She touched Mimi’s open palm, brushing the spent calligraphy. The power there was defunct; and nothing further came to meet her from the woman on the bed.
If Immacolata knew pleasure, she knew it then. Unlikely as it seemed, the Custodian was unarmed. She possessed no final, devastating rapture. If she’d ever had such authority, age had decayed it.
‘Time to unburden yourself,’ she said, and let a dribble of torment climb into the air above Mimi’s trembling head.
2
The night nurse consulted the clock on the wall. It was thirty minutes since she’d left the tearful daughter with Mrs Laschenski. Strictly speaking she should have told the visitor to return the following morning, but the woman had travelled through the night, and besides there was every chance the patient would not make it to first light. Rules had to be tempered with compassion; but half an hour was enough.
As she started down the corridor, she heard a cry issuing from the old lady’s room, and the sound of furniture being overturned. She was at the door in seconds. The handle was clammy, and refused to turn. She rapped on the door, as the noise within grew louder still.
‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.
Inside, the Incantatrix looked down at the bag of dry bones and withered flesh on the bed. Where did this woman find the will-power to defy her?; to resist the needles of interrogation the menstruum had driven up through the roof of her mouth, into her very thoughts?
The Council had chosen well, electing her as one of the three guardians of the Weaveworld. Even now, with the menstruum probing the seals of her brain, she was preparing a final and absolute defence. She was going to die. Immacolata could see her willing death upon herself before the needles pricked her secrets out.
On the other side of the door the nurse’s enquiries rose in pitch and volume.
‘Open the door! Please, will you open the door!’
Time was running out. Ignoring the nurse’s calls, Immacolata closed her eyes and dug into the past for a marriage of forms that she hoped would unseat the old woman’s reason long enough for the needles to do their work. One part of the union was easily evoked: an image of death plucked from her one true refuge in the Kingdom, the Shrine of the Mortalities. The other was more problematic, for she’d only seen the man Mimi had left behind in the Fugue once or twice. But the menstruum had its way of dredging the memory up, and what better proof of the illusion’s potency than the look that now came over the old woman’s face, as her lost love appeared to her at the bottom of the bed, raising his rotting arms? Taking her cue. Immacolata pressed the points of her enquiry into the Custodian’s cortex, but before she had a chance to find the carpet there, Mimi – with one last gargantuan effort – seized hold of the sheet with her good hand and flung it towards the phantom, a punning call on the Incantatrix’s bluff.
Then she fell sideways from the bed, dead before she hit the floor.
Immacolata shrieked her fury; and as she did so, the nurse flung the door open.
What the woman saw in Room Six she would never tell, not for the rest of her long life. In part because she feared the derision of her peers; in part because if her eyes told the truth, and there were in the living world such terrors as she glimpsed in Mimi Laschenski’s room, to talk of them might invite their proximity, and she, a woman of her times, had neither prayers nor wit enough to keep such darkness at bay.
Besides, they were gone even as her eyes fell upon them – the naked woman and the dead man at the foot of the bed – gone as if they’d never been. And there was just the daughter, saying: ‘No … no …’ and her mother dead on the floor.
‘I’ll get the Doctor,’ said the nurse. ‘Please stay here.’
But when she got back to the room, the grieving woman had made her final farewells, and left.
3
‘What happened?’ said Shadwell, as they drove from the hospital.
‘She’s dead,’ said Immacolata, and said no more until they’d driven two miles from the gates.
Shadwell knew better than to press her. She would tell what she had to tell in her own good time.
Which she did, saying:
‘She had no defence, Shadwell, except some poxy trick I learned in my cot.’
‘How’s that possible?’
‘Maybe she just grew old.’ came Immacolata’s reply. ‘Her mind rotted.’
‘And the other Custodians?’
‘Who knows? Dead, maybe. Wandered off into the Kingdom. She was on her own, at the last.’ The Incantatrix smiled; an expression her face was not familiar with. ‘There was I, being cautious and calculating, afraid she’d have raptures that’d undo me, and she had nothing. Nothing. Just an old woman dying in a bed.’
‘If she’s the last, there’s no-one to stop us, is there? No-one to keep us from the Fugue.’
‘So it’d seem,’ Immacolata replied, then lapsed into silence again, content to watch the sleeping Kingdom slide past the window.
It still amazed her, this woeful place. Not in its physical particulars, but in its unpredictability.
They’d grown old here, the Keepers of the Weave. They – who’d loved the Fugue enough to give their lives to keep it from harm – they’d finally wearied of their vigil, and withered into forgetfulness.
Hate remembered though; hate remembered long after love had forgotten. She was living proof of that. Her purpose – to find the Fugue and break its bright heart – was undimmed after a search that had occupied a human life-time.
And that search would soon be over. The Fugue found and put up for auction, its territories playgrounds for the Cuckoos, its peoples – the four great families – sold into slavery or left to wander in this hopeless place. She looked out at the city. A fidgety light was washing brick and concrete, frightening off what little enchantment the night might have lent.
The magic of the Seerkind could not survive long in such a world. And, stripped of their raptures, what were they? A lost people, with visions behind their eyes, and no power to make them true.
They and this tarnished, forsaken city would have much to talk about.
1
Of the design which her grandmother had shown her, she could find no sign. It was not in the grain of the floorboards, nor in the pattern of the wallpaper. Whatever it had been, it was gone now. She didn’t