by Liz Williams
“No, you’re right. We’re not geared up for anything. It’s been a year. Everyone’s put their heads in the sand and pretended that we can just bumble along as normal. We deserve to be attacked, frankly.” She paused. “A tale for a tale. This is what’s been happening here.”
When she had finished her story, Shadow stared at her. “The members of the Court have always wanted more power than they’ve been entitled to. But they’ll have to work with others now. If they don’t pitch in, the city could crumble. And I think we’ll need their magic to fight the Storm Lords.”
Mercy thought she was probably right, but she was not so sure that the Court would not want Worldsoul to fall. “We need to look at possibilities. The disir wouldn’t have been able to come through if the Skein were here. The flower attacks began after the Skein vanished. If the Skein were keeping a lid on rifts between the Liminality and parts of the nevergone, then we don’t have two problems: we’ve only got one, but it’s a big one.”
“Elemiel said there’s a spell which will seal the gap,” Shadow said. “But he doesn’t know where it is. We need to find it.”
“And if we do find it, it could shut out the Barquess, and probably the Skein as well.”
“Your mother is on that ship, isn’t she?”
“Yes.” Mercy did not trust herself to say more.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” Shadow said. “But for the rest-for the Skein, I mean-I think it’s time we stood on our own two feet.”
The emergency session of the Elders could have been embarrassing, but the matter was serious enough to override Mercy’s professional transgressions. Shadow addressed the dismayed Elders, speaking with clarity and force, and backed by a deputation from the Eastern Quarter that included Mariam Shenudah.
“The University has texts about the Storm Lords. They’re ancient. They’re story-eaters-that’s the aim. Devour and destroy the tales of men, so the nevergone will belong to them. But we have a choice,” Shenudah said. “We can squabble and fragment, or we can stand together.”
“What proof do you have?” Elder Tope asked. “This is a fantastic tale and we are used to fantastic tales. But what proof is there?” Moonlight flooded in through the tall windows of the council chamber, vying with the illumination from the lamps. So much light, Mercy thought, and yet none of us can see clearly.
“I know this woman,” Shenudah said. “She would not lie.”
Shenudah spoke quietly, however, and Shadow said, “But they don’t know me. I have no proof, only my word, and why should they believe me?”
“It is not that we think you are lying,” Tope said. “But people can get things wrong. Stories can be deceptive.”
“And this is as you said, a fantastic tale.”
Mercy began to have the terrible suspicion that all this would be in vain. After the hearing, things would simply remain as before. But what could they do except be reasonable? She thought Shadow’s story was indeed extraordinary, but she had spent her lifetime among extraordinary stories.
“The flower attacks didn’t come from nowhere,” she said.
Tope sighed. “We can’t just accept this without some kind of evidence.”
“No, I understand that.”
“Maybe I can help,” an unfamiliar voice said.
In the hours that followed, desperate though they were, Mercy found a few moments in which to treasure the sight of the faces of a Library committee confronted with the sudden manifestation of a talking camel.
“Oh, sorry,” the demon said, without a trace of apology. “Wrong one.” It now took the appearance of a woman, armoured for war. The armour was crimson and made of supple leather; the demon’s hair was braided and she wore a band across her brow with the symbol of a crescent moon. Mercy heard Shadow sigh.
“I wondered where you’d got to.”
“I was annoyed. Elemiel put us both at considerable risk-typical of someone indestructible to underestimate danger. I ended up at the ends of the Earth-it’s taken me all this time to get back.”
“You are a demon,” Librarian McLaren said. He looked amused rather than alarmed.
“Yes. My name is Gremory. I am a duke of Hell.”
“How did you get past the wards?”
“I don’t think I’ll tell you that,” Gremory said. “For reasons that should be obvious.” She strode forward and put taloned hands on the council table. “But this woman is telling the truth. I realise that a demon’s word is subject to some doubt, sadly, and thus as a gesture of good faith, I propose to lend you this for safekeeping.”
She tugged at her hand and placed a ring on the table: a thick band of gold bearing a carnelian inscribed with a sigil. The Elders’ eyes bulged: the demon had handed over her own domination.
“Why?” Mercy heard Shadow breathe.
The Duke of Hell looked at her. “I’m not really the altruistic sort. It’s because of the Court. I am a Goetic entity; they work with us, as you know. I come from the book known as the Grimoire Verum. This you can easily verify. The Abbot General, Jonathan Deed, has broken a pact made between the Court and my masters. He has sought power from elsewhere and that power, when it comes, will undermine ours.”
“From the disir?” Mercy asked.
“His god Loki has a disir army amassing in the nevergone. Plans to bring them into Worldsoul, take over the city. Meanwhile we’ve got the Storm Lords planning much the same thing, except they want to strip everything back to basics: obliterate humanity’s tales, replace them with their own. As one of those stories,” the demon said, looking modestly at a talon, “I am naturally a little concerned.”
Mercy could feel relief emanating from Shadow. “I’m glad you have an agenda. The lack of it was worrying me.”
The Duke of Hell laughed. “Help from demons. Always a worry.”
Tope was still staring at the carnelian ring as if mesmerised.
“We have to do something,” Mercy said.
“But what?” All the Elders were looking hopefully at her and Shadow; she should never have made that earlier promise. Mercy opened her mouth to speak, and the tall windows that flanked the council chamber burst inwards in a shower of glass. Mercy was flung against the wall and threw her arm across her face to shut out the glare of an explosion, but it did not come. She could not smell the firework odour of a flower, but the light beyond the windows was becoming steadily brighter.
“What’s that?” she heard an Elder say, shakily. Mercy pulled herself to her feet; beside her, Shadow was scrambling up. The demon stood, apparently unmoved, in the centre of a blizzard of glass shards. Tope was face down across the table.
“I’ve seen it before,” Shadow said, gripping Mariam Shenudah’s arm. “It’s the Pass.”
Forty-Eight
For purely dramatic reasons, Deed found that he profoundly resented being pipped to the post. After the debacle involving Fane and the Library, Deed had stepped up his preparations, making frequent checks down the long lens that connected Worldsoul with the nevergone, a periscope between dimensions. The periscope was not entirely reliable, showing as it did contingencies that had not in fact occurred, or at least, not yet. But what it did continue to show him was reassuring.
The bleak line of the horizon. The scroll of the oxbow river across the barren land. The disir army massing along its shores.
The lid had been removed from Loki’s memory jar during the night; he’d woken to find the sour smell of the old god filling the room and new knowledge in his head. He knew, now, what he had to do.
So Deed had continued to send out the necessary summonings, dropping knowledge into the heads of the shamans as they lay in that disir state of not-quite-sleep. Disir brains didn’t work in the same way as humans; it was fair to say that they were not completely conscious. As with ancient humans, the two halves of the brain were not entirely connected, so messages from one half would be interpreted as voices from elsewhere. Deed, his eye glued to the periscope, whispered instructions, coaxed, c
ajoled and threatened, until the shamans-moved by that murmur out of the darkness-drew the tribes into position.
Deed had few illusions about his ability to control the disir. They were savages, and feral. They would run amok in the city, following their own whims, but with Loki’s blessing at the tip of his tongue, he could destroy them if he had to. That was the plan: bring them in, and when the city was thoroughly cowed, remove the nuisance and bring the Court into centre stage as heroes. It was a simple, brutal plan, Deed felt, and it lacked elegance and subtlety, but it was at least historically tested.
He had already set the spellwork in place to open the rift in the Library. That the disir would make their grand entrance there, probably destroying hundreds of rare texts in the process, appealed to Deed. It would give the literary advantage to the Court in years to come, and he was prepared to sacrifice the odd grimoire to greater ambitions. With the Library crippled and the Court predominant, plus the existing support from Bleikrgard-that left only the Eastern and Southern Quarters to subdue and Deed was confident that with the disir plunging through the city, he would be able to persuade the relevant authorities in those areas that the Court would be an appropriate guiding force.
He was, therefore, both alarmed and annoyed when Darya ran into the room where he was undertaking his preparations.
“Abbot General! Something’s happening?”
She looked dishevelled. Strands of hair had come loose from her chignon and tendrilled across her face, and her jacket had been misbuttoned. Deed regarded her coldly.
“Would you mind knocking in future?”
“Look out the window!” Darya pointed a quivering finger. Deed did so and to his shock saw a vast chasm opening in the sky above the Western Sea. It was as if the sky was splitting in half. The windows of the Court bulged briefly inwards, but held. Deed took a hasty step back. Within the gap surged a tidal race of cloud in all the colours of fire. Rose, gold, scarlet and a livid white turned the night sky into a terrible false day.
“What the hell is that?” Deed breathed. Darya was wide-eyed, her appearance slipping further into disir.
The ground shuddered under their feet. In the laboratory next door, alembics and retorts rattled and the rattling did not stop. Deed looked at the window and saw the frame was shaking. He cast out a spell for stability, but it was like spitting into a hurricane. Battening down panic, Deed said, “The roof.”
They ran up shaking flights of stairs. Magicians were pouring out of the rooms of the Court and Deed heard the rising note of hysteria in their voices. The building gave a huge, convulsive shudder, then stopped. Followed by Darya, Deed burst out onto the roof. The sky was alight. The spell-vanes, gilded surfaces catching the rosy fire, spun wildly in all directions and the air tasted of wild magic, pungent as petrol.
Deed was running for the turret, Darya at his heels, when the Court shook again and a great section of roof broke off and plunged into the street. Deed didn’t look back. Good thing he had a penchant for emergency plans.
Tope was unconscious, but not dead. Librarians were running from the room in a panic. Shadow was bundling Mariam Shenudah through the door. Mercy hesitated over Tope’s still form.
“Go on!” Benjaya Vrone shouted. “I’ll take care of her.”
With the other Librarians, Mercy and Shadow fled down the stairs. A brief glance upwards told Mercy that the ghostly birds had gone to roost, just as living ones do during an eclipse. As they were halfway down, the stairs rippled like the skin of a stroked cat, flinging them against the banisters. Mercy lost her footing and sat down hard. She was thus in a position to watch in horror as the entire front façade of the Library split in two. Tiles fell from the roof and she saw the bird-faced spirit follow it, twirling down through the air to crack in two on the marble floor below. The crack widened so she could see all the way out into the square, which was filled with frightened groups of people running to and fro and a golem in the midst of it all, trudging stolidly about its business. She glimpsed McLaren, with Benjaya at his side, directing people to safety.
Shadow pulled her to her feet.
“Look!” But she was pointing up the stairs.
On the Ninth Floor, the rift that had begun as no more than a slit in the air along Section C, was now spreading. Icy air gusted through with a swirl of snow and Mercy caught her breath. She saw rather than felt the ka pluck her sleeve.
“Up or down?”
“I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” Mercy said. By now, along with the Duke, poised elegantly upon a tilted step, they were the only ones left on the upper staircase. Everyone else was pouring out through the crack in the front of the building; Mercy hoped they would at least have a chance at survival. She couldn’t work out whether it was an actual earthquake or not. The city wasn’t prone to them as geological phenomena, which suggested to Mercy that this was some massive ruction along the storyways themselves, some heave in the fabric of the nevergone.
But the rift from Section C was coming on fast. Shadow reached out and gripped Mercy’s arm as the curve of arctic air and twilight swept down the staircase to engulf them.
Deed could hear the engines powering up as he neared the turret. The building had stabilised for now, but Deed wasn’t taking any chances. As he drew close, the doors of the base of the turret burst open. The nose of an airship slid out, a dark, iridescent green, whirring with spell-vanes of its own. He could see the pilot in the cockpit, insectoid behind his goggles and flying mask.
Deed scrambled up over the running blades and through the open hatch. He didn’t bother to find out whether Darya had made it as the airship began to glide down the roof, but a thud and a curse behind him indicated that she had. Deed sighed. He stumbled into the cockpit and tapped the pilot on the shoulder.
“Keep away from that!” He pointed to the rift in the sky.
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” the pilot demanded, belatedly adding, “Sir.”
Deed flung himself into a seat before acceleration did it for him, and strapped himself in. A moment later, Darya joined him. At least there were no accusing glances about his unchivalrous behaviour; disir expected everyone to act on their own behalf.
Good thing he’d had the airship tested recently. Its maiden voyage through the overlight had been a success.
The airship reached the edge of the roof and lurched into the air. It rose surprisingly quickly for such a bulbous craft, although Deed could hear the increasing whine of the engines as levitation spells took hold. Around him, the mechanisms of the airship whirred: a large brass sigilometer in the centre column of the cockpit spat out data. Deed had a brief, dizzying glimpse of the scene below him in the square as the craft turned: crowds streaming down the alleyways and out of the Library. What was happening to the Library? Deed thumped the pilot on the shoulder.
“Take us around again!”
Muttering, the pilot obeyed and Deed saw that the front of the Library had broken like an egg. Let this be a lesson to you, Jonathan, he thought, next time you plot to bring down your enemies, make sure that the universe isn’t planning to do it for you.
“All right,” Deed said. “Get us out of here.”
But it was too late for that.
Mercy smacked down into snow. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. She inhaled again and the cold seared her throat.
“Shadow?”
“I’m here.” Shadow sat up. “Wherever here is.” Mercy did not recognise the precise place, but she thought they must be in the world from which the disir had come, the world of the bridge and the lands inside the mountain. The landscape was the same: plateaus of snowfield against black shards of mountain, descending through the pines. She got to her feet, to see the Duke of Hell and Perra sitting side by side in the branches of a tree like two exotic birds.
“Where are we?” Shadow asked.
“It’s part of the nevergone. You went back to somewhere that emerged out of the legends of the Fertile Crescent; this is furt
her north. The Ice Age. I’ve been here before.”
Shadow nodded, taking it in. “And the way out?”
“Well, this wasn’t where we first came in. We went down a particular storyway-there was a bridge and a waterfall of mist. This is further in from that land, deeper. This might not even relate to human memory.”
“The Pass comes from demon’s stories,” Gremory said. She walked lightly across the snow, dusting something from her taloned hands. Mercy thought it was ash. “I’ve never been here before. Do you know the way out?”
Mercy shook her head. “Not really. We’ll just have to keep walking and see if we can find our way back to the bridge.”
She thought, but did not say, And what happens then? The world of the bridge had led back into the Library, but that had been when there still was a Library. She was by no means sure this was still the case, given the state of it when they had left. Although “left” was rather too active a verb.
They began walking down through the pines. Here, the snow was sparse, kept away by the dense canopy above them. This, surely, was the sort of forest you found in fairy tales: thick, impenetrable and dark. And filled with monsters? Almost certainly. She thought about stumbling over the old god’s lair again and swallowed hard. Well, she’d found his story, hadn’t she? He ought to be pleased.
Above the pines, the sky was quite dark, swarming with stars. Mercy was only able to see by the light cast by Perra’s eyes: golden beams on the snow and the black trunks of the trees. But gradually, Mercy found she was able to see. The sky was lightening to a bright indigo blue and shadows appeared. Dawn? But then, with dismay, they came out onto a high plateau and Mercy realised that the reason she could see was because of the Pass itself.
The airship rocked as if it had been buffeted. Deed had a birds’-eye view of the second rift as it spread outwards from the Library, obscuring the ruined façade from view. He could see through the ragged edges of the rift to a familiar landscape: the world of the disir.
