Worldsoul

been here. She could smell wood smoke and snow, a fresh wild scent in the muted, dusty air of the Library, with an astringency running underneath it-pine, fir? Then a chill brushed the back of her neck, a draught of icy air coming from between the books. Mercy swung round, to find herself facing a sheet of paper-but that was wrong, it wasn’t paper at all, but something thicker, the shade of bone and covered with scratched markings. The draught was coming from the text and it was murmuring. Mercy glanced up at the spell filters and saw a blue electric flicker as something shorted out. The sword leaped in her hand. She braced her heels against the parquet floor. Something’s coming through.

Mercy raised her free hand and spoke into her palm. “Nerren? Section C. Incoming. Sorry.”

“On my way,” Nerren said, out of the air.

In fact, Mercy was not sure she was right. Sometimes, storyways took a long time to open up. Sometimes, they took years… Then, just as she thought she might be mistaken, a word in a harsh and unknown tongue spoke out and the storyway opened.

Mercy stood on an ice shelf, looking out over a landscape filled with blowing snow. A river snaked in a series of startling curves, oxbow lakes in their birthing, out to a frozen horizon where a red sun was going down. From her vantage point, Mercy, teeth chattering, heard the crack and roar of breaking ice from the direction of the river. Wind whipped the pins from her hair and took the strands streaming across her face. A black, attenuated shape was racing over the snow on all fours.

Mercy tried to speak the spell-word-emergency override-but her mouth was blistering with cold. The shape was swarming up the cliff: long black limbs whirling. It whistled as it came, singing in the wind. A flurry of blizzard spun up around Mercy’s feet and she staggered back, but not before she swung the sword. Confusion. Glowing bright eyes in a face as white and sharp as a knife, hair as black as her own swirling over a ridged skull. It had sharp teeth, it snapped at her out of the snow and Mercy brought the singing sword down.

She felt the Irish blade bite and exult as it did so. But the thing knocked her to one side, sending her sprawling on the wooden floor of the Library. The temperate air seemed unnaturally hot after where she had just been. The thing had closed the storyway behind it; there was now no sign of that snaking river, the thin pink line of the sunset horizon, the endless waste of snow. Nor was there any sign of what had come through the gap. Mercy looked at a blank parchment, its words stolen and gone.

“Bollocks,” Mercy said aloud.

“There’s no trace of it,” Nerren said, peering into the scrolls of readout spilling onto her desk. The old Library monitor whirred, brass cogs churning and turning as it rolled out data.

“Her,” Mercy said. She was huddled in a blanket in one of the cosier armchairs of Nerren’s study, hands cradling a hot cup of tea. She felt she would never be properly warm again. “Any word from Security yet?”

Nerren frowned. “Not yet. Her? Are you sure?”

“She had breasts. Well, teats. I saw them under the cape. And she was either piebald or tattooed. Or both.”

“But the basic skin colour was white?”

“Yes, white as snow. Black haired.”

“A witch figure,” Nerren murmured. “Baba Yaga?”

“Too familiar. Something else. This wasn’t human. It was a crone, yes, but something else besides.”

“Demon?”

“I just don’t know. C’s one of the oldest sections. Who knows what’s lurking in those pages?”

“There might be a duplicate,” Nerren said. “I’m looking now.”

Mercy craned her neck to look at the former text, which now sat in a humming lead box with a glass panel on Nerren’s desk. “It’s cured skin, isn’t it? Was it human?”

It was Nerren’s turn to look doubtful. “I’m not sure. Might be. But the texture’s wrong; it looks too thick.”

“Ancient, though. Definitely from the north.”

Nerren gave her a curious look. “Don’t some of your relatives come from the far north?”

“Yes. But I’ve never been there myself.” Except just now, with the wind knife-hissing over the snow.

Nerren sat back. “There’s nothing duplicated on the monitors.”

“Any record of the filing?”

“Yes.” Nerren spun the monitor so that Mercy could see. “There.”

Mercy leaned forward, noting serial numbers. “This was one of the first things ever acquired by the Library. It survived the fire.”

“I know. It’s that ancient.”

It wasn’t Norse, as Mercy had wondered. Before that, long before, from lands that no longer existed on Earth, although recent experience would indicate that they were still present somewhere.

“This dates from the Ice Age.”

“One of the oldest things written by humans,” Nerren said. “That is to say-there is older material, texts from the Fertile Crescent. But so little from the northern lands… ”

“A treasure,” Mercy said. “A spell.”

She thought of the thing she had seen; the thing that, mentally, she had started calling “the female.” Part of a story from so long ago that any humanity had surely been leached from her, if indeed she had ever possessed any. Something forgotten, that raged, like so many forgotten things. Something that wanted to be known.

And something that, now, would be.

Five

The grove lay a short distance from the Dead Road. The mist gathered around him as Deed moved along it, not bothering to pretend to walk, just letting the Road carry him forward. Behind, in Worldsoul, the Court lay in the late afternoon light. Darya was still at the Library, hopefully far advanced in the process of beguiling its curators.

A crossroads, fog-wrapped, with the gate-stone rising from the white swirl. Deed stepped past its looming bulk and took the small path off the side of the road. He could smell the grove. Not far now. The path was overgrown with the ghosts of bramble and wild clematis, but Deed spoke a word and the spectral plants parted before him, withering back into the undergrowth. Then he glanced up and there was the grove: the bones arching up, the curve of immense jaws snatched from a sperm whale from the northern seas, inscribed with runes. Beyond were ribs, and at the centre of it, a skull mounted on a plinth as black and grainy as the crossroads stone. Deed bowed his head for a moment before stepping into the grove, not an action he cared to take, but one which was wise. Reaching up, he brushed aside the sprig of mistletoe, not the dull green of the Earthly plant, hanging on apple or oak, but white as snow, the berries veined with red.

The old god was waiting. He could smell that, too.

He came as close as he dared to the skull. The basalt in which it was set had partially grown up around it, but still could not quite dim its light. From certain angles-ones that Deed took good care to avoid-the skull shone like the sun. And so it should, given the fairness of its owner in life. Bright Baldur, slain with a mistletoe dart.

“My lord?” the magician said into the waiting gloom.

He came out of the depths of the grove in a clank of chains, true disir and one of the only and oldest males. Deed, accustomed as he was and knowing that the god was chained, still had to concentrate on standing fast, not running. He despised the weakness, but it was an old fear too deeply rooted to be eradicated by force of will. Loki’s narrow head turned from side to side, the white eyes gleaming. He wore ancient leather armour, still supple, with splits and rents where the sharp bones pointed through: the armour had been made for a man, ransacked in the long-ago when the gods had gone to war. It was hard to look Loki in the face and Deed centred his gaze instead on the disir’s hands, the long fingers and sharp silvery talons.

“You’re so like me,” the disir said, and chuckled. It didn’t sound remotely human and Deed remembered what his old mentor of the Sept had said once: They are beasts in the guise of men. The raveners, the scavengers of the battlefields, the initiators of war. Deed had taken care to keep his ancestry from the old man, and had been hard-pressed to school his face into polite interest when these words were spoken, which he supposed proved the old man’s point. The words rang cold in Deed’s memory and he forced his gaze