Weave World

Part Nine. Into the Gyre

‘Upon our heels a fresh perfection treads ‘ John Keats Hyperion

I

TRESPASSERS

1

Always, worlds within worlds.

In the Kingdom of the Cuckoo, the Weave; in the Weave, the Fugue; in the Fugue, the world of Mimi's book, and now this: the Gyre.

But nothing that she'd seen in the pages or places she'd visited could have prepared Suzanna for what she found waiting behind the Mantle.

For one thing, though it had seemed as she stepped through the cloud-curtain that there'd been only night awaiting her on the other side, that darkness had been an illusion.

The landscape of the Gyre was lit with an amber phosphorescence that rose from the very earth beneath her feet. The reversal upset her equilibrium completely. It was almost as if the world had turned over, and she was treading the sky. And the true heavens?; they were another wonder. The clouds pressed low, their innards in perpetual turmoil, as if at the least provocation they'd rain lightning on her defenceless head.

When she'd advanced a few yards she glanced behind her, just to be certain that she knew the route back. But the door, and the battlefield of the Narrow Bright beyond, had already disappeared; the cloud was no longer a curtain but a wall. A spasm of panic clutched her belly. She soothed it with the thought that she wasn't alone here. Somewhere up ahead was Cal. But where? Though the light from the ground was bright enough for her to walk by, it - and the fact that the landscape was so barren - conspired to make a nonsense of distance. She couldn't be certain whether she was seeing twenty yards ahead of her, or two hundred. Whichever, there was no sign of human presence within range of her eyesight. All she could do was follow her nose, and hope to God she was heading in the right direction.

And then, a fresh wonder. At her feet, a trail had appeared; or rather two trails, intermingled. Though the earth was impacted and dry - so much so that neither Shadwell nor Cal's footfalls had left an indentation, where the invaders had trodden the ground seemed to be vibrating. That was her first impression, at least. But as she followed their route the truth became apparent: the soil along the path pursuer and pursued had taken was sprouting.

She stopped walking and went down on her haunches to confirm the phenomenon. Her eyes weren't misleading her. The earth was cracking, and yellow-green tendrils, their strength out of all proportion to their size, were corkscrewing up out of the cracks, their growth so fast she could watch it happening. Was this some elaborate defence mechanism on the Gyre's part? Or had those ahead of her carried seeds into this sterile world, which the raptures here had urged into immediate life? She looked back. Her own route was similarly marked, the shoots only just appearing, while those in Cal and Shadwell's path - with a minute or more's headway - were already six inches high. One was uncurling like a fern; another had pods; a third was spiny. At this rate of growth they'd be trees within an hour.

Extraordinary as the spectacle was, she had no time to study it. Following this trail of proliferating life, she pressed on.

2

Though she'd picked up her pace to a trot, there was still no sign of those she was following. The flowering path was the only proof of their passing.

She was soon obliged to run well off the trail, for the plants, growing at exponential rate, were spreading laterally as well as vertically. As they swelled it became clear how little they had in common with the Kingdom's flora. If they had sprung from seeds brought in on human heels, the enchantments here had wrought profound changes in them.

Indeed the resemblance was less to a jungle than to some undersea reef, not least because the plants' prodigious growth made them sway as if moved by a tide. Their colours and their forms were utterly various; not one was like its neighbour. All they had in common was their enthusiasm for growth, for fruitfulness. Clouds of scented pollen were being expelled like breaths; pulsing blossoms were turning their heads to the clouds, as if the lightning was a kind of sustenance; roots were spreading underfoot with such violence the earth trembled.

Yet there was nothing threatening in this surge of life. The eagerness here was simply the eagerness of the new born. They grew for the pleasure of growing.

Then, from off to her right, she heard a cry; or something like a cry. Was it Cal? No; there was no sign of the trail dividing. It came again, somewhere between a sob and a sigh. It was impossible to ignore, despite her mission. Promising herself only the briefest of detours, she followed the sound.

Distance was so deceptive here. She'd advanced perhaps two dozen yards from the trail when the air unveiled the source of the sound.

It was a plant, the first living thing she'd seen here beyond the limits of the trail, with which it shared the same multiplicity of forms and brilliance of colour. It was the size of a small tree, its heart a knot of boughs so complex she suspected it must be several plants growing together in one spot. She heard rustling in the blossom-laden thicket, and amongst the serpentine roots, but she couldn't see the creature whose call had brought her here.

Something did become apparent, however: that the knot at the centre of the tree, all but lost amongst the foliage, was a human corpse. If she needed further confirmation it was in plain sight. Fragments of a fine suit, hanging from the boughs like the sloughed skins of executive snakes; a shoe, parcelled up in tendrils. The clothes had been shredded so that the dead flesh could be claimed by flora; green life springing up where red had failed. The corpse's legs had grown woody, and sprouted knotted roots; shoots were exploding from its innards.

There was no time to linger and look; she had work to do. She made one circuit of the tree, and was about to return to the path when she saw a pair of living eyes staring out at her from the leaves. She yelped. They blinked. Tentatively, she reached forward, and parted the twigs.

The head of the man she'd taken for dead was on almost back to front, and his skull had been cracked wide open. But everywhere the wounds had bred sumptuous life. A beard, lush as new grass, grew around a mossy mouth which ran with sap; floret-laden twigs broke from the cheeks.

The eyes watched her intently, and she felt moist tendrils reaching up to investigate her face and hair.

Then, its blossoms shaking as it drew breath, the hybrid spoke. One long, soft word.

‘Amialive.'

Was it naming itself? When she'd overcome her surprise, she told it she didn't understand.

It seemed to frown. There was a fall of petals from its crown of flowers. The throat pulsed, and then regurgitated the syllables, this time better punctuated.

‘Am ia live?'

‘Are you alive?' she said, comprehending now. ‘Of course. Of course you're alive.'

‘I thought I was dreaming,' it said, its eyes wandering from its perusal of her a while, then returning. ‘Dead, or dreaming. Or both. One moment ... bricks in the air, breaking my head...'

‘Shearman's house?' she said.

‘Ah. You were there?'

The Auction. You were at the Auction.'

It laughed to itself, and its humour tingled against her cheek.

‘I always wanted ... to be inside ...' he said, ‘... inside...'

And now she understood the how and why of this. Though it was odd to think - odd? it was incredible - that this creature had been one of Shadwell's party, that was what she construed. Injured, or perhaps killed in the destruction of the house, he'd somehow been caught up in the Gyre, which had turned his broken body to this flowering purpose.

Her face must have registered her distress at his state, for the tendrils empathized, and grew jittery.

‘So I'm not dreaming then,' the hybrid said.

‘No.'

‘Strange,' came the reply. ‘I thought I was. It's so like paradise.'

She wasn't sure she'd heard correctly.

‘Paradise?' she said.

‘I never dared hope ... life would be such pleasure.'

She smiled. The tendrils were soothed.

This is Wonderland,' the hybrid said.

‘Really?'

‘Oh yes. We're near to where the Weave began; near to the Temple of the Loom. Here everything transforms, everything becomes. Me? I was lost. Look at me now. How I am!'

Hearing his boast her mind went back to the adventures she'd had in the book; how, in that no-man's-land between words and the world, everything had been transforming and becoming, and her mind, married in hatred with Hobart's, had been the energy of that condition. She the warp to his weft. Thoughts from different skulls, crossing, and making a material place from their conflict.

It was all part of the same procedure.

The knowledge was slippery; she wanted an equation in which she could fix the lesson, in case she could put it to use. But there were more pressing issues now than the higher mathematics of the imagination.

‘I must go,' she said.

‘Of course you must.'

‘There are others here.'

‘I saw,' said the hybrid. ‘Passing overhead.'

‘Overhead?'

‘Towards the Loom.'

3

Towards the Loom.

She retraced her steps to the trail with fresh enthusiasm. The fact of the buyer's existence in the Gyre, apparently accepted by the forces here - even welcomed - gave her some hope that the mere presence of a trespasser was not sufficient to make the Gyre turn itself -inside out. Its sensitivity had apparently been overestimated. It was strong enough to deal with an invading force in its own inimitable fashion.

Her skin had begun to itch, and there was a restlessness in her gut. She tried not to think too hard of what this signified, but the irritation increased as she again followed the trail. The atmosphere was thickening now; the world around her darkening. It wasn't night's darkness, coaxing sleep. The murk buzzed with life. She could taste it, sweet and sour. She could see it, busy behind her eyes.

She'd gone only a little way when something ran across her feet. She looked down to see an animal - an unlikely cross between squirrel and centipede, eyes bright, legs innumerable, cavorting between the roots. Nor, she now realized, was the creature alone. The forest was inhabited. Animals, as numerous and as remarkable as the plant-life, were spilling out from the undergrowth, changing even as they hopped and squirmed, more ambitious by the breath.

Their origins?: the plants. The flora had parented its own fauna; its buds flowering into insects, its fruits growing fur and scales. A plant opened, and butterflies rose in a flickering cloud; in a thorn thicket birds were fluttering into life; from a tree trunk, white snakes poured like sentient sap.

The air was so thick now she could have sliced it, new creatures crossing her path with every yard she advanced, only to be eclipsed by the murk. Something that was a distant relation of the armadillo waddled in front of her; three variations on the theme of ape came and went; a golden dog cavorted amongst the flowers. And so on. And so forth.

She had no doubt now why her skin itched. It longed to join this game of changes, to throw itself back into the melting pot and find a new design. Her mind, too, was half seduced by the notion. Amongst such joyous invention it seemed churlish to cleave to a single anatomy.

Indeed she might have succumbed in time to these temptations of the flesh, but that ahead of her a building now emerged from the fog: a plain brick building which she caught sight of for an instant before the air enclosed it again. Plain as it was, this could only be the Temple of the Loom.

A huge parrot swooped in front of her, speaking in tongues, then flitted away. She began to run. The golden dog had elected to keep pace with her; it panted at her heels.

Then, the shock wave. It came from the direction of the building, a force that convulsed the living membrane of the air, and rocked the earth. She was thrown off her feet amid sprawling roots, which instantly attempted to incorporate her into their design. She disengaged them from around about her, and pulled herself to her feet. Either the contact with the earth, or the wave of energy from the Temple, had sent her into paroxysms. Though she was standing quite still her whole body seemed to be dancing. There was no other word for it. Every part of her, from eye-lash to marrow, had caught the rhythm of power here; its percussion ordered her heart to a different beat; her blood sped then slowed; her mind soared and plummeted by turns.

But that was only flesh. Her other anatomy - the subtle body which the menstruum had quickened - was beyond the control of the forces here; or else was already in such accord with them it was left to its own work.

She occupied it now - telling it to keep her feet from rooting, and her head from sprouting wings and flying off. It soothed her. She'd been a dragon, and emerged again, hadn't she? This was no different.

Yes it is, said her fears. This is flesh and bone business; the dragon was all in my mind.

Haven't you learned yet? came the reply, there is no difference.

As the answer rang in her head, the second shock wave struck; and this time it was no petit mal, but the full fit. The ground beneath her began to roar. She started to run towards the Temple once more, as the noise mounted, but she'd got five yards at best when the roar became the hard din of breaking stone, and a zig-zag crack appeared to the right of her; and to the left another; and another.

The Gyre was tearing itself apart.

II

THE TEMPLE

1

Though Shadwell had a good lead on Cal, the thick air of the Gyre did not conceal him. The Salesman's jacket stood out like a beacon, and Cal followed it as fast as his jittery limbs would carry him. Though his struggle with the by-blow had left him weak, he was still much the fitter man, and steadily closed the gap between them. More than once he caught Shadwell glancing behind him, his face a smear of anxiety.

After all the chases and crusades, the beasts and the armies, it had come down to the two of them, racing towards a goal beyond the articulation of either. They were equals at last.

Or at least so Cal had thought. It was only when they came in sight of the Temple that the Salesman turned, and stood his ground. Either his fingers, or the air, had clawed his disguise from his face. He was the Prophet no longer. Fragments of the illusion clung to his chin, and around his hair line, but this was recognizably the man Cal had first confronted in that haunted room in Rue Street. ‘Come no further, Mooney,' he instructed. He was so breathless the words were barely audible, and the light from the earth made him look sick.

‘I don't want to shed blood,' he told Cal. ‘Not here. There are forces around us that wouldn't take kindly to that.'

Cal had stopped running. Now, as he listened to Shadwell's speech, he felt a twitching beneath the soles of his feet and looked down to see shoots springing up between his toes.

‘Go back, Mooney,' said Shadwell. ‘My destiny isn't with you.'

Cal was only half-listening to the Salesman. The sudden growth beneath his feet intrigued him, and he saw now that it spread across the ground, following Shadwell's footsteps to where he stood. The barren soil had suddenly produced all manner of plant life, which was growing at a phenomenal rate. Shadwell had seen it too, and his voice was hushed as he said:

‘Creation. See that, Mooney? Pure Creation.'

‘We shouldn't be here,' said Cal.

Shadwell's face carried a lunatic grin.

‘You have no place here,' he said. ‘I grant you that. But I've waited all my life for this.'

An ambitious plant burst the earth beneath Cal's foot, and he stepped aside to let it grow. Shadwell read the movement as an attack. He opened his jacket. For an instant Cal thought he was going to try the old trick, but his solution was far simpler. He pulled a gun from his inside pocket, and pointed it at Cal.

‘Like I said, I don't want to spill blood. So go back, Mooney. Go on. Go on! Back the way you came or so help me I'll blow your brains out.'

He meant it; of that Cal had not the least doubt. Raising his hands to chest height, he said:

‘I hear you. I'm going.'

Before he could move however, three things happened in quick succession. First, something flew overhead, its passage almost hidden by the clouds that pressed upon the roof of the Temple. Shadwell looked up, and Cal, taking the chance, ran at the man, reaching to knock the gun from his grip.

The third event was the shot.

It seemed to Cal he saw the bullet break from the barrel on a plume of smoke; saw it cleave the space between the gun and his body. It was slow, as in a nightmare of execution. But he was slower still.

The bullet hit his shoulder, and he was thrown backwards, landing amongst flowers that had not existed thirty seconds before. He saw droplets of his blood rise over his head, as if claimed for the sky. He let the puzzle go. There was only energy enough to hold onto one problem at a time, and he had to make life his priority.

His hand went to the wound, which had shattered his clavicle. He put his palm against the hole to stop the blood coming, as the pain spread down across his body.

Above him, the clouds roiled on, thundering; or was the clamour he heard only in his head? Groaning, he rolled onto his side, to see if he could get a glimpse of what Shadwell was up to. The pain almost blinded him, but he fought to focus on the building up ahead.

Shadwell was entering the Temple. There was no guard at the threshold; just an archway in the brick, through which he was disappearing. Cal inched himself up onto two knees and a hand - the other still clamped to his shoulder - and from there got to his feet, and began to stagger towards the Temple door to claim the Salesman from his victory.

2

What Shadwell had told Mooney was true: he had no wish to shed blood in the Gyre. The secrets of Creation and Destruction dwelled here. If he'd needed confirmation of that fact he'd seen it spring up beneath their feet: a fabulous fecundity which brought with it the promise of heroic decay. That was the nature of any exchange - a thing gained, a thing lost. He, a salesman, had learned that lesson as a stripling. What he sought now was to stand beyond such commerce, inviolate. That was the condition of Gods. They had permanence, and purpose everlasting; they could not be spoiled in their prime, nor shown wonders only to have them snatched away. They were eternal, unchanging, and here inside this bald citadel he would join that pantheon. It was dark over the threshold. No sign here of the shining earth outside; just a shadowy passageway, its floor, walls and ceiling built of the same bare brick, without mortar between. He advanced a few yards, his fingertips running over the wall. It was an illusion, no doubt, but he had a curious sensation walking here: that the bricks were grinding upon each other, as his first mistress had ground her teeth in her sleep. He withdrew his fingers from the walls, advancing to the first turn in the passage.

At the corner, a welcome discovery. There was a light source somewhere up ahead; he would not have to stumble in darkness any further. The passage ran for forty-five yards or so, before making another ninety-degree turn.

Again, it was the same featureless brick; but half way down it he was presented with a second archway, and stepping through found himself in an identical corridor, but that it was shorter by twice the breadth of the first. He followed it, the light brightening, around one corner and along another bare passage, then around a second corridor which again had a door in it. Now he grasped the architect's design. The Temple was not one building but several, set within each other; a box containing a slightly smaller box which then contained a third.

The realization unnerved him. The place was like a maze. A simple one, perhaps, but nevertheless designed to confound or delay. Once again he heard the walls grinding, and pictured the whole construction closing in on him, and he suddenly unable to find his way out before the walls pressed him to bloody dust.

But he couldn't turn back now; not with the luminescence tempting him to turn one more corner. Besides, there were noises reaching him from the world outside: strange, disfigured voices, as if the inhabitants of some forgotten bestiary were prowling around the Temple, scraping at the brick, padding across the roof.

He had no choice but to press on. He'd sold his life away for a glimpse of Godhood; he had nothing to return to now but the bitterest defeat.

Forward then, and to Hell with the consequences.

3

As Cal came within a yard of the Temple door his strength gave out.

He could no longer command his legs to bear him up. He stumbled, throwing out his right arm to prevent his falling too heavily, and hit the ground.

Unconsciousness claimed him, and he was grateful for it. Escape lasted seconds only however, before the blackness lifted, and he was delivered back into nausea and agony. But now - and not for the first time in the Fugue - his blood-starved brain had lost its grasp on whether he was dreaming, or being dreamt.

That ambiguity had first visited him in Lemuel Lo's orchard, he remembered: waking from a dream of the life he'd lived to find himself in a paradise he'd only ever expected to encounter in sleep. And then later, on Venus Mountain, or beneath it, living the life of planets - and passing a millennium in that revolving state - only to wake a mere six hours older.

Now here was the paradox again, at death's door. Had he awoken to die?; or was dying true wakefulness? Round and round the thoughts went, in a spiral with darkness at its centre, and he fleeing into that darkness, wearier by the moment.

His head on the earth, which was trembling beneath him, he opened his eyes and looked back towards the Temple. He saw it upside down, the roof sitting in a foundation of clouds, while the bright ground shone around it.

Paradox upon paradox, he thought, as his eyes drifted closed again.

‘Cal.'

Somebody called him.

‘Cal.'

Irritated to be summoned this way, he opened his eyes only reluctantly.

It was Suzanna who was bending over him, saying his name. She had questions too, but his lazy mind couldn't grasp them.

Instead he said:

‘Inside. Shadwell...'

‘Hold on,' she told him. ‘You understand me?'

She put his hand on her face. It was cool. Then she bent down and kissed him, and somewhere at the back of his skull he remembered this happening before; his lying on the ground, and her giving him love.

‘I'll be here,' he said.

She nodded. ‘You'd better be,' she replied, and crossed to the door of the Temple.

This time, he did not let his eyes close. Whatever dream waited beyond life, he would postpone its pleasure ‘til he saw her face again.

III

THE MIRACLE OF THE LOOM

Outside the Temple, the quake tremors were worsening. Inside, however, an uneasy peace reigned. Suzanna started to advance down the darkened corridors, the itching in her body subdued now that she was out of the turbulence, in this, the eye of the hurricane. There was light ahead. She turned a corner, and another, and finding a door in the wall, slipped through into a second passageway, as spartan as the one she'd left. The light was still tantalizingly out of reach. Around the next corner, it promised; just a little further, a little further.

The menstruum was quiet inside her, as though it feared to show itself. Was that the natural respect one miracle paid to a greater? If so, the raptures here were hiding their faces with no little skill; there was nothing about these corridors suggestive of revelation or power: just bare brick. Except for the light. That coaxed her still, through another door and along further passageways. The building, she now realized, was built on the principle of a Russian doll, one within another. Worlds within worlds. They couldn't diminish infinitely, she told herself. Or could they?

Around the very next corner she had her answer, or at least part of it, as a shadow was thrown up against the wall and she heard somebody shouting: ‘What in God's name?'

For the first time since setting foot here, she felt the ground vibrate. There was a fall of brick dust from the ceiling.

‘Shadwell,' she said.

As she spoke it seemed she could see the two syllables - Shad Well - carried along the corridor towards the next door. A fleeting memory came too: of Jerichau speaking his love to her; word as reality.

The shadow on the wall shifted, and suddenly the Salesman was standing in front of her. All trace of the Prophet had gone. The face revealed beneath was bloated and pale; the face of a beached fish.

‘Gone,' he said.

He was shaking from head to foot. Sweat droplets decorated his face like pearls.

‘It's all gone.'

Any fear she might once have had of this man had disappeared. He was here unmasked as ludicrous. But his words made her wonder. What had gone? She began to walk towards the door he'd stepped through.

‘It was you -' he said, his shakes worsening. ‘You did this.'

‘I did nothing.'

‘Oh yes -'

As she came within a yard of him he reached for her, his clammy hands suddenly about her neck.

"There's nothing there!' he shrieked, pulling her close.

His grip intended harm, but the menstruum didn't rise to her aid. She was left with only muscle power to disengage him, and it was not enough.

‘You want to see?' he screamed into her face. ‘You want to see how I've been cheated?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She ignored his accusations, a new thought forming. If the

magic had gone, she reasoned, why did the menstruum hide itself?

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

Til kill you!' he yelled.

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

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

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

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

‘The Loom is here.'

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

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

‘Do you remember me?' she asked Shadwell.

‘Jesus Christ.'

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

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

There is no Loom,' she replied.

‘But you just said -'

The Loom is here.'

‘Where then? Where?'

There is no Loom.'

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

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

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

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

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

‘Afraid, are you?' said Shadwell.

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

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

‘You reached here before me.'

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

Her eyes went back to Shadwell.

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

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

‘I remember very well.'

‘Where's the Loom?' Shadwell demanded.

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

‘Where the fuck is it?'

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

Her ridicule pressed Shadwell to breaking point; he flung himself at her. But she was not about to let herself be touched by his hands. As he snatched hold of her it seemed to Suzanna that her whole ruined face cracked open, spilling a force that might once have been the menstruum - that cool, bright river

Suzanna had first plunged into at Immacolata's behest - but was now a damned and polluted stream, breaking from the wounds like pus. It had force nevertheless. Shadwell was thrown to the ground.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The words were as much appeal as denial.

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

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

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

Suzanna looked back at Immacolata.

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

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

She smiled that terrible, twisted smile.

‘The Fugue's undone, sister —' she said.

‘What do you mean?'

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

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

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

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

‘I used to dream ...' she said,'... terrible emptiness ...'

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

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

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

Satisfied with her labours, Immacolata sank to the ground.

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

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

These events weren't lost on Immacolata.

‘The Loom ...' she whispered, her breath failing.

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

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

Her head began to slip forward.

‘Too late ...' she said again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What can be imagined need never be lost.'

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

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

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

What can be imagined - The chanting rose; the light-beams multiplied - need never be lost.

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

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

Her head was full of images, or fragments thereof:

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Cal'-She was at the last door, and flinging herself into the turmoil beyond.

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

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

She went to him and knelt by his side.

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

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

‘Yes,' he said.

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

‘Remember ... ?'

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

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

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

‘Everything?'

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

‘Why?'

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

‘Just bits and pieces.'

‘Whatever you can find. Every little piece.'

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

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

‘Please ...' she said.

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

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

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

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

‘Go on,' she said to Cal.

He had his eyes closed now, and the images were still pouring out of him. He'd remembered more than she'd dared hope. And she in her turn was adding sights and sounds to the flow- The lake; Capra's House; the forest; the streets of Nonesuch - they came back, razor sharp, and she felt the beams pick them up and speed them on their way.

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

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

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

‘Enough!' she said.

Cal's eyes flew open.

‘I haven't finished.'

‘Enough I said.'

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

Cal said: ‘Oh God.'

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

‘Of course I can walk.'

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

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

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

of their rot carried on the hooligan winds that scoured the Gyre.

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

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

‘How far?' Cal said.

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

Then:

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

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

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

‘Look up, Cal,' she said.

He did just that, though only with effort.

‘Not far now. A few more steps.'

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

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

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

‘I can't' and fell to the ground.

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

Wonderland had gone.

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

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

‘Suzanna!'

She looked back to see de Bono coming towards her.

‘What happened in there?'

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

‘I'll fetch a car.'

Cal's eyes flickered open.

‘Is it gone?' he murmured.

‘Don't think about it now,' she said.

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

He moaned, seeing the desolation before them.

Groups of Seerkind, with a few of Hobart's people scattered

amongst them, stood in the valley and up the slopes of the surrounding hills, neither speaking nor moving. They were all that remained.

‘What about Shadwell?' said Cal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She directed his attention to the passenger.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where will we go?'

‘We'll find a place.'

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

‘Later. First, we have to help Cal -'

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

‘Of course,' she said.

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

Then move,' she said. "Time's wasting.'

‘You will remember?' he said.

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

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

IV

SHADWELL

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

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

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

The fact that it had taken him so long to see how he'd been used, however, was proof positive of his innocence in all of this. He'd intended no harm to any living thing; he'd wanted only to bring truth and stability into a place sorely deficient in both. For his pains, he'd been cheated and connived against.

What could history accuse him of then, other than naivete: a forgivable sin. No, the true villains in this tragedy were the Seerkind, the wielders of rapture and unreason. They it was who'd twisted his benign ambition out of true, and so invited these horrors upon them all. A grim spiral of destruction that had ended in the Gyre - with him — a victim of circumstance - driven to murder.

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

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

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

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

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

The Scourge, she'd called it.

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

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

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

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

V

A FRAGILE PEACE

1

Cal was happy to sleep for a while; happy to be at ease in the embrace of gentle hands and gentle words. The nurses came and went; a doctor too, smiling down at him and telling him all would be well, while de Bono, at the man's side, nodded and smiled. A night later, he woke to find Suzanna with him in the room, mouthing words which he was too weary to hear. He slept, happy that she was near, but when he woke again, she'd gone. He asked after her, and after de Bono too, and was told that they'd be back, and that he wasn't to concern himself. Sleep, the nurse told him. Sleep, and when you wake all will be well. He vaguely knew this advice had failed someone he knew and loved, but his drugged mind couldn't quite remember who. So he did as he was told.

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

And sometimes he dreamt he was dead; was floating in an

infinite ocean of black milk, while presences invisible but

mighty distressed the stars above him, and threw them down

in long arcs that sang as they fell.

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

When he did, Nimrod was by his bed.

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

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

‘How did you do that?'

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

‘How are things?'

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

‘And Suzanna?'

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

‘You can't.'

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

Before he could offer a welcome she said:

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

Take it!' she said.

He did so.

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

‘Wait!' he called after her.

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

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

Cal, it read,

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

Do this for us all.

I'm kissing you.

Suzanna.

He read the letter over and over, moved beyond telling by the way she'd signed off: I'm kissing you.

But he was confounded by her instructions: the book seemed an unremarkable volume, its binding torn, its pages yellowed. The text was in German, which he had no command of whatsoever. Even the illustrations were dark, and full of shadows, and he'd had enough shadows to hurt him a lifetime. But if she wanted him to keep it safe, then he'd do so. She was wise, and he knew better than to take her instructions lightly.

3

After the visit from Apolline, nobody else came. He was not altogether surprised. There'd been an urgency in the woman's manner, and yet more in the letter from Suzanna. Our enemies are still with us, she'd written. If she wrote that, then it was true.

They discharged him after a week, and he made his way back to Liverpool. Little had changed. The grass still refused to grow in the churned earth where Lilia Pellicia had died; the trains still ran North and South; the china dogs on the dining-room sill still looked for their master, their vigil rewarded only with dust.

There was dust too on the note that Geraldine had left on the kitchen table - a brief missive saying that until Cal learned to behave like a reasonable human being he could expect none of her company.

There were several other letters awaiting him - one from his section leader at the firm, asking him where the hell he was, and stating that if he wished to keep his job he'd better make some explanation of his absence post haste. The letter was dated the llth. It was now the 25th. Cal presumed he was out of a job.

He couldn't find it in him to be much concerned by unemployment; nor indeed by Geraldine's absence. He wanted to be alone; wanted the time to think through all that had happened. More significantly, he found feelings about anything hard to come by. As the days passed, and he made a stab at reassembling his life, he rapidly came to see that his time in the Gyre had left him wounded in more ways than one. It was as though the forces unleashed at the Temple had found their way into him, and left a little wilderness where there'd once been a capacity for tears and regret.

Even the poet was silent. Though Cal could still remember Mad Mooney's verses by heart they were just sounds to him now; they failed to move.

There was one comfort in this: that perhaps his new-found stoicism suited better the function of solitary librarian. He would be vigilant, but he would anticipate nothing, neither disaster nor revelation.

That was not to say he would give up looking to the future. True, he was just a Cuckoo: scared and weary and alone. But so, in the end, were most of his tribe: it didn't mean all was lost. As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last.

If not, there was no hope for any living thing.