He was lying in darkness on a scented bed, while a woman's voice sang to him, some wordless lullaby whose cradle rhythms were shared by a feather-light touch upon his body. Fingers were playing on his abdomen and groin. They were cold, but they knew more tricks than a whore. He was hard in a heart-beat; gasping in two. He'd never felt such caresses, coaxed by agonizing degrees to the point of no return. His gasps became cries, but the lullaby drowned them out, matting his manhood with its nursery lilt. He was a helpless infant, despite his erection; or perhaps because of it. The touch grew more demanding, his cries more urgent.

For an instant his thrashings shook him from his dream, and his eyes flickered open long enough to see that he was still in the sister's sepulchral embrace. Then the smothering slumber claimed him again, and he discharged into an emptiness so profound it devoured not only his seed but the lullaby and its singer; and; finally, the dream itself.

He woke alone, and weeping. Every ligament tenor, he untied the knot he'd made of himself, and stood up.

His watch read nine minutes after two. The last train of the night had left Lime Street long ago; and the first of Sunday morning would not run for many hours yet.

VI

SICK SOULS

1

Sometimes Mimi woke; sometimes she slept. But one was much like the other now: sleep marred by distress and discomfort - wakefulness full of unfinished thoughts that faded into scraps of nonsense, like dreams. One moment she was certain there was a small child crying in the turner of the room, until the night nurse came in, and wiped the tears from her patient's eyes. Another moment she could see, as if through a dirtied window, some place she knew, but had lost, and her old bones ached with wanting to be there.

But then came another vision, and this one she hoped against hope was a dream. It was not.

‘Mimi?' said the dark woman.

The stroke that had crippled Mimi had dimmed her eyes, but she had sight enough to recognize the figure standing at the bottom of her bed. After years of being alone with her secret, somebody from the Fugue had finally found her. But there would be no tearful reunions tonight, not with this visitor, nor her dead sisters.

The Incantatrix Immacolata had come here to fulfil a promise she'd made before the Fugue had been hidden: that, if she could not rule the Seerkind, she'd destroy them. She was Lilith's descendant, she'd always claimed: the last pure line from the first state of magic. Her authority over them was therefore unquestionable. They'd laughed at her for her presumption. It wasn't their nature to be ruled, nor to count much on genealogy. Immacolata had been humiliated; a fact a woman like her - possessed, it had to be admitted, of powers that were purer than most - would not easily forget. Now she'd found the carpet's last Custodian, and she'd have blood if she could get it.

An age ago the Council had bequeathed Mimi some of the tactics of the Old Silence to arm her against a situation such as this. They were minor raptures, no more: devices to distract an enemy. Nothing fatal. That took more time to learn than they'd had. She'd been grateful for them at the time, however: they'd offered some smidgen of comfort as she faced life in the Kingdom without her beloved Romo. But the year had gone by and nobody had come, either to tell her that the waiting was over and the Weave could give up its secrets or to try and take the Fugue by force. The excitement of the early years, knowing she stood between magic and its destruction, dwindled to a weary watchfulness. She became lazy and forgetful; they all did.

Only towards the end, when she was alone, and she realized just how frail she was becoming, did she shake off the stupor that living amongst the Cuckoos had brought on, and try to set her beleaguered mental powers to the proem of the secret she'd protected for so long. But by that time her mind was wandering - the first symptoms of the stroke that would incapacitate her. It took her a day and a half to compose the short letter she'd written to Suzanna, a letter in which she'd risked saying more than she vented to, because time was getting short, and she sensed danger She'd been right; here it was. Immacolata had probably sensed the signal Mimi had sent up at the very last' a summons to any Kingdom-bound Seerkind who might have come to her aid. That, with hindsight, had probably been her greatest error. An incantatrix of Immacolata's strength would not have missed suchs alarms.

Here she was, come to visit Mind like a dispossessed child eager to make good at the death-bed, and so claim her inheritance. It was an analogy not lost on the creature.

I told the nurse I was your daughter: she said, ‘and that I heeded some time with you. Alone.'

Mimi would have spat in disgust, had she had the strength or the spittle.

‘- I know you're going to die, so I've come to say goodbye, after all these years. You've lost the power of speech, I hear; so I'm not to expect you to babble your confession. There are other ways. We know how the mind can, be laid bare without words, don't we?'

She stepped a little closer to the bed.

Mimi knew what the Incantatrix said was true; there were ways a body - even one as wretched and dose to death as her own - could be made to give up its secrets, if the interrogator knew the methods. And Immacolata did. She, the slaughterer of her own sisters; she, the eternal virgin, whose celibacy gave her access to powers lovers were denied: she had ways. Mini would have to turn some final trick, or all would be lost.

From the corner of her eye Mimi saw the Hag, the withered sister, hunkered up beside the wall, her toothless maw wide. The Magdalene, Immacolata's second sister, was occupying the visitor's chair, her legs splayed. They were waiting for the fun to begin.

Mimi opened her mouth, as if to speak.

‘Something to say?' Immacolata asked.

As the Incantatrix spoke Mimi used what little strength she had to turn her left hand palm up. There, amid the grid of her life and love lines, was a symbol, drawn in henna, and reworked so often that her skin was now irredeemably stained; a symbol taught to her hours before the great weaving by a Baba in the Council.

She'd long-ago forgotten what it meant or did - if she'd ever been told - but it was one of the few defences they'd given her that she was in any condition to use.

The raptures of the Lo were physical, and her body was too paralysed to perform them; those of the Aia were musical, and being tone deaf, had been the first she'd forgotten. The Ye-me, the Seerkind whose genius was weaving, hadn't given her raptures at all. They'd been too busy, during those last, hectic days, with the business of their magnum opus: the carpet that was soon to conceal the Fugue from sight for an age.

Indeed, most of what that Babu had taught her was beyond her present power to use - word raptures were valueless if your lips couldn't shape them. All she had left was this obscure 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. Inunacolata 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 ail 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.