"Another soul saved from the flood," she said.
Jude had stopped climbing. Though neither woman had made any sign that she was forbidden entry, she wanted to come into this miraculous place as a guest, not a trespasser.
"Am I welcome?"
"Of course," said the mother. "Have you come to meet the Goddesses?"
"Yes."
"Are you from the Bastion, then?"
Before Jude could reply, her companion supplied the answer. "Of course not! Look at her!"
"But the waters brought her."
"The waters'll bring any woman who dares. They brought us, didn't they?"
"Are there many others?" Jude asked.
"Hundreds," came the reply. "Maybe thousands by now."
Jude wasn't surprised. If someone like herself, a stranger in the Dominions, had come to suspect that the Goddesses were still extant, how much more hopeful must the women who lived here have been, living with the legends of Tishalulle and Jokalaylau.
When Jude reached the top of the stairs, the bespectacled woman introduced herself.
"I'm Lotti Yap."
"I'm Judith."
"We're pleased to see you, Judith," the other woman said. "I'm Paramarola. And this fellow"—she looked down at the baby—"is Billo."
"Yours?" Jude asked.
"Now where would I have found a man to give me the likes of this?" Paramarola said.
"We've been in the Annex for nine years," Lotti Yap explained. "Guests of the Autarch."
"May his thorn rot and his berries wither," Paramarola added.
"And where have you come from?" Lotti asked.
"The Fifth," Jude said.
She was not fully attending to the women now, however. Her interest had been claimed by a window that lay across the puddle—strewn corridor behind them: or, rather, by the vista visible through it. She went to the sill, both awed and astonished, and gazed out at an extraordinary spectacle. The flood had cleared a circle half a mile wide or more in the center of the palace, sweeping walls and pillars and roofs away and drowning the rubble. All that was left, rising from the waters, were islands of rock where the taller towers had stood, and here and there a corner of one of the palace's vast amphitheaters, preserved as if to mock the overweening pretensions of its architect. Even these fragments would not stand for much longer, she suspected. The waters circled this immense basin without violence, but their sheer weight would soon bring these last remnants of Sartori's masterwork down.
At the center of this small sea was an island larger than the rest, its lower shores made up of the half-demolished chambers that had clustered around the Pivot Tower, its rocks the rubble of that tower's upper half, mingled with vast pieces of its tenant, and its height the remains of the tower itself, a ragged but glittering pyramid of rubble in which a white fire seemed to be burning. Looking at the transformation these waters had wrought, eroding in a matter of days, perhaps hours, what the Autarch had taken decades to devise and build, Jude wondered that she'd reached this place intact. The power she'd first encountered on the lower slopes as an innocent, if willful, brook was here revealed as an awesome force for change.
"Were you here when this happened?" she asked Lotti Yap.
"We saw only the end of it," she replied. "But it was quite a sight, let me tell you. Seeing the towers fall—"
"We were afraid for our lives," Paramarola said.
"Speak for yourself," Lotti replied. "The waters didn't set us free just to drown us. We were prisoners in the Annex, you see. Then the floor cracked open, and the waters just bubbled up and washed the walls away."
"We knew the Goddesses would come, didn't we?" Paramarola said. "We always had faith in that."
"So you never believed they were dead?"
"Of course not. Buried alive, maybe. Sleeping. Even lunatic. But never dead."
"What she says is right," Lotti observed. "We knew this day would come."
"Unfortunately, it may be a short victory," Jude said.
"Why do you say that?" Lotti replied. "The Autarch's gone."
"Yes, but his Father hasn't."
"His Father?" said Paramarola. "I thought he was a bastard."
"Who's his father then?" said Lotti.
"Hapexamendios.''
Paramarola laughed at this, but Lotti Yap nudged in her well-padded ribs.
"It's not a joke, Rola.'1
"It has to be," the other protested.
"Do you see the woman laughing?" Then, to Jude: "Do you have any evidence for this?"
"No, I don't."
"Then where'd you get such an idea?"
Jude had guessed it would be difficult to persuade people of Sartori's origins, but she'd optimistically supposed that when the moment came she'd be possessed by a sudden lucidity. Instead she felt a rage of frustration. If she was obliged to unravel the whole sorry history of her involvement with the Autarch Sartori to every soul who stood between her and the Goddesses, the worst would be upon them all before she was halfway there. Then, inspiration.
"The Pivot's the proof," she said.
"How so?" said Lotti, who was now studying this woman the flood had brought to their feet with fresh intensity.
"He could never have moved the Pivot without his Father's collaboration."
"But the Pivot doesn't belong to the Unbeheld," Paramorola said. "It never did."
Jude looked confounded.
"What Rola says is true," Lotti told her. "He may have used it to control a few weak men. But the Pivot was never His."
"Whose then?"
"Uma Umagammagi was in it."
"And who's that?"
"The sister of Tishalulle" and Jokalaylau. Half-sister of the daughters of the Delta."
"There was a Goddess in the Pivot?"
"Yes."
"And the Autarch didn't know it?"
"That's right. She hid Herself there to escape Hapexamendios when He passed through the Imajica. Jokalaylau went into the snow and was lost there. Tishalulle—"
"—in the Cradle of Chzercemit," Jude said.
"Yes indeed," said Lotti, plainly impressed.
"And Uma Umagammagi hid Herself in solid rock," Paramarola went on, telling the tale as though to a child, "thinking He'd pass over the place not seeing Her. But He chose the Pivot as the center of the Imajica and laid His power upon it, sealing Her in."
This was surely the ultimate irony, Jude thought. The architect of Yzordderrex had built his fortress, indeed his entire empire, around an imprisoned Goddess. Nor was the parallel with Celestine lost on her. It seemed Roxborough had been unwittingly working in a grim tradition when he'd sealed Celestine up beneath his house.
"Where are the Goddesses now?" Jude asked Lotti.
"On the island. We'll all be allowed into their presence in time, and we'll be blessed by them. But it'll take days."
"I don't have days," Jude said. "How do I get to the island?"
"You'll be called when your time comes."
"That has to be now,11 Jude said, "or it'll be never." She looked left and right along the passageway. "Thank you for the education," she said. "Maybe I'll see you again."
Choosing right over left she made to leave, but Lotti took hold of her sleeve.
"You don't understand, Judith," she said. "The Goddesses have come to make us safe. Nothing can harm us here. Not even the Unbeheld.""I hope that's true," Jude said. "To the bottom of my heart, I hope that's true. But I have to warn them, in case it isn't."
"Then we'd better come with you," Lotti said, "You'll never find your way otherwise."