Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  A powerful instinct warned her not to touch it. Her immediate impulse was to do the opposite, challenge the fear and the cause of it, but this time she stayed her hands and threw a blanket on him instead. She had no idea what the magical potency of the venom was. If she became poisoned by it that would make two of them who weren’t up to anything. Seeing that he wasn’t going anywhere soon she went back for a bath.

  The water was hot, there was soap and a brush. She changed to human skin form and watched the disturbing slither of black leather and metal devolving to her old, pale tanned arms and legs. The blood and matter stayed where it was, coating her more thickly now that she had shrunk her surface, but in this form she didn’t have a hundred angular planes, seams and airvents so it was easier to clean everything. She was struggling to get her hair to rinse clear when she felt a change in the air and looked up to find Teazle walking in the door. His near-silent tread was thanks to the combination of his grace, human-form feet, and the carpets, and he looked exasperated when all this effort wasn’t enough to sneak up on her.

  He stood, white and pure as the finest snow, his hair a fall of frost, eyes glowing and face alight with the abundant energy – enough for a thousand demons – that was barely contained by his six-and-a-half-foot form. A knee-length robe of white cloth was all he had on, with the hilts of his two swords rising above his shoulders at his back like the stubs of wings. There was a change in him from the creature who had slipped out of Malachi’s tent days ago. Then he had been tired, introspective (for him) and in a rare moment of rest. Now there was a vibration in him so fine and strong it linked him to dreams and to other worlds. He came to stand at the side of the bath and then crouched down and rested his arms along the rim. He put his chin on his crossed wrists and watched her with his white eyes; god’s tautly strung bow.

  ‘You’re losing your edge,’ he said, voice low and deceptively mellow. ‘Zal got suckied. Careless.’

  At this range she could hear the hum of the twin blades – a sound well beyond most hearing, a foreboding in the nerves. ‘I’m surprised we’re not dead. We didn’t leave on the best of terms with ninety per cent of the population.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In spite of your undoing all my efforts and giving away most of our fortune to create a false sense of equality they retained a marvellous amount of resentment, enough to fuel more stupidity than I thought I would ever witness.’ He put a finger in the water and then into his mouth, sucking it thoughtfully for a second. She knew he was figuring out what she’d been doing. ‘It was hard work but I have straightened things out.’

  She looked at him from her position higher up the tub. ‘You mean you killed them.’

  ‘Only those who resisted.’

  ‘So how many didn’t resist?’

  ‘A handful. They have seen fit to relocate to estates further afield. Let me run you some fresh water, see the taps work like this – fresh in, seven-demon residue out.’

  Lila moved her foot from its resting place to let him fiddle with the mechanics. ‘Is that why everything looks so different?’

  ‘A couple of days can change a great deal,’ he said.

  ‘So, the old families bail out and in come the slavers and . . . who are all those others?’

  ‘They are merely temporary scum.’ He paused and gave her an exacting glance. ‘You’re not going to ask me to kill all of them as well, are you?’ He sounded wishful.

  ‘It’s up to you,’ she said, watching as filthy water began to drain out and jets of clear come in. ‘You can exterminate them all. Then what will you do?’

  ‘I’m not old and mad yet,’ he said with some reproach. ‘Besides, you forget that ’shebat is not the only city. There is an entire world of demons, including those of the wilds who are far superior to the civilised kind. A few hundred off the register is nothing to be concerned about.’

  ‘A few hundred.’ It was so hard to accept demon reckonings. They were glorious. They were idiots. She didn’t doubt they had all had opportunities to turn aside and stay alive. Their culture was their lifeblood. They were peacefully at one with it and all its consequences; it was only she, the outsider, who found it monstrous.

  ‘I stopped counting after three hundred and forty-six,’ Teazle confessed. ‘There was this airship battery, lots of guns, plasma rockets . . . I got distracted.’

  ‘In, what is it . . . two days?’

  ‘Three more like.’

  They might have been talking about fish prices, in another world and time. She decided to move on to something more practical. ‘What exactly does succubus venom do? I countered the physical properties but it has some aetheric components.’

  ‘Usually it’s some kind of love thing,’ Teazle said. ‘Love or lust. Could be focused on the sucky or could be more general. They like to incapacitate and enslave. Rarely fatal. Suckies aren’t into killing, it spoils their fun. They die very easy.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  Teazle watched her body reappearing from the brown water as it was diluted and cleared. ‘Inkies are different. They don’t have tails. They have a breath with a similar effect to sucky venom, and voices that charm, though not as well as siren suckies, like Sorcha. Also they can dematerialise into a vapour form for short periods.’

  She scanned her memories. ‘I never saw one of those.’

  ‘Nah, they’re one in a thousand, mostly in the employ of the big families, often used as assassins. And now even rarer than they were before.’ He let his gaze slide over her and up to her eyes, and smiled. ‘They’re hard to grab, easy to kill.’ He briefly mimed wrenching something into two parts and throwing the parts aside.

  ‘Is that the only way you classify anything?’

  ‘Is there some other way?’ he was candid. She had to look away from his eyes and he blinked and toned down their gleam to firefly levels. ‘You summoned me.’ His smile was rakish.

  ‘Not for that. Zal needs arming for a trip to Alfheim and I need to get to Ilya. Kinda burnt my boats with Mal so I might need a few alternative transport routes. What happened to that mirror from Madame’s house? I could try that.’

  ‘Still there,’ Teazle said, with a slight shiver. ‘The house is owned by someone else these days, so you’d have to break in through the warehouse. Nobody knows about that part of it, even now.’ Then he glanced towards the bedroom. ‘I suppose you’ll stick with him now that he’s back in some kind of body.’

  ‘Jealousy?’ she asked, sliding down to her neck in the steaming water, although she remembered their days and nights of passionate engagements in perfect clarity. ‘Doesn’t seem like you. You don’t love me. You’re my ex.’

  He frowned. It was nearly comical, as if he were puzzling over a difficult passage in a book. ‘I something you.’

  She smiled and stroked his hair with one wet hand. ‘Aww, I something you too, honey.’

  He growled slightly, quietly and closed his eyes. ‘You smell of faeries.’

  She peered at him but he hadn’t moved. How he could smell anything over the powerful smell of the soap and the demon blood she didn’t know. ‘Well, I was wearing one for a while.’

  ‘Ah yes, where did she go?’

  ‘I dumped her.’

  Now his eyes flashed open, their beams going straight into her face, and, it felt, straight into her soul. ‘Why?’

  She found herself pulling a shamed face; the truth seemed so petty now that it was time to speak of it. ‘I was mad at the time. I felt like everyone I had trusted was keeping secrets from me, and that they’d betrayed my trust. She didn’t, but she was damn near the last one and anyway, she’s never said anything about why she was with me.’

  Teazle scowled and the room darkened. ‘That was very foolish. You should make amends. She was your ally.’

  ‘She was my ally so far,’ Lila corrected him. ‘Sarasilien, Malachi . . . hell, I don’t know who else, but Sarasilien was responsible for introducing the Otopians to the cyborg programme in the first place and he ke
pt damn quiet about that. Now he’s back claiming some elf-Armageddon is about to hit and surprise surprise, he expects me and Zal to go picking up pieces like we’re his personal servants. Malachi knew it all along and said nothing, not a blind fucking word – he was more than happy to let me believe that I was a lucky survivor with a chance to help the world for as long as it played – and now he has the bare balls to sit there in a little bubble of beer and start pontificating about shitting tiger, hidden dragon, no, there’s more, wait. Meantime Max is back, really, or as close to really as I can’t tell, and there are faeries in the garden sitting waiting on toadstools to tell me that I need to get rid of her and the rest of the Returners because they’re going to make the world fall apart at the seams. That’s a message from all the faeries apparently, who can’t seem to muster a soap bubble for themselves in spite of the fact there are several thousand of them living in the city and across the continent. No, they’re occupied with covering up for various of their half kin who are deranged serial killers, or maybe just have some unfortunate life vectors, who knows? Greer expects me to do something about tidying up that. Even I think I should.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘But ’Demalion did you no harm.’

  Lila bared her teeth. ‘She enjoyed a lot of jokes at my expense.’

  ‘No real harm.’

  ‘No, no fucking real harm. Yet. You got off lightly with the faeries so far but I’ve seen their ways.’ She felt bitterly unjustified in making the statement, regardless of the fact it was true. She could have countered it with equally accurate pronouncements in the opposite direction.

  ‘You think so?’ He trailed a hand in the water, making idle patterns. His calm was determined and steady but it had a sultry quality like a cloudy sky on a still day, waiting for the change of the weather that would mass it into a storm. ‘What’s got you this paranoid?’

  She glared at him. He had been there, he had seen it; what was he asking for?

  ‘The faeries and these others, they kept secrets, they withheld information, they played some tricks but have they done you such a bad service, really, considering?’

  Fresh anger flared in her. ‘Apart from stealing my life and using up the remains for their own ends? Keeping Zal for fifty years as some kind of talking doorstop? No, I guess not.’

  ‘And if they had left you all alone, where would you be now? Six feet under, another ordinary human. Zal would have died along with Jack. You embraced the life offered, all of it. Else you wouldn’t be here. Why do you keep returning to this as if it is the grave of your beloved?’ The gaze he briefly awarded her was disappointed.

  She folded her arms across her breasts and stared at him coldly. ‘Whose side are you on?’

  He returned his eyes to the fascinating business of her bathwater and spoke his thoughts aloud as if they were a dot-to-dot puzzle he was slowly joining up. ‘Transitions are hard, but everyone must make them. You aren’t always in a rage. I guess something else is bothering you.’

  With an effort Lila thrust away the sense of righteous unfairness that was making her so useless. She felt that he was angry with her but there was more important business, so he was containing his emotions and she could at least match the favour. It was difficult but after a second or so she let her hold on the need to win slip, ‘Yes. There’s this girl . . .’ She told him the story of Sassy, leaving out no details, all the way up to the present moment.

  As he listened he continued to swirl the water lazily. The ripples sparkled in the light of his eyes but they dimmed the more he brooded and finally, when she was done, all his effulgence was gone and he looked at her from pale blue-grey irises, his hair and skin quite ordinary.

  ‘That’s an interesting story,’ he said. ‘And something of a conundrum. We can’t go near her without revealing ourselves entirely, but she can tell as many lies as she likes, and no doubt she will if it suits her. You agreed to help her, you say.’

  At this distance that did seem rather foolish. She sighed. ‘I didn’t have my fingers crossed at the time, but I wouldn’t say it was one of my better promises. I thought it was the closest I could get to putting her on hold. Are you going to tell me to go make nice to her, too?’

  ‘If you are the product of a long engineering process put in place by these players and the stakes are as high as they seem, then I wouldn’t go throwing away my allies so carelessly, is what I say,’ Teazle murmured. ‘Especially if you fancy playing as more than the virtuoso instrument of a greater hand. These childish fits of yours must stop, charming as they are.’ He flashed her a look of amused indulgence that made her instantly hot.

  She bristled. ‘People are always saying that.’

  ‘Then they must be right.’

  Lila knew it was true. She felt a tension inside her shoulders and upper back twist and turn – fish on a hook. The need to be belligerent, to fight and deny, to kick away from any kind of interference, no matter how well meant, was impossible for her to resist. It was a beast in her throat, in her chest, spinning in circles of panic. Sure, his statement was true. But there were other true statements that flew against it. She retaliated. ‘Is it childish to see the demon slaughter culture as a stupidity?’

  She saw he considered the arousal of her body a good reward for his ongoing efforts and in return he was conversational, rational and emphatic though he didn’t attempt to touch her except with his gaze.

  ‘If all you see is unfairness and feel pity, then it is. If you see it as a comic tragedy of loss and accept its transient moments of beauty and its ultimately pointless glory, then it is not. One slip now, one mistake about the nature of reality, and you will lose. I guarantee it. You can’t afford to be anything less than a perfect warrior if you want to win. Pitiless. Merciless. Without compassion. Without fault.’

  She was still in the grip of the beast within. ‘That’s monstrous!’

  He was unaffected. ‘It’s the way of angels. All other ways are hellbound.’ He looked at her once more with the kind of steady disappointment she’d hoped for but never found in her father. In spite of his hot and cold gambits however, Teazle didn’t mean to leave himself misunderstood and continued. ‘You’ve played around with hell a long time, especially in that part of it that is made of the dreams of kindness and mercy; the gold cloth of arrogance masquerading as the humble linen of the penitent. I think you must like it there. That is monstrous.’

  An awkward, horrible kind of pain, a rod between heart and gut, made her anger-beast spiral around it, moth on pin. She was silent, brooding, grim. Thoughts went through her head: were the angels monsters? Did he mean it? Was she a monster as he said, not because of any physical feature but because of her behaviour? She didn’t even understand why she was so angry. She thought she was over all the things that could have made her angry.

  Meantime, surely this talk of angels was his way of irony. A demon and an angel could not be the same thing at all. Angels were Others, even as far as demons were concerned.

  She struggled to find something that she believed in, to counter the onslaught. She must prove herself, redeem herself, justify. She scraped around, searching for her reasons, looking under them, and found a surprising lack from which only one or two bits and pieces stood out. Her mind was not the well-honed home of reason but more like the bargain basement of hand-me-down platitudes. This was a crushing disappointment but she grasped what she could and said, sure of its power and rightness in spite of the fact she didn’t even know where it came from, ‘I have faith in kindness.’

  He dismissed this with the merest of head shakes. ‘Idiotic. Only the unassailable can afford to be kind.’

  ‘Like you?’ she spat.

  He considered her stomach, head on his arm, waving the water with his free hand in a vague manner. ‘My kindness towards you has been unending.’

  She assumed he meant that she was still alive. ‘Kindness and mercy build better worlds.’

  ‘Kindness and mercy don’t build anything. They foster weaknes
s and that weakness grows to consume everything in its path.’ He let drips fall off his fingertips and made circle patterns. ‘Perhaps it would be sufficient, if everyone were kind and merciful, even if they were self-aware, but there is no population like that, though you won’t find any who don’t lie about it. Mercy is not a useful path to anything either, except your own death. It is a gate to corruption. Hell’s royal road. I know you are thinking of the great priests of your culture when you bandy their terms about like banners, but let me assure you that only the immaculate can be kind and merciful without consequence. First be immaculate. Then you may be as cruel with your kindness and mercy as you wish. Let all manner of evils riot for your enjoyment and call it fair-mindedness.’

  ‘So what do we do, kill everyone who isn’t a cold-hearted bastard?’

  ‘Kill your own weakness. Hunt it, stalk it, root it out. That will be enough. Others can do as they want, they have the same opportunity. Their choices are their own. Any of them might be the perfect warrior. The least and worst of them could be. Nothing stops them. Everyone has the power.’

  As he said this her mind had churned with images of her own parents and their make-do lives, struggling. They had not done well but they had tried hard to instill in her that kindness mattered, second chances mattered, there was always hope for a better future and that things can be learned from mistakes. Where was the point of learning if one mistake was an execution offence? She burned with resentment, almost hatred for him, a protective fire inside her around the images of all the world’s luckless victims. ‘Have you no empathy at all?’

  Teazle considered and swirled the water. He watched the ripples he made reach the shores of her knees and then the far side of the stone basin.

  ‘What you call empathy is merely the copying of suffering. You see someone in pain and you duplicate the feelings inside yourself and call that sympathy or empathy or somesuch. Then you wallow in it, and you feel pity and sorrow for the sufferer, first for them, and then for yourself. I know that you do this because it seems like a way you could lead them out. You go and join them, then you show the way out. But you can’t lead from a weak position and there you are, in the pit with them. You might change your state again, but they already chose their state. This braying about moral high grounds by thinking that your big heart is some kind of barometer of virtue is a junior alchemist’s mistake.’ He glanced at her stony face and shook his head slightly.