Worldsoul

by Liz Williams

  “Take us through!” Deed commanded the pilot.

  “Not much sodding choice! Sir.”

  The little airship was being pulled into the gap, nose forwards. Deed heard the whine of the engine as stabilising spells tried and failed to secure the craft’s trajectory. Then the temperature plummeted and they were sliding through the gap into the nevergone. Deed was looking down onto the churn of cold grey ocean and behind them, he saw the rift in the air snap shut.

  “What’s that?” Mercy was looking down onto the plain, at a dark mass of moving forms. From this distance, it looked like an ants’ nest, strung out along the looping shores of the river. She could see the glint of the rosy, heaving light of the Pass striking sparks from the metal of weapons.

  “Looks like we’ve found Loki’s army,” the Duke said beside her.

  “There are thousands of them.”

  “Yes. I must say, it will be interesting to see what happens when these two cultures clash-both ancient, both unhuman. Circumstances have always kept them apart, but now they’re going to meet at last.” The demon fished in a pocket of her armour and extracted a pair of small brass opera glasses. “Would you like a closer look?”

  The army stretched across the plain, far beyond the river. Looking through the opera-glasses, Mercy could see the disir clearly: tall, attenuated figures, wrongly jointed. Their skin was mottled black, white, grey. They wore leather armour, some in tatters. Many of them wore headdresses of wolf skulls, evidence of earlier kills. All were female, as far as Mercy could see. Some had bracelets and headbands of silver, and a pale fire flickered about their heads: those would presumably be the shamans.

  Mercy set her feet more firmly on the ridge.

  “How many are there?” Shadow asked.

  “Several thousand.” She could see poles bearing skulls and the tatters of clan banners, carried among them. Some rode beasts: huge horned creatures with shaggy black coats and cloven hooves. “I think those things are aurochs.” She took a deep breath.

  As they watched the army approach, a black speck appeared above it. It spiralled up like a blown leaf, then, as if snatched by the wind, it shot forwards. Mercy braced herself. It was a raven, the feathers black and shining, but the bird itself was a skeleton. Its eyes were sparks in its skull.

  “My mistress wants to speak with you.” It wasn’t a bird’s voice. Mercy thought that something was speaking through the puppet of its skull. The bone-white beaked head cocked on one side.

  “Me? Why?” Mercy asked. The raven’s skull went up as if its head had been jerked back. It shot upwards, whirling into the sky.

  “You have the god’s touch on you. It’s how she smelled you out.”

  The raven’s mistress, a shaman, was riding one of the aurochs. She spurred it forwards and it gave a bellowing cry, perhaps of protest, perhaps rage. It lumbered at startling speed across the frozen ground until it was close enough for Mercy to smell its pungent cattle-scent, warm in the cold air. The shaman herself wore a necklace of bones, delicately polished and interspersed with river garnet. Her armour was of white hide, linked by iron rings. She carried a flint blade at her hip and her long hair was matted with lime. Her eyes were snowfire pale and her face was bone, not skin. She slid down from the auroch’s back with a thud and said pugnaciously to Mercy, “I challenge you for the god’s favour. Begin.”

  “Look,” Mercy said. “If you’re talking about Loki, I don’t want him. You can have him.”

  “Begin!”

  Mercy drew the sword.

  “Not that. I meant magic.”

  “I’m not-” Oh, what the hell. She thought of her dreams and sighed.

  It would have to be wolf-magic; nothing else was old enough. She remembered her dream of the homunculus, wriggling in the snare under the ice. She thought of the curse. She remembered the shift, herself changing not into wolf, but wolf-woman.

  This was the nevergone. It was between-that was important, it was not the final product. No such thing as a finished story. She took a breath and changed.

  The world about her shifted. Maybe that was it: you yourself don’t alter, but you step into a different narrative, rewriting yourself. Mercy stood on the plateau she had seen in her dream, with the standing stone above the long valley. It was winter, twilight, a thin moon high overhead, but the air still smelled of the pines. And blood: something had been freshly killed.

  The disir shaman stepped out of the stone. At first, she, too, was different. She was no more than a girl, her hair white fire against the darkness of the rock. Her eyes were huge and luminous, and she was smiling. There was a touch of Mareritt, but her face was more elemental. Then it changed and the disir was back. She opened her jaws to display long teeth and gave a grating shriek of challenge.

  Mercy was hit with a blast of power. Not a conjuration or a spell, but the knowledge of what the disir was. Overwhelming cold, the long Ice Age winter, thousands of years long, when a thin rind of northerly humanity had clung to the chill planet and survived. The disir were their nightmares; they were the sharp-toothed dark and the killing cold. They were the stories and tales of the hunters, and when the ice had gone and the world grew warm, they too survived their long winter in the deep minds of men. And they were female, which men so often fear.

  Mercy could see, in that moment of understanding, why Mareritt was their enemy. Later she became a rival. She came from a part of history in which city-dwellers feared the forest, overlain onto something much older. But she wasn’t wild. She was an urban idea of the wilderness, and she was far closer to human than the disir would ever be. She wanted the disir gone so she could take their place.

  “This is my reply,” Mercy said. She thought of the wolf-clan, the hearth. She thought of people in the long night, the arctic cold, banding together against the rigours of the world. Animal and human, finding connection, reaching out. The long winter hadn’t killed them: they’d won. Greya and the lampmender Salt, who had helped one another. She raised the Irish sword and it began to sing in her mind a song of its own, a thread of telling about battles fought and won, the green summer hillside and the sparkling sea. It sang of honour and glory, but also of loss and the knowledge that it had been the agent of that loss. It was human-born, human-made and Mercy hung onto its song and pulled herself to her feet. She cut through the wintersong of the disir, the stories of iron ground and iron cold, of the delight in bloodshed, and she ran the shaman through so hard that the blade rang out against the standing stone.

  The stone and the valley were gone. Mercy was herself again, with the sword hilt reassuringly solid in her hand. Her arm was still numb with the shock of the blow, ringing up the bones of her arm. The body of the shaman lay at her feet, convulsed in death. The disir army cried out with rage and dismay.

  But Shadow, off to her left, was looking behind Mercy, not towards the vociferous disir.

  “This is not good,” Shadow said. Mercy turned. The clouds of the Pass were opening up. The sky was splitting in a ragged vertical to let more stormlight through. She saw bolts of azure flame rip the clouds, a blaze of golden light, with thousands of black specks whirling against it. Storm demons, coming through. They coiled in a spiral above the black line of the horizon, like bats or birds, but Mercy knew that from the distance, they must be vast.

  The horned beasts ridden by the disir were beginning to panic and stampede. Their riders wheeled them back, shrieking: an earsplitting sound which made Mercy clap her hands to her head. But she could still hear the riders’ cries and feel the thud of the hooves travelling up through the ground, a dull drumbeat. Something tugged her sleeve and she leaped, her heart pounding and the sword jumping in turn in her hand. The demon’s eyes were gleaming.

  “Can I make a suggestion?” Gremory said. She gestured with a long-taloned hand towards the oncoming storm. “If that lot sees you, they’ll tear you apart.”

  “I’d worked that out.” Mercy nodded towards the forest. “Only way out’s through there.”
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br />   “Best get a move on, then.”

  With Shadow, they ran for the line of trees. Perra ran ahead, bounding between the tussocks of grass. If the disir noticed, it meant little: their attention was now fully occupied by the oncoming storm. The trees would not protect them-but the rocks might. Mercy was remembering the bridge, and that crack in the mountain behind the mistfall.

  The only problem was that once off the open tundra, the trees slowed them down. The pines, their branches weighted with snow, grew closely together and the slope between them was slippery, with ice filming the glassy rocks beneath the thin covering of earth. Mercy could see Shadow was shivering, despite her heavy coat. She held out a hand and pulled her friend up the slope.

  “I’ll be all right,” Shadow said. The demon seemed to have no such difficulties: her boots made no footprints in the snow and Mercy was reminded of a raven, black above the red of a kill. They could hear the onrushing storm through the trees now, a battering wall of sound. Shrieks from the disir army suggested that the meeting was imminent.

  Mercy struggled across a short plateau of rock and found herself above the tree line. She looked back. Over the pines, the stormclouds boiled and writhed: she could see the tornado funnel of the winged demons, a black whiplash cracking against the sky. They had a clear few hundred yards of snowfield, before the rocks began.

  “Ready?” Mercy said to Shadow, and they ran.

  Forty-Nine

  Deed stood in the cockpit of the Court’s airship, binoculars clamped to his eyes. Disir sight was not always so keen and he had enhanced his own over the years with a variety of judicious preparations: sight stolen from the youths of the Western Quarter, vision sipped from the eyes of cats and nightbirds. But the tundra was too wide, and he needed the binoculars to check the magic levels. The readings slid in a sequence of silver sigils down the sights of the binoculars, ticking away the fluctuating degrees of different magics.

  As the airship slipped over the estuary, the first great curves of the World’s River came into sight. This river had been, in the true past, the first to reappear across Siberia once the ice had begun to retreat. Tales of the disir had first come from its banks, and so here it was in the nevergone. Loki’s land. Deed’s binoculars registered ancient sigils as they passed overhead, runes which were given by the land, not by man. He could taste them in blood and fire on his tongue; they spoke to him of the blast of the winter wind, of ice and the little flick of flame raised by a human hand, of the hunt and the long chase. Deed smiled, and then he saw the army of the disir.

  Thousands of his kindred stretched out across the plain, milling far below the airship. Ahead, he could see the mountain wall: features so ancient their true names had been lost. The pines spilled down the mountainside like ink, black against the snow. In that forest, Loki was waiting for his freedom. Deed’s mouth was suddenly dry.

  He touched the pilot on the shoulder.

  “How long?”

  “Before we can take them through the gap? Another few minutes.”

  Deed nodded. “Good enough.” He lowered the binoculars. Around him, the cabin’s instruments were showing readings of their own, currently displaying height, pressure, speed-none of these things mattered to Deed. He was interested in the levels of power. He crouched by the brass-clad sigilometer and studied it.

  Nehatz.

  Rutine.

  Gemart.

  Each sigil appeared briefly, outlined in fire, and then fading. He knew where this was coming from-the runic invocations uttered by the disir shamans below, keeping the fighting mettle of their sisters up, appealing to their own spirits, preparing a battering ram to hammer down any tales they might encounter on the way in.

  But there were other sigils, too, and at these, Deed frowned. A trace like a curling leaf: what the hell was that? It was blurred, as though whoever it belonged to had smeared their signature to prevent detection. And another-a name of God, unless he was much mistaken. Not the kind of magic he expected to find here, and Deed, ever the conscientious magician, did not take kindly to anomalies. He scowled as a hieroglyph chased fleetingly across the screen. The sigilometer whirred, spitting out a small roll of paper, its intermittent record of proceedings.

  But these were tiny indications that all was not as predicted below. Deed was far more considerably taken aback some moments later when the sigilometer clicked, made a grinding sound, and revealed a cascading torrent of sigils, slipping too quickly across its screen for individual symbols to be detected.

  “What-” Deed started to ask.

  At that point the airship gave a dramatic lurch to the left. Deed was thrown against the bulkhead, his shoulder slamming into the iron scrollwork of the spell-protection system. He heard someone cry out, thought for a moment that it was himself, then realised it was Darya, sprawling against the sigilometer. Next minute, the ship righted itself, but the pilot’s face was pallid and drenched with sweat.

  “What was that?” Deed demanded. “What was it?”

  Darya was staring with horror at the sigilometer.

  “Look!” The machine was beginning to smoulder, the sigils flashing at white heat over the little screen until the screen itself resembled a rapidly blinking white eye.

  Then the steersman brought the ship around and they saw the stormcloud gap in the sky.

  “Take us out!” Deed told the pilot. He did not know what this wrench in the heavens was, but he had no intention of sticking around to find out, whatever was happening to the army below. It seemed to extend right through the nevergone. The disir were not, essentially, a cooperative people. “Take us out now!”

  “I’m not sure I can!”

  The pilot hauled on the wheel. The ship swung, and something large and black like a blown umbrella smashed into the prow windows. It left a smear of green ichor on the glass as its grip was torn away from the ship by the sudden acceleration and its body was hurled up into the raging clouds.

  “What was it?” Darya echoed.

  “I don’t know.” An event of massive proportions, the cataclysm foreseen by the Crown divinators was clearly in the process of unfolding; Deed swore. That should have been his cataclysm.

  “They’re all over the sky!” the steersman cried. The ship rocked as if struck by a hammer. Deed flung himself into the neighbouring seat.

  “Strap yourself in,” he told Darya. He brought the prow cannon around so that it was pointing directly into the storm, now below and off to the left. Then he began to hit the sigil keys, one after another, two or three in combination, invoking spells of destruction and sending it down the prow cannon in a blast of white fire. The recoil reverberated throughout the ship. Deed saw the spell strike down into the heart of the storm; black shapes were flung outward, shrieking. This was not, Deed thought, a moment for subtlety. He reloaded the cannon, bypassing any demonic invocations. From the look of the things in the stormcloud-teeth, spines, spikes, claws-that was likely only to add to the problem. He kept to the runic, therefore: ancient magic, weather magic, conjuring up the deep cold of winter, the spirits of blizzard and gale, the spirits of the deep and bitter air.

  And for a few minutes, he almost thought it was working.

  But Deed recognised that he did not know what he was dealing with. He didn’t know where these entities had come from and that ignorance, combined with the fear that the army would be overwhelmed-for there were far more demons than there were disir and any army that has the advantage of flight will have the edge over one that does not-caused a bitter constriction to rise in Deed’s throat and start to choke him. He flung spell after spell, and for some moments watched with satisfaction as the demons that soared in front of the ship froze and cracked, blasted apart in the wake of cold magic, falling like showers of fiery snow to the curving world below. Some, but not all. There was a thunderous crack to the rear of the ship. The little vessel once more rocked before stabilising.

  “Darya,” Deed said pleasantly, turning to her. “Go and see what that was.�
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  She shot him a look of mingled fear, resentment, and loathing, but she did as he asked. That was good, Deed thought, that she still found him the most frightening thing around. But for how much longer?

  He fired another spell. Born of wind, it snatched the demons ahead and scattered them like leaves, but shrieking they rode the spirals of conjured air with glee before they regrouped, and one did not disperse at all, but hung with a hawk’s confidence upon the battering storm. There was a crash from the back of the ship.

  Deed unclasped the leather seat strap and, clinging to the bulkhead, went to the cabin door. The moment he opened it, he was smacked by a gust of wind, roaring in through a hole in the hull. A white snarling face turned on him: Darya. She had let go of the human in her as someone might release a soap bubble into a hurricane. Her skin was stretched taut over jutting bones and her face was a howl of teeth. The thing that had caught her resembled a lamprey: an oval taper of greying flesh with vaned white wings, beating with a steady rhythm above the storm. It had no eyes. Its mouth, a round series of needles, was wrapped around Darya’s leg. She was tearing at the thick grey skin with the talons of one hand, whilst the other clung to a stanchion.

  “Jonathan!” she cried, but the name was barely recognisable, coming from that teeth-filled mouth. Deed was quick to react. He kicked out, crushing her hand against the stanchion and causing her fingers to release it. With a soundless cry Darya was pulled through the gap and into the whirling air. Deed saw the final whisk of a pale wing and then she was gone. He spoke a command to the hull and the ragged metal began to seep back together, until only a tiny whistling hole remained.

  It was surprising what a relief it was to have got rid of Darya. No more competition? Fleetingly, Deed recognised that his ego would not allow him to entertain that thought and he pushed it away. No more Darya, at any rate.

  And what was happening to the army? Furious, and facing the wreckage of his hopes, Deed fought his way along the plunging airship to the cabin.