Worldsoul (27 page)

She had a point, but Deed kept smiling.

“Most of our magic. Not all.”

“No,” Mercy said, giving him a considering look. “Not all.”

“Did they bring you breakfast?”

“Yes, thank you. I don’t think Persephone and I have much in common, and I was hungry, so I ate it. They’ve taken away the tray.” She held up a cup. “I still have tea.”

Deed studied her. The sigil marks which were a part of her craft had not been renewed, and they had taken her weapons from her. Interrogating the sword had not proved successful; the thing had clammed up and refused to speak even under geas. Up close, Deed could see those betraying traces of ancestry in Fane’s face: the wax-pale skin and the elegant bones that seemed to be a trait of the wolf clans when they bred out into human. But the black hair and blacker eyes were more reminiscent of southern Europe. He would not be surprised to learn that there were traces of Spanish in her ancestry.

“Ever been far north?” he asked.

“Once.” Her eyes were wary. “Visiting relatives.”

“Wolves?”

“Perhaps.”

“The old clanholds and fortresses still stand, I believe. An interesting heritage.”

“And your own?”

Deed smiled at her. “Me? Oh, I come from a long line of accountants.”

Once he had made sure that the door to Mercy’s chamber was securely locked, he went back down to the laboratory. The homunculi were coming on nicely: three of them, which was all that the blood could produce, growing like mandrakes in jars of black earth and fluid. Even with fresh blood, the process was not limitless; the most anyone had ever been able to make was seven and the last had been too sickly to really count. Deed’s other alchemical preparations were proceeding well enough. In the furthest crucible, red lion was devouring white eagle, the symbolic representations of the magical chemicals writhing above the apparatus. Deed watched the process for a while, then checked on the spying eye that looked into Mercy’s chamber. She was sitting in the chair, looking at the history of the Court. Satisfied, Deed went down to the atrium to await the arrival of the Elders.

He had taken care to select the two most conservative members of the Library: Elder Vande, and Elder Egrim. Both, Deed knew from his enquiries, were old, querulous, and wanting a quiet life, which they were unlikely to achieve any time soon. They looked at him with palpable anxiety.

“Naturally, we are eager to avoid any unpleasantness,” Vande quavered. “This is most embarrassing.”

“Young people will be young people,” Deed said, sententiously. “I’m sure she thought she was doing the right thing. However . . . ”

“Can’t imagine why she didn’t go through official channels,” Egrim lamented, clutching her reticule.

“Doubtless she had her reasons. I suggest you confirm her presence here—I called you in because these things can be falsified, as I’m sure you’re aware—and then,” Deed paused. “Then we can begin to discuss terms.”

It was possible, of course, that the Library might simply decide to hang Mercy out to dry. But in that case, Deed would declare open war, and he was counting on the Elders’ timidity and caution. The disappearance of the city’s masters had hit them hard, much harder than the Court, which had, after all, sensibly put a number of contingency measures in place after a prophecy, which, though at the time unlikely, one would have to have been a fool to ignore.

On Earth, a prophecy was a prediction, and quite often false. In the Liminality, with its different ontological basis and the shifty temporal underpinnings of the nevergone, a prophecy could be something quite different, not a prediction at all but a fact which had slipped backwards down a storyway and lodged in the past, or a possibility from an alternate timestream which had flaked free of its rightful place and drifted through the overlight.

“You’ll want to install your own disciplinary measures,” Deed said, sorrowfully. “She hasn’t been ill treated, although regrettably she did have an unfortunate encounter with an entity . . . ” He watched the two elderly faces grow pale, and inwardly smiled. “She’ll tell you herself that we’ve put her in comfortable quarters.”

“Thank you for your restraint,” Egrim said.

“We have to work together,” Deed replied, with a degree of piousness. He led them down the winding passages of the Court, making sure that a maze-spell was in place just in case his two guests were a bit more clued-in than they appeared, and were able to trace where they’d been. When they reached the door of the incarceration chamber, Deed said, “Here she is,” and opened the door with a flourish.

The room, however, was empty.

• Forty-Four •

It felt like the edge of the world. Shadow stood beside Elemiel and the demon on a great lip of rock. Behind them stretched the narrow valley, filled with dangerous blooms. Below, was a howling pit of air. Shadow looked down onto a boiling storm; clouds scudded beneath her feet and a sudden bolt of lightning illuminated a landscape far below that looked like the surface of the moon. She stepped quickly back as something huge and black-winged soared close to the edge, veered, and was gone.

“What was that? What
is
this?”

“This is the Pass of Ages,” Gremory said, surprising her. Shadow looked at the demon. Gremory’s impassive face didn’t do “startled,” but Shadow thought there was a trace of disconcertment in the demon’s eyes. “Even I thought this was a myth.”

“It isn’t a myth. It was closed in the apparent world aeons ago, after the first fall of the Garden. But it opened again when the Skein vanished.”

“Do you know where the Skein have gone?” Shadow demanded.

“If I knew that, I would have gone after them.”

Angels cannot lie, she had once read. She nodded.

“But they kept this—this gap closed?”

“Or they professed to do so.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Skein deal in the highest of high magic. They were the lords of the world: their cities spanned the shores of Earth before the Flood, and those were drowned when a meteor hit the planet. Those of the Skein that were left vowed it would never happen again: they created the Liminality, wove it out of the legends of the ancestors of man, and then took refuge in it. Their magic is a blend of demonic and angelic: the forces which powered creation, two halves of the same whole. But the Skein didn’t know everything and they did not realise that their sanctuary was built on a crack: the Pass of Ages. Or perhaps they did realise, and thought they could control it. Stories enter the Liminality through the Pass, it’s part of the overlight. When it was closed, they seeped around its edges, and when it opens, they rush through. It is not fully open yet, and it is guarded. And there is a spell to close it.”

“Was that one of the guards just now?” Shadow looked down into the roil of indigo, silver, black. “That thing I saw?”

“No,” the Messenger said. “That was one of the servants of the Storm Lords.
That
is a guard.”

It was coming towards them, stepping on the clouds like someone walking across a thundering sea. It was a bright outline of a man, a silhouette shot with light, and its hair flared in a nimbus of golden blue around its head. It carried, upright, a flaming sword. Shadow drew the blade.

“Leave it,” the demon said, sharply. “Not even star iron will cut it.”

The Messenger held up a hand. The guard strode out of the storm, onto the rock and it sizzled and fused beneath its feet. Shadow could see its eyes now and they were so bright that she had to look away. Elemiel spoke a name and the thing faltered, but only for a moment. It swung the sword. Shadow felt the Messenger summon his power, drawing it into himself and sending it out but she could also feel this was not enough.

“It shouldn’t be able to see us!” the Messenger said.

His hand shot out and a curling whip of light knocked the sword aside but the guard swung again and the whip split apart.

“I can see,” Shadow heard Gremory say, “that I’m going to have to help you out.”

Black fire joined the whip of light. The ground shuddered beneath Shadow’s feet and she stumbled. As she went down on one knee she saw the sun-dark lash of light strike out and tear the sword from the guard’s hand. It fell backwards into the abyss without a sound and Shadow was falling too, into a hole of night.

• Forty-Five •

“I know the sword can look after itself,” Mercy hissed, ”but I don’t want to leave it here unless we have to.” It wasn’t as though it was her own sword: it belonged to the Library, but the thing was at least partly alive and the thought of it in the hands of the Court stuck in her throat.

“It will be under lock and key,” Perra warned.

“But do you know
where
?”

Despite the loss of the sword Mercy was, however, in reasonable spirits. The thought of the look on Deed’s face when he opened the door and found her missing was a notion she would treasure for some time, whatever other advantages he might have taken during her time with the Court. That, Mercy thought with a trace of smugness, was what came of underestimating other people’s reading habits.

She had not slept, although to anyone watching—and surely such a chamber would be under observation—it would have looked as though she had lain down on the couch, covered herself with the blanket and passed into slumber. She had certainly closed her eyes. But no power of the Court could keep someone who knew what they were doing from investigating matters on the astral level and she had spent the night examining the wards of the room. Each of the four walls was locked with a quarter-sigil: unfamiliar in particular to Mercy, but familiar when it came to type. A sigil is a group of words and symbols, bound together like weaving or knitting. Find the end, even if it has been woven into the pattern, and you can unravel the sigil.

Deed’s own strengths lay in the north, and in the Western Quarter where the Court resided. Mercy wasn’t too familiar with the South, but she did know the designs of the East; her other mother, Sho, had taught her well. Magic that tasted of aniseed and ginger. Not the snow-and-sea-salt of the north, or the greengrowing spells of the Southern Quarter, but something with which Deed was not, Mercy thought, all that familiar.

She found the sigil’s end in a name: a demon of the East. She did not speak the name aloud, but she whispered a syllable, over and over again, beneath her breath and without moving her lips, until the name began to fray like a pulled thread. Mercy uttered another syllable, pulling gently. In her mind’s eye, on the astral, she crouched by the sigil, which was inscribed in red and gold upon the wall, tugging at its corner. And quite suddenly the sigil began to unravel, looping out into Mercy’s hands until deactivated.

She did not act at once. She yawned, mumbled, stirred, and sat up, hoping that the sigil’s demise wouldn’t trigger some kind of alarm. If so, she would soon find out. Mercy got up from the couch and stretched, then wandered around the room. When she reached the western wall, she glanced up. A transparent oval had appeared in the middle of the wall, with the golden-eyed form of Perra peering through it.

Mercy let her gaze glide over the
ka.
She saw Perra mouth, “Wait.” Then the
ka
breathed out. A mist began to fill the room, feeding from shadows and the play of the flickering lamp that stood by the bed. Mercy stepped forwards to the hole in the wall and suddenly it was like facing a mirror. She stood there, looking into her own dark eyes.

“What the hell?” Mercy breathed.

“When you fell off the turret, this
ka
took the homunculus and extended it. This is just an illusion; the core remains. It will replace you for a time, then it will decay into dust. But you can’t leave now. Deed’s on his way. Once he’s gone, we will do the switch.”

“All right,” Mercy said. If Deed had placed anything else in the cell, anything that would betray she was no longer present, the homunculus would hopefully be enough to fool it. She backed into the room and the mist dispelled. When she once more looked at the wall, it was solid.

Later, when Deed had gone, Perra once more opened the hole in the wall. Mercy had been on tenterhooks throughout Deed’s visit; she had been sure he would notice the damaged sigil. But he had given no sign of having done so and now, for him, it would be too late. Mercy left her mute, unresponsive double sitting in her place with the book and fled through the wall.

This led them to the point of rescuing the sword. Mercy knew they had to act fast: it was only a matter of time before Deed or someone else discovered her escape and sounded the alarm.

“The library? Do you think he’d have put it in there?”

“I can find my way back,” Perra said, “if we need.”

But first, the roof. The two books were still where Mercy had left them, on the ledge by the window. Then they raced around the passages, down steps and up stairs. The library door was opening. As Mercy flattened herself behind a wall hanging, the door banged and the disir girl came out, heels clicking. Today she wore a gown of grey velvet and her face was once more remote and cold. She was writing something on a pad as she walked.

As soon as she had gone, Mercy slipped into the room. The same rows of grimoires; the same air of fermenting occult strangeness. The Irish sword lay on a slab of slate, bound in silver. Mercy reached out and wrenched it free. Moments later, an alarm sounded, shrieking at astral level throughout the building. She did not know, and cared less, whether it was as a response to the theft of the sword or in answer to her own escape. With Perra at her heels, she ran out of the lab. A door at the far end led onto an outside balcony, which opened onto the same courtyard that had come close to being decorated by Mercy’s plummeting body the day before. It was perhaps ten feet to the ground. Mercy ran along the balcony and at the end a door opened and the white gibbon-thing from the dungeons was loosed. It screamed, bounding towards her. As it leaped, Mercy skewered it with the sword, gutting it mid-flight. The monkey-devil howled and like the homunculus, wizened around the blade, diminishing until only a few bloody white ribbons fluttered about the hilt. The sword cried out in triumph; Mercy was not inclined to tell it to shut up. She ran to the end of the balcony and looked through the door. The Court was now chaotic with shouting and running footsteps. Mercy sprang over the rail and dropped down to the courtyard, trying to orient herself. The outer perimeter wall of the Citadel had been visible through the windows of the laboratory: that meant that the main square lay directly ahead and they were at ground level. Mercy ran through a door, down a passage, and came out into the atrium.