Weaveworld

2

There was nothing arbitrary in the Scourge’s attack. It was systematically destroying the field and the surrounding region in the knowledge that sooner or later its eyes would find the creatures whose proximity it smelt. In the trees there was an organized retreat; the children, accompanied by either guardians or parents, moving through to the rear of the wood and out into the open air. Few others moved, but stayed at their stations, preserving the integrity of their hiding place. Suzanna wasn’t certain if this was defiance or fatalism; perhaps a little of both. But however deep they dug, their store of raptures was all but exhausted. It was a matter of seconds rather than minutes now before Uriel-in-Shadwell’s glance reached the trees. When it did so the woods would bum, invisible or no.

Hamel was at Suzanna’s side as she watched the Angel’s approach.

‘Are you coming?’ he said.

‘In a moment.’

‘It’s now or never.’

Maybe it would be never, then. She was so transfixed by the formidable power being unleashed in front of her, she couldn’t avert her astonished gaze. It fascinated her that strength of this magnitude should be turned to the sordid business of atrocity; something was wrong with a reality that made that possible, and offered no cure for it, nor hope of cure.

‘We have to go,’ said Hamel.

‘Then go,’ she told him.

Tears were welling in her eyes. She resented them coming between her and seeing. But with them she felt the menstruum rising – not to protect her but to be with her at the last; to give her its little sum of joy.

The Angel raised its sights. She heard Hamel shout. Then the trees to the right of where she stood burst into flames.

There were cries from the depths of the wood as the screen was breached.

‘Scatter!’ somebody yelled.

Hearing its prey, the Scourge caused Shadwell’s face to smile: a smile to end the world with. Then the light in the bloated body intensified, as Uriel mustered a final fire, to destroy the rapturers forever.

A beat before it broke, a voice said:

‘Shadwell?’

It was the Salesman’s name that had been called, but it was Uriel that looked round, its calamitous glance momentarily postponed.

Suzanna’s gaze left the Scourge, and went to the speaker.

It was Cal. He was walking across the smoking ground that had once been the snow-covered field at the bottom of the hill; walking straight towards the enemy.

At the sight of him she didn’t hesitate to break cover. She stepped out from the margin of the trees and into the open air. Nor did she come alone. Though she didn’t take her eyes off Cal for an instant she heard whispers and footfalls at her side as the Kind appeared from hiding; a gesture of solidarity in the face of extinction which moved her profoundly. At the last, their appearance here said, we’re together, Cuckoo and Kind, part of one story.

None of which prevented an awed voice, which she recognized as that of Apolline, from saying:

‘Is he out of his fucking mind?’

as Cal continued to advance across the earth Uriel had laid waste.

Behind her, the crackling of flames mounted, as the fire, fanned by the wind, spread through the woods. Its glow washed the ground, throwing the shadows of the Kind towards the two figures in the field ahead. Shadwell, with his fine clothes torn and singed, his face paler than a dead man’s. Cal in his pigskin shoes, the flame-light picking out threads in his jacket.

No; not his jacket: Shadwell’s. The jacket of illusions.

How could she have been so slow as not to have noticed it earlier? Was it the fact that it fitted him so well, though it had been made for a man half his size again? Or was it simply that his face had claimed all her attention, that face which even now had about it a purposefulness she’d come to love.

He was within ten yards of the Scourge, and now stood still.

Uriel-in-Shadwell said nothing, but there was a restlessness in the Salesman’s body that threatened to detonate at any moment.

Cal fumbled to unbutton the jacket, frowning at the ineptitude of his fingers. But he got the trick of it on the fourth attempt, and the jacket fell open.

That done, he spoke. His voice was thin, but it didn’t shake.

‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said.

At first Uriel-in-Shadwell offered no response. When it did it was not the possessor who replied but the possessed.

‘There’s nothing there I want,’ the Salesman said.

‘It’s not for you,’ Cal replied, his voice growing stronger, ‘It’s for the Angel of Eden. For Uriel.’

This time neither Scourge nor Salesman replied. Cal took hold of the front panel of the jacket, and opened it, exposing the lining.

‘Don’t you want to look?’ he enquired.

Silence answered him.

‘Whatever you see,’ he went on. ‘It’s yours.’

Somebody at Suzanna’s side whispered: ‘What does he think he’s doing?’

She knew; but didn’t waste precious effort on a reply. Cal needed all the power she could will to him: all her hope, all her love.

Again, he addressed the Scourge.

‘What do you see?’ he said.

This time he got an answer.

‘Nothing.’

It was Shadwell who spoke.

‘I See. Nothing.’

‘Oh Cal,’ Suzanna breathed, catching the flicker of despair that crossed his face. She knew exactly what he was thinking, and shared his doubt. Were the raptures in the jacket dead? Had they withered away without victims to nourish them, leaving him standing before Uriel unarmed?

A long moment passed. Then, from somewhere in the belly of the Angel there rose a low moan. As it came Shadwell’s mouth opened, and he spoke again. But it was quietly this time, as if to himself; or the thing inside himself.

‘Don’t look,’ he said.

Suzanna held her breath, not daring to believe his words were a warning. Yet how else could they be construed?

‘You do see something,’ Cal said.

‘No,’ Shadwell replied.

‘Look,’ said Cal, opening the jacket as wide as he could.

‘Look and see.’

Suddenly, Shadwell began yelling.

‘It’s lies!’ he screeched, his body shuddering now. ‘It’s all corruption!’

But the moan that was still rising from the creature inside him drowned his warnings out. This was not the howl Suzanna had heard in the rock of Rayment’s Hill: not an insane cry of rage. This sound was sad, infinitely sad, and as if answering sound with light the jacket, whose threads she’d feared bankrupt, began to brighten.

Immediately Shadwell’s warnings began again, tinged with a new hysteria.

‘Don’t!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t, damn you!’

The Scourge was deaf to the appeals of its host, however. It had its innumerable eyes on the lining of the jacket, willing forth from it a vision only it could see.

For Cal the moment carried terror and joy in such confusion he could not tell one from the other. Not that it mattered: events now were out of his hands. All he could do was stand his ground while the jacket performed whatever deceits it had power to perform.

He hadn’t meant to put it on; that hadn’t been a part of his plan at all. Indeed he’d had no plan; he’d just plunged through the snow, hoping he wasn’t too late to intervene. But events had already outpaced him. Uriel’s glance had found the Kind’s refuge, and was destroying it. The jacket which he’d dug for was redundant; the Kind’s bluff was called. But the sight of the Salesman put another thought into his head: that the jacket’s raptures had worked when Shadwell had worn it, and that he had no better option now than to do the same.

No sooner had he slipped his arms into it than it fitted itself to him, snug as a surgeon’s glove. He felt its embrace as a bargain made. Hereafter it was a part of him, and he of it.

Even now, as he stood before Uriel, he could feel it tapping into him, seeking his humanity to add spice to the illusion it was creating. The Angel’s gaze was fixed on the lining, entranced, the face it wore becoming more distorted with every breath Shadwell wasted on his pleas and predictions.

‘It’ll deceive you!’ he roared. ‘It’s magic! Do you hear me?’

If the Angel was aware of his panic, it didn’t comprehend it. Or if it comprehended, it didn’t care. The jacket’s genius for seduction was rising to its greatest triumph. All it had enthralled hitherto were Cuckoos, whose hearts were malleable and sentimental, and whose desires scarcely rose above the pedestrian. But the dream-life of the entity which now gazed into it was of a different order entirely. Uriel had no halcyon childhood to mourn, nor lovers to pine for. Its mental powers, though they’d been long left to sterility, were immense, and the jacket’s raptures were pressed to their limits to produce an image of what it most desired.

The garment had begun to writhe and ripple on Cal’s back, its seams creaking around him as though it could scarcely bear what was being asked of it, and was ready to fly apart. He felt he might do the same if this wasn’t over soon. The jacket’s demands upon him were becoming intolerable, as it dug deeper and ever deeper into him, trawling his soul for the inspiration to match the Angel’s need. His torso and arms had grown numb; his hands no longer owned the strength to hold the jacket open. It was left to the forces loose in the lining to spread the coat wide, while he stood in the flux of power, his mind assaulted by fragments of whatever Uriel was yearning after. He could make only partial sense of them.

There was a planet of light he saw turning over and over before him, its immensity grazing his lips. There was a flame sea, lapping at a beach of stone and cloud. There were forms his mind’s eye couldn’t endure to look at making riddles of their breath.

But they were all fugitive visions, and when they’d gone he was back standing on the same dead earth, his body being wasted by Uriel’s hunger. The jacket had reached its limits. It had begun to disintegrate, threads being sucked from its warp and weft and burned away before him.

But Uriel wasn’t about to be cheated; its eyes drew on the fabric, demanding it make good the promise Cal had voiced. Beneath this assault the jacket finally capitulated, but in its destruction Uriel’s demand was answered. The lining burst, and from it rose the image Uriel’s appetite had shaped, its brightness blinding Cal.

He heard Shadwell bellow, then his own cries rose over the din, pleading with the Angel to take its dream to its bosom.

Uriel didn’t hesitate. It wanted this vision as much as Cal wanted rid of it. Through a haze of anguish Cal saw Shadwell’s body begin to bloat as the Angel inside him prepared to show itself. The Salesman could only wail his despair as he felt himself plucked into the air, Uriel’s geometries bearing him up. His skin was tight as a drum, stretched to the limits of its tolerance; his mouth a toothlined O as his cartilage tore and sinew snapped. Then he broke, his body bursting to release its captive, the fragments incinerated in the instant they flew by the glory his destruction unleashed.

Before him Cal saw plainly the incarnation he’d only glimpsed in the fog on Chariot Street: Uriel’s eyes, Uriel’s geometry, Uriel’s hunger.

And then its magnetism drew the illusion its will had made out from the ruins of the jacket and up to meet it.

The vision stood revealed: as bright as Uriel, and as vast, as well it had to be, for the image the raptures had made was another Uriel, the Seraph’s equal in every way. As it rose up the vestiges of the jacket fell away from Cal, but its degeneration did not compromise the creature it had parented. Uriel’s mirror stood unbowed before the power that had summoned it into being.

Cal, robbed both of his strength and of the images he’d peeped on, tasted a terrible banality. He had no energy left to look up and wonder at the majesty above him. His eyes were turned inward, and he saw only emptiness there. A desert, in which his dust blew with the dust of all the things he’d ever loved and lost; blew to the end of time and knew neither rest nor meaning.

His body surrendered, and he fell as though he’d been shot, while the dust in his head whipped him away, into the void. He witnessed nothing of what followed. Suzanna saw his collapse. Ignoring the giants that towered over the burning wood, she went to his aid. Overhead the Angels hovered like twin suns, their energies filling the air with invisible needles. Careless of their stings she bent her back to the task of dragging Cal away from this rendezvous of spirit and spirit. She was beyond fear now, or hope. The first and only necessity was to have Cal safe in her arms. Whatever followed would follow. It was beyond her.

Others had come to her assistance: Apolline, Hamel, and from the far side of the field, Nimrod. Together they picked Cal up and took him out of the region of needles, laying him down gently where the ground was softest.

Above them, the confrontation was reaching a new plateau. Uriel’s form had become impossibly complex, its anatomy transforming at the speed of its thought; part engine, part citadel; all meticulous fire. And its conjured companion was matching it change for change, darts passing between them like needles threaded with fire, drawing them closer and closer still, until they were locked like lovers.

If there had once been a distinction between Uriel the real and Uriel the imagined that no longer pertained. Such divisions were for Cuckoos, who believed they lived both inside their heads and out; to whom thought was only life’s shadow, and not its own true self.

Uriel knew better. It had needed the Old Science to seduce it into confessing its profoundest desire: simply, to see its own true face, and seeing it know how it had been before loneliness had corrupted it.

Now it embraced that remembered self, and learned its lesson on the instant. The pit of its insanity had been as deep as the stars it had descended from were high. Unreminded of its nature it had sunk into obsession, devoted to a dead duty. But looking on itself – seeing the glory of its condition – it shed that lunacy, and shedding it, looked starward.

There were heavens it had business in, where the age it had wasted here was but a day, and its grief, all grief, an unknown state.

On the thought, it rose, it and itself one triumphant splendour.

There were clouds above. It was away between them in moments, leaving only a rain of dwindling light on the faces of those who watched it pass from sight.

‘Gone,’ said Lo, when even the light had died, and there was only a gruel of snow shed from above.

‘Is it over then?’ Apolline wanted to know.

‘I think it is.’ said Hamel. There were tears pouring down his cheeks.

A fresh gust of wind had lent new fervour to the flames that were devouring the wood. It did not matter much. They no longer had need to take refuge there. Perhaps tonight marked an end to refuges.

Suzanna looked down at Cal, whom she was cradling as she’d once cradled Jerichau. But Jerichau had died in her arms: Cal would not; she swore he would not. He had not escaped the furnace of the jacket’s destruction unmarked: the skin of his face and his chest were burned, or perhaps staired. But that was the only outward damage.

‘How is he?’ said a voice she didn’t know.

She looked up to meet the harried gaze of a Cuckoo like herself, muffled up in several layers of clothing.

‘Suzanna?’ he said. ‘My name is Gluck. I’m a friend of Calhoun’s.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said someone.

Gluck beamed.

‘He’s not going to die,’ said Suzanna, stroking Cal’s face. ‘He’s just sleeping awhile.’

‘He’s had a busy night,’ said Nimrod, and there were tears on his stoical face too, pouring down.