By the time he reached the door he was his old self again, that watchful, careful, sneaky, angry and frustrated being he thought he’d left behind for good. It was almost funny. And then the razor edge of his own spine’s sense of self-preservation returned, waiting for blades, listening for lies and the breath of his doom. It spread its paranoid fingers out around him and in the astral silence found foreboding. It was good the wind howled like a banshee. It meant he didn’t have to do it for himself.
The cliffs of Delatra’s hostile exterior did nothing to prepare him for what he found inside. A city had been carved from the stone with vaults open in the high mountain above enough to light parks and gardens, farms and lakes. Zal stood, mite-tiny, on the interior balcony that looked across this magnificence and imagined how it must have been when it was whole. He couldn’t, because it was smashed to bits.
Rubble, covered in snow powder, buried in ice, was all that was left, with a few walls here and there to suggest what might have been. The shadowkin had not left without starting their work, then. There looked to be nothing down there of any interest. The vast hills and banks of ruined shapes were pristine. It was only the conviction of his aetheric body that made him stay a second longer. It said there were living elves in these remains. Under normal conditions he would have been able to place them within a few metres of their location because under normal conditions they were all subliminally aware of each other, unless they were trained and in hiding. Here he could feel their presence but there was no response and no intelligence of any kind in it, no sense of any awareness of the aether at all. They felt exactly like humans. Thus he set out to hunt them, his tread silent, dull and already hopeless.
It had been some tale of his mother’s that Delatra was a great city of the most talented aether-rich individuals, served and administered by the most dutiful and devoted servants, all of them united under the cause of progress and scholarship. She had said it with a scoff in her voice and, after drink, that scoff turned to poison. He’d never understood why. To Zal it had sounded boring. All his experience of the diurnal elves and their highly mannered, rigid society had rubbed him the wrong way. The shining idea of Delatra was one of the first great ideas he forgot and he forgot it twice – once on the island of the abandoned children, shamed for their lack of magic, and once when he escaped that place and came into his father’s instruction in the night forests of Lower Hajaf.
In between those forgettings he did remember it, when he was forced back on the last stock of stories he knew in order to survive the sea voyage to Hajaf with his sanity intact, but even then it had been hard work to speculate anything interesting about it. His mother’s tales centred on her dormitory of female students and later on her dislike and then hatred of the ruling mage priests. Since those priests had been the descendants of Sarasilien’s brood, he supposed there was probably a lot to dislike about them. They had supported apartheid and exiled his friends, so as far as he was concerned they were dismissible, worthy only of his utter contempt although he rarely mustered the energy on their behalf. Now he wondered if he was going to have to get this hate out of his soul’s footlocker of neglected things, though what magery was left clearly didn’t have the strength to set a single stone back in place.
Hate would have been more welcome than the leaden feeling he did have. He found a way through the wall’s considerable architecture and discovered it was the administration centre, surely, with its endless meeting places, small burrowlike storage places and modest little rooms. Ruined furniture and machineries of various kinds blocked his way but it was all old. Here and there cupboards and chests showed signs of looting but for the most part it was a deserted place and the only thing filling the passages was the boom and yowl of the wind. Even when you were used to it, he thought, it could drive you mad. Then he remembered something about a pipe organ, that the wind played. Great music. That surely was broken too.
The day passed slowly for him. Only the harness kept him warm enough to move as he slowly wound his way towards the faint sparks of energy moving about in the lowest tiers of the cliff. He knew, even with the urgency that drove him – Lila’s words and the uknown fate of Alfheim – he was delaying but he could only keep the pace resolute rather than eager. All the time the age of the ruin ate at his conviction. It was threadbare, iced, a coffin of a kind that was long past holding anything but bones. That meant it must have been destroyed just after his mother left it, although even that time seemed too short to account for the degradation. And then his foot caught on something and he fell forward, jerked out of this reverie and into the necessary moment of cold stone under his hands and he looked back and there was nothing at his foot, nothing at all.
At this point he began to suspect an illusion. When he found the elves living there at last his puzzlement deepened, because he was certain that any magic at work wasn’t theirs.
He hid himself among the rubble of a fallen archway and watched them. They were living at ground level using the rooms in the cliff wall as caves. They looked like elves, wore elvish clothing and used bows and small knife weapons. They didn’t talk, but communicated by gestures alone, and few of those. They were, in every way, as unelflike as could be, but they were thin and agile and fast. They moved in sudden darts and their eyes, brilliant, were empty and wary. They reminded him of crows, or monkeys. Their caves were littered with scavenged junk. They cooked something over a fire that was visibly constructed out of broken scroll woodwork and the ripped halves of large-size books.
He backed away very carefully, as he would from a pack of predatory wild animals, and dulled his brain yet further so that he wouldn’t have to think about what else he saw – their public rutting, their vicious squabbling or the howling wind that had occupied their empty eyes. They did not notice his shadow body although one of them looked around as he touched her foot with it and promptly brought her hand down to scratch her ankle. In a second she was more interested by the activities of a fighting pair of men on the far side of the tiny fire.
Another troupe of them were detectable, at the far side of the ruin. He saw tribal kinds of markings scratched on stones, faeces left at prominent points, tracks and old bloodstains showing the site of ambushes. This time he used his skill to avoid them and crept back upwards. The only other feature of Delatra he knew of was the library – a place containing a copy of all documents or artefacts of interest. He knew, from his mother’s stories of girlish foolery, that it was located inside the peak of the mountain in something like a bunker, inaccessible except through a narrow corridor. They had used to joke about it being a fire hazard and the books in the fire had made him think of it again.
After an hour of searching had failed to find it he decided to give up and head back to his rendezvous with Unloyal. At this point an arrow thudded into his back and knocked him off his feet. It had hit squarely between his shoulderblades but the harness had stopped it, even though he was pretty sure there was no harness at that point. Even so the force was a blow that hurt and winded him. He spun as he fell, landing on his side and springing up again with a move he didn’t know that he still had. It left him facing his attacker, who said as she put up her bow and gave him a flat glare, ‘You’ve lost your reflexes.’
‘Xavi.’ He stayed where he was, feeling the arrow slump down from where its point was stuck in the harness.
‘And there I almost thought I knew what she saw in you,’ Xaviendra said, plucking the bowstring awkwardly. She held the weapon up into the weak light coming from a high window and they both saw it was old and worn, the string frayed. ‘A good thing this isn’t a real bow. But then, nothing much is real here.’
Seeing that she didn’t seem bent on more violence he straightened up and relaxed his defensive stance. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘My job,’ she said, primly. She tossed the bow aside to clatter on the stone floor and composed her hands in a parody of demureness, her head with its cascade of black hair on one side. ‘Librarian.’
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Zal decided he wasn’t too interested in following her guidelines. ‘I thought you were in Otopia.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am, also there.’
He took this at face value. ‘What happened here?’
‘The city was—’
‘I mean the people. I don’t really buy the city.’
‘Oh.’ She seemed disappointed. ‘They are all that’s left. My father’s grand project. Excellent work.’
‘This is recent,’ Zal said, frowning. It was hard to discount the cold but then Xavi waved her hand and although there was no change in temperature he was able to make out tables, chairs, shelving that was solid and held various items against the walls. There was no snow and no ice.
‘I am protecting what’s left,’ she said. ‘It took them a while to get used to it. They woke up one morning to discover the whole city devastated. Ran around screaming, fighting, fucking each other like crazy, but now they’ve accepted it. It keeps them out of most of it, especially the centre city. They’re not very determined. They accept what they see. Within a day or two they retreated to the places that seemed most welcoming. It was really no trouble.’
He digested this as he kept watching her closely. She seemed pleased with herself. ‘But the people,’ he said. ‘What happened to them?’
‘As I said, my father’s noble goals happened to them. Wrath has been here. I guess he must have come here first, looking for him of course. That would be several weeks, maybe a month ago.’
Zal laughed at her, hollow and rasping. ‘They can’t have come to this in a week or two.’
‘Of course they can,’ Xavi said. ‘Those you see here are the ones who survived. The bodies of the dead are in the crypts.’ She gave an odd kind of shiver and for the first time he noticed her hands were stained with darkness and her clothing was ripped and bloody in places near the hem. ‘No mages survived. These are the servants you see.’
‘The ones without magical affinity,’ he said, feeling as if he were speaking the words of a curse.
Xavi nodded. ‘Just so. And now they have lost their minds and their memories, or perhaps it is only the memories, I am not sure. They have lost something very important, that’s clear. Anyway, salvaging them is a project I can’t afford. All my efforts are to preserve what is left. I’m sure you noticed that some of the materials from the library have already been destroyed. I don’t even know how much we have lost. Whole areas are desecrated. It would be years of work simply to correct the catalogue.’
Standing in the freezing room, aware of what was happening outside, watching her prattle on about books made something in Zal want to slap her very hard, but he was used to restraining these impulses in his Jayon guise and instead he felt the muscles around his face tighten up as he kept to the point and released any notions he had had of her being of some use. ‘Have you seen anywhere else?’
‘I came directly here.’ She was actually surprised at this. Her tail twitched as she sensed his displeasure and she became impatient. ‘You must understand the importance of this place and what it represents now.’
Zal, who had considered reaching out to her, recoiled his andalune body very carefully within his own skin. A wave of desire for her swept over him, making him hot but he ignored it. ‘Now?’
She frowned and he was reminded of her singular, fixated expression aboard the Temeraire, when she had been flanked by angels and determined to get her prize at any cost. For all their shared spirit she seemed not to have noticed his lust or his curse and that in itself was interesting but she was already talking.
‘Now that Wrath is in Alfheim. Nothing can stand against him. Or the others. If all of Alfheim, or even most of it, falls prey to this . . . plague of degeneration . . . then the only thing that remains of our whole culture and all its ages are the records of this library and others scattered across the world. Would you see them burned in order to toast rats?’
Zal considered it. ‘I’d rather see it wiping shit and rotting than recreating this situation, yes I would.’
Her eyes narrowed and she spat at him. ‘What an ignorant slut of a creature you are! How you can be her son I’ll never know! You have no idea of the beauty and the wonder contained in these things.’
‘Nothing of any importance, I’m sure of that. Sure as I am you’re your father’s daughter,’ he said, as disgusted with her as she was with him.
She scowled with displeasure and glanced at the bow and then at him. Her voice would have stopped his heart if she’d only had enough demon blood to transform its tone of vicious hatred into a literal lance of spite. ‘How dare you mention my father. I wish I’d killed you. You’re not fit to be here.’
Zal bent down and picked up the bow. He was aware now of how powerful she was, and it was orders of magnitude beyond what he had expected. It confused him, and the swirling vaporous desire in his body filled his judgement up with silty, suffocating confusion. It took all of his focus just to unstring the bow, adjust the tension with a few twists and restring it correctly before handing it to her. He let a little of his suffering flow into his own voice, so she’d understand he meant his next words as a threat. ‘Don’t throw away the one useful thing you’ve got. There’re no angels at your back now. It’s only a matter of time before they find you.’
She seethed at him. ‘You didn’t find me.’
‘Lucky me.’ He turned on his heel and began walking away. His head pounded with agonising pressure that promised it would ease if he only went in the other direction, back to her side.
‘Where are you going?’ she snapped.
‘To look for the living,’ he said without pausing or turning. The meeting with her and the demon’s curse had wearied him so much he knew he didn’t have long left before he’d be fawning over her feet. Only the burning heat of the harness kept him going; an embrace that was strong enough to hold him up when he felt that he was defeated. The succubus charm in his blood shrilled at him that he must stay, take care of her, love her and he remembered Lila’s writing in that book – ‘friends and lovers’, she had written, in her misguided, rushed, too-kind way. He grit his teeth and kept walking one step after another and finally he felt he was clear of Xavi or at least had no idea where she was. Ideas, concerns about her role here, her relation to her father, the meaning of her presence tried to rush him but he battered those aside too. Then it was only a matter of half an hour to retrace his way to the landing platform.
Shrieks, almost but not quite torn away on the wind, found his ears as he turned through the shattered panels of the last door and saw the blank arch of the indigo sky before him, framed in black rock. Unloyal, he wasn’t surprised to see, was not there.
His hands and feet were painful as he sat down in the lee of a rock to wait for true night and final confirmation of his abandonment. He folded his legs and wrapped his arms around them and put his forehead onto his knees, pack on his feet and the thin cloak he had with him over all. The wind boomed and screamed around the cliff but his aetheric body told him there was nobody there.
He began to murmur a tune to himself and then, to his surprise, he found he heard the original track and realised it was the harness. It hadn’t occurred to him that it would respond to sound, but then he thought of course it would. If it was Lila’s clone then the way to communicate with it was to talk. Strange ideas began to come to him about what he might be able to do with it and the pressure in his blood abated as he sang.
By the time Unloyal landed on the pitch-black platform, its own hide scoured and chilled beyond comfort, it was surprised to see its former partner dancing across the empty space. It was wearing a strange, flexible suit of plate armour that was radiating heat and trailed cloaks and streamers of shadow around it that acted as siphons on the darkness itself, drawing it in and making it denser. Unloyal knew an ifrit when he saw one, even if it was using shade and not flame. The whirling dance it did was also accompanied by wild music which Unloyal’s own andalune body could pick up even
when his sharp ears could not. He recognised some of the rhythms from the demon city. Then the elf noticed him and came waltzing up, a bizarre knight of darkness with a tattered flag of dirty blond hair.
‘Thought you’d forgotten,’ it said, recriminating.
Unloyal felt peeved but he put out his foot. The elf vaulted to the saddle without bothering to take it. Then Unloyal felt they were squared again and wondered for a second or two at the ease with which he had accepted an andalune link with such a lesser creature. ‘Turn up the volume,’ he ordered, taking them both to the edge of the wall. The wind slammed and sheared here, badly enough to rip off a wing if he were not careful or able to use more than aerodynamic means of support. The strange aetheric disruption of the atmosphere made life difficult, but not impossible.
Then Unloyal felt something even more unexpected. The elf was winding a metal wire firmly around one of his neck spines. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Now you can listen yourself. Just ask it to play.’
There was a moment, poised on the edge of oblivion where the drake was honestly lost for words, but then it found two. ‘Thank you.’
Its muscles bunched and its aether body swirled beneath it, gathering power, then they bolted forward and upwards. Within seconds they were whisked far from Delatra, over the lower peaks of the mountain and down towards the continent below, Unloyal making for places he had scouted out himself, wondering how he was to speak to a wire, and Zal with his streaming eyes watching the familiar constellations glitter overhead.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lila considered Bentley’s tape, Xavi’s face, Greer’s throwing arm and what it had felt like to stand in the bottom of the seeping labyrinth with Ilya, hearing his boy’s voice promise her to leave his heaven so that he, the failed Lord of Death, could track Sarasilien’s hounds of hell. They didn’t sit easily together.
Dusk was coming. In the offices the lights were on, showing people the way out. The evacuation processed silently. In the garden a few blackbirds chattered and some cicadas set up their louder hum. Malachi went into his yurt and lit his lamps. Through the open flapway Lila could see Tatters, hanging on the coat rack just as he had said.
Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Page 33
