Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ she said. ‘But if you want to . . . will you die there, in the mirror, Tath?’

  ‘If I stay I will be only a dream,’ he said. ‘And without a dreamer then yes, I will be gone. I have no form to return to unless I return to Faerie to my haunt at the Soulfall where the snow and ice remember me.’

  She wanted to say he could ride with her, for old times’ sake, but she didn’t know how he would take it. She didn’t know how she’d take it. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘One last journey, one last hunt, one more time. We can always die later. Why hurry?’

  She had to grate her teeth as she said it because suddenly she was in tears and she wanted to sob. There was a pain in her chest like a flat, crushing iron. The buzz in her skin spiralled inwards. She closed the fist of her will on the pain and extinguished it. She knew that the dream he was in was his heart’s desire, no nightmare, but a heaven; a boy and his dog, in the forests, running. He could stay there.

  She said, ‘For old times’ sake. They’re in Alfheim, I’m sure of it. For Dar’s sake.’

  There was a long pause, very long, in which she was glad there was no light at all to see by. ‘Very well,’ he said at last, his voice small. ‘Call me, when you must.’

  Then she was alone in the labyrinth. She ran out as fast as she could, given the low roof height, the twists and turns, the yawning empty mouths of its pit traps. In the room above she stood and gulped the stinking lagoon air with gratitude.

  When she arrived at the Sikarza house Zal and Teazle were on the roof deck. A drake was parked there, ignoring them and looking over the city, its ugly head turned away. Its rider was arguing with Teazle. Drinks had been drunk and spilled by the look of it, and insults were being exchanged. Zal was a bystander, cup in hand, lounging back in a sun chair as he watched the proceedings. His air of insouciance almost blanketed his exhaustion. Food was being brought out and laid with the golden plates, so Lila guessed they were in for a long deal. She took a seat beside Zal and accepted a cup of wine from a server.

  ‘What gives?’

  ‘We’re buying a drake for me to commit suicide on in Alfheim,’ Zal said. He leaned forward to a box of smokes and picked one, bit the end off it and lit it with one of the candelabra. The flames danced lazily. It was one of those windless days where nothing seemed to move and the air sat over the lagoon like a toad on a rock. ‘Teazle wants to have an expedition to find a better one but there isn’t time for that so he’s trying to find out if they have special stock they’re not letting him see.’

  Lila looked at the drake on the deck. ‘What’s wrong with that one?’

  ‘It’s the trader’s own. They’re loyal. You can’t jump on and off like bicycles.’

  She saw he was wearing the silver harness. ‘You got your present.’

  ‘Yes,’ he grinned at her. ‘Kinky.’

  ‘More than you know,’ she said, taking a sip of wine and finding she was thirsty and starving. She got up to reach the table herself. Within moments she was stuffing her face with sliced roast meat. She picked up a beer jug by the neck and took it back to her place with her.

  ‘You didn’t find him,’ Zal said, as a question.

  ‘I did.’ She met his iron-brown gaze and lost herself for a moment. ‘He will come when I call. I think.’

  Zal watched her with narrowed eyes. ‘He was as Mal said?’

  ‘Yes. He was.’ She put emphasis on the final word and saw Zal take her meaning. ‘We will pursue this until we find out what it is that the dark Titans are after and then we’ll decide if it’s worth being in Sarasilien’s pay. So far it is all hints and coyness from every side but having seen Ilya I think I’ll take my chances as they turn. The whole game is like this place. It looks civilised and regulated, if you’re standing at the top of the heap.’

  ‘That’s how you see it now, as a game?’

  ‘Players are crawling out of the woodwork,’ Lila said. ‘If it isn’t a product of a game, then it’s a sports field they want to be on. What do you think?’

  He discarded his wine cup and frowned. ‘I wonder at what people will do to pass the time. Life is here, and they manage to be bored enough and cold enough to do all this. At such moments it is hard not to hate them.’ He’d fallen back into an elvish way of talking, no shortenings, no common phrases. She wondered if he’d noticed. ‘I think they come for him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘For Sarasilien. And whoever else is still alive that was a part of their creation. That’s what I’d be doing if they made me into a creature and sent me to hell to fight devils and left me to die.’ The throwback moment was gone, his everyday self returned. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  She nodded. ‘I would.’

  Zal grinned at her, with the wolfish abandon that was both fierce and light-hearted. ‘And as a failed monster at least the pressure’s off.’

  ‘It has been suggested to me I might collect an army of lame halts to make an heroic stand,’ Lila said, putting aside the empty beef plate onto the floor and taking a drink from the jug. ‘As if by banding together with a common goal of great goodness we will be lifted by valour into victory.’

  ‘Did you swallow an elf on your way here?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I like to try it out and see how it feels. Well, it has. The thought popped into my head, much in the way they usually don’t. Just now.’

  ‘You’re hacked?’’

  ‘Possibly. Anyway, since it’s the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a long time I won’t be doing that.’

  ‘No,’ Zal said. ‘Though it has poetic and moral appeal. It could be an artistic feat.’

  ‘Not my style,’ Lila said.

  Zal stroked the silky smoothness of the harness and felt her skin. When he looked at her she saw his memories of their lovemaking in his eyes. ‘I wouldn’t say that. Is this what I think it is?’

  ‘Wait and see,’ she said, turning her attention back to Teazle’s bickering. ‘I think he will resort to violence soon.’

  Everything waits to break through.

  The words, the idea, formed in Lila’s mind as clearly as a voice speaking, so much so that she looked around for the speaker before realising that it wasn’t to be found in Demonia. She’d had a lot of this kind of thing with Tath, when he had lived in her heart, so she quickly got used to the idea, but now there was no physical connection to whatever or whoever had spoken. If spirits spoke, then they spoke this way. She waited.

  In her mind’s eye she saw the surface of reality splitting and breaking open like ice, smashing into shards, also unfolding like complex bundles of cloth, unravelling like twine and reknitting into other forms that broke through the fine, thin crust of the real and stretched it, pulled it. Everything tumbled under and boiled up again, places remade like personal memories of themselves. From these places unrecognisable creatures appeared and wrestled free of the grey goo that formed them, fishlike, ottery, and went dashing away.

  It lasted an instant, and then it was gone. It was nothing like the idea of forming the halt army – something she felt was a tease rather than a genuine suggestion, a test perhaps. She glanced at Zal but he was unperturbed, watching Teazle with an expression of tolerant wariness that surprised her. She had turned a blind eye to their rivalry, much as they did themselves because it suited them temporarily, but it had not vanished.

  Since she couldn’t detect or stop these two messages, nor discover their route or author, she decided not to worry about this new style of communication or speculate pointlessly on it. She drained the beer jug and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.

  Teazle gesticulated and dramatised and swore his way to a deal with the hardbitten figure of the drakewarden. At last, as the sun began to go down, they slapped each other’s shoulders and turned away. The dragon behind them, which had gone to sleep, lifted its ugly eyeless head and sniffed the air before getting to its feet, claws grating on the stone roof tiles. For a moment it moved its attention to Lila and s
he felt as if it were looking at her, then it hefted itself into the windless air and was out over the lagoon leaving her wondering if it had been her secret speaker.

  Around the city the lights were coming on. A cruiser balloon floated past, thrumming with engines and music. Somewhere in the twilight street below demons screamed and squabbled. Teazle said, ‘I’m going to watch. I don’t trust them.’ His wings opened as he took his natural form and then sprang into the air. Where the drake had flown so swiftly he arrowed even faster, gliding on non-existent air currents. She was left alone with Zal on the roof.

  ‘When you go out to Alfheim I’m heading back into Otopia. You can talk to me anytime. I can be there instantly.’ She hesitated, not wanting to ask the next question. ‘Did you get your cure?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There isn’t one. Teazle thought if he leaned hard enough on some of the mages up at the Eternal Light they’d be able to fix it, but they all said that because she’s dead they can’t do anything.’

  ‘So stupid,’ she said. ‘Why did she do it?’ She tapped her fingers restlessly on her thigh.

  ‘Demon,’ he said, as if that was the answer to everything. ‘Forget it. I’ll be fine.’

  She looked at him and shook her head. ‘Don’t get yourself killed.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re so worried about,’ he said. ‘You didn’t get yourself killed. Why would I?’

  ‘Because you gave a lot of your energy to me. Worked too.’

  ‘No it didn’t,’ he said and smiled, brilliantly. ‘That was just one of Teazle’s cheap tricks.’

  She peered at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well I am knackered, but it wasn’t from any aetherical donations. That was a placebo. We fooled you.’

  Lila felt the beer making her heavy but not heavy enough to stop her blood rising. ‘But it reacted to the . . . things . . .’

  ‘Of course it did. But that’s all it did.’

  She sat, mouldering on her anger a little, settling into it, trying it on for size and finding it didn’t quite fit. ‘You tosser,’ she said finally.

  ‘Yes, well.’ He lay back in the recliner as if bathing in the murky streetlight. ‘True to form, and that’s what counts. Now you know how the world of the spirit works.’

  ‘Trickery?’

  ‘Trickiness,’ he corrected. ‘If you believe it they will come and if you don’t, then they won’t. Or if they do then you can be rid of them, as long as you keep your wits and don’t fear them.’

  Lila didn’t remember fear. Dread wasn’t the same. Fear had some kind of hope in it but she had expected death so completely there was no point in that emotion. ‘Ilya said that the three Titans were migrating from beyond Last Water into the other worlds. Seems it’d be a lot easier to say no to them before that happened.’

  ‘I guess he tried it and they ignored him.’

  ‘Yes. Which makes your previous statement less persuasive.’

  ‘Poor old Ilya, too much time with the undead and not enough with Tinkerbell. Always his trouble.’ Zal turned the full force of his attention on her and she felt his strength of will like a physical force breaking against her so that for a minute she was convinced that it alone had the power to remake her. His smile cracked the spell. ‘Never my trouble.’

  ‘My trouble is that I don’t know that it’s my business to stop them,’ she said. ‘These Titans may be special, but I doubt their motives are anything to write home about. Maybe all they want is Sarasilien’s soul and maybe they should have it.’

  ‘Yes, could be,’ Zal said. ‘I’m curious to find out.’

  This statement pleased her and soothed her more than she understood. ‘So am I.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The drake they finally obtained was as promised, a large, ominous-looking creature with green fire burning behind the sealed skin of its eyesockets and a strange, mottled hide of cadaverous purple, which was lit from within as though by glowing globes rising to its surface and falling back. It touched down on the Manse roof with barely a whisper of claws on the stone and immediately angled its ugly saurian head towards Zal.

  ‘It speaks,’ Zal said faintly, so that only Lila could hear. ‘This is the one they call Unloyal and it knows and keeps the name.’

  Sikarza servants fussed around, fixing the drake’s harnesses and rigging Zal’s seat between the shoulderblades. An image appeared in the centre of Lila’s mind, a thought without words of someone who would not throw their lot in with anybody, for any price. It was the drake’s introduction, she realised. She knew how to speak that way in return; it was like forming composite patterns for another cyborg.

  She asked it what it was doing as the servant of a drake trader and its reply was an inscrutable smooth blank. At the same time she saw Zal frowning and guessed he was talking to it as well. How the signal passed from one to another she couldn’t detect. Her wondering about this became a question and the answers returned as fast as deflected shots – Unloyal had been getting fatter at the trader’s expense while he waited for an interesting opportunity to appear and was content for the demon to act as his agent. The thought sharing was transmitted because Unloyal was a telepath, not because she was.

  And what was telepathy? Lila wanted to know a scientific explanation.

  Two-way aetheric radio, Unloyal returned. In her case the drake was powering both sides of the operation, since she had no aetheric body of note. The transmission medium was the aether itself, clearly, and the packet rate was unimpeded by physical constraints and virtually instantaneous and as wide as the world.

  Lila told it she would stick with her clone and the old quantum transmission she understood, and the drake glanced at Zal’s harness, made an equalisation and said they were the same thing.

  She objected – surely aether and matter were not the same? Yes, it said, they were the same, but they were not simultaneously expanded in the most material types of universe. Then its interest wandered and she felt it turning to Zal, leaving her sitting in her sun lounger in the dark, looking at the gaudy pulsing lights of the dirigibles as her mind turned this new factlet over and over like prayer beads. She had begun to have an inkling of who might play games with Titans.

  Meanwhile Teazle returned, appearing like a white genie out of nowhere. He assumed his natural form and prowled across the roof to the two of them.

  ‘This is where we part ways again,’ he said. ‘There is news of strange events in the Uathtan Wilderness and a sudden silence from the City States of Zrae, which lie on its borders. Rumours fly of a demon horde from the wastes and in the Elusive Sanctum mages pack their bags and flee. They have sealed all portals into and out of Bathshebat.’

  Lila frowned. ‘Same thing as Alfheim?’

  ‘I am sure,’ Teazle said with great, pleased confidence. He was sparkling with anticipation. She could see she only warranted a part of his attention. ‘Zal, can you ride?’

  Zal got up and reeled slightly though he kept his feet. With a steady motion he eased the joints in his neck and shook out his arms. ‘I’ll survive it.’ He bent and picked up a light elvish pack that had been brought and laid at the side of his chair, went through it quickly and then slung it over his shoulder. ‘Don’t forget if they come to sack the place that you need to save the instruments from the Opera House. Put them away in one of your vaults or something. You’ll never be able to replace them.’

  Teazle’s bright gaze flicked briefly over Zal. ‘I intend to defend the city,’ he said, almost hurt. ‘It might be the last bastion of demon culture.’

  Zal nodded. ‘If I don’t hear from you I won’t come back here.’

  ‘I’ll find you,’ Lila said to Teazle.

  ‘The elf is right,’ Teazle replied. ‘You should consider Demonia closed from now on. Much as we may feast and party it is no time to let loose our wild brothers on foreign soils. All entry points shall be sealed as my first duty. I will do any finding that must be done.’

  ‘You’re really e
njoying this, aren’t you?’ She got up herself and finally conceded that the beery happiness must go. Within moments it was reconfigured to sugar and water in her system.

  ‘Why not?’ Teazle said. ‘It is interesting.’ With that he sprang up into the air on his own, white wings. Beside the looming bulk of the drake he was small, a lithe figure of beaming brilliance that flicked itself quickly up and over the observatory tower and then stooped with the speed of a falling dagger and was lost to sight somewhere in the night streets below.

  ‘Right,’ Zal said, blinking as if with a mighty mental effort. ‘One final thing. It seems to me there’s a slight chance of possession by unstoppable phantoms circling about. I didn’t want to burst his bubble but as from now on, all things being equal, we have no way of verifying anybody’s identity. I seem to remember something from my days as a spy that in this kind of situation we can’t trust one another at all. If you, for instance, got taken over by infernal evil able to copy your every move, how would I know this . . .’ he touched the silver harness, ‘. . . was still okay?’

  ‘I won’t be in contact with it as long as you’re in Alfheim,’ she said. ‘I did think of running it as a simultaneum but one consciousness is really more than enough to deal with. If you need to contact me you can instruct a part of it to return to Otopia. It will find a way. Of course, then I won’t be able to believe a word of what it has to say but . . . you know . . .’ She smiled and put her hands on the front of his shoulders lightly.

  ‘Thought that counts,’ he smiled back and his long, pointed ears fanned out their ragged edges in the way that always made her laugh. He leaned down and kissed her. She stored the moment in full sensory maximum-width capture and smelled lime zest. He wobbled on his feet. ‘Typical for the bloody charm to work now,’ he said and straightened up. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

  She watched him walk across the tiles to where the blotched, craggy form of Unloyal, who for some reason she couldn’t stop thinking of as Unholy, waited in his own septic light.