Spira Mirabilis

by Aidan Harte

  Grumbling incoherently, the veteran climbed back into the caravan. After some awkward manoeuvring, he managed to disconnect the pole from the girl’s ankles and hurried her to her feet. He used the pole to lead her to the caravan’s edge – then viciously booted her out.

  The corporal swore at him, then added, ‘Didn’t I say keep hold!’

  The veteran leaped down, pleased with himself. ‘All this fuss. It’s not as if she’s a mad dog.’

  The young soldier grinned. ‘She gave you a good—’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Shut up the both of you.’ The corporal grabbed the pole and pulled the prisoner to her feet. He pointed her away from Concord. ‘Release her feet and stand back – don’t worry, I got her.’

  They did as instructed, then the corporal carefully disconnected the pole before backing away himself. All three waited as the girl swayed on the spot, her fingers twitching, moaning.

  ‘Now what, Corp? She going to grow roots?’

  The sweating corporal jabbed the pole between her shoulder blades and thanked Saint Eco when she took the hint and started walking. They watched her getting smaller for a good quarter of an hour.

  ‘She ain’t turning, Corporal.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘General Spinther said she wouldn’t. Let’s go then.’

  ‘Before they start without us,’ the veteran said, and slapped his colleague’s back. ‘Ariminum, here we come!’

  As the carriage turned around and set off in pursuit of the legion, the hooded girl didn’t deviate from her course, not even when a stale breath from the Wastes whipped the shroud from her head. She danced on, on towards Rasenna.

  Isabella was coming home.

  Pale flesh, lined red where the skin was creased for the first time. A rotund chest, inflated to bursting point before emitting a shrill cry. By some animal instinct, the infant knew it was in peril. Torbidda tried to stifle the crying. It was so very cold up here on the canals. The guards must be close – he could hear their voices – but the mist rising up from the water – uneasy water, disturbed by the beckoning hands and grasping claws of the buio – made it hard to be sure of anything, even his next step. He stumbled and …

  … was in the Dissection Hall, scalpel in hand.

  ‘I warned you, Cadets,’ Agrippina shouted to the class. ‘You’d better have your subjects securely restrained.’

  She glanced at his bench as she marched by.

  ‘Cadet Sixty, what is that?’

  A trembling lamb lay upon the table. She whipped a sheet from a nearby cadaver and covered it. ‘Take it away,’ she whispered, ‘before they smell it.’

  Torbidda peeped over her shoulder and saw that his classmates were mostly wolves, though a few were still in the agonising process of shedding their human pelts. At the top of the hall, an old wolf stalked up and down the podium with his shaggy mane dripping wet. ‘Homo Homini Lupus!’ he howled and the class leaped onto their dissection tables and began eating their subjects.

  Over the screams, Agrippina thrust the bundle into this arms. ‘Go!’

  He ran under a bench and saw a student approaching Agrippina.

  ‘Where is he?’ Although the boy was not yet fully wolf, Torbidda shuddered. The voice was his own.

  ‘Who?’

  The other Torbidda pinned her wrists with his paws.

  ‘Torbidda, run!’ she screamed before her throat was ripped out.

  He burst out through the door into the corridors of Guild Hall – although somehow, as he ran, the columns changed to the scaffolds and cranes of a building site.

  Now he was on the windy summit of Monte Nero and looming overhead were the legs of the tripod. Disorientated, he stumbled again and dropped the bundle. It rolled to a stop ahead of him and the lamb poked its head out into the cold, then stumbled to its feet. A pathetic shudder ran through its body.

  It stood there, defiantly bleating. He tried to tell it to run, but what came from his throat was a low growl. He looked down at his hands: they were great brown wolf paws now. He watched curved ebony claws emerging, panting with fascination. The churning hunger in his gut made him look up.

  A young woman – he fancied he knew her smell – had picked up the lamb. ‘I lie upon your altar freely,’ she said, and again her voice was familiar. She could not outrun his long, loping stride – but she didn’t even try.

  ‘Damn you, run!’

  He was lying on the dusty wooden floorboards – must’ve fallen from his stool in his sleep. The candle had burned down and the Drawing Room was inconsistently illuminated by clouded moonlight while the windows were battered by rain and wind. He picked up the stool and placed it by the desk, on which were a dozen schematics he had no memory of drawing. He rubbed his eyes and looked into the dark shadows surrounding him. The nightmare fled from his memory and he did not pursue it.

  Suddenly his knees went weak and he stopped himself falling only by clinging to his desk. He remembered everything.

  The layers peeled off, in reverse order: the little nun and the things he’d done to her; Fra Norcino’s farewell; overseeing the tripod’s construction; addressing the people. As clear as a cut jewel, he remembered every second of the last few months – but that was the terrifying thing, for those memories were someone else’s.

  The last memory he could claim sole ownership of was dimmer. He recalled descending in the coffin, and his confidence that his strength was equal to whatever lay waiting. After that, a veil covered everything. Do ghosts remember their deaths? He remembered …

  … drowning. Codes long etched into metal enlivened by electric fluid clicked into place. The unsleeping blood-bloated worm that dwelt at the bottom of the pit – from whom even the mad buio fled – was waiting. His eyes opened underwater and cold red eyes stared back hungrily – the eyes of the architect who had fashioned his cathedral into a tomb. The Darkness had invaded him and he had been buried within himself.

  Afterwards, the usurper’s actions were things he watched from afar as he periodically attempted to break free, like a sleeper trying to kick off suffocating nightmare. Then a courageous girl had addressed him, spoke his name and awakened him from that horrid dream. He was Torbidda again, not Sixty: Torbidda. His hands, his feet, his mind, were his once more. He almost laughed, but a glimpse of himself in a window quelled all mirth. Illuminated by the moon’s frigid light, he looked like a corpse incompetently animated by some novice necromancer. The worm was only slumbering. How long before it swallowed him again? He had awakened from a nightmare into a reality that was worse.

  *

  It was still raining when he got there – it was always raining in the Depths. Despite the tumult in the rest of Concord, this part of Old Town never changed. He’d once brought Agrippina here on some mad romantic impulse. She’d asked about his mother, and he said she was dead and changed the subject.

  He knocked hard – a fair approximation of a praetorian rap, the summons that immediately demanded a response – and his heart pounded as he saw a flickering candle behind the shutters. Sweat covered his brow even though the heavy cloak he wore was saturated by rain.

  The door creaked open. ‘Oh. It’s you. Come in before death catches you,’ said a croak from the darkness. ‘Clever as you were, you always was daft.’

  He stepped in, and the smell of offal cooking on the charcoal fire that was never extinguished was exactly as he remembered. The shifting candlelight, the wind shaking the shutters, the rain trickling down his back, his disorientation with his flesh – it was as though the little hut was a cabin of a ship sailing unquiet seas.

  But no, not everything was the same – something was off.

  ‘Why’ve you returned, then? I’ve naught for you.’ She was shrunken like a ham hung too long. Her dried face was squashed between two round apple cheeks. Her hair, what was left of it, was like wiry white steel. Her skin was thin as a film of oil, and a similar greasy colour. A cheap tin Herod’s Sword hung from her neck by a leather string.
>
  ‘Nothing, eh? Well, you always was talkative,’ she said. ‘Let me put that cloak by the fire—’

  She saw among the rags underneath a distinctive red and pulled away as though it had burned her. Torbidda knew it was he who was out of place here.

  ‘I made First, Mother.’ He said it with a strange embarrassment, then asked, ‘You didn’t know?’

  Her ignorance wasn’t too surprising. The denizens of the Depths had as little notion of Guild politics as they had of the movements of the stars. One First Apprentice was much like the last.

  ‘I had one of my notions, but I don’t trust ’em no more.’ She shuffled over to a little counter and said, ‘I’ve naught to offer but hard bread and buttermilk. That used to settle you when you was little and dreamt bad.’

  On a tilting shelf beside the counter he saw an old Byzantine doll painted in shades of purple. He took it down. It was a wooden Madonna that came apart. Within its womb was another Madonna, and within that another. The final doll – small as a thimble – was the slain baby.

  She hacked at the loaf. ‘Funny you spotting that. It was your favourite toy.’

  ‘This was how I first conceived of Infinity.’

  ‘Aye, you was one for notions too,’ she said with a shrewd look. ‘Apprentice … so, it’s so. Your colour always was red. Hard to get, I expect?’

  There was so much he wanted to say, but no terms he could put it in that she would understand. ‘It required much labour.’

  ‘More than that, I expect. I expect you’ve a year’s worth of nasty dreams.’

  ‘An infinity. Tonight I dreamed I was carrying a baby by the Grand Canal. Guards were chasing me. It reminded me of a story you once told me.’

  ‘So, that’s why you came. To blame your old mother for your troubles.’

  ‘On the contrary. I think you had the right idea.’

  She sat down beside him, regarding him suspiciously. ‘You was never one for doubting yourself.’

  ‘You gave me to the Guild. I don’t blame you for it but they … changed me. They made me a vessel, but first they made me a killer.’

  The old woman laughed suddenly. ‘Oh no! They might have expanded your range but you was always a wrong ’un.’ She spat phlegm into the fire and wiped her mouth. ‘Better than any cat for keeping vermin down, you was. Had to hunt you into the streets or you’d cut them up in here. I expect that’s where I got the notion you’d get to the mountaintop if I put you on the track. They goaded you all the way up with promises and praise, no doubt. They told you you was smart, smartest of all – and now you come complaining to me that they tricked you into lying on their altar? Well, I can’t say I’m sorry. Ah, you don’t like that. I thought philosophers prized truth, but you came here for consoling lies, didn’t you?’

  ‘Very well then,’ said Torbidda, his voice hard. ‘The truth. Who was my father?’

  She leaped up and backed away, her hand still clutching the knife. ‘An evil wind got you! I ought to have drowned myself, there and then. I knew you was malignant from the start, even before the buio warned me. By the time I got up the courage, it was too late. I was too weak. You’re weak too, bastard. We was both vessels, vessels within vessels, and you didn’t come to ask me no questions.’

  ‘Why did I come?’ he whispered.

  She rushed at him with a despairing cry and he fell back from the table and touched the gash on his cheek. ‘Stop! What are you doing?’

  ‘What I ought to have!’

  She slashed again and this time he caught the blade in his dangling sleeves, wound it round and yanked it from her grip. As he bent to pick it up, she smashed the milk bottle and held the shattered end up. ‘Weak, I say! You can’t fight what’s in you!’

  Torbidda’s stomach lurched as if he’d been punched hard. If he had come for the truth, that was it. He couldn’t fight it. There was no reneging. A colourless pall descended over his eyes. He, the soul that had woken this night, was smothered and evicted by another much stronger, much older. He dropped the knife and smiled at her – and she instantly dropped the bottle and held up her Herod’s Sword. ‘Madonna protect me!’

  The worm slid over the glass shards. ‘She can’t even protect Herself.’

  In the storm, the neighbours claimed to have heard nothing, and by the time the smell became impossible to ignore, the rats had eaten most of her. Then they behaved as all neighbours did in the Depths and stole what was not wholly worthless and burned the rest – amongst the latter was a curious wooden doll that had been smashed into an infinity of splinters.

  CHAPTER 28

  The sons of Adam agreed to build a Temple to atone for their father’s sin but fell to arguing where to build it. Brother, thou art not my keeper, Abel said, Go thou thy way and let me go mine. And it came to pass that when Cain found Abel on Mount Moriah laying out foundations at the threshing place, he rose up and cleaved Abel’s head against a stone in the earth thereof. And the earth opened its mouth to receive his blood. Then the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel your brother? What have you done?

  Genesis 4

  Sofia came hurtling up on a gust and landed neatly beside Ezra. He did not comment, or even acknowledge her.

  ‘Oh come on! You have to admit that was better.’

  He kept looking at a swirling dust cloud on a distant ridge; Sofia didn’t think it looked so remarkable.

  He closed the book and gave it to her. ‘I must go.’

  She suddenly understood that he was deadly serious. ‘You promised to be at my side.’

  He turned wearily and faced the south. ‘You’re on a road that only Handmaids may travel. I’ve taught you how to do what’s expected – but hear me. You can be more than God’s wetnurse: you can change your role, as I have done. You are preparing to wrestle the Darkness, but there will come a time when you must wrestle God. He has made up His mind, but a righteous spirit can make Him relent. You have within you a power more powerful than any Molè, any army or wind or Wave. The love you bear for Iscanno can move mountains.’

  The sand-laden gusts that assailed them ebbed momentarily, long enough for Sofia to glimpse the object of Ezra’s attention. On the opposite ridge stood a solitary silhouette. The rags tumbling about him made him look like a great crow, vainly beating against the wind.

  ‘That’s him? The other—?’

  ‘My brother, yes.’

  ‘I’ll fight with you—’

  ‘You will protect Iscanno. This is my fight – my remaining act of contrition. I mentioned that we are not the only immortals left. A creature named Befana can tell you what I have not had time to teach you – don’t worry about finding her. She’ll find you.’

  The ragged figure pointed south, towards Jerusalem.

  She felt the wind change pitch and shouted, ‘You’re going to die, aren’t you?’

  Ezra pointed grimly in the same direction, as if in response. ‘Most likely.’

  A great sand-spout burst from the chasm that separated them and the ragged figure calmly let it carry him aloft. Ezra dashed forward and leaped from the cliff.

  Then the cold wind was upon them and Ezra was carried backwards and was gone.

  The wind tried to pry her fingers loose and when that failed, tried to lift the boulder to which she clung. She felt her grip weaken, but then as suddenly as it came, it was gone.

  She raised herself up dizzily, the wail still ringing in her ears, and saw the spout, unanchored now, writhing like a serpent towards the ruined city to whatever end Fate ordained.

  No one was free – though for a moment Ezra had convinced her otherwise.

  He believed that he’d broken his shackles, but they had pulled him away at last. If even immortals were subject to fate’s decrees, what hope had she? Once this land was populated by people who considered themselves Chosen because they kept the covenant – but surely it was the covenant that kept them? Every breath, every step, every kiss, every betrayal – these were gestures long-ordained and long-rehearsed
, devoid of meaning, like a graveyard language.

  *

  The wind carried them swiftly to their appointed end. Ezra floated a hundred braccia in front of Fra Norcino. They had known each other in the world’s first spring, had seen Nimrod’s tower rise and fall, had cured Nebuchadnezzar’s madness, had welcomed the Macedonian conqueror into Babylon – and their implacable hate for each other was vital as summer grass. The Jinn had removed all trace of Herod’s false temple from the Mount, all stain of the hand of Man. No temple was necessary; time itself was as holy here, an eternal Sabbath. They would not permit the race of Adam to defile it again.

  But the two astrologers had ceased to be men aeons ago. The mile-high wall of airborne sand that surrounded the Mount parted to allow them entry, and instantly reformed. There could only be one victor, for the Jinn too recognised that the Mount was a place of sacrifice.

  They landed lightly, each facing the other.

  ‘Brother,’ said Ezra.

  ‘We ceased to be brothers when you strayed from the true path.’

  ‘We were deceived! Can you not feel the change? How stale the water, how limp the wind? It was not thus when we were young.’

  ‘We were never meant to intervene directly.’

  ‘Aye, we used proxies: Nimrods, Herods, Bernoullis, just as the Darkness used us.’

  ‘I didn’t come to debate, Apostate. I came to end you!’ Air ripped as he hurtled through it, but Ezra was ready. Norcino’s attack was reckless, savage, frantic, and he countered with his most apollonian Water Style. Norcino switched to Wind to disrupt his rhythm, then both switched to Water together.

  The transitions – the result of centuries’ practise – were fluid as bird-flight, as gas, as thought, and the power was dreadful. Ezra returned his brother’s blows with doubled force till the displaced energy made the air around them vibrate, forcing the swirling wind back a few braccia.

  In this fight, Norcino’s sightless eyes were no impediment – a mere fragment of this contest was physical. The duel to which the Jinn were bearing witness took place on a higher plane.