by Liz Williams
When the monorail reached the Gate, it slowed to a halt. Guards got on, accompanied by security golems: this was not like crossing from West to East. Mercy had to hand over her sigilometer, which was checked, and her city pass. She was subjected to a scan of the eye, and then, to her great distaste, a drop of her blood was taken. After studying the results of that test, the guard unthawed noticeably and said, “Heading home?”
“Visiting family,” Mercy said. It might have been true, after all.
“Have a nice time.” After a quarter of an hour, when the other passengers were checked, the train slid through the Gate into winter.
The snow had melted to some degree, leaving patches of black stone along the pavement. Here, the buildings were massive-fortresses of wood, iron, and stone, away from the grace of the Eastern Quarter or the whimsicality of the Western-yet still impressive. Mercy still did not feel she belonged, however.
When they reached the first terminus, she got off the train. The person she was hoping to find was loitering at the entrance, reading a newspaper: a small middle-aged man with a long nose, and the universal badge of a City Reader on his coat.
“Good afternoon,” Mercy said. “I’m looking for an address.”
“You’re in luck,” the Reader said, folding his newspaper. “Maps won’t help you, but I can, and I can also tell you that there was a significant shift around the Black Canal region last night, resulting in a rearrangement of some blocks.”
“I rely on your expertise,” Mercy said.
“You’re very kind. Some people,” here his expression became bitter, “begrudge the expense and no doubt they are still wandering lost about the city. On Earth? Fine. Things stay put. Here they don’t.”
“I value knowledge,” Mercy said.
He nodded. “As a Librarian should.”
She showed him the address. His long nose twitched in surprise, like a mouse’s.
“This is old Mr Salt’s place.”
“You know him?”
“Everyone knows him. He mends lamps.”
He gave Mercy directions and summoned a steamsled for her, happily devoid of severed heads. Well worth the money, she thought as she dropped the coins into the Reader’s gloved hand and thanked him for his assistance.
The sled headed up the road and into a maze of back streets: Mercy could see an enormous building towering over the rooftops. She reached out and tapped the driver on the shoulder.
“What’s that?” she shouted, over the roar of the sled’s engine.
“Bleikrgard,” came the driver’s reply. “Where the Lords meet.”
Mercy nodded. The lampmender’s place, tucked away between two taller houses, was more her style, she felt. It was half timbered, in black and red, and bore a small crest above a leaded window. With Perra at her heels, she knocked at the door.
Thirty-Three
Shadow woke, blinking at the stars. The veil was thin across her face, its infinitesimal weight a comfort. She lay on her back, on what felt like a pallet of straw, on the courtyard in front of Elemiel’s dwelling. As she watched, a star shot overhead, bolting down in a trail of green fire. She groped at her sash and found the sun-and-moon blade hanging safely in its leather sheath.
Once she was assured of her veil and the knife, Shadow was more concerned with what was happening within. She shut her eyes and looked inside her mind: there was nothing there, except a sense of unfamiliar peace. The spirit had gone. Shadow breathed out, a sigh of relief and got unsteadily to her feet. Neither Elemiel nor Gremory were anywhere in sight. The crescent moon was riding high above a handful of cloud, but the desert seemed to shine with its own faint light, casting odd moving shadows across the rocks. Shadow remembered the figure she had seen and shivered.
Across the roof, steps led down to the platform of rock by which they had entered. Shadow went down the steps and looked in through the black arch, but there was no sign of the demon or the angel. The chamber was dark and quiet. She took the slope that led down from the platform, out into the desert.
Its peace mirrored the landscape within. She was reminded that it had been years since she had last been truly alone in the desert, without angel or demon or passenger. The journey she had made to find the knife had been like this, with the great starlit bowl of the sky hanging over the shifting sands and the green glow of twilight and dawn.
But now she was not alone; at least, if Gremory and the angel were still even here. Perhaps, their work done, they had departed for other realms, and she was alone. Shadow was not arrogant enough to think this had all been done as a favour to her. There were other agendas, more layers of meaning.
Then she came around an edge of rock and there was the demon. Gremory was in human form, barefoot and wearing a robe of black silk. She was crouching among the stones and as Shadow watched, her hand darted out, re-emerging with something spiny and wriggling. A scorpion. The demon stood, opened her mouth, bit it in half, and then swallowed each half. She turned to Shadow, a bead of venom glittering on her lip. She licked it away with the swipe of a long tongue and smiled.
“You’re awake.”
Shadow nodded.
“I-it’s gone. Where did it go?”
“Ah.” The demon had the grace to look a little abashed. “I need to explain something to you.”
“What?”
“Come up to the chamber.”
“Gremory?”
“Come.” The demon strode past her up the slope, beckoning. Shadow followed with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. Gremory did not pause at the angel’s chamber, but went past it, up onto the roof.
“There,” she said. “Do you see?”
Shadow frowned into the darkness. Something was sitting on the lip of rock opposite, something small and tailed. It raised its head and she caught a glimpse of eyes that were the colour of roses, a curl of horn at its brow.
“It’s a demon.”
“Only a little one. A small spirit, a genus loci. You shouldn’t be able to see it, Shadow.”
“Then why can I?”
“Well. Elemiel did his best.”
“And he got rid of the thing in my head.” The demon was looking somewhat shifty. “Gremory? Didn’t he?”
“He was largely successful,” the demon said. “He got it out of your mind, but it went-elsewhere.”
“What? Where?”
“Into your flesh. I don’t know whether it even meant to. I think it was so afraid of him that it split into a thousand pieces, and those fragments went into you-into your fingertips, your eyes, your ears… ”
“So now I’m-what? Infested?”
“Look on the bright side,” the demon said. “Try to see it as an upgrade.”
Thirty-Four
“I can’t do anything before next Fourth Day,” the lampmender said when he opened the door. “If it’s urgent, it’ll have to wait.”
Mercy had been expecting a little old man, like Einstein in an apron, bristling with eccentricity. It just went to show that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Salt was large and lugubrious, with bloodhound jowls and a figure like a pear. He looked at her without expression.
“I didn’t come about a lamp,” Mercy told him.
The stare increased in intensity. “You’d better come in.”
Once inside, he sat her down in a leather armchair. The shop did, at least, ring true to type. It was crowded and, for a lampmender’s, surprisingly dark. Maybe they were like cobbler’s children, going unshod.
“My mother had your address in a box,” Mercy said.
“I’ve got a lot of customers.”
“I don’t think she would have kept it if she’d just been a customer,” Mercy said. She did not add that romance was unlikely to have been a consideration; regardless of Greya’s sexual inclinations, Salt was not an immediate candidate for a burning lifelong passion. But she did not want to hurt his feelings.
“What was your ma’s name?”
“Greya Fane.”
“You obviously remember her.”
“I’ll say. The last time I saw Greya Fane, she was drenched to the skin, shivering fit to bust, and had just killed a man.”
“I see,” Mercy said, blankly.
“That was-what? Over forty years ago now. I was an apprentice at the time. This was my uncle’s shop. I knew Greya from up north; we’d both come down together from Aachven. Didn’t know one another well-different backgrounds. My family were woodcutters. Uncle broke out, wanted to make something of himself. Greya wanted to get away from the north and her family; I paid for her train ticket. Didn’t hear from her for several months, then one night, she turned up on the doorstep and said someone had attacked her. She’d killed him, apparently, though she never said how.”
“Did you call the authorities?”
Salt hesitated. “No. And I’ll tell you why. I felt us northerners ought to stick together a bit and I was… quite fond of Greya. I dried her clothes on the stove and gave her a day’s head start before I spoke to the Watch. But then, no body ever turned up. I did make some enquiries but no one missing, no one hurt… so I thought, forget it. And I did, pretty much until now. Funny, you don’t look a bit like her, and yet I can feel her in you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have told you all that. That, though,” he nodded in the direction of the ka, “that’s not hers.”
“No. Greya’s family were Wolfheads.”
“They were more than that. They were shamans. But for all that, they were good to the people around them.”
“If they were so great, why did Greya want to leave?”
“She wanted more. You know what girls are like. Wanted to see the bright lights.”
Mercy had the impression that there was something Salt wasn’t telling her. There was something else she wanted to know. “Have you ever heard of a woman named Mareritt?”
Thirty-Five
Being a partial ifrit was, Shadow was discovering, a step up from being merely possessed. Perhaps the demon had not been so sarcastic after all, in her talk of an upgrade. The voice in her head had gone, and she was conscious of another dimension, opening around her. She could see the lines of shimmering light around things, their essences and souls. She could hear the faint song of the stars, the whispered incantations of the moon. And the desert was busy, filled with flickering, darting spirits and the ghosts of small creatures.
Another star was falling. Shadow stood on the roof and watched it descend: it was slower than the other meteorite, and the flame it trailed behind it was a sunset pink… Shadow dived, straight off the roof. She hit the ground in a curl, arms folded over her head, and rolled under a lip of rock. The flower burst soundlessly, the world illuminated with a searing blaze of flame. She saw the rocks through her eyelids, imprinted in silhouette, and then her head rang.
“Well,” Gremory said, into her ear. “That was exciting.”
The angel’s beehive hut had gone, obliterated into a thousand shattered fragments of stone. Like the spirit, Shadow thought, cascading outwards into the desert of her flesh. Slowly, she uncurled, thinning the veil as she did so. The demon was standing beside her. Gremory wore a cloak and it billowed out behind her in a wind that Shadow could not feel, snapping like a banner. Her eyes blazed like garnets and her hair was free: it streamed out. She said something in a long string of syllables which should, Shadow felt, have hurt her ears, but did not. She remembered demon speech and it was like fire in the ears-this new possession seemed to mitigate it. She whispered a prayer.
Some distance away, Shadow could see the stamen-core of the flower, burning molten into the sand, which fused around it. Runnels of vitrification spread outwards. Shadow got to her feet and stood beside the demon. She would have taken action herself, but the stamen was cooling, more rapidly than it should have, fading into blue and then growing ashen and black.
“That’s all I can do,” Gremory said.
“What about Elemiel?”
“What about him? He isn’t here.”
“His house was.”
The demon laughed. “He doesn’t need a house. It’s just an affectation. What interests me is the target.”
“I was in a flower attack a few days ago,” Shadow said.
“I heard. In the Medina.” The demon smiled her slanted smile. “Looks like you’ve attracted someone’s attention.”
Shadow sighed. “That’s been happening a lot lately.”
She waited out the rest of the night with the veil at maximum thickness. No point in tempting fate-she felt she’d done quite enough of that lately. The demon squatted on her heels nearby, her gaze fixed on the crumbling ash of the stamen. She did not move; as before, she might as well have been carved from stone.
Towards dawn, a faint wind rose up, stirring eddies of loose sand and scattering the ash of the stamen. Shadow watched it crumble, flaking away and skittering across the desert floor. Apart from the glassy sand around it, it might never have existed, a brief, violent dream. With a rustle of robes, the demon stood. Rather to Shadow’s relief, she did not appear in search of breakfast.
“So,” Gremory said. “The angel has not returned and it looks like someone’s trying to kill you. I suggest we return to the city.”
Shadow gave a slow nod. She was reluctant to let matters stand, but they seemed to have reached a dead end. “What about the possession?” she asked. Gremory gave her a long, contemplative look.
“I’ll see what else can be done. For the moment, make the most of it.”
From the sound of it, Gremory was in a terrible mood. There was an eyeblink flicker. The demon sat before her, riding in state on the back of the black camel.
“Hang on,” Shadow said. “Which one of those are you?”
The demon looked puzzled. “Both.”
The camel knelt, looking at her out of a knowing eye. “Which eyes do you see out of, then? Both sets?”
The camel nodded. Unnerved, Shadow climbed up behind the human half of the demon and the camel wheeled around, heading out of the rising sunlight.
They had been travelling for about an hour, with the sun strengthening at Shadow’s back, when the mirage first shimmered up on the western horizon. At first, Shadow thought it was the city itself and frowned, wondering how they’d covered so much ground so quickly. Then, as the image grew clearer, she realised it was an illusion, conjured out of heat and sand and air.
It appeared to be a fortress, rising sheer out of the desert floor. She could see the castellated turrets, the massive battlements. It looked like something the crusaders might have left. A flag, bearing a device like a spiked golden wheel, snapped above the fortifications and she saw the glint of metal-armour? weapons?-on the battlements themselves, catching the sunlight for a moment before flicking out of view. The walls were of sandstone, a warm ruddy gold.
The demon slowed. Her gait became sidling, circuitous, but then she moved on. As they drew closer to the mirage, Shadow began to understand the reason for her hesitation: this image, out of air, looked very solid. Then, as they grew nearer still, she saw that it was solid. Her new senses, borrowed from the spirit, caught sight of wisps and curls of mist moving with purpose along the terraces.
“What the hell?”
“We’re too visible,” Gremory said. “Get down.”
Shadow slid off. Next moment, the demon was standing beside her, this time in her human form alone. Gremory took hold of the cloak and cast it outwards. It billowed on the air, a pale, transparent red, covering them both.
“It’s like your veil,” the demon explained.
Shadow nodded. They walked down the slope towards the fortress. Up close, she could see the immense blocks of stone from which it had been fashioned. It was far larger than it should have been, and she could only presume that it was some relic from a story, inexplicably made manifest here in the middle of the desert. There were still no signs of life
, only the faint traces of mist above them. But Shadow could not help but feel they were being watched.
Any question as to how they might get into the fort was rendered immaterial by the fact that the great doors at the base of the rock were wide open.
“Hmmm,” the demon said. Shadow laughed.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m not the trusting sort.”
“This reminds me of something.”
“It’ll be a tale of some kind. I’ve been trying to think-it’s familiar, but I don’t know where it’s from.”
By now they were immediately under the archway. Soot-black curves of rock stretched above them and there was a sudden cool damp breath, out of the morning heat. Shadow saw a courtyard immediately ahead, sunlit, with a splashing fountain. The sound took her back to the Shah’s courtyard and she shivered in the coolness. The demon shot her a sharp red glance.
“What is it?”
“Memory. I don’t think we should go further.”
“I want to see,” Gremory said.
They walked on, cautious. Shadow hesitated, but it seemed that the demon’s mind was made up and Shadow did not want to risk heading back to the city without her. She could see diamonds of light about the fountain; they reminded her of the spirit, fracturing. It was not a welcome recollection. The demon’s veil cast a rosy light over everything, a distraction. But the courtyard was empty of everything except the fountain and a small striped cat, washing itself.
“Hello,” Shadow said.
“Don’t talk to it. You don’t know what it might be.”
A fair point coming from a shapeshifting camel, Shadow thought. The cat glanced up incuriously and rose, sauntering into the dark colonnade which surrounded the courtyard. This was the middle of the building. Above the low colonnade the walls rose straight up for several hundred feet. Looking up was like looking down a well, and gave Shadow a moment of vertigo. They followed the cat under the colonnade. Here, in the shadows, a series of doors and steps led upwards. At the top of the stairs, the demon suddenly hauled Shadow back so hard that she stumbled.
