by Liz Williams
“What are you looking for?” Deceptively casual.
“Why, I-just an idea.”
“What sort of idea?”
Darya was silent. Mercy saw her take a teetering step backwards on those bony spines of heels.
“What sort of idea, Darya?”
“About the Library. I remember-I heard something once… ”
Mercy instantly felt herself on the attack. It wasn’t a rational thing, but a magical one: an instinct which stemmed directly from the vows that she’d made at her initiation. Any attack on the Library was an attack on a Librarian, and Darya’s comments could not bode well. It didn’t quite work the other way, but it was close. She forced herself to remain still but her fingers itched to move towards the sword. Beside her, Perra gave her a warning glance.
“Enterprising, Darya,” Deed said. “Did I sanction this search?”
Mercy saw the girl become very still. “I thought-”
“Thinking’s good,” Deed said softly, and he reached out and drew a sigil in the air above Darya’s brow. The girl wavered, as if a line of light had passed through her and her expression grew blank. Mercy saw Deed reach out and pluck something from the centre of Darya’s forehead, before the glowing green sigil faded. Then he turned and slipped out of the library without a backward glance.
Darya swayed and her face shuddered, showing sharp bones beneath the skin. Mercy thought: disir. And as if she had spoken the word aloud, the girl’s head came up and her lips bared back in a hound’s grimace. Long teeth slid out of her upper jaw and the bones of her face began to shift and slip, the skin moulding itself to the new structure beneath.
Mercy rammed the book more securely into her jacket and drew the Irish sword.
Thirty-Eight
By now, Gremory and Shadow had climbed to the top of the fortress. They avoided the red threads filling every room and snaking along the passageways, and kept to the stairs, which were bare of the red material and made of stone. Narrow slit windows, the kind from which arrows could be fired, pierced the staircase at intervals and Shadow glanced out of these as they climbed. She realised, from these glimpses, that the landscape around them was changing.
“Look at that,” she said to the demon. Gremory came down a step or two and stood beside her.
“What do you see?”
“The desert’s not the same.” She did not think it was the sight that the spirit’s presence had lent her.
Gremory smiled as if a theory had been confirmed. “You’re right. It isn’t.”
They had come across pale golden sand, from the ridges of Elemiel’s shattered beehive hut. Looking back, however, the desert was now made of black and red grit, with high undulating ridges of dark shale. Shadow could see some kind of equipment in the distance from which they had come, like a mining rig. It was not moving, but it had certainly not been there when they’d crossed the desert the day before, or that morning. Further away, a huge metal wheel stood, also unmoving, below one of the ridges.
The demon, to Shadow’s alarm, appeared nonplussed. “This is new to me. Although I’ll confess it’s why I came up here. There are stories… a fortress, from which you can see different times. I’ve never seen this kind of country before.”
“Not even where you come from?”
The Duke of Hell gave a snort. “My country is nothing like this. It is magnificent-the oceans of fire, the iron cities, the massed legions with their banners. Nothing like this little landscape.”
“I do not think I would last long in Hell,” Shadow said.
“You are not a demon or a devil, an ifrit or a spirit, it’s true. But do not be too sure. Your new passenger might give you some immunity.” Gremory’s red gaze slid to Shadow’s face. “Perhaps I will take you there.”
“We’ve got to get out of here first,” Shadow said, concealing alarm.
They climbed higher, checking on the changing land through the windows. Two storeys up, it had altered again, becoming darker, the ground changing to a plain of slate. The machinery had gone but a second fort stood in the distance, as grey as a great ship and with the spires of radio masts at its summit. Shadow had never seen anything like it before, either, and said so. The demon was silent.
Eventually, they reached the top of the fortress. Here, it was blisteringly hot, but the wind occasionally lashing the summit in eddies was cold as ice. Shadow shivered. This was no place for humans and she wondered anew who had built the fortress, or whether it was the outer carapace of something living. The red threads reminded Shadow of seaweed, drifting in the world’s tide.
The top of the fortress was a flat paved surface, surrounded by battlements. Shadow and the demon walked across to the edge and looked down. Gremory did not seem to suffer from vertigo, but Shadow was obliged to hold on to the edges of the stone, warm under her hands, and reassuring. From here, the view was once more very different.
She was looking out over a garden. The desert had retreated and was only visible at the edges, where a line of ochre stone showed above the foliage. Beneath, at the foot of the fort, radiating lines of trees reached outwards like a wheel, and it was only this symmetry that told Shadow she was not looking out over a forest. But the trees were not saplings; they were fully mature, their canopies arching up towards the sky in full leaf. From this height, however, they looked as tiny as toys. Shadow could see something moving methodically between them: a small dark figure.
Beyond these trees stretched others, but they did not seem to have been planted with planned regularity. She could see groves and clusters, with lines of pale grass in between. These trees, too, were in full growth, with high arched branches and scatters of green, gold, and flame-coloured leaves. The air, drifting up from the garden, smelled warm and fragrant, heavy with pollen. Shadow thought she could almost hear the distant humming of bees. She did not know if it was the spirit’s senses that made the colours so vivid, the scents so strong. It was as if every colour contained a thousand shades within it, too rich for a human to comprehend. Shadow took a breath and felt dizzy. She stepped back.
“Where is it?”
“I-” the demon stopped.
“Gremory. Do you know?”
“I think so. But I’m not sure.”
“Where, then?”-but the Duke shook her head.
“I won’t name it. If I say its name, it might secure it-like an anchor.”
“It looks pretty secure already to me,” Shadow said. “And there’s someone down there. But if we go down, will it change?”
“I don’t know.”
A thought struck Shadow.
“Tell me what you see.”
“I see a garden. It’s full of decay; everything is rotting. The trees are dying and I can see bones in the grass. It’s quite magnificent, actually. An excellent place to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon. Why? What do you see?”
“Not the same thing.”
“No,” the Duke said. “I didn’t think so.”
On the far side of the fortress, they found a flight of steps, leading down. There must have been a thousand or more.
“After you,” Gremory said.
Rather sourly, Shadow lowered herself over the little break in the battlements and began her descent. She half expected the landscape below to alter, reversing itself back into desert, but to her surprise the garden stayed put. She was now worried that they’d become stuck: there had been no sign of the city from the other side of the fortress and given its height, there should have been. Nor had she been able to see the Devil’s Ears, or Ator’s hut, beyond the limits of the garden.
But as they descended, the garden became more vivid, its features more pronounced. She could still see the figure moving between the trees but it showed no signs of having seen either her or the demon. Just as well. The scent rising from the garden was still overpowering: Shadow detected roses and lilies, the heady musks of jasmine and frangipani. She wondered, from the demon’s description, whether it was somehow designed to be appealing t
o whoever beheld it: perhaps Gremory was assailed by the odours of blood and forges and smoke. She asked.
“You would not wish to know,” the Duke said, her eyes glittering.
“I was just curious.”
Soon, they reached the final flight of steps and Shadow could feel the muscles of her calves vibrating as though they were the strings of a harp. She was in good physical condition, but even so, it had been a long way up to the top of the fortress and it was a long way down again, too. She felt she would be lucky to be able to stand once she reached the ground and, indeed, her first step was a stagger. Gremory caught her arm in a grip like a steel band.
“Take care. This is not a good point to show weakness.”
Grimly, Shadow nodded. She could see a shape moving beyond the trees: that distant figure. It would have been nice to think that it was just a gardener, but in Shadow’s experience, things rarely worked out under the category of “nice.”
There was no sign of desert sand beneath her feet. Instead, thick grass covered the ground, a dense vivid green and somehow unnatural. Shadow was not sure whether this could be attributed to her new senses or to something about the place itself. She could see cushions of moss and small starry flowers in the grass: there seemed to be a richness of species, as if different ecological layers had folded themselves into one particular space. Then her vision, quite suddenly, narrowed down so that she could see a tiny ant labouring up one of the blades of grass. Definitely the spirit’s sight, she thought, with its spatial differentials. With Gremory, she skirted the trees, trying to keep out of sight of the gardener.
She thought it had worked, until they were quite far into the orchard. Shadow did not recognise the fruit that grew on the trees: the leaves were like an apple’s, but the fruit was oval, small, the colour of sunsets, and they emitted a strong pungent fragrance.
“Do you know what they are?” she asked Gremory in an undertone.
“Don’t eat the fruit,” the demon replied.
“But you can see them, yes?”
“Yes. They grow on bones.”
Clearly Gremory was still apprehending the garden in a somewhat different way.
Shadow was tempted to pick one of the fruits, but reason told her this would be insane. She moved in and out of the trees, zigzagging, then movement caught her eye. She turned. To her dismay, the gardener was watching her.
It was a hunched, dark shape. The shoulders were massive in proportion to the rest of its body, tapering to a narrow waist and strong legs. She could see the small dark eyes, whiteless in its broad face. It looked more like an ape than a man, something primitive and ancient. It was watching her with a stillness that suggested intelligence, however, and when it saw that she had observed it, it began to bound forwards with long, loping strides.
Shadow drew her blade. She was conscious of the demon turning beside her, but Gremory’s hands remained at her sides. The gardener leaped. Shadow threw herself to the side, rolling out and down. Teeth snapped along her arm, grazing her sleeve and she thickened her veil to maximum across her shoulders and head. An arm like a club shot out and struck, knocking a numbing blow over her left shoulder. Her left arm grew limp; ignoring it Shadow feinted, then lashed out with the sun-and-moon blade. It hit home, just beneath the gardener’s collarbone, but there was no blood, just a small powdery shower. The thing’s lips, rubbery black like a dog’s, pulled back from its teeth and it gave a soundless growl, a vibration which Shadow felt rather than heard. Behind it, the demon took a dancing, mincing step backwards. Shadow took a chance and threw the blade. It struck the creature in the centre of its throat and should have severed the windpipe. The creature gave a breathy cough and spat something out into the grass: it looked like a small leaden cube. Shadow reached down and snatched it up with a corner of the veil, not wanting it to make contact with her skin. Then the creature fell apart. Its head burst like a melon dropped from a turret; its chest exploded, fragmenting outwards until only the legs were left, twin crumbling trunks which tottered and fell. Soon, the only thing left was clots of soil, dark in the greenness of the grass.
“Thanks for your help,” Shadow said sarcastically to the demon. Gremory shrugged.
“I didn’t want to steal your kill. You looked like you had it under control.”
“Well,” Shadow said, wiping the earthy blade on the grass. “Maybe I did.”
Thirty-Nine
Darya’s transformation was over almost as soon as it had begun. The teeth drew back, the bone structure returned to human-normal. Mercy’s hand, clasping the hilt of the sword, relaxed by degrees. Darya bent and swiftly took a book from the lowest shelf, near the back. She gave the impression that she knew what she had come for. She placed it inside her ruffled jacket and went quickly from the library. After a moment’s consideration, Mercy followed.
She knew relatively little about the lives of the members of the Court. Unlike Librarians, and other functionaries, they were a closed order, living mainly within the Court itself and its satellite houses. Their initiation practices were a closely guarded secret and said to be grim, but everyone said that about their own initiations, with a kind of magical machismo, so it was hard to know what to believe. As with any closemouthed system, rumours about it were rife.
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.
