Weave World

That sense of ease didn't falter. The dust moved in front of her in a slow dance, more soothing than distressing, the two flanking shapes forsaking their creation before they became coherent and running into the central figure to lend it new solidity. Even then it was only a dust-ghost, barely able to hold itself together. But in the features that were taking shape before her Suzanna could see traces of Immacolata.

What more perfect place for the Incantatrix to keep her Shrine? Death had always been her passion.

The priest was scrabbling for a prayer in the passageway outside, but the grey, glittering smudge that hung in the air in front of Suzanna was unmoved. Its features had elements of not one but all three sisters. The Hag's senility; the Magdalene's sensuality; the exquisite symmetry of Immacolata. Unlikely as it seemed, the synthesis worked; the marriage of contradictions rendered both more tenuous and more pliant by the delicacy of its construction. It seemed to Suzanna that if she breathed too hard she'd undo it.

And then the voice. That, at least, was recognizably Immacolata's, but there was a softness in it now that it had previously lacked. Perhaps, even, a delicate humour?

‘We're glad you came,' she said. ‘Will you request the Adamatical to leave? We have business to do, you and I.'

‘What sort of business?'

‘It's not for his ears,' the mote ghost said. ‘Please. Help him to his feet, will you? And tell him there's no harm done. They're so superstitious, these men ....'

She did as Immacolata asked: went down the drumming corridor to where the man was cowering, and drew him to his feet.

‘I think maybe you should leave,' she said. The Lady wants it.'

The priest gave her a sickened look.

‘All this time — ‘ he said. ‘I never really believed.'

‘It's all right,' she said. ‘There's no damage done.'

‘Are you coming too?'

‘No.'

‘I can't come back for you,' he warned her, tears spilling down his cheeks.

‘I understand,' she said. ‘You go on. I'm safe.'

He needed no further urging, but was off up the stairs like a jack rabbit. She returned down the passageway - the caskets still rattling - to face the woman.

‘I thought you were dead,' she said.

‘What's dead?' Immacolata replied. ‘A word the Cuckoos use when the flesh fails. It's nothing, Suzanna; you know that.'

‘Why are you here, then?'

‘I've come to pay a debt to you. In the Temple, you kept me from falling, or have you forgotten?'

‘No.'

‘Nor I. Such kindnesses are not negligible. I understand that now. I understand many things. You see how I'm reunited with my sisters? Together we're as we could never be apart. A single mind, three-in-one. I am we; and we see our malice, and regret it.'

Suzanna might well have doubted this unlikely confession but that the menstruum, brimming at her eyes and throat, confirmed the truth of it. The wraith before her - and the power behind it - had no hatred on its mind. What did it have? There was the question. She didn't need to ask; it knew her question.

I'm here with a warning,' it said.

‘About what? Shadwell?'

‘He's only a part of what you now face, sister. A fragment.'

‘Is it the Scourge?'

The phantom shuddered at the name, though surely its state put it beyond the reach of such dangers. Suzanna didn't wait for confirmation. There was no use disbelieving the worst now.

‘Is Shadwell something to do with the Scourge?' she asked.

‘He raised it.'

‘Why?'

‘He thinks magic has tainted him.' the dust said. ‘Corrupted his innocent salesman's soul. Now he won't be content until every rapture-maker's dead.'

‘And the Scourge is his weapon?'

‘So he believes. The truth may be more ... complex.'

Suzanna ran her hand down over her face, her mind seeking the best route of enquiry. One simple question occurred:

‘What kind of creature is this Scourge?'

The answer's perhaps just another question,' said the sisters. ‘It thinks that it's called Uriel.'

‘Uriel?'

‘An Angel.'

Suzanna almost laughed at the absurdity of this.

That's what it believes, having read the Bible.'

‘I don't follow.'

‘Most of this is beyond even our comprehension, but we offer you what we know. It's a spirit. And it once stood guard over a place where magic was. A garden, some have said, though that may be simply another fiction.'

‘Why should it want to wipe the Seerkind out?'

They were made there, in that garden, kept from the eyes of Humankind, because they had raptures. But they fled from it.'

‘And Uriel -'

‘ - was left alone, guarding an empty place. For centuries.'

Suzanna was by no means certain she believed any of this, but she wanted to hear the story completed.

‘What happened?'

‘It went mad, as any prisoner of duty must, left without fresh instructions. It forgot itself, and its purpose. All it knew was sand and stars and emptiness.'

‘You should understand...' said Suzanna. ‘I find all this difficult to believe, not being a Christian.'

‘Neither are we,' said the three-in-one.

‘But you still think the story's true?'

‘We believe there's truth inside it, yes.'

The reply made her think again of Mimi's book, and all it contained. Until she'd entered its pages the realm of Faery had seemed child's play. But facing Hobart in the forest of their shared dreams, she'd learned differently. There'd been truth inside that story: why not this too? The difference was that the Scourge occupied the same physical world as she did. Not metaphor, not dream-stuff; real.

‘So it forgot itself,' she said to the phantom. ‘How then did it remember?'

‘Perhaps it never hasI said Immacolata. ‘But its home was found, a hundred years back, by men who'd gone looking for Eden. In their heads it read the story of the paradise garden and took it for its own, whether it was or not. It found a name too. Uriel, flame of God. The spirit who stood at the gates of lost Eden -'

‘And was it Eden? The place it guarded?'

‘You don't believe that any more than I do. But Uriel does. Whatever its true name is - if it even has one - that name's forgotten. It believes itself an Angel. So, for better or worse, it is.'

The notion made sense to Suzanna, in its way. If, in the dream of the book, she'd believed herself a dragon, why shouldn't something lost in madness take an Angel's name?

‘It murdered its discoverers, of course - ‘ Immacolata was saying,' - then went looking for those who'd escaped it.'

The Families.'

‘Or their descendants. And it almost wiped them out. But they were clever. Though they didn't understand the power that pursued them, they knew how to hide. The rest you're familiar with.'

‘And Uriel? What did it do when the Seerkind disappeared?'

‘It returned to its fortress.'

‘Until Shadwell.'

‘Until Shadwell.'

Suzanna mused on this for a little time, then asked the one question this whole account begged. ‘What about God?' she said. The three-in-one laughed, her motes somersaulting. ‘We don't need God to make sense of this,' she said. Suzanna wasn't certain if she spoke only for themselves or for her too. ‘If there was a First Cause, a force of which this Uriel is a fragment, it's forsaken its sentinel.'