Dar’s devastation became more plausible.
There was something else too—about Tath’s magic—but she lost that as her scream came to an end. The external world came rushing in. She found herself upright but no longer standing. Dar was below her and she was aloft in a maelstrom of air currents that held her suspended several metres above the ground close to the cavern roof.
Tath separated out from her as Lila was turned slowly upside down. Give me control if you wish to live and have a chance of saving Zal, he pleaded from the leaf-green place inside her chest. There is no time for explanations. The elemental knows that we are not what we seem.
The air that held them up began to swirl and eddy. It spun Lila around. Tiny zephyr slivers ran under the tips of her nails and darted down through her mouth in between her teeth and gums. It felt like needles. Lila fought it, trying to bat it away, to rub it out, to fight free, but her thrashing made no difference whatsoever. The air would have its way.
Lila gave control to Tath. She felt blown apart, like there was nothing in the centre of her except the strange concentration of his green energy. Tath bloomed outwards as the gyre of wind that held her up began to spin her around in a circle, building velocity steadily. She had only the vaguest awareness of Dar below her, the stone whistle in his hand.
Tath-in-Lila was as agile as her Al-self, but with an instinctive biological grace she’d never had. Lila felt her arms and legs moved, drawn into a shape that was sympathetic to the currents as they shifted around. Where she’d fought the wind, Tath flowed with it and almost immediately the worst of the turbulence stopped. Belatedly, Lila realised this must be the way to talk to the air. Tath opened her mouth and spread her fingers. The air rushed into her lungs and out again, it drew her along with it and held her up. The gyration slowed down steadily, becoming a lazy swirl. The needlepoints had gone. Only temperate currents ran against her skin and through her hair. They penetrated Tath’s outer shell and felt their way along Lila’s magical stain, along her face, everywhere on her body that flesh was marked for ever by charm and bonded to metal.
Are you going to cast a spell? Did you? Lila asked Tath as they were gently lowered.
I know none that can hold the wind, he said. Only Dar’s whistle has that power, and then, it is not so great a power. The elementals are charmed by who they will, and there is no magic, even wild magic, that can command tthm against their inclination. Mere magical circles and barriers are insufficient. Air is the most curious of all the elements. This individual is in chosen service to the Lady of the Lake. Now we must wait and see if it is satisfied to let us pass. He hesitated a moment. Is that really a nuclear reactor?
Yes, Lila said as Tath unobtrusively handed her back her body, only his andalune glamour remaining unfolded within her. She lowered the reactor’s capacity to normal levels and saw the last of the yellow alert icons blink out.
Lila felt her feet touch the ground. She became heavier, then her full weight was down and the curtains of air were withdrawing, rushing around Dar one more time before calming to almost nothing. She was about to speak and apologise, but Dar wouldn’t meet her eye. He looked strangely chastened and then he turned.
“Time runs short,” he said.
Lila glanced back. The walls and roof of the cavern seemed closer than they had before. In fact, it was less than half as big as it had been when they crossed the stones. As she looked back at the Hall of Fire the other open mouths of the tunnels narrowed, closing. “Do they go anywhere?”
“I don’t know. I have little hope of that,” he said. He looked down at the whistle in his hand and then dropped it on the ground. “Perhaps this will buy some time. What power I do have I will give back now,” he said to the air, and then stepped on the delicate thing. There was a crunching sound as he crushed it completely with his foot.
Lila didn’t need Tath’s dismay to tell her what a sacrifice that was. She felt Dar’s andalune body touch her fingertips briefly, unconsciously, for he retreated a step when he noticed it himself. Around them the quiet breezes died away entirely. The walls and roof drew closer in a smooth, silent drift that would have seemed gentle in other circumstances. They walked closer to the Fire Hall’s gate, as close as they could go and not risk accidentally crossing it. The Water gate came sliding towards them. The roof paused its descent as it reached the height of both portals, leaving them a few centimetres of clearance.
“Did this happen before?” she asked.
“No,” Dar said. “We are out of luck.”
“There has to be a way out.”
“The only way is through the Hall of Fire, but the air will have told the fire that we are untrustworthy and we will not make it through there. I am sorry I did not get you further.”
Lila took hold of Dar’s jacket with both hands, pulled him close and kissed him on the mouth. His lips were cold. The walls drifted in, world shrinking. No air moved. Dar drew back and they shared a look that didn’t require words for communication. If this was it, then neither of them wanted to leave without doing something.
Lila contemplated nuking Alfheim’s most sacred spot, envisaged the mushroom cloud, the devastation, the destabilising effect on the inter-dimensional sheet, the shocking, complete sundering of the worlds.
Dar’s hands slid around her head as she felt rock against her back. He put his head beside hers as the closing space pressed them together, gently at first, then with a terrible authority. Lila’s Al-self ran through a thousand attempts at escape, none working. Dar’s heavy hair brushed against her cheek and pieces of metal began to bite their way into her ribs. She knew that she would be the last thing to break, or burn. She kissed Dar’s ear as the breath was pressed out of them and the Water Gate arrived and began to slowly push them up to the Fire Hall’s waiting maw.
She put her arm outside Dar’s, her leg outside his. Her sleeve went through first and caught immediately. The pain was indescribable. She couldn’t help but tense against the tall elf body. “Hold your breath and close your eyes,” she said feeling the strain in his body as his bones began to suffer badly under load. Her arm was burning, skin and synthetics in a conflagration but the temperatures weren’t yet high enough to spoil the action of her right arm gun system.
The outside edge of her foot passed the barrier but she had no real flesh there so it was only Tath’s boot blazing for now. When it got hot enough steel was a fuel, and in pure oxygen it would continue to burn until it was nothing but iron oxide, but that wasn’t going to happen. Lila configured the grenade shells in her arm for maximum burn and thrust her whole forearm suddenly through the shield. It caught with an explosion that incinerated her nerves and superficial transmission systems so fast that she felt almost nothing, but the gun assembled itself and discharged the full round into the hall as she used her considerable physical strength to keep Dar and herself from going through the invisible circle.
Her gamble paid off. The grenades went off about halfway down the tube in a glory of blue and white fire which flashed out instantly, filling the entire hall with a conflagration so extreme that the rock wall began to glow and melt. But the magical barrier prevented it burning them.
Dar groaned in pain.
“Press your hand over your eyes!” Lila commanded and felt his pelvis against her metal one starting to crack and one of the ribs she’d healed before broke again as she pulled free, dragging him with her into the Fire Hall and through the few seconds of near total vacuum and searing heat that was all that remained. The grenades had consumed the oxygen and rendered it into part of their crumbling pale ash and molten slag. The pain of the heat and the pain of near-explosion in the vacuum vied with each other.
Lila hadn’t given any thought to whatever was at the end of fire. The oxygen level was rising fast as they ran, their boot soles burning, hair smouldering, skin scalded by the heat radiating from the walls. She put on a spurt of speed. Dar couldn’t keep up with her, so she turned and lifted him, as she’d lifted Zal, throwing
him across her shoulder in a fireman’s lift, hurting him no doubt as the shear forces in both their bodies racked up terrible loads. She felt pieces of her tearing free of other pieces, but it was minor damage. At the same time Dar and Tath’s combined aethereal bodies provided a kind of barrier against the rising oxygen concentration.
The rock surface slid under her disintegrating boots and then hardened, mercifully, but the temperature was so extreme that the oxygen didn’t have to build up to its previous levels. Though the vacuum was gone now things wanted to ignite readily. Lila felt Dar’s clothes starting to catch light under her remaining good hand. She set her jaw and put all the power to her legs, making the last ten metres in a single leap which found them both alight as they fell through the empty rock ring and landed sprawling and gasping on the unyielding cool of a jade floor.
The floor dropped them. Lila found herself plunging into cold water. Still holding Dar she kicked strongly, but the weight of all her metal was making her sink. She couldn’t swim with only one arm. Then she felt Dar’s hands pulling her up, saw silver bubbles dashing past her, moving down. Abruptly several more pairs of elfin hands, came and hauled them both out of the lake water and, as they drew level with the floor, the water itself seemed to solidify, becoming the jade that had caught them before. It lifted Lila clear.
“Tath?” said a voice Lila didn’t recognise. She dashed water from her eyes, struggling to get to her feet. Tath’s spirit body and this other’s were in contact.
Astar, Tath informed her with sadness. It was someone he missed.
“Astar,” Lila made herself say though she could hardly see for the pain in her arm. But Tath’s glamour covered this. She didn’t even look particularly singed.
“What an entrance, My Lord,” said Astar’s soft, feminine voice. Lila looked up at the person helping her stand and saw an elf woman with black hair that curled and coiled around her shoulders in waves of night. A single diamond shone from a silver circle on her brow and beneath that her eyes were more than a little concerned—not for Tath’s health either, Lila thought, and her suspicion was confirmed as she heard another woman’s voice, this one even softer and more melodious than Astar’s.
“Tath and Dar, who would think to find you lacking in elemental kudos? There were days you would have danced to my door.”
Lila jerked her hands back from Astar’s gentle assistance before the other had time to feel a difference and straightened up, fighting to stand. “I have spent too long across the Void in Thanatopia,” she said, hoping this would be a good excuse to explain the situation. “Some changes are… inevitable.” She glanced quickly at Dar, who had also gained his feet though he looked both burned and drowned. Two strong male elves were on either side of him at a fastidious distance. Both of them were supremely well groomed and beautiful in that way that set Lila’s teeth on edge; they reminded her of salesmen. Thankfully none of them looked like Zal.
Then Lila turned to see Arie.
The Lady of Aparastil had eyes of the most intense grass green. They shone from within as though they were made of stained glass and were set before a gleaming morning sun. Her face was the pale cream white of fine porcelain framed by a waterfall of coiling amber hair. A circlet of silver sat around the Lady’s temple, and her ears were set close and elegant alongside her head, at a neutral angle. She wore watery, aqua robes of surprising practicality—Lila had expected dresses but Arie favoured britches, boots and strong, forest-suited gear, all of which she made look infinitely more lovely than any piece of couture. Delicate silver leaves that twinkled threaded here and there through the fabrics and across the leather, so it looked as though she had been dressed by the forest, spiders her tailors. Her features were of a different cast to Dar’s, the ones that Lila had grown used to looking at. Once all elves would have looked identical, but Lila recognised the High look now she saw it again—Zal’s look. But before she could think on it she was staring up around them, at the room in which they stood—the Lady’s Hall.
They were in a bubble beneath the lake. The walls and floor, the roof itself were made of water, water held aside by magic and charmed into the soft arches and parabolas of elfin architecture. The light that lit the place was sunlight, though Lila thought it must be channelled from the surface because her readings told her that there was about a fifth of a kilometre of lake water over their heads. Great thick stems of lily and giant water hyacinth rose beside them out of the dark green gloom. And below—the floor that Lila had taken for jade was simply water that refused to let them through its surface. She was amazed, trying to consider what possible conditions existed on that surface to permit her to stand on it and wondering how aetherial manipulation could create such a thing. For a moment she was struck totally dumb.
But Dar was far from being so impressed. He shook himself off, grimacing with the effort of concealing his wounds, and bowed deeply to Arie. “My Lady of Aparastil, I am your servant. Tath’s glamour is but a trick. He was slain in Sathanor and his ghost inhabits the human against his will. It was a necessary evil I had to permit in the name of achieving delivery of your prize, Agent Lila Black.”
Lila felt her jaw actually fall open. She was speechless with shock, aware only of Tath’s amusement inside her skin. “You treacherous fuck,” she said to Dar, in Tath’s voice.
Do not be so upset, Tath said to her. The Lady would see through me eventually and though there are few Elfin necromancers in all there are none who use flashbombs. A grudging admiration seemed to spread across the inside of her chest as he said this and Lila got the impression that Tath had rather liked the gun. This is the only way for one of you to remain at liberty here, and Dar is no good friend of Arie’s, which she well knows. She will be far from happy, Whatever her demeanour. Trust me. And whatever happens do not release me from the glamour. If she sees you her reaction will be less than kind. She knows only that you are human, not that you are a machine.
“Trust you!” Lila said aloud, only realising that she’d spoken when all eyes turned to her.
Tath reminded her about the daisy. She recalled her insight—even under the dulled effect of the Nirvana shunt—that he was an ally of Dar’s. That he must be opposed to Arie. She had no idea whether or not she ought to trust either of them. No, she had a perfectly good idea that she definitely shouldn’t, but there was no choice for the time being. She quickly covered up her slip…
“Trust you.” she said, slightly differently, stabbing her good finger out at Dar. “I don’t know whatever made me believe that I could trust you!”
Dar drew himself up to his full height and did a very good impression of haughty superiority. Lila couldn’t help flinching back—he looked exactly as he had in the instant before he had almost killed her. If she hadn’t had Tath’s insistence she would have counted herself completely betrayed. She was awed by his ability to dissemble, if that’s what it was. She wasn’t sure.
“Tath!” exclaimed Astar softly from behind Lila’s shoulder. Lila could hear tears in the voice.
“It is most unseemly to wear your victim as a disguise,” Arte said, although she could have been reading poetry for all the alteration in temper she showed. “Do us all the honour of releasing our friend from the hold of his name and we will look less unkindly upon your plea for fair trial after you also release his spirit to our care.”
Lila ran through scenarios in her mind, implicating Dar, not implicating Dar—she didn’t have time to play them through. Her arm and portions of her back hurt fiercely and she released as large a dose of cocodamol into her bloodstream as she dared.
As you love Zal, do not give Arie anything now, Tath said.
Sure you’re not just pleading for your own life? Lila shot back as the silence grew in expectancy within the lake hall. Aloud she said, “My hostage remains as he is. If you want him back then you can arrange safe passage for me to Otopia.”
“So bold,” Arie said, moving closer. She placed her hand on the pommel of a sword that hung bes
ide her hip then drew the blade from its scabbard and held the tip out, placing it precisely in the notch between Lila’s collarbones at the base of her throat. “Yet I can kill you now. I have no use for you. In fact you represent a considerable danger. Why should I let you live?”
Lila used her good left hand and took hold of the sword point between her forefinger and thumb. She began to move it aside. “Because if you do then your beloved Tath dies with me on the spot.” She felt Arie resisting her actions quite firmly but that the elf would not exert enough force to show that she was actually losing to Lila’s insistence as Lila forced the weapon tip away from herself. The edge of the blade altered subtly as Lila continued. She felt it grow harder and sharper until it was like a razor and marvelled at the speed and ease with which the substance changed to the elf’s will. It turned and cut through the remains of her burned fingers right to the transformed alloy of her bones, but even so it was no match for Lila’s brute strength. Blood dripped freely down onto the jade floor and ran back along his blade, over the ornamental guard and onto Arie’s fingers as Lila pushed it away to arm’s length.
Lila heard a satisfying and astounded gasp from the collected audience ringing them and turned her head to look at Dar. His lips parted and one side twitched upward for a moment. Then she looked back at the Lady. Although they both appeared to hold the weapon lightly there was a great deal of force running through it in both directions. Lila glanced into Arie’s eyes and wanted so much to destroy the cool hauteur there. With a small movement of her finger she bent the sword point to a ninety degree angle.
There was a moment that Lila felt was adequately interpreted as a pause for thought. Tath was a cold pleasure in her heart, enjoying every minute.
Arie released her effort and Lila let go. The Lady watched the blood running over her own knuckles like a cat watching a mouse and then handed the sword aside to the elf at her shoulder—another of those big Nordic blond types, all angular features and disapproval. Lila ignored him.
Keeping It Real Page 24
