Worldsoul

Twenty-Four

The bridge was high and arched: from the base, Mercy could not see the other side. It did not look like the kind of thing that could exist in the real world, a feat of magical engineering, and she did not like it.

“Where do you think we are?” Benjaya asked. “Are we still in the Liminality?”

She looked in the direction of the ka, which shrugged. Mercy sighed. “I doubt it very much-this is almost certainly somewhere in the nevergone. I’d like to see what’s at the end of the bridge, though.” Without waiting for Benjaya, she started walking upwards. It was a steep trudge and she only realised that she’d reached its summit when she looked up and saw she was standing on the arch. Ahead, the bridge sloped down to a snaking path through the mountains. To its left, stood something that, for a moment, she thought might be a sculpture of some kind. It was not: it was a waterfall, but made of mist. It cascaded silently, falling thousands of feet to the invisible valley below. Mercy stood above cloud. Yet the sun, though thin, was warm on her skin and the air smelled of pine.

“I’ve heard of this place, this mistfall,” Benjaya said. “It’s from the Norse myths. I think it’s a kind of Hell. Niflheim? I think that means ‘land of the mist.’”

“Seems too pleasant to be Hell,” Mercy answered, but she thought he was right, all the same. There was something archetypal about this landscape: the towering mountains, the clouds, the waterfall of mist. This was, she felt in her gut, part of the land from which the disir had come, and therefore not to be trusted. “If it’s Hell,” she went on, “then we need to find a way out.”

The trouble was, she had no idea how to go about it. Things like this happened to Librarians. They had occurred before, although infrequently. The last time had been some hundred years previously, when a cache of hidden scrolls had come to the Library from the east. A Librarian had gone missing, whisked into some desert kingdom, but he had been retrieved by the Skein who, like concerned parents with a lost toddler, had searched until they’d found him. But now the Skein had gone. If we had been trusted with significant magic of our own-safe words, key words… But they had not, and now they would have to make do for themselves. Perhaps it would not be a bad thing if the Skein never came back…

“All right,” Mercy said, aloud. “If it’s a Hell, there will be passage points. Entrances. Exits.” In much of the world’s literature, these had been situated near water: in wells, over rivers, through cracks in the earth. The mistfall was the closest possibility, and Mercy headed for it.

As she grew closer, she saw that the mist sparkled. A myriad diamond drops glittered within it and it made a soft rushing sound.

“Mercy?” Benjaya said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the sun’s going down.”

She nodded. “I know.” Looking out from the high span of the bridge, the low red sun had sunk even further, until it was now starting to touch the dark line of the horizon. The sky was deepening to a cold winter green.

“We’ve got a choice,” she said. “We can stay here, or try and press on. I think it’s easier to defend a bridge than a mountain path.”

“Perra, do you think we should look at the mist, while there’s still light?”

The ka agreed. Mercy went down to the edge of the bridge, and saw that steps led from it to a narrow platform that ran behind the mistfall. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. With the sword drawn, she followed the steps, Benjaya and Perra close behind.

At close hand, the mist fell across the skin in a moist coolness. Fearing unknown northern magic, Mercy did not care to get too close, but she had to step through the mist to get to the platform. As she did so, there was a long cry from the direction of the forest: something lost and angry. They looked at each other, not needing to ask what was that? It could be nothing good.

Mercy slid behind the fall of mist, feeling it speckle her face. She had expected this place to be dark, uneasy, dangerous, but instead it spoke to her. It was comforting. It enticed her inside, a return to somewhere cosy and loved. This alarmed her.

“Can you feel that?” she asked Benjaya.

“Yeah. Reminds me of my mum’s kitchen.”

“That’s not a good thing. I mean, no reflections on your mum or her kitchen, but you know what I mean.”

Benjaya nodded dumbly. The ka said, “Take great care. It is a glamour.”

Mercy held the Irish sword up in front of her face. “What can you cut?”

The sword sang, rejoicing, and there was a spark of light as it cut through the wall of mist and the shadows. As though a curtain had fallen from in front of her sight, Mercy saw.

She was standing on a lip of rock, looking into the mountain, and the mountain was hollow. There was a world within it: the world of ice she had glimpsed through the pages of the book, through which the disir had come. She saw, again, the forest, and the snaking river, and across the line of trees she saw the rise of mountains and, again, the high arch of a bridge. She had the feeling that if she had been able to see more clearly, through a telescope, there would be two uncertain people and a ka standing on a ledge behind a wall of mist…

“The world’s an onion,” she murmured.

“But we knew that,” Benjaya said, reasonably enough. “It’s in a lot of books.”

He was right. Stories don’t always reflect the world; they make it, too. A book is a world inside the world, and sometimes there are worlds within that. A galaxy in a speck of sand; suns in a water drop.

“Well,” Mercy asked. “Are we going in?”

Benjaya nodded. The ka blinked. Mercy took a step forward, into sudden searing cold. She had thought the world of the bridge was chilly, but the sunlight had meant that she had been too warm in the heavy greatcoat. This place was really arctic. She took a shuddering breath and heard Benjaya gasp and snuffle behind her. She looked back and saw the world of the bridge in miniature, the fall of mist cascading softly downwards, and then it was winked out. Night lay ahead. Mercy started walking.

The path wound down a rocky incline. When she looked back again, she saw a sparsely forested mountain summit, heavy with snow, looming behind them. The sky was thick with stars and a great creamy swirl, the galactic arm, lay overhead. She recognised a few of the constellations: they were ancient, and were those of Earth, not of the Liminality. No one had ever been able to explain to her why the stars were different, since the Liminality was so strongly linked to Earth itself, yet this was so. A mystery, another to which, presumably, the Skein held the key. But it was further evidence that this was the nevergone, some distant storytime. Mercy’s mouth tightened and she strode on, dodging loose pebbles. Was this even a path at all? An animal track, maybe. She kept the sword drawn and a moment later, was glad that she had done so when Benjaya cried out.

But it wasn’t an animal. Benjaya pointed. “Look!”

The airship came fast over the brow of the mountain. Its sides were rounded and black; it made a rushing sound as it came. A pennant flapped from a spike at its prow and Mercy could see lamplight gleaming inside its carapace, through a round brass porthole. Just as she noted this, a bolt shot out of the darkness and buried itself in a puff of dust, a few feet from where she stood. Mercy and Benjaya threw themselves behind a rock.

The airship shot on, flying across the long river valley. They watched, unspeaking, until it disappeared into the distance. Mercy was afraid it would turn, but it did not. It vanished over the rim of the world, into night.

“Not very friendly,” Benjaya said.

“I wonder who they are? I’ve never seen anything like it before. Well, apart from the Barquess. That reminded me of the Barquess, somehow.”

“There are stories of flying galleons,” Benjaya said, standing up cautiously. “One of them sent an anchor down into a churchyard. In England. I read it in a book.”

“That wasn’t a galleon, but it’s the same principle, I suppose. This world is too old for those, though. They must be travelling through.”

“Question is, are there more of them?”

“I’m hoping that’s a no,” Mercy said.

They trudged on, descending the long slope by degrees and eventually finding themselves standing on the flat valley floor. It was tundra, spongy underfoot, and starred with lichen. Here, the snow lay in patches, exposing the permafrost. Mercy pulled her coat closer. The ka padded across the lichen, delicate as a cat. As they drew nearer to the river, Mercy could hear the creak and crack of the ice. The river was flowing swiftly, bearing its cargo of ice with it, and an icy breeze came off it that chilled her still further. There was a weird smell, too: something musty and organic. A moment later, she realised she’d smelled it before. It was the odour of the disir.