Weaveworld

IV

ALLEGIANCES

1

t was eighty years, give or take half a decade, since the three sisters had trodden the earth of the Fugue. Eighty years of exile in the Kingdom of the Cuckoo, worshipped and reviled by turns, almost losing their sanity amongst the Adamaticals, but driven to endure countless mortifications by their hunger one day to have the Weaveworld in their avenging grasp.

Now they hung in the air above that rapturous earth – its touch so antithetical that walking upon it was a trial – and surveyed the Fugue from end to end.

‘It smells too much alive,’ said the Magdalene, lifting her head to the wind.

‘Give us time,’ Immacolata told her.

‘What about Shadwell?’ the Hag wanted to know. ‘Where is he?’

‘Out looking for his clients, probably,’ the Incantatrix replied. ‘We should find him. I don’t like the thought of his wandering here unaccompanied. He’s unpredictable.’

‘Then what?’

‘We let the inevitable happen,’ said Immacolata, gently swinging round to take in every sacred yard of the place. ‘We let the Cuckoos tear it apart.’

‘What about the Sale?’

‘There’ll be no Sale. It’s too late.’

‘Shadwell’s going to know you used him.’

‘No more than he used me. Or would have liked to.’

A tremor passed through the Magdalene’s uncertain substance.

‘Wouldn’t you like to give yourself to him once?’ she enquired softly. ‘Just once.’

‘No. Never.’

Then let me have him. I can use him. Imagine his children.’

Immacolata reached out and grasped her sister’s fragile neck. ‘You will never lay a hand on him,’ she said. ‘Not a finger.’

The wraith’s face grew absurdly long, in a parody of remorse.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘He’s yours. Body and soul.’

The Hag laughed. The man’s got no soul.’ she said.

Immacolata released the Magdalene, filaments of her sister’s matter decaying into sewer air between them.

‘Oh, he has a soul,’ she said, letting gravity claim her for the earth beneath. ‘But I want no part of it.’ Her feet touched the ground. ‘When all this is over – when the Seerkind are in the Cuckoo’s hands – I’ll let him go his way. Unharmed.’

‘And us?’ said the Hag. ‘What happens to us then? Will we be free?’

‘That’s what we agreed.’

‘We can go into extinction?’

‘If that’s what you want.’

‘More than anything,’ said the Hag. ‘More than anything.’

‘There are worse things than existence,’ said Immacolata.

‘Oh?’ the Hag replied. ‘Can you name one?’

Immacolata thought for a short while.

‘No,’ she conceded, with a soft sigh of distress. ‘You may be right, sister.’