Weave World

Part Ten. The Search for the Scourge

‘... if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil

I

NO REST FOR THE WICKED

1

Before the explorers, the Rub al Khali had been a blank space on the map of the world. After them, it remained so.

Its very name, given to it by the Bedu, the desert nomads who'd lived for unnumbered centuries in the deserts of the Arab Peninsula, meant: The Empty Quarter. That they, familiar with wildernesses that would drive most men insane, should designate this place empty was the most profound testament to its nullity imaginable.

But amongst those Europeans for whom names were not proof enough, and who had, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, gone looking for places to test their mettle, the Rub al Khali rapidly acquired legendary status. It was perhaps the single greatest challenge the earth could offer to adventurers, its barrenness unrivalled by any wasteland, equatorial or arctic.

Nothing lived there, nor could. It was simply a vast nowhere, two hundred and fifty thousand square miles of desolation, its dunes rising in places to the height of small mountains, and elsewhere giving way to tracts of heat-shattered stone large enough to lose a people in. It was trackless, waterless and changeless. Most who dared its wastes were swallowed by it, its dust increased by the sum of their powdered bones.

But for that breed of man - as much ascetic as explorer -who was half in love with losing himself to such an end – the number of expeditions that had retreated in the face of the Quarter's maddening absence, or disappeared into it, was simply a spur.

Some challenged the wasteland in the name of cartology, determined to map the place for those who might come after them, only, to discover that there was nothing to map but the chastening of their spirit. Others went looking for lost tombs and cities, where fabled wealth awaited that man strong enough to reach into Hell and snatch it out. Still others, a patient, secretive few, went in the name of Academe, seeking verification of theories geological or historical. Still others looked for the Ark there; or Eden.

All had this in common: that if they returned from the Empty Quarter- even though their journey might have taken them only a day's ride into that place - they came back changed men. Nobody could set his eyes on such a void and return to hearth and home without having lost a part of himself to the wilderness forever. Many, having endured the void once, went back, and back again, as if daring the desert to claim them; not content until it did. And those unhappy few who died at home, died with their eyes not on the loving faces at their bedside, nor on the cherry tree in blossom outside the window, but on that waste that called them as only the Abyss can call, promising the soul the balm of nothingness.

2

For years Shadwell had listened to Immacolata speak of the emptiness where the Scourge resided. Mostly she'd talked of it in abstract terms: a place of sand and terror. Though he'd comforted her in her fear as best he'd known how, he'd soon stopped listening to her babble.

But standing on the hill overlooking the valley which the Fugue had once occupied, blood on his hands and hatred in his heart, her words had come back to him. In subsequent months he'd set himself the task of discovering that place for himself.

He had chanced on pictures of the Rub al Khali early in his investigations, and had quickly come to believe that this was the wasteland she'd seen in her prophetic dreams. Even now, in the latter portion of the century, it remained largely a mystery. Commercial aircraft routes still gave it wide berth, and though a road now crossed it the desert swallowed the efforts of any who attempted to exploit its spaces. Shadwell's problem was therefore this: if indeed the Scourge did live somewhere in the Empty Quarter, how would he be able to find it in a void so vast?

He began by consulting the experts: in particular an explorer called Emerson, who had twice crossed the Quarter by camel. He was now a withered and bed-bound old man, who was at first contemptuous of Shadwell's ignorance. But after a few minutes' talk he warmed to the obsessive in his visitor, and offered much good advice. When he spoke of the desert it was as of a lover who'd left stripes upon his back, yet whose cruelty he ached to have again.

As they parted he said:

‘I envy you, Shadwell. God alive, I envy you.'

3

Though Emerson had told him that the desert was always a solitary experience, Shadwell did not go alone to the Rub al Khali; he took Hobart with him.

The Law no longer called Hobart as it had. An investigation into the events that had all but destroyed his Division had found him criminally negligent; he might well have been imprisoned but that his masters concluded he was unbalanced - indeed probably always had been - and that exposing a system that would employ such a madman to the scrutiny of a court case would cover none of them in glory. Instead a complete story was fabricated - which made heroes of those men who'd gone into the Fugue with Hobart and died there, and retired on full pay those who'd emerged with their sanity in tatters. There was a valiant attempt by several bereaved wives to discredit this fiction, but when hints of the real explanation were uncovered it seemed infinitely more unlikely than the lie. Nor were the survivors able to give any coherent account of what they'd experienced. Those few details they did unburden themselves of merely served to confirm their lunacy.

Hobart, however, did not have madness as a place of retreat, having been in its hold for years. The vision of fire that Shadwell had given him - and which had first claimed him for the Salesman's faction - obsessed him still, despite the fact that the coat had been discarded. Knowing that in Shadwell's company his obsession would not be mocked, Hobart elected to remain there. With Shadwell, his dreams had come closest to being realized; and, though their shared ambitions had been defeated, the man still spoke a language Hobart's dementia understood. When the Salesman talked of the Scourge, Hobart knew it could only be the Dragon of his dreams by another name. Once, he half-remembered, he'd sought that monster in a forest, but he'd found only confusion there. It had been a sham, that Dragon; not the true beast he still longed to meet. He knew where that legend waited now: not in a forest but a desert, where its breath had reduced all living matter to ash and sand.

They went together, therefore, to a village on the Southern fringe of the Quarter; a place so inconsequential it couldn't even lay claim to a name.

Here they were obliged to leave their jeep, and, with their driver as interpreter, pick up guides and camels. It was not simply the practical problems of crossing the Quarter by vehicle that made Shadwell forsake wheel for hooves. It was a desire - encouraged by Emerson - to be as much a part of the desert as was possible. To go into that void not as conquerors but as penitents.

Locating their two guides for the expedition was the business of an hour, no more, there being so few either willing or able-bodied enough to make the journey. Both men were of AM Murra tribe, who alone of all the tribes claimed spiritual kinship with the Quarter. The first, a fellow called Mitrak ibn

Talaq, Shadwell chose because he boasted that he'd guided white men into the Rub al Khali (and back out again) on four previous occasions. But he would not go without the company of a younger man by the name of Jabir, whom he variously described as his cousin, half-cousin and brother-in-law. This other looked to be little more than fifteen, but had the scrawny strength and the worldly-wise glance of a man three times that age.

Hobart was left to haggle with them, though the terms of the arrangements took some time to sort out, as the Arabic he'd learned for this expedition was primitive, and the Arabs' English was bad. They seemed to know their profession however. The purchase of camels was the business of half a day; the purchasing of supplies another morning.

It was therefore the labour of a mere forty-eight hours to prepare for the crossing.

On the day of their departure, however, Shadwell - whose fastidiousness had not kept him from satisfying his belly -fell foul of an intestinal plague that turned his innards to water. With his gut in revolt he couldn't keep a morsel of food in his system long enough to profit by it, and he quickly became weak. Wracked by fever, and with access only to the most rudimentary medication, all he could do was take refuge in the hovel they'd hired, find the corner where the sun couldn't reach him, and there sweat the sickness out.

Two days passed, without his improving. He was not used to illness, but on those few occasions he had fallen sick he'd always hidden himself away, and suffered in private. Here, privacy was nearly impossible to find. All day he could hear scrabblings outside the door and window, as people fought for a chance to peer through the cracks at the infidel, moaning on his filthy sheet. And when the locals grew tired of the spectacle there were still the flies, watching over him, thirsty for the tainted waters at his lips and eyes. He'd long since learned the hopelessness of shooing them away. He simply lay

in his sweat and let them drink, his fevered mind drifting off to cooler places.

On the third day Hobart suggested they postpone the journey, pay off Ibn Talaq and Jabir, and return to civilization. There Shadwell could regain his strength for another try. Shadwell protested at this, but the same thought had crept into his own head more than once. When the infection finally left his body, he'd be in no fit state to dare the Quarter.

That night, however, things changed. For one, there was a wind. It came not in gusts but as a steady assault, the sand it carried creeping in beneath the door and through the cracks in the window.

Shadwell had slept a little during the preceding day, and had benefited from his rest, but the wind prevented him from settling now. The disturbance got into his gut too, obliging him to spend half the night squatting over the bucket he'd been provided with, while his bowels gave vent.

That was where he was - squatting in misery in a cloud of flatulence - when he first heard the voice. It came out of the desert, rising and falling like the wail of some infernal widow. He'd never heard its like.

He stood up, soiling his legs in doing so, his body wracked with shudders.

It was the Scourge he was hearing, he had no doubt. The sound was muted, but indisputable. A voice of grief, and power; and summoning. It offered them a signpost. They would not have to go blindly into the wilderness, hoping luck would bring them to their destination. They'd follow the route the wind had come. Sooner or later wouldn't it lead them to the creature whose voice it carried?

He hoisted up his trousers and opened the door. The wind was running wild through the tiny town, depositing sand wherever it went, whining at the houses like a rabid dog. He listened again for the voice of the Scourge, praying that it was not some hallucination brought on by his hunger. It was not. It came again, the same anguished howl.

One of the villagers hurried past the spot where Shadwell stood. The Salesman stepped out of the doorway and took the man's arm.

‘You hear?' he said.

The man turned his scarred face towards Shadwell. One of his eyes was missing.

‘Hear?' said Shadwell, pointing to his head as the sound came again.

The man shook off Shadwell's grip.

‘Alhiyal,' the man replied, practically spitting the words out.

‘Huh?'

‘Al hiyal...' he said again, backing away from Shadwell as from a dangerous idiot, his hand at the knife in his belt.

Shadwell had no argument with the man; he raised his hands, smiling, and left him to his troubles.

A curious exhilaration had seized hold of him, making his starved brain sing. They'd go tomorrow into the Quarter, and damn his intestines to Hell. As long as he could stay upright on a saddle he could make the journey.

He stood in the middle of the squalid street, his heart pounding like a jack-hammer, his legs trembling.

‘I hear you,' he said; and the wind took the words from his lips as if by some perverse genius known only to desert winds it could return the way it had come, and deliver Shadwell's words back to the power that awaited him in the void.

II

OBLIVION

1

Nothing, neither in the books he'd read nor the testimonies he'd listened to, nor even in the tormented voice he'd heard on the wind the previous night, had prepared Shadwell for the utter desolation of the Rub al Khali. The books had described its wastes as best words could, but they couldn't evoke the terrible nullity of the place. Even Emerson, whose mixture of understatement and passion had been persuasive in the extreme, hadn't come near to touching upon the blank truth.

The journey was hour upon relentless hour upon relentless hour of heat and bare horizons, the same imbecile sky overhead, the same dead ground beneath the camels' feet.

Shadwell had no energy to waste on conversation; and Hobart had always been a silent man. As for Ibn Talaq and the boy, they rode ahead of the infidels, occasionally whispering, but mostly keeping their counsel. With nothing to divert the attention, the mind turned to the body for its subject, and rapidly became obsessed with sensation. The rhythm of the thighs as they chafed against the saddle, or the taste of the blood from the lips and gums; these were thought's only fodder.

Even speculation about what might lie at this journey's end was lost in the dull blur of discomfort.

Seventy-two hours passed without incident: only the same curdling heat, the same rhythm of hoof on sand, hoof on sand, as they followed the bearing of the wind on which the Scourge's voice had come. Neither of the Arabs made any enquiry as to the infidels' purpose, nor was any explanation offered. They simply marched, the void pressing upon them from all sides.

It was worse by far when they stopped, either to rest the camels, or to offer their sand-clogged throats a dribble of water. Then the sheer immensity of the silence came home to them.

Existence here was an irrational act, in defiance of all physical imperatives. What kind of creature had chosen to make its home in such an absence, Shadwell wondered at such moments: and what force of will must it possess, to withstand the void? Unless - and this thought came more and more - it was of the void: a part of the emptiness and silence. That possibility made his belly churn: that the power he sought belonged here - chose dunes for its bed and rock for its pillow. He finally began to understand why Immacolata's visions of the Scourge had brought sweat to her brow. In those nightmares she had tasted a terrible purity, one that had made her own pale by its light.

But he was not afraid; except of failing. Until he stepped into the presence of that creature - until he learned the source of its cleanliness, he could not be cleansed himself. That he longed for above all things.

And, as the night fell on their fourth day in the Quarter, that desire came still closer to being realized.

Jabir had just set the fire when the voice came again. There was little wind tonight, but it rose with the same solemn authority as before, tainting the air with its tragedy.

Ibn Talaq, who'd been cleaning his rifle, was the first to his feet, his eyes wide and wild, either an oath or a prayer on his lips. Hobart was on his feet seconds later, while Jabir went to soothe the camels, who had panicked at the sound and were tearing at their tethers. Only Shadwell stayed beside the fire, gazing into the flames as the howl - sustained as if on one monumental breath - filled the night.

It seemed to go on for minutes before it finally died away.

When it did it left the animals muttering, and the men silent. Ibn Talaq was first back to the fire, and the business of rifle-cleaning; the boy followed. Finally, Hobart too.

‘We're not alone,' said Shadwell after a time, his gaze still on the flames.

‘What was it?' said Jabir.

‘Al hiyal,' Ibn Talaq said.

The boy pulled a face.

‘What is al hiyal? Shadwell said.

They mean the noise the sand makes,' Hobart said.

The sand?' said Shadwell. ‘You think that was the sand?'

The boy shook his head.

‘Of course not,' said Shadwell. That's the voice of the one we've come to meet.'

Jabir threw a handful of bone-white sticks onto the fire. It devoured them immediately.

‘Do you understand?' Shadwell asked.

Ibn Talaq looked up from his work, and stared at Shadwell.

They understand,' said Hobart.

‘I thought maybe they'd lose their nerve.'

Ibn Talaq seemed to sense the implication of this remark.

‘Rub al Khali,' he said, ‘we know. All of it. We know.'

Shadwell grasped the point. They were Murra. Their tribe laid claim to this territory as its own. To retreat before the mysteries of the Empty Quarter would be tantamount to disinheritance.

‘How close are we?' said Hobart.

‘I don't know,' Shadwell replied. ‘You heard it the same as me. Perhaps very near.'

‘Do you think it knows we're here?' said Hobart.

‘Perhaps,' said Shadwell. ‘Does it matter?'

‘I suppose not.'

‘If it doesn't know tonight, it will by tomorrow.'

2

They set out at dawn the next day, to cover as much distance as they could before the sun mounted too high, following the same bearing as they'd followed on the previous four days.

For the first time in their journey the landscape they were crossing showed some subtle change, as the rhythmical rise and fall of the dunes gave way to much larger, irregular rises.

The sand of these hills was soft, and collapsed in sibilant avalanches beneath the feet of animal and human alike. Nobody could ride. The travellers coaxed the animals, still jittery after the night before, up the ever steeper slopes with curses and kindness in equal measure, only to reach the top and find a yet larger dune ahead of them.

Without any words being exchanged, Ibn Talaq had relinquished his position at the head of the quartet, and it was Shadwell who now set the pace, leading the party up the faces of the dunes and down into the troughs between. There, the subtlest of winds blew, more distressing in its ingratiating way than any storm, for it seemed to whisper as it ran over the sand, its message just beyond the reach of comprehension.

Shadwell knew what words it carried, however: Climb, it said, climb if you dare. One more hill, and you'll find all you ever wanted waiting - and with its coaxing he'd lead the way up the next slope, out of the cool shadow and into the blinding sunlight.

They were close, Shadwell knew; very close. Though, in the early afternoon, Jabir began to complain, demanding that they rest the animals, Shadwell would have none of it. He forced the pace, his mind divided from his body's discomfort; almost floating. Sweat was nothing; pain was nothing. All of it could be endured.

And then, at the top of a dune it had taken the better part of an hour to climb, the murmurs in the wind were confirmed.

They had left the dunes behind them. Ahead the terrain was absolutely flat as far as the eye could see, though that wasn't many miles, for the wind carried a cargo of sand that veiled the horizon like smoke. Even in the Rub al Khali this wasteland was a new refinement of desolation: a connoisseur's nowhere.

‘God Almighty,' said Hobart, as he climbed to where Shadwell stood.

The Salesman took hold of Hobart's arm. His breath was rapid and rasping; his sun-skinned face dripped sweat.

‘Don't let me fall,' he murmured. ‘We're close now.'

‘Why don't we wait awhile before going any farther?' said Hobart. ‘Maybe rest, until tomorrow?'

‘Don't you want to meet your Dragon?' Shadwell asked.

Hobart said nothing to this.

Then I'll go alone,' was Shadwell's response. He dropped the camel's reins and began to stagger down the slope to meet the plain.

Hobart scanned the sterility before him. What Shadwell said was true: they were close, he felt it. And that thought, which days ago had excited him, now put a terror into him. He'd seen enough of the Quarter to know that the Dragon that occupied it was not the glittering monster of his dreams. It defied his imagination to conjure the terror that nested in such a place.

But one thing he knew: it would care not at all for the Law, or its keepers.

He might turn from it still, he thought, if he were resolute. Persuade the guides that Shadwell was leading them to extinction, and that they'd all be wiser leaving the Salesman to his insanity. Already Shadwell was at the bottom of the slope, and marching away from the dune, not even bothering to glance behind him to see that the rest were following. Let him go, a part of Hobart said: let him have his Scourge if that's what he wants; and death too.

But fearful as he was he couldn't quite bring himself to turn his back on the wasteland. His mind, which was narrowed now to a tunnel, showed him again his hands alive with an unconsuming flame. In that rare moment of vision he'd tasted power he'd never quite been able to put words to, and nothing his subsequent experience had brought - the defeats and humiliations - could extinguish the memory.

Somewhere, far from here, those who'd defeated him -who'd perverted the Laws of the real and the righteous – still lived. To go back amongst them with fire at his fingertips and lay their wretched heads low - that was an ambition worth enduring the wasteland for.

Dreaming of flame, he took up the reins of Shadwell's camel, and followed in the Salesman's footsteps down onto the mirror-bright sand.

III

THE WALL

Distance was impossible to judge on the plain they now crossed. The dunes at their backs were soon obscured by the sand-thickened air, and ahead, the same veil shut the vista from sight. Though the wind was insistent, it did nothing to alleviate the assault of the sun: it merely added misery to misery, dragging at the legs until every step was a torment. But nothing slowed Shadwell. He marched like a man possessed until - after an hour of this inferno - he stopped dead, and pointed through the blur of heat and wind. There,' he said.

Hobart, who'd come abreast of him, narrowed his dazzled eyes and followed the direction of Shadwell's finger. But the sand clouds defied his scrutiny. ‘Nothing,' he said. Shadwell seized hold of his arm. ‘Damn you, look.'

And this time Hobart realized Shadwell was not deceived. Some distance from where they stood the ground seemed to rise up again.

‘What is it?' Hobart shouted against the wind. ‘A wall,' Shadwell said.

It looked more like a range of hills than a wall, Hobart thought, for it ran along the entire visible horizon. Yet, though there were breaks in its length here and there, its regularity suggested Shadwell's judgement was correct. It was indeed a wall.

Without further exchange, they began the march towards it.

There was no sign of any structure rising on the far side, but its builders must have valued whatever it had been made to enclose and protect, for with every yard they drew closer, its sheer scale became awesomely apparent. It rose fifty feet or more above the desert floor; yet such was the skill of the masons there was no visible sign of how it had been constructed.

Twenty yards from the wall the party halted, leaving Shadwell to approach it unaccompanied. He stretched his hand out to touch the stone, which was hot beneath his finger-tips, its surface so smooth it was almost silken. It was as if the wall had been raised out of molten rock, shaped by intelligences that could mould lava like cold clay. Clearly there was no practical way of scaling a surface so innocent of niche or scar, even if any of them had possessed the energy to do so.

There must be a gate,' said Shadwell. ‘We'll walk ‘til we find it.'

The sun was well past its peak now, the day beginning to cool. But the wind was not about to give the travellers a moment's respite. It seemed to be keeping guard along the wall, lashing at their legs as though eager to throw them to the ground. But having got so far without being slaughtered, the party's fears had been replaced by curiosity as to what lay on the other side. The Arabs had found their voices again, and kept up a constant dialogue, doubtless planning how they'd boast of their find once home.

They walked for fully half an hour, the wall unbroken. There were places where cracks had appeared in it - though none low enough to offer hand-holds - and others where the top edge showed signs of crumbling, but there was neither window nor gate in its length, however small.

‘Who built this?' said Hobart as they walked.

Shadwell was watching their shadow on the wall, as it kept pace with them.

‘Ancients,' he said.

To keep the desert out?'

‘Or keep the Scourge in.'

The last few minutes had brought a subtle change in the wind. It had given up nipping at their legs, and gone about braver business. It was Ibn Talaq who first spotted what.

‘There! There!' he said, and pointed along the wall.

A few hundred yards from where they stood a stream of sand was being carried out through the wall, bellowing as it went. As they approached, it became apparent that this was not a gate, but a breach in the wall. The stone had been thrown down in heaps of rubble. Shadwell was first to reach the scattered pieces, many the size of small houses, and began to scramble up over them, until at last he looked down into the place the walls had been raised to guard.

Behind him, Hobart called:

‘What do you see?'

Shadwell didn't speak. He simply surveyed the scene behind the wall with disbelieving eyes, as the wind that roared through the breach threatened to throw him from his perch.

There were neither palaces nor tombs on the other side of the wall. Indeed there was no sign, however vestigial, of habitation; no obelisks, no colonnades. There was only sand, and more sand; endless sand. Another desert, rolling away from them, as empty as the void at their backs.

‘Nothing.'

It wasn't Shadwell who spoke but Hobart. He too had scaled the boulders, and stood at Shadwell's side.

‘Oh Jesus ... nothing.'

Shadwell made no reply. He simply clambered down the other side of the breach, and stepped into the shadow of the wall. What Hobart said appeared to be true: there was nothing here. Why then did he feel certain that this place was somehow sacred?

He walked through the mire of sand that the wind had heaped against the rubble of the breach, and surveyed the dunes. Was it possible that the sand had simply covered the secret they'd come here to find? Was the Scourge concealed

here, its howl that of something buried alive? If so, how could they ever hope to locate it?

He turned back, and squinted up at the wall. Then, on impulse, he began to climb the open edge of the breach. It was heavy going. His limbs were weary, and the wind had polished the stone in its many years of passage, but he eventually gained the summit.

At first it seemed his efforts had been for nothing. All he'd won for his sweat was a view of the wall, running off in both directions until distance claimed it.

But when he came to survey the scene below, he realized that there was a pattern visible in the dunes. Not the natural wave patterns that the wind created, but something more elaborate - vast geometrical designs laid out in the sand - with walkways or roads between them. He'd read, in his research on wastelands, of designs drawn by some ancient people on the plains of South America; pictures of birds and gods that could have made no sense from the earth, but had been drawn as if to enchant some heavenly spectator. Was that the case here? Had the sand been raised in these furrows and banks as a message to the sky? If so, what power had done it? A small nation would be needed to move so much sand; and the wind would undo tomorrow what had been done today. Whose work was this then?

Perhaps night would tell.

He climbed back down the wall to where Hobart and the others were waiting amid the boulders.

‘We'll camp here tonight,' he said.

‘Inside the walls or out?' Hobart wanted to know.

‘Inside.'

IV

URIEL

Night came down like a dropped curtain. Jabir made a fire in the shelter of the wall, out of the remorseless assault of the wind, and there they ate bread and drank coffee. There was no conversation. Exhaustion had claimed their tongues. They simply sat hunched up, staring into the flames.

Though his bones ached, Shadwell couldn't sleep. As the fire burned low, and one by one the others succumbed to fatigue, he was left to keep watch. The wind dropped a little as the night deepened, its bellow becoming a moan. It soothed him like a lullaby, and at last, his eyelids dropped closed. Behind them, the busy patterns of his inner-eye. Then emptiness.

In sleep, he heard the boy Jabir's voice. It called him from darkness but he didn't want to answer. Rest was too sweet. It came again, however: a horrid shriek. This time he opened his lids.

The wind had died completely. Overhead the stars were bright in a perfect sky, trembling in their places. The fire had gone out, but their light was sufficient for him to see that both Ibn Talaq and Jabir were missing from their places. He got up, crossed to Hobart, and shook him awake.

As he did so, his eye caught sight of something on the ground a little way beyond Hobart's head. He stared - doubting what he saw.

There were flowers underfoot, or so he seemed to see. Clusters of blooms, set in abundant foliage. He looked up from the ground, and his parched throat unleashed a cry of astonishment.

The dunes had gone. In their place a jungle had risen up, a riot of trees that challenged the wall's height - vast, flower-laden species whose leaves were the size of a man. Beneath their canopy was a wilderness of vines and shrubs and grasses.

For a moment he doubted his sanity, until he heard Hobart say: ‘My God,' at his side.

‘You see it too?' said Shadwell.

‘I see it...' Hobart said,'... a garden.'

‘Garden?'

At first sight the word scarcely described this chaos. But further scrutiny showed that there was order at work in what had initially seemed anarchy. Avenues had been laid under the vast, blossom-laden trees; there were lawns and terraces. This was indeed a garden of sorts, though there would be little pleasure to be had walking in it, for despite the surfeit of species - plants and bushes of every size and shape - there was not amongst them a single variety that had colour. Neither bloom nor branch nor leaf nor fruit; all, down to the humblest blade, had been bled of pigment.

Shadwell was puzzling at this when a further cry issued from the depths. It was Ibn Talaq's voice this time; and it rose in a steep curve to a shriek. He followed it. The ground was soft beneath his feet, which slowed his progress, but the shriek went on, broken only by sobbing breaths. Shadwell ran, calling the man's name. There was no fear left in him; only an overwhelming hunger to see the Maker of this enigma face to face.

As he advanced down one of the shadowy boulevards, its pathway strewn with the same colourless plant-life, Ibn Talaq's cry stopped dead. Shadwell was momentarily disoriented. He halted, and scanned the foliage for some sign of movement. There was none. The breeze did not stir a single frond; nor - to further compound the mystery - was there a hint of perfume, however subtle, from the mass of blossoms.

Behind him, Hobart muttered a cautionary word. Shadwell turned, and was about to condemn the man's lack of curiosity when he caught sight of the trail his own footsteps had made. In the Gyre, his heels had brought forth life. Here, they'd destroyed it. Wherever he'd set foot the plants had simply crumbled away.

He stared at the blank ground where there'd previously been grasses and flowers, and the explanation for this extraordinary growth became apparent. Ignoring Hobart now, he walked towards the nearest of the bushes, the blooms of which hung like censers from their branches. Tentatively, he touched his fingers to one of the flowers. Upon this lightest of contacts the blossom fell apart, dropping from the branch in a shower of sand. He brushed its companion with his thumb: it too fell away, and with it the branch, and the exquisite leaves it bore; all returned to sand at a touch.

The dunes hadn't disappeared in the night, to make way for this garden. They had become the garden; risen up at some unthinkable command to create this sterile illusion. What had at first sight seemed a miracle of fecundity was a mockery. It was sand. Scentless, colourless, lifeless: a dead garden.

A sudden disgust gripped him. This trick was all too like the work of the Seerkind: some deceitful rapture. He flung himself into the midst of the shrubbery, flailing to right and left of him in his fury, destroying the bushes in stinging clouds. A tree, brushed by his hand, collapsed like an extinguished fountain. The most elaborate blossoms fell apart at his merest touch. But he wasn't satisfied. He flailed on until he'd cleared a small grove amid the press of foliage.

‘Raptures!' he kept yelling, as the sand rained down on him. ‘Raptures!'

He might have gone on to more ambitious destruction, but that the Scourge's howl - the same he'd first heard days before, as he'd squatted in shit - began. That voice had brought him through desolation and emptiness; and to what? More desolation, more emptiness. His anger unassuaged by the damage he'd done, he turned to Hobart.

‘Which way's it coming from?'

‘I don't know,' said Hobart, stumbling back a few steps. ‘Everywhere.'

‘Where are you?' Shadwell demanded, yelling into the depths of the illusion. ‘Show yourself!'

‘Don't - ‘ said Hobart, his voice full of dread.

‘This is your DragonI Shadwell said. ‘We have to see it.'

Hobart shook his head. The power that had made this place was not one he wanted sight of. Before he could retreat, however, Shadwell had hold of him.

‘We meet it together,' he said. ‘It's cheated us both.'

Hobart struggled to be free of Shadwell's grip, but his violence ceased as his panicked eyes caught sight of the form that now appeared at the far end of the avenue.

It was as tall as the canopy; twenty-five feet or more, its long, bone-white head brushing the branches, sand-petals spiralling down.

Though it still howled, it lacked a mouth, or indeed any feature on its face but eyes, which it had in terrifying numbers, twin rows of lidless, lashless slits which ran down each side of its head. There were perhaps a hundred eyes in all, but staring an age at it would not have revealed their true number, for the thing, despite its solidity, defied fixing. Were those wheels that moved at its heart, tied with lines of liquid fire to a hundred other geometries which informed the air it occupied? Did innumerable wings beat at its perimeters, and light burn in its bowels, as though it had swallowed stars?

Nothing was certain. In one breath it seemed to be enclosed in a matrix of darting light, like scaffolding struck by lightning; in the next the pattern became flame confetti, which swarmed at its extremities before it was snatched away. One moment, ether; the next, juggernaut.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the wail it was unleashing died away.

The Scourge stopped moving.

Shadwell released Hobart, as the stench of shit rose from the man's trousers. Hobart fell to the ground, making small sobbing sounds. Shadwell left him where he lay, as the Scourge's head, mazed in geometries, located the creatures that had trespassed in its garden.

He didn't retreat. What use was retreat? In every direction from this place lay thousands of square miles of wasteland. There was nowhere to run to. All he could do was stand his ground and share with this terror the news he brought.

But before he could utter a word, the sand at his feet began to move. For an instant he thought the Scourge intended to bury him alive, as the ground liquified. But instead the sand drew back like a sheet, and sprawled on the bed below - a few feet from where Shadwell stood - was the corpse of Ibn Talaq. The man was naked, and appalling torments had been visited upon him. Both his hands had been burned from his arms, leaving blackened stumps from which cracked bone protruded. His genitals had been similarly destroyed, and the eyes seared from his head. There was no use pretending the wounds had been delivered after death: his mouth still shaped his dying scream.

Shadwell was revolted, and averted his eyes, but the Scourge had more to show him. The sand moved again, to his right, and another body was uncovered. This time, Jabir, lying on his belly, his buttocks burned down to the bone, his neck broken and his head twisted round so that he stared up at the sky. His mouth was burned out.

‘Why?' was the word on Shadwell's lips.

The Scourge's gaze made his bowels ache to empty themselves, but he still delivered the question.

‘Why? We mean no harm here.'

The Scourge made no sign that it had even heard the words. Had it perhaps lost the power of communication after an age here in the wilderness, its only response to the pain of being, that howl?

Then - somewhere amid the legion eyes - a skittering light, which was snatched by the burning wheels and spat towards Shadwell. In the breath before it struck him he had time to hope his death would be quick; then the light was on him. The agony of its touch was blinding; at its caress his body folded up beneath him. He struck the ground, his skull ready to split. But death didn't come. Instead the pain dropped away suddenly, and the burning wheel appeared in his mind's eye. The Scourge was in his head, its power circling in his skull.

Then the wheel went out, and in its place a vision, lent him by his possessor:

he was floating through the garden; high up in the trees. This is the Scourge's sight, he realized: he was sitting behind its eyes. Their shared gaze caught a motion on the ground below, and moved towards it.

There on the sand was Jabir - naked, and on all fours -with Ibn Talaq impaling him, grunting as he worked his flesh into the boy. To Shadwell's eyes the act looked uncomfortable, but harmless enough. He'd seen worse in his time; done worse, indeed. But it wasn't just sight he was sharing with the Scourge; its thoughts came too: and the creature saw a crime in this rutting, and judged it punishable by death.

Shadwell had seen the results of the Scourge's executions; he had no desire to watch them re-enacted. But he had no choice. The Scourge owned his mind's eye; he was obliged to watch every terrible moment.

Brightness reached down and tore the pair from each other, then scoured out the offending parts - mouth, and eyes, and groin and buttocks - erasing them with fire. It was not quick. They had time to suffer - he heard again the shrieks that had brought him into the garden - and time to beg. But the fire was unforgiving. By the time it had done its work Shadwell was sobbing for it to stop. Finally it did, and a shroud of sand was drawn over the bodies. Only when that was done did the Scourge grant him his own sight back. The ground he lay on - stinking of his vomit - reappeared in front of him.

He lay where he'd fallen, trembling. Only when he was certain he wouldn't collapse did he raise his head and look up at the Scourge.

It had changed shape. No longer a giant, it sat on a hill of sand it had raised beneath itself, its many eyes turned up towards the stars. It had gone from judge and executioner to contemplative in a matter of moments.

Though the images that had filled his head had faded.

Shadwell knew the creature still maintained its presence in his mind. He could feel the barbs of its thought. He was a human fish, and hooked.

It looked away from the sky, and down at him.

Shadwell...

He heard his name called, though in its new incarnation the Scourge still lacked a mouth. It needed none of course, when it could dabble in a man's head this way.

I see you, it said. Or rather, that was the thought it placed in Shadwell's head, to which he put words.

I see you. And I know your name.

That's what I want,' Shadwell said. ‘I want you to know me. Trust me. Believe me.'

Sentiments like these had been part of his Salesman's spiel for more than half his life; he drew confidence from speaking them.

You're not the first to come here, the Scourge said. Others have come. And gone.

Shadwell knew all too well where they'd gone. He had a momentary glimpse - whether it was at the Scourge's behest or of his own making he couldn't be sure - of the bodies that were buried beneath the sand, their rot wasted on this dead garden. The thought should have made him afraid, but he'd felt all he was going to feel of fear, seeing the executions. Now, he would speak plainly, and hope the truth kept him from death.

‘I came here for a reason,' he said.

What reason?

This was the moment. The customer had asked a question and he had to reply to it. No use to try and prevaricate or prettify, in the hope of securing a better sale. The plain truth was all he had to bargain with. On that, the sale was either won or lost. Best to simply state it.

‘The Seerkind,' he said.

He felt the barbs in his brain twitch at the name, but there was no further response. The Scourge was silent. Even its wheels seemed to dim, as if at any moment the engine would flicker out.

Then, oh so quietly, it shaped the word in his head.

Seer. Kind.

And with the word came a spasm of energy, like lightning, that erupted in his skull. It was in the substance of the Scourge as well, this lightning. It flickered across the equation of its body. It ran back and forth in its eyes.

Seerkind.

‘You know who they are?'

The sand hissed around Shadwell's feet.

I had forgotten.

‘It's been a long time.'

And you came here, to tell me?

To remind you.'

Why?

The barbs twitched again. It could kill me at any moment, Shadwell thought. It's nervous, and that makes it dangerous. I must be careful; play it cunningly. Be a salesman.

They hid from you,' he said.

Indeed.

‘All these years. Hid their heads so you'd never find them.' And now?

‘Now they're awake again. In the human world.' I had forgotten. But I'm reminded now. Oh yes. Sweet Shadwell.

The barbs relaxed, and a wave of the purest pleasure broke over Shadwell, leaving him almost sick with the excess of it. It was a joy-bringer too, this Scourge. What power did not lie in its control?

‘May I ask a question?' he said.

Ask.

‘Who are you?'

The Scourge rose from its throne of sand, and in an instant it grew blindingly bright.

Shadwell covered his eyes, but the light shone through flesh and bone, and into his head, where the Scourge was pronouncing its eternal name.

I am called Uriel, it said.

Uriel, of the principalities.

He knew the name, as he'd known by heart the rituals he'd heard at St Philomena's: and from the same source. As a child he'd learned the names of all the angels and archangels by heart: and amongst the mighty Uriel was of the mightiest. The archangel of salvation; called by some the flame of God. The sight of the executions replayed in his head - the bodies withering beneath that merciless fire: an Angel's fire. What had he done, stepping into the presence of such power? This was Uriel, of the principalities...

Another of the Angel's attributes rose from memory now, and with it a sudden shock of comprehension. Uriel had been the angel left to stand guard at the gates of Eden.

Eden.

At the word, the creature blazed. Though the ages had driven it to grief and forgetfulness, it was still an Angel: its fires unquenchable. The wheels of its body rolled, the visible mathematics of its essence turning on itself and preparing for new terrors.

There were others here, the Seraph said, that called this place Eden. But I never knew it by that name.

‘What, then?' Shadwell asked.

Paradise, said the Angel, and at the word a new picture appeared in Shadwell's mind. It was the garden, in another age. No trees of sand then, but a lush jungle that brought to mind the flora that had sprung to life in the Gyre: the same profligate fecundity, the same unnamable species that seemed on the verge of defying their condition. Blooms that might at any moment take breath, fruit about to fly. There was none of the urgency of the Gyre here, however; the atmosphere was one of inevitable rising up, things aspiring at their own pace to some higher state, which was surely light, for everywhere between the trees brightnesses floated like living spirits.

This was a place of making, the Angel said. For ever and ever. Where things came to be.

To be?'

To find a form, and enter the world.

‘And Adam, and Eve?'

I don't remember them, Uriel replied.

The first parents of humanity.'

Humanity was raised from din in a thousand places, but not here. Here were higher spirits.

The Seerkind?' said Shadwell. ‘Higher spirits?'

The Angel made a sour sound. The image of the paradise-garden convulsed, and Shadwell glimpsed furtive figures moving amongst the trees like thieves.

They began here, said the Angel; and in Shadwell's mind he saw the earth break open, and plants rise from it with human faces; and mist congeal ... But they were accidents. Droppings from greater stuff, that found life here. We did not know them, we spirits. We were about sublimer business.

‘And they grew?'

Grew. And grew curious.

Now Shadwell began to comprehend.

They smelt the world,' he prompted.

The Angel shuddered, and again Shadwell was bombarded with images. He saw the forefathers of the Seerkind, naked, every one, their bodies all colours and sizes - a crowd of freakish forms - tails, golden eyes and cox-combs, flesh on one with the sheen of a panther; another with vestigial wings - he saw them scaling the wall, eager to be out of the garden -

They escaped.'

Nobody escapes me, said Uriel. When the spirits left, I remained here to keep watch until their return.

That much, the Book of Genesis had been correct about: a guardian set at the gate. But little else, it seemed. The writers of that book had taken an image that mankind knew in its heart, and folded it into their narrative for their own moral purposes. What place God had here, if any, was perhaps as much a matter of definition as anything. Would the Vatican know this creature as an Angel, if it presented itself before the gates of that state? Shadwell doubted it.

‘And the spirits?' he said. The others who were here?'

I waited, said the Angel.

And waited, and waited, thought Shadwell, until loneliness drove it mad. Alone in the wilderness, with the garden withering and rotting, and the sand breaking through the walls ....

‘Will you come with me now?' said Shadwell. ‘I can lead you to the Seerkind.'

The Angel turned its gaze on Shadwell afresh.

I hate the world, it said. I was there before, once.

‘But if I take you to them,' said Shadwell. ‘You can do your duty, and be finished with it.'

Uriel's hatred of the Kingdom was like a physical thing; it chilled Shadwell's scalp. Yet the Angel didn't reject the offer, merely bided its time as it turned the possibility over. It wanted an end to its waiting, and soon. But its majesty was repulsed at the thought of contact with the human world. Like all pure things, it was vain, and easily spoiled.

Perhaps... it said.

Its gaze moved off Shadwell towards the wall. The Salesman followed its look, and there found Hobart. The man had taken the chance to creep away during the exchange with Uriel; but he'd not got far enough.

‘... this time...' the Angel said, the light flickering in the concourse of its eyes, ‘... I will go... ‘ The light was caught up by the wheels, and thrown out towards Hobart.... in a different skin.

With that, the entire engine flew apart, and not one but countless arrows of light fled towards Hobart. Uriel's gaze had bound him to the spot; he could not avoid the invasion. The arrows struck him from forehead to foot, their light entering him without breaking his skin.

In the space of a heart-beat all trace of the Angel had gone from the hill beside Shadwell; and with its disappearance into flesh came a new spectacle. A shudder ran through the ground from the wall where Hobart stood and through the garden. At its passage the sand forms began to decay, countless plants dropping into dust, avenues of trees shuddering and collapsing like arches in an earthquake. Watching the escalating destruction, Shadwell thought again of his first sight of the patterns in the dunes. Perhaps his assumptions then had been correct; perhaps this place was in some way a sign to the stars. Uriel's pitiful way of recreating a lost glory, in the hope that some passing spirit would come calling, and remind it of itself.

Then the cataclysm grew too great, and he retreated before he was buried in a storm of sand.

Hobart was no longer on the garden's side of the breach, but had climbed the boulders, and stood looking out across the blank wastes of the desert.

There was no outward sign of Uriel's occupancy. To a casual eye this was the same Hobart. His gaunt features were as glacial as ever, and it was the same colourless voice that emerged when he spoke. But the question he posed told a different story.

‘Am I the Dragon now?' he asked.

Shadwell looked at him. There was, he now saw, a brilliance in the hollows of Hobart's eyes that he'd not seen since he'd first seduced the man with promises of fire.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘You're the Dragon.'

They didn't linger. They began the trek back towards the border there and then, leaving the Empty Quarter emptier than ever.