Sacrament

'Under Steep's influence? Me?' She laughed in the darkness. 'Listen to you! He needs me a lot more than I need him.'

'Really?'

'Yes, really. He's going to go crazy without me. If he hasn't already. I was the one who kept his feet on the ground.'

Will had perhaps halved the distance between the door and the corner of the room while she spoke, but he was no closer to seeing Rosa. 'I wouldn't come any nearer if I were you,' she warned.

'Why not?'

'I'm coming apart,' she said. 'I'm unknitting. It's a dange:ous place for you to be right now.'

'And Frannie?'

'She's fine. Women are a lot less susceptible. If she can seal me up, I may survive a day or two.'

'But you won't heal?'

'I don't want to heal!' she replied. 'I want to find my way back to Rukenau, and I'll be happy...' She drew a deep, ragged breath. 'You asked me what I needed from you,' she said.

'Yes...'

'Take me to him.'

'Do you know where he is?'

'On the island.'

'Which island?'

'I don't think I ever knew. But you know where he is-'

'No, I don't.'

-but in the garden.'

'I was bluffing.'

There was a sound of motion from the corner of the room, and a wave of heat came against Will's face. He felt slightly sickened, and was sorely tempted to retreat to the door. But he held his ground, while the murk in front of him coalesced, and he began to see Rosa in its midst. She was like a phantom of her former self, her once-luxurious hair falling straight to either side of her hollow-eyed face. She had her hands clamped to the wound, but she could not entirely conceal its strangeness. There were motes of pale matter, some glinting like gold, skittering over her fingers. Some trailed up her body, clinging to her breasts. Others flew like sparks from a bonfire, and exhausting themselves in their flight, were extinguished.

'So you can't deliver me to Rukenau?' she said.

'I can't take you straight to him, no,' Will confessed. 'But that doesn't mean-'

'Just another liar-'

'I had no choice.'

-you're all the same.'

'He was going to kill me.'

'It wouldn't have been any great loss,' she said sourly. 'One liar more or less. Just go away!'

'Hear me out-'

'I've heard all I want to hear,' she said, starting to turn from him.

Without thinking, he moved towards her, intending another appeal. She caught the motion from the corner of her eye, and thinking perhaps he meant her some harm she reeled around. In that instant the fragments of brightness on her hands found purpose. They grew frenetic, and in a heartbeat fused, flying from her body in a bright thread. It came at Will too fast for him to avoid it, grazing his shoulder as it snaked towards the ceiling. A fleeting contact, but enough to throw him off-balance. He reeled for a moment, his legs so weak they refused to bear him up. Then he sank down to his knees while a kind of euphoria ran through him, its source the place where the thread had grazed his flesh. He felt, or imagined he felt, its energy spreading through his body, sinew, nerve and marrow illuminated by its passage; blood brightening, senses shining-He saw the thread on the ceiling now, dividing again, like a string of tiny pearls dropped in defiance of gravity, and snapping. They rolled away in every direction, the weaker ones going out on the instant, the stronger striking the walls before they ran out of light. Will watched them as he might have watched a meteor shower, head back, mouth wide. Only when every one had been extinguished did he look back at their source. Rosa had retreated to her corner, but Will's eyes had been lent an uncanny strength by the luminescence, and in the moments before it died in him he saw her as he had never seen before. There was a creature of burnished shadow in the midst of her; dark and sleek and protean. A creature held in check by all that she'd become over the years, like a painting so degraded by accruals of grime and varnish and the hands of inept restorers that its glory was now no longer visible. And just as surely as his revelatory gaze saw through to the core of her, so she in her turn saw something miraculous in him.

'So tell me,' she said, her voice low, 'when did you become a fox?'

'Me?' he said.

'It moves in you,' she replied, staring at him, 'I can see it there, plainly.'

He looked down at his body, half expecting the power that had emanated from her to have worked some physical change in him. Absurd, of course; it was still pale, sweaty flesh he was looking down at. More disappointing still, the last of the light was going out in him. He could feel its gift passing away, and was already mourning it.

'Steep was right about you,' she said. 'You're quite a creature. To have a spirit move in you that way, and not be driven crazy.'

'Who says I haven't been driven crazy?' he said, thinking of the troubled path that had brought him to this possession. 'You know that I see something in you, don't you?'

'If you do then look away,' she said.

'I don't want to. It's beautiful.' The burnished creature was still visible, but only just: its alien elegance receding into Rosa's wounded substance. 'Oh Lord,' he murmured. 'I've just realized, I've seen this before. This body inside you.'

She didn't speak for a moment, as though she couldn't make up her mind whether to be drawn into this enquiry or not. But she could not resist. 'Where?' she said.

'In a painting,' he said. 'By Thomas Simeon. He called it the Nilotic.'

She shuddered at the syllables. 'Nilotic?' she said. 'What is that?'

'Somebody who lives on the Nile.'

'I was never.. .' she shook her head; began again, '... I remember an island,' she said, '... but not a river. Not that river, at least. The Amazon, yes. I went with Steep to the Amazon to kill butterflies. But ... never the Nile . . .' her voice was fading as she spoke, and the last of her other self disappeared from sight. 'Yet ... there's truth in what you say. Something moves in me as the fox moves in you...'

'And you want to know what it is.'

'Only Rukenau knows that,' she said. 'Will you take me to Rukenau? You're a fox. You can sniff him out.'

'And you think he'll explain it.'

'I think if he can't, then nobody can.'

He found Frannie sitting at the bottom of the stairs, reading a yellow and welltrodden newspaper she'd found in one of the rooms. 'How's she doing?' she asked.

He clung to the door frame, his limbs still weak. 'She wants to find Rukenau. That's about the only thing in her mind right now.'

'And where's he?'

'If he's anywhere, he's up in the Hebrides, where the book said he went. She doesn't know what island.'

'Do you want us to take her?'

'Not us. Me. If you can bandage her up, I'll take over from there.'

Frannie closed the newspaper and tossed it to the dusty boards. 'And what do you thinks on this island?'

'Worst case scenario: a lot of birds. Best case? Rukenau; and the Domus Mundi, whatever the hell that is.'

'So you're suggesting I should stay here while you go off and see?' Frannie said with a tight little smile. 'No, Will. This is my moment too. I was there at the beginning. And I'm going to be there at the end.'

Before Will could respond the front door was pushed open, and Sherwood came in, nursing a bag of medications. 'I've brought every bandage I could find,' he said, dumping the bag in Frannie's arms.

'All right,' said Will. 'Here's the plan. I'm going to go back to my Dad's house and tell Adele I've got to leave

'Where are you going?' Sherwood wanted to know.

'Frannie'll explain,' Will said, coaxing his still nervous limbs into motion. He lurched past Sherwood to the front door.

'Please be quick,' Frannie said, 'I don't want to be here when-'

'Don't even say it,' Will told her. 'I'll be quick as I can, I promise.'

Then he was out of the door at a stumble, down the pathway and out into the street. He wanted to run barefoot; or naked, the way he'd once