The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘We know that full well,’ said the mottled one. ‘We will master it. We are legion.’

  The demon meant they’d spend as many lives as it took, Taryn thought.

  It went on. ‘You have satisfied your conscience. Now—what are your conditions?’

  ‘When you win your freedom,’ Shift said, and glowed at them with sympathy and encouragement, ‘there must still be a treaty of peace between the Sidh and Hell. But without a Tithe.’

  ‘Done,’ said the smoky demon.

  ‘And two,’ Shift said, ‘I want my father’s glove.’

  The demons became, if possible, even more still.

  Shift said, to the smoke-wrapped one, ‘With it you can use the gates like a sidhe, because the glove was made for an angel, and you have an angel ancestor.’

  ‘He has angel wings,’ Neve added, helpfully. ‘That mantle of smoke. And the angel sign above his eyes is like yours.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t we keep the glove and take the Firestarter?’ said the demon.

  ‘Because you can use a gate, and block a gate—but you can’t move a gate, or make a gate. Even with both gloves. It’s sidhe magic, and you have no sidhe blood.’

  A large moth thumped into the lamp and Hugin hopped over and ate it. She continued to pace restlessly as if the moth were a stimulant.

  Taryn thought, She’s ahead of us. Whatever she’s worked out is making her anxious.

  Shift went on, his voice warm and reasonable. ‘I need both gloves to make a gate into the box to remove the primer.’

  ‘The putative primer,’ said Jacob.

  ‘Not possible,’ said the demon. ‘We know we can’t put a hand through a gate to take anything. That’s not how gates work. Our whole selves must pass through. It’s the same for you. That’s the way gates work. That box is too small for you.’

  ‘That wasn’t my plan.’

  ‘Were you planning to ask me at some point?’ Munin said. ‘And to think I believed I was here to fulfil the role of bodyguard, and generally add dignity to the proceedings.’

  ‘No point in asking if I didn’t have the glove,’ Shift said. ‘Besides, you won’t say no.’

  ‘No,’ Hugin said. ‘No.’

  ‘We’re not the same raven,’ her sister reminded her.

  ‘Apart from sending the Raven of Memory into the box to fetch for us the thing we want, what else would you do with the glove?’ said the smoky one.

  ‘Make it mine,’ Shift said. ‘And Neve’s.’

  ‘Pure symbolism and ceremony,’ said the demon. ‘What would you do with it in a material way?’

  ‘Nothing to harm Hell.’

  ‘Once you’ve tamed the language, and you’re ready to rise, Shift and I will use the gloves to go to battle at your side and help you dispose of your masters,’ Neve said. ‘It would be an honour and a pleasure to help you with that.’

  ‘But more immediately,’ the mottled demon said, insistent, and unimpressed by Neve’s offer.

  ‘I’d like to free that young frost giant you’re using as a cooling system in your compound in Pakistan. Make a gate to get it straight back to its people. Who I hope will show their gratitude by lending me a few years of their time.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘There are places that could do with being a little more cold,’ Shift said, mild and ingenuous.

  Taryn felt lightheaded. He’s going to do it, she thought. God help us all. He really does mean to save the world.

  ‘You’d give up the language?’

  ‘I believe that mastering it in order to make a primer for me is what killed my mother. I’m my mother’s son.’

  ‘And your grandmother’s grandson,’ Neve said. She, too, seemed to value the second glove more than the tongues of angels.

  ‘Shift is sincere about helping you,’ Hugin said. ‘He says “people” of everyone. It isn’t your “we”, but he is a true egalitarian.’

  ‘I do desire your freedom,’ Shift said to the demons.

  ‘But not the whole of our homeland in our hands,’ said the suppurating one, in sly tones.

  Neve lowered her eyelids and said, ‘You wouldn’t like what we’ve done with it.’

  Taryn had looked away again at the house, her eyes drawn by the swoop of headlights, some visitor or security sweep well after midnight. When she looked back, she was just in time to see the smoke-wrapped demon float the glove into Shift’s hands.

  It was twice the size of the other and was made of white gold, stainless, very plain. It also had the late addition of an iron chain.

  Shift put it down quickly. The ravens ambled over and set to work on the links. Under their blows the iron smoked, grew cherry red and flew apart in molten sparks. Munin dragged the remainder of the chain away across the table, down the steps and right out of the folly.

  Neve picked up the glove and draped it over Shift’s left hand. The fingers overlapped his by inches.

  Shift said, ‘Now why couldn’t I have inherited some of his imposing size?’

  ‘Oh, no, he was a just little fellow with giant hands,’ Neve said. She removed the other glove from her throat and tied it onto Shift’s right hand.

  Hugin began her demented hopping again.

  Shift laughed with delight, not at the raven, but at whatever sensation he got from wearing both gloves.

  Neve swivelled the Firestarter until one of its narrow ends faced him.

  Jacob said, ‘Do you think there’s a box inside the box? The way Taryn remembered?’

  ‘No. The noise it makes will be the spindles at the ends of the scroll knocking on the wood. Bone spindles,’ Shift said. ‘The entire thing is indestructible. Angel-bone spindles, angel-skin scroll, angel-blood ink. My father’s killers left his body, and my mother used it to make something that would last. She knew what she was doing.’

  ‘I don’t think she knew it would kill her,’ Neve said.

  Shift looked at the demons. ‘Do we have a bargain?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the leader.

  Taryn seriously doubted that, now Shift had his hands on the gloves, or rather the gloves on his hands, the demons could take anything from him without a long period of planning and stealth.

  ‘Will you go in the box?’ Shift said to Munin. ‘Please?’

  ‘What’s in it for us?’ Hugin said.

  ‘I’m hoping the sidhe will like having something new to do. Something really difficult. After all, they are the descendants of people who did something formidably difficult. They made a world out of pieces of other very different worlds. Any people who once built a house for themselves can certainly repair someone else’s house. Do you think you and your sister might like to help with that too?’

  Hugin spat and fluffed up.

  ‘Odin is our second God,’ Munin said to her sister. ‘Perhaps Shift might be our third.’

  ‘I’ll forget my way out of any godhood.’

  ‘True, true,’ Munin said. Then to her sister, ‘I want to do it. I want to see how they all go on. Him, and all his people people people.’

  Shift knelt and set his elbows on the snail-smeared, sword-pierced table. He eyed the short end of the rectangular box and edged both hands towards it, twisting and picking. His gestures were like those he, Aeng, and Neve used to direct their forcebeast.

  The end of the larger glove clicked against the charred, stone-pummelled timber.

  Taryn had a brief sensation of something hollowing out. It was like a barometric change, but wasn’t. The chatter of late crickets and summer frogs dropped into silence—a silence that spread from the folly, across the lake, and through all the remnant woods of the Northover’s former and future estate. It was like a birth. Something began to breathe, a child born with language already in its mind, not crying, not asking, just alive.

  Shift withdrew his hands. The air beside the box sparkled with something.

  ‘Gwy,’ Neve said. ‘I can smell the marsh. Mud, peat smoke, the honey from the wild hive. Adhan’s house, her h
ands, her hair.’

  ‘Yes. I smell those things too, but it doesn’t remind me of anything.’

  Munin trotted across the table and thrust her beak at the square end of the box. Then she put her head into it.

  Hugin made a noise like someone snapping Christmas candy canes.

  Munin walked into the box. Her tail feathers disappeared.

  ‘No intervening time,’ Jacob said, and Taryn recognised it as a very short prayer.

  A few seconds later the tail feathers reappeared. Hugin snatched at them but managed to refrain from pulling her sister back out of the box.

  Munin shuffled out, slowly dragging a scroll. Soft vellum, dark in colour, and wound onto polished white arm bones. She shook it from side to side as she went, as if having trouble freeing it. But before long it was out of the box, in one piece.

  Shift reached for the box, to clear the table or close his gate, Taryn wasn’t sure which.

  Munin seemed to know. ‘No, leave it be,’ she chided. ‘It’s your first gate. We should celebrate its birthday with some ceremony.’

  The demons crowded around the table. The mottled one unrolled the scroll.

  Taryn felt as if something were pushing her head down. She wanted to get onto her knees and drag herself away. From the corner of one eye she saw Neve and three of the demons jostling as they retreated. They ended up on the steps, clustered together, enmity forgotten, staring in the direction of the scroll, too far away now to read anything accidentally.

  Taryn was aware that Jacob was completely outside the folly. He had taken himself over the rail and was fighting his way free of the shrubbery.

  Only Shift, the ravens and the smoky demon remained at the table.

  Shift said, to the ravens, ‘Does it make any sense to you?’

  ‘It’s all grebes and egrets, curlews and eels,’ Hugin said. ‘Though I suppose there is an “A” for “apple” there.’

  Munin said, ‘Your mother wrote this for you. It’s all the things you first knew.’

  The smoky demon said, ‘In time we will make sense of it.’

  Taryn heard the scroll roll up again, the clack of the ball joints knocking together.

  ‘Thank you, and goodbye,’ Shift said. ‘Would you like me to put you as close to your place in Pakistan as the existing gates can go?’

  ‘If you would,’ said the demon politely. ‘Little god of the marshlands, fate-foresworn princeling, Gatemaker.’

  The demon joined its fellows on the steps. Neve stepped swiftly out of their way. Prince’s Gate jumped off the bottom of the lake and swallowed the four demons. Shift laughed as he swung all the gates into place and set his passengers somewhere near the server farm.

  ‘So wide?’ Neve breathed. ‘Why did you use eight gates?’

  ‘To let our people know they have a gatemaker again,’ Shift said.

  ‘Two gatemakers,’ Neve said, gazing eagerly at the gloves.

  Shift hurried out of the folly and helped Jacob from the lilac, which was covered in powdery mildew and made a mess of his last fine Aeng outfit. They came back to the others. Neve was trying and failing to pull her sword out of the table. She complained, ‘How did you make it work for Arthur?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Shift said.

  She gave up.

  Hugin suddenly burst out into squawks of horror. Munin was once again venturing into the box. She disappeared completely. The chorus of insects and amphibians, which had only tentatively recommenced once the demons and primer vanished, dropped away again.

  Munin backed out with a single sheet of vellum. Once again, everyone but Shift and the ravens quickly averted their eyes.

  For a time no one said anything, then Shift said, in a carefully controlled voice, ‘It’s in Latin as well as the tongues of angels.’ Further silence, then in the same careful voice, ‘It’s a letter from my mother. She apologises for all the deceptions she practised on me. And for hiding me.’

  ‘By virtue of its being the same text written in two languages, it is also a cipher key,’ Hugin said. ‘It will be useful to you, Shift.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shift said. He wasn’t replying to Hugin, but to the woman who wrote the letter. ‘Being hidden has been difficult for me.’

  Epilogue

  Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people . . .

  —Ruth 1:16

  33

  One Hundred Years, Eighty with Good Behaviour

  Taryn was puzzled as to who her visitor might be, five days from Christmas and three before her release date. She was expecting her father, but not yet. She’d had a letter: ‘I’m already near at hand and will be there on the dot to deliver you.’ His play had wrapped till the roads were more passable. Its eighteen-month run had so far covered most of the island, from Land’s End to York. The play was a theatrical adaptation of the final four episodes of the television fantasy series—never aired, never filmed—with large-scale puppetry supplying the action scenes. The four-hour production had retained a third of the show’s cast, and had altered its projected storylines to give all those people more to do. There had been a few unavoidable substitutions, accepted by the audience because of the faithful way the already familiar actors accommodated the newcomers. Besides, it was theatre, so there were no close-ups, and that helped.

  The cast and company worked tirelessly, had fun, and proved that things didn’t all have to wind down just because, as Basil Cornick liked to say, ‘bloody elves have called time on us’.

  Basil had rehearsed his opinions in a letter to Taryn, who’d written back to say he must know it wasn’t the ladies and gentlemen calling time—more the exaggerated expectations of profit by various industries, like Telcos. All the businesses that clambered over one another’s bodies running down the mooring rope before the ship that may or may not sink even left the port. ‘The government should have nationalised things,’ Taryn wrote. ‘But I guess that since for years everything’s been about returns to shareholders, and they’re all shareholders, they couldn’t get their heads around what’s worth having, and why.’

  Basil replied, ‘I accept your argument, but can you tell me why that woman looks like the person who received me at Stone Street and oversaw a screen test Peter insisted never happened?’

  Basil meant the more visible of the two people who, throughout a year, five years before, had halved nine rivers from surface to bed, and bank to bank. There was a famous picture of the woman, posed as if holding one end of an invisible rope that stretched all the way to the far shore of the Ganges. Her feet were sudsy, ashy. She’d just walked right through people soaping clothes on the stone steps directly downstream of Manikarnika Ghat. There was a patch of sweat on the silk at the small of her back, and a sheen on her bare arms and face. She stood directly before her handiwork—and his, her partner on the far side of the river, the man who was never successfully photographed. It looked as if a pane of glass had been dropped into the river, from shallows to depths, covering every contour of the riverbed all the way from one bank to the other. A brown wall just sat there, like water in a fish tank when the oxygen pump has failed, the whole thing left so long that only anaerobic algae hasn’t stifled. Below the woman on the sticky riverbed were charred bones, a whole bail of construction site safety mesh, a blackly bleeding car battery, and a mattress-thick carpet of shredded plastic bags. The photograph had been taken only moments before another river appeared from an inlet in exactly the same dimensions as the outlet. A blue-green wall which sat flush against the brown, so that the river was continuous.

  Taryn’s father had visited the first of those refreshed rivers and had taken a tour boat which cruised across the line where brown became green, and opaque became translucent. He had marvelled at how the boat slipped serenely over the division, maybe hastening a little on the second river.

  Taryn wanted to tell her father how it worked. That where th
e line appeared there were three gates, always open. The first, upstream, gate removed all flotsam, but nothing living, and dropped it all beyond the Exiles’ Gate and into interstellar space. The second gate took the water away and poured it into the wetlands at the mouth of a river in the Sidh. A river which, in turn, flowed through the third gate in the sequence—effectively replacing the Ganges. The polluted water wasn’t good for the wetlands. The ‘blue line’ in each of the nine changed rivers was always the continuation of one of the Sidh’s great, clean waterways, now pouring themselves into the Indian Ocean, the China Sea, the Mekong Delta.

  Taryn longed to tell her father everything. But she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t monitored.

  She had however been able to write down much of what she’d like to tell her father. The history that was hers, and History’s. She’d asked the ravens for pencils and notebooks. Munin would arrive with one notebook at a time, an hour before sunrise, when there was enough light coming through the window of the cell to illuminate a page. Several hours later, the raven would carry the filled notebook away with her.

  By that time, Taryn had a cell to herself. Inmates were two to a cell when she came to the prison, but with pressure on lines of supply and communications, and budgets evaporating, the populations of women’s prisons had begun to thin out by year two. Women’s prisons first. Men’s now too. Sentences were reduced. There were fewer incarcerations. And there were fewer crimes, or various authorities had adjusted their ideas about what was criminal. It was the creep of pragmatism more than compassion—the authorities were rethinking many matters around incarceration and, finally, putting sane solutions in place.

  While Taryn wrote, Munin would nestle into the curve of her body. Hours would pass and the noise would increase from the motorway across the valley. Later, when petrol consumption was curtailed, it was quieter. That pervasive longshore sound of a stream of traffic became a rarity everywhere.