1.

That night, with Nimrod gone, and Jerichau sleeping off his champagne, she did something she'd never done before. She evoked the menstruum, simply for company. It had shown her many sights in recent weeks, and it had saved her from Hobart and his malice, but she was still suspicious of its power. She still couldn't quite work out whether she controlled it, or vice versa. Tonight, however, she decided that that was a Cuckoo's way of thinking, always making divisions: the viewer from the viewed; the peach from the taste it left on the tongue.

Such compartments were useful only as tools. At some point they had to be left behind. For better or worse, she was the menstruum, and the menstruum was her. She and it, indivisible.

Bathing in its silver light, her thoughts turned again to Mimi, who'd lived a life of waiting, her years growing dusty while she hoped for a miracle that was too late in coming. Thinking of that, she began to cry, quietly.

Not quietly enough, for she woke Jerichau. She heard his footsteps outside, then his tapping on the bathroom door.

'Lady?' he said. It was the name he only used when there was an apology in the air. 'I'm all right,' she said.

She had neglected to lock the door, and he pushed it open. He was dressed only in the long vest he always slept in. Seeing her misery, his face dropped.

'Why so sad?' he asked.

'It's all wrong,' were the only words she could find to express her confusion.

Jerichau's eyes had found the dregs of the menstruum, which moved across the floor between them, their brightness flickering out as they left her immediate vicinity. He kept a respectful distance.

Til go to the meeting place with Nimrod,' he said. 'You stay with the Weave. Yes?' 'Suppose they demand it?'

'Then we'll have to decide,' he said. 'But we shall see this Prophet first. He could be a charlatan.' He paused, not looking at her, but at the empty floor between them. 'A lot of us are,' he said after a moment. 'Me, for instance.'

She stared at him as he loitered in the doorway. It wasn't the dying glamour of the menstruum that kept him at bay, she now realized. She spoke his name, very quietly. 'Not you,' she said. 'Oh yes,' he replied. There was another aching silence. Then he said: 'I'm sorry, lady.' 'There's nothing to be sorry for.'

'I failed you,' he said. 'I wanted to be so much to you, and look how I failed.'

She stood up and went to him. His misery was so heavy he could not raise his head beneath its weight. She took hold of his hand and held it tight.

'I couldn't have survived these months without you,' she said. 'You've been my dearest friend.'

'Friend,' he said, his voice small. 'I never wanted to be your friend.'

She felt his hand tremble in hers, and the sensation brought back their adventure on Lord Street, when she'd held him in the crowd, and shared his visions, his terrors. Since then, they'd shared a bed as well, and it had been pleasurable, but little more. She'd been too obsessed with the beasts on their heels to think of much else; both too close and too distant from him to see how he suffered. She saw it now, and it frightened her.

'I love you, lady,' he murmured, his throat almost swallowing the words before they were said. Then he extricated his hand from hers and retreated from her. She went after him. The room was dark, but there was sufficient illumination to etch his anxious face, his jittering limbs.

'I didn't understand,' she said, and reached out to touch his face.

Not since the first night they'd met had she thought of him as unhuman; his hunger to soak up the trivialities of the Kingdom had further obscured that fact. Now she remembered it. Saw before her another species; another history. The thought made her heart pound. He sensed - or saw - the arousal in her, and his earlier hesitancy evaporated. He took a half step towards her, until his tongue could run along her lips. She opened her mouth to taste him, embracing him as she did so. The mystery embraced her in return.

Their previous coupling had been comforting, but unremarkable. Now - as though released by the statement of his love - he took a new lead, undressing her almost ritualistically, kissing her over and over and between the kisses whispering words in a language he must have known she couldn't understand, but which he spoke in a voice of infinite dexterity so that, uncomprehending, she understood. It was his love he spoke; erotic rhymes and promises; words that were the shape of his desire.

His phallus, a word; his semen, a word; her cunt, which he poured his poems into, a dozen words or more.

She closed her eyes and felt his recital consuming her. She answered him, in her way, sighs and nonsenses that found their place in the swell of his magic. When her eyes flickered open again she found the exchange had ignited the very air about them, their words - and the feelings they conveyed -writing a lexicon of light which flattered their nakedness.

It was as if the room was suddenly filled with lanterns, made of smoke and paper. They drifted up on the heat of their makers' bodies, their lights bringing every part of the room to exquisite life. She saw the tightly curled hairs he'd shed on the pillow, describing their own alphabet; saw the simple weave of the sheet extolled; saw everywhere a subtle intercourse of form with form: the walls' congress with the space they contained; the curtains' passion for the window; the chair for the coat that lay upon it, and the shoes beneath.

But mostly she saw him, and he was a wonder.

She caught the minute fluctuations of his iris when his gaze moved from the darkness of her hair to the pillow upon which it was spread; saw the pulse of his heart in the corrugation of his lips, and at his throat. The skin of his chest had an almost eerie smoothness to it, but was deeply muscled; his arms were sinewy, and would not countenance unbinding her a moment, but held her as tight as she held him. There was no show of machismo in this possessiveness, only an urgency which she more than equalled.

Outside, darkness was upon the hemisphere, but they were bright.

And though he had no breath for words now, their tenderness fuelled the lights that cradled them, and they didn't dim, but echoed the lovers - marrying colour to colour, light to light, until the room blazed.

They loved, and slept, and loved again, and the words kept vigil around them, mellowing their show to a soothing flicker as sleep came a second time.

When she woke the next morning, and opened the curtains on another anxious day, she remembered the previous night as a vision of pure spirit.

2.

'I was beginning to forget, lady,' he said that day. 'You kept what you were doing clear in your head. But I was letting it slip. The Kingdom is so strong. It can take your mind away.'

'You wouldn't have forgotten,' she said.

He touched her face, ran his finger-tip down the rim of her ear.

'Not you.'

Later, he said: 'I wish you could come with me to see the Prophet.'

'I do too; but it's not wise.'

'I know.'

'I'll be here, Jerichau.'

That'll make me quick.'

Ill

CHARISMA.

Nimrod was waiting for him at the rendezvous they'd arranged two days before. It seemed to Jerichau his fervour had intensified in the intervening time.

'It's going to be the biggest meeting so far...' he said. 'Our numbers are growing all the time. The day's at hand, Jerichau. Our people are ready and waiting.' 'I'll believe it when I see it.'

See it he did.

As evening fell Nimrod took him by an elaborate route to a vast ruin of a building, far from any sign of human habitation. The place had been a foundry in its prime; but its heroic scale had doomed it when times got leaner. Now its walls would supposedly see the kindling of another heat entirely.

As they drew closer, it became apparent that there were lights burning in the interior, but there was no sound or sign of the immense gathering Nimrod had promised. A few solitary figures lurked amongst the rubble of service buildings; otherwise the place seemed to be deserted.

Once through the door, however, Jerichau faced the first shock of a night that would bring many: the vast building was filled to capacity with hundreds of the Kind. He saw members of every Root, Babu and Ye-me, Lo and Aia; he saw old men and women, he saw babes in arms. Some he knew had been in the Weave at the beginning, and had apparently elected the previous summer to try their luck in the Kingdom; others he guessed were descendants of those who'd rejected the Weave at the outset; they had a look about them which marked them out as strangers to their homeland. Many of them stood quite separately from their fellow devotees, as if nervous of rejection.