The merest ripple, like the beginnings of a heat haze, shimmered across the ground and through the air a short distance away. It became more pronounced in the next second, rocks and earth moving like the surface of a still lake disturbed by the rise of a large body from deep beneath. Pebbles and loose dirt shimmied and whirled up into brief, tiny spirals before falling flat. This activity covered a wide area, several tens of metres square. Within its span what small scrubby grasses and weeds had struggled into life abruptly withered and crisped. There was sudden flat heat and Lila’s skin began to tingle with the first hint of sunburn. She automatically put up an arm to shield her face and Zal turned away, backing off behind her as Sorcha’s crimson flames rose around her like a cloak. Thingamajig leaped to her shoulder and tried to burrow under her armour; failing, he clung to her back instead.
“We could just go and Teazle can catch us up later,” Lila said, trying hard to feel it was not too late for this. Her amulet was burning again. The cool wash of Tath’s andalune body covered her face suddenly, with the effect of a cold handkerchief. She was able to lower her arm.
It is incorporeal. At last I begin to understand, the elf said to her. The reason you see nothing is because it has removed most of its existence from the physical plane.
We can’t fight what we can’t hit, Lila said.
You can hit it elsewhere, where it is. Not here.
So where is it?
The Void’s Edge, I-space, Tath replied. And Otopia.
But… how… ?
It all overlaps, the elf replied, as though this was obvious. Did you not know ?
No I did not know, Lila replied, mimicking his own voice back to him with bad humour. But if we can’t hit it, it can’t hit us.
Wrong, the elf said. It has enough presence here to deal with the aetheric and that is quite enough.
“Zal?” Lila said as they remained still, as if already captured. To Tath she said, Can you do anything?
Perharps, Tath said. But I doubt it. You may hope it has no ill will. It would be a scant hope. It has come because it sensed power, and the only reason it might have interest in that is to acquire it.
“Yeah, seems a lot of bother just to call Teazle back,” Zal said, for once unable to mask the tension in his voice. “I thought it would be… much easier and less dangerous. I never crossed the wall before.” He gave a humourless laugh, “I’ve got stupid, being here so long. The city fooled me…” he sounded surprised.
“It is worth the mistake to discover a legend,” Sorcha whispered, with a lift of her pointed chin. “I thought stories of the wall were to keep greedy idiots away from the Family hoards hidden in the mountains.”
They were all quite still, including the drake. The air in the dead, hot region had begun to move. Vague shapes and shadows crossed it, turning in on themselves. Something was slowly boiling itself into form.
“You came here on a whim and you didn’t know this would happen?” Lila said, just to get things straight and distract herself from the threads of panic she was beginning to feel.
“The Country Vice is not unsurvivable,” Zal objected, then added, over fifty percent of the time.” There was a soft explosion of light and Lila felt and saw the yellow and orange flame of his wings suddenly unfurl, casting weak lilac shadows of them all out before them.
Inside the shimmering air a shape began to emerge that was recognisably demonic: a tall satyr with extremely heavy horns on its head. It carried a sickle and a sword, a spear and a dagger and two katanas in its three pairs of hands. The slightest wash of black ran through it, a single drop of ink in a glass of water, and stained it just enough to see, though the landscape was clearly visible through it.
It appears to have some life-draining abilities like my own that do not require direct contact.
Joy, Lila replied, giving full rein to her AI strategic and tactical systems. And how do I get it more corporeal? But to this she had her own answer. She’d never met a demon who wouldn’t eventually rise to some form of taunt. They had no sense when it came to their pride. The eventually bit was the part that was going to be trouble. She didn’t see why you’d give up an advantage like total invisibility, to her at least, so she guessed it was in some way vain. She turned around, putting her back to the demon as if there was nothing there, and set her hands on her hips—
“So where is Teazle? It’s not like it would take him any time to get here.”
“Might be dead,” Sorcha said, after a moment’s pause.
“I’m not dead, you pitiful excuse for an Ahriman,” said the drake and abruptly shifted its form, becoming suddenly as smooth as plaster, smaller, thinner, whiter, and even more draconic. Teazle flicked his wings and scooped up a shower of dust and small stones, flinging them over the wild demon that faced them. For an instant Lila saw the creature’s surface become coated and flicker. Teazle continued, “Though I am rather pleased you’d go to all this bother just to find me. Lila, don’t stand there with your mouth open. Zal, do something useful like attune yourself to that bastard so you can tell me how to kill it. I’ve been trying to figure it out for five minutes but it’s too good with demon aether.”
The demon figure reached back with one hand in a classic casting action.
“Ah holy crap,” Teazle said.
The next few seconds passed in slow time for Lila as all her abilities went into overdrive. She saw that Zal was in line to be hit by whatever was coming and pushed backwards to make sure she was in the way. Teazle teleported behind the semivisible demon. Sorcha opened her ruby red mouth and took a huge breath. Zal moved to the side, away from Lila. The demon’s arm came back and its hand opened.
And then she was taken by surprise as Tath, without asking or warning, seized control of her body. His force was astonishing, bursting from aetherial to physical power in less than a split second. She felt him as if she was wearing him on the inside. His elven reflexes were faster even than her machine ones and he acted with absolute precision. He reached out, caught hold of Sorcha by the arm, and dragged her in front of Lila with a single jerk that was so abrupt Lila felt the demon woman’s shoulder joint pop. But this was a trifle compared to what happened in the next instant.
Tath jumped forwards across their connection into Sorcha’s aura. Lila felt him flinching, revolted, but committed too much to care. Whatever the demon had cast hit Sorcha at the same moment. Lila felt an abominable emptiness, a hunger beyond sating, and it pulled; it pulled on Sorcha and it pulled on Tath and it pulled on her with the horrifying gravity of a neutron star. But instead of drawing on phys ical matter, it drew on spirit and she, who had never really believed in the existence of souls and had doubted seriously if there was any reality in notions of spiritual energy or chi or anything like that for humans, felt her life force lifting out of her cells, quite bodily, and funnelling swiftly into a moving tornado whose terminus lay beyond them all, beyond Demonia, in a dimension she had no name for, into a being whose maw was open and into which she had no way of preventing herself from falling.
It was like being pulled abruptly to the edge of a cliff and then right over, to your great surprise and dismay, finding nothing to hold on to. There wasn’t even time to scream.
She realised with what she presumed was her last moment, quite calm, that in any case she had had no defences against this kind of attack. She tried to look for Zal, and hoped he might get away. She felt herself leaving her body and plunging forwards, through Sorcha, whose spirit had already left her. At least Tath was still with her.
You give up too easily, she felt him say to her, and then there was a truly horrible moment in which the easy forward motion ground to a halt and she felt completely suffused by Tath in a grim intimacy she would never have granted, and through him she could just feel Sorcha, and beyond that and with growing clarity, the demon—and the demon was unbearable, unspeakable. Beside it even Teazle was simply a player among fools. She had never believed such things existed.
Tath pulled.
Then she understood that the ritual being worked against her was that of a necromancer. The funnel of life led directly through the odd, flat, and two-dimensional realm of death, into the demon who stood beyond it. He commanded them to come, but Tath commanded them to remain, and now they were lost in a tugging match which would solely be determined by the power of the intent of the two combatants.
Free of her body Lila could look down on herself, on Sorcha and the others. In another way she could see through herself and the elf, and the demons, through the regions they passed across. She saw Teazle’s odd form stretched out in those dimensions too and felt surprise as her agony increased—the sense of being stretched too thin. She was part of a rope that was made up of her, Tath, Sorcha, and the other demon and it was under a huge load as its two opposing anchors hauled on it. The most curious thing was that as soon as she had lifted up here she felt no stress about what was going on. Death, or life, both were equal. She was quite detached about the outcome because whatever happened she knew that she was all right. This demon, even if it killed her, could do nothing to her beyond ending her human life—and she had just risen above that and seen that it was, in any case, only a temporary station. She didn’t even feel the slightest emotion at the prospect of the annihilation of her consciousness. She’d been unconscious before and it had never bothered her. So what if she never woke up? Things would go on without her.
Pity you never get to keep this, she heard Tath say of the experience but even that didn’t disturb her. Far off she was aware of Sorcha, strangely gleeful in the way only demons were at any and every turn of fate. Here only Tath and the wild demon struggled.
Can I do something?
His response was negative. She was not a necromancer. She didn’t exist where it mattered right now. The fight for souls may be on, but commanding souls was a matter for those with aetheric power who had tuned themselves beyond death’s gate. Lila knew herself to be part of an epic struggle, but she couldn’t feel it. She saw Tath thinning, his grip on the two of them making his own hold on the material plane hard to maintain and his lack of attunement to Sorcha’s demonic nature making his grip on her even more difficult to keep. Sorcha was floating, looking at the other thing that had grabbed her, curious about what it would be like to be consumed; knowing it didn’t matter—she would never be that other creature. One could not be changed. She felt a trace of disappointment leak through from Sorcha, who had been speculating on the possibility of leaping forwards and, in her last moments, dealing some kind of ferocious and maiming attack. The only thing that held her back was that she couldn’t think of a way to do it.
In the real world almost no time had passed. They were fixed, each in their odd positions. Lila saw narrow tentacles, almost feelers, emerging from Teazle’s open mouth. From her great height she saw them seize hold of the astral form of the attacking demon. That was interesting. She hadn’t known that demons could do this sort of thing. Not that she had known or believed much in this sort of thing. Most humans could accept the small magics and sleights of hand they encountered in aetherically poor Otopia, but hard information on aetheric battle and astral war was still the stuff of paranormal speculation and still, these short years after the Bomb, considered beneath scientific examination—mostly because no human scientific equipment had managed to detect a trace of it and the extensive evidence of human psychics was anecdotal and, to the prevailing paradigm of strict materialism, symptomatic of derangement. She tried to cue a recording but of course all that was down there in her body so nothing happened.
Time dragged as they began to slip slowly towards the invisible demon. Lila turned to look back at Zal, and she forgot what was going on for a moment. From where she was he was visible in an entirely different way, like Teazle, and like Sorcha. What she was seeing wasn’t a particular shape, it was the form of his spirit, both elf and demon. And it was singing. She could see that now, in the midst of this fight, he had no real awareness of it. It was just how he was. She was surprised and pleased to find him beautiful in this different way, as if it proved his worth beyond any doubt. She knew that she loved him, but here she didn’t feel it. She marvelled at how simple everything was from this perspective. She couldn’t imagine why she’d ever struggled against so much that was quite obvious and not in the least difficult or distressing…
She looked back at the others. Sorcha sang too. And Teazle was a hunter, silent and watchful. Tath she could not see, nor herself. They were too close. The other demon… now she realised what Tath had said and why. It was a predator and a killer in its true nature and it had refined that nature to a single hunger. It was less sophisticated than they were. It was raw. She doubted that it even had a conscious mind left anymore—and perhaps that was why it was winning.
Through their union Lila felt quite plainly that Tath was capable of stopping himself and her from being sucked away from the body they shared, but he could not hold onto Sorcha forever unless he held on and they were all dragged away. The demon had Sorcha in its grip, held in the strength of its absolute first cast. Teazle might prevent it from making two such attacks, but he had been too late for the first one.
You must let go, she said.
He hesitated. She knew for a fact, because they had been intimate so long, that if this had been him alone he would never have held onto Sorcha even for a second in such a situation, unless it would have bought him time. Tath had been a legendary cool operator, even in Alfheim. He’d betrayed his own lover for a cause he barely had a scrap of faith in. To her certain knowledge the only true bond he’d ever honoured was to his mistress and commander, the Lady of Aparastil, becoming a necromancer to suit her requirements even when it went against his own nature. He was a creature of necessity. And now he hesitated, on the verge of falling apart from effort.
He let go.
Lila was yanked back into her body with a snap. Tath went with her. In her hand Sorcha’s body fell lifeless, like a giant doll, and hung there. The last of her red fire flickered out.
In front of them the demon reached back. Lila could see Teazle doing something, but now she had lost her spirit vision so she didn’t know what it was. Behind her she felt the hot wash of Zal’s wings, heard him scream, “No!” A wave of agony shot through her torso as she felt the shock of what had just happened, all vestiges of detachment gone.
In the midst of this she felt also something tugging at her free hand. She glanced down and saw the imp attempting to press something into her palm.
“Run, baby, run, you gotta all run!” he shrieked, pushing the small object at her. “Throw this and go.” He didn’t wait or try to rush up to her shoulder now but leapt away to the side and put his tiny hands out, beginning to mutter and chant and hop.
Lila pulled Sorcha to her and grabbed hold of her more firmly with that arm. She was back alive and her heart was full of pain but she still had a few neurons attached to the AI processors and she knew what she was going to do, whatever anyone else thought. Calculations fast as light had already run their course almost before the combat itself had begun. She flung whatever useless shit the imp had given her at the demon with as much force and ill intent as she could muster, and before it had even landed she turned, snatched hold of Zal around his whip thin waist, and blasted out of there.
Her actions were so fast and powerful she felt the living elf buckle over her arm and lose his breath, first from the impact and then from the acceleration of their climb into the air. His wings burned her hair and eyelashes and seared the surface of her body armour. She ignored both it and his howl of rage and took them faster and further, heading for the wall. But even as they fled she couldn’t help but look back with her machine senses.
Whatever she had thrown at the demon had made it suddenly denser, more real. It had three distinct dimensions for a moment, and a form that was nothing like human, all muscle and teeth and raging, apocalyptic eyes. A blast of heat much stronger than the flames beside her rolled up and then everythin
g went hazy. It was difficult to see any details but she got the two main points: Teazle’s hands grown to an incredible size, his fingers tipped with razor talons, ripping through the creature with such ferocity that guts and matter spewed out of the gigantic gashes in a fountain; and Thingamajig, dancing on a little rock fifty metres away like one of Beelzebub’s leprechauns.
She thought that Teazle’s attack was surely fatal, but then she saw the wounds closing almost instantly, and the thing beginning to fade, to turn, to get some kind of grip on the white snake behind it. Then she felt the sickening plunge of fear and loathing as something it did made Teazle’s body shudder and jerk. She realised then that reaching the wall was not possible if Teazle couldn’t hold the thing back. But then the imp said something, words in Demonic that weren’t meant for her and so sounded only like the muffled bass thunder behind some drug-ridden heavy metal song played far away. Thingamajig spat and turned his back, scratching dry grit off his rock with his foot claws and shaking his tail. The nightmare demon vanished into the earth leaving Teazle slumped flat on the baking ground.
She flew up and over the wall and made landfall on the other side in a grove of pines, startling a group of young demons who scattered into the woods, hooting and squawking. They, at least, knew better than to stick around when adults were fighting.
Zal wrenched himself free of her before she had a chance to loosen her grip and staggered back several metres, ash white, his wings flickering and dying into his back.
“I…” Lila began, feeling Sorcha’s head lolling heavily against her shoulder and neck. “I didn’t…” but she knew how it must have looked. The demon had tried to get her and she had pulled Sorcha in front of her like a true coward.
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