Going Under

by Justina Robson

  Outside Thingamajig was doing an elaborate mime. When she frowned at him, he went off and shortly returned with a dead bird. He tore out the tail feathers and stuck them to his bottom and then held the loose-necked head in front of his face. Then he dropped his props and wiggled his fingers close to his eyes before stretching his arms out, indicating all directions. Satisfied from the change on her face that she had understood, he returned to yanking ribbons off the baskets and licking them for traces of aether.

  “He’s right,” Teazle murmured without opening his eyes. His tail twitched. “You should go and see her. It’s time.”

  “If it’s time why is he still here?” she folded her arms and watched the imp’s activities. “Surely I’m still hellbound if he hasn’t gone away of his own accord?”

  Teazle grunted, “Unlike most imps he seems to have an agenda that goes beyond tormenting the damned.” He sounded vaguely intrigued, but only vaguely. “If that weren’t the case I’d have eaten him already. But he hasn’t been on your shoulder in a week, and that’s good enough. Will you go alone?”

  She knew enough about the white demon by now to know that a leading question from him was always a taunting opportunity in the making; if she said no, she’d drop in his estimation and his power over her—always a factor that must be accounted for, even with demons with whom you were intimate—would rise. This was a world where yielding to fear had dire consequences.

  “I’ll get dressed and take a flight,” she said casually, not wishing in the slightest to make the visit.

  “Zal and I will amuse ourselves,” Teazle murmured, making it sound in just those few words as though he had elaborate plans that would involve a great deal of life-threatening activity. No doubt he did. Lila wondered just how long they could survive a vacation in Demonia. “Don’t worry your human head about it,” was added into her silence.

  “I don’t have a human head,” she said and turned around, heading towards the bathroom.

  “Heart then,” the demon said with surprising fondness. “I know you love him. I’ll be sure and be the first to die.”

  She couldn’t think of an adequate reply to that, so she just went and took her bath.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thingamajig rode on Lila’s shoulder to the Souk. He babbled anxiously all the way about whatever caught his attention and, instead of his customary piercing of her earlobe with his sharp talon, he clutched the cloth of her padded vest in a vice grip.

  “Can’t you sit still? I don’t know what you have to be nervous about,” she said crossly. The day was hot and humid, the roads seemingly full of lazy, torpid demons who were content to simply stare at her and mutter or else call various congratulations or deathwishes on her marriage. They oiled from their idleness into sudden huddles as she passed. She wanted to smack them, but for once nobody seemed in the mood for a duel.

  Occasionally strangers attempted to press small gifts on her, as she had been warned they would, and she directed them to the servant behind her whom Teazle had instructed to collect and check all items. The servant had already sent one full bag back to the house. Lila hoped that personalised thank-you notes were not required, but reasoned that for what amounted to bribes, they were almost certainly not. The House of Ahriman had been a major demon cabal and the House of Sikarza was in a similar position before the wedding. Now their joint power was vast. Everybody who wasn’t allied to one of the great families was angling for a position with them.

  The imp by her ear came to the end of his babbling history of the allegiances of the House of Ceriza, which they had passed some time ago, and made an unhappy noise before piping, “I have more business than you being damn nervous. She…” but he wasn’t able to go on. In fact, the word as he said it was so loaded with dread and the impossibility of escape, that it was quite sufficient.

  “You will tell her that you want me around strictly on a retainer basis, won’t you?” he asked, for the thousandth time. “I mean you’ll say it quickly. I don’t want her getting the wrong idea and banishing me before you get to say it when you really intend to keep your promise and help me discover my true identity, which is your mission, you and the others, to do good things, like heroes of old, eh? Like the Maha Animae of the old days. You’d not let a small friend such as myself languish in the abysses of the infinite like just any old imp, waiting for some hopeless neurotic to walk past and pull them back into physical being with the force of their madness, would you? No. That would be a terrible thing indeed. And who knows where I might be stuck? I could be stuck halfway up the sky over the Lagoon and not even in the city, and then what would the chances be of some possessed dimwit flapping by close enough to pull me free of the miserable torment of limbo? None. Not for thousands and thousands and thousands…” he continued for a second as Lila’s hand clamped over his head but then stopped as she closed the implacable machinery of her fist.

  “I’ll mention it,” Lila said in a very even voice, speeding up her tread to a pace just short of running. “Oh, I’m sorry, I seem to be crushing your skull…” She let go.

  The imp remained motionless for a moment, then very carefully rubbed its hideous little face against her vest. “You have the tender mercies of a goddess. I shall say no more.” And it didn’t, although it vibrated with anxiety so violently she started to feel that his talking had been a better option.

  Madame Des Loupes was the greatest clairvoyant of the age. Lila had met her before, and taken tea. Nothing bad had happened. She had been given no dire prophecies or information, and the tea was good. Madame had been infallibly correct and polite about Lila’s descent into hell, Lila thought. A pity for Lila that she had imagined fiery morasses and roasting spits instead of intense emotional and mental anguish, but either way, forewarned was not forearmed.

  She had not understood her personal situation until much too late. Too late she realised that when a demon talked about living in hell, it meant you were living inside the worlds of your own illusions. Demons considered this a form of victimhood—you were a victim of an inaccurate reality. This made you easy meat for anyone who could push your buttons, whatever they were. And for those who were without illusion, seeing the hotspots of other people’s lies, selfdeceptions, motivations, and fears was simple.

  Lila still wasn’t sure it was human to live without some illusions and to see what was there as clearly as the demons claimed to see it although seeing of reality for what it was… that had a power she couldn’t deny. But again, it wasn’t a power you could wield like a sword. It was a power you could follow, like a current, or you might fight and swim against it and drown. Either way you might drown in fact. Just knowing what things were like wouldn’t save you from them any more than knowing how a volcano works would save you from a fiery death if you got close to one that was going up.

  Lila had once thought that all great powers of that kind, such as seeing The Truth and suchlike, were the powers of champions which would grant a kind of immunity from harm. They seemed legendary and otherworldly, supernatural abilities for the rare people who were spiritually developed enough to have gained them. But no. They were not like that at all. The only thing you had to do to acquire them was to stop fooling yourself (though that was not easy when you had spent a lifetime being bamboozled into your illusions by other bamboozled people who came from great long heritages of similarly bamboozled people who all had very good and proud reasons for wanting to believe bamboozling things).

  However, the visionary gifts of the champions who saw truly—which she had thought of as so grandly elevated and conferring great privilege—showed instead the limits of one’s power; what one might do, or might not, and when. She got that now. Compared to the dreams she used to cultivate about knowing everything, dreams in which everything was so obvious that it was only a matter of doing the right thing at the right moment to ensure the whole world turned in a more favourable direction—why, the realisations of her own mistakes in so believing were like repeated slaps in the
face with a wet, week-old dead fish. Look at Mom and Dad, who had finally seen through their self—destructiveness in the moments of their death, but never bothered to do so in life when it could have been of use. And look at Lila, who had shored them up in their folly with her protective lies and deceptions, while despising them secretly and pretending the entire thing was loving care. The horrific and pointless waste of it made her eyes prick with tears and her throat close with pain. And to think she had been going to show them, with her nice job and her superior sense of how to organise life, exactly how to be better people when she was busy blaming her sister for leaving home and bailing out and saying rude, nasty things about Mom and Dad…

  Yes, the vision of the demons was hard to take. Because she felt she had at least managed to face most of its revelations, Lila was not as scared of Madame as she might be. But then, that was perhaps due to the limits of her vision, she thought, whereas Thingamajig was much better informed about Madame, even if he had forgotten exactly in what ways. Lila had no idea and so she was content to go and find out if Madame was prepared to, somehow, let her out of Hell, for Madame had that power at least. Lila knew, because Madame had given it to Zal.

  A thought struck her as she turned through the beaded door of the Souk; its soul-guards tinkling in the wind with the sound of a thou sand tiny sighs, “Is that why you’re an imp then, because you wouldn’t acknowledge some truth?”

  “It was not a truth,” Thingamajig snapped, emphasising the last word. “It was a conjecture. An hypothesis. A notion. An idea unverified by scientific observations. A matter,” he intoned with the utmost loathing, “of opinion.”

  “What was?”

  “I don’t remember,” he said hopelessly and fell into a slump.

  Lila set her eyes to tunnel vision as they began to pass the esoteric stalls. She had seen them once and once was enough. Part of her wanted to look again, to reinforce its belief that living things preserved in fluids twitched in bottles and much worse things lay dead in various ways… but she didn’t indulge herself. The dark magics were as practised as any other skill in Demonia; to artistic perfection, and beyond, to zeotika—corruption.

  She was afraid she might see necromancers’ vials, and if she did, how could she pass, knowing what they held? Souls, or spirits, or whatever aetheric portions of beings could be detached from the gross mortal body would be imprisoned there. The bodies themselves might be in any state. No, she didn’t want to see them and to know, from Tath, what they were for. She didn’t want to feel his own cocktail of repulsion and desire. It felt shamefully weak, but to survive this world it didn’t pay to bring your human sensibilities too close to the surface.

  Lila remembered when Tath had eaten Teazle’s brother. The glorious vampirism. The thrilling jolt of power, the gluttonous, eager bite that seized the spirit and shredded it to nothing more than primal energy.

  No, she didn’t want to think about that. In her chest Tath was utterly silent, a suspended shimmer of presence no more intrusive than a breath of air. He and she were so closely attuned now that they rarely needed to speak, although they frequently did, to pretend that they didn’t feel one another’s hearts. Of their secrets, they were each other’s keeper. How soon that had come about… how easily.

  Lila’s view widened as she cleared the narrow walk with its overhanging webs of fine floating coloured gauze and came to one of the major ways that led to the souk’s ancient heart. Along this passage there were fewer items on display and they were all artworks of various kinds: sculptures, paintings, fabrics… every kind of designable item. In the dim interiors of the old plasater-daub warehouses demons worked to pack things into crates and to load crates onto pallets which waited for nightfall when the trade closed and the streets admitted the passage of goods carts. She saw some marked for Otopia and, without any awareness of the long machine processes involved in the research that her AI performed, she understood that their barcodes directed them to Home Depot. She wondered if the buyers had any idea what the demons were capable of doing with apparently ordinary items, but that was a Customs matter, not for her to concern herself with.

  “Wait wait wait!”

  A blurt from the imp shook her out of her surreptitious spying. She slowed down and then stopped. They were alone in a narrow coil where the buildings blotted out most of the sky with their overhanging upper storeys, their flags and hoardings and drying laundry. She saw Thingamajig’s skinny arm pointing to a stand of unremarkable statues set close by the pavement. Rows of varying-sized demon models were ranked on cheap wooden shelving, held in place by lengths of rough twine. They looked like they were cast in resin or some kind of clay.

  “Go closer!”

  Oh. My. God.

  Lila raised her eyebrows at this double jeopardy taunt and questions flicked through her mind. “What is it?” She idled across and pretended to browse the statues. On closer inspection she realised the workmanship was exquisite on every single one. They were models of demons in various dramatic poses, and incredibly lifelike. Every scale and hair was minutely rendered and the smallest ones were small enough to have fitted into a small pocket. Paper price tags were stuck to each one and after doing the conversion she thought they were a reasonably good value, if you liked that kind of thing. They were coloured, but not as brightly as real demons, as if the trend in that particular art leaned towards a muted understatement.

  The imp crawled down the front of her vest, claws clinging, and hung there, fixated. “It’s really him.”

  She tracked his gaze and found him looking at one of the largest pieces, almost waist high to her—standing to the side of the shelved items.

  It’s really him, Tath echoed with a profound irony she didn’t understand.

  The statue had a lot of horns and was various hues of red and orange. Large leathery wings and a spined tail were half extended, as though it was about to do something. Its face wore an expression of annoyance and the mouth was partway open.

  “Someone you know?”

  “Knew,” the imp said softly. “Yes indeed, the leader of my Precinct. A fearless hunter of the unrighteous he was, not only a mage but gifted with a shaman’s powers to call on the land. Rare. His art was geomancy. He could flatten cities with a stamp of his hoof or raise towns out of living rock. Made a lot of money in building. Had a whole passel of architects and pretty much the entire business all paid a tithe to him in some way or other. No way you could put up anything if he didn’t like you. He’d destabilise your foundations and make your materials fall into dust. A right bugger, he was.” It had grown thoughtful on the last few phrases and stared closely. “Just look at the size of him. Very powerful. How much is he?”

  Lila looked for a tag but there was none… and at that moment the shopkeeper came out. She was thin and tall and green, with beautiful fins on her head. “May I help you?”

  “I was just wondering how much this statue is,” Lila said.

  The finned demon raised a membranous eyebrow. “Indeed. He’s not for sale at home. Export only. Are you perhaps a trader from Otopia?”

  “No,” Lila said quickly. “Just a tourist.”

  “Mmn,” the demon looked at her, not believing a word. “Well, if you’re very keen you can make me an offer.”

  “I don’t even have a garden,” Lila said apologetically.

  The demon nodded.

  “Or a house big enough.”

  “He’s not a domestic size,” the demon agreed. “Small ones for that. Lucky statues. Not a big totem. He’s more a corporate kind of… relic.”

  Lila thought it best to keep to herself that she had no idea why anybody might want such things in the house or anywhere. “Company forum,” she agreed politely.

  Lila, they are not facsimiles. They are real. These are demons who have passed into their predeath ages.

  Lila felt her social smile freeze on her face, but then suddenly the strange conversation that she had once overheard in a tea house, where she had seen a de
mon shrink and ossify, clicked into to place. His friends had bitched that he wouldn’t fetch much money. Predeath?

  Before true death a demon separates from the physical plane and its body petrifies and reduces, depending on how much spirit it had. Inside the remains the demon itself lives on, detached from worldly proceedings. It may stay there indefinitely, seeking to influence others through the aethereal planes, or it may depart for the endless shores.

  How do you tell which ones are really dead?

  Only a necromancer can know, Tath said smugly. And I can tell you that most of these, including the big one, are fully present and listening to every word.

  Just like you, she said and regarded the rigid little forms with a new wariness.

  Well, good luck to them in the human world, Tath said acidly. They have as much chance of accurately placing a psychic influence on you dullards as they have of running a three-minute mile. You would think that thousands of years of effort occupying talismans and making themselves into New Age jewellery would have taught them that.

  She decided not to ask for more detail, because she knew he wanted her to. “Come on,” she said to Thingamajig, and turned back to the road. “We’ve got other things to do.”

  “Hey! What’s he retail for?” the imp screeched from her shoulder as she walked away.

  The trader made some reply and Thingamajig bristled. “Overpriced.”

  “So,” Lila said as she walked, “demons have infiltrated the human world.”

  “Everyone has infiltrated the human world,” Thingamajig asserted breezily. “Long before you started noticing us with your fancy bomb whatsit. I wouldn’t doubt that was an arcane invention that required a lot of influence, if you may say, in its creation. You were a lot of innocent fun before it all became this serious diplomatic angst-fiasco and formal governmental whatnot. I often wonder who made that thing and why they wanted to spoil everything. Not only did we have you for light entertainment, but before it went off we also had worlds that were stable and pleasant and not prone to breaking up and dissolving into the primal materials. Of course many say it’s a conspiracy. Don’t know by whom and for what though. Can’t see what anyone had to gain by ruining everything. Now that we have you on the case, however, I’m sure it will all soon be sorted out.”