Worldsoul

Forty-Eight

For purely dramatic reasons, Deed found that he profoundly resented being pipped to the post. After the debacle involving Fane and the Library, Deed had stepped up his preparations, making frequent checks down the long lens that connected Worldsoul with the nevergone, a periscope between dimensions. The periscope was not entirely reliable, showing as it did contingencies that had not in fact occurred, or at least, not yet. But what it did continue to show him was reassuring.

The bleak line of the horizon. The scroll of the oxbow river across the barren land. The disir army massing along its shores.

The lid had been removed from Loki’s memory jar during the night; he’d woken to find the sour smell of the old god filling the room and new knowledge in his head. He knew, now, what he had to do.

So Deed had continued to send out the necessary summonings, dropping knowledge into the heads of the shamans as they lay in that disir state of not-quite-sleep. Disir brains didn’t work in the same way as humans; it was fair to say that they were not completely conscious. As with ancient humans, the two halves of the brain were not entirely connected, so messages from one half would be interpreted as voices from elsewhere. Deed, his eye glued to the periscope, whispered instructions, coaxed, cajoled and threatened, until the shamans-moved by that murmur out of the darkness-drew the tribes into position.

Deed had few illusions about his ability to control the disir. They were savages, and feral. They would run amok in the city, following their own whims, but with Loki’s blessing at the tip of his tongue, he could destroy them if he had to. That was the plan: bring them in, and when the city was thoroughly cowed, remove the nuisance and bring the Court into centre stage as heroes. It was a simple, brutal plan, Deed felt, and it lacked elegance and subtlety, but it was at least historically tested.

He had already set the spellwork in place to open the rift in the Library. That the disir would make their grand entrance there, probably destroying hundreds of rare texts in the process, appealed to Deed. It would give the literary advantage to the Court in years to come, and he was prepared to sacrifice the odd grimoire to greater ambitions. With the Library crippled and the Court predominant, plus the existing support from Bleikrgard-that left only the Eastern and Southern Quarters to subdue and Deed was confident that with the disir plunging through the city, he would be able to persuade the relevant authorities in those areas that the Court would be an appropriate guiding force.

He was, therefore, both alarmed and annoyed when Darya ran into the room where he was undertaking his preparations.

“Abbot General! Something’s happening?”

She looked dishevelled. Strands of hair had come loose from her chignon and tendrilled across her face, and her jacket had been misbuttoned. Deed regarded her coldly.

“Would you mind knocking in future?”

“Look out the window!” Darya pointed a quivering finger. Deed did so and to his shock saw a vast chasm opening in the sky above the Western Sea. It was as if the sky was splitting in half. The windows of the Court bulged briefly inwards, but held. Deed took a hasty step back. Within the gap surged a tidal race of cloud in all the colours of fire. Rose, gold, scarlet and a livid white turned the night sky into a terrible false day.

“What the hell is that?” Deed breathed. Darya was wide-eyed, her appearance slipping further into disir.

The ground shuddered under their feet. In the laboratory next door, alembics and retorts rattled and the rattling did not stop. Deed looked at the window and saw the frame was shaking. He cast out a spell for stability, but it was like spitting into a hurricane. Battening down panic, Deed said, “The roof.”

They ran up shaking flights of stairs. Magicians were pouring out of the rooms of the Court and Deed heard the rising note of hysteria in their voices. The building gave a huge, convulsive shudder, then stopped. Followed by Darya, Deed burst out onto the roof. The sky was alight. The spell-vanes, gilded surfaces catching the rosy fire, spun wildly in all directions and the air tasted of wild magic, pungent as petrol.

Deed was running for the turret, Darya at his heels, when the Court shook again and a great section of roof broke off and plunged into the street. Deed didn’t look back. Good thing he had a penchant for emergency plans.

Tope was unconscious, but not dead. Librarians were running from the room in a panic. Shadow was bundling Mariam Shenudah through the door. Mercy hesitated over Tope’s still form.

“Go on!” Benjaya Vrone shouted. “I’ll take care of her.”

With the other Librarians, Mercy and Shadow fled down the stairs. A brief glance upwards told Mercy that the ghostly birds had gone to roost, just as living ones do during an eclipse. As they were halfway down, the stairs rippled like the skin of a stroked cat, flinging them against the banisters. Mercy lost her footing and sat down hard. She was thus in a position to watch in horror as the entire front façade of the Library split in two. Tiles fell from the roof and she saw the bird-faced spirit follow it, twirling down through the air to crack in two on the marble floor below. The crack widened so she could see all the way out into the square, which was filled with frightened groups of people running to and fro and a golem in the midst of it all, trudging stolidly about its business. She glimpsed McLaren, with Benjaya at his side, directing people to safety.

Shadow pulled her to her feet.

“Look!” But she was pointing up the stairs.

On the Ninth Floor, the rift that had begun as no more than a slit in the air along Section C, was now spreading. Icy air gusted through with a swirl of snow and Mercy caught her breath. She saw rather than felt the ka pluck her sleeve.

“Up or down?”

“I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” Mercy said. By now, along with the Duke, poised elegantly upon a tilted step, they were the only ones left on the upper staircase. Everyone else was pouring out through the crack in the front of the building; Mercy hoped they would at least have a chance at survival. She couldn’t work out whether it was an actual earthquake or not. The city wasn’t prone to them as geological phenomena, which suggested to Mercy that this was some massive ruction along the storyways themselves, some heave in the fabric of the nevergone.

But the rift from Section C was coming on fast. Shadow reached out and gripped Mercy’s arm as the curve of arctic air and twilight swept down the staircase to engulf them.

Deed could hear the engines powering up as he neared the turret. The building had stabilised for now, but Deed wasn’t taking any chances. As he drew close, the doors of the base of the turret burst open. The nose of an airship slid out, a dark, iridescent green, whirring with spell-vanes of its own. He could see the pilot in the cockpit, insectoid behind his goggles and flying mask.

Deed scrambled up over the running blades and through the open hatch. He didn’t bother to find out whether Darya had made it as the airship began to glide down the roof, but a thud and a curse behind him indicated that she had. Deed sighed. He stumbled into the cockpit and tapped the pilot on the shoulder.

“Keep away from that!” He pointed to the rift in the sky.

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” the pilot demanded, belatedly adding, “Sir.”

Deed flung himself into a seat before acceleration did it for him, and strapped himself in. A moment later, Darya joined him. At least there were no accusing glances about his unchivalrous behaviour; disir expected everyone to act on their own behalf.

Good thing he’d had the airship tested recently. Its maiden voyage through the overlight had been a success.

The airship reached the edge of the roof and lurched into the air. It rose surprisingly quickly for such a bulbous craft, although Deed could hear the increasing whine of the engines as levitation spells took hold. Around him, the mechanisms of the airship whirred: a large brass sigilometer in the centre column of the cockpit spat out data. Deed had a brief, dizzying glimpse of the scene below him in the square as the craft turned: crowds streaming down the alleyways and out of the Library. What was happening to the Library? Deed thumped the pilot on the shoulder.

“Take us around again!”

Muttering, the pilot obeyed and Deed saw that the front of the Library had broken like an egg. Let this be a lesson to you, Jonathan, he thought, next time you plot to bring down your enemies, make sure that the universe isn’t planning to do it for you.

“All right,” Deed said. “Get us out of here.”

But it was too late for that.

Mercy smacked down into snow. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. She inhaled again and the cold seared her throat.

“Shadow?”

“I’m here.” Shadow sat up. “Wherever here is.” Mercy did not recognise the precise place, but she thought they must be in the world from which the disir had come, the world of the bridge and the lands inside the mountain. The landscape was the same: plateaus of snowfield against black shards of mountain, descending through the pines. She got to her feet, to see the Duke of Hell and Perra sitting side by side in the branches of a tree like two exotic birds.

“Where are we?” Shadow asked.

“It’s part of the nevergone. You went back to somewhere that emerged out of the legends of the Fertile Crescent; this is further north. The Ice Age. I’ve been here before.”

Shadow nodded, taking it in. “And the way out?”

“Well, this wasn’t where we first came in. We went down a particular storyway-there was a bridge and a waterfall of mist. This is further in from that land, deeper. This might not even relate to human memory.”

“The Pass comes from demon’s stories,” Gremory said. She walked lightly across the snow, dusting something from her taloned hands. Mercy thought it was ash. “I’ve never been here before. Do you know the way out?”

Mercy shook her head. “Not really. We’ll just have to keep walking and see if we can find our way back to the bridge.”

She thought, but did not say, And what happens then? The world of the bridge had led back into the Library, but that had been when there still was a Library. She was by no means sure this was still the case, given the state of it when they had left. Although “left” was rather too active a verb.

They began walking down through the pines. Here, the snow was sparse, kept away by the dense canopy above them. This, surely, was the sort of forest you found in fairy tales: thick, impenetrable and dark. And filled with monsters? Almost certainly. She thought about stumbling over the old god’s lair again and swallowed hard. Well, she’d found his story, hadn’t she? He ought to be pleased.

Above the pines, the sky was quite dark, swarming with stars. Mercy was only able to see by the light cast by Perra’s eyes: golden beams on the snow and the black trunks of the trees. But gradually, Mercy found she was able to see. The sky was lightening to a bright indigo blue and shadows appeared. Dawn? But then, with dismay, they came out onto a high plateau and Mercy realised that the reason she could see was because of the Pass itself.

The airship rocked as if it had been buffeted. Deed had a birds’-eye view of the second rift as it spread outwards from the Library, obscuring the ruined façade from view. He could see through the ragged edges of the rift to a familiar landscape: the world of the disir.

“Take us through!” Deed commanded the pilot.

“Not much sodding choice! Sir.”

The little airship was being pulled into the gap, nose forwards. Deed heard the whine of the engine as stabilising spells tried and failed to secure the craft’s trajectory. Then the temperature plummeted and they were sliding through the gap into the nevergone. Deed was looking down onto the churn of cold grey ocean and behind them, he saw the rift in the air snap shut.

“What’s that?” Mercy was looking down onto the plain, at a dark mass of moving forms. From this distance, it looked like an ants’ nest, strung out along the looping shores of the river. She could see the glint of the rosy, heaving light of the Pass striking sparks from the metal of weapons.

“Looks like we’ve found Loki’s army,” the Duke said beside her.

“There are thousands of them.”

“Yes. I must say, it will be interesting to see what happens when these two cultures clash-both ancient, both unhuman. Circumstances have always kept them apart, but now they’re going to meet at last.” The demon fished in a pocket of her armour and extracted a pair of small brass opera glasses. “Would you like a closer look?”

The army stretched across the plain, far beyond the river. Looking through the opera-glasses, Mercy could see the disir clearly: tall, attenuated figures, wrongly jointed. Their skin was mottled black, white, grey. They wore leather armour, some in tatters. Many of them wore headdresses of wolf skulls, evidence of earlier kills. All were female, as far as Mercy could see. Some had bracelets and headbands of silver, and a pale fire flickered about their heads: those would presumably be the shamans.

Mercy set her feet more firmly on the ridge.

“How many are there?” Shadow asked.

“Several thousand.” She could see poles bearing skulls and the tatters of clan banners, carried among them. Some rode beasts: huge horned creatures with shaggy black coats and cloven hooves. “I think those things are aurochs.” She took a deep breath.

As they watched the army approach, a black speck appeared above it. It spiralled up like a blown leaf, then, as if snatched by the wind, it shot forwards. Mercy braced herself. It was a raven, the feathers black and shining, but the bird itself was a skeleton. Its eyes were sparks in its skull.

“My mistress wants to speak with you.” It wasn’t a bird’s voice. Mercy thought that something was speaking through the puppet of its skull. The bone-white beaked head cocked on one side.

“Me? Why?” Mercy asked. The raven’s skull went up as if its head had been jerked back. It shot upwards, whirling into the sky.

“You have the god’s touch on you. It’s how she smelled you out.”

The raven’s mistress, a shaman, was riding one of the aurochs. She spurred it forwards and it gave a bellowing cry, perhaps of protest, perhaps rage. It lumbered at startling speed across the frozen ground until it was close enough for Mercy to smell its pungent cattle-scent, warm in the cold air. The shaman herself wore a necklace of bones, delicately polished and interspersed with river garnet. Her armour was of white hide, linked by iron rings. She carried a flint blade at her hip and her long hair was matted with lime. Her eyes were snowfire pale and her face was bone, not skin. She slid down from the auroch’s back with a thud and said pugnaciously to Mercy, “I challenge you for the god’s favour. Begin.”

“Look,” Mercy said. “If you’re talking about Loki, I don’t want him. You can have him.”

“Begin!”

Mercy drew the sword.

“Not that. I meant magic.”

“I’m not-” Oh, what the hell. She thought of her dreams and sighed.

It would have to be wolf-magic; nothing else was old enough. She remembered her dream of the homunculus, wriggling in the snare under the ice. She thought of the curse. She remembered the shift, herself changing not into wolf, but wolf-woman.

This was the nevergone. It was between-that was important, it was not the final product. No such thing as a finished story. She took a breath and changed.

The world about her shifted. Maybe that was it: you yourself don’t alter, but you step into a different narrative, rewriting yourself. Mercy stood on the plateau she had seen in her dream, with the standing stone above the long valley. It was winter, twilight, a thin moon high overhead, but the air still smelled of the pines. And blood: something had been freshly killed.

The disir shaman stepped out of the stone. At first, she, too, was different. She was no more than a girl, her hair white fire against the darkness of the rock. Her eyes were huge and luminous, and she was smiling. There was a touch of Mareritt, but her face was more elemental. Then it changed and the disir was back. She opened her jaws to display long teeth and gave a grating shriek of challenge.

Mercy was hit with a blast of power. Not a conjuration or a spell, but the knowledge of what the disir was. Overwhelming cold, the long Ice Age winter, thousands of years long, when a thin rind of northerly humanity had clung to the chill planet and survived. The disir were their nightmares; they were the sharp-toothed dark and the killing cold. They were the stories and tales of the hunters, and when the ice had gone and the world grew warm, they too survived their long winter in the deep minds of men. And they were female, which men so often fear.

Mercy could see, in that moment of understanding, why Mareritt was their enemy. Later she became a rival. She came from a part of history in which city-dwellers feared the forest, overlain onto something much older. But she wasn’t wild. She was an urban idea of the wilderness, and she was far closer to human than the disir would ever be. She wanted the disir gone so she could take their place.

“This is my reply,” Mercy said. She thought of the wolf-clan, the hearth. She thought of people in the long night, the arctic cold, banding together against the rigours of the world. Animal and human, finding connection, reaching out. The long winter hadn’t killed them: they’d won. Greya and the lampmender Salt, who had helped one another. She raised the Irish sword and it began to sing in her mind a song of its own, a thread of telling about battles fought and won, the green summer hillside and the sparkling sea. It sang of honour and glory, but also of loss and the knowledge that it had been the agent of that loss. It was human-born, human-made and Mercy hung onto its song and pulled herself to her feet. She cut through the wintersong of the disir, the stories of iron ground and iron cold, of the delight in bloodshed, and she ran the shaman through so hard that the blade rang out against the standing stone.

The stone and the valley were gone. Mercy was herself again, with the sword hilt reassuringly solid in her hand. Her arm was still numb with the shock of the blow, ringing up the bones of her arm. The body of the shaman lay at her feet, convulsed in death. The disir army cried out with rage and dismay.

But Shadow, off to her left, was looking behind Mercy, not towards the vociferous disir.

“This is not good,” Shadow said. Mercy turned. The clouds of the Pass were opening up. The sky was splitting in a ragged vertical to let more stormlight through. She saw bolts of azure flame rip the clouds, a blaze of golden light, with thousands of black specks whirling against it. Storm demons, coming through. They coiled in a spiral above the black line of the horizon, like bats or birds, but Mercy knew that from the distance, they must be vast.

The horned beasts ridden by the disir were beginning to panic and stampede. Their riders wheeled them back, shrieking: an earsplitting sound which made Mercy clap her hands to her head. But she could still hear the riders’ cries and feel the thud of the hooves travelling up through the ground, a dull drumbeat. Something tugged her sleeve and she leaped, her heart pounding and the sword jumping in turn in her hand. The demon’s eyes were gleaming.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Gremory said. She gestured with a long-taloned hand towards the oncoming storm. “If that lot sees you, they’ll tear you apart.”

“I’d worked that out.” Mercy nodded towards the forest. “Only way out’s through there.”

“Best get a move on, then.”

With Shadow, they ran for the line of trees. Perra ran ahead, bounding between the tussocks of grass. If the disir noticed, it meant little: their attention was now fully occupied by the oncoming storm. The trees would not protect them-but the rocks might. Mercy was remembering the bridge, and that crack in the mountain behind the mistfall.

The only problem was that once off the open tundra, the trees slowed them down. The pines, their branches weighted with snow, grew closely together and the slope between them was slippery, with ice filming the glassy rocks beneath the thin covering of earth. Mercy could see Shadow was shivering, despite her heavy coat. She held out a hand and pulled her friend up the slope.

“I’ll be all right,” Shadow said. The demon seemed to have no such difficulties: her boots made no footprints in the snow and Mercy was reminded of a raven, black above the red of a kill. They could hear the onrushing storm through the trees now, a battering wall of sound. Shrieks from the disir army suggested that the meeting was imminent.

Mercy struggled across a short plateau of rock and found herself above the tree line. She looked back. Over the pines, the stormclouds boiled and writhed: she could see the tornado funnel of the winged demons, a black whiplash cracking against the sky. They had a clear few hundred yards of snowfield, before the rocks began.

“Ready?” Mercy said to Shadow, and they ran.