Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  She spat the words out as if each one was a bullet given her to bite on for a separate pain. ‘It took me to the edges of existence and there it showed me the source of the destruction that is ripping all of our worlds into shreds. A point of stillness, of opposites meeting, where energy spits from the mouth of nothingness. It showed me that all I would have done was speed the destruction.’

  She had become stonelike in her resistance to what she had come to say next. Her fixation on Zal remained, the only thing that was keeping her self-control in place. Her lips worked, narrowed and finally she said, ‘I have come to offer you my aid in what is coming. I owe it to Alfheim. And I was convinced that I am in some part to blame, so it must be paid back. I am no longer Arie of the Lake. I am Arie of the Waters. You may summon me through that element, when the time comes.’

  With the mention of her titles some dignity returned to her, though she was unable to conceal her loathing of Zal behind aloofness any more. Lila realised that even though she considered him a traitor, Zal was the only one Arie could stand to look at. She and Teazle were abominations too far. Without another word Arie turned on her heel and walked back the way she had come.

  Zal stood for a moment or two, his hands flexing at his sides, watching her go. ‘Something’s really off here,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want me to kill her?’ Teazle offered.

  ‘Nah,’ Zal sat down again, picked up the nearest drink of clear liquid and drank it all. As Teazle surrendered grumpily to his reply, Zal shot Lila a loaded glance.

  ‘It’s time we all had a nice sit down with our friend Malachi and found out what the hell’s going on.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lila, Zal, Teazle and Malachi lay on the floor of Malachi’s yurt. It was two a.m. There was no sound except for the burr of cicadas and the hum of air-conditioning units. The yurt’s main doorflap was closed to block out the sight of the Agency buildings and the courtyard, save for a small fold that was clipped back to let some of the night air in. In the middle of their group the space was occupied by Malachi’s hardworking icebox and its ever-replenished supply of Lite and Dark bottles of faery ale.

  At the very edge of their ring amid a sea of empties lay the slim, dark curl of the elf who would be god, Xaviendra, her pointed ears slack, her mouth open. She’d passed out some time ago and they had put her there after she had fallen over backwards with a Dark bottle still upended in her mouth like a flag raised on a freshly discovered island. Malachi had worried that the faery brewmaster, to whom he was paying a stiff subscription, and who prided himself on his professionalism, might give her an endless free refill and drown her. It had taken two of them to prise the bottle out of her hand and loosen her jaws from their clamped position around its rim. The charmed hemp manacles on her wrists remained in place. She was a guest, but she was also a prisoner of the state and in Lila’s custody. Until a short time ago she had been unknown to them, but Lila had written her into the script using the most powerful weapon in the universe and now . . . here she was, their strange new friend.

  Lila thought of this often, almost as often as she reviewed Xaviendra’s interview sessions searching for telltale signs of deception. But she couldn’t help it. She liked Xavi, and trusted her, and there was no way to know if that was the doing of magic or the more commonplace forces of personal interaction.

  ‘And another thing,’ Malachi was saying from his reclined position, waving his bottle about by a two-fingered grip on the neck, ‘about this dragon bishniss.’ His brilliant orange eyes narrowed as he held their attention and he gave off a faint fey puff of anthracite dust, briefly making the air around him glitter.

  Teazle, in his human form, nodded sagely as though Malachi were already making profound sense. ‘Tricky,’ he said, carefully. ‘Tricky bishniss.’ His long white tail whirled, the arrow tip drawing a kind of circle before falling back to the rug with a thump and lying there, spent. He glowed, his eyes as brilliant as police officers’ torch beams. Thanks to this they’d been able to cut all power and data and were in splendid isolation. As a courtesy he mostly remembered not to look anyone directly in the face. After a second’s blink, in which he shrouded the rest of them in near darkness, he added, ‘Prolly more to come. More.’

  ‘You met a dragon,’ Lila poked Zal on the leg solemnly. She sounded more accusing than she meant to but as she intended it playfully she felt as though she was getting away with something naughty. He was cross-legged, his back deep in a beanbag. Zal was slender and muscular, lithe as only a true elf could be and Lila had the pleasure of lying resting against his chest as if he were her throne and she was a little girl playing at being queen. She amended her poke by quickly stroking the area and admiring the hard line of his thigh.

  Zal shook his head, slowly. He was matching Malachi bottle for bottle. ‘Mr V,’ he said after a moment’s pause. ‘He was stuck in the mirror and I . . . well he tricked me into letting him out, kinda. I don’ know. He didn’ seem t’have much of an agenda, so t’speak. The other one, back in the Lake – that was something. I forget what it said now. Somethin’ like . . . ah, no . . . Iit’s gone. That one ate Arie, though. Then it sicked her up again.’

  This wandering retrospective then was the end of their debriefing session, which had begun that morning in an official manner with recordings and witnesses and suchlike, but which had at some point in the evening become so exhausting that Malachi had called a time out and brought them all here to recuperate. The office staff had gladly fled homewards, but because they were so preoccupied with their analysis, they had continued to talk about their joint past experiences over drinks. They had been going to have dinner, but this was forgotten, in favour of the Dark, which had properties of insight, foresight and other kinds of clairvoyance when drunk in large quantities.

  They had also needed it because of the alcohol content to prise Xaviendra out of her habitual frosty silence. This had backfired rather, since she had gone from silent, through silently rapt and directly to the ultimate frigidity of unconsciousness without uttering a word. However, from her position on the floor, occasionally snoring, she had spoken in a slurring way if a question was put directly to her. They had discovered this by accident when Zal had turned in her direction and said, ‘What’s that sticking in my butt?’ and Xavi had replied, correctly, ‘It’s your phone.’

  Now she sometimes said a word, such as, ‘true’ or ‘shathi’, which was elf for fuck. Then Lila had said elves did not have words like that and Zal said they just weren’t listed anywhere the elves would let anybody else see. At that point the debriefing had changed into bantering and even Teazle had started drinking. Ever since then he had occasionally punctuated the conversation with one of the demon words for fuck and although a long time had passed he had still not run out of them.

  ‘She must have tasted horrid,’ Lila said, referring to Arie, who had once put her on a platform for all the elves to publicly despise.

  Zal made a soothing noise and nuzzled her ear.

  ‘Kuroosma,’ Teazle said into the moment of contemplative silence, lingering on the vowel with enjoyment. Lila looked the word up, cautiously, as if she were peeking at it through her fingers. Every different one had a different nuance. This one made her face heat up, and she was no prude.

  ‘Nah,’ Zal said. ‘It didn’t say that. For sure.’ Then after a second, ‘Do you think dragons swear?’

  ‘No,’ Lila said firmly.

  ‘Yes,’ Malachi said at the same time with equal conviction.

  ‘No,’ Lila waved him down with her free hand. ‘Noble. Godly. Things like that don’t swear. Forces of nature don’ swear.’

  ‘What about lightning?’ Teazle said, taking a swig from a new bottle. ‘Lightning is nature swearing. An’ if a thing like that can swear, which isn’t self-’ware, then dragons mus’ swear ’cos they is speakers and things that speak swear. Proof . . .’ he pointed vaguely at Xaviendra, who had begun to snore. ‘She done nothing but ruffaguff this and shathi t
hat since she fell over.’

  ‘Are dragons forces of nature then?’ Lila asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ Zal said. ‘But with more wizard and less . . . less . . . they don’t have to be manifest or, shathi, help me out here . . .’ he appealed to Malachi who had been nodding along.

  ‘They are part ’maginary,’ Malachi intoned solemnly. ‘Cusp beings, intershtitial, on the edge, not matter or aether, both and neither, the primary moversh that shtir the great s-soup of creation, that’sh what they are.’

  ‘Soup spoons,’ Lila said, blinking. She was playing with the end of one of the ties on Zal’s shirt and this notion just came out of her mouth without passing through her head.

  ‘Yesh,’ Malachi replied earnestly. ‘Jusht that. And now they are . . .’ he whirled his fingers and shed some more dust. ‘Dammit, didn’t mean to do that.’ He put his hand down where the floor was blackened with coal and when he lifted it up the white rug was pristine again.

  ‘Stirring!’ Lila said, feeling quietly triumphant.

  ‘Yes!’ Teazle glowed more brightly for a second.

  ‘T,’ Lila said, addressing him with a slight yet regal frown across the icebox that sat between them with its fresh bottlenecks at jaunty angles. ‘Aren’t you a dragon?’

  ‘No,’ Teazle said. ‘I jus’ look like one. Demon’s an aetheric creation. But you gotta remember they don’ always look like that.’

  ‘Dragons can be a human or elf,’ Zal said. ‘Or dwarf.’

  ‘They can be a bunch of flowers,’ Malachi added, frowning at himself as though he wasn’t sure he hadn’t just invented this. ‘Or, well, maybe not. Can’t see the point of that acshally. But my point is . . . my point is they can rise in like, a material form, in a body, as flesh and bone, or they can rise as energy inshide other things.’

  ‘What things?’ Lila demanded, finishing her drink and shaking the bottle upside down for a few seconds before tossing it over her shoulder where it hit Xaviendra’s foot and rolled to clink among the others lying there.

  ‘Like a pop— a poppy— a pip—’ Teazle struggled heroically for a moment, working his mouth carefully. ‘Pop-u-la-tion.’

  Lila stretched forward for another drink, picking up the one brown bottleneck poking out of the heap of ice in the cooler. She drew it out, admiring its label and the icy water running off it. As she sat back with the prize another one slowly nudged up out of the ice mound to replace it. ‘Yeah but, what ARE they?’

  ‘What ARE you?’ Malachi slurred mildly with an emphatic nod. ‘Hmm?’

  Lila paused for a few seconds. ‘Drunk.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Zal said. They all paused. ‘Primal forces,’ he added a minute later. ‘But with attitude. Some of them . . . they rise and fall you know, into . . . I’m not really sure.’

  ‘Dragons,’ said a delicate, exacting voice from behind him in the tones of a slightly annoyed schoolmistress, ‘are archaeotypal subdeic elementals, pre-dating the actualisation of the seven worlds and instrumental in their creation, by virtue of being organising principles and generative structures within which any amount of conscious realisation of the infinite may occur at any time. Persistence in material form occurs as a necessary process of becoming baryonically bound. Personality and etcetera accrue after this manifestation into linear temporal planes according to the usual principles.’

  ‘Unnerving how she does that,’ Zal said, twitching his shoulders.

  ‘It’s like she’s shome kind of enshyclopaedia with a will of its own,’ Teazle frowned and stared accusingly into his beer. ‘A will sho powerful it can work even when she’s ashleep. Or only when she’s asleep. Spooky.’ He shivered in pretend horror and shone the rays of his interest on Xaviendra for a moment.

  ‘Well it’s more than she ever says when she’s awake,’ Lila said and felt bad for reproaching the girl. Xavi had good reasons to shut up, Lila figured, having been convicted of acts of terrorism of which she was certainly guilty. She was out of her cell for a few hours only because Lila was able to bring her out and guarantee she wouldn’t escape. The entire drinking event had been staged in the hopes that it might make her tongue loosen, and in its way it had been successful.

  ‘Ask her the angel one again,’ Malachi said, blinking as he changed position to something more upright in an effort to stay awake.

  ‘What is an angel?’ Lila said, half angled towards the unconscious elf so that she could see Xavi’s mouth moving even though the rest of her remained in a stupor.

  ‘An angel is an articulated form of energy imbued with mental and emotional faculties that act in accordance with its own will. Angels are beings of nonbaryonic dimensions, although they are able to assume baryonic forms, and are not limited to ordinary space-time considerations. It is suspected though not proven that their appreciation of the nature of all material and immaterial things far surpasses that of the bound races who have intelligence and awareness. Emergence from the purely aetheric into material form will result in a necessary accrual of personality and etcetera according to the usual principles.’

  There was nothing about this voice that was the slightest bit intoxicated.

  ‘Hah!’ said Zal after a second, ‘I know what sh’minds me of. You, Lila! She talks like you do when you’ve got the AI on.’ He twirled a finger next to his head.

  Lila scowled and fixed her gaze on Teazle who was snickering, his tail tip gently beating the rugs in time with his laugh.

  She felt annoyed. ‘I make more sense though. This isn’t getting us far—’

  ‘Wait, wait,’ Malachi said confidently. ‘Dark takes time to work. Got to get down to get up again, like they say. We jus’ need to keep going aroun’ the subject an it’ll be fine. You’ll see. Inspiration’ll strike!’

  ‘What was the subject?’ Teazle asked. He blinked slowly and the yurt was once again briefly submerged in the sepulchral glow of his exposed skin. In that second Lila could see the outline of his body gleaming faintly through the folds of his robe, dappled on his lower torso, arms and legs like a cheetah-patterned lightbulb.

  ‘What are we going to do about all the dead people?’ Lila reminded him, ignoring the knot in her stomach as she mentioned it. Images of her family home flashed in front of her mind’s eye in an unstoppable rush, which she tried to blot out by carrying on. ‘Also, is this the end-times as foreseen by the popular press? And if so, wh—’ but she was interrupted by Zal gently putting his hand over her mouth.

  ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘It’s happening. I had an idea that wasn’t my own.’

  ‘And?’ Malachi asked, foregoing the obvious remark about Zal having any kind of idea at all, but sharing the fact that he wasn’t saying it by giving Lila and Teazle a significant stare each.

  ‘And,’ Zal said emphatically, including Lila and Teazle in his own three-way group by glancing at them, ‘we should get divorced.’

  Lila did a quick retake on it. ‘That was your idea?’

  ‘No. That was my conclusion, given my idea.’

  ‘What was the idea?’ Teazle asked, staring his potential ex directly in the face for a second and then, becoming aware that this was painful for Zal, suddenly flicking his thousand watts back to the drinks cooler while still remaining attentive.

  ‘Well, as you were talking I had this vague kind of . . . you know dragons, right?’

  They all nodded vigorously in the hope that he would get to the point.

  ‘Well, we are intersti—, cusp—, beings who’ve been changed one way and another and made into hybrid sort of things, you know?’ he raised his eyebrows and nodded as if this made things so clear they must leap to an intuitive judgement. When they continued to look at him, Lila over her shoulder and Teazle with his long, horsey ears indicating the direction of his attention, he sighed. ‘We are . . . what we are . . . and we are together. Between us we cover eighty per cent of the total aethero-material troposphere.’

  ‘Whoah, it really isn’t his idea!’ Malachi said at the mention of these h
ighly theoretical terms, his jaw going slightly slack.

  Zal shook a fist in Malachi’s direction, but continued. ‘And if you add in Tatters it’s ninety. And if you add in Malachi and Xavi it’s ninety-five. And—’

  ‘Tath,’ Lila said. ‘Add Tath and,’ she hesitated, stomach burning, ‘and Max and it is one hundred per cent.’

  ‘We,’ Zal said, including everyone mentioned, ‘are a . . .’

  They waited.

  ‘I don’t know what we are but we are one hundred per cent and THAT is a bit scary; was my idea,’ Zal finished.

  ‘Dragon,’ said Xaviendra’s voice.

  ‘Shikba!’ Teazle snorted, laughing almost silently, faint beery bubbles coming out of his nose.

  Lila looked up Shikba and found no human equivalent or translation, although the dictionary appended a symbol that indicated it was highly perverted.

  Malachi made a pfff sound with his lips. ‘It would be scary, if it added up to anything like a clear indication of trouble. But there’s no direction, is there?’ He waited for a second, looking around at their faces.

  When they didn’t reply straight away he faced them with a frank expression, ‘Lila, you’re fed up of serving the agency but you’ve no clue about what to do with your life instead.’

  Lila gave him a daggers look but she couldn’t find a riposte because this was the truth.

  ‘Teazle, you’ve become the demon who’s got a master, which is on the slippery slope to hell, although given the master (who shall not be named, bless her soul) it could be that she’s grooming you to assume a role with an awesome reputation.’

  Teazle glowed brighter with pleasure and rolled onto his stomach, rubbing himself on the scrap of carpet he was lying on like a contented cat.

  ‘Zal, you’re a has-been musician without a band . . .’

  ‘I’ve got a song in my heart,’ Zal countered, theatrically, hand on his chest.