The rain had passed, and the clouds had parted, and the surface of the sea was no longer vibrated by an excess of magic. Sirius floated exhausted, and in the absence of the immediate urgency of action that had typified the previous activity – during which time the dog had been living very quickly – he slowed his experience of the world sufficiently to commune mystically with the creatures around him.
There is some variance in the way time passes for animals. It is not quite a rule, but almost, that the smaller a thing is, the quicker it is, and the larger the slower, which is another way of saying that for very small things the world passes by very slowly by comparison with their experiences, while for very large things it is much quicker. This may go to explain why a mayfly lives only a day while a whale can live for many decades.
That said, there is something close to a common rate for communication, and this was the pace at which Sirius now came to operate. This allowed him to make himself known in the minds of those around him being expressed neither too compactly and briefly for his persona to be recognised, nor too drawn-out either.
Sirius took a deep breath, not quite a sigh, and he spoke to the fishes and birds around him with his mind. As has already been established, Sirius did not think in words as much as he did in impressions, and nor do animals understand words and rational thoughts, but that is not to say that there was no exchange of meaning, since there was. It was meaning of a sufficient complexity that a dog with speech such as Anaximander could have translated it into human language with some flexibility and liberties taken.
The fishes and birds indicated to him where enough of the wreckage of the Master’s ship might be found floating for him to rest on, and, in response to a polite request, creatures on the seabed where he had recently been reconnoitred the area and gave him to understand that there was a severed human finger there. He asked that it might be brought up to him, but most marine creatures use no ethical framework, and, finding the digit liable to contain nutrients, an oyster clamped it with its shell, intending to consume it over time, ignoring Sirius’s prior claim, and this oyster was soon in a mortal struggle with an interloping octopus over its catch, a struggle which neither party was likely to give up easily.
This all became somewhat moot shortly after, when, to Sirius’s surprise, the finger communed with him itself, now suddenly containing the essences of both the oyster and the octopus. It had nothing to say other than that it needed darkness, and then it was gone into the silence that generally typifies the sunless sea floor, escaping via a crack in a rock.
From the brief connection with the finger, and from the impressions in the mystical organ which that provoked, Sirius understood it to be Nathan’s father’s digit, severed, which now, by virtue of its former godliness – since its owner had killed the original God to claim that title – had come alive in the form of an oyster-octopus hybrid, infused with the power of the weft and with a future which would be filled with incident and adventure.
None of these futures felt germane to the business at hand, so Sirius turned his attention towards the fact that the raft of wreckage that he rested on was, quite definitely, being carried out to sea, away from Mordew. He now had time to observe the city, smouldering and clattering on the horizon, steaming like an engine that has split, the water meeting the hot coals and sending dangerous gushes of superheated liquids and gas into the world.
Ships of all types and sizes cut through the waters, and in the hulls, Sirius could smell their cargos – bacon and coal, tin and weed – and their crews, fearful, exhilarated, drunk. Everything was singed, sails, boards and barrels, and redolent of smoke.
They were fleeing from the city.
As he floated, he heard, he thought, the very distant howling of a female dog coming from the collapsed city. She cried, it seemed, in an exulted type of triumph, delighting in the destruction, as if she was an enemy of the place and had brought its destruction about herself. Sirius turned his head first one way and then the other, listening, but as the wind blew across the waves, the bitch’s voice was lost, and in any case his attention was attracted by something closer.
Hovering above the surface of the water right before him a very elderly ghost manifested himself, visible by the eye and to the mystical organ. With the one it appeared as a crooked and elaborately garbed old man, his gums mashing earnestly against each other, saying something that he amplified with an urgent and repeated indication of Mordew with a rheumatic forefinger, and by the mystical organ he was a roughly man-sized patch of magic tending both inwards and outwards, forwards and backwards in time in the manner which Sirius had come to know of intrusions from the weft, and which caused him to growl in pain and annoyance, that reaction having been chosen by the Master in order that Sirius should always seek relief and go to the person who could provide it. That person, the Master, was gone now, and the period when he had valued Sirius was long past, so Sirius was left to his own discomfort.
At first, Sirius attempted to achieve peace by barking at the ghost and glaring – something that very successfully caused living things to flee from him – but the ghost was not at all concerned. Rather than run away, it came closer, urged him more forcefully, and jabbed always to the Sea Wall in the distance. Sirius, unable suddenly to contain his natural annoyance, jumped off the raft and dived at the phantom. It was delighted at this, rather than frightened, but it moved off in any case, towards where it wanted Sirius to go, and then it began its urgent indicating again.
It was in this direction that the dog swam, a little later, but not on the ghost’s say-so – if anything, Sirius wanted to defy it – but because that was where he was going in any case.
The choice was between Mordew and eventual drowning.
When the sea works against you with its currents and tides, it is very difficult to make headway at swimming, and it doesn’t help when seabirds harry you from above, taking your ears and back as objects to peck at, all the while cawing and screeching and shitting down on you. And then there is tiredness and cold and the constant threat of water inhalation. Sirius suffered all of these hardships, and the hours he spent swimming brought him hardly any closer to land.
He was a magical dog, certainly, but even they have limits, and he was reaching the end of his.
In the distance the howling of the female dog came again. She seemed to call to him, both siren-like and encouraging, urging him to efforts he didn’t feel able to make but somehow giving him the strength to make them.
He paddled with the last of his energy, keeping at least his muzzle above the water, and just as the bitch’s call faded away Sirius sensed a sudden surge of weft energy that forced the ground up under his feet, pushed him rushing, gratefully, up into the air. It suddenly stopped, leaving what once had been flat and below the waves now steep, beneath his paws and thrust up into the sky.
From nowhere had come a mountain made from the seabed, stretching up through the clouds. For moments Sirius luxuriated in the passing of the necessity to swim and delighted in the ground that supported him – admittedly it was wet and muddy, but there was sufficient solidity to it to make it feel much better, in that moment, than the fluidity of water had felt.
Up into the air the new earth was pulled, as if someone up in the clouds had pinched a place at the middle of Mordew and was drawing it up, like a cook pulls off the gelatinous skin from a cooled gravy before throwing it down to a hungry and attentive dog, waiting by the stove, mouth open, panting. Mordew was not thrown down though, in that way, but remained solid, brown, steep in the centre, before making a slow curve where it met the surface of the sea.
Here was the ghost again, which, not properly understanding what had happened, now stood perpendicular to the surface of this new curve, making an impossible angle. Its urging and indicating took on a comic air, since it didn’t seem to recognise the difference that had overcome the landscape. A ghost is not a thing proper to the material realm, and one should not expect it to instinctively obey its laws as a physical person might. Rather, the ghost gradually comes to remember what it did before its death and does those things. For the time it took to remember, and then the time it took to collate those remembered things, and then the time it took to come to a more or less accurate prediction of how it would have behaved in its life – this was several seconds – the ghost remained at an angle. Then he oriented himself to the proper plane – that being ‘down’ – and now, when he indicated, he did not indicate an expanse of water which must be crossed, but a place up the new mountain, behind the Sea Wall – which was now no longer where it had been but which was slowly tumbling down the hill in pieces.
Then, like the lash of a black glass whip, wrapping around the mountain and solidifying in place, a new Glass Road appeared, tighter to the surface, slicker and more magical, though neither Sirius nor the ghost paid it much attention.
Sirius had a good sense of distances, as most animals do, and he was not interested in the bricks of the Wall since they were still a way away, but he was interested in the direction the ghost was pointing.
Dogs, even those without a mystical organ, make for themselves in their mind’s eye a perceptual map which combines elements of memory with the visual, the auditory and the olfactory, each type of sense material informing the other. There might be a tree on which a dog evacuates urine on its patrols through a territory. This tree will have a certain look, will make a certain creaking, and will smell of the evacuations of whomever has evacuated onto it, along with its own natural odours. This tree the dog will remember, since it is an object of interest which it seeks out on its daily walk. If the dog should either see, or smell, or hear, or remember that tree it will, on the map in the dog’s mind, join all the other places and objects of its interest in a network of connected experiences of this type, all of which, synaesthetically, make the world in miniature inside the dog’s mind and form a thing that can be manipulated and queried internally.
A dog might ask of this map: ‘Where is the dog that emitted this unusually pungent secretion on this tree yesterday?’ – not using words, but feelings – and if that dog is present to be sensed it will be obvious to the questioner where in this miniature representation that dog might be. It will allow him to go there in the material world and do whatever it is he pleases there.
Of course, this is merely a metaphor for the experience of a sense that man does not possess, but nonetheless there it is.
While he had been at sea – which is so mutable and unfixed that it makes even instinctual cartography, at least of the surface, pointless – he hadn’t needed it, but this map now encompassed where things were and what they looked, sounded and smelled like. It combined this with memories of times he had been to this place, and Sirius knew that the place that the ghost was indicating was the secret den that Nathan and his playmates had occupied from time to time, and in which Sirius had encountered these ghosts before.
Back then he had tried to bite them in his anger and frustration, and there was nothing in this present ghost’s demeanour that convinced Sirius that the same course of action was not now justified. Yet the memory of that previous visit, and the still, it seemed to Sirius, extant service-pledge established with Nathan, meant that this place – where Nathan had been and therefore could be again – seemed to the dog to be a good place to go, and the ghost seemed to be leading him to it. He put away his desire to disrupt the thing’s material presence by harassing its image, and instead followed him at a run, the ghost always maintaining an exact distance away from him and never drawing any closer or further away, no matter at what speed Sirius approached it.
When Sirius had reached the Sea Wall he was already splattered with simple, innocent silt, but once he passed the first pile of partially disassembled brickwork his paws hit clumps of the Living Mud, slowly slicking down the new slope towards the sea. His mystical organ detected within the Mud writhing potentialities of ill-portent. Sirius had experienced the Mud before, but then it was generally passive, and what active things there were in it were small, mostly, and unthreatening. Now it seemed to have a will of its own, an intent towards violence, and the things that thrashed in it were larger, and all claws and teeth, red-eyed and wailing.
Up ahead, between tumbled brickwork and toppled shacks, there was a thing as high as Sirius’s shoulder built of all the aggressive parts of a beast or insect – horns and fangs, stings and pincers – these bound to each other by strips of ligament and articulated by muscles intent only on operating whatever organic weapon they were attached to. This thing could not move around, but eyes from within it watched Sirius as he passed, angrily staring, and it made a sound like the hissing of a fearful cat. Then a poisoned sting at the end of a multiply jointed limb lashed out at him, though to no real effect.
This monster was not unique – there were many of them all around, some perched on piles of rubble and collapsed shacks, some half-emerged from the mountainside. None of them would commune with him, and his organ only sensed in them a spiteful and piteous bitterness.
When the mountain that Mordew now was had grown up out of the sea it had not done so by virtue of some natural movement in the plates below it, or by some gradual buckling of the crust; it had been forced up by magic and this had stretched the matter it had raised so that what had once been the slums – the ground, the dwellings, what passed for roads – was deformed upwards and made higher. Some parts were almost as they had been, the effect being unevenly distributed.
Sirius came to Nathan’s parents’ shack, which had been close to the Sea Wall, but the planks that had made it were now represented in the world as great long strips of wood, tens of feet in length, and these rested precariously together, more of a tepee than a shack. He slipped inside, between the gaps the stretching had made. Some of their small things were longer too – pillows, bedsteads, fire grate all pulled into shapes as if made from thick treacle gone solid, or from the sap of tree left to drip, or even like stalactites that stretch down with impossible solidity from the ceiling of a cave – while other objects were almost the same.
Sirius sniffed at a keepsake of Nathan’s mother – one of her son’s milk teeth, kept in a wooden box, that had fallen from wherever she had secreted it to rest on a table that had once been sturdy but which now had two elongated legs and two untouched ones. The table toppled when his snout touched the box, and tooth and box rolled into the Living Mud and sank into it.
There was something about this that made Sirius unhappy, so he lurched out of the remains of that place and ran here and there, not knowing how to escape.
Anything that was warped was warped in the same direction – up, towards the far distant Manse – and the disparities in the transformation undermined the foundations of anything that still stood, making structures rattle and list, all weak and prone to collapse, as Sirius passed.
Within this strange new organisation of the world, the clawed stinging flukes were dotted, and others like them: smaller, scurrying terrors; abominations that flopped and rolled in the filth; half-formed hybrids that jumped, hoping to hop, seemingly, into flight, only to splash down, growling. They were all lit in the same evil light, and all equally furious with the state they found the world in.
Prey they appeared to have found, despite their ineffectiveness, in the form of worms the size of a dog’s forelimb, lungworms like those Sirius had seen in a bowl once, and which parasitised on anything, boring into flesh and eating it from within.
Then Sirius saw something that made him bark in excitement, though he was soon disappointed. A Nathan fluke came down the slope, its silhouette so like his service-pledge, slipping easily between any obstacle, gliding quickly without seeming to lift its legs. It was the size of Nathan and his shape, down to the smallest detail, but rather than a boy, who possesses disparate qualities, who wears clothes and is, materially speaking, differently textured in places, this fluke was made of all the one matter – a kind of shadowy, firm, blubbery putty, all smooth and dark like a dead porpoise, except for its fiery blue eyes.
It gave an aura of hostility, so Sirius did not try to commune with it when it stopped a hundred yards away. It picked up an object – something that had once been a kettle and which was now an attenuated lozenge of iron, six feet or more in length – raised it high, then brought it down in the midst of one of the sting creatures. The blow provoked a long, gurgling ululation that became a sickeningly choked-off silence when the Nathan fluke brought the iron down again.
Then it made its way towards Sirius.
The rules of the service-pledge are binding, but not definite, and for a moment Sirius was unsure, in his actions, how to manage the Nathan fluke as it approached. It had the form of Nathan, and had, as far as the dog could determine, been born out of his Spark energy. While a person of the material realm may not understand this, the kind of creation that Nathan used to make these flukes requires a certain passing of rights and obligations to bring about. These rights are analogous to the bond established during procreation between the parent organism and its child, though even more closely, the child being a thing of its own whereas the fluke has no such claim to individuality. It is very much more its creator than it is anything else. But just as a tumour is not equal to the person from whom it has been removed, nor is matter expelled, mucus for example, the same as the person who has expelled it, Sirius felt that he did not owe this fluke any particular service since it was something Nathan had made and then abandoned, and was not like a lost child, or a thing his service-pledge needed for his health or happiness.
This feeling was not one the dog came to instantaneously, though, and in the time he used to come to it, the Nathan fluke came before him, iron in hand, taking him presumably for one of the excrescences from the Living Mud that the previous creature it had dispatched had represented.
Regardless of the absence of any obligation, Sirius still found it difficult to countenance biting out the throat out of something that bore such a close resemblance to Nathan, though imperfectly, and certainly more difficult than running away. So he ran.
The Nathan fluke followed him for a little way, but soon found another target for its violence – a mix of man and pig lolling and retching in the mire – and while it was staving it in, thereby killing it, the ghost had left the vicinity, satisfied, possibly, that Sirius had understood his message.
Sirius made his way upward in the direction the ghost had been pointing.