The Mortal Knife

by D. J. McCune

  Clotho smiled. ‘This is where I make things.’ She unlatched a huge wooden door and stepped inside. Adam followed, peering into the gloom. ‘Let there be light,’ Clotho said softly and from nowhere a warm, golden glow filled the air around. He was looking at the world’s biggest sewing room.

  It was staggering. Inside the barn there were endless aisles of wooden shelves, stacked with spools and spools of thread. Some threads were fine and some were thick; some were pastel coloured while others almost burned with their own brightness in the dim light. One thing was for sure – the barn was deceptive. From the outside it looked big but inside it looked like this place went on forever.

  Clotho reached into her skirts and her silver spindle appeared. She led Adam down one of the endless aisles, through the towering rows of shelves. Adam had never seen so many colours and types of thread. It was like the biggest sewing supplier in the world. He was fascinated by the sheer variety. He couldn’t help stopping to look at some of the colours – then hurried to catch up with Clotho.

  What felt like hours later they emerged near the back of the barn in front of a series of vast pieces of spinning equipment. Some looked like they had been borrowed from a folk museum; others like they had been liberated from a high-tech factory churning out millions of metres of thread a day.

  Clotho gestured at the machinery. ‘I spend most of my time here. This is where I make my souls. And when they are made Lachesis measures them for the Tapestry of Lights.’

  Adam felt a vague disquiet that something as individual as a soul could be mass produced. ‘How many do you have to make every day?’

  ‘A few hundred thousand most days,’ Clotho said. She smiled at Adam’s stunned expression. ‘Remember, time moves differently here. A day in your world is a long, long time here. The first Fates spun every single soul by hand but with modern medicine there are so many mortals born that it is no longer possible. I still spin as many as I can with my spindle.’

  ‘But can’t you have a helper?’

  Clotho shrugged. ‘There are no helpers. We are what we are. This is just how things are done.’

  There it was again, that phrase – the favourite phrase in the Luman world. This is just how things are done. This was why only men were Lumen; why Chloe would marry a stranger and be sent to the far side of the world; why Morta could murder as many souls as she liked just because she had a quota. Adam thought about his father’s exhaustion and tried not to scowl. Was he the only one to ever think about changing anything? For all their swooping and keystones and balls, most of the Lumen he knew were like sheep, blindly following orders. ‘I see.’

  Clotho was studying him. ‘You are different from most of our kind, Adam Mortson. I have watched you for some time now.’

  A prickling sense of danger slid down Adam’s spine. ‘I’m not very interesting to watch.’ He tried to make a joke of it. ‘Now if you saw what my brother Luc gets up to you’d find him much more entertaining.’

  ‘Oh, but you are interesting. The things you do … ’ Clotho tailed off and tilted her head to one side, birdlike. ‘The thoughts you must think to act as you do. To put yourself in so much danger for strangers.’

  Adam stared at her, feeling sick. His mind was a black hole. There was nothing helpful in there right now; no smart comeback or brilliant explanation. How much did she know? He hadn’t planned for this. Stupidly he’d assumed that bringing him here meant she wouldn’t hurt him. Now he realised that it didn’t mean anything. He was just one soul, breaking laws that had been there for thousands of years, and Clotho could make a billion more souls in his place. Maybe he was a curiosity. She was probably going to kill him now.

  But as Clotho looked at him her eyes were shining. ‘I know why you save them,’ she said and her voice was barely above a whisper. ‘You see them as I see them. Every thread is precious. I weave this knowledge into as many threads as I can, as many souls as I can. The knowledge that every single human soul is precious.’

  Adam’s heart was thumping. So she did know what he was doing – and yet somehow she didn’t seem angry. ‘I just want to help people,’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t want to break the laws or get anyone into trouble. It’s just … I know when some of them are going to die. Not all the time but – sometimes I can stop it. I want to give them longer.’

  Clotho nodded but her face was sad. ‘She knows.’

  His heart kicked up a gear. He didn’t have to ask who Clotho was talking about. ‘Right.’

  ‘As they are mine to spin they are hers to sever.’ There was a bitterness creeping into her voice that Adam hadn’t heard before. ‘Atropos took as wisely and carefully as she could, bound though she was by the actions of mortals. Her successor has not yet learned wisdom. Maybe it will come in time.’ Clotho didn’t sound convinced.

  Adam hardly dared to ask the question but there would never be another chance. ‘Who made Morta a Fate? And you?’

  Clotho looked at him for a long moment. ‘We are all threads, Adam. Even the Lady Fates.’ She fell silent and Adam thought she wouldn’t say anything more but she sighed and shook her head. ‘We all have our freedom, within limits. Morta knows that someone is cheating her of souls and when she finds you she will kill you. She is free to do this, as I am free to try and save you. I have warned you but I can do no more. You are free to act as you choose but there are consequences. Tread carefully, precious soul.’

  Warmth filled Adam. When she called him ‘precious soul’ she meant it. All his life he’d felt like a failure, as if he was walking a tightrope, one step from disaster. Every other Mortson seemed to know their place in the world but he never had. He had been a disappointment to everyone – but not to Clotho. She was looking at him with something like love. It wasn’t favouritism; he had a feeling that she looked at every soul that way.

  As if she was reading his thoughts, Clotho smiled. ‘All of you passed through my hands on your way into your mortal life. All of you are known by me and valued by me, however short or long your thread is. Always remember that. Protect the other souls if you choose, but protect yourself too.’ Her face changed, growing weary. ‘I am glad to have spoken with you, Adam Mortson but now there is work to do. Other souls must pass through my hands, just as you once did.’ Her eyes left him and roamed over the nearest spools of thread. ‘They are waiting,’ she whispered and moved soundlessly to the shelves. ‘This one will be short and strong, bright and brittle.’ Even as she spoke she was gathering threads: a dark red, a fine gold, a thin black knotted cord. ‘You must leave me now.’

  Adam nodded even though she didn’t see. Her attention was gone, absorbed in her work as she twisted threads together, dropped her spindle and began to spin. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he should ask for directions, then decided against it. How could you interrupt the creation of a soul? Imagine the harm that could do. For a moment he thought about the evil humans could sometimes be capable of. Was there just a mistake in their thread? Maybe – but Adam wasn’t convinced. After all, as Clotho had said, every human had free will, just as the Fates did. How you used it, that was the important thing.

  He took a last look at Clotho and slipped away.

  Minutes later he was on the verge of regretting his decision. He had assumed the stacks would follow straight lines and lead him eventually back to the point where they had come into the barn – but in fact the stacks were bisected at intervals by other shelves of threads. It was hard not to get distracted and sneak a peek. Some of the threads were beautiful and as he veered off to have a look he would spot others and then others and before he knew what was happening he was in the middle of a great maze of shelves. He wandered fruitlessly, trying to find something familiar but the shelves went on as far as the eye could see.

  Adam stopped, unwilling to admit to feeling a pang of fear. He supposed he could call out to Clotho but would she even hear him? He had an awful feeling he could wander here forever, just as a soul could wander lost on the Unknown Roads. He stared a
round him, trying to get his bearings; trying to come up with some kind of plan that would get him out of there. In the end he admitted defeat and just started walking.

  After what felt like a long time, just as real panic might have set in, Adam squinted ahead and realised he could finally glimpse a wall at the far end of the row. He took off at a run, hoping there would be a corridor of some kind and not just a dead end. To his indescribable relief a path followed the line of the wall in both directions. Now all he had to do was follow the wall along until he reached the doorway.

  He didn’t walk for long before he found what he was looking for. The path ahead was cut off by a bookshelf and just before it was a plain, wooden door set into the wall. He opened it, expecting to see the light outside – only to find pitch-darkness ahead. Adam stopped, frustrated. Where was the door he had come in? This place seemed to go on forever. He could go back the way he came and hope to find another way outside – but what if there wasn’t one? Or what if he got lost again? He gritted his teeth. A doorway of any kind had to be better than no doorway at all.

  He stepped inside and stubbed his foot on a stair. There were no lights. Bending down and searching with his fingers, Adam could feel the edges of the bottom few steps, rising straight ahead into the darkness. His spirits sank but he began to climb, almost on his hands and knees, hoping that another doorway would reveal itself. The door into the barn closed behind him, plunging him into utter blackness. It reminded him of the stairway last time he had been in the Realm of the Fates but that had been a spiral staircase. This one rose straight up.

  Thankfully it was much shorter too. Adam had been tentatively climbing for only a minute when he raised his foot and brought it down into thin air. He almost toppled backwards down the stairs but managed to throw himself forward into the darkness instead, landing painfully on his hands and knees. There was something horribly familiar about it all. He had the same sensation of being a tiny speck at the centre of somewhere huge and cavernous.

  He could guess where he was. The trouble was, last time he’d been here Morta had been the one to light the place up. Still, he’d seen Clotho in action – calling for light, bringing rain to a standstill with a raised hand. In this realm things could be manipulated with words and intention. The question was, were the Fates the only ones who could do this? He cleared his throat as quietly as possible and whispered, ‘Let there be light.’

  For a long moment nothing happened and Adam felt a jolt of terror, alone in the dark in this forbidden place. Then, just as before, a faint glow crept into the air around him and points of brilliant light appeared on the walls, racing along like sparks on petrol, spreading out and illuminating everything – a vast, globe appearing all around him with Adam the axis at the centre of the wheel. He was standing once again before the Tapestry of Lights.

  He knew he shouldn’t be here but seeing the Tapestry so close and on his own sent a thrill through Adam. Every soul in the world glowed in the wall before him. His eyes darted from country to country, thinking about all the people he knew. Threads blazed red and gold and green and white, like a rainbow of fireflies. He stepped away from the stairwell and searched until he found the tiny knots of Britain and Ireland, high up out of reach, perched alone on the edge of the vast darkness of the Atlantic. Up close the lights seemed magnified. The threads were no ordinary pieces of cotton or wool. They were alive and moving, a great swirling river of lights weaving together in a kind of harmonic dance.

  Adam wasn’t sure how long he stood there for. It was mesmerising, letting his eyes roam endlessly over the Tapestry, knowing that his own light glowed there somewhere. Absorbed in what he was seeing something jarred him back to the present with a faint sense of irritation. It took a moment for his mind to register the sounds behind him and when it did it sent alarm bells ringing in Adam’s head.

  Voices. He could hear voices. Someone was coming.

  Chapter 16

  There was no time for panic or even thought. Adam took the instinctive path of every hunted animal and fled towards the darkness – but there was nowhere to hide. The chamber was empty of furniture and decoration so even if he was able to will something into existence all it would do was draw attention to him. He ran towards the wall in the black space of the Atlantic where only the occasional tiny pinpricks of light shone and threw himself flat on the ground. I need to hide, he thought fiercely. Make the shadows darker, blacker. Make me invisible. There was no way of knowing if he had succeeded in changing anything.

  The voices were close now. In Adam’s eagerness to see the Tapestry he had completely failed to notice that his stairwell wasn’t the only one still there. A few seconds later Morta’s familiar face appeared. She rose up from her stairwell and stalked into the chamber looking beautiful and furious and deadly, the Mortal Knife gleaming at her side. Adam willed himself into the floor and felt himself sinking down into the shadows. Not too far, he thought hastily. He didn’t want to suffocate.

  Morta was talking in short, angry bursts. A figure rose up behind her – a man – and as he turned Adam felt a cold shock of recognition. He was looking at Darian. Adam frowned from the shadows, some of his fear displaced by anger. There was something a bit too convenient about all this. Adam knew that the Frenchman hated Nathanial, blaming him in some way for thwarting his plans to marry Elise. It didn’t help that Darian was a Seer like Adam and one of the few people who could know that souls were being saved. Finding him here with Morta was more than a coincidence, Adam was sure of it.

  Morta was close now; close enough for Adam’s senses to scream in warning. Fortunately her focus was on the wall where Adam had been standing just a minute earlier, staring at the Kingdom of Britain. Her eyes were furious but her voice was calm. ‘I have taken many extra souls and yet you tell me there have been no more souls saved?’

  Darian moved smoothly behind her. ‘The last I know of was three weeks ago in our physical time. But I cannot always be in Britain. My duties with the Concilium force me to travel frequently. Soon I will be able to return.’ He hesitated.

  Morta’s attention was on the lights ahead of her but she seemed to sense the Luman’s anxiety. ‘Speak freely.’

  Darian grimaced. ‘Your freedom with the Mortal Knife has caused … concern. We Curators have been called to session frequently. If you were to relax your efforts somewhat I could return to Britain for longer. My absence would not be noted. I could gather information. Find the rogue and bring him to you.’

  ‘The son is the rogue.’ Just as Adam’s heart might have exploded in his chest Morta continued. ‘The second son. The boy Luc. I am certain of it.’

  Darian looked at her curiously. ‘What makes you think this?’

  ‘He is in love with danger, as I was once.’ Morta smiled, almost fondly, and studied the glowing map of Britain. The tip of the Mortal Knife glinted as she turned it over between her fingers. ‘Such a bright light. Such a great shame to cut it off and yet … ’ She shrugged. ‘I shall take my time and enjoy it.’

  ‘I must prove it.’ Darian’s voice was low and urgent. ‘There must be evidence I can bring before the Concilium. Do nothing yet Morta. Be patient.’

  Adam could tell straight away that Darian had said the wrong thing. Morta pulled back from him and her face became cold. ‘Be patient? You tell me to be patient? Believe me, mortal, no woman survives in the Luman world without understanding patience.’

  Darian’s face was calm but his voice betrayed him. ‘I only wish to do things properly. The Kingdom of Britain is in disarray. The rogue alone is not to blame. The High Luman must bear his share of the blame.’

  ‘Perhaps you have been mistaken Darian. Perhaps there is no rogue, robbing me of souls. Perhaps you wish to use me for your own purposes.’ Morta stepped closer to Darian and slid the tip of her blade towards his belt. She moved her hand and the knife trailed up his torso, caressing his neck and coming to a standstill under his chin, tilting the Frenchman’s head back. ‘What game are you play
ing with me, Luman?’

  Darian stared straight ahead and didn’t flinch. ‘I would never be so foolish, my Lady Fate.’

  ‘No.’ Morta studied him for a moment, then tapped the flat of her blade against his cheek. ‘It would be foolish indeed.’ She bent her head and kissed the hollow of his throat, then turned back to the wall. Behind her Adam watched Darian relax. Morta stared at the Tapestry of Light for a long time. ‘A little longer. I shall give you a little longer. And then I shall bring such a wave of deaths that the rogue will have no choice but to intervene. And you will be waiting to expose him.’

  She turned and strode back to the stairwell without even looking at Darian. The Frenchman watched her and Adam saw the spasm of fear and hatred that crossed his face – but a moment later he followed her, impassive once more. Leaving Adam alone.

  It took Adam a few minutes to find his courage and leave the shadows. His mind was racing. All the extra deaths in the Kingdom of Britain – they weren’t an accident. They were there to try and draw him out. All he had wanted to do was save some lives. Now because of him more people than ever were dying.

  He felt hot and sick with guilt – then forced himself to stop and think. This wasn’t just about him – it was about Morta and Darian. After all, Clotho said the old Atropos had chosen wisely and spared as many souls as she could. Morta on the other hand seemed to delight in the deaths. He thought of the caressing way she held the Mortal Knife and shivered. Who in their right mind would give someone like Morta that kind of power? He knew the Fates were only another link in the chain. There were higher powers than them. Somebody somewhere had appointed Morta – and they had made a mistake.

  As for Darian … Adam felt a fresh wave of rage. Darian didn’t care about the law or the Fates. All Darian cared about was Elise and getting back at Nathanial. Without meaning to Adam had given him the opening he needed.

  Worst of all – they thought it was Luc! Adam could understand why. Luc was cool and in control and a little bit devilish. Maybe this was why girls liked him so much – even Morta. It was also why Adam felt invisible beside him and for once this might be a good thing. But how could he stand by and let Luc get killed for something he didn’t do? What if Morta lured Luc to see her, just as Clotho had persuaded Adam back into the Realm of the Fates? Luc was just arrogant enough to believe that a Fate wanted to meet him for a date, not that she wanted to kill him!