“You’re awake.”
Shadow nodded.
“I-it’s gone. Where did it go?”
“Ah.” The demon had the grace to look a little abashed. “I need to explain something to you.”
“What?”
“Come up to the chamber.”
“Gremory?”
“Come.” The demon strode past her up the slope, beckoning. Shadow followed with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. Gremory did not pause at the angel’s chamber, but went past it, up onto the roof.
“There,” she said. “Do you see?”
Shadow frowned into the darkness. Something was sitting on the lip of rock opposite, something small and tailed. It raised its head and she caught a glimpse of eyes that were the colour of roses, a curl of horn at its brow.
“It’s a demon.”
“Only a little one. A small spirit, a genus loci. You shouldn’t be able to see it, Shadow.”
“Then why can I?”
“Well. Elemiel did his best.”
“And he got rid of the thing in my head.” The demon was looking somewhat shifty. “Gremory? Didn’t he?”
“He was largely successful,” the demon said. “He got it out of your mind, but it went-elsewhere.”
“What? Where?”
“Into your flesh. I don’t know whether it even meant to. I think it was so afraid of him that it split into a thousand pieces, and those fragments went into you-into your fingertips, your eyes, your ears… ”
“So now I’m-what? Infested?”
“Look on the bright side,” the demon said. “Try to see it as an upgrade.”
Thirty-Four
“I can’t do anything before next Fourth Day,” the lampmender said when he opened the door. “If it’s urgent, it’ll have to wait.”
Mercy had been expecting a little old man, like Einstein in an apron, bristling with eccentricity. It just went to show that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Salt was large and lugubrious, with bloodhound jowls and a figure like a pear. He looked at her without expression.
“I didn’t come about a lamp,” Mercy told him.
The stare increased in intensity. “You’d better come in.”
Once inside, he sat her down in a leather armchair. The shop did, at least, ring true to type. It was crowded and, for a lampmender’s, surprisingly dark. Maybe they were like cobbler’s children, going unshod.
“My mother had your address in a box,” Mercy said.
“I’ve got a lot of customers.”
“I don’t think she would have kept it if she’d just been a customer,” Mercy said. She did not add that romance was unlikely to have been a consideration; regardless of Greya’s sexual inclinations, Salt was not an immediate candidate for a burning lifelong passion. But she did not want to hurt his feelings.
“What was your ma’s name?”
“Greya Fane.”
This did produce an effect. Salt’s chilly eyes, which resembled those of a cod, widened. “Oh!” he said.
“You obviously remember her.”
“I’ll say. The last time I saw Greya Fane, she was drenched to the skin, shivering fit to bust, and had just killed a man.”
“I see,” Mercy said, blankly.
“That was-what? Over forty years ago now. I was an apprentice at the time. This was my uncle’s shop. I knew Greya from up north; we’d both come down together from Aachven. Didn’t know one another well-different backgrounds. My family were woodcutters. Uncle broke out, wanted to make something of himself. Greya wanted to get away from the north and her family; I paid for her train ticket. Didn’t hear from her for several months, then one night, she turned up on the doorstep and said someone had attacked her. She’d killed him, apparently, though she never said how.”
“Did you call the authorities?”
Salt hesitated. “No. And I’ll tell you why. I felt us northerners ought to stick together a bit and I was… quite fond of Greya. I dried her clothes on the stove and gave her a day’s head start before I spoke to the Watch. But then, no body ever turned up. I did make some enquiries but no one missing, no one hurt… so I thought, forget it. And I did, pretty much until now. Funny, you don’t look a bit like her, and yet I can feel her in you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have told you all that. That, though,” he nodded in the direction of the ka, “that’s not hers.”
“No. Greya’s family were Wolfheads.”
“They were more than that. They were shamans. But for all that, they were good to the people around them.”
“If they were so great, why did Greya want to leave?”
“She wanted more. You know what girls are like. Wanted to see the bright lights.”
Mercy had the impression that there was something Salt wasn’t telling her. There was something else she wanted to know. “Have you ever heard of a woman named Mareritt?”
Thirty-Five
Being a partial ifrit was, Shadow was discovering, a step up from being merely possessed. Perhaps the demon had not been so sarcastic after all, in her talk of an upgrade. The voice in her head had gone, and she was conscious of another dimension, opening around her. She could see the lines of shimmering light around things, their essences and souls. She could hear the faint song of the stars, the whispered incantations of the moon. And the desert was busy, filled with flickering, darting spirits and the ghosts of small creatures.
Another star was falling. Shadow stood on the roof and watched it descend: it was slower than the other meteorite, and the flame it trailed behind it was a sunset pink… Shadow dived, straight off the roof. She hit the ground in a curl, arms folded over her head, and rolled under a lip of rock. The flower burst soundlessly, the world illuminated with a searing blaze of flame. She saw the rocks through her eyelids, imprinted in silhouette, and then her head rang.
“Well,” Gremory said, into her ear. “That was exciting.”
The angel’s beehive hut had gone, obliterated into a thousand shattered fragments of stone. Like the spirit, Shadow thought, cascading outwards into the desert of her flesh. Slowly, she uncurled, thinning the veil as she did so. The demon was standing beside her. Gremory wore a cloak and it billowed out behind her in a wind that Shadow could not feel, snapping like a banner. Her eyes blazed like garnets and her hair was free: it streamed out. She said something in a long string of syllables which should, Shadow felt, have hurt her ears, but did not. She remembered demon speech and it was like fire in the ears-this new possession seemed to mitigate it. She whispered a prayer.
Some distance away, Shadow could see the stamen-core of the flower, burning molten into the sand, which fused around it. Runnels of vitrification spread outwards. Shadow got to her feet and stood beside the demon. She would have taken action herself, but the stamen was cooling, more rapidly than it should have, fading into blue and then growing ashen and black.
“That’s all I can do,” Gremory said.
“What about Elemiel?”
“What about him? He isn’t here.”
“His house was.”
The demon laughed. “He doesn’t need a house. It’s just an affectation. What interests me is the target.”
“I was in a flower attack a few days ago,” Shadow said.
“I heard. In the Medina.” The demon smiled her slanted smile. “Looks like you’ve attracted someone’s attention.”
Shadow sighed. “That’s been happening a lot lately.”
She waited out the rest of the night with the veil at maximum thickness. No point in tempting fate-she felt she’d done quite enough of that lately. The demon squatted on her heels nearby, her gaze fixed on the crumbling ash of the stamen. She did not move; as before, she might as well have been carved from stone.
Towards dawn, a faint wind rose up, stirring eddies of loose sand and scattering the ash of the stamen. Shadow watched it crumble, flaking away and skittering across the desert floor. Apart from the glassy sand around it, it might never have existed, a brief, violent dream. With a rustle of robes, the demon stood. Rather to Shadow’s relief, she did not appear in search of breakfast.