“What was that? What is this?”
“This is the Pass of Ages,” Gremory said, surprising her. Shadow looked at the demon. Gremory’s impassive face didn’t do “startled,” but Shadow thought there was a trace of disconcertment in the demon’s eyes. “Even I thought this was a myth.”
“It isn’t a myth. It was closed in the apparent world aeons ago, after the first fall of the Garden. But it opened again when the Skein vanished.”
“Do you know where the Skein have gone?” Shadow demanded.
“If I knew that, I would have gone after them.”
Angels cannot lie, she had once read. She nodded.
“But they kept this-this gap closed?”
“Or they professed to do so.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Skein deal in the highest of high magic. They were the lords of the world: their cities spanned the shores of Earth before the Flood, and those were drowned when a meteor hit the planet. Those of the Skein that were left vowed it would never happen again: they created the Liminality, wove it out of the legends of the ancestors of man, and then took refuge in it. Their magic is a blend of demonic and angelic: the forces which powered creation, two halves of the same whole. But the Skein didn’t know everything and they did not realise that their sanctuary was built on a crack: the Pass of Ages. Or perhaps they did realise, and thought they could control it. Stories enter the Liminality through the Pass, it’s part of the overlight. When it was closed, they seeped around its edges, and when it opens, they rush through. It is not fully open yet, and it is guarded. And there is a spell to close it.”
“Was that one of the guards just now?” Shadow looked down into the roil of indigo, silver, black. “That thing I saw?”
“No,” the Messenger said. “That was one of the servants of the Storm Lords. That is a guard.”
It was coming towards them, stepping on the clouds like someone walking across a thundering sea. It was a bright outline of a man, a silhouette shot with light, and its hair flared in a nimbus of golden blue around its head. It carried, upright, a flaming sword. Shadow drew the blade.
“Leave it,” the demon said, sharply. “Not even star iron will cut it.”
The Messenger held up a hand. The guard strode out of the storm, onto the rock and it sizzled and fused beneath its feet. Shadow could see its eyes now and they were so bright that she had to look away. Elemiel spoke a name and the thing faltered, but only for a moment. It swung the sword. Shadow felt the Messenger summon his power, drawing it into himself and sending it out but she could also feel this was not enough.
“It shouldn’t be able to see us!” the Messenger said.
His hand shot out and a curling whip of light knocked the sword aside but the guard swung again and the whip split apart.
“I can see,” Shadow heard Gremory say, “that I’m going to have to help you out.”
Black fire joined the whip of light. The ground shuddered beneath Shadow’s feet and she stumbled. As she went down on one knee she saw the sun-dark lash of light strike out and tear the sword from the guard’s hand. It fell backwards into the abyss without a sound and Shadow was falling too, into a hole of night.
Forty-Five
“I know the sword can look after itself,” Mercy hissed, ”but I don’t want to leave it here unless we have to.” It wasn’t as though it was her own sword: it belonged to the Library, but the thing was at least partly alive and the thought of it in the hands of the Court stuck in her throat.
“It will be under lock and key,” Perra warned.
“But do you know where?”
Despite the loss of the sword Mercy was, however, in reasonable spirits. The thought of the look on Deed’s face when he opened the door and found her missing was a notion she would treasure for some time, whatever other advantages he might have taken during her time with the Court. That, Mercy thought with a trace of smugness, was what came of underestimating other people’s reading habits.
She had not slept, although to anyone watching-and surely such a chamber would be under observation-it would have looked as though she had lain down on the couch, covered herself with the blanket and passed into slumber. She had certainly closed her eyes. But no power of the Court could keep someone who knew what they were doing from investigating matters on the astral level and she had spent the night examining the wards of the room. Each of the four walls was locked with a quarter-sigiclass="underline" unfamiliar in particular to Mercy, but familiar when it came to type. A sigil is a group of words and symbols, bound together like weaving or knitting. Find the end, even if it has been woven into the pattern, and you can unravel the sigil.
Deed’s own strengths lay in the north, and in the Western Quarter where the Court resided. Mercy wasn’t too familiar with the South, but she did know the designs of the East; her other mother, Sho, had taught her well. Magic that tasted of aniseed and ginger. Not the snow-and-sea-salt of the north, or the greengrowing spells of the Southern Quarter, but something with which Deed was not, Mercy thought, all that familiar.
She found the sigil’s end in a name: a demon of the East. She did not speak the name aloud, but she whispered a syllable, over and over again, beneath her breath and without moving her lips, until the name began to fray like a pulled thread. Mercy uttered another syllable, pulling gently. In her mind’s eye, on the astral, she crouched by the sigil, which was inscribed in red and gold upon the wall, tugging at its corner. And quite suddenly the sigil began to unravel, looping out into Mercy’s hands until deactivated.
She did not act at once. She yawned, mumbled, stirred, and sat up, hoping that the sigil’s demise wouldn’t trigger some kind of alarm. If so, she would soon find out. Mercy got up from the couch and stretched, then wandered around the room. When she reached the western wall, she glanced up. A transparent oval had appeared in the middle of the wall, with the golden-eyed form of Perra peering through it.
Mercy let her gaze glide over the ka. She saw Perra mouth, “Wait.” Then the ka breathed out. A mist began to fill the room, feeding from shadows and the play of the flickering lamp that stood by the bed. Mercy stepped forwards to the hole in the wall and suddenly it was like facing a mirror. She stood there, looking into her own dark eyes.
“What the hell?” Mercy breathed.
“When you fell off the turret, this ka took the homunculus and extended it. This is just an illusion; the core remains. It will replace you for a time, then it will decay into dust. But you can’t leave now. Deed’s on his way. Once he’s gone, we will do the switch.”
“All right,” Mercy said. If Deed had placed anything else in the cell, anything that would betray she was no longer present, the homunculus would hopefully be enough to fool it. She backed into the room and the mist dispelled. When she once more looked at the wall, it was solid.
Later, when Deed had gone, Perra once more opened the hole in the wall. Mercy had been on tenterhooks throughout Deed’s visit; she had been sure he would notice the damaged sigil. But he had given no sign of having done so and now, for him, it would be too late. Mercy left her mute, unresponsive double sitting in her place with the book and fled through the wall.
This led them to the point of rescuing the sword. Mercy knew they had to act fast: it was only a matter of time before Deed or someone else discovered her escape and sounded the alarm.