“Thingamajig?”
“The imp.”
“I don’t know. He didn’t come from Demonia with me. We had a falling out.”
“And the others?”
She shrugged.
“Because of Sorcha,” he said.
She nodded. “We were all very angry. It was like… and how stupid does this sound… it was like this giant over-the-top party, where anything goes, there’s even a bodycount of people who were walk-on extras, and then something stupid happens and your friend is dead. How did I get so I can talk about this as if it were a party? How did we all think that what we did was anything but a bad idea? I said extras. And to be honest, that’s exactly what Demonia feels like to me. Like some kind of movie set, where hardly anything is real. I don’t know, the whole damn world is starting to feel that way.” She took a deep breath and swallowed her horrible emotion. “Anyway, that’s where it, me, and a whole lot of other things parted company.”
Malachi nodded, his face gentle. “They’re a savage kind. Their ways aren’t yours. That’s all. I keep trying to explain this to whoever will listen, but the plans to go ahead and open up Otopia to the demons more keep moving along. It isn’t that they’re evil, as so many would have you believe, but they aren’t suitable for your world. First the party. Then the fight. Then the funerals. It’s the funerals part that most people can’t stand.”
“Actually it’s the waste,” Lila said. “She was so talented and so young. And fun.”
“The demons would say that the talent and youth are even more precious now. They wouldn’t say it was a waste. They’d say ..
… it was the making of a hero.” Lila nodded. “I know. As far as they’re concerned I’m the one who’s the dead loss.” She paused, “Is that what you think?”
“You’re not dead yet, so I can’t say that,” he said and grinned at her, a sly, funny, wicked grin.
She smiled, even though she wasn’t in the mood to laugh out loud. “Heroes can’t be self-doubters, Malachi,” she told him. “I read it in the book of rules. That means I can’t be a hero. So at least I’m safe from that one.”
“That’s the spirit!” He finished the last of his beer, turned the bottle upside down, and looked sadly at the single drip that fell out of it. “You could probably be a heroine though,” he added. “You’re in love, you’re racked with self-questioning, you’re at the mercy of society’s higher forces, and you’re riddled with a form of consumption. That’s quite gothic.”
“I’ll try to look at it that way from now on.”
“Do, if it helps. Meanwhile, I’ve got some advice. Don’t mention either of the amulets to Williams.”
Lila had already slipped them both inside the collar of her combat vest.
“Who do you think sent the technology here?” she asked.
“The Others,” he said. “I think that some of that idiot Paxendale’s theoretical mumblings are probably right. The worlds are inherently unstable and wrenching each other apart because of a gravitational problem caused by the absence of a substantial mass.” He chuckled, “Hard to believe a faery ever said that but I like to get the lingo right.”
“A seventh world.”
“Yes.”
“Has there ever been a seventh world?”
“Not to my knowledge. But my knowledge is only as long as the faery genealogy, so it’s possible that a catastrophe occurred before anyone had any clue what was going on, before anyone was even anyone. This instability reportedly takes a long time to occur. Literal ages of time. What we see is the very final stage of the process, not the start.”
“So, Otopia becoming more permeable at the Bomb Event…”
“Compared to that the Bomb wasn’t an event, it was a little slipup, and it only caused a slight increase in accessibility. Either the Bomb accelerated some pull effect and drew everything that bit closer or it was a symptom of the same thing. Doesn’t matter.”
“And you still don’t buy the Bomb Event as creating the entire…
Malachi darkened.
“I don’t,” she said. “It doesn’t make a difference anyway.”
“Oh yes it does,” he replied. “If they reverse the Bomb and all returns to ‘normal’ in Otopia or whatever it is, then everyone you know, more or less, will vanish, never to be seen again. Certainly, whether or not that happens we would then have the problem of the instability to contend with anyway, but you would have no say in it, always supposing we weren’t simply extinguished with the experi ment. Not that the humans consider us real so I suppose that isn’t important.”
“They can’t do it anyway,” she said. “Reversing a thing like that isn’t possible within an expanding universe.”
Malachi looked at her, suddenly frowning but this time with surprise. “How’d you know that?”
“It was on Jeopardy,” she said wearily, having no idea how she knew it. “But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m not even sure they can remake the Bomb Event because it was a very rare quantum collision in a specific timespace location. They could try for millions of years and get nothing.” She finished her own beer and tossed the bottle among the others. “Where do you suppose the remote control is located, and how many of them?”
“I’d guess more than you like in places you won’t know,” he said. “We need a big magic to get them.”
“I think I know the kind,” she said, and got up. For a second she was unsteady, and bubbles of ginger and mint popped up through her head, but then she got her balance. It was so easy, she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before, but if it worked at all the chances were it would be detected.
“What’re you doing?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Stick around and call me when Williams wakes up. I’ve got some things I have to do alone.”
“Don’t be too long.” He pointed at his clock, which showed the time as two AM.
“Just one question,” she said. “How do you get to Faery from here, I mean, if you’re not one?”
“I take you,” he said. “Or one of us does. You can’t go by accident and there are no portals. Or you can find a faery ring, but you won’t find one unless someone wants you to find it. So it’s all the same thing.”
“We have to go there anyway to get something for the moths, right?”
“Right.”
“So, be ready then. We might need to leave quite suddenly.” For the first time since she’d started talking she looked him in the eye and willed him not to ask why. So many of their dealings relied on keeping secrets and she knew there was no reason for him to agree to anything she asked. She wasn’t even about to tell him what she intended, so if he’d wanted to walk away she wouldn’t blame him at all.
He nodded. “What about Zal?”
“If he’s here, then he comes along. If not, then we go alone.”
Malachi watched her duck out of the tent. A gust of wind full of the smell of ancient dust and rain came in to replace her. He went to his computer and flicked to a security camera view on Williams’s office. She was still sleeping.
As fast as he could he went about finding the things he needed and then dematerialised himself and took the fast and ugly route through freezing I-space to Demonia. He emerged in the city at the Faery Tree in his cat form, which was reasonably safe, and loped off towards the Ahriman Manse as fast as he was able.
CHAPTER TEN
Lila measured the steps to Sarasilien’s rooms in kilometres. 0.43. Since the Alfheim secession he’d taken to living here, much like Williams and various others among the Agency staff who either didn’t have time for another life, didn’t want one, or for whom these buildings were the only safe haven. She didn’t even want to think about her own position in that unhappy legion, so she counted metres, centimetres, millimetres, carpet tiles, ceiling lights, and other rubbish until she reached the green doorway and pressed her hand to the entry panel. She scratched her head as she waited for an answer and felt her fine, impressionable, and immu
table skin become coated with a thin film of grease and Demonian grit.
Obviously he’d been asleep because he appeared in immaculate robes, his hair tied back and a scarf hanging around his neck loosely which she suspected he had worn tied around his eyes. It had a lot of writing on it in some magical language. A thin haze of magical activity briefly made her vision blur as she stepped through at his invitation. Inside the air was five degrees warmer and squelchy with moisture. Plants surged in every crevice and corner. Soft night sounds and lights played from the roof. The office was unrecognisable.
“Home from home?”
“For the time being,” he said and she relaxed fractionally at the sound of his familiar voice. For an instant she was almost not angry with him.
She turned to face him and her composure nearly went. His face looked old and oddly ravaged. The rims of his long, slanted eyes were red and his shoulders hung forwards. He was holding something small in his hand and when she glanced down at it for clues she saw the glossy pages of a daily glamour magazine, open at Sorcha’s picture. He closed it as she was looking and placed it carefully on one of his worktops. Abruptly she felt out of place and rude, as if she had discovered him naked and whatever she’d been going to say died on her lips.
He acknowledged her discomfort and drew himself together visibly. “Tea?”
“No thanks,” she said. “I just drank my own weight in faery ale.”
He smiled for a millisecond and then shrugged, “I might try that.” Then he searched her face with his gaze. “You were a long time away in Demonia.”
“Too long,” she said, trying to be offhand and failing. He waited a second more but she didn’t know what to say about it.
“How are you?” he was as genuinely tentative as a father with a rebellious teenage daughter. Lila didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or cry about that. She felt like the daughter.
“Oh, you know.” She gave a little wave with one hand: their mutual joke that had started one day shortly after she’d woken from her resurrective surgery. He’d ask, often across a room crowded with machinery and staff, and she’d just signal, like in the poem-waving, or drowning, usually both.
“Still here though,” he said and she felt that he was struggling with the same inertia that she was. They shared a rueful smile. “But this is not simply a social moment, is it?”
“Nothing is, here.”
“No.”
Her longing for comfort evaporated, faced with the futility of hoping for it here, from this person, at this moment in this place. She held the necklaces forward. “I wanted to ask you about this.”
“The charm to conceal poor, lost Ilya,” Sarasilien said quietly and nodded. “Yes, I thought that might be it.” He beckoned to her and she followed him through the lush growth of the office and laboratory to the small room that had become his living space, and in which she had last seen him awkwardly ministering to Sorcha, helpless in the demon’s benign erotic spell. She saw a silk scarf that had belonged to her sister-in-law draped over the couch there. It glittered with precious stones and as she got closer she was suddenly struck by a faint trace of Sorcha’s trademark musky perfume, tinted with brimstone. She glanced at the tall, stoical figure of the old elf ahead of her and wondered, really wondered, if there had been more to that relationship than she had guessed.
He paused, sensing her attention—she could never hide a damn thing from them. “Old men have their weaknesses,” he said. “Even those who know better.”
Inside her chest, Tath was alert and circling, but he didn’t speak or attempt to move. She was aware of him, and he of her, but they left one another alone. Now she felt the faint traces of contempt in him. It was only a flicker, but her judgement on it was suddenly harsh and he flared with anger. They could fight without words it seemed.
“Does he wear you down?”
She was taken aback. “I… we argue all the time. Territory wars. Have to keep our distance somehow. It’s not easy.”
“You can let him go.” He said it as if it was just that easy and indicated she should take a seat.
She didn’t feel like sitting on the couch, so she sat on the floor.
“Everybody dies, Lila,” Sarasilien said, continuing from his previous comment. “It was his time. You don’t owe it to him.”
“I made my choices,” she said. “Now I know this amulet is no ordinary object. And you’re no ordinary elf. Seems like everyone has their secrets around here, and I don’t mind that, except where I need to know.”
“Let me guess, someone has been asking about it, and made you an offer.”
She had no taste for duplicity. “It was a good offer.”
“May I ask what?”
“Information about where all my technology really came from.”
He nodded. “Do you trust them?”
“No,” she said immediately, surprising herself, and her tone clearly said she didn’t trust him either. She wasn’t sure she trusted herself. In fact, she wasn’t sure how much she was herself. “Strange shit is happening to me. I’m sick of asking for the truth and playing by the rules. Later I won’t ask, either because I don’t have the time or because I ran out of time and no longer care. So. At the risk of laying out all my cards and letting every other sod have time enough to slide theirs down their sleeves—What gives?”
He picked up Sorcha’s scarf and ran it through his hands, then sat down on the couch and leant forward, elbows on his knees. His long, fox-coloured hair hid his face in shadow. “I am an elf, by birth, for all that counts for. But I was born in the old times, before the Light elves became what they are, and before they made the shadow races. At that time all the worlds threw up their most powerful avatars—the like of which no longer arise. The cause is more homogenisation than decay, but it matters not. I was one of those avatars. Will this information be enough for you to deal?”
“Maybe,” she said. “So, what’s an elf like you doing in a place like this?”
“Following my interest,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
She shook her head and smiled for a second. “Okay. I’m thinking I’d be better off asking you about the changes in my machine than these doctors and techies from the human side.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Do you know where it came from?”
“It is from world seven. But world seven has never been here. Someone brought it.”
“Who?”
“I would like to know that.”
“One of the Others?” she’d used up all her guessing and knowledge.
“Others is just a word that people use for things they cannot name,” Sarasilien said, sliding Sorcha’s scarf through his fingers. “They are not a set unto themselves.”
“So, an unknown. Like you?”
“Possibly. Avatars from the old world might linger in other places. Perhaps the seventh world had its own, and they made it here and left these pieces—with or without intent. As far as I am aware nobody knows any more than this.”
“But it’s why you’re here.”
“It’s why we’re all here. Me, Malachi, the demons, the ghosts… ah yes… you’re nodding. You know about that too.”
“Only what Mal told me.”
“Mmn, these upwellings in the aether take place sometimes. Things are always changing.”
“Was it… was it Dar who put the elementals into me?”
“Yes. It was part of his healing talent. But I was the one who fixed them into the substance of the materials,” he looked up for the first time since they had begun speaking.
“Nice experiment,” she said, after a while. “Dar. Then you.”
“First Otopian betrayal. Then Dar. Then Otopian science. Then Dar again. Then Zal. Then me.”
He was right. He was only one in a long line of interferences, experiments, manipulations. “What has Zal got to do with it?”
“Zal’s talent is to harmonise. He does it at all kinds of levels. In your case he harmon
ised the essential frequency of the vibrations of your living tissues and the metal substitutes, assisted by the presence of the elementals, which are always needed for alchemy involving two kinds of unsympathetic material. He is a natural, that is to say not studied, so I doubt he had any conscious awareness of his effects on you. But the growth of your two body types into one is probably due to his influence.”
She sat up. “Boy, I never realised you could be so damn cold and calculating. I thought you were such a… nice guy.”
He went back to stroking Sorcha’s scarf. “Lila, you and the machine were not suited. We do everything we can to help you survive but this hasn’t been done before, all of it is a risk with unknown consequences.”
“You didn’t even ask me!”
“You have your choices. Nothing forces you to continue. I have my choices. You chose Ilya. I chose you.”
“Sounds so easy when you put it that way.”
“It is easy. You want it to be fair. You’re disappointed. That’s all.”
“All.”
“Yes.”
She got up.
“Listen to me,” he said, effectively halting her midstride. “Anger will get you only so far. If you want to avoid Sorcha’s fate you have to stop resisting and grow up. You have to. And do it soon.”
“You gonna tell me I’m some kind of hero model, out to fix the world and if I don’t then it’s all going to hell in a handbasket?” she spat at him.
“No. There’s nothing special about you. You don’t have to do anything. More will come. They always do. Heroes are ten a penny. The world will turn without you and if things fall apart it won’t be because you didn’t act. I said what I said only for you. Do it for yourself. Wise up, Lila, before it’s too late.”
She flexed her hands into fists and out again. Instead of rising, with his words her anger had vanished. She felt cold and empty.
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