Deed sighed. “My apologies.” He spread his hands in deprecation. “I’m used to the West.”
“The West,” the woman said, in contempt.
“I am not a Westerner myself.” Deed, caught off guard, was annoyed to find himself sounding defensive.
“I can tell,” the woman said. “You are disir.”
Deed froze, and not because of the cold. “How did you-?”
“Ah.” The woman laughed. She looked over the side of the sleigh and Deed saw her face for the first time. She was beautiful, but not young. White hair was piled high in a chignon, secured with silver icicles. Her eyes glittered silver in the lamplight.
“What are you?” Deed whispered.
“My name is Mareritt.”
It meant “nightmare.” That placed her as something out of story, and not quite of the world. Silently, Deed cursed. Trust his luck to be badgered by some stray tale.
“You see,” Mareritt said, smiling thinly, “Your kind and I have had a long and profitable history.” He felt her reach out through his own defences, take his name out of his head like someone plucking fruit from a tree. “Where are you going, Jonathan Deed?”
He did not want to tell her, but again, she stole it easily from his mind and laughed at his discomfort. “You can’t have too many secrets from me, Mr Deed. I am inside everyone’s head sooner or later.”
Deed swallowed. Used to being the one in control, he was finding it hard to know how to proceed. He gave silent, fleeting thanks to Loki then, for burying the plan so deep that no one could find it. Then the woman said, “I can give you a lift, if you like?”
Deed opened his mouth to say that he would prefer to walk, but instead he found himself stepping onto the lip of the sleigh and sitting uncomfortably beside her. She was dressed in rags and tatters beneath her cloak, which he could now see was made of feathers, white and black. Swans and crows… but he could not quite place her. She seemed to embody elements of different tales, a ragbag of stories. He glanced behind him into the body of the sleigh, behind the driving seat, and froze.
The sleigh was filled with severed heads, perhaps a dozen. All of them were male, and their necks and brows were bound with metal bands, bronze and silver and lead, brass and the soft gleam of gold. Each band was covered with runic signs and Deed felt the tug and pull of magic. Their eyes were closed but they mumbled and muttered to themselves in sleep. The pallid lips of the closest head, bound in tin, smacked with a wet sucking noise. Deed, accustomed to gruesome sights, found himself unable to tear his gaze away.
“These are my kings,” Mareritt said, and laughed. “Do you like them?”
“I-” With difficulty, he wrenched his eyes back to her face. She smiled at him and he saw she had teeth as sharp as his own.
Mareritt cracked her whip and the deer sprang forward in a flurry of snow. Bleikrgard rose up ahead.
Fourteen
Shadow should have been suspicious of the woman from the Library, and indeed, retained a certain level of paranoia out of habit. However, when she consulted her intuition, it told her that Mercy was sound, and the presence of the
She checked anyway, leaving Mercy alone in the lab. The Librarian on duty said placidly that Mercy Fane was currently on sick leave, but would be back soon.
Therefore, Shadow had little reservation about taking Mercy to meet Mariam Shenudah. The latter would, she felt, have her own opinions on what had transpired, and if she did not trust Mercy, she would have little hesitation in saying so. And doing something about it.
They had sealed the severed hand in its box. Shadow had no intention of letting it out of the laboratory, but she had taken pictures. Interesting to see what Shenudah would make of it.
They reached Mariam’s apartment close to twilight. Mercy would not, she had told Shadow, be obliged to return to work immediately: she could call in sick, and muttered something about preferring her to do so-something about an inspection. Shadow had not offered to put her up overnight, but had asked Sephardi to find her a room in a nearby guest house. The Librarian had not seemed to take affront at this.
Shenudah lived at the summit of an apartment block, one of the many that had gone up around the Medina in recent years. It was rickety, covered in bamboo scaffolding and tangles of plants where enterprising dwellers had made the most of their balconies, given the lack of a garden. Mercy followed her up flights of winding stairs.
“She says it keeps her fit,” Shadow said over her shoulder.
“I’m not surprised.”
The building creaked and groaned like a ship in a high wind. Shadow was almost relieved when they reached the final flight and an ancient door, incongruous in the modern setting of the apartment block. Shadow knocked, once. “Mariam? It’s me.”
A pause, then the door opened and a small face looked out. Shenudah, like her door, was elderly, but as usual she was dressed with the utmost smartness: a neat black suit with a rose and lily corsage, sheer stockings, high- heeled shoes.
“Good evening!” The voice was brisk and educated.
“Mariam, I’ve brought a visitor. From the Library.”
Shadow was conscious of a piercing stare over her shoulder, then the old woman said, “You look like someone I used to know, once.”
“Who was that, Mrs-er,”
“It’s Dr Shenudah. But you may call me Mariam. Come in.”
On her first visit here, Shadow had expected a motley, shambolic apartment filled with books, but Mariam Shenudah’s home was tidy and controlled. All four walls were covered in bookcases, but these were neatly filed and the books were in alphabetical order, in a range of languages from Arabic to Mandarin. A polished wooden table stood in the centre of the room, bearing a vase filled with roses and the curving statue of an ibis. Shadow looked with pleasure at the familiar deep, rich colours: gold and dun and deep red, rose pink and ivory, the colours of a desert at twilight.
“Sit, please,” Mariam Shenudah said. “I will bring tea.”
“I hadn’t forgotten that the Eastern Quarter runs on tea,” Mercy said, with a smile.
“The West, too,” Shadow murmured.
“Or booze. But I don’t suppose you drink alcohol, do you?”
“No. I am observant. But I don’t object to others doing as they see fit. We all have different paths, after all.”
Once Mariam had brought the round silver tray of tea glasses, she once more looked at Mercy. “Allow me to guess. Your mother is called Greya Fane. She had a partner called Sho.”
“You knew them?”
“Yes, well. Perhaps forty years ago, now. A long time. How old are you, Mercy?”
“I’m twenty-eight.”
“I knew Greya in the north, when she lived in Aachven. She was a child of the Wolf Clans, as doubtless you know.”
“Yes. They’re my family, but I’ve never met them. Sho and Greya… kept themselves to themselves. I’ve never been sure what had gone wrong.” She paused. “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know who my father was. Greya chose him because she and Sho wanted to have a child, but I don’t know anything about him.”
How odd Westerners could be, Shadow thought. But that wasn’t quite fair: Sho had come from this quarter, evidently.
Mariam said, “Greya was always-reckless. She took risks-magical ones. She associated with people whom a wiser, older woman would not have gone near, but Greya was young, and I’m afraid she was easily beguiled by
