by Liz Williams
Shadow looked out of the window and saw the roofs and domes of the Eastern Quarter lined with darkness like the negative of a photograph, flashing on and off. Then her vision cleared. She saw everything in sudden sharp relief: the outlines of the latticed shutters in stark black and pale, the dust motes sparkling in the shafts of sun. Then she looked up.
Entirely unexpected, there was a ship. It hung above her, as tiny as an illustration in a Persian miniature. It was a dreadnaught, but it had sails furled along its sides. It was a monstrous thing, unnatural, made for no worldly sea and Shadow knew it immediately: the Barquess. She heard the ifrit hiss. Then the ship was abruptly gone. A bolt of golden light flooded outwards from the ifrit’s cage as the ifrit exploded, flying silently apart into a thousand shards. Shadow felt an icy touch against her arm, penetrating her sleeve and then flying inwards through her left eye. She cried out. She felt a sharp pain as if her eye had been stabbed with a pin and then wetness welling up inside it. She clawed at her face, panicking, and felt the wet spreading out from her eye. She looked down, out of the good eye, and saw that it was not blood. A blackness stained her sleeve and her hand, gleaming like ink. She felt it pouring from the socket of her eye and spilling down her face, as though the socket were a bowl which someone had overfilled. Shadow stumbled back against the wall, reeling with shock. O Allah, help me, help me-and He must have heard her, for there was a coolness in the air, a soft singing note like a nightingale after rain. Shadow managed a ragged breath. The pain in her eye diminished; she felt the wetness cease to flow. Clasping her arms about herself, she slumped down the wall, crouching on the floor. A single black drop splashed down from her eye and onto the tiled floor, where it remained for a moment before seeping into the tile, swallowed by the blue. The nightingale note sang on and it brought freshness, cutting through the dusty mustiness of the chamber, which now felt scorched as if a fire had raged through it. As indeed, a fire had, and its black knife had cut through Shadow. With great care, wincing, she tried to open her left eye. She raised a hand, gently probing it with a forefinger.
To her surprise, the eye was still there. She could feel it, soft in its socket. She had expected to find the socket reamed and empty, its seed gone. She shut her right eye and looked. Everything was filmed with blackness, as though she looked through a veil, but it was different. Everything was in shadow, but as she looked, the lines at the edges of things became light. Her vision cleared: everything was sharp and vivid. She was seeing more clearly with the damaged eye than she had ever seen: right into the heart of things. She could see their names-a faint script which described everything, God’s language underwriting the world. The name of the ifrit was still clear, in the centre of the tangled mass of iron that had been its cage. Shadow spoke the name.
“I am here,” said a small, clear voice inside her mind.
Twenty-Four
The bridge was high and arched: from the base, Mercy could not see the other side. It did not look like the kind of thing that could exist in the real world, a feat of magical engineering, and she did not like it.
“Where do you think we are?” Benjaya asked. “Are we still in the Liminality?”
She looked in the direction of the ka, which shrugged. Mercy sighed. “I doubt it very much-this is almost certainly somewhere in the nevergone. I’d like to see what’s at the end of the bridge, though.” Without waiting for Benjaya, she started walking upwards. It was a steep trudge and she only realised that she’d reached its summit when she looked up and saw she was standing on the arch. Ahead, the bridge sloped down to a snaking path through the mountains. To its left, stood something that, for a moment, she thought might be a sculpture of some kind. It was not: it was a waterfall, but made of mist. It cascaded silently, falling thousands of feet to the invisible valley below. Mercy stood above cloud. Yet the sun, though thin, was warm on her skin and the air smelled of pine.
“I’ve heard of this place, this mistfall,” Benjaya said. “It’s from the Norse myths. I think it’s a kind of Hell. Niflheim? I think that means ‘land of the mist.’”
“Seems too pleasant to be Hell,” Mercy answered, but she thought he was right, all the same. There was something archetypal about this landscape: the towering mountains, the clouds, the waterfall of mist. This was, she felt in her gut, part of the land from which the disir had come, and therefore not to be trusted. “If it’s Hell,” she went on, “then we need to find a way out.”
The trouble was, she had no idea how to go about it. Things like this happened to Librarians. They had occurred before, although infrequently. The last time had been some hundred years previously, when a cache of hidden scrolls had come to the Library from the east. A Librarian had gone missing, whisked into some desert kingdom, but he had been retrieved by the Skein who, like concerned parents with a lost toddler, had searched until they’d found him. But now the Skein had gone. If we had been trusted with significant magic of our own-safe words, key words… But they had not, and now they would have to make do for themselves. Perhaps it would not be a bad thing if the Skein never came back…
“All right,” Mercy said, aloud. “If it’s a Hell, there will be passage points. Entrances. Exits.” In much of the world’s literature, these had been situated near water: in wells, over rivers, through cracks in the earth. The mistfall was the closest possibility, and Mercy headed for it.
As she grew closer, she saw that the mist sparkled. A myriad diamond drops glittered within it and it made a soft rushing sound.
“Mercy?” Benjaya said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the sun’s going down.”
She nodded. “I know.” Looking out from the high span of the bridge, the low red sun had sunk even further, until it was now starting to touch the dark line of the horizon. The sky was deepening to a cold winter green.
“We’ve got a choice,” she said. “We can stay here, or try and press on. I think it’s easier to defend a bridge than a mountain path.”
“Perra, do you think we should look at the mist, while there’s still light?”
The ka agreed. Mercy went down to the edge of the bridge, and saw that steps led from it to a narrow platform that ran behind the mistfall. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. With the sword drawn, she followed the steps, Benjaya and Perra close behind.
At close hand, the mist fell across the skin in a moist coolness. Fearing unknown northern magic, Mercy did not care to get too close, but she had to step through the mist to get to the platform. As she did so, there was a long cry from the direction of the forest: something lost and angry. They looked at each other, not needing to ask what was that? It could be nothing good.
Mercy slid behind the fall of mist, feeling it speckle her face. She had expected this place to be dark, uneasy, dangerous, but instead it spoke to her. It was comforting. It enticed her inside, a return to somewhere cosy and loved. This alarmed her.
“Can you feel that?” she asked Benjaya.
“Yeah. Reminds me of my mum’s kitchen.”
“That’s not a good thing. I mean, no reflections on your mum or her kitchen, but you know what I mean.”
Benjaya nodded dumbly. The ka said, “Take great care. It is a glamour.”
Mercy held the Irish sword up in front of her face. “What can you cut?”
The sword sang, rejoicing, and there was a spark of light as it cut through the wall of mist and the shadows. As though a curtain had fallen from in front of her sight, Mercy saw.
She was standing on a lip of rock, looking into the mountain, and the mountain was hollow. There was a world within it: the world of ice she had glimpsed through the pages of the book, through which the disir had come. She saw, again, the forest, and the snaking river, and across the line of trees she saw the rise of mountains and, again, the high arch of a bridge. She had the feeling that if she had been able to see more clearly, through a telescope, there would be two uncertain people and a ka standing on a ledge behind a wall of mist…
“The world�
��s an onion,” she murmured.
“But we knew that,” Benjaya said, reasonably enough. “It’s in a lot of books.”
He was right. Stories don’t always reflect the world; they make it, too. A book is a world inside the world, and sometimes there are worlds within that. A galaxy in a speck of sand; suns in a water drop.
“Well,” Mercy asked. “Are we going in?”
Benjaya nodded. The ka blinked. Mercy took a step forward, into sudden searing cold. She had thought the world of the bridge was chilly, but the sunlight had meant that she had been too warm in the heavy greatcoat. This place was really arctic. She took a shuddering breath and heard Benjaya gasp and snuffle behind her. She looked back and saw the world of the bridge in miniature, the fall of mist cascading softly downwards, and then it was winked out. Night lay ahead. Mercy started walking.
The path wound down a rocky incline. When she looked back again, she saw a sparsely forested mountain summit, heavy with snow, looming behind them. The sky was thick with stars and a great creamy swirl, the galactic arm, lay overhead. She recognised a few of the constellations: they were ancient, and were those of Earth, not of the Liminality. No one had ever been able to explain to her why the stars were different, since the Liminality was so strongly linked to Earth itself, yet this was so. A mystery, another to which, presumably, the Skein held the key. But it was further evidence that this was the nevergone, some distant storytime. Mercy’s mouth tightened and she strode on, dodging loose pebbles. Was this even a path at all? An animal track, maybe. She kept the sword drawn and a moment later, was glad that she had done so when Benjaya cried out.
But it wasn’t an animal. Benjaya pointed. “Look!”
The airship came fast over the brow of the mountain. Its sides were rounded and black; it made a rushing sound as it came. A pennant flapped from a spike at its prow and Mercy could see lamplight gleaming inside its carapace, through a round brass porthole. Just as she noted this, a bolt shot out of the darkness and buried itself in a puff of dust, a few feet from where she stood. Mercy and Benjaya threw themselves behind a rock.
The airship shot on, flying across the long river valley. They watched, unspeaking, until it disappeared into the distance. Mercy was afraid it would turn, but it did not. It vanished over the rim of the world, into night.
“Not very friendly,” Benjaya said.
“I wonder who they are? I’ve never seen anything like it before. Well, apart from the Barquess. That reminded me of the Barquess, somehow.”
“There are stories of flying galleons,” Benjaya said, standing up cautiously. “One of them sent an anchor down into a churchyard. In England. I read it in a book.”
“That wasn’t a galleon, but it’s the same principle, I suppose. This world is too old for those, though. They must be travelling through.”
“Question is, are there more of them?”
“I’m hoping that’s a no,” Mercy said.
They trudged on, descending the long slope by degrees and eventually finding themselves standing on the flat valley floor. It was tundra, spongy underfoot, and starred with lichen. Here, the snow lay in patches, exposing the permafrost. Mercy pulled her coat closer. The ka padded across the lichen, delicate as a cat. As they drew nearer to the river, Mercy could hear the creak and crack of the ice. The river was flowing swiftly, bearing its cargo of ice with it, and an icy breeze came off it that chilled her still further. There was a weird smell, too: something musty and organic. A moment later, she realised she’d smelled it before. It was the odour of the disir.
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 purel
y 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.