Keeping It Real

by Justina Robson

  Surely no greater king… she thought. Dar had been telling her to carry on, just as Tath was, even if they could never have been real friends.

  Because it was all he could give you at that moment, Tath said. And if you do not fulfil that command you will have twice betrayed him.

  Arte and Tath had come to the centre of the circles. The other mages had followed them some of the way, each halting within the ring that denoted their particular shell of influence. Two mages stood in the circle beyond the centre. Eight in the circle beyond that Lila/Tath and Arie were alone in the nucleus, until they fetched Zal.

  if As he got closer Lila saw his eyes were dilated and sheened in a classic opiate reaction. He was naked above the waist and his face and body were limned in sweat that was making the magical markings drawn on him run in streaks of coloured ink. He was doped, and when Arte took his arms and pushed him down he sank to his knees on the floor and sat there, head slightly to one side, completely unresisting. His andalune body was quite withdrawn, not even projecting beyond his skin. He lolled against Arie’s leg like a ragdoll and she stroked his hair absently with one hand as she signed orders with the other. Lila could feel, through Tath, Arie’s great anticipation of relief, the pleasure with which she looked forward to the safety and restoration of a world she loved without limit.

  Singers and speakers closed the outer shells of the seal, beginning with the least and outer ring, and then the inner ones. As each was completed they hazed Lila’s view of the room, spheres of pale mist and aether leaping into instant life around them until, as the inmost ring was made whole, she and Tath, Arte and Zal were enclosed within an opaque bell whose walls shimmered with all colours like mother-of-pearl. This circle, unlike Zal’s casts, did not transport them to another realm. It took them outside all realms, outside time, into the Interstitial. They hung nowhere and nowhen, everywhere and everywhen, held within the tidal powers of all seven regions, balanced as though on the point of a pin.

  Finally Lila understood what Tath had meant when he called Arie the pearl, but she did not feel pearl-like herself. As her blood reverted to normal she felt cold and alone. She most longed to go home and to never have come anywhere near Alfheim.

  You need not stay, Tath said to her and lifted their hands upwards to his jerkin. Lila witnessed herself opening hidden pockets on its front, lifting out the instruments they had always contained and which, until now, she had never even discovered. I will do it.

  I will goddamn well do it. Whatever the hell it is, Lila said. The only shred of self-respect left in her demanded it. She could not let someone else take the blame.

  She saw the things she held in Tath’s glamoured hands: a length of bone carved into the ornate handle of a pen, the nib point replaced by an obsidian flake of black glass; a hollow crystal needle, like the ones she had used on Dar, but this one bigger and mounted between straps of fine leather upon which magical writing oozed and ran like liquid.

  The needle was slant cut at one end, ready to puncture, but the other end broadened and fanned out, the thin walls becoming liquid at their limits, then so thin that they evaporated. They were light to hold, but she felt them weigh on Tath suddenly and her hands drooped beneath the load.

  The bone was his bone. The leather was his skin.

  You’re kidding, Lila said. Tath didn’t say anything.

  Around them in the ring the songs merged suddenly and became a single chanted line. Mesmeric syllables spun the pearl wall faster and beside him Tath felt Arie’s energy suddenly intensify. And then the Lady of Aparastil began to sing.

  She had the clear, sweet voice of a young girl. Her melody was sad and lonely, a heartbreakingly lovely lament such as Lila had never heard in her life. What words in High Elvish that she sang were borne on notes of such purity that they seemed to pierce all matter and Lila felt the song in her bones and in her circuits, in every cell and unit, all resonating where they were able, amplifying and harmonising with the spell until Lila was part of the charm, bound to it in synchrony against her will, and Tath with her, and Zal with them. The faint idea she had held of shooting Arte point blank seemed impossibly distant to her. She could never destroy anything like this, and she wanted to listen to it go on and on in any case, to let the song transport her to the places that it promised, so good and far from all this.

  Tath bent down before Zal. Lila felt her hands take Zal’s right arm and rest the forearm on her knee.

  The faintest zip of wild magic, barely more than a flicker, ran down through her leg and up into her body. The note Arie was singing wavered ever so slightly. Zal’s dreamy expression didn’t alter.

  Keep that in check! Tath pleaded. This must not get out of hand He pressed the pen blade to Zal’s skin and wrote quickly down the length of white skin from elbow to wrist in a series of flashing gestures. Blood spat from the nib. Zal groaned and his eyes rolled up in his head. The slashes stood out clearly for a moment or two and then began to blur deep scarlet. The characters were all from the Thanatopic alphabet. Where Zal’s blood leaked from them it ran a short distance and then began to bubble and evaporate into a fine dark haze. The haze coiled and flicked. It drew wicked faces in the air and they spoke to Tath, though Lila could not understand a single word.

  Meanwhile Lila fought the lull of Arie’s song, but whenever the urge to shoot came close, the pretty sound pushed it away from her. She used the AI bypass, thinking Arie’s magic was working on her feelings, but it made no difference when she locked herself in her AI mind. Only Tath moved, and he let go of that arm and took Zal’s left arm up instead and wrote on that too, and spoke to the dark faces that emerged. She had given up hope that Tath would help her now. She doubted he even could, but she was wrong.

  Play something. Anything! said to her. You must drown her out and take back your will. At Lila’s unspoken question he added, Thanatopic immersion at least has the virtue of blocking off other charm.. If you are to do anything you must do it soon, Before her song is finished, for then the pearl will break. and whatever is done remains.

  Lila didn’t have the energy to search for a song. She simply accessed whatever played last, and turned up her internal systems as loudly as she could. Loud rock music beat through her head. The bass and dram negated Arie’s languorous rhythms and the piercing guitar took out most of her midline.

  Lila’s mind cleared a little. She remained inside her Al-self, and took a long, calculated assessment of conditions. Then she searched every part of her systems.

  Tath put the pen nib into her mouth and she felt a burning lick of pain as it cut her tongue.

  All Thanatopic magic requires blood. Aloud he spoke again to the twisting figures that danced in the burning of Zal’s blood and now the words he used took on form also, and became creatures that walked across the air and danced with the creatures Zal made. It was most interesting.

  A wisp of pale green energy appeared at the junction of Lila’s leg and Zal’s dripping arm. Its appearance made the dark dancers pause and eagerly look its way. One or two of them zipped down towards Zal’s wounds and began to burrow back in.

  No! Tath reacted instantly, his voice and speech changing. Faster than she would have thought him able he slashed at her upper arm with the pen blade where her flesh met metal, and drew another ghostly djinn from the wound with whispers. At his direction it darted forward and where it touched Zal the blood ran faster from him and the tiny genies were pushed back. They were pushed back, but they grew larger, and stronger. I told you to keep that in check! He was almost panicked.

  I need my hand for a moment, Lila said, increasing the volume as Zal’s voice began to sing in her head, and replaced the pen in Tath’s pocket. She put her hand to the floor, where water supported them above the gulf, the lake itself hidden completely by the pearl shell. She channelled the Mode-X music down into the lake in a sequence burst: two, eight, eighteen pulses. If she was right, if she had started to understand it, then magic was the user and their will, no more than
that. A canticle was a summons, and she was calling.

  Give me that back! Tath reclaimed her limb immediately. He took hold of Zal’s wrist in his hand, set the crystal spike against the vein in his elbow and pushed it through the skin, not very hard. He didn’t need to, because as the instrument made contact it leapt from their hand and drove itself home, as though it was alive.

  Zal shrieked, a terrible, multi-tonal cry of agony, as Tath bound the crystal to his arm. Bright scarlet blood ran down into the instrument’s tiny pan and where it fanned out into the air its surface ran with bright red and golden flames. No smoke or genies came from it. Where the crystal pen seemed to become thin air the flames did too, vanishing from Alfheim, Lila realised.

  Flowing into Interstice. Tath said grimly, watching the Demon flicker. All done, brother.

  Arie’s song stopped. There was a sound like the distant boom of a buried atomic bomb and a second later an aetheric wavefront passed through them, momentarily disabling Arie and Tath equally, obliterating the genies that had been skittering around, leaving only the burning flow from Zal’s arm. Zal’s body seemed to waver, as though it was passing into another reality and Lila saw a shadow come over him.

  It is his Death, Tath told her.

  With the passing of the wave the shadow drew away again, lost in the tide.

  At the same instant Lila began to rise and ready her guns, all pretences dropped. She felt within her body the cool, insistent pressure footprint of a major spellcast and then, as her metal and machine parts continued their action, her flesh and bone suddenly stopped and there was a blinding and devastating pain. It didn’t entirely surprise her. She had suspected that either the energy Arie had had to use for the spell or the wild magic intrusion had given the game away.

  Tath read the impact before she could.

  Arie has bound your body not to oppose her. She can’t command the metals, only the rest of you. If you try to move against her physically now, you’ll tear yourself to pieces.

  Lila didn’t even pause. As she heard Tath, she re-targeted, gaining her freedom, and shot the floor. The bullets punctured the tension easily but it didn’t break. Where they went through it weakened however, and her foot suddenly plunged downward to the knee into the bitterly cold lake water. She was almost through.

  At that moment something struck the pearl shell from beneath and it broke into a million glittering shards.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Lila was falling, her feet no longer supported by the water. At high process speed she stretched time out for herself and felt the Lady’s willpower, strengthened and aetherised, pushing her and Tath down into the lake. She didn’t need them any more. Lila did not attempt to counter Arie’s supreme force or struggle to stay within the palace. She simply placed her hand around Zal’s ankle as she fell past his sprawled, bleeding body, and locked it in place, dragging him after her into the icy water. Heavier than any human or elf, or any being twice her size, Lila fell like a stone.

  Gold and green lights far away winked at her in the instant of silent calm as they plunged into the depths. She looked down and, on radar, sounded the bottom, only there was no bottom… She looked up and saw the silver palace of air above them receding gently. And then the water convulsed around them and boomed with a grating, grinding sound like planets colliding. A powerful electromagnetic pulse followed, so powerful that it momentarily knocked out all her machine self and left her reeling inside, alone, with Tath. The ends of readouts and the simple obliteration made for an easy calculation of the cause.

  Faultquake! Lila shrieked at Tath.

  But Aparastil… he began

  Sathanor’s not on a regular fault or even an aetheric ley, you idiot. Don’t you do geology? The whole thing is a crater. This is the Quantum Bomb crater as it manifests in this dimension and we’re falling into the biggest non-recorded fault in the whole history offaultlines! How could you live in this thing and not know?

  There was a second in which she felt Tath bristle.

  Arie was the keeper of such knowledge and her word. . .

  She lied! Lila frantically tried to reconnect with her systems but all of them had died. The reactor, presumably, ran on but she couldn’t find it. She couldn’t feel her arms below the elbow, her legs below the first few inches, half her spine seemed to be missing, her internal organs felt as though they were being crushed by a deadly, numbing cold and she was suddenly very, very short of breath, Tath, you’ve got to help me! Now! Lila screamed at him. Her lungs and body were aching, burning. She didn’t know how much longer she could prevent herself trying to breathe. A second trembling ran through the ground and the lake.

  Tath’s andalune surged outwards. Though Lila could only sense it in her human body she could feel the desperate energy with which he focused himself and drove up through her arm and shoulder. At such densities and concentrations the aethereal was capable of becoming corporeal and Tath’s form of magic, the lively art, was more able than most to manifest strong forces through the shaping of raw aether. Shaping himself was only a variation. If he had still possessed his own body it would have been routine. Without it he had to spend himself in making the effort. Lila felt his presence flicker and weaken. But his ghostly hand extended up and up, beyond the rigid lock of her manacle on Zal’s leg, up to his arm where the flechette was bound. Tath said a word and a darkness, a final shadow, dragged at her heart. She felt part of her life leaving her as the flechette disintegrated.

  The binding is undone, Tath informed her weakly. But his lungs have collapsed. He drowns.

  She tried again and again to find any connection that could operate, counting away the seconds. How could it take so long? There must be a mistake…

  And then at last she heard her Al-self’s voice: Countdown to automatic restart commencing Five, four, three…

  … and then the world shook and boomed again and another pulse tore silently through them and the voice was gone.

  Lila opened her mouth and the water of Aparastil filled it as she tried to suck it into her lungs. She failed. Her lungs were too compressed to hold anything. Detached and dreamy, knowing this the final stage of asphyxia, the dream and the hallucination, she wondered what they would think at home when they found out, only they wouldn’t find out of course, because she would be falling for ever, and in any case, they thought she was already gone… She wanted to sleep. Yes. Just for a minute. After so much fighting, surely she deserved a minute? She began to drift, but an annoying voice, an annoying sensation in her chest wouldn’t leave her in peace.

  Tath was talking to her, in a stupid foreign language that wasn’t remotely like elvish or Otopian. Everything was sibilant, like hissing snakes. The vowels were owlish, hooting, soft.

  Shut up, she said to him. Why won’t you just shut up?

  Ooleratnan sirssalliel, Tath said softly, coaxing her. The words tied her up and drew her closer to him. They opened tiny doors inside, onto sweet darkness that was not of the lake at all. They offered pathways. She saw lights within them, beckoning her. Sirmasenna, sirmasenna, abrayutb manmayess.

  Just like the dragon, she remembered. She hurt. She was beyond tired. Let me go.

  Abrayuth Lila Amanda Black. Abrayuth set imma. Manmayesim.

  She saw Dar’s face. Not the face of her dreams that had tormented her. The face of his death, stretched in pain. Leave me alone!

  Countdown to automatic restart commencing. Five, four, three, two, one. Main power online. Auxiliary power online. Automedic enabled. Emergency autorespiration enabled.

  Lila struggled against the colossal weight of anaerobic toxins in her blood, against the need to sleep still clogging her mind. Around her the world, which had been no bigger than a mote of dust, expanded into vast, lightless space. They were still falling—more than 230 metres down.

  Lila pulled Zal’s body against her and held it to her side with her left arm, then ignited her foot jets and began to drive them upward, ascending as fast as she could. As she did so
she ordered the last of her drug precursors to synthesize adrenaline, Terbutalin and other pharmacological agents that aided rapid decompression.

  Tath, frail as candlelight, stretched out inside her, and kept up his

  Whispering, to Zal this time. Abrayuth Azrazal Suhanathir Taliesetra. Abrayuth set imma. Manmeyesim.

  Selecting the biggest needle from her store, Lila activated her wrist injector, found Zal’s neck, located his artery with precise ultrasound and pushed in, tangling her fingers in his hair to stabilise his head and neck against her arm. His pulse was very slow, very weak, heart almost stopped, but the cold and the opiates and Tath had saved him so far.

  Lila could run her own blood through a nitrogen scrubber to save her from the bends. The same system was now flooding her with necessary oxygen whilst replacing much of what she would normally have needed with helium, oxygen being toxic at depth. She shifted her hold on Zal and switched usage on her secondary forearm systems, dropping and dumping her gun and its ammunition into the lake, replacing it with another wide-bore catheter which she inserted into the other side of his neck. She shunted her blood back around away from the gas exchange system and ran Zal’s blood through it instead, not even pausing to consider the effects of contamination. She had to get up, and she had to get up very soon.

  And so they went, breathing alternately with Lila’s machine system, stopping often in their ascent as the nitrogen built and dispersed, held in life by Tath’s commands against death. As they ascended they drew after them a long, lambent tail of wild magic and after the tail came the golden and black gliding shape of the dragon. Lila saw it suddenly as she held at 210 metres, the palace above her, the water around them full of bodies, and artefacts and clutter, trapped beneath the bubble’s silvery bulk. Fascinated in spite of her fear she stared at it as she pumped Zal’s blood through her arms and back into him, waiting for him to wake up or show any sign of life, listening to his slow, weak heartbeat…