Worldsoul

Ten

When Mercy woke up, the ka was crouched on her chest, breathing out. She felt filled with sudden life, a glittering sense of well-being.

“Perra?”

“I breathe for you,” the ka said.

“Well, thank you.” Perra jumped down, but Mercy barely noticed: the ka was as light as air, weighing far less than a cat. It sat, a small sphinx, on the carpet by the bed and gazed up at her with lambent eyes. “Where am I?” Mercy asked. She blinked. The room was panelled in a faint willow-green. A lamp stood by her bed.

“You’re in hospital, dear.” A nurse appeared, with a white starched cap. “You had an accident.”

“Yes, I remember.” Her head hurt. “My colleague-Nerren?”

“She’s in the next ward. She’s fine. So are you. We’re discharging you both as soon as I get the all-clear from the doctors.”

“All right,” Mercy said, relieved. It struck her as particularly ironic that she should have survived the morning’s encounter in Section C with the thing from the ice, only to be nearly flattened by a falling flower. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“Yes, and one death.” The nurse checked her blood pressure.

“Damn it. Who are these people? Who’s sending these things?”

“If we knew that, dear,” the nurse remarked, “We could do something about it.”

And yet no one seemed to know, despite all the resources of Worldsoul. The Library had set a team on it, the Court had done so as well, and so had a myriad other organisations. The flower attacks had begun not long after the Skein had left: was this some natural phenomenon that the Skein had kept at bay, or was it part of the same thing that had led to the disappearance of the Skein themselves? No one knew. But they were devastating. Mercy felt lucky to be alive.

“I have given you a life,” the ka said, in its reedy, whispering voice.

“Thank you!” Mercy raised herself up on an elbow and peered down at it. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s a spare. I have seven left.”

They had been granted nine originally, Mercy knew. Like cats. She did not like to ask the ancestral spirit how the eighth had been lost. Not given to either of her mothers, evidently: the heritage was wrong. The ka must have come from her father’s line, and who he had been, Greya-her mother-had never told.

“I’ll see you shortly,” the nurse said, giving the ka a disapproving glance, and bustled out before Mercy could ask her why they had given her a private room. Perhaps Nerren had pulled strings? The Library was still rich. But Nerren had no private room. She was in a ward.

Mercy lay back and after a moment saw the ka jump onto the windowsill. Perra gave a twist, and was gone out into the twilight. Mercy thought she might have dozed after that, because when she woke again, it was dark outside and a man was standing over her.

“Miss Fane?” He passed a hand across her eyes and there was a moment where her vision blurred. Then it cleared again. “How are you feeling?”

“A bit dizzy, actually.”

“You had a nasty bang on the head.”

He was dark-haired, pale-faced, ascetic. He wore a ruffed black suit, of expensive cut, a crisp white shirt, round spectacles. This must be the doctor, she thought, and wondered why there was such a sense of familiarity about him. Perhaps he was a frequenter of the Library: it had an extensive medical section.

“I’ve come to give you a final check-up,” the man said. “I am Doctor Roke.”

“Thanks,” Mercy said. “I don’t feel too bad.”

“A few last checks,” Roke said, soothingly. She found that she was lulled by his voice: Everything, it suggested, will be all right. “After all, we still don’t really understand what effects these flower attacks can produce. We need to be sure. I just need to take a quick blood test-” and before Mercy could open her mouth, she felt a needle at her arm and the doctor was holding up a phial of crimson fluid. “There we are. All done. We’ll let you know if there are any significant results.”

Then he was gone, leaving Mercy feeling safe. Ten minutes after that, the door opened again and the nurse reappeared with a small, stout man. “This is Dr Marlain. He’s going to give you a final check-up before we discharge you.”

“You’re very thorough,” Mercy said. “I’ve already had one of those. Dr Roke did a blood test?”

The nurse and Marlain exchanged startled glances. “Who?”

“A Dr Roke? Tall, dark? Nice manner. Very urbane.”

“There’s no one called Roke on the register,” Marlain said, blankly.

“Ah.” She digested this. So someone now unknown had come into her room and, entirely trusting, Mercy had let him take her blood. For what? And from the looks on their faces, they thought she had made it up. “Maybe I was dreaming,” Mercy said, dismayed.

They let her out anyway. Nerren was waiting in the lobby, bandaged and bruised.

“We’ve been told to take tomorrow off,” Nerren said, rising stiffly from her seat. “You didn’t have any appointments anyway.”

“I’m going to need it,” Mercy replied. “Did you? Appointments, I mean.”

“Some northern grad student, but I can put her off.” They began to walk slowly towards the doors.

Then Mercy remembered. “Oh, hell. The Citadel inspection.”

“You know what?” Nerren said. “Benjaya Vrone can handle it. He’s always bitching that I don’t give him enough responsibility, but I prefer to ask McLaren-he’s just good at dealing with crises. Let Ben handle the inspection and if there is a problem, we’ll just have to deal with it later. Having narrowly escaped being blown up, a bunch of civil servants suddenly seems less intimidating.” She pushed open the heavy doors and they stepped out into the warm embrace of the night.

“Agreed,” Mercy said.

They exchanged weary goodbyes.

Mercy walked stiffly through the darkness to a rickshaw row, and took an uncomfortably jolting ride home.

The blizzard had died out over the pass, but in her dream, Mercy knew that winter was coming. She took the clantrack south, heading down through the silent, snow-weighted pines and into the valley. It stretched, both shallow and wide, for three miles until the estuary, which in summer was a place of leaping salmon and flickering eels, white with water-fowl, but which now creaked and groaned with the cascade of ice floes from the further sea. Mercy was heading for the river and for the traps. She ran quickly, running on back-jointed feet across the hard ground, her pack bouncing against her shoulder blades. High above, a pair of ravens bobbed and wheeled, game playing in the first of the snows.

There was a build-up of cloud on the horizon, golden-grey turrets towering into the sky. More snow before nightfall. She reached the river, and stepped carefully down the icy tumble of soil that had become its bank. The ice was not yet thick and she could see the slow seep of water underneath it. The ice was glassy: it was like a dim mirror and she could see the faint outline of her head-the long muzzle, the golden eyes. In her dream, this did not seem at all strange to her; she had always been like this. She looked like the rest of the clan, although darker of fur than most.

The first trap was close to the bank. A small stick protruded above the ice, marking its location. Mercy took the axe and broke the ice, shattering it star-shaped around the marker. Beneath, under the frigid water, something writhed in the snare. She reached down, took hold of the string, and pulled it up, expecting a fish.

It wasn’t a fish. It was a small, man-like figure, dark, with twig-like limbs. It should have been drowned but it hissed and spat in the snare, twisting round to snap at her hand. Its face was like her own: her human face, not the wolf-face she now wore. Mercy dropped it in the snow in a spatter of blood and, to her great relief, woke up.

Daylight was flooding through the window, along with the scent of jasmine. Mercy took a deep breath and sat up. The headache had receded to a dull afterburn and her first thought was that she had overslept and was late for work. Then she remembered: day off, because of the accident. But a day off was the one thing she could not afford to take right now.

Objectively, she knew the house was warm, but Mercy felt cold. She wrapped the robe more closely, flung a wrap around herself and went downstairs. She could not stop thinking about the woman-thing at the Library. It had made more of an impact on her than being caught in the flower blast. For a moment, whirling around, thinking the thing was actually in the room. But it was only the steam from the kettle, rising up. She was starting to become annoyed with herself. Let’s think about what’s real. She heaped green tea into a frog-shaped pot and stood staring at the familiar walls of the kitchen while she waited for it to brew. The walls, painted yellow. The polished boards of the floor, with a speckle of white by the stove where, long ago, her mother Sho had spilled hot oil while trying to make pancakes. Sho, always taking risks, always getting things wrong, but somehow it had never seemed to matter. So different from her other mother, Greya: the cautious, sensible suffocating one, the mother who had wanted Mercy, the single chick, to do something sensible in turn, something safe.

Mercy had never been able to blame her for this. Greya was from the Northern Quarter, after all, and something had frozen inside her, causing icicles in the heart. Greya’s mother had been from one of the wolfclans, or so Sho had whispered to Mercy as a child; Mercy had never known whether or not this was really true, although Greya’s eyes, in certain lights, gleamed gold. And there had just been that dream… But Greya herself-no wolfcub. Whatever fire and spit she’d owned had been burned out of her on the journey south, made her dry as a winter leaf, careful as a cat on ice.

Yet Greya had been the one to go, when the first word of the Barquess had come, asking for volunteers. Mercy had resented that, after all the slammed doors and hisses over her dangerous choice of career at the end of her teens. Greya had not stayed to see her try to survive in the now-Skeinless Library, as though she’d just hung around long enough to really piss Mercy off by doing something completely unpredictable.

Sho had gone after her, of course. No change there. She’d bequeathed the house to Mercy, which had been both reassuring and not: Mercy wouldn’t lose the family home, but it didn’t say much for the chances of either Sho or Greya returning. She’d asked the ka about the fate of the Barquess, but the ka had been unable to tell her, said that no oracle could, said it was “fuzzy.” Oh, well. Mercy was used to that.

She sipped her tea, now brewed and sour. It suited Mercy’s mood. Something was loose in the city, something for which Mercy felt responsible. If the Library had seen fit to give her a day off, it therefore made sense to Mercy to see if she could find it.

“Perra!”

The ka leaped lightly onto the kitchen table. Its feet made shadowy golden traces, like pollen.

“I think,” Mercy said, “that I’m going to need your help.”

The docks were a hubbub. The Golden Island steamer could not get into harbour, having to wait at anchor in the waters beyond. Mercy could see the passengers milling on the deck, gesturing, but they were too far away for her to hear what they were saying. She doubted it was polite. The harbour itself was thronged with fishing boats, private yachts, a junk from the far side of the Eastern Quarter, and the air smelled of salt and smoke and fish. Mercy and Perra walked to the far end of the harbour, where a thistle-head of bridges indicated the start of the West-East Canal. Here, the gates were being opened. She could hear the creak and tear of the winch and knew that a ferry was waiting, riding up in the womb of the lock, and Mercy’s spirits rose with it. Soon, the boathouse came into view and then the ferry itself. A small crowd was already present, bags and children clutched in eager arms, to take passage to the Eastern Quarter. The ka plucked at her boot with a claw.

“I am not sure, mind,” the ka whispered.

“I know. But you said you heard something.”

“Rumours are like dandelion clocks. They spread on the wind. There is no substance to them.”

“But sometimes seeds take root, and there are dandelions all over the city, Perra.”

The ka’s small solar face turned up to hers. “As I told you, a demon says that there was something by the Eastern Wall last night. It attacked a woman and lost a hand.”

“Who was this demon?”

“Only one of the small, the lesser, not a duke or an earl. Those would not talk to me, I am too lowly. But the little spirits like to gossip. It had no reason to lie.”

“They can be malicious.” Yet this tale sounded too specific, somehow. She thought of Roke, the blood snatcher, and felt herself grow still. Who had he been? She was still sure that she’d seen him somewhere before, but an odd dizzy moment blanked him out. Now that she thought back, he was becoming difficult to recall.

“It spoke of cold,” the ka said, then fell silent. “The woman is an alchemist. The demon could not remember her name.” It looked briefly disapproving. “They have minds like mayflies.”

“We’ll take the ferry anyway,” Mercy replied. “It will be a nice day out.”

With the rest of the passengers-mainly Easterners, in all manner of dress-Mercy and Perra queued briefly, then climbed the walkway to the ferry. Standing in the prow, Mercy could see the canal snaking across the city, all the way through the Western Quarter to the banners and flags of the East. And then, with a creak, the ferry cast off.