Weave World

Part Eleven. The Dream Season

‘The sky is darkening like a stain, Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers ‘ W. H. Auden The Two

I

PORTRAIT OF THE HERO AS A YOUNG LUNATIC

1

That's happened to Cal Mooney? the neighbours were saying: what an odd fellow he's become, full of half-smiles and sly glances. Mind you, weren't they always a peculiar family? The old man was related to a poet, I've heard, and you know what they say about poets: a little mad, all of them. And now the son's gone the same way. So sad. Funny the way people change isn't it?

The gossip rang true of course. Cal knew he had changed. And yes, he probably was a little mad. When he looked at himself in the mirror some mornings there was a wildness in his eyes which was no doubt distressing to the cashier at the supermarket, or the woman who tried to pry some potential scandal from him as they waited in line at the bank.

‘Are you living alone then?'

‘Yes,' he'd say.

‘It's a big house for one. You must find it difficult cleaning.'

‘No, not really.'

He'd get a quizzical look from the questioner. Then he'd say:

‘I like dust,' knowing the remark would fuel the tittle-tattle, but unable to lie for their benefit. And he could see, as he spoke, the way they smiled inside, filing the remark away for regurgitation over the laundry.

Oh, he was Mad Mooney all right.

2

This time, there was no forgetting. His mind was too much a part of his lost Wonderland for it to slip away. The Fugue was with him all day, every day; and through the nights too.

But there was little joy in remembering. Only an all but unbearable ache of loss, knowing that a world which he'd longed for all his life was gone forever. He would never again tread its rapturous earth.

The how and why of this loss were somewhat hazy, particularly when it came to events in the Gyre. He recalled in some detail the battle at the Narrow Bright, and his plunging through the Mantle. But what had happened subsequently was just a series of disconnected images. Things sprouting, things dying; his blood, dancing down his arm in a little ecstasy; the brick at his back, trembling ...

That was about all. The rest was so vague he could scarcely conjure a moment of it.

3

He knew he needed some diversion from his grief, or he'd simply dwindle into a melancholy from which there would be no emerging, so he looked around for a new job, and in early July got one: baking bread. The pay was not good, and the hours were anti-social, but he enjoyed the work - which was the antithesis of his labours at the insurance firm. He didn't have to talk much, or concern himself with office politics. There was no rising in the ranks here, just the plain business of dough and ovens. He was happy with the job. It gave him biceps like steel, and warm bread for his breakfast.

But the diversion was only temporary. His mind went back all too often to the source of his suffering, and suffered again. Such masochism was perhaps the nature of his species. Indeed that belief was supported by the reappearance of Geraldine in the middle of July. She turned up on the doorstep one day and stepped into the house as if nothing had ever happened between them. He was glad to see her.

This time, however, she didn't move in. They agreed that returning to that domestic status quo could only be a retrograde step. Instead she came and went through the summer on an almost daily basis, sometimes staying over at Chariot Street, more often not.

For nigh on five weeks she didn't ask him a single question about events the previous spring, and he in turn volunteered no information. When she eventually did raise the subject, however, it was in a manner and context he hadn't expected.

‘Deke's telling everyone you've been in trouble with the police ...' she said,'... but I told him: not my Cal.'

He was sitting in Brendan's chair beside the window, watching the late summer sky. She was on the couch, amid a litter of magazines.

‘I told them, you're no criminal. I know that. Whatever happened to you ... it wasn't that kind of trouble. It was deeper than that, wasn't it?' She glanced across at him. Did she want a reply? It seemed not, for before he could open his mouth she was saying:

‘I never understood what was going on, Cal, and maybe it's better I don't. But...' She stared down at the magazine open on her lap, then back up at him. ‘You never used to talk in your sleep,' she said. ‘And I do now?'

‘All the time. You talk to people. You shout sometimes. Sometimes you just smile.' She was a little embarrassed confessing to this. She'd been watching him as he slept; and listening too. ‘You've been somewhere, haven't you?' she said.

‘You've seen something nobody else has.'

‘Is that what I talk about?'

‘In a sort of way. But that's not what makes me think you've seen things. It's the way you are, Cal. The way you look sometimes...'

That said, she seemed to reach an impasse, and returned her attention to the pages of the magazine, flipping the pages without really looking at them.

Cal sighed. She'd been so good with him, so protective: he owed her an explanation, however difficult it was.

‘You want me to tell you?' he said.

‘Yes. Yes, I do.'

‘You won't believe it,' he warned.

Tell me anyway.'

He nodded, and took up the story that he'd come so near to spilling the previous year, after his first visit to Rue Street.

‘I saw Wonderland ...' he began.

4

It took him three quarters of an hour to give her the outline of all that had happened since the bird had first flown from the loft; and another hour to try and fine-tune his account. Once begun, he found himself reluctant to leave anything out: he wanted to tell it all as best he could, as much for his own benefit as for Geraldine's.

She listened attentively, looking up at him sometimes, more often staring out of the window. Not once did she interrupt.

When he was finally finished, the wounds of bereavement reopened by the telling, she said nothing, not for a long time.

Finally he said: ‘You don't believe me. I said you wouldn't.'

Again, there was silence. Then she said: ‘Does it matter to you if I do or I don't?'

‘Yes. Of course it matters.'

‘Why, Cal?'

‘Because then I'm not alone.'

She smiled at him, got up, and crossed to where he sat.

‘You're not alone,' she said, and said no more.

Later, as they slipped into sleep together, she said: ‘Do you love her? ... Suzanna, I mean?' He'd expected the question, sooner or later.

‘YesI he said softly. ‘In a way I can't explain; but yes.'

‘I'm glad' she murmured in the darkness. Cal wished he could read her features, and know from them if she was telling the truth, but he left any further questions unasked.

They didn't speak of it at all thereafter. She was no different with him than she'd been before he told her: it was almost as if she'd put the whole account out of her mind. She came and went on the same ad hoc basis. Sometimes they'd make love, sometimes not. And sometimes they'd be happy; or almost so.

The summer came and went without much disturbing the thermometer, and before the freckles had a chance to bloom on Geraldine's cheeks, it was September.

5

Autumn suits England; and that autumn, preceding as it would the worst winter since the late forties, came in glory. The winds were high, bringing passages of warm rain interspersed with stabs of liquid brightness. The city found a lost glamour. Clouds the colour of slate piled up behind its sunstruck houses; the wind brought the smell of the sea; brought gulls too, on its back, dipping and weaving over the roofs.

That month Cal felt his spirits rise again - seeing the Kingdom of the Cuckoo shine, while above it the skies seemed charged with secret signs. He began to see faces in the shreds of clouds; heard codes tapped out by rain-drops on the sill. Something was surely imminent.

He remembered Gluck too, that month. Anthony Virgil Gluck, collector of anomalous phenomena. He even thought of contacting the man again, and went so far as to dig Gluck's card out from the pocket of his old trousers. He didn't make the call however, perhaps because he knew he was ripe to believe any pretty superstition if it promised miracles, and that wouldn't be wise.

Instead he kept his eye on the sky, day and night. He even bought himself a small telescope, and began to teach himself the whereabouts of the constellations. He found the process reassuring. It was good to look up during the day and know that the stars were still above his head, even though he couldn't see them. It was doubtless the same for countless other mysteries. That they shone, but the world shone more brightly, and blinded him to them.

And then, in the middle of October (the eighteenth, in fact; or rather, the early morning of the nineteenth) he had the first of the nightmares.

II

REPRESENTATIONS

1

Eight days after the destruction of the Fugue and all it had contained, the remnants of the Four Families - in all, maybe a hundred individuals - assembled to debate their future. Though they were survivors, they had little reason to celebrate the fact. With the Weaveworld's passing they'd lost their homes, their possessions, and in many cases their loved ones too. All they had, as reminders of their former happiness, was a handful of raptures, much weakened with the Fugue's defeat. These were small comfort. Raptures could not wake the dead, nor keep the corruptions of the Kingdom at bay.

So; what were they to do? There was a voluble faction -led by Balm de Bono - that argued to make their story public; to become, in essence, a cause. There was merit in the idea. Perhaps the safest place to be was in plain sight of the human world. But there was substantial opposition to the scheme, fuelled by the one possession circumstance could not take from these people: pride. Many of them stated bluntly that they'd rather die than throw themselves on the mercy of Cuckoos.

Suzanna had a further problem with the idea. Though her fellow humans might be persuaded to believe the Kind's tale, and sympathize, how long would their compassion last? Months?; a year, at most. Then they'd turn their attention to some new tragedy. The Seerkind would be yesterday's victims, tainted by celebrity but scarcely saved by it.

The combination of her argument and the widespread horror at humbling themselves to the Cuckoos was sufficient to outweigh the opposition. Determined to be civilized in defeat, de Bono conceded.

It was the last time the etiquette of debate shaped the night's proceedings, as the meeting grew steadily more heated. The escalation began with a call from a harried, grey-faced man that they put aside all pretence to bettering their lot and concentrate on revenging themselves on Shadwell.

‘We've lost everything,' he said. The only satisfaction we've got left is seeing that bastard dead.'

There were voices raised in protest against this defeatism, but the man demanded the right to be heard.

‘We're going to die out here,' he said, his face knotted up. ‘All we've got left are a few moments ... to destroy the ones who did this to us.'

‘Seems to me this is no time for a vendetta,' Nimrod said. ‘We have to think constructively. Plan for the future.'

There was some ironic laughter amongst the gathering, above which the voice of the would-be avenger rose:

‘What future?' he said, almost triumphant in his despair. ‘Look at us!' There were many downcast eyes at this; they knew all too well what a forlorn sight they made. ‘We're the last of the few. There won't be any coming after us, and we all know it.' He turned on Nimrod. ‘I don't want to talk about the future,' he said. ‘That's just asking for more grief.'

‘That's not true - ‘ Suzanna said.

"Easy for you to say,' he retorted.

‘Shut your mouth, Hamel,' Nimrod shouted.

‘I won't!'

‘She came here to help us.'

‘We've had enough help from her to kill us!' Hamel yelled back.

His pessimism had found a good number of supporters.

‘She's a Cuckoo,' one of them now piped up. ‘Why doesn't she go back where she belongs?'

Part of Suzanna was ready to do just that: she had no desire to be the target for so much bitterness. Their words stung.

More than that, they stirred another fear: that somehow she could have done more than she had; or at least done it differently. But she had to stay, for de Bono, and Nimrod, and all the others who looked to her for guidance in the Kingdom. The fact was that all Hamel had argued made a sad sense to her. She could see how easy it would be to take strength from hating Shadwell, and so be diverted from the losses they'd sustained. They more than she, of course; and that thought she had to keep uppermost in her mind. She'd lost a dream she'd had a few precious moments to indulge. They'd lost their world.

A new voice now entered the controversy; one she was surprised to hear: that of Apolline. Suzanna hadn't even been aware of the woman's presence in the room until she rose from a cloud of tobacco smoke and addressed the company.

‘I'm not going to lie down and die for anyone,' she said. ‘Especially not you, Hamel.'

Her defiance echoed that of Yolande Dor, back in Capra's House: it seemed always to be the women who argued most vehemently for life.

‘What about Shadwell?' somebody said.

‘What about him?' said Apolline. ‘You want to go kill him, Hamel? I'll buy you a bow and arrow!'

The remark won over-enthusiastic laughter from some quarters, but only served to infuriate the opposition more.

‘We're practically extinct, sister,' Hamel replied, his scorn lavish. ‘And you're not too fertile these days.'

Apolline took the taunt in good humour.

‘Want to try me?' she said.

Hamel's lips curled at the suggestion.

‘I had a wife - ‘ he said.

Apolline, taking her usual pleasure in offending, jiggled her hips at Hamel, who spat in her direction. He should have known better. She spat back, only more accurately. Though the missile was harmless enough he responded as though he'd been stabbed, throwing himself towards Apolline with a cry of rage. Somebody got between them before he could land a blow, and he struck out instead at the peace-maker. The assault ended any lingering pretence to civilized debate: the whole assembly began shouting and arguing, while Hamel and the other man traded punches amongst the overturned chairs. It was Apolline's pimp who parted them. Though the fight had lasted no more than a minute, both had taken a beating, and were bleeding at mouth and nose.

Suzanna watched with a heavy heart as Nimrod attempted to calm proceedings. There was so much she wanted to talk with the Kind about: problems upon which she needed their advice; secrets - tender and difficult - which she wanted to share. But while things were so volatile she feared voicing these matters would simply be further fuel for dissension.

Hamel took his leave, cursing Suzanna, Apolline and all who - as he put it - ‘sided with the shit'. He didn't go unaccompanied. Two dozen left with him.

There was no serious attempt to return to the debate after this eruption; the meeting had effectively been brought to a halt. No one was in any mood to make balanced decisions, nor were they likely to be so, at least until a little time had passed. It was concluded, therefore, that the survivors would disperse, and lie low in any safe place they could find. There were so few of them left that melting amongst the populous would not prove too difficult. They'd wait out the winter, until the reverberations had died down.

2

Suzanna parted from Nimrod after the meeting, leaving instructions with him as to her whereabouts in London. She was exhausted; she needed to rest her head awhile.

After two weeks back at home, however, she discovered that attempting to restore her energies by doing nothing was a sure route to lunacy, and instead returned to work at the studio. It proved a wise move. The problems of re-establishing a working rhythm distracted her from dwelling too much on the losses and failures of recent times; and the very fact of making something - even if it was only pots and plates - answered the need she had to begin again. She'd never been so aware of day's mythic associations as now, of its reputation as the first stuff, the base matter from which story-book nations had taken shape. Her skill could only manage pots not people, but worlds had to begin somewhere. She worked long hours, with just the radio and the smell of the clay for company, her thoughts never completely free of melancholy, but lighter than she'd dared hope.

Hearing that she was back in town, Finnegan appeared on her doorstep one afternoon, spruce as ever, to invite her out to dinner. It was strange to think of his waiting for her while she'd been adventuring; and touching too. She accepted his invitation, and was more thoroughly charmed by his company than she ever remembered being. He, forthright as ever, said that they were made for each other, and should marry immediately. She told him she made a rule of never marrying bankers. The next day he sent flowers, and a note saying that he'd relinquish his profession. They saw each other regularly thereafter. His warmth and easy manner were the perfect diversion from the darker thoughts that still threatened to intrude when she had time to think.

Every now and then, through the summer months and into the early autumn, she had some brief contact with members of the Kind, though they were kept to the minimum, for safety's sake. The news seemed to be good. Many of the survivors had returned to the vicinity of their ancestors' homes, and found niches there.

Better news still, there was no sign of either Shadwell or Hobart. There were rumours that Hamel had instigated a search for the Salesman, and had given up after failing to uncover a single clue as to the enemy's whereabouts. As for the remnants of his army - those Seerkind who'd embraced the Prophet's visions - they'd been the authors of their own punishment, waking from their evangelical nightmare to find it had destroyed all they held dear.

Some had sought forgiveness from their fellows, and had arrived, shamefaced and despairing, at that controversial meeting. Others, the grapevine confirmed, had been overcome by remorse, and had spiralled into dereliction. Some had even taken their own lives. There were yet others, she'd heard -the born blood-letters amongst the Kind - who'd left the battlefield regretting nothing, and gone out into the Kingdom in search of further violence. They would not have to look far.

But rumour and supposition apart, there was little to report. She got on with trying to make sense of her old life, while they made new lives for themselves. As to Cal, she followed his rehabilitation through Kind who'd gone to ground in Liverpool, but made no direct contact. This was in part a practical decision: it was wiser that they kept their distance from each other until they were certain the enemy had disappeared. But it was also an emotional consideration. They had shared much, in the Fugue and out. Too much to be lovers. The Weaveworld occupied the space between them - it had from the beginning. That fact made a nonsense of any thought of a domestic or romantic arrangement. They'd seen Hell and Heaven together. After that, surely everything else was bathos.

Presumably Cal felt the same, because he made no attempt at contacting her. Not that it was necessary. Though they neither saw nor spoke to each other she felt his constant presence. She had been the one to nip in the bud any possibility of physical love between them, and she had sometimes regretted that; but what they shared now was perhaps the highest aspiration of all lovers: between them they held a world.

3

In the middle of October her work started to take a new and completely uncharacteristic turn. For no particular reason she forsook her plates and bowls and began to work figuratively. The results gained her few admirers, but they satisfied some inner imperative which would not be gainsaid.

Meanwhile, Finnegan pressed his suit with dinners and flowers, his attentions redoubling each time she politely rejected him. She began to think there was more than a streak of the masochist in his nature, coming back as he did each time she sent him on his way.

Of all the extraordinary times she'd had since she'd first become part of the Fugue's story, these were in their way the strangest, as her experience of the Weaveworld and that of her present life did battle in her head for the right to be called real. She knew this was Cuckoo thinking; that they were both real. But her mind would not marry them - nor her place in them. What did the woman Finnegan proclaimed his love for - the smiling, clay beneath the fingers Suzanna - have to do with the woman who'd stood face to face with dragons? She came to wish she couldn't evoke those mythic times as well as she could, because afterwards she'd feel sick with the triviality of being herself.

For that reason she kept a rein on the menstruum, which was not difficult to do. Its once unpredictable nature was much tamed now; a consequence of the Fugue's demise, she assumed. It hadn't foresaken her entirely. Sometimes it seemed to get restless, and decided to stretch itself, usually -though it took her a little time to realize this - in response to some environmental cue. There were places in the Kingdom that were charged up; places where she sensed a spring beneath the earth, aching to fountain. The menstruum knew them. So, in some cases, did the Cuckoos, sanctifying the spots as best their myopia knew how: with steeples and monuments. Just as many of these territories remained unrecognized, however, and passing through some unremarkable street she'd feel a surge in her belly, and know power was buried there.

Most of her life she'd associated power with politics or money, but her secret self had learned better. Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could. She saw its processes even in Finnegan. On the few occasions she coaxed him to talk about his past, particularly his childhood, she saw the colours around his head strengthen and ripen, as in the act of imagining he was reunited with himself; made a continuum. At those moments she'd remember the line from Mimi's book: That which is imagined need never be lost. And on those days she was even happy.

4

Then, early in the third week of December, any fragile hope of good times abruptly came to an end.

The weather turned icy that week. Not just bitter, but arctic. There was no snow as yet, just a cold so profound the nerve-endings couldn't tell it from fire. She still worked on in the studio, unwilling to give up her creating, though her paraffin heater could barely raise the temperature above zero, and she was obliged to wear two sweaters and three pairs of socks. She scarcely noticed. She'd never been so preoccupied with making as she was now, bullying the clay into the shapes in her mind's eye.

Then, on the seventeenth, completely without warning, Apolline came calling. The eternal widow, she was swathed in black from head to foot.

‘We have to speak,' she said, as soon as the door was closed.

Suzanna escorted her through to the studio, and cleared a seat for her amid the chaos. She didn't want to sit, however, but wandered around the room, eventually ending up at the frost-scoured windows, peering out of them while Suzanna rinsed the clay from her hands.

‘Are you being followed?' Suzanna asked her.

‘I don't know,' came the reply. ‘Maybe.'

‘Do you want some coffee?'

‘I'd prefer something stronger. What have you got?'

‘Just brandy.'

‘Just brandy will do.'

She sat. Suzanna located the bottle she kept for her occasional one-woman parties, and put an ample measure in a cup. Apolline drained it, filled it a second time, then said:

‘Have you had the dreams?'

‘What dreams?'

‘We've all been having them,' Apolline said.

The way she looked - face sallow despite the cold, eyes ringed with darkness - Suzanna wondered that she'd had any sleep at all of late.

Terrible dreamsI the widow went on, ‘like the end of the world.'

‘Who's been having them?'

‘Who hasn't?' said Apolline. ‘Everyone, the same thing. The same appalling thing.'

She'd drained her cup a second time, and now took the bottle from the bench for a further shot.

‘Something bad's going to happen. We can all feel it. That's why I've come.'

Suzanna watched her while she poured herself more brandy, her mind posing two quite separate questions. First: were these nightmares simply the inevitable result of the horrors the Seerkind had endured, or something more? And - if the latter - why hadn't she had them too?

Apolline interrupted these thoughts, her words slightly slurred by her intake of alcohol.

‘People are saying it's the Scourge. That it's coming for us again, after all this time. Apparently this is the way it first made its presence known before. In dreams.'

‘And you think they're right?'

Apolline winced as she swallowed another throatful of brandy.

‘Whatever it is, we have to protect ourselves.'

‘Are you suggesting some kind of ... offensive?'

Apolline shrugged. ‘Don't know,' she said. ‘Maybe. Most of them are so damn passive. It sickens me, how they lie back and take whatever comes their way. Worse than whores.'

She stopped, and sighed heavily. Then said:

‘Some of the younger ones have got it into their heads that maybe we can raise the Old Science.'

To what purpose?'

To finish off the Scourge, of course!' she snapped, ‘before it finishes us.'

‘How do you estimate our chances?'

‘A little better than zero' Apolline grunted. ‘Jesus, I don't know! At least we're wise to it this time. That's something. Some of us are going back to the places where there was some power, to see if we can dredge up anything useful.'

‘After all these years?'

‘Who's counting?' she said. ‘Raptures don't age.'

‘So what are we looking for?'

‘Signs. Prophecies. God knows.'

She put down her cup, and traipsed back to the window, rubbing at the frost with the ball of her gloved hand to clear a spy-hole. She peered out, then made a ruminative grunt before once more turning her narrowed eyes on Suzanna.

‘You know what I think?' she announced.

‘What?'

‘I think you're keeping something from us.'

Suzanna said nothing, which won a second grunt from Apolline.

‘I thought so,' she said. ‘You think we're our own worst enemies, eh? Not to be trusted with secrets?' Her gaze was black and bright. ‘You may be right,' she said. ‘We fell for Shadwell's performance, didn't we? At least some of us did.'

‘You didn't?'

‘I had distractions,' she answered. ‘Business in the Kingdom. Come to that, I still do ...' Her voice trailed off. ‘I thought I could turn my back on the rest of them, you see. Ignore them and be happy. But I can't. In the end ... I think I must belong with them, God help me.'

‘We came so close to losing everything,' said Suzanna.

‘We did lose,' said Apolline.

‘Not quite.'

The interrogating eyes grew sharper; and Suzanna teetered on the edge of pouring out all that had happened to Cal and herself in the Gyre. But Apolline's appraisal was accurate: she didn ‘t trust them with their own miracles. Her instinct told her to keep her account of the Loom to herself for a while longer. So instead of spilling the story she said:

‘At least we're still alive.'

Apolline, undoubtedly sensing that she'd come close to a revelation and been denied it, spat on the floor.

‘Small comfort,' she said. ‘We're reduced to digging around in the Kingdom for some sniff of rapture. It's pitiful.'

‘So what can I do to help?'

Apolline's expression was almost venomous; nothing would have given her greater satisfaction, Suzanna guessed, than walking out on this devious Cuckoo.

‘We're not enemies,' said Suzanna.

‘Are we not?'

‘You know we're not. I want to do whatever I can for you.'

‘So you say,' Apolline replied, without much conviction. She looked away towards the window, her tongue ferreting in her cheek for a polite word. ‘Do you know this wretched city well?' she said finally.

‘Pretty well.'

‘So you could go looking, could you? Around and about.'

‘I could. I will.'

Apolline dug a scrap of paper from her pocket, torn from a notebook.

‘Here are some addresses,' she said.

‘And where will you be?'

‘Salisbury. There was a massacre there, back before the Weave. One of the cruellest, in fact; a hundred children died. I might sniff something out.'

Her attention had suddenly been claimed by the shelves on which Suzanna had put some of her recent work. She went to it, her skirts trailing in the clay dust.

‘I thought you said you hadn't been dreaming?' she remarked.

Suzanna scanned the row of pieces. She'd been immersed in their making for so long she'd scarcely been conscious of their potency, or indeed the consistency of the obsession behind them. Now she saw them with fresh eyes. They were all human figures, but twisted out of true, as though (the thought came with a pricking of the scalp) they were at the heart of some devouring fire; caught in the instant before it erased their faces. Like all of her current work they were unglazed, and roughly rendered. Was that because their tragedy was as yet unwritten: simply an idea in the fermenting mind of the future?

Apolline took one of the figures down, and ran her thumb over its contorted features.

‘You've been dreaming with your eyes open,' she commented, and Suzanna knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was true.

‘It's a good likeness,' the widow said.

‘Of whom?'

Apolline set the tragic mask back on the shelf.

‘Of us all.'

III

NO LULLABIES

1

Cal had been sleeping alone when he had the first of the nightmares.

It began on Venus Mountain; he was wandering there, his legs ready to give out beneath him. But with that horrid foreknowledge of disaster that dreams grant he knew it would not be wise to close his eyes and sleep. Instead he stood on the warm ground while forms that were lit as if by a sun that had already set behind the mountain moved around him. A man was dancing nearby, his skirts like living tissue; a girl flew over, trailing the scent of her sex; there were lovers in the long grass, coupling. One of them cried out, whether in pleasure or alarm he wasn't certain, and the next moment he was running over the mountainside, and there was something coming after him, something vast and remorseless. He shouted as he ran, to alert the lovers and the bird-girl and the dancer to the horror that had come for them all, but his voice was pitifully thin - the voice of a mouse - and the next moment the grass around him began to smoulder. Before his eyes the coupling bodies now burst into flames; an instant later the girl fell out of the sky, her body consumed by the same venomous fire. Again, he shouted, in terror this time, trying to leap over the flames as they advanced across the ground in his direction. But he wasn't agile enough. His heels caught fire, and he felt the heat creep up the back of his legs as he ran. Howling now, he found an extra burst of speed, and suddenly Venus Mountain was gone, and he was running barefoot down streets he'd known since childhood. It was night, but the lamps along the street had been smashed, and the paving stones torn up beneath his feet made the going treacherous.

Still the pursuer came after him, sniffing his carbonized heels.

Knowing it would outpace him given time, he looked for some place of sanctuary as he ran, but the doors of the houses - even those of childhood friends - were nailed shut, the windows boarded up.

There was no help to be had here. All he could do was keep running, in the vain hope that the monster would be distracted by more tempting quarry.

An alleyway caught his eye; he ducked down it. Made a turn, made another turn. Ahead, a brick wall, and in it, a door, through which he hurled himself. Only then did he realize where this inevitable route had taken him.

He knew the yard at once, though the wall had grown twice as high since he'd last been here, and the gate through which he'd stepped a moment ago had sealed itself up. It was the yard behind Mimi Laschenski's house. Once, in another life, he'd stood on that wall, and toppled, and fallen, finally, into paradise.

But there was no carpet in the yard now, nor any presence, bird or man, to offer their consolation. Just him, and the four shadowy corners of the yard, and the sound of his pursuer approaching the hiding place.

He took refuge in one of the corners and crouched down. Though the heels beneath his buttocks had been extinguished, his panic had not; he felt sick with fear.

The monster approached. He smelt the heat off its hide. It wasn't the heat of life - not sweat or breath - but a dry, dead fire; ancient, merciless; an oven in which all the good of the world might be cremated. And it was close. Just beyond the wall.

He held his breath. There was a crippling ache in his bladder. He put his hands between his legs, cupping his prick and balls, shaking with terror. Make it go away, he silently pleaded to the darkness: make it leave me alone and I'll be good as gold forever: I swear I will.

Though he could scarcely believe his luck, his appeal was heard, for the presence on the other side of the wall gave up its pursuit and retreated. His spirits lifted a little, but he kept his cramped position until his dream-sense told him that the enemy had withdrawn entirely. Only then did he dare stand up again, his joints cracking.

The pressure in his bladder would no longer be denied. Turning to the wall, he unzipped himself. The brick was hot from the presence of the creature, and his piss hissed against it.

In mid-flow, the sun came out, suddenly, flooding the yard. No, it wasn't the sun. It was his pursuer, rising over the wall, its head hotter than a hundred noons, its oven-maw open wide.

He could not help but look into its face, though it would surely blind him. He saw enough eyes for a nation, pressed side by side, set on great wheels, their nerves drawn out like bright threads and knotted in the belly of the creature. There was more, much more, but he only glimpsed it before the heat set him alight from head to toe-nail.

He shrieked.

And with the cry, the yard disappeared, and he was travelling again on Venus Mountain, only this time the landscape beneath him was not earth and rock, but flesh and bone. It was his own body he was flying over, his substance become a world, and it was burning up, burning to extinction. His shriek was the land's shriek, and it rose and rose as he and it were utterly consumed.

Too much!

He woke suddenly to find himself curled up in the middle of the bed, a knot of dreamt agony. He was sweating so much surely the fire would have been extinguished.

But no. It burned on in his mind's eye for minutes afterwards, still bright.

2

It was more than a nightmare, he knew; it had the potency of a vision. Alter that first visit there was a blank night, then it came again, and again the night after. The particulars were altered somewhat (a different street, a different prayer) but it was in essence the same warning; or prophecy.

There was a gap of several days before the fourth dream, and this time Geraldine was with him. Though she made every attempt to wake him - he was howling, she said - he could not be roused until the dream was over. Only then did he open his eyes to find her sobbing with panic.

‘I thought you were dying,' she said, and he half believed she was right; that his heart would not bear many more of these terrors before it burst.

It was not just his death the vision promised, however; it was that of the people on Venus Mountain, who seemed to occupy his very substance. A catastrophe was coming, that would lay waste those few Seerkind who had survived; who were, in their way, as intimate to him as his own flesh. That was what the dream told.

He lived through November in fear of sleep, and what it would bring. The nights were growing longer, the portions of light shrinking. It was as if the year itself was sliding into sleep, and in the mind of the night that would follow the substance of his dream was taking shape. A week into December, with the nightmare coming almost as soon as he closed his eyes, he knew he had to speak to Suzanna. Find her, and tell her what he was seeing.

But how? Her letter to him had been quite clear: she would contact him when it was safe to do so. He had no address for her; nor a telephone number.

In desperation, he turned to the only source of intelligence he had on the whereabouts of miracles. He found Virgil Gluck's card, and rang the number on it. There was no reply.

IV

THE SHRINE OF THE MORTALITIES

1

The day after Apolline's visit - with polar conditions moving down across the country, and the temperature dropping hourly - Suzanna went out to look at the sites on the list. The first of them proved a disappointment: the house she'd come to see, and those adjacent to it, were in the process of being demolished. As she studied her map, to be certain she'd come to the correct address, one of the workmen left a fire of roof-timbers he was tending and sauntered across to her.

There's nothing to see,' he said. There was a look of distaste on his face which she couldn't fathom.

‘Is this where number seventy-two stood?' she asked. ‘You don't look the type,' he replied. ‘I'm sorry, I don't - ‘

‘To come looking.'

She shook her head. He seemed to see that he'd made an error of some kind, and his expression mellowed. ‘You didn't come to see the murder house?' he said.

‘Murder house?'

‘This is where that bastard did his three kiddies in. There've been people here all week, picking up bricks -'

‘I didn't know.'

She vaguely remembered the grim headlines, however: an apparently sane man — and loving father — had murdered his children while they slept; then killed himself.

‘My mistake,' said the fire-watcher. ‘Couldn't believe some of these people, wanting souvenirs. It's unnatural.'

He frowned at her, then turned away and headed back to his duties.

Unnatural. That was the way Violet Pumphrey had condemned Mimi's house in Rue Street; Suzanna had never forgotten it. ‘Some houses,' she'd said, ‘they're not quite natural.' She'd been right. Perhaps the children who'd died here had been victims of that same unfocused fear; their killer moved either to preserve them forever from the forces he felt at work in his little sphere, or else wash his own fear away in their blood. Whichever, unless she could read auguries in smoke or rubble, there was no sense in lingering.

2

The second site, which was in the centre of the city, was neither house nor rubble, but a church, its dedicatees Saints Philomena and Callixtus, two names she was not at all familiar with. Minor martyrs, presumably. It was a charmless building of red brick and stone dressing, hedged in on every side by new office developments, the small accompanying graveyard littered and forsaken. In its way it looked as unpromising as the ruins that had been the murderer's house.

But before she even stepped over the threshold the menstruum told her that this was one of the charged places. Inside, that instinct was confirmed: she was delivered from a cold, bland street into a haven for mysteries. She didn't need to be a believer to find the candlelight and smell of incense persuasive; nor to be touched by the image of Madonna and Christ-child. Whether their story was history or myth was academic; the Fugue had taught her that. All that mattered was how loudly the image spoke, and today she found in it a hope for birth and transcendence her heart needed.

There were half a dozen people sitting in the pews, either praying or simply letting their pulses slow a little. Out of respect for their meditations she walked as quietly as the stone underfoot would allow down one of the side-aisles to the altar. As she approached the chancel rail her sense that there was power here intensified. She felt self-conscious as though somebody had their eyes on her. She looked round. None of the worshippers was looking her way. But as she turned back towards the altar, the floor beneath her feet grew insubstantial, then vanished entirely, and she was left standing on the air, staring down into the labyrinthine bowels of St Philomena's. There were catacombs laid out below; the power was sourced there.

The vision lasted two or three seconds only before it flickered out, leaving her hanging onto the rail until the vertigo it had brought with it passed. Then she looked about her for a door that would offer her access to the crypt.

There was only one likely option that she could see, off to the left of the altar. She climbed the steps, and was crossing to the door when it opened and a priest stepped through.

‘Can I help you?' he wanted to know, offering up a wafer-thin smile.

‘I want to see the crypt,' she said.

The smile snapped. ‘There isn't one,' he replied.

‘But I've seen it,' she told him, pressed to bluntness by the fact that the menstruum had risen in her as she'd crossed beneath Christ's gaze, unnerving her with its eagerness.

‘Well, you can't go down. The crypt's sealed.'

‘I have to,' she told him.

The heat of her insistence brought a stare of something like recognition from him. When he spoke again his voice was an anxious whisper.

‘I've got no authority,' he said.

‘I have,' she answered, the response coming not from her head, but from her belly.

‘Couldn't you wait?' he murmured. The words were his last appeal, for when she chose not to reply he stood aside, and allowed her to walk past him into the room beyond.

‘You want me to show you?' he said, his voice now barely audible.

‘Yes.'

He led her to a curtain, which he drew aside. The key was in the lock of the door. He turned it, and pushed the door open. The air that rose from below was dry and stale, the stairway before her steep; but she was not afraid. The call she felt from below coaxed her down, whispering its encouragement. This was no grave they were entering. Or if it was, the dead had more than rot on their minds.

3

Her glimpse of the maze beneath the church hadn't prepared her for how far below ground level it actually lay. The light from the baptistery rapidly faded as the staircase wound its way down. After two dozen steps she could not see her guide at all.

‘How much further?' she said.

At that moment, he struck a match and set it to a candle-wick. The flame was reluctant in the feeble air, but by its uncertain light she saw the priest's fretful face turned towards her. Beyond him were the corridors she'd first viewed from above, lined with niches.

There's nothing here,' he said, with some sadness. ‘Not any longer.'

‘Show me anyway.'

He nodded weakly, as though he'd lost entirely the strength to resist her, and led her down one of the passageways, carrying the candle before him. The niches, she now saw, were all occupied: caskets piled from floor to ceiling. It was a pleasant enough way to decay, she supposed, cheek by jowl with your peers. The very civility of the sight lent greater force to the scene that awaited her when, at the end of the passageway, he opened a door, and - ushering her before him - said:

This is what you came to see, isn't it?'

She stepped inside; he followed. Such was the size of the room they'd entered that the meagre candle-flame was not equal to illuminating it. But there were no caskets here, that much was apparent. There were only bones - and those there were in their thousands, covering every inch of the walls and ceiling.

The priest crossed the room and put the candle to a dozen wicks set in candelabra of femur and skull pan. As the flames brightened the full ambition of the bone-arranger's skills became apparent. The mortal remains of hundreds of human beings had been used to create vast symmetrical designs: baroque configurations of shin and rib, with clusters of skulls as their centre pieces; exquisite mosaics of foot and finger bones, set off with teeth and nails. It was all the more ghastly because it was so meticulously rendered, the work of some morbid genius.

‘What is this place?' she asked.

He frowned at her, perplexed.

‘You know what it is. The Shrine.'

‘ ... shrine?'

He moved towards her.

‘You didn't know?'

‘No.'

Rage and fear suddenly ignited his face. ‘You lied to me!' he said, his voice setting the candles fluttering. ‘You said you knew - ‘ He snatched hold of her arm. ‘Get out of here,' he demanded, dragging her back towards the door. ‘You're trespassing -'

His grip hurt her. It was all she could do to stop the menstruum retaliating. As it was, there was no need, for the priest's gaze suddenly left her, and strayed to the candles. The flames had grown brighter, their jittering manic. His hand dropped from her arm, and he began to back away towards the door of the Shrine, as the flickering fires became incandescent. His short-cropped hair was literally standing on end; his tongue lolled in his open mouth, robbed of exclamation.

She didn't share his terror. Whatever was happening in the chamber, it felt good to her; she bathed in the energies that were loose in the air around her head. The priest had reached the door, and now fled down the passageway towards the stairs. As he did so the caskets began to rattle in their brick niches, as if their contents wanted to be up to meet the day that was dawning in the Shrine. Their drumming lent fervour to the spectacle before her. In the centre of the chamber a form was beginning to appear, drawing its substance from the dust-filled air, and the bone-shards that lay on the floor. Suzanna could feel it plucking flecks from her face and arms, to add to its sum. It was not one shape, she now saw, but three; the central figure towering over her. Common sense might have counselled retreat, but unlikely as it seemed, given that death surrounded her on all sides, she'd seldom felt safer.

That sense of ease didn't falter. The dust moved in front of her in a slow dance, more soothing than distressing, the two flanking shapes forsaking their creation before they became coherent and running into the central figure to lend it new solidity. Even then it was only a dust-ghost, barely able to hold itself together. But in the features that were taking shape before her Suzanna could see traces of Immacolata.

What more perfect place for the Incantatrix to keep her Shrine? Death had always been her passion.

The priest was scrabbling for a prayer in the passageway outside, but the grey, glittering smudge that hung in the air in front of Suzanna was unmoved. Its features had elements of not one but all three sisters. The Hag's senility; the Magdalene's sensuality; the exquisite symmetry of Immacolata. Unlikely as it seemed, the synthesis worked; the marriage of contradictions rendered both more tenuous and more pliant by the delicacy of its construction. It seemed to Suzanna that if she breathed too hard she'd undo it.

And then the voice. That, at least, was recognizably Immacolata's, but there was a softness in it now that it had previously lacked. Perhaps, even, a delicate humour?

‘We're glad you came,' she said. ‘Will you request the Adamatical to leave? We have business to do, you and I.'

‘What sort of business?'

‘It's not for his ears,' the mote ghost said. ‘Please. Help him to his feet, will you? And tell him there's no harm done. They're so superstitious, these men ....'

She did as Immacolata asked: went down the drumming corridor to where the man was cowering, and drew him to his feet.

‘I think maybe you should leave,' she said. The Lady wants it.'

The priest gave her a sickened look.

‘All this time — ‘ he said. ‘I never really believed.'

‘It's all right,' she said. ‘There's no damage done.'

‘Are you coming too?'

‘No.'

‘I can't come back for you,' he warned her, tears spilling down his cheeks.

‘I understand,' she said. ‘You go on. I'm safe.'

He needed no further urging, but was off up the stairs like a jack rabbit. She returned down the passageway - the caskets still rattling - to face the woman.

‘I thought you were dead,' she said.

‘What's dead?' Immacolata replied. ‘A word the Cuckoos use when the flesh fails. It's nothing, Suzanna; you know that.'

‘Why are you here, then?'

‘I've come to pay a debt to you. In the Temple, you kept me from falling, or have you forgotten?'

‘No.'

‘Nor I. Such kindnesses are not negligible. I understand that now. I understand many things. You see how I'm reunited with my sisters? Together we're as we could never be apart. A single mind, three-in-one. I am we; and we see our malice, and regret it.'

Suzanna might well have doubted this unlikely confession but that the menstruum, brimming at her eyes and throat, confirmed the truth of it. The wraith before her - and the power behind it - had no hatred on its mind. What did it have? There was the question. She didn't need to ask; it knew her question.

I'm here with a warning,' it said.

‘About what? Shadwell?'

‘He's only a part of what you now face, sister. A fragment.'

‘Is it the Scourge?'

The phantom shuddered at the name, though surely its state put it beyond the reach of such dangers. Suzanna didn't wait for confirmation. There was no use disbelieving the worst now.

‘Is Shadwell something to do with the Scourge?' she asked.

‘He raised it.'

‘Why?'

‘He thinks magic has tainted him.' the dust said. ‘Corrupted his innocent salesman's soul. Now he won't be content until every rapture-maker's dead.'

‘And the Scourge is his weapon?'

‘So he believes. The truth may be more ... complex.'

Suzanna ran her hand down over her face, her mind seeking the best route of enquiry. One simple question occurred:

‘What kind of creature is this Scourge?'

The answer's perhaps just another question,' said the sisters. ‘It thinks that it's called Uriel.'

‘Uriel?'

‘An Angel.'

Suzanna almost laughed at the absurdity of this.

That's what it believes, having read the Bible.'

‘I don't follow.'

‘Most of this is beyond even our comprehension, but we offer you what we know. It's a spirit. And it once stood guard over a place where magic was. A garden, some have said, though that may be simply another fiction.'

‘Why should it want to wipe the Seerkind out?'

They were made there, in that garden, kept from the eyes of Humankind, because they had raptures. But they fled from it.'

‘And Uriel -'

‘ - was left alone, guarding an empty place. For centuries.'

Suzanna was by no means certain she believed any of this, but she wanted to hear the story completed.

‘What happened?'

‘It went mad, as any prisoner of duty must, left without fresh instructions. It forgot itself, and its purpose. All it knew was sand and stars and emptiness.'

‘You should understand...' said Suzanna. ‘I find all this difficult to believe, not being a Christian.'

‘Neither are we,' said the three-in-one.

‘But you still think the story's true?'

‘We believe there's truth inside it, yes.'

The reply made her think again of Mimi's book, and all it contained. Until she'd entered its pages the realm of Faery had seemed child's play. But facing Hobart in the forest of their shared dreams, she'd learned differently. There'd been truth inside that story: why not this too? The difference was that the Scourge occupied the same physical world as she did. Not metaphor, not dream-stuff; real.

‘So it forgot itself,' she said to the phantom. ‘How then did it remember?'

‘Perhaps it never hasI said Immacolata. ‘But its home was found, a hundred years back, by men who'd gone looking for Eden. In their heads it read the story of the paradise garden and took it for its own, whether it was or not. It found a name too. Uriel, flame of God. The spirit who stood at the gates of lost Eden -'

‘And was it Eden? The place it guarded?'

‘You don't believe that any more than I do. But Uriel does. Whatever its true name is - if it even has one - that name's forgotten. It believes itself an Angel. So, for better or worse, it is.'

The notion made sense to Suzanna, in its way. If, in the dream of the book, she'd believed herself a dragon, why shouldn't something lost in madness take an Angel's name?

‘It murdered its discoverers, of course - ‘ Immacolata was saying,' - then went looking for those who'd escaped it.'

The Families.'

‘Or their descendants. And it almost wiped them out. But they were clever. Though they didn't understand the power that pursued them, they knew how to hide. The rest you're familiar with.'

‘And Uriel? What did it do when the Seerkind disappeared?'

‘It returned to its fortress.'

‘Until Shadwell.'

‘Until Shadwell.'

Suzanna mused on this for a little time, then asked the one question this whole account begged. ‘What about God?' she said. The three-in-one laughed, her motes somersaulting. ‘We don't need God to make sense of this,' she said. Suzanna wasn't certain if she spoke only for themselves or for her too. ‘If there was a First Cause, a force of which this Uriel is a fragment, it's forsaken its sentinel.'

‘So what do we do?' said Suzanna. There's been talk of mustering the Old Science.' ‘Yes, I heard ‘Would that defeat it?'

‘I don't know. Certainly I made some miracles in my time that might have wounded it.' Then help us now.'

That's beyond us, Suzanna. You can see our condition for yourself. All that's left is dust and will-power, haunting the Shrine we were worshipped at, until the Scourge comes to destroy it.'

‘You're certain it'll do that?'

This Shrine is sacred to magic. Shadwell will bring the Scourge here and destroy it the first chance he gets. And we're defenceless against it. All we can do is warn youI Thank you for that.'

The wraith began to waver, as its power to hold its form diminished.

There was a time, you know...' Immacolata said, ‘when we had such raptures.' The dust she was made of was blowing away, the bone-shards dropping to the ground. ‘When every breath was magic; and we were afraid of nothingI

‘It may come again.'

Within seconds the three had grown so tenuous they were barely recognizable. But the voice lingered a little while, to say:

‘It's in your hands, sister.. ,' And then they were gone.

V

THE NAKED FLAME

1

The house that Mimi Laschenski had occupied for over half a century had been sold two months after her death. The new owners had been able to purchase it for a song, given its dilapidated condition, and put several weeks of hard labour into modernizing it before moving in. But that investment of time and money was not enough to persuade them to stay. A week later they left in a hurry, claiming the place was haunted. Sensible folks too, to look at them, talking of empty rooms that growled; of large invisible forms that brushed past them in darkened passageways; and, almost worse in its way, the pungent smell of cats that hung over the place, however hard they scrubbed the boards.

Once left empty, number eighteen Rue Street remained so. The property market was slow up that end of the city, and the rumours about the house were enough to deter the few who came to view. It was eventually taken over by squatters, who in the six days of their occupancy undid much of the work the previous owners had put in. But the twenty-four hour a day orgy which the neighbours suspected was going on came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the sixth night, and the tenants were gone by the following morning, exiting in some haste to judge by the litter of belongings they left on the steps.

After that, the house had no more occupants, legal or otherwise, and it didn't take long for gossip about number eighteen to be supplanted by talk of more lively scandals. The house simply became an unsaleable eye-sore: its windows boarded up, its paintwork deteriorating.

That was, until that night in December. What would happen that night would change the face of Rue Street entirely, and guarantee that the house in which Mimi Laschenski had lived out her lonely old age was never occupied again.

2

Had Cal set eyes on the five figures that entered number eighteen that night it would have taken him some time to recognize their leader as Balm de Bono. The rope-dancer's hair was cropped so short it was all but invisible; his face was thin, his features set. Even less recognizable, perhaps, was Toller, whom Cal had last seen perched on a rope in Starbrook's Field. Toller's ambitions as a rope-dancer had come to an abrupt end hours after that encounter, when he'd fallen foul of the Prophet's men. They'd broken his legs, and cracked his skull, leaving him for dead. He had at least survived. Starbrook's third pupil, Galin, had perished that night, in a vain attempt to protect his master's Field from desecration.

It had been de Bono's inspiration to visit the Laschenski house - where the Weave had lain for so long - in the hope of finding a pocket of the Old Science to arm themselves against the approaching cataclysm. He had three other allies in this, besides Toller: Baptista Delphi, whose father had been shot down in Capra's House; her lover, Otis Beau; and a girl whom he'd first seen in Nonesuch, sitting on a window-ledge wearing paper wings. He'd seen her again, on Venus Mountain, in the reverie the presences there had granted him, and she'd shown him a world of paper and light that had kept him from total despair in the hours that followed. Her name was Leah.

Of the five, she was the most expert in the working of raptures; and the most sensitive to their proximity. It was she therefore, who led the way through the Laschenski house in search of the room where the Weaveworld had lain. Her path-finding took them up the stairs and into the second-storey front room.

‘The house is full of echoes,' she said. ‘Some of the Custodian; some of animals. It takes time to sort them out - ‘ She went down on her knees in the middle of the room, and put her hands on the floor.' - but the Weave lay here, I'm sure of it.'

Otis went across to where she knelt. He too crouched and put his palms to the ground.

‘I don't feel a thing,' he said.

‘Believe me,' said Leah. ‘This is where it lay.'

‘Why don't we get down to the bare boards?' Toller suggested. ‘We may get a clearer signal.'

Plush, deep-pile carpeting had been laid in the room, only to be subsequently soiled by the squatters. They removed what remnants of furniture the room could boast, then tore the carpet up. The labour left them shaky: the training de Bono had devised for this expedition - refinement techniques culled from his old master's teachings - had kept sleep and food in recent days to the minimum. But it paid dividends when they laid their hands on the stripped boards. Their rarefied senses responded on the instant; even Otis could feel the echoes now.

‘I can practically see the Weave,' Baptista said.

It was a sensation they all shared.

‘What do we do now?' Otis asked Leah, but she was too involved in the echoes to hear his question. He turned to de Bono: ‘Well?' he said.

De Bono had no answers. Though he'd theorized at length with any who'd debate on the subject, the plain fact was this: they were flying blind. There was no sure way of getting to the raptures whose memory they were evoking. His unspoken hope was that the ghosts of power here would come to them, sensing the urgency of their mission. If, however, the force beneath their fingertips was unmoved by the gravity of their cause, then they had no way to persuade it. They'd be obliged to face their nightmares unprotected; which was - he didn't doubt - a sentence of death.

3

At two-fifty in the morning Cal woke from a dream which - though it resembled the terrors of previous nights - was in several significant ways different. For one thing, he'd not been alone on Venus Mountain; he'd had the company of de Bono. Together they'd fled the creature that came after them, into the same maze of alleyways that would lead - had the dream proceeded in its usual fashion - to the yard behind the Laschenski house. But it didn't. Somewhere in the alley he and de Bono were parted, and Cal, completely disoriented, took a route that led him into another street entirely.

There, the sense of pursuit waned, only to be replaced by a fresh anxiety. He was no longer the quarry, his dream-self knew, because the creature had gone after de Bono, leaving him in the role of helpless observer. The street seemed to be full of hiding places - doorways and garden walls - where it might wait, stoking its fires. But he'd misunderstood, once again. It had no need to hide. There it was now, crossing the intersection at the end of the street. Not a single pursuer this time, but two. One was human; a slouching shadowy form. The other - gigantic, as tall as a house, a cloud in which a furnace roared. He started to edge back towards the alleyway from which he'd stepped, moving slowly so as not to attract the monster or its companion's attention. A foolish hope. The refuge he sought had been sealed up, and as his fingers scrabbled at the brick the creature looked his way.

It had already devoured de Bono: he saw his friend's ashes in the cloud whose flame sight was on him.

I don't want to burn! he yelled, but the fire was coming at him - Please God!

Before it struck him he flung himself up out of sleep.

Geraldine was not with him tonight; he lay in the middle of the bed, trembling from gut to pores, until he was certain movement wouldn't make him vomit, then he got up, went to the window, and drew the curtains aside.

Chariot Street was perfectly quiet; the same icy hush that would be city-wide at this hour. Snow had begun to fall; its idling descent hypnotic. But the sight of neither street nor snow nor lamplight reassured him. There was a reason why the terrors that came in sleep were different tonight: because they weren't just in dreams any longer. He knew this without any trace of doubt. That somewhere near, in a street like this - all lamplight and peace - his nightmares were coming true.

4

There was mute but perceptible elation in the upper room of the Laschenski house: the call had been answered. It had begun slowly, with lights moving back and forth through the echoes of the Weave, as the Old Science rose from its hiding places in the carpet and came to meet those who longed for it. The process was still slow, and demanding - they could not afford distraction from the task for fear of losing contact. But they were prepared for such rigours, and as the power beneath their hands intensified they couldn't help but express their pleasure in soft words of welcome. The past was coming to fetch them.

A noise from the floor below drew de Bono's attention. Taking care not to disturb the others as they worked, he tip-toed to the door and stepped out onto the landing.

There was no encore to the sound that had brought him out here. He crossed the darkened landing to the top of the stairs, and studied the shadows below. Nothing moved there. He'd imagined it, he decided. His protein-starved brain was playing tricks on him. But just to be certain he went through to one of the back bedrooms and peered down into the yard. Snow was falling, the flakes tapping lightly on the glass. That was all he could see or hear.

He took his spectacles off and pressed his fingers to his eyes. The burst of energy that had come with the first intimations of success had faded. All he wanted now was sleep. But they had a good deal of work to do yet. Calling the Old Science up was just beginning; next came the problem of harnessing it.

He turned away from the window to make his way back to his companions. As he did so he saw two figures moving towards the Weave room. Had someone come out to search for him? He put his spectacles back on, to get a better look at them.

The sight before him brought a shouted warning to his lips, but it was old news by the time he raised it, falling on ears already deafened by their own screams. It was all so quick. One moment he was slipping the scene into focus; the very next, it erupted.

Before he could reach the landing the killers had stepped into the carpet room, and the door was flung off its hinges by the force unleashed inside. A body was flung out on a stream of molten light and held - as though spitted - in the middle of the landing, while darts of flame devoured it. He saw the victim clearly. It was Toller; poor Toller; his body closing into a blistered knot as the fire withered him.

The de Bono who'd been with Cal at Lemuel Lo's orchard would now have flung himself into the holocaust, and not considered the consequences. But bad times had taught him caution. There was no merit in suicide. If he tried to challenge the force that was running riot in the carpet room he'd die the way the rest were dying, and there'd be nobody left to testify to this atrocity. He knew the power whose labours he was witnessing: the worst predictions of his fellow Kind were here proved. This was the Scourge.

There was another explosion in the carpet room, and fresh fire blossomed onto the landing. The ceiling and floor were alight now; so were the bannisters and stairs. Very soon any escape route would be blocked, and he'd perish where he stood. He had to risk crossing the landing, and hope that the smoke would conceal him from the killing glance. There was no time to plot his route through the fire. Shielding his face he made a straight run for the stairs.

He almost got there too, but as he came within a pace of the top step he stumbled. He threw out his arms to save his fall and his hands gripped hold of the burning bannister. A cry escaped him, as the fire caught him; then he was up again and stumbling down the stairs towards the front door.

The Scourge came after him immediately, its first blow melting the brick where he'd stood two beats before. Eyes on the door, he pelted down the stairs, and was within five steps of the hallway when he heard a sound - like a titanic intake of breath - behind him. Why did he turn? He was a fool to turn. But he wanted a sight of the Scourge before it slaughtered him.

It was not the fire-bringer he saw at the top of the stairs however, but its slave. He'd never seen the Salesman dressed in his own skin, so he couldn't name this man. All he saw in that instant was a wasted, sweating face, regarding him with more desperation than malice. The sight made him hesitate, and as he did so this Cuckoo stood aside, and the Scourge came into view.

It was made of innumerable eyes; and bone that had never been clothed; and emptiness. He saw the fire in it too, of course: a fire from the bowels of a sun, in love with extinction. And he saw agony.

It would have been upon him - both fire and agony - had the ceiling above the stairs not given way at that moment, falling between him and his tormentors in a curtain of flame. He didn't escape its touch. Pieces of debris struck him: he smelt his skin burn. But while the deluge eclipsed him he was down the rest of the stairs and out - in three or four panicked paces - into the freezing air of the street.

There was a body burning in the gutter, having been thrown from the upper window, reduced by the Scourge's heat to the size of a child. It was beyond all recognition.

With sudden fury he turned back on the house and yelled at the beasts within:

‘Bastards! Bastards!'

Then he took to his heels, before the fire came after him.

There were lights on all along the street, and doors opening as Cuckoos came out to see what it was that had disturbed their slumbers. Always the sight-seers: open-mouthed, disbelieving. There was a force for desolation loose in their midst which could consume their lives at a glance, surely they could see that? But they'd watch anyway, willing to embrace the void if it came with sufficient razzmatazz. In his rage and his despair de Bono found himself saying: let it come, let it come. There were no safe places left; nor powers to protect the vulnerable.

So let it do its worst, if that at the last was inevitable. Let the void come, and bring an end to the tyranny of hope.

VI

DEATH COMES HOME

As the dead hours between midnight and first light ticked by, the snowfall became heavier. Cal sat in his father's chair at the back window, and watched the flakes as they spiralled down, knowing from experience that trying to get back to sleep was a waste of effort. He would sit here and watch the night until the first train of the new day rattled by. The sky would begin to lighten an hour or so after that, though with the clouds so snow-laden the dawn would be subtler than usual. About seven-thirty he'd pick up the telephone and try calling Gluck, something he'd been doing regularly, both from the house and from the bakery, for several days, and always with the same result. Gluck didn't answer; Gluck wasn't home. Cal had even asked for the line to be checked, in case it was faulty. There was no technical problem, however: there was simply nobody to pick up the receiver at the other end. Perhaps the visitors Gluck had been spying on for so long had finally taken him to their bosom.

A knocking at the front door brought him to his feet. He looked at the clock: it was a little after three-thirty. Who the hell would come calling at this hour?

He stepped out into the hallway. There was a sliding sound from the far side of the door. Was somebody pushing against it?

‘Who's there?' he said. There was no reply. He took a few more steps towards the

door. The sliding sound had stopped, but the rapping - much fainter this time - was repeated. He unbolted the door, and took off the chain. The noises had ceased entirely now. Curiosity bettering discretion, he opened the door. The weight of the body on the other side threw it wide. Snow and Balm de Bono fell on the Welcome mat.

It wasn't until Cal went down on his haunches to help the man that he recognized the pain-contorted features. De Bono had cheated fire once; but this time it had caught him, and more than made up for its former defeat.

He put his hand to the man's cheek, and at his touch the eyes flickered open.

‘Cal...'

‘I'll get an ambulance.'

‘No,' said de Bono. ‘It's not safe here.'

The look on his face was enough to silence Cal's objections.

‘I'll get the car-keys,' he said, and went in search of them. He was returning to the front door, keys in hand, when a spasm ran through him, as though his gut was trying to tie a knot in itself. He'd felt this sensation all too often of late, in dreams. There, it meant the beast was near.

He stared out into the spattered darkness. The street was deserted, as far as he could see; and silent enough to hear the snow-hooded lamps hum in the cold. But his heart had caught His belly's trepidation: it was thumping wildly.

When he knelt at de Bono's side again, the man had made a temporary peace with his pain. His face was expressionless and his voice flat, which gave all the more potency to his words.

‘It's coming...' he said. ‘... it's followed me ...'

A dog had started to bark at the far end of the street. Not the whining complaint of an animal locked out in the cold, but raw alarm.

‘What is it?' Cal said, looking out at the street again.

‘The Scourge.'

‘ ... oh Jesus...'

The barking had been picked up from kennels and kitchens

all along the row of houses. As in sleep, so waking: the beast was near.

‘We have to get moving,' Cal said.

‘I don't think I can.'

Cal put his arm beneath de Bono and lifted him gently into a sitting position. The wounds he'd received were substantial, but they weren't bleeding; the fire had sealed them up, blackening the flesh of his arms and shoulder and side. His face was the colour of the snow, his heat running out of him in breath and sweat.

‘I'm going to take you to the car,' Cal said, and pulled de Bono to his feet. He wasn't quite dead weight; there was enough strength left in his legs to aid Cal in his efforts. But his head lolled against Cal's shoulder as they crept up the path.

The fire touched me ...' de Bono whispered.

‘You'll survive.'

‘It's eating me up ...'

‘Stop talking and walk.'

The car was parked only a few yards down the street. Cal leaned de Bono against the passenger side while he unlocked the doors, glancing up and down the street every few seconds while his inept fingers fumbled with the keys. The snow was still getting heavier, shrouding both ends of the street.

The door was open. He went round to help de Bono into the passenger seat, then returned to the driver's side.

As he stooped to get into the car, the dogs all stopped barking. De Bono made a small sound of distress. They'd done their duty as watch-dogs; self-preservation silenced them now. Cal got into the car and slammed the door. There was snow on the windscreen, but there wasn't time to start scraping it off: the wipers would have to take care of it. He turned on the ignition. The engine laboured, but failed to start.

At his side de Bono said,'... it's near ...'

Cal didn't need telling. He tried the key again; but still the engine resisted life.

‘Come on,' he coaxed it, ‘please.'

His plea bore fruit; on the third attempt the engine caught.

His instinct was to accelerate and get out of Chariot Street as quickly as possible, but the snow, falling as it did on several days' accumulation of ice, made the going treacherous. The wheels repeatedly threatened to lose their grip, the car sliding back and forth across the road. But yard by yard they crept through the pall of snow, which was so heavy now it reduced visibility to a car length. It was only as they approached the end of Chariot Street that the truth came clear. It wasn't just snow that was smothering them. There was a fog thickening the air, so dense that the car headlights had difficulty penetrating it.

Chariot Street was suddenly no longer part of the Kingdom. Though it had been Cal's stamping ground since childhood, it was alien territory now: its landmarks erased, its urbanity turned over to wasteland. It belonged to the Scourge, and they were lost in it. Unable to see any sign of a turning he trusted to instinct and made a right. As he swung the wheel over, de Bono sat bolt upright.

‘Go back!' he yelled.

‘What?'

‘Back! Jesus! Back!'

He was gripping the dashboard with his wounded hands, staring into the fog ahead.

‘It's there! There!'

Cal glanced up, as something huge moved in the fog ahead, crossing the path of the car. It came and went too quickly for him to gain more than a fleeting impression: but that was already too much. He'd underestimated it in his dreams. It was vaster than he'd imagined: and darker; and emptier.

He struggled to put the vehicle into reverse, panic making his every motion a farce. Off to his right the fog was folding upon itself, or unfolding. Which direction was the thing going to come from next? or was it somehow everywhere around them, the fog its hatred made matter?

‘Calhoun.'

He looked at de Bono, then through the windscreen at the sight that had de Bono rigid in his seat. The fog was dividing in front of them. From its depths the Scourge loomed.

What Cal saw befuddled him. There was not one form emerging from the murk, but two, locked in a grotesque union.

One was Hobart; albeit a Hobart much transfigured by the horror that now possessed him. His flesh was white, and there was blood running from the dozen places around his body where lines of force - connected by wheels and arcs of fire -entered his body and broke out the other side, revolving through him as they swung to meet the second form: the monstrous geometry that towered above him.

What Cal saw in that geometry was all paradox. It was bleached, yet black; a void, yet brimming; perfect in its beauty, yet more profoundly rotten than any living tissue could be. A living citadel of eyes and light, corrupt beyond words, and stinking to high heaven.

De Bono threw himself against the door and began to wrestle with the handle. The door opened, but Cal snatched hold of him before he could pitch himself out, at the same time putting his foot on the accelerator. As he did so a sheet of white flame erupted in front of the car, eclipsing the Scourge.

It was the briefest of respites. The car had backed up only five yards before the Scourge came at it again.

As it came, Hobart opened his mouth to a dislocating width, and a voice that was not his issued from his throat.

‘I see you,' it said.

The next moment it seemed the ground beneath the car erupted, and the vehicle was flung over onto the driver's side.

There was total confusion within, as a hail of bric-a-brac tumbled from dashboard and glove compartment. Then de Bono was scrabbling at the passenger door once again, pushing it open. Despite his wounds some of a rope-dancer's agility was still in evidence, for he was out of the felled vehicle in two economical moves.

‘Get going!' he yelled to Cal, who was still attempting to work out which way was up. As he stood, and levered himself out of the car, two sights were there to greet him. One, that of de Bono disappearing into the fog, which now seemed charged on every side with an empire of eyes. The other, a figure standing in the midst looking at him. It seemed it was a night for familiar faces, changed by circumstance. First, de Bono; then Hobart; and now - though for an instant Cal refused to believe it - Shadwell.

He'd seen the man play many roles. Avuncular salesman, wreathed in smiles and promises; tormentor and seducer; Prophet of Deliverance. But here was a Shadwell stripped of pretences, and the actor beneath was a vacant thing. His features, robbed of animation, hung on his bones like soiled linen. Only his eyes - which had always been small, but now seemed vestigial - still preserved a trace of fervour.

They watched Cal now, as he scrambled off the car and onto the ice-slick street.

There's nowhere left to run,' he said. His voice was slurred, as though he needed sleep. ‘It's going to find you, wherever you try to hide. It's an Angel, Mooney. It has God's eyes.'

‘An Angel? That?'

The fog trembled to right and left of them, like living tissue. At any moment it might be back upon them. But the sight of Shadwell, and the riddle of his words, kept Cal glued to the spot. And another puzzle too; something about Shadwell's changed appearance which he couldn't put his finger on.

‘It's called Uriel,' Shadwell said. The flame of God. And it's here to bring an end to magic. That's its only purpose. An end to rapture. Once and for all.'

The fog trembled again, but Cal still stared at Shadwell, too intrigued to retreat. It was perverse, to be vexed by trivia when a power of an Angel's magnitude was within spitting distance. But then the Mooneys had always been perverse.

That's my gift to the world,' Shadwell was declaring. ‘I'm going to destroy the magicians. Every one. I don't sell any longer you see. I do this for love.'

At this mention of selling, Cal recognized the change in the man. It was sartorial. Shadwell's jacket, the jacket of illusions which had broken Brendan's heart, and doubtless the hearts of countless others, had gone. In its place Shadwell wore a new coat, immaculately tailored but bereft of raptures.

‘We're bringing an end to illusions and deceptions. An end to it all -'

As he spoke the fog shuddered, and from it there came a single shriek, which was cut off abruptly. De Bono: living and dying.

‘ ... you fucker...' Cal said.

‘I was deceivedI Shadwell replied, untouched by Cal's hostility. ‘So terribly deceived. Seduced by their duplicity; willing to spill blood to have what they tantalized me with -'

‘And what are you doing now?' Cal spat back. ‘Still spilling blood.'

Shadwell opened his arms. ‘I come empty-handed, Calhoun,' he replied. That's my gift. Emptiness.'

‘I don't want your damn gifts.'

‘Oh you do. In your bones you do. They've seduced you with their circus. But here's an end to that sham.'

There was such sanity in his voice; a politician's sanity, as he sold his flock the wisdom of the bomb. This soulless certainty was more chilling than hysteria or malice.

Cal realized now that his first impression had been mistaken. Shadwell the actor had not disappeared. He'd simply forsaken his patter and his hyperbole for a playing style so plain, so minimal, it scarcely seemed like a performance at all. But it was. This was his triumph: Shadwell the Naked.

The fog had begun to chum with fresh enthusiasm. Uriel was coming back.

Cal took one more look at Shadwell, to fix the mask in his mind once and for all, then he turned and started to run.

He didn't see the Scourge reappear, but he heard the car explode behind him, and felt the blast of heat which turned the snow to a warm drizzle around his head. He heard Shadwell's voice too - carried crisply on the cold air.

‘I see you... ‘ he said.

That was a lie; he didn't and he couldn't. The fog was for the moment Cal's ally. He fled through it, not caring much in which direction he went as long as he outpaced the gift-giver's brute.

A house loomed up out of the murk. He didn't recognize it, but he followed the pavement until he reached the first crossroads. The intersection he knew, and took off back towards Chariot Street by a labyrinthine route designed to confuse his pursuers.

Shadwell would guess where he was headed, no doubt; the living fog that concealed the Scourge was probably half way down Chariot Street already. The thought gave speed to Cal's feet. He had to get to the house before the fire. Suzanna's book was there: the book she'd given into his hands for safe-keeping.

Twice the ice underfoot brought him down, twice he hauled himself up again - limbs and lungs aching - and ran on. At the railway bridge he clambered over the wire and up onto the embankment. The fog had thinned out here; there was just the snow, falling on the silent tracks. He could see the backs of the houses clearly enough to count them as he ran, until he reached the fence at the back of his father's house. He clambered over, realizing as he ran past the loft that he had another duty to perform here before he could make his escape. But first, the book.

Stumbling through the ruins of the garden he reached the back door and let himself in. His heart was a lunatic, beating against his ribs. Any moment the Scourge would be outside, and this - his home - would go the way of the Fugue. There was no time to retrieve anything of sentimental value, he had seconds only to gather the bare essentials: maybe not even that. He picked up the book, then a coat, and finally went in search of his wallet. A glance at the window showed him that the street outside had vanished; the fog was pressing its clammy face at the glass. Wallet secured he raced back through the house and left by the route he'd come: out of the door and through the tangle of bushes his mother had planted so many springs ago.

At the loft, he halted. He couldn't take 33 and his mate with him, but he could at least give them a chance to escape if they wanted to. They did. They were flying back and forth in the frost-proofed cage he'd built for them, perfectly alive to their jeopardy. As soon as he opened the door they were out and into the air, rising through the snow until they found the safety of the clouds.

As he started along the embankment - not back towards the bridge but in the opposite direction - he realized that he might never again see the house he was leaving behind. The ache that thought awoke made the cold seem benign. He paused, and turned to try and hold the sight in his memory: the roof, the windows of his parents' bedroom, the garden, the empty loft. This was the house in which he'd grown to adulthood; the house where he'd learned to be the man he was, for better or worse; here all his memories of Eileen and Brendan were rooted. But in the end it was just bricks and mortar; evil could take it as it had taken the Fugue.

As certain as he could be that he had the picture before him memorized, he headed off into the snow. Twenty yards on down the track a roar of destruction announced that he was a refugee.