“My headmistress at school called it a work of pagan darkness touched by the dawning of Christ.”
“Then I suspect you only got the highlights. To be aglœc is to possess greatness, for good or ill. My son has it. He killed his family. I was drowning in the scale of him. I chose to float, to be carried on his tide. I did not know what else to do. Monster’s mother.
“And then there was this. This new design, this plan: a thing to end war. The Frenchwoman has aglœca, no doubt. A divine smith, perhaps. Or a woman Prometheus, a thief of fire. She has no idea what my son will do with what she makes in her forge. Or perhaps she does. Perhaps she plots, too. The gifts of gods were always dangerous. A hero’s sword may be the blade on which he dies. So. But I do not know. I do not think she sees the world like that. She is not… small… enough.
“But something in me said: no. No more. This far and no further. I will not let him make the world in his own image. Horror and war and selfishness. No.” Dotty Catty sags. She waves her hands once, twice in front of her face, warding off flies and memories. Edie suspects she sees the young Shem Shem Tsien, looking for a lost ball or a favoured pet: Mother, can you help me? No, child. Not now. Not any more.
“So I betrayed him to your King. But I told them, I shall only meet a woman. They assumed it was customary. Bah! What do I care for custom, here, now? Do you imagine that I do? I plot against my son. Of course I do not care who comes to my room. Send the first five regiments of the British Army in India! Send them all, naked as they were born! I shall not be afrighted in the slightest. But I knew, if they sent a woman, she must be a rare one. To do this work at all, to be accepted, to be trusted with such a thing. They would have to think carefully. Send the best.” The Dowager-Khatun shakes her head, and Edie can smell rosehips and oil. From the lined, empty face, little dark eyes are measuring, probing. She wants something.
“I have a choice. I can float to my death, on the tide of a man’s destiny, or I can make my own. I can decide I will be great in my own way. I can accept that I, too, have a little aglœca within me. So I asked for you.”
Edie takes the line she has been given. “What for?”
“Those soldiers downstairs—they follow your orders?”
“Yes.”
“Aglœc-wif. A woman of consequence. A devil hag or a goddess. Do you see?”
“No. Nearly.”
“If I must do this thing—if I must betray my one remaining, murderous son—then it is an act of greatness. I do not mean that I am great. Just that this choice is the great kind of choice. So, then: let it be a matter between women of consequence. Between queens.”
“I’m… I’m sorry they sent me, then. I’m not that important.”
“Pfft. You have no rank, you mean. You are not Lady Edie or Duchess Edie.”
“No. Plain old Edie.”
“And yet here you are, on the far side of the world, with your King’s commission and soldiers to do your bidding. You have achieved things.”
“Small things, maybe.”
“With grand results. You play on the great stage.”
“I suppose.”
“And you will carry this through. You will get it right, whatever the cost?”
“I will.”
“Then you are a woman of consequence, Commander Banister. You will do very well. You will acquire secrets and treasure and weapons. And so that is the second thing: I have a treasure. All crones and witches do, do they not? A great treasure, that must not be held by one such as Shem Shem Tsien. You must take the Frenchwoman, and her impossible mind, and you must take my treasure, and you must spirit them away so they will be safe.”
“I’m only supposed to concern myself with the scientist—”
“Of course. But to concern yourself with the scientist, you must do as I ask. Or I shall not help you at all.”
Mad old hag, Edie Banister thinks, with considerable approval, and extends her hand. Dotty Catty smiles—terrible sight—and shakes it with vigour. Consumatum est.
“We’re ready to go,” says a shallow, nervous voice from the door, and Edie turns to see a pale young Ruskinite in a sort of warm-weather version of their usual kit, looking very unhappy and clandestine, but trying to be brave about it.
Dotty Catty leads the way.
Shem Shem Tsien is a man who likes, after taking his pleasure, to sleep with his hand upon his conquests. Amid the half-eaten carcass of the swan, row upon row of ewers and a heap of slumbering, exhausted trollops—Edie recognises At Your Service on top of the pile—the Opium Khan lies on his side, rapt in dreams of war and pillage. Edie wonders sickly whether he forced the crucified bishop to watch the whole debauch.
Dotty Catty’s rescue party steps lithely past the doorway of the sleeping Khan and on through corridors of dressed stone and down staircases to rougher tunnels and mazy passages, until a strange, caustic smell floats in the air and a sound as of water falling on a bass drum the size of Kentish Town thrums around them. Dotty Catty holds up her hand, and her two attendants step to the side of the corridor and wait.
Ahead of them is a stout wooden door. Dotty Catty eyes it with a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty. Edie glances at her.
“Best get this rescue on the road, ey?” she says.
Dotty Catty nods. She steps forward and opens the door.
Edie has a sense of space even before her eyes adjust to the gloom beyond, and in that space, a great presence, as if she has come into the kennel of a titanic dog and can feel the hound snuffling around her. And then her brain lumbers up behind, assembling the pieces.
The room is vast.
It’s so big, it isn’t properly a room. It is a chamber, or a cavern. And yet there is a sense of the familiar, even the homely… oh. Of course. Abel Jasmine has been making a place just like this in Cornwall, to greet his transplanted genius when she arrives.
Above and to one side, Edie can see part of the depthless shaft which plunges from the Khan’s throne room, and passes on through the floor of the cavern to a river down below. And all around, there are figures, man-high and higher, frozen in aspects of combat and carnage, and a battlefield littered with limbs, as if a chess game has come alive and then stopped in mid-course.
Edie’s first thought is of the lair of the Gorgon Medusa, populated with the petrified corpses of defeated foes. Then she wonders whether at some point some primordial glacier has rolled through this cavern and deposited its frozen passengers here, and finally whether the Opium Khan has arranged a great graveyard of his enemies under his throne. Then she realises that all the warriors—lying atop one another, transfixed and hanging on spears, or slumped over on their knees—are made of metal. The ground is littered with cogs and springs, wires and belts, and the whole cavern smells of heated metal and construction. As Dotty Catty leads the way between them, Edie can pick out the stamps of individual Ruskinite craftsmen on the beautiful, broken arms and fanciful masks. Cogs jut through burnished skins of brass, and the black, grimy stains which run from their wounds are oil, not blood. A legion of homunculi.
She steps closer, and nearly loses her head as the nearest one swings its sword abruptly forward. She steps back and the blow swooshes past. She stares: the homunculus is pinned to the ground by another’s weapon, but the eyeless face tracks her all the same. A moment later, its opponent turns to face her too. When she stays still, they go back to looking at one another. Behind her she can hear Songbird swearing continuously under his breath.