Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  She shook her head. ‘Can’t believe it. It seems just . . . wrong.’

  ‘Times change,’ he said, letting the meaningless words slip out as he lay back and gave in to a minute of exhaustion. He wasn’t as young as he wished he was. ‘Speaking of which – meaningless segue – you haven’t seen much of Teaz since we got back. Are you avoiding him?’

  ‘Why, did he ask you to ask me?’

  Which sounded defensive and some, so he took it as a yes. ‘He misses you is all I was going to say.’ Not exactly true but he was going to have to fish here before he figured it out.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, fiddling pointlessly with the rent front of his shirt. ‘He won’t mind, Zal. He’s got a billion things to do.’ She made some slicing and dicing motions with her hand. A sigh escaped her nostrils.

  ‘I didn’t pick you for the jealous girlfriend type.’

  ‘What? That’s insane. I mean, when you were gone we . . . it was convenient Zal, and it was distracting and he just found it terribly terribly entertaining and I . . .’

  ‘You?’ he prompted in the pause. His mage came up in her soft flowing robe and wordlessly handed over a set of towels before laying his clothes out on the arm of the sofa and retreating. She tried quite hard to get a reading off him but he was closed to her now and registered how much she didn’t like it. It was considered deeply impolite to remain aloof in that manner. Only agents of the secret service from old – the Jayon Daga – were permitted to habitually contain their aetheric bodies. He hadn’t served there for a long, long time but he was going to keep the privilege. ‘You?’ he nudged Lila and handed her a towel for her hair, even though it was almost dry already from their ride.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said unhappily.

  Zal realised this angle was going nowhere. He knew perfectly well what was going on, but if she didn’t want to admit it to him that was another thing. ‘I think you should talk to him.’

  She made a ‘not now’ gesture and busied herself with the towel. ‘He’s full demon, Zal, he couldn’t care less. It’s a marriage of convenience and politics. No need for the drama.’

  Zal smiled under his own towel, gave up and tossed it aside. ‘If you don’t I’m sure he’ll come for you,’ was all he said.

  ‘Yuh,’ she replied, curling against him like a large cat.

  ‘How’s Greer?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said before she had time to think it over. ‘Why you—’

  ‘See, I know you inside out, Metallica. You can’t help yourself. The Agency fall in another pile of shit and you have to be there to help them out.’

  ‘Yeah well, the pile of shit you refer to is walking around out there in its hundred bits of undead glory and it shows no sign of stopping. As for cause, since I was instrumental in the cause I guess I do feel some responsibility towards finding a solution.’ She was clipped with him. He felt duly rebuked but that only made him angry.

  ‘It was Xavi,’ he said. ‘Not you.’

  ‘She’s in the cells,’ Lila replied. ‘I’m in charge of her.’

  ‘It’s a fucking bad idea,’ Zal said. ‘Every time I go near her I feel the same thing and it’s not good. And yeah, you tied her to us, to me, you, Tea, Tath and Malachi . . . but it remains to be seen how far those bonds will pull. I know lots of friends and lots of lovers who are more than able to stab each other in the back.’

  ‘She’s totally contrite,’ Lila said in a tone that made him shut up, not because he wanted to but because he felt anything more would only push her into a greater defence of the woman. ‘And she’s in prison. And she’s doing all she can to stop it.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Zal asked. ‘Is she reading a book on it?’ But he wasn’t going anywhere with it. Lila would always take the underdog’s position first. It was something he liked about her, but now it was driving him nuts.

  ‘She’s explaining everything.’

  Zal could only roll his eyes at this. No human had any idea of the nature of elf politics, which was infinitely long in its centuries of progress and infinitely complex. One reason he had left Alfheim behind. Still, maybe she could be right. The magical bond was written in the blood of Nyx, the black dragon of creation. It was probably enough to alter time, space and more than a few hearts. It could have the power to make a friend of an enemy, he didn’t doubt that. And yet . . . still he couldn’t rest easy with it. ‘Your power is making you insensitive to other angles of attack,’ he said, in a tone that made her look around at him.

  ‘You’re serious,’ she said, folding her own towel and laying it aside.

  ‘Always,’ he said, hopeless now.

  ‘Zal, that prison was built by Sarasilien and a hundred others, especially to contain aetheric beings. She can’t get out, not any way. She’s got nothing. She’s going nowhere.’

  He gave up. ‘Here’s breakfast.’

  She looked down. ‘Oh god, what is that?’

  He handed her a sealed, disposable hot cup. ‘At least I made them go out to the Italian place down the street for the coffee.’

  She opened it and took a deep inhale. ‘You’re forgiven. I suppose this isn’t the time to mention that Malachi wants to see us all.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘You know who.’ She poked him with her elbow, sitting up.

  ‘Is he going to ask us to hunt down the undead for Temple Greer?’ Zal’s heart was sinking.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. He seemed a bit disturbed. Wanted it to be soon. Today or tomorrow.’

  ‘You should see her before that,’ he said without thinking.

  ‘Who?’ She sipped the scalding drink in her hand, settling herself down against him again.

  ‘You know who.’ He was referring to her sister and he knew she knew it. The talk of undead never left Max far behind: she had died of old age during Lila’s fifty-year blackout but a month ago Otopia had suffered an incursion of beings from the undead planes and ever since then the numbers of Returners had increased steadily and unpredictably. Max was one of these, apparently alive, full of memories and not a day over twenty-five. She had gone back to live in the house Lila had inherited from her and he was sure this was the reason Lila had tried to live in Demonia with her husbands again, and taken to sneaking back to spend any nights in Otopia sleeping at the office with Malachi and whoever else was unlucky enough to pull two shifts.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said.

  ‘You can’t run from them for ever, Lila.’

  ‘Yeah well, it’s not for ever and it’s not even her.’

  Except that he knew as well as she did that for her Max really was still twenty-five, alive as the day she’d been left behind a few months previously. And there was more to it.

  ‘Zal,’ Lila said quietly after a minute. ‘I called them, didn’t I? I wrote that note in that ink with that bloody pen and I called her back. And they followed.’

  ‘They didn’t follow without a lot of help,’ Zal replied, though he couldn’t deny it entirely.

  ‘Still. I did it.’

  ‘The pen did it. These things have minds of their own. You were just the fingers and the legs that delivered it.’

  She took another drink and watched the sunlight come through the roof. ‘I wish I believed you.’

  He pulled her against him closer. He wished he believed it too, but he didn’t have any of the feelings that equated with things being over, finished and done. This brought him to a question he knew she’d know the answer to and which he didn’t want to know the answer to. For all of them it was the elephant in the room these days. He guessed it was behind the elves’ rapid incursions into Otopia – a see it before it’s too late kind of impulse. Since long before he had met Lila, before she was born, before he was even born, fissures in the space-time fabric of all their worlds had started opening up. Some led onto the Void – a vast space brimming with creative energy from which he’d seen the youngest of the three weird sisters pull the material she spun on her distaff to cre
ate reality. Some others opened onto the least understood of all the worlds it was possible to go to.

  Dubbed Thanatopia, rather fatuously, by the Otopian security agencies, as if it were some kind of paradisical death playground, it was a place into which material beings could not pass. They said these days that things came out of it; invisible, immaterial creatures – spirits and ghosts. But ghosts spawned in the deep Void so Zal didn’t believe that. He was familiar enough with ghosts to know these fresh invaders weren’t that. And since those later cracks had opened up, creating tensions along the planar divisions, it had been clear that unless something was done eventually a critical rip would occur. After that all bets were off, no matter who you were or what power you had.

  The humans blamed the bomb they thought had created the entire situation from their ordinary single space-time seventy years previously, but the elves and fey and those who’d been around longer than Otopia knew it wasn’t the bomb’s doing. It was something else. There were even speculations that the bomb was an indirect product of the abyssal formations that had permitted wild aether to leak into Otopian space somewhere too close to a quantum-research facility. Otopia’s bomb was just some minor occurrence in a much larger pattern. Since the bomb however, there was no doubt that the problem had accelerated. And since Xaviendra had made her ill-fated bid for godhood they had moved into exponential figures. So Zal really didn’t want to know the answer, because it was like asking when the world was ending, but he asked it anyway.

  ‘What’s the cracking rate?’

  ‘Five per cent acceleration per Otopian month,’ Lila replied without even having to check.

  ‘When’s critical break point?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Nobody knows. Weeks, months, years. Depends where the weakest warps are and what happens across the cosmosphere. Inherently unpredictable and not even certain. There have been reports of temporal anomalies closing previous cracks and stabilising local continua. It’s not possible to survey most of the worlds due to their size and some not at all – Zoomenon for instance. Nothing survives long enough there to take readings that are reliable.’

  Yes, that was a far from over feeling if ever he had one. ‘Can’t you hear it in the Signal?’ he asked her, hoping the answer was no. The Signal was the machines, they were information and process, nothing more, nothing less.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said unhappily, putting the empty coffee container down. She leaned over him to look into his eyes and gave him a lingering kiss and a wryly sad half-grin. ‘If only I had a clue what most of it meant.’ She cupped the palm of her hand, shell-like, next to his ear, and played him the sound.

  It sounded like white noise to him, a low hissing whisper of meaningless static like the sound of radio telescopes listening to the echoes of the first moment. There was nothing to cling onto, no trace of a pattern that he could detect. But she was a million times more suited to it than he was. Even so her face had a bleakness, a greyness in it suddenly as she listened with him.

  ‘There it is,’ she said quietly over the wash of sound. ‘There it all is. If only I could understand.’

  A flash of insight occurred to him and he said aloud, ‘You’re hoping that the rogues know, that they have an ability to listen that you don’t. You want them to come and find you out in the middle of that industrial nowhereland, so you can take it.’ He wondered if all those components were more than bikes.

  She fisted her hand and there was silence.

  ‘Lila,’ he said, knowing they were the only thing that really threatened her. ‘They’re more advanced—’

  ‘They just lived longer. They had more time. That’s all,’ she said stubbornly and put a piece of bread in his mouth.

  He stuffed it into his cheek with his tongue. ‘Don’t get that look with me.’

  ‘What look?’

  But his objection was cut off by the sudden commotion in the entryway – a wash of rage and energy coming through the andalune that jolted Zal half out of his seat and woke every last sleeping elf in the building, spilling them to their feet wide-eyed and witless.

  Zal was out of the seat and halfway there as he heard the snapping of teeth and the desperate sound of blades ringing out uselessly on scale armour. Lila was close behind him, barefoot on the stone floor. He heard her dress catch and tear and her curse it as steam and smoke billowed under the curtain, lifting it enough for him to see the guards’ feet in fighting stances and the huge claws that feinted a savage strike at them, pushing them backwards into the weighted cloth. Their stumbling retreat was echoed by running in the walls and the sudden high-pitched shriek of armour-piercing arrowheads slicing the air open. Wooden shafts peppered the screen and fell clattering to the floor. There was a low, sinister hiss that became a snarl of rage; a deep, bloodied sound of raw ill-intent that was formed into almost incomprehensible elven words by a huge, nearly lipless mouth and a barbed mass of tongue,

  ‘Get out of way if want live!’

  Zal didn’t think the owner of that voice was in a mood to be too careful with the Otopian armistice agreements. He caught a swaying edge of the screening and pulled it back to let him through. The guard on that side tumbled past him, losing footing and falling on his ass. Blood spattered from several shallow wounds, onto Zal’s boots and across the floor.

  Before him, filling the confessional-box confines of the entryway, a draconid the size of a horse was busy pulling the last of several arrows out of his hide with his teeth. Their feathered ends were dwarfed in any case by his own blue quills, wet with poison. These rattled and erected themselves with the slight pain of the attack. With a jerk of his long neck the demon yanked the shaft out impatiently, leaving the head stuck in his skin. It was an impressive sight. Zal knew the shots could have gone through a car door. Then the huge ugly head tilted towards him and glared at him with one and then another slitted white eye. A slight pall of steam rose from the long lines of its face, up from the white mane of hair rising between its long horns, and from the cramped lines of its wings. Its tail lashed around, striking long splinters off the panelling as the finned edge, tipped with diamond, struck the walls.

  More arrows were aimed from the hidden sconces but Zal was already extended into the andalune matrix of the place and waved them back. At his touch the remaining guard looked up at him with a faint dawning of horrified comprehension running across his handsome features.

  ‘This . . . is . . .’ the guard started to say, sword still held out before him until the dragon head swung in his direction and fixed him with its inscrutable glare. Yellow and white light radiated from its hide in sudden brilliance and then, in a motion that was as smooth as it was impossibly awkward, the demon stood up on its hind legs, shrinking, changing until it was of a similar size, height and form to the rest of them.

  ‘Yes,’ it said much more clearly from its human mouth, as unreal as a white statue talking from the pedestal of an ancient gallery, ‘this is that demon you always wondered about. Yes, I will kill you without a care. Yes, I have come here for them. Yes, you will get out of my way and make me very comfortable until I tell you to stop. No hysteria. No touching, unless I say so.’ He paused and glanced unerringly towards the hidden elves behind the security panes. ‘No more arrows.’

  The arrowhead that had lodged in his hide fell to the floor from somewhere among the narrow panels of blue cloth that now draped off his shoulders and around his waist. His white hair fell over his shoulders unbound and at his back two long swords were crossed, one gleaming yellow, the other a blue-white. A faint and nasty sound came from them but it was overpowered by the distinctly visible, although translucent, white wings that seemed to grow from his shoulders out and through their sheathed blades.

  Zal pulled the screen aside wider and stepped back to let Teazle in. As they drew level he moved forward again until they were chest to chest. This put them eye to eye as well. Teazle’s eyes were almost completely clear, like crystal. They stared at one another and Zal felt the de
mon’s will pushing at him but he didn’t move. It was going to be this way from now on. Even though Zal was pleased to see Teazle the demon was getting older and that meant that his dominance would have to be kept in check all the time. If he got overconfident around Zal their tentative equality – dodgy at the best of times with Zal’s elf nature in the mix – would tip in Teazle’s favour. At that point Zal could expect to start watching his back and considering an exit strategy. One day in the future he’d lose one of these alpha-male contests as Teazle altered from youth to maturity. One day he’d be in the fight of a lifetime and he knew that he’d lose it. But not today.

  The vertical slits in the demon’s eyes expanded slightly and only then did Zal slide his leg back and allow Teazle to pass him. He felt Teazle’s hand on his ass briefly, in the kind of idle, suggestive caress that was inviting and submissive at once and then figured they were in the clear for the length of his stay.

  Lila, who never believed Zal when he warned her about how things were heading with Teazle, blushed and ducked her head for a second as she moved forward to greet their husband. Zal rolled his eyes as he felt Teazle’s energy level increase.

  Demon auras operated at different frequencies antagonistic to elven ones, hence the legendary hatred between the two races. Zal had learned to tune to it and not mind the rasping disharmonics. Now touching Teazle that way was a familiar and not entirely unpleasant feeling. He knew he could grow to like it and that this went both ways between them. Lila had no such contact available but fortunately she noticed in time and lifted herself to her full height as she met Teazle and embraced him. She lifted her hand up and twisted one of the demon’s sharply pointed and fan-edged ears that were the butt of a lot of elf-ancestry jokes and pushed her face into his neck to kiss him under his jaw the way she liked. The demon’s long tail, tipped with a blunted arrowhead point, snaked under the hem of her dress and Zal snorted in resignation and let the screen door go. He stepped over the prone guard, ignoring the man’s open stare, and went back to the recliner and the food without a backward glance.