Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘But Will said –’

  ‘There is one circumstance in which a full sparagmos is thought to be reversible, and one only. If the Bride herself were to gather up the scattered fragments of a life and breathe into it new motion, it is said that she might make something of nothing, and graft being on to absence. So Isis once gathered the parts of Osiris after the god Set had dismembered him and scattered the pieces across the earth. It is said that she remade him. But we simply don’t know. It’s a story, a belief, a myth, an assumption. But then, who is there who knows the Bride, her ways, her powers? Has anyone sat with her under the spreading plane and learned her mysteries? Has anyone questioned her, as you question me now? Has anyone among us, perished in the endless night of madness, felt the healing power of the Bridestone, or seen the milk-light of its twelve-pointed star? No. You have heard the song, you have sung it – “the star will show in the morn”. But the song is all we have. If we know that she can do this, we know it only because we have not had occasion to disprove it.’

  ‘But how does a dispersal take place? How does a sparagmos take place? I want to know.’

  The old wraith looked at her sharply. ‘It is not a thing that a child should see, even in her imagination.’

  ‘A lot of the things that have happened lately are things I ought not to have seen. I need to know this. Please tell me.’

  Kay looked around from face to face. They all seemed about to say something.

  ‘And don’t tell stories.’

  ‘When a wraith knows everything there is to know about a person’s life, about her mind or his ambitions, about her fears or his weaknesses, about the things she loves and the things he knows – then the wraith knows how to undo them, how to negate them, how to undermine them. In a dispersal, the wraith seizes on one, or many, or all these elements as if they were filaments in the thread of the life, and pulls. They unravel. The mind comes apart.’

  ‘Then my father isn’t – You don’t mean he’s dead?’

  ‘He’s worse than dead, Kay. He has been tortured beyond his ability to withstand it. He’s mad.’

  ‘And he can’t get better. You’re saying that he can’t get better.’ Kay’s tone was practical, searching. She would press them. Push them.

  Make them reach.

  ‘I don’t tend to say that things are impossible. But if Foliot and Firedrake performed a full sparagmos, they will have twisted the knife in every corner of his mind, and there will be no part of his being that is not rent and scattered.’

  ‘And in an integration, normally –’

  ‘Well, as you saw in Alexandria. A wraith – and it has to be a skilled one like Will – can meditate, and course back through the motives and causes of a life, as if with plotting stones or the threads in a knot, and find the story that will re-bind or re-graft the thoughts and feelings, the assumptions and first principles that have been broken. Will thought he knew then what they had done to your father, and he was looking for that one clue that would show him which story to tell. Because if we had found your father, then Will might have told him the story that would bring him out of his madness, the way an antidote dispels a poison or soap clears away grime. The way glue sticks. The way a chestnut trees. But Ghast outplotted us, as if they were green novices. Perhaps he had good advice.’ Here Phantastes lifted his eyebrow and nodded over to Razzio. ‘But let that bygone be a bygone.

  ‘They didn’t know they had been followed, of course. But, more importantly, we just don’t know how to approach a sparagmos. We were clutching at straws. We are clutching at them now. It’s such a serious thing, Kay – almost a sacred thing. It is the destruction not of a life, but of a world. The broken sparagmotic does not keep the madness within, but spreads it, pouring it out into any and all receptive minds. He reels through the world not only broken but breaking. It is almost uncontrollable, a desperate and a dire thing; something that Ghast would never have dared to do in the old days, in Bithynia. That he has done it now means he believes himself untouchable. And it suggests that he really does want to destroy the world around us – at least, he wants to change it permanently.’

  ‘But the Bride –’

  ‘The Bride, child – what we mean when we talk about summoning the Bride – it’s about a feeling, about sharing a feeling, about every wraith in the hall having the same sense of a luminous and overbinding presence, the sense of an enablement. It’s about everyone believing, all at once. They believe that they are wedded to the world! But you can’t make people believe. They have to come to it themselves. These things you want, Kay – they are colossal improbabilities. We don’t know how to do what we want to do.’

  ‘But say we could, just say we could. If we knew where Foliot and Firedrake left him, surely we could find my father through plotting? And then Will could talk to him and tell him stories like that old poet in the myths, and –’

  Phantastes shook his head slowly, pressing his long fingers against his knees. His face passed in and out of the light, like a huge pendulum beating out an eternal refusal. ‘No, child. Plotting works by reason, and the necessary movement from cause to effect. It follows patterns. Even I know that. But the sparagmotic is no more reasonable than chaos itself. He is borne on a current of madness, as if he were headless, and he chants a melody that is beyond form. Plotting cannot reach after him.’

  ‘Then we do the reverse of plotting. We’ll take every step the wrong way. Can’t you imagine a way out of this?’

  ‘Of course I can imagine. But I wouldn’t know what I was imagining. The madness of sparagmos is not the reverse of the pattern; it is everything but the pattern – an infinite range of non-being, in every direction, for everything that is. It’s not just a shadow but a comprehensive darkness. You can no more predict it than you can explain the cause of all causes. Sparagmos is final.’

  ‘Kay doesn’t think asparagus moss is final. And that’s final.’ No one had noticed that Ell had woken, that she had been watching the conversation with the fascination of a kitten, new eyed.

  In the double face of the window, Kay almost thought she was laughing, and because she thought she was, she just about did. The train answered her with a long, stomach-churning curve. She sat up.

  That thing Phantastes said – the night isn’t all bad. You can look on the night and see expectation, promise, as great a significance as you could ever hope for. At night, looking can be longing. The star will show in the morn – and stars are there.

  It took her only a few minutes to convince them. She told them what had happened on the dais, in the place of pure being, when she had seen and felt the power of the cause of all causes. How she had for a moment been not in one but two places, seen not one but two worlds, how she had been at once both far and near, both subject and object of her own regarding. She told them how she had been and not been at the same time, how she had suffered sparagmos.

  I will perform a sparagmos on myself. I will go again into the place of pure being, to the place where everything dissolves and is one, and then I will return. I will know what my father knows. I will know where he is. I will find him there, and I will bring him to himself. And then I will bring him home.

  Before long, they were all asleep. The train sped on.

  The landing was built of stone quarried in the mountain. The barge came to rest snugly against it, and was still. After the rough passage through the storm, its stillness was to be savoured. Ghast sat, then, at rest in his throne. Soon he would have the title that the throne implied. Then he would destroy this landing, with the quaintly intricate carvings that ran unchecked around its storied walls. From every face of the eastern gate the form of the First Wraith danced. This was unquestionably his place, his temple, the seat of his lost power. If it had been possible to move Ghast to any emotion, he might have felt rage. Instead he felt the foretaste of his final victory. It tasted of steel.

  The exhausted wraiths drew their long poles out of the water and, while they still dripped with the river, r
an them one to each side through the slots cut into the throne. Two to each end of each pole, they lifted him and bore him on to the landing; river water dripped from the throne as they passed. The light was falling now, and in the shadows antic shapes gathered and recoiled in the carved walls of the eastern gate. Ghast forced himself to watch them as they passed. His servants were now bearing him along the ancient ramp of the Ring, circling the walls as they ascended towards the height. Twice, then three times they passed through the dark interior of the east tower as they turned, and he felt the chill of the dark stone settle on his skin. Shapes, chill, darkness were nothing to him. Let his arms bristle. He was coming as a conqueror, and would soon have his crown; all this – shapes, chill, darkness – would be his kingdom, to wield as he willed.

  From the height of the walls, in the last of the evening’s red light, he finally looked down on the Shuttle Hall, the library, the Bindery, the Imaginary and the vast dormitories. Beyond lay the overgrown mulberry orchards, long left untended and draped thick with ungathered silk. He felt no affection for these crumbling shells of an antiquated order. Soon he would have them all destroyed. He would erect in their place the more functional offices his clerks had designed. He would require many fewer wraiths than in the past. And their duties would be somewhat lighter. They would operate the machines that made the stories.

  He had sent his letters. He thought of them coursing through the air, landing in the hands of their recipients, drawing them back to Bithynia. He thought of the movement of the Weave, and of the shuttle writhing through the warp and weft of the fabric, back and forth, almost faster than the eye could pick it out. His was the hand, his the movement in the fabric. He looked at his hands, reddish in the light of the setting sun, and for a moment they looked like worms turning in the soil. It disgusted him. But he would be king of this, too.

  Leaves

  Kay looked out of the window. She thought they must be about to arrive: a sort of grey cast hung over the buildings they passed, and though there was greenery and some open space, its order and symmetry made it obvious that it was the greenery and open space of a city. Kay jostled Ell awake, and the two girls rubbed their eyes and stretched their feet, pushing out the kinks and aches.

  ‘Ell,’ Kay said. ‘I think we’re in Paris. We’re going to have to get out and walk again for a while.’

  ‘Okay, oh Kay,’ said Ell. Imp. It was an old joke. ‘Kay,’ she said, and she held her older sister’s arm where it lay across her own chest. ‘Thank you for saving me. I knew you were going to. And I know you’re going to get us all home.’

  Kay squeezed hard, and the tension wasn’t all affection. If I can.

  The two girls got to their feet and clung somewhere to the cloth between Flip and Phantastes; Razzio and Will had gone on ahead, and were already waiting by the carriage door. The train was slowing, and outside Kay could make out the same frosty pavements and chill, dry air they had left behind in England the week before. The shock of the familiar northern winter caught her unprepared, and she thought instantly and unguardedly of their mother, surely now outside her wits with worry over her husband and daughters. As the train pulled up to the platform, slowing all the time, Kay noticed on the next track a press of people waiting to board another train – little clumps gathered in the frosty morning, expecting the doors to open and give their cheeks some respite. Here and there a family stood close together, clutching satchels and sometimes one another. Kay felt tears standing in her eyes, and looked away at a panel of blinking lights on the rear wall of the carriage. I know what I have to do, she told herself. I only have to find him. I only have to find him.

  The air outside the train rushed in at them as the doors opened. It was every bit as cold as it had looked; even bundled within the hairy anoraks Oidos had rustled up from a well-remembered room, they were only tired, slight children, and they shivered almost uncontrollably. The station around them, barrel-vaulted by huge steel and glass arcs, crawled with trains and their passengers, and the wraiths took trouble to bring the girls safely and quickly through the crowds, up a grand stone staircase and out through an arcade of shops into the street. Flip led with his loping gait, trailing Phantastes and Razzio some way behind, and Will brought up the rear with the girls. Kay noticed that Flip seemed enormously confident in these streets, as if he had walked them many times before, and so knew exactly where to cut a corner, where to look for an oncoming car, where to slow down or stop in order to keep his followers with him. Many of the buildings they passed, she observed, stood forbidding and proud – empty and tenantless at this time of year, and dark; but for all that, they had a kind of human sternness, which made Kay shiver a little harder.

  After about twenty minutes of breathless walking the girls crossed a wide but drab square and suddenly found themselves next to a river. ‘The Seine,’ Will said as he scooped Ell up for a better look over the embankment. ‘It’s named for Sequana, a nymph or goddess. Thousands of years ago the ancient Gauls used to pray to her for healing.’ He pointed to the centre of the river, where the current of the river parted, smooth and heavy, on the foreshore of a spit of island. ‘Her temple used to stand over there.’

  Kay looked at the rocks and low, leafless trees on the narrow island.

  ‘As nymphs go, she was really nice,’ Will said.

  When Kay stared hard at him, Will couldn’t help but smile. ‘Okay, we never met. But watch yourself here – this is where it will get interesting, especially if we’re not alone.’

  Kay kept moving across the bridge, just to keep warm, and Will and Ell followed. The others were still slightly strung out ahead of them, with Flip well in the lead, already turning a corner and disappearing behind the grand facade of a monumental public building, all of white stone. In sixty steps Kay had reached it, and found herself turning into what looked like an abandoned car park. Towering nearby she could see the buttressed tower of a huge church. ‘Is that where we’re going?’ she asked, pointing up to it as Will rounded the corner. ‘Not today,’ he said. ‘That’s the cathedral. We’re just going to the chapel.’

  The others were nowhere to be seen. Will took the hands of the two girls and led them on past a parked car and through a low, narrowly arched wooden door in a wall that, for its unremarkably flat grey aspect, Kay had hardly even noticed. Beyond a short course of steps and through another low stone doorway the girls spilled into a dim, damp room with a low ceiling. ‘Not here,’ said Will simply, and held open another tiny door – so small that Kay hardly thought he would be able to fold himself through it. Ell first, the girls ascended by narrow spiral stairs, all of stone heavily worn at the centre of each sagging step. Kay counted the treads: seventeen to the top.

  The tall chapel on to which the stairs gave seemed at first to be built all of coloured light: not only did rich blues and reds cascade over the walls, but the very air seemed impregnated with colour, and glowed in the beams of suddenly warm sunshine all around. The ceiling was very high and the chapel long and narrow. Great stained-glass windows, through which the light poured, ran along every side. The two girls turned and turned in the space, soaking up the warmth and the sumptuously velveted air, their arms limp and gestureless at their sides but their eyes – no longer wind-burned and teary – glazed rather with wonder and admiration. Delicately wrought stone pillars ran up almost like latticework all around the walls and into the vaults of the lofty ceiling; here and there an ornament in the stone or a blemish interrupted the flow, but the overall effect was of agility, elegance and power emanating like impossible exhalations from the strife of light and stone.

  ‘The Sainte-Chapelle,’ said Flip, rounding on the girls from the far end of the chapel, where he had been poking his head down another stairwell. ‘Normally it’s packed with tourists, but now it is empty for the Christmas holidays. It’s an old royal chapel, built by the Capetian kings –’

  ‘And it’s a very handy, quiet place at midwinter for a sparagmos,’ finished Will.

  Ka
y stopped turning. ‘Why here?’ she asked.

  ‘You don’t want to be disturbed during a dispersal,’ Will answered. Razzio and Flip spoke in whispers at the far end of the room. Phantastes was rummaging in his sack. ‘To work your way back to the first causes of a person’s being means un-telling a lot of stories, and the process can take many hours, even for the most skilled unravellers. So privacy is important. But if you can get it, a large space like this always amplifies the impact of any imagining.’

  ‘No,’ Kay persisted. ‘I mean, why here? Why in Paris? Why did they bring him here? If I’m going to do this – I have to know.’

  Will grimaced. ‘I haven’t thought about much else since yesterday, Kay. Maybe it’s random.’

  ‘No. It’s not.’

  Will looked at her as if he were a child caught stealing sweets. ‘I know. I think Ghast may be trying to force us away from the mountain, away from Bithynia. I think he’s trying to make it impossible for us to summon a Weave.’

  Kay looked at Will blankly. ‘Or else he’s daring us,’ she said.

  She let her shoulders slump. What am I doing?

  ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  ‘Ready,’ she replied. I am not ready.

  ‘You’re not ready, are you?’ Will put his hands on her shoulders and smiled at her with such vast compassion that Kay was overwhelmed with a desire to hug him. ‘You don’t need to do this,’ he said, mussing up her hair. ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea.’

  Kay pushed him away and stood apart. ‘I’m sure, Will. I know how to lose myself. Being ready has exactly nothing to do with it.’