Weaveworld. Клайв Баркер

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СКАЧАТЬ sign – little more than a dirt-mark on her palsied hand – to keep the Incantatrix at bay.

      But nothing happened. There was no release of power; not even a breath. She tried to recall if the Babu had given her some specific instruction about activating the rapture, but all her mind would conjure was his face; and a smile he’d given her; and the trees behind his head sieving sunlight through their branches. What days they’d been; and she so young; and it all an adventure.

      No adventure now. Just death on a stale bed.

      Suddenly, a roar. And from her palm – released by the memory, perhaps – the rapture broke.

      A ball of energy leapt from her hand. Immacolata stepped back as a humming net of light came down around the bed, keeping malice at bay.

      The Incantatrix was quick to respond. The menstruum, that stream of bright darkness which was the blood of her subtle body, spilled from her nostrils. It was a power Mimi had seen manifested no more than a dozen times, always and only by women: an etheric solution in which it was said the wielder could dissolve all experience, and make it again in the image of her desire. While the Old Science was a democracy of magic, available to all – independent of gender, age or moral standing – the menstruum seemed to choose those it favoured. It had driven a fair number of those chosen to suicide with its demands and its visions; but it was undeniably a power – perhaps even a condition of the flesh – that knew no bounds.

      It took a few droplets only, their spheres becoming barbed in the air, to lacerate the net that the Babu rapture had created, leaving Mimi utterly vulnerable.

      Immacolata stared down at the old woman, fearful of what would come next. Doubtless the Council had left the Custodian with some endgame rapture which, in extremis, she’d unleash. That was why she’d counselled Shadwell that they try other routes of investigation first: in order to avoid this potentially lethal confrontation. But those routes had all been cul-de-sacs. The house in Rue Street had been robbed of its treasure. The sole witness, Mooney, had lost his wits. She’d been obliged to come here and face the Custodian, not fearing Mimi herself, but rather the scale of the defences the Council had surely lodged with her.

      ‘Go on …’ she said, ‘… do your worst.’

      The old woman just lay there, her eyes full of anticipation.

      ‘We haven’t got forever,’ Immacolata said. ‘If you’ve got raptures, show them.’

      Still she just lay there, with the arrogance of one who had power in plentiful supply.

      Immacolata could bear the waiting no longer. She took a step towards the bed, in the hope of making the bitch show her powers; whatever they were. There was still no response.

      Was it possible that she’d misread the signs? Was it perhaps not arrogance that made the woman lie so still, but despair? Dare she hope that the Custodian was somehow, miraculously, defenceless?

      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 СКАЧАТЬ