The Sword of Feimhin (46 page)

‘Shit!'

Mark returned his attention to the image on the tablet screen. The artwork – the extraordinary proliferation of overlapping images – was astonishing in its complexity and dexterity. Certain images were easy to recognise: churches, monuments like St Paul's, Piccadilly, Cleopatra's Needle, Trafalgar Square. They were drawn with a curious distortion of perspective, as if Penny had been able to see, and portray, something beyond photographic accuracy.

‘You're going to have to help us with this, Gully.'

‘Penny – she can see things you and me can't. She was goin' on about someplace she called the City Below.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘You ask me it's bonkers. Like there's this City Above an' there was this other place she called the City Below.'

Mark rubbed at his brow, looking hard at the extraordinary pictorial labyrinth.

‘Nan, can you figure it out?'

They stared at the images together.

Nan pressed Gully, ‘Are you saying there are two cities – the city we can all see and a second city underneath it, a city that most people don't see?'

‘Somefink like that. Yeah.'

Cogwheel spoke from his seat in the cab. ‘Have you guys ever heard of a palimpsest.'

‘What's that?'

‘It's where you find one image superimposed on another – or even more than one above the other.'

Mark stared at the picture again, thinking about what Cogwheel had said. The picture took up an entire ceiling. It was dense with information and images curling and crawling around the fixed points of monumental buildings, yet the whole thing was eerily beautiful and strangely alive. But it was also, clearly, a recording of Penny's vision; a vision that was incredibly imaginative and intelligent. The idea of a palimpsest made some sense. If you could imagine the old, central city as some kind of complex living whole, and beneath it a much stranger, more alien presence: the City Below. You could see, through the pictures, that the City Below was invading and overwhelming the City Above. Wheeling trails of golden stars – like force lines – interlaced, interconnected various elements of the composition. It was the most mysterious, most extraordinary picture he had ever seen.

‘Gully,' Mark gestured to him, ‘let's see if we can make out where we are right now on Penny's map. Can you make out where we are?'

Gully stared at the map. He pointed to an area with a trembling finger, the nail of which was black with dirt. Mark and Nan looked at the spot, close to the centre of the picture. The image that greeted them might have been a cleft in the fabric of a world; multitudes of the strangest, most monstrous creatures were issuing out from it and into the City Above in a continuous stream, like a swarm of wasps.

Gully prodded the screen with his finger. ‘I think that's where Penny was headin'. She told me there was a Grimling's nest close to Saint Paul's. She told me she had found the way to the City Below.'

Mark looked at Nan in the gloom. The Mamma Pig lurched forwards again, inching closer to the gate into the arena – which, if Mark read Penny's map accurately, was directly over the cleft in the fabric of Penny's world.

Mo Grimstone came instantly awake. The voice of Magtokk was in her head as before, but this time he had addressed her by her true name, the name given to her by her birth mother.

The hackles on her neck pricked as she sat upright. But, seeing the sleeping form of the guardian Shee, Usrua, by her side, she remembered to keep the conversation mind-to mind.

Mo's head fell. There was another questions that pressed upon her mind: who was her biological father? The worry gnawed at her, like an indigestible stone in the pit of her stomach.

Mo's hands went to her throat. With her eyes closed she brought the talisman to her lips. The three-headed figurine, shaped by nature from black bog oak, had been given to her by Padraig back in Clonmel, so long ago. She couldn't help shivering. She thought:
Padraig! Just how much did you know even back then? Did you have any inkling of what was to come when you gave it to me during that beautiful summer?

When she opened her eyes again, they had arrived as soul spirits into the night-shrouded Valley of the Pyramids. Their journey had been effortless, and the landscape no longer appeared so ravaged and spoiled. It looked dreamlike and eerily enchanting when compared Mo's earlier fleeting inspection with Alan and the others.

Mo was already jittery with expectation at the thought of another dream journey in the company of the magician.

he said.

She saw something glowing on the floor of the stony valley a short distance away. Then the strange wasp-goblins fluttered out of their stone-capped holes in the ground, their wings sheening in what she assumed to be starlight. Their faces, with the bulging multifaceted eyes, were pallid
as ghosts and in the air above the vast proliferation of pyramids something strange was happening: arrays of glistening black filaments, gossamer fine and vast, streamed out of the skull pyramids, spiralling and rising through the moonlit air, reaching out into the starry firmament. They were independent of gravity, like some of the feathery fronds that soared into the oceans out of coral reefs.

Mo tried to imagine something like the antennae of insects – such as butterflies and moths – but so vast that they could reach out and measure the night sky, like radio telescopes back on Earth.

She found that, when in soul spirit, she could move through the landscape traversing great distances at will. The thrill of that was exciting as well as frightening. Beside her, Magtokk gazed up into the streaming net, in awe at its ambition and purpose. Meanwhile, Mo's attention was distracted by a flurry of movement on the valley floor, where the vast numbers of lids they had noticed previously were now thrown wide open to the night air, spread over the entire floor of the valley, so spaced and regular that they looked somewhat like the open pores of a giant's skin. And from every pore the whirling weave erupted, so the observing net extended over the entire sky. There must have been millions upon millions of individual filaments. Approaching one of the vents, she saw dozens or more of
the wasp-like creatures fanning the opening with their wings, as if ventilating the tunnels beneath.

Magtokk's voice startled her from her musing.

Mo looked up with him into the sky.

It took several moments of study before Mo saw the flickering matrix he was referring to.

To Mo that sounded like a riddle. But what did it mean?

Even in soul spirit form, she sensed the heavy rug of Magtokk's arm wrap itself around her shoulder. He was already guiding her into one of the larger holes in the ground.

Mo wasn't sure she entirely trusted the magician. If only the sceptical Turkeya could have accompanied her on the exploration.

For all of Magtokk's encouragement, and in spite of the
fact she was, at least in spirit, cradled within his arm, Mo's anxieties did not settle as they drifted down through a pit in the valley floor. There was the unpleasant sensation that they were being sucked down past the frantic buzzing of the wasp-like creatures' wings and into what felt like a dark and dangerous interior.

Mo found herself wondering what lesson she was intended to learn. The act of bringing her here suggested that there was some important message. It seemed hard to credit that this secret world lay beneath the desolate Valley of the Pyramids. As if some intelligence had read her mind, her vision opened. She glimpsed what appeared to be underground farms where worker beings cultivated a wide variety of fungi, of every size and colour and shape, in endless but apparently highly organised consortia. She focused on a single mushroom garden, gloriously coloured, buzzing with colonies of insect-like beings that tended and fed on the mushrooms, and which, themselves, fed great flocks of fatty winged creatures resembling white-haired bats. Meanwhile, the bat droppings provided fertiliser for the mushrooms. She thought:
am I witnessing an ecosystem at work?

Now she looked more closely, many of the creatures had
eyes that were reduced to balls of skin, reflecting the evolution of creatures that lived in the dark; they were blind. She glimpsed more lowly creatures that chewed on root fibres to make bedding and clothes for their young, which, from what she glimpsed, were as ugly as kangaroo embryos in their nakedness. She knew, without needing to be told, that they cannibalised their dead. It removed the need for burial, or cremation, while recycling proteins and essential minerals.

She held onto the thought:
without needing to be told
…

She spoke to Magtokk aloud: ‘Nothing here is quite as it appears. I feel I could be within the mind of a magician.'

It was no accident that Magtokk had become her tutor. Though he had claimed it was fated when first they met, fate could mean many things on Tír.

Already, the more mundane sights had melted away as she moved further through the labyrinth. She still had no idea where she was, or why she was there. In spite of her reservations, Mo clasped the spirit arm of the orang-utan, sensing that she was being guided through dimensions of place and experience stranger than she cared to imagine.

She felt the big hairy arm hug her closer to him.

Mo tried to calm her overexcited mind. She did her best to expand her consciousness so as to allow her to examine her surroundings through the two very different amulets.

She had expected the rough walls of a narrow burrow, or cave of sorts, but instead she found herself drifting through an immense hall of … mirrors? But then, no, not really mirrors … She had no idea, she only knew that she was flooded with powerful impressions she neither recognised nor understood. Her spirit being was drifting through veil after veil of twinkling images, like a series of frosted panes of glass that extended to the horizon of her senses in all directions.

Mo was aware of a sense of wonder, of exaltation, so beautiful that tears moistened her eyes.

Mo clapped her hands in delight.

She said:

Magtokk's arm was around her again, gripping her shoulders so tightly she could hardly breathe.

Even as he spoke, Mo found her vision blinded with light.

When, after several minutes of acclimatisation, Mo felt able to look around through narrowed lids, she saw that she had entered an enormous chamber filled with dazzling while light. The lambency came from the floor, which was up-curved, as if the face of a minor sun were pressing into the rounded emptiness beneath her feet. Out of the resultant meniscus, a vast weave of crystalline filaments emerged to whirl and flow through every morsel of space, illuminating every crook and crevice with their shadow light.

As her eyes, and senses, became more accustomed to the ambient brilliance, Mo saw that the chamber was no cave but a vast stellate composition, its ceiling a profusion of
intricate cones, like the spiny carapace of a sea urchin. And as she became even more accustomed – and observant – she saw that the weave followed the architectural conduits, rising and passing through the apical cones to the connecting labyrinth above.

Mo considered for several moments.

Mo was shocked into silence for several moments, gazing up into the night sky.

Mo considered this. She turned round in a slow circle, gazing around the giant stellate chamber of light, her senses numbed with astonishment. Then she realised that the chamber was filled with movement. Starry points of condensed light swept and swirled all around her, following the tracery of the weave.