Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  ‘Your heart rate’s gone up,’ Lila’s harness said.

  ‘It’s that charm,’ Zal said. ‘No trouble.’ But the images of Xavi didn’t go away.

  He thought of the elves in the ruins burning books and made himself remember the moment when a group of teenagers, playing apparently innocently by jumping through windows in remaining buildings, had suddenly turned on one of the girls and smashed a rock into her head over and over as she screamed. He hadn’t even seen what had made them turn. Some signal, a feeling so like the one they’d lost maybe, a signal of togetherness or of hate or of simple ferocity; he had no idea.

  He’d seen a lot of things like that in his life; things that must not be allowed inside. A lifetime’s andalune sensitivity made sure most elves he’d known had been masters of boundaries, allowing only what they wished to affect them and keeping everything else safely out of reach of any tender feeling so they could not be hurt, or involved. And still the memory of the girl screaming, her erstwhile friends tearing the clothes off before she was dead, finding interest in her body as her head, finally silent, shed an inordinate scarlet into the filth of the doorway.

  He moved himself far away from this recollection, watched from a cold distance, a black and white distance, like a master god. He made it shrink and cool until he felt nothing. He tried to push Xavi into this distance but the succubus charm resisted him, locking his aether body to her vibration. Her colours gleamed at him and he felt her heart yearning, lonely, sad – she was an exile, a monster, like him. She was a living elf. Like him. They were the only ones left. He must go to her.

  ‘Zal?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he reassured the harness, stroking, but he wasn’t sure. The urge to go and be sure nothing happened to petite, delicate, broken Xavi was almost intolerable. He remembered her andalune body with longing. He would have given a lot to feel the casual contact of his kind, the reassuring awareness of another who could understand what it was to be a part of the whole; apart, together. But here was no other and maybe, the thought came persistently – maybe there would be no other. He couldn’t allow that notion to rise yet. It was too soon for that.

  He gripped the harness and felt himself beginning to sweat. He pressed on, covering mile after mile until he was so tired that the only desire he felt was for rest.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Malachi played cards with the girl in Lila’s house. After a few hands he had a reasonably good idea of who they were dealing with here, but he wanted to be sure so, when it seemed polite enough, he excused himself with a plausible tale about Greer and the office and some downtown work he must do before nightfall when the vampires would make it too difficult.

  The girl, who answered only to the name Lila had given her, Sassy, folded the last of her cards delicately and collected up the rest of the deck. Under her fingers their pictures changed although he didn’t look too closely at this.

  ‘Look, pussycat,’ she said, indicating the pile of empty takeaway cartons they had made, ‘that wasn’t bad. What do I owe you?’

  ‘It’s paid for,’ he said, backing away and minding the furniture. He had grown in size although also in darkness, and gained, if that was the term, a certain insubstantiality that reminded him of Zal.

  She nodded, matter of fact, and wiped her mouth and nose on the back of her sleeve. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any of those peaches around, you know the ones?’

  She meant Madrigal’s peaches, the fruits of faery’s Summerlong. ‘I could find one maybe,’ he said, which was as close to a promise as he was going to get between faeries.

  Sassy grinned. ‘Can you check on my old folks in Cedars?’

  ‘I can,’ he said, a policeman doing his duty. He knew she meant the people she’d stayed with before some change beyond his understanding had set her free. Human people. That she cared enough to remember them made him kind.

  ‘Then tell them I’m okay. I think they’ll understand.’

  He considered the address she’d scrawled on a ripped-off piece of cardboard carton. ‘This the name: Saija?’

  ‘She was my pretend sister for a bit, when things weren’t too bad. Saved me a lot of bother. Friend. That’s all.’ Sassy looked a bit sad, although she defiantly faced it out and he thought he detected a quiver in her lip and what might be a tear forming. ‘Tell me they’re okay, won’t you?’

  ‘Sure.’ He hesitated, considering the address and the precinct it was in; a magic shop under the thrall of a very pissed-off gangster community. Fortunately he didn’t need a car because she’d just fleeced him of his last paypacket. He checked but Lila hadn’t called. He knew it was late, very very late. He called Bentley and she said there was no message. They were evacuating. Sarasilien refused to leave. Greer of course wouldn’t go before everything sank. Nothing else to report.

  Sassy watched him and then got up to see him out.

  He felt quite wrong leaving her alone in the house and said so.

  She smiled. ‘I’ll be fine. All quiet. And if I hear anything I’ll run. No worries.’

  ‘Where will you run?’ he asked as they reached the door, testing the locks with great distaste.

  ‘Away of course,’ she said, her lips thinning and whitening. ‘Get lost.’

  He sighed and agreed, sure that everything was as bolted and shut as it could be though he was no electronics expert. He guessed Lila would have fixed everything well enough.

  Sassy was looking at him with great interest. He shook his head but the other thing he’d lost that night had been several of his names. There was no point in pretending he wasn’t what he was. With a sigh of misgiving he put his heavy paw to the crack between door and frame and flowed through it, softly as air.

  ‘Goodnight, Nightshade,’ she said, giggling.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said and then he felt very foolish and a little bit embarrassed on the other side of the door. It was easy and a relief to melt away into the pitch blackness of the woods and flow down into the heart of the city where there were no girls whose fingers could change the shapes of fate.

  As he emerged from the shaded trees at the corner of ninth and Cedar he found it hard to get his form. Magic struggled here in Otopia but that wasn’t the problem. The trouble was that he was losing the ability. Before he’d been a beast of any kind, he’d been the shadows of the darkest night, an ephemeral creature who might come anywhere that light was not and the darker the better. He was a thing of corners and alleys, caves and everywhere there was night. He gathered under beds and in closets, among forgotten and hidden things. He was curiosity and a body was no use to him for his work was subtle, the essence of shady business. He struggled to remember how to make himself solid and encumbered and slow and particular. The beast was the best he could do, because that was the form that came after Nightshade – Nightbane.

  He looked down at his hands and saw the massive claws, the brute shapes that were more wolf than cat, but with a special hideousness of their own because they so resembled human hands and were not one thing or another. His feet were similar, his heels off the ground now as he fought to stand straight and ended half bent in a permanent forward lunge. The legs of the beast were cloven footed, soft like a camel’s but also toed and clawed. He knew that he was in every respect terrifying but at least his thick pelt and mane made clothing unnecessary. The worst part was that in the yellow gleam of his eyes he could see his little Leaf card – a delicate and pretty link to Otopian technology – lying in the palm of his massive paw, but he couldn’t use it any more. He didn’t even have anywhere to carry it that wasn’t in his hand. He debated smashing it but that seemed wrong so he held it instead and turned towards the long parade of shops that led up to the apartment blocks of Cedars itself. He licked his lips and flexed them. He wasn’t sure that he would be able even to speak and felt fresh humiliation pending.

  In the last light of the afternoon he took one more look towards the south bay, hoping to see any trace or hear any sound of Lila. When there
was nothing he turned towards the storefronts and looked for the hanging sign of the pentagram and the violet roses that Sassy had described.

  As they noticed him coming people fled, screaming. At the corner of Tenth and Cedars there was honking and shouting as car automatics narrowly avoided accidents caused by their drivers. Malachi prowled onwards, head down in an imaginary trench coat and fedora, pretending it wasn’t happening. His little card kept signalling who he was but he wasn’t convinced it would be believed. Nevertheless responses were slow today, thanks to the surge of outworlder activity and the evacuations so he didn’t meet an armed response and made the shop door with everything except any sense of dignity intact.

  He opened it on the third try and shouldered his way through, ducking and squeezing and turning around to be sure his tail didn’t get trapped. It was a small, dark, cluttered place, full of shelves containing large numbers of fragile things. He barely dared breathe although he still sounded like a small steam train or a very, very large bull. Over this the tinkle of the door chime was barely audible. Fortunately there were no other customers.

  Behind the counter a young man of about seventeen, coca brown with dreadlocks to his waist, was standing slack-jawed, eyes round. His mouth was working but no sound was coming out.

  Malachi held out his paw with the Leaf card in it so that the shop’s master AI could verify him. The lad glanced at the counter screen to see this but it didn’t make any difference to his speaking ability. After a few moments he staggered backwards through a beaded curtain and into the back rooms leaving Malachi watching the swinging strips in silence, surrounded by scented candles, books, bells and bones, plus posters advertising psychic readings, all genuine, good rates, forecasting available. Sassy’s picture stared down at him from some of these, smiling. One of them winked at him now.

  Malachi felt something touch his arm. He looked down and saw it was drool. He realised with absolute digust that he was slavering. His stomach growled suddenly as though it was reminded of meals past. He pretended to himself that he was not in any way thinking about eating the shop staff. Voices, rushed, high pitched, hysterical and slower, measured, calmer vied for positions in the unseen rooms beyond the curtain. Malachi swallowed firmly.

  At last a human woman came out, cautiously but without obvious signs of mental disturbance. She was in one of those indiscriminate age zones that could be anything between twenty-five and forty given the dim lighting. She flicked a long hank of brown hair over her shoulder and fixed him with steady eye contact. He saw that she wore a name badge on the lapel of her beautifully tailored chinoiserie jacket: Saija.

  ‘How can I help you?’ she said.

  He fixated on the precision handstitching of her collar for focus and presented the Leaf card. It was displaying an image of Sassy, just taken at Lila’s house. Sassy had her thumbs up. Malachi let the leaf fall out of his paw on to the counter and the woman picked it up carefully as the image came to life.

  They both heard Sassy’s short, definite message about her safety and apologies for absconding. The woman watched it twice and then expertly cued the card to Malachi’s personal details. She studied these

  for a few moments and then looked back up at him.

  ‘I think I have something you’ll need,’ she said. She sniffed and he saw her reach into her pocket for a tissue as she went back through the curtain. When she returned she had a small thermoplastic card case and a lariat with her. She put his card into the case and attached it to the clip of the looped cord and then handed it back to him.

  Awkwardly he settled it around his head and neck, giving up when the thickness of his mane made it impossible to tug further. ‘Thank you.’

  The woman looked at him with misgiving. ‘Will she come back?’

  Nightbane, who was Malachi in another, future life he could only just remember, considered the question as he tried to cling onto what remained of his civilised being by recollecting the feel of a cotton sock on his elegant foot, the slide of a perfectly polished shoe over the top of it and the nimble thoughtlessness of tying laces. ‘I hope so,’ he said. The words were garbled by his jaws and inept tongue.

  Saija looked at him sadly, her face setting into a stalwart mask over its mixture of relief and anxiety. ‘She always was a pain in the ass, you know. Never could tell her anything. Best reader we ever had though.’

  His long mouth cracked into a smile and split his self-pity in two. He grinned. ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘I miss her. You can tell her that.’ This was said with a defiant lift of the chin.

  ‘You can tell her yourself when you see her,’ he growled, unintentionally sounding much more aggressive than he imagined he would. He huffed an apology, muttered about the situation, the times and left, backing out in a storm of his own blarney before he made a mistake and said too much in his effort not to become the go-between.

  The shop bell rang merrily at his back as he closed the street door and blinked in the sudden glut of light. The rosy sky signalled the end of the day. He listened to the card but it made no noises. Lila was still not back. He was considering where the nearest alley was in which he could find some dark corner to dematerialise when a whoosh and a streak of heat went past him. Then he heard the close-knit roar of high-powered jet boots and the clump of feet landing on the pavement, just before his eyes made their final adjustments and beheld Lila herself standing in front of him, a black silhouette in a stance of grim determination edged in blown rags and the short, heavy streaks of her hair on the wind. A heavy reek of brimstone and carbon wafted towards him, and he felt tiny flakes of ash patter onto the wet tip of his nose and across his whiskers.

  ‘Mal,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse. For a second he thought he saw right through her but then she moved forward and he moved forward and they were both in the light. He almost recoiled in shock from the smell and the powerful aura that was coming off her in waves. Her black leather and tough-girl look were still there, but swathed in a mummy’s worth of grave shroud wrappings of a dark grey fabric whose edges were burned and seared, some parts still smoking and winking where the ends were red embers. Elvish script swirled in the fabric and the writing, unreadable to his eye, looked like the rise and ebb of silvery scum on a black tide.

  Lila’s face, pretty and human and unhurt was frowning at him. The scarlet slash of the burn mark was brilliant red and her eyes, normally silver, had become blue and grey with a deep ring of black around the iris that made him want to cross himself in front of her though he wasn’t anything to do with Catholic and didn’t believe in that sort of god. The aura, which he could more feel than see, was a miasmic thing, an aetherial spirit of a kind he’d never experienced before. It fairly boiled off her in waves that threatened to immolate him. He saw Lila, he knew her, but she was a dark revenant of a kind he didn’t know at all and in spite of himself he cowered back from her intense, angry stare.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I went to get Friday,’ she said, rasping like an old woman. He realised her throat was burned. ‘I can’t prove it was him, Malachi. What shall I do? What’s the matter?’ She looked down at her arms as if only just noticing them. ‘It’s just a bit of burning. Nothing to worry about.’

  He didn’t know how to tell her that it wasn’t. Apart from anything else, he didn’t know the words. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked, hopelessly. It came out as ‘r’ow djoo ’ee-ul,’ a beast-snarl of defensiveness.

  Her distracted eyes flicked around, dismissing the street and all it held as of no interest. ‘Fine. I have to get to the office, face him down. Should have done it ages ago.’ Her restless gaze lighted on him. ‘What is it? Did you see Sassy?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He was concentrating on putting what he was feeling into a frame he understood. The black radiation was like an onslaught. It smelled of pure terror. He was amazed that she seemed to be completely unaware of it. Gouts of it leaked from gaps in the bandages that wrapped her limbs and body and all the way u
p her neck to her skull. It came out of her mouth and nostrils. He wanted to touch her to find out more but he daren’t touch that. Some instinct told him he wouldn’t survive it. It was anathema for his kind. Maybe for every kind. Looks like we won’t be needing Tath any more, he thought to himself and the notion made him give a half bark of humourless laughter.

  ‘Mal.’ Her preoccupation was so focused it was letting her bypass all his signals that tried to warn her of danger. She didn’t notice his discomfort or register it as more than his previous discomfort with his changed state. ‘Will you come with me?’ In that question her voice sounded like the girl he’d first met years ago in her hospital bed, small, pale, deathly ill and frightened of almost everything. In spite of himself and his own will to live, in spite of it, he knew that he would say yes but suddenly he felt tears rising in his bear’s eyes and to cover it he gruffly demanded,

  ‘Did you find nothing?’

  ‘There are three of them pushing through from Not,’ she said. ‘Wrath, Hellblade and Nemesis. They are coming.’

  Then he knew what was wrong and he had all the words for it but no heart to say it. Her use of the old faery word for the planes of the undead that lay beyond Last Water proved it. Not. A simple term for a simple thing. A place of things that did not live, did not have form, that weren’t, in any sense, alive except that they existed and had intent. He’d never really understood how this didn’t qualify as alive but he did understand that they were inimical to what he usually understood as life. They were an antiform of a sort. The theosophy of it had always eluded him, even when he did have a much more scientific kind of brain. Now it wasn’t important. The way to deal with them was not scientific. He’d believed Tath could hold them there, but even the elf had fallen to their bleak souls. He couldn’t begin to imagine the force of their annihilative despair and what Tath must have gone through and he didn’t want to, though he smelled and saw it on Lila now, hidden in plain sight. Not.