‘
Was Sirius in the weft?’ Anaximander said, the next morning, as they doused the embers of the fire.
The relaxed Clarissa, the pleased Clarissa, the Clarissa of the warming compliments of the night before, was gone. In her place was the tense, irritable, dismissive Clarissa. ‘What?’ she said. ‘I’m busy.’
Anaximander repeated his sentence, his head lower than before, his eyes averted, but before he could finish, she walked away from him and went down to a stream to wash.
Why shouldn’t she attend to her toilet? He was her service-pledge, she was not his. She owed him nothing.
The dog returned to the others.
Bellows was reading Adam, the pair of them entirely engaged in whatever story the book was telling.
If Clarissa had not looked for Sirius, perhaps Anaximander could do it himself.
Yes, that was better – he should never have given his service-pledge work to do on his behalf. It was up to him to do that job, following the lead she had provided.
He shut his eyes and pressed himself flat on the earth.
Immediately he sensed it, much stronger this time, as if another dog was right below him. Anaximander breathed deeply, silenced all other sensation, and interrogated that feeling, seeking information in it.
Direction, extent, depth – none of these things were clear. The source of sound, because a dog hears it with both his ears, can be triangulated, its relative softness or loudness speaks of proximity, and its clarity can indicate whether there are obstacles in between. The situation is similar with the other physical senses. Magical senses are deficient in this way, even while in other ways they are much more precise.
Quality, though, Anaximander could sense. This magic was very similar to his own, almost the same in its – for want of a better metaphor – flavour. So, was it Sirius then? Was he active in a non-material realm which was reverberating somehow within this land?
Anaximander wanted to believe that this was the case, not least because Clarissa had suggested that it was, but a magical dog’s character is as much a part of him as the flavour of his magic, and Sirius’s was not present in the sensation. There was none of the familiarity that Sirius’s presence should have brought. Instead, there was an uncomfortable wrongness.
He tried to feel past this wrongness, to locate Sirius in the feeling, but no matter how he tried, he couldn’t do it.
Eventually, when it was clear that he had failed to do the work Clarissa had set him, and the sense of presence was still too strong to ignore, he went to where Bellows and Adam were, and read the story they were engaged in over their shoulders until it was time to leave.
That afternoon, having made good progress, Clarissa stopped their walking.
They made camp early and she busied herself again with secret preparations, gathering roots and husks, digging troughs of various depths and shapes, chipping at and arranging stones in cryptic patterns. Anaximander watched her throughout, determined not to be absent when there was any way he could be of help, but also trying to know what it was that she was doing, matching her actions to the contents of his mind, hoping to give them significance. Bellows, though, mostly paid attention to the pages of his brother, and whatever was written there was known to them alone.
Later, Clarissa asked for privacy, and boy and dog went to hunt for food, taking Adam with them.
It is not easy to satisfy the dietary preferences of a disparate group of individuals. There is always one who will not eat what the others will, and what some people insist on having is often what will disgust another. Bellows would have cheerfully eaten seeds and berries, but these were no use to Anaximander, and Clarissa’s tastes ran to difficult to catch red meat, she needing, she said, ‘the iron’. Adam did not eat, but he did, within his pages, have instructions as to how to make a snare, and illustrations of the tops of edible roots.
‘Let us settle on rabbit,’ Anaximander said, ‘and supplement its meat with whatever else we can easily forage.’
Bellows agreed, and the two of them opened Adam and lay him on a patch of clean dry ground, where they could consult him easily.
Anaximander’s paws were not suited to the tying of knots, and Bellows’s fingers were too fragile to dig with, so despite the fact that the boy would have preferred not to eat the rabbit, and the dog could not digest potato, each one did what he was best suited to. Bellows made the rabbit snare, with a stick and a length of fabric from his jacket, and Anaximander excavated the bases of the plants Adam drew on his pages.
When the preparations were made and the roots gathered, the three hid in a secluded place from where they could not be seen but where they could see the snare.
It was getting late. Adam, who knew more about game hunting than the other two, said, ‘Make yourselves comfortable, this can take a while.’
No sooner had he said it, though, than a scream tore through the quiet of the woods.
Bellows leapt up, but Anaximander bit at his clothes and pulled him back. ‘It is Clarissa,’ he said. ‘I know that cry – she is at her work in the weft. There is no need to concern yourself; the source of her fear is not of this world.’
Bellows was about to ask him how he could be so sure, and to insist that he removed his teeth from the seat of his trousers, when, seemingly startled by Clarissa’s noise, a brace of rabbits came jumping though the undergrowth, directly at where the snare had been placed.
Boy and dog held their breath, but the animals swerved at the last moment, missing the trap.
Bellows nodded to himself, as if this confirmed some suspicion in him that things must never go his way, but then a third rabbit emerged from a bush and seemed to dive head first into the loop of the snare. Anaximander darted out from their hiding place and dispatched the thing with clinical effectiveness, returning with it in his mouth. ‘It is quite the specimen!’ he said, happily. ‘I cannot wait to show Clarissa!’
When they returned, Clarissa, exhausted, slept early without eating, and showed no interest in the catch.
In the twilight, Bellows and Anaximander stared into the fire. The boy suspended the skinned rabbit between cleft sticks, where it could cook. When the fat rendered, it fell onto a log, and, for a moment, a brighter flame flared. Its smoke, redolent of the rodent’s flesh, curled up into the sky.
Anaximander, his eyes fixed on the passing of these drippings, turned his head to the side, first one way and then the other. In an unspeaking dog, this is the sign of mute incomprehension, but this dog was not mute. On the contrary. ‘What, I wonder, is fire? Clearly, I understand that it is that hot, red, flickering presence above the burning wood. But what is it made from?’ he said.
When Bellows didn’t answer, but only turned the spit to brown the topside of the rabbit, Anaximander went on. ‘The question seems nonsensical – fire, after all, is made from fire. But of what sort of thing is it? Clothes are made of fabric’ – he looked over at the ones that contained Clarissa, groaning restlessly in her EYE fugue – ‘and fabric is made of threads. Threads come from plants, and plants gain their matter from the soil. Can it not be said, then, that clothes are of the earth, transformed from it by degrees?’
Bellows turned the meat again, though this time it didn’t really need turning. He didn’t speak.
‘What can fire be said to be transformed from?’ the dog asked. ‘Not earth, certainly. Nor is it of water, which is obvious, since water douses a flame and kills it. Nor is it of the air, since air is invisible and flames can be seen.’ Anaximander took a log from the fuel pile with his mouth and threw it onto the blaze, making it burn brightly. ‘Is it then light? No, since light gives illumination to an object but is itself invisible, whereas, as we have noted, fire can be seen. Is it then heat? No, for the reasons it is not light. Light and heat are effects on things – everything can be made light or dark, hot or cold – but fire is a thing of itself. Look, Bellows’ – he indicated with his muzzle – ‘fire dances above the wood. And look’ – he blew over it with his breath – ‘see how the movement of air directs it. Air cannot direct light, nor heat, it only acts on physical things. So, fire must be physical. Yet it cannot be captured in the mouth and held, and if one tries one receives only pain.’
Since the fire was now much stronger after Anaximander’s addition of superfluous wood, Bellows had to take the spit away, and since the meat was cooked – he prodded it with his finger in the way Cook had done many times in the Manse and it gave, but not too much – he passed Anaximander his share. As he did it, putting a portion at the dog’s feet, he said, ‘The Master taught me many things, but the nature of fire was not one of them. It seems to me that the world is a place where there are things that are acted upon, and things that act upon them. Fire, like lightning, is not a thing in itself but is a sign of an actor, acting upon the acted-upon, transferring its power, in this case destructively. We are acting upon the logs, turning them into heat. Fire is the sign of this, so that we see that it is happening. It is a particular sign of a particular action. Just as tears are the sign of an unhappy action in a man, or thunder is the sky’s anger acted out on the air.’
Anaximander had been eating while Bellows delivered his speech, but when he sensed the boy was finished, he swallowed his mouthful quickly. This wasn’t because words couldn’t leave him if impeded – his magic voice could not be obstructed by a mouthful of meat and bones – it was more that he didn’t want his enjoyment of the food to distract him. Anyway, it was a politeness he had learned from Clarissa, who never spoke with her mouth full. ‘This may be true,’ he said, licking his lips, ‘but the question remains – from what is it made?’
As if from the empty space where no one was sitting, Adam spoke. ‘Fire,’ the book said, ‘is a flux of combusting gases. Heat and light combined given off by reactions in the presence of air. It can be moved because the combusting gases that make it can move, it dances because these gases themselves dance invisibly in a breeze.’ There on the ground Adam lay open in the dirt, lit by the flames, his two visible pages covered with diagrams, short pieces of text and arrows indicating which words referred to which images.
Anaximander could see the pages from where he sat, but they didn’t seem to convince him. ‘You say it is a “flux”, but I ask again, what type of thing is a flux? Is it a quality of existence that only fire exhibits? I have never seen any other flux of this type, except to recognise it as “fire”. To say fire is a flux—’
Adam interrupted him. ‘If the word means nothing to you, then that is because you are ignorant and so should turn your attention more assiduously to your studies.’
‘You’re all wrong,’ said a voice, startling the three, who had believed themselves alone in the gathering night. It wasn’t Clarissa, waking, Anaximander knew this in a moment, and so he went into an attacking stance. Bellows stood; Adam snapped shut.
The voice, the source of which Bellows and Anaximander strained to see through the flames, was high but strong. She carried confidence, but not arrogance, and had there been a woman of sturdy middle age there, a schoolmistress or a doctor, then they would not have been surprised. But there was no one of that sort.
Instead, there was a tall and beautiful woman, in travelling clothes, with a pretty face and long hair in ringlets. She had almond eyes and glistening lips, and on each finger she wore rings, all different from each other. In one hand she held a sword, thin and stiff as a fencing foil, sharpened to a point. ‘I am Sharli,’ she said, ‘and I’m here on business.’
Anaximander indicated a plan to Bellows with nods, that the pair should circle the fire, each converging on the woman by their closest route, but Bellows remained where he was, rigid with fear.
‘Your friend is sensible, dog. Stay where you are.’ Sharli indicated with a jerk of her head to where Anaximander’s service-pledge was sleeping. ‘I’m here with my lover. He is called Deaf Sam.’ This ‘Deaf Sam’ had a handkerchief over Clarissa’s face and a knife at her heart. ‘He has ether at her mouth, but if you wake the woman up, his blade will do the killing.’
Anaximander set up a low growl, but at whom it was difficult to tell, since he could attack neither of them without risking Clarissa’s life.
Sharli put up one hand, the other swishing the sword through the air. ‘Fire,’ she said, ‘is made of death. As am I. If you don’t believe me, we can put it to the test.’ She didn’t wait for them to agree to this, instead she took a step forward, into the flames, standing with one boot in the ash at their fire’s centre and the other on the most fiercely burning log. She stood there, seemingly unaffected by heat or flux, and looked directly at Bellows. ‘Would any of you like to join me?’ she said. The flames licked up her calves, encircled her legs to the knees. ‘No?’ She smiled and then, in one quick and smooth movement she reached down, speared Adam with the sword and dropped him into the embers.
Bellows, suddenly overcoming his fear, stepped towards her, but Sharli aimed her rapier at the boy’s throat.
From over by Clarissa there was a senseless bark that stopped whatever murder she was about to attempt. It was not Anaximander, as anyone familiar with him would know. It was Deaf Sam, attracting Sharli’s attention.
She turned to him and read the signs he then made, never moving from the fire, never suffering its effects. ‘Theatrics? They’ve never bothered you before,’ she replied to his objection. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘My lover doesn’t see the need for all this… flair. Fair enough. If you’re curious, my boots and trews are coated with a paste that’s resistant to flame. I, through my many years of training, am resistant to pain.’ She smiled. ‘I’m still death, though… at least as far as two of you are concerned.’ She faced Bellows, who was anxiously stepping forward and backward, staring at Adam.
Anaximander spoke now, creeping forward in the luxury of all the others’ attention on Sharli. ‘There is no need to fear, Bellows; Adam cannot be destroyed in that way. See, he remains as untouched as this woman appears to be. Her bodily integrity will not last, though, and nor will her gentleman companion’s.’ Anaximander lowered his head and raised his lips and in the firelight his teeth, sharp and long, glistened. He growled as Heartless Harold Smyke had trained him to, a sound that men and dogs felt in their anxious bowels. ‘I will kill you, and then I will kill him, and, if I still live, I will gnaw your bones white.’
This, the dog felt, was a threat that seemed to ignore the couple’s own threat – namely to kill Clarissa, his service-pledge – and he made it having considered three aspects of the situation, each of which he had understood with the magical speed he possessed by virtue of his fantastic provenance, and in combination with the information his magical senses gave to him.
Firstly, when he had been to Padge’s office to fulfil his debt to the gin-wife and where he had been shot with the poisoned bullet, there had been very many sensations that circumstances dictated he ignore. This is true of all of us – a person must always focus on the business at hand, though that does not seal off the senses to all other input. Whatever you are doing now, pause. Look left, look right – those things do not seem entirely unfamiliar because they were at the periphery of your attention while you were reading, yet they still impacted on your sensorium. So it was with Anaximander back then, in Padge’s quarters. He had, he now realised, smelled these two people before, faintly, by virtue of their previous presence there. They had also been in the restaurant outside the office, amongst the sense-signatures of the people who made up the patrons there. He thus knew these two to be particularly dangerous by their association with Mr Padge, who was himself a particularly dangerous man.
Secondly, there was about the persons of these two a conspicuous number of weapons, some of which were visible in the outlines they made in their clothes, some of which had odours associated with them – gunpowder, whetstone, solid smoke, etc. – and some of which had caused reactions on their skin, or which were carried in their sweat, so that Anaximander knew that they had been altered in some way. Some unscrupulous dog men will poison their fighters’ claws, so it is not uncommon for others to dose their animals with antidotes, and these poisons and cures have subtle but recognisable scents, and both of these people smelled of these, which made him know that they were the kind of people who felt it was in their interests to do such a thing, something that made them likely to be assassins, or skilled roughs of a similar type.
Thirdly, Anaximander was very familiar with the sleeping breathing of Clarissa, he having laid beside her many nights in her place in the Merchant City, hoping that she was resting, keeping watch over her until the morning. He knew her to have been engaged, before the assassins arrived, with her inward, dreaming activities, and now knew, although she feigned to be unconscious, that in fact she was not unconscious at all but was preparing for some action. The ether, he could smell, was fresh enough to be effective, so it must have been that Clarissa was tolerant to it – perhaps through regular use as a soporific – which is why he could hear micro-muscular movements of her jaw in the clicking of its joints. While he could not decode the words, he guessed, knowing enough of the rhythm of spells, that she was in the process of silently mouthing one.
These three facts, as they were now to him, made him sure that his best course of action was direct attack, this being, as is often asserted, the best defence.
Assassins assassinate, so there is no point in negotiating with them; Clarissa was not under threat, even if the man who threatened to kill her thought she was; and if fighting was in the offing it was better that it occurred on his terms rather than theirs, since it is a rule in combat that the person who strikes first has an advantage. This is why he made the threat to gnaw their bones white, because it would, in order to correct his seeming failure to understand the gravity of the situation and restore their initial strategy to effectiveness – that is to blackmail them to compliance on the threat of the murder of all of them rather than one – require Sharli to make a clarification of some kind, verbally or by action, during which time he could make his first strike.
This is what happened, because the woman in the fire opened her mouth to say something, even as the flames licked up behind her, and this gave the dog the opportunity to attack.
Someone not trained to fight in a dog pit might think that a pounce upward is the best tactic, with the aim, perhaps, of hitting the chest with force, revealing the throat and then biting it out. This is too bold and leaves the attacker vulnerable to any quick counterstrike. It takes time to soar though the air, and to attack the chest is a mid-level attack, meaning that anyone upright on two legs – person, bear, rearing stag – is presented with a dog’s most vulnerable parts when it is very easy for them to use whatever weapon they might have – knife, claw or antler – to pierce that creature’s heart, and many was the dog that Anaximander had seen defeated that way.
If you have a long memory, you might recall that he had leapt in just that way at Mr Padge – and thus got himself shot. This was at the forefront of Anaximander’s mind, so instead he ran directly into the fire a little to the left of the foot that Sharli was resting on the burning log. He flung himself through the flames, clamping his jaws down on her ankle as he passed, then snapping his neck around so that the full weight of him pierced her boot down to the talus and spun her leg out from under her, causing her to fall to her knee in the flames, screaming, entirely unable to riposte with her rapier. Moreover, it meant that the dog himself was not in the burning part of the fire, and anything the man by Clarissa might have attempted was obscured by an upwards billowing cloud of embers and smoke, confusing everyone. This was exactly what Anaximander had hoped and is an object lesson in why it is wiser to strike at non-fatal weak points, and to consider one’s next moves rather than always to go for a direct kill in a fight against a skilled opponent.
What he had not considered, and this is because it is hard to know what someone you have never seen fight will do under the circumstances, is what the book, Adam, would do. He hadn’t imagined there was anything he could do, fighting being a bodily activity, but that was to underestimate what a magical book is capable of.
Any magical book has within it spells, and Adam was made as a catalyst, one, incidentally, entirely immune to burning, as we saw before when he went with Nathan Treeves to kill the Mistress of Malarkoi, so he brought his catalysing powers to bear, burning up everything in the fire that could be burned up in a single moment, causing a deafening and blinding explosion of light and heat that left Anaximander and Bellows singed, and Sharli, who was in the epicentre of the blast, kneeling, scorched and hairless, blistered and furious, where the fire had been.
She dropped her rapier – it had absorbed so much heat that the pommel was burning in her hand – and clawed all over herself with her blackened fingers, pulling everything metal away from her – her throwing knives, her belt buckles, the poison needles in her sleeves, the necklace of steel links Deaf Sam had given her, her bracelets and bangles, her earrings and the rings of her many victims – and they burned the remaining skin from her fingertips.
Even her gold tooth she spat out, burned loose in its socket.
Bellows, not known for anything but the most secondary forms of violence, did not shrink from the fight. Though he was slight, he was cunning, and he took the spit he had earlier used for the rabbit and drove that into Sharli’s back. Admittedly, he put it in the least useful place: there are many organs that are easily pierced, and which will end life sooner or later when destroyed, and he missed all of these and hit her spine instead. Regardless, it is harder to fight a battle on multiple fronts than it is on one, and Anaximander had regained his feet, preparing to show this assassin the mercy of a quick death.
All the above was the work of a moment, and Deaf Sam was distracted enough not to even attempt to carry out Sharli’s threat against Clarissa, and this gave the woman in question the chance to turn him to stone by uttering the final syllable of the spell she had been preparing.
In her childhood Clarissa had always found pleasure in the legend of a woman so ugly that to look upon her petrified a man. This she liked not for the reason that story was told – to make girls understand that it was their duty to be beautiful, and the perils of failing to attend properly to their looks – but because she thought that it was fitting that men who attempt to steal beauty from a woman should receive more than they bargain for – and so she used a spell which loosened the weft sufficiently to confuse the material realm in the volume of this man’s existence with the certainty that instead of being made of flesh he was made of a quantity of granite. This is what Deaf Sam immediately became, ending his life.
When this was done there was a short period in which nothing happened physically, but there was much taking stock, and it was everyone’s conclusion that, despite what an observer might have expected, the assassins had been routed easily, and there was nothing for Sharli to do but surrender, if she lived long enough to do that.
Anaximander, always eager to provide service, said, ‘I can end this person’s life very quickly. While she may not appear dangerous, my assumption is that she is an assassin in the previous employ of Mr Padge, most likely here on a long-standing commitment to revenge his killers – in this case the boy Bellows, who, while he did not provide the finishing blow, did at least distract Padge with his murderous employment of a magical concentrate. I doubt she would recant her ways, even at this late stage, and may well have recourse to small acts of aggression, the biting of a poison gas tooth, for example, or the ability to explode in the proximity of a foe.’
As the dog spoke, Clarissa came closer, staring all the while at the woman, who was on her side in the ash, breathing heavily. ‘What are you?’ Clarissa said, but it wasn’t a question for Sharli as much as it was one for herself.
Sharli backed painfully away, but soon stopped when Anaximander barked a warning at her to stay still.
When Clarissa was within touching distance, the puzzlement left her face. ‘She is a weft-replica,’ she told Anaximander, although he didn’t understand what that meant. ‘You are a copy,’ she said to Sharli, ‘if that’s any comfort to you. Your original has already died, or still lives, somewhere. You aren’t real.’ Clarissa turned her back on her and walked away. ‘She won’t be any trouble.’
Anaximander, looking back just in case, followed Clarissa. ‘She did at last find out what fire is, first-hand,’ he called after his service-pledge when he was at a safe distance, but she didn’t seem to hear him.
Bellows picked up Adam, blew the ash from him, and followed the others.
Sharli remained to die there of her burns, something that inevitably happened shortly afterwards, watched over by the silent statue of Deaf Sam.
This deathly tableau provided a disturbing sight for another assassin, the Druze, when that neuter person arrived later, their magic paper having changed to indicate that Bellows and Clarissa were now the assigned targets.
No killer blanches much at the sight of death, but the scene that confronted the Druze did certainly influence the tactics they then went on to employ.
The sun rose slowly and in the weak light of the dawn – which for Anaximander was perfectly adequate, his other senses doing most of the work his eyes were spared, but which for Bellows was hardly enough, his arms held pre-emptively out in front of him when they were not trying to grab the dog’s tail – Clarissa led them through the Island of White Hills until they came to a strange place.
‘What,’ Anaximander asked, ‘is a weft-replica?’ The question had been occupying his mind as he trotted along after Clarissa, down to the submerged forest, and no amount of considering the dictionary definitions of those terms had provided him with an answer.
If he expected Clarissa to satisfy his curiosity, though, he was mistaken. ‘We don’t have much time,’ she said. ‘If there’s a contract on us, then there’ll be others following behind.’
Anaximander cursed himself for not thinking of it. She was right, of course, and now, when he interrogated the sense-memories linked with the two who had attacked them he realised that there were five others like them, all probably in Padge’s employ, although he imagined some would have been concentrating on finding the child Gam Halliday, whose knife thrust did the actual work of killing their employer.
They had risen by gentle ascents, but now she drew them down into a bowl between two high granite ridges like the backs of starved grey horses, spaced a mile or more apart. It seemed in the shadows these ridges made as if this bowl was filled with black oil, with thick tar, with congealed and darkened blood, its surface reflective and viscid, a petrified lake perfect in its flatness, except that spears erupted through it everywhere, the silent, stripped tops of dead trees. There had been a forest here, Anaximander guessed, one that was now almost entirely below the surface of a lake.
Clarissa went to the line where the ground met the water – for water it was, not oil, something Clarissa proved when she walked into it, so that it rose above her ankles easily, not struggling, like tar might. She turned to the two following her and said, ‘The first time I came here was as a girl. It was called the Arboretum, then. I don’t think it has a name now. I remember because that was also the first time I ever smoked. Behind the gift shop.’ She frowned, put her hand to her temple, as if the memory gave her a headache. ‘Such a long time ago. A different world.’
Anaximander, seeing she was in distress, ran to her side, and Bellows stumbled after him, but in the short period that facilitated their arrival she had pulled herself together, forcing a smile. ‘Anyway, that’s by the by,’ she said. ‘There’s a cave system, down at the bottom. We need to find our way in.’
Anaximander sat at her feet and looked up at her. He paused, opened his mouth, shut it, then opened it again. ‘While I am pledged to your service,’ he said, eventually, ‘I am not required by that pledge to execute my obligations blindly. You must know that I will do whatever you ask of me, almost without exception, and I ask that you repay this courtesy by taking me into your confidences. I am an intelligent being, and I do not enjoy being in ignorance. With these considerations foremost, I ask: what are you planning by coming here?’ This said, he put out his tongue and breathed heavily over it, thereby cooling himself and indicating that he intended no further immediate conversation for his part.
Bellows scoffed, loudly. ‘A dog should never place stipulations on his obedience! No! He should do without question what his mistress wishes, knowing that she exceeds him in her intellect, in her wisdom, and, most importantly, in her requirements, she having many where he should have none. Ignore him, madam, he—’
Clarissa interrupted him. ‘Bellows,’ she said, ‘you don’t seem to have learned your lesson yet.’
Bellows was chastened, and even went so far as to put his hand over his mouth. Clarissa came over to him and removed it. ‘You can say what you like, boy. Just try make sure it’s what you want to say, not what you think someone else wants to hear.’ She turned away from him. ‘The caves lead to a ceremonial chamber, a pocket of air surrounded by a rough sphere of stone, one of those geological quirks people like to come to visit. But I know what it was. What it is.’ She paused and Anaximander waited.
Bellows, having thought of some other argument against the dog, began to make it, but Clarissa spoke over him. ‘Most objects exist entirely in the material realm, but some powerful things have a dual existence – here and in another place. At the same time, most places are entirely in the material realm, but some powerful places have a dual existence too. If you know the INWARD EYE, if you can see the conditions of the weft, then the combination of a dual object and a dual place is quite distinctive. Like this glacial valley and its forested lake, it stands out.’ She walked further out into the water until it was up to her thighs, and then she kneeled.
Reflexively, Anaximander lurched forward, his body thinking she might be in danger. His mind knew that she was not, so he stopped himself the moment he could.
Clarissa stayed there for a while, and then she put her face, slowly and carefully, down into the water, her eyes open and staring. She stayed there for thirty seconds, possibly a minute. Her hair surrounded her head, spreading on the pillow of the water. When bubbles of her breath broke the surface, she pulled herself out again. ‘Down there is a magical thing, waiting. A relic from a past.’
At the edge of the lake the sense of another magical dog’s presence was very strong to Anaximander. He went to Clarissa, and this time she anticipated his question.
‘I looked for Sirius in the weft,’ she said. ‘I didn’t find his presence here. There is something, though, and I am glad you’re here.’
Again, Anaximander was filled with the warmth of her approbation. His ears picked up and he became alert to every possible nuance of what she was saying to him.
‘I’ll need you, where we’re going,’ she continued, ‘My work’s very nearly complete. I just need the relic, now, and everything will be fine.’
Again, Anaximander had no understanding of what she meant. ‘What will you need me to do?’ he said, the answer he requested not a means of deciding whether he’d do it, but more as a way of preparing himself to do the best possible job.
It seemed as if her mouth went dry, and she swallowed, but then she smiled and left the question unanswered.