Weaveworld

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 day 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 day from her hands.

‘Are you bang 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 dreams,’ 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?

A pollute 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.’