Liz Williams - Worldsoul

The first book in the Worldsoul Trilogy series, 2012

Fire tore through the library, scattering burning scrolls across the floor, inscribing smooth marble with letters of ash. With a breath of the sea wind through the glassless window, the words were gone. The pale-haired woman turned, a silhouette against the fire, took a dying word in her hand and stared at it. Flames licked the hem of her robe, leaving the linen untouched.

“This is an intriguing tongue,” she said. “Runic. From before the ice, perhaps? What do you think?”

“ Beheverah. ” The name was accented with exasperation. “We need to act. Before They realise what’s happening. Before They come.”

The woman arched an eyebrow. “You overestimate them. They’re savages, nothing more. Mindless… Although I grant you that their masters are not. There’s no rush.”

“Maybe not in the Liminality.” His voice was still sharp. “But here-this doesn’t work the same way. And we need to take action before it’s too late. Think of all the stories here they will devour. You can look at them at leisure, later, if you wish. All those stories,” he coaxed.

“Very well.” Beheverah sighed. It was so interesting in here, with everything changing so quickly, the flames climbing up to swallow marble and paper alike. She brushed a smouldering fragment from her skirts. “If you really think so… ”

Shouts were coming from outside, cries of panic and dismay trickling up from the harbour.

“The scrolls!” someone cried, an old voice, a heart breaking. “The scrolls!”

Raising her gaze beyond the blazing papyri, the woman could see out past the torchlight on the quay: a green sky, a greener sea, merging into one as the twilight deepened. A good time to steal something away; an edge in time. She reached out and touched her companion’s fingertips, stood on tiptoe, called on the horizon and the dying day. His murmuring voice summoned up power, drawing it from the fire and the cracking stone that surrounded them, making the spell concrete, then deconstructing it again. Beneath her bare toes, the library started to shift. She smiled. This was almost easy. She spoke three careful words, spells of moving, and the floor rippled as though she was standing on ocean.

More shouts. She knew what they’d see, those horrified observers. They’d see something that couldn’t possibly be happening: their beloved library-the greatest repository of knowledge in the world-first in flames and blazing, then starting to shimmer and glow, the gleam of magic blinding out the glow, then the whole magnificent columned structure meteor-shooting out of sight and taking its consuming fire with it.

Gone from Alexandria. Gone from Earth. But not gone forever.

At dawn, the distant hoot of the Golden Island steamer split the moist air and told Mercy Fane that it was time to get up. Mercy hauled herself out of bed. For an acknowledged insomniac, it was surprisingly difficult to get out from between the sheets, as though she might trick herself into dropping off after all. But work was beckoning; she’d told Nerren that she’d be in early. Big day today.

She dressed quickly in leather trousers and a crisp white shirt; oiled her hair and bound its springy coils in a club at the nape of her neck. She didn’t want any stray strands that something might be able to clutch. Then Mercy drew a line of kohl around each eye and inked the tattooed sigil spirals between her brows and around each shoulder-just in case-waiting a moment for each sigil to glimmer darkly, then fade to matte. After that, she fastened the ward-bracelets around her wrists and ankles, slipped a charm into the hole in her left earlobe, placed her sigilometer on its chain in her pocket, and was ready. A quick glance in the glass reassured her: Mercy Fane: Librarian, a chess-piece study in white and black.

She’d think about weapons later.

She went downstairs into the yellow-painted kitchen. Sunlight poured in through the branches of the apple tree outside the open window, the rosy fruit already ripening. Midsummer was past, the year was growing on. As she stared at the apples, the ka leaped in through the window to land on the table below.

“Morning, Perra. Good night?”

The ka yawned, stretching small leonine paws. Its grave golden eyes regarded her, from a human face. “Good enough.”

“Anything of interest?”

The ancestral spirit blinked. “Rumours. But there are always those. I have visited an astrologer, a friend. She says that there are curious configurations in the heavens.”

“There are always those, too.”

The ka nodded and sat back on its haunches. “Portents of change, throughout the city. Planetary alignments, signifying shifts of power.”

“Oh dear,” Mercy said. “Maybe the Seal is up to something again?”

“I do not know.”

“I don’t expect you to. I know it’s one place you can’t go.”

“They experiment on my kind,” Perra said.

“They experiment on everything,” Mercy replied. Bloody alchemists. It was different in the Eastern Quarter, where alchemy was a different, and honourable, science. Not so with the Seal, who regarded everything as grist for its sinister mill. She left the ka curled up on the couch and headed off to work.

Outside, the morning was already warm. Mercy walked along the canal bank, glancing down occasionally at the shoals of small golden fish whisking, in amoeboid commas, through the clear water. The city had known days when these canals ran red with blood-a long time ago now, but not quite long enough. And now there were these new attacks, the lethal flowers falling from the skies and bursting like bombs, the petals deadly shrapnel.

Mercy had only been a small child, but she still remembered the last days of the Long War, before the Quiet, and then the bloodspill of the Short. She felt a prickle at the back of her neck but the morning seemed peaceful enough.

On the Street of the Hunter, the cafés were already doing a roaring breakfast trade. Mercy stopped under an awning and bought a bun, eating it on her way to the Library. The way to work took her up the hill. As she climbed, she looked through the gaps in the buildings to the blue arc of sea, fringed with mimosa and oleander. Ahead, she could already see the Library and the other buildings of the Citadel, the gold-and-cream domes butter-bright against the morning sky, the gilded spell-vanes of the Court of the Bond glittering in the sunlight. She fancied for a moment that she could almost hear them creaking in the wind, turning on their spires to catch every whisper and breeze of passing magic and siphoning it down into the bubbling crucibles of the Court. But the roofs of the Court itself were darkly tiled: it sat like a jackdaw among doves, upon the hill. Black and bright-eyed, stealing anything shiny…

Still, it all looked so quiet from down here.

When she reached the steps of the Library, the bun was finished and Mercy’s monochrome outfit was covered in crumbs. She took a moment to brush them off. Why could she never stay tidy, unlike the many chic women she saw coming out of the Citadel buildings first thing in the evening, their chignons intact and free of escaping tendrils, their shoes as polished as beetles’ wings? Mercy felt as though her clothes and hair were perpetually escaping from her control, in spite of a reassuring glance down at her now crumb-free shirt. Sure that her hair was coming loose, too, she checked it. It seemed smooth enough. For now, anyway.