“Look, never mind all that. The thing is you want to go to the Souk and the other thing is that I want to prove I’m really who I say I am . . .”
“You didn’t say who you were.”
“If I could say my name I wouldn’t be a damned imp, would I?” the imp snapped. “I have to get my name. And you have . . . some business that’s probably important to someone somewhere so I was thinking I help you, you help me, match made in hell. You need someone who knows what they’re doing around demons and you don’t have that. I need someone . . . I need someone . . . so there we are. Perfection.”
Lila sighed and shook her head, “I’m not telling my business to you so you can sell it all around town. Do I look crazy?”
“Yes, frankly. You have got an imp on your shoulder, and everyone knows that their entire purpose in life is to drive people crazy.”
“With lots of lies. Which are pathetic, by the way.”
“Just one shot. One. I’ll get you something. Do something. Say something that will show you I’m telling you the truth.”
“Nah, you’ll just do it enough to convince me and then stab me in the back. Your entire MO is old news to me,” Lila said with conviction as the server returned, via the door this time, and slid a tray off its pristine back onto the table. It bore a glass of mint tea, steaming, and a pot of coffee with a tiny cup and a small pitcher of milk.
“You see. I bet you’re never usually that suspicious of anyone without some magical extra winding up your nerves. Of course you won’t believe me, that’s part of my curse.”
“You’re an imp. I don’t believe you because of that.”
“Sure, sure. Taste the tea. It’s all good.” The imp waited and Lila, because she had nothing to drink for hours, decided to try it. She put her finger into it first, in spite of the heat, for a quick analysis. It was tea. She raised the glass to her lips.
“Anyway if I was a real imp I’d have this hotline into your worst neuroses and be telling you that your boyfriend is too good for you, you’ll never know the half of what goes on behind your back at work because it’s in everyone else’s interests to keep you ignorant and Tartarus will be under an ice sheet by the time you manage to conquer your fear of being alive. In the meantime you’ll waste a lot of energy agonising about your old life and supporting your own denial with relentless activities that seem to be focused on work but really are just distraction tactics with vaguely work-related payoffs. Your heart is concealing something you’d really rather not face for reasons you don’t want to look at so you’ll spend what’s left of your time keeping a lid on that whilst convincing yourself rationally that it’s for everyone else’s good that you do as you’re told, don’t ask too many questions, and play at being strong in situations that seem dangerous but don’t matter to you so you can fool other people about how well you’re doing. Of course, you know very well that you’re turning into the biggest sell-out of them all.
“In your future alcoholism or other forms of addiction await you for when you get bored of playing at supergirl. You will become a cynical, bitter old woman who can only relate to small pets in order to avoid your intimacy issues, which by then will be of apocalyptic proportions and your loneliness will only be alleviated by certain great pieces of music which will also intensify its piquancy for reasons you never understand. There may be some dallying with literature or other arts as a way of faking contact with others of your kind but at a remove that allows your fantasies to remain untouched whilst never bringing you close to the ugly reality of genuine connections with the flawed and annoying monstrosities that are other people. You will die alone, like the rest of us, and making sense of your life in order to paint yourself the martyr will be the biggest fake ever hung in the big gallery of retrospective narrative lies and you’ll know that in your final moments and in that second everything you have struggled so hard to hold onto will vanish like smoke on the wind but it will be too late.
“See, if I was a real imp, that’s what I’d be saying.”
Lila spluttered and swallowed a mouthful that was too hot and then put her glass down. The tea was really good. Her tongue was burned. She took a long breath over it, trying to cool it down. Tath spun in her chest; he was a little sparkly, like a gulp of champagne and Lila had learned to recognise that as laughter. There was a sharp pain under her breastbone that had nothing to do with him. For a moment she felt intense rage at the pair of them, little parasites, but then a cold calm took hold of her.
“Now let’s get one thing clear,” she said. “My minions don’t gang up on me. My minions don’t tell me the uncomfortable truth or the comfortable truth or any kind of stuff like that to make my life harder. My minions help me to the bitter end of their bitter little lives or they get sent through the nine circles to the Infinite Pit by any means I can find and, by golly gosh, if you don’t think I have the balls to hold a grudge beyond all reasonable limits, demon, then you really don’t have two powers to rub together.”
The imp let go of her ear and pattered down her arm, balancing on her hand as it reached for the coffee pot and poured itself a cup. It disdained the milk it had ordered and knocked back the scalding brew with a single jerk of its head. Espresso dribbled down its chin, “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ bout, baby,” it said with gusto. “You and me. Match made in hell. Had the eyeballs dream. Spoken like a real devil, my lovely. Let’s hit the Souk. I’m itching for a battle of wits with those jessies.”
Minions?
I didn’t notice you protesting my valour. So can it.
Lila got up suddenly. The imp reached for another coffee, almost fell from her hand, and scuttled back up to its place. A sharp pain reported a fresh grip on her ear. She tried not to let the eye on that side tear up.
In the corner one of the large demons hawked and spat into the pot. Thick purple billows came from it and his companion sniffed deeply, reeled for a moment, and then fell senseless onto the floor. The other two cackled and scraped piles of small change from the table into their hands.
“Wait till he shrinks,” one slurred.
“Yeah, so you can carry him out first . . .” the other said. “No way. I buy the percentage.”
“Myeh, what you think he’s good for?”
“Can’t tell until . . . ah wait . . .”
The demon on the floor began to shrink. Nothing about it altered except that its breathing slowed and it got smaller, and smaller, and smaller.
Lila watched with unstoppable fascination. The demon, which had been just about her size, continued to diminish until it was no larger than a salt shaker at which point it took on a polished kind of sheen and a stony appearance.
“Crap,” said the quilled demon. “Fucking chess set is what. You can have fifty-fifty on him. Think he’d at least have done for garden statuary, demon of his bearing.”
“He must have been lying all these years about that witchery business. I said he was a bluffer. Gah, the money I’ve given him for enchantments. All up in smoke now, and I’ll be lucky if we can get enough paint on him to call him a bishop.” The feathered demon picked up the pot of bubbling mixture and flung it across the room where it splattered on the wall with a clang. The pot rolled away and the server came in and chittered in a high voice, spitting venom.
The demons attempted to get up and run for it but the server snared them in a sticky web until they paid up some sum. The quilled demon scooped up the frozen figure of the shrunken one, shook off a couple of roaches, and stuffed it into a pouch at its belt. “I’ll do the fixings and sell him. Maybe there’ll be some tips on eBay about the kind of things the humans like to buy. See you tomorrow for the cash up.”
They shuffled out, weaving and bumping each other, unsteady on their feet and cursing frequently as they clutched at the walls for support.
Lila watched this without moving.
“True friends,” the imp said on her shoulder with nostalgic longing. “Lovely that was. Just lovely.” It had a quaver in its voi
ce. “Oh, one more thing. We can’t just roll around town with me riding here like some ordinary pestilence talking into your ear or nobody will trade doohickey with you. And I think rubies will go nicely with that big red streak in your hair. Nice touch that. Shows off your creative side.”
The casual pinprick pain in Lila’s earlobe became a swift, savage biting agony. “Oww! What the eff . . .” Her hand snapped up to her shoulder but the imp was gone, not even into its cold flame form. It was just gone. There was a cold, cut-sided stone set into her ear, like an earring stud. It pierced through and held at the back with a similar-size rock. Her fingers came away bloody. She could hear the imp almost as well as before.
“So, what are we bidding for?” it perked.
“Information,” Lila said. “When the elf Zal Ahriman became a demon something happened here to him. I want to know what and how. And when I know, I’m going to do it too.”
“Well that’s easy,” the imp whispered. “Every demon in the seven cities knows how you do that. It’s the one legend of our world that never disappoints. You don’t need the Souk at all, unless you need magic for something else. All you need to do is go through Hell.”
Zal had gone about a hundred metres when he heard a familiar voice behind him and the sound of light fey feet running.
“Hey! Wait up.”
He turned, grateful the back street behind the hotel was deserted except for an automated trash-collection bot doing the round of the bins. Poppy was bright, vivacious, sensationally dressed and together they could attract more attention in two minutes than a full-scale car crash at a city centre junction. His understated clothes and broad-brimmed hat, chosen to make him seem unremarkable in Otopia, were pointless beside her resplendent rainbow of clothing and her flaring green hair.
He waited for her, a soft spot under his heart always open to her in spite of the fact he found her over the top and she had tried to kill him on at least one occasion. She had a great voice.
She paused the regulation metre away from him. “You’re going to see Lila, right?”
Zal made a face and sighed. She was sharp, despite having extreme blonde tendencies. He nodded.
Poppy bit her lip and drifted slightly across the ground, her invisible wings rendering her virtually weightless. She held something out to him in her hand. He took it. “What’s this?”
The small packet was wrapped in a silk cloth and unwound to show a hammered silver pendant in the shape of a spiral attached to a grey silk ribbon which glimmered with the faint purple gleams of magical marks. It was a delicate object and looked as though the spiral should easily slip off the ribbon although Zal suspected that no earthly force and certainly not one as obvious as gravity would separate it from its band. It had a weight that was heavy to his andalune, light on his flesh hand.
“Just something I got her,” Poppy said. “Kind of to say sorry from me and Vidia, you know, for the whole nearly drowning you both thing.”
Zal folded the cloth again and put it in his pocket. “I’ll give it to her.”
“Don’t be late back with Sorcha, me and V need some money.” This statement came with the kind of offhand casualness Zal knew signalled great importance.
“I can give you a loan . . .”
“Nah nah, just be back on time, cut the track, that’s good. Oh, and Boom asked me to give you this.” She pulled a crumpled piece of hotel notepaper out of the back pocket of her trousers and held it towards him. She wouldn’t meet his eye.
Zal flicked it from her grasp and read the scratchy pencilled handwriting. “What is this shit?”
“She wanted to keep true to her musical principles and . . .” Poppy began with rolling eyes and pulling her mouth into awkward shapes as she delivered the bad news.
Zal read aloud, “. . . will not record sub-vaudeville neo-romantic diva disco for the sake of a quick buck . . . spoiling the pure spirit of the hip-hop tradition . . . slave to corporate greed . . . less the spirit of punk than the seepage of neo-fascist marketing spunk . . . back to my roots in the souldance houses of Bay City . . . leaving your corrupting influence for the good of the genre . . .” He took a deep breath, “That superficial, ponced-up, jealous little two-bit hack programmer!”
Poppy bit both lips. “She was pretty good as a DJ.”
“Well, screw her. What does she know about souldance Mode-X crossover anyway? The closest she gets to creative is sampling tracks out of the Otopia Tree Library Least Listened archive. I can get a better sound out of a demon technician than some bloody human. Good. Another damn reason to go back. Tell Jolene I’ll find a replacement. Tell her I’ll find two!”
“Zal . . .” Poppy began in a patient tone, clearly about to ask for some understanding in what was a major moment of band history. They both knew Boom was good and that she was pretentious and that she was gone and this would be hard to get over.
“No.” He balled up the note and threw it on the ground. “We had this out. She was going to have as much leeway as she wanted to create a whole new sound and she bottled out of it. I don’t want this bullshit about creative freedom and the history of fucking music. Let her go back to working clubs and selling her sad little story.”
“The thing is, Zal . . .”
He looked into Poppy’s smile-to-cover-the-story face and her awkward manner. A slow, weary sinking feeling spread across him. “You agree with her, don’t you?”
“No, not exactly. But we were all, you know, feeling like it was bad to get attached to Sorcha’s image too much and you know you were absent for the tour date and that was really hard for us . . .”
“Enough excuses. Are you going to bail out too? And who else? Do I or do I not remember you just telling me to get back fast to make some bucks for whatever stupid problems you and V have got yourselves into now? So it looks to me like whatever you think you’re stuck with it.”
“No no no. We’re fine. We’re all ready to do it. It’s fine.” Poppy backed away from him, her hands held up and waving in front of her in airy little gestures. “We just . . . we’re worried, Zal. About you. That’s all.”
“Worry about yourself!” he snapped. “Worry about finding another DJ and worry about the money because I am not your damn problem.” He spun on his heel and walked fast away from her, seething. For once he was glad there was no chance anyone could contact him via one of the ubiquitous Berries that the others used as electronic lifestyle aides. The worst part was that Poppy was right to call him on his absence. Even so, it was stupid elitist crap to say that any kind of music couldn’t be good, no matter what style it was or what it was made with. Anyway, she was double wrong because disco was fantastic. He’d find some demon to help, someone who really understood the way all the grooves fit together, and had it branded in their soul like him.
His irritation made him more bad tempered, his awareness that he was bad tempered made him exasperated, his exasperation made him restless, and his restlessness pointed only one way. He walked the six blocks of back streets to where the warehouses of Ikea opened to the loading bays and climbed the wire fence onto the property. There was a shiver point so strong under the building that he could sense it even without trying. It lay along the same faultline that the recording studio in Bay City stood beside but here there was only the thinnest skin between Demonia and Otopia and a running torrent of free aether in I-space. Demonia’s border, like the wall of a giant cell, softly billowed up from the aether depths at regular intervals with magmatic slowness. By the time Zal had walked in, unnoticed, to the self-serve area where the endless cabinets were racked, it had risen on its ten-minute turnaround and was practically right there beneath his feet. The boxes and pallets of furniture shimmered and a couple of bits were stolen by demonic fingers, right before his eyes. They vanished from the stock without a whisper. It was pure devilment as no demon would be seen dead with mass-produced items in their homes.
Zal opened his hands, released his andalune body to the floor where the borders were thinn
est, and opened what he thought of as the inner fire in his soul. This was not a literal thing. Whoever you were, to get to Alfheim you needed some kind of portal. To get to Thanatopia you had to be dead. To get into Zoomenon you had to summon and find a spot where elementals liked to gather in sufficient numbers to help you out but to get into Demonia, especially if you were a demon, you only had to stand close to it and tune in to the ever-present beat of hedo nistic joy in your heart—Demonia’s music that was never out of key and never entirely out of reach.
He had the brief sensation of falling. It was always like that, like the dream where you step off the pavement into an unexpected drop and there’s a heartstopping moment of being off-balance and out of control. It lasted a little longer than the dream, but not very much. He smelt brimstone and the sweet reek of rose-scented ifriti flowers, blooming with their love-drenched and fatal nectar saturating each petal and suffusing the air around them. Otopian Ikea gave way to Zhanzabar Walk’s gardens. Next to Zal two sturdy horned demons piled their looted flatpacks onto a wheelbarrow and hurried off.
“No scented candles?” said one with disappointment.
“They’re not close enough to the shiver point,” the other repeated in the tones of someone who has repeated it a thousand times.
Zal stepped quickly out of range of the flowering bush and quickly stripped off his jacket and shirt, allowing the flare on his back to be visible. He folded the clothes and carried them with him in one hand until a flitting sprite in the family colours came by, attuned to seek out higher ranks and offer service. He gave it the clothing and told it to send word that he was coming to stay at home for a few days.
The sprite took the parcel of cloth in its long fingers and rippled its scales and whiskers with purplish delight. “Very good, sir. I will have your things set out. Will you be dining at home?”
“Yes. As long as the guest Lila Black is attending.”
“We expect her to be there. No events are on the schedule for this evening. Drinks are served on the terrace at eight. Shall I alert your wife that you wish her company? She is at the house in Tartarus presently . . .”
Selling Out Page 11
