'I learned magic; I became quite a learned fellow. And quite admired, I fancy. I didn't care much. I'd had all the admiration I needed in a year or two. Then I went off around the world, in search of the secret geometries that make holy places holy. I went to Greece to look at the temples, and to India to see what the Hindoo had done. And on my way home, to Egypt, to see the pyramids. There I heard tell of a creature who had, according to legend, made temples from the altars of which a priest might see the Creator's labours at a single glance.
'It sounded preposterous, of course, but I journeyed up the Nile in search of this nameless angel, prepared to use whatever magical makings I possessed to bring it to my purpose. And in a cave near Luxor, I found the creature, which I dubbed a Nilotic. I brought it back here, and with Simeon's help I laid plans for the masterpiece it would build. A place so holy all my father's churches would fall into ruin, and his memory be despised.' He made a sour laugh at his own folly. 'But of course it was too much for us all. Simeon fled, and lost his mind. The Nilotic grew impatient, and left me, even though I had confounded its memories of itself, and without my help it would remain in ignorance. And I ... stayed here ... determined to master what I'd made.' He shook his head. 'But there's no mastering the world, is there?'
He was interrupted here by another shout from Steep.
'I think he'd disagree with you,' Will said.
'Why am I afraid?' Rukenau said. 'I've no desire to live.' He looked at Will with distressing rabidity in his eyes. 'Oh but Jesu, keep it from me.'
'You controlled it before,' Will pointed out. 'Do the same again.'
'How can I do to it what's already done?' Rukenau spat. 'You have to find persuasions of your own.'
With that he started to scramble back up the ropes, his panic making him nimble. He'd only got a few yards however, when Will heard Steep's footfall across the chamber, and looked round to see the man lurching into view. He looked far worse than he had in Donnelly's home. He was rain-sodden, and spattered with mud from brow to boots, the orbits of his eyes pressing brightly at his flesh, his body shaking. He looked like a man who would die very soon.
Even his voice, which at its most monotonal had still been persuasive, was scoured of charm. 'Has he told you the story of our lives, Will?' he said.
'Some of it.'
'But you'd like to know still more. And apparently you're willing to perish for the privilege.' He shook his head. 'You should have left me alone, both of you. Lived and died in ignorance.'
'You wanted to be touched,' Will said.
'Did I?' Steep replied, as though he was now quite ready to be persuaded on the subject. 'Maybe I did.'
There was a motion on the web overhead, and with almost theatrical slowness, Steep looked up. Rukenau had by now retreated to the heights.
'You can't hide up there,' Steep said to him. 'You're not a child. Don't make yourself ridiculous. Come down.' He took the knife out of his jacket. 'Don't make me crawl up there.'
'Let him be,' Will said.
'Please,' Jacob replied, a little pained. 'This isn't your business. Why don't you go and look at the pretty lights? Go on. Take a look, while you still can. I'll join you in a little while.' He spoke to Will as though to a child. 'Go on!' he yelled suddenly, reaching up to catch hold of the net. 'Rukenau! Come down!' He shook the net with astonishing violence. Clots and scabs of filth rained down on both his head and Will's; the ropes creaked, and in several places snapped; a chair was shaken free and fell, smashing on the ground.
Plainly no words of Will's were going to calm him, which left Will with only one option. He strode towards Jacob and caught hold of the man, laying his palm against the man's neck.
There was no intake of breath this time; no earth-moving tremor. There was only a sudden blinding dust, a bitter red, in which Will glimpsed, all in the same moment, a thousand geometries, vast as cathedrals, moving; opening, some of them, like rigorous flowers, while brightening glyphs - the language of Simeon's paintings and of Steep's journal - blazed from them. These weren't Jacob's memories, Will realized. They were the Nilotic's thoughts, or some portion thereof: an array of mathematical possibilities far more overwhelming than the wood, or the fox or the palace on the Neva.
Gasping, he let Jacob go and stumbled away from him. The assault of forms didn't leave his head immediately, however: they continued to move in his mind's eye for several seconds, blinding him. If Jacob had chosen to strike him down in that moment Will would have been as vulnerable as a sheep in a pen; but Steep had more pressing business. By the time Will had recovered his sight Jacob had given up shaking the web, and was climbing it. And as he climbed, he yelled to Rukenau: 'Don't be afraid. It has to happen to us all. Living and dying we feed the fire.'
CHAPTER XIV
0f all the bizarrities that Frannie had experienced on this journey none was quite as shocking to her as stepping over the threshold of the Domus Mundi with Rosa. To be standing in daylight one moment surrounded - as far as her naW a senses were concerned - with grass and sky, and the next to be in a dark, poisonous place with the sun gone, and the sea gone: it was terrifying. She was glad she had Rosa with her, or she'd certainly have panicked, and this would not be, she thought, a good place to lose your self control.
Rosa demanded to be set down once they were in the House, and went with a few stumbling steps to the nearest wall. There she passed her hands over the surface, leaning a little closer to sniff at it. 'Shit,' she said. 'He's covered the wall in shit.' She called to Frannie. 'Is it all like this?'
'As far as I can see.'
'Ceiling the same?'
Frannie looked up. 'Yes.' Rosa laughed. 'Is it different from the way you remember it?'
'I don't much trust my memories, but I don't think it was a sewer when I was last here. Rukenau must have done this.'
She started to probe the wall with her fingers, pulling away cobs of filth once she had her fingers deep enough. There was a source of light beneath the excrement, Frannie saw; a luminescence which seemed to ripple as Rosa worked, as though it sensed somebody was labouring to unveil it. This was no illusion. The larger the hole Rosa tore in the wall became, the more apparent the muscular motion in the light. And there were colours in the brightness; brilliant darts of turquoise and tangerine. The caked dirt was no match for this energy, now that it sniffed its liberation. What had first been a rain of small cobs of filth rapidly escalated, as Rosa's labours inspired the light to shake itself loose. Cracks spread up and out from the place where Rosa had begun, the caked soil losing its grip as word of revolution spread.
Frannie watched astonished as the process unfolded before her, and not for the first time on this journey wished Sherwood could have been at her side to share the sight. Particularly this: his Rosa, the woman he'd idolized, turning her hands to such transformative labour. Frannie felt blessed to witness it.
And as more and more of the mystery that Rukenau had concealed came into view, Frannie began to make some fledgling sense of its nature. The colours that gleamed and shone in the wall were hints of living things. Nothing whole yet, but enough intimations: a flicker of stripes on a pulsing flank, the glitter of hungry eyes, a spreading canopy of wings. Nor were these presences going to be readily restrained, that much was already apparent. They were too vital; too eager. The more ambitious of them were spreading into the room, spilling the echoes of their forms into the grateful air, like sparks flying from an uncontainable fire.
'Help me up,' Rosa demanded, and Frannie duly went to her aid, though she did so without looking at Rosa, she was so enraptured by the spectacle of burgeoning forms.