Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  “That was lucky,” Lila said without thinking.

  Malachi frowned with incomprehension.

  Lila became aware of a coldness in her chest. Tath?

  I cannot tell which of two possibilities are there, he said, calm and gentle. Either they were soul-sucked by a necromancer, or they were eaten by the shadowkin or some creature of that kind. I have seen this petit-mort often, but without a close inspection I cannot tell the cause.

  Petit mort?

  The little death. Those taken out of time are spoken of this way. To die in the body by more natural means is the grand mort.

  She handed the Berry back and turned away to find Sorcha staring at her. The servants were gone. The place was pristine. Lila felt a grim determination fill her.

  “Sorcha,” she said. “I need to go home.”

  “I . . .” began the demon.

  Lila cut her off, “If you would keep all my duel notes and just say I’m delayed, and send a No to all the proposals and business plans while I’m gone, I’d be grateful. I’ll leave you some money for the messengers and sacrifices and all the stuff you need for that. Now, I understand I have to take on the Mantle of Vengeance for Adai, and I’ll deliver the notice on that as soon as I find who did it. I believe that frees you from debt to her family.”

  Sorcha nodded, her face serious as she matched Lila’s change of mood. “I will also send out the wedding invitations.”

  Lila frowned.

  Malachi groaned as he got a grip on the facts, finally. “Of course. Li, you inadvertently caused Zal’s wife’s murder. You have to replace her with a like value.”

  “With what?” Lila asked.

  Sorcha rolled her eyes, her brief interlude of solicitious patience over. “Will y’all be wearing red or black?” she smouldered, giving off a slumberous purple vapour, her flare lit with scarlet and cerise.

  “You can decide,” Lila said, ignoring everything that wasn’t of essential importance. She had no intention of going through with a wedding. She could deal with it later however.

  “Red, then,” Sorcha said. “No sense in being half-assed about it.” She looked pleased, her tail became lofted and perky.

  Malachi seemed to have come to the same conclusion. He put the Berry in his pocket. “I will summon a taxi to take us to the port.”

  “I need this thing off my wrist,” Lila held up her shackled arm. “What can I do?”

  “Nothing.” Sorcha dismissed the notion with a wave of her hand. “I will inform them of the situation and they’ll give you Leave of Mis ericordia. Five days of free action.”

  Lila nodded at her and then said to Malachi, “Let’s go.”

  He spread his wings and lifted clear of the ground. “I will fetch a car.”

  He disappeared into the night air. Where he had stood a small pile of black coal dust blew into a ring and then glittered briefly before it faded entirely to nowhere.

  Sorcha curled her lip at it. “Cheeky creature. Still, what do you expect from cats? Marking themselves on everything. At least he didn’t piss on the plants.” She glanced up at Lila. “I don’t know what gives in your world, but if a demon did this, we pay. We always pay for our mistakes and we always keep our end of a deal. Even if we ain’t the ones making them. We take a strong view on it. You understand? Adai—I know you meant nothing there. I’m just sore is all. If you need help, send your imp. They’re a useless gaggle of crap, but they can send messages fine.”

  Lila nodded. “Mine says he’s a lord of Hell.”

  “The old ones are the best,” Sorcha shrugged. “It’ll be fine.”

  Lila guessed she didn’t mean the imp with the last line. She tried for a brave smile but didn’t make it. Sorcha snarled for a servant and instructed it to retrieve Thingamajig. Her face was deadly serious, an expression Lila had never seen on her before and hoped never to again for it was like seeing a sunny day turn to the point of a sword. She fixed Lila with a steel gaze.

  “You’re one of us now. Do as we would do, or be damned.”

  Without thinking, acting only on her feelings, Lila snarled in return, “I’m not one of you and I’ll do as I will.”

  Sorcha glared at her then laughed, “No less!” She sobered as an aircar appeared from the night, balloon swelling like a second moon in the torchlights.

  It approached rapidly, fanning all the flames to flat streaks of light with the wind from its propellers. Beneath the gasbag Malachi leaned out, one hand on the rail, the other held to Lila as they walloomed close to the terrace with a whirring and the jingle of a chain ladder being unrolled expertly into position. The ladder shone faintly and seemed feeble, but a large and capable-looking baboon swiftly swarmed down its links to the terrace rail and secured the end of it with a piece of rope cast into a knot faster than Lila’s eye could follow.

  “Hup, lady,” it said to her with some difficulty around its large yellow canines. “Be so kind. Master y’ave paid and we is hurry. Otopia Portal close in the quarter mark o’ the clock.”

  Lila, stone inside, heavy and numb, sprang up without the use of the ladder and set her foot to the deck, taking Malachi’s hand. The aircar swung heavily down at her side and dropped a few metres, slackening the ladder until it was horizontal. The baboon raised its eyebrows, loosed the knot, and leaped the gap, barrelling past both of them wth a rattle as it stowed the lines. The pilot, a monkey-headed humanoid, turned the wheel, and they moved steeply away from the Ahriman mansion. Lila turned to look back. The house looked huge from the air at this angle, as many lights as an office block, but of strange shapes that were inhuman in their setting. Coloured banners draped it, now being replaced by the white streaming trailers of mourning even as she watched. The stonework on her side moved with shadows that did not seem entirely in keeping with inert architecture.

  Malachi’s hand gripped her shoulder.

  “How long until we arrive?” she asked.

  “Otopia Portal will open to Bay City. Did you live far away?”

  “Half an hour,” she said.

  “I got my car. Twenty minutes then.”

  “I should call my sister.” She activated a line link into the Otopia Tree before she even thought about it, then cancelled the call. She’d been gone for years. What would she say?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The bone did not open its secrets. Zal sat as the sun rose and his headache grew and blew out through his lips, a sigh of defeat. The earth elemental was drying out across its back where the light fell on it and from the warmth that Zal’s fire body gave out. Periodically it would stop watching him and roll itself into a ball, then reform its little humanoid shape.

  “I think,” Zal said, “that the charm I know to open this is not the one that was used to seal it. Which, given the age, seems quite likely. Spells change. Fashions go in and out. Knowledge changes. Usually for the worse, for reasons I never got . . .” He had quite a friendly feeling towards the bone now. He’d been holding it so long. A cough interrupted his talk—a dry, itchy cough that tickled with flame. “We need a drink,” he said and looked around.

  The bone field was as dry a place as he’d seen. There were no water elementals around, in fact nothing he could detect except for himself and Mr. Head. He rubbed his head where it itched with the heat and saw several strands of hair come away on his hand. “Radiation sickness,” he said and deliberately did not open up any more knowledge about it. It wasn’t his problem. Over the pocked land, hazes of the primordial numbers appeared as clusters of light that flared for an instant and then were gone, with the fleeting speed of notion. Maybe Zoomenon had regions where certain kinds of elemental spawned and died, ecologies . . . just his luck to find something useless and abstract instead of a blazing vale of plasma. He decided he had to leave the field and move on. It was tempting to just lie down and die but that would have spoiled what interest he had left, and he had some. He got to his feet and promptly fell over.

  He was too sick to go anywhere. But he had one resour
ce, even though he was reasonably sure now that eating the long dead here was erasing their knowledge and whatever message was left in them. His shadow blood had never been strong enough to let him preserve the dead, as a true shadowkin did, taking their knowledge to his own memory. This was why the shadow had no written histories, and why the light ones trailed around libraries all their lives long, forgetting and losing important stuff. The reminder of his early years and the irritation that his unusually good memory had given to his guardians brought a smile to his face. He put his bone aside—it seemed important—and moved along the sand on his belly to another spot before closing his eyes and letting his aetheric body find what it must and sunder it to nothing. To prevent himself thinking or feeling too much about what he was doing or what Lila might be doing, and where, he worked on his song in his mind. Zoomenon didn’t really lend itself to disco. Even the beats and the melody wanted to revert to a purity of form that he’d never been drawn to before: one drum, one voice.

  He became aware of a tapping addition and looked around to the source. Mr. Head was counting time with two ribs by tapping them on a small stone, following his line. The situation struck him with its full absurdity then and he laughed soundlessly, his body shaking against the ground as the fire aether sucked on the last juice of the long murdered and started to burn hotter. Emotion filled the flames and they danced out happily across the dry field. He felt so much better suddenly, and recognised the groovy feeling of getting dosed with surprise. Close to his face he felt the soft reports of bones cracking in the sudden heat. He put his head up and opened his eyes.

  Almost half the field was on fire. Sprites of flame—the first stage of elemental formation—were coming into being above the burning bones. They were barely more than candlelights but swiftly darted down to join the conflagration to add their heat and hunger. As the blaze intensified they rose again, big as torches, and gathered in groups before plunging in again.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered. Burning all the evidence hadn’t factored in his plans. Then he saw the fire that limned his own body, his andalune demon fire. Its normal orange glow, the flare of the creative, happy-go-lucky individual, had fuelled up to an intense yellow-white burn which glowed with a steady, furnace-like blast rather than its more common tealight flicker. That explained the feeling of exaltation and furious power then. Also the niggling sensation that if it got much more potent it felt like his andalune was going to ignite and fry his brains and most of the rest of him into something crispy. Technically demon fire was an expression of energy, not a hot flame of the sort that signified combustion. It was aetheric plasma, not matter burning. But the fire elementals had complicated the whole thing out of the window and out of Zal’s, and possibly anyone’s experience. They seemed happy with aetheric plasma and electron plasma on more or less equal terms, feeding on one to the other without a flicker of shame. He could see both types out there, and both in elemental form.

  They liked his fire. A lot.

  As he stared at the destruction for an instant he felt rage and annoyance that some idiot hadn’t come here a long time ago and sorted out the technicalities of how Zoomenon actually functioned. Then he figured that they had probably tried, they just hadn’t lived long enough to get very far. On the plus side, nobody would be around to care that he had just ruined a piece of elvish prehistory that could possibly rewrite some of the currently popular histories fuelling the war. Only him, and he wouldn’t be around very long.

  The flame surge suddenly hit him with some force—in the mind. Wasn’t this how he got to Zoomenon? Ingesting elementals? Shadowkin talents plus demon affinity for fire plus an innate curiosity equalled . . . well, mostly it equalled social ostracisation and daily danger of death but in a more positive light it equalled the ability to do more than just crank up on elemental jazz like an ordinary elf. And then he remembered Lila. She had been suffering until Dar was with her. Dar was shadowkin, full blood and aether line. He had done the other shadow trick with her—the opposite of eating—feeding. A light elf could have healed her but only temporarily. A light elf could heal the flesh and living material. It would have been energised by the elementals fooling around with her metal, but it would never have been able to ingest the elemental power and spit it back out into her metal body, doing the same to flesh, fusing the two incompatible parts of her into a seamless being. Dar had transmuted her metal to a kind of living metal, one infused with the essence of metal spirits, which were aetheric in nature, alive. Just like now, when they were using that same technology no doubt to forge living weapons and cut the light elves to pieces, like the old days . . .

  While he was thinking his hair was singeing. The awful carbonising smell and the growing heat made him refocus fast.

  He did a quick calculation along the lines of eating aether from bones plus attracting fire elementals, plus eating fire elementals eating said bones, plus changing flare colour to increasingly whitened tones and yellows . . . white the colour of pure creation and yellow was transfiguration.

  Some of the new creatures were entering third generation as he watched. These shapes had humanoid elements—they were gaining conscious abilities . . . paraconscious ones anyway, it had never been too clear since they didn’t speak even in their highest forms as pure spirit avatars. Meanwhile, the flames were spreading and pulling him with them. And the bones were shattering, their aetheric information being converted to aether plasma without passing through anything like a mind first. He tried to pick some up but even before he touched them the blaze of his andalune overspill set them alight.

  Zal jerked his face around and shouted at the earth elemental that stood beside him still holding its two drumsticks, “Save the bones, Mr. Head! Save them!”

  The clay man turned its noseless and mouthless face to the pyre. It looked down at the rib sticks in its hands with expressionless consideration. Then through a wall of golden light Zal saw it roll backwards into a football-sized lump of thick clay and then go rolling off.

  “The bones!” he screamed after it, upright on his feet before he was even aware of moving. His eyes and nostrils began to hurt with the temperature of the air around him. Somehow the material and aetheric fires were getting out of hand. He had to close his eyes and focus then, drive the material burn down and away so he didn’t go up in smoke with everything else. It was a feeling, that was all, just want to do it and the andalune reacts . . . he wanted to live, he wanted the knowledge, he wanted the power. On his back he felt the flare erupt into a new kind of power as the elementals entered fourth generation. Now they wanted him. They wanted awareness. Wanted life. They dove into his andalune and out again, ripping themselves free with glee and seizing what they could of his spirit body for their own only to know, by their growing instincts for survival, that if they were going to make it they had to get enough organisation going to escape the terrible dismembering gravity of Zoomenon’s aether fields.

  In an instant of superclarity it became obvious to him that he had never been the one doing the exploiting in the elf-elemental relation. What they had always taken for a mutual attraction was interest and greed on the elf’s part and a parasitic necessity on the elemental’s. Elves had the upper hand in terms of knowledge and complexity. Elementals had the mojo. The weakened ones who survived in places like Otopia and the other realms were easy enough to subdue for a being like him, but here, where they bred and rose and where he broke up and died . . . here they were king. In another few minutes his fleeting shadow abilities would be history because they were eating him alive, mindlessly destroying in their need for a mind of their own. At the same time their power added to his own, for the length of their immersion in his aetheric body. It was glorious. He felt his wings open, bigger, broader, more powerful than they had ever been in any other region. Fire rained on him from the barren sky and from beneath the bodies added spectral heat on heat.

  He engulfed the pyre and the firestorm engulfed him and they became as one.

  Thin
gs happened in a chaos then. Zal was aware of much more going on than he was able to perceive in any way—the truth was beyond his senses. But the following things became clear, more or less in a sequence.

  He stopped burning.

  The bones began to incandesce.

  All the fire elementals of every stage rose up suddenly like a flock of birds startled. They swarmed together rapidly, motes of light and fiery blazes with rudimentary features, whirling into a vast cloud. They raced about in seething ribbons of sheeting flames that flashed through every colour of the rainbow, making a roaring sound and creating a wind that slapped up the sand and used it to scour Zal’s skin and the exposed ground, whisking through his fragile andalune and turning to glass beads in flight.

  A boulder roughly the size of a builder’s skip rolled up and came to a halt where Mr. Head used to stand. Its terracotta clay with admixed grit formed up into the shape of an android figure, somewhat larger than Zal by half a metre. Two dark eyes formed as it shed unwanted gravel from its skin. It turned and mechanically began to pick up bones from the last untouched edges of the pits. It placed the bones against its body and took them in, arm bones to arms, leg bones to legs, and so forth. It created a vast maw beneath its eyeholes and consumed half a skull. What did not burn, Mr. Head placed within himself, picking indiscriminately and without count.

  As Zal watched this in amazement that briefly won out over his other amazements, the whirligigs of fire elementals abruptly came to some decision, bunched together, and flew directly at him with the force and accuracy of a guided missile. With more will than idea he tried to move away. His wings beat and he lifted just off the ground in time to be hit midchest by the swarm. His body remained untouched, in a different dimension, but his aether body, burning, white, furious, deranged with survival instincts, instead of resisting, took them all in and ate them up.

  Zal opened his mouth to scream and with his voice a huge jet of fire spat out into the swiftly circulating air, where wind sprites were massing, attracted by their fire cousins storming and raising of the weather. The fire jet and the sonic scream, an elven expression of savagery containing all Zal’s great need to live, caught Mr. Head full force. Things went white, and then red, and then they went black. It was, Zal felt as he collapsed, a whole big elemental thing right there and happily fitting as a colourful end. He would have objected to a lack of balance and maybe the need for a few secondary powers if everything was to be considered artistically perfect, but he was already out cold before that notion had time to become a thought.