Worldsoul (25 page)

Still, during the years of the Skein, the Court had contributed substantially to the upkeep of the city, working in many instances alongside the Library itself and reining in the more elaborate or obtrusive stories. Several rogue bits of legend had been tracked down by Court magicians and stuffed back into their ontological places, in more than one case saving the city itself from disaster. There was known to have been some exchange of manuscripts.

With the disappearance of the Skein, matters had gone downhill to some degree. Mercy supposed that this was only to be expected: two powerful organisations, plus a power vacuum at the top, do potential chaos bring. But because she had not been involved with the Court directly, and because the Elders of the Library would naturally not be inclined to confide issues of higher policy to their underlings, she wasn’t entirely sure how far things had gone.

She pursued Darya at a distance through another maze of passages. She had quickly lost any ability to discern direction and the lack of windows did not help. Darya was, however, heading upwards and this was helpful, if only because it reassured Mercy that she was heading back towards the roof.

A few minutes later, Darya dived through a doorway and vanished. Mercy, hovering at the entrance of the door, was surprised to hear the sound of weeping, although it took her a moment to work out what this was. It sounded like a gull or a mewing cat rather than anything human.

She peered through the door. Darya sat on a low couch, her face buried in her hands. When at last she looked up, staring sightlessly at the wall, Mercy saw that her face was sliding back towards disir: she no longer looked human. Miserable Darya might be, but Mercy had no intention of having her throat torn out in a misguided attempt at consolation. She shrank back against the wall. The sobbing died away to a hoarse rasp like the sound of a saw, then silence.

Mercy once more looked around the corner of the door. Darya was lying on the couch as though she had been thrown there. The tight skirt had ridden up over her long, spiny legs and her hair was a tangle. She looked like a broken doll and if Mercy had found another woman like that, she would have suspected rape at the very least. But she was sure that there had been no one else in the room.

“Perra,” she mouthed. “Watch for me.”

The
ka
gave a single nod. Mercy slipped into the room, holding her breath. The book which Darya had taken from the library lay on the floor by the couch; it had fallen from her jacket. Her heart hammering, Mercy whisked it up and fled from the room.

At the end of the corridor she slowed, expecting to hear the disir girl coming after her, but the passage was silent. Perra murmured, “We are close to the roof. Do you see?” A narrow window above the landing showed a sliver of moon and a curve of stone: one of the eaves of the House of the Court.

Mercy exhaled. “Good. Let’s get out of here.”

She reached up and grasped the windowsill, then pulled herself up. After a moment’s grappling, she managed to force the window open. A gushing wind immediately rushed through. Mercy swore.

“Come
on,
Perra!”

The
ka
flowed through the open window and Mercy squeezed after it, turning so that her legs were dangling back into the stairwell. She eased herself out backwards, arching her back so that she was, for a moment, aware of a dizzying glimpse of the inverted city. There was the bulk of the Library, the domes of the Western Quarter and far away, the silver line of the sea. As she started to draw her legs up, there was a sudden blazing pain in her ankle.

“Shit!” Mercy kicked out. The pain decreased and, clinging to the frame, she went backwards out of the window. Her legs were now free, but razor sharp teeth sank into her hand. Mercy bit back a scream, mindful of an entire building full of Court magicians below and herself a trespasser. The thing that had bitten her also squealed, though a mouthful of flesh. She could see the thing: a hideous wizened face that was yet, somehow, in miniature her own. It had her wide brow and a flow of black hair. She didn’t have room to draw the sword. Instead, she wrenched her hand free in a spray of blood and whipped one of the sharpened pins out of her knot of hair. Her first stab at the thing missed as it dodged, but her second connected. She stabbed the thing through one eye and a terrible pain assailed her own.

“Damnit!”

Someone—probably Deed—had made a homunculus of her. When it hurt, so would she, and vice versa. But the alternative was to give into the pain, let the thing bite her fingers off and fall from the roof to the stone flags a thousand feet below. Not much contest
there.
Mercy drew a breath, gripped the windowsill as tightly as she could, whipped both books out of her jacket and stashed them on the windowsill. Then she rammed the pin through the homunculus’ brain.

The pain was too much. She heard it shriek as it shrivelled around the pin. The burn inside her head was overwhelming: it numbed her fingers and she let go of the sill. As she dropped past the upper windows of the House of the Court, mercifully, she blacked out.

• Forty •

Shadow had become paranoid about the earth on which they walked. It was all very well preparing oneself from attack by unknown spirits, but what about the ground itself? She expected at any moment that it would rise up and assault her.

Gremory seemed prone to no such fears. She appeared amused, occasionally smiling satirically at things that Shadow was unable to see, as though she walked through a private world. Shadow found this annoying, but she did not want to anger her only ally, so she said nothing.

Once past the orchard, the garden was indeed beautiful, but it was overpowering. The flowers were too large and highly scented; the trees were immense. Shadow would not have described it as a garden of giants, but things were bigger than they should have been and this made her nervous. Looking back, the fortress itself had again altered: it stood in a series of high steps, like a ziggurat.

Eden. Babylon. Both? Shadow did not know; the legend of which this was a part was possibly too old to know much of, dating back to the very dawn of Earth’s Fertile Crescent. There were signs of some kind of occupation, apart from the golem-gardener and the orchard rows. There were stone spires, like totems, but decorated with winged birds that might have been vultures, and they looked very old. They pricked something in Shadow’s memory, something primal. She was inclined to avoid them, and did so.

And she felt they were being watched. When she asked Gremory, the demon simply shrugged again, as if this was a matter of no consequence. “I haven’t seen anyone living. There are plenty of the dead.”

“What do they look like?”

“Ancient. Their skulls are strange; their heads are too narrow. I think they are an earlier form of man.”

“There were other peoples before the Flood, so it’s said.” She had once heard that, on Earth, a volcano in the region of Sumatra had wiped out three-quarters of the variants of the human species, leaving behind only their boring old ancestors.

Did these unknown plants and trees date from then, the dawning of the human world? Shadow wondered as she walked.

Some distance from the fortress, the trees began to thin out and eventually Shadow and the demon stepped into a glade that fanned outwards to become a valley. The sides were wooded, but faded into golden cliffs and finally, Shadow recognised an echo of the Great Desert through which they had travelled. The valley floor, perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, was grassland, with trees only at the edges, so that it resembled a natural park. Along the valley, a black rock jutted up from the grass, a boulder so dark that it resembled a fragment of night.

Gremory hissed when she saw it.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s from the heavens. A meteorite.”

“It’s not the Ka’aba.”

“No, another. Older. Still worshipped.”

“We don’t—” Shadow stopped. “Well, never mind. I don’t see any signs of people.”

They approached the black stone. It had fused with the surrounding earth, reminding Shadow of the flower strike that had destroyed Elemiel’s hut. Something flickered along its length as Shadow thought this, and then the demon cried out.

“Shadow!”

She felt the scorch of it through the veil, but the veil itself saved her hair from catching fire. The thing shot over her head, rolling against the base of the rock. Shadow scrambled up; to her dismay, this was not another earth-creature. It was made of fire, a flicker of bright flame in a shift of rainbow colours. It smelled of hot metal. It turned to come at her again and Shadow ran.

Her first thought was to find water. Paper, scissors, stone . . .  Metal trumps earth and water trumps fire. She needed a stream and she found one, but it was only a rivulet of water, a trickle, running between narrow crumbling banks in the grass. It was perhaps two feet wide and shallow, not enough to cover her. The thing hissed as it sprang and at its brightness, Shadow shut her eyes and stepped backwards over the stream. Then there was a sound like a crack of lightning and flame erupted behind Shadow’s eyelids. She opened her eyes, half-blinded, to see only a thin wisp of smoke. Elemiel stood before her, with a flaming sword in his hand.

“Hello again,” the Messenger said.

“So this is—what? Your home?”

They sat by the stream. Shadow’s feet were in cool water. Elemiel sat cross-legged in the grass. Some distance away, Gremory paced like a prowling cat, intent on her own thoughts.

“No. But I can come here.”

“When we met you—”

“Still the same place. It’s changed over time. Thirty thousand years or more.”

Shadow eyed the Messenger with respect. “You’re a long-lived species.”

His smile was sad. “Too long.”

“Your house has been destroyed, I’m afraid,” Shadow told him, but she wondered whether this would really mean anything. After all, a garden had died; a desert had taken its place and that desert itself had shifted and changed so much as to be almost unrecognisable. He did not seem surprised.

“I know. Are you all right?”

“I think so. Were they aiming for me, or for you?”

“Both.”

“So who’s the enemy?”

“I said I’d show you. And so I will.”

“The spirit—” Shadow began.

“Yes. I’m sorry. I did not succeed in what I set out to do; I’ve made matters worse for you.”

She did not want to say:
it’s all right.
It wasn’t.

“I don’t know what to do now,” she said.

“Nor do I,” the Messenger admitted. “But I think it’s brought you here. That’s a good thing and a bad thing.”

“I don’t like ‘bad thing.’ ”

“Who does?”

• Forty-One •

Mercy woke to a room thronging with shadows. They hummed and whispered about her head, like a host of moths. Her skin crawled with them and there was a buzzing in her ears. But she knew what it meant. Unless she was greatly mistaken, it meant she was alive.

“
Ka
? Are you there?” she hissed. She did not want to speak Perra’s name, not knowing who might be listening; a name could be used against its bearer. She waited, but there was only the sibilance of the shadows. Light was coming from somewhere, but it was diffuse. It was enough to see the flitting, flickering shades.

And the place stank. After a moment, Mercy decided she was not detecting this with her nose: it was more like a spiritual stench. She sat up. She did not seem to be restrained in any way, and this in itself was ominous, suggesting as it did that her captors did not need to place her in bonds as they were confident of her inability to escape.

Captors.
Her hand hurt like hell. She remembered falling from the turret but not anything after that, although her back and the backs of her legs felt bruised. What had happened to the homunculus? Evidently not with her in the room, otherwise she doubted she’d be alive. If she had died, then so would it, but they were programmed to finish the job. It evidently didn’t work the other way around, as she was fairly sure that she’d killed it, but then she was the original and it was just a copy.

Stiffly, she got off the low pallet on which she’d been lying and looked around the room. Enough light to see that it was an even square, windowless. She could see the faint rusty traces of sigils on the walls: a containment cell, then. But perhaps not usually for human beings. Then she turned and saw with a shock that ran electric through her that the light was coming from something’s eyes.

They shone out, huge and a pallid yellow, from the other side of the room. As she stared, the head tilted. She could see it faintly: a long hairless skull, ridged with cartilage. Its body was white, with long arms hunched around its knees. When it was sure it had got its full attention, it uttered a shriek, leaped to its feet and threw a handful of something at her.

Mercy ducked and the stuff whistled over her head and splattered against the opposite wall. There was the sudden, overpowering smell of shit. The thing capered, ran up the opposite wall and clung, upside down, from the ceiling, where it gave voice to another gibbering shriek. It was at least the size of a man, but its arms were longer.

A shit-flinging monkey demon. Great.

Frantically, Mercy ran through a mental magical arsenal. The Irish sword had been removed and so had her hairpins. The charm was no longer in her ear and her ward bracelets had also been taken away. That left the tattooed sigils, which she had reaffirmed with a paste made of powdered myrrh and dragon’s blood resin that morning. She clapped a hand to her brow, transferred the sigil to her palm and threw it. Her injured hand burned with its passage.

The sigil spiralled outwards like a throwing star. It stuck the monkey-demon full on and knocked it from the ceiling. Howling, it rushed forwards, its arms flailing. Mercy threw herself to the side and dodged under its arm, hurling herself to the other side of the room. She knew she could not keep this up indefinitely, but what was the alternative?

The monkey-demon turned with frightening speed. Mercy kicked it in the stomach, grabbed its wrist and threw. The demon sprawled to the floor but her move, which would have broken a human’s arm, had merely twisted the demon’s. Mercy saw its muscles rippling back into place as she watched. The thing grinned at her, displaying long yellow teeth. It wasn’t quite a monkey, and not quite a man either.