Weaveworld (84 page)

‘We’re glad you came,’ she said. ‘Will you request the Adamatical to leave? We have business to do, you and I.’

‘What sort of business?’

‘It’s not for his ears,’ the mote ghost said. ‘Please. Help him to his feet, will you? And tell him there’s no harm done. They’re so superstitious, these men …’

She did as Immacolata asked: went down the drumming corridor to where the man was cowering, and drew him to his feet.

‘I think maybe you should leave,’ she said. ‘The Lady wants it.’

The priest gave her a sickened look.

‘All this time –’ he said. ‘–I never really believed.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘There’s no damage done.’

‘Are you coming too?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t come back for you,’ he warned her, tears spilling down his cheeks.

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘You go on. I’m safe.’

He needed no further urging, but was off up the stairs like a jack rabbit. She returned down the passageway – the caskets still rattling – to face the woman.

‘I thought you were dead,’ she said.

‘What’s dead?’ Immacolata replied. ‘A word the Cuckoos use when the flesh fails. It’s nothing, Suzanna; you know that.’

‘Why are you here, then?’

‘I’ve come to pay a debt to you. In the Temple, you kept me from falling, or have you forgotten?’

‘No.’

‘Nor I. Such kindnesses are not negligible. I understand that now. I understand many things. You see how I’m reunited with my sisters? Together we’re as we could never be apart. A single mind, three-in-one.
I
am
we;
and we see our malice, and regret it.’

Suzanna might well have doubted this unlikely confession but that the menstruum, brimming at her eyes and throat, confirmed the truth of it. The wraith before her – and the power behind it – had no hatred on its mind. What
did
it have? There was the question. She didn’t need to ask; it knew her question.

‘I’m here with a warning,’ it said.

‘About what? Shadwell?’

‘He’s only a part of what you now face, sister. A fragment.’

‘Is it the Scourge?’

The phantom shuddered at the name, though surely its state put it beyond the reach of such dangers. Suzanna didn’t wait for confirmation. There was no use disbelieving the worst now.

‘Is Shadwell something to do with the Scourge?’ she asked.

‘He raised it.’

‘Why?’

‘He thinks magic has tainted him,’ the dust said. ‘Corrupted his innocent salesman’s soul. Now he won’t be content until every rapture-maker’s dead.’

‘And the Scourge is his weapon?’

‘So he believes. The truth may be more … complex.’

Suzanna ran her hand down over her face, her mind seeking the best route of enquiry. One simple question occurred:

‘What kind of creature is this Scourge?’

‘The answer’s perhaps just another question,’ said the sisters, ‘It
thinks
that it’s called Uriel.’

‘Uriel?’

‘An Angel.’

Suzanna almost laughed at the absurdity of this.

‘That’s what it believes, having read the Bible.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Most of this is beyond even our comprehension, but we offer you what we know. It’s a spirit. And it once stood guard over a place where magic was. A garden, some have said, though that may be simply another fiction.’

‘Why should it want to wipe the Seerkind out?’

‘They were made there, in that garden, kept from the eyes of Humankind, because they had raptures. But they fled from it.’

‘And Uriel –’

‘ – was left alone, guarding an empty place. For centuries.’

Suzanna was by no means certain she believed any of this, but she wanted to hear the story completed.

‘What happened?’

‘It went mad, as any prisoner of duty must, left without
fresh instructions. It forgot itself, and its purpose. All it knew was sand and stars and emptiness.’

‘You should understand …’ said Suzanna. ‘I find all this difficult to believe, not being a Christian.’

‘Neither are we,’ said the three-in-one.

‘But you still think the story’s true?’

‘We believe there’s truth
inside
it, yes.’

The reply made her think again of Mimi’s book, and all it contained. Until she’d entered its pages the realm of Faery had seemed child’s play. But facing Hobart in the forest of their shared dreams, she’d learned differently. There’d been truth inside
that
story: why not this too? The difference was that the Scourge occupied the same physical world as she did. Not metaphor, not dream-stuff;
real.

‘So it forgot itself,’ she said to the phantom. ‘How then did it remember?’

‘Perhaps it never has,’ said Immacolata. ‘But its home was found, a hundred years back, by men who’d gone looking for Eden. In their heads it read the story of the paradise garden and took it for its own, whether it was or not. It found a name too.
Uriel, flame of God. The spirit who stood at the gates of lost Eden –’

‘And was it Eden? The place it guarded?’

‘You don’t believe that any more than I do. But Uriel does. Whatever its true name is – if it even has one – that name’s forgotten. It believes itself an Angel. So, for better or worse, it is.’

The notion made sense to Suzanna, in its way. If, in the dream of the book, she’d believed herself a dragon, why shouldn’t something lost in madness take an Angel’s name?

‘It murdered its discoverers, of course –’ Immacolata was saying, ‘– then went looking for those who’d escaped it.’

‘The Families.’

‘Or their descendants. And it almost wiped them out. But they were clever. Though they didn’t understand the power that pursued them, they knew how to
hide.
The rest you’re familiar with.’

‘And Uriel? What did it do when the Seerkind disappeared?’

‘It returned to its fortress.’

‘Until Shadwell.’

‘Until Shadwell.’

Suzanna mused on this for a little time, then asked the one question this whole account begged.

‘What about God?’ she said.

The three-in-one laughed, her motes somersaulting.

‘We don’t need God to make sense of this,’ she said. Suzanna wasn’t certain if she spoke only for themselves or for her too. ‘If there was a First Cause, a force of which this Uriel is a fragment, it’s forsaken its sentinel.’

‘So what do we do?’ said Suzanna. ‘There’s been talk of mustering the Old Science.’

‘Yes, I heard …’

‘Would that defeat it?’

‘I don’t know. Certainly I made some miracles in my time that might have wounded it.’

‘Then help us now.’

‘That’s beyond us, Suzanna. You can see our condition for yourself. All that’s left is dust and will-power, haunting the Shrine we were worshipped at, until the Scourge comes to destroy it.’

‘You’re certain it’ll do that?’

‘This Shrine is sacred to magic. Shadwell will bring the Scourge here and destroy it the first chance he gets. And we’re defenceless against it. All we can do is warn you.’

‘Thank you for that.’

The wraith began to waver, as its power to hold its form diminished.

‘There was a time, you know …’ Immacolata said, ‘when we had such raptures.’ The dust she was made of was blowing away, the bone-shards dropping to the ground. ‘When every breath was magic; and we were afraid of nothing.’

‘It may come again.’

Within seconds the three had grown so tenuous they were barely recognizable. But the voice lingered a little while, to say:

‘It’s in your hands, sister…’

And then they were gone.

V

THE NAKED FLAME

1

he house that Mimi Laschenski had occupied for over half a century had been sold two months after her death. The new owners had been able to purchase it for a song, given its dilapidated condition, and put several weeks of hard labour into modernizing it before moving in. But that investment of time and money was not enough to persuade them to stay. A week later they left in a hurry, claiming the place was haunted. Sensible folks too, to look at them, talking of empty rooms that growled; of large invisible forms that brushed past them in darkened passageways; and, almost worse in its way, the pungent smell of cats that hung over the place, however hard they scrubbed the boards.

Once left empty, number eighteen Rue Street remained so. The property market was slow up that end of the city, and the rumours about the house were enough to deter the few who came to view. It was eventually taken over by squatters, who in the six days of their occupancy undid much of the work the previous owners had put in. But the twenty-four hour a day orgy which the neighbours suspected was going on came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the sixth night, and the tenants were gone by the following morning, exiting in some haste to judge by the litter of belongings they left on the steps.

After that, the house had no more occupants, legal or otherwise, and it didn’t take long for gossip about number
eighteen to be supplanted by talk of more lively scandals. The house simply became an unsaleable eye-sore: its windows boarded up, its paintwork deteriorating.

That was, until that night in December. What would happen that night would change the face of Rue Street entirely, and guarantee that the house in which Mimi Laschenski had lived out her lonely old age was never occupied again.

2

Had Cal set eyes on the five figures that entered number eighteen that night it would have taken him some time to recognize their leader as Balm de Bono. The rope-dancer’s hair was cropped so short it was all but invisible; his face was thin, his features set. Even less recognizable, perhaps, was Toller, whom Cal had last seen perched on a rope in Starbrook’s Field. Toller’s ambitions as a rope-dancer had come to an abrupt end hours after that encounter, when he’d fallen foul of the Prophet’s men. They’d broken his legs, and cracked his skull, leaving him for dead. He had at least survived. Starbrook’s third pupil, Galin, had perished that night, in a vain attempt to protect his master’s Field from desecration.

It had been de Bono’s inspiration to visit the Laschenski house – where the Weave had lain for so long – in the hope of finding a pocket of the Old Science to arm themselves against the approaching cataclysm. He had three other allies in this, besides Toller: Baptista Dolphi, whose father had been shot down in Capra’s House; her lover, Otis Beau; and a girl whom he’d first seen in Nonesuch, sitting on a window-ledge wearing paper wings. He’d seen her again, on Venus Mountain, in the reverie the presences there had granted him, and she’d shown him a world of paper and light that had kept him from total despair in the hours that followed. Her name was Leah.

Of the five, she was the most expert in the working of raptures; and the most sensitive to their proximity. It was she,
therefore, who led the way through the Laschenski house in search of the room where the Weaveworld had lain. Her path-finding took them up the stairs and into the second-storey front room.

‘The house is full of echoes,’ she said. ‘Some of the Custodian; some of animals. It takes time to sort them out –’ She went down on her knees in the middle of the room, and put her hands on the floor. ‘ – but the Weave lay here. I’m sure of it.’

Otis went across to where she knelt. He too crouched and put his palms to the ground.

‘I don’t feel a thing,’ he said.

‘Believe me,’ said Leah. ‘This is where it lay.’

‘Why don’t we get down to the bare boards?’ Toller suggested. ‘We may get a clearer signal.’

Plush, deep-pile carpeting had been laid in the room, only to be subsequently soiled by the squatters. They removed what remnants of furniture the room could boast, then tore the carpet up. The labour left them shaky: the training de Bono had devised for this expedition – refinement techniques culled from his old master’s teachings – had kept sleep and food in recent days to the minimum. But it paid dividends when they laid their hands on the stripped boards. Their rarefied senses responded on the instant; even Otis could feel the echoes now.