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As he began the trek back to the house he remembered that Jude had asked him to pick up milk and cigarettes on his journey, and that he was returning empty-handed. He turned and went in search of both, which took him longer than he expected. When he finally rounded the corner, goods in hand, there was an ambulance outside the house. The front door was open. Jude stood on the step, watching the drizzle. She had tears on her face.
"He's dead," she said.
He stood rooted to the spot a yard from her. "When?" he said, as if it mattered.
"Just after you left."
He didn't want to weep, not with her watching. There was too much else he didn't want to stumble over in her presence. Stony, he said, "Where's Clem?"
"With him upstairs. Don't go up. There's already too many people." She spied the cigarettes in his hand and reached for them. As her hand grazed his, their grief ran between them. Despite his intent, tears sprang to his eyes, and he went into her embrace, both of them sobbing freely, like enemies joined by a common loss or lovers about to be parted. Or else souls who could not remember whether they were lovers or enemies and were weeping at their own confusion.
16
Since the meeting at which the subject of the Tabula Rasa's library had first been raised, Bloxham had several times pla
"We may as well enjoy ourselves," he said, as they headed down through the remains of Roxborough's original house, a floor of which had been preserved and concealed within the plainer walls of the tower.
Neither of them had ventured into this underworld for many years. It was more primitive than either of them remembered. Electric Hght had been crudely installed—cables from which bare bulbs hung looped along the passages—but otherwise the place was just as it had been in the first years of the Tabula Rasa. The cellars had been built for the express purpose of housing the Society's collection; thus for the mille
"Shall we break open the bottle before we start?" Bloxham suggested.
"Why not? What are we drinking from?"
His reply was to bring two fluted glasses from his pocket. She claimed them from him while he opened the bottle, its cork coming with no more than a decorous sigh, the sound of which carried away through the labyrinth and failed to return. Glasses filled, they drank to the Purge.
"Now we're here," Charlotte said, pulling her furs up around her, "what are we looking for?"
"Any sign of tampering or theft," Bloxham said. "Shall we split up or go together?"
"Oh, together," she replied.
It had been Roxborough's claim that these shelves carried every single volume of any significance in the hemisphere, and as they wandered together, surveying the tens of thousands of manuscripts and books, it was easy to believe the boast.
"How in hell's name do you suppose they gathered all this stuff up?" Charlotte wondered as they walked.
"I daresay the world was smaller then," Bloxham remarked. "They all knew each other, didn't they? Casanova, Sartori, the Comte de Saint-Germain. All fakes and buggers together."
"Fakes? Do you really think so?"
"Most of them," Bloxham said, wallowing in the ill-deserved role of expert. "There may have been one or two, I suppose, who knew what they were doing."
"Have you ever been tempted?" Charlotte asked him, slipping her arm through the crook of his as they went.
"To do what?"
"To see if any of it's worth a damn. To try raising a familiar or crossing into the Dominions."
He looked at her with genuine astonishment. "That's against every precept of the Society," he said.
"That's not what I asked" she replied, almost curtly. "I said, Have you ever been tempted?"
"My father taught me that any dealings with the Imajica would put my soul in jeopardy."
"Mine said the same. But I think he regretted not finding out for himself at the end. I mean, if there's no truth in it, then there's no harm."
"Oh, I believe there's truth in it," Bloxham said.
"You believe there are other Dominions?"
"You saw that damn creature Godolphin cut up in front of us."
"I saw a species I hadn't seen before, that's all." She stopped and arbitrarily plucked a book from the shelves. "But I wonder sometimes if the fortress we're guarding isn't empty." She opened the book, and a lock of hair fell from it. "Maybe it's all invention," she said. "Drug dreams and fancy." She put the book back on the shelf and turned to face Bloxham. "Did you really invite me down here to check the security?" she murmured. "I'm going to be damn disappointed if you did."
"Not entirely," he said.
"Good," she replied, and wandered on, deeper into the maze.
Though Jude had been invited to a number of New Year's Eve parties, she'd made no firm commitment to attend any of them, for which fact, after the sorrows the day had brought, she was thankful. She'd offered to stay with Clem once Taylor's body had been taken from the house, but he'd quietly declined, saying that he needed the time alone. He was comforted to know she'd be at the other end of the telephone if he needed her, however, and said he'd call if he got too maudlin.
One of the parties she'd been invited to was at the house opposite her flat, and on the evidence of past years it would raise quite a din. She'd several times been one of the celebrants there herself, but it was no great hardship to be alone tonight. She was in no mood to trust the future, if what the New Year brought was more of what the old had offered.
She closed the curtains in the hope that her presence would go undetected, lit some candles, put on a flute concerto, and started to prepare something light for supper. As she washed her hands, she found that her fingers and palms had taken on a light dusting of color from the stone. She'd caught herself toying with it several times during the afternoon, and pocketed it, only to find minutes later that it was once again in her hands. Why the color it had left behind had escaped her until now, she didn't know. She rubbed her hands briskly beneath the tap to wash the dust off, but when she came to dry them found the color was actually brighter. She went into the bathroom to study the phenomenon under a more intense light. It wasn't, as she'd first thought, dust. The pigment seemed to be in her skin, like a he