Worldsoul

Forty-Five

“I know the sword can look after itself,” Mercy hissed, ”but I don’t want to leave it here unless we have to.” It wasn’t as though it was her own sword: it belonged to the Library, but the thing was at least partly alive and the thought of it in the hands of the Court stuck in her throat.

“It will be under lock and key,” Perra warned.

“But do you know where?”

Despite the loss of the sword Mercy was, however, in reasonable spirits. The thought of the look on Deed’s face when he opened the door and found her missing was a notion she would treasure for some time, whatever other advantages he might have taken during her time with the Court. That, Mercy thought with a trace of smugness, was what came of underestimating other people’s reading habits.

She had not slept, although to anyone watching-and surely such a chamber would be under observation-it would have looked as though she had lain down on the couch, covered herself with the blanket and passed into slumber. She had certainly closed her eyes. But no power of the Court could keep someone who knew what they were doing from investigating matters on the astral level and she had spent the night examining the wards of the room. Each of the four walls was locked with a quarter-sigil: unfamiliar in particular to Mercy, but familiar when it came to type. A sigil is a group of words and symbols, bound together like weaving or knitting. Find the end, even if it has been woven into the pattern, and you can unravel the sigil.

Deed’s own strengths lay in the north, and in the Western Quarter where the Court resided. Mercy wasn’t too familiar with the South, but she did know the designs of the East; her other mother, Sho, had taught her well. Magic that tasted of aniseed and ginger. Not the snow-and-sea-salt of the north, or the greengrowing spells of the Southern Quarter, but something with which Deed was not, Mercy thought, all that familiar.

She found the sigil’s end in a name: a demon of the East. She did not speak the name aloud, but she whispered a syllable, over and over again, beneath her breath and without moving her lips, until the name began to fray like a pulled thread. Mercy uttered another syllable, pulling gently. In her mind’s eye, on the astral, she crouched by the sigil, which was inscribed in red and gold upon the wall, tugging at its corner. And quite suddenly the sigil began to unravel, looping out into Mercy’s hands until deactivated.

She did not act at once. She yawned, mumbled, stirred, and sat up, hoping that the sigil’s demise wouldn’t trigger some kind of alarm. If so, she would soon find out. Mercy got up from the couch and stretched, then wandered around the room. When she reached the western wall, she glanced up. A transparent oval had appeared in the middle of the wall, with the golden-eyed form of Perra peering through it.

Mercy let her gaze glide over the ka. She saw Perra mouth, “Wait.” Then the ka breathed out. A mist began to fill the room, feeding from shadows and the play of the flickering lamp that stood by the bed. Mercy stepped forwards to the hole in the wall and suddenly it was like facing a mirror. She stood there, looking into her own dark eyes.

“What the hell?” Mercy breathed.

“When you fell off the turret, this ka took the homunculus and extended it. This is just an illusion; the core remains. It will replace you for a time, then it will decay into dust. But you can’t leave now. Deed’s on his way. Once he’s gone, we will do the switch.”

“All right,” Mercy said. If Deed had placed anything else in the cell, anything that would betray she was no longer present, the homunculus would hopefully be enough to fool it. She backed into the room and the mist dispelled. When she once more looked at the wall, it was solid.

Later, when Deed had gone, Perra once more opened the hole in the wall. Mercy had been on tenterhooks throughout Deed’s visit; she had been sure he would notice the damaged sigil. But he had given no sign of having done so and now, for him, it would be too late. Mercy left her mute, unresponsive double sitting in her place with the book and fled through the wall.

This led them to the point of rescuing the sword. Mercy knew they had to act fast: it was only a matter of time before Deed or someone else discovered her escape and sounded the alarm.

“The library? Do you think he’d have put it in there?”

“I can find my way back,” Perra said, “if we need.”

But first, the roof. The two books were still where Mercy had left them, on the ledge by the window. Then they raced around the passages, down steps and up stairs. The library door was opening. As Mercy flattened herself behind a wall hanging, the door banged and the disir girl came out, heels clicking. Today she wore a gown of grey velvet and her face was once more remote and cold. She was writing something on a pad as she walked.

As soon as she had gone, Mercy slipped into the room. The same rows of grimoires; the same air of fermenting occult strangeness. The Irish sword lay on a slab of slate, bound in silver. Mercy reached out and wrenched it free. Moments later, an alarm sounded, shrieking at astral level throughout the building. She did not know, and cared less, whether it was as a response to the theft of the sword or in answer to her own escape. With Perra at her heels, she ran out of the lab. A door at the far end led onto an outside balcony, which opened onto the same courtyard that had come close to being decorated by Mercy’s plummeting body the day before. It was perhaps ten feet to the ground. Mercy ran along the balcony and at the end a door opened and the white gibbon-thing from the dungeons was loosed. It screamed, bounding towards her. As it leaped, Mercy skewered it with the sword, gutting it mid-flight. The monkey-devil howled and like the homunculus, wizened around the blade, diminishing until only a few bloody white ribbons fluttered about the hilt. The sword cried out in triumph; Mercy was not inclined to tell it to shut up. She ran to the end of the balcony and looked through the door. The Court was now chaotic with shouting and running footsteps. Mercy sprang over the rail and dropped down to the courtyard, trying to orient herself. The outer perimeter wall of the Citadel had been visible through the windows of the laboratory: that meant that the main square lay directly ahead and they were at ground level. Mercy ran through a door, down a passage, and came out into the atrium.

“Shut the doors!” she heard someone shout, but it was too late. Mercy threw herself through the iron doors of the Court and rolled down the outside steps into the square. She dodged into the maze of passages that ran between the Court and its neighbours, and was swallowed by the city.