Weaveworld

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 has,’ 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 you.’

‘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 nothing.’

‘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.