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Weaveworld
The only reply was his own voice, echoing back and forth until it died. The child’s arms jerked forward, and its long fingers latched onto Cal’s face. He tried to fight it off, but it drew closer to him, its sticky body embracing him. The more he struggled the more he was caught.
The rest of the by-blows loosed their hold on him now, leaving him to the new child. It was only minutes old, but its strength was phenomenal, the vestigial hands on its belly raking Cal’s skin, its grip so tight his lungs laboured for breath.
With its face inches from Cal’s, it spoke again, but the voice that came from the ruined mouth was not its father’s this time, but that of Immacolata.
‘Confess.’ she demanded. ‘Confess what you know.’
‘I just saw a place –’ he said, trying to avoid the trail of spittle that was about to fall from the beast’s chin. He failed. It hit his cheek, and burned like hot fat.
‘Do you know what place?’ the Incantatrix demanded.
‘No …’ he said. ‘No, I don’t –’
‘But you’ve dreamt it, haven’t you? Wept for it …’
Yes, was the answer; of course he’d dreamt it. Who hadn’t dreamt of paradise?
Momentarily his thoughts leapt from present terror to past joy. To his floating over the Fugue. The sight of that Wonderland kindled a sudden will to resist in him. The glories he saw in his mind’s eye had to be preserved from the foulness that embraced him, from its makers and masters, and in such a struggle his life was not so hard to forfeit. Though he knew nothing about the carpet’s present whereabouts he was ready to perish rather than risk letting anything slip that Shadwell might profit by. And while he had breath, he’d do all in his power to confound them.
Elroy’s child seemed to read this new-found resolution. It drew its arms more tightly about him.
‘I’ll confess!’ he yelled in its face. ‘I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’
Immediately, he began to talk.
The substance of his confession was not, however, what they wanted to hear. Instead he began to recite the train timetable out of Lime Street, which he knew by heart. He’d first started learning it at the age of eleven, having seen a Memory Man on television who’d demonstrated his skills by recalling the details of randomly chosen football matches – teams, scores, scorers – back to the 1930s. It was a perfectly useless endeavour, but its heroic scale had impressed Cal mightily, and he’d spent the next few weeks committing to memory any and every piece of information he could find, until it struck him that his magnum opus was passing to and fro at the bottom of the garden: the trains. He’d begun that day, with the local lines, his ambition elevated each time he successfully remembered a day’s times faultlessly. He’d kept his information up to date for several years, as services were cancelled or stations closed. And his mind, which had difficulty putting names to faces, could still spew this perfectly redundant information out upon request.
That’s what he gave them now. The services to Manchester, Crewe, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry, Cheltenham Spa, Reading, Bristol, Exeter, Salisbury, London, Colchester; all the times of arrival and departure, and footnotes as to which services only operated on Saturdays, and which never ran on Bank Holidays.
I’m Mad Mooney, he thought, as he delivered this filibuster, listing the services with a bright, clear voice, as if to an imbecile. The trick confounded the monster utterly. It stared at Cal while he talked, unable to understand why the prisoner had forsaken fear.
Immacolata cursed Cal through her nephew’s mouth, and offered up new threats, but he scarcely heard them. The timetables had their own rhythm, and he was soon carried along by it. The beast’s embrace grew tighter; it could not be long before Cal’s bones began to break. But he just went on talking, drawing in gulps of breath to start each day, and letting his tongue do the rest.
It’s poetry, my boy, said Mad Mooney. Never heard its like. Pure poetry.
And maybe it was. Verses of days, and lines of hours, transmuted into the stuff of poets because it was all spat into the face of death.
They’d kill him for this defiance, he knew, when they finally realized that he’d never exchange another meaningful word with them. But Wonderland would have a gate for ghosts.
He had just begun the Scottish services – to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Inverness, Aberdeen and Dundee – when he caught sight of Shadwell from the corner of his eye. The Salesman was shaking his head, and now exchanged some words with Immacolata – something about having to ask the old woman. Then he turned, and walked into the darkness. They’d given up on their prisoner. The coup de grace could only be seconds away.
He felt the grip relax. His recitation faltered for an instant, in anticipation of the fatal blow. It didn’t come. Instead, the creature withdrew its arms from around him, and followed behind Shadwell, leaving Cal lying on the ground. Though released, he could scarcely move; his bruised limbs were rigid with cramp after being held fast for so long.
And now he realized that his troubles were not over. He felt the sweat on his face turning cold, as the mother of Elroy’s terrible infant drew herself towards him. He could not escape her. She straddled his body, then reached down and drew his face up towards her breasts. His muscles complained at this contortion, but the pain was forgotten an instant after, as she put her nipple to his lips. A long-neglected instinct made him accept it. The breast spurted a bitter fluid down his throat. He wanted to spit it out, but his body lacked the strength to reject it. Instead he felt his consciousness flee from this last degeneracy. A dream eclipsed the horror.
He was lying in darkness on a scented bed, while a woman’s voice sang to him, some wordless lullaby whose cradle rhythms were shared by a feather-light touch upon his body. Fingers were playing on his abdomen and groin. They were cold, but they knew more tricks than a whore. He was hard in a heart-beat; gasping in two. He’d never felt such caresses, coaxed by agonizing degrees to the point of no return. His gasps became cries, but the lullaby drowned them out, mocking his manhood with its nursery lilt. He was a helpless infant, despite his erection; or perhaps because of it. The touch grew more demanding, his cries more urgent.
For an instant his thrashings shook him from his dream, and his eyes flickered open long enough to see that he was still in the sister’s sepulchral embrace. Then the smothering slumber claimed him again, and he discharged into an emptiness so profound it devoured not only his seed but the lullaby and its singer; and, finally, the dream itself.
He woke alone, and weeping. Every ligament tender, he untied the knot he’d made of himself, and stood up.
His watch read nine minutes after two. The last train of the night had left Lime Street long ago; and the first of Sunday morning would not run for many hours yet.
VI
SICK SOULS
1
But then came another vision, and this one she hoped against hope was a dream. It was not.
‘Mimi?’ said the dark woman.
The stroke that had crippled Mimi had dimmed her eyes, but she had sight enough to recognize the figure standing at the bottom of her bed. After years of being alone with her secret, somebody from the Fugue had finally found her. But there would be no tearful reunions tonight, not with this visitor, nor her dead sisters.
The Incantatrix Immacolata had come here to fulfil a promise she’d made before the Fugue had been hidden: that, if she could not rule the Seerkind, she’d destroy them. She was Lilith’s descendant, she’d always claimed: the last pure line from the first state of magic. Her authority over them was therefore unquestionable. They’d laughed at her for her presumption. It wasn’t their nature to be ruled, nor to count much on genealogy. Immacolata had been humiliated; a fact a woman like her – possessed, it had to be admitted, of powers that were purer than most – would not easily forget. Now she’d found the carpet’s last Custodian, and she’d have blood if she could get it.
An age ago the Council had bequeathed Mimi some of the tactics of the Old Science to arm her against a situation such as this. They were minor raptures, no more; devices to distract an enemy. Nothing fatal. That took more time to learn than they’d had. She’d been grateful for them at the time, however: they’d offered some smidgen of comfort as she faced life in the Kingdom without her beloved Romo. But the years had gone by and nobody had come, either to tell her that the waiting was over and the Weave could give up its secrets, or to try and take the Fugue by force. The excitement of the early years, knowing she stood between magic and its destruction, dwindled to a weary watchfulness. She became lazy and forgetful; they all did.
Only towards the end, when she was alone, and she realized just how frail she was becoming, did she shake off the stupor that living amongst the Cuckoos had brought on, and try to set her beleaguered mental powers to the problem of the secret she’d protected for so long. But by that time her mind was wandering – the first symptoms of the stroke that would incapacitate her. It took her a day and a half to compose the short letter she’d written to Suzanna, a letter in which she’d risked saying more than she wanted to, because time was getting short, and she sensed danger close.
She’d been right; here it was. Immacolata had probably sensed the signal Mimi had sent up at the very last: a summons to any Kingdom-bound Seerkind who might have come to her aid. That, with hindsight, had probably been her greatest error. An incantatrix of Immacolata’s strength would not have missed such alarms.
Here she was, come to visit Mimi like a dispossessed child, eager to make good at the death-bed, and so claim her inheritance, it was an analogy not lost on the creature.
‘I told the nurse I was your daughter,’ she said, ‘and that I needed some time with you. Alone.’
Mimi would have spat in disgust, had she had the strength or the spittle.
‘– I know you’re going to die, so I’ve come to say goodbye, after all these years. You’ve lost the power of speech, I hear; so I’m not to expect you to babble your confession. There are other ways. We know how the mind can be laid bare without words, don’t we?’
She stepped a little closer to the bed.
Mimi knew what the Incantatrix said was true; there were ways a body – even one as wretched and close to death as her own – could be made to give up its secrets, if the interrogator knew the methods. And Immacolata did. She, the slaughterer of her own sisters; she, the eternal virgin, whose celibacy gave her access to powers lovers were denied: she had ways. Mimi would have to turn some final trick, or all would be lost.
From the corner of her eye Mimi saw the Hag, the withered sister, hunched up beside the wall, her toothless maw wide. The Magdalene, Immacolata’s second sister, was occupying the visitor’s chair, her legs splayed. They were waiting for the fun to begin.
Mimi opened her mouth, as if to speak.
‘Something to say?’ Immacolata asked.
As the Incantatrix spoke Mimi used what little strength she had to turn her left hand palm up. There, amid the grid of her life and love lines, was a symbol, drawn in henna, and reworked so often that her skin was now irredeemably stained; a symbol taught to her hours before the great weaving by a Babu in the Council.
She’d long ago forgotten what it meant or did – if she’d ever been told – but it was one of the few defences they’d given her that she was in any condition to use.
The raptures of the Lo were physical, and her body was too paralysed to perform them; those of the Aia were musical, and, being tone deaf, had been the first she’d forgotten. The Ye-me, the Seerkind whose genius was weaving, hadn’t given her raptures at all. They’d been too busy, during those last, hectic days, with the business of their magnum opus: the carpet that was soon to conceal the Fugue from sight for an age.
Indeed, most of what that Babu had taught her was beyond her present power to use – word raptures were valueless if your lips couldn’t shape them. All she had left was this obscure sign – little more than a dirt-mark on her palsied hand – to keep the Incantatrix at bay.
But nothing happened. There was no release of power; not even a breath. She tried to recall if the Babu had given her some specific instruction about activating the rapture, but all her mind would conjure was his face; and a smile he’d given her; and the trees behind his head sieving sunlight through their branches. What days they’d been; and she so young; and it all an adventure.
No adventure now. Just death on a stale bed.
Suddenly, a roar. And from her palm – released by the memory, perhaps – the rapture broke.
A ball of energy leapt from her hand. Immacolata stepped back as a humming net of light came down around the bed, keeping malice at bay.
The Incantatrix was quick to respond. The menstruum, that stream of bright darkness which was the blood of her subtle body, spilled from her nostrils. It was a power Mimi had seen manifested no more than a dozen times, always and only by women: an etheric solution in which it was said the wielder could dissolve all experience, and make it again in the image of her desire. While the Old Science was a democracy of magic, available to all – independent of gender, age or moral standing – the menstruum seemed to choose those it favoured. It had driven a fair number of those chosen to suicide with its demands and its visions; but it was undeniably a power – perhaps even a condition of the flesh – that knew no bounds.
It took a few droplets only, their spheres becoming barbed in the air, to lacerate the net that the Babu rapture had created, leaving Mimi utterly vulnerable.
Immacolata stared down at the old woman, fearful of what would come next. Doubtless the Council had left the Custodian with some endgame rapture which, in extremis, she’d unleash. That was why she’d counselled Shadwell that they try other routes of investigation first: in order to avoid this potentially lethal confrontation. But those routes had all been cul-de-sacs. The house in Rue Street had been robbed of its treasure. The sole witness, Mooney, had lost his wits. She’d been obliged to come here and face the Custodian, not fearing Mimi herself, but rather the scale of the defences the Council had surely lodged with her.
‘Go on …’ she said, ‘… do your worst.’
The old woman just lay there, her eyes full of anticipation.
‘We haven’t got forever,’ Immacolata said. ‘If you’ve got raptures, show them.’
Still she just lay there, with the arrogance of one who had power in plentiful supply.
Immacolata could bear the waiting no longer. She took a step towards the bed, in the hope of making the bitch show her powers; whatever they were. There was still no response.
Was it possible that she’d misread the signs? Was it perhaps not arrogance that made the woman lie so still, but despair? Dare she hope that the Custodian was somehow, miraculously, defenceless?
She touched Mimi’s open palm, brushing the spent calligraphy. The power there was defunct; and nothing further came to meet her from the woman on the bed.
If Immacolata knew pleasure, she knew it then. Unlikely as it seemed, the Custodian was unarmed. She possessed no final, devastating rapture. If she’d ever had such authority, age had decayed it.
‘Time to unburden yourself,’ she said, and let a dribble of torment climb into the air above Mimi’s trembling head.
2
The night nurse consulted the clock on the wall. It was thirty minutes since she’d left the tearful daughter with Mrs Laschenski. Strictly speaking she should have told the visitor to return the following morning, but the woman had travelled through the night, and besides there was every chance the patient would not make it to first light. Rules had to be tempered with compassion; but half an hour was enough.
As she started down the corridor, she heard a cry issuing from the old lady’s room, and the sound of furniture being overturned. She was at the door in seconds. The handle was clammy, and refused to turn. She rapped on the door, as the noise within grew louder still.
‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.
Inside, the Incantatrix looked down at the bag of dry bones and withered flesh on the bed. Where did this woman find the will-power to defy her?; to resist the needles of interrogation the menstruum had driven up through the roof of her mouth, into her very thoughts?
The Council had chosen well, electing her as one of the three guardians of the Weaveworld. Even now, with the menstruum probing the seals of her brain, she was preparing a final and absolute defence. She was going to die. Immacolata could see her willing death upon herself before the needles pricked her secrets out.
On the other side of the door the nurse’s enquiries rose in pitch and volume.
‘Open the door! Please, will you open the door!’
Time was running out. Ignoring the nurse’s calls, Immacolata closed her eyes and dug into the past for a marriage of forms that she hoped would unseat the old woman’s reason long enough for the needles to do their work. One part of the union was easily evoked: an image of death plucked from her one true refuge in the Kingdom, the Shrine of the Mortalities. The other was more problematic, for she’d only seen the man Mimi had left behind in the Fugue once or twice. But the menstruum had its way of dredging the memory up, and what better proof of the illusion’s potency than the look that now came over the old woman’s face, as her lost love appeared to her at the bottom of the bed, raising his rotting arms? Taking her cue. Immacolata pressed the points of her enquiry into the Custodian’s cortex, but before she had a chance to find the carpet there, Mimi – with one last gargantuan effort – seized hold of the sheet with her good hand and flung it towards the phantom, a punning call on the Incantatrix’s bluff.
Then she fell sideways from the bed, dead before she hit the floor.
Immacolata shrieked her fury; and as she did so, the nurse flung the door open.
What the woman saw in Room Six she would never tell, not for the rest of her long life. In part because she feared the derision of her peers; in part because if her eyes told the truth, and there were in the living world such terrors as she glimpsed in Mimi Laschenski’s room, to talk of them might invite their proximity, and she, a woman of her times, had neither prayers nor wit enough to keep such darkness at bay.
Besides, they were gone even as her eyes fell upon them – the naked woman and the dead man at the foot of the bed – gone as if they’d never been. And there was just the daughter, saying: ‘No … no …’ and her mother dead on the floor.
‘I’ll get the Doctor,’ said the nurse. ‘Please stay here.’
But when she got back to the room, the grieving woman had made her final farewells, and left.
3
‘What happened?’ said Shadwell, as they drove from the hospital.
‘She’s dead,’ said Immacolata, and said no more until they’d driven two miles from the gates.
Shadwell knew better than to press her. She would tell what she had to tell in her own good time.
Which she did, saying:
‘She had no defence, Shadwell, except some poxy trick I learned in my cot.’
‘How’s that possible?’
‘Maybe she just grew old.’ came Immacolata’s reply. ‘Her mind rotted.’
‘And the other Custodians?’
‘Who knows? Dead, maybe. Wandered off into the Kingdom. She was on her own, at the last.’ The Incantatrix smiled; an expression her face was not familiar with. ‘There was I, being cautious and calculating, afraid she’d have raptures that’d undo me, and she had nothing. Nothing. Just an old woman dying in a bed.’
‘If she’s the last, there’s no-one to stop us, is there? No-one to keep us from the Fugue.’
‘So it’d seem,’ Immacolata replied, then lapsed into silence again, content to watch the sleeping Kingdom slide past the window.
It still amazed her, this woeful place. Not in its physical particulars, but in its unpredictability.
They’d grown old here, the Keepers of the Weave. They – who’d loved the Fugue enough to give their lives to keep it from harm – they’d finally wearied of their vigil, and withered into forgetfulness.
Hate remembered though; hate remembered long after love had forgotten. She was living proof of that. Her purpose – to find the Fugue and break its bright heart – was undimmed after a search that had occupied a human life-time.
And that search would soon be over. The Fugue found and put up for auction, its territories playgrounds for the Cuckoos, its peoples – the four great families – sold into slavery or left to wander in this hopeless place. She looked out at the city. A fidgety light was washing brick and concrete, frightening off what little enchantment the night might have lent.
The magic of the Seerkind could not survive long in such a world. And, stripped of their raptures, what were they? A lost people, with visions behind their eyes, and no power to make them true.
They and this tarnished, forsaken city would have much to talk about.
VII
THE TALL-BOY
1
Of the design which her grandmother had shown her, she could find no sign. It was not in the grain of the floorboards, nor in the pattern of the wallpaper. Whatever it had been, it was gone now. She didn’t look forward to the melancholy task of breaking that news to the old lady.
What she did find, however, all but concealed behind the stack of furniture at the top of the stairs, was the tall-boy. It took a little time to remove the items piled in front of it, but there was a revelation waiting when she finally set the candle on the floor before it, and opened the doors.
