And after? When the Quickening has burnt itself out. What will the world be like then?

But it is not like that, the Smoke, it has no use for words. It speaks in images instead, in feelings referencing memories that, recounted later, across a pillow in the dark, will appear both familiar and strange. In this wordless realm these whispers are not something yet, are but the possibility of thought; like a joy neither voiced nor performed, shapeless and real. And all the while the Smoke surrounds them, humming their melodies, sneaking its tendrils across the borders of their individual selves.

Thomas’s Smoke is the darkest, raw and confused. It sings his fear — of Julius; of becoming like him; of being abandoned for his crimes — and the bliss of self-forgetting. His father is in his Smoke, cradling a pewter mug. Livia, too, her shirt wet and clinging to her chest. Charlie: befriending him on that first day of school. His mother dying; a bullet slamming into his head. A nurse’s kiss; a boxing bout; bones breaking under knuckles. Gypsy vagrants fighting, rutting in the dirt. A church floor, littered and noble; a drunken priest. Hope.

Charlie’s Smoke is different, more marshalled and orderly, a procession of people sketched in white, tan, and grey. There is the woman in the woods, dressed in her shift and smoking as naturally as she is breathing. There are Renfrew and Eleanor, sewn into her harness of leather and steel. Thomas, Livia, flushed and beckoning; bare shoulders entangled under a linen sheet. His parents, stiff-backed, sitting in their ill-begotten house and wondering whatever happened to their son. A room of coachmen, huddled together on the floor against the cold. The tattoo of a mermaid, her bosom blinking with each movement of the coachman’s thumb.

And threaded into their Smokes, unpredictable, at turns more controlled and more volatile than either’s, is Livia’s, in violet and green. Her mother, crying, in front of the cell she had built to make prisoners of little boys and girls. Her father strapped to his attic bed, staring up at her with fearful eyes. Francis the miner walks in, tugging a pony on bandy legs. Grendel, her killer angel, brandishing a snub-nosed gun; Mowgli hiccupping his first billow of Smoke. Thomas, half naked, holding out to her the black of the mask. Charlie, in darkness, tongue to her tongue.

“Yes?” she asks into the Smoke, her eyes closed, a hand on each of the boys.

“Yes,” says Charlie.

“Yes,” says Thomas. He removes the stopper, tilts the beaker, and washes Julius’s head in blood. The next moment Charlie pushes Julius’s body to the centre of the pool; the Soot shifting with him, his bridal train, his burial shroud.

Then they step back, Livia, Thomas, and Charlie.

And run like hell.

PART SIX CLOUD

PART SIX CLOUD

If thou art displeas’d with Lawes Divine, and Civil,