Worldsoul

Twenty-Three

Shadow stepped back from the cage containing the ifrit. The Shah’s ring was changing temperature, first cold, like a heavy lump of ice, then hot as a coal. Shadow gritted her teeth and held onto the ring as the ifrit became a cloud of boiling dark within the confines of the cage, and the room grew oppressively hot. Ifrits were storm spirits in their original form, she knew, denizens of the deep desert where men would never go, unless they were mad. Burning at noon and freezing at midnight, places of extremes. She could sense the ifrit’s mood now, plucking at the edges of her senses as if it sought to unravel her, like someone pulling the loose threads of a tapestry.

“I have what you asked for,” Shadow said.

“So I perceive.” The ifrit spoke softly and its voice filled the world. Shadow was finding it difficult to breathe.

Now. She held out the ring. “Tell me!” There was a silent moment, a waiting, then the ifrit whispered the Name it had been sent to find. In that moment of compliance, Shadow felt a connection between them: a thin, threadlike bridge, made of cooperation and agreement. It was enough. She sent her own spell down it, a spell of changing and transformation, a human blueprint contained within a sigil and translated into a word. She felt the ifrit absorb it. The world stopped.

Shadow looked out of the window and saw the roofs and domes of the Eastern Quarter lined with darkness like the negative of a photograph, flashing on and off. Then her vision cleared. She saw everything in sudden sharp relief: the outlines of the latticed shutters in stark black and pale, the dust motes sparkling in the shafts of sun. Then she looked up.

Entirely unexpected, there was a ship. It hung above her, as tiny as an illustration in a Persian miniature. It was a dreadnaught, but it had sails furled along its sides. It was a monstrous thing, unnatural, made for no worldly sea and Shadow knew it immediately: the Barquess. She heard the ifrit hiss. Then the ship was abruptly gone. A bolt of golden light flooded outwards from the ifrit’s cage as the ifrit exploded, flying silently apart into a thousand shards. Shadow felt an icy touch against her arm, penetrating her sleeve and then flying inwards through her left eye. She cried out. She felt a sharp pain as if her eye had been stabbed with a pin and then wetness welling up inside it. She clawed at her face, panicking, and felt the wet spreading out from her eye. She looked down, out of the good eye, and saw that it was not blood. A blackness stained her sleeve and her hand, gleaming like ink. She felt it pouring from the socket of her eye and spilling down her face, as though the socket were a bowl which someone had overfilled. Shadow stumbled back against the wall, reeling with shock. O Allah, help me, help me-and He must have heard her, for there was a coolness in the air, a soft singing note like a nightingale after rain. Shadow managed a ragged breath. The pain in her eye diminished; she felt the wetness cease to flow. Clasping her arms about herself, she slumped down the wall, crouching on the floor. A single black drop splashed down from her eye and onto the tiled floor, where it remained for a moment before seeping into the tile, swallowed by the blue. The nightingale note sang on and it brought freshness, cutting through the dusty mustiness of the chamber, which now felt scorched as if a fire had raged through it. As indeed, a fire had, and its black knife had cut through Shadow. With great care, wincing, she tried to open her left eye. She raised a hand, gently probing it with a forefinger.

To her surprise, the eye was still there. She could feel it, soft in its socket. She had expected to find the socket reamed and empty, its seed gone. She shut her right eye and looked. Everything was filmed with blackness, as though she looked through a veil, but it was different. Everything was in shadow, but as she looked, the lines at the edges of things became light. Her vision cleared: everything was sharp and vivid. She was seeing more clearly with the damaged eye than she had ever seen: right into the heart of things. She could see their names-a faint script which described everything, God’s language underwriting the world. The name of the ifrit was still clear, in the centre of the tangled mass of iron that had been its cage. Shadow spoke the name.

“I am here,” said a small, clear voice inside her mind.