• Twenty-Five •
Shadow listened to the voice. In a way, it was reassuring to have this rider in her head, and that alarmed her more than anything. It was smooth, decisive, clear. It knew what it wanted and what it wanted was to be free of the Shah. In that, both Shadow and the rider were in accord.
“What
are
you?” But it had to be the ifrit, that inchoate thing of fire and flame.
“I am a word made flesh.”
“Yes, in me,” Shadow thought, tartly.
“Until I choose otherwise.” Smoothly, to conquer her rising anger, it added, “I understand. No one cares to be possessed. Who should know this better than I? I am the essence. You asked that I should be transformed into a human. This is so, is it not? You are human, and I am in you.”
And then she understood how the spell had gone so wrong.
Be careful what you wish for.
She was an alchemist, an agent of change—and now change had caught her in its web.
“What sort of spirit are you?” Shadow asked, through mentally gritted teeth. “Are you male or female?” Shadow was dreading this answer. The cool voice could have belonged to either gender.
“We are not like you. But you would see me as a man, were I to choose to appear to you in a form other than the one you have seen.”
Shadow, appalled, said nothing. The idea of having this male spirit within her was defiling, abhorrent. But at the moment, there was little she could do.
In the end, it told her what to do. She must go to the Shah, and tell him a tale. The ifrit would dictate it to her, it said kindly, as one conferring a favour. Ten minutes and already Shadow was sick of the thing, quite apart from any other considerations. She did not think that the spirit was the one doing the favour. But she did not have a choice. Shadow had essentially failed, and the Shah would not be pleased unless the situation was finessed.
And so she went.
“The spell was unsuccessful,” she said. “I have failed. I am deeply sorry.”
The Shah looked at her. “What has become of it, then?” he asked, deceptively mild.
“Rather than becoming human, it has passed into your ring,” Shadow said, prompted by the ifrit. “You will, of course, wish to check.”
The Shah gave a sad smile. “I wouldn’t want to doubt your word. Perhaps we can find a use for it.” He steepled his fingers, looking past her. “A truly captive spirit, within the ring. Such things have been known. Maybe this will be more useful than if it had become a man.”
You wouldn’t doubt my word? Hell.
“Of course.” The Shah took the ring from her and held it over a flame. Shadow inclined her head, staring at her hands clasped in her lap as he inspected it. Shadow sneaked a look upwards and saw that the blue smoke from the flame was forming words, inscribed in azure light upon the air. A name, and also a spell. She tried to remember the name, but it drained out of her mind like water through a sieve. The Shah had set safeguards. She would have done the same. She was glad her face was concealed behind her veil and she knew that if the Shah penetrated it, she would be warned. But he was respectful, and did not. The veil did not protect her from the thing in her head, however.
Whatever the Shah had learned from the ring, he seemed satisfied.
“You’ve done your best. There have been—difficult—elements to this case.”
You’re telling me.
“Thank you,” Shadow said. There was a pressure behind her tongue, as if the ifrit was willing her to say more. With an effort, she forced it back; she would not be a completely pliant puppet.
“Of course, you’ll remain on the payroll,” the Shah said now.
“Oh, good.”
She felt the Shah’s sharp gaze through the veil.
“I shall, also of course, be calling on your services again.” He handed over a small leather bag. It was heavy, and gave a metallic
chink
as she took it. Gold. How old-fashioned. But it was how you were supposed to pay an alchemist, in coin. Shadow murmured her thanks and, at a gesture from the Shah, rose to go. She needed to get out of the Has, for all sorts of reasons. She could feel the spirit looking out of the back of her head as she left, an odd sensation and intrusive.
“This will take some getting used to,” the ifrit said. Perhaps it felt the same way. She knew, without being told, that there were deep levels in her mind the spirit could not access, not without a proper set of keys. That was not beyond the realms of probability, either. But on the way through the bazaar she took care to focus on the purely quotidian: which spices were for sale, which pieces of machinery.
“How boring your life must be,” the spirit said, in wonder.
“I need the downtime,” Shadow said, and thought of different kinds of tea for the rest of the journey home.
• Interlude •
It was easy to succumb to despair. She had lived all her life under a benign hand. When doubts had come, or conflicts, she had been encouraged to express her own opinions, knowing that beneath the tightrope of uncertainty, there had been a safety net. She had loved her life. Her speciality had been in investigating the storyways to do with children-in-the-forest and even today Tope’s mind could be soothed by the thought of gingerbread houses, darkened pines, poisoned apples, mad old hags. So many of them, yet not a lifetime’s work, one would have thought, but there had been other stories, too. A worthwhile life, ever since she had trembled on the edge of her initiation at seventeen. That had been during the war—one of them—and she had been filled with an ardent blaze, a desire to keep this fortress of civilisation against what was coming at it out of the night.
Now the night was once more coming fast, it seemed to her, and there was nothing to hold it back. She knew she should have had more faith in the Library itself, in its capacity to remain a tower of strength. Because it was an open secret that the Library itself was a living thing, an entity with a myriad minds and a thousand tongues. She just hoped that this would be enough.
• Twenty-Six •
Mercy was worried about the airship. It had come out of nowhere, and it was anomalous to this primitive wintry world through which they now trudged. True, the airship had not come back, but it had been automatically hostile. On top of that, she was concerned about the disir themselves. This was their territory and even though they were supernatural beings—legends that had come from the minds of men—some laws of evolution still applied. She wondered what they were sharing their world with. She had the feeling she was about to find out.
With Benjaya and the
ka,
she had now been following the river for over an hour. The light had not changed and neither had the flow of the river, although the crack and creak of the ice was now more marked. She thought that the temperature had risen a little, as well. A spring, for this winter world? Somehow, that seemed unlikely. She could not help feeling that this was an ice age, and spring very far away.
Mercy’s feet were cold. So was her nose. She was hungry (the
ka’
s hunting had not yet produced a result) and tired, but she was not yet exhausted. She and Benjaya had given up conversation, but Mercy could hear the murmuring voice of the Irish sword and it was this that kept her going. Odd, that a weapon should be the link that, she felt, kept her attached to the Library, yet the Library was the thing she had sworn to protect and so it made a kind of sense. And the sword could not tire or falter, although it could be broken. It would not let her down. She gripped its hilt a little tighter and walked on.
The curve of the river took them along the shore of a rocky bluff, and then the ground evened out. Forest spilled down the slopes, encroaching onto the shore. Here was a scattering of pines, filling the air with a fresh astringent scent that wiped out the lingering odour of the disir. Mercy wasn’t even sure that she hadn’t imagined it. She turned to Benjaya.
“What do you think?”
Benjaya glanced nervously at the forest. “I don’t know. I don’t like the thought of being in those trees when it’s still half dark. You don’t know what might be in there.”
Mercy agreed, but there had never been any sign that it might get lighter.
“What are you thinking?” Benjaya added.
Instead of answering, Mercy turned to the
ka.
“How about you? Are you up for taking a look?” She did not like asking Perra to do her dirty work for her, but the
ka
was a lot less vulnerable than Benjaya or herself.
“I will try,” the
ka
agreed. It padded rapidly among the trees, leaving Benjaya and Mercy standing on the foreshore. Mercy peered into the clouds: there was no sign of the airship.
“I’m worried about getting back again,” Benjaya said, suddenly.
Mercy thought about saying something reassuring, but he deserved the truth. “So am I,” she said.
“It’s as though the city is bleeding people. First the Skein, then the
Barquess.
Now us.”
“We will
get
back, Ben. I’ll do my best.” But she’d told the Elders that she’d take care of it, and what if her best wasn’t good enough?
The
ka
appeared at her feet, as silently as it had gone. “There’s something in the forest. A road.”
“A
road
? What sort of road?” This land was too long-ago for any kind of buildings. Yet there had been the flying boat . . . “All right. Let’s take a look.”
It was made of stone flags and cut straight between the trees. She could see it vanishing off into shadow. It did not look right. It did not belong. The Irish sword twitched in her hand.
When she took a step onto the road, the sole of her boot rang out as if she was treading onto metal, a cold, metallic sound. Mercy swallowed. She had the sudden disquieting feeling that the road would snatch her away, whisk her into the darkness.
“Ben,” she said. “Let’s not lose sight of each other, all right?”
He gave her a rather odd look in reply. It should indeed have been obvious.
“I don’t know where it goes,” the
ka
said.
“Then we’ll follow it and find out.”
They had been walking for some time when Mercy became aware the world was changing around them. It was subtle, at first: the trees thinning out, a slight lightening of the sky above their heads. Then she realised that the road itself was altering, the stone becoming less rough and more cleanly cut. They crested a low hill and found themselves looking down on a crossroads. A black stone stood at its heart. The sword twitched in Mercy’s hand. This wasn’t the landscape they had left, the Ice Age tundra. It looked more like part of the Scottish highlands—rolling bald hills with scattered pines, shadowy beneath the ferocious stars. The bisecting road ran in either direction, across moorland, but the crossroads itself stood alongside a grove of trees. Benjaya and Mercy looked at one another. Crossroads meant magic: the threefold meeting-place of the Greeks, where Hekate’s offerings had been left, the junction where you meet the devil at midnight, a place of ritual and magic . . . They headed down into the scent of heather. Dark pools formed mirrors on either side of the road; sparse saplings gradually clustered until Mercy could see the crossroads stood in a grove of oak. Beneath her feet, the road changed, blackening. The oaks were heavy with leaf, a midsummer foliage. She stopped. She did not know what was in the grove, but she did not want to go any further. It felt ancient, laden with bloodshed like the site of a forgotten battlefield. She could smell meat on the air.
“If the disir are anywhere . . . ” Mercy said, then stopped. A breeze stirred the oaks, as if the word had become a wind. The sword twitched again like a hound straining at the leash.
But if we don’t go, we won’t know.
“I will go,” Perra said.
Even though Mercy knew how hard it was to harm the spirit, she heard herself say, “No. We’ll go together.”
As they approached the crossroads, the smell of blood increased. There was no sign of anything amiss: nothing hanging from the branches. Mercy couldn’t help thinking of Roman descriptions of the druid groves of Britain, butchered meat dripping blood on the forest floor . . . this was not a productive line of thought. Besides, she couldn’t see anything.
Into the grove. The
ka
gave a compulsive shiver, as though wind had rippled over its fur.
“Perra? What is it?”
“Predators.”
“There’s an altar,” Benjaya whispered.
It stood at the centre of the crossroads, a slab of basalt four foot high and six long. It gleamed faintly in the light of the stars. A skull stood at the centre of the altar, shining. Mercy stared. The altar had a fascination, the kind of compulsion that she associated with controlling magic. Before it was the jawbone of a whale, an immense ragged white arch.
“It’s very old,” a sly voice said from the trees, making Mercy leap.
“Who’s there?”
“Come and see.”
She did so, hearing the others close behind her. Deep inside the oak grove, behind the bone arch, stood a rock, an outcrop of granite. Something stood before it and it was a moment before Mercy realised the figure was chained to the rock.
It wasn’t human. It was bigger than the disir she had seen, and it was male: a long white face, sharp-toothed, beneath matted pale hair. He wore leather rags, the remnants of armour. His nails had scored the rock: she could see the grooves. He smiled at her, head cocked to one side.
“I don’t often have visitors.”
The voice was sophisticated, resonant. It held promises and malice. It seemed to Mercy that she had heard it somewhere before, but not directly: like an echo through someone else’s voice. Warily, she stepped forward.
“Maybe this isn’t an easy place to find. Where are we?”
She wasn’t expecting an answer, but to her surprise, one came. “It’s called ‘the place of the crossroads.’ I’m afraid your ancestors were rather literal.”
“
My
ancestors?”
“This is the far north of the storyways, the far deep, but not as deep as where you’ve been. I can smell the tundra on you.” He raised his blade-like nose and gave a prim sniff. “An archetypal place, somewhere that’s found in the hollows of the head. You know how it works.”