Worldsoul (12 page)

Before she opened the door, she reset the wards with a gesture of her hand and they burned a dull red around the frame. Someone was standing on the step: a woman in green.

“Yes?” Shadow said.

The woman bowed her head. She handed over a parchment scroll, tied with a black ribbon.

“Who has this come from? Is it the Shah?” Shadow demanded. The woman looked up and Shadow recognised the blind eyes: it was the mute serving maid from the Has el Zindeh. She bowed her head again and melted into the dimness of the stairwell, leaving Shadow clutching the scroll.

Some time later, she perched on the windowsill of the laboratory, looking out across the desert. The scroll sat beside her and she was tempted to fling it into the sands, let it be swallowed by nothingness and shift. But Shadow knew this was childish. It would accomplish nothing; the obligation set by the Shah would still remain. Had she not taken the vows that she had, Shadow would have simply ignored it, but by the initiatory terms of her training, she could not. She even wondered whether the Shah had summoned the disir himself. The timing did not add up, but the Shah had diviners, and more than that, understood people, damn him. Coercion and threats would have made Shadow dig her heels in: this, however, was a far greater compulsion.

She picked up the scroll again and studied the contents. She was required, most politely, to present herself at the Has on the following morning, with a range of tools. The Shah would, he said, leave those to her discretion. There was no attempt to bluster, or to suggest that Shadow herself might call his bluff by not appearing. That still left the issue of the disir. Shadow and Mercy had talked long into the night, but had been unable to come up with an explanation as to why Shadow, in particular, had been attacked. Was it connected with the Shah, or not? Had it been purely random? Whatever the case, two things seemed clear: the Shah had been keeping an eye on her, and the disir was now engaged. Shadow had wounded it, and it was somewhere in the Eastern Quarter. Shadow had no doubts that it would be back.

On the following morning, after a troubled night, Shadow walked to the Has. She kept the veil as thick as possible, feeling secure behind its magic, but she knew that this was illusory only, no real solution. The ones who wanted her would find her, and Shadow disliked feeling exposed.

The door was opened by the same old woman as before. She gave Shadow a knowing glance. “Nice to see you back.”

“Thank you,” Shadow said sourly. “Where am I to go, please?”

She was led up a narrow staircase. The Shah stood in a room high in the Has, a turret with fretworked windows that were shuttered against the sun, looking out over the courtyard garden and letting in diamonds and squares of dappled, pleated light. The Shah stood in mingled bright and shade, reminding her uneasily of her own sun-and-moon knife. The floor was tiled in white and blue.

“Good morning,” the Shah said, placidly. “I’m pleased that you could come.”

“I do not see the need to fence,” Shadow said. “We both know what I feel.”

“Yes. And although you will not believe this, you have my apologies. I dislike extreme measures. I take them only when they are necessary.”

“You are right. I do not believe.”

“Nonetheless.” The Shah’s voice remained mild. “I imagine that, under the circumstances, you are eager to start work.”

Shadow did not trust herself to speak. She walked past him to a window, hearing the heavy cream robes that he wore rustle against the tiles as he turned.

“I will have the ifrit brought up,” the Shah said. “Here in the heights, overlooking all, it is closer to the air and fire which is its element, and it will prove more compliant.”

“I would have thought that miring it in water and earth would have been a more sensible solution.”

“No. A curious paradox. Using its own elements against it has proved more helpful. Please don’t think that we have not tried.”

“I do not want to reinvent the wheel.”

“Of course not.”

She looked out over the quarter as the Shah clapped his hands and spoke into the air. The turret was higher than it had appeared: she could see the curving dome of the Medina and then the jumbled buildings of the Quarter beyond. There was the wall, her own windows mercifully not visible from this angle. There was the apartment in which Mariam Shenudah lived. Shadow blinked into the morning sun as the sounds of something heavy being carried up the stairs drew louder.

• Interlude •

The young man was walking quickly, his footsteps unsteady on first the steps and then the cobbled street as he made his way up from the cellar bar. She had not hunted here before, and she was enjoying the change of scene. Had this been the Northern Quarter, she would never have taken this sort of risk, but it was not. She was enjoying that, too.

In her mother’s house, she would be expected to bring back any kills. The cub was told to do that; any transgressions would earn a beating. But then, it was exactly the same in the Court. It did not occur to her to miss her mother’s house, that blackstone fort near Bleikrgard, but she did want to make her family proud. And jealous. She planned to accomplish that on her next visit home with a casual remark.

I’ve become very—close—to the Abbot General.

If they didn’t believe her, she’d show them the bite marks.

She watched, now, as the young man wove his way along the street. It had recently rained, one of those sea-stained downpours for which the Western Quarter was famous, not good cold northern snow. It occurred to her that had the Skein still been in dominion, she might not have taken such a risk then either, but they were gone and she stretched, luxuriating in unaccustomed freedom.

She wasn’t supposed to be out but, well, windows could be opened. It was a relief to be naked and free of all those formal gowns. She knew Deed liked them: that was the human half. His little disir doll. But he liked the row of multiple teats and the spiky spine, too. She watched the young man with eyes grown luminous until he reached the end of the street, and then she stepped, clicking, from the shadows.

She didn’t drink his blood. She wasn’t
wampyr.
But she did take a little memento.

• Eighteen •

Nerren was due in later that morning after a doctor’s appointment. The Library inspection had apparently gone as well as possible and Benjaya informed her that it had been thankfully brief.

“They said they’d do a more extensive one later.”

“Oh, good,” Mercy said. “Something to look forward to.”

Predictably, she found herself with a mountain of paperwork, and some explaining to do. She spent most of the morning of her return with the Elders of the Library, trying to work out where the disir had come from. Nerren had told them about the events in Section C, eventually. Mercy called on Librarian McLaren for moral support: he could be relied upon to talk sense, and he looked more like a warrior than a Librarian. She felt she needed that.

“It must be a priority,” Elder Tope said, her elderly face creased in concern. “We simply cannot have leakage.”

“This never happened when the Skein were here,” Elder Jonah lamented.

“But now the Skein are gone,” McLaren remarked. “We have to shift for ourselves.”

She looked at the Elders and suddenly felt very sad. Despite their age, they were like children whose parents had suddenly disappeared, leaving them alone and defenceless. She had thought this before and, of course, it was no more than the truth: the Skein had always taken care of everything. They might not have been gods, but they were god-like—powerful, benevolent, remote. Not for the first time, however, Mercy started to wonder whether this was really an accurate perception. How much had they really known about their masters and mistresses, after all?—although the Skein had changed gender seemingly at will, adopting new bodies as one might put on another set of clothes. They had always seemed kind, but when Mercy thought about it, she had the impression that the Skein treated humans as a sort of amusing pet, that their agenda lay entirely elsewhere. These thoughts did not make her comfortable, but this was not a comfortable world. And looking at the faces of the Elders, creased with worry and bewilderment, Mercy was conscious of a growing anger.
Did you go away on purpose,
she mentally asked the Skein,
so that we would grow up? But in that case, why didn’t you prepare us better?

“Don’t worry,” she heard herself say. “I’ll take care of it. I promise you that I will.”

Outside the doors, McLaren gave her a quizzical look. “We’ve known each other a long time, Mercy. Are you sure you can handle this?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not. I’m not sure at all.”

The
ka,
Perra, slipped on velvet feet through the labyrinthine passages of the Library. These were the secret ways, that even most of the Librarians did not know. Only the Librarians were allowed entry here, but Perra and
ka
-kind, along with others, used the secret routes: the little-known pathways of forgotten stories, the backdoors of tales, the null-spaces between lines of text and subtext. The route that Perra now took had brought the
ka
through an ancient tale of a winged bull and the sun, a fragment of poetry from an Elizabethan noblewoman’s writing desk, and a folktale about fox witches from nineteenth-century China. Nimbly, Perra skirted hooves crashing into sunwarmed dust, tasted old rose petals and disappointment, glimpsed a galleon on a far and silver sea, and pattered through snow under pine trees, before coming out into the liminal space between Sections C and D of the secured section of the Library.

Perra was curious, like all spirits. Perra wanted to
know.

This section of the Library was very quiet, even compared to the usual silence of all libraries anywhere. Perra, being a spirit, was noiseless, and yet felt a distinct tinge of the ominous in the air, glimpsing shadows from the corners of the eye that had no relationship to the storyways.

This ka,
thought Perra,
is being watched.

The spirit spoke a name into the air, experimentally. Nothing answered, but Perra was not really expecting it to. The name hung for a moment, glimmering, then shattered like glass, the shards falling to the floor and disappearing.

This ka sees.

The name had been a revelatory one, calling the invisible into being, and it was a powerful and ancient word. It took a considerable resistance to protect oneself against it and the non-appearance of anything significant gave Perra two theories: either there was nothing there, or there was something
big.
Perra, from both experience and a natural caution, was inclined to favour the latter.

Mercy had mentioned the problematic section and so Perra approached it with a considerable degree of caution. As soon as the relevant stack was reached, the
ka
became aware of a tingling in the air, a jangling resonance which a human would have been unlikely to pick up. To the
ka,
however, it was as though someone had stretched a wire far too tightly and made it sing, sending ripples out into the surrounding air. It ruffled the goldensand fur of Perra’s spine and set the
ka
’s small sharp teeth on edge. Reflexive claws slid out from Perra’s toes to make small indentations on the parquet floor, which lingered briefly and then vanished: spirits leave little trace.

Cold/drivensnow/blackice/wrongness.

All of these things were familiar to the
ka
by now, in direct opposition to its own ancestral magic, which was of the desert, the warm breath of the sand-laden winds, the heat of stone and the cooler shadows of moonlight. Golden magic, and old. But the
ka
had seen what had come through this ripped gate in the world and what now haunted the Eastern Quarter: the disir. The
ka
had some other ideas about that.

Pausing before the stacks, Perra could see where the disir had come through. The rent would be invisible to Mercy and her colleagues, but to Perra, it looked like a black shining rip in the air, the edges hanging loosely and occasionally billowing outward as the between-worlds wind caught them and sent them flying like a ragged banner. Perra made a small, clucking sound of disapproval. Not Mercy’s fault, of course. How can you mend something if you don’t know that it’s there? But the
ka
could see it and with sight, came knowledge, and with knowledge, came responsibility.

Perra knew that the sensible thing to do would be to close the rift at once. But
kas
are old, and although they are wise, they know that wisdom sometimes has to be earned and won. Thus Perra did not close the gap immediately. It thought it would take a little look.

Together, Mercy and Nerren studied the map. Its edges bristled with thistledown sigils: the spells that were keeping the map’s representation three-dimensional, and mid-air. Occasionally, Nerren cranked the bronze and silver sigilometer up a notch, bringing the map into sharper focus.

“It’s too far,” Mercy said. “It’s off the map.” But they had known that. They were looking for loose threads and there were plenty of those.

This part of the map showed the northern storyways. At the top were the more modern folktales, threads of narrative which led down into more ancient groups of legend. Most of them were quests, showing the distinctive golden-brown colour of quest stories and featuring brave children, elf-folk and svart-folk, mythical swords, magical objects. Earlier on, the children had been heroes, usually male, and then gods.

“Here’s something,” Nerren said, peering. The readout showed a partial tale, of a wonderful necklace desired by a goddess: this one was multilayered and emergent into Earth’s present day, but at the bottom a thread disappeared into nowhere. Nerren sighed. “It’s slid past the Holdstockian layer into the nevergone. Looks more like a love story, though.”

“I’m not really interested in those,” Mercy said.

“What
happened
to what’s-his-name, by the way?”