Her heart sank. “I thought as much. There have been signs, the usual portents. Someone saw a bloodstained lion in the Medina last week. People have had visions. There’s been a great deal of astrological mayhem going on: peculiar conjunctions of the heavens.”
“I can’t tell you what it heralds, because I don’t know. But there’s been a change at the end of the world.”
“That’s not good,” she said. “The end of the world-well, if you walk far enough away from there, you’ll end up here.”
“Something’s happening, Mariam,” the Messenger said. Against the brocaded cushions of the couch, she could see his faint illuminated transparency, visible only in certain lights. This was a projection, if a good one. Messengers can do that, dissolve and reform at will. “Something’s changing,” he continued. “The question is, what?”
Thirteen
Darya had done well in the limited time he had given her, but Jonathan Deed had no intention of telling her this. Instead, he frowned down at the collection of parchment that she now placed before him and said, “Is this all?”
She hid her feelings well, but he saw her mouth tighten a fraction and her fingers clench. “It was all I could find, Abbot General,” she said, with a deference which clearly did not come naturally. Darya was learning. Good.
“Very well,” Deed said, with a sigh. “I suppose it will have to do.”
He waited until her bone heels clicked away, then turned back to the parchments. These were fragmentary: Mercy Fane’s genealogy was likely to be held in full by the Library, as the Skein had liked to keep tabs on their personnel, but locating her personal details would be troublesome given the level of security. For the moment, he would work with what he had.
They knew that Mercy was descended from the Wolfhead clans, via Greya Fane. That didn’t mean very much: half or quarterbreeds didn’t usually exhibit the Wolf Clans’ particular brand of magic. As Deed knew well, that magic was heavily dependent on place, on the ice fields and pine forests of the north: wild magic, drawing on earth and sky and all the winds that blew.
So. Greya Fane. But what about the other mother, the woman called Sho? She would, Deed knew, have contributed to Mercy’s heritage-a magical binding, a connection, was usual in such partnerships, even though Mercy would have had a biological father as well and he would need to be taken into consideration. If they could ever find out who he had been… Sho herself was, apparently, missing. Looking at the partial family tree, Deed worked out that she had come from the Eastern Quarter, and that gave Mercy links with Eastern magic, too. An interesting combination and one that could prove powerful. Mercy would have skills in a number of areas, otherwise the Library would not be employing her.
“So,” Deed said, aloud. He looked up from the parchments, into a sudden shaft of sunlight. “Time to ask some questions.”
He did not enter the Northern Quarter by the usual route, the North Road that led up from the Heart of the World. Instead, he chose to slip into the Quarter at night, through the Ancestral Gate itself. He was entitled, and its magic would not snare him, but even so, Deed felt a faint prickle of what in a human might have been called fright as he stepped beneath its huge stone-and-iron portal. The ground beneath the Gate was red. This was not, Deed knew, symbolic.
In this district, the buildings of the Northern Quarter were massive, resembling forts, and the castellated pinnacles of the castles of the old Northern lords fragmented the skyline. It was cold, too: snow crunched beneath Deed’s boots as he made his way through the quiet, dark street. He was heading for Bleikrgard, the Pale Castle: not a trip he cared to make, because the northern lords were fractious and twitchy, disliking his kind. Insularity, Deed thought, had long been a problem, and would doubtless continue to be so long after he was gone. But when they had heard what he had to tell them… Loki’s plan still itched inside his subconscious, like a burr inside a shirt.
A silvery thread of sound broke the silence: sleigh bells. Deed stepped back into the shadows and waited. The sleigh came around the corner of the street, travelling swiftly. It was drawn by two white deer, with bells woven into their ruffed manes. A woman sat inside it, wielding a whip. Deed, in sudden alarm, took care to wrap invisibility about himself, drawing it up from the snow and the cold air, freezing the world around him, but the sleigh came to a halt nonetheless.
“It’s no use doing that,” the woman called. “You’re perfectly visible.”
Deed sighed. “My apologies.” He spread his hands in deprecation. “I’m used to the West.”
“The West,” the woman said, in contempt.
“I am not a Westerner myself.” Deed, caught off guard, was annoyed to find himself sounding defensive.
“I can tell,” the woman said. “You are disir.”
Deed froze, and not because of the cold. “How did you-?”
“Ah.” The woman laughed. She looked over the side of the sleigh and Deed saw her face for the first time. She was beautiful, but not young. White hair was piled high in a chignon, secured with silver icicles. Her eyes glittered silver in the lamplight.
“What are you?” Deed whispered.
“My name is Mareritt.”
It meant “nightmare.” That placed her as something out of story, and not quite of the world. Silently, Deed cursed. Trust his luck to be badgered by some stray tale.
“You see,” Mareritt said, smiling thinly, “Your kind and I have had a long and profitable history.” He felt her reach out through his own defences, take his name out of his head like someone plucking fruit from a tree. “Where are you going, Jonathan Deed?”
He did not want to tell her, but again, she stole it easily from his mind and laughed at his discomfort. “You can’t have too many secrets from me, Mr Deed. I am inside everyone’s head sooner or later.”
Deed swallowed. Used to being the one in control, he was finding it hard to know how to proceed. He gave silent, fleeting thanks to Loki then, for burying the plan so deep that no one could find it. Then the woman said, “I can give you a lift, if you like?”
Deed opened his mouth to say that he would prefer to walk, but instead he found himself stepping onto the lip of the sleigh and sitting uncomfortably beside her. She was dressed in rags and tatters beneath her cloak, which he could now see was made of feathers, white and black. Swans and crows… but he could not quite place her. She seemed to embody elements of different tales, a ragbag of stories. He glanced behind him into the body of the sleigh, behind the driving seat, and froze.
The sleigh was filled with severed heads, perhaps a dozen. All of them were male, and their necks and brows were bound with metal bands, bronze and silver and lead, brass and the soft gleam of gold. Each band was covered with runic signs and Deed felt the tug and pull of magic. Their eyes were closed but they mumbled and muttered to themselves in sleep. The pallid lips of the closest head, bound in tin, smacked with a wet sucking noise. Deed, accustomed to gruesome sights, found himself unable to tear his gaze away.
“These are my kings,” Mareritt said, and laughed. “Do you like them?”
“I-” With difficulty, he wrenched his eyes back to her face. She smiled at him and he saw she had teeth as sharp as his own.
Mareritt cracked her whip and the deer sprang forward in a flurry of snow. Bleikrgard rose up ahead.
Fourteen
Shadow should have been suspicious of the woman from the Library, and indeed, retained a certain level of paranoia out of habit. However, when she consulted her intuition, it told her that Mercy was sound, and the presence of the ka, Perra, was further testament to this. Ka spirits did not take well to evil, sent from the gods as they were. As ancestral guides, they were evidence of a degree of divine faith. Besides, she thought that Mercy would have concocted a less bald narrative, had she been lying.