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Part Eight. The Return

‘You were about to tell me

something, child-but you

left off before you began ‘

William Congreve The Old Bachelor

STRATEGY

Shadwell's army of deliverance consisted of three main battalions.

The first, and by far the largest, was the mass of the Prophet's followers, the converts whose fervour he had whipped to fanatical proportions, and whose devotion to him and to his promise of a new age knew no bounds. He had warned them that there would be bloodshed, and bloodshed they would have, much of it their own. But they were prepared for such sacrifice; indeed the wilder faction amongst them, chiefly Ye-me, the most hot-headed of the Families, were fairly itching to break some bones.

It was an enthusiasm Shadwell had already used - albeit discreetly - when occasional members of his congregation had called his preaching into question, and he was ready to use it again if there was any sign of softening in the ranks. He would of course do what he could to subdue the Fugue by rhetoric, but he didn't much fancy his chances. His followers had been easily duped: their lives in the Kingdom had so immersed them in half-truths that they were ready to believe any fiction if it was properly advertised. But the Seerkind who had remained in the Fugue would not be so easily misled. That was when the truncheons and the pistols would be called into play.

The second part of his army was made up of Hobart's confederates, choice members of the Squad Hobart had diligently prepared for a day of revolution that had never come. Shadwell had introduced them to the pleasures of his jacket, and they had all found something in the folds worth selling their souls for. Now they were his Elite, ready to defend his person to the death should circumstance demand.

The third and final battalion was less visible than the other two, but no less powerful for that. Its soldiers were the by-blows, the sons and daughters of the Magdalene: an unnumbered and unordered rabble whose resemblance to their fathers was usually remote, and whose natures ranged from the subtly lunatic to the beserk. Shadwell had made sure the sisters had kept their charges well hidden, as they were evidence of a corruption the Prophet could scarcely be associated with, but they were waiting, scrabbling at the veils Imma-colata had flung around them, ready for release should the campaign demand such terrors.

He had planned his invasion with the precision of a Napoleon.

The first phase, which he undertook within an hour of dawn, was to go to Capra's House, there to confront the Council of the Families before it had time to debate the situation. The approach was made as a triumphal march, with the Prophet's car, its smoked glass windows concealing the passengers from the eyes of the inquisitive, leading a convoy of a dozen vehicles. In the back of the car Shadwell sat with Immacolata at his side. As they drove he offered his condolences on the death of the Magdalene.

‘I'm most distressed ...' he said quietly. ‘... we've lost a valued ally.'

Immacolata said nothing.

Shadwell took a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and lit up. The cigarette, and the covetous way he had of smoking it, as if any moment it would be snatched from his lips, was utterly out of synch with the mask he wore.

‘I think we're both aware of how this changes things,' he said, his tone colourless.

‘What does it change?' she said. How he liked the unease that was plain on her face.

‘You're vulnerable,' he reminded her. ‘Now more than ever. That concerns me.'

‘Nothing's going to happen to me,' she insisted.

‘Oh but it might,' he said softly. ‘We don't know how much resistance we're going to meet. It might be wise if you withdrew from the Fugue entirely.'

‘No! I want to see them burn.'

‘Understandable,' Shadwell said. ‘But you're going to be a target. And if we lose you, we lose access to the Magdalene's children as well,'

Immacolata looked across at Shadwell. ‘Is that what this is about? You want the by-blows?'

‘Well... I think there's some tactical -'

‘Have them,' she interrupted. ‘Take them, they're yours. My gift to you. I don't want to be reminded of them. I despised her appetites,'

Shadwell offered a thin smile.

‘My thanks,' he said.

‘You're welcome to them. Just let me watch the fires, that's all I ask,'

‘Oh certainly. Absolutely,'

‘And I want the woman found. Suzanna. I want her found and given to me,'

‘She's yours,' said Shadwell, as though nothing were simpler. ‘One thing though. The children. Is there some particular word I use to bring them to me?'

There is,'

He drew on his cigarette. ‘I'd best have it,' he said. ‘As they're mine,'

‘Just call them by the names she gave them. That'll unleash them,'

‘And what are their names?' he said, reaching into his pocket for a pen.

He scribbled them on the back of the cigarette pack as he recited them, so as not to forget them. Then, the business concluded, they continued their drive in silence.

THE BURIAL PARTY

Suzanna and Cal's first duty was to locate Jerichau's body, which took fully half an hour. The landscape of the Fugue had long since invaded the place where she'd left him, and it was more by luck than system that they found him. Luck, and the sound of children; for Jerichau had not remained unaccompanied. Two women, and a half dozen of their offspring, from two years to seven or so, were standing (and playing) around the corpse.

‘Who is he?' one of the women wanted to know when they approached.

‘His name is Jerichau,' said Suzanna. ‘Was,' one of the children corrected her. ‘Was.'

Cal posed the inevitable, and delicate, question. ‘What happens to bodies here? I mean ... where do we take him?'

The woman grinned, displaying an impressive absence of teeth.

‘Leave him here,' she said. ‘He's not going to mind, is he? Bury him.'

She looked down lovingly on her smallest boy, who was naked and filthy, his hair full of leaves. ‘What do you think?' she asked him. He took his thumb from his mouth, and shouted: ‘Bury him!' - a chant which was immediately taken up by the other children. ‘Bury him! Bury him!' they yelled, and instantly one of them fell to her knees and began to dig at the earth like a mongrel in search of a bone.

‘Surely there must be some formalities,' Cal said.

‘Are you a Cuckoo then?' one of the mothers enquired.

‘Yes.'

‘And him?' She pointed to Jerichau.

‘No,' said Suzanna. ‘He was a Babu; and a great friend.'

The children had all taken to digging now, laughing and throwing handfuls of earth at each other as they laboured.

‘Seems to me he was about ready to die,' said the woman to Suzanna. ‘Judging by the look of him.'

She murmured: ‘He was.'

‘Then you should put him in the ground and be done with it,' came the response. ‘They're just bones,'

Cal winced at this, but Suzanna seemed moved by the woman's words.

‘I know,' she said. ‘I do know,'

The children'll help you dig a hole. They like to dig,'

‘Is this right?' said Cal.

‘Yes,' said Suzanna with a sudden certainty: ‘Yes it is,' and she and Cal went down on their knees alongside the children and dug.

It was not easy work. The earth was heavy, and damp; they were both quickly muddied. But the sheer sweat of it, and the fact of getting to grips with the dirt they were going to put Jerichau's body beneath, made for healthy, and strangely rewarding, labour. It took a long time, during which the women watched, supervising the children and sharing a pipe of pungent tobacco as they did so.

As they worked Cal mused on how often the Fugue and its peoples had confounded his expectations. Here they were on their knees digging a grave with a gaggle of children: it was not what his dreams of being here had prepared him for. But in its way it was more real than he'd ever dared hope - dirt under the fingernails and a snotty-nosed child at his side blithely eating a worm. Not a dream at all, but an awakening.

When the hole was deep enough for Jerichau to be decently concealed, they set about moving him. At this point Cal could no longer countenance the children's involvement. He told them to stand away as they went to assist in lifting the corpse.

‘Let them help,' one of the women chided him. They're enjoying themselves.'

Cal looked up at the row of children, who were mud-people by now. They were clearly itching to be pall-bearers, all except for the worm-eater, who was still sitting on the lip of the grave, his feet dangling into the hole.

‘This isn't any business for kids,' Cal said. He was faintly repulsed by the mothers' indifference to their off-springs' morbidity.

‘Is it not?' said one of the women, refilling the pipe for the umpteenth time. ‘You know something more about it than they do, then?'

He looked at her hard.

‘Go on,' she challenged him. Tell them what you know.'

‘Nothing,' he conceded reluctantly.

Then what's to fear?' she enquired gently. ‘If there's nothing to fear, why not let them play?'

‘Maybe she's right, Cal,' said Suzanna, laying her hand on his. ‘And I think he'd like it,' she said. ‘He was never one for solemnity.'

Cal wasn't convinced, but this was no time to argue. He shrugged, and the children lent their small hands to the task of lifting Jerichau's body and laying it in the grave. As it was, they showed a sweet tenderness in the act, untainted by formality or custom. One of the girls brushed some dirt from the dead man's face, her touch feather-light, while her siblings straightened his limbs in the bed of earth. Then they withdrew without a word, leaving Suzanna to lay a kiss on Jerichau's lips. It was only then, at the very last, that she let go a small sob.

Cal picked up a handful of soil and threw it down into the grave. At this the children took their cue, and began to cover the body up. It was quickly done. Even the mothers came to the graveside and pitched a handful of earth in, as a gesture

of farewell to this fellow they'd only known as a subject of debate.

Cal thought of Brendan's funeral, of the coffin shunted off through faded curtains while a pallid young priest led a threadbare hymn. This was a better end, no doubt of it, and the children's smiles had been in their way more appropriate than prayers and platitudes.

When it was all done, Suzanna found her voice, thanking both the grave-diggers and their mothers.

‘After all that digging,' said the eldest of the girls, ‘I just hope he grows.'

‘He will,' said her mother, with no trace of indulgence. They always do.'

On that unlikely remark, Cal and Suzanna went on their way, with directions to Capra's House. Where, had they but known it, the flies were soon to be feasting.

Ill

THE HORSE UNHARNESSED

Norris the Hamburger Billionaire had long ago forgotten what it was like to be treated as a man. Shadwell had other uses for him. First, of course, during the Weave's first waking, as his horse. Then, when man and mount returned to the Kingdom and Shadwell took on the mantle of Prophet, as footstool, foodtaster and fool, the butt of the Salesman's every humiliating whim. To this, Norris put up no resistance. As long as he was in thrall to the raptures of Shadwell's jacket he was utterly dead to himself.

But tonight, Shadwell had tired of his creature. He had new vassals on every side, and mistreating the sometime plutocrat had become a tired joke. Before the unweaving, he'd left Norris to the untender mercies of his Elite, to be their lackey. That unkindness was nothing, however, to his other: the withdrawal of the illusion that had won Norris' compliance.

Norris was not a stupid man. When the shock of waking to find himself bruised from head to foot had worn off he soon put the pieces of his recent history together. He couldn't know how much time had passed since he'd fallen for Shadwell's trick, (he'd been declared dead in his home town in Texas, and his wife had already married his brother), nor could he recall more than vaguely the discomforts and abuse that had been heaped upon him in his period of servitude. But he was quite certain of two things. One, that it was Shadwell who had reduced him to his present abjection, and two, that Shadwell would pay for the privilege.

His first task was to escape his new masters, which, during the spectacle of the unweaving, was easily done. They didn't even notice that he'd slipped away. The second objective was to find the Salesman, and this he reasoned was best done with the aid of whatever police force this peculiar country boasted. To that end he approached the first group of Seerkind he came across and demanded to be taken to somebody in authority. They were apparently unimpressed by his demands, but suspicious nevertheless. They called him a Cuckoo, which he took some exception to, and then accused him of trespassing. One of the women even suggested he might be a spy, and should be taken post haste to somebody in authority, at which point Morris reminded her that he'd been requesting that all along.

So they took him.

Which is how, a short while later, Shadwell's discarded horse was brought to Capra's House, which was at the time the centre of considerable commotion. The Prophet had arrived at the House half an hour before, at the end of his triumphal march, but the Councillors had refused him access to the sacred ground until they'd first debated the ethics of it.

The Prophet declared himself willing to accede to their metaphysical caution (after all was he not Capra's mouthpiece?, he understood absolutely the delicacy of this), and so stayed behind the black windows of his car until the Councillors had sorted the matter out.

Crowds had gathered, eager to see the Prophet in the flesh, and fascinated by the cars. There was an air of innocent excitement. Envoys ferried messages back and forth between the occupants of the House and the leader of the convoy that waited on its threshold, until it was at last announced that the Prophet would indeed be given access to Capra's House, on the understanding that he went bare-foot, and alone. This the Prophet apparently agreed to, because mere minutes after this announcement the car door was opened and the great man indeed stepped forth, his feet naked, and approached the doorstep. The throng pressed forward to see him better - this Saviour who'd brought them to safety.

Norris, who was towards the back of the crowd, caught only a glimpse of the figure. He saw nothing of the man's face. But he saw the jacket well enough, and he recognized it on the instant. It was the same garment with which the Salesman had tricked him. How could he ever forget the iridescent fabric? It was Shadwell's jacket. It followed therefore that the wearer was Shadwell.

The sight of the jacket brought back an echo of the humiliations he'd endured at Shadwell's hands. He remembered the kicks and curses; he remembered the contempt. Filled with just fury, he shrugged off the hold of the man at his side, and squirmed his way through the pack of spectators towards the door of Capra's House.

At the front of the crowd he glimpsed the jacket and the man who wore it stepping inside. He made to follow, but a guard at the doorway blocked his path. He was pitched backwards, the throng laughing and applauding his antics, idiots that they were.

‘I know him!' he yelled, as Shadwell disappeared from view. ‘I know him!'

He got to his feet, and ran at the door a second time, veering away at the last moment. The guard took the bait and gave chase, pursuing him into the crowd. Norris' life as a lackey had taught him something of strategy; he avoided the guard's grasp and made a dive for the unprotected doorway, flinging himself over the threshold before his pursuer could bring him down.

‘Shadwell!' he yelled.

In the chamber of Capra's House the Prophet froze in mid-platitude. The words he'd been speaking were all conciliation, all understanding, but even the blindest of the assembly could not have failed to read the flicker of anger in the peace-bringer's eyes as that name was called.

‘Shadwell!'

He turned towards the door. Behind him he heard the Councillors exchange whispered remarks. Then there was a commotion in the passageway outside, the door was flung open, and Norris was standing there, yelling his name.

The horse faltered as it set eyes on the Prophet. Shadwell could see doubt registering. This wasn't the face Norris had expected to see. He might yet escape with his masquerade unchallenged.

‘Shadwell?' he said to Norris. ‘I'm afraid I don't know anybody by that name.' He turned to the Councillors. ‘Do you know the gentleman?' he enquired.

They regarded him with open suspicion, especially an old man at the heart of the gaggle, who hadn't taken his baleful eyes off the Prophet since Shadwell had entered this hovel. Now the canker of doubt had spread, damn it.

The jacket....' said Norris.

‘Who is this man?' the Prophet demanded. ‘Will somebody please have him taken out?' He tried to make a joke of it. ‘I think he's a little mad.'

Nobody moved; nobody except the horse. Norris stepped towards the Prophet, yelling as he came.

‘I know what you did to me!' he said. ‘Don't think I don't. Well I'm going to sue your ass off, Shadwell. Or whoever the hell you are.'

There was a further disturbance at the front door, and Shadwell glanced up to see two of Hobart's finest knocking the guard aside and coming to his aid. He opened his mouth to instruct them he could handle the situation, but before the words were off his lips Norris, his face all fury, flung himself at his enemy.

The Prophet's Elite had strict orders in such circumstances. Nobody, but nobody, was to lay hands on their beloved leader. Without a second's hesitation the two men had their pistols from their holsters, and they shot Norris dead in his tracks.

He fell forward at Shadwell's feet, blood coming from his wounds in bright spurts.

‘Jesus God,' said Shadwell, through gritted teeth.

The echoes of the executioners' shots took longer to die than Norris had. It was as if the walls disbelieved the sound, and were playing it back and forth, back and forth, until they'd verified the transgression. Outside, the crowd had fallen absolutely silent; silent too, the assembly behind him. He could feel their accusing eyes.

That was stupid,' he murmured to the killers. Then his arms outspread, he turned to the councillors.

‘I do apologize for this unfortunate -'

‘You're not welcome here,' one of the number said. ‘You've brought death into Capra's House.'

‘It was a misunderstanding,' he replied softly.

‘No.'

‘I insist you hear me out.'

Again: ‘No.'

Shadwell offered a tiny smile.

‘You call yourselves wise,' he said. ‘Believe me, if that's true then you'll listen to what I've got to say. I didn't come here alone. I've got people—your people, Seerkind - with me. They love me, because I want to see the Fugue prosper, as they do. Now ... I'm prepared to let you share my vision, and the triumph that'll come with it, if you want to. But believe me, I'm going to liberate the Fugue with or without your support. Do I make myself clear?'

‘Get out of here,' said the old man who'd been watching him.

‘Be careful, Messimeris,' one of the others whispered.

‘You don't seem to understand,' Shadwell said. ‘I'm bringing you freedom.'

‘You're not Seerkind,' Messimeris replied. ‘You're a Cuckoo.'

‘What if I am?'

‘You cheated your way in here. You don't hear Capra's voice.'

‘Oh I hear voices,' said Shadwell. ‘I hear them loud and clear. They tell me that the Fugue's defenceless. That its leaders have spent too much time in hiding. That they're weak and frightened.'

He surveyed the faces in front of him, and saw, it had to be admitted, little of the weakness or the fear he spoke of: only a stoicism that would take longer to erode than he had time to waste. He glanced round at the men who'd shot Norris.

‘It seems we have no choice,' he said. The men perfectly understood the signal. They withdrew. Shadwell turned back to the Councillors.

‘We want you to leave,' Messimeris re-stated.

‘Is that your final word?'

‘It is,' said the other.

Shadwell nodded. Seconds ticked by, during which neither side moved a muscle. Then the front door opened again, and the gunmen returned. They had brought four more of the Elite with them, which made up a firing squad of six.

‘I request you, one final time,' said Shadwell, as the squad formed a line to either side of him, ‘don't resist me.'

The Councillors looked more incredulous than afraid. They had lived their lives in this world of wonders, but here before them was an arrogance that finally brought disbelief to their faces. Even when the gunmen raised their weapons they made no move, spoke no protest. Only Messimeris asked:

‘Who is Shadwell?'

‘A salesman I once knew,' said the man in the fine jacket. ‘But he's dead and gone.'

‘No,' said Messimeris. ‘You're Shadwell.'

‘Call me what you like,' said the Prophet. ‘Only bow your heads to me. Bow your heads and all's forgiven.'

Still there was no movement. Shadwell turned to the gunman at his left and claimed the pistol from his hand. He pointed it at Messimeris' heart. The two were standing no more than four yards apart; a blind man could not have failed to kill at that range.

‘I say again: bow your heads.'

At last, a few of the assembly seemed to comprehend the seriousness of their situation, and did as he requested. Most just stared, however, pride, stupidity or plain disbelief keeping them from acquiescence.

Shadwell knew the crisis point was upon him. He either pulled the trigger now, and in so doing bought himself a world, or else he left the salesroom and never looked back. In that instant he remembered standing on a hill-top, the Fugue laid before him. The memory tipped the balance. He shot the man.

The bullet entered Messimeris' chest, but there was no flow of blood; nor did he fall. Shadwell fired again, and a third time for good measure. Each shot hit home, but the man still failed to fall.

The Salesman felt a tremor of panic run through the six gunmen that stood around him. The same question was on their lips as on his: why wouldn't the old man die?

He fired his pistol a fourth time. As the bullet struck him the victim took a step towards his would-be executioner, raising his arm as he did so, as if he intended to snatch the smoking weapon from Shadwell's hand.

The motion was enough to push one of the six beyond the limits of his self-control. With a high-pitched cry he started to fire into the crowd. His hysteria instantly ignited the rest. Suddenly they were all firing, emptying their guns in their hunger to close the accusing eyes in front of them. In moments the chamber was filled with smoke and din.

Through it all, Shadwell saw the man he'd first fired upon complete the motion he'd begun with his salute. Then Messimeris fell forward, dead. His collapse didn't silence the guns; they blazed on. There were a few Councillors who'd fallen to their knees, heads bowed as Shadwell had demanded, and there were others who were taking refuge in the corners of the room. But most were simply gunned down where they stood.

Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

Shadwell threw down his gun, and - though he had no taste for abattoirs - forced himself to survey the carnage before him. It was, he knew, the responsibility of one aspiring to Godhood never to look away. Wilful ignorance was the last refuge of humanity, and that was a condition he would soon have transcended.

And, when he studied the scene, it wasn't so unbearable.

He could look at the tumble of corpses and see them for the empty sacks they were.

But, as he turned to the door, something did make him flinch. Not a sight, but a memory: of Messimeris' last act. That stepping forward, that raised hand. He hadn't realized what it had signified until now. The man had been seeking payment. Try as he might to find some other explanation, Shadwell could not.

He, the sometime Salesman, had finally become a purchaser; and Messimeris' dying gesture had been to remind him of that.

He would have to start the campaign moving. Subdue the opposition and get access to the Gyre as speedily as possible. Once he'd drawn back the veil of cloud he'd be a God. And Gods were beyond the claims of creditors, alive or dead.

THE ROPE-DANCERS

Cal and Suzanna walked as swiftly as curiosity would allow. There was much, despite the urgency of their mission, that slowed their steps. Such fecundity in the world around them, and a razor-sharp wit in its shaping, that they found themselves remarking on the remarkable so frequently they had to give it up and simply look. Amid the spectacle of flora and fauna surrounding them they saw no species entirely without precedent in the Kingdom of the Cuckoo, but nothing here - from pebble to bird, nor anything the eye could admire between - was untouched by some transforming magic.

Creatures crossed their path that belonged distantly to the family of fox, hare, cat and snake; but only distantly. And amongst the changes wrought in them was a total lack of timidity. None fled before the newcomers; only glanced Cal and Suzanna's way in casual acknowledgement of their existence, then went about their business.

It might have been Eden - or an opium dream of same -until the sound of a radio being ineptly tuned broke the illusion. Fragments of music and voices, interspersed with piercing whines and white noise, all punctuated by whoops of pleasure, drifted from beyond a small stand of silver birches. The whoops were rapidly replaced, however, by shouting and threats, which escalated as Cal and Suzanna made their way through the trees. On the other side was a field of tall, sere grass. In it, three youths. One was balanced on a rope slung loosely between posts, watching the other two as they fought. The source of the acrimony was self-evident: the radio. The shorter of the pair, whose hair was so blond it was almost white, was defending his possession from his bulkier opponent, with little success. The aggressor snatched it from the youth's grip and threw it across the field. It struck one of several weather-worn statues that stood half lost in the grass, and the song it had been playing abruptly ceased. Its owner threw himself at the destroyer, yelling his fury:

‘You bastard! Your broke it! You damn well broke it.'

‘It was Cuckoo-shite, de Bono,' the other youth replied, easily fending off the blows. ‘You shouldn't mess with shite. Didn't your Mam tell you that?'

‘It was mineV de Bono shouted back, giving up on his attack and going in search of his possession. ‘I don't want your scummy hands on it.'

‘God, you're pathetic, you know that?'

‘Shut up, dickhead!' de Bono spat back. He couldn't locate the radio in the shin-high grass, which merely fuelled his fury.

‘Galin's right,' the rope-percher piped up.

De Bono had fished a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from the breast pocket of his shirt, and had crouched down to scrabble around for his prize.

‘It's corruption,' said the youth on the rope, who had now taken to performing a series of elaborate steps along its length: hops, skips and jumps. ‘Starbrook would have your balls if he knew.'

‘Starbrook won't know,' de Bono growled.

‘Oh yes he will,' said Galin, casting a look up at the rope-dancer. ‘Because you're going to tell him, aren't you, Toller?'

‘Maybe,' came the reply; and with it a smug smile.

De Bono had found the radio. He picked it up and shook it. There was no music forthcoming.

‘You shit-head,' he said, turning to Galin. ‘Look what you did.'

He might have renewed his assault at this juncture, if Toller, from his perch on the rope, hadn't set eyes on their audience.

‘Who the hell are you?' he said.

All three stared at Suzanna and Cal.

This is Starbrook's Field,' said Galin, his tone threatening. ‘You shouldn't be here. He doesn't like women here.'

‘Mind you, he's a damn fool,' said de Bono, putting his fingers through his hair and grinning at Suzanna. ‘And you can tell him that, too, if he ever comes back.'

‘I will,' said Toller, grimly. ‘Depend on it.'

‘Who is this Starbrook?' said Cal.

‘Who's Starbrook?' Galin said. ‘Everybody knows ....' His voice trailed away; comprehension dawned. ‘You're Cuckoos,' he said.

That's right.'

‘Cuckoos?' said Toller, so aghast he almost lost his balance. ‘In the Field?'

De Bono's grin merely became more luminous at this revelation.

‘Cuckoos,' he said. Then you can mend the machine -'

He crossed towards Cal and Suzanna, proffering the radio.

‘I'll give it a try,' said Cal.

‘Don't you dare,' said Galin, either to Cal, or de Bono, or both.

‘It's just a radio, for God's sake,' Cal protested.

‘It's Cuckoo-shite,' said Galin.

‘Corruption,' Toller announced once more.

‘Where did you get it?' Cal asked de Bono.

‘None of your business,' said Galin. He took a step towards the trespassers. ‘Now I told you once: you're not welcome here.'

‘I think he's made his point, Cal,' Suzanna said. ‘Leave it be.'

‘Sorry,' Cal said to de Bono. ‘You'll have to mend it yourself.'

‘I don't know how,' the youth replied, crest-fallen.

‘We've got work to do,' Suzanna said, one eye on Galin. ‘We have to go.'

She pulled on Cal's arm. ‘Come on,' she said.

That's it,' said Galin. ‘Damn Cuckoos.'

‘I want to break his nose,' Cal said.

‘We're not here to spill blood. We're here to stop it being spilled.'

‘I know. I know.'

With an apologetic shrug to de Bono, Cal turned his back on the field, and they started away through the birches. As they reached the other side they heard footsteps behind them. Both turned. De Bono was following them, still nursing his radio.

‘I'll come with you,' he said, without invitation. ‘You can mend the machine as we go.'

‘What about Starbrook?' Cal said.

‘Starbrook's not coming back,' de Bono replied. ‘They'll wait ‘til the grass grows up their backsides and he still won't come back. I've got better things to do.'

He grinned.

‘I heard what the machine said,' he told them. ‘It's going to be a fine day.'

De Bono proved an instructive fellow-traveller. There wasn't a subject he wasn't prepared to speculate upon, and his enthusiasm for talk did something to coax Suzanna from the melancholy that had come in the wake of Jerichau's death. Cal let them talk. He had his hands full trying to walk and repair the radio at the same time. He did, however, manage a repeat of his earlier question, as to where de Bono had got the item in the first place.

‘One of the Prophet's men,' de Bono explained. ‘Gave it to me this morning. He had boxes of them.'

‘Did he indeed,' said Cal.

‘It's a bribe,' said Suzanna.

‘You think I don't know that?' said de Bono. ‘I know you get nothing for nothing. But I don't believe everything a Cuckoo gives me is corruption. That's Starbrook's talk. We've lived with Cuckoos before, and survived -' He broke off, and turned his attention to Cal. ‘Any luck?'

‘Not yet. I'm not very good with wires.'

‘Maybe I'll find somebody in Nonesuch,' he said, ‘who can do it for me. It's only spitting distance now.'

‘We're going to Capra's House,' said Suzanna.

‘And I'll go with you. Only via the town.'

Suzanna began to argue.

‘A man's got to eat,' said de Bono. ‘My stomach thinks my throat's cut.'

‘No detours,' said Suzanna.

‘It's not a detour,' de Bono replied, beaming. ‘It's on our way.' He cast her a sideways glance. ‘Don't be so suspicious,' he said. ‘You're worse than Galin. I'm not going to lead you astray. Trust me.'

‘We haven't got time for sight-seeing. We've got urgent business.'

‘With the Prophet?'

‘Yes...'

‘There's a piece of Cuckoo-shite,' Cal commented.

‘Who? The Prophet?' said de Bono. ‘A Cuckoo?'

‘I'm afraid so,' said Suzanna.

‘See, Galin wasn't entirely wrong,' Cal said. ‘The radio's a little piece of corruption.'

‘I'm safe,' said de Bono. ‘It can't touch me.'

‘Oh no?' said Suzanna.

‘Not here,' de Bono replied, tapping his chest. ‘I'm sealed.'

‘Is that how it has to be?' said Suzanna, sighing. ‘You sealed up in your assumptions, and us in ours?'

‘Why not?' said de Bono. ‘We don't need you.'

‘You want the radio,' she pointed out.

He snorted. ‘Not that much. If I lose it I won't weep. It's worthless. All Cuckoo stuff is.'

‘Is that what Starbrook says?' Suzanna remarked.

‘Oh very clever,' he replied, somewhat sourly.

‘I dreamt of this place -' Cal said, breaking into the debate. ‘I think a lot of Cuckoos do.'

‘You may dream of us,' de Bono replied ungraciously. ‘We don't of you.'

That's not true,' Suzanna said. ‘My grandmother loved one of your people, and he loved her back. If you can love us, you can dream of us too. The way we dream of you, given the chance.'

She's thinking of Jerichau, Cal realized: she's talking in the abstract, but that's who she's thinking of.

‘Is that so?' said de Bono.

‘Yes, that's so,' Suzanna replied, with sudden fierceness. ‘It's all the same story.'

‘What story?' Cal said.

‘We live it and they live it,' she said, looking at de Bono. ‘It's about being born, and being afraid of dying, and how love saves us.' This she said with great certainty, as though it had taken her a good time to reach this conclusion and she was unshakeable on it.

It silenced the opposition awhile. All three walked on without further word for two minutes or more, until de Bono said:

‘I agree.'

She looked up at him.

‘You do?' she said, plainly surprised.

He nodded. ‘One story?' he said. ‘Yes, that makes sense to me. Finally, it's the same for you as it is for us, raptures or no raptures. Like you say. Being born, dying: and love between.' He made a small murmur of appreciation, then added: ‘You'd know more about the last part, of course,' he said, unable to suppress a giggle. ‘Being the older woman.'

She laughed; and as if in celebration the radio leapt into life once more, much to its owner's delight and Cal's astonishment.

‘Good man,' de Bono whooped. ‘Good man!'

He claimed it from Cal's hands, and began to tune it, so that it was with musical accompaniment that they entered the extraordinary township of Nonesuch.

NONESUCH

As they stepped into the streets de Bono warned them that the township had been put together in considerable haste, and that they shouldn't expect a paradigm of civil planning. But the warning went little way to preparing them for the experience ahead. There seemed to be no sign whatsoever of order in the place. The houses had been laid cheek by jowl in hapless confusion, the tunnels between - the terms streets flattered them - so narrow, and so thick with citizens, that wherever the eye went it found faces and facades ranging from the primitive to the baroque.

Yet it wasn't dark here. There was a shimmering in the stone, and in the paving at their feet, that lit the passages, and turned the humblest wall into an accidental masterpiece of bright mortar and brighter brick.

Any glamour the town could lay claim to was more than matched by its inhabitants. Their clothes had in them that same amalgam of the severe and the dazzling which the visitors had come to recognize as quintessentially Seerkindish; but here, in the Fugue's closest approximation to an urban environment, the style had been taken to new extremes. Everywhere there were remarkable garments and accoutrements on view. A formal waistcoat that rang with countless tiny bells. A woman whose clothes, though buttoned up to the throat, so matched the colour of her skin she was dressed as if naked. On a window sill a young girl sat cross-legged, ribbons of every colour lifting around her face on no discernible breeze.

Further down the same alley a man whose fedora seemed to have been woven from his hair was talking with his daughters, while in an adjacent doorway, a man in a rope suit sang to his dog. And style, of course, bred anti-style, like that of the negress and the white woman who whistled past naked but for pantaloons held up with string.

Though all took pleasure in how they appeared, it was not an end in itself. They had business to do this new morning; there was no time for posturing.

The only sights that seemed to be drawing any significant attention were the few items of late twentieth-century bric-a-brac that a few of the citizens were playing with. More gifts from the Prophet's Elite, no doubt. Toys that would tarnish in days, the way all Shadwell's promises would. There was no time to try and persuade the owners of these glittering nonsenses to discard them; they would find out soon enough how frail any gift from that source truly was.

‘I'll take you to The Liars,' said de Bono, leading the way through the crowd. ‘We'll eat there, then get on our way.'

From every direction sights and sounds claimed the attention of the Cuckoos. Snatches of conversation came at them from doorstep and window; and songs (some from radios); and laughter. A baby bawled in its mother's arms; something barked above them, and Cal looked up to see a peacock parading on a high balcony.

‘Where's he gone, for God's sake?' said Suzanna, as de Bono disappeared into the crowd for the third or fourth time. ‘He's too damn quick.'

‘We have to trust him. We need a guide,' said Cal. He caught sight of de Bono's blond head. There -'

They turned a corner. As they did so a cry went up from somewhere in the packed alleyway ahead, so piercing and so grief-stricken it seemed murder must have been committed. The sound didn't silence the crowd, but hushed it enough for Cal and Suzanna to catch the words that followed, as the echo of the howl died.

They burned Capra's House!'

That can't be,' somebody said, a denial taken up on every

side, as the word spread. But the news-carrier was not about to be shouted down.

‘They burned it!' he insisted. ‘And killed the Council.'

Cal had pressed forward through the throng to within sight of the man, who indeed looked as if he'd witnessed some catastrophe. He was dirtied with smoke and mud, through which tears coursed as he repeated his story, or what few bones of it there were. The denials were quietening now: there could be no doubting that he spoke the truth.

It was Suzanna who asked the simple question:

‘Who did it?'

The man looked her way.

The Prophet....' he breathed. ‘It was the Prophet.'

At this the crowd erupted, curses and imprecations filling the air.

Suzanna turned back to Cal.

‘We weren't quick enough,' she said, tears in her eyes. ‘Jesus, Cal, we should have been there.'

‘We wouldn't have made it,' said a voice at their side. De Bono had reappeared. ‘Don't blame yourselves,' he said. Then added: ‘Or me.'

‘What now?' said Cal.

‘We find the bastard and we kill him,' Suzanna said. She took hold of de Bono's shoulder. ‘Will you show us the way out?'

‘Of course.'

He about-turned and led them away from the knot of citizens surrounding the weeping man. It was apparent as they went that the news had reached every ear and alleyway. The songs and the laughter had entirely vanished. A few people were staring up at the slice of sky between the roofs, as if waiting for lightning. The looks on their faces reminded Cal of how the people of Chariot Street had looked, the day of the whirlwind: full of unspoken questions.

To judge by the snatches of conversation they caught as they went, there was some argument as to what had precisely happened. Some were saying that all those in Capra's House had been murdered; others that there were survivors. But

whatever the discrepancies, the broader points were undisputed: the Prophet had declared war on any who challenged his primacy; and to that end his followers were already sweeping the Fugue in search of unbelievers.

‘We have to get out into open country,' said Suzanna. ‘Before they reach here.'

‘It's a small world,' de Bono observed. ‘It won't take them long to purge it, if they're efficient.'

‘They will be,' said Cal.

There was no sign of panic amongst the residents; no attempt to pack their bags and escape. This persecution, or events like it, had happened before, or so their furrowed faces seemed to say. And most likely it would all happen again. Should they be so surprised?

It took the trio a handful of minutes to wind their way out of the township, and into the open air.

‘I'm sorry we have to part so quickly,' Suzanna said to de Bono, when they stood at the perimeter.

‘Why should we have to part?'

‘Because we came here to stop the Prophet,' Suzanna said, ‘and we're going to do that.'

‘Then I'll take you where he'll be.'

‘Where?' said Cal.

‘The Firmament,' de Bono replied with confidence. The old palace. That's what they were saying in the street. Didn't you hear them? And it stands to reason. He'd be bound to take the Firmament if he wants to be King.'

They'd not got far from Nonesuch when de Bono halted, and pointed across the valley to a pall of smoke.

‘Something burning,' he said.

‘Let's hope it's Shadwell,' said Cal.

‘I think I ought to know something about this bastard,' said de Bono. ‘If we're going to slaughter him in his boots.'

They told him what they knew, which was, when they came to summarize it, a piffling amount.

‘It's odd,' said Cal. ‘It seems like I've known him all my life. But, you know, it's less than a year since I first set eyes on him.'

‘Shadows can be cast in any direction,' said de Bono. That's my belief. Starbrook used to say there were even places close to the Gyre where the past and the future overlap.'

‘I think maybe I visited one of them,' said Cal, ‘last time I was here.'

‘What was it like?'

Cal shook his head.

‘Ask me tomorrow,' he said.

Their route had taken them into marshy territory. They picked their way across the mud from stone to stone, any hope of conversation cancelled by the clamour of frogs which rose from the reeds. Half way across, the sound of car engines met their ears. Putting caution aside they crossed to firmer ground by the most direct route, sinking up to their ankles in the water-sodden ground while the frogs - thumb-nail small, and poppy red - leapt before them in their many hundreds.

On the other side Cal shinned up a tree to get a better view. The vantage point offered him sight of a convoy of cars, heading towards the township. It had no need of roads. It was forging its way by dint of wheel and horsepower. Flights of birds rose before it; animals - those that were fast enough -scattered.

Suzanna called up to him:

‘What can you see?'

‘It's Hobart's mob, at a guess.'

‘Hobart?'

She was up the tree and beside him in seconds, edging out along the branch to be clear of the foliage.

‘It's him,' he heard her say, almost to herself. ‘My God, it's him.'

She turned back to Cal, and there was a wildness in her eyes he didn't much like.

‘You're going to have to go on without me,' she said.

They climbed down again, and picked up the argument at ground level.

‘I've got business with Hobart. You go on. I'll find you when I'm done.'

‘Can't he wait?' Cal said.

‘No,' she told him firmly. ‘No he can't. He's got the book Mimi gave me, and I want it back.'

She saw the perplexed look on his face, and could hear before he delivered them every argument he'd make against their parting. Shadwell was their true objective, he'd say; this was no time to be diverted from facing him. Besides, a book was just a book wasn't it?; it'd still be there tomorrow. All of which was true, of course. But somewhere in her belly she sensed that Hobart's cleaving to the book had some perverse logic about it. Perhaps the pages contained some knowledge she could put to good use in the conflict ahead, encoded in those Once upon a times. That was certainly Hobart's conviction, and what the enemy believed of you was probably true, or else why were you enemies in the first place?

‘I have to go back,' she said. ‘And that's all there is to it.'

‘Then I'll come with you.'

‘I can deal with him myself, Cal,' she said. ‘You two have to go on to the Firmament. I'll find my way to you once I've got the book.'

She spoke with unshakeable conviction; he sensed it would be fruitless to argue with her.

Then take care,' he said, wrapping his arms around her. ‘Be safe.'

‘And you, Cal. For me.'

With that, she was away.

De Bono, who'd been out of this conversation while he toyed with his radio, now said:

‘Aren't we going with her?'

‘No,' said Cal. ‘She wants to go alone.'

He pulled a quizzical face. ‘Love-affair, is it?' he asked.

‘Something like that.'

Suzanna retraced their steps to the township with an urgency, an enthusiasm even, she didn't entirely comprehend. Was it just that she wanted the confrontation over and done with? Or could it be that she was actually eager to see Hobart again; that he had become a kind of mirror in which she might know herself better?

As she stepped back into the streets - which the citizens, retreating behind their doors, had now left more or less deserted - she hoped he knew she was near. Hoped his heart beat a little faster at her proximity, and his palms sweated.

If not, she'd teach him how.

THE FLESH IS WEAK

Though Shadwell had set his sights on occupying the Firmament - the only building in the Fugue worthy of one teetering on Godhood - once ensconced there he found it an unsettling residence. Each of the monarchs and matriarchs who'd occupied the place over the centuries had brought their own vision to its halls and ante-chambers, their one purpose to expand upon the previous occupant's mysteries. The result was part labyrinth, part mystical ghost-train ride.

He was not the first Cuckoo to explore the Firmament's miraculous corridors. Several members of Humankind had found their way into the palace down the years, and wandered there unchallenged by its makers, who had no desire to sour its tranquillity with hard words. Lost in its depths these lucky few had seen sights that they would take to their graves. A chamber in which the tiles on the walls had twice as many sides as a dice, and flipped forever over and over, each facet having its place in a fresco that never came to rest long enough for the eye to entirely comprehend it. Another room in which rain constantly fell, a warm spring night rain, and the floor gave off the smell of cooling pavements; and another which seemed at first quite plain, but was built with such sense-beguiling geometries a man might think his head swelled to fill it one moment, and the next be shrunk to the size of a beetle. And after an hour, or a day, of trespassing amongst these wonders, some invisible guide would lead them to the door, and they'd emerge as if from a dream. Later they'd try to speak of what they'd seen, but a failure of memory and tongue usually conspired to reduce their attempts to babble. In desperation, many went back in search of that delirium. But the Firmament was a movable feast, and it had always flitted away.

Shadwell was the first Cuckoo, therefore, who walked those rapturous corridors and called them his own. It gave him no pleasure, however. That was perhaps its most elegant revenge on its unwelcome occupant.

In the late afternoon, before the light dwindled too much, the Prophet made his way up to the top of the Firmament's watchtower, to survey his territories. Despite the demands of recent weeks - the masquerading, the rallies, the constant politicking - he didn't feel weary. All he'd promised his followers and himself had come true. It was as if his performance as a Prophet had lent him prophetic powers. He'd found the Weave, as he'd said he would, and claimed it from its guardians; he'd led his crusaders into the very heart of the Fugue, silencing with almost supernatural speed any and all who'd defied him. From his present elevated status there was no route to rise but towards Godhood, and the means to that advancement was visible from where he now stood.

The Gyre.

Its Mantle roiled and thundered, veiling its secrets from all eyes, even his. No matter. Tomorrow, when Hobart's battalion had finished its suppression of the natives, they would escort the Prophet to the doorway of the Gyre, the place the Kind called the Narrow Bright, and he would step inside.

Then? ah, then...

A chill on his nape stirred him from speculation.

Immacolata was standing at the viewing-room door. The light did not indulge her. It showed her wounds in all their suppurating glory; showed her frailty too; and her rancour. It repulsed him to look at her.

‘What do you want?' he demanded.

‘I came to join you,' she said. ‘I don't like this place. It stinks of the Old Science.'

He shrugged, and turned his back on her.

‘I know what you're thinking, Shadwell,' she said. ‘And believe me, it wouldn't be wise.'

He hadn't heard his name uttered in a long while, and he didn't like the way it sounded. It was a throwback to a biography he'd almost ceased to believe was his.

‘What wouldn't be wise?' he said.

‘Trying to breach the Gyre.'

He made no reply.

‘That is what you intend isn't it?'

She could read him still, all too easily.

‘Maybe,' he said.

‘That'd be a cataclysmic mistake.'

‘Oh, indeed?' he said, not taking his eyes off the Mantle. ‘And why's that?'

‘Even the Families don't understand what they created when they set the Loom to work,' she said. ‘It's unknowable.'

‘Nothing's unknowable,' he growled. ‘Not to me. Not any more.'

‘You're still a man, Shadwell,' she reminded him. ‘You're vulnerable.'

‘Shut up,' he said.

‘Shadwell -'

‘Shut up!' he repeated, and turned on her. ‘I don't want to hear your defeatism any longer. I'm here, aren't I? I won the Fugue.'

‘We won it.'

‘All right, we. What do you want for that little service?'

‘You know what I want,' she said. ‘What I've always wanted. Slow genocide.'

He smiled. His reply was a long time coming, and when it came was spoken slowly.

‘No,' he said. ‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Why did we follow them all those years?' she asked. ‘It was so you could have profit, and I could be avenged.'

‘Things have changed,' he said. ‘You must see that.'

‘You want to rule them. That's it, isn't it?'

‘I want more than that,' he said. ‘I want to know what creation tastes like. I want what's in the Gyre.'

‘It'll tear you apart.'

‘I doubt that,' he said. ‘I've never been stronger.'

‘At the Shrine,' she replied, ‘you said we'd destroy them together.'

‘I lied,' Shadwell said lightly. ‘I told you what you wanted to hear, because I needed you. Now you disgust me. I'll have new women, when I'm a God.'

‘A God now is it?' She seemed genuinely amused by the thought. ‘You're a salesman, Shadwell. You're a shabby little salesman. I'm the one they worship.'

‘Oh yes,' Shadwell replied. ‘I've seen your Cult. A boneyard, and a handful of eunuchs.'

‘I won't be cheated, Shadwell,' she said, moving towards him. ‘Not by you, of all men.'

He'd known for many months that this time would come, when she finally understood how he'd manipulated her. He'd prepared himself for the consequences, quietly and systematically divesting her of her allies, and increasing his own store of defences. But she still had the menstruum - of that she could never be dispossessed - and it was formidable. He saw it burgeoning in her eyes even now, and couldn't help but want to flinch before it.

He governed the instinct however, and instead walked across to her, and putting his hand to her face, stroked the lesions and the scabs there.

‘Surely ....' he murmured, ‘... you wouldn't kill me?'

‘I won't be cheated,' she said again.

‘But dead is dead,' he said, his tone soothing. ‘I'm just a Cuckoo. You know how weak we are. No Resurrections for us.'

His touch had become more rhythmic. She hated it, he knew. She, the perfect virgin; she, all ice and regret. In earlier times she might have burned the skin from his fingertips for visiting this indignity upon her. But Mama Pus was dead, the Hag her useless lunatic self. The once mighty Incantatrix was weak and weary, and they both knew it.

‘All these years, sweetheart ...' he said,'... all these years you gave me just enough leash, just enough temptation ...'

‘We agreed -' she said, ‘- together -'

‘No,' said Shadwell, as though correcting a child. ‘You used me, to go amongst the Cuckoos, because if the truth be known they frighten you.'

She made to contradict, but he put his hand across her throat. ‘Don't interrupt,' he told her. She obeyed him. ‘You've always held me in contempt,' he went on. ‘I know that. But I was useful, and did as I was told, as long as I wanted to touch you.'

‘Is that what you want now?' she said.

‘Once....' he said, almost mourning the loss, ‘... once I would have killed to feel the pulse in your throat. Like this.' His hand tightened a little. ‘Or to have stroked your flesh ...'

He worked the palm of his other hand against her breast.

‘Don't do that,' she said.

The Magdalene's dead,' he reminded her. ‘So who's going to produce children now? It can't be the old bitch; she's sterile. No, lover. No. I think it has to be you. You'll finally have to offer up that precious cunt of yours.'

At this she threw him off her, and might have struck him dead but that revulsion at his mauling distracted her from the act. She soon recovered her self-control. The killing power was mustering behind her eyes. He couldn't with safety delay his revenge any longer. She'd taken him for a fool, but he had ways to make her regret her arrogance. As she raised her head to spit the menstruum at him he called out the names he'd written, mere hours before, on his pack of cigarettes.

‘Sousa! Vessel! Fairchild! Divine! Loss! Hannah!'

The by-blows came at his call, scrabbling up the stairs. They were no longer the wretched, love-lorn things that the Magdalene had suckled. Shadwell had treated them tenderly in the short time he'd owned them; fed them; made them mighty.

The light died in Immacolata's face as she heard them behind her. She turned as they spilled through the door.

‘You bequeathed them to me,' he said.

She let out a cry at the sight of them, grown gross and meaty. They stank of the slaughterhouse.

‘I gave them blood instead of milk,' said Shadwell. ‘It makes them love me.'

He made a clucking sound with his tongue, and the creatures sidled over to him, trailing organs they had yet to find a purpose for.

‘I warn you,' he said, ‘try to harm me and they'll take it badly.'

As he spoke he realized that in these last moments Immacolata had summoned the Hag from the cooler regions of the Firmament. She was at the Incantatrix's shoulder now, a restive shadow.

‘Leave him,' he heard her sigh in Immacolata's ear. He didn't for an instant think she'd take that advice, but she did, first spitting on the floor at Shadwell's feet, then turning to go. He could scarcely believe the battle had been so easily won. She'd been more demoralized by grief and mutilation than he'd dared hope. The showdown was over before it had even begun.

One of the by-blows at his side uttered a soulful wail of frustration. He took his eyes off the sisters and told it to hush itself. His doing so proved all but fatal, for in the instant his gaze dropped the wraith-sister came flying at him, her jaws wide, her teeth suddenly vast, ready to tear out his cheating heart.

At the door, Immacolata was turning back, the menstruum breaking from her.

He yelled for the beasts to come to his aid, but even as he did so the Hag was upon him. His breath burst from him as he was thrown back against the wall, claws raking at his chest.

The by-blows weren't about to see their blood-bringer laid low. They were upon the Hag before her nails could rip through Shadwell's jacket, and she was dragged from him, shrieking. She'd been midwife to these creatures; she'd delivered them into a world of lunacy and darkness. Perhaps for that very reason they showed her no mercy. They tore at her without pause or apology.

‘Stop them,' Immacolata yelled.

The Salesman was examining the lacerations the Hag had made in his jacket. Another moment and her fingers would have clutched his heart.

‘Call them off, Shadwell! Please!'

‘She's dead already,' he said. ‘Let them play.'

Immacolata moved to aid her sister, but as she did so the largest of the by-blows, with the tiny white eyes of a deep-sea fish and a mouth like a wound, came between her and rescue. She spat an arrow of the menstruum into its pulsing chest, but it took the hurt in its stride, and came at her unchecked.

Shadwell had seen these monstrosities murder amongst themselves for the sport of it. He knew they could sustain horrendous injury without slowing. This one, for instance, called Vessel, could take a hundred such wounds and still make merry. Nor was it stupid. It had learned the lessons he'd taught it well enough. Even now it leapt upon the Incantatrix, wrapping its arms around her neck, and its legs about her hips.

Such intimacy would, he knew, drive Immacolata to distraction. Indeed, as it put its face to hers, kissing her as best its malformations would allow, she started to scream, all control and calculation finally lost. The menstruum flew from her in all directions, wasting its potency on the ceiling and the walls. Those few barbs that found her attacker did nothing but arouse it further. Though it had no sexual anatomy to speak of, Shadwell had trained it in the basic moves. It worked itself against her like a dog in heat, howling into her face.

Opening its mouth was a mistake on its part, for a fragment of the menstruum found its way down into its throat, and blew it wide. Its neck erupted, and its head, no longer supported, fell backwards on greasy strings of matter.

Even so, it clung to her, its body moving in ragged spasms against hers. But its grip had loosened sufficiently for her to tear its body from her, the struggle leaving her bloodied from head to foot.

Shadwell called the remaining by-blows from their vengeful play. They withdrew to his side. All that was left of the Hag was a litter that resembled the leavings on a fish-gutter's tiles.

Seeing the remains, Immacolata, her face slack to the point of imbecility, let out a low moan of loss.

‘Get her out of here,' said Shadwell. ‘I don't want to see her filthy face. Take her into the hills. Dump her.'

Two of the by-blows approached the Incantatrix, and took hold of her. There was not so much as a flicker in her eye, nor a finger raised in protest. She seemed no longer even to see them. Either the slaughter of her one remaining sister, or her own violation by the beast, or perhaps both, had undone something inside her. She was suddenly bereft of any power to enchant or terrify. A sack, which they hauled away through the door, and carried off down the stairs. Not once did she even raise her eyes in Shadwell's direction.

He listened to the slouching gait of the by-blows fade down the stairs, still half expecting her to come back for him, to mount one final attack. But no. It was over.

He crossed to the muck of the Hag. It smelt of something rotten.

‘Have it,' he said to the remaining beasts, who fell upon the scraps and fought over them. Revolted by their appetite, he turned his gaze back towards the Gyre.

Very soon now night would be upon the Fugue; a last curtain on the events of a busy day. With tomorrow, a new act would begin.

Somewhere beyond the cloud he was watching lay a knowledge that would transform him.

After that, no night would fall, except at his word; nor day dawn.

VII

AN OPEN BOOK

The Law had come to Nonesuch.

It had come to root out dissension: it had found none. It had come with truncheons, riot shields and bullets, prepared for armed rebellion: it had found no whisper of that either. All it had found was a warren of shadowy streets, most of them deserted, and a few pedestrians who bowed their heads at the first sign of a uniform.

Hobart had immediately ordered a house to house search. It had been greeted with a few sour looks, but little more than that. He was disappointed; it would have been gratifying to have found something to sharpen his authority upon. All too easy, he knew, to be lulled into a false sense of security, especially when an anticipated confrontation had failed to materialize. Vigilance was the key word now; unending vigilance.

That was why he'd occupied a house with a good view of the township from its upper storeys, where he could take up residence for the night. Tomorrow would bring the big push on the Gyre, which could surely not go unopposed. And yet, who could be certain with these people? They were so docile; like animals, rolling over at the first sign of a greater power.

The house he'd commandeered had little to recommend it, beyond its view. A maze of rooms; a collection of faded murals, which he didn't care to study too closely; spare and creaking furniture. The discomfort of the place didn't bother him: he liked spartan living. But the atmosphere did; the sense he had that the ousted tenants were still here, just out of sight. If he'd been a man who believed in ghosts, he'd have said the house was haunted. He wasn't, so he kept his fears to himself, where they multiplied.

Evening had fallen, and the streets below were dark. He could see little from his high window now, but he could hear laughter drifting up from below. He'd given his men the evening to enjoy themselves, warning them never to forget that the township was enemy territory. The laughter grew more riotous, then faded down the street. Let them indulge themselves, he thought. Tomorrow the crusade would take them onto ground the people here thought of as sacred: if they were going to show any resistance, it would be then. He'd seen the same happen in the world outside: a man who wouldn't lift a finger if his house were burned down throwing a fit if someone touched a trinket he called holy. Tomorrow promised to be a busy day, and a bloody one too.

Richardson had declined the opportunity to take the night off, preferring to stay in the house, and make a report of the day's events for his personal records. He kept a ledger of his every move, set down in a tiny, meticulous hand. He worked on it now, as Hobart listened to the laughter disappearing below.

Finally, he put down his pen.

‘Sir?'

‘What is it?'

‘These people, sir. It seems to me-'

Richardson halted, unsure of how best to voice a question that had been vexing him since they'd arrived, ‘- it seems to me they don't look quite human.'

Hobart studied the man. His hair was immaculately cut, his cheeks immaculately shaved, his uniform immaculately pressed.

‘You may be right,' he said.

A flicker of distress crossed Richardson's face.

‘I don't understand ... sir.'

‘While you're here, you should believe nothing you see.'

‘Nothing, sir?'

‘Nothing at all,' Hobart said. He put his fingers to the glass. It was cold; his body heat lent the tips misty haloes. ‘The whole place is a mass of illusions. Tricks and traps. None of it's to be trusted.'

‘It's not real?' Richardson said.

Hobart stared across the roofs of this little nowhere, and turned the question over. Real was a word he'd once had no problem using. Real was what made the world go round, what was solid and true. And its flip side, unreal, that was what some lunatic in a cell shouted at four in the morning; unreal was dreams of power without the flesh to give them weight.

But his view of these matters had subtly changed since his first encounter with Suzanna. He had wanted her capture as he'd wanted no other, and his pursuit of her had led from one strangeness to another, until he was so fatigued he scarcely knew right from left. Real? What was real? Perhaps (this thought would have been unthinkable before Suzanna) real was merely what he said was real. He was the general, and the soldier needed an answer, for his sanity's sake. A plain answer, that would let him sleep soundly.

He gave it:

‘Only the Law's real here,' he said. ‘We have to hang onto that. All of us. Do you understand?'

Richardson nodded. ‘Yes, sir.'

There was a long pause, during which somebody outside began whooping like a drunken Cherokee. Richardson closed his ledger, and went to the second window.

‘I wonder...' he said.

‘Yes?'

‘Perhaps I should go out. Just for a while. To see these illusions face to face.'

‘Maybe.'

‘Now that I know it's all a lie -' he said, ‘- I'm safe, aren't I?'

‘As safe as you're ever going to be,' said Hobart.

‘Then, if you don't mind ...'

‘Go on. See for yourself.'

Richardson was away in seconds, and down the stairs. A few moments later Hobart caught sight of his shadowy form moving away down the street.

The Inspector stretched. He was tired to the marrow. There was a mattress in the next room, but he was determined not to avail himself of it. Laying his head on a pillow would offer the rumours of occupancy here an easy victim.

Instead he sat down in one of the plain chairs and took the book of faery-tales from his pocket. It had not left his presence since its confiscation; he'd lost count of the times he'd scanned its pages. Now he did the same again. But the lines of prose grew steadily hazier in front of him, and though he tried to check himself, his lids became heavier and heavier.

Long before Richardson had found himself an illusion to call his own, the Law that had come to Nonesuch had fallen asleep.

Suzanna didn't find it so difficult to avoid Hobart's men when she stepped back into the township. Though they swarmed through the alleyways the shadows had become unnaturally dense there, and she was always able to stay a few steps ahead of the enemy. Getting access to Hobart was another matter, however. Though she wanted to be finished with her work here as quickly as possible there was no use in risking arrest. She'd escaped custody twice; three times might be pressing her luck. Though impatience gnawed at her, she decided to wait until the light faded. The days were still short this early in the year; it would only be a few hours.

She found herself an empty house - availing herself of some plain food that the owners had left there - and wandered around the echoing rooms until the light outside began to dwindle. Her thoughts turned back, and back again, to Jeri-chau, and the circumstances of his death. She tried to remember the way he looked, and had some success with his eyes and hands, but couldn't create anything like a complete portrait. Her failure depressed her. He was so soon gone.

She had just about decided that it was dark enough to risk venturing out when she heard voices. She went to the bottom of the stairs, and peered through to the front of the house. There were two silhouetted figures on the threshold.

‘Not here ...' she heard a girl's voice whisper.

‘Why not?' said her male companion, his words slurred. One of Hobart's company, no doubt. ‘Why not? It's as good as any.'

There's somebody here already,' said the girl, staring into the mystery of the house.

The man laughed. ‘Dirty fuckers!' he called. Then he took the woman roughly by the arm. ‘Let's find somewhere else,' he said. They moved away, into the street.

Suzanna wondered if Hobart had sanctioned such fraternization. She couldn't believe he had.

It was time she put an end to stalking him in her imagination; time to find him and get her business with him done. She slipped through the house, scanned the street, then stepped out into the night.

The air was balmy, and with so few lights burning in the houses, and those that did burn mere candle-flames, the sky was bright above, the stars like dew-drops on velvet. She walked a little way with her face turned skyward, entranced by the sight. But not so entranced she didn't sense Hobart's proximity. He was somewhere near. But where? She could still waste precious hours going from house to house, trying to find him.

When in doubt, ask a policeman. It had been one of her mother's favourite saws, and never more apt. A few yards from where she stood one of Hobart's horde was pissing against a wall, singing a ragged rendition of Land of Hope and Glory to accompany the flood.

Trusting that his inebriation would keep him from recognizing her, she asked Hobart's whereabouts.

‘You don't need him,' the man said. ‘Come on in. We've got a party going.'

‘Maybe later. I've got to see the Inspector.'

‘If you must,' the man said. ‘He's in the big house with the white walls.' He pointed back the way she'd come, splashing his feet as he did so. ‘Somewhere off to the right,' he said.

The instructions, despite the provider's condition, were good. Off to the right was a street of silent dwellings, and at the corner of the next intersection a sizeable house, its walls pale in the starlight. There was nobody standing sentry at the door; the guards had presumably succumbed to whatever pleasures Nonesuch could offer. She pushed the door open and stepped inside unchallenged.

There were riot-shields propped against the wall of the room she'd entered, but she needed no confirmation that this was indeed the house. Her gut already knew that Hobart was in one of the upper rooms.

She started up the stairs, not certain what she would do when she confronted him. His pursuit of her had made her life a nightmare, and she wanted to make him regret it. But she couldn't kill him. Despatching the Magdalene had been terrible enough; killing a human being was more than her conscience would allow. Best just to claim her book, and go.

At the top of the stairs was a corridor, at the end of which a door stood ajar. She went to it, and pushed it open. He was there, her enemy; alone, slumped in a chair, his eyes closed. In his lap lay the book of faery-tales. The very sight of it made her nerves flutter. She didn't hesitate in the doorway, but crossed the bare boards to where he slumbered.

In his sleep, Hobart was floating in a misty place. Moths flew around his head, and beat their dusty wings against his eyes, but he couldn't raise his arms to brush them away. Somewhere near he sensed danger, but from which direction would it come?

The mist moved to his left, then to his right.

‘Who ... ?' he murmured.

The word he spoke froze Suzanna in her tracks. She was a yard from the chair, no more. He muttered something else; words she couldn't comprehend. But he didn't wake.

Behind his eyelids Hobart glimpsed an unfixable form in the mist. He struggled to be free of the lethargy that weighed him down; fought to waken, and defend himself.

Suzanna took another step towards the sleeper.

He moaned again.

She reached for the book, her fingers trembling. As they closed around it, his eyes sprang wide open. Before she could snatch the book away from him, his grip on it tightened. He stood up.

‘No!' he shouted.

The shock of his waking almost made her lose her hold, but she wasn't going to give her prize up now: the book was her property. There was a moment of struggle between them, as they fought for possession of the volume.

Then - without warning - a veil of darkness rose from their hands, or more correctly from the book they held between them.

She looked up into Hobart's eyes. He was sharing her shock at the power that was suddenly released from between their woven fingers. The darkness rose between them like smoke, and blossomed against the ceiling, immediately tumbling down again, enclosing them both in a night within a night.

She heard Hobart loose a yell of fear. The next moment words seemed to rise from the book, white forms against the smoke, and as they rose they became what they meant. Either that or she and Hobart were falling, and becoming symbols as the book opened to receive them. Whichever; or both; it was all one in the end.

Rising or falling, as language or life, they were delivered into storyland.

VIII

THE ESSENTIAL DRAGON

It was dark in the state they'd entered; dark, and full of rumour. Suzanna could see nothing in front of her, not even her fingertips, but she could hear soft whispers, carried to her on a warm, pine-scented wind. Both touched her face, whispers and wind; both excited her. They knew she was here, the people that inhabited the stories in Mimi's book: for it was there, in the book, that she and Hobart now existed.

Somehow, in the act of struggling, they'd been transformed - or at least their thoughts had. They'd entered the common life of words.

Standing in the darkness, and listening to the whispers all around her, she didn't find the notion so difficult to comprehend. After all hadn't the author of this book turned his thoughts into words, in the act of writing it, knowing his readers would decode them as they read, making thoughts of them again? More: making an imagined life. So here was she now, living that life. Lost in Geschichten der Geheimen One; or found there.

There were hints of light moving to either side of her she now realized; or was it she that was moving: running perhaps, or flying? Anything was possible here: this was faery land. She concentrated, to get a better grasp of what these flashes of light and darkness meant, and realized all at once that she was travelling at speed through avenues of trees, vast primeval trees, and the light between them was growing brighter.

Somewhere up ahead, Hobart was waiting for her, or for the thing she'd become as she flew through the pages.

For she was not Suzanna here; or rather, not simply Suzanna. She could not simply be herself here, any more than he could be simply Hobart. They were grown mythical in this absolute forest. They had drawn to themselves the dreams that this state celebrated: the desires and faiths that rilled the nursery stories, and so shaped all subsequent desires and faiths.

There were countless characters to choose from, wandering in the Wild Woods; sooner or later every story had a scene played here. This was the place orphaned children were left to find either their deaths or their destinies: where virgins went in fear of wolves, and lovers in fear of their hearts. Here birds talked, and frogs aspired to the throne, and every grove had its pool and well, and every tree a door to the Netherworld.

What, amongst these, was she7 The Maiden, of course. Since childhood she'd been the Maiden. She felt the Wild Woods grow more luminous at this thought, as though she'd ignited the air with it.

I'm the Maiden...

she murmured,

... and he's the Dragon.

Oh yes. That was it; of course that was it.

The speed of her flight increased; the pages flipped over and over. And now ahead she saw a metallic brightness between the trees, and there the Great Worm was, its gleaming coils wrapped around the roots of a Noahic tree, its vast, flat-snouted head laid on a bed of blood-red poppies as it bided its terrible time.

Yet, perfect as it was, in every scaly detail, she saw Hobart there too. He was woven with the pattern of light and shade, and so - most oddly - was the word DRAGON. All three occupied the same space in her head: a living text of man, word and monster.

The Great Worm Hobart opened its one good eye. A broken arrow protruded from its twin, the work of some hero or other no doubt, who'd gone his tasselled and shining way in the belief that he'd dispatched the beast. It was not so easily

destroyed. It lived still, its coils no less tremendous for the scars they bore, its glamour untarnished. And the living eye? It held enough malice for a tribe of dragons.

It saw her, and raised its head a little. Molten stone seethed between its lips, and murdered the poppies.

Her flight towards it faltered. She felt its glance pierce her. Her body began to tremble in response. She tumbled towards the dark earth like a swatted moth. The ground beneath her was strewn with words; or were they bones? Whichever, she fell amongst them, shards of nonsense thrown up in all directions by her flailing arms.

She got to her feet, and looked about her. The colonnades were empty in every direction: there was no hero to call upon, nor mother to take comfort with. She was alone with the Worm.

It raised its head a few feet higher, this minor motion causing a slow avalanche of coils.

It was a beautiful worm, there was no denying that, its iridescent scales glittering, the elegance of its malice enchanting. She felt, looking at it, that same combination of yearning and anxiety which she remembered so well from childhood. Its presence aroused her, there was no other word for it. As if in response to that confession, the Dragon roared. The sound it made was hot and low, seeming to begin in its bowels and winding down its length to break from between the countless needles of its teeth, a promise of greater heat to come.

All light had gone from between the trees. No birds sang or spoke, no animal, if any lived so close to the Dragon, dared move a whisker in the undergrowth. Even the bone-words and the poppies had disappeared, leaving these two elements, Maiden and Monster, to play out their legend.

‘It finishes here,' Hobart said, with the Dragon's laval tongue. Each syllable he shaped was a little fire, which cremated the specks of dust around her head. She was not afraid of all this; rather, exhilarated. She had only ever been an observer of these rites; at last she was a performer.

‘Have you nothing more to tell me?' the Dragon demanded spitting the words from between its serried teeth. ‘No blessings? No explanations?

‘Nothing,' she said defiantly. What was the purpose of talk, when they were so perfectly transparent to each other? They knew who they were, didn't they?; knew what they meant to one another. In the final confrontation of any great tale dialogue was redundant. With nothing left to say, only action remained: a murder or a marriage.

‘Very well,' said the Dragon, and it moved towards her, drawing its length over the wasteland between them with vestigial forelegs.

He means to kill me, she thought; I have to act quickly. What did the Maiden do to protect herself in such circumstances as this? Did she flee, or try to sing the beast to sleep?

The Dragon was towering over her now. But it didn't attack. Instead it threw back its head, exposing the pale, tender flesh of its throat.

‘Please be quick,' it growled.

She was bewildered by this.

‘Be quick?' she said.

‘Kill me and be done,' it instructed her.

Though her mind didn't fully comprehend this volte face, the body she occupied did. She felt it changing in response to the invitation; felt a new ripeness in it. She'd thought to live in this world as an innocent; but that she couldn't be. She was a grown woman; a woman who'd changed in the last several months, sloughed off years of dead assumptions; found magic inside herself; suffered loss. The role of Maiden - all milk and soft sighs - didn't fit.

Hobart knew that better than she. He hadn't come into these pages as a child, but as the man he was, and he'd found a role here that suited his most secret and forbidden dreams. This was no place for pretence. She was not the virgin, he was not the devouring worm. He, in his private imaginings, was power besieged, and seduced, and finally - painfully - martyred. That was why the Dragon before her raised its milky throat.

Kill me and be done, he said, lowering his head a little to look at her. In his surviving eye she saw for the first time how wounded he was by his obsession with her; how he'd come to be in thrall to her, sniffing after her like a lost dog, hating her more with every day that passed for the power she had over him.

In the other reality - in the room from which they'd stepped, which was in turn hidden in a larger Kingdom (worlds within worlds) he would be brutal with her. Given the chance he'd kill her for fear of the truth he could only admit in the sacred grove of his dreams. But here there was no story to tell except the true one. That was why he raised his palpitating throat, and fluttered his heavily lidded eye. He was the virgin, frightened and alone, ready to die rather than sacrifice his tattered virtue.

And what did that make her? The beast, of course. She was the beast.

No sooner thought than felt.

She sensed her body growing larger, and larger, and larger still. Her blood-stream ran colder than a shark's. A furnace flared up in her belly.

In front of her Hobart was shrinking. The dragon-skin fell away from him in silky folds, and he was revealed, naked and white: a human male, covered in wounds. A chaste knight at the end of a weary road, bereft of strength or certitude.

She had claimed the skin he'd lost; she felt it solidify around her, its armour glittering. The size of her body was a joy to her. She exulted in the way it felt to be so dangerous and so impossible. This was how she truly dreamt of herself; this was the real Suzanna. She was a Dragon.

With that lesson learned, what was she to do? Finish the story as the man before her wished? Burn him? Swallow him?

Looking down at his insipidity from her rearing height, smelling the dirt off him, the sweat off him - she could easily find it in her heart to do her Dragon's duty, and devour. It would be easy.

She moved towards him, her shadow engulfing him. He was weeping, and smiling up at her with gratitude. She opened her vast jaws. Her breath singed his hair. She would cook him and swallow him in one swift motion. But she was not quick

enough. As she was about to devour him she was distracted by a voice nearby. Was there somebody else in the grove? The sounds certainly belonged in these pages. They were far from human, though there were words attempting to surface through the barking and grunting. Pig; dog; man: a combination of all three, and all panicking.

The Knight Hobart opened his eyes, and there was something new in them, something besides tears and fatigue. He too had heard the voices; and hearing them, he was reminded of the place that lay beyond these Wild Woods.

The Dragon's moment of triumph was already sliding away. She roared her frustration, but there was nothing to be done. She felt herself shedding her scales, dwindling from the mythical to the particular, while Hobart's scarred body fluttered like a flame in a breeze, and went out.

Her instant of questioning would surely cost her dearly. In failing to finish the story, to satisfy her victim's desire for death, she'd given him fresh motive for hatred. What change might it have wrought in Hobart to have dreamed himself devoured? To have made a second womb in the Worm's belly until he was born back into the world?

Too late, damn it; far too late. The pages could contain them no longer. Leaving their confrontation unfinished they broke from the words in a burst of punctuation. They didn't leave the din of the animals behind them: it grew louder as the darkness of the Wild Woods lifted.

Her only thought was for the book. She felt it in her hands once more, and took fiercer hold of it. But Hobart had the same idea. As the room appeared around them in all its solidity she found his fingers clawing at hers, tearing at her skin in his eagerness to claim the prize back.

‘You should have killed me,' she heard him murmur.

She glanced up at his face. He looked even sicklier than the knight he'd been, sweat running down his sallow cheeks, gaze desperate. Then he seemed to realize himself, and the eyes grew arctic.

Somebody was beating on the other side of the door, from which the pained cacophony of animals still came.

‘Wait!' Hobart yelled to his visitors, whoever they were. As he shouted he took one hand from the book and drew a gun from the inside of his jacket, digging the muzzle into Suzanna's abdomen.

‘Let the book go, or I'll kill you.'

She had no choice but to comply. The menstruum would not be swift enough to incapacitate him before he pulled the trigger.

As her hands slipped from the volume, however, the door was thrown open, and all thought of books was eclipsed by what stood on the threshold.

Once, this quartet had been amongst the pride of Hobart's Squad: the smartest, the hardest. But their night of drinking and seduction had unbuttoned more than their trousers. It had undone their minds as well. It was as if the splendours Suzanna had first seen on Lord Street, the haloes that sainted Human and Seerkind alike, had somehow been drawn inside them, for the skin of their limbs and faces was swollen and raw, bubbles of darkness scurrying around their anatomies like rats under sheets.

In their panic at this disease, they'd clawed their clothes to tatters; their torsos shone with sweat and blood. And from their throats came the cacophony that had called the Dragon and the Knight out of the book; a bestiality that was echoed in a dozen horrid details. The way this one's face had swollen to lend him a snout; the way another's hands were fat as paws.

This, she presumed, was how the Seerkind had opposed the occupation of their homeland. They'd feigned passivity to seduce the invading army into their raptures, and this nightmare menagerie was the result. Apt as it was, she was appalled.

One of the pack now staggered into the room, his lips and forehead swollen to the brink of bursting. He was clearly trying to address Hobart, but all his spellbound palate could produce was the complaint of a cat having its neck wrung.

Hobart had no intention of deciphering the mewls, but instead levelled his gun at the wreckage shambling towards him.

‘Come no closer,' he warned.

The man, spittle running from his open mouth, made a incoherent appeal.

‘Get out!' was Hobart's response. He took a step towards the quartet.

The leader retreated, as did those in the doorway. Not for the gun's sake, Suzanna thought, but because Hobart was their master. These new anatomies only confirmed what their training had long ago taught them: that they were unthinking animals, in thrall to the Law.

‘Out!' said Hobart again.

They were backing off along the corridor now, their din subdued by their fear of Hobart.

In a matter of moments his attention would no longer be diverted, Suzanna knew. He'd turn on her again, and the slim advantage gained by this interruption would have been squandered.

She had to let her instinct lead; she might have no other opportunity.

Seizing the moment, she ran at Hobart and snatched the book from his hand. He shouted out, and glanced her way, his gun still keeping the howling quartet at bay. With his eye off them, the creatures set up their racket afresh.

‘There's no way out -' Hobart said to her,'- except by this door. Maybe you'd like to go that way ... ?'

The creatures clearly sensed that something was in the air, and redoubled their din. It was like feeding time at the zoo. She'd not get two steps down the passage before they were upon her. Hobart had her trapped.

At that realization, she felt the menstruum rise in her, coming with breath-snatching suddenness.

Hobart knew instantly she was gathering strength. He crossed quickly to the door, and slammed it on the howling breed outside, then turned on her again.

‘We saw some things, didn't we?' he said. ‘But it's a story you won't live to tell.'

He aimed the gun at her face.

It wasn't possible to analyse what happened next. Perhaps he fired and the shot miraculously went wide, shattering the window behind her. Whatever, she felt the night air invade the room, and the next moment the menstruum was bathing her from head to foot, turning her on her heel, and she was running towards the window with no time to consider the sense of this escape route until she was up on the sill and hurling herself out.

The window was three storeys up. But it was too late for such practicalities. She was committed to the leap, or fall, or-flight*.

The menstruum scooped her up, throwing its strength against the wall of the house opposite, and letting her slide from window to roof on its cool back. It wasn't true flight, but it felt like the real thing.

The street reeled beneath her as she tumbled on solid air to meet the eaves of the other house, only to be scooped up a second time and carried over the roof, Hobart's shouts diminishing behind her.

She could not be held aloft for long, of course; but it was an exhilarating ride while it lasted. She slid helter skelter down another roof, catching sight in that moment of a streak of dawn light between the hills, then over gables and chimney stacks and down, swooping, into a square where the birds were already tuning up for the day.

As she flew down they scattered, startled by the twist evolution had taken to produce such a bird as this. Her landing must have reassured them that there was much design work still to do. She skidded across the paving stones, the menstruum cushioning the worst of the impact, and came to a halt inches from a mosaiced wall.

Shaking, and faintly nauseous, she stood up. The entire flight had probably lasted no more than twenty seconds, but already she heard voices raising the alarm in an adjacent street.

Clutching Mimi's gift, she slipped from the square and out of the township by a route that took her once in a circle and twice almost threw her into the arms of her pursuers. Every step of the way she discovered a new bruise, but she was at least alive, and wiser for the night's adventures.

Life and wisdom. What more could anybody ask?

THE FIRE

The day and night that Suzanna spent in Nonesuch, and in the Wild Woods, stalking Hobart, took Cal and de Bono to no less remarkable places. They too had their griefs, and revelations; they too came closer to death than either wanted to come again. Upon parting from her, they'd resumed their journey to the Firmament in silence, until out of nowhere de Bono had said: ‘Do you love her?'

Oddly enough, that very thought had been on Cal's mind, but he hadn't replied to the question. It had frankly embarrassed him.

‘You damn fool,' de Bono said. ‘Why are you Cuckoos so afraid of your feelings? She's worth loving; even I can see that. So why don't you say it?'

Cal grunted. De Bono was right, but it rankled to be lectured on the matter by someone younger. ‘You're afraid of her, is that it?' de Bono said. The remark added insult to injury.

‘Christ no,' Cal said. ‘Why the fuck should I be afraid of her?'

‘She's got powers,' said de Bono, taking off his spectacles and surveying the terrain ahead. ‘Most women have, of course. That's why Starbrook wouldn't have them in the Field. It threw him off balance.'

‘And what have we got?' Cal asked, kicking a stone ahead of him.

‘We've got our pricks.'

‘Starbrook, again?'

‘De Bono,' came the reply, and the boy laughed. ‘I tell you what,' he said. ‘I know this place where we could go -'

‘No detours,' said Cal.

‘What's an hour or two?' said de Bono. ‘Have you ever heard of Venus Mountain?'

‘I said no detours, de Bono. If you want to go, then go.'

‘Jesus, you're boring,' de Bono sighed. ‘I just might leave you to it.'

‘I'm not much enjoying your damn fool questions, either,' Cal said. ‘So if you want to go pick flowers, do it. Just point me to the Firmament.'

De Bono fell silent. They walked on. When they did start talking again de Bono began to parade his knowledge of the Fugue, more for the pleasure of belittling his fellow traveller than out of any genuine desire to inform. Twice, in the middle of a diatribe, Cal dragged them into hiding as one of Hobart's patrols came within sighting distance of them. On the second occasion they were pinned down for two hours while the Squad got progressively drunker within yards of their hiding place.

When they finally moved on, they progressed much more slowly. Their cramp-ridden limbs felt leaden; they were hungry, thirsty and irritated by each other's company. Worst of all, dusk was creeping on.

‘Just how far is it from here?' Cal wanted to know. Once, looking down on the Fugue from Mimi's wall, the confusion of its landscape had promised unending adventure. Now, immersed in that confusion, he would have given his eye-teeth for a good map.

‘It's quite a distance yet,' de Bono replied.

‘Do you know where the hell we are?'

De Bono's lip curled. ‘Of course.'

‘Name it.'

‘Huh?'

‘Name it!'

‘I'll be damned if I will. You just have to trust me. Cuckoo.'

The wind had got up in the last half hour, and now it brought with it the sound of cries, which halted the escalating war of words between them.

‘I smell a bonfire burning,' de Bono said. It was true. Besides its burden of pain, the wind brought the scent of burning wood. De Bono was already bounding off in search of its source. Nothing would have given Cal more satisfaction at that moment than leaving the rope-dancer to his own devices, but - much as he doubted de Bono's value as a guide - he was better than nothing. Cal followed him through the gathering darkness, up a small ridge. From there -across a space of fields littered with arches - they had a fine view of the fire. What looked to be a small copse was burning lustily, the flames fanned by the wind. On the outskirts of this sizeable blaze a number of cars were parked, their owners - more of Shadwell's army of deliverance - running riot.

‘Bastards,' said de Bono, as several of them hounded down a victim and laid into him with cudgels and boots. ‘Cuckoo bastards.'

‘It's not just my people -' Cal began. But before he could finish the defence of his tribe, the words died on his tongue, as he recognized the place that was being destroyed in front of his eyes.

This was no wood. The trees weren't arbitrarily scattered, but planted in ordered avenues. Once, beneath the awning of those trees, he'd spoken Mad Mooney's verses. Now the orchard of Lemuel Lo was ablaze from end to end.

He started down the slope towards the conflagration.

‘Where are you going?' de Bono asked him. ‘Calhoun? What do you think you're doing?'

De Bono came after him, and took hold of his arm.

‘Calhoun! Listen to me!'

‘Let me alone,' Cal said, attempting to throw de Bono off. In the violence of that attempt the soil of the incline gave way beneath his heel and he lost balance, taking de Bono with him. They slid down the hill, dirt and stones showering them, and came to a halt in a waist-deep ditch of stagnant water at

the bottom. Cal began to haul himself out the other side, but de Bono had hold of his shirt.

‘You can't do anything, Mooney,' he said.

‘Get the fuck off me.'

‘Look, I'm sorry about the Cuckoo remark, right? We breed vandals too.'

‘Forget it,' said Cal, his eyes still on the fire. He detached de Bono's hand. ‘I know this place,' he said. ‘I can't just let it burn.'

He pulled himself up out of the ditch and started towards the blaze. He'd kill the bastards who'd done this, whoever they were. Kill them, and call it justice.

‘It's too late!' de Bono called after him. ‘You can't help.'

There was truth in what the youth said. Tomorrow there'd be nothing left of the orchard but ashes. Still he couldn't bring himself to turn his back on the spot where he'd first tasted the Fugue's raptures. Vaguely aware that de Bono was padding after him, and completely indifferent to the fact, he headed on.

As the scene before him became clearer he realized that the Prophet's troops (the word flattered them; it was a rabble) were not going unresisted. In several places around the fire figures were locked in hand-to-hand combat. But the orchard's defenders were easy meat for the fire-raisers, for whom these barbarities were little more than sport. They'd come into the Fugue armed with weapons that could decimate the Seerkind in hours. Even as Cal watched he saw one of the Kind felled with a pistol shot. Somebody went to the wounded man's aid, but was in her turn brought down. The soldiers went from body to body to see that the job was done. The first of the victims was not dead. He raised his hand towards his executioner, who pointed his gun at the man's head and fired.

A spasm of nausea convulsed Cal's system, as the smell of cooking flesh mingled with the smoke. He couldn't control his revulsion. His knees buckled, and he fell to the ground, retching on his empty stomach. At that moment his misery seemed complete: the wet clothes icy on his spine; the taste of his stomach in his throat; the paradise orchard burning nearby.

The horrors the Fugue was showing him were as profound as its visions had been elevated. He could fall no further.

‘Come away, Cal.'

De Bono's hand was on his shoulder. He put a handful of freshly torn grass in front of Cal.

‘Wipe your face,' he said softly. There's nothing to be done here.'

Cal pressed the grass beneath his nose, inhaling its cool sweetness. The nausea was passing. He chanced one more look up at the burning orchard. His eyes were watering, and at first glance he couldn't trust what they now told him. He wiped them with the back of his hand, sniffing. Then he looked again, and there - moving through the smoke in front of the fire - he saw Lem.

He spoke the man's name.

‘Who?' said de Bono.

Cal was already getting up, though his legs were jittery.

‘There,' Cal said, pointing towards Lo. The orchard-keeper was crouching beside one of the bodies, his hand extended to the face of the corpse. Was he closing the dead man's eyes, offering a blessing as he did so?

Cal had to make his presence known; had to speak to the man, even if it was just to say that he too had witnessed the horrors here, and that they wouldn't go unrevenged. He turned to de Bono. The blaze, reflected in the rope-dancer's spectacles, hid his eyes, but it was clear from the way his face was set that what he'd seen had not left him untouched.

‘Stay here,' Cal said. ‘I have to speak to Lem.'

‘You're insane, Mooney,' de Bono said.

‘Probably.'

He began back towards the fire, calling Lem's name. The rabble seemed to have tired of their hunt. Several had returned to their cars; another was pissing into the fire; yet others were simply watching the blaze, stupefied by drink and destruction.

Lem had done with his blessings, and was walking away from the remains of his orchard. Cal called his name again, but the sound of the fire drowned it out. He began to pick up his pace, and as he did so Lem caught sight of him from thecorner of his eye. He seemed not to recognize Cal, however. Instead, alarmed by the approaching figure, he turned and started to run. Again, Cal yelled his name, and this time drew the man's attention. He stopped running and glanced back, squinting through the smoke and smuts.

‘Lem! It's me!' Cal yelled. ‘It's Mooney!'

Lo's grimy face was not capable of a smile, but he opened his arms in welcome to Cal, who crossed the last yards between them fearful that at any moment the curtain of smoke would part them again. It didn't. They embraced like brothers.

‘Oh my poet,' said Lo, his eyes reddened with tears and smoke. ‘What a place to find you.'

‘I told you I wouldn't forget,' said Cal. ‘Didn't I say that?'

‘You did, by God.'

‘Why did they do it, Lem? Why did they burn it down?'

They didn't,' Lem replied. ‘I did.'

‘You?'

‘You think I'd give those bastards the pleasure of my fruit?'

‘But, Lem ... the trees. All those trees.'

Lo was digging in his pockets, and brought out handfuls of the Jude Pears. Many were bruised and broken, sap glistening as it ran over Lo's fingers. Their perfume pierced the filthy air, bringing back memories of lost times.

‘There's seeds in every one of them, poet,' Lem said. ‘And in every seed there's a tree. I'll find another place to plant.'

They were brave words, but he sobbed even as he spoke them.

‘They won't defeat us, Calhoun,' he said. ‘Whatever God's name they come in, we won't kneel to them.'

‘You mustn't,' said Cal. ‘Or everything's lost.'

As he spoke he saw Lo's gaze move off his face towards the rabble at the cars.

‘We should be going,' he said, stuffing the fruit back into his pocket. ‘Will you come with me?'

‘I can't, Lem.'

‘Well, I taught your verses to my daughters,' he said. ‘I remembered them as you remembered me -'

‘They're not mine,' Cal said. ‘They're my grandfather's.'

‘They belong to us all now,' Lo said. ‘Planted in good ground -'

Suddenly, a shot. Cal turned. The three fire-watchers had seen them, and were coming their way. All were armed.

Lo snatched hold of Cal's hand for an instant, and squeezed it by way of farewell. Then contact was broken, as more shots followed on the first. Lo was heading off into the darkness, away from the light of the fire, but the ground was uneven, and he fell after only a few steps. Cal went after him, as the gunmen began a further round of shots.

‘Get away from me -' Lo shouted. ‘For God's sake run!'

Lo was scrabbling to pick up the fruit that he'd dropped from his pocket. As Cal reached him one of the gunman got lucky. A shot found Lo. He cried out, and clutched his side.

The gunmen were almost upon their targets now. They'd given up firing, to have better sport at close range. As they came within a half a dozen yards, however, the leader was felled by a missile hurled from the smoke. It struck his head, opening a substantial wound. He toppled, blinded by blood.

Cal had time to see the weapon that had brought the man down, and recognize it as a radio: then de Bono was weaving through the murky air towards the gunmen. They heard him coming: he was yelling like a wild man. A shot was fired in his direction; but went well wide. He threw himself past the hunters, and ran off in the direction of the fire.

The leader, his hand clamped to his head, was staggering to his feet, ready to give chase. De Bono's tactics, though they'd distracted the executioners, were as good as suicidal. The gunmen had him trapped against the wall of burning trees. Cal caught sight of him pelting through the smoke towards the fire, the killers in howling pursuit. A volley of shots was fired; he dodged them like the dancer he was. But there was no dodging the inferno ahead. Cal saw him glance round once, to take in the sight of his pursuers, then - idiot that he was - he plunged into the fire. Most of the trees were now no more than burning pillars, but the ground itself was a fire walker's heaven, hot ash and charcoal. The air shimmered with the heat, corrupting de Bono's figure until it was lost between the trees.

There was no time to mourn him. His bravery had earned them a reprieve, but it would not last long. Cal turned back to aid Lemuel. The man had gone, however, leaving a splash of blood and a few fallen fruit to mark the place he'd been. Back at the fire, the gunmen were still waiting to mow de Bono down should he re-emerge. Cal had time to get to his feet and study the conflagration for any sign of the rope-dancer. There was none. Then he backed away from the pyre, and took off towards the slope on which he and de Bono had' fought. As he did so a vague hope rose in him. He decided to change his route, and made a run that took him around to the other side of the orchard.

The air was clearer here; the wind was carrying the smoke in the opposite direction. He ran along the edge of the orchard, hoping against hope that maybe de Bono had outpaced the heat. Half way along the flank of the fire his horrified eyes found a pair of burning shoes. He kicked them over, then searched for their owner.

It was only when he turned his back on the flames that he saw the figure, standing in a field of high grass two hundred yards from the orchard. Even at that distance the blond head was recognizable. So, as he drew closer, was the smug smile.

He'd lost his eye-brows and his lashes; and his hair was badly singed. But he was alive and well.

‘How did you do that?' Cal asked him, when he got within speaking distance of the fellow.

De Bono shrugged. ‘I'd rather fire-walk than rope-dance any day of the week,' he said.

‘I'd be dead without you,' Cal said. ‘Thank you.'

De Bono was clearly uncomfortable with Cal's gratitude. He shooed it away with a wave of his hand, then turned his back on the fire and waded off through the grass, leaving Cal to follow.

‘Do you know where we're going?' Cal called after him. It seemed they were striking off in another direction to the one they'd been following when they'd first come upon the fire, but he couldn't have sworn to it.

De Bono offered a reply, but the wind blew it away, and Cal was too weary to ask a second time.

UNEARTHLY DELIGHTS

The journey became a torment thereafter. Events at the orchard had drained Cal of what few reserves of strength he could still lay claim to. The muscles in his legs twitched as if they were about to go into spasm; the vertebrae in his lower back seemed to have lost their cartilage and were grinding against each other. He tried not to think of what would happen if and when they finally reached the Firmament. In the best of conditions he and de Bono would scarcely be Shadwell's equal. Like this, they'd be fodder.

The occasional wonders the starlight had uncovered - a ring of stones, linked by bands of whispering fog; what appeared to be a family of dolls, their identical faces pale, smiling beatifically from behind a silent waterfall - to these he gave no more than a cursory glance. The only sight that could have brought joy to his lips at that moment was a feather mattress. But even the mysteries dwindled after a time, as de Bono led him up a dark hillside, with a soft wind moving in the grass around their feet.

The moon was rising through a bank of cumulus, making a ghost of de Bono as he forged on up the steep slope. Cal followed like a lamb, too weary to question their route.

But by degrees he became aware that the sighs he heard were not entirely the voice of the wind. There was an oblique music in them; a tune which came and fled again. It was de Bono who finally came to a halt, and said:

‘D'you hear them, Cal?'

‘Yes. I hear them.'

They know they've got visitors.'

‘Is this the Firmament?'

‘No,' said de Bono softly. ‘The Firmament's for tomorrow. We're too tired for that. Tonight we stay here.'

‘Where's here?'

‘Can't you guess? Don't you smell the air?'

It was lightly perfumed; honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine.

‘And feel the earth?'

The ground was warm beneath his feet.

This, my friend, is Venus Mountain.'

He should have known better than to trust de Bono; for all his heroics the fellow was wholly unreliable. And now they'd lost precious time.

Cal glanced behind him, to see if the route they'd come was discernible, but no; the moon had slipped into the cloud-bank for a little while, and the mountain-side was in darkness. When he looked back, de Bono had vanished. Hearing laughter a little way off, Cal called his guide's name. The laughter came again. It sounded too light to be de Bono, but he couldn't be certain.

‘Where are you?' he asked, but there was no reply, so he went in the direction of the laughter.

As he advanced he stepped into a passage of warm air. Startled, he retreated, but the tropical warmth came with him, the honey scent now strong in his nostrils. It made him feel light-headed; his aching legs threatened to fold beneath him from the sheer swooning pleasure of it.

A little further up the incline he saw another figure, surely that of de Bono, moving in the gloom. Again he called the man's name, and this time he was granted a reply. De Bono turned and said:

‘Don't fret, Cuckoo.'

His voice had taken on a dreamy quality.

‘We've got no time -' Cal protested.

‘Can't do ... can't do anything ...' de Bono's voice came and went, like a weak radio signal. ‘Can't do anything tonight ... except love

The last word faded, and so did de Bono, melting into the darkness.

Cal about-turned. He was certain that de Bono had been speaking from further up the mountain, which meant that if he turned his back on the spot, and walked, he'd be returning the way they'd come.

The warmth went with him as he about-turned. I'll get a new guide, he vaguely thought; get a guide and find the Firmament. He had an appointment to keep with somebody. Who was it? His thoughts were going the way of de Bono's voice. Oh yes: Suzanna.

At the mental formulation of her name the warmth somehow conspired with his limbs to draw him down to the ground. He wasn't sure how it happened - he didn't trip, he wasn't pushed - but in an instant he had his head on the ground, and oh, the comfort of it. It was like returning to a lover's bed on a morning of a frost. He stretched out, indulging his weary limbs, telling himself he'd just lie here long enough to gain some strength for the trials ahead.

He might well have fallen asleep, but that he heard his name called.

Not Cal, nor even Calhoun, but:

‘Mooney...'

It was not de Bono's voice, but a woman's.

‘Suzanna?'

He tried to sit up, but he was so heavy, so laden with the dirt of his journey he couldn't move. He wanted to slough the weight off like a snake its tired skin, but he lay there unable to move a finger joint, while the voice called him and called him, fading as it went searching for him in higher regions.

He so wanted to follow it; and without warning he felt that yearning realized, as his clothes fell away from him and he began to travel over the grass, his belly to the earth's belly. How he was transported he wasn't certain, for he felt no movement in his limbs, and his breath was not quickened by the effort. Indeed he felt so removed from sensation it was as if he'd left body and breath behind him with his clothes.

One thing he had brought with him: light. A pale, cool light that illuminated the grass and the small mountain flowers nestling there; a light that travelled so close to him it might have been of him.

A few yards from where he journeyed he saw de Bono lying asleep on the grass, his mouth open like a fish's mouth. He moved towards the sleeper to question him, but before he reached the man something else drew his attention. Mere yards from where de Bono lay there were shafts of light springing up from the dark ground. He moved over his companion's body, his light almost stirring de Bono, then on towards this new mystery.

It was easily solved. There were several holes in the earth. He went to the lip of the nearest and peered down. The entire mountain, he now saw, was hollow. Below him was a vast cavern, with brightnesses moving in it. These were, presumably, the presences of which de Bono had spoken.

Now the suspicion that he'd left his body behind him somewhere along the way was confirmed, for he slipped down the hole - which would not have been wide enough to allow access to his head never mind his shoulders - and fell into the upper air of the cavern.

There he hovered, and gazed on the ritual being performed below.

At first sight the performers seemed to be spheres of luminous gas, perhaps forty of them, some large, some minute, their colours ranging from cool pastels through to livid yellows and reds. But as he drifted down from the dome of the cavern, claimed not by gravity but by the simple desire to know, he realized that the globes were far from blank. Within their confines forms were appearing, like ghosts in their perfect geometries. They were ephemeral, these visions, lasting seconds at most, before pale clouds veiled them and new

configurations took their place. But they lingered long enough for him to make sense of them.

In several of the spheres he saw shapes that resembled human foetuses, their heads vast, their thread-like limbs wrapped about their bodies. No sooner seen than gone; and in their place perhaps a splash of bright blue, that made the globe into a vast eyeball. In another, the gases were dividing and dividing, like a cell in love with itself; in a third the clouds had become a blizzard, in the depths of which he saw a forest and a hill.

He was certain these entities were aware of his being in the cavern, though none broke the regime of their motion to welcome him. He was not offended by this. Their dance was elaborate, and it would cause no little confusion if one of them were to move off its course. There was an exquisite inevitability about their motion - some of the spheres repeatedly moving within a hair's breadth of collision, then swinging wide an instant before disaster struck; others proceeding in families which described complex paths around each other while simultaneously moving in the great circle that was pivoted at the centre of the cavern.

There was more to fascinate him here than the tranquil majesty of the dance, however, for twice in the flux of one of the larger spheres he glimpsed an image which carried an extraordinary erotic charge. A naked woman, her limbs defying all the laws of anatomy, was floating on a pillow of cloud, her position one of pure sexual display. As Cal witnessed her she was gone, leaving him with the image of her invitation: her lips, her cunt, her buttocks. There was nothing whorish in her exhibition; the crime would have been in shame, which had no place in this charmed circle. The presences were too in love with being for such nonsenses.

They loved death too, and as unequivocally. One sphere had a corpse in its midst, rotted and crawling with flies, disclosed with the same delight as its companion glories.

But death did not interest Cal; the woman did.

Can't do anything tonight — de Bono had said — except love, and Cal knew it now to be true.

But love as he'd known it above ground was not appropriate here. The woman in the sphere needed no sweet-talk; her company was offered freely. The question was: how did he express his desire? He'd left his erection behind on Venus Mountain.

He needn't have concerned himself: she already knew his thoughts. As his eyes found her a third time, her glance seemed to draw him down into the midst of the dance. He found himself executing a slow, slow somersault, and settling into place beside his mistress.

As he attained this spot, he realized just what function he had here.

The voice on the mountain had called him Mooney, and that name had not been chosen in vain. He had come from above as light, as moonlight, and here he had found his orbit in a dance of planets and satellites.

Perhaps, of course, this was simply his interpretation. Perhaps the imperatives of this system pertained as much to love and snow-storms as to astronomy. In the face of such miracles conjecture was fruitless. Tonight, being was all.

The presences made another circuit, and he, lost in the sheer delight of this preordained journey, tumbling over and over (no heels or head here; only the pleasure of motion), was momentarily distracted from the woman he'd seen. But as his orbit took him out in a wide arc he once more set eyes on the planet she haunted. She emerged even as he watched, only to be lost in cloud again. Did he perform the same rites for her, turning from humanity to abstraction and back again at the blossoming of a milky cloud? He knew so little of himself, this Mooney, in his singular orbit.

All he could hope to comprehend of what he was he had to discover from the spheres upon whose faces he shed his borrowed light. That was perhaps the condition of moons.

It was enough.

He knew in that moment how moons made love. By bewitching the nights of planets; by stirring their oceans; by blessing the hunter and the harvester. A hundred ways that needed only the unbound anatomies of light and space.

As he thought this thought the woman opened to bathe in him, to spread her cunt and let his light pleasure her.

Entering, he felt the same heat, the same possessiveness, the same vanity as had ever marked the animal he'd been, but in place of labour there was ease, in place of ever imminent loss, sustenance; in place of urgency the sense that this could last forever, or rather that a hundred human lifetimes were a moment in the span of moons, and his ride on this empyrean carousel had made a nonsense of time.

At that thought a terrible sense of poignancy swept over him. Had all he'd left above on the mountain withered and died while these constellations moved steadily about their business?

He looked towards the centre of the system, the hub about which they all described their paths - eccentric or regular, distant or intimate; and there, in the place from which he drew his light, he saw himself, sleeping on a hillside.

I'm dreaming, he thought, and suddenly rose - like a bubble in a bottle - less moon than Mooney. The dome of the cavern - which he vaguely realized resembled the inside of a skull -was dark above him, and for an instant he thought he'd be dashed to death against it, but at the last moment the air grew bright around him and he woke, staring up at a sky streaked with light.

It was dawn on Venus Mountain.

Of the dream he'd had, one part was true. He had sloughed off two skins like a snake. One, his clothes, lay scattered around him in the grass. The other, the accrued grime of his adventures, had been bathed away in the night, either by dew or a fall of rain. Whichever, he was quite dry now; the warmth of the ground he lay upon (that part also had been no dream) had dried him off and left him sweet-smelling. He felt nourished too, and strong. He sat up. Balm de Bono was already on his feet, scratching his balls and staring up at the sky: a blissful combination. The grass had left an imprint on his back and buttocks.

‘Did they please you?' he said, cocking an eye at Cal.

‘Please me?'

‘The Presences. Did they give you sweet dreams?'

‘Yes they did.'

De Bono grinned lewdly.

‘Want to tell me about it?' he said.

‘I don't know how to —'

‘Oh spare me the modesty.'

‘No, it's just I... I dreamt I was ... the moon.'

‘You did what?'

‘I dreamt -'

‘I bring you to the nearest thing we've got to a whorehouse, and you dream about being the moon? You're a strange man, Calhoun.'

He picked up his vest, and put it on, shaking his head at Cal's bizarrity.

‘What did you dream of?' Cal enquired.

‘I'll tell you, one of these times,' said de Bono. ‘When you're old enough.'

They dressed in silence, then set off down the gentle slope of the mountain.

A WITNESS

Though the day had dawned well for Suzanna, with her miraculous escape from Hobart, it had rapidly deteriorated. She'd felt oddly cocooned by night; with the dawn came nameless anxieties.

And some she could name. First off, the fact that she'd lost her guide. She had only the roughest idea of the direction in which the Firmament lay, so elected to make her way towards the Gyre, which was plainly visible at all times, and make what enquiries she could along the route.

Her second source of concern: the many signs that events in the Fugue were rapidly taking a turn for the worse. A great pall of smoke hung over the valley, and though there'd been rain in the night, fires still burned in many places. She came upon several battle sites as she went. In one place a fire-gutted car was perched in a tree like a steel bird, blown there presumably, or levitated. She couldn't know what forces had clashed the previous night, nor what weapons had been used, but the struggle had dearly been horrendous. Shadwell had divided the people of this once tranquil land with his prophetic talk -setting brother against brother. Those conflicts were traditionally the bloodiest. It should have come as no surprise then, to see bodies left where they'd fallen, for foxes and birds to pick at, denied the simple courtesy of burial.

If there was any sliver of comfort to be drawn from these scenes it was that Shadwell's invasion had not gone undefied. The destruction of Capra's House had been a massive miscalculation on his part. What chance he'd had of taking the Fugue with words alone had been squandered in that one tyrannical gesture. He could not now hope to win these territories by stealth and seduction. It was armed suppression or nothing.

Having seen for herself what damage the Seerkind's raptures were capable of, she nurtured some faint hope that any such suppression might be subverted. But what damage - perhaps irreversible - would be done to the Fugue while its inhabitants' freedom was being won? These woods and meadows weren't meant to host atrocities; their innocence of such horrors was a part of their power to enchant.

It was at such a spot - once untainted, now all too familiar with death - that she encountered the first living person in her travels that day. It was one of those mysterious snatches of architecture of which the Fugue could boast several; in this case a dozen pillars ranged around a shallow pool. On top of one of the pillars sat a stringy middle-aged man in a shabby coat - a large pair of binoculars around his neck - who looked up from the notebook in which he was scribbling as she approached.

‘Looking for someone?' he enquired.

‘No.'

‘They're all dead anyway,' he said dispassionately. ‘See?' The pavement around the pool was splashed with blood. Those that had shed it lay face up at the bottom of the water, their wounds white.

‘Your handiwork?' she asked him.

‘Me? Good God no. I'm just a witness. And what army are you with?'

‘I'm with nobody,' she said. ‘I'm on my own.'

This he wrote down.

‘I don't necessarily believe you,' he said, as he wrote. ‘But a good witness sets down what he sees and hears, even if he doubts it.'

‘What have you seen?' she asked him.

‘Confusion,' he said. ‘People everywhere, and nobody sure who was who. And blood-letting the like of which I never thought to see here.' He peered at her. ‘You're not Seerkind,' he said.

‘No.'

‘Just wandered in by chance, did you?'

‘Something like that.'

‘Well I'd wander back out again if I were you. Nobody's safe. A lot of folks have packed their bags and gone into the Kingdom rather than be slaughtered.'

‘So who's left fighting?'

‘Wild men. I know I shouldn't venture an opinion but that's the way it looks to me. Barbarians, raging around.'

Even as he spoke she heard shouting a little way off. With their breakfast done, the wild men were at work already.

‘What can you see from up there?' she asked him.

‘A lot of ruins,' he said. ‘And occasional glimpses of the factions.' He put his binoculars to his eyes and made a sweep of the terrain, pausing here and there as he caught sight of some interesting detail. ‘There's been a battalion out of Nonesuch in the last hour,' he said, ‘looking much the worse for wear. There's rebels over towards the Steps, and another band to the North-West of here. The Prophet left the Firmament a little while ago - I can't say exactly when, my watch was stolen - and there's several squads of his evangelists preceding him, to clear the way.'

The way where?'

‘To the Gyre, of course.'

‘The Gyre?'

‘My guess is that was the Prophet's target from the outset.'

‘He's not a Prophet,' said Suzanna. ‘He's called Shadwell.'

‘Shadwell?'

‘Go on, write that down. He's a Cuckoo, and a salesman.'

‘You know this for certain?' the man said. Tell me all.'

‘No time,' Suzanna replied, much to his aggravation. ‘I've got to get to him.'

‘Oh. So he's a friend.'

‘Far from it,' she said, her eyes straying back to the bodies in the pool.

‘You'll never get near his throat, if that's what you're hoping,' the man told her. ‘He's guarded day and night.' ‘I'll find a way,' she said. ‘You don't know what he's capable of.'

‘If he's a Cuckoo and he tries stepping into the Gyre, that'll be the end of us, that I do know. Still, it'll give me a last chapter, eh?' ‘And who'll be left to read it?'

She left him up on his pillar, like some lonely penitent, pondering the remark. Her thoughts were grimmer for the conversation. Despite the presence of the menstruum in her system, she knew very little of how the forces that had made the Weaveworld worked, but it didn't take genius to see that for Shadwell to trespass on the rapturous ground of the Gyre would prove cataclysmic. He was all that rarefied region, and its makers, despised: he was Corruption. Perhaps the Gyre could destroy itself rather than give him access to its secrets. And if it ceased to exist wouldn't the Fugue - the unity of which was preserved by the power there - be lost to the maelstrom? That, she feared, was what the witness had meant with his pronouncements. If Shadwell entered the Gyre, the world would end.

There'd been no sign of animal or bird life since she'd left the vicinity of the pool. The trees and bushes were deserted; the undergrowth was hushed. She summoned the menstruum up until it brimmed in her, ready to be used in her defence should the occasion arise. There was no time left for niceties now. She would kill anyone who tried to prevent her from getting to Shadwell.

A noise from behind a partially demolished wall drew her attention. She stood her ground, and challenged the observer to make himself known. There was no reply forthcoming.

‘I won't ask you again,' she said. ‘Who's there?'

At this there was a fall of brick shards, and a boy of four or

five, naked but for socks and dust, stood up and clambered over the rubble towards her.

‘Oh my God,' she said, her heart going out to the child. In the instant her defences fell there was movement to right and left of her, and she found herself surrounded by a ragged selection of armed men.

The child's forlorn expression dropped, as one of the soldiers summoned him to his side. The man put a grimy hand through the boy's hair, and gave him a grim smile of approval.

‘Name yourself,' someone demanded of her.

She had no idea of which side these men were on. If they were of Shadwell's army, admitting her name would be an instant death sentence. But, desperate as things were, she couldn't bring herself to unleash the menstruum against men - and a child - whose allegiance she didn't even know.

‘Shoot her,' the boy said. ‘She's with them.'

‘Don't you dare,' said a voice at the back. ‘I know her.'

She turned, as her saviour spoke her name, and there - of all people - was Nimrod. The last time they'd met he'd been a convert to Shadwell's unholy crusade: all talk of glorious tomorrows. Time and circumstance had humbled him. He was a picture of wretchedness, his clothes tattered, his face full of hurt.

‘Don't blame me,' he said before she could even speak.

‘I don't,' she said. There'd been times she'd cursed him, but they were history now. Truly I don't.'

‘Help me -' he said suddenly, and came to her. She hugged him. He concealed his tears behind their embrace, until the others left off watching the reunion and slipped back into hiding.

Only then did he ask:

‘Have you seen Jerichau?'

‘He's dead,' she said. The sisters killed him.'

He drew away from her, and covered his face with his hands.

‘It wasn't your fault,' she told him.

‘I knew ....' he said quietly. ‘As soon as things went sour. I knew something terrible had happened to him,'

‘You can't be blamed for not seeing the truth. Shadwell's a brilliant performer. And he was selling what people wanted to hear.'

‘Wait,' said Nimrod, looking up at her. ‘Are you telling me Shadwell's the Prophet?'

‘Yes I am.'

He made a small shake of the head.

‘A Cuckoo,' he said, his tone still half disbelieving. ‘A Cuckoo.'

‘It doesn't mean he isn't strong,' Suzanna cautioned. ‘He's got raptures all his own.'

‘You've got to come back to the camp,' Nimrod said, with fresh urgency. ‘Talk to our commander before we leave for the Gyre.'

‘Make it quick,' she said.

He was already away, leading her into the rockier terrain that concealed the rebels.

There's only me and Apolline left alive,' he said, as they went, ‘from the First Wakened. The rest are gone. My Lilia. Then Freddy Cammell. Now Jerichau.'

‘Where's Apolline now?'

‘She went out into the Kingdom, the last I heard. What about Cal? Is he with you?'

‘We were going to meet up at the Firmament. But Shadwell's already on his way to the Gyre,'

‘Which is as far as he'll get,' Nimrod said. ‘Whatever raptures he's stolen, he's still just a man. And men bleed.' So do we all, she thought, but left the thought unspoken.

XII

ONE FELL SWOOP

Nimrod's brave talk was undercut by what she found at the camp. It was more like a hospital than a military establishment. Well over three quarters of the fifty or so soldiers, men and women, who were gathered in the shelter of the rocks, had sustained some wound or other. Some were still capable of fighting, but many were clearly at death's door, tended with soft words in their failing minutes.

In one corner of the camp, out of sight of the dying, a dozen bodies were laid beneath make-shift shrouds. In another, a cache of captured armaments was being sorted through. It made a chilling display: machine-guns, flame-throwers, grenades. On this evidence Shadwell's followers had come prepared to destroy their homeland if it resisted their deliverance. Against these horrors, and the zeal with which they were wielded, the profoundest raptures were a frail defence.

If Nimrod shared her doubts he chose not to show them, but talked ceaselessly of the previous night's victories, as if to keep a telling silence at bay.

‘We even took prisoners,' he boasted, leading Suzanna to a muddy pit amongst the boulders, where maybe a dozen captives sat, bound at ankles and wrists, guarded by a girl with a machine-gun. They were a forlorn mob. Some were wounded, all were distressed, weeping and muttering to themselves, as though Shadwell's lies no longer blinded them and they were waking up to the iniquity of what they'd done. She pitied them in their self-contempt. She knew all too well the powers of beguilement Shadwell possessed - in her time she'd almost succumbed to them herself. These were his victims, not his allies; they'd been sold a lie they'd had no power to refuse. Now, disabused of his teachings, they were left to brood on the blood they'd spilt, and despair.

‘Has anybody talked with them?' she asked Nimrod. ‘Maybe they've got some grasp of Shadwell's weaknesses.'

The commander forbade it,' said Nimrod. ‘They're diseased.'

‘Don't talk nonsense,' Suzanna replied, and climbed down into the pit with the prisoners. Several turned their troubled faces towards her; one, at the sight of a face that bore some sign of lenience, started to sob loudly.

‘I'm not here to accuse you,' she told them. ‘I just want to talk with you,'

At her side a man with blood-caked features said:

‘Are they going to kill us?'

‘No,' she told him. ‘Not if I can help it,'

‘What happened?' another enquired, his voice slurred and dreamy: ‘Is the Prophet coming?' Someone tried to shush him, but he rambled on. ‘He must come soon, mustn't he? He must come, and take us into Capra's hands.'

‘He isn't coming,' said Suzanna.

‘We know that,' said the first prisoner. ‘At least most of us do. We've been cheated. He told us -'

‘I know what he told you,' Suzanna said. ‘And I know how he cheated you. Now you've got to make good the damage, by helping me.'

‘You can't overthrow him,' the man said. ‘He's got powers,'

‘Shut your mouth,' said one nearby, who was clutching a rosary so tightly his knuckles looked ready to pop. ‘You mustn't say anything against him. He hears.'

‘Let him hear,' the other spat back. ‘Let him kill me if he chooses. I don't care,' He turned back to Suzanna: ‘He's got demons with him. I've seen them. He feeds the dead to them,'

Nimrod, who was standing behind Suzanna listening to this evidence, now spoke up:

‘Demons?' he said. ‘You've seen them?'

‘No,' said the white-faced man.

‘I have,' said another.

‘Describe them ...' Nimrod demanded.

It was surely the by-blows the man spoke of, Suzanna thought, grown to monstrous proportions. But as the man began to tell what he knew she was distracted by the sight of a prisoner she hadn't previously noticed, squatting in the filthiest part of the compound, face turned to the rock. It was a woman, to judge by the hair that fell to the middle of her back, and she'd not been bound like the rest, simply left to grieve in the dirt.

Suzanna made her way through the captives towards her. As she approached she heard mutterings, and saw that the woman had her lips pressed to the stone, and was talking to it as if seeking comfort there. Her supplication faltered as Suzanna's shadow fell on the rock, and she turned.

It took a heart-beat only for Suzanna to see beyond the dried blood and excrement on the face that now looked up towards her; it was Immacolata. On her maimed face was the look of a tragedian. Her eyes were swollen with tears, and brimming now with a fresh flood; her hair was unbraided and thick with mud. Her breasts were bared for all to see, and in every sinew there was a terrible bewilderment. Nothing of her former authority remained. She was a madwoman, squatting in her own shit.

Contrary feelings fought in Suzanna. Here, trembling before her, was the woman who'd murdered Mimi in her own bed; part architect of the calamities which had overtaken the Fugue. The power behind Shadwell's throne, the source of countless deceits and sorrows; the Devil's inspiration. Yet she could not feel for Immacolata the hatred she'd felt for Shadwell or Hobart. Was it because the Incantatrix had first given her access to the menstruum, albeit unwillingly; or was it that they were - as Immacolata had always claimed - somehow sisters? Might this, under other skies, have been her fate; to be lost and mad?

‘Don't ... look at ... me,' the woman said softly. There was no sign of recognition in her blood-shot eyes.

‘Do you know who you are?' Suzanna asked her.

The woman's expression didn't change. After a few moments her answer came.

‘The rock knows,' she said.

‘The rock?'

‘It'll be sand soon. I told it so, because it's true. It'll be sand.'

Immacolata took her gaze off her questioner and began to stroke the rock with her open palm. She'd been doing this for some while, Suzanna now saw. There were streaks of blood on the stone, where she'd rubbed the skin from her palm as if attempting to erase the lines.

‘Why will it be sand?' Suzanna asked.

‘It must come,' said Immacolata. ‘I've seen it. The Scourge. It must come, and then we will all be sand.' She stroked more furiously. ‘I told the rock.'

‘Will you tell me?'

Immacolata glanced round, and then back to the rock. For a little while Suzanna thought the woman had forgotten the questioner until the words came again, haltingly.

The Scourge must come,' she said. ‘Even in its sleep, it knows.' She stopped wounding her hand. ‘Sometimes it almost wakes,' she said. ‘And when it does, we'll all be sand...'

She laid her cheek against the bloodied rock, and made a low sobbing sound.

‘Where's your sister?' Suzanna said.

At this, the sobbing faltered.

‘Is she here?'

‘I have ... no sisters,' Immacolata said. There was no trace of doubt in her voice.

‘What about Shadwell? Do you remember Shadwell?'

‘My sisters are dead. All gone to sand. Everything. Gone to sand.'

The sobs began again, more mournful than ever.

‘What's your interest in her?' Nimrod, who'd been standing at Suzanna's shoulder for several seconds, wanted to know.

‘She's just another lunatic. We found her amongst the corpses. She was eating their eyes.'

‘Do you know who she is?' Suzanna said. ‘Nimrod... that's Immacolata.'

His face grew slack with shock.

‘Shadwell's mistress. I swear it.'

‘You're mistaken,' he said.

‘She's lost her mind, but I swear that's who it is. I was face to face with her less than two days ago.'

‘So what's happened to her?'

‘Shadwell, maybe ...'

The name was echoed softly by the woman at the rock.

‘Whatever happened, she shouldn't be here, not like this -'

‘You'd better come speak to the commander. You can tell it all to her.'

It seemed it was to be a day of reunions. First Nimrod, then the Incantatrix, and now - leading this defeated troop - Yolande Dor, the woman who'd so vehemently fought the reweaving, back when Capra's House was still standing.

She too had changed. Gone, the strutting confidence of the woman. Her face looked pale and clammy; her voice and manner were subdued. She wasted no time with courtesies.

‘If you've got something to tell me, spit it out.'

‘One of your prisoners -' Suzanna began.

‘I've no time to hear appeals,' came the reply. ‘Especially from you.'

This isn't an appeal.'

‘I still won't hear it.'

‘You must; and you will,' Suzanna responded. ‘Forget how you feel about me -'

‘I don't feel anything,' was Yolande's retort. The Council condemned themselves. You were just there to carry their burden for them. If it hadn't been you it would have been somebody else.'

This outburst seemed to pain her. She slipped her hand inside her unbuttoned jacket, clearly nursing a wound there. Her fingers came away bloody. Suzanna persevered, but more softly. ‘One of your prisoners,' she said, ‘is Immacolata.' Yolande looked across at Nimrod. ‘Is that true?' ‘It's true,' Suzanna said. ‘I know her better than any of you. It's her. She's ... lost; insane maybe. But if we could get some sense from her, we might use her to reach Shadwell.'

‘Shadwell?'

‘The Prophet. They were allies once; him and Immacolata.' ‘I won't conspire with Corruption like that,' Yolande replied. ‘We'll hang her when the proper time comes.'

‘Well at least let me talk to her. Maybe I can coax something from her.'

‘If she's lost her mind, why should we trust a word she says? No. Let her rot.'

‘It's a wasted chance.'

‘Don't tell me about wasted chances,' Yolande said bitterly. There was clearly no hope of persuading her. ‘We move towards the Mantle in an hour,' she stated.

‘If you want to swell our ranks, do so. Or else get about your business.' This said, she turned her back on them both. ‘Come on,' said Nimrod, and took his leave. But Suzanna lingered.

‘For what it's worth,' she said, ‘I hope we have time to talk, when all this is over.'

Yolande didn't turn back. ‘Leave me alone,' she said. Suzanna did just that.

For several minutes after Suzanna's departure from the prisoners' compound, Immacolata sat in the murk of her forgetfulness. Sometimes she wept. Sometimes she stared at the silent rock in front of her. The violation Shadwell had visited upon her at the Firmament, following as it had upon the destruction of her wraith-sisters, had driven her mind into a wilderness. But she'd not been alone there. Somewhere in those wastes she'd been reacquainted with the spectre that had haunted her so often in the past: the Scourge. She, who'd been happiest where the air was thickest with decay, who'd made necklaces of entrails, and soul-mates of the dead - she had found in the presence of that abomination nightmares even she'd prayed to wake from.

It still slept - which was some small consolation in her terror - but it would not sleep forever. It had tasks unfinished; ambitions unfulfilled. Very soon it would rise from its bed, and come looking to finish its business.

And on that day?

‘... all sand ...' she told the stone.

This time it didn't answer her. It was sulking, because she'd been indiscreet, talking to the woman with the grey eyes.

Immacolata rocked back and forth on her heels, and as she rocked the woman's words drifted back to her, tantalizing her. She only remembered a little of what the woman had said: a phrase, a name. Or rather, one name in particular. It echoed in her head now.

Shadwell.

It was like an itch beneath her scalp; an ache in her skull. She wanted to dig through her ear drum and pull it out, grind it underfoot. She rocked faster, to soothe the name away, but it wouldn't leave her head.

Shadwell. Shadwell.

And now there were other names rising to join the ranks of the remembered -

The Magdalene.

The Hag.

She saw them before her, as clear as the rock; dearer: her sisters, her poor, twice-slaughtered sisters.

And beneath their dead heels she saw a land; a somewhere she'd conspired to spoil for such a long, weary time. Its name came back to her, and she spoke it softly.

‘The Fugue...'

That's what they'd called it, her enemies. How they'd loved it. How they'd fought for its safety, and in the process wounded her.

She put her hand out to the rock, and felt it tremble at her touch. Then she hauled herself to her feet, while the name that had begun this flood filled her head, washing forgetfulness away.

Shadwell.

How could she ever have forgotten her beloved Shadwell? She'd given him raptures. And what had he done in return? Betrayed and befouled her. Used her for as long as it had suited his purposes, then pitched her away, into the wilderness.

He hadn't thrown her far enough. Today, she'd found her way back, and she came with killing news.

The screams began suddenly, and mounted. Cries of disbelief, then shouts of horror the like of which Suzanna had never heard.

Ahead of her, Nimrod was already running towards the source of the din. She followed; and stepped into a scene of the bloodiest chaos.

‘We're attacked!' Nimrod yelled at her, as rebels ran in all directions, many bearing fresh wounds. The ground was already littered with bodies; more were falling with every moment.

Before Nimrod could plunge into the fray, however, Suzanna took hold of his jacket.

They're fighting each other!' she shouted to him, above the bedlam.

‘What?'

‘Look!' she said.

It took him only a few seconds to confirm what she'd seen. There was no sign of any outside attack. The rebels were at each others' throats. No quarter was being given on any side. Men were murdering men they'd moments ago been sharing

a cigarette with. Some had even risen from their death-beds and were beating at the heads of those who'd nursed them.

Nimrod stepped on to the battlefield and dragged one of these sudden lunatics from the throat of another.

‘What in God's name are you doing?' he demanded. The man was still struggling to reach his victim.

‘That bastard!' the man shrieked. ‘He raped my wife.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘I saw him! Right there!' He jabbed his finger at the ground. ‘There!'

‘Your wife's not here!' Nimrod yelled, shaking the man violently. ‘She's not here!'

Suzanna scanned the battlefield. The same delusion, or something similar, had seized hold of all of these people. Even as they fought, they wept, and howled their accusations at each other. They'd seen their parents trampled underfoot, their wives abused and their children slaughtered: now they wanted to kill the culprits. Hearing this collective delusion voiced, she looked for its maker, and there - standing on a high rock, surveying the atrocities, was Immacolata. Her hair remained unbraided. Her breasts were still bare. But she was obviously no longer a stranger to her history. She'd remembered herself.

Suzanna began to move towards her, trusting that the menstruum would keep this terrible rapture from curdling her brains. It did so. Though she had to be nimble to avoid the brutalities on every side, she reached the vicinity of the rock without harm.

Immacolata seemed not to see her. Head back, teeth bared in a grin of appalling ferocity, her attention was entirely upon the mayhem she'd given birth to.

‘Forget them,' Suzanna called up to her.

At these words the head dropped a fraction, and Suzanna felt the Incantatrix's gaze come to rest on her.

‘Why are you doing this?' she said. They've done you no harm.'

‘You should have left me to my emptiness,' the Incantatrix replied. ‘You made me remember.'

Then for my sake,' Suzanna said, ‘leave them be.'

Behind her, the shouts had begun to wane, only to be replaced by the moans of the dying and the sobs of those who'd woken from this delusion to find their knives buried in the hearts of their friends.

Whether the rapture had faltered because Immacolata had done her worst, or because she'd responded to Suzanna's appeal, was neither here nor there. At least the death-dealing had stopped.

There was a moment's respite only, however, before a shot punctuated the sobs. The bullet struck the rock between Immacolata's bare feet. Suzanna turned to see Yolande Dor striding through the mortuary that had once been her little army, taking fresh aim at the Incantatrix as she did so.

Immacolata was not prepared to play target. As the second of the shots pealed against the rock, the Incantatrix rose into the air, and floated towards Yolande. Her shadow, passing over the battlefield like that of a carrion-bird, was fatal. At its touch the wounded, unable to run before it, turned their faces to the blood-sodden ground and breathed their last. Yolande didn't wait for the shadow to reach her, but fired at the creature over and over again. The same power that held Immacolata aloft simply threw the bullets aside.

Suzanna yelled for Yolande to retreat, but her warning went unheard or ignored. The Incantatrix swept down upon the woman and snatched her up - the menstruum wrapping them both in light - then threw her across the field. Her body hit the face of the rock upon which Immacolata had been standing, with a sickening thud, and dropped, broken, to the ground.

None of the surviving rebels made a move to go to their commander's aid. They stayed - frozen in terror - as the Incantatrix floated, a yard above the ground, across the arena of bodies, her shadow claiming those failing few who'd not been silenced by it on its outward journey.

Suzanna knew that what slim chance of mercy she'd won from the Incantatrix had been forfeited by Yolande's attack: she would now leave none living amongst her sometime captors. Without any time to formulate a defence, she threw the menstruum's living glance towards the woman. Its power was minuscule beside that of Immacolata, but she'd dropped her guard after killing Yolande, and the blow found her vulnerable. Struck in the small of the back she was flung forward. It took her seconds only to regain her equilibrium however, and turn, still hovering like some perverse saint, towards her attacker. There was no fury in her face; only mild amusement.

‘Do you want to die?' she asked.

‘No. Of course not.'

‘Didn't I warn you how it would be, sister? Didn't I tell you? All grief, I said. All loss. Is that how it is?'

Suzanna wasn't entirely humouring the woman when she nodded her head. The Incantatrix made a long, soft sigh.

‘You made me remember,' she said. ‘I thank you for that. And in return -' She opened her hand, as if presenting some invisible gift'- your life.' The hand became a fist. ‘And now, the debt's paid.'

As she spoke she began to descend once more, until her feet were on solid ground.

There will come a time,' she said, looking at the bodies in whose midst they stood, ‘when you will take comfort in the company of such as these. As I have. As I do.'

Then she turned her back on Suzanna and started to walk away. Nobody made any move to challenge her as she climbed the rocks and disappeared from sight. The survivors just watched, and gave up a prayer to whichever deities they held dear that the woman from the wilderness had passed them by.

XIII

A FLEETING GLIMPSE

Shadwell had not slept well; but then he supposed aspirant deities seldom did. With God-hood came a great burden of responsibility. Should he be so surprised then that his slumbers were uneasy?

Yet he'd known, from the time that he'd stood in the watchtower and studied the Mantle of the Gyre, that he had nothing to fear. He could feel the power hidden behind that cloud calling him by name, inviting him to step into its embrace, and be transformed.

A little before dawn however, as he was preparing to leave the Firmament, he was brought unsettling news: Hobart's forces in Nonesuch had been decimated by raptures that had driven most of them to lunacy. Nor was Hobart entirely free of the taint. When he arrived, an hour after the messenger, the Inspector had about him the air of a man who wasn't certain he could trust himself any longer.

From elsewhere, the news was better. Wherever the Prophet's forces had faced the native population in natural warfare, they had triumphed. It was only when the soldiers had failed to strike swiftly that the Seerkind had found a window through which to work their raptures, and when they had, the results were the same as they'd been in Nonesuch: men had either lost their minds, or woken from their evangelical zeal and joined the enemy.

Now that enemy was gathering at the Narrow Bright, warned either by rumour or rapture that the Prophet was intending to breach the Gyre, and prepared to defend its integrity to the death. There were several hundreds of them, but they scarcely constituted an army. They were, by all reports, an unarmed, unregimented collection of old men, women and children. The only problem they presented lay in the ethics of decimating them. But he'd decided, as his entourage left the Firmament for the Gyre, that such moral niceties were beneath him now. The greater crime by far would be to ignore the call he'd heard from beyond the Mantle.

When the moment came, as it soon would, he'd summon the by-blows, and let them devour the enemy, children and all. He would not shirk.

Godhood called, and he went, fleet-footed, to worship at his own altar.

The sense of physical and spiritual well-being Cal had felt when he woke on Venus Mountain did not falter as he and de Bono made their way down the slope towards the Firmament. But his fine mood was soon spoiled by the agitation in the landscape around them: a distressing, but unfixable, anxiety in every leaf and blade of grass. What shreds of bird-song there were sounded shrill; more alarms than music-making. Even the air buzzed around his head, as though for the first time he was alive to the news it carried.

Bad news no doubt. Yet there was not much of consequence to be seen. A few smouldering fires, little more, and even those signs of strife petered out as they approached the Firmament itself.

‘This is it?' said Cal as de Bono led him through the trees towards a tall, but in truth quite unexceptional, building.

‘It is.'

All the doors stood open; there was neither sound nor movement from within. They quickly scrutinized the exterior searching for some sign of Shadwell's occupancy, but there was none visible.

After one circuit, de Bono spoke what Cal had been thinking: ‘It's no use us waiting out here. We have to go in.'

Hearts hammering, they climbed the steps and entered.

Cal had been told to expect the miraculous, and he wasn't disappointed. Each room he put his head into showed him some new glory in tile and brick and paint. But that was all; only miracles.

‘There's nobody here,' said de Bono, when they'd made a complete search of the lower floor. ‘Shadwell's gone.'

‘I'm going to try upstairs,' Cal said.

They climbed the flight, and separated, for speed's sake. At the end of one corridor Cal discovered a room whose walls were cunningly set with fragments of mirrors, reflecting the visitor in such a fashion that he seemed to see himself behind the walls, in some place of mist and shadow, peering out from between the bricks. That was strange enough; but by some further device - the method of which was beyond him - he seemed not to be alone in that other world, but sharing it with an assortment of animals - cats, monkeys and flying fish - all of which his reflection had apparently fathered, for they all had his face. He laughed to see it, and they all laughed with him, fish included.

Indeed it was not until his laughter died down that he heard de Bono summoning him, his shouts urgent. He left the room reluctantly, and went in search of the rope-dancer.

The call was coming from up a further flight of stairs.

‘I hear you,' he yelled up to de Bono, and began to climb. The ascent was lengthy and steep, but delivered him into a room at the top of a watch-tower. Light poured through windows on every side, but the brightness couldn't dissuade him that the room had seen horrors; and recently. Whatever it had witnessed, de Bono had worse to show him.

‘I've found Shadwell,' he announced, beckoning Cal over.

‘Where?'

‘At the Narrow Bright.'

Cal peered through the window adjacent to de Bono.

‘Not that one,' he was told. ‘This one brings it nearer.'

A telescopic window; and through it, a scene to make his pulse pick up its pace. Its backcloth: the seething Mantle cloud; its subject: massacre.

‘He's going to breach the Gyre,' de Bono said.

It clearly wasn't just the conflict that had paled the youth; it was the thought of that act.

‘Why would he want to do that?'

‘He's a Cuckoo isn't he?' came the reply. ‘What more reason does he need?'

‘Then we have to stop him,' Cal said, ungluing his gaze from the window and heading back towards the stairs.

‘The battle's already lost,' de Bono replied.

‘I'm not going to stand and watch him occupy every damn inch of the Fugue. I'll go in after him, if that's what it takes.'

De Bono looked at Cal, a mixture of anger and despair on his face.

‘You can't,' he said. ‘The Gyre's forbidden territory, even to us. There are mysteries in there even Kind aren't allowed to set eyes on.'

‘Shadwell's going in.'

‘Exactly,' said de Bono. ‘Shadwell's going in. And you know what'll happen? The Gyre will revolt. It'll destroy itself.'

‘My God ....'

‘And if it does, the Fugue comes apart at the seams.'

‘Then we stop him or we die.'

‘Why do Cuckoos always reduce everything to such simple choices?'

‘I don't know. You've got me there. But while you're thinking about it, here's another one: are you coming or staying?'

‘Damn you, Mooney.'

‘You're coming then?'

XIV

THE NARROW BRIGHT

There were less than a dozen individuals from amongst Yolande's rebel band who were firm enough of limb to make their way towards the Gyre. Suzanna went with them - Nimrod had requested that - though she told him in plain terms that any dream of overwhelming the enemy by force of arms was misbegotten. The enemy were many; they were few. The only hope remaining lay in her getting close to Shadwell, and dispatching him personally. If Nimrod's people could clear her route to the Prophet they might yet do service; otherwise, she advised them to preserve themselves, in the hope that there'd be a life worth living tomorrow.

They got within about two hundred yards of the battle, the sound of shots, and shouts, and car-engines, deafeningly loud, when she had her first sight of Shadwell. He'd found himself a mount - a vast, vile monster that could only be one of the Magdalene's children grown to a foul adulthood - and he was sitting astride its shoulders, surveying the battle.

‘He's protected,' said Nimrod at her side. There were beasts, human and less than human, circling the Prophet. ‘We'll divert them as best we can.'

There'd been a moment, as they'd approached the Gyre, when Suzanna's spirits had risen, despite the circumstance. Or perhaps because of it; because this confrontation promised to be the end-game - the war that would end all wars - after

which she'd have no more nights dreaming of loss. But the moment had passed quickly. Now all she felt - peering through the smoke at her enemy - was despondency.

It grew with every yard they covered. Wherever she looked, there were sights pitiful or nauseating. The struggle, it was clear, was already lost. The Gyre's defendants had been outnumbered and outarmed. Most had been laid low; the corpses food for Shadwell's creatures. The remnants, brave as they were, could not keep the Salesman from his prize any longer.

I was a dragon once, she found herself thinking, as she fixed her eye on the Prophet. If she could only remember how it had felt she might be one again. But this time there'd be no hesitation, no moment of doubt. This time, she'd devour.

The route to the Gyre took Cal through territory he remembered from his rickshaw ride; but its ambiguities had fled before the invading army, or else hidden their subtle heads.

And, he wondered, what of the old man he'd met at the end of that ride? Had he fallen prey to the marauders? Had his throat slit defending his little corner of Wonderland? Most likely Cal would never know. A thousand tragedies had wracked the Fugue in recent hours - the old man's fate was just part of a greater horror. A world was going to ash and dust around them.

And up ahead, the architect of these outrages. Cal saw the Salesman now, at the heart of the carnage, his face blazing with triumph. The sight made him put aside any thought of safety. With de Bono at his heels, he pitched into the thick of the battle.

There was scarcely a foot of clear ground between the bodies; the closer he got to Shadwell, the thicker the smell of blood and burning flesh became. He was soon separated from de Bono in the confusion, but it didn't matter any longer. His priority had to be the Salesman; every other consideration fell away. Maybe it was this purposefulness which got him through

the blood-letting alive, though bullets filled the air like flies. His very indifference was a kind of blessedness. What he failed to notice, failed in turn to notice him. Thus he went unscathed through the heart of the battle, until he was within ten yards of Shadwell.

He cast around amongst the slain at his feet, in search of a weapon, and laid his hands on a machine-gun. Shadwell was dismounting from the beast he'd been riding, and turning his back on the conflict. There were a mere handful of defenders left between him and the Mantle, and they were already falling. He was seconds only from entering the Gyre. Cal raised the gun, and pointed it towards the Prophet.

But before his finger could find the trigger something rose up from feasting at his side, and came at him. One of the Magdalene's children, flesh between its teeth. He might have tried to kill it, but recognition slurred his intent. The creature that tore the gun from his hand was the self-same that had almost murdered him at the warehouse: his own child.

It had grown; it now stood half as tall again as Cal. But for all its bulk it was no sloth. Its fingers reached for him swift as lightning, and he only ducked them by the slimmest of margins, flinging himself down amid the corpses, where it doubtless intended to lay him permanently.

In desperation he sought the fallen gun, but before he could locate it the child came in fresh pursuit, its weight pulping the bodies it trod upon. Cal attempted to roll out from beneath it, but the beast was too quick, and snatched hold of his hair and throat. He clutched at the corpses, seeking purchase as the creature hauled him up, but his fingers slid over their gaping faces, and he was suddenly an infant in the embrace of his own monstrous off-spring.

His wild eyes caught fleeting sight of the Prophet. The Mantle's last defenders were dead. Shadwell was yards from the wall of the cloud. Cal struggled against the beast until his bones were about ready to break, but to no avail. This time the child intended to complete its task of patricide. Cal's last breath was steadily pressed from his lungs.

In extremis, he clawed at the polluted mirror before him, and through the dusky air saw gobs of the child's flesh come away. There was a rush of bluish matter - like its mother's stuff - the chill of which slapped him back from dying, and he drove his fingers deeper into the beast's face. Its size had been gained at the price of durability. Its skull was wafer thin. He made a hook of his fingers, and pulled. The beast howled, and dropped him, the filth of its workings spilling out.

Cal dragged himself to his feet, in time to hear de Bono calling his name. He looked up towards the shout, vaguely aware that the ground beneath him was trembling, and that those who could were fleeing the battlefield. De Bono had an axe in his hand. He threw it towards Cal, as the by-blow, its head cratered, came for him again.

The weapon fell short, but Cal was over the bodies and to it in an instant, turning to face the beast at his back with a sideways blow that opened a wound in its flank. The carcass loosed a stinking froth of matter, but the child didn't fall. Cal swung again, opening the cut further; and again. This time the beast's hands went to the wound, and its head was lowered as it peered at the damage. Cal didn't hesitate. He raised the axe and brought it down on the child's skull. The blade divided the head to the neck, and the by-blow toppled forward, the axe still buried in its body.

Cal looked about him for a sign of de Bono, but the rope-dancer was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any other living person, Kind or Cuckoo, visible through the smoke. The battle had ended. Those who'd survived it, on either side, had retreated; and with reason. The shuddering in the earth had intensified; it seemed the ground was ready to gape and swallow the field.

He turned his gaze back towards the Mantle. There was a raw-edged tear in the cloud. Beyond it, darkness. Shadwell, of course, had gone.

Without hesitating to compute the consequences, Cal stumbled through the devastation towards the cloud, and entered its darkness.

Suzanna had seen the conclusion of Cal's struggle with the by-blow from a distance, and might have reached him in time to prevent his going into the Gyre alone, but the tremors that rocked the Narrow Bright had Shadwell's army in sudden panic, and she came closer to being killed in their haste to get to safe ground than she'd been in the conflict itself. She was running against the tide, through smoke and confusion. By the time the air had cleared, and she'd oriented herself, Shadwell had dismounted and disappeared into the Gyre, and Cal was following.

She called to him, but the earth was in further convulsions, and her voice was lost beneath its roars. She cast one final look round to see Nimrod helping one of the wounded away from the Bright, then she began towards the wall of cloud, into which Cal had now vanished.

Her scalp tingled; the power of the place she stood before was immeasurable. There was every chance that it had already annihilated those foolhardy enough to trespass inside; but she couldn't be certain of that, and as long as there was a sliver of doubt she had to act. Cal was there, and whether he was dead or alive she had to go to him.

His name on her lips, as a keepsake and a prayer, she followed where he'd gone, into the living heart of Wonderland.