Worldsoul

was a sudden cool damp breath, out of the morning heat. Shadow saw a courtyard immediately ahead, sunlit, with a splashing fountain. The sound took her back to the Shah’s courtyard and she shivered in the coolness. The demon shot her a sharp red glance.

“What is it?”

“Memory. I don’t think we should go further.”

“I want to see,” Gremory said.

They walked on, cautious. Shadow hesitated, but it seemed that the demon’s mind was made up and Shadow did not want to risk heading back to the city without her. She could see diamonds of light about the fountain; they reminded her of the spirit, fracturing. It was not a welcome recollection. The demon’s veil cast a rosy light over everything, a distraction. But the courtyard was empty of everything except the fountain and a small striped cat, washing itself.

“Hello,” Shadow said.

“Don’t talk to it. You don’t know what it might be.”

A fair point coming from a shapeshifting camel, Shadow thought. The cat glanced up incuriously and rose, sauntering into the dark colonnade which surrounded the courtyard. This was the middle of the building. Above the low colonnade the walls rose straight up for several hundred feet. Looking up was like looking down a well, and gave Shadow a moment of vertigo. They followed the cat under the colonnade. Here, in the shadows, a series of doors and steps led upwards. At the top of the stairs, the demon suddenly hauled Shadow back so hard that she stumbled.

“Sorry,” Gremory said, perfunctorily. Ahead, a landing opened out into a high, airy room, with unglazed windows which should have been open to the sky. The entire room was filled with sticky red strands, undulating faintly as if in a draught. They glistened.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Don’t touch them.”

Shadow did not need to be told. They moved on, finding the same strange threads filling other rooms, and stretching out above their heads to the ceiling of the passages. There was no discernible smell that Shadow could detect, but the threads looked alarmingly like bloody sinews-fibrous tendons connecting bones to tissue more properly found inside a living creature, not inhabiting a fortress.

Thirty-Six

Deed was speaking to the Librarian’s blood. He crouched in front of an alembic, watching as the liquid it contained bubbled and congealed. He had already added the substances that would precipitate the nigredo to it-eking out the blood with a fluid condenser-and had carefully scraped the resulting residue from the bottom of the retort. He was now well into the second stage of the process. Around him, the boards of the chamber crackled with spells, keeping any wards contained within the Librarian’s blood well within bounds. He doubted that Mercy Fane herself knew they were there, or what the oaths that she had taken had produced. Deed smiled, imagining Mercy as young, ardent, keen, and completely ignorant of what she was actually letting herself in for. The Skein had, Deed was forced to admit, certainly done a pretty effective number on their personnel. If Mercy knew what her initiation had done, and how it had changed her, he wondered whether she would be so zealous in her defence of the Library. Perhaps she would. People, Deed was the first to admit, were weird.

He dropped the preparation of powdered blood into a nearby crucible and took a pipette. With this, a drop of the boiling blood was added, along with a preparation of fuller’s earth and copper. Deed, murmuring under his breath, added elements to the mixture until an unwholesome sludge formed in the bottom of the crucible. Not promising. Never mind, thought Deed. There were more ways than one if this didn’t work.

Deed recited a long sequence of spells with ease. Disir memory was long, and retentive, especially when combined with human powers of analysis. Then he placed the crucible back over the flame and waited for a moment. The crucible sparked and crackled with momentary electricity and something began to rise and flex in the base. Deed stood back, and watched with satisfaction.

Thirty-Seven

Mercy looked at the Court from the vantage point of the Library steps. On returning from the Northern Quarter, they had come straight back to the Library and the late afternoon sun was strong, falling clear as honey over the surfaces of the buildings and the marble of the square, imbuing it with a lucidity that made it almost transparent. It was a relief to be out of the northern part of the city, away from the snow. The Western Quarter felt almost tropical. The sun was going down over the Western Ocean: she could see it in a gap between the buildings, making the sea molten. It was not long till dusk.

She had no intention of telling anyone what she was planning, only Perra, who had seen Mareritt and heard what Salt had to say, but the ka kept its own counsel. She could feel the geas at the back of her head: a magical engine, driving her on. Infuriating, but she’d tried everything she could think of to dislodge it and nothing had worked. Followed by the silent Perra, she took the staircase up to the summit of the building and a view of the Court: the black facade, shadowy in the sunlight, and the perpetual glitter of the golden vanes that rode the air above it, testing the direction of the magics that coiled around its eaves.

When she once more stepped out onto the roof of the Library, Mercy had woven a trail of thought, untraceable behind the solid walls of the Library itself, a trail of memory that would enable anyone who knew what they were doing to follow her. If necessary.

She hoped that wouldn’t have to happen. What she was doing was risky, but it was the only way in, and daylight-just on the turn-was the safest time. Now, she hoped, with the onset of twilight, the Court would be preoccupied with closing its main entrance and reaffirming its wards, rather than with what might be happening on its roof.

Mercy perched on the roof of the Library, steadying herself on the arm of a stone spirit. The spirit gazed sightlessly out across the city; a sculpture that had been old when the world was young. It had come with the Library from Egypt, a human figure with a bird’s head. The beak had long since worn away, impossible to tell now whether it had been hawk or ibis or owl. Mercy had studied it before, and sometimes when it rained, she thought she detected the gleam of life in its sightless eyes, like a flicker of movement at the bottom of a pool.

It was not raining now. The sun was a line of flame above the horizon and as she watched it slipped below the world into night. Behind her, above the Eastern Quarter, the sky was already deepening to aquamarine. On the stone spirit’s shoulder crouched the ka.

Mercy took her notes from her pocket. She had jotted down a number of things relating to the Court: old tales, ancient stories. No poems, though, although she had found several; they were too unstable for the purpose she had in mind. Glancing down at her notes, she began to speak.

“… and there was a guild of Magicians, who summoned demons from the storms of the air…

Once upon a time, there was a boy…

The nature of the Lemegeton is this, that it is the word of Solomon the King…

She did not know who the old man might be, but…

… and the conjuror took his handkerchief out of his pocket and from it, he brought a dove… ”

As she spoke, she looked out across the air. A fragile bridge of words was beginning to link the summit of the Library with the golden-vaned rooftop of the Court. Mercy spoke on, weaving words into the air, drawing in the last of the light to power her tale, rendering it into a storyway: a story of a boy and a magician and a dove. No demons, though: she didn’t want to take the risk. The ka stirred, restless, on the stone spirit’s shoulder. When she was sure that the story had taken form, Mercy stepped out onto the storyway, praying to the