A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Seven: Awakening

Lying in the long grass, with her pig-tails stretched out along the ground like snakes, Myrrha watched the weather turn. Some kind of hurdle had been overcome. The acrid, yellow-grey clouds were clearing.

The crisis point had passed. Of course, there would be other crisis points. Eve's short, repeated lives were a constant succession of them. But for now, the clouds ebbed away, and the demon world would get on with the slow, tender, vulnerable process of awakening.

Myrrha was skilled at reading portents in the weather, but it didn't take much discernment to read them today. Eve's resurrection had stirred up everything. Even the ground underneath her seemed to be prickling with potential. Myrrha wouldn't have been surprised to see clawed demon-hands surfacing through the soil on either side of her head.

Still, there were other – more direct – ways of spying on Eve, and she had come prepared. In fact, this spell would allow her to spy on anyone. She had already used it to witness the highly entertaining fate of Jack and Ellini the night before. But it was infuriating to have to use it for spying on Eve. Eve was so prevalent in the demon and new-breed worlds, so intimately connected to everything and everyone, that spying on her was as ludicrous as spying on the sky. You simply shouldn't have to.

But she wasn't tied to Eve the way other demons and new-breeds were. That connection had been severed long ago. So she had to rely on cleverness – which, fortunately, she had in abundance.

She turned to the bowl of water she had brought out with her. In the early-morning sun, it flashed her own reflection back at her. She was sprightly and dazzling and golden-haired, but somehow tired – indefinably so, because her face was as youthful now as it had ever been. Still, there was something about youth that she could never quite get right. Perhaps it was the innocence. She had never understood what it was good for.

She took up a bottle of black ink and let a few drops fall into her water bowl, watching as the droplets diffused. As an afterthought, she scattered a handful of iridescent beetle wing-cases over the surface, and then placed the bowl on the ground, where the sunlight could strike through and bounce off it.

After a while, she took up the bowl and stirred it about impatiently. Just as the ink-drops began to lose their shape and melt almost indefinably into the water, her focus shifted, and she saw what she'd been looking for.

A dark corridor, with a line of dusty candelabras on each side. They burst into flame one by one as the eye travelled forwards, until the very last of them threw their light onto a throne at the end of the corridor. It was burnished gold and the figure sitting in it had cobwebs stretched across him. A little cloud of dust stirred as he flexed his fingers.

Myrrha tried to remember his name, but he was just one of many, and her eye was soon dragged away.

She was descending through water, over shelves of coral that looked like mountain peaks. These jagged, washed-out shapes suddenly gave way to a cityscape. She could see underwater palaces made of agate and topaz, with seaweed climbing the walls like ivy. She could see bubbles and dark fins thrashing in her peripheral vision, but she could never manage to turn in time to see the creatures they belonged to.

Worlds blossomed out of the darkness. Caves that had previously been little more than pot-holes suddenly deepened and widened, became gateways to worlds that hadn't existed a few moments before. She could see eggs hatching, eyes opening, bats flying madly through caves which had previously been set in stillness.

Myrrha didn't really understand it, but she knew these worlds opened up as Eve extended her mind into the unknown – as she discovered things. The more she found out, the richer and more vibrant the demons and their kingdoms became. It was as though the demon race had been so much disused furniture, draped in dust-sheets, and she was gradually – dazzlingly – uncovering them again.