Weaveworld

XII

A VANISHING BREED

1

espite Chloe’s words, the spectacle ahead offered little comfort. The devouring line was approaching at considerable speed, and it left nothing unchanged. His gut feeling was to flee before it, but he knew that would be a vain manœuvre. This same transfiguring tide would be eating in from all compass points: sooner or later there would be nowhere left to run.

Instead of standing still and letting it come to fetch him, he elected to walk towards it, and brave its touch.

The air began to itch around him as he took his first hesitant steps. The ground squirmed and shook beneath his feet. A few more yards and the region he was walking through actually began to shift. Loose pebbles were snatched into the flux; leaves plucked from bush and tree.

‘This is going to hurt,’ he thought.

The frontier was no more than ten yards from him now, and he could see with astonishing clarity the processes at work: the raptures of the Loom dividing the matter of the Fugue into strands, then drawing these up into the air and knotting them – those knots in their turn filling the air like countless insects, until the final rapture called them into the carpet.

He could afford to wonder at this sight for seconds only before he and it met each other, strands leaping up around him like rainbow fountains. There was no time for farewells: the Fugue simply vanished from sight, leaving him immersed in the working of the Loom. The rising threads gave him the sensation of falling, as though the knots were destined for heaven, and he a damned soul. But it wasn’t heaven above him: it was pattern. A kaleidoscope that defeated eye and mind, its motifs configuring and re-configuring as they found their place beside their fellows. Even now he was certain he’d be similarly metamorphosed; his flesh and bone become symbol, and he be woven into the grand design.

But Chloe’s prayer, if that it had been, afforded him protection. The Loom rejected his Cuckoo-stuff and passed him by. One minute he was in the midst of the Weave. The next the glories of the Fugue were behind him, and he was left standing in a bare field.