Weaveworld

distraction of the priest’s appearance, he was again attempting to seize control. The contested body immediately became epileptic, a throttled roar emerging from its throat, which may have been intended as a warning to the priest. If so, it went uncomprehended. The man stood his ground as Uriel twisted Hobart’s head back in his direction – bone and cartilage audibly grinding upon each other. A moment passed: priest and Angel face to face. Then Uriel’s flame erupted from Hobart’s mouth.

The effect, in the confined space of the passage, was more impressive than anything Shadwell had witnessed in Rue Street. The shock-wave threw him backwards, but he was too much the voyeur to be denied the spectacle, and hauled himself upright to watch Uriel’s lethal theorems proved on its victim. The priest’s body was lifted against the ceiling and pinned there until the flames had devoured it.

It was over in seconds, and Shadwell squinted through the smoke to see Uriel moving off towards the Shrine, with Hobart loosing a sobbing howl of horror at what had been done. Shadwell followed, dwindling motes of fiery ash falling around him. The fire had not just caught the priest, but was eating at the very brick of the passageway, and consuming the caskets in the niches. The lead of their inner linings dripped from the ledges, and the bodies came with it, shrouds burning around their illustrious bones.

As he approached the door of the Shrine Shadwell’s feet slowed. This had been Immacolata’s domain. Here she’d been all-powerful, worshipped by unmanned men whose abeyance to Christ and his Mother had been a sham; men who’d believed her a Goddess. He’d never believed that himself. So why did he have this sudden fear upon him?: a desecrator’s fear?

He stepped inside the Shrine, and there had his answer. As he surveyed the bones on the walls he knew as only a lover could know that the creature he’d lusted after, and finally betrayed, was still holding court here. Death had no hold on her. She was in the walls, or in the air: somewhere near.

‘Goddess …’ he heard himself say.

There was no time to warn Uriel. A second priest, younger than his dead brother, appeared from the shadows and ran at the Angel, knife in hand. Hobart’s cry stopped, and he turned his mutinous hands to the task of preventing a second slaughter, clamping them to his face to dam the coming fire. The device gave the attacker time to deliver a cut, the knife entering Hobart’s side. But as the priest withdrew it for a second stab Uriel’s benediction spurted between Hobart’s fingers, then broke out entirely, taking the flesh and bone of his hands with it. The fire caught the priest head on and flung him across the Shrine. He danced against the bones for a heart-beat, then he, like his brother, was ash.

He’d done serious damage to Hobart, but it took Uriel less time to cauterize the wound with its glance than it had taken the knife to deliver it. The task done, it turned its gaze on Shadwell. For a breathless moment the Salesman thought it meant to burn him where he stood. But no.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ it said.

It had offered the same meagre comfort to Hobart mere minutes before. The sentiment had sounded hollow then, but more so now, in the light of the way it had maimed its host. Hobart’s hands, which he’d once envisaged burning with righteous fire, had been reduced to withered claws in the act of trying to prevent that fire from doing its work. Hobart was sobbing again, as he or the Angel held the stumps up to be examined. Had Uriel left him with the burden of pain his nerve-endings must be suffering, or did he sob that his body was an instrument in these abominations?

The arms dropped, and Uriel turned his attention to the walls.

‘I like these bones,’ it said, and wandered over to the most elaborate of the designs. Tendrils, thin as sewing-thread and lightning bright, skipped from its borrowed torso and face, and ran over the skulls and rib-cages.

There was a moment of hiatus, the fire roaring in the niches outside, the ashes of the second priest still hanging in the air. In that moment Shadwell heard Immacolata’s voice. It was the most intimate of whispers, a lover’s whisper.

‘What have you done?’ she said.

He glanced across at Uriel, who was still entranced by the macabre symmetry of the wall. It made no sign of having heard the Incantatrix. Again, the question.

‘What have you done?’ she said. ‘It knows no mercy.’

He did not need to voice his response. Thought was enough.

‘And you did?’ he answered.

‘I didn’t know myself,’ Immacolata told him. ‘I think this Scourge is the same.’

‘It’s called Uriel,’ Shadwell reminded her, ‘it’s an Angel.’

‘Whatever it is, you have no power over it.’

‘I freed it.’ Shadwell responded. ‘It obeys me.’

‘Why lie?’ Immacolata said. ‘I know when you’re afraid.’

The din of destruction broke the exchange. Shadwell looked up from his thoughts to see Uriel, its tendrils extended across the wall, sweep all the bones from their places like so much crockery from a piled table. They fell around it in a dusty litter, the remains of fully half a hundred people.

Uriel laughed – another trick it had caught from Shadwell – the sound made more distressing by its artificiality. It had found a game it liked. Turning to the next wall it proceeded to vandalize that in the same manner; then on to the third.

‘Tell it to stop …’ Immacolata’s ghost whispered, as bones large and small joined the myriad on the ground, ‘If you’re not afraid: tell it to stop.’

But Shadwell simply watched as the Angel cleared the fourth wall at a stroke, then turned its attention to the ceiling.

‘You’ll be next,’ Immacolata said.

Shadwell flattened himself against the now naked brick as remains rained down.

‘No …’ he murmured.

The bones stopped falling; there were none left on either walls or ceiling. Slowly, the dust began to settle. Uriel turned to Shadwell.

‘Why do you whisper behind my back?’ it enquired lightly.

Shadwell glanced towards the door. How far would he get if he tried to run now? A yard or two, probably. There was no escape. It knew; it heard.

‘Where is she?’ Uriel demanded. The demolished chamber was hushed from one end to the other. ‘Make her show herself.’

‘She used me,’ Shadwell began. ‘She’ll tell you lies. Tell you I loved raptures. I didn’t. You must believe me. I didn’t.’

He felt the Angel’s countless eyes upon him; their stare silenced him.

‘You can hide nothing from me,’ the Angel pronounced. ‘I know what you’ve desired, in all its triviality, and you needn’t fear me.’

‘No?’

‘No. I enjoy the dust you are. Shadwell. I enjoy your futility, your meaningless desires. But the other that’s here – the woman whose raptures I can smell – she I want to kill. Tell her to show herself and be done with it.’

‘She’s dead already.’

‘So why does she hide?’

‘I don’t,’ came Immacolata’s voice, and the bones on the floor churned like a sea as the ghost rose from them. Not simply from them but of them, defying Uriel’s destruction as her will made a new anatomy from the fragments. The result was far more than a sum of its parts. It was, Shadwell saw, not one but all of the sisters, or a projection of their collective spirit.

‘Why should I hide from you?’ the monument said. Every shard in its body revolved as she spoke.

‘Are you happy now?’ she asked.

‘What is happy?’ Uriel wanted to know.

‘Don’t bother to protest your innocence,’ the phantom said. ‘You know you don’t belong in this world.’

‘I came here before.’

‘And you left. Do so again.’

‘When I’m done,’ Uriel replied. ‘When the rapture-makers are