The Duke of Hell laughed. “Help from demons. Always a worry.”
Tope was still staring at the carnelian ring as if mesmerised.
“We have to do something,” Mercy said.
“But what?” All the Elders were looking hopefully at her and Shadow; she should never have made that earlier promise. Mercy opened her mouth to speak, and the tall windows that flanked the council chamber burst inwards in a shower of glass. Mercy was flung against the wall and threw her arm across her face to shut out the glare of an explosion, but it did not come. She could not smell the firework odour of a flower, but the light beyond the windows was becoming steadily brighter.
“What’s that?” she heard an Elder say, shakily. Mercy pulled herself to her feet; beside her, Shadow was scrambling up. The demon stood, apparently unmoved, in the centre of a blizzard of glass shards. Tope was face down across the table.
“I’ve seen it before,” Shadow said, gripping Mariam Shenudah’s arm. “It’s the Pass.”
Forty-Eight
For purely dramatic reasons, Deed found that he profoundly resented being pipped to the post. After the debacle involving Fane and the Library, Deed had stepped up his preparations, making frequent checks down the long lens that connected Worldsoul with the nevergone, a periscope between dimensions. The periscope was not entirely reliable, showing as it did contingencies that had not in fact occurred, or at least, not yet. But what it did continue to show him was reassuring.
The bleak line of the horizon. The scroll of the oxbow river across the barren land. The disir army massing along its shores.
The lid had been removed from Loki’s memory jar during the night; he’d woken to find the sour smell of the old god filling the room and new knowledge in his head. He knew, now, what he had to do.
So Deed had continued to send out the necessary summonings, dropping knowledge into the heads of the shamans as they lay in that disir state of not-quite-sleep. Disir brains didn’t work in the same way as humans; it was fair to say that they were not completely conscious. As with ancient humans, the two halves of the brain were not entirely connected, so messages from one half would be interpreted as voices from elsewhere. Deed, his eye glued to the periscope, whispered instructions, coaxed, cajoled and threatened, until the shamans-moved by that murmur out of the darkness-drew the tribes into position.
Deed had few illusions about his ability to control the disir. They were savages, and feral. They would run amok in the city, following their own whims, but with Loki’s blessing at the tip of his tongue, he could destroy them if he had to. That was the plan: bring them in, and when the city was thoroughly cowed, remove the nuisance and bring the Court into centre stage as heroes. It was a simple, brutal plan, Deed felt, and it lacked elegance and subtlety, but it was at least historically tested.
He had already set the spellwork in place to open the rift in the Library. That the disir would make their grand entrance there, probably destroying hundreds of rare texts in the process, appealed to Deed. It would give the literary advantage to the Court in years to come, and he was prepared to sacrifice the odd grimoire to greater ambitions. With the Library crippled and the Court predominant, plus the existing support from Bleikrgard-that left only the Eastern and Southern Quarters to subdue and Deed was confident that with the disir plunging through the city, he would be able to persuade the relevant authorities in those areas that the Court would be an appropriate guiding force.
He was, therefore, both alarmed and annoyed when Darya ran into the room where he was undertaking his preparations.
“Abbot General! Something’s happening?”
She looked dishevelled. Strands of hair had come loose from her chignon and tendrilled across her face, and her jacket had been misbuttoned. Deed regarded her coldly.
“Would you mind knocking in future?”
“Look out the window!” Darya pointed a quivering finger. Deed did so and to his shock saw a vast chasm opening in the sky above the Western Sea. It was as if the sky was splitting in half. The windows of the Court bulged briefly inwards, but held. Deed took a hasty step back. Within the gap surged a tidal race of cloud in all the colours of fire. Rose, gold, scarlet and a livid white turned the night sky into a terrible false day.
“What the hell is that?” Deed breathed. Darya was wide-eyed, her appearance slipping further into disir.
The ground shuddered under their feet. In the laboratory next door, alembics and retorts rattled and the rattling did not stop. Deed looked at the window and saw the frame was shaking. He cast out a spell for stability, but it was like spitting into a hurricane. Battening down panic, Deed said, “The roof.”
They ran up shaking flights of stairs. Magicians were pouring out of the rooms of the Court and Deed heard the rising note of hysteria in their voices. The building gave a huge, convulsive shudder, then stopped. Followed by Darya, Deed burst out onto the roof. The sky was alight. The spell-vanes, gilded surfaces catching the rosy fire, spun wildly in all directions and the air tasted of wild magic, pungent as petrol.
Deed was running for the turret, Darya at his heels, when the Court shook again and a great section of roof broke off and plunged into the street. Deed didn’t look back. Good thing he had a penchant for emergency plans.
Tope was unconscious, but not dead. Librarians were running from the room in a panic. Shadow was bundling Mariam Shenudah through the door. Mercy hesitated over Tope’s still form.
“Go on!” Benjaya Vrone shouted. “I’ll take care of her.”
With the other Librarians, Mercy and Shadow fled down the stairs. A brief glance upwards told Mercy that the ghostly birds had gone to roost, just as living ones do during an eclipse. As they were halfway down, the stairs rippled like the skin of a stroked cat, flinging them against the banisters. Mercy lost her footing and sat down hard. She was thus in a position to watch in horror as the entire front façade of the Library split in two. Tiles fell from the roof and she saw the bird-faced spirit follow it, twirling down through the air to crack in two on the marble floor below. The crack widened so she could see all the way out into the square, which was filled with frightened groups of people running to and fro and a golem in the midst of it all, trudging stolidly about its business. She glimpsed McLaren, with Benjaya at his side, directing people to safety.
Shadow pulled her to her feet.
“Look!” But she was pointing up the stairs.
On the Ninth Floor, the rift that had begun as no more than a slit in the air along Section C, was now spreading. Icy air gusted through with a swirl of snow and Mercy caught her breath. She saw rather than felt the ka pluck her sleeve.
“Up or down?”
“I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” Mercy said. By now, along with the Duke, poised elegantly upon a tilted step, they were the only ones left on the upper staircase. Everyone else was pouring out through the crack in the front of the building; Mercy hoped they would at least have a chance at survival. She couldn’t work out whether it was an actual earthquake or not. The city wasn’t prone to them as geological phenomena, which suggested to Mercy that this was some massive ruction along the storyways themselves, some heave in the fabric of the nevergone.
But the rift from Section C was coming on fast. Shadow reached out and gripped Mercy’s arm as the curve of arctic air and twilight swept down the staircase to engulf them.
Deed could hear the engines powering up as he neared the turret. The building had stabilised for now, but Deed wasn’t taking any chances. As he drew close, the doors of the base of the turret burst open. The nose of an airship slid out, a dark, iridescent green, whirring with spell-vanes of its own. He could see the pilot in the cockpit, insectoid behind his goggles and flying mask.