They entered a timeless, empty region of cold so profound that he lost all feeling.
The next thing he knew, he was lying in mud, vomiting up semistagnant lake water. The cold was agonising, so less cold than before. He stood up and found himself on all fours, shaking himself vigor ously and spraying water in all directions. He tried to speak and felt his mouth shape itself clumsily around too-big teeth. A growling noise emerged, but no words.
At his side Nixas crawled further up the bank they were lying on, coughing, and sat for a moment, his body almost entirely transparent, made of water. The surface shone weakly in what passed for sunlight under the grey, winter sky of Umeval. His fine features were gone, replaced by suggestions of a face that wavered in and out of being. Petals and bits of stick moved idly in the volume of his translucent body. He looked as stunned as Malachi felt.
On the trampled grass before them he saw the legs of horses—not the fine black mares that had stormed the sea back in Otopia, but shorter and sturdier ponies with heavy hooves and thicker hair. Their manes and tails moved idly, floating in the air as if in water. Their black eyes were empty and far colder and hungrier than Malachi ever remembered. He couldn’t see the girls in them at all, and then one of them shivered into her change and he saw it was Poppy, though a shorter, fatter, and much more buxom Poppy. She wasn’t green and pretty but dark haired with dun skin. She had a voluptuous beauty of a kind but a look on her that was far craftier than she had ever worn in his knowledge. He knew that she was looking at him and seeing what he saw in her—a much older form of himself, from ages long gone in human memory, even from his own. He feared suddenly that he had no other shape than the cat and tried to change, scrabbling for the feeling and the charm with a desperation that felt inept and clumsy.
He stood up on two legs with relief but Poppy put her dirty-nailed hand to her mouth to cover it with shock. She was naked but her thick hair covered her, moved with her to keep her modesty whilst constantly threatening to reveal everything. In that respect the way she wore things hadn’t changed.
“Never saw you like that,” she said in her curiously older woman voice.
Viridia tossed her dark, dripping horse head in agreement.
“Worthy of our caste,” Teazle’s voice said from a short distance away and Malachi looked around to see the demon in his human form, sitting on a tussock. Of course he had ancient echoes of being deep in the past, but Malachi was stunned to silence by what he saw. He didn’t know what he’d expected exactly, although horns and monstrosity and danger had featured largely. Instead Teazle sat like a dream of a warrior, fine, strong, fully armed with swords at his back and knives at his belt. Everything about him was made of white light. He shone. His light gleamed on the ground around him and his eyes blazed like stars. The only word that came to Malachi’s mind was angel. He was dumbstruck for a full minute.
Teazle chuckled and when he spoke even the inside of his mouth shone white. “Don’t mind me, faery. Look in the water.”
Malachi turned around and stumbled back to the edge of the lake that spread out behind him and into the visible distance. It was lightly ruffled by the wind but close to the bank reeds sheltered large patches of it and he could see himself clearly.
It was exactly what he saw when he hung suspended with fear in the unknown grey of I-space. He was half changed, neither a man nor a great black cat, but both. A catman. His head was as big and heavy as a full-grown tiger’s with large cat’s eyes but something like the beginnings of a human nose and human lips. His jaws were cat large and he saw white teeth, sharp canines like spears. Triangular ears with long black fur tips stuck up on his head, lynxlike. His body was no longer the svelte and sleek powerhouse of a panther but the heavyboned and brutal build of a much larger cat. He had a lion’s mane of thick hair but also stripes of utter black in a fur that was richly, magnificently umbral like autumn leaves in the shade. He stood upright, with human design, tilted a little forwards at the hip, his feet halfway to paws as he balanced on the ball of his foot, claws in. He looked at his thickly furred hands and saw that he could curl the fingers under and they became massive paws, replete with pads. His tail was long and thick, he could feel that it would easily balance him and act as counterweight. He moved it as easily as breathing. Down the front of his torso his hair became long and silky. He looked to check and found that he was made like a cat and not a man between his legs—everything was retracted except his balls, hidden in his long fur. Black wings, like drifting patches of night, lay along his shoulders. He could feel that in an instant he could flick them out but without intent they were almost as insubstantial as imaginary wings. His deep fur glittered with anthracite fragments. Where Teazle lit the world, he darkened it. His slitted eyes glowed red.
He tried to speak again, tentatively, and heard his voice say gutturally, “Holy crap.”
Nixas laughed. He was staring at Teazle. “Who knew the demon had an ancient form? They are so short lived. This puts the cat among the pigeons of their ridiculous theories of inheritance. The Alchemical Council always thought they had more in common with us than they liked to admit! This must prove that there is more to their anitnae than can be met in a single mortal lifetime. They are reincarnates! Think what this will mean for the Conference of Souls! Mind you, it somewhat rubbishes our other theories about their diabolical origins if it proves correct. I do wonder what this is in truth! I hope we find out before this is over!”
Teazle shrugged under this tirade of scientific enthusiasm as though he couldn’t care less, and his grin became more enigmatic. “Hell, I would have paid you to find this out if I knew such a trip was possible,” he said. “Makes me feel it was well worth the journey. I cannot wait to discover more. And you, Malachi, why do you look so surprised? I thought all the fey lived simultaneously in their forms, scattered in the deep ages of faery.”
Viridia shook herself into female shape, proving to be a surprisingly young girl, almost a child. Her blonde hair was short and ragged and her body small and slender, ribs showing through her grubby skin, but she didn’t seem to be bothered by the cold at all. “We move around. Sometimes we forget things,” she said in a tone of strict reproof. She glanced at herself and sighed. “Sometimes we want to move on. Oh, Pop, I can feel it all falling away! Can’t you?”
Malachi didn’t need to ask what she meant. He felt it too, his modernity was crumbling. It didn’t belong here. He was reverting. He loathed the feeling. On the wind he could smell living bodies, warm blood beating, and he felt his stomach growl.
Poppy nodded. “My old name… the old hungers. I’d forgotten.”
Malachi shook himself. “We have to focus. We must get to the Twisting Stones.”
“And avoid Jack,” Viridia said. “I can smell him,” she winced. “South of us but coming this way. He camps further down the shore and sets his city across the lake for midwinter when everything is frozen fast.” Her eyes became distant and bleak. “Now I remember why we ran away from here. Back when it was still possible to rise.”
Malachi’s sense of smell came to a sharp conclusion: “Advance parties are coming. They will be here within the hour. Which way is it, though?”
Teazle got to his feet and pointed west of them. “If what you’re looking for is a place of doors into time, then it’s that way.”
Now it was Malachi’s turn to stare, open mouthed.
“Teleporting,” Teazle said simply, “requires stillness in time but movement across the other planes. I am time-anchored.”
“What does that mean?” Nixas asked eagerly, moving to join him.
“It is what I am, not what I can explain,” the demon said. “But it’s this way.” He grinned. “Suppose I’ll have to walk with you temporally challenged individuals. Only polite.”
“Just one thing,” Malachi growled. “Can you stop shining? You’re like a big sign that says Hey, Come and Find the Troublemakers Right Here.”
Teazle closed his eyes for a second. There w
as a pause and then he noticeably dimmed, but didn’t go out. Finally, after another minute of concentration he looked more like a softly glowing statue than a blaze, but he still stood out painfully in the darkness. “Seems not,” he said with irritation.
“Stand by me,” Malachi said, and spread his aethereal wings. A pool of intense darkness spread around him. Teazle stepped into it and vanished. Malachi let dust from the wings fall. When he furled them again Teazle was covered in a film of almost complete blackness.
The demon sneezed twice, hard, and his open mouth and eyes still burned, but it was better.
“Just don’t do any looking back and we might be all right,” Malachi said grudgingly though he was pleased with his efforts. When Teazle blinked he was invisible. Now he simply appeared as two blazing eyes suspended in the air.
“Cover all of us,” said Nixas. “Safer from prying eyes.”
“Mmn, now you just need to learn to walk less like a party of ogres out on a hike,” Malachi agreed, casting the earth-rich, ancient darkness of hidden forests on them all. “Also, you stink of lakebed. No offence.”
“We won’t say what you smell like,” Viridia retorted, wrinkling her tiny nose.
“Fair enough,” Malachi prinked his tail automatically, sniffed at Teazle, and smelt lightning. He snorted the odd metallic odour out of his nostrils. “Lead on, Macdemon.”
It was difficult, after a few minutes of walking, not to admit that he was starting to feel a kind of ferocious exhilaration in his body and the situation, the kind of exhilaration that had been lingering beneath the surface unexpressed for a very long time, but he did try for as long as it took him to wonder what had happened to his very expensive suit and his car keys, neither of which appeared to have made it through.
Lila and Zal slid down another snowy slope, facing distinctly in the opposite direction to the cleft mountain. The path led away from it and around another turn, appearing to circle a rocky outcrop starred with the windwracked bodies of old shrubs. After two hours their destination was not visibly closer, in fact Lila would have sworn on a number of calculations that it was exactly as far away as it had been when they’d started out on Gulfoyle’s instruction. She began to suspect trickery and said as much to Zal.
He put an unnecessary hand out to help her to her feet, ice dreadlocks swinging in the forepart of his hair, smashing each other apart and raining little crystals down the front of his jerkin. The elvish runes in the cloth glimmered with colour. Against her body, held fast by the faery armour, she felt the heavy T-shirt slap wetly and increased the heat donated from her reactor core to her own natural thermogenesis. It had become darker and the moonlight less intense. She couldn’t help but notice as she took Zal’s hand that the shadows on his skin were deepening into a rich lilac blue and the lighter, yellowish tones of his skin were fading into a kind of insubstantiality, a wash of colour over more of the same shades. His ordinarily dark brown eyes were purple in the strange light of faery night and his andalune body was blueblack where it swirled around him. She held onto him as she stood up, looking at his hand, and he followed her gaze, interpreting it as the question she intended.
“Seems like the aether here is wakening that side of me,” he said. “It was like this in Alfheim, long ago, when I was with my father.”
“What’s that mean?” she asked, sounding gruff even to herself. “Is it bad?”
“Different,” he said. “Good for now. More able at night.”
The imp, who had been sitting in a bare circle of earth, lit by his own yellow and orange fires, looked up. “That’s how it is here. Whatever your nature, it’s deeper and bigger and more of it. You’ll be shadow at night and light in the day and we’ll no doubt discover what that demon fire of yours feasts on if we ever come across the fuel for it. And he’s not the only one.”
Lila looked at the imp carefully. “You haven’t changed a bit, far as I can see.”
“Ah well, I’m in stasis ent I? I’m what you’d call out of play, magically speakin’. Only thing that gets better in me is me ability to read yet stupid hell-making and spell it back to yet. I’ve been lookin’ at the road though, so I’ve not been doing it,” he explained. “So here’s yet update.” He took a big breath. “Even though you’re mostly numb by all that crap you found out back at the Freaky Farm you’re still managin’ to fuck your relationship with this idiot because you keep thinking his grief is your fault and you’ve got to do something about it and maybe he doesn’t love you properly because he let you get wed to Doctor Death without a scrap of objection and since the marriage nothing much has changed and you’re sort of up to your deaf ears in all that doubting yak about whether or not you’re corrupted now, what with two men, surely it’s all decadence before the fall and your parents, were they alive, would be spinning in their graves with shock at the lack of morality, not to mention what everyone else in Otopia would think, if they knew the first thing about you, which they don’t, and amid all that dreck there’s barely any room for a second of pleasure in the fact that, despite all indications to the contrary, you are becoming something beyond human, beyond your dreams, quite extraordinary, and in her way quite happy. ‘Xcept of course yet happiness seems triggered by very unsuitable and immoral and wayward things that would get you stoned to death back at home, if yet human middle-class ijits were into that kind of thing, which mostly they ain’t, a few faery shags aside. But no, you don’t notice that ‘cos you’re so busy worrying about how much you don’t fit any more into some bloody old mould made for devil-fodder sheepies. You don’t even notice what’s going on in yet body, yet head’s so full of nonsense. Yet wonder where yet old arms and legs have got to when you should be seeing what you’ve got. Denial is like a way of life with you.” He paused, gasping for breath. “But since Sorcha died it’s been relatively quiet, like. I’d almost say you’ve had entire minutes of health. Felt meself slipping away I did for a while, going all sleepy and useless.” He mimed falling unconscious elaborately, tongue falling out of his mouth and drooling. “But then Zal comes back full of his own hurt and you decide you’d rather agonise than deal with reality and tell him what happened at the laaaaaa-aaab. Agh!”
He leapt away from the compacted ball of ice that struck the ground where he’d been, smashing up a splatter of mud. Lila bared her teeth at him and bent to grab more snow but it was only show. She’d gone cold inside at his mention of more changes. What hadn’t she noticed?
Zal turned to Lila with a frown. “What happened at the lab? Are you hiding things from me?”
“There didn’t seem time to tell you,” she said, lamely.
His look became angry but he shrugged. “Lots of time now. We’re in the middle of nowhere following a path to nothing.”
“Right,” she flung her second snowball at the imp, catching it on the rump and propelling it two metres further down the path. They began to walk again slowly. She explained the events he’d missed. “Everything feels like manipulation now,” she concluded. “What I do, where I’m sent, the things I find,” she touched her collar and felt the lumpy necklaces under the shirt. “I got mad and tried to get even, hah, but it didn’t work. I’m certain they have more controllers or at least the means to make more. And the pain in my joints has stopped. I thought, along with the whole liquid-metal thing, that it meant I was better, or that the elementals in the machine had sorted themselves out or something, I didn’t stop to find out.” She sighed. “I’m tired of it. Part of me just doesn’t want to know any more. I keep on moving because I daren’t stop. I don’t look down, you know?”
She looked up at his face, higher than hers, more gaunt and alien than ever in the spectral light. He kept walking and his expression was set and grim for a few moments though at the same time she felt his aetheric body surround her, warm and gentle tempered. “Sometimes that’s the best thing to do, but only for very short bursts. Detaching from reality will get you killed faster than anything else I know. So, what’s really going on with y
ou? I can’t believe you think me false because of Teazle.”
“I don’t. I mean… I…” she stumbled on the words, tripping herself up entirely. She felt rightly accused.
“I don’t care what you feel about him,” Zal said intently. “The fact is I only actually care about what I feel about people, not the other way about. I don’t have time for that. Neither do you.”
“But,” Lila started, ready to object that of course it mattered what other people felt about you because if you knew about it you could do something about it, except that it occurred to her that maybe you couldn’t do anything about it at all, as he said. The idea violated almost everything she had ever thought or felt to be true about relationships, particularly romantic ones. Instead she ended up saying, “How come?”
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