Worldsoul

by Liz Williams

  Fifty

  All the way across the snowfield, Mercy expected to feel the plunge of talons into her back. She struggled through the thick drifts, occasionally hauling Shadow along, occasionally being hauled in turn. The demon and Perra ran lightly across; Gremory with impatience, Perra with a ka’s usual impassivity. The Duke made no attempt to help. Mercy suspected that it simply did not occur to her.

  When they reached the rocks, Mercy pushed Shadow ahead of her and dived into the stony clefts. Something shrieked overhead. She looked up to see a shadow moving fast above them. It was enormous, perhaps forty feet long. A hammer-head snaked down to a serpent’s tail and as they cowered between the rocks, a stinging lash shot down, raking through the cleft. Mercy felt it whistle past her hair. The thing shrieked in frustration and turned. The sky above the rocks grew dark as it veered and shot back, its small ball-bearing eyes glittering with malice. Mercy ducked. A black-and-scarlet shadow leaped onto the rocky ledge ahead of her. There was a thin hissing sound as a lash whipped overhead, was flung upwards to tangle itself around the storm demon’s throat. The Duke, knocked off balance, fell into the rocks in a tangle of metal; the whip blazed up, a bright necklace around its throat, and its head fell severed to the snowy ground. A moment later, Gremory was back, red eyes alight.

  “I can’t take all of them.”

  “Aren’t they your kin?” Mercy asked. The demon bared her teeth.

  “No kin of mine.”

  They fled up into the mountain wall. Once, Mercy glanced back and saw the storm demons falling on the disir. The shamans were plucked from their mounts and carried kicking into the sky. Mercy saw a demon drop one of them onto the rocks, splitting armour and carapace as a thrush beats a snail against a stone. Then another demon whisked down out of the heavens. They cowered down between the rocks, Shadow’s veil billowing out across their heads. Mercy felt rather than saw it rip; it felt as though something had scratched her own soul. She heard Shadow cry out in pain and understood at last what the veil was: part of Shadow herself, a visible part of her spirit. Mercy whispered an incantation, flung it upwards at the writhing white form. Grooves of bloody fire appeared on the thing’s flank, but although the demon shrieked it did not fall. But then, as if something had summoned it back, it wheeled away and flew towards the river.

  They hurried on through the rocks, emerging onto another plateau of snow. This was much wider, with the black rock wall rearing jagged at its further side. To Mercy, the monochrome landscape was a nightmare fairy tale. What had Nerren said, the day the monorail blew up? White as snow, black as night. Red as blood. There was no blood there now, at least, not yet.

  She looked back. The disir army was a struggling mass at the river’s edge, with the storm a locust cloud above it. When the demons had finished with the disir, they would come after straggling prey. The only reason, Mercy knew, that they had not yet been devoured had been accident, and that only a couple of demons could be bothered. That situation would not last. She shouted to Shadow, “We’ve got to get across the snowline now. In a minute it will be too late.”

  But in this she was wrong.

  Fifty-One

  Deed had just returned to the cabin when the windscreen shattered. There was a heavy thump on top of the airship, and a moment later the glass imploded as a stinging whip-like tail burst through it. The pilot, impaled, did not have time to cry out as he died. Deed ducked as the demon withdrew its tail, then sent it back inward for another lashing thrust. He was unable to reach the controls: the tail filled the cockpit. The airship’s engine began to emit a high mosquito scream. Its nose veered sharply downwards. Deed would have slithered uncontrollably towards the shattered windscreen had he not grabbed onto one of the wall stanchions. Didn’t matter, though, did it? Deed thought. He was going to die anyway, because the airship was going to crash. He hurled an incantation at the demon, blasting it away from the stricken ship, but by now the engine was making a noise like a tortured tomcat and the ship was corkscrewing down towards the river. He could see the ice-flecked water spinning up in a series of loops and coils as the ship plummeted down.

  He was not conscious, for once, of changing. It happened fast: bones jutting out from his skin, his vision altering, teeth extending. The hand that gripped the stanchion now had long iron-coloured talons and the bones stood out like knives. Deed snarled as the ship skimmed over the surface of the river, the breath of ice blasting cold through the shattered glass, and ploughed into the bank.

  Fifty-Two

  Mercy ran, slogging through the deep snowfield. It had an icy crust like a loaf of bread, but her feet were plunging into the depths beneath and the Duke finally had to help both Mercy and Shadow, seizing their hands and dragging them along. From above, Mercy thought, they must look like three children, little dark figures toiling over the snow. It was with a terrible sense of despair, but no surprise, when the demon swooped down out of the sky, a hawk hunting. Gremory’s hard hand was torn from Mercy’s grasp and she was whisked up into the storm as easily as a captured dove.

  “Gremory!” Shadow cried, in a voice of startling loss. Mercy, futilely, brandished the sword, but the Duke was gone. A dove, Mercy thought. Aloud she cried, “Mareritt! Mareritt! Mareritt!”

  A silver bolt flew out of the shadows of the mountain wall. It shot over her head and buried itself in the storm demon’s throat. Blood pattered down, burning Mercy’s skin; Shadow threw the torn veil over them both. The storm demon dropped Gremory. She fell, twisting elegantly through the air, and landed in the snow. Mercy heard a hissing sound that was unknown and yet oddly familiar: she turned to see Mareritt’s sleigh gliding swiftly over the snowfield.

  “Well, get in.”

  Mercy did not need asking twice. Shadow pushed her over the side of the sleigh, into the mass of heads, then followed. Gremory crouched on the sleigh’s side, knees drawn up; she appeared unharmed. The heads gaped, astonished.

  “What is happening?” the Brass-bound head asked in a voice like a bell.

  “Hush,” Silver-Bound said. “You ask such foolish questions.”

  “It is the time,” Golden-Bound remarked. The others looked at him, their eyes rolling in their sockets.

  “You never make any sense,” Brass-Bound complained.

  The Bronze-bound head appeared to be sleeping, but Iron-Bound, the one who must have been a warrior, laughed, silently showing its bloodstained teeth. Its eyes, black and small, met Mercy’s for a moment: they exchanged a glance of complicit enjoyment.

  Over her shoulder, Mareritt said, “Well done.”

  “I found your book,” Mercy said.

  “Excellent.”

  “I’m just not sure that there’s still a city to read it in.”

  “We’ll have to see, won’t we?” Mareritt said. She cracked the whip in a shower of silver bells and the sledge sped on towards the mountain wall.

  Mercy did not wish to backseat drive, but she did want to know what the plan was. And even if there was one. She crawled to the front of the sleigh, behind the driving seat.

  “Careful,” Bronze-Bound said, without opening its eyes.

  “Sorry.” Cautiously, for the sleigh was travelling fast, she stood and found herself looking past Mareritt’s white-clad arm, all lace and frost, and over the silvery rumps of the running deer. “Where are we heading? For the gap?”

  “Oh, no, dear.” Mareritt turned her head and grinned a feral grin. “I can’t take this through something that narrow-a person, perhaps, but not this sleigh. We came the long way round when I heard your call, along the Dead Road. I’m not going back that way. I don’t think you’d survive it.”

  Mercy was aware of a cold lump of dread, lodged beneath her breastbone. “Then which way are we going?”

  Mareritt pointed with the whip, to the lick of fiery cloud that was the newly opened Pass. “We’ll be going through there.”

  Deed lay, face down, in snow. It was cold enough to have killed a human by now. He raised himself up on
taloned hands. The airship rested several yards away. It was burning. A hard blue flame flickered throughout its exposed bowels and occasionally something shorted out with a hiss. He saw a small spirit, released from the mechanism, darting out across the snow, beak gaping, before it faded and vanished.

  Deed was reluctant to stand, in case he got snatched by one of the storm worms. He looked across the river. The battle was over: he could smell blood on the faint wind and it was disir blood. He knew that scent very well. The demons themselves were amassing high up in the clouds; he could see the tornado funnel gathering. Deed forced himself to think logically-for that, human heritage was useful. The disir were not big on rational planning: aggression, rage, and death, yes, but not reasoned consideration. If the army had been destroyed, that meant that Deed’s own intentions would now have to undergo a serious revision. He did not have the requisite knowledge to repair the airship, even if it could be mended. That meant that, assuming he wasn’t killed in the next few minutes, he was stranded here for the time being, on the other side of the World’s River. He would have to cross the river, then make his way through Loki’s forest to the nearest gap back into the city.

  Being disir, Deed was inclined to regard this as an opportunity rather than a challenge. To have the army destroyed was galling, true, but it also meant a lessening of competition. Now, if his understanding was correct, he and the female still loose in Worldsoul were the only disir left.

  A breeding pair; how romantic. Deed did not consider himself to be ideal parent material.

  He was still aiming at control of the city. He looked on the bright side. The Skein still had not come back. That left all sorts of opportunities to grab at power, assuming he could get back into the city without running into one of Loki’s wolves. And that was a rather big “if.”

  “You must be mad,” Mercy said. Mareritt looked at her, apparently genuinely surprised.

  “Whatever makes you say that?”

  “A look up ahead?” Shadow said, coming to stand by Mercy’s side. The sleigh was now skirting the mountain wall, running along the air just above the surface of the snowfield, like a skimming stone. The stormcloud was gathering over the bony wreckage of the disir army, whipping upwards in a mass of teeth and stinging tails. Beyond, the Pass was clearly visible, a wound in the air.

  “All you have to do,” Mareritt said, “is keep your heads down.”

  “Oh, that’ll be all right, then,” Mercy said.

  “Your friend has a veil.”

  “It got torn,” Mercy told her. She could still feel Shadow’s pain: an invisible rent, seeping invisible blood.

  Shadow gripped her hand. “It’s all right. I’ll be all right. And we have to do this. I’ve realised why now.”

  “I don’t want-” Mercy began, but by this time the sleigh was sweeping up, up towards the tear in the sky.

  Deed leaped. The ice rolled beneath his feet, nearly sending him down into the swift dark water. He jumped to the next floe, which was more stable, a shelf of ice carried on the current. Deed clung to it as it took him around one of the ox-bow curves in the river: using the ice to carry him as far as possible from the scene of the battlefield, away from the attention of the gathering aerial force.

  But he could not let it take him too far. Ahead lay the estuary of the World’s River and then the sea: eternal, ice-locked, ancient, and cold. He’d seen its slow oily heave from the airship’s maiden voyage, the tidal sway of a sea that is on the perpetual point of freezing, and he had no wish to be carried out into the waves. That meant judging his movements across the ice. Deed crouched, sprang, and landed once again.

  Shadow’s veil may not have been able to protect them from demonic attack, but it did save them to some extent from the noise. Up here, the shrieking of the horde that had come through the Pass was close to unbearable: a starling flock magnified a thousand fold. As the sleigh approached the edges of the tight formation that was the swarm, Mercy saw a dozen lamprey heads turning in their direction. She clung on as the sleigh veered, taking the turn around the edge of the funnel. But several of the worms had already broken away and were sailing down, their wings gilded by the light of the Pass into eerie transparency. There was a snap above Mercy’s veil-shrouded head as Mareritt cracked the whip, urging the deer on. What struck Mercy, even with the demons soaring down to meet them and the Pass coming up fast ahead, was how hot it had become. The upper air above this ancient land should have been freezing. Instead, a bead of sweat was trickling down her nose and the point between her shoulder blades had become unpleasantly damp. The air smelled of musty spice, the odour of stale musk that was, she realised with nausea, generated by thousands of demonic bodies. Across the sled, Gremory was managing to look superior. The ka sneezed.

  “Kindly get out of the way!” That was Golden-Bound.

  “Yes, how can we act when your soul is all over the place?” Brass-Bound chimed in. Mercy saw Shadow’s eyes widen, and she whisked the veil down so that it covered Mercy and herself closely, like a pair of snoods. Brass-Bound made a prim face, as if about to utter some distasteful truth, then spat. A gobbet of liquid fire shot out and struck an oncoming demon in the middle of its lamprey jaws. Mercy saw the flame travel all the way down its long throat, illuminating the demon from within, and then it exploded. Brass-Bound allowed a faint smugness to show across its face. The Duke gave a brief, I-am-reluctantly-impressed nod.

  Silver-Bound followed suit with a plume of blue-white flame. A demon fell like a singed eel out of the sky, bursting into a brief flare as it sank towards the tundra. As a demon screamed with rage, all of the heads swivelled in the direction of the swarm and spat in unison. A rainbow arc of flame coreolised in the sled’s wake as Mareritt whipped the deer on.

  The movement of the swarm had sung up the wind. Ice-laden branches of fir lashed against Deed’s face. But the disir thought things were looking up. He was far from the swarm now, and into the treeline. He was at home in these forests-for a moment, it occurred to Deed that it might be an option to remain here, run wild through the forests of the night rather than returning to Worldsoul and its tedious politics. A little vacation… He rejected this as coming from the disir-self, the feral-self. This back-to-nature business was all very well, but he still had the old god’s wolves to contend with and besides, there was too much of intrinsic interest in the city. Deed took a gasping breath of arctic air and trudged on.

  The demon was on fire, but this did not seem to deter it. It came over the backs of the racing deer and struck Mareritt on the breast, ramming her backwards over the lip of the sleigh and into the well of heads, where it exploded. The heads cried out in a unison of disgust. Mercy and Shadow both scrambled for the reins; Mercy, due to position, was a fraction quicker. She clambered up into the driver’s seat and steered the deer towards the Pass.

  She had driven a horse buggy, once or twice, in the parks of Worldsoul on holidays. This was different. Taking the reins was like taking hold of something living; they twitched quicksilver in her hands and she felt electricity dance up the bones of her arms into her spine. For a second, it was as though she looked through the ice-dark eyes of the deer, seeing a web of connections spreading out between demons and air, a way of seeing which she could not understand and which momentarily disoriented her. The reins fell slack in her hands, but she grasped them more tightly, bringing them up. The deer turned.

  “Is she all right?” A spit of fire shot past her ear, singing her hair. “Careful!”

  Shadow was leaning over Mareritt. “I think so. She’s trying to speak.”

  Mercy risked a glance over her shoulder and saw the gaping hole in Mareritt’s chest was beginning to knit together: blood, tissue, lace and bone all forming a seamless whole. Mareritt’s mouth was open so wide, she looked barely human. Well, she wasn’t, was she? Mercy reminded herself. She concentrated on the Pass ahead.

  Deed was expecting the wolf when it came. He had heard it coming through the trees; soft footed, it had n
onetheless betrayed itself by the single rustle of a twig. He pretended to be lost, glancing nervously around him, adjusting his appearance to partway human. It would not fool the wolf entirely-they knew disir when they smelled one-but it might confuse it. Thus he was, deliberately, facing away from the wolf when it sprang. Then he turned, falling backwards, reaching up with taloned fingers to rake the wolf’s throat. Its own momentum ripped out its jugular. Deed, exulting, was covered in a bath’s worth of blood. He drank it in, an indulgence, for it was the wolf’s spirit that he was lapping up, stealing its strength, its wildness, its ferocity. At the very bottom of its animal soul lay something that might be compared to a bright jewel: a shining pearl which Deed recognised as its imprimatur from the old god. A berry of mistletoe. This he did not touch, and it fell snowflake silent to the ground and dimmed away. There was a chance that Loki would be conscious of it, a little candle going out, but hell, animals died all the time. He hadn’t been aware of any tugs on the wyrd-web, but he’d taken good care to shut himself off from it, severing any connections that might have curled out, vine tendrils from his spirit. Old Loki was subtle, though. Deed still wasn’t planning on taking risks.

  It was now obvious that Mareritt would not be mended by the time they reached the Pass. Mercy estimated this to be another thirty seconds or so. The Pass filled the sky: it was like flying into the sunset. As a child, and sometimes now, Mercy had hung out of the back windows of her house, looking into the shining crimson sky above the Western Sea and its the golden clouds of islands, wondering if she would ever visit them. A whimsical notion, but now here she was. These clouds were moving too fast to be islands, however. They were like boiling clouds of golden steam, laced with lightning fire. Mercy couldn’t help feeling if she took the sleigh into the middle of that, they’d all be fried.