Worldsoul

by Liz Williams

  “This is where they come from? Are they natural? You said ‘they’ grow them. Who are they?”

  “I’ll show you. But keep close behind me-there are guards.”

  As they walked, Shadow was conscious of things moving around them through the darkness. She heard no voices, but once someone ran past them, disappearing swiftly down the valley. She nudged Elemiel, not wanting to speak, although it seemed impossible to her that whoever was out there could be unaware of their presence.

  “They aren’t interested in us,” the Messenger said, in what seemed to Shadow to be an unnecessarily loud voice. “They don’t know we’re here.”

  “We’re pretty obvious, Elemiel,” Shadow said.

  “They’re not in the same story-stream. Look above you.”

  Shadow did so and saw that the stars overhead had changed their configuration again. The couple of constellations that she had recognised, low on the western horizon, had disappeared, but not enough time had elapsed for them to have sunk down below the rim of the world. These stars were new.

  “That makes no sense, astronomically,” she said aloud.

  “This garden is where stories overlap,” Elemiel replied. “You’re not seeing the world as it ever was: you’re in storytime now. Or more than story. Mythtime. In your city, there are many legends, but time doesn’t shift so much. Here, it does. The people around us can’t see us because I’ve taken the path that leads past the storystream. We’re not in the same space. Look-”

  For a moment Shadow saw a fleeting sequence of impressions: the garden itself, a desert city made of low domes and huge walls, buried in a terrible storm of sand. Then other settlements rising in its place, abandoned when tribes swept down from the north. She saw a battle, between people who looked scarcely human. Then djinn and demons, stalking the battlefield and devouring the spirits of the slain. She did not see Gremory among them, and was grateful.

  After that, the desert bloomed again, as if the blood of the fallen had watered it, only to sink down into the sand once more. A ghost city arose, but was dispelled by a magician who could have been the grandfather of Suleiman the Shah. And then the familiar outlines of the Khaureg, the Great Desert that had lain beyond Worldsoul since the city’s rise. Which was, Shadow was reminded now, relatively recent in the great scheme of things. She tried to pay no more attention to the beings that surrounded her in the darkness.

  “The only thing you need to worry about is the guards,” the Messenger said.

  “How will I know when those appear?”

  The Messenger laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll know.”

  Forty-Three

  Mercy Fane had been confined to a secure room in the heart of the House of the Court: windowless and warded. Deed could have put her back in the dungeons with the devil-monkey, but it amused him to keep Mercy off balance. He suspected that she knew exactly what he was doing, but for now, it would do. He didn’t want to have her killed, not just yet. She was too useful as a bargaining chip. The initial homunculus had disappeared, probably going to ground, rat-like, when Mercy had been captured but he had fresh blood with which to make another if the need arose.

  He spent a peaceful night and rose at dawn to prepare a letter. This was on official Court parchment, with the identification sigils prominently displayed around its crest. It gave a brief account of recent events, more in sorrow than anger, and invited two of the Elders of the Library to visit their recalcitrant employee. Once that was done, Deed wrote in his letter, they could begin to discuss terms. Phrases like:… long association between our two institutions… a pity if anything were to damage our hitherto excellent relationship… city as a whole taking a dim view of internecine rivalries at a time of crisis… all rolled fluently from the tip of Deed’s quill.

  When he had finished the letter, he rolled it up, sealed it with the Court’s usual method of bloodwax, and dispatched it by golem across the square. Then he sat back to wait.

  He did not have to wait long. Mid-morning, a golem trundled back again. It thrust a sealed letter at Deed and waited, staring at him from incurious eyes.

  “You may go,” Deed told it and perused the reply. The tone of the reply pleased Deed. It read as if it had been written by someone unnerved, and Deed liked unnerved, particularly in an adversary. The Elders would, he read, meet with him as soon as they had received his reply confirming a time.

  Deed cast a small astrological divination and discovered that, given the planetary alignments, two o’clock would do very well. He duly inscribed the appointed time in a second letter, summoned the golem, gave it the missive, tucked an instruction slip between its ridged jaws, and sent it on its way.

  He then went down to visit his captive. “I hope you spent a comfortable night?”

  “Yes,” the Librarian said blandly. “Thank you for providing me with a book.”

  She was sitting in an armchair, with the book in question spread open on her lap. It was the official history of the Court.

  “What’s your professional opinion?”

  “Of the book? Bit of a hagiography, isn’t it? I didn’t find any mention of that regrettable episode in the nineties when a small castle got flattened by accident.”

  Deed laughed. “It’s an edited version.”

  “Heavily edited, I’d say.”

  “You can’t expect us to betray trade secrets.”

  It was, apparently, Mercy’s turn to laugh. “I didn’t think there were any left. What with disgruntled magicians heading off in a sulk to tell everyone else what your methods are, and the fact that most of your magic is grimoire-based anyway and therefore accessible to anyone who can read… ”

  She had a point, but Deed kept smiling.

  “Most of our magic. Not all.”

  “No,” Mercy said, giving him a considering look. “Not all.”

  “Did they bring you breakfast?”

  “Yes, thank you. I don’t think Persephone and I have much in common, and I was hungry, so I ate it. They’ve taken away the tray.” She held up a cup. “I still have tea.”

  Deed studied her. The sigil marks which were a part of her craft had not been renewed, and they had taken her weapons from her. Interrogating the sword had not proved successful; the thing had clammed up and refused to speak even under geas. Up close, Deed could see those betraying traces of ancestry in Fane’s face: the wax-pale skin and the elegant bones that seemed to be a trait of the wolf clans when they bred out into human. But the black hair and blacker eyes were more reminiscent of southern Europe. He would not be surprised to learn that there were traces of Spanish in her ancestry.

  “Ever been far north?” he asked.

  “Once.” Her eyes were wary. “Visiting relatives.”

  “Wolves?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “The old clanholds and fortresses still stand, I believe. An interesting heritage.”

  “And your own?”

  Deed smiled at her. “Me? Oh, I come from a long line of accountants.”

  Once he had made sure that the door to Mercy’s chamber was securely locked, he went back down to the laboratory. The homunculi were coming on nicely: three of them, which was all that the blood could produce, growing like mandrakes in jars of black earth and fluid. Even with fresh blood, the process was not limitless; the most anyone had ever been able to make was seven and the last had been too sickly to really count. Deed’s other alchemical preparations were proceeding well enough. In the furthest crucible, red lion was devouring white eagle, the symbolic representations of the magical chemicals writhing above the apparatus. Deed watched the process for a while, then checked on the spying eye that looked into Mercy’s chamber. She was sitting in the chair, looking at the history of the Court. Satisfied, Deed went down to the atrium to await the arrival of the Elders.

  He had taken care to select the two most conservative members of the Library: Elder Vande, and Elder Egrim. Both, Deed knew from his enquiries, were old, querulous, and wanting a quiet life, wh
ich they were unlikely to achieve any time soon. They looked at him with palpable anxiety.

  “Naturally, we are eager to avoid any unpleasantness,” Vande quavered. “This is most embarrassing.”

  “Young people will be young people,” Deed said, sententiously. “I’m sure she thought she was doing the right thing. However… ”

  “Can’t imagine why she didn’t go through official channels,” Egrim lamented, clutching her reticule.

  “Doubtless she had her reasons. I suggest you confirm her presence here-I called you in because these things can be falsified, as I’m sure you’re aware-and then,” Deed paused. “Then we can begin to discuss terms.”

  It was possible, of course, that the Library might simply decide to hang Mercy out to dry. But in that case, Deed would declare open war, and he was counting on the Elders’ timidity and caution. The disappearance of the city’s masters had hit them hard, much harder than the Court, which had, after all, sensibly put a number of contingency measures in place after a prophecy, which, though at the time unlikely, one would have to have been a fool to ignore.

  On Earth, a prophecy was a prediction, and quite often false. In the Liminality, with its different ontological basis and the shifty temporal underpinnings of the nevergone, a prophecy could be something quite different, not a prediction at all but a fact which had slipped backwards down a storyway and lodged in the past, or a possibility from an alternate timestream which had flaked free of its rightful place and drifted through the overlight.

  “You’ll want to install your own disciplinary measures,” Deed said, sorrowfully. “She hasn’t been ill treated, although regrettably she did have an unfortunate encounter with an entity… ” He watched the two elderly faces grow pale, and inwardly smiled. “She’ll tell you herself that we’ve put her in comfortable quarters.”

  “Thank you for your restraint,” Egrim said.

  “We have to work together,” Deed replied, with a degree of piousness. He led them down the winding passages of the Court, making sure that a maze-spell was in place just in case his two guests were a bit more clued-in than they appeared, and were able to trace where they’d been. When they reached the door of the incarceration chamber, Deed said, “Here she is,” and opened the door with a flourish.

  The room, however, was empty.

  Forty-Four

  It felt like the edge of the world. Shadow stood beside Elemiel and the demon on a great lip of rock. Behind them stretched the narrow valley, filled with dangerous blooms. Below, was a howling pit of air. Shadow looked down onto a boiling storm; clouds scudded beneath her feet and a sudden bolt of lightning illuminated a landscape far below that looked like the surface of the moon. She stepped quickly back as something huge and black-winged soared close to the edge, veered, and was gone.

  “What was that? What is this?”

  “This is the Pass of Ages,” Gremory said, surprising her. Shadow looked at the demon. Gremory’s impassive face didn’t do “startled,” but Shadow thought there was a trace of disconcertment in the demon’s eyes. “Even I thought this was a myth.”

  “It isn’t a myth. It was closed in the apparent world aeons ago, after the first fall of the Garden. But it opened again when the Skein vanished.”

  “Do you know where the Skein have gone?” Shadow demanded.

  “If I knew that, I would have gone after them.”

  Angels cannot lie, she had once read. She nodded.

  “But they kept this-this gap closed?”

  “Or they professed to do so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Skein deal in the highest of high magic. They were the lords of the world: their cities spanned the shores of Earth before the Flood, and those were drowned when a meteor hit the planet. Those of the Skein that were left vowed it would never happen again: they created the Liminality, wove it out of the legends of the ancestors of man, and then took refuge in it. Their magic is a blend of demonic and angelic: the forces which powered creation, two halves of the same whole. But the Skein didn’t know everything and they did not realise that their sanctuary was built on a crack: the Pass of Ages. Or perhaps they did realise, and thought they could control it. Stories enter the Liminality through the Pass, it’s part of the overlight. When it was closed, they seeped around its edges, and when it opens, they rush through. It is not fully open yet, and it is guarded. And there is a spell to close it.”

  “Was that one of the guards just now?” Shadow looked down into the roil of indigo, silver, black. “That thing I saw?”

  “No,” the Messenger said. “That was one of the servants of the Storm Lords. That is a guard.”

  It was coming towards them, stepping on the clouds like someone walking across a thundering sea. It was a bright outline of a man, a silhouette shot with light, and its hair flared in a nimbus of golden blue around its head. It carried, upright, a flaming sword. Shadow drew the blade.

  “Leave it,” the demon said, sharply. “Not even star iron will cut it.”

  The Messenger held up a hand. The guard strode out of the storm, onto the rock and it sizzled and fused beneath its feet. Shadow could see its eyes now and they were so bright that she had to look away. Elemiel spoke a name and the thing faltered, but only for a moment. It swung the sword. Shadow felt the Messenger summon his power, drawing it into himself and sending it out but she could also feel this was not enough.

  “It shouldn’t be able to see us!” the Messenger said.

  His hand shot out and a curling whip of light knocked the sword aside but the guard swung again and the whip split apart.

  “I can see,” Shadow heard Gremory say, “that I’m going to have to help you out.”

  Black fire joined the whip of light. The ground shuddered beneath Shadow’s feet and she stumbled. As she went down on one knee she saw the sun-dark lash of light strike out and tear the sword from the guard’s hand. It fell backwards into the abyss without a sound and Shadow was falling too, into a hole of night.

  Forty-Five

  “I know the sword can look after itself,” Mercy hissed, ”but I don’t want to leave it here unless we have to.” It wasn’t as though it was her own sword: it belonged to the Library, but the thing was at least partly alive and the thought of it in the hands of the Court stuck in her throat.

  “It will be under lock and key,” Perra warned.

  “But do you know where?”

  Despite the loss of the sword Mercy was, however, in reasonable spirits. The thought of the look on Deed’s face when he opened the door and found her missing was a notion she would treasure for some time, whatever other advantages he might have taken during her time with the Court. That, Mercy thought with a trace of smugness, was what came of underestimating other people’s reading habits.

  She had not slept, although to anyone watching-and surely such a chamber would be under observation-it would have looked as though she had lain down on the couch, covered herself with the blanket and passed into slumber. She had certainly closed her eyes. But no power of the Court could keep someone who knew what they were doing from investigating matters on the astral level and she had spent the night examining the wards of the room. Each of the four walls was locked with a quarter-sigil: unfamiliar in particular to Mercy, but familiar when it came to type. A sigil is a group of words and symbols, bound together like weaving or knitting. Find the end, even if it has been woven into the pattern, and you can unravel the sigil.

  Deed’s own strengths lay in the north, and in the Western Quarter where the Court resided. Mercy wasn’t too familiar with the South, but she did know the designs of the East; her other mother, Sho, had taught her well. Magic that tasted of aniseed and ginger. Not the snow-and-sea-salt of the north, or the greengrowing spells of the Southern Quarter, but something with which Deed was not, Mercy thought, all that familiar.

  She found the sigil’s end in a name: a demon of the East. She did not speak the name aloud, but she whispered a syllable, over and over aga
in, beneath her breath and without moving her lips, until the name began to fray like a pulled thread. Mercy uttered another syllable, pulling gently. In her mind’s eye, on the astral, she crouched by the sigil, which was inscribed in red and gold upon the wall, tugging at its corner. And quite suddenly the sigil began to unravel, looping out into Mercy’s hands until deactivated.

  She did not act at once. She yawned, mumbled, stirred, and sat up, hoping that the sigil’s demise wouldn’t trigger some kind of alarm. If so, she would soon find out. Mercy got up from the couch and stretched, then wandered around the room. When she reached the western wall, she glanced up. A transparent oval had appeared in the middle of the wall, with the golden-eyed form of Perra peering through it.

  Mercy let her gaze glide over the ka. She saw Perra mouth, “Wait.” Then the ka breathed out. A mist began to fill the room, feeding from shadows and the play of the flickering lamp that stood by the bed. Mercy stepped forwards to the hole in the wall and suddenly it was like facing a mirror. She stood there, looking into her own dark eyes.

  “What the hell?” Mercy breathed.

  “When you fell off the turret, this ka took the homunculus and extended it. This is just an illusion; the core remains. It will replace you for a time, then it will decay into dust. But you can’t leave now. Deed’s on his way. Once he’s gone, we will do the switch.”

  “All right,” Mercy said. If Deed had placed anything else in the cell, anything that would betray she was no longer present, the homunculus would hopefully be enough to fool it. She backed into the room and the mist dispelled. When she once more looked at the wall, it was solid.