She stopped, but the words were scrolling up from the pages of the Danish fairy tale book, coiling into the air like silver and black threads and pulling them in through the weave…
… there was a vast tugging sensation, as though the air had been sucked out of the room. Mercy was gasping for breath, the oxygen knocked out of her. She was lifted off her feet and whisked upwards and through…
Stone hit under her heels. She heard Benjaya shout out. The ka, predictably, was silent. Mercy blinked into sudden light.
“Sunshine?”
It was a winter sun, low and red, hanging over a jagged black line of forest. She breathed in yet more cold air. They were high up, standing on stone flags which formed the arch of a bridge. Perra balanced on the low parapet and Mercy noticed that the ka’s coat had become thicker. A ruff of gold and cream obscured the sleek lines of its neck.
“I didn’t think spirits felt the cold,” Mercy said.
“This is a chill of the spirit,” the ka said, reprovingly.
“If this is the bridge,” Benjaya remarked, with unease, “then where’s the troll?”
Twenty-Two
Deed waited for Darya in the winter garden at the top of the Court, behind the gallery. Here, those of his colleagues who possessed green fingers chose to grow various plants: poisonous verdure, delicate orchids, various aphrodisiacs. Deed was not among them. Plants withered when he came too near. If he planted a seed, it went black in the ground and rotted as if the frost had touched it, which essentially it had. But he admired plants, with a kind of wary reluctance. They grew and lived with no help from him, and he could kill them, yet they always rose up again somewhere else. He sometimes felt the same about people.
Now, he sat, not too close, to a wall of orchids. They were the colour of roses, of bruises, of flesh. Some were like stormclouds, a livid white with indigo hearts, and some were a sooty midnight black. Deed liked those the best, and despised himself for predictability, but only a little. They had very little scent; it had been bred out of them.
He heard Darya’s bone heels clicking against the treads of the staircase like some monstrous insect and grew very still, waiting. He had intended to remain human, but that-well, that wasn’t happening. Instead, his own bones began to sharpen and change, his jaw elongating and the teeth within growing sharp. His vision changed, the flowers growing darker, a spectrum that humans do not see becoming resonant, a glimmering aura emerging around each bloom. By the time Darya’s footsteps reached the door, paused, hesitated, faltered-Deed was a long way from mankind, a skeletal nightmare in a ruff.
He grabbed her from behind, long clawed fingers snaking around her throat and squeezing tight. He lifted her off the floor so that she kicked out, squealing, but Deed evaded the sharp, flailing heels. Then he dropped her so she fell in a heap on the parquet floor, gasping for breath. The marks of his talons showed on her neck, small bloodied new moons.
“Abbot General. What have I done?” Darya whispered. She kept her head lowered, but Deed could see a rebellious silver spark in her eyes and even at the back of the disir emotions, which were not human ones, he took careful note.
“Not a good enough job,” Deed said, a man once more. He brushed off his hands against his coat, as if they had become contaminated. “The Watch has found a body. A young man, down by the canal, in a considerable state of disarray. They asked me if I knew anything about it; I have just spent an hour fobbing them off. They believed me, but I’m not pleased.”
“I am sorry, Abbot General” Darya said, meekly.
“You should always share, Darya. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?”
He waited for her to ask forgiveness, apologise further for her offence, but she remained silent and that made Deed coldly angry, until he realised, with a glow of pleasure, that she was simply too afraid.
Afraid, in spite of that rebellious silver spark. He could taste it against his teeth. It tasted good.
Twenty-Three
Shadow stepped back from the cage containing the ifrit. The Shah’s ring was changing temperature, first cold, like a heavy lump of ice, then hot as a coal. Shadow gritted her teeth and held onto the ring as the ifrit became a cloud of boiling dark within the confines of the cage, and the room grew oppressively hot. Ifrits were storm spirits in their original form, she knew, denizens of the deep desert where men would never go, unless they were mad. Burning at noon and freezing at midnight, places of extremes. She could sense the ifrit’s mood now, plucking at the edges of her senses as if it sought to unravel her, like someone pulling the loose threads of a tapestry.
“I have what you asked for,” Shadow said.
“So I perceive.” The ifrit spoke softly and its voice filled the world. Shadow was finding it difficult to breathe.
Now. She held out the ring. “Tell me!” There was a silent moment, a waiting, then the ifrit whispered the Name it had been sent to find. In that moment of compliance, Shadow felt a connection between them: a thin, threadlike bridge, made of cooperation and agreement. It was enough. She sent her own spell down it, a spell of changing and transformation, a human blueprint contained within a sigil and translated into a word. She felt the ifrit absorb it. The world stopped.
Shadow looked out of the window and saw the roofs and domes of the Eastern Quarter lined with darkness like the negative of a photograph, flashing on and off. Then her vision cleared. She saw everything in sudden sharp relief: the outlines of the latticed shutters in stark black and pale, the dust motes sparkling in the shafts of sun. Then she looked up.
Entirely unexpected, there was a ship. It hung above her, as tiny as an illustration in a Persian miniature. It was a dreadnaught, but it had sails furled along its sides. It was a monstrous thing, unnatural, made for no worldly sea and Shadow knew it immediately: the Barquess. She heard the ifrit hiss. Then the ship was abruptly gone. A bolt of golden light flooded outwards from the ifrit’s cage as the ifrit exploded, flying silently apart into a thousand shards. Shadow felt an icy touch against her arm, penetrating her sleeve and then flying inwards through her left eye. She cried out. She felt a sharp pain as if her eye had been stabbed with a pin and then wetness welling up inside it. She clawed at her face, panicking, and felt the wet spreading out from her eye. She looked down, out of the good eye, and saw that it was not blood. A blackness stained her sleeve and her hand, gleaming like ink. She felt it pouring from the socket of her eye and spilling down her face, as though the socket were a bowl which someone had overfilled. Shadow stumbled back against the wall, reeling with shock. O Allah, help me, help me-and He must have heard her, for there was a coolness in the air, a soft singing note like a nightingale after rain. Shadow managed a ragged breath. The pain in her eye diminished; she felt the wetness cease to flow. Clasping her arms about herself, she slumped down the wall, crouching on the floor. A single black drop splashed down from her eye and onto the tiled floor, where it remained for a moment before seeping into the tile, swallowed by the blue. The nightingale note sang on and it brought freshness, cutting through the dusty mustiness of the chamber, which now felt scorched as if a fire had raged through it. As indeed, a fire had, and its black knife had cut through Shadow. With great care, wincing, she tried to open her left eye. She raised a hand, gently probing it with a forefinger.
To her surprise, the eye was still there. She could feel it, soft in its socket. She had expected to find the socket reamed and empty, its seed gone. She shut her right eye and looked. Everything was filmed with blackness, as though she looked through a veil, but it was different. Everything was in shadow, but as she looked, the lines at the edges of things became light. Her vision cleared: everything was sharp and vivid. She was seeing more clearly with the damaged eye than she had ever seen: right into the heart of things. She could see their names-a faint script which described everything, God’s language underwriting the world. The name of the ifrit was still clear, in the centre of the tangled mass of iron that had been its cage. Shadow spoke the name.