He woke up with the mother of all headaches and a pain in his spine so severe he thought he must have broken it. He tried hard to be unconscious again, but it wasn’t working. He also felt sick and there seemed to be a lot of minor pains like burning sand and rocks around so he figured he was still in Zoomenon. A big grin spread across his face. Not dead. Result! Then he threw up.
“Mr. Head,” he whimpered into the ground when he was done, “this is all very instructive stuff, but I have to confess a certain boredom in the dying scenario. It’s getting to operatic proportions.” He looked up. The dimpled ground was free of bones. It was free of everything. The air was stagnant and flat. He racked his brains but no new memories of anything prehistoric were in his head. The pain made him lie flat a while until the sensation of being burned by the sun got too much. The ground was a desert.
Zal thumped a fist weakly on the ground, “Drinks! Shady palms! Overpriced hotels and malls full of air conditioners. That’s what this place needs!”
A cool stripe fell across him. He felt a slight shudder. Then, from nowhere, a trickle of water splattered down onto the back of his neck.
With great difficulty he rolled over. A twelve-foot-tall terracotta elf with the physical dimensions of a brick outhouse was standing over him with its arm extended, hand in a fist. The water was running out of the fist. Zal watched drops land on his chest. He was naked. He had no andalune at all and panicked for a moment until he tried reaching out to the aether and saw a yellow-green flame lick from the tips of his fingers. The pain was receding in his back. He was glad. He worshipped whatever caused that to happen, put his hands under the silty trickle, cupped them, and then drank.
After a short while he felt much better. Then he could look up at the enormous figure and move more comfortably into its sizeable shadow. Shading his eyes against the glare of the light he got a better look at it.
“Mr. Head,” he said. “Why, I do believe you’ve . . . evolved.”
The golem creature released its hand and the water stream dried up. It looked like shadowkin, if they had been into bodybuilding in a major way and made out of malleable wet clays. It even had hair, but that moved in hefty blocks as it flowed around its massive shoulders. It was naked, as he was, but had no sex organs or genital openings at all, just a smooth shape, like a plastic action doll. Otherwise the detailing was superb. Its eyes were long and slanted. They even blinked though they were not wet. But their centres were dark hearts of emptiness. Very deep. As Zal looked at them he thought they reached into a blackness that was more than just a shadow and, in spite of his heat and discomfort, he shivered.
Mr. Head put his arm down and shifted with colossal slowness on his thick feet. His ears, backswept and much longer than usual, were not the narrow tipped ones like Dar’s, but flatter and thinner with ragged edges. They were wedge shaped and got wider the further they reached from his head, like the vanes of a demon pleasure boat. Close to the head they were pierced many times and hung with rings. Not a fashion Zal had seen on any elf other than ones in museum paintings.
“Can you speak?”
Mr. Head opened his mouth as if for a dental examination and out of it came voices. There were many of them, female and male, all elven but not speaking any language Zal was overfamiliar with and so many at once it was both deafening and crowded out. They were all frightened and desperate sounding. They made Zal’s flesh crawl.
“Very good. Enough for now,” he said supportively and gave Mr. Head what he hoped was a grin. “Welcome to the world of the semi-conscious. Give me a hand.”
The golem closed its mouth and there was a blissful silence. Zal held up a hand. The creature reached down and took hold. Its skin was dry and leathery and much more flexible than Zal had thought. It felt like—it felt exactly like an old fired earthenware pot. It lifted him up without effort and then stared down at their hands. It let go. Zal was relieved but attempted not to show it.
“I don’t suppose you have any special powers of the ancestors about you?” he asked hopefully. “We’re still going to die here in a few hours, miraculous rebirths from elemental fusion notwithstanding.”
Mr. Head lifted one gargantuan arm and pointed with a finger. His resolute, immobile face followed that direction. Then he returned to his akimbo stance—waiting, apparently with the patience of a rock, for Zal to decide what to do.
“That way?” Zal looked. It looked like every other way. “Good. You must know your way around. Better than me anyway. You go first. Then I can walk in your shadow.”
Mr. Head took a step forward with a purpose and impetus that reminded Zal of something . . .
“My girlfriend—fabulous woman—walks like that,” he said, stepping into line behind it and trying not to notice the muscular action apparently going on in the granite-style buttocks in front of him. “Well, I say like that . . . no, actually, just like that. She has buns of steel. Really. And the same kind of . . . unstoppable mechanoid ever-ready action. I thought was all down to well-lubed pistons but now I’m not so sure maybe it’s a strength-to-weight thing. Yes. That’d explain it. I used to worry she’d crush me but as it turns out she’s so strong she can move as if she’s as light as a feather as long as some bit of her is in contact with the furniture. Bit expensive on the furniture, mind you. Next time I should call ahead and get some reinforced pieces in, though the bed was all right once all the legs had broken and it was flat on the floor. Hotel were very understanding but then, Jelly paid for it so it was fine.
“You will stop me if I get boring, won’t you? Only, I like to talk when I’m feeling anxious and the whole being-lost-and-near-death business has got me a bit rattled. Usually I keep it all under control—you can’t cry in a war and all that—but seeing as it’s only you and me left alive out here I don’t think the old agency will mind me showing my elvish side and I’m kind of hoping that if I just go on long enough maybe just maybe you will learn to speak something I can understand, Friday. Because you have elf ears, sort of.”
Mr. Head plodded onwards without reacting.
“Or not,” Zal added, saving his breath for the walk, which was looking like it might be a long one. The horizon they were headed to seemed as flat as an absolute straight line. “Friday Head. If anyone asks. That’s your name,” he said then. “Mr. F Head. Or . . . Mr. Head anyway. I wonder what you are.” And he did wonder, all the way to the crack in the desert from which nothing radiated, or shone. Mr. Head stopped before it.
“Faultline,” Zal said looking at the matte un-ness of the Void. “Akashic region opening. Very . . . dangerous. Very . . . in betweeny. Very universal instability.”
The giant clay elf stood like a statue. Occasionally it blinked.
“If I were a faery,” Zal said, patting the massive arm next to him consolingly, “that could be really helpful.”
Mr. Head leaned over and stared into the Void. There was nothing to see. It wasn’t a thing you could see. It was a wasn’t. Zal knew you crossed it when you opened portals, but that was less of a crossing than a pulling of two worlds together until you could punch a hole for an instant. You didn’t go over the Void, or through it as such. Necromancers did, to reach Thanatopia. Fey did, during their own moments of unstitching when they shifted form or universe, but he had no idea how it worked. And Brinkmen wandered in the depthless, beginning-less, endless nothing without losing themselves—an arcane twist of fate that, one that was a mystery to all, even those who had the trick. From the Void came the ghosts. From the Void came raw aether, so the demon scientists claimed, and from the Void came wild aether, manifesting into Alfheim in ever greater abundance, to the dismay of all his kind. What is not mastered lies in wait . . . isn’t that what those ancient elves used to say?
Mr. Head pointed at the crack with a firm decision.
“We can’t,” Zal said, leaning back larily. “For you and me there’s no trifling with That Which Cannot Be Spoken. Speakers, elves. Singers. We talk the world, and what you can’t say yo
u no can do. Portals. We persuade stuff to come together. We don’t do immersions and crossings and trips in the Unmentionable. Even demons don’t do that . . .” He trailed off, not convinced by his own presentation. He had been brought here, and not through a portal. “Maybe you can. But I can’t.”
Mr. Head remade his gesture. He reached out and took hold of Zal’s forearm in a grip that had all the negotiability of time itself.
“Listen,” Zal said quickly, “I know you’re new to the world of ideas in general and this may be your first and a very good effort it is too but I have to tell you as an elf of the world that you are mistaken if you think that just because we’re friends and you like me so much that you can pull me with you somewhere I can’t actually go without . . .”
Mr. Head opened his mouth and the thousand Shadow voices spoke at once in their ancient tongue. Zal understood one phrase though . . . out of the million words . . . because they all said it together and he knew it, a name really . . .
“Abida Ereba.”
In modern Alfheim it was blasphemous to utter the names of primordial powers. Especially that one. To call something of which you were not the master was always a very, very dangerous business and in the long list of things that most elves never mastered Abida Ereba was pretty close to number one. If there had been a fight between Abida Ereba and the Void itself, Zal would have given even odds but he’d put his money on the name.
He didn’t want to be the biggest wimp in the universe, so when Mr. Head put out his foot to jump in Zal copied him and made it look like he wanted to go even though he’d have cut his own arm off not to go.
If you pretended you did, maybe it would seem better, and if you had to go, then you should set out like you meant it.
He was still the one screaming at the top of his lungs though, as they dropped out of the world and into the uncontrollable, unknowable, and ineffable. He tried to make it sound like the roar of the warrior and in the second or two in which there was still air, and therefore sound, he felt reasonably pleased with the attempt.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lila’s hair blew in the wind and battered at the sides of her unnecessary sunglasses. She’d always wondered why your hair blew forwards if you were in a convertible and Malachi’s vintage ’65 Eldorado was no exception. Now she could know why, complete with a detailed moving graphic of airflow dynamics, almost as soon as she could wonder. She was glad she’d turned off the AI. It spoiled things indefinably—too much information when the interesting part was the experience, and not the explanation . . . She sipped from their shared Diet Coke and rattled the ice as Malachi took the huge boat of a vehicle up to a stately sixty on the autoroute. There was nothing technological about the car. It was like a kid’s toy, all huge steering wheel and big numbers with plastic indicator needles. She liked it more than she could say, and it had a ride like a sofa lost at sea, made worse by her uneven loading of its suspension. Above the wind noise the sound of Malachi’s favourite girly-funk tracks on the stereo were almost lost.
“We’re going to my place first,” she’d said. He hadn’t baulked, just turned the car out of the office lot and taken the bay road instead of the bridge. He knew her address. Driving there was a lot like it used to be, she thought. They could have been cruising back for pizza and movies after another long day training. She pretended it was so and ignored the throbbing pain in her ear and the green density in her chest as if they were the results of a minor accident.
The Eldorado, pearly green and shiny, dwarfed pretty much every other neat and zippy little personal car on the highway. Lila felt herself whale riding, moving in a world set to a different kind of scale and speed. The car turned into her driveway with a head-rocking shimmy as it met and danced over the curb, then silently stopped before the main door. The sprinklers were out on the apartments’ grass, fanning the green with diamonds. Lila got out of the creaking leather seat and turned to face Mal.
“I’m just gonna get a few things. I won’t be long.”
“Want me to wait here?” Meaning, did she want him along as wing support.
“Nah. I’m good,” she said, lying with a clear conscience. “Be a few minutes.”
He nodded like he was supposed to and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as Pink sang shocked about the state of people’s hearts. “. . . they knew better, still you said forever . . .”
Lila’s building let her in with a near silent click of the lock. Inside the atrium it was cool and perfumed. A faery mistlamp gave off the comforting smells of home. She ignored the waiting lift—at this time of day most of the people here were at work except Mary the escort, who was at work too, only usually at home. Up one floor and turn to the back garden view, past the public patio terrace with its maintained barbecue and serviced jardinette, its fragrant flowers, its executive vistas across the Lower Bay and Steamboat Pool. Government stipends paid for a lot, at least they did if you were a hotshot experimental cyborg who had to be compensated for the loss of a lifetime.
Her door was the second on the right. She didn’t feel a thing as she opened it up. The only hint that something was wrong was the way that the air felt as the door moved in, like it pushed a little against her because it was already moving into the rooms from another place. She felt the guns in her hands open up and arm. They were a little noisier, or was it her imagination? They were a little slower.
Over the scent of baking biscuits, cinnamon, and ocean came the slightest tang of lemons. Wild magic, and its bearer, looking for trouble.
Allow me.
Tath spilled from her skin with the ease of a lover falling out of warm sheets. Lila was uneasily comforted by his familiarity and strength as he clothed her in his aetheric body and his glamour and she shrank within, the hidden iron hand inside the velvet glove. For some reason she wanted to cry.
Tath’s senses were better suited by far. In an instant he was relaxed with the aura of a fighter who knows it’s only a second away. He withdrew once he had discovered the facts and animated her from the centre, her trusted puppeteer for those moments where she was out of her aetheric depth. She wanted to hug him.
Aloud he had her mouth speak his voice, “Come out. Nobody’s playing and I see you already.” With her legs he strode into the living room.
A dark shape, like a curled giant cat, undid itself from the Persian rug and stretched out. Its colour shifted as it moved in a bewildering change of purples and lilacs, blue and white. Besides the colour the shape altered too. As it rose it showed long tail and wings unfurling, long neck and horsy head with fans, big eyes, long arms, hugely powerful body naked and shining with natural sheen. And then, as it straightened on two legs, it became much more like a man, absorbing all its natural demonic form and smoothly morphing into a handsome, slim-hipped white guy in his early twenties, silver haired and blue eyed and wearing pale blue clothes that came out of nowhere, wrapping themselves around him in strips of cloth like lovers’ arms which became the fabric of a beautifully cut shirt and trousers.
Tath handed back, the perfect tag-team buddy. Lila lowered her guns. “Teazle?”
The young man bowed his head a fraction, amusement giving him an endearing monkeyish grin. “Clearly you expected someone else.” He glanced at her guns.
She put them away and flexed her hands, feeling a moment’s pain in her shoulder, but it was gone almost before she knew it. “I expected to find my house like I left it. Cut to the chase. I have to leave.” She would have been pleased to see him, even as an intruder, at some other moment, she was surprised to realise, but now she didn’t have the inclination. She walked past him to her bedroom and opened up the wardrobe, looking for something she could wear that wasn’t military issue and that would cover her up from neck to ankles. Everything in it looked strangely foreign, like they were someone else’s. With annoyance she began to fling things onto the bed.
Teazle followed her, his presence like a vibration on the end of her nerves, but what sort of vibration she wasn
’t sure. Right now it felt like irritation.
“I’m here to give you service,” he said without a trace of humour.
Lila snorted, throwing a bizarre ginger-toned two-piece suit out with astonishment she had ever thought it was suitable for anything. She used to wear it to business meetings. The idea made her shudder now, the idea of all those serious faces, telling her how it had to be and what she was to do, how she was going to live—all worked out. And she would be there nodding seriously too, taking it all in and inside she’d feel like she was dying out and hoped it didn’t show in case they thought she was too weak. “I don’t need it.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “And even if you didn’t I have to give it to you because I gave you the shadowkin.”
“I could have given it back,” she said.
“But y’didn’t. And it was no fair gift. It was a test.”
“Nice,” she said. “And I failed. Not your problem.”
“I failed,” he said. “So, I’ll take all this down to the garbage and then . . .”
Lila spun around and spat, “Get this through your thick head. I don’t want you, in any way. Not now and not ever. You’re free. I absolve you. Get lost and play your sick jokes on someone who gives a shit.”
His eyes widened and his mild expression altered to one of interest. “No. I know the demon that hunts you and I know the shadow that stalks you. You need me. And you are Hellbound. The journey is sacred to us. Pilgrims will be looked after on the way. And I am champion of Demonia and what I say I do, I do. Here.” He held out his hand and slithering from his fingers, as if from the sleeve of a conjuror, a fall of dark blue cloth.
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