Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  Sorcha finished and closed her lips in a final silence. She and Lila sat for a while and the evening washed gently past them.

  “What did the elf do to her?” Lila asked. She could hear the subdued voices and movements from beyond the door that signified the police at work. Barges on the canals below them twinkled. Bats flitted, catching insects. The calm seemed unreal. Everything did.

  “Shadow filth are aether suckers. Best of them tap a little from a lot. Worst of them are like spiders. They inject their andalune body into someone else’s and pump in some kind of elemental poison. It liq uidises every aetheric mote. Whatever a person was, they get blended into raw aether. The elf sucks it all in, converts the aether to its own form—getting hugely powerful as a result—and leaves what you saw. Just the imprint, and the shadow. The only damn good thing is that they can’t pick up talents or knowledge. Just juice. But they get kinda strong. Wherever it went, wherever it’s hiding out, it’ll take more than an ordinary power to find it now.” She looked down at Lila’s shackle. “You plead ignorance. True enough. But you’re all they’ve got. And nobody likes a killer on the loose outside the law.”

  “I don’t suppose I get any consideration because of . . . the Hell thing?” Lila asked.

  “Nah,” Sorcha snorted. “All you humans mostly in Hell all the time. For your species, it’s not a mark of devotion.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Lila said in a quiet voice. “It’s not a place.”

  “Sure it is,” Sorcha said. “You carry it with you wherever you go.”

  “In Otopia, Hell stories say it’s somewhere you go after you’re dead, to be tortured for eternity . . . by demons . . .”

  Sorcha laughed and the night lit up with its sound, a glowing, sparkling few seconds. She thumped her own knee with the palm of one hand and coughed, “It never gets old, sweetie.” She straightened up and composed her shoulders, letting them drop, and her face returned to a stern confidence. “You look around the worlds and see who the experts in tormenting themselves are . . . where is the torturer and their shadow? Then you be out of Hell.”

  Lila took an impulsive risk, “Madame Des Loupes said she was the gateway.”

  Sorcha’s eyes narrowed and oranged. “She was Zal’s opener. Adai was of her Precepture. With Adai gone you could use an ally there. I hope she doesn’t take news of Adai’s death too literally . . . but perhaps she knew it was coming . . . and called you . . .” Sorcha looked disturbed and Lila shivered, feeling the air had become suddenly very chill though the sun was not down. The tinkly notes of a distant piano came floating up to them.

  “I like jazz at night,” Sorcha said quietly, “just don’t tell my fans.”

  “If you don’t have to be born a demon to be one, what do you have to be?” Lila asked.

  “Know thyself,” Sorcha said, and her voice took on a power and authority that pierced Lila to the bone. Even Tath felt it. “And accept all. That is the heart of a demon. And ride life like riding the wind. Seize it, love it, never let it go except for the moment when you must let it go, or else see it change into the shadow of itself, the living death of the fearful and the weak. Then abandon it without a hesitation, before you spoil. This is the essence of the divine as it is shaped into the form of demons.”

  “No selling out,” Lila murmured.

  “No selling out,” Sorcha affirmed. She rose and shook her hair back, inhaling as she drew herself up to the haughty, proud figure of the diva again. She inclined her head in a gentle movement that Lila was surprised to acknowledge as respect, walked to the door, released it, and went indoors, leaving Lila alone.

  Lila sat and looked at the soft glow of the evening. She put her head in her hands and cried.

  Dawn in Zoomenon. The sun rose swiftly, a blaze of merciless pain, refracted through the billion indices of pure crystals that grew in profusion from the sandy desert. Colour shimmered. The aether whined with torment and weather patterns began to emerge from the night’s calm as pressure zones developed in its distribution. Zal withdrew his andalune body automatically, shrinking from the cacophony, but there was no real escape.

  The light revealed that Mr. Potato Head at least had had a good night. He was the size of a pumpkin and stouter in form than before, but, as Zal groggily woke from the fevered rest he had endured to find that his meal of the dead had sustained him, the earth elemental shifted slowly and contemplatively into a little humanoid figure, with rudimentary arms and legs, a blob of a nose, and a slash of a mouth. It stood and looked around, managing to appear slightly surprised.

  Zal reckoned he must look pretty sick considering the state of decay he was fighting, but he was more surprised, he was sure of it. In front of him, as far as the eye could see—skeletons.

  This made no sense. Only pure forms could exist in Zoomenon for any length of time. Still, Zal didn’t care too much for scientific anomalies at that moment. He got to his hands and knees, crawled over the fine dust that was what remained of his dinner, and fell face-first down onto a crumbling heap of rib cages with an almost transcendental gratitude.

  He lost count of how many corpses he pillaged. The only things he was aware of were the influx of aether, the surge of elemental fire force that came after that, and the burn of resurrection that it brought. He guzzled himself stupid. And then he lay in the bottom of the hollow he had found and stared at the painless sky. He held his hands in front of his face and saw that his andalune had reemerged. Instead of the elven green he would have seen, it was yellow and orange fire. He looked as though he was burning up alive. He giggled. This was very funny. Surely he was insane and death not far away. Around him the field of bones lay stark white against the dull brown of the silicate sand. He found that he was able to see the aether residue they contained, like a kind of faint light that glowed out of them. He didn’t remember being able to do that before. He felt suspicious, and after a few minutes that seemed more interesting than death, he sat up.

  There was something tickling his back. He wormed an arm around to scratch fiercely between his shoulder blades, but before he touched skin he felt a thick, syrupy resistance and then the slightly sticky but unmistakable shape of a feather. His wings were out, unsummoned. That explained some of his optimism. His demonic self had become stronger, probably because the elementals he had absorbed were fire and it was his demon nature that bore the fire affinity. He felt better. At least, half of him did.

  He took a quick inventory and reckoned there was enough aether in the bones to keep his material forms organised enough to survive for several days. But then he began to notice more things about them; which he had not noticed before because he was too busy being grateful for their energy. They were deeply familiar. They were elf bones.

  His euphoric minute seeped away. He glanced guiltily at the earth elemental. It had settled to a slump of dull clay and regarded him steadily. “You don’t tell anyone about this and I won’t tell anyone . . . I won’t . . .” His attempt failed him. He stared back out across the battleground. No, not a battleground, he thought. There was no damage, only decay, and this strange persistence in a region that ought to have dessicated all aether to raw state long since.

  His curiosity rapidly outweighed his revulsion at his cannibalism. He studied the slopes and the shape of the bowl in the ground where most of the bones lay. It was formed from a series of circular depressions—many of them, hundreds, that had been created randomly, one on top of the other . . .

  Zal got to his feet slowly and began to walk along the edge of the field. It did not take him long to realise that the circles each contained the same number of people—always six. Where they fell across one another the bones were jumbled and piled higher, some destroyed. He began to see a history of something that made no sense to him at all. These circular dips were the imprints of powerfully cast magical circles, rings of binding and porting. All the occupants were, without exception, elven. The rings were of a diameter Zal knew from his childhood; the scale of a double
-eight cast, a charm that required sixteen equal sorcerers to make. That kind of power was rare—elf sorcerers of skill were hermits who tended to live in the deep woods, far from contact with others. Their andalune bodies were so powerful that they disrupted the natural flow of the spirit in others. They usually took voluntary exile and devoted themselves to the shepherding of plants and the practice of alchemy. The only person with authority to summon such a cast was a Lord or Lady of the First House . . . so if he knew the age of these then he would know who sent them. They puzzled him greatly, for he had never heard of anyone making so many sendings, nor calling so many circles. Casting into Zoomenon was common only among shadowkin.

  That made him think of the war. Long coming, now on, and him nowhere near it, though he had been instrumental in its making. And Dar. And other things he had not thought about since Hell.

  He heard a stamping sound and turned to find Mr. Potato Head close by, mimicking his stance almost exactly, clay hands set to clay hips, his eyeholes set to regard the worn white sticks with an intense frown shaping up above them.

  “I didn’t intend to leave the war to others,” he said to the little figure.

  The clay man simply stared.

  “This can’t be part of it.”

  Mr. Potato Head seemed uncertain about the claim. His stare beetled unwaveringly.

  “It’s too old.” But he wasn’t sure about that. The more he looked, the more it occurred to him that the ageing processes of Zoomenon could be incredibly deceptive. These could be recent. Or else they were the product of something very old, very strong, and very strange. A feeling of deep unease made him sit down where he was. He picked up the femur of a skeleton at his feet and felt its lightness. The flames on his fingers danced out over the bone. His elven abilities let him sense the energy latent in its fragile structure. Woody, almost papery, the structure held just enough power to keep it intact. It was not decaying, even though he was. Why not?

  He picked up another, then another, and found the same thing. After a time he began to remember some kind of charm he’d come across before, during his years in the Alfheim secret service. As an agent of the Jayon Daga you were expected not to let yourself give information to an enemy. In the event of capture and interrogation that could not be resisted, with no hope of escape, you committed suicide. But first you incanted your body and sealed part of it against deterioration, reforming its aether to hold the information of your imprisonment and some small part of your memory for eventual recovery by another agent . . . one who knew the unwinding spell. These bones—he could have sworn they were here only because they had been acted upon by a charm like that. But all of them? There weren’t even this many agents in the Daga entire.

  “I wonder if you can cast on someone else,” he said, consulting his assistant who continued to stare across the legions of dead. “Never thought about it. But if you knew they were going to die . . . if you knew that and you wanted to try to save their memory for a long, long time, as long as possible. You cast on bone, because it lasts longest.” He looked at the field, and it changed before him. He’d seen survival. Now he saw another kind of harvest. “You cast on them all. You’re there every time. It’s the only way you can think of to tell someone what you did. Hope they get found. Hope someone knows what they’re looking at. Has to be an agent. Not much chance. But you do them all. You want to tell someone. But you don’t stop what you’re doing. Why not?”

  The earth elemental marched stiffly to his side and sat down, absorbing its legs and becoming a lump with arms. It picked up a bone and held it like Zal did.

  “More to the point, Mr. Head,” Zal said, “why bother with such an elaborate death? If you want them dead, why not kill them an ordinary way? What’s so special about this place?” He looked at the elemental and the answer came to him as clearly as if it had spoken. “That’s right,” he said approvingly. “Because nobody comes here and if they do they never stay. Your chances of having the bodies found are about zero.” He leaned over and held his hand out to the small creature, “Welcome to the Near Zero Club, pal. Good work.”

  And then he was even more perplexed because he didn’t recall any history about large numbers of missing people. Unless . . .

  Dar was Zal’s only direct contact with shadowkin. He’d referred, once or twice in bitter moments, to some long-lost bit of shadow history called Winnowing. Zal hadn’t paid too much attention at the time. He’d been too keen on surviving training and then gathering enough strength to try and follow his own convictions. He didn’t feel any particular interest in shadow history. They were a divergent species and that was enough for him. It was difficult to manage even one friendship and keep it alive in the atmosphere of loathing that the hugely dominant diurnal Light elves maintained against Dar and his kind. History had just been one more stick that the older ones use to justify their bigoted hate, he’d thought. He couldn’t have stood adding the injustices of the past to those of the present, not and keep his focus, he daren’t, so he never studied the history of the shadow. Now he racked his brains for some clue about that elusive word—winnowing. Beating grain from chaff, it meant. Keeping the goodness and throwing the useless things to the wind. It was also a part of the harvest.

  “Ah, very wise,” he said as the earth elemental put down its bone on his knee with a look at him that seemed quizzical. “I should try to unlock it. You’re quite right.” He didn’t say that it was clear that at least one reason for casting on the bones of your victims was confession: the first step towards an absolution for a crime you couldn’t face being responsible for in reality, only in another reality, where you were already long gone—the future.

  He looked out across his field. “Time to reap, Mr. Head,” he said quietly, his voice almost lost in the soft burring sound of his fire body. He took the bone in his burning hands and closed his fingers around it. The unlocking charm was easily made, the power of the binding of structure cost the person who bound it, not the undoer. So this binder was someone of great power, that they could fix all these people into their mortal shape against the entropy of Zoomenon . . . and with that he wondered what it was hiding in his hands. More than information?

  He had no urge to continue. He sat there for some time, contemplating the kinds of things you could stick into a whole skeleton, and he didn’t like the idea too much. He couldn’t have done it himself, but he was reasonably sure you could reposition a spirit body into their frame. If you were really good. If you were incredibly strong. He’d come across it when Ilyatath had Crossed Over. It was part of the necromancer’s bind, the way they anchored their spirit selves to their physical body when they chose to voyage in time.

  There had not been a necromancer First Lord in Alfheim since times before humans had walked across their world. If this was the case, then these bones were more than old. They were ancient; prehistoric.

  “Mr. Head,” Zal said uneasily, remembering standing guard over Ilya’s body long ago when he, Zal, was still playing the loyal pack animal, knowing that he could sunder the elf forever from the material planes with a single spoken charm. It had been his job to do so, Arië had instructed him, in case Ilya came back wrong. Necromancy was a chancy art. The best-trained adepts often went astray at the first voyage.

  He’d never have said it, but he felt it come quickly to his mouth now: a sound, a call, a word that must be obeyed.

  He turned to the earth elemental and said, wishing it were a longer line, “I’m going for a little journey. I may be some time.”

  What did he have to lose? He could only die here with them. He had hours left at best. Nobody came to Zoomenon. Nobody left. So, what else to do but dance?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lila?

  She knew it was Tath, and Tath never used her name, so it was important.

  She took her head out of her hands and savagely wiped her face on the backs of them. The synthetic skin felt a bit rubbery suddenly, and too cold. “Fuck,” she said and cast about fo
r anything to dry her eyes on, but aside from ripping a few leaves off the nearest ornamental bush there was nothing. She yanked up her military vest and used the hem. “What?”

  Little feet with claws on pattered on the bench next to her. It was a green imp, larger and fatter than the one she was used to and it looked at her with a contemplative greed. “Piss off,” she said, but it only sidled closer and reached out towards her with a clammy paw.

  There was a pain in her ear and she felt Thingamajig suddenly explode, his voice shrill with atavistic, possessive passion, “Get off my . . .”

  The green imp exploded. Bits of it splattered across the bench, the floor, and the pretty flowers. Lila looked at the gun that had assembled itself over her right hand and gently relaxed the fingers. The gun took itself apart and placed itself back into storage in her forearm. Her skin molded itself over the metal and carbon surfaces. It looked like putty. She curled her lip and flexed her fingers.

  There was, she felt, a stunned silence from her shoulder, where a light weight swayed gently. “I want to be alone,” she said.

  “Yeah,” the imp said. “I know. I was gonna go get you a pack of wetwipes. Be right back. Shops are all open late . . .” It hopped down and scampered over the balcony rail hastily, soon lost to sight in the growing dusk.

  “Don’t bother,” Lila said to the empty space. She slid sideways, away from the worst of the mess, and then looked at her hands again. She made guns. She made grenade launchers. She made fists with spikes and fists with razors. She made hands that were almost but not quite right.

  Lila.

  “I know,” she said. “Tell me something, Tath.”