by Liz Williams
Worldsoul
Liz Williams
What if being a librarian was the most dangerous job in the world?
Worldsoul, a great city that forms a nexus point between Earth and the many dimensions known as the Liminality, is a place where old stories gather, where forgotten legends come to fade and die-or to flourish and rise again. Until recently, Worldsoul has been governed by the Skein, but they have gone missing and no one knows why. The city is also being attacked with lethal flower-bombs from unknown enemy. Mercy Fane and her fellow Librarians are doing their best to maintain the Library, but… things… keep breaking out of ancient texts and legends and escaping into the city. Mercy must pursue one such dangerous creature. She turns to Shadow, an alchemist, for aid, but Shadow-inadvertently possessed by an ifrit-has a perilous quest of her own to undertake.
Liz Williams
Worldsoul
The first book in the Worldsoul Trilogy series, 2012
To Trevor and Kari.
Prologue
Fire tore through the library, scattering burning scrolls across the floor, inscribing smooth marble with letters of ash. With a breath of the sea wind through the glassless window, the words were gone. The pale-haired woman turned, a silhouette against the fire, took a dying word in her hand and stared at it. Flames licked the hem of her robe, leaving the linen untouched.
“This is an intriguing tongue,” she said. “Runic. From before the ice, perhaps? What do you think?”
“Beheverah.” The name was accented with exasperation. “We need to act. Before They realise what’s happening. Before They come.”
The woman arched an eyebrow. “You overestimate them. They’re savages, nothing more. Mindless… Although I grant you that their masters are not. There’s no rush.”
“Maybe not in the Liminality.” His voice was still sharp. “But here-this doesn’t work the same way. And we need to take action before it’s too late. Think of all the stories here they will devour. You can look at them at leisure, later, if you wish. All those stories,” he coaxed.
“Very well.” Beheverah sighed. It was so interesting in here, with everything changing so quickly, the flames climbing up to swallow marble and paper alike. She brushed a smouldering fragment from her skirts. “If you really think so… ”
Shouts were coming from outside, cries of panic and dismay trickling up from the harbour.
“The scrolls!” someone cried, an old voice, a heart breaking. “The scrolls!”
Raising her gaze beyond the blazing papyri, the woman could see out past the torchlight on the quay: a green sky, a greener sea, merging into one as the twilight deepened. A good time to steal something away; an edge in time. She reached out and touched her companion’s fingertips, stood on tiptoe, called on the horizon and the dying day. His murmuring voice summoned up power, drawing it from the fire and the cracking stone that surrounded them, making the spell concrete, then deconstructing it again. Beneath her bare toes, the library started to shift. She smiled. This was almost easy. She spoke three careful words, spells of moving, and the floor rippled as though she was standing on ocean.
More shouts. She knew what they’d see, those horrified observers. They’d see something that couldn’t possibly be happening: their beloved library-the greatest repository of knowledge in the world-first in flames and blazing, then starting to shimmer and glow, the gleam of magic blinding out the glow, then the whole magnificent columned structure meteor-shooting out of sight and taking its consuming fire with it.
Gone from Alexandria. Gone from Earth. But not gone forever.
One
At dawn, the distant hoot of the Golden Island steamer split the moist air and told Mercy Fane that it was time to get up. Mercy hauled herself out of bed. For an acknowledged insomniac, it was surprisingly difficult to get out from between the sheets, as though she might trick herself into dropping off after all. But work was beckoning; she’d told Nerren that she’d be in early. Big day today.
She dressed quickly in leather trousers and a crisp white shirt; oiled her hair and bound its springy coils in a club at the nape of her neck. She didn’t want any stray strands that something might be able to clutch. Then Mercy drew a line of kohl around each eye and inked the tattooed sigil spirals between her brows and around each shoulder-just in case-waiting a moment for each sigil to glimmer darkly, then fade to matte. After that, she fastened the ward-bracelets around her wrists and ankles, slipped a charm into the hole in her left earlobe, placed her sigilometer on its chain in her pocket, and was ready. A quick glance in the glass reassured her: Mercy Fane: Librarian, a chess-piece study in white and black.
She’d think about weapons later.
She went downstairs into the yellow-painted kitchen. Sunlight poured in through the branches of the apple tree outside the open window, the rosy fruit already ripening. Midsummer was past, the year was growing on. As she stared at the apples, the ka leaped in through the window to land on the table below.
“Morning, Perra. Good night?”
The ka yawned, stretching small leonine paws. Its grave golden eyes regarded her, from a human face. “Good enough.”
“Anything of interest?”
The ancestral spirit blinked. “Rumours. But there are always those. I have visited an astrologer, a friend. She says that there are curious configurations in the heavens.”
“There are always those, too.”
The ka nodded and sat back on its haunches. “Portents of change, throughout the city. Planetary alignments, signifying shifts of power.”
“Oh dear,” Mercy said. “Maybe the Seal is up to something again?”
“I do not know.”
“I don’t expect you to. I know it’s one place you can’t go.”
“They experiment on my kind,” Perra said.
“They experiment on everything,” Mercy replied. Bloody alchemists. It was different in the Eastern Quarter, where alchemy was a different, and honourable, science. Not so with the Seal, who regarded everything as grist for its sinister mill. She left the ka curled up on the couch and headed off to work.
Outside, the morning was already warm. Mercy walked along the canal bank, glancing down occasionally at the shoals of small golden fish whisking, in amoeboid commas, through the clear water. The city had known days when these canals ran red with blood-a long time ago now, but not quite long enough. And now there were these new attacks, the lethal flowers falling from the skies and bursting like bombs, the petals deadly shrapnel.
Mercy had only been a small child, but she still remembered the last days of the Long War, before the Quiet, and then the bloodspill of the Short. She felt a prickle at the back of her neck but the morning seemed peaceful enough.
On the Street of the Hunter, the cafés were already doing a roaring breakfast trade. Mercy stopped under an awning and bought a bun, eating it on her way to the Library. The way to work took her up the hill. As she climbed, she looked through the gaps in the buildings to the blue arc of sea, fringed with mimosa and oleander. Ahead, she could already see the Library and the other buildings of the Citadel, the gold-and-cream domes butter-bright against the morning sky, the gilded spell-vanes of the Court of the Bond glittering in the sunlight. She fancied for a moment that she could almost hear them creaking in the wind, turning on their spires to catch every whisper and breeze of passing magic and siphoning it down into the bubbling crucibles of the Court. But the roofs of the Court itself were darkly tiled: it sat like a jackdaw among doves, upon the hill. Black and bright-eyed, stealing anything shiny…
Still, it all looked so quiet from down here.
When she reached the steps of the Library, the bun was finished and Mercy’s monochrome outfit was covered in crumbs. She took a moment to brush them off. Why could sh
e never stay tidy, unlike the many chic women she saw coming out of the Citadel buildings first thing in the evening, their chignons intact and free of escaping tendrils, their shoes as polished as beetles’ wings? Mercy felt as though her clothes and hair were perpetually escaping from her control, in spite of a reassuring glance down at her now crumb-free shirt. Sure that her hair was coming loose, too, she checked it. It seemed smooth enough. For now, anyway.
At the top of the Library’s steps she paused again and looked out. From this height, you could see as far as the Eastern and Southern Quarters; although the Northern was blocked by the towers of the Citadel and the looming darkness of the Court, Mercy could still feel the blood-tug, the pull of ancestral tales. A very long way away, she could see the billow of the flags that flew from the Eastern minarets, marshalling winds to the burn of the Great Desert beyond. An azure banner, fringed like a centipede, snapped and sang above the distant dome of the Medina. Below, the faint rumble of the monorail slid up between the buildings, a low thunder. She caught a flash of brass and bronze as the little carriages whisked along it.
A long way, to the south and to the east. Longer than it looked. Mercy thought she could taste rain on the wind. She turned, pushed open the Library’s heavy bronze doors, and went inside.
There did not seem, at first, to have been any crises during the night. Good. The Elders had planned an inspection this morning and Mercy, Nerren, and their colleagues wanted everything to go smoothly. Things were quite unstable enough, Mercy thought, without the poor Elders having a conniption-at least, not more of one than they were having already.
However, the huge, echoing foyer of the Library was as austere and tranquil as ever; the smoke-dappled marble columns rising out of a floor so polished that it looked like a pool of grey-green water. Touches of silver-on lecterns, on the spine of the Great Book that stood on its plinth in the centre of the hall, on croziers and the Librarian’s Crown-caught the sunlight filtering in through glass that was stained black and white and grey; the windows being one of the few parts of the Library that were really new, untainted by ancient fire. Above, soaring above the motes of light and dust, flew the ghosts of birds.
“You’re early,” said Nerren, bustling out from behind the reception desk.
“I said I would be. Did anything-?”
“No.” Nerren’s brow creased. The Senior Librarian wore a man’s suit: narrow tapering trousers, cream silk shirt, a frock coat. A black curl of hair had been coaxed to rest on her brow; it looked varnished against her brown skin. Sigils glowed dark-bronze on cheeks and throat, in the manner of the Southern Quarter, but southerner though she was, Nerren had eyes like Mercy’s own; the same shape, the same shade. Dark and disapproving. Mercy sometimes wondered whether being a member of the Order of the Library had endowed her with a permanent frown. Now Nerren was frowning, too. Nerren added, in that beautiful musical voice with its accent of the Islands, “At least, not that I’m aware of. But I haven’t checked Section C.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Are you sure? Do you want some help before the Elders get here?”
“No, it’s all right. I’ll do it myself.” Mercy had entertained doubts about Section C for some weeks, and had not mentioned the extent of them to Nerren. The Senior Librarian had quite enough on her plate. But now she wondered whether Nerren knew anyway.
“There’s more. Bad news.” Nerren’s fluid voice was not suited to staccato, but it obviously matched her mood. “We’re due for a Citadel inspection as well. They’ll be coming on Third Day.”
“What, this Third Day?” Mercy stared at Nerren in dismay.
“Yes. That’s the whole point. Not to give us time to cover things up. I suppose we should be grateful they haven’t just showed up this morning. At least we’ve had some warning.”
“Two days,” Mercy mourned. “Doesn’t give anyone much time.”
“We haven’t been doing anything wrong, Mercy.” Nerren’s voice was sharp.
“No. We haven’t done anything wrong,” Mercy echoed, as if repeating it would make it true. And in a sense, it was true. It was just that they hadn’t been entirely… forthcoming.
Nerren gave her a beady look. “Section C. Do you want a coffee before you start?”
“Perhaps a stiff brandy.” She hadn’t meant it to sound quite so sour.
In the weapons room, Mercy stood considering her options.
The bow: taut as a razor’s edge, sensitive as the antenna of a moth. The bow, all gleaming silver-black, called to Mercy and she whispered to it, “Wait. Not long. I have to be sure.”
There were other bows, but only one that spoke to Mercy and of course, one could take none other.
It must be strange, Mercy reflected, to be someone to whom no weapons spoke. But then again, such people probably didn’t become Librarians.
The sword: a thin-whipping rapier, also in black, also in silver, with a curling intricacy of guard fretworked in Kells-coils. Old Irish, from the look of it. Mercy had not seen this blade before, it was newly arrived from the lands of Earth, and its slender length sparkled with stories. It spoke to Mercy of moorland, peat-dark under a new moon, of bogs of sooty water into which horses vanished, of cold high cliffs and seas like thunder. A broch, rising out of the heather, grey as an old bone, haunted by the ghosts of the warrior dead.
“You,” Mercy murmured. “Might take you.”
A knife: short-bladed, stoical, with little to say. Mercy passed it by, but not because of its relative silence.
She paused before the guns, but guns boasted too much for Mercy’s liking. They were not quite a woman’s weapon, she always thought, though she knew those who considered differently. They shouted to her of their kills: street kills, Northern Ireland, in Spain, the islands of the Small Realms, Nicaragua, Los Angeles. They had their own legends and she did pause before a musket, speaking of blood and bayou.
“Not in this day and age,” Mercy said aloud. She’d probably blow her hand off if she touched the thing. She was almost at the end of the armoury now, by the high windows that looked out over the Citadel as if the presence of the weapons alone was sufficient to protect it. The rows of weaponry and munitions stretched back to infinity-point, the armoury far larger from within than from without, as befitted the nature of the Library. Mercy walked back to the Irish rapier, said, “I’ll take you, then.” To the bow, she said, “Next time.” The bow acquiesced with grace; she would have expected no less from it. But she had a feeling that the sword was right for the day, without knowing why. If she knew why, the story would be over.
The sword had a scabbard-ebony leather, slightly worn but carefully tooled. She strapped it around her waist, slid the sword inside and walked from the armoury, taking care to bolt and bar and spell-ward the door as she did so. Things had been stolen before and not just weapons. The sword tapped lightly against her boots as she walked, a deathwatch clicking.
Section C was located up ten flights of stairs, the winding steps giving a panoramic view of the Library entrance hall below. She could see Nerren’s bent head, an ink blot against the marble of her desk. From this height, she was level with the bird-spirits: their shadowy wings beating in ceaseless rotation. They did not appear unduly concerned, but this meant little. Nerren and Mercy had long since given up using the bird-spirits as a barometer of danger, their canaries in the mine.
Finally, she reached the tenth floor landing and paused before the door. Moving with great care, one hand on the hilt of the Irish sword, Mercy leaned an ear to the door.
Inside, something was whispering.
Two
The man stood at the window, staring out over the fragile scattering of roses in Citadel Square. He watched as a golem trudged across the flagstones, the spell parchment protruding from its half-open mouth like the tip of a tongue. It carried a lead box, something from the Court’s own vaults, and Jonathan Deed wondered idly who had sent what to whom. As Abbot General of the Court, he preferred to know as much as
possible about what was going on in the Court. How else could he fulfil his office as the Court’s Abbot? More importantly, how could he attain his own goals?
Thick walls and thick glass cut out the city’s murmur, the creak of the spell-vanes on the roofs above. But his office in the Court was not far from the Library, and Deed could almost hear the weight of history, years of hushed whispers in marble corridors, years of policy-making. But now the Skein were gone. Deed smiled, thinking of that. Over there, the Librarians believed they were the ones running the world-and so they had been, but only on the microcosm. The macrocosm, ah, now that was something else entirely.
“Abbot General,” the woman said. “What is it? You’re making me nervous.” She stood, just inside the door, her feet on the outer border of the Persian carpet.
“Perhaps you should be nervous,” he said, without turning his head. He tapped the tightly-rolled scroll on the study’s windowsill. “It’s falling to us, Darya. Did you ever think you’d see that day?”
“No. But maybe-you did?” There was the faintest trace of accusation in her voice, and he grinned, turning to her at last. Amusing, how she tried not to recoil.
“Darya.” His voice was a caressing purr. “Mage Nem. You ought to be proud.”
“I am proud.” There was only a little hesitation in her voice and that was good enough. For the moment. Later on, maybe Darya would have to be taken down a peg or two, but there was no rush. Plenty more apprentices waiting in the wings, after all. The Sept had made sure of that in its breeding programme down the long years. Thinking of that, Deed studied her as she sat on the divan, deliberately not looking at him. He knew he frightened her-Abbots General were supposed to be intimidating-but, of course, that wasn’t the whole story. He could see the traces of it in her angular face: typically Northern Quarter with the high arched bones of her cheeks, the wide-set blue eyes, and square jaw. She looked so demure in her neat black gown, with the silver charms and wards dangling along the chain of her sigilometer. But there was more than demureness behind her face if you knew where to look, just as there was more than the human behind his own. As the sunlight grew stronger, you could see the silver light at the back of her eyes, a faint mirrorglow. And for a moment, the bones of her face seemed to shift into something not-human, so subtle that he doubted anyone not of the Sept would have noticed it. Naturally, if you looked at her with the sight-beyond-sight, the difference was a great deal more marked: the aura so indigo that it was nearly black, with a sparkle at the edges like distant starlight.
