Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  When you need a clean that’s fine, use Rapstallion’s Burnishing Powders. Suitable for all colours of scale and chitin. Does not scratch. Usual disclaimers apply.

  Cheap, cheerful, and always ready. Punty Maroon’s Downhouse Tavern serves Surprise Meat of the Moment—at any moment!

  Kiss of Death . . . this last was just a name and a feeling of closing cold, the image of a woman with black hair and purple lips leaning near, then darkness . . .

  Lila moved with the last short-lived seconds of this shadow, crossing the narrow alley at its speed. She had no plan, there was no time to plan. She held out both hands, palm forward and in the last stride made her smart, artificial skin into speakers. She sent out sound waves in a specific pattern and read them as they returned. Without a pause she made both hands into fists, braced her feet, and punched through the wall. Demon stone was bonelike—friable and soft. She barged the edges of the hole with her shoulders and felt her skin tear but her strength and the speed of her blow was enough to create space for her whole body to fit through. In a flurry of dust and dry mortar she emerged into a dimly lit space full of incense. By the time the dirigible passed on and sunlight claimed the alley she was into the third room of the magehouse, going through any door that caught her eye.

  Demons and other—things—shifted in the darkness and the flickering light of lamps and candles; mages and their clients started at her passage, though some of them were deep into whatever they were doing and did not notice her darting from one side of their room to the other. But, as she knew there must be, there was soon a room with no other door except the one she came in by. As soon as she stepped over the threshold she knew it was a mistake.

  She had collected a trail of protesting demons who attempted to follow her to this point but once she crossed into this room they turned back without another word. Unlike the other rooms this one had only one lamp and it cast a faint violet gleam, barely enough to see by. It was a big room and it smelled musky and dry. There was no incense. Colours moved on the walls, all of them as near to black as could be. They shifted in patterns that made symbols and then undid them, created pictures as if by accident on their way past each other. At first she thought the room was empty but then, in the farthest corner, in the dark, she heard a movement and then looked that way and just made out the glimmer of lilac light sliding over a dark body; a spike, a scale, and then the surface of an ink-black eye.

  Get out.

  She hadn’t heard Tath’s voice in so long it startled her. She froze for a moment and in that moment she heard the hissing sound of a long intake of breath through narrow, refined nostrils. Something ephemeral, a spirit voile, brushed her shoulder where the skin was raw. On the wall in front of her the colours moved into an image of sudden clarity, dim and barely there but there nonetheless.

  Get. OUT. NOW.

  But she couldn’t move. She was frozen, staring at the sight of her mother, standing at the kitchen sink. She was in her nightdress and her hands were shaking. She held a glass in one and an open bottle of pills in the other. Lila knew it was twenty fourteen, the year before the bomb, and she was a little girl and it was the night that grandma died. Classical music was playing on the radio, a song she could hear right now—Clair de Lune. She hated that song.

  Her mother looked at her, across time, across the night. She picked up the bottle of pills and tipped them down the sink. They weren’t needed any more. They made a tiny, tinny rattle in the metal bowl, exactly the sound they made that night. Water rushed from the faucet automatically and flushed them into the waste disposal. It made a sound like grinding teeth. The colours were so dark that Mum’s eyes were dark pits, her mouth a slice of black, like a skull.

  This is one of your marker points, Tath’s voice snapped, cold and powerful with a command Lila was grateful to hear. Move away quickly before the anchor is created. Think of a different time.

  Because the association was so obvious she began to think of that, which led to the night they met, the night he died . . . Her mother vanished and she saw a pale, dead body lying with a blade in its chest . . .

  Not that one!

  By now, through AI and intuition she knew she had stumbled into the path of a necromancer. All the Otopian data on such people amounted to little more than a list of names and a few speculations. Even Tath himself, whom she had begun to trust almost as a part of her with her usual foolish disregard she seemed to bring to the essential spy armoury of personal boundary setting, had never revealed anything of his profession, except in that single moment he had slaughtered Teazle’s brother. The pale body had already dissolved and in its place she saw the twisted limbs of the demon, felt herself coated in sticky blood . . .

  Not that one either!

  She got it. Nothing involving death. But as soon as she tried to think of anything except death all the deaths she knew about shot through her mind at the speed of a bullet. She felt seasick. Around her the darkness thickened as the demon sensed so many potentials . . . Aether seethed like heavy vapour and smarted where wild tendrils snapped at her skin and investigated the elemental nature of her metal.

  It searches for entry points to your life matrix. At least too many is almost as good as too few but if you are to save us think of the living!

  Lila smelled citrus peel. The game potential rose at the same moment as she felt the demon—still invisible in its own darkness—prepare to pounce upon one of the fleeting images that raced across its charmed atmosphere; the traces of her past. She smelled fresh blood and only then felt the sting of a blade on her bare shoulder. As her blood ran, the images became suddenly three-dimensional and the room began to fade.

  Without thinking she immediately sprang to the opportunity to start a game. “I bet you can’t beat me in a straight fight.”

  What?!

  The room returned. The citrus smell vanished. There was a clear, fresh burst of air and the static crackle of an aether discharge. In the ordinary gloom she looked across the stone floor to her adversary. The bleeding stopped as her enhanced platelets sealed the wound. The indigo demon slavered and stared up at her from its lizard sprawl, slowly getting up from its belly to its hind legs. The challenge was accepted. Her Game was on.

  If there was a chance, you just lost it, Tath informed her with the frigidity of shock.

  But you sucked the life out of the other one . . . Lila protested inwardly, battle systems activating in an almost silent explosion of perfectly operating components. She got bigger, stronger, faster. She armed her guns.

  That was just an ordinary demon, Tath said. This is a necromancer and where it has spent its entire life practising the art of the pursuit of death in this room, I have done my best to avoid every opportunity to exert my abilities. It is a master and I am barely qualified . . .

  Why NOW?! Lila screamed at him inside. Why do you never tell me anything important BEFORE it matters?

  Who knew you would run directly into this lair? Necromancers are rare . . .

  Tath, how do I kill it?

  Decapitation. If that fails you have to find its phylactery.

  Its what?

  A special vessel, object, person, or document in which its life is stored.

  Great, where’s that?

  I do not know. If you had the whole of space and time to hide such an object in, where would you put it?

  Lila stood for a moment and then put her guns away and took a large blade out of her left thigh and another from the inner right where it lay just beneath her armour.

  The demon snickered and lifted its long saurian head, exposing its narrow neck. With one clawed finger it made a slashing motion across its own throat and cocked its head at her, eye glinting with grey and purple light. It stabbed the finger towards the imaginary line and hissed, “Cut here . . .” Then it laughed and raised its heavy, scaled brow in a clear, amused taunt.

  “Oh that is so not fair!” Lila exclaimed and stamped her foot, letting her blades drop to her sides. “How does having a p
hylac . . . philac . . . life hidden away count as FAIR?”

  The demon paused and said in a normal, much milder voice, “I had it before you challenged me. I didn’t conceal it and you didn’t ask. So according to the rules, it’s fair.” It then resumed its taunt pose, complete with glaring eye. Then it paused and relaxed again. “How did you know about that?”

  “I . . . it was a good guess . . .” Lila said, bringing the blades up automatically as the creature suddenly advanced with a much more serious expression on its long, lizard face.

  “My ass,” the necromancer said. It made a throwing gesture, languid and graceful, and a sheet of dark fell across her, and through her; a voile so soft it barely existed as a trace. Tath shuddered and twisted but he could not avoid its caress. Too late she recognised the aetheric equivalent of x-rays. It had scanned her for magic.

  It pointed at her chest and fixed its gaze there. She set a defensive stance and prodded at its hand with the tip of her knife but it ignored her . . . it stared and gaped, yellow throat pulsing with basic reptilian surprise. “Acolyte!”

  Now he has to die, Tath said, doing the internal emotional equivalent of throwing his hands up in the air and casting eyes to the sky in despair.

  All suggestions gratefully accepted, Lila said and, without pausing, launched into a blur of normally fatal blows. Without hope of killing she thought she’d settle for a good mincing and see how that slowed it down.

  At speeds beyond human perception, battle blades catching the grey light, her arms seemed to move in blurs the shape and density of faery wings, their lethal tips striking with machine precision. A haze of sickly purple flew from their dance as they sliced flesh and bone, and the spraying blood of the necromancer collided with itself drop upon drop smashing each other to ever smaller parts. Lila glided in a mist of gore and the clean form of the demon vanished into the lilac storm of slaughter with unnatural ease, as though passing through a flat plane that destroyed it; as if it had fallen into a shredder.

  She stopped when she reached its tail.

  Tath was a moment of frozen surprise. She felt him peering through her at the twitching, snakelike lump of meat left in the pool of chunky purple and lime goo. A faint patter of blood rain fell on her skin and hair, on her glistening armour and into the murky puddles. Lila felt the side of her mouth twitch with satisfaction at his response and some pleasure in her appalling ability . . . as bad as the Souk . . . yes . . .

  “Now that’s gotta hurt!” The imp’s voice came from the doorway, full of delight and admiration.

  Lila turned around, senses primed and the world seeming slow to them as they were in battle mode. Time was watery.

  The imp scampered across the floor, up the wall partway and then leapt to her shoulder, sinking its claws into the padding. It beckoned to the ominous figures that followed it. To Lila it said, apologetically, “Boy, I thought you were way worse than that so I went to get us the only help I could think of . . .” It hesitated and the two shapes came out of the corridor and into the near darkness. Lila saw them easily. They were tall and narrow humanoids with hulking shoulders draped in black sacking that fell around them in tatty festoons to the floor. Their heads were the bare skulls of giant carrion birds, with ravenlike beaks. Instead of eyes, maggots moved in their sockets. They had limbs like insect arms poking through their robes. They stank of raw meat.

  “. . . well, they were more or less on the way anyway . . .” the imp added more quietly as the two approached with the slow measure of coming night. “I just helped a little bit. But I did help. I was very useful. They’ll remember that part.”

  Lila shifted her weight into a ready stance and raised her daggers. The pair of raven demons halted just out of reach. They tipped their birdy heads and regarded the jellying mass of the ex-necromancer and his tail.

  Before its ghost recovers the phylactery we ought to depart, Tath whispered urgently to her. It will not be caught like that twice, and now it will be furious.

  The bird demons moved as one and lifted their heads upright. One extended a black, pincer-ended limb. It was holding out a white business card.

  Lila extended the tip of a dagger and, after a moment, the demon impaled the card on it. Keeping her other blade ready she brought it close to read. The card simply said,

  “Madame Des Loupes requests the pleasure of the company of Lila Amanda Black and her companions at her earliest convenience. Tea and small fancies will be served. Formal dress is not required.”

  Lila read it twice—companions—and said to Tath, silently, Don’t tell me I have to assassinate a perfect clairvoyant as well as a deathless necromantic fiend or I’m going home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The radiation counts in Zoomenon were high, always. Partly this was because of the raw lodes of uranium and plutonium that it contained, scattered hither and yon in patterns that defied analysis. That accounted for the electromagnetic interference that was like having elfin nerves scraped with sandpaper, let alone their flesh mortified by damage. Partly it was because of the aetheric concentrations and fluctuations that created enormous turbulence in the panspermic raw aether atmosphere. These concentrations took the form of elementals, both primitive and agile. Zal watched them with the apparent disinterest of a sated tiger watching deer in the forest. He nursed his sore body and the nauseating headache that the twin radiation had given him and from which there was no obvious respite. Inside his andalune body the surge and rush of the fire elementals whom he had permitted to transect him burned on, purging the worst of the damage from him with swift cautery. He knew that if and when their power abated he would soon sicken and die in this hostile, monophilic world. So he watched the elementals flock and disperse, watched their play, their moving and breath and death among the eerie perfection of the rocky world around him. Overhead the Zoomenon sun, a solar of pure white energy more powerful than any natural star with its endless raw fusion, flooded him with merciless light. He lay and considered his position with an ironic sense of the ridiculous that was rapidly growing old.

  He had not been to Zoomenon before. Well, that was slightly inaccurate. He had been in Zoomenon. He had simply not been to it. When he created his magic circles and excluded the world from his universe he had summoned the place to him. It had come forth and enveloped him, spawning through the fissure he was able to open up with his small aetheric abilities. To his knowledge very few mages were powerful enough in their control or adept in their understanding to create genuine transits across the realms. But under the influence of the elemental storm, possessed by the essence of his own elemental relation, he must have been carried here as the beings themselves used their massed energy to return to their home. This was their nature of course; they enjoyed flitting among the realms, even Otopia, but as with every other creature, they felt best in their natural environment and, more than most, took every chance to trip back to it. He supposed it was something of a scientific coup to have discovered their ability to transport nonelemental matter (himself) with them in this manner. But it seemed he would have no chance to share his knowledge. Zoomenon was a place of purity and nobody with any sense came here, even if they could. Of course there were expeditions . . . but these were few, even among those who dared to scavenge here. The problem of Zoomenon was that it was the least permeable realm. And what came here in complexity tended to leave as components . . .

  He got to his feet but that was horrible. The merciless glare shivered off the salt flats and glanced off outcrops of crystal. It hurt his eyes and that hurt his head and his head already hurt with the thrumming horror of the aetheric weather which seemed worse further off the ground for reasons he didn’t understand. On his hands and knees he crawled into a patch of shade. An earth elemental materialised beside him, as though it had been waiting for him to join it in its shelter. It condensed out of the aether with easy speed and sat with him upon a small stone, at his shoulder. It was a stocky humanoid with somewhat globular, muddy limbs and a potato-shaped
head, black pebbles for eyes. It smelled of rich, wet, alluvial soil. Where it touched the ground it was one with it.

  Zal didn’t speak. Elementals may take certain forms but the outer appearance was not matched by inner capacity. The best he had seen were about as intelligent and individual as cats, and with as much inclination to conversation. The worst were simply forms without reason of any kind. They did not need reason. They simply borrowed it, he understood, from millennia of elven research. But not always. They enjoyed aether. They were considered expressions of aether, as the elves were expressions of the divine will to intelligence and self-awareness; nature’s reach towards itself.

  He didn’t feel like a divine intelligence. He felt hungry, thirsty, sick, and stupid. The earth elemental grew more solid and fixed him with a curious stare from its oddly attentive eyes. Perhaps it was looking forward to the entertainment of seeing him disintegrate. Zal wondered what he would reduce to. Humans that had been found here were patches of iron-rich dust surrounded by the white crystals of a few salts—their water having evaporated by the time the expeditions arrived. Demons left behind shards of various crystalline components and many curious globules of condensed aetheric matter, and various stains like shadows upon the places they left behind. Of elven fatalities there were no records but he suspected that these had been scrupulously erased by the secret service since it was hard to believe elves had not attempted to come here and died in the grip of the conundrum that faced him. Magic could bring you to Zoomenon, but it could not take you away. Nobody knew why. They came and went with the death of their fiendishly expensive portals and if they missed their moment the curious died here and left only their own elements to mark their passing.

  “They say,” Zal decided to strike up a conversation with his new friend. “They say that the aetheric structure of this place is so tight to keep the electromagnetic problems under control that conditions don’t permit creative acts like enchanting.”