Lila's heart sank another notch to a position somewhere near her boots, and she looked at the clock-three in the morning. She rubbed her chest, high over the bodice where she was able, but it did nothing to ease the ache. "What kept you?" She bent down to examine the crucible and saw the demon's strange feet close up-cloven pads like a camel's, broad and strong with a claw tip just visible on each part, painted emerald green and wet with some type of mild venom. They never managed to get rid of all their characteristics in the change of form. Teazle always had a tail. This one apparently had feet.
The crucible was wired shut and marked with a great deal of demonic symbols intended to maintain a lock and prevent the wire from melting, though they were fighting a losing battle in Otopia's primaterial atmosphere. It was extremely hot-enough to frizzle and crisp a stray scrap of the dress that dangled too close to it. At least the floor was made of tiles in here, so it hadn't started to burn. She moved back to a more comfortable point as the demon started to talk and studied it, wondering what she was going to do.
"Teazle Sikarza has gone missing."
Thoughts of the present dilemma fled instantly from her mind. "What?"
"White Death is lost." The water demon's soft, liquid eyes were a perfect Prussian blue as they delighted in sharing this information. He was drinking in the effect it had on her, and Lila felt her face steel over as she fought with him. "At least, the judges of Bathshebat cannot find him."
She got to her feet as he continued, apparently impervious to the news, but inwardly it was eating like acid at the fragile resolve she had. The corset creaked, and she felt the laces take themselves in a fraction. In the dark the demon didn't see fresh fabric twine down the black-armoured length of her thighs, wrapping tight like a living black bandage.
"Go on." Her voice remembered the tone of command she had learned to use all the time in Demonia.
Vadrahazeen made a moue that he wasn't getting a better taste of shock and flared his wide nostrils. "There is a great deal of commotion surrounding the major cities as searches take place. The government has attempted to seize his assets in absentia, in an effort to stabilize the volatility of the commons as news spreads, but as there is no proof of his death they are unable to proceed. Meanwhile the heirs of the various houses recently come under his aegis are seeking ways to reclaim their power either through acts of secession and open rebellion, or else a grovelling servitude to his name in which they climb the ladder of favour. It depends on whether they think he will return alive or not. Armies are massing and alliances forming. Loyal vassals and family are looking for him with their own armed regiments, large numbers of mercenaries and any amount of scum-for-hire from all the worlds. Until there is a body there is no progress, and with such rewards as exist for his death many lesser demons fancy themselves a chance at making their fortune. Whichever way matters fall the economy will be bankrupted by gambling debts. Entire houses have staked themselves upon the outcome. It is ripe chaos." He smiled with a warm nostalgia.
Lila frowned, a gesture that showed her genuine displeasure, if not her alarm, and hedged her only hope. "He often goes into the wild country to hunt for worthy rivals to fight." She gave Vadrahazeen a scathing look. "Or to the other worlds."
The demon spread his hands out, suddenly the soul of peaceable ambivalence. "Yes, but divining his location is a simple matter for any seer. The enforcement officers have twenty routinely tracking him at any time, to be sure of the legal state of his affairs. There is even a Bound Heart beating in the High Court to verify his health at all times. All sources say he is in Bathshebat, and alive." He moved impatiently, and she could feel his eagerness to go and participate in the heady thrill of a mass hysterical maul.
She envisioned parties, balls, duels rife to the eyeballs with murder and intrigue. Dance floors would be slippery with blood. Assassins must lurk around every corner and in the slightest shadow. Demon society must be thrilled to the core, living at a peak of frenzied delight and terror. It would be an orgy of destruction as they found a ready excuse to strive for the pinnacles of excess they so valued. But Vadrahazeen was clearly quite young, because he managed to master his longing for all this and stand still.
Lila moved closer to him. Under the change his age was hard to determine. Her mistake in assuming youth could be costly. But Teazle himself was young, barely out of the prime minister's seat. They had a certain similarity. But she was wasting too much time on a hesitation and he was waiting, counting every moment as a moment in which she failed to be decisive and in which she became increasingly vulnerable. She let it go, turned her back on him ostentatiously to check Zal, and pointed at the red-hot clay with a small gesture of her foot as if it were nothing. "What do I do with them?"
"It," he corrected her. "One is more than enough trouble." He looked around the room pointedly." This is not a safe location. There must be containment."
"I've seen them wandering in the wild in Demonia," Lila said, meaning he'd better come up with something more than generalisations.
"We are not in Demonia," Vadrahazeen replied smoothly. "In the basket the elemental is in a stable environment. Released here it will either deport to Zoomenon-best case-or else burn everything in sight until it runs out of oxygen, at which point it will then deport. There is no aether present, and it is an aetheric being. Any fraction of its element is enough to keep its attention, but if combustion stops and no plasma is available it won't stick around. The other possibility is that it is strong already and would take the chance of seeking immediate refuge with the closest aetheric source. Myself, as I am strongest, after that you, and then the Ahrimani here, what's left of him."
Lila, who hadn't even looked at Zal once, straightened up, turned around, and looked the demon in the face, "So, you can tell he's alive?"
"I can tell that something of his spirit remains. A flicker. As can you. Nothing else. Your metal elementals are much more powerful than that fragment right now." He folded his hands, still, calm.
Lila made an expression of deep indifference. "And what happens if it ... seeks refuge?"
The demon narrowed its eyes in speculation and a wistful curiosity. "It is a popular method of murder at dinner parties, most entertaining. Alas, I have never seen it myself."
"Probably you don't get invited to those parties," she said comfortingly, and saw it irk him in a suitably satisfying way. "The method?"
The demon walked to the bed and looked at Zal for a long minute. He shrugged. "Put them together, release the elemental, and pray to whatever god you think is listening. If he hasn't got will enough to master the energy then you should cut off his head or, if you don't wish to be merciful, let the elemental burn him from the inside out. Either way, same result in the end."
"There has to be something else," Lila demanded. "I've seen you all tripping out on these things and they don't damage you."
Vadrahazeen recovered himself and put his head on one side. "Demons who are addicted to elemental frequencies often end their lives as prey to higher elemental forms or as accidental fodder to the minor ones." He began to preen with superiority as he was able to lecture her. "You must not have seen enough of them to realise. And those who don't succumb always bring a healthy tribute of some kindsomething the elemental would rather take instead. There's not a day in Bathshebat you can't buy short ribs and burnt ends pulled off some fried fire dancer from the night before."
"At last," Lila snarled at him, staring him down until he backed off a step. "The one useful bit of knowledge crawls out of your brain. Set up a containment around the bed."
"It will use all of my energy," he objected.
"Get on with it." She was implacable.
"In this world that is the best anyone could do," he hissed, and set about withdrawing himself into a meditative state so that he could do as she said. His demeanour was sulky, but she didn't see any rebellion in it.
She considered going to fetch the flares and an oxygen cylinder herself, but something about he
r back crawled when she thought of leaving Zal alone with the demon. It was busy colouring itself purple and blue-colours of insight, calm and will-but she'd seen demons flicker through the rainbow to the flat white of deadly assault in a second, so that meant little to her. Instead she cued up a steady string of stimulants and nutrition into her own bloodstream and sent a summons to Bentley.
The grey figure arrived a few minutes later. "Your books, and flares."
Lila looked for somewhere to put the flare sticks and the thin tube of the oxygen cylinder, then said, "Hand them to me when I say." She opened the first book, a tome from Sarasilien's collection, and was about to start leafing when Bentley made a discreetly polite noise in her throat and held out a volume that Lila hadn't requested.
Ophelia's Compendium of Bittersweet Remedies for All Occasions, it was titled, under a thick layer of mildew that had died and dried into a vile stain along the spine.
A certain eagerness crept into her measured tones. "Open it."
Lila opened it. Damp pages stuck together, ink running like a mad chromatograph. Peeled apart they were utterly illegible. The whole thing gave off a rank, fungal odour, and then she lifted a second clump of leaves and saw that it had been carefully hollowed out at the very centre. Inside the hole lay a memory stick, almost as old as the book by the looks of it-even had a USB port. As she examined it more closely she saw that this in turn was a fake-a piece of recent memory technology masquerading as an obsolete form. The port was glued on. Break it off and a normal crystal junction offered to grow to meet her fingers. As soon as she accessed it, she found the elf's entire library, meticulously catalogued, cross-referenced.
Over a thousand volumes in more than twenty languages, not counting the mathematical ones. And not only were they illustrated, they were illuminated with designs and pictograms of exquisite detail and shimmering colours. The gift left her speechless with delight and rent with loss. She would far rather have had the owner to talk to. That feeling led to a place she couldn't go now, however, so she cut it off and copied the whole to her own memory. Then she absorbed herself in a second of grace-put the stick back, closed the book, passed it over. "He was such a technophobe."
"We've all tried touching it and even scanning it remotely," Bentley said, tucking the book back under her arm. "But like everything else, it was charmed to be just for you. Bet it's gone blank now." She sounded sad.
"This is such a bad idea," Lila murmured, watching the demon cast his circle, a generously sized one, around the inside perimeter of the room. She forbade the medical staff to interfere and took a few minutes to make sure they were all incarcerated in rooms with exits to the outside world. This forethought earned her the kinds of reprimands that would have burned her ears off if she'd been paying attention and more curses than she realised human beings even knew.
Meanwhile she was reading. The lore of the library said what the demon had said, only in much more explicit details. She would have been better off in a demon lab, using a host of other adepts as backup, but even so her plan to revive Zal was as sophisticated a treatment as wiring him to the mains and letting it rip. "I need a faery healer or an elven one."
"We can get one," Bentley said. "But she lives out of town. Don't you want to wait? I mean, he might recover. It's not unknown. Cryostasis and-"
"No," Lila said with absolute conviction, unable to articulate to herself why. She had begun to feel a deep, pressing unease that was growing all the time. Hurry up, he'd written. Using the pen. Her pen. It had occurred to her more than once that she could have created the letters in her sleep, through some dreaming frenzy. It would be a simple matter for her to forge his writing. In her nightmares as a child she'd sleepwalked out of the house one time, taking a packed bag with her. Even the pen could forge it all by itself. Just because it let her carry it around didn't mean the thing couldn't serve other masters, or itself. Who knew what such things could want? Meanwhile, as she glanced at the bed now she thought she detected a weakening of the aether signature in Zal. The aetheric trace showed no signs of wanting to reinhabit the whole of his body. His heart beat-ten beats a minute-only because it lingered as if it also had misgivings or was maybe waiting for a place where it could safely leave. God, she didn't want to think it was that.
That erased any doubts she had over her timing. She moved Bentley to a station near the door. "Stay right here and do as I say." The doubts she had over her motives would have to wait.
"I'll have her called," Bentley said, meaning the healer, but did as she was told and stayed put.
Lila took a long look at the demon. "Don't forget to seal the roof off," she said. "And the floor. This is on the fifth level of ten storeys."
He glared at her, his mouth working incantations, his hands busy. A moment of genuine hate. That was progress at least.
By now word had got around that the new agent was bossing staff around for some mad experimental work. She could hear people gathering to watch through the one-way viewing deck above them, and in the connecting rooms where more usual human medical equipment was stored. Messages and suggestions that she ought to slow down, follow procedure and generally stop came flooding in to her, but she deleted them.
Who had she been kidding? The romance with the agency was never going to last. They didn't want the same things at all. But at least they had some nice gear.
A senior doctor issued her a direct order to surrender proceedings to him, but she declined. She felt calm, thanks to the drugs, aware that she might be making an awful mistake but determined to carry it through, as if that determination would improve the situation and render it virtuous. Again the knell of disquiet rang through her.
I am mad, she thought quite clearly as the demon finished working on his containment ring and began to shape it into an invis ible but implacable sphere of aetheric force. He wasn't looking nearly as perky as he had a few minutes ago. Sweat coated his face and he had begun to shiver. Before he completed it she picked up the long handles of the crucible's cage and carried it to the bedside, where she set it on the floor.
Someone in the other room was talking about putting her under arrest. She thought she probably deserved it, but checked all doors were sealed on automatic, locking everyone out, then pulled Bentley to the last corner of the room that was safely away from the demon's containment field. Finally he was done and backed up to join them. There was nothing to see; Lila would have to take his word for it. "All ready?"
"Good as it gets," the demon muttered through clenched teeth. He was panting and chose to slide down the wall and sit rather than keep standing.
"Projectiles can get through it from here?"
He snorted, as if this was common knowledge. "Anything over a hundred miles an hour has sufficient inertia to break through. It will weaken the field at that-"
"Okay," she said, lifted her right hand, and took aim with the .45 it had efficiently become. She had her mind on Fate when she squeezed the trigger. Come on then, let's see what you've got, she thought. Her own private bets finalised in her mind. What had her mom used to say? Aces high. Lila wondered what it meant. She shot the crucible.
Blinding yellow light flooded the room, making everyone duck or shield their faces, except Lila, who had expected it and already closed down her irises so that she would see the consequences of what she'd done in all their detail. As the fragments of the clay pot blasted wide, the toughened wire cage glowed white and then ran like water. Smoke rose from the burning metal, and the front of some of the bed machinery melted and failed. Alarms began to sound everywhere, but nobody moved or spoke. They were all looking at the small, ribbonlike shape of the creature that emerged from the pooling steel. It flowed in rings, disposed itself in fractal curls, balled itself up, and then expanded into the chaotic shape of living flames as it felt its way curiously into the air. Almost as suddenly as it had reached out it contracted and became a distinct form, sinuous of body, with four legs, a long neck, a long tail, and a small head each made of flame t
hat turned in on itself over and over as if it existed in a different, infinitely combustible universe.
The creature floated around. It attenuated, rose like a cobra, like hot air or steam winding upwards. Its light danced on the silver blanket and glistened on the wet gel that coated the near-dead body. The body did not move, as it hadn't moved yet. The creature rose higher, its posture attentive and giving every impression of acute listening. Its small head wavered, homing in on Zal's chest, to the heart chakra, where the last of Zal was still hiding out. On one of the displays the room temperature reading climbed steadily.
Lila took a last look at it as it reached a sweltering ninety-nine. Her Al mind was silently ticking off probabilities with every creeping degree, and at this point she mentally cashed in her winnings. For a moment she lingered, and looked at Zal. Yes, it would be easier to watch him burn than see him live like that, that was for sure.
Her reasoning, sadly, was impeccable. Any flame of any kind was a fragment of elemental fire-she knew that without reading it in Sarasilien's books. A special form from Zoomenon was a second-order being, it was true, one that had moved up one quantum step on the evolutionary ladder towards the conscious awareness of Elemental Fire, itself a singular collective entity composed of all its instances but selfaware in only one manifestation. An encounter with it would be unsurvivable. But the acceleration of heat in the room bespoke not of the tenuous heat of a living flame but ready combustion, something well into a thorough burning. The temperature told her beyond question that the little salamander wasn't what it looked like. It was not even an elemental, but a fire demon at full power, attempting to contain itself. She'd never seen or heard of one within civilised bounds. Therefore she assumed this was one of those things from the Wild. Whatever way she looked at it it was an assassination effort, and quite a good one. Her disappointment and rage gave way to cold calculations.
Chasing the Dragon Page 17
