Tope sighed. “We can’t just accept this without some kind of evidence.”
“No, I understand that.”
“Maybe I can help,” an unfamiliar voice said.
In the hours that followed, desperate though they were, Mercy found a few moments in which to treasure the sight of the faces of a Library committee confronted with the sudden manifestation of a talking camel.
“Oh, sorry,” the demon said, without a trace of apology. “Wrong one.” It now took the appearance of a woman, armoured for war. The armour was crimson and made of supple leather; the demon’s hair was braided and she wore a band across her brow with the symbol of a crescent moon. Mercy heard Shadow sigh.
“I wondered where you’d got to.”
“I was annoyed. Elemiel put us both at considerable risk-typical of someone indestructible to underestimate danger. I ended up at the ends of the Earth-it’s taken me all this time to get back.”
“You are a demon,” Librarian McLaren said. He looked amused rather than alarmed.
“Yes. My name is Gremory. I am a duke of Hell.”
“How did you get past the wards?”
“I don’t think I’ll tell you that,” Gremory said. “For reasons that should be obvious.” She strode forward and put taloned hands on the council table. “But this woman is telling the truth. I realise that a demon’s word is subject to some doubt, sadly, and thus as a gesture of good faith, I propose to lend you this for safekeeping.”
She tugged at her hand and placed a ring on the table: a thick band of gold bearing a carnelian inscribed with a sigil. The Elders’ eyes bulged: the demon had handed over her own domination.
“Why?” Mercy heard Shadow breathe.
The Duke of Hell looked at her. “I’m not really the altruistic sort. It’s because of the Court. I am a Goetic entity; they work with us, as you know. I come from the book known as the
“From the disir?” Mercy asked.
“His god Loki has a disir army amassing in the nevergone. Plans to bring them into Worldsoul, take over the city. Meanwhile we’ve got the Storm Lords planning much the same thing, except they want to strip everything back to basics: obliterate humanity’s tales, replace them with their own. As one of those stories,” the demon said, looking modestly at a talon, “I am naturally a little concerned.”
Mercy could feel relief emanating from Shadow. “I’m glad you have an agenda. The lack of it was worrying me.”
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
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.
