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‘Aeng,’ Blanche said. ‘He’s a friend of Shift’s, though it’s rather one-sided now. Shift values Aeng’s loyalty without desiring to understand their history.’ Because she wasn’t able to think of a safe question to follow that confidence, Taryn was thrown back on memories of her own one-sided relationship and how she’d left a man who loved her because his love couldn’t fix her—as if that were its purpose. She’d thought she was letting Alan go. That he wouldn’t have to carry her around, a cloud that rained on him all the time. But really she just couldn’t bear seeing him wait—with dignity and
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Taryn felt heart-wrung, so she just kissed his damp, musky shoulder and said, ‘I love you.’ He was quiet through the watery percussion of a dozen strokes, then he said, ‘But you can’t see me.’ ‘That’s true. But the world wakes up when you’re there. Especially my world. And that I can see.’ He turned to look at her. They were inches apart, and she could clearly see his beautiful hazel eyes. ‘Thank you, Taryn,’ he said.
Neve frowned at their approach but greeted each of them by name. Her small party of humans made room. Introductions were exchanged, and Taryn found herself sitting one place along from Franz Schubert.
She understood that the sidhe knew they were doing wrong, but their habit of living meant they just kept on living with it.
Jane gave Taryn a sharp look and clutched her hand. Hard. She said, ‘They are our betters.’ ‘No one is anyone’s better,’ Taryn said. But who was she to talk? She, who had made another person her instrument.
‘The treasured Taken,’ Jane whispered. ‘Making their argument. I made mine ten years ago with a book of sidhe botany. It took an artist friend and me fifty years to produce. I’m afraid the sidhe won’t remember it, though those with houses will all have a copy. But of course I shouldn’t worry, because none of them need to be reminded of a thing that happened only ten years ago.’ ‘Are these treasured people earning their keep?’ ‘They’re just ensuring for their patrons that there will be no argument about their remaining here. They’re demonstrating why they should be permitted to continue their
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Taryn had sometimes watched her friends’ families trying to get one up on each other in a moral or emotional accounting. Who did what for Mother when she was dying. How much money was borrowed. Who took time to attend all the school plays. Who remembered birthdays. Taryn couldn’t understand the language in which the sidhe spoke, but she understood the character of the interactions. Sidhe were saying to other sidhe, ‘I’ve done my bit. It’s your turn.’
You know what offer Hell has made for you. Hell’s standing offer of a thousand years in which the Sidh would not have to pay a single human soul. A thousand years in which our lives would be unthreatened and free. You have never seen your way to make that sacrifice. You love your life and cling to it, while human souls are pushed out of their bodies and through Hell’s Gate every hundred years. You preserve only your own Taken, while all this time you’ve had the power to spare millions.
But the Tithe is not my arrangement. All sidhe on this beach were party to that treaty. I wasn’t born when you found yourself having to pay for your stolen land. Which, being thieves, you chose to pay for with stolen human souls.’
Neve said, ‘It was the sole agreed price. And may I remind you that that price was demanded by your father’s people.’ She spoke with cold finality. ‘He the chief of them.’
Taryn had a moment when the other shoe dropped. Of course there had to be a reason Hell was able to threaten the Sidh. There must be a claim. A claim recognised by both parties. That was how all these immortals worked. The sidhe had arrived, a very long time ago, in a place inhabited by demons. They drove the demons off, partitioned and—Taryn guessed she could say—terraformed the land. It was why there was an Exiles’ Gate with nothing on the other side of it. They’d come from somewhere else, exiles who arrived as colonists. Then, in time, someone more powerful than demons enslaved the
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She and Jacob had escaped, but none of it had been without consequences. And as soon as Jacob was able to collect himself, his resentment against her had ignited. She was to blame, and he blamed her. That had separated them and made him vulnerable to Aeng. And that was her loss and Shift’s. Jacob himself was happy. And even if Neve made good on her threats, Jacob would be safe.
‘I want there to be libraries in the future. I want today to give up being so smugly sure about what tomorrow won’t need.’ ‘For there to be libraries in the future, what would be required?’ ‘People to care about the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation, and about keeping what isn’t immediately necessary because it might be vital one day. Or simply intriguing, or beautiful.’
‘No, I’m meeting my sister. She’ll be along in a minute. We’re going to the movies. If it’s any of your business.’ ‘What film will you see?’ ‘Beatrice wants to go to Donnie Darko.’ ‘And what film did you end up seeing?’ Taryn frowned at the question. Then she remembered how she had argued for A Beautiful Mind and they’d both been disappointed. Taryn watched Donnie Darko only last winter, in a hotel in Liverpool the night before some bookshop gig. She was very moved by how the hero let everything happen again so that it was he who died, not his sister.
The third speaker asked, ‘What happened to the man’s arm?’ ‘I ate it,’ Shift answered, and looked perplexed and alarmed, as if he hadn’t meant to respond truthfully, or at all. ‘He must have already been dead when you ate it, or you’d be in the Nearest Place,’ the second speaker intoned in a singsong chant. ‘You must have had a good reason to kill him, or you’d be in the Nearest Place. You must have had a good reason to eat him, or you’d be in the Nearest Place.’ Taryn gathered that the Nearest Place was Hell.
She thought of the thing she and Shift were looking for—a cipher key to a language capable of commanding nature, a kind of absolute book, one they had dreamed up out of their different personal needs, and which was probably no more real than the fictional absolute books she had written about in The Feverish Library: Casaubon’s Key to All the Mythologies; Lovecraft’s Necronomicon; and the ‘catalogue of catalogues’ Borges’s librarian wandered in search of in his youth.
It was either worth showing consideration to others as a general display of good form to the invisible powers who must surely be paying attention, or it was not, because no one here who helped another would, by doing so, help themselves. Taryn wanted to say that the general habit of being helpful would make life easier for everyone, whether or not it was noticed. That human kindness was heartwarming, and didn’t they need their hearts warmed?
Purgatory wasn’t forever living with your mistakes; it was forever defending your decisions.
Glaring absences were a sense people didn’t tend to get until adulthood—if ever.
Odin is best left out of this. We’re not sure what his intentions are. He’s not himself these days. His head has been turned by many new worshippers. Of the wrong kind.’ Jacob thought about that for a bit. The wrong worshippers for Odin. ‘You mean white supremacists with valknuts tattooed on their man boobs?’ ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Your wits seem intact in some matters.’
‘No one can compel a promise, Taryn. There’s persuasion and extortion, and the latter isn’t much different from knocking someone on the head and locking them in a room.’
‘It’s honest praise, Taryn. We are incapable of honest praise.’ ‘We humans?’ ‘We British. We can’t offer straightforward compliments on anything of substance. We operate on the meanest band of enthusiasm and—if we’re of your class—remind people that too much fervour is vulgar. While my class just josh people out of their enthusiasms, make mock, burst the bubble of anybody giving themselves airs—anyone who has made a bubble just to be able to breathe.’
for my whole life the only gift I’ve been given is the gift of a place in other people’s plans. Aeng gave me the gift of belonging. With him, and with myself.’
Shift’s tone when he answered was matter-of-fact. ‘It is a scroll made from the skin of an angel. The skin is tattooed with words, in an ink made of the angel’s own blood. The scroll is a primer of the tongues of angels, otherwise known as the Language of Command. A language that, like the language of the sidhe, has no written form. The primer is in the Roman alphabet, with the phonetics of Latin used to approximate the sounds of the words of the Language of Command.’
‘I want you to understand that the language is lethal with short exposure to humans, and with only a little longer to sidhe. You are not your masters. The language doesn’t just cause you pain because they use it to compel you. It compels you because it causes you pain.’
‘It’s in Latin as well as the tongues of angels.’ Further silence, then in the same careful voice, ‘It’s a letter from my mother. She apologises for all the deceptions she practised on me. And for hiding me.’ ‘By virtue of its being the same text written in two languages, it is also a cipher key,’ Hugin said. ‘It will be useful to you, Shift.’ ‘Yes,’ Shift said. He wasn’t replying to Hugin, but to the woman who wrote the letter. ‘Being hidden has been difficult for me.’
Taryn sighed. ‘You know, there were always people who found cause for complaint about falling birth rates whenever women in developing nations got educations and the means of supporting themselves.’
‘Life is mostly Venn diagrams. Even a person can be. A quarter this, a quarter that, half something completely different.’
‘Mr Price, you’re really going to have to say your goodbyes.’ Price produced some credentials. Taryn craned over the table to get a look at them. ‘The Ministry of what?’ she said. ‘Very well, Mr Price,’ said the guard. ‘But I’ll have you know I thought it was very unfair of you people to make Ms Cornick serve a whole six years when most of our other inmates were being sent home.’ Taryn was perplexed. ‘I chose to.’ ‘If you hadn’t chosen, they meant to make you.’ The guard was genuinely indignant. ‘Everyone had instructions.’
‘She’s not going to answer any questions.’ ‘I’ve just about answered all the important ones,’ Taryn said. ‘Taryn!’ ‘What difference does it make? Munin has been carrying my notebooks out of here for months. A whole book’s worth of writing. My next book, the one my agent wanted. Title: The Absolute Book. A history of how this all came to pass. It begins with two sisters raising their babies in a house beside the Wye, hands on through two sisters hiding behind a curtain while a man possessed by a demon sets fire to a library, and ends with the sisters who visit me in prison and bring me
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‘Nothing was ever on the table,’ Price said. His face was white with fury. ‘You mean to take our sovereignty. You have no respect for the rule of law.’ ‘Look,’ Taryn said. ‘I’m going to try this one more time. It’s like that thing in Star Trek. The Starfleet regulation that says the doctor can relieve the captain of his duties. The writers probably got it from the real-life navy. Anyway, human beings are the captain. The doctor is the trees and the grasses and the marshes, and the beasts of the field and birds of the air. We humans were declared unfit for command.’
