‘Nobody crosses me, Mooney!' he screamed; then fired.

But even as he pulled the trigger somebody leapt at him. He fell sideways. The bullet flew wide of its target.

Cal's saviour was Nimrod. He raced towards Cal now, his expression all urgency. He had reason. The entire house had begun to shake; there were roars of capitulation from above and below. The Fugue had reached the foundations, and its enthusiasm was about to pitch the house over.

Nimrod seized hold of Cal's arm, and pulled him not towards the door but towards the window. Or rather, the wall that had once contained the window, for the burgeoning Weave had torn them all out. Beyond the wreckage, the Fugue was telling its long-silenced story hither and thither, filling the darkness with further magic.

Nimrod glanced behind him.

‘Are we going to jump?' said Cal.

Nimrod grinned, and held on even tighter to Cal's arm. One backward glance told Cal that Shadwell had found his gun, and was aiming it at their backs.

‘Look out!' he yelled.

Nimrod's face brightened, and he pressed his hand on the nape of Cal's neck, to make him tuck his head down. An instant later Cal understood why, as a wave of colour sprang from the Weave, and Nimrod threw them both before it. The force carried them out through the window, and for a panicky moment they trod thin air. Then the brightness seemed to

solidify and spread beneath them, and they were riding down it like surfers on a tide of light.

The ride was over all too soon. Mere seconds later they were rudely deposited in a field some distance from the house, and the wave was off into the night, parenting all manner of flora and fauna as it went.

Dizzied but exhilarated, Cal got to his feet, and was delighted to hear Nimrod exclaim:

‘Ha!'

‘You can speak?'

‘It appears so,' said Nimrod, his grin wider than ever. ‘I'm out of her reach here -'

‘Immacolata.'

‘Of course. She undid my rapture, to tempt the Cuckoos. And tempting I was. Did you see the woman in the blue dress?'

‘Briefly.'

‘She fell for me on sight,' said Nimrod. ‘Perhaps I should find her. She's going to need some tenderness, things being what they are -' and without another word he turned back towards the house, which was well on its way to rubble. Only as he disappeared in the confusion of light and dust did Cal notice that in his true shape Nimrod possessed a tail.

Doubtless he could look after himself, but there were others Cal was still concerned for. Suzanna, for one, and Apolline, whom he'd last seen lying beside Freddy in the ante-chamber to the Auction Room. All was din and destruction, but he started back towards the house nevertheless, to see if he could find them.

It was like swimming against a technicolour tide. Strands, late-born, flew and burst about him, some breaking against his body. They were kinder by far to living tissue than they were to brick. Their touch didn't wound him, but lent him fresh energy. His body tingled as though he'd stepped from an ice-water shower. His head sang.

There was no sign of the enemy. He hoped Shadwell had been buried in the house, but he knew too much of the luck of the wicked to believe this likely. He did however glimpse several of the buyers wandering in the brightness. They didn't aid each other, but made their way as solitaries, either gazing at the ground for fear it open beneath their feet, or stumbling, hands masking their tears.

As he came within thirty yards of the house there was a further burst of activity from within, as the great cloud of the Gyre, spitting lightning, shrugged off the walls that had confined it, and blossomed in all directions.

He had time enough to see the figure of one of the buyers consumed by the cloud, then he turned and ran.

A wave of dust threw him on his way; filaments of brightness flew to left and right of him like ribbons in a hurricane. A second wave followed, this time of brick-shards and furniture. His breath was snatched from his lips, and his legs from beneath him. Then he was performing acrobatics, head over heels, no longer knowing Heaven from Earth.

He didn't try to resist, even if resistance had been possible, but let the fast train take him wherever it chose to go.

‘Flee into some forgotten night and be Of all dark long my moon-bright company; Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come. There, out of all remembrance, make our home.' Walter de la Mare The Tryst

I

CAL, AMONGST MIRACLES

1

True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.

Thus it was, when the dust storm that had snatched Cal up finally died, and he opened his eyes to see the Fugue spread before him, he felt as though the few fragile moments of epiphany he'd tasted in his twenty-six years - tasted but always lost - were here redeemed and wed. He'd grasped fragments of this delight before. Heard rumour of it in the womb-dream and the dream of love; known it in lullabies. But never, until now, the whole, the thing entire. It would be, he idly thought, a fine time to die. And a finer time still to live, with so much laid out before him.

He was on a hill. Not high, but high enough to offer a vantage point. He got to his feet and surveyed this new-found land.

The unknotting of the carpet had by no means finished; the raptures of the Loom were far too complex to be so readily reversed. But the groundwork was laid: hills, fields, forest, and much else besides.

Last time he'd set eyes on this place it had been from a bird's eye view, and the landscape had seemed various enough. But from the human perspective its profusion verged on the riotous. It was as if a vast suitcase, packed in great haste, had been upturned, its contents scattered in hopeless disarray.

There appeared to be no system to the geography, just a random assembling of spots the Seerkind had loved enough to snatch from destruction. Butterfly copses and placid water-meadows; lairs and walled sanctuaries; keeps, rivers and standing stones.

Few of these locations were complete: most were slivers and snatches, fragments of the Kingdom ceded to the Fugue behind humanity's back. The haunted corners of familiar rooms that would neither be missed nor mourned, where children had perhaps seen ghosts or saints; where the fugitive might be comforted and not know why, and the suicide find reason for another breath.

Amid this disorder, the most curious juxtapositions abounded. Here a bridge, parted from the chasm it had crossed, sat in a field, spanning poppies; there an obelisk stood in the middle of a pool, gazing at its reflection.

One sight in particular caught Cal's eye.

It was a hill, which rose almost straight-sided to a tree-crowned summit. Lights moved over its face, and danced amongst the branches. Having no sense of direction here, he decided to make his way down towards it.

There was music playing somewhere in the night. It came to him by fits and starts, at the behest of the breeze. Drums and violins; a mingling of Strauss and Sioux. And occasionally, evidence of people too. Whispers in the trees; shadowed figures beneath a canopy which stood in the middle of a waist-high field of grain. But the creatures were fugitive; they came and went too quickly for him to gain more than a fleeting impression. Whether this was because they knew him for the Cuckoo he was, or simply out of shyness, only time would tell. Certainly he felt no threat here, despite the fact that he was, in a sense, trespassing. On the contrary, he felt utterly at peace with the world and himself. So much so that his concern for the others here - Suzanna, Apolline, Jerichau, Nimrod -was quite remote. When his thoughts did touch upon them it was only to imagine them wandering as he was wandering, lost among miracles. No harm could come to them; not here. Here was an end to harm, and malice, and envy too. Having