Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘I will have fruit,’ he said. ‘Bring it to me, and another light, and a change of clothes.’

  The wraith left the room and Ghast waited as his quick steps sounded away down the long hallway outside, merging into the sound of the storm. He took his hand from the lamp, and smelled as he did so the faint stench of burnt skin. He held on to the pain in his hand as if it were a rope pulling him from the deep, from the surging memories of his voice; his voice that had cried out, calling for heads, calling for slaughter, calling for the huddled ruck of settling wings and stabbing beaks of vultures.

  Whatever they had seen and heard, it was no matter. Had they been in any doubt before, they would fear him now.

  After he had eaten a little plate of fruit and changed into fresh clothes, he draped himself in blankets and sat at a wooden desk in the corner. Two lamps created a pool of steady glowing, and he worked between them. The light and the work staved off the heaves of wind rushing through the valley outside. He had letters to write, business to be transacted in his own hand. Copy after patient copy he drafted and signed, occasionally tearing up imperfect sheets where his grip on the pen had faltered and threatened to soil his authority. Three hours of patient writing. Still the night beat at the shutters; still the light of the lamps steadied him.

  ‘You.’

  The unheralded arrival of another tall form, after so much solitude, in such a mix of mind and wind, had surprised him. This one was not meek. A grey dawn hung around his heels, where dripping water, too, gathered on the stone floor.

  ‘Oidos has given them the child. The author. The dreamer.’

  ‘I know who she is,’ he spat.

  ‘She has given them the horn.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And we have crushed the plotter forever.’

  ‘As I instructed you. I expected nothing else.’

  ‘I had expected to meet you downriver, in the marshes –’

  ‘And yet you find me here.’

  There was a silence. Ghast knew that something had remained unspoken. He clawed at it with his thought, but his face remained a stone. He would not be drawn to ask what his servant must freely deliver.

  ‘The imaginer is with them.’

  So. Not dead. His resolve buckled for a moment, then held. His face never flickered.

  ‘That is nothing now. I have letters summoning the Weave.’

  ‘I will deliver them –’

  ‘In Paris.’ Within the hour the barge would be moving downriver again. Many of his company had gone ahead to ready the hall at Bithynia for his landing. ‘We will go now at a doubled pace,’ he said. ‘There is very little time.’

  As he held the packet out to Firedrake, Ghast allowed his gaze to rest on the bedstead behind him. And yet he thought he caught in the corner of his eye a fleeting turn of the wraith’s mouth, a flicker of disgust. The light was steady; his eye had not deceived him. The girl, then, the dreamer, had power.

  It was no matter. He had laced the hive, and the bees would swarm to it.

  Part Three

  * * *

  WEB

  Sparagmos

  As the train carriage around her hummed and jostled, Kay fumbled between sleep and wake. She dreamed, and in her dreams images and arguments slid and flowed into one another, all in a turbulent current. She was ahead of herself, looking back with a profound sense of disorientation upon the traumatic events of the early morning. That very day.

  Why would he do that? The black smoke rising at dawn.

  Her head lolled across field after field, and she murmured intermittent protests. Picking up speed, she felt the train racing north and west, leaving behind Rome and the House of the Two Modes, leaving behind those lawns charred with sacrifice, climbing out of the broad river valleys and back into the mountains and their clear air. Every time the train jolted, Kay woke, felt her speed and remembered where she was. I am on track for once.

  Escaping from the catacombs had been easier than they expected – easier than they deserved. While descending the staircase from Ontos’ dais, Kay had felt strongly that they were captains going gravely below decks on a sinking vessel; but once in the tunnels their pace and their purpose had quickened. Through those halls of death and burial they had blown like the charge of a blast, hurtling through the rock with their torches thrown out ahead, the light striding with them through the darkness. Kay struggled to keep up with the long and loping pace of the wraiths, bent but unbowed as they drove due south to the nearly concealed exit of the tunnels. Here, framed by an ancient stone archway, the dark rock passage gave out on to a little hill; not twenty metres away a tall wood began, now almost stripped of its leaves, but still – in among the evergreen thickets with which it was fringed – offering the promise of cover.

  Just inside the archway Flip and Ell had stood waiting. As they approached, he had motioned for them to be quiet and move softly.

  ‘Two wispers.’ Kay recalled how he had moved his mouth without making a sound. He had pointed out through the open arch – first left, then almost straight ahead. Peering round the wall, Kay had seen something move in the periphery of her vision, but straight ahead could only see a still form lying in the grass – perhaps just a sack or a coat, for nothing was ever as it seemed in the silvery paling of a very early morning.

  Those minutes of waiting had been tense. Flip had made it clear that most of the wispers had moved off, drawn by the flight of the balloons to the north, leaving only these two behind. It was obvious that he, Will, Phantastes and Razzio could overpower them, even if they were armed, but everything depended on what happened in the intervening twenty metres: would they call for help? If they did, could they run fast enough – could Ell and Kay run fast enough – to slip into the woods without being pursued? Ell had shivered uncontrollably, her muscles after days of sleep sluggish. From his pack Flip had shared out food while the others watched, waited and worried.

  And then something inexplicable had happened. An owl had called in the woods – once, then twice, then again. The wisper concealed in the bracken to the left had risen silently and melted into the ravine that ran eastwards around the House of the Two Modes. The other figure lay prone, motionless.

  ‘Now.’ Flip had pushed them out. There had been no time to hoist their packs or get their bearings. With their heads low they had raced single-file directly towards the silent form on the grass.

  ‘Not dead,’ Will had called back in a volleyed whisper as the girls drew level with Phantastes. ‘But whoever struck the blow knew exactly what he was doing.’

  The dent in the wraith’s temple had looked about three inches long. The bruise forming around it was straight.

  ‘Someone wants us to escape.’ Phantastes had crouched by the body to touch his finger to the wound and to gather the wraith’s loose robe more tightly around his body. ‘I dare say help will come for this one before long.’

  Without another word they had all passed into the wood, threading the thorn trees and the dense-growing bushes at its edge, then disappearing into the mists that still lay heavy upon it.

  It had taken the whole day to make their way through the trees, across hills and past houses, on buses and down endless streets along the flat brown river into the city. Kay had thought for sure that they would attract attention, but the wraiths in their robes and cloaks seemed to blend perfectly into the surroundings, especially when the little group, moving fast but wearily, Eloise slung across Will’s broad back, reached the ancient heart of Rome. Church after church they had passed, and in among them shrines and ancient monuments, decayed, sometimes in ruins, every site swarming with eager faces not sceptical but delighted to see Phantastes’ wizened sagacity, Razzio’s harrowed despair, Flip’s urgent intensity and Will’s –

  Whatever you are, everyone who sees you loves you.

  Kay shifted in her seat. Boarding the train at dusk, the six of them had found a quiet compartment to themselves, and the seats seemed to Kay practically luxurious. After hours
of waiting in the station – bleak, lined with shops, thrumming with the passing of footsteps, the sweat and sonorities of countless strangers, the slow and creeping cold that comes of sitting still, waiting – the peace of this enclosed space settled around her exhausted body like a warm bath. To her right, Ell nestled neatly into Will’s side, exhausted after a day spent rushing through Rome; opposite her, Phantastes and Razzio and Flip were dozing.

  As she turned her face towards the carriage window, looking through her own dim reflection in the glass, Kay started suddenly from her reverie and gasped for air; she had either pulled her coat up over her mouth or sunk down into its folds while she slept. Forms that must have been trees were racing by the train in the pitch of the dark, and for a long waking present Kay observed them, entranced. Also there were larger fields of black void that instantly gave way to the clear, star-shouldering night, and she decided that the train must be among the mountains – the Alps. She peered to discover as much as she could, but there was no moon and she could make out very little. When they did pass roads, they were all uniformly deserted.

  And then it happened. The train, in racing by night through so many remote regions, so many ranges and passes of such grandeur and scale, moved at once quickly and – against the huge vistas – very slowly. Anything close to the tracks – buildings, trees, streets and signs, parked cars, platforms, fences, tunnels – came and went in a black blur, punctuated by occasional flashes of bleak light; but the skies full of stars, the mountain slopes and peaks seemed to hang richly inaccessible and constant, shrouded in darkness like – she fumbled – like riddles, mysteries, things that were difficult but true. Kay found herself with her cheek pressed to the glass, staring as intently as she could at everything that passed, with a single eye pushed well in beyond any possibility of being distracted by her own dim reflection – when the train, hurtling out of a tunnel, suddenly broke into a broad-sloped valley, huge in its wheel and almost desolate, therefore pristine. The starlight, faint elsewhere, collected on the high snow that crowned the valley’s bowl and its sheer rocks, and from that height poured down illumination on the scene below; like milk in a dish it splashed down on a lone house, a single dark structure steaded firmly in its centre, the focus of all the sleeping splendour that lay about it, like the snug centre of a giant winter rose. And there, for a handful of seconds as they passed through the valley, in lanternly pools where it spilled across the ground, warm, thick, dense, as crammed as amber, Kay saw light, yellow light: the lights of rooms filled with laughter and song, with close-murmuring embraces and long savours, rooms of love, kindness, patience, integrity and respect. It was as if she had glimpsed, for only five or six beats of her own heart, the eternal heart of everything beautiful upon the earth.

  Hot tears welled in her eyes, and she sprang back from the glass as if she had been bitten.

  ‘What did you see in the dark?’

  It was Will’s voice. Careful of Ell’s comfort, he hardly dared turn his head; but his eyes were kind, as distant as Kay had ever seen them.

  ‘A home,’ she whispered. ‘Someone’s home.’

  And then it passed. Then we went on.

  ‘Do you miss home?’

  ‘No,’ Kay said. ‘Yes. I think I miss a home we don’t have. A home we never had.’

  Will was silent. He looked down at Ell’s sleeping face where it lay against his heavy cloak. In the darkness Kay fancied she could just see the warm flush on Ell’s cheeks.

  ‘I wish that we could be together. Everything about that house I just saw was together. It was filled with light.’

  ‘Kay, I’m sorry we took your father away.’

  ‘No.’ She spoke with decision. ‘Don’t be sorry. He was gone long before you took him. For as long as I can remember we’ve all – all of us – been apart.’

  Will let a long, slow breath whistle softly between his lips. ‘Sometimes people who truly love one another can’t bear to come together.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Where would you go from there?’

  ‘Where would you need to go?’ asked Kay.

  ‘Ask a left-wraith,’ said Will. It almost seemed that he might laugh.

  Kay turned back to the window. Even in the darkness, she couldn’t look at Will and say what she wanted to say.

  ‘Will, that morning before he left, before you took him, before everything went wrong – my father told me that I would know where to find him.’

  ‘And do you?’ Will asked.

  ‘No,’ said Kay. ‘He didn’t say that I did know. He said I would, in the future. That I would come to know. I didn’t notice at the time – but it was in that little red book –’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did he say that? How did he know that I would need to find him?’

  ‘Don’t you always?’

  Kay felt that Will wasn’t so much asking questions as leading her forward. She didn’t know where they were going.

  ‘Always what?’ She traced patterns on the train window with her hand – patterns that weren’t there. Patterns that she wished were there.

  ‘Find him. Aren’t you always the one who brings him back?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kay. Now she turned back and looked Will full in the eye. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘I’m always the one in the middle,’ she answered.

  ‘Like me,’ said Will quietly.

  ‘I don’t want to be in the middle any more.’

  ‘Do you know what I always say, Kay? The thing I always tell myself when I have to take that long walk down the centre of the Shuttle Hall by myself and leave my friends among the right-wraiths and my friends among the left-wraiths, when I have to pass by the twelve thrones and go to the stiff loom and the hard chair that sits before it, and touch my bruised and blistered fingers to the shuttle, and start to work the warp apart? When the shouts begin and the debate masses like a wave over my head? When the arguments start to flow, laced with taunts and gibes – sometimes merry, sometimes mortal? I bend over my work, alone, knowing that, for the duration of the festival, until the wraiths disperse again into the world as a single fellowship, until the conclave is adjourned and the wispers take up their packs to disappear on the night air, until that moment I am the only thing that binds them. I am their medium. I am their middle.’

  ‘And so long as there is a middle, there is a story,’ said Kay.

  ‘So long as there is a middle, there is a story,’ agreed Will.

  ‘Will, I’m tired.’

  ‘Do you want to sleep?’

  ‘No, I’m not tired like that. I’m awake. I mean, I’m tired of all this. I want to go home and get into bed.’

  ‘I’m tired, too, Kay.’ Will was silent for a little while in the darkness. Beneath them the train rushed reassuringly on.

  But to what end?

  ‘This train is travelling very fast,’ said Phantastes. He switched on the overhead light, and leaned forward into the little brilliance that it created. His face looked haggard in the night. ‘And it makes me wonder what will happen if we find your father, if we make it to Bithynia. It makes me wonder whether we are ready. Ghast has overawed the right-wraiths. Perhaps we will not find even a handful to stand against him.’

  The light had woken Razzio, across from Kay.

  He added what they all knew: ‘I would gladly denounce him now, even before the Weave; but maybe it is too late. The left-wraiths, too, have long been in his power, and now he rules them not with love, but with fear.’

  Kay had been staring at the window. In the light cast by the little bulb above Phantastes’ head the thick pane seemed to double her face, and she stared at the two overlapping versions of herself.

  ‘I can do it.’ She announced it briskly and cheerfully, as if they had asked her the question. Perhaps she had asked it of herself. ‘I can find my father. I can bring him back to himself. We can do the integration. I can do it.’

  Will protested. The
y all did. Kay didn’t listen. She thought of herself smiling at their disbelief; in the window’s altered face she could almost see it.

  ‘Kay.’ It was Flip. He had been watching silently. Now he spoke out of the shadows, almost as if he couldn’t bear to join the little lighted circle. ‘I read the order sheet, the day Ghast enrolled it in the Dispersals Room. The thing is, it wasn’t just a dispersal. It was a full sparagmos – irreversible. There’s no going back.’

  ‘I don’t understand that word,’ Kay said. ‘Tell me. In Alexandria it was all possible. Tell me what has changed.’

  For what seemed like a very long time Phantastes stared at her in the gloom, his eyes anything but soft and merry, as they had been in the subterranean vaults of the Temple of Osiris in Alexandria. He looked abruptly ancient, as if the events of the day before had taken him to the edge of an awful cliff – and he had fallen off. As he began to answer her, Kay noticed that Razzio, beside him, was shuffling stones in a closed fist.

  ‘There are different degrees of dispersal, Kay – even a kind of spectrum. In the insignificant cases it is enough for the removal and dispersal merely to shake a person from her or his path. Here we take up the thread of a life and fray it, shake it, twist it, perhaps splice it. We meddle with the course, but do not stop the flow. In other cases the process is more far-reaching, more substantial. Here we take up the story and we break it, or bind it to a new story, or even cut it off. But even this extreme form – where we snap away and tear off the future of a narrative, and finish it completely – is not the absolute end of that person’s thread; because, if you know that thread and you know how to weave a story, you can return to it and start it anew. You can eke it out, graft it together, make it whole again. You have something to work with. But in the case of sparagmos, there the thread is not simply cut and the course impeded. There the bed is dug up. There the thread is burned. Nothing is left. There is no stump from which to coax an afterlife or second beginning. Sparagmos is final. Even Asclepius, in the heady days of the great rebirths, could not remake a full unmaking. There were times when even he sat down and despaired.’