Going Under

by Justina Robson

  “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she repeated softly, her eyes tightly shut, tears squeezing out between her lashes. They ran from her nose. She was so tight and rigid she felt as if she were made of steel but for all her holding inside, she couldn’t keep a grip. Her whole body shook with the effort. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, making an effort to say it the human way, his hand strong on her shoulder but his voice gentle and calm like the sky. “It’s all right.”

  He kept repeating it often, and his hold eventually loosened and then became slack and then stroking and his voice just a murmur. The light faded, the sun went down, and night came.

  She woke and saw stars overhead, not a few, but billions upon billions. Then her eyes adjusted.

  Tath was still with her, but over them stood the tall, rounded silhouette of Madrigal, gun in her hand.

  “Come,” she said. “It’s time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Lila got up and reached down and gave Tath her hand. He got to his feet easily. Where they were was warm and the night full of the sound of chirping insects, but Madrigal still wore her heavy furs. She threw a pack down at Tath’s feet.

  “You will need these.”

  He didn’t say anything, just opened it up and got dressed. He tucked her T-shirt into thick cloth trousers, the trousers into fur boots. Over the top went more fur, a stiff jacket that belted over both shoulders and at the waist. There was a hood but he ignored it.

  At her belt Madrigal’s Hoodoo doll glowed with its own faint witchlight from every chink and cranny in its twisted grass. The faery herself shone slightly, providing enough light to see by.

  Lila took off her amulet and handed it to Tath as he straightened up. “It’s yours really.”

  He pulled his long hair back in both hands and used the cord to tie it, fixing the charm tightly in place. “Thank you.”

  As soon as he was done Madrigal led the way downhill through a narrow gap between her massive trees until at last they came out onto the acres of white snow that covered all of Jack’s land. Where the cave and the city had been there was no trace of anything. The lake was clearly visible, frozen over, as a large patch of complete flat ness, unmarked, spanning the valley they stood in from side to side. They were at its head, and a short distance away the host of the faeries that belonged to Jack were gathered en masse, Moguskul visible as a gigantic bear at the head of their ragged lines. A bitter, thin kind of wind blew among them. Without exception from the tiny to the giant they were all dressed as Madrigal was, in thick, ugly clothing hastily made from crude materials; refugees in an inhospitable land. By comparison to the finery of other faery things this spoke most cleanly of their intention not to linger, no matter how long they were forced to do so. Their indistinct faces turned to watch Lila and Tath pass by.

  Beside Moguskul stood a snow-glass, as tall as Lila, its huge inverted bowl almost run empty as it counted the minutes. They stopped before it as the final few flakes fell slowly down. Then the wind got up, quite suddenly, and whipped around them, snatching up great sloughs of snow and building the figure of a tall, powerful man where the glass had been. Frost crackled around it and from the shower of glittering particles stepped Jack Giantkiller, his body built of powder and rime to give the illusion of a massive man clad in white furs with moustache and beard and heavy hair braided down and hung with beads of ice. He had two axes at his belt and a bow in his hands, taller even than he was, its single curve glacier blue and shining.

  With a forward sweep of his arm he made a commanding strike and in answer the bear Moguskul roared—a sound of ferociousness and agony. He reared up on his hind legs, jaws open, and split into a hundred different forms. Hounds spilled out of him and poured along the ground. Falcons burst from his head, and crows. As they scattered the bear was gone, to the sky, to the chase. A hound gave voice, then another and another. Jack stared at Lila once, a hard look, then his dogs began to run and he whirled to follow.

  Madrigal whistled her wolf and leapt to its huge back. She set out after him. Lila and Tath began to run. Thousands of faery voices shrieked and sang after them, “No matter where you run or where the path bends the Twisting Stones by midnight is where it will end!”

  She guessed that explained why they didn’t follow but it was of little interest to her. She ran alongside Madrigal’s wolf, and Tath ran with her, at the limit of his ability. It was easy for Lila. Nothing hurt, nothing was difficult, she needed no more breath than usual. Her body flowed in seamless action, with endless power. Soon Tath was exhausted and he tapped her once on the arm, unable to speak, before he quit. They left him standing on the far lakeshore, panting, his hands on his knees, bent double. Lila photographed him as she left him behind. She kept the feeling of his touch on her arm, resonating in her nerves as if he were still there, and her feet never missed their place on the rough and dangerous ground.

  Zal knew a lot about hunting at night, though he’d usually been on the other end of things. He knew in this case it would be pointless to think that there was a hope of escape, even with the taste of the faery peach on his lips. Nothing in his experience of the aether’s paths led him to believe he could outwit Jack on his own ground. But if the catch was foregone, nothing else was, not what came before it and not what came after. So from the moment he jumped over the fire he’d already decided to take Jack for as much of a ride as he could manage.

  The rest of what had happened back in the cave didn’t hurt until he’d crossed the lake, his shadow feet making no marks. He hadn’t given a thought to why he could make himself solid enough to strike Jack, but not enough to touch Lila. He didn’t think about it now as he searched for possible tracks, over rocks, around boulders, into the trees, and then up into the rough canopy of brittle branches. But he felt ita catch in his chest that didn’t let his breath run true. He was glad Teazle hadn’t been there to hear his reasons for running and that made heat flare in his chest and he tried to run faster, missed his footing, tripped, fell, went flying, and crashing through several layers of branches until he caught himself by the hands. Only his ultralight form prevented him from being seriously hurt. He hung there, panting, then pulled up onto the tree and changed direction, taking courses that looped back on themselves, went up, down, through deep drifts and rocky canyons.

  It was very hard, and soon, even before half an hour was out, his pace had tired him. Easy living had taken a toll on him, he realised. He was not the fit and tough presence that had come to Demonia the first time, fuelled by rage and hate and the burning ache of betrayals, the passion and idealism that had pitched him headfirst into a stinking canal full of imps and degradation for Adai to save and bring to life. But then of course, he was saved, fixed, sorted. He’d believed his own press release.

  Pain made him slow down, though he fought against it with everything he had. His muscles burned, his chest was agonising with the rasp and claw of the icy air. Semisolid, he clawed his way through impossible gaps in rocks and underneath thick vegetation, cutting and bruising himself. He shed the bow and his arrows, everything that weighed him down, but it still wasn’t enough. At the base of his spine a tickling, prickling sensation told him it was past time. Jack was coming. He redoubled his efforts and flung himself forwards until he came to a cliff face and went over, head over heels down a huge scree. He slid and tumbled to another dropoff, shocked into a moment of paralysis as he clutched at the edge and saw the rock through his own fingers. Beneath him a long fall awaited—he didn’t even know what was at the bottom. He couldn’t breathe because the fall had banged the air out of him and he was left with the aching shock and a clutching in his throat as his heart hammered and his vision blurred. His grip felt like it would not last long.

  Stupid, he thought, and then other thoughts that had been dammed up a long time spun uncontrollably after: yes, it was a stupid fall, but that was no surprise surely, because he had been looking for it, waiting for it, for a long, long t
ime and naturally here it was at last, just as he’d said to Lila in the cave.

  What the rockstar lifestyle and denial hadn’t softened, love had. Sorcha, Lila, they mattered, and he wasn’t free as he used to be. He resented them for that.

  Hadn’t he, even when they were sailing on that fated airship with its treacherous crew, been glad of the fighting, the risks? He’d known quite clearly that they could be eliminated there by some chance that was purely accidental, and if they were then he’d be liberated. And he could feel what that would be like and it would be good. For what use was a warrior when he was prisoner? No use. Weak. Anyone could have leverage against him. The savagery of the violence that followed had been born from his anger.

  But even before that, he’d sold himself, hadn’t he? It had happened in that moment when what was now clear in his thoughts had been born as a feeling. It had occurred to him that his desire to be free—and safe, yes, let’s say safe, Zal, because when you have nothing to lose you cannot be bought and nothing holds you, so safe from what you fear most, Zal, which is to lose what you love. You’d solved this problem very neatly before, by not loving at all until you met Sorcha. Elves are commonly coldhearted, who knew? Then you’d solved it by denial when you married Adai and pretended it was all a wedding of convenience, rushing straight off to Otopia and leaving her with the Ahrimani, thinking yourself a bit of a hero. And finally you’d solved it with a stroke of genius, when Lila came along, by pretending that you had grown nerves of steel and a will of iron in the interim (since you became a demon and abandoned your entire race and land in a massive first strike rejection), and anyway, she was safety itself because nobody could get her, surely, and she was a pushover, desperate for love, so you were at no risk of rejection or loss. Lila was bulletproof and you could love her without a twinge of fear, except that suddenly she’s been targeted by every freak in the city and you realise one of them only has to get lucky once.

  Yes, your intent in that heady afternoon, two days ago aboard the airship, had been not to save and protect them, Sorcha and Lila, but to proxily kill them, and with them destroy your growing sense of weakness… ah, it was that, and not your sister’s death, which has slaughtered your abilities now and left you hanging off this ledge, and which led you to take Lila’s place in the hunt. You had longed for Jack to follow, so that you could prove to yourself that you’d done your best, run the gauntlet, faced the worst, and then failed through no fault of your own. You’d fall at his mercy and have him execute justice upon you, because you could not bear to do it for yourself. And Jack saw it. In one second. And you lied. And then you ran.

  All this ran through his mind in a second as he hung on the edge of the fall. He knew that all he had to do was let go and it would be over. He would be free, as he wanted, as he had planned; even Jack would not get to finish him. He would choose it for himself, the honourable demon solution to a moment’s mistake in which he had discovered himself vulnerable and sought to run away, letting Sorcha pay with her life. Nothing in the world could be easier than letting go. His fingers hurt even holding his slight weight, his nails were starting to crack. The rock was slippery, its purchase pathetic so that if he hadn’t been shadow he’d already be dead. His forearm burned and began to weaken. He stared at the rock. An image of the imp played across his mind and then, from the extreme distance, carried by the following wind, he heard the sound of hounds baying. The sound was gleeful, delighted, excited, and looking for his death.

  A fierce anger overcame him. He swung his free arm once, twice, and caught hold of the rock’s edge with two more fingers. There was no easy way up. The overhang was blunt, but it offered a small crack for a foothold. The pain in his arms only made him more determined, even as he felt them failing. He kicked up and jammed his boot into the toehold, ignoring the pain. The slight easing of the weight on his arms and the change of position was just enough to let him get a better handhold on the top of the rock. After that it was relatively easy to climb up and over. He lay on the boulder’s edge, feeling the wind buffet him and the shocking burn of his tendons, the ache of his foot, the spite in his heart, and smiled.

  He gave himself twenty seconds, and then he was up and running again, along the ledge, along the cliff, across the icy rocks and hills, back into the woods…

  The hounds of Moguskul tracked by means Lila couldn’t detect. It wasn’t smell, for as a shadow creature Zal had lost his. She had no description or adequate explanation for what form he was now. Immaterial was too little, and material too much. As she kept pace with Madrigal through the trees of the winter woodlands Lila was reminded of the information the researcher had attempted to pass on—and she realised how ignorant and how limited the human comprehension of aether really was. Tonight’s drama at a deep level of aetheric involvement only proved something that had been building a long time in her mind; aether was mixed up with consciousness, with mind, and spirit. It was the stuff of these things and it flirted with matter in different ways in different regions. Time and space were only two of the expansions. She was now racing through a third, whose name she didn’t know, which was intimately connected to those others and which would never be undone from them. Before the Bomb, that was when this region was closed to humans and the gross matter of her realities. After the Bomb, things had opened, but nothing was there now that hadn’t been there before. She wanted to rush back and conduct tests, experiments, find volunteers, discover the truth.

  She held that in her mind as she wove between the trunks, ducked boughs, and burst through thickets, cutting swathes where she could not move freely or jumping in huge, gazellelike bounds over logs and streams that were so similar to the ones she knew from home, but were essentially different because these were features of Jack himself. The land, the forest, everything in it was an expression of the faery’s nature. He hunted through himself for sport alone. Of course he knew where Zal was. Even the dogs and the birds were just for show. It was a cruel game, and the more strange dales and bizarre formations the trail led them through, the more she understood the lie of the land. Here things were both exactly what they seemed and not at all as they appeared.

  Try as she might she could see no way to turn that to their advantage. Suddenly ahead of them there was yelping and cries. They were brought up short, the wolf making a brute turn that unseated Madrigal and sent her flying to the hardpacked snow at the foot of some boulders. Lila transformed her forward momentum into an upward and slightly backward leap, activating her jets to keep her aloft as she looked over the edge of an enormous, concealed drop where two hounds were still falling over and over down into the darkness below. Those that were left barked excitedly and fussed over some ground where traces of blood were marked on the ice. Jack bent down and traced these almost lovingly. He brought his hand to his mouth and licked the tips of his fingers, then threw his head back and howled in a bloodcurdling crescendo that made the ground vibrate. Ice fell from the trees in the aftermath and the hounds went into a frenzy, boiling over themselves until one of them found the trail and went galloping off into the night.

  Madrigal cursed Jack profusely as she recovered herself. He ignored her and let the dogs run for a moment, before setting off himself. He was unnaturally fast, of course, and nothing got in his way even though he huffed and puffed like the big man he was pretending to be. The blood was not much, Lila thought as she bent to examine it. Minor. She tracked back over the rocks, following the marks more carefully than the dogs had, and found the place at the edge where Zal had hung. The exact size and shape of the tiny spots, the skin cells left on the edge, the taste of it all—she pictured him dangling there and knew it was no feint.

  At the bottom of the ravine the two unlucky hounds were dead. Already their bodies were decomposing and falling apart into tiny whirls of shining ash that were spun away on the wind. To rejoin the rest of Moguskul, she assumed, or simply returning to the greater aether out of which he had summoned them. It didn’t matter. The only deaths here that wo
uld be true were their own, not the faeries’.

  Lila straightened and narrowed her eyes against the wind. Zal had had the chance to die here, she was sure of it. But he hadn’t taken it.

  She put on a concentrated burst of speed to catch up with the rest of the hunt, and for the next hour in the Spartan trail of bloody drops, bent twigs, and curiously melted footprints, she read the increasing rise of his anger and fire. By the time they took the westerly turn she had anticipated, back towards the Twisting Stones, smoke was rising from bushes and trunks that were blackened in his wake. As time grew short he gave up on any effort to conceal his tracks and instead they found branches lit like torches, blazing to show the way. Zal’s contempt wasn’t lost on Jack, whose howls now transformed from the smug lust of victory to seething rage. He began to storm among the hounds, forgetting them entirely in his haste. As they fell back Lila found a brindle wolf running alongside her, its tongue lolling out of its mouth.

  “Thank you,” it said to her, before falling behind. As it peeled away from the main line and diverted into the deeper woods all the hounds and the birds in the sky abruptly spun to follow. She stopped to watch them arrow down on Moguskul’s spirit form, vanishing into the grey and white canopy of the frozen trees. The quiet was eerie in the absence of their voices.

  This time she took to the sky to regain her lost ground. She barely felt the cold, though she knew it was terrible, and at her speed the wind increased its chill steeply. Ahead of her Jack burst from the treeline and onto the absolute whiteness of the frozen lake. Zal’s trail was a clear straight line of dark meltwater reflecting the sky, at the end of which, near the far shore, she could see his running form—a black silhouette outlined in orange fire against the glowing blue white of the snow under the starlight. Her heart caught in her throat at the sight.