisers had underestimated the scale of unrest or the quality of leaders among the rabble—he might find the circle closing and the Apocalypse into which he'd been bora that faraway summer coming around again, here in the heart of his promised land.
What then, if Yzordderrex burned instead of Patashoqua? Where would he go for comfort? Back to England, perhaps? Did the house in Clerkenwell still stand, he wondered, and if so were its rooms still sacred to the workings of desire, or had the Maestro's undoing scoured them to the last board and nail? The questions tantalized him. As he sat and pondered them he found a curiosity in his core— no, more than curiosity, an appetite—to discover what the Unreconciled Dominion was like almost two centuries after his creation.
His musings were interrupted by Rosengarten, a name he'd bequeathed to the man in the spirit of irony, for a more infertile thing never walked. Piebald from a disease caught in the swamps of Loquiot in the throes of which he had unmanned himself, Rosengarten lived for duty. Among the generals, he was the only one who didn't sin with some excess against the austerity of these rooms. He spoke and moved quietly; he didn't stink of perfumes; he never drank; he never ate kreauchee. He was a perfect emptiness, and the only man the Autarch completely trusted.