Don’t look at it. You know better than that. Tath said, breaking his canticle.
But Lila didn’t need to look at it. She smiled as the dragon came up on them and then wound around them, wild magic from the deep streaming off its flanks, sparking on her arms and legs, in her hair, against the metal surface of her eyes.
Zal shuddered against her and only her thumbs locked against his jaw prevented him from trying to breathe the lake. His eyes opened, but she doubted that he’d see much with his unmachine sight, a few gleams. He could feel the cold vice of her around him however, and the pain of his many cuts.
“It’s all right,” Lila said through her hands into the bone of his skull. “I’ve got you.”
It is not all right., Tath amended gently and, with dismay, Lila saw the dragon’s lazy winding around them change into a full-on charge towards the bubbles above.
Something Arie said upset it maybe? Lila asked him but she rolled onto her back away from their vertical position and drove them away as fast as she could through the water. She didn’t see the Dragon or its impact on the Palace, but she felt it. There was a high-pitched vibration, and then a world was falling.
As Lila felt Zal’s hands catch hold of her waist the first object struck them. It was the stone altar of Earth. Lila rolled and fell with it, fighting out from under. Zal’s grip fell away on the left, tightened reflexively on the right. But then they were in the midst of a storm of falling debris—every piece of furniture, every object, every person who had inhabited the Palace of Aparastil was now within the lake, and those below fifty metres were simply sinking, as bodies will when they reach a certain depth. The heaviest things sank the fastest. Lila and Zal received a battering. Amid the furor Lila felt the water itself surging, trying to tow her with it as it responded to Arie’s summons. The lake queen was drawing undines to her aid, huge bodies of lakewater, animated by her will, though they were weakening as the mages who had bound themselves to her drowned, one by one.
Astar! Tath thought, and Lila inwardly moaned with the very idea of trying to do more than survive. To their left and right, back and front, materials fell and bumped and bashed them. Something heavy smacked the side of her head and she reeled, seeing stars. She missed her pump switch and Zal blacked out again.
There was a moment or two of floating weightlessly, beginning to fall again. Through radar and sonar and heat-sensors she saw Arte propelled towards the surface in a twisting eel-like vortex of water, and she saw the dragon’s golden arrow tear through that column, its huge mouth agape. It seized Arie in its jaws and, without pause, turned to face gravity and plunged down and down into the dark until it was lost to all sight.
Lila restored Zal’s oxygen and boosted the level of it in the tri mix. She added the last dregs of her pharmacopoeia as opiate antagonists and began the long journey up towards the light. They rested at forty metre intervals, waiting for the nitrogen bubbles in their blood to abate. At 180 metres Zal’s hands came back to Lila’s waist. It was discernibly green here, and Lila could see him in normal vision as the faintest ghost in front of her.
“It’s still okay,” she said to him through her hands. “Don’t worry about the pain. It’s only pressure. You’ll be fine.” It was a lie. She thought that the pressure and depth would have burst his eardrums—though he should still hear through the transmission of his skull—and the pumping system kept having to speed its game. Zal was bleeding out, right in front of her.
The catheter I used prevents healing, Tath said to her, simply as an explanation. He did not mention Astar again, but Lila kept scanning for her. She could not remove her hands from Zal’s neck and head. She kept Zal on an extra cycle and rose through another fifty metres in ten seconds flat, constantly adjusting the oxygen mix. They kept bumping palace debris that sank very slowly or floated. Dead bodies were there, but Lila didn’t look at them. She knew Astar must be among them. Knew it. And Tath did too. He became very still and silent.
At fifty metres Zal suddenly moved closer to her, the drift of water between their bodies vanishing, its cool replaced by warmth. His eyes were heavy-lidded but the corners of his long mouth flickered with the hint of a smile. His lips, blue tinged, parted slightly and she saw him swallow.
Drink the water, Tath said suddenly. He is trying to tell you.
She did. Vigour and health surged into her. She didn’t care to think about what would have happened to them if they hadn’t been submerged in a lake of such intense aetherial properties. Long dead.
Zal’s smile deepened and he pushed forward against her hands. His arms slid around her. She didn’t believe what she felt. Here was Zal, cut, bleeding, half-dead, catheterised, drugged, cyanotic, but against her she could feel the unmistakable line and press of a serious erection. His andalune body caressed her so lightly she could have mistaken it for currents in the water, but this moved beneath her clothing.
Demons adore such straits, Tath said with appalled fascination.
She decided to ignore it and took them to the surface, turning her face to the light and air as it came down to her, holding Zal away from her as she cycled his blood and rebalanced it to elfin normal. The fresh day broke against her face and she gasped for real, clear air.
In front of her Zal coughed and groaned with pain. They floated for a moment on the power of Lila’s jets and then she drew back both needles with a whir and snap. Zal gasped and his head rocked as she let him go and took hold of him more securely around his midsection. Keeping them high in the water she quickly found his right arm and pressed her thumb down on the open wound, sealing it shut. Zal smiled faintly at her, barely conscious.
“Are we at my two minutes of charity yet?” he asked. And then he disappeared.
He was seized so fast that Lila barely noticed it as he was torn from her weak hold and pulled down again. Then something tough grabbed her foot and dragged her under.
She was swallowing water, her hands battering lost items, getting tangled in scarves and clothes, hitting wooden things, hitting dumb flesh limbs. Lila was so tired.
“Battle Standard,” she said and felt the elfin clothing of Tath’s be cut to shreds as all her capacities and weapons expanded to their maximum extent. The water boiled around her and the grip on her foot vanished.
You called? Each-Uisge exclaimed, jolted out of his grief into a breath of hysteria at her stupidity. Otopian mania! Do you know nothinq!
Zal’s friends, Lila amended, diving down and boosting power with grim and certain intent. She could see the two faeries ahead of her, their beautiful black horse forms with their finned feet and streaming hair wrapped fatally around Zal’s pale body. His hot blood made a trail that was easy to follow. She had not known about Poppy and Viridia being deadly hunters but even if she had, they were her only possible allies.
In human form perhaps. In water or their true body they remember nothing but the hunger. You are insane! All this, and now they will drown him and rip him to pieces and leave you his liver as a keepsake.
Like hell they will, Lila said, Unless I’m mistaken, you can knock them cold.
In Otopia maybe, Tath said. In Aparastil… no Each Uisge has ever come here. They are of the water, Lila. They are in their element.
The water horses dived fast but Lila’s rocket boots were faster.
As she neared them she noticed that they were slowing, their easy glide becoming sluggish and dull—they were falling asleep, just as they always did around elves when their andalune bodies made contact with faery flesh. It would have been funny if she hadn’t been so exhausted, and in some other time and place.
She caught the water horses that were once Poppy and Viridia around their fine necks and, as the hair tried to tangle her arms, wrapped her legs around Zal and swept her hands through their manes, cutting the hair clean through. The faeries fought and struggled to recapture them both but they could not get a good enough grip.
This time she took Zal up fast, not looking or caring what they hit, not pau
sing at the surface but leaping up and out into the waning light of late evening. She set them down at some distance inland, at the clearing where she and Dar had stopped before entering Aparastil. There she laid Zal on the sweet blue-green grass.
The wounds on his arms were all gone, except the single puncture that still bled freely. It was incongruous there, in the delicious peace of the wooded grove, in the scented twilight Lila tried not to notice how beautiful Zal was, how his vulnerability made him almost perfect, that she wanted him, like this and here, when he was barely even there. She didn’t want to be that person.
How do I fix it?
You cannot. I will Tath said. Even he was a shadow of his former seltLila regarded with horror the degree to which he had faded. It was only with the greatest effort that he managed to extend his aetherial presence outward through her. He spoke in the dragon’s language. The wound in Zal’s arm stopped flowing. Lila felt Tath sink lower, lower, shrink down to almost nothing.
Tath!
He didn’t respond.
Songbirds swept across the glade, calling their last calls of the evening. A soft blue mist rose among the grass and there was loveliness everywhere, everywhere.
“Zal?” Lila said, kneeling beside his head. He was unconscious.
Like she used to do for herself she went through the routines of checking, this time doing it for him. With ultrasound she located the meridians in his body, scanned and found his deafened ears, some damage to his heart, peculiar resonances that might have been unique to him, or a kind of ruin—she didn’t know what. Her hands, multi-sensory, glided above the surface of his skin and she willed him well. For herself, she felt almost perfectly healthy, in a fresh and glowing way, the way she recognised of Sathanor, that had never been before she had come here. Her own body was well in itself, for the first time perfectly harmonised, biometalloids and flesh seamless, as though they were always meant to be this way.
Finally she had nothing left that she could do. She sat back on her heels and slowly watched her Battle Armour power down and withdraw into normally sized limbs, ordinary shapes. “Please wake up,” she said to him, in her own voice. But he did not.
After a few moments she heard sounds from the lake. Poppy and Viridia, getting out to come looking…
Lila bent down and picked up Zal in her arms. She held him gently, close to her, and carried him away into the night forest, away from hunting faeries and hunting Saaqaa, wherever the path took her, seeing and avoiding all the soft trails of lemon and lime magic that twisted and danced in the moonlit air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“It’s all right, Lila. Lila, you can put me down.” Zal’s voice was laced with melodic cadences that rose above and sank below the true tone, a curious effect that made Lila feel sleepy, as though she’d been drugged. She could barely understand his words, but the music filtered into her limbs and slowed them down. All her perceptions misted and fogged away from the battle-vision’s piercing clarity and she came to a halt like a heavy horse, one last footfall sinking gently into the soft earth beneath them.
Lila stood in a silver place underneath a full moon shining, more brilliantly and through less pollution than any moon in Otopia had ever shone. She glanced at Zal, realised that he was all right, and that she was too, and set him down. The night was very quiet. Around them the trees and bushes soughed gently in a light breeze. Their scents—tobacco flowers and dark jasmine—twined around them both in heady sweetness. There was no sight or sound of other creatures nearby. Everything was indigo, violet, purple and royal blue; the grass and the trees reaching high above her with their massive span, the thickets of broadleaved plants clustering close in the moonlight their two shadows inky on the ground.
Zal stood very shakily on his own and rested for a moment with his hands on his knees. His breath was quick as though he was the one who’d been running. “You need to rest.”
“Me?” Lila said. “No.”
Without motion she felt empty, like a jug that had been poured out and cleaned and set aside. Without direction she did not know what was important in this scene she was in. It was so strangely quiet without the shrieking, screaming elves swimming amid the palace ruins, scrabbling to gather themselves on the lakeshore, staggering around like crazy people, fighting one another in panic. The fury of their grief and recriminations was written on her eardrums in a precise, pretty language that had burned her inside.
Yes, now it was very quiet, Lila thought appreciatively, and her body sang with the vitality of Sathanor and with raw power from the reactor core, machine and flesh indistinguishable to her now. Everything was running smoothly, though things did seem to be at a remove from her. She liked that. She liked it a lot. She liked her cool mind. “I’m fine. Been in the health farm pool. You know, I’m just fine.”
Zal straightened up and drew a deep breath, “I know. Me too. But let’s pretend.”
Lila shrugged. His words made sense enough though he was speaking in a rather exaggerated way. Still, she took no offence—thinking he must perhaps have PTSD or another related issue, particularly after what had just occurred. Why not? She had nothing else to do, no mission goal left, though she would have expected there to be some orders about returning home. There were none however. Pretend to rest Even so, the sense of something being wrong niggled at her. “Here?”
“Why not here?” he said.
She looked around automatically and then, finding no dangers, folded her legs and sat down.
“Flatter,” the elf said, sitting beside her. His voice was very quiet, as if he was speaking to a frightened animal—a thing she almost resented, or rather, got the impression she would have resented, in another life. “Lie down.”
“I’m perfectly fine. I’m not scared. I’m not tired. I don’t need to.”
“I know. But I do, and it would make me feel much better if you did too. So, do you mind?”
“No, I don’t mind.” It was pleasant and easy to have a direct, simple instruction, much nicer than having no instruction at all, Lila thought as she complied. The ground gave gently under her weight and the grass bent under her skin, cool and faintly prickly. The soil was damp and there was a gathering of misty vapour among the tiny leaves which chilled her a little, condensing on her metals. She liked it here, but it was difficult to lie this way with all her weapons in assault mode. Her armaments scored and cut the earth and separated her from its welcome. Lila downgraded her defensive conditions and listened to the soft whirr and snicker of a billion perfect metal parts shifting back into her civilian body, smoothing her skin, making her comfortable. If only the nagging sensation in her mind would be quiet she could sleep here.
“On your side,” Zal said perfunctorily, and she obeyed without thinking—having once accepted his instructions, she found herself glad for more. It was a relief to be told what to do.
He lay behind her and matched his long tall body to the shape of hers, knees bent; spoons. He negotiated a position for his arm around her carefully, avoiding the hard metals of her forearm and outer hip on the upward side. Carefully he undid the front of the elvish jerkin she wore and slid his hand underneath its tatters. She felt his fingers work to push her vest up a few inches, so that he had skin to skin contact with her at her waist and then the soft, warm touch of his andalune spread out from there, covering her over in seconds like the world’s softest, most intelligent smart blanket. It was curiously asexual, this contact, kind and concerned but no more than that and it made her smile just a little. She predicted its likely motivations, recalled her previous encounter with this, and began to explain that she was quite healthy and in no need of medical assistance,
“You don’t need to…”
“Just shut up, Lila. This is my home town and I’m going to look after you here,” he said, back in his most normal voice, elf in sound, human in word, demon in temper. “Elven hospitality, if it still works after that hook-up with unreality. Here’s hoping.”
Unreality? Her AI
mind didn’t know how to process that. Everything was real that could be perceived and there were no immediate threats. She responded to the part she did understand. “I don’t need to be looked after. I’m looking after you. That’s my assignment and that’s what I’m doing.”
“Yeah, I got that,” he drawled as if he didn’t believe a word she was saying.
The gentle, downy sensation of the andalune presence began to sink down into her as though it was melting through her skin like butter. There was something weird about it—more weird than usual even, as though Zal was connected to Sathanor, as though all of Alfheim was holding her through him, or more like he and it were temporarily concurrent, like two solutions to a single equation. She didn’t like it It was too big. It was too elfy. Magic ran through it and magic was both untouchable and unpredictable. She didn’t want to be there now.
“Stop. Stick a sock in it,” he said patiently. “And turn off whatever Ninja Assassin program you’ve got running that’s making you act like GI Jane on acid. Do you want that treacherous little shit to live, or don’t you?”
For a split second Lila had no idea who he was talking about. Then what he said sunk in and she realised that Battle Standard was operational. She’d forgotten it was on, didn’t even remember cueing it. With numb efficiency she executed the commands to disable it.
Virtual Warrior Suite closing down. Normal Status resuming.
Guilt flooded her, but it had a hard time getting anywhere because of the suffused pleasure of Zal’s andalune body, occupying all the space Tath had once occupied. “Tath?” she said aloud, to him and to Zal. There was no response from the place Tath used to be. “You mean Tath!”
“Yes, him. Unless there’s someone else here I don’t know about,” Zal snapped, completely unable to disguise how exhausted he was and how angry.
“He saved your life, you know.”
“Don’t even start, girl. Hold still.”
Keeping It Real Page 31
