Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  She was the spitting image of the green tailored clothing Teazle had given her and Lila briefly put her hand to her sleeve, realizing she’d been tricked. Tatterdemalion was already on her back. ‘You two faced sonofabitch,’ she said quietly. Bentley glanced at her but saw the remark was an interior moment briefly breaking the surface and ignored it. Lila wondered if cursing angels was some kind of sin. She got up.

  ‘You’re going?’ Bentley asked, signalling Greer with a wave of her arm.

  The quoits game was long finished. Greer had been sitting near the pitch on one of Malachi’s deck chairs, taking the air. He eyed Lila gravely. ‘So? As you can see, we’re all making tracks for the hills.’

  ‘Stay cool,’ Lila said. ‘I have to check something out. I won’t take too long. When I get back, then we’ll see.’ She saw Malachi looking out at them. He’d finally admitted defeat and taken off the camel coat. He had hung it, closed the buttons and was brushing it down with a velvet pad. She went across to him, ignoring Greer’s huff at her lack of detail.

  Lila made a show of examining the green dress. ‘Were you in it with him?’

  ‘I don’t cross angels,’ Malachi said.

  ‘Never mind,’ she sighed and looked up into his ugly beast’s face. In the last few hours it had darkened further, becoming almost purplish in its shadows, the eyes dimming from their lava burn to a sulphurous yellow. Around him the little woolly cavern of the yurt was darker than it should have been given the prevailing light. There was a smell of pine forests and night-blooming jasmine.

  ‘You should get out of here too,’ she said.

  ‘So saieth little red riding hood to the wolf? Get about your own business.’ His reply was one of those faery moment-turning charms that was meant to avert a misfortune by belittling its possibility. He adjusted the sleeve of the perfected coat and in doing so his claw snagged on the cuff button and tore through the threads, ripping it loose so that it hung by a single strand. He growled at the ill omen and his own clumsiness. His massive shoulders slumped until his paws were nearly at the floor. The velvet buffing pad dropped soundlessly from his other hand.

  ‘Yeah, so say she,’ Lila clapped him on the shoulder. ‘This isn’t your fight. Faery will be safe. It didn’t feature in the story so far.’

  His growl became nastier and he turned on her although she felt his malice wasn’t aimed at her.

  ‘Faery worked so hard to contain all the horror that has been spared and I have caused it to be freed. So long it was at bay that even you humans had come to think maybe there was no such thing as true evil, but now you will find otherwise. I set that in motion. I was the hand. It is my fight if it is anyone’s so don’t you boss me about.’

  She lowered her voice. ‘Ilya was beaten. Even he didn’t say how. I got the impression he couldn’t. It’s not worth all of us . . .’ She couldn’t finish the impossible sentence. ‘It isn’t worth it.’

  ‘No. It isn’t,’ he said firmly and flicked the button off its last thread with a lightning movement of his paw. It struck the wall and bounced down onto the floor. ‘So what?’

  She sighed and took her hand from him. ‘Take care.’

  ‘I wait for you here,’ he said and turned away as if he was very busy. Then he added, ‘That girl at your house. Did she tell you her story?’

  ‘She said you sent her, you and Greer. You sent her to clean up the house. And to clear out the previous tenants. Nice call, pussycat. You could always remodel yourself and become a real estate agent.’

  He made a low, swinging motion of his head that accepted his guilt and pushed it aside as necessary. He wasn’t about to apologise. ‘I must check on her,’ he said, more slowly and calmly. ‘You go your way. Your business is short?’

  ‘Short one way or another,’ Lila agreed, thinking of the Folly’s inferno. She must find Friday. She had to know the truth. ‘I should be back in an hour. Two at the most. If I’m not, you can cancel my rent agreement.’

  ‘Mmnnn,’ he assented, a sound that was half a purr and half a growl. He was down on all fours then and when he turned towards her he had become entirely catlike, a panther of gothic and prehistoric proportions. ‘Don’t come back here. Go home when you’re done. I’ll see you there. Zal too. No more coming here. Understand?’ He blinked once and then he flowed out of the door and vanished into the twilight so completely that she couldn’t track him across the yard.

  Lila took a bike out of the inventory, for old times’ sake. The quartermaster saw her coming and rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll order another one shall I?’ he said as she passed him, smiling.

  ‘Several,’ she said, thinking that this might be the last time she’d ride one. She could have gone a dozen ways under her own power but only the bike felt like the right way and she knew enough of what they were doing by now to know that however dumb or pointless it seemed, it was most important to do things the right way. It was how you moved in the game.

  The ride to Solomon’s Folly was the ride of her life. She’d been along it many times and every time had resulted in one turn of fate or another. This wasn’t going to be different, even if she had to burn down the dusty edge of the highway to pass the standing traffic. From the first turn out of the garage to the last slide on the loose gravel of the private road she felt that she was running on a rail. The time shift separated her from the rest of the world again, but since she expected it she felt no particular fear. It was only as she came to the depth of the woods surrounding the house and saw that the road had grown over completely, didn’t exist any more, that she was forced to stop.

  She dismounted and the green elegant folds of Tatterdemalion sank slowly round her legs, wrenched out of shape.

  The trees of the scrub woodland that had surrounded Zal’s rented house had grown to full size, fallen, rotted and given way to a new and more vital forest, which was itself mature. Undergrowth as thick as hedging barred her way and the enormous trees vaulted into a dark cathedral overhead. She thought that an hour was possibly too short a time to have allowed herself as she dismounted and put the bike onto its stand. It looked forlorn and helpless in the shadow of the trees. She checked the time shift and found that it had continued to accelerate. Tendrils of grass crept up the tyres.

  Because what faced her was a wall of impenetrable trees, twined with brambles as thick as a man’s arm and tangled as a medusa’s hair, she jetted up into the sky. Immediately wind buffeted her. Though nothing had stirred the branches a second before, suddenly she was caught in a powerful cross-stream that flung her sideways out of her path. As she corrected, more and more force gathered and then changed direction, sweeping her around the perimeter of the Folly’s elemental sinkhole. She swore and rode it, ignoring the tornado’s gathering mass as long as she was making headway towards her goal at its eye. The dress changed, coating her armour in a skintight sheen of lace. It formed a mask over her face, lace even covering the eyeslots although it was so open it didn’t blot her sight.

  The vortex picked at her, stripping off the superficial layers of her atoms. She remade them, watching for a place to set down. Foreboding filled her but she wouldn’t proceed against Sarasilien until she had all the evidence in her hands. She had to make one final attempt to locate Friday and his secrets.

  Below her she saw that the land itself had begun to reform in pure elements; gold and copper littered a grey-pumice ground between massive trees and running streams of clear water. The house, covered in the ghost of ancient fire, burned here and there with real flames that licked on the final remnants of its timbers. The fire was weak however, since there wasn’t much left that hadn’t been returned to clay or carbon. As long as clay was still good however, she had hope.

  Try as it could to dissuade her the air elementals were only capable of increasing or lessening their force and changing direction so she was able to punch through the diversion without trouble. Landing was difficult, right at the edge of the frying zone where already she could feel herself responding to the
radiation levels and the deep magnetic forces massing around the house’s unknown core.

  ‘Suit up,’ she said to the dress. She didn’t know if it would respond to a command. It was as likely to fly off in a huff and make itself into a paper bag but her rending of it seemed to have bought her a few moments of repentance. The lace unfolded rapidly into the full white and gold priest’s outfit of before, complete with lead-plate shielding and a surface of woven symbols. It vibrated constantly at a frequency she felt was almost desperate in its struggle to maintain integrity against the entropic maelstrom before them. Even time was getting ripped apart in there.

  ‘This’ll just take a minute,’ Lila said, knowing that was true, regardless of the outcome. She pulled up the files on the house’s morbidly confused floorplans and set off inwards.

  The way was blocked by more than just debris, which she had to shove and kick aside. The entire structure flickered. Like its one-time inhabitant the worldwalker Azevedo, it was yanked in and out of existence, at one moment solid and threatening, at others insubstantial or even vanished entire so that she could walk through the ghosts of walls or run through fallen beams. Tatterdemalion anchored her to the base reality of Otopian space-time, threads unravelling in all directions so that they walked like a strange anemone through a roaring ocean of fire. Walls powdered at her touch.

  She crossed the last spot where she’d seen Jones, Malachi’s friend. It was in the kitchen, with Azevedo flickering around them, the house itself steeped in what felt like a sentient brooding. Its death throes had the same quality now, in spite of the firestorm’s lively digestion, and Lila was almost running as she reached the head of the steps that led down to the basement.

  There was nothing but a hole in the ground left. The rim flickered with reflected light but that was lost immediately in the billows of black smoke filling the cavity. Behind the facemask of the helm Lila gave up on human vision and went to infra red, ultraviolet and radar. Microparticles and hostile frequencies beat relentlessly at her. She felt the dress, Tatterdemalion, tighten and smelled that they were themselves on fire. Her skin temperature began to rise quickly. She jumped down the hole before she could second-guess herself.

  The basements of Solomon’s Folly were large – carved out in days before refrigeration when ice blocks in straw kept things cool and because the owner had been a collector of wine. In Zal’s day they’d drunk the wine collection and everything that was unwanted from the house had been shoved down here either through the kitchen door or the coal-hole trap outside. There was nothing left of any of this except great piles of feathery ash, which billowed up around Lila in the sunburst heat, thickening the air and bursting into radioactive bomblets of ultrafine dust. This clogged the robes entirely and stopped the burning, though it began to eat at them in a newer, more scientific way, as though it intended to render them fit for Zoomenon within the minute. She saw red warnings, heard alarms, knew that in spite of all the aetheric and metallic shielding, the reconfiguration of her surface, she was beginning to disintegrate.

  Mostly blind she waded through the burning dust, feeling her way with her hands and Doppler. The time differential had increased too – she calculated an hour passing in Otopia as she crossed the first room in a dart of movement that would have been fast enough to blur. She discovered the cellar arches cracking under the load of the house rubble, because they were also being rendered to dust. And there in the second room, lay a prone figure, humanoid in shape and about two metres tall, covered completely in radioactive ash.

  Friday. Being an earth elemental, and a golem of great power, this vortex of earth-based energies had done as much to build him as to harm him. Victory gave her a final burst of conviction that he would still hold her answers.

  As she approached him however the lintel behind her gave way and with a smashing billow of pumice and dust the forepart of the house crumbled into the cellar, letting out a wave of new heat as it did so. Only the absence of almost all oxygen saved her from burning like a torch. Above her head the ceiling groaned. She had no idea how much was up there, or what state it was in. Even with all her senses the storm made everything into so much mud. Instinct told her she must get out. There was no time. The ground shook violently and she was thrown off her feet onto her stomach into the smelting zone.

  She reached out to touch the clay figure and her hand closed on the smooth shape of his foot.

  Once, years ago, Friday Head had been nothing but a small earth elemental in Zoomenon who had happened to be next to a dying elf. Then he had become a golem, occupied by the ghosts of Alfheim’s dead. Now, after a hundred years inside the furnace of Solomon’s Folly he was melting. Under the pressure of her hand the foot slumped into a pool, dragging the leg with it into a quickly forming puddle.

  She’d imagined grabbing him and blasting her way out of there, but now it was clear that was never going to happen. Even if she could pick him up, the cooling change to the outside world would shatter him in pieces.

  ‘Are you in there?’ she screamed in Elvish to the collapsing form. ‘Is anybody in there?’

  Since she’d never known whether or not Friday himself was a person, she didn’t know to ask him separately but she figured in the circumstances all bases had been covered. Friday had once had the means of independent motion. If he’d wanted to save himself, he could have.

  ‘Please!’ she shouted, unable to feel her face.

  Then that possibility had passed for ever. The body became a flat ooze. The holes of the eyes and mouth and nostrils gaped for the last time and exhaled a final burst of scalding air into the ash clouds – and something else went with it. She saw a bright shadow streak towards her. Cinders furled in its wake just as Friday’s remains pooled around her hand, glowing cherry and orange.

  At the same moment the precariously balanced mass of the ceiling surrendered to gravity and the entire weight of the dead house crashed down upon her head.

  No, she thought. No, this was a mistake. She took a breath and the shadow zipped inside her mouth in a fleeting second. Her mouth melted and then there was nothing as the entropy storm took her.

  The spirits of the long dead had inhabited Friday Head the golem for fifty years. This was nothing compared to the time they had been interred within their own dessicating bones in the deserts of Zoomenon, preserved by charm against the chance of their discovery and the possible telling of their miserable tale. The command that had preserved them against Zoomenon’s special case of entropic decay had also preserved them for the duration of Friday’s immolation, although the same couldn’t be said of Friday himself.

  An earth elemental who had grown to semi sentience under Zal’s babbling insistence, he had long-since deserted his insignificant form to join the wellsink of primal forces gathered deep within the cavities that honeycombed the region beneath the house and surrounding low hills. Tiny calderas of pure forms had been accreting there since the detonation of the quantum bomb. Bomb faultlines riddled the area of Bay City and the entire western seaboard of the collated states of what had once been America, and was agreed, in general story and some histories, to be the site of that astronomically unlikely explosion. Thus that part of Otopia was like a piece of rotted wood, decomposing to some interesting elements and propositions whilst at the same time being woodwormed by concentrations of aether. It was as curiously porous and also strong as a bone.

  The quantum inferno at its heart was the marrow of this bone, generating fresh chances, fresh possibilities, and scattering them into local potentials. It was a place that was as close to being a raw furnace of creation as anything that had ever existed. It was the kind of place that, if you were going to make something very, very impossible, you would go to.

  Most makers capable of this sort of thing stayed well away, because the furnace itself was as likely to undo them as help them. It had no mind and didn’t take kindly to the sort of linear organisation that most minds required. Only a fool or someone who felt extremely lucky would try
to use the furnace to fire a new being into existence.

  Or someone who had no choice because they were stuck and temporarily stunned by several tons of falling rubble and because the last moments of their only protection from annihilation had just melted into a puddle of treacly, golden goo. You could go there to die in the hope of rebirth.

  Lila understood all this to be true and concurrent as she regained consciousness. She was glad, because otherwise the feeling of being inhabited by screaming, endless planescapes would have thrown her presence of mind and prevented her from blasting out of the inferno in the form of a ballistic missile, engines on full throttle, moving from subground to high atmosphere in something slightly under ten seconds.

  As she ascended, soaring, cooling, the tale of the lost elves and the Three Betrayed unfolded in her head. The Three Betrayed were three of several thousand who were put through the soul forge that the mages had created in the heart of Delatra. All were volunteers.

  Some emerged as the forerunners of the shadowkin, but others came back deformed beyond recognition as the Saaqaa – more beast than elf – and in noncorporeal forms, which could only be detected or communicated with in andalune form. The vast majority were of these three sorts. For the purpose of defeating the horror of the intangible Sleeper, they were useless. The void energies and spirits that had been forced by pressure into them had remoulded them, but it did not make the spirit warriors that the mages needed. Not that they didn’t try it. Those that were able to make the transit to the spirit plane didn’t return. The embodied ones, who travelled astrally, died in their beds.

  They added other beings into the mix, first separating out their parts with elemental fragmentation, then recombining them. This killed most subjects outright. It would have been abandoned altogether if they had not raided Demonia and captured the eggform of an archdemon of the wilds. Within the shell a physical aspect had not yet been determined, and this embryonic creature was the first to emerge and live as a successful hybrid.