The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  The demon had scuttled to Taryn’s interior, where it cowered in shock.

  Taryn’s arms dropped, her shoulders popping. Her hands were still tied to the door. She had only an instant to brace and take its weight on her spine. Then something hot, padded and transparent closed around both her and the door. The thing holding her was filled with soft clouds of static. She heard the door panels popping with pressure. Her swollen fists jammed into her diaphragm and she couldn’t draw breath.

  The last sensation Taryn had before losing consciousness was the demon doing something terrible to some essential part of her, like a clumsy brain surgeon, laser off by a millimetre, burning away an integral part of her. That, and the spine-compressing sensation of being in a poorly calibrated express elevator on its way up a very tall building with no one waiting for it on any floor.

  Part Four

  Damp

  ‘No sight so sad as that of a naughty child,’ he began, ‘especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?’

  ‘They go to hell,’ was my ready and orthodox answer.

  ‘And what is hell? Can you tell me that?’

  ‘A pit full of fire.’

  ‘And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And what must you do to avoid it?’

  I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: ‘I must keep in good health and not die.’

  — Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

  13

  Failing Kindness

  Taryn lay with the top of her head turned to the setting sun, her scalp saturated with the hot oil of its light. Her hands were bandaged and she couldn’t use her fingers to explore her injuries. Every breath pained her, but each was a continuation, and promised consciousness.

  But, even semi-conscious, Taryn felt there was something she no longer owned. That when the demon left her it had taken something of hers away with it.

  Now and then she’d fumble for the call button. She’d try to summon a nurse. But her carers came when they came. The water they gave her had a strange flavour. It wasn’t town water, or tank water. It tasted of washed rock dust, as fresh as some summer in a future with forests, but without cities.

  All day she was in the hut, her bed far from the low doorway. At dusk, when the light had gone, they’d carry her out into the fresh air. It was a routine. She and the bed covered in bearskins were at the centre of the routine. Anyone else at that centre and it would be a ritual. That’s what she felt. They were all people of some size. She was not. She existed for routine, not ritual. She was smaller now.

  Neve appeared once, at a fastidious distance. And the printer, whose name was Jane. Jane Aitken.

  There was no sign of Shift until, some twilight along a succession of twilights, Taryn saw him standing on the beige sand of the pocket-sized beach of the little lake. She watched him crouch and scoop up water to wash his face.

  ‘Was he hurt?’ she asked Jane. ‘Is he angry with me?’

  ‘He’s only out of sorts. He wants to get on with things. He has sent for a palanquin so you can be carried. We’re going by way of the hot springs at Forsha to help you recover from your injuries.’

  ‘If he’s in a hurry we mustn’t go out of our way,’ Taryn said, then corrected herself. ‘His way.’

  Time was going by and Taryn had somewhere else to be. But she couldn’t even get up off the bed of bracken and bearskins when she needed to urinate. Several times a day Jane would slip a basin under her bottom. All she could manage to eat was a broth whose main ingredients seemed to be salt, honey, ginger and bitter greens. The insides of her cheeks were lacerated, and eating hurt her. Her ribs were bound, but if she raised an arm or tried to turn over she was reminded that some were broken.

  ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Jane said, but when she said it she kept her face turned away.

  The following day the palanquin arrived with a large party of sidhe. Two beautiful people, a man and a woman, carried Taryn out of Shift’s hut. They put her down on the palanquin’s platform, which was covered in white furs. They draped a cloudy silk eiderdown over her. They closed the cream linen curtains, and slotted filigreed wood panels into place on all four sides. Then four people lifted the palanquin onto their padded shoulders and set off, without ceremony. They didn’t even pause to take refreshment at Shift’s hut. Their haste wasn’t an attempt to avoid him, because he came away with them, with Jane and Neve, who were waiting at the rim of the hollow.

  Shift’s goats trailed after them for a time, but stopped at the belt of twisted trees. Their plaintive bleating followed the party as it set off around the side of the mountain, the litter bearers high-stepping through tussocks. The two uphill adjusted their grips so that they held the poles by their extended arms while the downhill two continued to bear the weight on their shoulders. They didn’t have the dress or bearing of servants. Nor had they the self-respecting willingness to oblige, the jaunty chatter of the guide Taryn had hired for a taxi tour of Istanbul. (This was after her divorce. In such places Alan would have a picnic arranged in an idyllic spot, with just the right number of alert servitors to chase away people selling resin artefacts or offering camel rides, so that Taryn never saw them, and instead progressed everywhere in a bubble of luxury and ease, even when dining alfresco on some famous monument.)

  Alan would have paid a fortune for these apt, discreet people. They went along, careful but effortless. They admired the downhill view and lifted their faces to watch black hawks hovering on the wind. They sometimes spoke quietly among themselves, but didn’t look at Taryn. That was politeness, she decided. She wasn’t being shunned. She wasn’t beneath their notice. They were just leaving her in peace, letting her rest. They weren’t a kind people, but they were enormously civil.

  Taryn did rest. Once she’d got over imagining the bearers might take a tumble she fell asleep and slept for most of the journey.

  On the first night the party stopped at a level place, a platform cut into the hillside, with a sheltered firepit, a small stream dripping from a moss-covered channel into a pool overhung by ferns, and two stone slabs tilted together to make a shelter where dried wood was stored.

  On the second night they halted by a mountain tarn, very similar to Shift’s lake, but with water stained tea-brown by the plant matter sifted to its bottom. The tarn was surrounded by tough alpine grasses and thorn bushes with berries of candy pink and cough-drop red. At that camp the party’s fire looked choked and small. And when the moon came out its light shone on and through the blue ice cliffs fastened to the black rock faces of surrounding mountains. The night breeze came as an icy down-draught carrying a scent of hostile nothingness, as if it blew all the way from the stars.

  On the third day Taryn sometimes pushed a curtain aside to watch the world go by. Or she dozed with her eyes open, hypnotised by the swinging cage that held the tea set.

  Jane climbed into the litter with a copper kettle and filled the teapot with mint tea and hot water. She let it steep for a time, then poured it into two jade cups. She helped Taryn to sit, settled the pillows behind her and passed her the steaming tea. ‘I wondered what your plans are. What you might do next.’

  It seemed Jane had judged Taryn recovered enough to broach the subject of her future.

  Taryn said, she hoped without self-pity, ‘When I think of my future I think of Hell.’

  Jane took the cup from Taryn’s grip and didn’t give it back until Taryn’s hands had stopped trembling. She said, ‘You are one of Shift’s people now. I think he means to let you fulfil your obligations in your world, as well as help him uncover things he’s decided he needs to know.’

  ‘That’s something we’re doing together. The uncovering. I’m not helping him. I’m not his servant, even if you are.’ Taryn paused, studying Jane. ‘Or perhaps you’re Neve’s?’

  ‘I am one of
Shift’s people. As for Neve, she helped me build my printing press, and now houses it, and me whenever I’m printing. Neve wants to paper the walls of every house in the Tacit with copies of the great Sidh songs. I’ve printed those. And sometimes I print song sheets for choirs of Taken children, or new poems by the favoured Taken poets—Baudelaire, Keats, Emily Brontë. You will know their names. They were after my time.’ Jane smiled at Taryn’s expression of numb astonishment. She refilled Taryn’s cup and, her eyes lowered, said, ‘That’s how I occupy my time. Shift is less possessive of his Taken than the other sidhe. You might say he has me, but he didn’t choose me, since I came with several hundred other women. My home is with them. You will stop there for a night on your way to the Horse Road, which is the route along which the demons have most often been seen. Shift and Neve hope to intercept and question one.’

  Even battered and miserable, Taryn was keenly aware of her commitments. Of the career she’d earned and had to maintain.

  All her life Taryn had loved books. She’d attended festivals, an eager member of their audiences. Now, finally, she got to be a guest at those festivals. She’d arrived. She had to do well by her book. Do well for Angela, for her publishers and for her cherished subject, libraries—as if there were a god of libraries and she were that god’s servant.

  She needed to find out how long she’d lain in the wattle hut. ‘When did Shift bring me here?’

  ‘Seven nights ago,’ Jane said. ‘This detour will add several days to our journey. The Horse Road lies north. We’ll go west, then north.’

  ‘How many days altogether?’

  Jane balanced her teacup on the box of the set and counted on her fingers. ‘Four to the springs, and two or three nights at them. Three days down to the Summer Road. Six along the Summer Road to the Isle of Women. One night on the Isle. Or perhaps we will arrive and leave the same day—Shift doesn’t like to stay there. I’ll take leave of your party at the island. After the island you will cut straight across the great marsh to the Horse Road. That will take anywhere between two to four days since I hear the boardwalk is under repair. You are ultimately headed to Hell’s Gate—where the demons are coming through. Shift and Neve hope to encounter one on the road before the gate. Or, failing that, lie in wait at the gate.’

  Over three weeks.

  Jane said, ‘All this could be accomplished more quickly if Shift would give the glove to Neve so she could call a gate. But I believe they both think it would be better if everything lay quiet until after they’ve cornered a demon. We have no idea if demons can feel the gates move, as the sidhe can.’

  ‘Gods can. Munin said she and her sister could feel it when Shift moved a gate,’ Taryn said. She felt as if she was name-dropping.

  ‘Hugin knows everything that happens in your world that isn’t purposely hidden from her.’

  Taryn tried to take that in. She wanted to ask what kind of everything, and didn’t the Raven of Knowledge have a point of view of her own? And were there things she knew but didn’t understand?

  Jane continued to lay out the course of Taryn’s immediate future. ‘After they have satisfied their curiosity, Neve will send you back to Earth through Hell’s Gate. You can only use Princes Gate to come here, not go back through it. Shift left your demon trapped inside it. If you go out that way the demon can fasten onto you again. Shift believes the demon will fall into dormancy sooner or later, but for now you should regard Princes Gate as unhealthy.’

  Taryn lay digesting this last bit of news, working her way around the oddity of Shift’s gate having the same name as her grandfather’s house. It was helpful anyway to have that report and forecast, baked firm by Jane’s blithe telling.

  ‘So I can go back to my life without the demon finding me?’

  Jane nodded.

  ‘I’m Taken, but I needn’t stay?’

  ‘You can go about your life. But my understanding is that you’ve somehow put your soul in peril. The demon might be foiled, but damnation can’t be. If Hell is your future, fairyland makes that future much further off.’

  ‘Yes,’ Taryn agreed. ‘But as I understand it Hell is the eventual fate of all who are Taken.’

  ‘A fate that can be deferred for a very long time.’

  Taryn waited.

  ‘You can stay away if you want. Shift would let you. He would have let me—but I was an ailing, ageing woman, and under the hand of the law. For me the Sidh has meant health and freedom. Shift is not like the rest of them. He can’t make anyone love him. But the Sidh itself can make you love it, so even if you go back to your life, sooner or later you’ll start dreaming about it, and waking up in tears.’

  The hot springs emerged as a series of pools along a tumbling streambed of sculpted limestone. This warm waterway skirted the foot of a glacial terminal moraine, its slopes covered in alpine thorn bushes. A schist-stepped path climbed to a structure which took up the entire top of the moraine and overhung the slope on all sides like the brim of a trilby. The platform was supported by beams of squared whole tree trunks of some black timber. The decking was the same, only sun-silvered. But the longhouse above the deck was like a piece of furniture from Thailand, a varnished table or tallboy or escritoire formed from sample inlays of various kinds of wood. It was like a museum piece made to a great scale. Its deck had no rail. And its interior comprised only two rooms: a long hall, and a privy with box seats covering holes on the floor.

  Faced with this primitive toilet on her first morning, Taryn peered through it and saw that the rock face forty feet below was wet but entirely clean. She sat, urinated, used a square of linen to mop herself dry and placed it in the receptacle intended. The squares were obviously washed and reused. Then she glanced through the hole again to see something with the volume and transparency of a wash of clean water, but without water’s liquescence, bubble across a slope and carry away the splashes of urine.

  The main room of the longhouse had a very high ceiling and pigeon-holed shelving on two sides. The deep oblong shelves mostly held rolled futon bedding, mattresses and quilts of several thicknesses. None of these was the white, cream, amber, soft green palette of every textile Taryn had so far encountered. These were patterned, some by simple block prints of a single colour on white, others intricately, like Italian brocades.

  By the time Taryn finished in the privy and returned to the main room, full of questions, the beds—nine for her party, and five for the people already there when her party arrived—had been bundled and put away. Everyone was sitting on the deck, their legs dangling.

  One of the litter bearers got up and collected cushions for Taryn. He piled them and help her recline. Breakfast appeared, carried in steaming copper containers in which food had been cooked by immersion in the hot springs. It was the usual Sidh food—a creamy porridge of sweet potato, with seeds, ground and whole; flakes of steamed fish; and a variety of slivered root vegetables, steamed in parcels of some large aromatic leaf, and dressed with lemon juice. There was a bright green soup, and teas—mint, chamomile, chrysanthemum, and apple.

  Jane came to help Taryn manage her plate. Taryn’s hands were still bandaged. Everyone ate and admired the view. The sidhe talked quietly in their own language. Shift, who was farthest from Taryn, occasionally raised his head to listen, his eyes resting quietly on the speaker’s face, his attention unwavering, as if he were a lip reader.

  The sun was warm, but the air cold. Snow lay between the tussocks on the slope below. Beyond one ridge, steam billowed up from hidden water, rose thick then melted in the breeze.

  Neve was wearing fur boots and a fur tippet—white—but the interchangeably beautiful young men and women had bare feet, and very good circulation, for their toes were rosy rather than puce.

  Taryn bent her head towards Jane and whispered a question. ‘There’s something that cleans the rocks below the latrine. Something like sentient sago pudding. What is it?’

  ‘The sidhe have three kinds of magic,’ said Jane. ‘There are glamours,
which, contrary to folklore, are scarcely ever used to disguise their appearance. Rather, they might be used to conceal something, or pass one thing off as another. You won’t encounter any of that in the Sidh—it’s something the sidhe practise only on free human beings. Glamours aren’t honest or respectful. Another magic is the gates. Gatemaking is now a lost art. Those that remain are solely for the purposes of travel, but could once do extraordinary things, like turn dirty water into clean. Only the sidhe can use them—others if invited and accompanied by a sidhe, which is why the trespassing demons are a mystery and worry. A great human witch could use a gate if he or she had the Gatemaker’s glove. Before Shift, the glove belonged to his mother, Adhan—who was half human. Her mother was the last Gatemaker, who made the glove. Shift’s grandmother has been in her tomb for two centuries now.’

  One of the bearers, listening in on Jane’s explanation, muttered something in his own language, which Jane did not translate. She went on. ‘The most useful sidhe magic is that of mendings. So—the wind was blowing last night, wasn’t it?’

  It had been. At one point there had come a gust that made the whole building creak like a ship at sea. Taryn had poked her head out of her burrow of quilts to look out the wide-open end of the longhouse. She saw rags of steam whipping past, and the stars shimmering as if the wind were shaking them. But the room itself was quiet.

  ‘The wind didn’t come in, because the mendings join to make a kind of barrier that allows people to pass through it, and air, but not insects or air moving at any velocity. Sidhe houses have problems in any high and relentless wind because the mendings can work to exclude air altogether. But their houses are large and storms scarcely ever go on for days. Once or twice I’ve seen people sweeping out rainwater and tree debris after a storm, because the storm continued too long and they had to let the mendings fail. The main purpose of mendings is to keep everything clean and in good repair. You saw them at work on the slope below the privy. Sidhe wear them. Mendings clean their skin and clothes and hair. They keep dust and dirt and bits of vegetation from sticking. That’s why the people always look spotless. You will never see Neve with a hair out of place or a stray eyelash on her cheek or smear of food beside her mouth. Her clothes can be elaborate and stay perfectly neat even if she walks all day through high grass.’