The Crooked Letter (63 page)

‘You,’ said Meg, pointing at Hadrian, ‘should have been told about the third way by the raven, Kutkinnaku, and the oracle, Mimir. The imp Pukje would have shown you the rest, had the opportunity presented itself. In that timeline, you and your brother would have met before now, in the devachan between the realms.’

‘In that timeline,’ concluded Ana, ‘this outcome would have been much more likely.’

‘So,’ said Hadrian, ‘you’re saying that this will be our new history.’

‘Yes.’ The taller Sister nodded.

‘Will we remember the old one?’

‘There might be some blurring. Memory is fluid. Facts rarely speak for themselves when you’re down among them.’

That suited him. If there was any chance of erasing the attack of the draci from his mind, he was going to take it.

The pounding of the invaders reached a new note.

‘I thought I said no speeches,’ Seth said. ‘Let’s just do it. Before Yod breaks free would be good.’

Hadrian raised a hand. ‘I think we should hear them out.’

‘Realms come and go,’ Ana said, ‘and so do the things that live in them.’

‘I know, sister, but the one place that has always existed is the devachan, the void. It surrounds the realms like air: although invisible and unfelt, its effects are very, very real. Your emergence from the void,’ Meg said to the twins, ‘will spark a new round of uncertainty. It’s difficult to know what might happen beyond that point.’

‘What about the rest of us?’ asked Synett, moving from a position on the sideline to confront the Sisters. ‘Don’t I get a say in what happens to me? I’m human, too.’

‘That’s for us to know and the rest of you to find out,’ said Ana.

‘My sister is responding to your first question, not your final statement.’ Meg’s eyes twinkled. ‘You will get a say, Ronald Synett, but not here and not now.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Are we talking about letting the Cataclysm happen or not?’

‘Neither,’ said Seth. ‘Why
are
we still talking?’

‘Because
we
have not made our decision yet,’ said Ana. ‘Hadrian? Are you committed?’

He considered only for a moment, although it felt like eternity in miniature. He had initially been looking for a way to minimise or contain the Cataclysm. Instead, he had stumbled across a means of transcending it. That didn’t automatically make it right; there were indeed numerous effects he couldn’t see, since his life-tree was no longer visible in all its grim complexity. If he was wrong, he could be condemning the world to something worse than any mere Cataclysm.

The First Realm had laws, and so did the Second Realm. Perhaps it was time to try some new laws, for a change. For the Change.

Do the right thing, boy,
Pukje had said. That was all very well, Hadrian thought, if one knew what the right thing was. Was it what Seth would do, or what he would do? Or what they could do
together?

‘I — I think this is the best course,’ he said. ‘Of all the choices I have open to me, of all the different world-lines I saw, this isn’t the easiest or the simplest, but it is the most — apt.’

‘Well put,’ said Meg. ‘Very well. You have made your wishes known. It’s our turn now.’

‘As it happens,’ said Ana, ‘my sister and I are diametrically opposed on which way to cast our votes. I am inclined to let nature play its course, while Meg is curious to intervene. We need a tie breaker.’

‘Ellis,’ said Meg, ‘it’s your turn now. Your decision will break our deadlock.’

‘Come forward, Nona,’ added Ana with a devilish look.

‘I just knew this was going to happen,’ said Ellis, standing up straighter between Ana and Meg. The three of them were the right height to form a straight diagonal along the top of their heads. Ellis was younger than any of them by decades — or appeared so — but her presence fitted perfectly between them.

‘While I have no memory of ever doing this before,’ she said, ‘or of being someone other than who I am now, I can’t deny that I’m well placed to make this choice. I was there when Seth died; I’m here now when the twins are reunited. I am a victim of Yod’s plan as much as they are, and I stand to lose much should the Cataclysm proceed as Yod intends it to. I’ve already lost one world. Can I stand by and watch as another is destroyed?’

She hesitated. Her poise didn’t crack, but Hadrian thought he glimpsed the pressure she was under. Should she give her former lovers what they wanted, or should she let this branch of their tangled life-memories play itself out? The decision couldn’t possibly be an easy one.

‘But I’m only human,’ she said. ‘I didn’t ask to be more than that. The woman I was in a previous life, the woman called Moyo — she thought she was only a woman too, and she acted accordingly. She loved mirror twins and died in the near-Cataclysm triggered by their deaths.’ The monsters, flat gold eyes blinking with complex emotions, hung on her every word. ‘Her memory was revered by the people she left behind — but that doesn’t make up for the fact that she was used, just as
I’m
being used. That someone who thinks they’re us is doing the using doesn’t make it any easier to accept.

‘I’m not the sort of person who takes things lying down. Neither was Moyo. In fact, the longer I think about it, the more certain I am that she had definite reasons for wanting me back in the spotlight again. Eventually, the time comes to take action. So the decision I’m about to make will be as much for me as it is for Seth and Hadrian or for either of the realms.’

She reached out to take Meg’s hand; the older woman took it, but with hesitation, as if suddenly uncertain.

‘We are the Three Sisters,’ Ellis said solemnly, taking Ana’s hand in turn. ‘Once made, our decision stands forever. It cannot be appealed or undone.’

Hadrian swallowed.

‘Will we see you again?’ Seth asked.

‘That’s what Hadrian asked me in Sweden,’ she said instead of answering. ‘I’m as decided now as I was then.’

The Flame flared behind them. The fabric of the realm flexed.

In a soft voice, as though speaking to the two of them alone, she said: ‘Boys, I set you both free.’

* * * *

AFTER

‘People say many things. The truth is silent.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
FRAGMENT 332

he first of the Lost Minds took the twins by surprise, so enmeshed were they in the song of the deep void. They had almost forgotten that there was or had been anything else. They could not have guessed how long it had been since they went out of the world.

The first was a woman named Yugen. She said that she was a magician from the Greater Desert. They listened to her story with rapt fascination. She had been working with a team of engineers on the construction of a ravine designed to split the desert in two. Why this was necessary she never completely conveyed. The world she spoke of was very different to the one they had left, one of strange creatures, dangerous ruins, and terrible adversity. Humanity survived in isolated pockets, avoiding the depopulated, haunted cities wherever possible and only with great difficulty gathering new alliances against those who would harm them. The ravine was somehow intended to keep disaster at bay: a supernatural version of China’s Great Wall perhaps.

The twins’ first glimpse of the world they had made came in brief fragments as Yugen raged about her new prison, trying to find a way out. She howled at infinity and screamed at the endless drone. She wove charms and chanted arcane words. None of them made any difference. There she remained, with them.

The twins tried to explain who they were and why they had done what they did. It wasn’t easy. There were moments they did not want to revisit. Only time would tell whether it had all been for nothing.

* * * *

And She said: I know that you have sinned, and greatly, but the time has come for you to put that life behind you. I give you a new life, a new message. You must take it to the world in my name, and deliver the ones I love from oblivion.

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
FRAGMENT 13

Seth remembered: the Flame imploding and the two Sisters being sucked into it; ekhi breaking into Sheol and Ellis escaping on a brilliant, hypnotic back; mountains closing in over a dark, hunched shape and three slender glassy towers entombing them all. Through the chaos, a green figure strode calmly toward him and whispered softly into his ear.

‘Peace, Seth. This is neither our first meeting nor our last. In your future, the Goddess awaits.’

Then Horva was gone. Seth dreamed of Agatha placing one of her self-made silver rings on his finger. The bubble of the world burst, and a new topography swept over the land. A book opened, and a bandaged hand began to write.

‘Remember us, Seth,’ Horva insisted from very far away. ‘Please, remember us ...’

* * * *

Seth remembered a sharp tugging sensation as though his soul had snagged on something and begun to unravel. A rush of sensations threw him off-balance. Third Realm memories flooded through him, granting him sensory flashes of times long past and times yet to come. The feel of lips on his came and went, followed almost immediately by the smell of ancient dirt, dry and electric. His lungs tightened in thin, cold air.

Everything went black.

‘Are we there yet?’ Hadrian asked out of the darkness.

Seth knew what his brother meant: were they in the new timeline? Had the old one fallen away like so much shed skin? Had the Cataclysm been subverted?

‘I don’t think we’re anywhere at all,’ he said, as the void pressed in around them and only echoes of their lives remained.

* * * *

Whence did the Goddess come? There are those who say that glowing jade Angels carried Her gently from the Sky onto the Mountain, where the ruined air was thick with the smell of Blood. Though the Beast raged in its stone Cage beneath her, and the Earth shook to feel it, She was not afraid.

There She met the Imp who was also a Dragon and found two Bodies. One She interred at the Summit of the World, where a Crater marks the place of Her return. The other She burned and scattered to the Four Winds. The Spirit of the Wolf bit and clawed at her, but it could do Her no harm.

When that was done, the Angels bowed to Her and took their leave to continue on the Holy Path. The Imp fled as the Goddess and Her two beastly Companions travelled aloft in a fiery Balloon, rending the Sky and remaking it more to Her liking. The Earth She rearranged at Her whim, rending and mending as She saw fit. She remade the World, not in Her image, but so it might flourish and grow under the Light of a new Sun.

Her Work continues even now, some say, in ways we can never know.

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
FRAGMENT 143

The hum was deep and resonant. It swept the twins up on its back and carried them on the harmonics of infinity. The temptation was strong to dissolve into it, to let all thoughts and concerns wash away forever like blood from a wound into an ocean.

‘Don’t leave me,’ Hadrian begged. ‘Stay here with me. Keep me sane.’

Seth remembered swearing that he would rather be damned than admit that Hadrian was the missing piece of him. The irony of it all — that they should end up locked together for an eternity, like babes in a womb — was not lost on him. The noose of twinship had slipped around both their necks, and might not ever let them go. The faint promise of the future Meg had shown him now seemed very thin indeed.

‘Seth? Are you there?’

‘I’m here, little brother.’ The words emerged from the void like a sigh, like a thought that belonged to both of them. ‘I can’t leave you now.’

Sandwiched in the knot that had once been Bardo but was now something else, the twins waited. They weren’t in the First Realm; they weren’t in the Second Realm; they were between, holding the worlds together like glue. There was no sensation in the void to mark the passage of time; there was no landscape to explore; there was nothing on which they could enact their will but each other.

Seth remembered waiting for oblivion as his soul rose from the First Realm to the Second, a hundred lifetimes ago. There had been so much to live for, so many reasons to be angry about dying. Now, there was only one thing to cling to, one passion to keep him going, and it was all too easy to forget what that was in the dark.

I set you both free ...

The hum swept over them like the breathing of an ocean, smoothing them out and removing their sharp edges. They rolled and tumbled in its embrace, in each other’s embrace. Time passed, and they knew it not.

* * * *

The legends of the Goddess are as numerous as her names. Our Lady of the Eye, some call her, was said to have tamed the stone people of the earth, binding them in service to the heirs of the new world. The Three in One, according to others, caged the ghosts of the old times in towers