Worldsoul

Mareritt pointed with the whip, to the lick of fiery cloud that was the newly opened Pass. “We’ll be going through there.”

Deed lay, face down, in snow. It was cold enough to have killed a human by now. He raised himself up on taloned hands. The airship rested several yards away. It was burning. A hard blue flame flickered throughout its exposed bowels and occasionally something shorted out with a hiss. He saw a small spirit, released from the mechanism, darting out across the snow, beak gaping, before it faded and vanished.

Deed was reluctant to stand, in case he got snatched by one of the storm worms. He looked across the river. The battle was over: he could smell blood on the faint wind and it was disir blood. He knew that scent very well. The demons themselves were amassing high up in the clouds; he could see the tornado funnel gathering. Deed forced himself to think logically-for that, human heritage was useful. The disir were not big on rational planning: aggression, rage, and death, yes, but not reasoned consideration. If the army had been destroyed, that meant that Deed’s own intentions would now have to undergo a serious revision. He did not have the requisite knowledge to repair the airship, even if it could be mended. That meant that, assuming he wasn’t killed in the next few minutes, he was stranded here for the time being, on the other side of the World’s River. He would have to cross the river, then make his way through Loki’s forest to the nearest gap back into the city.

Being disir, Deed was inclined to regard this as an opportunity rather than a challenge. To have the army destroyed was galling, true, but it also meant a lessening of competition. Now, if his understanding was correct, he and the female still loose in Worldsoul were the only disir left.

A breeding pair; how romantic. Deed did not consider himself to be ideal parent material.

He was still aiming at control of the city. He looked on the bright side. The Skein still had not come back. That left all sorts of opportunities to grab at power, assuming he could get back into the city without running into one of Loki’s wolves. And that was a rather big “if.”

“You must be mad,” Mercy said. Mareritt looked at her, apparently genuinely surprised.

“Whatever makes you say that?”

“A look up ahead?” Shadow said, coming to stand by Mercy’s side. The sleigh was now skirting the mountain wall, running along the air just above the surface of the snowfield, like a skimming stone. The stormcloud was gathering over the bony wreckage of the disir army, whipping upwards in a mass of teeth and stinging tails. Beyond, the Pass was clearly visible, a wound in the air.

“All you have to do,” Mareritt said, “is keep your heads down.”

“Oh, that’ll be all right, then,” Mercy said.

“Your friend has a veil.”

“It got torn,” Mercy told her. She could still feel Shadow’s pain: an invisible rent, seeping invisible blood.

Shadow gripped her hand. “It’s all right. I’ll be all right. And we have to do this. I’ve realised why now.”

“I don’t want-” Mercy began, but by this time the sleigh was sweeping up, up towards the tear in the sky.

Deed leaped. The ice rolled beneath his feet, nearly sending him down into the swift dark water. He jumped to the next floe, which was more stable, a shelf of ice carried on the current. Deed clung to it as it took him around one of the ox-bow curves in the river: using the ice to carry him as far as possible from the scene of the battlefield, away from the attention of the gathering aerial force.

But he could not let it take him too far. Ahead lay the estuary of the World’s River and then the sea: eternal, ice-locked, ancient, and cold. He’d seen its slow oily heave from the airship’s maiden voyage, the tidal sway of a sea that is on the perpetual point of freezing, and he had no wish to be carried out into the waves. That meant judging his movements across the ice. Deed crouched, sprang, and landed once again.

Shadow’s veil may not have been able to protect them from demonic attack, but it did save them to some extent from the noise. Up here, the shrieking of the horde that had come through the Pass was close to unbearable: a starling flock magnified a thousand fold. As the sleigh approached the edges of the tight formation that was the swarm, Mercy saw a dozen lamprey heads turning in their direction. She clung on as the sleigh veered, taking the turn around the edge of the funnel. But several of the worms had already broken away and were sailing down, their wings gilded by the light of the Pass into eerie transparency. There was a snap above Mercy’s veil-shrouded head as Mareritt cracked the whip, urging the deer on. What struck Mercy, even with the demons soaring down to meet them and the Pass coming up fast ahead, was how hot it had become. The upper air above this ancient land should have been freezing. Instead, a bead of sweat was trickling down her nose and the point between her shoulder blades had become unpleasantly damp. The air smelled of musty spice, the odour of stale musk that was, she realised with nausea, generated by thousands of demonic bodies. Across the sled, Gremory was managing to look superior. The ka sneezed.

“Kindly get out of the way!” That was Golden-Bound.

“Yes, how can we act when your soul is all over the place?” Brass-Bound chimed in. Mercy saw Shadow’s eyes widen, and she whisked the veil down so that it covered Mercy and herself closely, like a pair of snoods. Brass- Bound made a prim face, as if about to utter some distasteful truth, then spat. A gobbet of liquid fire shot out and struck an oncoming demon in the middle of its lamprey jaws. Mercy saw the flame travel all the way down its long throat, illuminating the demon from within, and then it exploded. Brass-Bound allowed a faint smugness to show across its face. The Duke gave a brief, I-am-reluctantly-impressed nod.

Silver-Bound followed suit with a plume of blue-white flame. A demon fell like a singed eel out of the sky, bursting into a brief flare as it sank towards the tundra. As a demon screamed with rage, all of the heads swivelled in the direction of the swarm and spat in unison. A rainbow arc of flame coreolised in the sled’s wake as Mareritt whipped the deer on.

The movement of the swarm had sung up the wind. Ice-laden branches of fir lashed against Deed’s face. But the disir thought things were looking up. He was far from the swarm now, and into the treeline. He was at home in these forests-for a moment, it occurred to Deed that it might be an option to remain here, run wild through the forests of the night rather than returning to Worldsoul and its tedious politics. A little vacation… He rejected this as coming from the disir-self, the feral-self. This back-to-nature business was all very well, but he still had the old god’s wolves to contend with and besides, there was too much of intrinsic interest in the city. Deed took a gasping breath of arctic air and trudged on.

The demon was on fire, but this did not seem to deter it. It came over the backs of the racing deer and struck Mareritt on the breast, ramming her backwards over the lip of the sleigh and into the well of heads, where it exploded. The heads cried out in a unison of disgust. Mercy and Shadow both scrambled for the reins; Mercy, due to position, was a fraction quicker. She clambered up into the driver’s seat and steered the deer towards the Pass.

She had driven a horse buggy, once or twice, in the parks of Worldsoul on holidays. This was different. Taking the reins was like taking hold of something living; they twitched quicksilver in her hands and she felt electricity dance up the bones of her arms into her spine. For a second, it was as though she looked through the ice-dark eyes of the deer, seeing a web of connections spreading out between demons and air, a way of seeing which she could not understand and which momentarily disoriented her. The reins fell slack in her hands, but she grasped them more tightly, bringing them up. The deer turned.

“Is she all right?” A spit of fire shot past her ear, singing her hair. “Careful!”

Shadow was leaning over Mareritt. “I think so. She’s trying to speak.”

Mercy risked a glance over her shoulder and saw the gaping hole in Mareritt’s chest was beginning to knit together: blood, tissue, lace and bone all forming a seamless whole. Mareritt’s mouth was open so wide, she looked barely human. Well, she wasn’t, was she? Mercy reminded herself. She concentrated on the Pass ahead.

Deed was expecting the wolf when it came. He had heard it coming through the trees; soft footed, it had nonetheless betrayed itself by the single rustle of a twig. He pretended to be lost, glancing nervously around him, adjusting his appearance to partway human. It would not fool the wolf entirely-they knew disir when they smelled one-but it might confuse it. Thus he was, deliberately, facing away from the wolf when it sprang. Then he turned, falling backwards, reaching up with taloned fingers to rake the wolf’s throat. Its own momentum ripped out its jugular. Deed, exulting, was covered in a bath’s worth of blood. He drank it in, an indulgence, for it was the wolf’s spirit that he was lapping up, stealing its strength, its wildness, its ferocity. At the very bottom of its animal soul lay something that might be compared to a bright jewel: a shining pearl which Deed recognised as its imprimatur from the old god. A berry of mistletoe. This he did not touch, and it fell snowflake silent to the ground and dimmed away.