Weaveworld

  He dragged her towards the door, and pitched her through into the room at the heart of the Temple: the inner sanctum in which the miracles of the Gyre had been generated; the powerhouse which had held the many worlds of the Fugue together for so long.

  It was a room some fifteen feet square, built of the same naked brick as the rest of the Temple, and high. She looked up to see that the roof had a skylight of sorts, open to the heavens. The clouds that swirled around the Temple roof shed a milky brightness down, as if the lightning from the Gyre was being kindled in the womb of troubled air above. The clouds were not the only movement overhead, however. As she gazed up she caught sight of a form in the corner of the roof. Before her gaze could focus on it. Shadwell was approaching her.

  ‘Where is it?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s the Loom?’

  She looked around the sanctum, and discovered now that it was not entirely bare. In each of the four corners a figure was sitting, gazing towards the centre of the room. Her spine twitched. Though they sat bolt upright on their high-backed chairs, the quartet were long dead, their flesh like stained paper on their bones, their clothes hanging in rotted rags.

  Had these guardians been murdered where they sat, so that thieves could remove the Loom unchallenged? So it seemed. Yet there was nothing in their posture that suggested a violent death; nor could she believe that this charmed place would have sanctioned bloodshed. No; something else had happened here – was happening still, perhaps – some essential point both she and Shadwell could not yet grasp.

  He was still muttering to himself, his voice a decaying spiral of complaint. She was only half-listening; she was far more interested in the object she now saw lying in the middle of the floor. There it lay, the kitchen knife Cal had brought into the Auction Room all those months ago; the commonplace domestic tool which the look between them had somehow drawn into the Weave, to this very spot, the absolute centre of the Fugue.

  Seeing it, pieces of the riddle began to slot together in her head. Here, where the glances of the sentinels intersected, lay the knife that another glance – between herself and Cal – had empowered. It had entered this chamber and somehow cut the last knot the Loom had created; and the Weave had released its secrets. All of which was well and good, except that the sentinels were dead, and the Loom, as Shadwell kept repeating, was gone.

  ‘You were the one,’ he growled. ‘You knew all along.’

  She ignored his accusations, a new thought forming. If the magic had gone, she reasoned, why did the menstruum hide itself?

  As she shaped the question Shadwell’s fury drove him to attack.

  ‘I’ll kill you!’ he yelled.

  His assault caught her unawares, and she was flung back against the wall. The breath went out of her in a rush, and before she could defend herself his thumbs were at her throat, his bulk trapping her.

  ‘Thieving bitch,’ he said. ‘You cheated me!’

  She raised her hands to beat him off, but she was already growing weak. She struggled to draw breath, desperate for a mouthful of air even if it was the flatulent breath he was expelling, but his grip on her throat prevented so much as a mouthful reaching her. I’m going to die, she thought; I’m going to die looking into this curdled face.

  And then her upturned eyes caught a glimpse of movement in the roof, and a voice said:

  ‘The Loom is here.’

  Shadwell’s grip on Suzanna relaxed. He turned, and looked up at the speaker.

  Immacolata, her arms spread out like a parachutist in free-fall, was hovering above them.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ she asked Shadwell.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘I missed you, Shadwell. Though you were unkind.’

  ‘Where’s the Loom?’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There is no Loom,’ she replied.

  ‘But you just said –’

  ‘The Loom is here.’

  ‘Where then? Where?’

  ‘There is no Loom.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind,’ he yelled up at her. ‘Either there is or there isn’t!’

  The Incantatrix had a skull’s smile as she gazed down on the man below.

  ‘You’re the fool,’ she said mildly. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’

  Shadwell put on a gentler tone. ‘Why don’t you come down?’ he said. ‘My neck aches.’

  She shook her head. It cost her effort to hang in the air that way, Suzanna could see; she was defying the sanctity of the Temple by working her raptures here. But she flew in the face of such edicts, determined to remind Shadwell of how earth-bound he was.

  ‘Afraid, are you?’ said Shadwell.

  Immacolata’s smile did not falter. ‘I’m not afraid,’ she said, and began to float down towards him.

  Keep out of his way, Suzanna willed her. Though the Incantatrix had done terrible harm, Suzanna had no desire to see her felled by Shadwell’s mischief. But the Salesman stood face to face with the woman and made no move. He simply said:

  ‘You reached here before me.’

  ‘I almost forgot you,’ Immacolata replied. Her voice had lost any trace of stridency. It was full of sighs. ‘But she reminded me,’ she glanced at Suzanna. ‘It was a fine service you did me, sister,’ she said. ‘To remind me of my enemy.’

  Her eyes went back to Shadwell.

  ‘You drove me mad,’ she said. ‘And I forgot you. But I remember now.’

  Suddenly the smile and the sighs had gone entirely. There was only ruin, and rage.

  ‘I remember very well.’

  ‘Where’s the Loom?’ Shadwell demanded.

  ‘You were always so literal,’ Immacolata replied, contemptuously. ‘Did you really expect to find a thing? Another object to be possessed? Is that your Godhood, Shadwell? Possession?’

  ‘Where the fuck is it?’

  She laughed then, though the sound from her throat had nothing to do with pleasure.

  Her ridicule pressed Shadwell to breaking point; he flung himself at her. But she was not about to let herself be touched by his hands. As he snatched hold of her it seemed to Suzanna that her whole ruined face cracked open, spilling a force that might once have been the menstruum – that cool, bright river Suzanna had first plunged into at Immacolata’s behest – but was now a damned and polluted stream, breaking from the wounds like pus. It had force nevertheless. Shadwell was thrown to the ground.

  Overhead, the clouds threw lightning across the roof, freezing the scene below by its scalpel light. The killing blow could only be a glance away, surely.

  But it didn’t come. The Incantatrix hesitated, the broken face leaking tainted power, and in that instant Shadwell’s hand closed on the kitchen knife at his side.

  Suzanna cried a warning, but Immacolata either failed to hear or chose not to. Then Shadwell was on his feet, his ungainly rise offering his victim a moment to strike him down, which was missed – and drove the blade up into her abdomen, a butcher’s stroke which opened a traumatic wound.

  At last she seemed to know he meant her death, and responded. Her face began to blaze afresh, but before the spark could become fire Shadwell’s blade was dividing her to the breasts. Her innards slid from the wound. She screamed, and threw back her head, the unleashed force wasted against the sanctum walls.

  On the instant, the room was filled with a roaring that seemed to come from both the bricks and the innards of Immacolata. Shadwell dropped the blood-slicked knife, and made to retreat from his crime, but his victim reached out and pulled him close.

  The fire had entirely gone from Immacolata’s face. She was dying, and quickly. But even in her failing moments her grip was strong. As the roaring grew louder she granted Shadwell the embrace she’d always denied him, her wound besmirching his jacket. He made a cry of repugnance, but she wouldn’t let him go. He struggled, and finally succeeded in breaking her hold, throwing her off and staggering from her, his chest and belly plastered with blood. He cast one more look in her direction then started towards
the door, making small moans of horror. As he reached the exit he looked up at Suzanna.

  ‘I didn’t …’ he began, his hands raised, blood trickling between his fingers. ‘It wasn’t me …’

  The words were as much appeal as denial.

  ‘It was magic!’ he said, tears starting to his eyes. Not of sorrow, she knew, but of a sudden righteous rage.

  ‘Filthy magic!’ he shrieked. The ground rocked to hear its glory denied.

  He didn’t wait to have the roof fall on his head, but fled from the chamber as the roars rose in intensity.

  Suzanna looked back at Immacolata.

  Despite the grievous wounding she’d sustained she was not yet dead. She was standing against one of the walls, clinging to the brick with one hand and keeping her innards from falling with the other.

  ‘Blood’s been spilt,’ she said, as another tremor, more fierce than any that had preceded it, unknitted the foundations of the building. ‘Blood’s been spilt in the Temple of the Loom.’

  She smiled that terrible, twisted smile.

  ‘The Fugue’s undone, sister –’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I came here intending to spill his blood and bring the Gyre down. Seems it’s me who’s done the bleeding. It’s no matter.’ Her voice grew weaker. Suzanna stepped close, to hear her better. ‘It’s all the same in the end. The Fugue is finished. It’ll be dust. All dust …’

  She pushed herself off the wall. Suzanna reached and kept her from falling. The contact made her palm tingle.

  ‘They’re exiles forever,’ Immacolata said, and frail as it was, there was triumph in her voice. The Fugue ends here. Wiped away as if it had never been.’

  At this, her legs buckled beneath her. Pushing Suzanna away, she stumbled back against the wall. Her hand slipped from her belly; her guts unspooled.

  ‘I used to dream …’ she said, ‘… terrible emptiness…’

  She stopped speaking, as she slid down the wall, strands of her hair catching on the brick.

  ‘… sand and nothingness,’ she said. That’s what I dreamt. Sand and nothingness. And here it is.’

  As if to bear out her remark the din grew cataclysmic.

  Satisfied with her labours, Immacolata sank to the ground.

  Suzanna looked towards her escape route, as the bricks of the Temple began to grind upon each other with fresh ferocity. What more could she do here? The mysteries of the Loom had defeated her. If she stayed she’d be buried in the ruins. There was nothing left to do but get out while she still could.

  As she moved to the door, two pencil beams of light sliced through the grimy air, and struck her arm. Their brightness shocked her. More shocking still, their source. They were coming from the eye sockets of one of the sentinels. She stepped out of the path of the light, and as the beams struck the corpse opposite lights flared there too; then in the third sentinel’s head, and the fourth.

  These events weren’t lost on Immacolata.

  ‘The Loom …’ she whispered, her breath failing.

  The intersecting beams were brightening, and the fraught air was soothed by the sound of voices, softly murmuring words so unfixable they were almost music.

  ‘You’re too late,’ said the Incantatrix, her comment made not to Suzanna but to the dead quartet. ‘You can’t save it now.’

  Her head began to slip forward.

  ‘Too late …’ she said again.

  Then a shudder went through her. The body, vacated by spirit, keeled over. She lay dead in her blood.

  Despite her dying words, the power here was still building. Suzanna backed towards the door, to clear the beams’ route completely. With nothing to bar their way they immediately redoubled their brilliance, and from the point of collision threw up new beams at every angle. The whispering that filled the chamber suddenly found a fresh rhythm; the words, though still alien to her, ran like a melodious poem. Somehow, they and the light were part of one system; the raptures of the four Families – Aia, Lo, Ye-me and Babu – working together: word music accompanying a woven dance of light.

  This was the Loom; of course. This was the Loom.

  No wonder Immacolata had poured scorn on Shadwell’s literalism. Magic might be bestowed upon the physical, but it didn’t reside there. It resided in the word, which was mind spoken, and in motion, which was mind made manifest; in the system of the Weave and the evocations of the melody: all mind.

  Yet damn it, this recognition was not enough. Finally she was still only a Cuckoo, and all the puzzle-solving in the world wouldn’t help her mellow the rage of this desecrated place. All she could do was watch the Loom’s wrath shake the Fugue and all it contained apart.

  In her frustration her thoughts went to Mimi, who had brought her into this adventure, but had died too soon to entirely prepare her for it. Surely even she would not have predicted this: the Fugue’s failing, and Suzanna at its heart, unable to keep it beating.

  The lights were still colliding and multiplying, the beams growing so solid now she might have walked upon them. Their performances transfixed her. She felt she could watch them forever, and never tire of their complexities. And still they grew more elaborate, more solid, until she was certain they would not be bound within the walls of the sanctum, but would burst out –

  – into the Fugue, where she had to go. Out to where Cal was lying, to comfort him as best she could in the imminent maelstrom.

  With this thought came another. That perhaps Mimi had known, or feared, that in the end it would simply be Suzanna and the magic – and that maybe the old woman had after all left a signpost.

  She reached into her pocket, and brought out the book. Secrets of the Hidden Peoples. She didn’t need to open the book to remember the epigraph on the dedication page:

  ‘What can be imagined need never be lost.’

  She’d tussled with its meaning repeatedly, but her intellect had failed to make much sense of it. Now she forsook her analytical thinking and let subtler sensibilities take over.

  The light of the Loom was so bright it hurt her eyes, and as she stepped out of the sanctum she discovered that the beams were exploiting chinks in the brick – either that or eating at the wall – and breaking through. Needle-thin lines of light stratified the passageway.

  Her thoughts as much on the book in her hand as on her safety, she made her way back via the route she’d come: door and passageway, door and passageway. Even the outer layers of corridor were not immune to the Loom’s glamour. The beams had broken through three solid walls and were growing wider with every moment. As she walked through them, she felt the menstruum stir in her for the first time since she’d entered the Gyre. It rose not to her face, however, but through her arms and into her hands, which clasped the book, as though charging it.

  What can be imagined –

  The chanting rose; the light-beams multiplied.

  – need never be lost.

  The book grew heavier; warmer; like a living thing in her arms. And yet, so full of dreams. A thing of ink and paper in which another world awaited release. Not one world perhaps, but many; for as she and Hobart’s time in the pages had proved, each adventurer reimagined the stories for themselves. There were as many Wild Woods as there were readers to wander there.

  She was out into the third corridor now, and the whole Temple had become a hive of light and sound. There was so much energy here, waiting to be channelled. If she could only be the catalyst that turned its strength to better ends than destruction.

  Her head was full of images, or fragments thereof:

  she and Hobart in the forest of their story, exchanging skins and fictions;

  she and Cal in the Auction Room, their glance the engine that turned the knife above the Weave.

  And finally, the sentinels sitting in the Loom chamber. Eight eyes that had, even in death, the power to unmake the Weave. And … make it again?

  Suddenly, she wasn’t walking any longer. She was running, not for fear that
the roof would come down on her head but because the final pieces of the puzzle were coming clear, and she had so little time.

  Redeeming the Fugue could not be done alone. Of course not. No rapture could be performed alone. Their essence was in exchange. That was why the Families sang and danced and wove: their magic blossomed between people: between performer and spectator, maker and admirer.

  And wasn’t there rapture at work between her mind and the mind in the book she held?; her eyes scanning the page and soaking up another soul’s dreams? It was like love. Or rather love was its highest form: mind shaping mind, visions pirouetting on the threads between lovers.

  ‘Cal!’

  She was at the last door, and flinging herself into the turmoil beyond.

  The light in the earth had turned to the colour of bruises, blue-black and purple. The sky above writhed, ripe to discharge its innards. From the music and the exquisite geometry of light inside the Temple, she was suddenly in bedlam.

  Cal was propped against the wall of the Temple. His face was white, but he was alive.

  She went to him and knelt by his side.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he said, his voice lazy with exhaustion.

  ‘I’ve no time to explain,’ she said, her hand stroking his face. The menstruum played against his cheek. ‘You have to trust me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Good. You have to think for me, Cal. Think of everything you remember.’

  ‘Remember …?’

  As he puzzled at her a crack, fully a foot wide, opened in the earth, running from the threshold of the Temple like a messenger. The news it carried was all grim. Seeing it, doubts filled Suzanna. How could anything be claimed from this chaos? The sky shed thunder; dust and dirt were flung up from the crevasses that gaped on every side.

  She endeavoured to hold onto the comprehension she’d found in the corridors behind her. Tried to keep the images of the Loom in her head. The beams intersecting. Thought over and under thought. Minds filling the void with shared memories and shared dreams.

  Think of everything you remember about the Fugue,’ she said.