Worldsoul

was a dreadnaught, but it had sails furled along its sides. It was a monstrous thing, unnatural, made for no worldly sea and Shadow knew it immediately: the Barquess. She heard the ifrit hiss. Then the ship was abruptly gone. A bolt of golden light flooded outwards from the ifrit’s cage as the ifrit exploded, flying silently apart into a thousand shards. Shadow felt an icy touch against her arm, penetrating her sleeve and then flying inwards through her left eye. She cried out. She felt a sharp pain as if her eye had been stabbed with a pin and then wetness welling up inside it. She clawed at her face, panicking, and felt the wet spreading out from her eye. She looked down, out of the good eye, and saw that it was not blood. A blackness stained her sleeve and her hand, gleaming like ink. She felt it pouring from the socket of her eye and spilling down her face, as though the socket were a bowl which someone had overfilled. Shadow stumbled back against the wall, reeling with shock. O Allah, help me, help me-and He must have heard her, for there was a coolness in the air, a soft singing note like a nightingale after rain. Shadow managed a ragged breath. The pain in her eye diminished; she felt the wetness cease to flow. Clasping her arms about herself, she slumped down the wall, crouching on the floor. A single black drop splashed down from her eye and onto the tiled floor, where it remained for a moment before seeping into the tile, swallowed by the blue. The nightingale note sang on and it brought freshness, cutting through the dusty mustiness of the chamber, which now felt scorched as if a fire had raged through it. As indeed, a fire had, and its black knife had cut through Shadow. With great care, wincing, she tried to open her left eye. She raised a hand, gently probing it with a forefinger.

To her surprise, the eye was still there. She could feel it, soft in its socket. She had expected to find the socket reamed and empty, its seed gone. She shut her right eye and looked. Everything was filmed with blackness, as though she looked through a veil, but it was different. Everything was in shadow, but as she looked, the lines at the edges of things became light. Her vision cleared: everything was sharp and vivid. She was seeing more clearly with the damaged eye than she had ever seen: right into the heart of things. She could see their names-a faint script which described everything, God’s language underwriting the world. The name of the ifrit was still clear, in the centre of the tangled mass of iron that had been its cage. Shadow spoke the name.

“I am here,” said a small, clear voice inside her mind.

Twenty-Four

The bridge was high and arched: from the base, Mercy could not see the other side. It did not look like the kind of thing that could exist in the real world, a feat of magical engineering, and she did not like it.

“Where do you think we are?” Benjaya asked. “Are we still in the Liminality?”

She looked in the direction of the ka, which shrugged. Mercy sighed. “I doubt it very much-this is almost certainly somewhere in the nevergone. I’d like to see what’s at the end of the bridge, though.” Without waiting for Benjaya, she started walking upwards. It was a steep trudge and she only realised that she’d reached its summit when she looked up and saw she was standing on the arch. Ahead, the bridge sloped down to a snaking path through the mountains. To its left, stood something that, for a moment, she thought might be a sculpture of some kind. It was not: it was a waterfall, but made of mist. It cascaded silently, falling thousands of feet to the invisible valley below. Mercy stood above cloud. Yet the sun, though thin, was warm on her skin and the air smelled of pine.

“I’ve heard of this place, this mistfall,” Benjaya said. “It’s from the Norse myths. I think it’s a kind of Hell. Niflheim? I think that means ‘land of the mist.’”

“Seems too pleasant to be Hell,” Mercy answered, but she thought he was right, all the same. There was something archetypal about this landscape: the towering mountains, the clouds, the waterfall of mist. This was, she felt in her gut, part of the land from which the disir had come, and therefore not to be trusted. “If it’s Hell,” she went on, “then we need to find a way out.”

The trouble was, she had no idea how to go about it. Things like this happened to Librarians. They had occurred before, although infrequently. The last time had been some hundred years previously, when a cache of hidden scrolls had come to the Library from the east. A Librarian had gone missing, whisked into some desert kingdom, but he had been retrieved by the Skein who, like concerned parents with a lost toddler, had searched until they’d found him. But now the Skein had gone. If we had been trusted with significant magic of our own-safe words, key words… But they had not, and now they would have to make do for themselves. Perhaps it would not be a bad thing if the Skein never came back…

“All right,” Mercy said, aloud. “If it’s a Hell, there will be passage points. Entrances. Exits.” In much of the world’s literature, these had been situated near water: in wells, over rivers, through cracks in the earth. The mistfall was the closest possibility, and Mercy headed for it.

As she grew closer, she saw that the mist sparkled. A myriad diamond drops glittered within it and it made a soft rushing sound.

“Mercy?” Benjaya said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the sun’s going down.”

She nodded. “I know.” Looking out from the high span of the bridge, the low red sun had sunk even further, until it was now starting to touch the dark line of the horizon. The sky was deepening to a cold winter green.

“We’ve got a choice,” she said. “We can stay here, or try and press on. I think it’s easier to defend a bridge than a mountain path.”

“Perra, do you think we should look at the mist, while there’s still light?”

The ka agreed. Mercy went down to the edge of the bridge, and saw that steps led from it to a narrow platform that ran behind the mistfall. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. With the sword drawn, she followed the steps, Benjaya and Perra close behind.

At close hand, the mist fell across the skin in a moist coolness. Fearing unknown northern magic, Mercy did not care to get too close, but she had to step through the mist to get to the platform. As she did so, there was a long cry from the direction of the forest: something lost and angry. They looked at each other, not needing to ask what was that? It could be nothing good.

Mercy slid behind the fall of mist, feeling it speckle her face. She had expected this place to be dark, uneasy, dangerous, but instead it spoke to her. It was comforting. It enticed her inside, a return to somewhere cosy and loved. This alarmed her.

“Can you feel that?” she asked Benjaya.

“Yeah. Reminds me of my mum’s kitchen.”

“That’s not a good thing. I mean, no reflections on your mum or her kitchen, but you know what I mean.”

Benjaya nodded dumbly. The ka said, “Take great care. It is a glamour.”

Mercy held the Irish sword up in front of her face. “What can you cut?”

The sword sang, rejoicing, and there was a spark of light as it cut through the wall of mist and the shadows. As though a curtain had fallen from in front of her sight, Mercy saw.

She was standing on a lip of rock, looking into the mountain, and the mountain was hollow. There was a world within it: the world of ice she had glimpsed through the pages of the book, through which the disir had come. She saw, again, the forest, and the snaking river, and across the line of trees she saw the rise of mountains and, again, the high arch of a bridge. She had the feeling that if she had been able to see more clearly, through a telescope, there would be two uncertain people and a ka standing on a ledge behind a wall of mist…

“The world’s an onion,” she murmured.

“But we knew that,” Benjaya said, reasonably enough. “It’s in a lot of books.”

He was right. Stories don’t always reflect the world; they make it, too. A book is a world inside the world, and sometimes there are worlds within that. A galaxy in a speck of sand; suns in a water drop.

“Well,” Mercy asked. “Are we going in?”

Benjaya nodded. The ka blinked. Mercy took a step forward, into sudden searing cold. She had thought the world of the bridge was chilly, but the sunlight had meant that she had been too warm in the heavy greatcoat. This place was really arctic. She took a shuddering breath and heard Benjaya gasp and snuffle behind her. She looked back and saw the world of the bridge in miniature, the fall of mist cascading softly downwards, and then it was winked out. Night lay ahead. Mercy started walking.

The path wound down a rocky incline. When she looked back again, she saw a sparsely forested mountain