The Secrets of Names. Snow Chronicles. Book 1

A real one.

Slightly crooked, because otherwise it would not have been Domino at all, but something much too official.

His tail moved once, slowly.

And light rippled over the snow.

The Rustlers fell back.

«Domino?» Vera breathed.

The enormous cat turned one yellow eye on her.

«And whom, precisely, were you expecting?» he thundered. «A committee for public safety with apologies?»

One of the Rustlers, evidently, was either exceptionally hungry or exceptionally stupid. Unfortunately those qualities often travel together. It launched itself straight at Domino’s chest.

Domino did not move.

He merely looked.

The creature came apart in mid-air into strips of dull grey smoke, which the wind whipped away into the darkness between the hills.

«I did warn you,» said Domino almost lazily.

The others sprang back farther still.

The lightning in his fur burned brighter. The crown trembled and grew a little taller.

«Listen carefully, you rustling scraps,» he said, and there was so much cold dignity in his voice that even the snow seemed to lie flatter. «Human beings may be confused. Human beings may be tiresome. Human beings may even be mildly educated. But only by cats. To touch one of my subjects without permission is simple impertinence.»

In spite of everything, Vera nearly snorted.

Even as a thunderous cat-deity Domino somehow sounded like a householder lodging a complaint about an empty food bowl.

The Rustlers circled the edge of the clearing. They did not attack. They did not retreat. They waited.

For fear to weaken.

And Domino saw that.

He took one step forward.

One step – and the snow beneath his paw burst into white fire.

«Out,» he said.

A second step – and a jagged bolt of lightning tore between him and the pack, lighting the clearing so fiercely that Vera had to screw her eyes shut.

«Of here.»

He did not take a third step.

He simply fluffed up his fur, and over the clearing rolled such a crack of thunder that at last the Rustlers lost their nerve – if creatures of that sort can be said to possess anything so respectable.

The pack broke and scattered over the slopes, melting into the bright snow. Within seconds there was only their dry, affronted rustling, fading farther and farther away.

Then that vanished too.

Silence.

Only the snow still glowed faintly. Only the air still smelled of storm – if storm can smell of ice and ringing and slightly singed dignity.

The storm-cat stood with his head high until everything around them had fallen still. Only then did he turn to Vera.

She was sitting in the snow, trembling, looking at him with an expression that caused a small, awkward sensation somewhere inside him.

«You… came,» she whispered.

Domino snorted. Looked away. Looked back. Came over. Sat down beside her. For a moment he said nothing.

«Of course I came,» he muttered at last. «Who else was supposed to save you?»

She threw her arms round one enormous thunderous paw.

Properly.

He went absolutely still, as if struck.

«Now then,» he said quietly. «No crying on the fur. It isn’t waterproof.»

«I was frightened,» she whispered. «I thought I’d never see them again. Mum, or Dad, or the boys…»

«Nonsense,» said the cat.

Quietly. Not grumpily. Almost kindly.

«I always find my own. Even if they have forgotten who they are. Even if they have forgotten who owns them.»

He got up, shook the snow off one ear, resumed his ordinary cat shape, and turned as if to go.

Then stopped.

Domino let out a long breath.

And began to grow smaller.

Not all at once, not with some vulgar magical snap, but with the strange natural dignity of a great wave going back into the sea. One moment he was huge, taller than a cliff, more alarming than a storm. The next he was merely a very large cat. Then just a large one. Then ordinary Domino.

Or ordinary for Domino, at any rate.

The crown remained.

He shook his head crossly. It slid over one ear.

«I detest this thing,» he muttered.

Vera flung herself at him and, before she had time to remember that he was still a cat with the temperament of a vindictive war god, hugged him.

She gave a short laugh through the last of her fright, clutching the black-and-white bundle with the crooked crown.

Then she looked at him – at the crown, at the whiskers still trembling faintly from thunder – and asked with pure, childlike astonishment,

«Domino… what are you, exactly?»

Domino gave her the look of a being who had been caught doing something altogether too solemn and was now expected to explain it in a domestic tone.

«That,» he said, adjusting the crown with one paw, «is an unreasonably large question for a girl who was, ten minutes ago, lying here as a puddle.»

«I was not lying here as a puddle,» Vera said automatically.

«You were. Snow notices everything while it is falling. A highly expressive puddle, admittedly. But that is not the point.»

Yin gave a delicate cough. If snowy light had ever chosen to become a librarian, it would have coughed exactly like that.

«As a matter of fact,» she said, «we ought to go.»

«Go where?» Vera asked.

Yang threw up his hands.

«Where indeed? To the Mirror City, naturally! We have to show you something. Something very odd is happening there, and you are also very odd, so I feel certain the two are connected.»

Domino jumped down from the rock he had somehow contrived to get on top of with the air of a victorious commander, and landed softly beside them.

He was ordinary-sized again now. Only his eyes still shone a little more brightly than any domestic cat’s had a proper right to, and the crown – small, silver-white, and crooked to one side, as though it too possessed a personality – sat between his ears with perfect seriousness.

Vera stared at it.

«Is it real?»

«Unfortunately, yes,» Domino muttered. «A great many things here become real simply because too many people have thought about them.»

«And what does that make you? A king?»

Domino stopped.

«First of all, not king, but His Unpredictable Feline Majesty, if we are to preserve standards.»

«And secondly?» said Yang with obvious enjoyment.

«And secondly – not now. We are going to the city. I do not care to linger here waiting for Rustler reinforcements. We may discuss my peculiarities on the way.»

And with that, the crowned cat set off in front, making it perfectly plain that certain subjects were suitable for discussion only after a respectful supper – which, as had already been established, did not exist here.

Way

The road to the Mirror City was not, in any ordinary sense, a road at all.

Indeed, a great many things here were making a most determined effort not to be ordinary. The path appeared, vanished, decided it would much rather be a bridge of light, then spread itself obligingly under their feet as a broad snowy slope. Once it rose straight upwards in the form of a staircase, although there was no hill ahead, no house, and not the least excuse for behaving architecturally.

«Is it always like this?» Vera asked, stepping cautiously on to a shining stair that had been air a moment before.

«No,» said Yang. «Sometimes it is stranger.»

«This world dislikes standing still,» Yin explained. «There is no time here in your sense. No before and after. No yesterday or tomorrow in the way you mean them.»

«Then how is there?»

Yin considered.

«Like memory,» she said at last. «You can remember summer and yesterday’s breakfast and what it felt like to be six all at once, can’t you? None of them has to wait politely for the others.»

«Only here it’s all… outside?» Vera said slowly.

«Exactly,» said Yang, pleased. «Extremely inconvenient for admirers of timetables, and extremely useful for oddities.»

«And for trouble,» said Domino.

«Trouble,» said Yang, «is wonderfully resourceful in every world.»

Vera walked on in silence for a while, trying to digest this. Snow glowed underfoot. Endless sky shimmered overhead. Far away, cities sharpened into view and faded again, as if someone were sketching them on frosted glass and changing their mind.

«If there isn’t any time here,» she said at last, «does that mean I could stay a long while, and only a minute would pass at home?»

«Perhaps,» said Yin.

«Or the other way round,» said Yang cheerfully. «You go back and discover it’s summer, everyone has retired, and they’ve redone the stairwell.»

«Yang,» said Yin wearily.

«What? I am broadening her grasp of possibilities.»

Vera cast a nervous look at Domino.

«Is he joking?»

«In part,» said the cat. «Which is the most disagreeable kind of joke. In the World of Meanings, the farther you go, the faster time moves in the human world. But if you stand still, time stands still too. You could remain here for an eternity, if that happened to suit you.»

Cats

By now they had been walking for quite a long time, though quite a long time was not a very reliable expression here, and possibly a little impolite.

In a world with no time, there were still such things as tiredness, curiosity, unease, and that peculiar sensation belonging to journeys: the feeling that one has come a very great distance, although on turning round one still sees the same slope, the same river of light, the same row of thin towers on the horizon. Vera looked back several times, and each time had the same strange impression. The landscape did not repeat itself, exactly, but neither did it quite change. It was as if it remembered what it had been a moment ago and did not want to lose it.

The path beneath their feet was pale and steady now – not fragile, as it had seemed at first, but firm, with a muted inward glow, as if the snow there had lain for a long time and had become not simply snow but something rather like habit.

«Why doesn’t it melt?» Vera asked, looking down.

«What exactly?» said Domino lazily.

«Well, for one thing it’s glowing. And where I come from, anything glowing is usually either blinking or broken.»

«A very human observation,» said Yang.

Yin, drifting a little ahead, answered, «Because it is not snow in your sense. Not matter, but meaning. Information. What has fallen out of the stream and held.»

«The meaning of what?»

«Everything,» said Yang. «Traces. What was named. What was lived. What was passed on. Anything that didn’t vanish immediately.»

«And all of that falls from above?» Vera tipped back her head.

The sky over them was deep and iridescent, with no sun, no moon, and no familiar source of light. It offered no explanation at all. It behaved as all truly large things do: existing with such calm assurance that a human being beside it becomes embarrassed by her own fuss.

«From above comes the new,» said Yin. «Not all of it. But much. In the upper layers the snow falls more often, and more brightly. There things are born faster, alter faster, forget their old shapes faster.»

«And lower down?»

Yin turned her head slightly, as if listening not to Vera’s question but to the world itself.

«Lower down is what has held. What has passed through many people and not come apart. Old ideas. Obstinate forms. Long meanings. Things that no longer shine very brightly, but carry weight.»

«And lower still,» said Domino, «is somewhere you have no need to go. Not yet.»

He said it in such a tone that to ask any more would have been either brave or silly. And Vera, though she was exactly at the age when bravery and silliness often arrive together, remained quiet.