“Not a demon,” she said, and did not realise she had spoken aloud until it was too late.
“An opposite number,” Gremory said, and smiled thinly.
“Fallen?” Shadow asked and was appalled she had said such a thing.
The person said, “You cannot help but speak the truth in front of me. It makes social conversation very trying, I know. No, I am not fallen. I choose to be here. Duke, it’s good to see you again.”
“His name is Elemiel,” the demon said. Shadow noticed Gremory-Duke?-took care not to step too close to Elemieclass="underline" around the entity’s feet, a faint golden glow spread outwards. Protective measures. Shadow had no doubt that the entity needed them.
“I got your letter,” the angel said.
“We’ve come because this woman is possessed,” Gremory said. “She needs your help.”
“I may not be able to give it.”
“Yet, you may.” They stared at one another for a moment.
“All right,” Elemiel said, at last. “Let’s see.”
The world was filled with light. It was as though her veil had become transparent, and Shadow’s eyes had opened wide as a door. Illumination flooded into her; she breathed light. She was a doorway, she realised, and the angel stepped lightly in.
“Now,” Elemiel said. “Where is this person?”
It was not like being possessed by the spirit, or invaded by the demon. The angel’s step into her soul was thistledown soft, as imperceptible as a moth. But she could not more have resisted it any more than she could have flown: there was an inexorable push behind it, sunlight-strong. She stood quietly back and let the angel in.
And then she watched, passive, but this time not minding, as Elemiel strolled down the walkways of her mind, quietly and methodically opening doors. He walked into rooms that Shadow had long since forced shut; chambers filled with cobwebs and matters of the dark, and the light wind of the angel’s passing stirred up the dust and opened windows, letting in the air of the spirit.
Housecleaning, Shadow thought, and the angel laughed. Illuminated by the light that he brought in his wake, she was able to look on things that she had thought long buried-her mother’s death, her father’s disappearance-all without pain. She could sense the demon watching with detached interest. Gremory did not attempt to intrude. But always the spirit that had possessed her ran, fleeing swiftly down the corridors, and the angel went after it like a silent hunter.
He caught up with it at last in a basement room, somewhere small and walled and tucked away. Shadow recalled it as an early memory: a tense night of arguments, the family shouting around her as she lay, fearful, in her small bed. There were slamming doors and hissed accusations. She had never known what it was about. Yet she remembered now that on the following day, her aunt had taken her to the zoo, and the happy memory had eclipsed the other one, forcing it from her mind until now. She again had that feeling of miserable oppression, filled with lack of understanding and wish-you’d-just-stop, until the angel’s touch banished the unhappiness and brought healing in its place.
The spirit’s back was up against the wall; she sensed Elemiel closing in. The angel did not have wings, but colours swirled around it, shades that she was unable to name, colours of the soul and not of the manifest world. She could see the spirit over Elemiel’s shoulder, and it was as bright as a dancing flame.
“Come now,” the angel said, commanding, and a blade that was a fire and a leaf and a word appeared in his hand. The flame shrank back and then it dispersed into a mass of fragments, much as the ifrit itself had done. Elemiel gave a wordless cry and the light around him folded, faded, diminished to a small glowing point, coal-hot against the cool dimness of the room.
Thirty-Two
The Irish sword was not the only weapon in her arsenal, Mercy reflected, and not all weapons are swords. The mind is the best weapon of all and thus she had taken herself early in the morning to the Library in order to do some emergency research.
Mareritt and the Order of the Court itself were the objects of her enquiries. A superficial search revealed a great deal about the Court, all of it on public display and none of it startling. Mercy could probably have amplified much of it herself, through common knowledge. That mean a deeper investigation, and she decided to leave this until a later hour and track down Mareritt instead. The nature of the woman who had come to visit her seemed to entail a focus on the Northern Quarter; there was something tugging at the edges of her mind, some half-recalled memory that rendered the name familiar.
The name meant “nightmare,” and it seemed this was what Mareritt was. But whether she was an avatar of that phenomenon, or an entity with the same name, remained to be seen. Mercy followed the trail down through the forest tracks of a dozen books, along a sequence of winding etymological trails, words which conjured snow and the scent of fir, fragments of legends which brought in the ice and the winter wind, just as the disir had done. She did not think Mareritt was the same, but she did not like the thought of the risk. She tracked her quarry down into story, running her to ground in fairy tale.
And the little boy took the spinning top and spun it as he spoke the magic words, and Mareritt appeared like sugar taffy curdling in the air. At first Jan was very frightened, but she spoke kindly to him and told him not to be afraid. Then she asked him to show her the golden ball that his stepmother had given him. When he put it into her hand, she uttered a word and a knife came out from the middle of the ball, as sharp as an unkind word. “If you had done as she asked you and thrown this to the dove, it would have killed her.” Jan did not say anything, but a tear came to his eye because of his love for the dove. “Don’t cry,” Mareritt said. “Come with me.” She took his hand. Her glove was as soft as silk but he could feel the coldness of her flesh inside it and her breath made patterns on the air, like flowers. She led Jan to the window and he could see her sledge hanging on the air: it was made of snowflakes and silver and it shone like the moon. The white swans that drew it stamped their feet upon the air and Mareritt helped Jan into the sledge. “We’ll rescue your dove,” she said, settling a fur robe around his shoulders, “and leave your stepmother to me.” Then the sledge sailed up into the clouds and-
That was all there was of the story. Mercy was sorry. She would have liked to know what happened next, a good sign in any tale. The legend suggested a number of things: Mareritt was honourable, perhaps fond of children, or at least willing to take their side. The wicked stepmother was, of course, a staple of fairy tales, often a witch herself. What had happened to the stepmother in this story, Mercy wondered? Had Mareritt breathed on her with a cold breath, brought winter nightmares to her bed? And what had happened to Jan? What did happen to boys in fairy tales who meet a fascinating woman? Did they become an army of acolytes, a loyal band of followers? Or were they damaged forever, like Kay with the Snow Queen’s splinter of ice in his heart? Thoughtfully, Mercy tucked the notes she had made into her pocket and placed the original fragment back in its place.
As she walked back down the stairs to the central hall, where the Great Book stood on its plinth, the birds whisked and whirled around her head. Jan’s dove: what had that meant? Had Mareritt saved it from the evil stepmother? Mercy stopped mid-step, looking up, and as she did so, the bird-ghosts began to change. From shadows, they became solid: some white, some black as soot and night. They began an aerial ballet, turning and twisting until they formed a column of light and dark. They soared up in a pillar of flight towards the ceiling, until they reached the roof, when the pillar broke apart and fell into a flickering mass of birds, shadows once more.