Weaveworld

  ‘Nonesuch, they called it,’ said Apolline. ‘Damn fool name.’

  ‘At first there was an attempt to put all this property into some kind of order,’ said Freddy. ‘But that soon fell by the wayside, as refugees kept arriving with more to be woven into the carpel. More every day. There’d be people waiting outside Capra’s House for nights on end, with some little niche they wanted kept from the Scourge.’

  ‘That’s why it took so long,’ said Lilia.

  ‘But nobody was turned away,’ said Jerichau. ‘That was understood from the beginning. Anyone who wanted a place in the Weave would be granted it.’

  ‘Even us,’ said Apolline, ‘who weren’t exactly lily-whites. We were granted our places.’

  ‘But why a carpet?’ said Suzanna.

  ‘What’s more easily overlooked than the thing you’re standing on?’ said Lilia. ‘Besides, the craft was one we knew.’

  ‘Everything has its pattern,’ Freddy put in. ‘If you find it, the great can be contained within the small.’

  ‘Not everyone wanted to go into the Weave, of course,’ said Lilia. ‘Some decided to stay amongst the Cuckoos, and take their chance. But most went.’

  ‘And what was it like?’

  ‘Like sleep. Like dreamless sleep. We didn’t age. We didn’t hunger. We just waited until the Custodians judged that it was safe to wake us again.’

  ‘What about the birds?’ said Cal.

  ‘Oh, there’s no end of flora and fauna, woven in –’

  ‘I don’t mean in the Fugue itself. I mean my pigeons.’

  ‘What have your pigeons got to do with this?’ said Apolline.

  Cal gave them a brief summary of how he’d first come to discover the carpet.

  ‘That’s the Gyre’s influence,’ said Jerichau.

  ‘The Gyre?’

  ‘When you had your glimpse of the Fugue,’ said Apolline. ‘You remember the clouds in its heart? That’s the Gyre. It’s where the Loom’s housed.’

  ‘How can a carpet contain the Loom it was woven on?’ said Suzanna.

  ‘The Loom isn’t a machine,’ said Jerichau. ‘It’s a state of making. It drew the elements of the Fugue into a rapture which resembles a common-place carpet. But there’s a good deal there that denies your human assumptions, and the closer you get to the Gyre, the stranger things become. There are places there in which ghosts of the future and past are at play –’

  ‘We shouldn’t talk about it,’ said Lilia, ‘it’s bad luck.’

  ‘How much worse can our luck become?’ Freddy observed. ‘So few of us …’

  ‘We’ll wake the Families, as soon as we recover the carpet,’ said Jerichau. ‘The Gyre must be getting restless, or else how did this man get a look? The Weave can’t hold forever –’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Apolline. ‘I suppose we’re obliged to do something about it.’

  ‘But it isn’t safe.’ said Suzanna.

  ‘Safe for what?’

  ‘Out here. I mean, in the world. In England.’

  ‘The Scourge must have given up –’ said Freddy, ‘– after all these years.’

  ‘So why didn’t Mimi wake you?’

  Freddy pulled a face. ‘Maybe she forgot about us.’

  ‘Forgot?’ said Cal, impossible.’

  ‘Easy to say,’ Apolline replied. ‘But you have to be strong to resist the Kingdom. Get in too deep and next thing you can’t even remember your name.’

  ‘I don’t believe she forgot,’ said Cal.

  ‘Our first priority,’ said Jerichau, ignoring Cal’s protest, ‘is to retrieve the carpet. Then we get out of this city, and find a place where Immacolata will never come looking.’

  ‘What about us?’ said Cal.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Don’t we get to see?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘The Fugue, damn you!’ Cal said, infuriated by the lack of anything approaching courtesy or gratitude from these people.

  ‘It’s not your concern now,’ said Freddy.

  ‘It damn well is!’ he said, ‘I saw it. Almost got killed for it.’

  ‘Better you stay away then,’ said Jerichau. ‘If you’re so concerned for your breath.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Cal,’ said Suzanna, putting her hand on his arm.

  Her attempt to calm him merely inflamed him further.

  ‘Don’t side with them,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not a question of sides –’ she began, but he wasn’t about to be placated.

  ‘It’s easy for you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got connections –’

  ‘That’s not fair –’

  ‘– and the menstruum –’

  ‘What?’ said Apolline, her voice silencing Cal. ‘You?’

  ‘Apparently,’ Suzanna said.

  And it didn’t dissolve the flesh off your bones?’

  ‘Why should it do that?’

  ‘Not in front of him,’ said Lilia, looking at Cal.

  That was the limit.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to talk in front of me, that’s fine. You can all go fuck yourselves.’

  He started towards the door, ignoring Suzanna’s attempts to call him back. Behind him, Nimrod was tittering.

  ‘And you can shut the fuck up,’ he told the child, and left the room to its usurpers.

  IV

  NIGHT TERRORS

  1

  hadwell woke from a dream of Empire; a familiar fantasy, in which he owned a vast store, so vast indeed that it was impossible to see the far wall. And he was selling; doing trade to make an accountant weep for joy. Merchandise of every description heaped high on all sides – Ming vases, toy monkeys, sides of beef – and customers beating at the doors, desperate to join the throngs already clamouring to buy.

  It wasn’t, oddly enough, a dream of profit. Money had become an irrelevancy since he’d stumbled upon Immacolata, who could conjure all they needed from thin air. No, the dream was one of power, he, the owner of the goods that people were bleeding to buy, standing back from the crowd and smiling his charismatic smile.

  But suddenly he was awake, the clamour of customers was fading, and he heard the sound of breathing in the darkened room.

  He sat up, the sweat of his enthusiasm chilling on his brow.

  ‘Immacolata?’

  She was there, standing against the far wall, her palms seeking some hold in the plaster. Her eyes were wide, but she saw nothing. At least, nothing that Shadwell could share. He’d known her like this before – most recently two or three days ago, in the foyer of this very hotel.

  He got out of bed, and put on his dressing gown. Sensing his presence, she murmured his name.

  ‘I’m here,’ he replied.

  ‘Again,’ she said. ‘I felt it again.’

  ‘The Scourge?’ he said, his voice grey.

  ‘Of course. We have to sell the carpet, and be done with it.’

  ‘We will. We will,’ he said, slowly approaching her. ‘The arrangements are underway, you know that.’

  He spoke evenly, to calm her. She was dangerous at the best of times; but these moods scared him more than most.

  ‘The calls have been made,’ he said. ‘The buyers’ll come. They’ve been waiting for this. They’ll come and we’ll make our sale, and it’ll all be over with.’

  ‘I saw the place it lives,’ she went on. ‘There were walls; huge walls. And sand, inside and out. Like the end of the world.’

  Now her eyes found him, and the hold this vision had on her seemed to deteriorate.

  ‘When, Shadwell?’ she said.

  ‘When what?’

  ‘The Auction.’

  ‘The day after tomorrow. As we arranged.’

  She nodded. ‘Strange,’ she said, her tone suddenly conversational. The speed with which her moods changed always caught him unawares. ‘Strange, to have these nightmares after so long.’

  ‘It’s seeing the carpet,’ said
Shadwell. ‘It reminds you.’

  ‘It’s more than that,’ she said.

  She went to the door that led through to the rest of Shadwell’s suite, and opened it. The furniture had been pushed to the edges of the large room beyond, so that their prize, the Weaveworld, could be laid out. She stood on the threshold, staring at the carpet.

  She didn’t set her bare soles on it – some superstition kept her from that trespass – but paced along the border, scrutinizing every inch.

  Half way along the far edge, she stopped.

  ‘There,’ she said, and pointed down at the Weave.

  Shadwell went to where she stood.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A piece missing.’

  He followed her gaze. The woman was right. A small portion of the carpet had been torn away; in the struggle at the warehouse, most likely.

  ‘Nothing significant,’ he commented. ‘It won’t bother our buyers, believe me.’

  ‘I don’t care about the value.’ she said.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Use your eyes, Shadwell. Every one of those motifs is one of the Seerkind.’

  He went down on his haunches, and examined the markings in the border. They were scarcely recognizable as human; more like commas with eyes.

  ‘These are people?’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes. Riff-raff; the lowest of the low. That’s why they’re at the edge. They’re vulnerable there. But they’re also useful.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘As a first defence,’ Immacolata replied, her eyes fixed on the tear in the carpet. ‘The first to be threatened, the first –’

  ‘To wake,’ said Shadwell.

  ‘– to wake.’

  ‘You think they’re out there now?’ he said. His gaze went to the window. They’d closed the curtains, to keep anyone from spying on their treasure, but he could picture the benighted city beyond. The thought that there might be magic loose out there brought an unexpected charge.

  ‘Yes,’ the Incantatrix said. ‘I think they’re awake. And the Scourge smells them in its sleep. It knows, Shadwell.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We find them, before they attract any more attention. The Scourge may be ancient. May be slow and forgetful. But its power …’ Her voice faded away, as though words were valueless in the face of such terrors. She drew a deep breath before beginning again. ‘A day’s scarcely gone by,’ she said, ‘when I haven’t watched the menstruum for a sign of it coming. And it’ll come. Shadwell. Not tonight maybe. But it’ll come. And on that day there’ll be an end to all magic.’

  ‘Even to you?’

  ‘Even to me.’

  ‘So we have to find them,’ said Shadwell.

  ‘Not we,’ said Immacolata. ‘We needn’t dirty our hands.’ She started to walk back towards Shadwell’s bedroom. They can’t have gone far,’ she said as she went. They’re strangers here.’

  At the door she stopped, and turned to him.

  ‘On no account leave this room until we call you.’ she said. ‘I’m going to summon someone to be our assassin.’

  ‘Who?’ said Shadwell.

  ‘Nobody you ever met,’ the Incantatrix replied. ‘He was dead a hundred years before you were born. But you and he had a good deal in common.’

  ‘And where is he now?’

  ‘In the Ossuary at the Shrine of the Mortalities, where he lost his life. He wanted to prove himself my equal you see, to seduce me. So he tried to become a necromancer. He might have done it too; there was nothing he wouldn’t dare. But it went awry. He brought the Surgeons from some nether-world or other, and they weren’t amused. They pursued him from one end of London to the other.

  ‘At the last he broke into the Shrine. Begged me to call them off.’ Her voice had become a whisper now. ‘But how could I?’ she said. ‘He’d made his conjurations. All I could do was let the Surgeons perform what tricks Surgeons must. And at the end, when he was all blood, he said to me: Take my soul.’

  She stopped. Then said:

  ‘So I did.’

  She looked at Shadwell.

  ‘Stay here,’ she said, and closed the door.

  Shadwell didn’t need any encouragement to stay clear of the sisters while they were plotting. If he never again set eyes on the Magdalene and the Hag he would count himself a lucky man. But the ghosts were inseparable from their living sister; each, in some fashion incomprehensible to him, a part of the other. Their perverse union was only one of the mysteries that attended them; there were many others.

  The Shrine of Mortalities, for one. It had been a gathering place for her Cult when she’d been at the height of her power and ambition. But she’d fallen from grace. Her desire to rule the Fugue, which had then still been a ragged collection of far-flung settlements, had been frustrated. Her enemies had assembled evidence against her, listing crimes that had begun in her mother’s womb, and she and her followers had retaliated. There had been bloodshed, though Shadwell had never gathered the scale of it. The consequence however, he had gathered. Vilified and humiliated, Immacolata had been forbidden to tread the magic earth of the Fugue again.

  She had not taken this exile well. Unable to mellow her nature, and so pass unseen amongst the Cuckoos, her history became a round of blood-lettings, pursuits and further bloodlettings. Though she was still known and worshipped by a cognoscenti, who called her by a dozen different names – the Black Madonna, the Lady of Sorrows, Mater Malifecorium – she became nevertheless a victim of her own strange purity. Madness beckoned; the only refuge from the banality of the Kingdom she was exiled in.

  That was how she had been when Shadwell had found her. A mad woman, whose talk had been like none he’d heard before, and who spoke in her ramblings of things that, could he but lay his hands upon them, would make him mighty.

  And now, here they were, those wonders. All contained within a rectangle of carpet.

  He approached the middle of it, staring down at the spiral of stylized clouds and lightning called the Gyre. How many nights had he lain awake, wondering what it would be like in that flux of energies? Like being with God, perhaps?; or the Devil.

  He was shaken from these thoughts by a howl from the adjacent room, and the lamp above his head suddenly dimmed as its light was sucked beneath the intersecting door, testament to the profundity of darkness on the far side.

  He moved to the opposite end of the room, and sat down.

  How long until dawn? he wondered.

  2

  There was still no sign of morning, when – hours later, it seemed – the door opened.

  There was only blackness beyond. Out of it, Immacolata said:

  ‘Come and see.’

  He stood up, his limbs stiff, and hobbled to the door.

  A wave of heat met him at the threshold. It was like stepping into an oven in which cakes of human dirt and blood had been cooking.

  Dimly, he could see Immacolata, standing – floating, perhaps – a little way from him. The air pressed against his throat: he badly wanted to retreat. But she beckoned.

  ‘Look,’ she instructed him, staring off into the darkness. ‘Our assassin came. This is the Rake.’

  Shadwell could see nothing at first. Then a shred of fugitive energy skittered up the wall and upon contact with the ceiling threw down a wash of cankered light.

  By it, he saw the thing she called the Rake.

  Had this once been a man? It was difficult to believe. The Surgeons Immacolata had spoken of had re-invented his anatomy. He hung in the air like a slashed coat left on a hook, his body somehow drawn out to superhuman height. Then, as though a breeze had gusted up from the earth, the body moved, swelling and rising. Its upper limbs – pieces of what might once have been human tissue held in an uneasy alliance by threads of mercurial cartilage – were raised, as if it were about to be crucified. The gesture unwound the matter that blinded its head. They fell away, and Shadwell could not prevent a cry from escaping him, as he understood what su
rgery had been performed upon the Rake.

  They’d filleted him. They’d taken every bone from his body and left a thing more fit for the ocean-bed than the breathing world, a wretched echo of humanity, fuelled by the raptures the sisters had devised to bring it from Limbo. It swayed and swelled, its skull-less head taking on a dozen shapes as Shadwell watched. One moment it was all bulging eyes, the next only a maw, which howled its displeasure at waking to this condition.

  ‘Hush …’ Immacolata told it.

  The Rake shuddered and its arms grew longer, as if it wanted to kill the woman that had done this to it. But it fell silent nevertheless.

  ‘Domville,’ Immacolata said. ‘You once professed love for me.’

  It threw back its head then, as if despairing of what desire had brought it to.

  ‘Are you afraid, my Rake?’

  It looked at her, its eyes like blood blisters close to bursting.

  ‘We’ve given you a little life,’ she said. ‘And enough power to turn these streets upside down. I want you to use it.’

  The sight of the thing made Shadwell nervous.

  ‘Is he in control of himself?’ he whispered. ‘Suppose he goes berserk?’

  ‘Let him,’ she said. ‘I hate this city. Let him burn it up. As long as he kills the Seerkind, I don’t care what he does. He knows he won’t be allowed to rest until he’s done as I ask. And Death’s the best promise he’s ever had.’

  The blisters were still fixed on Immacolata, and the look in them confirmed her words.

  ‘Very well,’ Shadwell said, and turned away, heading back into the adjoining room. There was only so much of this magic a man could take.

  The sisters had an appetite for it. They liked to immerse themselves in these rites. For himself, he was content to be human.

  Well, almost content.

  V

  FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES

  1

  awn crept over Liverpool cautiously, as if fearful of what it would find. Cal watched the light uncover the city, and it seemed to him it was grey from gutter to chimney stack.

  He’d lived here all his life; this had been his world. The television and the glossy magazines had shown him different vistas on occasion, but somehow he’d never quite believed in them. They were as remote from his experience, or indeed from what he hoped to know in his seventy years, as the stars that were winking out above his head.