Zal had the same easy stride and arrogant swagger he’d had when walking out onto a concert stage. If anything, he looked more convincing now and less like a set extra from a movie. His leap to the high saddle was an effortless bound of the elastic sort only elves could muster. He landed as though weightless and buckled the safety straps over his legs, ignoring the drake’s sudden lurch as it got to its four feet and stretched itself out for a shake. He took hold of the saddle bow and then Unloyal turned to her.
Again she felt the sensation of a pause in conversation, but it said nothing. She did not attempt to conceal her conviction that if Unloyal did anything harmful or neglectful to Zal she would hunt it down. A faint amusement came to her that wasn’t her own and then with a swing of its head Unloyal crouched and burst up from the roof. A single flap of its wings sent all the tables and chairs and everything else loose scattering and tumbling across the tiles, servants falling down headlong to save themselves. Only Lila stood fast, her hand lifted to shield her eyes as she watched them take off into the humid murk of the demon night. She felt lonely as she followed their going until they were only a speck against the greater darkness out over the ocean. She tracked the burst of particles that showered their departure through the drake’s own portal and then knew them to be as far away as the faint stars overhead.
Then Lila went back the way she had come, to the ruined gangster house and through the portal in the room with the broken window.
The Cedars apartment block was quiet as she came into it. She didn’t know much about portal technology, but enough to know how to ruin one. Teazle had taught her. She found the locking crystals and smashed them, then watched the circular time-space distortion decay over a few seconds until its presence was only a piece of history visible to high-end forensics. There were better ways of disposing of the things, less dangerous ways with less risk of blowback, but she didn’t care about the other end of the system, only that one more wormhole was shut.
She did the same to the Zoomenon garbage portal in the opposite room, noting that Roxa’s blood was still sticky in places on the floor, and then walked back into the apartment proper. There was nobody about. The cushioned area with its two thrones was vacant, although incense still smouldered in a dish on the floor. She heard voices on the floor below. Something about their pitch, a feeling of anxiety, made her open a tentative spy channel into the Otopian networks.
Silence greeted her.
She closed the link and recrypted her operating frequencies, then crossed to the window, opened it and stepped onto the sill. From there it was a quick leap up to the roof, which was high enough to give a reasonable view over the city and the bay.
From shoreline to hills every road was jammed with cars, every street full of people. Some rushed purposefully, others stood and gaped around them at the incomprehensibility of a world suddenly without its lifeblood of electronic chatter. She was glad she’d lived on the outside of it for so long, self-sufficient because she had the world of information in her head. There was a giddy unpleasant fretfulness to the movements she saw and heard everywhere, a panic not far away in spite of the fact that barkers were already out, moving through lines of stalled traffic to reassure everyone that this was a temporary and relatively unimportant setback. Fine, unless you wanted to buy, or sell, or travel, she thought, watching cars trying painfully to work their way across gridlocked junctions. Going by the activity she figured the whole network was down, but she could feel local traces of electrochatter here and there, so individual machines were working and there was power.
Beneath her several gang-coloured cars were gathering, teams moving quickly, arming themselves. She knew a raid forming when she saw it and expected that a thousand other opportunists would be making ready to snatch and run while the systems failure inhibited the police response. Her anger at them was brief, useless. She could only stop them with death or violence close to it, and after them would be more and a billion other unstoppable things. She felt the Signal, its eternal hum of bee-busy knowledge, but whatever she did that hum never altered. It didn’t approve or disapprove, it gave no sign that something was gained or lost, if she had won or if she was just another one of the features pushing the numbers of the dead up and up. There was no payback either way.
In the cracked concrete yard the car doors were sliding shut. Bullets counted themselves into guns, voices swore, laughed, said obscene things with the emphasis of overconfident foolishness riding fear. So alive. So uncertain.
Everything waits to break through.
She ignited her jets and took to the air.
Temple Greer waited for her in the open courtyard – what he called his ‘ready room’ at moments when he couldn’t stand to be indoors. Malachi was with him outside the yurt’s cream-coloured woollen dome. They were playing quoits. Greer was winning. Bentley sat to the side, a grey statue on the bench where the trees cast the most shade. Her hands were folded in her lap. She looked demure, quiet, an android from some period film of social manners. Her face was tilted towards the sky.
As Lila arrived Bentley turned towards her and half lifted her hand in a wave. Lila waved back, coming in to land on the browned grass, worn almost to its roots by so many feet. Malachi was slow to notice her, because he was hidden behind a clump of shrubbery. As she moved around it she saw another reason. His graceful figure had broadened so his shoulders split the seam of his coat. His arms protruded far below his cuffs, and they were furry with clawed hands that handled the rope rings of the quoits with a degree of clumsiness. His head was more square, more flat from the back and when he turned she saw that his face had lengthened. Halfway between a worg and a tiger, he was a hunched aberration in his tailored camel coat – the only clothing he had left. But it was still Malachi. The orange eyes and a way of moving as if the air around him was silk would have given it away.
Greer tossed his final quoit at the post and missed. ‘Goddamn it.’
She reached them. ‘They always said the old games were the best.’
Malachi blinked at her. ‘They?’ It was barely distinguishable as words. It was a growl that had a shape like a word, and that’s all.
‘Chess, shove ha’penny, billiards, dominoes, all that stuff that was good before computers,’ she said. ‘Quoits.’
Malachi held out two rings to her, speared on the bulky, gnarled shape of his index finger. She unhooked one and stepped up to the line as Greer moved aside for her. She looked at the stumpy stick that was the mark and turned the ring in her hand for a moment before tossing it with a flick of her wrist. It spun down and snagged the mark, coming to rest so that it lay centred over it. She stood aside to let Malachi have his last throw. He sighed and made a cast, opening his hand with difficulty. The ring bumped and rolled on its edge, turning away into the rough.
‘Quiet around here,’ she said as Greer went forward to collect the rings, shucking up his trousers to bend down and gather them all up. ‘When did all this happen?’
‘Two hours ago,’ Malachi rumbled. ‘All systems at first. Then some things came back on. No communication though.’
Greer came back, sorted out the rings marked with orange and the rings with green. ‘I guess it’s the same everywhere.’
‘Demonia’s out,’ she confirmed. ‘T stayed there. Zal’s gone to Alfheim.’
‘Well, it’s not like we were a big alliance,’ Greer said, handing the orange rings to Malachi again. ‘I mean, we’re all cut off. So what? Most people here are over the moon about it.’
‘Don’t I get any?’ Lila asked.
‘No,’ he said, edging her out of the way so that he could line up to throw again. ‘You’re no fun at this.’
She moved back and stood shoulder to shoulder with Malachi. ‘Nice coat,’ she said to him.
‘You’re playin’ with fire, Black,’ he snarled, literally curling his lip to show the size of his big yellow teeth. They were oddly whiter and sharper than she remembered. His gums and tongue were black, with red
edges. It was hard not to stare. He lined up his rings on his finger carefully.
‘Do you know where Tatters is?’ She tried to make the question sound casual.
He jerked his head in the direction of the yurt’s open door flap. ‘On the rack.’
‘We didn’t expect you to cut and run so fast,’ Greer said. ‘But thanks for tidying up that police job. I crossed off one entire line of my to-do list.’
‘Sir,’ Lila said. ‘How comprehensive is this isolation?’
He paused in his lengthy stance process and stood back to eye her. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Are any internal networks functional?’
‘Nothing. Individuals and within individuals, yes. Everything else is as quiet as the . . . what’s your point?’
‘I think this is a by-product and not an attack. It’s like a necessary prequel.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Greer said, recreating his position and leaning forward, ring balanced in his fingertips. ‘I had a guy up here to explain it and he couldn’t.’
‘It’s aether disruption,’ Lila said just as he made his move. The ring tumbled forward, hit wide of the post and flopped in the dust. ‘And it does. But not to a pure-matter physicist. My point is that it doesn’t look like we can evacuate the city without networks. But I think that at least we should evacuate this building and the surrounding area.’
‘The entire army and every officer able to walk is presently supervising contraflows downtown,’ Greer said, easing a shoulder as he moved to let Malachi take his place. ‘Those that are able are distributing themselves to keep order. Why do you want this building turned upside down as well?’
‘I think this is all about Sarasilien. Where he is, that’s where trouble is coming,’ she said.
‘He is our only adept advisor, with the exception of Malachi here,’ Greer said watching Malachi flick a ring and just edge the post. ‘And he’s the only one with significant powers. The only one, Black. One. In a world of trouble.’
‘He is your trouble,’ Lila said.
‘You’ve got proof of course.’ Greer moved around Malachi and smoothed one side of his moustache with a finger before squinting at the post and adjusting the position of his toe to the scraped line in the dirt.
‘There would be no silence without him, no crisis.’
‘No cyborgs,’ Malachi growled, making the word sound like a beast’s curse.
‘You see, Black,’ Greer fiddled with the shoulders of his jacket and took a deep breath, ‘Sarasilien is a royal pain in my ass but I have to be grateful, and the rest of us, because we’ve got you and you are something that stands on the line between the humans and the rest of the aetherials and their goddamned business. Without you we’d go back to being the wildebeests on the savannah with a lion explosion in process. So while you may be right, I still have to protect his skinny elf butt.’
‘Everything you see is just the tip of a much nastier iceberg,’ Lila said. ‘And I believe it’s going to try to shove itself right up that skinny elf butt. So the further away everyone else gets, the better.’
Greer tossed his quoit. It thumped solidly over the post, the first one. ‘How far away?’
‘I have no idea. For my money, about one country.’
‘I can probably manage a couple of miles. What else?’ He walked behind Lila as Malachi moved in front of her to take aim. A smell of hot animal fur and baking minerals pushed out towards her from the folds of the camel coat. She watched him flex his pawlike hands, trying to straighten the knuckles, failing.
‘Xavi’s got to go,’ Lila said. ‘She’s a wild card.’
‘Yeah well, that’s not a problem. She’s gone already. That was what I was going to give you as your next assignment, always assuming you survive this assignment.’
‘She’s gone?’
‘Completely gone. Mal came to sign her out, the comms went down and she skipped town at the same moment. My guess is she cracked the aether part of the cell a while ago and was waiting for an opportunity.’
Malachi made his turn and watched his quoit thud into the scrappy weeds next to the post. He grunted in disgust. ‘I picked up traces of her spells. She went to Alfheim.’
‘You sure?’ Lila was taken aback and puzzled.
The huge cat-beast gave her a baleful orange stare and stepped wearily off the plate. ‘I’m sure.’
‘Who made that cell?’ Lila asked. She dreaded the answer.
‘Who do you think?’
‘Then he knows,’ she said. ‘Crap.’ She’d been relying on the information as an ace in her sleeve; now she was back to nothing.
‘Maybe not,’ Malachi said as they both stood back and watched Greer re-rolling his sleeves. Faces came and went in the windows of the surrounding building but nobody tried to come out and disturb them. ‘If she was correct about him then he had no idea she was alive. He will be in shock. Shocked people are not at the top of their form.’
‘D’you think she’s in touch with them – with the Betrayed?’ Lila asked.
Greer picked up his remaining rings and skimmed one low, too low. It hit Malachi’s previous throw and fell over, making a little Venn diagram of near misses. ‘From what she’s told us, I doubt it, but then, she might be a good liar. Mal here thinks your diary charm made her unwittingly honest so, I’m gonna make a bet and go with him. Say she hasn’t, but she still is more like them than not. She could be in touch. Who knows if they’re in cahoots or not?’
‘I have a taped interview.’ The voice was Bentley’s, carrying clearly from her spot on the bench where she was beyond human hearing distance but obviously not beyond cyborg pickup. ‘Would you like to see it?’
‘Yeah,’ Lila said, watching Malachi miss again. He groaned and rolled his heavy head, easing the massive neck muscles under their thick ruff of coal-black hair. She excused herself from the game with a slight bow and backed away from her position, going to join Bentley in the shade.
The grey woman greeted her with a smile and as Lila sat down reached out and took hold of her hand. With the contact established passing across the files was as simple as usual. Lila unpacked the compressions and closed her eyes, keeping hold of Bentley’s hand even though there was no need any more as she watched the recording.
Bentley and Xaviendra were sitting in Xavi’s holding cell. It was a single room with an adjoining bathroom and in the weeks that she had been there Xavi had furnished and decorated it extensively – this at Lila’s expense – creating a pretty, well-lit sitting room complete with a work area in which a huge array of painting materials lay ordered with two canvases up on easels, although they were turned from the camera. It was hard to say who looked the most unreal in the situation, Bentley with her uniformly grey plastic exterior or Xavi’s purple- and blue-toned elf skin with its mane of black hair hanging almost to her ankles and her blue, saurian tail coiled neatly around her hoofed feet. They sat with an ease that spoke of their familiarity with the situation. Lila knew there were dozens of recordings of Xavi. She had taken many of them herself but by far the most had been patiently undertaken by Bentley.
This one was part way through. Bentley was speaking.
‘ . . . did you ever know about any successes in the experiments?’
‘Yes,’ Xavi said in her immaculate, accented Otopian. ‘There were three.’
‘But you weren’t on the site any more at that time.’
‘No, I had escaped, but I stayed close by – I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t want to go anywhere.’ She sighed. ‘I heard them, you might say. I felt them. They had a presence in that . . . place . . . where I was.’
‘Was this place physical?’
‘No. It was shadows. The place of the undead. I don’t know its name. I don’t know if it has a name. Nobody speaks there. There are things without names, without bodies. I didn’t understand how I could be there. I was very frightened. When they came I knew them because they felt like me and not like the other things there.
We could touch each other and I knew their thoughts.’
‘Who were they?’
Xaviendra’s hooves flexed and her tail wound itself more tightly about her ankles. ‘It doesn’t matter. Who they were didn’t exist any more. Nor me. We chose new names there, so that we wouldn’t get lost.’
There was an expectant pause and then Xavi said, ‘I cannot use them here. It is not right for you to know them. Magical naming. I am sure you know of this.’
Bentley nodded. They had never tried to coerce anything out of Xaviendra. She had been a broken creature and readily forthcoming with anything they asked so it hadn’t been necessary to push. Having her withhold something was new.
‘You must understand I wouldn’t ask for them unless we had a strong belief that we would need them,’ Bentley said.
‘I would not give them to you unless I was certain it was necessary,’ Xaviendra countered. ‘You do not know the three.’
‘And do you?’
‘We suffered the same fates. In that I know them. When it became clear that they were much more able than was I, and that they were bound in a way that I was not, then we had to separate. They went to their duty and I stayed in case any others came that way. But as time passed I knew that I was losing myself there. If I stayed I would decay and be as dead as I was supposed to be, as undone as the elements. In that place there is no time, nothing to see, it is dark, an eternity of darkness, a space without limit. The three suffered no loss there. But I had to return to one of the heavier planes. I tried to go to Alfheim, but I . . . was barred.’ She became straighter, taller, narrower in her chair with the effort of holding back her feelings. ‘My father’s magic kept me out. I was dead to them all.’
Bentley was the soul of compassion, her expression gentle as the turn of the subject. ‘Did you encounter the thing of which they were afraid?’
‘The cause of the atrocity? No. After all I had been told I expected to face a monster of perfect horrors, a hell of vileness beyond my imaginings. That is why I was lost for so long there. I thought it was a mistake. There was nothing there except the spirits, and they were neither kind nor useful. They were malignant, but nothing at the same time. They were fond of my misery but they were . . . of no consequence. There was nothing there.’ She sounded puzzled now and spread out her hands on her knees. Bright paint covered her fingers and she absently scratched some of it off.
Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Page 31
