The Sword of Feimhin (43 page)

Penny was hyperventilating again, staring ahead to where Jeremiah was sitting on a ledge feeding a gathering of small creatures. Something resembling a bat was eating from his open hand, but when she got closer she saw that the creatures were alien to her, and some as spectral as wraiths or ghosts. What she had taken for a bat was really a baby Grimling. A winged creature with eyes as red as coals and the figure of a minuscule stork alighted on his left shoulder as Jeremiah turned to look at Penny with those all-black eyes. She saw his lips moving, but the words came to her not through her ears but her mind.

Her voice shook as she spoke: ‘Who – or what – are you?'

Penny didn't know what to think of his reply. ‘Are you going to hurt me?'

Penny felt faint. She began to tremble. The trembling spread to her thighs and her legs, then her whole body began to shake.

‘Where is this place? What's happening here?'

His voice was the same soft voice she had heard before, in the rain-drenched street when she had seen the monster come out of the caravan.

‘The City Below?'

‘It's … awesome. Terrifying.'

‘Yes. Yes – it is beautiful.'

His calmness scared her.

Penny wasn't sure what he meant. ‘Why am I important?'

He laughed.

‘Nobody cares for me other than Gully.'

‘Nobody has ever seen me as special.'

Her mind was invaded by black discordant shapes constantly changing, as if being reborn again and again and again against an ash white background. There was something disturbingly organic about the shapes, as if the clots of black were being torn from a living organism, the rent fragments being constantly and violently remodelled. The vision both frightened and excited her. Her heart rose into her throat as her lungs struggled for breath. Then, abruptly, her mind felt more at ease with the dark mystery of it.

‘I … I think they are like living fractals. They are beautiful, but there is a message in their changing beauty. I'm trying to understand the message.'

‘I'm certain that you'll succeed.'

Her instinct was to let her mind go perfectly blank, then she willed her blank mind to be completely taken over; willed it to be consumed by the strange, metamorphosing images. She made herself focus on a single fractal, following its changing shape and pattern as it writhed and twisted in every axis within the glaring ether of white. Her concentration was unrelenting until she had grasped the wholeness of its existence in three-dimensional space. And then she did the same to another, close by, and then another.

She watched the shapes blend and change, and blend and change again. She saw how the sum of the metamorphoses
of the individual fractals become one with the entire swarm. Then she understood. The triumph of revelation shuddered through her, exalting her mind, her spirit.

She clapped her hands. ‘They're blueprints.'

‘Blueprints for what?'

Jeremiah stopped speaking mind-to-mind and spoke gently into her ear. ‘Something that will fascinate you. Come – the makers are waiting for you.'

He was referring to the huge slug-beings. Their bodies undulated with waves of movement, their relatively large but simple heads had sets of exquisitely sharp teeth, which were assembling what looked like fibrils made out of a very fine blue-black wire. When she looked closer, she could see that their side-mounted jaws were actually spinning the fibrils, joining columns of crystals together.

‘They are called Akkharu.'

‘What are they?'

‘The Akkharu are creative beings. They mine the most precious secret in this world, or any other. They have no name for it, such is their reverence for it, but you might regard it as stardust.'

Penny stared, her eyes wide. She wondered if she had heard the words correctly.
Stardust?

Some of them were weaving bubbles, in which other creatures seemed to be cocooning themselves. Others were weaving whole strings of
gigantic
bubbles which, when they
coalesced together, became tunnels, which were then further refined and strengthened by ribs and barbs of the same crystalline substance – the stardust.

By now she was assimilating the black, changing images, reconstructing their instructions within her mind and interpreting the three dimensional geometry that was emerging from them. She saw the instructions become reality, the crystalline structures – the dreams of the makers – appeared and changed in three-dimensional space, and then shadows emerged from them that extended into … other dimensions!

‘Do you like what you see, Penny?'

‘The Akkharu – they're architects,' she marvelled. ‘They construct with their minds because the crystals follow their thoughts. I think … Oh, there's only one word for it. They're magicians.'

‘Magi.'

‘A whole race of magical beings.'

‘Only a mind as beautiful as yours would perceive it.'

‘I feel the need to capture it – to draw it.'

‘It is enough to paint it in your mind, to savour its elegance with your senses. Your mind sees what is, not what your human nature would make of it. The language of the Akkharu is related to what your people would call creativity. You understand it effortlessly, naturally and instinctively.'

‘I still don't fully understand it.'

‘That's because you try to understand it in words. It
cannot be understood in words – it is enough that you can admire its manifold dimensions.'

‘What does the name of these magi mean – Akkharu?'

‘In your language, the closest concept might be the same as a dreamcatcher, but it might also be taken to mean dreamstealers or dreamweavers.'

To Penny the notion of a dreamstealer was frightening. It reminded her of ravenous monsters from the more unpleasant fairy tales. She preferred the idea of dreamweavers. How wonderful to weave architecture out of one's dreams! She felt a wave of delight sweep through her.

‘Oh, now they're singing.'

‘What you hear is their hymn of creation. The dreams enter, become common to the weave, and through the weave the stardust is woven into the fabric of
being
.'

Penny was aware of a growing sense of wonder. She watched some smaller creatures, perhaps baby Akkharu, spin shapes with walls that were thinner than gossamer. They took joy in invoking starry or radial symmetries; objects of great beauty and charm that floated in air, like children playing with soap bubbles.

‘They are wonderful. Yet still I don't understand – why are they here? What is it that they are constructing?'

‘You know it as the City Below.'

‘But what is its purpose?'

‘Soon you will understand.'

In that instant he turned into the figure of her father, but the image of her father retained the all-black eyes. She
stared at him, dumbstruck. The trembling had never gone away and now it was more violent than ever. Her throat tightened, making it hard to speak. Her left thigh was jumping as if she had climbed a very tall building.

‘Who – what are you, really?'

His voice had changed, too. His voice was the voice of her father. ‘You might regard me as your adoptive parent – a mentor.' He brushed a finger over her broken nose.

‘Oh!'

‘Surely you remember, Penny. The summer house, the one place you could be alone, the one place you called your own. You could escape from Mother and me, wind the big lever and follow the sun.'

One special day, above all, she recalled. A sunny day, with the golden light flooding in through the dust on the panes. Penny felt the pain ease as her nose healed.

‘I remember.'

Penny had never been able to talk about her life to anybody before, but the growing feeling of intimacy with Jeremiah was soothing and the growing halo of lights so calming, she felt she could talk to this figure that had borrowed the face of her father. Indeed, she felt that she must talk. As she was speaking to him, now, she saw the memories so clearly within her mind it was as if she had returned to inhabit them.

‘There is no meaning here,' she saw her younger self strike her breast. ‘There is no welcome anywhere for me.' She saw herself drop her head into both her hands.

‘In your mind, in your heart, you have known loneliness and alienation. But soon you will discover tranquillity. You will discover your destiny.'

The trembling worsened. It felt as if her entire being had been caught up in an irresolvable conflict for all of eternity.

‘I don't believe you. I think you are going to hurt me.'

‘No.'

‘There was a man. He … He …'

‘I saw what happened. I helped you to escape him. I promise you that nobody will ever hurt you again.'

‘What will happen to me?'

‘You will become my avatar in your world. You will do and see extraordinary things. You will be adored as a goddess.'

Penny felt faint.

His hand reached out to steady her, resting on her left shoulder. In that light contact she sensed the immense power in him. Awe overwhelmed her.

‘What must I do?'

‘Can you remember what you asked yourself that special day, when you were alone in the summer house?'

‘I … I wondered why we existed. If there is no meaning to it all, no purpose, as Father insisted, why spend all those years and years at school? Why struggle to find a job, struggle to support a family, and then die? It isn't worth it.'

She had thought a lot about that. She had wanted life to mean something, to be worth the bother of living.

Penny was aware that a lot of people her age talked about fate, about what they thought they were on the Earth to do, but she didn't believe a word of it. Sometimes, like when she was reading about people who had fought to achieve something – like great explorers, or composers – she would come across passages where they talked about the place their life was headed. They really believed they had been born to do a certain thing – they wouldn't be chopping and changing their mind in a day, or a week, or a year.

‘Do you remember arriving at your decision?'

‘Yes.' It was the great moment, the ultimate decision in her life. ‘It was when they were sending me to university. I knew they wouldn't like me there and that there would be no summer house to escape to. So I decided that I would run away – to London.'

‘Do you remember why you ran to London?'

‘To discover my destiny.'

‘Now you realise that you have always been coming here to discover your City Below. You know that you were right in the decision you made all by yourself, on that fateful day in the summer house. There really is a City Below. It's your city, Penny. It's the place you have been coming to, all your life.'

‘It feels different to how I imagined it would be.' She sensed the earthiness, the strangeness and the magic … that was what she had hoped for. That was what she had prayed she would find when she was drawn towards that
blue light. The calling that had made her leave home and come to London was her desire to discover a kind of truth. A truth that would tell her what life was all about, what mattered to her and what would give meaning to it all.

‘But why are you here?'

‘That isn't the question you really want to ask me – is it?'

The question invaded her mind and it spiralled endlessly within it. The question was:
Why am I here?

‘There's something happening right here in London. I sense it. I sense that something really big is about to happen.'

‘What you sense is the coming war.'

‘War?'

‘Your world – this world – has involved itself in a very ancient war taking place on another world. It has taken sides against me. In doing so it made an enemy of me.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘It wasn't a very prudent thing to do – not for a world that has become ultimately dependent on machines.'

Penny felt herself tense up. She felt her lips tremble again. ‘What will you do?'

‘I have done it already. It was begun long, long ago, when the Akkharu manufactured a weapon of magic – a sword.'

‘A sword of magic?'

Penny thought about that for several seconds. ‘What do you want of me?'

‘Of you, of this city, of your imagination? Nothing. I have brought you here to bequeath it to you, Penny. I will make you queen of your City Below.'

‘But you will hurt people.'

‘I don't have your concerns for humans.'

‘Why – why do you hate us?'

‘Like you, Penny, I have dreams. Certain people from your world are attempting to end my dreams.'

‘What will you do?'

‘It is already begun. You have seen one of my servants at work – the people in the caravan.'

‘The monstrous creature – Shedur? You never told me what its name really means.'

‘Hunger. It is a destroyer of worlds.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘You saw how it reproduced.'