Weaveworld

IV

NIGHT TERRORS

1

hadwell woke from a dream of Empire; a familiar fantasy, in which he owned a vast store, so vast indeed that it was impossible to see the far wall. And he was selling; doing trade to make an accountant weep for joy. Merchandise of every description heaped high on all sides – Ming vases, toy monkeys, sides of beef – and customers beating at the doors, desperate to join the throngs already clamouring to buy.

It wasn’t, oddly enough, a dream of profit. Money had become an irrelevancy since he’d stumbled upon Immacolata, who could conjure all they needed from thin air. No, the dream was one of power, he, the owner of the goods that people were bleeding to buy, standing back from the crowd and smiling his charismatic smile.

But suddenly he was awake, the clamour of customers was fading, and he heard the sound of breathing in the darkened room.

He sat up, the sweat of his enthusiasm chilling on his brow.

‘Immacolata?’

She was there, standing against the far wall, her palms seeking some hold in the plaster. Her eyes were wide, but she saw nothing. At least, nothing that Shadwell could share. He’d known her like this before – most recently two or three days ago, in the foyer of this very hotel.

He got out of bed, and put on his dressing gown. Sensing his presence, she murmured his name.

‘I’m here,’ he replied.

‘Again,’ she said. ‘I felt it again.’

‘The Scourge?’ he said, his voice grey.

‘Of course. We have to sell the carpet, and be done with it.’

‘We will. We will,’ he said, slowly approaching her. ‘The arrangements are underway, you know that.’

He spoke evenly, to calm her. She was dangerous at the best of times; but these moods scared him more than most.

‘The calls have been made,’ he said. ‘The buyers’ll come. They’ve been waiting for this. They’ll come and we’ll make our sale, and it’ll all be over with.’

‘I saw the place it lives,’ she went on. ‘There were walls; huge walls. And sand, inside and out. Like the end of the world.’

Now her eyes found him, and the hold this vision had on her seemed to deteriorate.

‘When, Shadwell?’ she said.

‘When what?’

‘The Auction.’

‘The day after tomorrow. As we arranged.’

She nodded. ‘Strange,’ she said, her tone suddenly conversational. The speed with which her moods changed always caught him unawares. ‘Strange, to have these nightmares after so long.’

‘It’s seeing the carpet,’ said Shadwell. ‘It reminds you.’

‘It’s more than that,’ she said.

She went to the door that led through to the rest of Shadwell’s suite, and opened it. The furniture had been pushed to the edges of the large room beyond, so that their prize, the Weaveworld, could be laid out. She stood on the threshold, staring at the carpet.

She didn’t set her bare soles on it – some superstition kept her from that trespass – but paced along the border, scrutinizing every inch.

Half way along the far edge, she stopped.

‘There,’ she said, and pointed down at the Weave.

Shadwell went to where she stood.

‘What is it?’

‘A piece missing.’

He followed her gaze. The woman was right. A small portion of the carpet had been torn away; in the struggle at the warehouse, most likely.

‘Nothing significant,’ he commented. ‘It won’t bother our buyers, believe me.’

‘I don’t care about the value.’ she said.

‘What then?’

‘Use your eyes, Shadwell. Every one of those motifs is one of the Seerkind.’

He went down on his haunches, and examined the markings in the border. They were scarcely recognizable as human; more like commas with eyes.

‘These are people?’ he said.

‘Oh yes. Riff-raff; the lowest of the low. That’s why they’re at the edge. They’re vulnerable there. But they’re also useful.’

‘For what?’

‘As a first defence,’ Immacolata replied, her eyes fixed on the tear in the carpet. ‘The first to be threatened, the first –’

‘To wake,’ said Shadwell.

‘– to wake.’

‘You think they’re out there now?’ he said. His gaze went to the window. They’d closed the curtains, to keep anyone from spying on their treasure, but he could picture the benighted city beyond. The thought that there might be magic loose out there brought an unexpected charge.

‘Yes,’ the Incantatrix said. ‘I think they’re awake. And the Scourge smells them in its sleep. It knows, Shadwell.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We find them, before they attract any more attention. The Scourge may be ancient. May be slow and forgetful. But its power …’ Her voice faded away, as though words were valueless in the face of such terrors. She drew a deep breath before beginning again. ‘A day’s scarcely gone by,’ she said, ‘when I haven’t watched the menstruum for a sign of it coming. And it’ll come. Shadwell. Not tonight maybe. But it’ll come. And on that day there’ll be an end to all magic.’

‘Even to you?’

‘Even to me.’

‘So we have to find them,’ said Shadwell.

‘Not we,’ said Immacolata. ‘We needn’t dirty our hands.’ She started to walk back towards Shadwell’s bedroom. They can’t have gone far,’ she said as she went. They’re strangers here.’

At the door she stopped, and turned to him.

‘On no account leave this room until we call you.’ she said. ‘I’m going to summon someone to be our assassin.’

‘Who?’ said Shadwell.

‘Nobody you ever met,’ the Incantatrix replied. ‘He was dead a hundred years before you were born. But you and he had a good deal in common.’

‘And where is he now?’

‘In the Ossuary at the Shrine of the Mortalities, where he lost his life. He wanted to prove himself my equal you see, to seduce me. So he tried to become a necromancer. He might have done it too; there was nothing he wouldn’t dare. But it went awry. He brought the Surgeons from some nether-world or other, and they weren’t amused. They pursued him from one end of London to the other.

‘At the last he broke into the Shrine. Begged me to call them off.’ Her voice had become a whisper now. ‘But how could I?’ she said. ‘He’d made his conjurations. All I could do was let the Surgeons perform what tricks Surgeons must. And at the end, when he was all blood, he said to me: Take my soul.’

She stopped. Then said:

‘So I did.’

She looked at Shadwell.

‘Stay here,’ she said, and closed the door.

Shadwell didn’t need any encouragement to stay clear of the sisters while they were plotting. If he never again set eyes on the Magdalene and the Hag he would count himself a lucky man. But the ghosts were inseparable from their living sister; each, in some fashion incomprehensible to him, a part of the other. Their perverse union was only one of the mysteries that attended them; there were many others.

The Shrine of Mortalities, for one. It had been a gathering place for her Cult when she’d been at the height of her power and ambition. But she’d fallen from grace. Her desire to rule the Fugue, which had then still been a ragged collection of far-flung settlements, had been frustrated. Her enemies had assembled evidence against her, listing crimes that had begun in her mother’s womb, and she and her followers had retaliated. There had been bloodshed, though Shadwell had never gathered the scale of it. The consequence however, he had gathered. Vilified and humiliated, Immacolata had been forbidden to tread the magic earth of the Fugue again.

She had not taken this exile well. Unable to mellow her nature, and so pass unseen amongst the Cuckoos, her history became a round of blood-lettings, pursuits and further bloodlettings. Though she was still known and worshipped by a cognoscenti, who called her by a dozen different names – the Black Madonna, the Lady of Sorrows, Mater Malifecorium – she became nevertheless a victim of her own strange purity. Madness beckoned; the only refuge from the banality of the Kingdom she was exiled in.

That was how she had been when Shadwell had found her. A mad woman, whose talk had been like none he’d heard before, and who spoke in her ramblings of things that, could he but lay his hands upon them, would make him mighty.

And now, here they were, those wonders. All contained within a rectangle of carpet.

He approached the middle of it, staring down at the spiral of stylized clouds and lightning called the Gyre. How many nights had he lain awake, wondering what it would be like in that flux of energies? Like being with God, perhaps?; or the Devil.

He was shaken from these thoughts by a howl from the adjacent room, and the lamp above his head suddenly dimmed as its light was sucked beneath the intersecting door, testament to the profundity of darkness on the far side.

He moved to the opposite end of the room, and sat down.

How long until dawn? he wondered.