Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  “Azarktus, my brother,” it said softly and tutted. “You impetuous fool.” A tear rolled from its eye and fell onto the body. When it landed there was a sound like a sigh and something faint, almost invisible, streaked up from the corpse and fled, wraithlike, out of the window. “I’d kill you myself if you weren’t already dead.” Then the creature stood up tall and held out its slender hand, smiling and showing all its sharp tigerish teeth.

  “I’m Teazle,” it said in a heavy demonic accent. “Pleased to meet you.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Of course,” the demon continued, conversationally, whilst glancing between her and its outstretched hand in an inviting manner, “now that you have slain my blood kin my family is at war with you and I am bound by near infinite regress of ties and duties to seal your mortal fate at my earliest possible convenience, however . . .” It paused, glanced at the hand Lila had not taken, and then quietly closed it before abruptly coming to a change of heart and smiling and offering it again. “However, I consider it extremely inconvenient to do so and I expect that I will continue to consider it that way almost indefinitely which is technically not a crime though it violates the spirit of the law (though who cares for that?) and I wish you would take my hand because I am beginning to feel stupid.”

  Lila, woozy from poison, irritated by pain, and generally feeling in a bad mood, stared at the hand and then at the demon’s yellow eyes. Straw to gold, she thought with annoyance.

  Watch out . . . Tath whispered faintly . . . beware of . . .

  Magic? Lila asked. She was heartily sick of his warnings and her own frequent memories of how easily it took her in. She did not feel the citrus airburst of wild streams which could bind her into some unwilling pact.

  She dropped the blade she was holding and with her own bloodied hand took hold and shook firmly. The returning grip was strong and confident. The demon smiled cheerfully and its eyes narrowed in wrinkles of pleasure.

  “Charmed,” it murmured and tilted its head, looking mostly at her from one side. “And it feels so real.”

  Lila pulled her hand back. “It is real. Really.”

  “But of course.” The demon flexed its fingers, remembering her grip. “Pardon my imprecision, it’s not long since I left government and the affairs of state and, more accurately, the documentation and language of state, are slow to depart. I meant to say how fleshlike it feels, considering it is nothing of the sort.”

  Lila looked down. “You don’t seem very . . . sad . . .”

  The demon glanced at the body briefly and shrugged. “He is gone. There is nothing I can do about it. What I have missed of him through neglect whilst he was alive is my own failing but that is also gone. This,” it rolled the corpse over with its foot, “is for the garbage collectors. Look, his face is very angry. At least he did not go to the endless shores in a self-pitying state. Really, our mother will be glad of that. Which reminds me. I was sent here to invite you to a party.” With a quick jerk it tore a feather from its wing. “Burn this tonight at seven and follow the smoke. I’d stay and help you out here with whatever you were doing but I have to go deliver the rest of the invitations and my mother turns into a living horror if her parties go wrong. The librarian will send someone for the body if you holler. Pity about your dress, all that blood really has spoiled it. Nice breasts.” It flashed her a grin of long, tigerish teeth and then hopped once, twice, onto the balcony and over the rail.

  Lila stood and slowly straightened up to her full height. The body steamed. A light breeze ruffled the scattered, trodden on, and generally ruined pages of her scholarship. From behind her the soft padding of feet came into the room. There was a short, impatient sigh and a faint growl of anger.

  “How many times must I go over it?” she heard the librarian mutter. “No duelling in the Reading Rooms!”

  “I . . .” Lila began, seeing the old demon stoop and shuffle forwards, leaning on his staff with which he tapped a large brass sign attached to the wall beside the door. Lila had not really noticed it before. It said, “No duelling. No summoning of imps or other manifestations of elements potentially damaging to the records, including but not limited to: elementals, wisps, sprites, ifrits, goblins, vile maidens, bottleboys, basprats, toofigs, magshalums, witches, elokin and major, minor, and inferior spawn. No praying. No cursing, except by staff. The library is closed on public holidays. Donations welcome.”

  “I . . .” Lila tried again weakly.

  “Not you!” he rasped crossly. “This idiot.” He kicked the heavy body with one cloven foot and then growled with pain. “Arthritis in my knee. Janitor already fuming about unscheduled funeral arrangements—oh his job is not worth the grief, he is not paid to cart corpses about the place, he is thinking of forming a union . . . Curse you, whippersnapper!” His stave glowed and fizzed. He gave Lila a rueful look. “Can’t curse the dead of course . . . and I suppose I should congratulate you but it seems a little like harsh sarcasm, my dear, considering you have voluntarily entered a vendetta with the Sikarzi family. They’re big in this town, you know. One of their sons is the most successful assassin from Bathshebat to Zadrulkor, perhaps even the most successful assassin in the history of Demonia, although one has to say that just in case the bastard is lurking behind the shelving units.” He rubbed his knee with one seven-fingered hand and stared balefully at the dead demon. “Not this one of course.”

  “No,” Lila said, looking down, feeling sick and feverish as the discharge of contamination from her poisoned blood briefly overloaded her liver. “Of course not.”

  “No,” said the librarian with vicious satisfaction. “This one was the runt of the litter and no mistake. If there was any justice in the world they’d send another son to marry you, you doing them a favour like that,” he made a chopping motion and then a slicing motion, a common gesture in Demonia that indicated the importance of culling the weak, “but instead it’ll be the endless war no doubt, depending on how long it takes them to kill every living relative you have.” He glanced up at Lila and nodded with appreciation. “Weak and foolish but his mother’s favourite. Doted on him. On all the sons of course, as they do, but this one more than any because he was weak and she couldn’t stand the shame of having brought him from the egg so she made out it was all part of his character development and him some new experimental brave new breed to try out being more like humans—all snot and bother but no balls—no offence, Miss. Made it her mission in life to try to develop him. Her whole world, he was. How he must have hated her! And here you are, the human ambassador and a perfect freak to boot—everything he never was nor could be, like some kind of nemesis or foul doppelgänger sent to torment him, eh Miss? Ah well. He’ll have been glad you came along, you see? Your public death would be the only thing that could have gained him any respect. Now he goes to the murk unmourned as the ass he was.

  “Well, you can’t walk around my catalogues covered in that muck. I will send you to your circumstances . . .” He whirled his hands in the air. A blue glow appeared around them.

  “But . . .” Lila began.

  And then she was back in her room at Sorcha’s house.

  The old male demon who kept the rooms free of wandering magics during the hours of daylight was there, collecting stray essences from the air that came in through the windows and sipping them from his hooly-bowl. He raised one, thorny eyebrow. “You look like you’ve had a successful day, Miss.”

  Lila felt herself cold, sick, sticky. She might throw up but that all seemed trivial in comparison to her new situation as murderer of a favoured son, subject of a vendetta and intended victim of the greatest assassin in a world of dutiful killers. And she had to go to a party, and her dress was completely ruined. “I guess,” she said.

  Look pleased, Tath said. In their terms you just entered the big league. You should be throwing your own party and spending your inheritance on it, while you still can.

  I don’t have an inheritance, Lila told him, walking directly into the
shower.

  Stop!

  Stop? She began to turn on the water.

  You have to go as you are. Wear the blood.

  No.

  Yes. It would be a sign of enormous cowardice to wash it off.

  It smells.

  You’ll live.

  That seemed like a promise. Tath assured her it was something like one. Wearily, she stayed her hand on the tap.

  Zal stood staring moodily out of the window of the suite at the Beautiful Palms Hotel, watching the surf roll up and down the beach. It was a beautiful day. It was beautiful weather. It was all very very picture perfect. He was in a foul temper. It was because of what the faery behind him had just said a moment ago—words still ringing around his head in that acutely irritating way that happened when someone said something that hit a nerve . . .

  “Tell her about your addiction, before it gets out of hand and she finds out another way.”

  Since the day, perfect though it was, provided absolutely no avenue of escape, he turned around and sat down in one of the armchairs and glared at Malachi for a few moments, but that didn’t work either. Vague fantasies of a spectacular fight with the creature flitted through his mind but were squashed by the knowledge that this was one of Lila’s friends and also by the fact that the faery’s instruction was quite right.

  In the other armchair Malachi matched Zal’s steady gaze. There was a bouquet of flowers almost but not quite between them, placed on a circular glass table. Zal angled his feet away from Malachi and put his gaze on the flowers. He considered allowing his andalune body to spread out in the hope that it might put Malachi to sleep—elven aetheric bodies interacted with faery aetheric senses and caused an overload of some kind which put the faery straight into a deep sleep in a protective reaction.

  “Don’t even think about it,” the faery said.

  Zal ground his teeth.

  Malachi smiled and it was not entirely pleasant. He enjoyed Zal’s discomfort and Zal felt duly punished.

  “Move back to your questions,” Zal said. “I liked them better.”

  “As you wish,” Malachi shifted to a position of greater comfort and crossed his legs. He was, like all faeries, a great and showy dresser, but whereas many of their ideas about costume were extremely peculiar to alien eyes Malachi had chosen, in his human form, to adopt a human style of plain yet extremely expensive looking elegance. His immaculate camel-coloured silk suit draped his tall, powerful form with insouciant grace. Against the warm colour the ink blackness of his skin and hair stood out, shining faintly with what Zal’s nose told him was Unction: a rare and highly prized magical product, worn on the skin. It bestowed magical gifts, among them clairvoyance, protected the wearer from mortal harm, and it moisturised with a buttery sheen. He also radiated two contrasting attitudes in typical faery fashion—a good-humoured frivolity and a deadly serious self-confidence in his position. He was interviewing Zal in a more-or-less-but-not-exactly unofficial way on behalf of Lila’s organisation, Earth Security, and he was enjoying it.

  Zal also felt himself examined as Lila’s new prospect, as if Malachi were her brother or father. He got this impression despite the fact that he did not know exactly what the relation between Malachi and Lila was about, but the fact that the faery was taking him so seriously made him resentful of the assumption and the intrusion and of the presumed closeness he must have with Lila in her working hours. And that led him to think about Lila on her own in Demonia and that made him crazy. So he stared at the flowers and willed himself calm.

  “What we really want to know is why someone like you is in a place like this singing songs, Zal. And what does it mean to be both an elf and a demon? Surely you must understand your position here is almost intolerable to the authorities. Elven voices carry beyond the range of hearing and into matters no human even knows about. You and I—for all that either one of us claims to befriend them in their need to know our worlds—we haven’t explained the half of what we know about each other.”

  “You keep quiet and I keep quiet,” Zal said.

  “Exactly,” Malachi nodded. “All is honour among traders in secrets. No point ruining the delicate balances established over millennia for the sake of easing human anxieties. Trust must be gained with time and care. And there is so much to care about . . .”

  Zal frowned. Malachi was starting to “wiffle” in the habit of faeries of his kind. Not that Zal had exactly determined his kind but he suspected from the clothes and the chat that Malachi was powerful. There were ways of discovering more . . .

  “Want to play cards as we talk?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” The faery reached into his inside pocket and drew out a sealed deck of playing cards, breaking the plastic wrapper with his thumbnail as he did so and shedding the cards into his outstretched hand in a single, flowing movement. The box ended up on the glass table, the plastic in his pocket, the cards in his resting hands. Zal had not seen exactly what happened, he realised. Malachi looked at him expectantly. A soft furl of wild magic, summoned by Malachi’s invisible wings, crept between them—its presence was a guarantee the faery made that both of them would be able to detect magical forms of cheating in the other.

  “No limits Texas Hold ’Em,” Zal said, sitting fowards, starting to like matters much better now they had dispensed with the ridiculous human manners of simple talk and were playing. He flexed his hands and found them stiff. It was too long since he’d played for anything worth winning.

  “Questions for answers. One question per game. Stakes on the Hoodoo Measure Rule . . .”

  “You got the Hoodoo?” Zal would have to fetch one.

  “Always, my man,” Malachi assured him with a smile and from his jacket pocket produced a small handful of recently picked grass. With skilful fingers he fashioned a crude doll with the strands. He pulled a hair from his head and Zal did the same, handing it over so both were wrapped together before being wound around and around the grass to create a separation making head and torso; the hair was the noose that made its neck. “Good enough,” Malachi said and set the doll on the table under the shadow of a daisy. He blew on one finger and tapped the doll on the head with it.

  There was a faint burst of the scent of old battlegrounds, steeped in bloody mud. A tiny voice said, “Don’t cheat and don’t lie, or if you do I’ll have your eye.”

  “Cool,” Zal said approvingly. Whatever else he was, the faery was a good Maker, and Making was one of the most difficult of any magical art. He watched the black faery’s hands shuffle the cards and the tiny Hoodoo doll sat down to wait.

  Malachi shuffled the deck, his fingers moving in a blur, the cards shifting like water, in and out, round about. He dealt two and put the rest aside. Zal studied his cards with a nonchalant air. Queen of Spades, King of Diamonds. The faery glanced at his and waited.

  “Impersonal noninteresting,” Zal said, beginning with the obligatory stake of the lowest and least worthwhile kind of question.

  “Impersonal interesting,” Malachi said, raising him two instantly. The faery watched him closely.

  Zal shrugged and yawned. “Impersonal interesting,” he said, matching the stake.

  Malachi dealt two cards on the table face up. Three of clubs. Nine of spades.

  Zal felt a certain kind of sinking but strove to distance himself from it. He knew that everyone betrayed themselves but experienced liars only betrayed themselves to a practised eye that knew them and Malachi did not know him well enough. “Impersonal sensitive,” he said.

  “Impersonal sensitive,” Malachi matched. He silently dealt out a third card.

  “Impersonal acute,” Zal said automatically, always geared to risk. He looked at the card afterwards: ten of hearts.

  “Impersonal acute.” The sixth card appeared.

  Zal suspected the worst. They showed their hands.

  “You had nothing,” Malachi said with satisfaction showing a ten and a nine; two pairs. “So, should we tell the humans about the Other
s, do you think?”

  “Nah,” Zal said, gathering the cards up with a sigh and shuffling them himself. As he did so he watched the faery with considerably more curiosity than he had previously felt. How curious that Malachi would bring up such a taboo on the very first play . . . and something so apparently unconnected to his immediate concern. Zal added with some conviction, “They’d only worry unnecessarily and they have a lot of worries to get on with just through learning to know us in our least troublesome forms. Let’s not go that far just yet.”

  “Mmn,” Malachi said critically. “I thought so too. Deal.”

  Zal dealt with exact care and wondered if Malachi would take his word. In the faery world any of its ambassadors abroad might assume the diplomatic powers of the queen. Malachi did not only speak for himself, but for the entire universe he represented, even in minor dealings with a mere ex-agent like Zal, and his pronouncements had the force of law. It seemed a marvellously stupid arrangement of whimsical tyranny to Zal, but there it was. The faeries would not divulge a whisper about the Others to any human from now on. Zal was not sure that the humans really understood this feature about faeries or they would not treat them as powerless citizens so often. Still, buyer beware.

  They played another round cautiously. Zal asked Malachi if there were remote activation codes for Lila’s AI-managed abilities, codes which might override her own will. He had worried about this a lot, particularly as he grew to understand how little Lila herself knew about the way she was made. To his great irritation she did not seem to care, whereas he burned with suspicion.

  Malachi lounged in his seat, idly spraying a waterfall of cards from one hand to the other. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it does seem like something that would exist.”

  “Lila wasn’t made anew to save her life,” Zal stated and the faery nodded slowly. “And if I made her I’d be sure to have some kind of insurance on my investment. Know why she was made, really?”

  The Hoodoo doll sighed and said, “Rule violation. Do you really think it’s worth it, elf? Left or right eye? Hurry up, I’m not going to last all day.”