‘What happened?' he said. ‘Was it just the sun?'

She didn't look at him, but she deigned to speak.

‘I felt the Fugue...' she said, so softly he had to hold his breath to catch her words ‘... then something else.'

He waited for further news from her, but none came. Then, as he was about to break the silence, she said: ‘At the back of my throat...' She swallowed, as if to dislodge some remembered bitterness ‘... the Scourge...'

The Scourge? Had he heard her correctly? Either Immacolata sensed his doubt, or shared it, for she said: ‘it was there. Shadwell,' and when she spoke even her extraordinary self-control couldn't quite tame the flutter in her voice.

‘Surely you're mistaken.'

She made a tiny shake of her head.

‘It's dead and gone,' he said.

Her face could have been chiselled from stone. Only her lips moved, and he longed for them, despite the thoughts they shaped.

‘A power like that doesn't die,' she said. ‘It can't ever die. It sleeps. It waits.'

‘What for? Why?'

‘Till the Fugue wakes, maybe,' she said.

Her eyes had lost their gold; become silvery. Motes of the menstruum, turning like dust in a sun-beam, dropped from her lashes and evaporated inches from his face. He'd never seen her like this before, so close to exposing her feelings. The spectacle of her vulnerability aroused him beyond words. His prick was so hard it ached. She was apparently dead to his arousal however; or else chose to ignore it. The Magdalene, the blind sister, was not so indifferent. She, Shadwell knew, had an appetite for what a man might spill, and horrid purposes to put it to. Even now he saw her form coagulating in a recess in the wall, one hunger from scalp to sole.

‘I saw a wilderness,' Immacolata said, calling Shawl's attention from the Magdalene's advances. ‘Bright sun. Terrible sun. The emptiest place on earth.'

‘And that's where the Scourge is now?'

She nodded. ‘It's sleeping. I think... it's forgotten itself.'

‘It'll stay that way, then, won't it?'

Shadwell replied. ‘Who the hell's going to wake it?'

His words failed to convince even himself.

‘Look he said, ‘- we'll find the Fugue and sell it before the Scourge can so much as roll over. We haven't come so far to stop now.'

Immacolata said nothing. Her eyes were still fixed on that nowhere she'd sighted, or tasted - or both - minutes earlier.

Only very dimly did Shadwell comprehend what forces were at work here: Finally, he was only a Cuckoo - a human being - and that limited his vision; for which fact, as now, he was sometimes grateful.

One thing he did comprehend: the Fugue trailed legends. In the years of their search he'd heard it reported so many ways, from cradle-song to death-bed confession, and he'd long ago given up attempting to sort fact from fiction. All that mattered was that the many and the mighty longed for that place, spoke of it in their prayers, without knowing - most of them - that it was real; or had been. And what a profit he would turn when he had that dream on the block: there had never been a sale its like, or ever would be again. They could not give up now. Not for fear of something lost in time and sleep.

‘It knows. Shadwell,' Immacolata said. ‘Even in its sleep, it knows.'

Had he had the words to persuade her from her fear she would have been contemptuous of them instead, he played the pragmatist.

‘The sooner we find the carpet and dispose of it the happier we'll all be.' he said.

The response seemed to stir her from the wilderness.

‘Maybe in a while,' she replied, her eyes flickering towards him for the first time since they'd stepped off the street.'

Maybe then we'll go looking.'

All sign of the menstruum had abruptly vanished. The moment of doubt had passed, and the old certainty was back. She would pursue the Fugue to the end, he knew,-as, they had always planned. No tumour - even of the Scourge would deflect her from her malice.

‘We may lose the trail if we don't hurry.'

‘I doubt that,' she said. ‘We'll wait. Until the heat dies down.'

Ah, so this was to be his punishment for that ill-considered touch. It was his heat she made mocking reference to, not that of the city outside. He would be obliged to wait her pleasure, as he had waited before, and bear his stripes in silence. Not just because she alone could track the Fugue by the rhythm of its woven life, but because to wait another hour in her company, bathing in the scent of her breath, was an agony he would gladly endure.

For him it was a ritual of crime and punishment which would keep him hard for the rest of the day.

For her, the power his desire lent her remained a diverting curiosity. Furnaces, after all, grew cold if left unstoked. Even stars went out after a millennium. But the lust of Cuckoos, like so much else about that species, defied all the rules. The less it was fed, the hotter it became.

V

BEFORE THE DARK

1

In all, Suzanna had probably met her maternal grandmother less than a dozen times. Even as a child, before she'd fully understood the words, she'd been taught that the old woman was not to be trusted, though she could not remember ever hearing a reason offered as to why. The mud had stuck however. Though in her early adulthood - she was now 24 - she had learned to view her parents' Prejudices with a critical eye, and come to suspect that whatever their anxiety regarding her grandmother it was likely to be perfectly irrational - she could nevertheless not entirely forget the mythology that had grown up around Mimi Laschenski.

The very name was a stumbling block. To the ear of a child it sounded more like a faery-tale curse than a name. And indeed there had been much about the woman that supported such a fiction. Suzanna remembered Mimi as being small, with skin that was always slightly jaundiced, her black hair (which with hindsight, was probably dyed) drawn back tightly from a face which she doubted capable of a smile. Perhaps Mimi had reason for grief. Her first husband, who had been some sort of circus performer, had disappeared before the Great War; run away, the family gossip went, because Mimi was such a harridan. The second husband, Suzanna's grandfather, had died of lung cancer in his early forties; smoked himself to death. Since then the old woman had lived in increasingly eccentric isolation, alienated from her children and grand children alike, in a house in Liverpool; a house to which - at Mimi's enigmatic request - Suzanna was about to pay a long-delayed visit.

As she drove North she turned over her memories of Mimi, and of that house. She recalled it being substantially larger than her parents' place in Bristol had been; and darker. A house that had not been painted since before the Flood, a stale house, a house in mourning. And the more she remembered, the gloomier she became.

In the private story-book of her head this trip back to Mimi's was a return to the mire of childhood; a reminder not of blissful, careless years, but of an anxious, blinkered state from which adulthood had liberated her. And Liverpool had been that state's metropolis; a city of perpetual dusk, where the air smelt of cold smoke and a colder river. When she thought of it she was a child again, and frightened of dreams.

Of course she'd shrugged off those fears years ago. Here she was, at the wheel of her car, perfect mistress of herself, driving in the fast lane with the sun on her face. What hold could those old anxieties have over her now? Yet as she drove she found herself drawing to her keepsakes from her present life, like talismans to keep that city at bay.

She thought of the studio she'd left behind in London, and the pots she'd left to be glazed and fired when - in just a little while - she got back. She remembered Finnegan, and the flirtatious dinner she'd had with him two nights ago. She thought of her friends, robust and articulate people, any of a dozen of whom she'd trust her fife and sanity to. With so such clarity to arm her, she could surely re-tread the paths of her childhood and remain untainted. She travelled a broader, brighter highway now.