Worldsoul (26 page)

“Nice try,” it said, and buffeted her on the side of the head. Mercy went down, feigning more dizziness than she felt and kicked its feet from under it. It fell, sprawling, then reached out and grabbed her by the wrist. It was certainly as strong as a gibbon. It hauled her first to her feet and then off them. Its other hand came up, clasped her round the throat and banged her head against the wall. The room exploded into a firework of lights.

“That’s enough,” a voice said. Mercy was abruptly released.

“No! More!”

“Do as you’re told.” The man spoke perfunctorily, almost absent-minded. Still seeing stars, Mercy heard him cross the room. He bent down. “Nothing broken.”

“No thanks to you.”

“I wanted to see what you’d do,” the man—Roke, Deed—said. “Now I’ve found out. Anyway, I rescued you in the first place, so be grateful. I’m Jonathan Deed, by the way, although you know me as Roke. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be making a mess all over our nice courtyard.”

“How did you do it?”

“Magical net.” He squatted on his heels by her side. She could see him more clearly now, and he held a lantern.

“The Library took a major risk sending you here.”

“I was acting on my own initiative.”

An eyebrow was raised. “I don’t think I believe you, though it’s very public spirited to claim sole responsibility.”

“You can put me through a truth process.” Mercy had no idea what was involved in such a process, but she could guess that was beyond unpleasant
.
“I’m not lying.”

“All right,” Deed said. “I might do that. On the other hand, that rather begs the question that I actually care.”

“Ah,” Mercy said.

“Because it’s a great excuse to pick a fight with the Library, you see, something I’ve been needing to do for some time.”

“Thought so,” Mercy croaked. “Now that the Skein have gone . . . ”

“Be reasonable,” Deed said, pained. “You can’t have Librarians running a city. You’d spend all your time shushing people and cataloguing things. Forgive me, but you’re not known in your profession for wide-ranging vision and overall perspective; you’re more the fine detail sort.”

Mercy said nothing to this, partly out of annoyance, and partly because she was secretly afraid he might be right.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked at last. “Keep me here?”

“No. This was just an experiment; we’re not barbarians. As I said, I wanted to see what you’d so. That’s what we do—we experiment. We’re scientists, after all. Come with me.”

He pulled her to her feet, not ungently, and ushered her ahead of him through the door. Mercy began planning strategy: a backwards kick, elbow to the face . . .  But he was staying too far behind her, even when she deliberately slowed, and when she glanced over her shoulder she could see from his amused expression that he had read her mind.

She was expecting to be led to another cell. To her surprise, however, he took her into a parlour. Panelled walls, brocade seats, and a pianola. Very nice.

“Sit down. Would you like a scotch?”

“I—actually, yes.”

Deed grinned. “Good girl. You’ve no chance of getting out of here, but if you cooperate, we’ll see what we can do. Please don’t take any of this personally.”

“Likewise.”

“You’re angry about the theft of your blood. I can tell. Well, fair enough. I’d be cross, too.”

“I can’t blame you for taking an advantage. We’re not on the same side.”

“But you think we should be.”

Mercy paused. As long as he thought she was working for the Library, and not for Mareritt . . . if he wanted an excuse to go up against the Library, he’d got one anyway, no matter what the truth was, and if she kept quiet about Mareritt it might give Mercy an advantage. She accepted the heavy crystal tumbler of whisky that he offered her, and took a sip. Peat-flavoured fire spread through her.

“Good whisky.”

“It’s a magician’s drink,” he said. “Like red wine. Claret.”

She couldn’t tell whether he was making a veiled threat or simply expounding a personal theory; oddly, she got the impression that it was the latter. He took a seat opposite her and sat comfortably, long legs stretched out in front of him. The ruff made it look, disconcertingly, as though his head had been cut off. An angular face, a thin mouth, not without humour. An oddly compelling face. She did not want to even think about going down that road.

“So,” he said. “What were you looking for?”

“A book.”

Again, the eyebrow was raised. “Because you don’t have enough of your own?”

“That actually was part of the problem.”

Deed laughed. “So what was this book about? Medieval drainage systems? Growing better cauliflowers? Marxist dialectic?”

Since she did not know what
The Winter Book
contained, Mercy decided to shake the tree of speculation and see what fell out.

“The disir.”

His face did not change.

“I see.”

“Do you? We had one in the Library.”

“Did you? I don’t imagine it’s the sort of thing you’d want in a Library. I should think that the monkey-demon might even be a little higher on the desirability list.”

“The disir didn’t throw shit,” Mercy said. “Though she did try to kill me.”

“Perhaps not, then. So, a disir came to kill you and you decided that the best way to deal with this was to do some reading up. Why didn’t you just call me and ask to borrow something?”

“Would you have lent it to me?”

“I might have, actually. Let this be a lesson to you, Miss Fane. Always ask your neighbours
before
burgling their premises.”

“My apologies.”

Deed waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter. As I said, it’s useful to me. So what did you find out about the disir?”

“They’re old. They come from the Ice Age. They’re not human but they were probably conjured up by some shaman or other, part of a story that we no longer possess.”

“Fairy tales,” Deed said. “That’s the engine that runs this city, after all, isn’t it? That’s what drives us on. Was that all you discovered?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll have to do some research,” Deed said pleasantly. “And see what else I can find out for you.”

• Forty-Two •

The orchard fruit was not, Elemiel told her, safe to eat. But there were seeds and a number of bracket fungi that were edible. Shadow did not feel like eating them, despite Elemiel’s assurances. There were no animals to hunt and at this, the demon pulled an expression that, after a minute, Shadow interpreted as eye rolling.

Night would soon fall, but that didn’t matter, so the Messenger said, because there was a moon.

The moon, whenever they were, was a lot closer to the Earth than it subsequently became, at least in myth, as became apparent when it rolled up over the summit of the hill. This was a young moon, its face a little less starred with craters. Shadow felt a comfort in its light, and it made it easier to see where they were going.

Elemiel led them deeper into the valley, past the black stone. Shadow had interrogated him about the elementals: the earth spirit, the fire, thinking he must know them well. But the Messenger told her that the fire spirits were new.

“Only the gardeners are original. The golems. Ancient technology, rediscovered anew closer to your day.”

“They have them in some quarters,” Shadow said. “They’re not always very reliable.”

“They were designed to be close to the earth,” the Messenger said, “and sung into submission, but in your time, most of those songs have been lost.” He walked up over a lip of land and pointed. “This is where we start to climb.”

There was a path leading up through the groves, into the hills. Shadow and Gremory followed, breathing in the scent of fir, still warm with the sun. Shadow could hear a nightingale, singing far below in the valley, and they came out into starlight.

“It’s only safe to come here now,” the Messenger said. “And even now, not very.”

“Why?” Shadow asked.

“They’re growing nightblooms. But most of the plants flower during the day.”

“What sort of flowers?” Shadow asked, with a sudden prickle of suspicion.

“The sort you’re afraid of.” He guided her to the edge of the rocks. “Be careful.”

She was looking down into a ravine. It was full of flowers, a garden in itself. The huge blooms were all folded, tightly as parasols. She was reminded of hibiscus, but each flower was the height of a man. The tip of the stamens protruded at the end of each curled flower, like an obscene tongue. She recognised them: she’d last seen one bury itself in the floor of the desert and destroy Elemiel’s hut.

“This is where they come from? Are they natural? You said ‘they’ grow them. Who are
they
?”

“I’ll show you. But keep close behind me—there are guards.”

As they walked, Shadow was conscious of things moving around them through the darkness. She heard no voices, but once someone ran past them, disappearing swiftly down the valley. She nudged Elemiel, not wanting to speak, although it seemed impossible to her that whoever was out there could be unaware of their presence.

“They aren’t interested in us,” the Messenger said, in what seemed to Shadow to be an unnecessarily loud voice. “They don’t know we’re here.”

“We’re pretty obvious, Elemiel,” Shadow said.

“They’re not in the same story-stream. Look above you.”

Shadow did so and saw that the stars overhead had changed their configuration again. The couple of constellations that she had recognised, low on the western horizon, had disappeared, but not enough time had elapsed for them to have sunk down below the rim of the world. These stars were new.

“That makes no sense, astronomically,” she said aloud.

“This garden is where stories overlap,” Elemiel replied. “You’re not seeing the world as it ever was: you’re in storytime now. Or more than story. Mythtime. In your city, there are many legends, but time doesn’t shift so much. Here, it does. The people around us can’t see us because I’ve taken the path that leads past the storystream. We’re not in the same space. Look—”

For a moment Shadow saw a fleeting sequence of impressions: the garden itself, a desert city made of low domes and huge walls, buried in a terrible storm of sand. Then other settlements rising in its place, abandoned when tribes swept down from the north. She saw a battle, between people who looked scarcely human. Then djinn and demons, stalking the battlefield and devouring the spirits of the slain. She did not see Gremory among them, and was grateful.

After that, the desert bloomed again, as if the blood of the fallen had watered it, only to sink down into the sand once more. A ghost city arose, but was dispelled by a magician who could have been the grandfather of Suleiman the Shah. And then the familiar outlines of the Khaureg, the Great Desert that had lain beyond Worldsoul since the city’s rise. Which was, Shadow was reminded now, relatively recent in the great scheme of things. She tried to pay no more attention to the beings that surrounded her in the darkness.

“The only thing you need to worry about is the guards,” the Messenger said.

“How will I know when those appear?”

The Messenger laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll know.”

• Forty-Three •

Mercy Fane had been confined to a secure room in the heart of the House of the Court: windowless and warded. Deed could have put her back in the dungeons with the devil-monkey, but it amused him to keep Mercy off balance. He suspected that she knew exactly what he was doing, but for now, it would do. He didn’t want to have her killed, not just yet. She was too useful as a bargaining chip. The initial homunculus had disappeared, probably going to ground, rat-like, when Mercy had been captured but he had fresh blood with which to make another if the need arose.

He spent a peaceful night and rose at dawn to prepare a letter. This was on official Court parchment, with the identification sigils prominently displayed around its crest. It gave a brief account of recent events, more in sorrow than anger, and invited two of the Elders of the Library to visit their recalcitrant employee. Once that was done, Deed wrote in his letter, they could begin to discuss terms. Phrases like:  . . . 
long association between our two institutions . . . a pity if anything were to damage our hitherto excellent relationship . . . city as a whole taking a dim view of internecine rivalries at a time of crisis . . . 
all rolled fluently from the tip of Deed’s quill.

When he had finished the letter, he rolled it up, sealed it with the Court’s usual method of bloodwax, and dispatched it by golem across the square. Then he sat back to wait.

He did not have to wait long. Mid-morning, a golem trundled back again. It thrust a sealed letter at Deed and waited, staring at him from incurious eyes.

“You may go,” Deed told it and perused the reply. The tone of the reply pleased Deed. It read as if it had been written by someone unnerved, and Deed liked
unnerved,
particularly in an adversary. The Elders would, he read, meet with him as soon as they had received his reply confirming a time.

Deed cast a small astrological divination and discovered that, given the planetary alignments, two o’clock would do very well. He duly inscribed the appointed time in a second letter, summoned the golem, gave it the missive, tucked an instruction slip between its ridged jaws, and sent it on its way.

He then went down to visit his captive. “I hope you spent a comfortable night?”

“Yes,” the Librarian said blandly. “Thank you for providing me with a book.”

She was sitting in an armchair, with the book in question spread open on her lap. It was the official history of the Court.

“What’s your professional opinion?”

“Of the book? Bit of a hagiography, isn’t it? I didn’t find any mention of that regrettable episode in the nineties when a small castle got flattened by accident.”

Deed laughed. “It’s an edited version.”

“Heavily edited, I’d say.”

“You can’t expect us to betray trade secrets.”

It was, apparently, Mercy’s turn to laugh. “I didn’t think there were any left. What with disgruntled magicians heading off in a sulk to tell everyone else what your methods are, and the fact that most of your magic is grimoire-based anyway and therefore accessible to anyone who can read . . . ”