“There are magics,” Arie said in the light, conversational tone in which true hatred is best delivered, “which Tath will know of, that are useful in dislodging the possessed. They would be hard to endure.”
Lila felt Tath shudder eloquently. Now you tell me!
“Perhaps you would be so kind as to await our decision elsewhere,” the Lady continued. Her Nordic type and another who might have been his brother stepped quickly to either side of Lila. Lila looked back. The elf Astar had her face in her hands but she looked up now,
“I would speak with Tath,” she cried. “My Lady, let me talk with him and perhaps I will be able to decipher some knowledge to our advantage or persuade this human to mercy.”
“You may have half an hour,” Arie told her kindly. “For that is the time it will take me to make preparations for his extraction.”
The elves took hold of Lila’s arms, flexing their hands uncomfortably against Tath’s glamour, feeling him in spite of the fact they suspected something different underneath.
You’ll never know how different, I hope, Lila thought She struggled and twisted so that, as Arie addressed Dar, Lila could spit in his face with all the conviction of the fear that she’d been holding back. One thing Lila was confident above all else in—she was a good shot. She hit him square in the eye. Dar’s return glance, blinking, held all the condensed loathing she was pretty sure he could genuinely feel. Then Lila let herself be taken away.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Zal lay on the floor of his cell, singing a little because he could think of nothing else to do. From time to time he heard Arie’s voice. She would just say the name of someone he knew and for a moment his memory would fill in one of those blank places at the court with a familiar image. He guessed she meant him to realise that she was listing the people he had condemned with his silence, maybe mentioning them as she punished them. Or he was meant to think so.
He was reasonably sure that Lila was in Aparastil. It was just a feeling but in Alfheim feelings were unusually trustworthy about this kind of thing. Aether was everywhere and it transmitted information instantly, even faster than the Otopians’ electromagnetic waves. He wondered how she had got here, and how long she would last. He sighed as he thought about the reception she would receive.
He thought about the songs he had been going to write and the hope that the charm in the music and the words could effect some kind of shift in awareness among a wider population towards a new kind of openness between the races… it seemed very silly to him now. Trying it in Otopia of all places where the humans had so little use for other ways of seeing the world was manifestly dumb. He should have stayed in Demonia where they were open to ideas—too open, but open nonetheless…
He realised he was singing “A Hard Day’s Night” and stopped with his mouth ajar. Thinking about Lila was why. He wished she was there in the room. He wished he hadn’t lost her jacket and his bruised arms ached.
Of course he could not have stayed in Demonia, doing nothing. Aggravating Alfheim’s wavering would-be radicals by pissing them off with music and cavorting in Otopia was exactly the thing to do in the circumstances ...
Way out in the lake, something looked at him.
The same flicker of awareness he had noticed before was there again. It was faint, and very, very strange. He thought it was ghostly. Its attention was like the laying of a cool butterfly wing against the inside of his forehead.
All elves carried wards against ghosts; bones with eyes on, stones with naturally made holes in, small circlets of thorn wood, snippets of cloth once soaked in children’s tears. Ghosts could not always be turned aside even by these. They came and they took in silence.
Zal had long since discarded all of these trinkets, even before Demonia, when he decided it was better to know than not know, and he had let go of any hope of eluding fear. He just hoped that he not be paralysed by it when it was strong. But that was all. And even this wish was only a necessary little bit of flag waving. He recalled Lila’s battle stance function with a wince and a smile—at least she could switch fear off and act in the face of it He worried less about her suddenly.
The thing looking at him was not a ghost. Zal knew ghostly touches. When the ghost of Forgotten Forests touched him on the hill above Solomon’s Folly it had felt—it had been the absence of feeling. This was alien but not absent. It was almost the opposite of absence. He couldn’t identify it but it had, yes, presence.
It turned away.
Zal sang another line.
It looked back. It was so deep and far away he was not sure it wasn’t imagination on his part. But who cared?
He carried on singing, one song and another, whatever came into his head.
From the dark it drifted upwards beneath him. He saw little gas bubbles and old leaf silt rising on a new current, passing his prison as water was pushed upwards at some speed. The thick stems of the waterquoia trembled. The cool wing under his skull folded itself closed and left with what impressions it had gained. The water stilled. It didn’t come again.
Dragons, he thought. In elven lore they were lucky creatures. Tales mentioned a time when dragons and elves talked, but then again, tales mentioned a time when elves and demons were one race so… that was probably too long ago to be of any use today. And if you went back far enough there were records that stated the worlds were made by dragons spinning words like silk, as if dragons were spiders and the universe their web-In modern times it was well known that dragons were creatures of the Interstitial, of the space between worlds. The Otopians had even attempted to tag one and radio track it. Of the research team nothing was ever found except a rather nice handbag containing some fortune cookies. The cookie fortunes were classified, so Zal had never discovered what they said, although he believed the rest of the story when his informers didn’t. Dragons were inexpressibly strange. No. doubt Arie considered its presence the final commendation on her status. To attract a dragon was the ultimate pride, a mark of absolute sorcery or innocence.
Zal didn’t think it was his innocence doing the trick, Arie just said the names. Zal sang songs and waited and hoped Lila had some kind of discreet yet incredibly useful weapon hidden about her person that he hadn’t yet seen.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Astar trailed after Lila and her guards. They passed from the hall through walks glimmering with wave-lensed light, beside gardens of weed filled with incredible varieties of fish curiously nosing up against the air world of the interior. Rooms filled with fountains, walls tumbling with falling water… Lila only looked to notice entrances and exits and to map the way. She tested the strength of her guards, pulling this way and that, and realised they were tough, but much lighter than she was in spite of their bigger size. She fought the urge to vomit with the nauseating pain of being held around her burned right arm. To distract herself she talked to Tath and tried to discover anything that might make it more likely she could get into the same room as Zal.
Now that we’ve bought some thinking time, tell me, does Arie know that I was Zal’s guard?
Unless Dar has told her so I would think not. She has little interest in your function although, if she ever dound out that Zal had caught you in a Game, that would be a different matter. A lever against Zal is something she would value more than my life or Dar’s, that is certain. She will not accept your mastery of me at all and I believe she would sooner kill us both that suffer the continued embarrassment of that, for she sees me as her property, buth she would gladly spend Dar and myself in the achievement of mastery over you. Like us, you must decide exactly how much you value the lives of those with whom you must deal and how much you value the greater good of your people.
This was good news of a sort. As long as Lila played things right, she at least could survive long enough for an attempt at escape. Tath’s statements about his relation to Arie made her cringe however. Her property?
Arie is the leader of the light elves of the Valar inheritance, among whose number I
count myself. As she is our leader, according to her authority I am hers to spend. It is why I became a necromancer. If not for her engagement of me, why would I pretend to sucha loathsome office?
Lila guessed elf loyalties in the spy business might run to extreme altruism. For the Jayon Daga?
Even they cannot require such a sacrifice of service.
Lila was turned to face a door. Like all doors in the lake palace it had no solid barrier involved, being a magical barrier which vanished at the her guards’ touch. A small room lay beyond encapsulated within a dark area of weeds which overgrew the sides of the bubble walls. A bed, a table and a minimum of other furnishings graced it, looking as though they floated in mid-air from most angles. It was hard not to stagger when she walked because it was so hard to judge depth of space. Astar followed her inside and watched as the magical wall shut itself at their backs.
As soon as they were alone, the graceful female elf turned Lila to face her and held her hands, pleading, “Say it is you, Tath, and this some dreadful Game playing and not the truth!” Her elongated eyes were rimmed with red, their dark irises huge in the low light. As she finished speaking she made to dab her tears with a filmy handkerchief out of which fell a scatter of flowers, as though she had been picking them at some point in the past, and forgot them within the handkerchief’s folds. She bent quickly to pick them up, a slight pressure on her hand drawing Lila with her. Among the pretty things one white daisy…
Inside her, Tath doubled in intensity, sad, his andalune over Lila becoming strong enough to reach out and touch Astar’s carefully restrained aethereal form. His sadness was worse than the burning pain in her arm.
Lila picked up the daisy and held it towards the black-haired elf. “Sadly, it is the truth, but hardly all of it.”
Astar held Lila’s hand but she felt Tath’s fingers as she took the flower carelessly and then drew the hand to her lips and kissed each of the knuckles gently. “I have missed you so much. Say it’s you that speaks and not the impostor.”
Lila had been about to attempt soft politeness in the face of this sympathy but found herself grating out impatiently, “It’s the freak, not your brother.”
Astar put Lila’s hand away from her but stared boldly into Lila’s face. “You wear him well, then, whoever you are, for his andalune is his own where it and mine are joined, and he is not suffering because of you. Will you let him speak with one who holds his heart dear?”
How many girlfriends have you got, exactly? Lila said to Tath.
One exactly, though she died as I did upon the hillside where you left us. I have three sisters.
Hell, oh hell, Lila thought. If you’re lying to me… She let Tath have the whole show. Give the elves their due, she thought, as Tath used her body to embrace his sister, they’re fey and strange but they know who’s who and they don’t freak out like I would if I could go back to my family and hug them one last time. A stab of pain in her heart made her wince.
But there was no point in thinking about that. She concentrated on lining up repair systems, prioritising, cueing up harmonics in the nerves causing her the most discomfort so that their efforts to tell her she was in trouble became simple information in her Al-self rather than a sensation of pain in her body. Probably Dar would be okay, she thought as she wondered what she would do with the largely destroyed surface of her right arm. Sathanor was that kind of place. Probably he would be better already.
Lila quietly mended the fingers of her left hand as Tath used it to hold Astar close to him. They sat down together on the narrow bed.
“Can we persuade this person to release you?” Astar was saying. “I would hold your spirit within mine and release it to a child of your heart… Give me the flower. Where is it?”
What the hell? Lila thought. Elves clone! Are you crazy? Is that what she’s saying?
It is extremely rare. Aloud to Astar Tath said, “I do not wish to leave my host.”
“What?” Astar and Lila said simultaneously.
Tath took the handkerchief out of his sister’s hands and found the white flower again. He would not give a reason aloud although to Lila he said,
If I leave you and Arie discovers what you are she will not kill you. It will be worse. Arie loves Tathanor, But beneath her love lies fear, and the thing she fears most is technology like you.
It is quite irrational. She will continue with Her disastrous plan involving Zal, and she will certainty kill Dar, very inventively I expect. There is nothing good in any of that.
What did she mean about the flower? Lila insisted.
The power bound me in life to my true friends. All necromancers carry one. Without it, if one of us dies, we cannot be restored by any means. Thus it is when you burned it that I became bound to you, Lila, because without it I cannot cross over. If you die, I die, and when Arie tries to separate us, if she succeeds, then I certainly will.
But if you’still had it then you and… whoever. . .’they could have resurrected you in some way and… does Dar know? Lila was outraged at being kept ignorant about this, especially by Dar. Letting her think he’d slaughtered Tath when all along there was this chance of resurrection—she was furious for a second, but Tath was still talking.
It does not mean the same thing to Dar because it is also a mark of the Revolution, but yes, when he saw you burn it he did know that whatever chance there was for me to survive was gone. When it went, he had effectively murdered me most surely.
Oh, so now it’s my fault? Lila snapped, though she didn’t get an answer.
“You are talking together,” Astar said quietly. “I can feel your attention shifting.”
“Oh crap!” Lila said, not meaning to speak her sudden fresh doubt in Dar aloud but unexpectedly finding that she had command of their voice.
Astar started.
“Not you, I mean…”
“You are the host,” Astar said attentively. “Why does my brother not wish to leave you?”
Do not… Tath began hesitantly, full of the delicate subtleties of elven politics, not sure if he could trust Astar or even the water not to betray them but Lila was watching Astar’s face which was soft and sympathetic on the surface but with eyes rather more suited to a patient lizard than a trembling rabbit, and she was reasonably sure that the woman wasn’t quite as spineless as Tath seemed to think.
“He can’t leave,” Lila said. “The daisy soulkeeper thingy he had is toast. He’s stuck with me, and if you want to see him alive in any form for much longer then you’d better start thinking of a way to get me to Zal before Arie rips his spirit out of me and feeds us to the fishes. So,...’know where Zal is?”
Astar, mute, eyes like saucers, gave her a long, thoughtful elven stare.
“Anytime in the next ten seconds would be good,” Lila prompted.
Brilliant, Tath observed sarcastically.
“You’re most direct,” Astar said. “I hope you are as effective in pleading for your life and that of my brother as you are at issuing questions. Zal is far below the surface, where the darkness and cold plunge over the edge of the lake bed and into a chasm of extreme depth—a ley chasm of great aetheric potential where Arie seeks to…” She continued to say something about raising power and using it to purify Sathanor and some other kind of semi-Biblical flood analogy that Lila thought sounded uncannily like a form of Whole Earth fascism. The ideology didn’t interest her except inasmuch as it was now clear that Alfheim was about to enter a civil war and that was worth reporting. But the really interesting thing was A bomb fault! Lila thought, translating the elfin way of thinking. Under Sathanor, how peculiar. I wonder if it is linked to the recording studio in Otopia or is the same kind of thing?
“… He is contained by a separate sphere which hangs free in the lake water, connected to the palace by a single hair from Arie’s head,” Astar concluded. “More than that I have been unable to discover. We are not permitted so far below.”
“He has to come to us,” Lila said, “That c
an happen how?”
Astar shook her head helplessly. “Nothing but the Lady can command it.”
“So she just needs a reason.”
We need more help than this, Lila said privately to Tath. I’ll be straight with you. Unless you have any more friends here who are on the white daisy side then we aren’t looking so great. Let’s say I do get to him, then how can I get Zal out of this place? Oh wait… I know. Her Al-self had been checking possibilities and had decided the best thing must be to wait until they were all united, for any reason, and then to power her way out, carrying Zal. She could certainly make the surface alive, and probably use her internal oxygen systems to support at least one other if it was a long way up. As for how to get together in the first place, she and Tath could most likely break through the charm wall and swim down…
Tath picked up her thoughts quickly, much more than he used to. He even clocked the Al-self’s neat chart of survival possibilities and its redlined conclusions.
No!
Yes. It’s the only way. And look on the bright side, if it fails and I have to, I can blow us all to doomsday and back. It’s a plan. You don’t have one. We’ll’stick with it.
Dar was quite correct in his analysis that you are poorly placed for diplomacy, Lila.
Lila recounted her explosives, ammunition and the chances that Arie was insane. Most likely Arie was not insane but frighteningly intelligent and well-motivated, if wrong. It all looked extremely bad.
Astar looked up. Their time was over. “Arie likes to keep what she fears in sight,” she said in quiet, rapid tones. “And she would enjoy making a fool of Zal. She has no fear in her own house. Offer her the chance and you may get yours.”
You do not know that Astar used to turn in to our father when I’stayed out after dark, don’t you? Tath complained. She would betray me for one approving smile and gloatt at my punishment. One look from our mother was enough to make her come to heel.
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