Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  Hellblade had reached across the fragile veil of the Mirror’s flickering surface to rip away the closest souls, of those who’d sent him beyond life to this undead hell. His was the power of slaying and he gloried in it like a true demon and abhorred it like a true elf and there was no reconciliation of these things, they existed in contradiction that was fierce and endless. He seized and rent. Then, true to her making, Nemesis judged, sundering the remains into pure spirit energies for Wrath to consume. They had other names then: Render, Judge and Eater. Those were their names from the book in which their task had been written in the ink of blood and tears.

  The mages they attacked from the spirit plane soon died, gibbering and mindless as babies but with a deal less charm. Time moved faster for the spirits. It left enough in Alfheim for the last remaining mages to rally and investigate.

  Mage Xaviendra found the three and offered them a bargain: if they spared her life she would ensure that the geas was lifted. Without this intervention as soon as the last mage died they would be sucked beyond the edge of everything into true death. She also offered them a second spirit mirror, the Mirror of Refraction, through which they were able to see into and partake of the material worlds, watch their loved ones and remain connected to Alfheim and Demonia and Faery. They took this.

  The mirror was a trick however, and as soon as they looked into it they were trapped. It was the mirror of the Faery Queen and although it did exactly what was promised it kept them in the thrall of the visions it offered, helpless to escape until a faery King or Queen should look into it.

  What happened to the mirror itself the three didn’t know but there was a moment when someone did come and look into it – an elf boy with golden hair and a nondescript dog, white with black spots – and then the mustered strength of all the years was enough for them to break the trance, not least because the mirror was hoping to find its way home by then, since it was one of those objects that doesn’t like to be lost.

  Then they came to finish their task, but by this time their rage had cooled. What Teazle found in Hellblade was a cold determination to escape the hold of the geas by any means and so end his existence. The demon part of him didn’t want to die, but the elf did.

  Both of them had taken a hateful pleasure in enslaving and driving their erstwhile hosts here in Demonia but they were changed now. The flesh had made them remember their mortal lives. What had been called Hellblade before was really only an intent to catch and slay with a few fleeting memories still attached to it like dried flesh to an old bone. But with the addition of blood they were suddenly vibrant with the possibilities of life and the will to die was at war in them. Meantime Teazle had destroyed their lovely new body, that perfect essential vehicle of meat and blood. So they would have his.

  Teazle recognised immediately that he had no defence against Render, Hellblade’s purposive element. The soul-rip that Render could perform was the same method through which the beautiful Sorcha had been killed the last time Teazle fooled around with wild demons – and it was this kind of creature that had been involved in Render’s making. However, Teazle wasn’t quite what he used to be. The swords he carried began to vibrate at frequencies so high that they were imperceptible to ordinary beings but they were quite perceptible to the phantom that screamed in agony as it felt itself beginning to shatter. At the same moment that Teazle was feeling terrible pains and the loss of his senses from lack of air Hellblade felt an inexorable entropic force beginning to ruin all that was left of him including his final plans.

  Both realised the solution, offered and accepted the deal on that instant. Air returned, pain and loss abated.

  Teazle and Hellblade stood in an uneasy silence in a pile of stinking meat, sharing one body. Because Hellblade was a phantom they were no longer exactly one or another but they were sure that in this state, however long it lasted, there was nothing earthly or much divine that was going to stand against them.

  Teazle stepped out of the heap of guts puddled around his legs and smelt the blood in the air. Hellblade’s necrotic andalune weaved around and through him in a strange revelry of lustful satiation with his excellent body. He felt violated and exultant but also he felt the compulsion of Hellblade’s bonds and his will to execute the poetic justice therein decreed.

  One of the escaped mages had come, it seemed, to Demonia, to find a necromancer able to sever the spirit so that it could be hidden, come the inevitable day of Hellblade’s rise from damnation. The phantom had planned to scour Demonia to find this soul canister, leaving no bone unturned and no blood unshed but Teazle, after a moment of exquisitely pleasurable revulsion at the turn of events, deemed this unnecessarily dramatic and a waste of time. He knew necromancers and clairvoyants who had inexplicably gone missing whilst hiding a Mirror in their cellar. Madame Des Loupes had made her exit early, but she hadn’t been wrong about who was coming to call on her and what was likely to happen on that day. He had a very good idea of where to start looking for that canister.

  He spread his huge wings and took to the air, much as to feel the joy of being able to do it as for any practical need. Blood and matter that still clothed him exploded outwards, scattered and fell around him as he thrashed higher, delighted by the physical struggle and the air’s resistance. He beat slowly across the brittle rocks and then, when he was sated with the mastery of flight, winked out. With every second Hellblade soaked him and the distinction between them grew more and more blurred. He feared he would never be rid of the thing, but then he forgot to fear it, even as they appeared over the familiar greenish muck of the Lagoon in a sweltering Bathsheban afternoon and descended, a white dragon slicked in gore, to the centre of the city, at the square in the souk outside Madame Des Loupes’ house.

  Lila found herself face to face with Malachi in the corridor outside what had been her office. She smelled of jet fuel and her scowl was as black as her armour. ‘The mountain’s come to Mohammed,’ she said. ‘Let me pass.’

  ‘Wait,’ Malachi croaked. It was so difficult to speak now. He was forgetting words. ‘The phantom is with you. You carry Nemesis.’

  She froze in a nonhuman way, utterly still, for a split second, then slight movements returned and he saw her eyes flick as she considered this and all its ramifications.

  ‘That explains a lot,’ she said tightly. ‘It’s funny, I’m so used to silent knowledge I didn’t even think it wasn’t me. We’ve got the same wishes. I guess that makes me a Returner, doesn’t it? Or does it make me Lila at all? Even so. The time’s come.’ She made to move past him but he blocked the way. She gave him a long, even stare. ‘Move or be moved.’

  ‘Lila, think . . .’ But by the time he’d said this she had grabbed him and spun them around in a pirouette so that she was at the door and he was behind her. It was locked but she unlocked it and pushed it open with a small kick of one boot toe. She walked through, slowly, letting the sound of her boots on the tile sound steady as she moved into the new silence beyond.

  Malachi followed her, a beast shadow.

  ‘Lila,’ Sarasilien’s voice was loud and startled as Malachi heard it, then he saw around her shoulder and the elf’s face was stricken – by the sight of Nemesis, he was sure, even though this was only the faintest sheen of spirit light around Lila’s figure by now. He stood up from where he had been reclining on the chaise. At its foot Sandra Lane moved forward from where she’d been resting at attention, taking a flanking position. Lila ignored her.

  ‘Time for our little chat,’ Lila said. Her tone could have frozen steel. The voice was a fusion of hers and that of another so that it sounded distorted. ‘Tell me about your daughter.’

  Malachi edged around so that he was just behind Lila and to the side. Lane faced him as he manoeuvred but he stayed back.

  ‘Lila,’ Sarasilien said, his hands held forward, slightly open and a look of deepest concern on his features, ‘you are in a very dangerous position.’

  ‘No,’ she said evenly. ‘That would be your posi
tion. Time to convince me you don’t deserve what I’m bringing. Your hell has been visited everywhere and all I see is your running, lying back.’

  There was a presence about her that Malachi had never witnessed before and he wasn’t entirely sure it was down to Nemesis. It was formidable and the room felt so still he could feel his own heart beating, and that seemed like too much.

  ‘Either you talk,’ Lila said, ‘or I will take you apart to find out the truth.’

  That was and was not Lila, Malachi knew. The promise was hers, the backup truth behind it was the phantom’s.

  ‘Judge,’ he said, holding just one hand out now, palm forward, placating. He moved very cautiously, as Malachi wanted to. The sense of something about to spill over into violence was so acute that the air felt hard to breathe. Sarasilien spoke quickly and quietly, ‘Judgement will not be necessary. I have one daughter and she is here.’

  ‘She is not here,’ Lila said. ‘She left and went to Alfheim to do something. What was it?’

  Sarasilien blinked, ‘Do you mean Xaviendra?’

  ‘Is there another?’

  He looked slightly blindsided and stumbled over the name. ‘Xaviendra is not my daughter.’

  Lila might have hesitated, she might have debated the points for some machine aeon, Malachi didn’t know, but he saw her reach forward and grab Sarasilien by the front of his jacket and lift him up and shake him an inch from her face as if he were a rag doll. Finally she slammed him against the wall and moved in until her nose and his were a millimetre apart.

  She spoke in a whisper that was soft and quiet, full of malice, ‘Say it ain’t so one more time. I dare you.’

  Her anger was a crackle that ripped through Malachi’s fur like static. At the same instant Sandra Lane was there holding Lila’s arms, trying to wrestle her off Sarasilien but she might as well not have been there for all the effect it had.

  ‘Look at me,’ the elf said, although his lips had gone white and he was holding her gauntleted wrists with yellowing knuckles. ‘With Lila’s sight, Nemesis, you can see the truth.’

  With a bellow of rage Lila flung him down to sprawl at her feet. In a continuation of the same gesture, blasting off her feet with power, she knocked back Lane, sending her flying into the far wall with a force that smashed plaster and made the entire room vibrate. In inch crack shot up and down from floor to ceiling as Lane crashed to the floor and the walls and floor shuddered but Lila’s attention was only for the elf as she spat, ‘What? How can this be? It was written in that book, that book I wrote in, it was all in there, her diary, the journal of Xaviendra Sarasilien, your name, the history, the experiment . . . it was all in there! I read it. I see it now. Every line. Every word!’

  Sarasilien made no effort to pick himself up. ‘I have only one daughter, and she is not the Mage Princess of Delatra, which Xaviendra surely is.’

  ‘Then who is she? And what about that book? I wrote in it. Because . . .’ Lila stopped.

  Malachi could see Sarasilien’s face. He expected avoidance, because a faery would twirl away through the gaps and elves preferred to keep secrets but there was an odd light in Sarasilien’s eyes.

  ‘It’s you, Lila,’ he said, using the Otopian shortening of the words. ‘The second time you were born, I made you. I have no other off-spring. I never have had. There is only one person I had a hand in making. It’s you.’

  Malachi thought he saw Lane flinch a little as she stood up, plaster dust falling off her.

  Lila drew herself up and back like a recoiling snake. There was a moment of complete stillness.

  ‘The book you had,’ Sarasilien said, still slumped like an old blanket on the floor. ‘Who gave it to you? Where did it come from?’

  ‘Zal,’ Lila said, poised. ‘It was in his pocket. He got it from the Three Sisters.’

  ‘A faery book, Fate’s book,’ Sarasilien said in the same even tone. He didn’t need to glance at Malachi for the implication of this to be understood – faery books of great importance almost certainly were able to write themselves as occasion demanded. ‘What did you write in it?’

  ‘I wrote . . .’ Lila said and hesitated. ‘. . . friends and lovers all . . .’

  The slightest smile flitted through the elf’s face, a wry expression. ‘Xavi must have loved that,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘A perfect disarm. So written in such a book with Night’s blood, it became true as you wrote it and she who was your clever adversary was suddenly your ally.’

  ‘She?’ Lila repeated, almost in a kind of trance although her posture remained balanced at a point of absolute threat over him. ‘Who the hell is she, then?’

  ‘Xaviendra of Delatra is the greatest of the ancestral mages of Alfheim,’ he said. ‘She is the last surviving member of the Final Council, except myself and the Lady of Aparastil. The opening of the phantom plane was her doing. She created the shadowkin, and the phantom Titans. The original mistake was hers and she has sought to avoid the consequences ever since.’

  Lila frowned, unmoving. ‘She said she was a consequence of the experiment. A victim. She is . . . shadow. Some kind of shadowkin.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarasilien said. ‘She is, but at her own hand.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s a lesson in obsession with power that must wait,’ he said. ‘She has gone to Alfheim to finish what she started before the phantom Titans find her. She knows they are coming, perhaps closer than she thinks.’

  Now Sandra Lane’s black vinyl head jerked like a bird’s. ‘Finish?’

  ‘Godhead, dragonhood, one or the other, only that will do. She made her ambition everything, or it made her.’

  Lila finally stood down from her stance and crouched to take his hand and pull him back up to his feet.

  ‘You did not mention a further motive,’ Lane said to him resentfully.

  ‘You never know what someone will do until they do it,’ he replied. ‘You can only guess and hope you are wrong. I thought she might only try to save herself from Hellblade but I believe her actions at the time, in betraying the Titans and their purpose, pointed at a new opportunity she—’

  ‘Cut to the chase, in Otopian,’ Lila butted in, still unforgiving. ‘Some of us aren’t immortal.’

  He grimaced, standing stiffly. ‘If she can gain enough aetheric mass potential in her present form she would be able to consume the phantoms. With their power and her own she would be in a position to make another try for ascendancy and I think it is reasonable to assume that this time nothing would stand in her way successfully.’

  He sighed with exasperation as they all stared at him blankly, not seeing what he was trying to say. ‘She intents to transcend her present semi-material state for the plasticity of a true dragon, able to move in any dimension, in any manner, without losing cohesion as an individual, all consciousness and memory preserved without the need for any material anchor. It is extremely rare but it can happen.’

  ‘Yeah, but what is she doing in Alfheim that’s so important?’ Lila said. ‘And we still haven’t come to your part in her rise either.’

  ‘I was the one who opposed her,’ Sarasilien said. ‘Perhaps it is why the three came for me last. I was against the entire project. Later would be a better time to discuss these details.’

  ‘Sure,’ Lila said sarcastically. ‘Like there’s gonna be a later at this rate.’

  ‘She is correct,’ the Lane android said. ‘The instability of the fissures in the aether-time expansion are becoming critical. There is a possibility of a quantum implosion event.’

  ‘I . . .’ Sarasilien began but Lila overrode him.

  ‘It’s all me me me with some people,’ she said, glaring at him, anger radiating off her in waves. ‘I hate that. Make me a portal to wherever we have to be and let’s get this over with.’ She half turned to Malachi. ‘Come with me. I need you.’

  ‘I will come too,’ Sandra Lane said.

  ‘Not you,’ Lila commanded, looking at Sarasilien as he concen
trated. ‘You stay right here.’

  For once in his life Malachi couldn’t see the way it was going to fall. He wasn’t sure who was speaking now, Lila or Nemesis. Burnt rags clung to her, edges alight with ember fire that flared in breezes he couldn’t feel. Her skin was white as snow, the red of her hair, the magical scar and her lips blood red, the armour black as the void. Her eyes were perfect mirrors. The portal opened and they passed through into a darkness so absolute that for a moment he wondered if the last joke was on them and Sarasilien had routed them directly into the Endless that lay beyond all things.

  But then he heard a dog bark.

  Teazle found the mirror room in the labyrinth beneath Madame’s house by memory, his eyes closed fast all the way. Some superstition had made him take the slow route inside. Now he patted his way around the rubble-strewn room like a blind man, only much more ineptly. Relics of the dead were everywhere. Behind him he could feel the weight of the mirror’s stare all the time, like a force on his back drawing him towards it, but he almost jumped out of his skin when he heard a voice from it say,

  ‘The object you are looking for is to the left. You will have to dig. It’s in the corner.’ It was elvish and fussy, and it spoke Demonic as if it was being forced to eat excrement but it got the words right.

  The weaving presence in his blood that was Hellblade reached out to seize the speaker and Teazle had to scream, ‘No!’ even as it recoiled in response to his reaction. He didn’t know if Hellblade were capable of seeing in any sense that the mirror needed but he didn’t want to get sucked in again.

  The elf voice laughed, a merry and unrestrained sound that really rubbed Teazle the wrong way.

  ‘Who are you?’ he snarled even as he began to grope his way left, finding a large pile of dead-demon stone and bits of fallen ceiling lying there. The rocks were damp and slimy. They slipped and clattered as he started to excavate. ‘And how come you get to look out of that thing?’

  ‘My name is Ilyatath,’ said the voice. ‘And because I am who I am. I see you’ve changed, Teazle. The pure one is ridden by the polluted. And there was I thinking you’d escape change and be yourself for ever. I wish I’d known it was you they were looking for. Then I wouldn’t have tried to stop them, and I would have escaped myself.’