Weaveworld

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Everything. All the places you’ve seen.’

  ‘Why?’

  Trust met’ she said. ‘Please God, Cal, trust me. What do you remember?’

  ‘Just bits and pieces.’

  ‘Whatever you can find. Every little piece.’

  She pressed her palm to his face. He was feverish, but the book in her other hand was hotter.

  In recent times she’d shared intimacies with her greatest enemy, Hobart. Surely she could share knowledge with this man, whose sweetness she’d come to love.

  ‘Please …’ she said.

  ‘For you …’ he replied, seeming to know at last all she felt for him, ‘… anything.’

  And the thoughts came. She felt them flow into her, and through her; she was a conduit, the menstruum the stream on which his memories were carried. Her mind’s eye saw glimpses only of what he’d seen and felt here in the Fugue, but they were things fine and beautiful.

  An orchard; firelight; fruit; people dancing; singing. A road; a field; de Bono and the rope-dancers. The Firmament (rooms full of miracles); a rickshaw; a house, with a man standing on the step. A mountain, and planets. Most of it came too fast for her to focus upon, but her comprehension of what he’d seen wasn’t the point. She was just part of a cycle – as she’d been in the Auction Room.

  Behind her, she felt the beams breaking through the last wall, as though the Loom was coming to meet her, its genius for transfiguration momentarily at her disposal. They hadn’t got long. If she missed this wave there’d be no other.

  ‘Go on,’ she said to Cal.

  He had his eyes closed now, and the images were still pouring out of him. He’d remembered more than she’d dared hope. And she in her turn was adding sights and sounds to the flow –

  The lake; Capra’s House; the forest; the streets of Nonesuch –

  – they came back, razor sharp, and she felt the beams pick them up and speed them on their way.

  She’d feared the Loom would reject her interference, but not at all; it married its power to that of the menstruum, transforming all that she and Cal were remembering.

  She had no control over these processes. They were beyond her grasp. All she could do was be a part of the exchange between meaning and magic, and trust that the forces at work here comprehended her intentions better than she did.

  But the power behind her was growing too strong for her; she could not channel its energies much longer. The book was getting too hot to hold, and Cal was shuddering beneath her hand.

  ‘Enough!’ she said.

  Cal’s eyes flew open.

  ‘I haven’t finished.’

  ‘Enough I said.’

  As she spoke, the structure of the Temple began to shudder.

  Cal said: ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Time to go,’ said Suzanna. ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘Of course I can walk.’

  She helped him to his feet. There were roars from within, as one after another the walls capitulated to the rage of the Loom.

  They didn’t wait to watch the final cataclysm, but started away from the Temple, brick-shards whining past their heads.

  Cal was as good as his word: he could indeed walk, albeit slowly. But running would have been impossible in the wasteland they were now obliged to cross. As Creation had been the touchstone of the outward journey, wholesale Destruction marked their return. The flora and fauna that had sprung into being in the footsteps of the trespassers were now suffering a swift dissolution. Flowers and trees were withering, the stench of their rot carried on the hooligan winds that scoured the Gyre.

  With the earth-light dimmed, the scene was murky, the gloom further thickened by dust and airborne matter. From the darkness animal cries rose as the earth opened and consumed the very creatures it had produced mere minutes before. Those not devoured by the bed from which they’d sprung were subject to a fate still more terrible, as the powers that had made them unknitted their children. Pale, skeletal things that had once been bright and alive now littered the landscape, breathing their last. Some turned their eyes up to Cal and Suzanna, looking for hope or help, but they had none to offer.

  It was as much as they could do to keep the cracks in the earth from claiming them too. They stumbled on, arms about each other, heads bowed beneath a barrage of hailstones which the Mantle, as though to perfect their misery, had unleashed.

  ‘How far?’ Cal said.

  They halted and Suzanna stared ahead; she could not be certain they were not simply walking in circles. The light at their feet was now all but extinguished. Here and there it flared up, but only to illuminate another pitiable scene: the last wracking moments of the glory that their presence here had engendered.

  Then:

  ‘There!’ she said, pointing through the curtain of hail and dust. ’I see a light.’

  They set off again, as fast as the suppurating earth would allow. With every step, their feet sank deeper into a swamp of decaying matter, in which the remnants of life still moved; the inheritors of this Eden: worms and cockroaches.

  But there was a distinct light at the end of the tunnel; she glimpsed it again through the thick air.

  ‘Look up, Cal,’ she said.

  He did just that, though only with effort.

  ‘Not far now. A few more steps.’

  He was becoming heavier by the moment; but the tear in the Mantle was sufficient to spur them on over the last few yards of treacherous earth.

  And finally they stepped out into the light, almost spat from the entrails of the Gyre as it went into its final convulsions.

  They stumbled away from the Mantle, but not far before Cal said:

  ‘I can’t…’

  and fell to the ground.

  She knelt beside him, cradling his head, then looked around for help. Only then did she see the consequences of events in the Gyre.

  Wonderland had gone.

  The glories of the Fugue had been shredded and torn, their tatters evaporating even as she watched. Water, wood and stone; living animal tissue and dead Seerkind: all gone, as though it had never been. A few remnants lingered, but not for long. As the Gyre thundered and shook, these last signs of the Fugue’s terrain became smoke and threads, then empty air. It was horribly quick.

  Suzanna looked behind her. The Mantle was receding too, now that it had nothing left to conceal, its retreat uncovering a wasteland of dirt and fractured rock. Even its thunder was diminishing.

  ‘Suzanna!’

  She looked back to see de Bono coming towards her.

  ‘What happened in there?’

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘First, we have to get help for Cal. He’s been shot.’

  ‘I’ll fetch a car.’

  Cal’s eyes flickered open.

  ‘Is it gone?’ he murmured.

  ‘Don’t think about it now,’ she said.

  ‘I want to know,’ he demanded, with surprising vehemence, and struggled to sit up. Knowing he wouldn’t be placated, Suzanna helped him.

  He moaned, seeing the desolation before them.

  Groups of Seerkind, with a few of Hobart’s people scattered amongst them, stood in the valley and up the slopes of the surrounding hills, neither speaking nor moving. They were all that remained.

  ‘What about Shadwell?’ said Cal.

  Suzanna shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ she said. ‘He escaped the Temple before me.’

  The din of a revved car-engine cancelled further conversation, as de Bono drove one of the invaders’ vehicles across the dead grass, bringing it to a halt a few feet from where Cal lay.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ said Suzanna, once Cal had been laid on the back seat.

  ‘What do we tell the doctors?’ Cal said, his voice getting fainter. ‘I’ve got a bullet in me.’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ said Suzanna. As she got into the driver’s seat, which de Bono had only reluctantly vacated, somebody called her name. Nimrod was running toward
s the car.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he said to her.

  She directed his attention to the passenger.

  ‘My friend,’ he said, seeing Cal, ‘you look the worse for wear.’ He tried a smile of welcome, but tears came instead.

  ‘It’s over,’ he said, sobbing. ‘Destroyed. Our sweet land …’ He wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his hand. ‘What do we do now?’ he said to Suzanna.

  ‘We get out of harm’s way,’ she told him. ‘As quickly as we can. We still have enemies –’

  ‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ he said. ‘The Fugue’s gone. Everything we ever possessed, lost.’

  ‘We’re alive, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘As long as we’re alive …’

  ‘Where will we go?’

  ‘We’ll find a place.’

  ‘You have to lead us now,’ said Nimrod. There’s only you.’

  ‘Later. First, we have to help Cal –’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’ He’d taken hold of her arm, and was loath to let her go. ‘You will come back?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll take the rest of them North,’ he told her. ‘Two valleys from here. We’ll wait for you there.’

  ‘Then move,’ she said. ‘Time’s wasting.’

  ‘You will remember?’ he said.

  She would have laughed his doubts off, but that remembering was all. Instead she touched his wet face, letting him feel the menstruum in her fingers.

  It was only as she drove away that she realized she’d probably blessed him.

  IV

  SHADWELL

  he Salesman had fled the Gyre as the first dissolution began in the Fugue outside. His escape had therefore not only gone unchallenged, but unseen. With the fabric of their homeland coming apart on every side, nobody paid the least attention to the shabby, blood-stained figure that stumbled away through the mayhem.

  Once only was he obliged to stop, and find a place in the chaos where he could give vent to his nausea. The vomit splattered his once-fine shoes, and he spent a further moment cleaning them with a handful of leaves, which began to evaporate in his hands even as he put them to the task.

  Magic! How it revolted him now! The Fugue had enticed him with its promises. It had flaunted its so-called enchantments in front of him until he – poor Cuckoo that he was – had been blinded to all sense. Then it had led him a merry dance. Made him dress in borrowed skin; made him deceive and manipulate: all for love of its lies. And lies they were; he saw that now. Even as he’d reached to embrace his prize it had evaporated, denying him ownership, and leaving him to look like the guilty party.

  The fact that it had taken him so long to see how he’d been used, however, was proof positive of his innocence in all of this. He’d intended no harm to any living thing; he’d wanted only to bring truth and stability into a place sorely deficient in both. For his pains, he’d been cheated and connived against. What could history accuse him of then, other than naïveté: a forgivable sin. No, the true villains in this tragedy were the Seerkind, the wielders of rapture and unreason. They it was who’d twisted his benign ambition out of true, and so invited these horrors upon them all. A grim spiral of destruction that had ended in the Gyre – with him – a victim of circumstance – driven to murder.

  He made his way out through the decaying Fugue, and began to climb up from the valley. The wind was cleaner on the slopes, and it shamed him. He stank of fear and frustration, while it smelt of the sea. Inhaling it, he knew that in such cleanliness lay his only hope for sanity.

  Disgusted by his condition, he pulled off his bloodied jacket. It was excrement: corrupted and corrupting. In accepting it from the Incantatrix he’d made his first error: from that all subsequent misdirections had sprung. In his repugnance he tried to tear at the lining, but it resisted his strength, so he simply bundled the jacket up and threw it, high into the air. It rose a little way, then fell again, tumbling down a rocky slope, its passage starting a minor avalanche of pebbles, and came to rest spreadeagled like a legless suicide. At last it was where it had belonged from the start: in the dirt.

  The Seerkind belonged with it, he thought. But they were survivors. Deception was in their blood. Though their territories had been destroyed, he didn’t put it past them to have another trick or two up their sleeves. As long as they lived, these defilers, he would not rest easy in his bed. They’d made a fool and a butcher of him, and there was no health for him now until every last one of them was laid low.

  Standing on the hill, looking down into the valley below, he felt a breath of new purpose. He’d been tricked and humiliated, but he was at least alive. The battle was not yet over.

  They had an enemy, these monsters. Immacolata had dreamt of it often, and spoken of the wilderness where it resided.

  The Scourge, she’d called it.

  If he was to destroy the Seerkind he would need an ally, and what better than that nameless power from which they’d hidden, an age ago?

  They could never hide again. They had no land to conceal themselves in. If he could find this Scourge – and wake it from its wilderness – it and he would cleanse them at a stroke.

  The Scourge. He liked the sound of the word mightily.

  But he’d like better the silence that would come when his enemies were ash.

  V

  A FRAGILE PEACE

  1

  al was happy to sleep for a while; happy to be at ease in the embrace of gentle hands and gentle words. The nurses came and went; a doctor too, smiling down at him and telling him all would be well, while de Bono, at the man’s side, nodded and smiled.

  A night later, he woke to find Suzanna with him in the room, mouthing words which he was too weary to hear. He slept, happy that she was near, but when he woke again, she’d gone. He asked after her, and after de Bono too, and was told that they’d be back, and that he wasn’t to concern himself. Sleep, the nurse told him. Sleep, and when you wake all will be well. He vaguely knew this advice had failed someone he knew and loved, but his drugged mind couldn’t quite remember who. So he did as he was told.

  It was a sleep rich with dreams, in many of which he had a starring role, though not always wearing his own skin. Sometimes he was a bird; sometimes a tree, his branches laden with fruits each of which were like little worlds. Sometimes he was the wind, or like the wind, and ran unseen but strong over landscapes made of upturned faces – rock faces, flower faces – and streams in which he knew every silver fish by name.

  And sometimes he dreamt he was dead; was floating in an infinite ocean of black milk, while presences invisible but mighty distressed the stars above him, and threw them down in long arcs that sang as they fell.

  Comfortable as it was, this death, he knew he was only dreaming it, indulging his fatigue. The time would come soon when he’d have to wake again.

  When he did. Nimrod was by his bed.

  ‘You needn’t worry,’ he told Cal. ‘They won’t ask you any questions.’

  Cal’s tongue was sluggish, but he managed to say:

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘A little rapture,’ Nimrod said, unsmiling. ‘I can still manage the occasional deceiving.’

  ‘How are things?’

  ‘Bad,’ came the reply. ‘Everyone’s grieving. I’m not a public griever myself, so I’m not very popular.’

  ‘And Suzanna?’

  He made an equivocal look. ‘I like the woman myself,’ he said. ‘But she’s having problems with the Families. When they’re not grieving, they’re arguing amongst themselves. I get sick of the din. Sometimes I think I’ll go find Marguerite. Forget I was ever Seerkind.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘You watch me. It’s no use being sentimental, Cal. The Fugue’s gone; once and for all. We may as well make the best of it. Join the Cuckoos; let bygones be bygones. Good God, we won’t even be noticed. There’s stranger things than us in the Kingdom these days.’ He pointed to the television in the c
orner of the room. ‘Every time I turn it on, something new. Something different. I might even go to America.’ He slipped off his sunglasses. Cal had forgotten how extraordinary his eyes were. ‘Hollywood could use a man with my attributes,’ he said.

  Despite Nimrod’s quiet despair, Cal couldn’t help but smile at this. And indeed, perhaps the man was right; perhaps the Seerkind had no choice now but to enter the Kingdom, and make whatever peace they could with it.

  ‘I must go,’ he was saying. ‘There’s a big meeting tonight. Everyone has a right to have their say. We’ll be talking all night, most likely.’ He went to the door.

  ‘I won’t go to California without saying goodbye,’ he remarked, and left the patient alone.

  2

  Two days passed, and nobody came. Cal was getting better quickly; and it seemed that whatever rapture Nimrod had worked on the staff had indeed diverted them from making any report of their patient’s wound to the police.

  By the afternoon of the third day Cal knew he was much improved, because he was getting restless. The television – Nimrod’s new love – could provide only soap opera and a bad movie. The latter, the lesser of the two banalities, was playing when the door opened, and a woman dressed in black stepped into the room. It took Cal a moment before he recognized his visitor as Apolline.

  Before he could offer a welcome she said:

  ‘No time to talk, Calhoun –’ and, approaching the bed, thrust a parcel at Cal.

  ‘Take it!’ she said.

  He did so.

  ‘I have to be away quickly,’ she went on. Her face softened as she gazed at him. ‘You look tired, my boy,’ she said. Take a holiday!’ And with that advice retreated to the door.

  ‘Wait!’ he called after her.

  ‘No time! No time!’ she said, and was away.

  He took the string and brown paper from around his present, and discovered inside the book of faery-tales which Suzanna had found in Rue Street. With it, there was a scrawled note.

  Cal, it read.

  Keep hold of this for me, will you? Never let it out of your sight. Our enemies are still with us. When the time is safe, I’ll find you.