Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  “What you see is what you get,” Lila said as Tath muttered darkly and incomprehensibly something about waste and superficiality. He was far too nervous to unwind even enough to get a sentence out and she was oddly glad though she tried not to show it, thinking he would be hurt and that outcome would annoy her.

  “Exactly,” the imp said. “Except in my case of course.”

  “Of course,” Lila agreed, not giving it credence for a second. “So, I have to do something with this shadow elf before I set off for Hell. What’s your best shot?”

  “Death is too good for such a creature, particularly since its assassination efforts were so puny.”

  “I’m not going to kill it.” She gave a brief outline of how she had come by her prisoner.

  “You could do worse than to torture it for answers before the lady at whose party you were fortunate enough to be attacked. Such a gesture would curry favour with her and her household and make the son who passed you the elf look rather good too. You would increase your standing with demon society for being so polite and your ruthlessness and willingness to get ahead would look well all over, I think. So of course you won’t do any such thing, being a human and stubbornly lacking in sense and decorum. Therefore, the only recourse that might pass in society, let your host family save face, and display graciousness in the receiving of a gift like that is to buy some enchantment that will bind the awful thing to you in obedient service for a reasonable term. Say, not more than a hundred years.”

  “Slavery,” Lila said, feeling a horrible weight slowly descending upon her.

  “It is the only civilised and acceptable option for such as yourself,” the imp declared with a nod. “Since I guess you will not sell her for profit.”

  “I couldn’t just banish her from Demonia for eternity?”

  “The coward’s way out,” the imp said with contempt. “It would only serve to make you look weak and as soon as that happens you will be regarded as everybody’s meat. I doubt your host family could preserve you, even if they wanted to.” Its tone indicated that it thought they would be extremely unlikely to want to. “If you like, to soften the blow, you could think of it as acquiring family of your own. Like me for instance. She could be a sister to you and I could be . . .”

  “You are an annoyance,” Lila said firmly, rejecting the idea with absolute horror. Sadly, its ideas about the elf did seem quite in keeping with all her data on demon culture. She had thought as much and now it was confirmed she was furious. The elf probably thought the same thing, and would look for death at every opportunity. Lila would be honour bound to preserve her. The elf, wanting Lila’s death, would be bound to preserve her by the forces of aetheric binding. It would all be just jimdandy. And since Lila didn’t reckon on living a hundred years it would last forever.

  “You can avoid all the irritation and bother by simply handing her to the hostess’s family,” the imp observed airily, examining its tiny finger claws and giving them a polish on Lila’s collar. “Easy peasy, pudding and pie.”

  “Who will do what with her?” Lila asked, desperately hoping against hope that it would not be that bad.

  “They may exert mercy in consideration of your humanity and simply eat her.”

  “Fuck,” Lila said.

  “After that no doubt,” the imp sighed. “Well, come on, hero. How much money or trade goods do you have about you? What’s on offer and what’s not negotiable? What have we got to work with?”

  “Let’s just find what we need,” Lila said grimly. She could see no good way out of her predicament. “You hide. I’ll do the talking.”

  “If I might . . .” the imp began, clearly disagreeing with the plan.

  Lila powered up her left gauntlet and exposed part of her finger struts to act as conductors. Sparks crackled across their tips as electricity began to discharge. She slowly moved her hand up to her shoulder.

  “Of course,” the imp said demurely. Again there was a piercing pain in her ear and then no imp but a blood-red stone, which whispered in a silent, niggling way directly to her cerebellum. Same method as Tath, she thought and then went silent, waiting to see if the imp had heard her thoughts like the necromancer could. But there was no response and she didn’t believe the creature would keep quiet about it, so she took a gamble on it not being two-way telepathy. Yet one more thing to file in the AI and download for someone else to worry about later.

  The Souk door was a hexagonal opening in the thick, old walls of soft red lavastone. The stone was weathered and pocked with holes and looked like sponge. The doorway was hung with a giant-size bead curtain.

  “Every bead unique,” the imp earring said, taking on the proud tones of a tour guide. “Shrunken heads, teeth, carved bones, dried berries, bits of old tins made into tiny racing cars . . . go and look you won’t find two the same, I guarantee it.”

  Lila reached out to gently move aside some strands of the swaying, jangling curtain. “Don’t tell me, if I want to return to Demonia I have to add a bead . . .”

  “Dear Lord, no,” the imp gasped. “These are the beads of the damned, fashioned from their treasured personal possessions by their own hands before the traitors were put to fire and the sword.”

  “Oh.” Lila stepped through faster than she intended and wiped her hand unconsciously on her leg.

  “It is an antitheft device of the highest enchantment,” the imp added. “Try running through that with stolen goods and it rips the spirit from the body and shreds the spirit into pieces. The spirits of the damned are shriven and stuck in the beads you see, and if they can grab enough energy from thieves and brigands they can eventually break free and fly to Thanatopia’s dark shores. Otherwise it’s just curtains f’r ever and ever, amen. The sweet banality of it after lives of great drama and importance sacrificed . . . mmmnnn . . . you could never fault the demons for not understanding romance.”

  On the other side of the curtain the Souk itself was a labyrinth of broad streets with narrow ways leading to all directions off the wider avenues, and narrower channels yet splitting from those so that in layout it resembled three nets of increasing fineness, one laid over the other. Everything joined up eventually. If Lila had not had her AI to map and guide her she would have been lost within ten steps. As it was she tracked her route and let her inboard systems put an easy green line on her internal minimap so that she could find her way back, but otherwise she simply wandered, Tath a cold green clutch of dread around her heart.

  There were many fey here, she soon noticed, clustered in twos or larger groups at almost every place, in every store. They moved in peculiar patterns, avoiding or moving towards magics that attracted them she supposed, though being human she could feel nothing and maintained a course in the centre of the alleys. Everything imaginable was on sale. She kept her face schooled to stony indifference to the living and dead animals, the pieces of things dried and preserved in jars, the fragments that she could identify not only as Otopian, but as human, among the collections. Her AI-self was perfect for the mission and she allowed its machine logic to overrule her feelings as she moved smoothly, taking footage of all she saw, recording every conversational whisper she overheard, analysing it, translating it, filing it. She was a moving library and she did not have to give in to care. Tath’s repulsion was enough for both of them. A part of her clung to him and she strolled with relaxed ease through something she had anticipated would be a tourist’s encounter with the arcane but which proved to be a catalogue of horrors. There were beautiful things, jewels and rich objects, weapons, treasures . . . her eyes flicked over them as they flicked over the severed hands, the shrunken flesh on ancient skulls, the pickled children of every race afloat in the amnion of formaldehyde and aetheric spirit.

  Lila walked, fluid motion in body, frozen inside. If the imp had spoken she would have picked her ear off her head and destroyed it with any means but, perhaps sensing her hatred, it did nothing and she found herself longing for its voice and the excuse for a truly cru
el vengeance. In those moments she felt her slightly embarrassed admiration of the demons alter into a much more complicated and difficult emotion and that extended to all the other magic users by a tenuous, horrible leakage. A prejudice she had not known she had, a fear she did not believe in unfolded from its dark seed and took root in her. The back of her throat dried and contracted. What a fool she had been to be sucked into the cheap superficial glamour of the demons’ universe. All their art, their devotions to beauty and the pursuits of science, of greatness in intellect and spirit, their unrivalled exultation in every experience in the pursuit of the sublime . . . and beneath it all the time they said nothing about this.

  And Zal was one of them.

  Whatever interest she had felt in her mission here to find a spell to help her with her farcical elven prisoner situation vanished into insignificance. Let the stupid woman take her chances in the Ahriman house or starve to death waiting. She’d signed her own ticket the day she decided it was fine to shoot Lila.

  And Sorcha . . . Lila could hardly believe she had felt such closeness, such friendship from her but that it was all this false front, this lie, hiding something as ugly as the true nature of demon magic. Arië’s violence and plotting when she attempted to use Zal as her victim to destroy the link between Alfheim and the other realms, why, that was barely gracing the fringe of wicked compared with this casual, everyday traffic. Arië, twisted as she had become, was a positive saint. No wonder the elves despised this race and called them irredeemably corrupt.

  She tried hard, with every machine and personal resource, to come up with an explanation that would lessen the nightmare but found none anywhere. It was as though in walking through the curtain she had stepped into a different reality. She wondered if Sorcha would have tried to conceal it, if she had asked . . . There was nothing about this place in her databases . . . Would the tourist trade include trips here? She wanted to laugh so that she didn’t have to hold back the pain of not crying. She felt as though she was falling down a deep, dark hole and the circle of the known world, still in light above her, was shrinking. It was slow, but inevitably she could already see that there would be a moment when it receded to a dot in which nothing was discernible. For the first time since she had woken after Dar’s magic had blown her to pieces she felt the possibility that even the dot may one day vanish.

  “Now is not a good moment for an existential crisis,” the imp whispered. “You are close to the clairvoyance of Madame Des Loupes. Her home is on this corner and her clarity of vision is said to be impeccable within the Souk if you catch her attention and there is no way that a beautiful freak such as yourself will escape that.”

  Lila felt a stabbing panic in her chest. She halted in the middle of the street. A faery bumped into the back of her and muttered something darkly as he floated around her, sniffing. When he glanced at her the irises of his human eyes were pinpricks in a blue field. He swiped at his nose and moved on, in a hurry. She found herself watching him go. He staggered slightly. His attention was on something else entirely. She realised that she had seen many others like that here, and in the city. They had been everywhere and she had considered it part of the fabric of demon life, that people took drugs or expanded their consciousness in many ways just as they might drink a coffee. She’d assumed that they were different from humans, much more able and in control of themselves, enlightened and educated, always so knowing about what they were doing and what it meant. But now she wasn’t seeing exciting voyages in aetheric power and self-expansion. She saw an addict, wandering in the throes of his compulsion, lost to himself.

  “What does Madame Des Loupes do?” she asked, barely recognising the sound of her own voice in her thoughts. “What’s her thing?”

  “You don’t want her,” the imp said with conviction. “We need a binder. Turn left here. Madame is a seer.”

  “What does she see?”

  “Souls,” the imp said with unease. “When she looks into your eyes there is nothing you can hide from her. She is able to speak of your past with perfect accuracy, and of your future with great insight, because she sees what you are and what you can be made into. She has allies who enjoy the challenge of making great things from poor materials too, and they will all attempt to engage you. She sees potentials everywhere, what you might be, and who. And that may sound so intriguing but I must warn you it is not something to do lightly. Madame knows so much about so much, and of course her knowledge is power. Those of us with secrets go no closer than the end of the road where she lives. Even then, who can say what she knows about us? We treat her as a goddess here, for fear she will betray us.”

  “Betray you?”

  “Madame is old. In her youth she was the president of our world, the head of government. Nothing escaped her, and nobody. Under her guidance we soared in all our enterprises. But as time went on and she grew out of responsibility and duty and into the reckless abandon of adulthood she led her precepture to great power through trades and combats which she all foresaw to her advantage. She cannot be deceived. Without the limit of her conscience working any longer a group of great sorcerers devised a binding upon her to put her under house arrest. If they had not succeeded in restraining her she would have enslaved our world as she once ruled it in fairness.”

  “But she didn’t foresee this happening to her?” Lila asked.

  “She permitted it,” the imp said. “She knew what she could become. She saw that most of all.”

  Lila found a grudging admiration for that. “Or maybe this way her ultimate goal was better served?”

  “We may have to admit that as a possibility . . .” the imp conceded. “In any case, she is the oldest of all of us and she shows no sign of petrification. Other demons as they use their powers age and become as stone. This is the price of metabolising aether. But the limits have kept her almost free of such entropic damage. Year on year her strength increases but she does not waste. You should turn left.”

  But as he spoke Lila was looking directly forwards at the corner house. It had a first-floor verandah, with an ornate balcony railing about which grew luxurious trailing vines—a caged bird’s cage, she had been thinking and then even as she thought it the bird appeared. A delicate womanly shape, with the head of a raven and the wings of a hummingbird stepped out and put her elegant hand upon the rail. She turned her head and with one black eye looked directly at Lila. Lila heard her own thoughts joined by another’s like a voice speaking in harmony—the caged bird’s cage. Then the new voice continued alone, “To enter Hell you must find one who opens, a gatemaker. When you do not find another, find me.”

  “Leeee-eeft!” whined the imp. “She’s looking this way.”

  The demon turned her raven head, cocking it abruptly to look down into the square below her where a few ordinary crows were walking about, looking upwards with one side of their heads, then the other, clearly waiting. She threw something down to them that looked like scraps of meat and they hopped and scrabbled over them in a storm of wings. Lila saw a train of peacock feathers where most demons would have had a different kind of tail as Madame Des Loupes went inside and closed the shutter.

  “Did she . . . ?”

  “No,” Lila said. “I think she was just feeding the birds.”

  “They’re her eyes and ears,” the imp said. “Most of them not here. Always be careful when you talk business not to do it within earshot of a crow.

  “Binding, binding, binding . . .”

  “Just pick someone,” Lila said. She had been about to make an excuse and ask the imp to do it all for her. The sight of the birds stamping down on the bits of flesh and tearing it with their beaks, gulping shreds, had almost pushed her to a place where she could not contemplate carrying on and she didn’t know why. She’d seen worse than anything here. Done things almost as bad without much more than a flinch.

  A shadow crossed her shoulder, a cool patch running over her bare skin where the strong shoulder padding of the assault vest gave way to
a short sleeve of net. It was her only warning but her instincts and her AI all told her to move and she was more than ready for that. She dropped her weight, slid her hips sideways, twisted and ducked, coming around and away in an arc that moved her towards the shelter of the closest building, its side in shade. The attack missed her by a millimetre. She felt a breath of air as a spinning blade clattered into the stone paving and shattered with the force. Its trajectory would have set it in her neck—a bold and accurate shot but one she felt could only have been half hearted, perhaps a distraction.

  As she swung around she let her natural twisting motion carry her through a sweep of the area, her AI senses on full alert, looking for the patterns of reaction and movement in people over a wide area to detect not only her assailant but anyone responding to the incident. In the second it took her to slow and straighten, free the firing ports in her forearms, and arm up the weapons she had taken from her cache back at the Ahriman house she already knew the demon in the air who had distracted her wasn’t alone.

  It was a small, agile-winged creature which was already fleeing the scene at top speed. She didn’t bother shooting at it. The others were in groups of two and three, walking as if they were not really together through each one of the arteries that led towards the square of Madame Des Loupes’s house. On the rooftops another three figures, lying close to the tiles, moved with spider confidence across sharp angles and over buttresses. They were converging on her with a clear purpose—to corral her in any of a dozen useful dead ends close to the square. In the sky no less than five airborne creatures spiralled out of the afternoon traffic and floated lower. The small number of pedestrians in the Souk who were not involved moved about a fraction more slowly, more idly. There were not enough of them to shield her.

  The shadow of the large central route dirigible moved slowly across her, plunging her into a sudden pale fog of mystical advertising: words and images floated towards her with scents and sounds like fleeting dreams . . .