by Liz Williams
Forty
Shadow had become paranoid about the earth on which they walked. It was all very well preparing oneself from attack by unknown spirits, but what about the ground itself? She expected at any moment that it would rise up and assault her.
Gremory seemed prone to no such fears. She appeared amused, occasionally smiling satirically at things that Shadow was unable to see, as though she walked through a private world. Shadow found this annoying, but she did not want to anger her only ally, so she said nothing.
Once past the orchard, the garden was indeed beautiful, but it was overpowering. The flowers were too large and highly scented; the trees were immense. Shadow would not have described it as a garden of giants, but things were bigger than they should have been and this made her nervous. Looking back, the fortress itself had again altered: it stood in a series of high steps, like a ziggurat.
Eden. Babylon. Both? Shadow did not know; the legend of which this was a part was possibly too old to know much of, dating back to the very dawn of Earth’s Fertile Crescent. There were signs of some kind of occupation, apart from the golem-gardener and the orchard rows. There were stone spires, like totems, but decorated with winged birds that might have been vultures, and they looked very old. They pricked something in Shadow’s memory, something primal. She was inclined to avoid them, and did so.
And she felt they were being watched. When she asked Gremory, the demon simply shrugged again, as if this was a matter of no consequence. “I haven’t seen anyone living. There are plenty of the dead.”
“What do they look like?”
“Ancient. Their skulls are strange; their heads are too narrow. I think they are an earlier form of man.”
“There were other peoples before the Flood, so it’s said.” She had once heard that, on Earth, a volcano in the region of Sumatra had wiped out three-quarters of the variants of the human species, leaving behind only their boring old ancestors.
Did these unknown plants and trees date from then, the dawning of the human world? Shadow wondered as she walked.
Some distance from the fortress, the trees began to thin out and eventually Shadow and the demon stepped into a glade that fanned outwards to become a valley. The sides were wooded, but faded into golden cliffs and finally, Shadow recognised an echo of the Great Desert through which they had travelled. The valley floor, perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, was grassland, with trees only at the edges, so that it resembled a natural park. Along the valley, a black rock jutted up from the grass, a boulder so dark that it resembled a fragment of night.
Gremory hissed when she saw it.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s from the heavens. A meteorite.”
“It’s not the Ka’aba.”
“No, another. Older. Still worshipped.”
“We don’t-” Shadow stopped. “Well, never mind. I don’t see any signs of people.”
They approached the black stone. It had fused with the surrounding earth, reminding Shadow of the flower strike that had destroyed Elemiel’s hut. Something flickered along its length as Shadow thought this, and then the demon cried out.
“Shadow!”
She felt the scorch of it through the veil, but the veil itself saved her hair from catching fire. The thing shot over her head, rolling against the base of the rock. Shadow scrambled up; to her dismay, this was not another earth-creature. It was made of fire, a flicker of bright flame in a shift of rainbow colours. It smelled of hot metal. It turned to come at her again and Shadow ran.
Her first thought was to find water. Paper, scissors, stone… Metal trumps earth and water trumps fire. She needed a stream and she found one, but it was only a rivulet of water, a trickle, running between narrow crumbling banks in the grass. It was perhaps two feet wide and shallow, not enough to cover her. The thing hissed as it sprang and at its brightness, Shadow shut her eyes and stepped backwards over the stream. Then there was a sound like a crack of lightning and flame erupted behind Shadow’s eyelids. She opened her eyes, half-blinded, to see only a thin wisp of smoke. Elemiel stood before her, with a flaming sword in his hand.
“Hello again,” the Messenger said.
“So this is-what? Your home?”
They sat by the stream. Shadow’s feet were in cool water. Elemiel sat cross-legged in the grass. Some distance away, Gremory paced like a prowling cat, intent on her own thoughts.
“No. But I can come here.”
“When we met you-”
“Still the same place. It’s changed over time. Thirty thousand years or more.”
Shadow eyed the Messenger with respect. “You’re a long-lived species.”
His smile was sad. “Too long.”
“Your house has been destroyed, I’m afraid,” Shadow told him, but she wondered whether this would really mean anything. After all, a garden had died; a desert had taken its place and that desert itself had shifted and changed so much as to be almost unrecognisable. He did not seem surprised.
“I know. Are you all right?”
“I think so. Were they aiming for me, or for you?”
“Both.”
“So who’s the enemy?”
“I said I’d show you. And so I will.”
“The spirit-” Shadow began.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I did not succeed in what I set out to do; I’ve made matters worse for you.”
She did not want to say: it’s all right. It wasn’t.
“I don’t know what to do now,” she said.
“Nor do I,” the Messenger admitted. “But I think it’s brought you here. That’s a good thing and a bad thing.”
“I don’t like ‘bad thing.’ ”
“Who does?”
Forty-One
Mercy woke to a room thronging with shadows. They hummed and whispered about her head, like a host of moths. Her skin crawled with them and there was a buzzing in her ears. But she knew what it meant. Unless she was greatly mistaken, it meant she was alive.
“Ka? Are you there?” she hissed. She did not want to speak Perra’s name, not knowing who might be listening; a name could be used against its bearer. She waited, but there was only the sibilance of the shadows. Light was coming from somewhere, but it was diffuse. It was enough to see the flitting, flickering shades.
And the place stank. After a moment, Mercy decided she was not detecting this with her nose: it was more like a spiritual stench. She sat up. She did not seem to be restrained in any way, and this in itself was ominous, suggesting as it did that her captors did not need to place her in bonds as they were confident of her inability to escape.
Captors. Her hand hurt like hell. She remembered falling from the turret but not anything after that, although her back and the backs of her legs felt bruised. What had happened to the homunculus? Evidently not with her in the room, otherwise she doubted she’d be alive. If she had died, then so would it, but they were programmed to finish the job. It evidently didn’t work the other way around, as she was fairly sure that she’d killed it, but then she was the original and it was just a copy.
Stiffly, she got off the low pallet on which she’d been lying and looked around the room. Enough light to see that it was an even square, windowless. She could see the faint rusty traces of sigils on the walls: a containment cell, then. But perhaps not usually for human beings. Then she turned and saw with a shock that ran electric through her that the light was coming from something’s eyes.
They shone out, huge and a pallid yellow, from the other side of the room. As she stared, the head tilted. She could see it faintly: a long hairless skull, ridged with cartilage. Its body was white, with long arms hunched around its knees. When it was sure it had got its full attention, it uttered a shriek, leaped to its feet and threw a handful of something at her.
Mercy ducked and the stuff whistled over her head and splattered against the opposite wall. There was the sudden, overpowering smell of shit. The thing capered, ran up the opposite wall and clung, upside down, fro
m the ceiling, where it gave voice to another gibbering shriek. It was at least the size of a man, but its arms were longer.
A shit-flinging monkey demon. Great.
Frantically, Mercy ran through a mental magical arsenal. The Irish sword had been removed and so had her hairpins. The charm was no longer in her ear and her ward bracelets had also been taken away. That left the tattooed sigils, which she had reaffirmed with a paste made of powdered myrrh and dragon’s blood resin that morning. She clapped a hand to her brow, transferred the sigil to her palm and threw it. Her injured hand burned with its passage.
The sigil spiralled outwards like a throwing star. It stuck the monkey-demon full on and knocked it from the ceiling. Howling, it rushed forwards, its arms flailing. Mercy threw herself to the side and dodged under its arm, hurling herself to the other side of the room. She knew she could not keep this up indefinitely, but what was the alternative?
The monkey-demon turned with frightening speed. Mercy kicked it in the stomach, grabbed its wrist and threw. The demon sprawled to the floor but her move, which would have broken a human’s arm, had merely twisted the demon’s. Mercy saw its muscles rippling back into place as she watched. The thing grinned at her, displaying long yellow teeth. It wasn’t quite a monkey, and not quite a man either.
“Nice try,” it said, and buffeted her on the side of the head. Mercy went down, feigning more dizziness than she felt and kicked its feet from under it. It fell, sprawling, then reached out and grabbed her by the wrist. It was certainly as strong as a gibbon. It hauled her first to her feet and then off them. Its other hand came up, clasped her round the throat and banged her head against the wall. The room exploded into a firework of lights.
“That’s enough,” a voice said. Mercy was abruptly released.
“No! More!”
“Do as you’re told.” The man spoke perfunctorily, almost absent-minded. Still seeing stars, Mercy heard him cross the room. He bent down. “Nothing broken.”
“No thanks to you.”
“I wanted to see what you’d do,” the man-Roke, Deed-said. “Now I’ve found out. Anyway, I rescued you in the first place, so be grateful. I’m Jonathan Deed, by the way, although you know me as Roke. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be making a mess all over our nice courtyard.”
“How did you do it?”
“Magical net.” He squatted on his heels by her side. She could see him more clearly now, and he held a lantern.
“The Library took a major risk sending you here.”
“I was acting on my own initiative.”
An eyebrow was raised. “I don’t think I believe you, though it’s very public spirited to claim sole responsibility.”
“You can put me through a truth process.” Mercy had no idea what was involved in such a process, but she could guess that was beyond unpleasant. “I’m not lying.”
“All right,” Deed said. “I might do that. On the other hand, that rather begs the question that I actually care.”
“Ah,” Mercy said.
“Because it’s a great excuse to pick a fight with the Library, you see, something I’ve been needing to do for some time.”
“Thought so,” Mercy croaked. “Now that the Skein have gone… ”
“Be reasonable,” Deed said, pained. “You can’t have Librarians running a city. You’d spend all your time shushing people and cataloguing things. Forgive me, but you’re not known in your profession for wide-ranging vision and overall perspective; you’re more the fine detail sort.”
Mercy said nothing to this, partly out of annoyance, and partly because she was secretly afraid he might be right.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked at last. “Keep me here?”
“No. This was just an experiment; we’re not barbarians. As I said, I wanted to see what you’d so. That’s what we do-we experiment. We’re scientists, after all. Come with me.”
He pulled her to her feet, not ungently, and ushered her ahead of him through the door. Mercy began planning strategy: a backwards kick, elbow to the face… But he was staying too far behind her, even when she deliberately slowed, and when she glanced over her shoulder she could see from his amused expression that he had read her mind.
She was expecting to be led to another cell. To her surprise, however, he took her into a parlour. Panelled walls, brocade seats, and a pianola. Very nice.
“Sit down. Would you like a scotch?”
“I-actually, yes.”
Deed grinned. “Good girl. You’ve no chance of getting out of here, but if you cooperate, we’ll see what we can do. Please don’t take any of this personally.”
“Likewise.”
“You’re angry about the theft of your blood. I can tell. Well, fair enough. I’d be cross, too.”
“I can’t blame you for taking an advantage. We’re not on the same side.”
“But you think we should be.”
Mercy paused. As long as he thought she was working for the Library, and not for Mareritt… if he wanted an excuse to go up against the Library, he’d got one anyway, no matter what the truth was, and if she kept quiet about Mareritt it might give Mercy an advantage. She accepted the heavy crystal tumbler of whisky that he offered her, and took a sip. Peat-flavoured fire spread through her.
“Good whisky.”
“It’s a magician’s drink,” he said. “Like red wine. Claret.”
She couldn’t tell whether he was making a veiled threat or simply expounding a personal theory; oddly, she got the impression that it was the latter. He took a seat opposite her and sat comfortably, long legs stretched out in front of him. The ruff made it look, disconcertingly, as though his head had been cut off. An angular face, a thin mouth, not without humour. An oddly compelling face. She did not want to even think about going down that road.
“So,” he said. “What were you looking for?”
“A book.”
Again, the eyebrow was raised. “Because you don’t have enough of your own?”
“That actually was part of the problem.”
Deed laughed. “So what was this book about? Medieval drainage systems? Growing better cauliflowers? Marxist dialectic?”
Since she did not know what The Winter Book contained, Mercy decided to shake the tree of speculation and see what fell out.
“The disir.”
His face did not change.
“I see.”
“Do you? We had one in the Library.”
“Did you? I don’t imagine it’s the sort of thing you’d want in a Library. I should think that the monkey-demon might even be a little higher on the desirability list.”
“The disir didn’t throw shit,” Mercy said. “Though she did try to kill me.”
“Perhaps not, then. So, a disir came to kill you and you decided that the best way to deal with this was to do some reading up. Why didn’t you just call me and ask to borrow something?”
“Would you have lent it to me?”
“I might have, actually. Let this be a lesson to you, Miss Fane. Always ask your neighbours before burgling their premises.”
“My apologies.”
Deed waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter. As I said, it’s useful to me. So what did you find out about the disir?”
“They’re old. They come from the Ice Age. They’re not human but they were probably conjured up by some shaman or other, part of a story that we no longer possess.”
“Fairy tales,” Deed said. “That’s the engine that runs this city, after all, isn’t it? That’s what drives us on. Was that all you discovered?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ll have to do some research,” Deed said pleasantly. “And see what else I can find out for you.”
Forty-Two
The orchard fruit was not, Elemiel told her, safe to eat. But there were seeds and a number of bracket fungi that were edible. Shadow did not feel like eating them, despite Elemiel’s assurances. There were no animals to hunt and at this, the demon pulled
an expression that, after a minute, Shadow interpreted as eye rolling.
Night would soon fall, but that didn’t matter, so the Messenger said, because there was a moon.
The moon, whenever they were, was a lot closer to the Earth than it subsequently became, at least in myth, as became apparent when it rolled up over the summit of the hill. This was a young moon, its face a little less starred with craters. Shadow felt a comfort in its light, and it made it easier to see where they were going.
Elemiel led them deeper into the valley, past the black stone. Shadow had interrogated him about the elementals: the earth spirit, the fire, thinking he must know them well. But the Messenger told her that the fire spirits were new.
“Only the gardeners are original. The golems. Ancient technology, rediscovered anew closer to your day.”
“They have them in some quarters,” Shadow said. “They’re not always very reliable.”
“They were designed to be close to the earth,” the Messenger said, “and sung into submission, but in your time, most of those songs have been lost.” He walked up over a lip of land and pointed. “This is where we start to climb.”
There was a path leading up through the groves, into the hills. Shadow and Gremory followed, breathing in the scent of fir, still warm with the sun. Shadow could hear a nightingale, singing far below in the valley, and they came out into starlight.
“It’s only safe to come here now,” the Messenger said. “And even now, not very.”
“Why?” Shadow asked.
“They’re growing nightblooms. But most of the plants flower during the day.”
“What sort of flowers?” Shadow asked, with a sudden prickle of suspicion.
“The sort you’re afraid of.” He guided her to the edge of the rocks. “Be careful.”
She was looking down into a ravine. It was full of flowers, a garden in itself. The huge blooms were all folded, tightly as parasols. She was reminded of hibiscus, but each flower was the height of a man. The tip of the stamens protruded at the end of each curled flower, like an obscene tongue. She recognised them: she’d last seen one bury itself in the floor of the desert and destroy Elemiel’s hut.
