‘Seerkind?’ So many new words. ‘Are they the Fugue people?’
‘They’re dead people,’ came the reply. ‘Don’t look to them for answers. They’re dust soon enough. Gone the way everything in this stinking Kingdom goes. To dirt and mediocrity. We’ll see to that. You’re alone. Like she was.’
That ‘we’ reminded her of the Salesman, and the potency of the coat he wore.
‘Is Shadwell a Seerkind?’ she asked.
‘Him?’ The thought was apparently preposterous. ‘No. Any power he’s got’s my gift.’
‘Why?’ said Suzanna. She understood little of Immacolata, but enough to know that she and Shadwell were not a perfect match.
‘He taught me …’ the Incantatrix began, her hand moving up to her face, ‘… he taught me, the show.’ The hand passed across her features, and upon reappearing she was smiling, almost warmly. ‘You’ll need that now.’
‘And for that you’re his mistress?’
The sound that came from the woman might have been a laugh; but only might. ‘I leave love to the Magdalene, sister. She’s an appetite for it. Ask Mooney –’
Cal. She’d forgotten Cal.
‘– if he has the breath to answer.’
Suzanna glanced back towards the door.
‘Go on …’ said Immacolata, ‘… go find him. I won’t stop you.’
The brightness in her, the menstruum, knew the Incantatrix was telling the truth. That flood was part of them both now. It bonded them in ways Suzanna could not yet guess at.
‘The battle’s already lost, sister.’ Immacolata murmured as Suzanna reached the threshold. ‘While you indulged your curiosity, the Fugue’s fallen into our hands.’
Suzanna stepped back into the warehouse, fear beginning for the first time. Not for herself, but for Cal. She yelled his name into the murk.
‘Too late …’ said the woman behind her.
‘Cal!’
There was no reply. She started to search for him, calling his name at intervals, her anxiety growing with each unanswered shout. The place was a maze; twice she found herself in a location she’d already searched.
It was the glitter of broken glass that drew her attention; and then, lying face down a little way from it, Cal. Before she got close enough to touch him she sensed the profundity of his stillness.
He was too brittle, the menstruum in her said. You know how these Cuckoos are.
She rejected the thought. It wasn’t hers.
‘Don’t be dead.’
That was hers. It slipped from her as she knelt down beside him, a plea to his silence.
‘Please God, don’t be dead.’
She was frightened to touch him, for fear of discovering the worst, all the while knowing that she was the only help he had. His head was turned towards her, his eyes closed, his mouth open, trailing blood-tinged spittle. Instinctively, her hand went to his hair, as if she might stroke him awake, but pragmatism had not entirely deserted her, and instead her fingers sought the pulse in his neck. It was weak.
So the grief begins, Immacolata had said, mere minutes before. Had she known, even as she offered that prophecy, that Cal was half way to dying already?
Of course she’d known. Known, and welcomed the grief this would bring, because she wanted Suzanna’s pleasure in the menstruum soured from its discovery; wanted them sisters in sorrow.
Distracted by the realization she focused again on Cal to find that her hand had left his neck and was once again stroking his hair. Why was she doing this? He wasn’t a sleeping child. He was hurt; he needed more concrete help. But even as she rebuked herself she felt the menstruum start to rise from her lower abdomen, washing her entrails, and lungs and heart, and moving – without any conscious instruction – down her arm towards Cal. Before, it had been indifferent to his wounding; you know how these Cuckoos are, it had said to her. But her rage, or perhaps her sadness, had chastened it. Now she felt its energies carry her need to wake him, to heal him, through the palm of her hand and into his sealed head.
It was both an extraordinary sensation, and one she felt perfectly at ease with. When, at the last moment, it seemed not to want to go, she pressed it forward and it obeyed her, its stream flowing into him. It was hers to control, she realized, with a rush of exhilaration, which was followed immediately by an ache of loss as the body below her drank the torment down.
He was greedy for healing. Her joints began to jitter as the menstruum ran from her, and in her skull that alien song rose like a dozen sirens. She tried to take her hand from his head, but her muscles wouldn’t obey the imperative. The menstruum had taken charge of her body, it seemed. She’d been too hasty, assuming control would be easy. It was deliberately depleting itself, to teach her not to press it.
An instant before she passed out, it decided enough was enough, and removed her hand. The flow was abruptly stemmed. She put her shaking hands up to her face, Cal’s scent on her fingertips. By degrees the whine in her skull wound down. The faintness began to pass.
‘Are you all right?’ Cal asked her.
She dropped her hands and looked across at him. He’d raised himself from the ground, and was now gingerly investigating his bloodied mouth.
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘You?’
‘I’ll do,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know what happened …’ The words trailed away as the memory came back, and a look of alarm crossed his face.
‘The carpet –’
He hauled himself to his feet, looking all around.
‘– I had it in my hand,’ he said. ‘Jesus, I had it in my hand!’
‘They’ve taken it!’ she said.
She thought he was going to cry, the way his features crumpled up, but it was rage that emerged.
‘Fucking Shadwell!’ he shouted, sweeping a copse of table-lamps off the top of a chest-of-drawers. ‘I’ll kill him! I swear–’
She stood up still feeling giddy, and her downcast eyes caught sight of something in the litter of broken glass beneath their feet – she stooped again; cleared the fragments, and there was a piece of the carpet. She picked it up.
‘They didn’t get it all,’ she said, offering the find to Cal.
The anger melted from his face. He took it from her almost reverentially, and studied it. There were half a dozen motifs worked into the piece, though he could make no sense of them.
Suzanna watched him. He held the fragment so delicately, as though it might bruise. Then he sniffed, hard, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
‘Fucking Shadwell,’ he said again, but softly now; numbly.
‘What do we do now?’ she wondered aloud.
He looked up at her. This time there were tears in his eyes.
‘Get out of here,’ he said. ‘See what the sky says.’
‘Huh?’
He offered a tiny smile.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Must be Mad Mooney talking.’