Eight
Life was full of irony, Deed thought in frustration. He studied the message that lay before him on the desk, marked with a top-secret sigil. It had come in that morning, from one of the Library moles.
The Library. Trust Loki to manage to send something in through the Library. The disir had been disruptive, apparently, which came as no surprise. Mind you, Deed thought sourly, to the old codgers who ran the place, “disruptive” probably meant putting a book back in the wrong place or abusing your lending rights. The disir had not remained long in the place, anyway. She had fled, somewhere in the city. But where? They were likely, Deed thought, to find out reasonably soon. Wild disir were not unobtrusive.
He turned again to the report. The Librarian who had made the discovery had a name: Mercy Fane. Well, Deed thought, let’s see what we can find out about Miss Fane, shall we?”
The curse hung from the lower branches of a pine tree, about head height. It was made of feathers and bone, tied together with sinew. A shrew’s skull, the jaws curved in an elegant arc and ending in small razor teeth, surmounted it and it carried the rune for winter.
The shaman of the wolf clan studied it for some time in silence. He took a rattle from his pouch and shook it, making a dry sound of falling seeds in the still air. His grey pelt was starred with snow, as stray flakes drifted down from the pines. Then he turned to Mercy, dreaming, and said, “Of course, it’s an enemy’s work. The question is, which one?”
“No shortage of those,” Mercy heard herself reply. As with all dreams, she did not question how she knew this. “The White Owl Tribe, or the Shinbone People.”
“Not quite their style,” the shaman said. His lips drew back over his long teeth. “Look at the back of it.”
Mercy did so. The back was a small flayed skin, stretched out. She could see the remnants of black fur. “What does that mean?”
“It’s hunters’ work.”
“We’re all hunters, aren’t we?”
“Who hunts everything? Including the wolf clans?”
Mercy thought. “Death?”
“Nightmares. Everything is hunted by nightmares.”
“I don’t understand,” Mercy said.
“You don’t have to understand. All you have to do is remember,” the shaman said. Mercy once again surged down into sleep.
Nine
Shadow spent the evening in the laboratory, working on a summoning spell for a client. So much of this work required personal concentration-the will bound into sulphur and dragon’s blood and myrrh-that she lost track of the time. She was dimly aware of the sun slipping over the edge of the world, the blue fall of twilight, but when at last she looked up from the end of the preparation, night had fallen and the stars prickled out across the ridges of the desert. She was, she realised, hungry. And there was nothing in the place. Not even an alchemist can eat incense.
Shadow, frowning, investigated the ice-box. Bottled water, nothing else. She sighed. It meant a trip back to the Medina, to one of the all-night chaikhanas, and she was tired. She really ought to have got some stuff in the market. She’d learned long ago that you need to keep your strength up when you do this kind of work, need to keep grounded and earthed. Especially after the use of magic, which would take your light-headedness and spin you away, cause you to follow phantoms and chase illusion. Food would put a stop to that.
Shadow thickened her veil and stepped out into the warm night. The street was still busy: people strolling, bicycles, scooters. Shadow wove her way through the throng and back into the Medina. In a small chaikhana set into the Medina wall, she took tea and ful mesdames with pita. Thus sustained, she started back to the laboratory.
The attack came when she was almost back at the Eastern Quarter Wall. Shadow was not expecting it, but her instincts held sway. She was turning almost before the thing was upon her: a swirling form out of the blackness beneath the wall. The air around her was suddenly icy cold, a wind howling out of nowhere. She had a moment to reflect that it felt like the harmattan wind that blows from the desert, bringing madness in its wake, but where the harmattan was hot, this wind was nerve-chilling. It knocked her backwards, flung her against the wall, snatching her breath for a moment. Paradoxically, this probably saved her life-the wind pushed her out of the path of her attacker. The twisting form-darker than the night-took a mincing step forwards. Shadow’s blade was up. The entity spoke in a language Shadow did not understand but which she recognised to be a spell.
The air about her grew black as ink, but Shadow had magic of her own and this was her territory, her strength. She spoke a word, a name, and a lance of light shot through the gathering dark and stabbed at the eyes of her attacker. The thing gave a wordless cry, fell back, and Shadow drew back her sun-and-moon blade, twisted it in her hand and struck. There was a foul billow of cold smoke, making Shadow choke, and then the thing was gone. She had a glimpse of it scrambling up the city wall like a monkey, shrieking as it went. And when the normal lamplight was once more shining down upon the street, Shadow saw that it had left something behind.
A hand.
Some time later, she stood at the acid-stained laboratory table, staring down. The hand her attacker had left behind was a mottled black and white, withering as she watched, but it had not had the fleshy consistency of a human hand in the first place: more like a wizened claw. It had the normal complement of fingers, but an extra joint on each and long, black nails as hard as iron. Shadow pursed her lips and tapped a finger against the surface of the table.
“What,” she said aloud, “Are you?”
She had consulted grimoires, sought answers in encyclopedias, and done a series of magical tests, but there had been nothing in the tomes to suggest what her assailant might be, and the spells had only shown her glimpses: a wild, bleak land, swirling snow, endless cold. Not the sort of country in which she felt at home. Had that been why it had attacked her? she wondered whimsically. Sensing an opposite: a person of warmth, fire, sun? Surely this was due to more than geography. Shadow, over years as an alchemist, had learned not to discount apparent synchronicities. Her visit to the Shah at noon; the attack, at close to midnight. Was the Shah trying an unusual means of persuasion? If so, it had failed. Shadow did not respond graciously to threats.
She walked across to the open window and took a breath of desert air, hot and clean, to wipe away the sense of foulness. Odd, how something so cold could yet be putrid. When she turned back to the table, the hand had moved.
“Aha,” Shadow said, tilting her head to one side.
She walked across to the door and drew it shut, then watched through a crack. Sure enough, the hand-she did not think that it possessed intelligence, animate though it might be-scuttled along the surface of the table, leaving a greasy trail of ichor in its wake. Once at the table’s edge, it seemed to be uncertain as to how to get down. It faltered, hesitated, tapped a finger much as Shadow herself had just done. Then, disappointingly, all the life seemed to ebb out of it and it slumped down in a tangle of fingers, unmoving. Shadow was reminded of chickens whose heads had been cut off. Tutting, she went back into the lab and found a small lead box. She picked up the stiffening hand with a pair of tongs and dropped it into the box, then sealed it with a soldering iron and put a binding of spells around it. Magic sizzled and hissed as she did so, flickering indigo-blue about the box, and when she had finished, the box was barely visible, contained in a cloud of magic. That, Shadow thought before she went to bed, would have to do.