Lila, Zal, Teazle, and Malachi lay on the floor of Malachi's yurt. It was two a.m. There was no sound except for the burr of cicadas and the hum of air-conditioning units. The yurt's main doorflap was closed to block out the sight of the Agency buildings and the courtyard, save for a small fold that was clipped back to let some of the night air in. In the middle of their group the space was occupied by Malachi's hard-working icebox and its ever-replenished supply of Lite and Dark bottles of faery ale.
At the very edge of their ring amid a sea of empties lay the slim, dark curl of the elf who would be god, Xaviendra, her pointed ears slack, her mouth open. She'd passed out some time ago and they had put her there after she had fallen over backwards with a Dark bottle still upended in her mouth like a flag raised on a freshly discovered island. Malachi had worried that the faery brewmaster, to whom he was paying a stiff subscription, and who prided himself on his professionalism, might give her an endless free refill and drown her. It had taken two of them to prise the bottle out of her hand and loosen her jaws from their clamped position around its rim. The charmed hemp manacles on her wrists remained in place. She was a guest, but she was also a prisoner of the state and in Lila's custody. Until a short time ago she had been unknown to them, but Lila had written her into the script using the most powerful weapon in the universe and now…here she was, their strange new friend.
Lila thought of this often, almost as often as she reviewed Xaviendra's interview sessions searching for telltale signs of deception. But she couldn't help it. She liked Xavi, and trusted her, and there was no way to know if that was the doing of magic or the more commonplace forces of personal interaction.
“And another thing,” Malachi was saying from his reclined position, waving his bottle about by a two-fingered grip on the neck, “about this dragon bishniss.” His brilliant orange eyes narrowed as he held their attention and he gave off a faint fey puff of anthracite dust, briefly making the air around him glitter.
Teazle, in his human form, nodded sagely as though Malachi were already making profound sense. “Tricky,” he said, carefully. “Tricky bishniss.” His long white tail whirled, the arrow tip drawing a kind of circle before falling back to the rug with a thump and lying there, spent. He glowed, his eyes as brilliant as police officers' torch beams. Thanks to this, they'd been able to cut all power and data and were in splendid isolation. As a courtesy he mostly remembered not to look anyone directly in the face. After a second's blink, in which he shrouded the rest of them in near darkness, he added, “Prolly more to come. More.”
“You met a dragon,” Lila poked Zal on the leg solemnly. She sounded more accusing than she meant to but as she intended it playfully she felt as though she was getting away with something naughty. He was cross-legged, his back deep in a beanbag. Zal was slender and muscular, lithe as only a true elf could be, and Lila had the pleasure of lying resting against his chest as if he were her throne and she was a little girl playing at being queen. She amended her poke by quickly stroking the area and admiring the hard line of his thigh.
Zal shook his head, slowly. He was matching Malachi bottle for bottle. “Mr. V,” he said after a moment's pause. “He was stuck in the mirror and I…well he tricked me into letting him out, kinda. I don' know. He didn' seem t'have much of an agenda, so t'speak. The other one, back in the Lake—that was something. I forget what it said now. Somethin' like…ah, no…it's gone. That one ate Arie, though. Then it sicked her up again.”
This wandering retrospective then was the end of their debriefing session, which had begun that morning in an official manner with recordings and witnesses and suchlike, but which had at some point in the evening become so exhausting that Malachi had called a timeout and brought them all here to recuperate. The office staff had gladly fled homewards, but because they were so preoccupied with their analysis, they had continued to talk about their joint past experiences over drinks. They had been going to have dinner, but this was forgotten, in favour of the Dark, which had properties of insight, foresight, and other kinds of clairvoyance when drunk in large quantities.
They had also needed it because of the alcohol content to prise Xaviendra out of her habitual frosty silence. This had backfired rather, since she had gone from silent, through silently rapt, and directly to the ultimate frigidity of unconsciousness without uttering a word. However, from her position on the floor, occasionally snoring, she had spoken in a slurring way if a question was put directly to her. They had discovered this by accident when Zal had turned in her direction and said, “What's that sticking in my butt?” and Xavi had replied, correctly, “It's your phone.”
Now she sometimes said a word, such as, “true” or “shathi,” which was elf for fuck. Then Lila had said elves did not have words like that and Zal said they just weren't listed anywhere the elves would let anybody else see. At that point the debriefing had changed into bantering and even Teazle had started drinking. Ever since then he had occasionally punctuated the conversation with one of the demon words for fuck and although a long time had passed he had still not run out of them.
“She must have tasted horrid,” Lila said, referring to Arie, who had once put her on a platform for all the elves to publicly despise.
Zal made a soothing noise and nuzzled her ear.
“Kuroosma,” Teazle said into the moment of contemplative silence, lingering on the vowel with enjoyment. Lila looked the word up, cautiously, as if she were peeking at it through her fingers. Every different one had a different nuance. This one made her face heat up, and she was no prude.
“Nah,” Zal said. “It didn't say that. For sure.” Then after a second, “Do you think dragons swear?”
“No,” Lila said firmly.
“Yes,” Malachi said at the same time with equal conviction.
“No,” Lila waved him down with her free hand. “Noble. Godly. Things like that don't swear. Forces of nature don' swear.”
“What about lightning?” Teazle said, taking a swig from a new bottle. “Lightning is nature swearing. An' if a thing like that can swear, which isn't self-'ware, then dragons mus' swear 'cos they is speakers and things that speak swear. Proof…” he pointed vaguely at Xaviendra, who had begun to snore. “She done nothing but ruffaguff this and shathi that since she fell over.”
“Are dragons forces of nature then?” Lila asked.
“Something like that,” Zal said. “But with more wizard and less…less…they don't have to be manifest or, shathi, help me out here…” he appealed to Malachi who had been nodding along.
“They are part 'maginary,” Malachi intoned solemnly. “Cusp beings, intershtitial, on the edge, not matter or aether, both and neither, the primary moversh that shtir the great s-soup of creation, that'sh what they are.”
“Soup spoons,” Lila said, blinking. She was playing with the end of one of the ties on Zal's shirt and this notion just came out of her mouth without passing through her head.
“Yesh,” Malachi replied earnestly. “Jusht that. And now they are…” he whirled his fingers and shed some more dust. “Dammit, didn't mean to do that.” He put his hand down where the floor was blackened with coal and when he lifted it up the white rug was pristine again.
“Stirring!” Lila said, feeling quietly triumphant.
“Yes!” Teazle glowed more brightly for a second.
“T,” Lila said, addressing him with a slight yet regal frown across the icebox that sat between them with its fresh bottlenecks at jaunty angles. “Aren't you a dragon?”
“No,” Teazle said. “I jus' look like one. Demon's an aetheric creation. But you gotta remember they don' always look like that.”
“Dragons can be a human or elf,” Zal said. “Or dwarf.”
“They can be a bunch of flowers,” Malachi added, frowning at himself as though he wasn't sure he hadn't just invented this. “Or, well, maybe not. Can't see the point of that acshally. But my point is…my point is they can rise in like, a material form, in a body, as flesh and bone, or they can rise as energy inshide other things.”
“What things?” Lila demanded, finishing her drink and shaking the bottle upside down for a few seconds before tossing it over her shoulder where it hit Xaviendra's foot and rolled to clink among the others lying there.
“Like a pop—a poppy—a pip—” Teazle struggled heroically for a moment, working his mouth carefully. “Pop-u-la-tion.”
Lila stretched forward for another drink, picking up the one brown bottleneck poking out of the heap of ice in the cooler. She drew it out, admiring its label and the icy water running off it. As she sat back with the prize, another one slowly nudged up out of the ice mound to replace it. “Yeah but, what ARE they?”
“What ARE you?” Malachi slurred mildly with an emphatic nod. “Hmm?”
Lila paused for a few seconds. “Drunk.”
“Exactly,” Zal said. They all paused. “Primal forces,” he added a minute later. “But with attitude. Some of them…they rise and fall you know, into…I'm not really sure.”
“Dragons,” said a delicate, exacting voice from behind him in the tones of a slightly annoyed schoolmistress, “are archaeotypal subdeic elementals, predating the actualisation of the seven worlds and instrumental in their creation, by virtue of being organising principles and generative structures within which any amount of conscious realisation of the infinite may occur at any time. Persistence in material form occurs as a necessary process of becoming baryonically bound. Personality and etcetera accrue after this manifestation into linear temporal planes according to the usual principles.”
“Unnerving how she does that,” Zal said, twitching his shoulders.
“It's like she's shome kind of enshyclopaedia with a will of its own,” Teazle frowned and stared accusingly into his beer. “A will sho powerful it can work even when she's ashleep. Or only when she's asleep. Spooky.” He shivered in pretend horror and shone the rays of his interest on Xaviendra for a moment.
“Well it's more than she ever says when she's awake,” Lila said and felt bad for reproaching the girl. Xavi had good reasons to shut up, Lila figured, having been convicted of acts of terrorism of which she was certainly guilty. She was out of her cell for a few hours only because Lila was able to bring her out and guarantee she wouldn't escape. The entire drinking event had been staged in the hopes that it might make her tongue loosen, and in its way it had been successful.
“Ask her the angel one again,” Malachi said, blinking as he changed position to something more upright in an effort to stay awake.
“What is an angel?” Lila said, half angled towards the unconscious elf so that she could see Xavi's mouth moving even though the rest of her remained in a stupor.
“An angel is an articulated form of energy imbued with mental and emotional faculties that act in accordance with its own will. Angels are beings of nonbaryonic dimensions, although they are able to assume baryonic forms, and are not limited to ordinary space-time considerations. It is suspected though not proven that their appreciation of the nature of all material and immaterial things far surpasses that of the bound races who have intelligence and awareness. Emergence from the purely aetheric into material form will result in a necessary accrual of personality and etcetera according to the usual principles.”
There was nothing about this voice that was the slightest bit intoxicated.
“Hah!” said Zal after a second, “I know what sh'minds me of. You, Lila! She talks like you do when you've got the AI on.” He twirled a finger next to his head.
Lila scowled and fixed her gaze on Teazle, who was snickering, his tail tip gently beating the rugs in time with his laugh.
She felt annoyed. “I make more sense though. This isn't getting us far—”
“Wait, wait,” Malachi said confidently. “Dark takes time to work. Got to get down to get up again, like they say. We jus' need to keep going aroun' the subject an it'll be fine. You'll see. Inspiration'll strike!”
“What was the subject?” Teazle asked. He blinked slowly and the yurt was once again briefly submerged in the sepulchral glow of his exposed skin. In that second Lila could see the outline of his body gleaming faintly through the folds of his robe, dappled on his lower torso, arms, and legs like a cheetah-patterned lightbulb.
“What are we going to do about all the dead people?” Lila reminded him, ignoring the knot in her stomach as she mentioned it. Images of her family home flashed in front of her mind's eye in an unstoppable rush, which she tried to blot out by carrying on. “Also, is this the end-times as foreseen by the popular press? And if so, wh—” but she was interrupted by Zal gently putting his hand over her mouth.
“Shh,” he said. “It's happening. I had an idea that wasn't my own.”
“And?” Malachi asked, foregoing the obvious remark about Zal having any kind of idea at all, but sharing the fact that he wasn't saying it by giving Lila and Teazle a significant stare each.
“And,” Zal said emphatically, including Lila and Teazle in his own three-way group by glancing at them, “we should get divorced.”
Lila did a quick retake on it. “That was your idea?”
“No. That was my conclusion, given my idea.”
“What was the idea?” Teazle asked, staring his potential ex directly in the face for a second and then, becoming aware that this was painful for Zal, suddenly flicking his thousand watts back to the drinks cooler while still remaining attentive.
“Well, as you were talking I had this vague kind of…you know dragons, right?”
They all nodded vigorously in the hope that he would get to the point.
“Well, we are intersti—, cusp—, beings who've been changed one way and another and made into hybrid sort of things, you know?” he raised his eyebrows and nodded as if this made things so clear they must leap to an intuitive judgement. When they continued to look at him, Lila over her shoulder and Teazle with his long, horsey ears indicating the direction of his attention, he sighed. “We are…what we are…and we are together. Between us we cover eighty percent of the total aethero-material troposphere.”
“Whoah, it really isn't his idea!” Malachi said at the mention of these highly theoretical terms, his jaw going slightly slack.
Zal shook a fist in Malachi's direction, but continued. “And if you add in Tatters, it's ninety. And if you add in Malachi and Xavi, it's ninety-five. And—”
“Tath,” Lila said. “Add Tath and,” she hesitated, stomach burning, “and Max and it is one hundred percent.”
“We,” Zal said, including everyone mentioned, “are a…”
They waited.
“I don't know what we are but we are one hundred percent and THAT is a bit scary; was my idea,” Zal finished.
“Dragon,” said Xaviendra's voice.
“Shikba!” Teazle snorted, laughing almost silently, faint beery bubbles coming out of his nose.
Lila looked up Shikba and found no human equivalent or translation, although the dictionary appended a symbol that indicated it was highly perverted.
Malachi made a pfff sound with his lips. “It would be scary, if it added up to anything like a clear indication of trouble. But there's no direction, is there?” He waited for a second, looking around at their faces.
When they didn't reply straightaway, he faced them with a frank expression, “Lila, you're fed up of serving the agency but you've no clue about what to do with your life instead.”
Lila gave him a daggers look but she couldn't find a riposte because this was the truth.
“Teazle, you've become the demon who's got a master, which is on the slippery slope to hell, although given the master (who shall not be named, bless her soul), it could be that she's grooming you to assume a role with an awesome reputation.”
Teazle glowed brighter with pleasure and rolled onto his stomach, rubbing himself on the scrap of carpet he was lying on like a contented cat.
“Zal, you're a has-been musician without a band…”
“I've got a song in my heart,” Zal countered, theatrically, hand on his chest.
“…and a few million in the bank they don't want to give you, you being officially dead. And I'm hanging around waiting for something to happen and trying to prevent Xavi from getting any worse, which is hardly a mission.”
Zal scowled at him. “Yes, when you're here. Otherwise you're shacked up with Jack's wife, getting the benefits of spring and summer Green-man duties, and licking the cream off your whiskers. The last thing you want is for something to spoil that. But carry on.”
Malachi scowled back. “Xaviendra is a mystery, but there's no way I'd trust her to be out for anyone but herself. Ilyatath is indisposed as the Winter King until further notice, not that he can leave Winter. And Max is…” Now he faltered and glanced at Lila cautiously, his mouth still half open in midsentence.
“Max is undead, unemployed, and unhappy about both of those things. End of,” Lila said for him, moving her hand to her belly to ease a biting pain. “And you forgot Tatters,” she brushed the ruffle of the blue and lilac ra-ra skirt that was sitting on her hips over the top of her biker's leather trousers.
Malachi glanced at the cloth faery and then quickly away, making a small sign of warding that everyone noticed and nobody commented on. “Tatters is as she is,” he said with uncharacteristic vague ness.
“And your point is?” Teazle drawled, stretching his legs until one of the joints popped.
“My point is that we don't add up to much, countering Zal's point that we add up to a hundred percent and Xavi's point that we are here as we are because of a rising dragon. Which is, incidentally, also her theory for the state of the worlds ever since the cracking began. That's several millennia by anyone's calendar, so in summary, it's hardly news.”
“Perhaps it's a rising dragon's fart,” Teazle said.
Zal laughed. “No no, Ragnarok, like the press all say. Or Armageddon. The End-Times.”
“Ragnageddon,” Xaviendra's voice said with withering contempt from the floor.
“See, the resident speaker of prophecies says so,” Zal said, peering to be sure that Xaviendra wasn't about to be sick on his boots.
“And all because of a few returning dead,” Lila said with a shrug and mock exasperation. “And a few breakdowns in physical material laws here and there, and the inexplicable leakages, timepits, and etceteras that have all appeared in the last fifty years, dated to within a few hours of the opening of Under. God, what a bunch of frothing exaggerators.”
“Armarok,” Xaviendra intoned as if playing the narrator in a school drama production.
“Shazbat,” Teazle said, sighing with longing.
Lila sighed. “You're missing the obvious.” Her pleasant merry fug of tipsiness had dispersed as this occurred to her. “We were all united by Night's Mantle when I wrote in that journal.”
“I didn't understand that part,” Zal said. “Was Night the pen itself?”
“Yes,” Lila said. “And Night was the first dragon, out of which all the others sprang.”
“They killed her in doing so,” Teazle said. “The sisters, Zal, the daughters of Night, those ladies who kept you at their disposal doing bin duty and minding the cat. It was them, wasn't it? Those faery ones?”
Zal nodded.
“Night can't be killed, she was only sundered,” Malachi corrected him in a grumpy, unhappy tone. “She's in pieces, abstracted, objectified, separated, whatever, but she ain't gone. She is the sum total. She is the system. She just doesn't exist as a whole being anymore.”
“Did the faeries come from dragons then?” Teazle scratched his head and examined his nails for findings.
“Not like oaks from acorns,” Malachi had to get up and turn around three times before he sat down again, looking pained as he made a variety of distracting signs with his hands in an effort to diffuse the aetheric vortices that gathered anytime anyone mentioned the faeries directly. “Please don't discuss this in open air. It's dangerous.”
“Mmraah,” Teazle said, which was a kind of apology, and sliced a hole in the rug with the nail on his forefinger. “I don't mind being a dragon or part of one. It sounds like there'll be fighting.”
Lila took a long drink to try and quell a moment of severe stomach pain. “But I don't get how this leads to divorce, Zal.”
She leaned back on him and turned her face briefly into the curve between his neck and collarbone. She knew they all joked about the marriage being a sham anywhere except Demonia and that it was a convenience of state for Teazle and Zal, not the kind of white dress and romance life match that was the Otopian myth of weddings. But somewhere inside her she was deeply attached to it and she disliked any notion of separation from Zal even though he didn't seem to be talking about an emotional divide.
“That's very simple,” he said. “Whenever we're together major shit goes down that threatens our lives. We should split up just to survive. At least if we got a divorce, then that would nix the demon interest in us and that would be a good thirty percent drop in the trouble.”
“You're very mathematical,” Malachi told him. “Not like you at all.”
“It's the beer,” Zal said. “And I want to live. Anything that ups the odds in my favour, that's good. Dragons are not good in this case. They're bad. They're like a big neon sign saying Trouble This Way. Is this why the faeries created Under, to keep this stuff away?”
“I don't know,” Malachi said quickly, glaring daggers. “There might've been another reason.”
Zal stared at him. They were well used to each other's different forms of lying. “Yuh huh. The Queen's Magic, I heard.”
“Yeah!” Malachi said, smiling a salesman's smile.
“I don't understand fey,” Teazle grumbled, resting his head on his crossed hands. “You wan' it, you don' wan' it. You like it, you don' like it. All at the same time.”
“Yes,” Malachi said with relief, as though he had found an unexpected soulmate. “Yes, that's exactly it.”
Teazle sighed heavily. “I'll divorce ya, Zal. Way I see things going I'll only become a threat anyway.” He said this in a matter-of-fact way, with some regret in his tone. Another long sigh shrank his ribs and flattened his body to the floor. He stared morosely at the cooler. “And you, Lila,” he added. “You're free to go.”
And just like that there it was, all done. Say married to a demon and you were. Say not and you weren't. A word was all it took.
For a moment silence rang through the room and made it seem smaller and grubbier than ever before. Lila felt there should be more to say and do, some fall in the weather to mark the shattering feeling in her solar plexus. She glanced at Zal and saw him look abruptly nothing more than tired, old. Teazle sighed a heavy sigh. His eyes were on Zal, she saw, watching him with something like regret.
Lila's heart sank. “Teaze,” she said, but was unable to say any more. It was so unlike him to be down about anything, it felt completely wrong, as if the world had got a loose screw. She consoled herself with the excuse that probably he was regretting his loss of status and command in Demonia, but another part of her knew that wasn't true. Teazle would have scorned the idea that he ever needed more than he already possessed. She and Zal had been a temporary kind of truce that worked to cover a bad political moment in history and that was all.
Anxiety gnawed her and for a second the pain in her stomach made her speechless. Teazle's arrogance was the rock she'd clung to in Zal's absence, when Malachi chided her, when she'd felt herself falling to bits in the horrible days of their return. When the machines had whispered to her so much she felt they intended to drive her insane, Teazle's body and willing lust had been there to anchor her. Since Zal was back, that part of their relationship had been put aside but it wasn't finished, merely suspended. She had wondered what it meant to him, but hadn't asked. She felt it would be weak of her, and the bond itself was already one in which her position was inferior so she could not risk giving him more power over her. In a human world this would have mattered much less. In a demon one it could lead to nasty things and that was why now, when she wanted to go and touch him and affirm something that felt threatened, she stayed in Zal's lap, immersed in the sensitive shadow of Zal's aetheric body, and watched the demon without speaking.
“Hm, didn't expect that,” Malachi said after a while had passed. “I wish I thought it was worthwhile but I fear you might have bought more trouble, not less now.”
He stood up and for an instant his body glittered as his moth aspect fluttered its wings and coal dust filled the air around him, turning and sparkling as it whirled into the familiar runes that would port him away. “To Faery with me. I see you all, adieu, anon. Rest well.” He bowed, smiled, and with a flourish of his hand turned to walk away and vanished around an unseen corner.
“Goodnight!” sang out Xavi's voice from the floor, as sunny in disposition as she was not.
Zal jumped. “I wish she wouldn't do that.” He put his half-finished beer back on top of the cooler. He looked at Teazle with misgivings.
The demon looked back and Lila saw some kind of communication passing between them that she couldn't understand.
“Is that it?” she asked. “We're through?”
Teazle's head swung to her and he nodded. “You're free of me, free of Demonia.” His expression was inscrutable now though she tried hard to see into it. His face was set. “You wanted it.”
And there was nothing she could say to that. She looked down, pushing the force of everything that was bursting her heart and which she didn't understand down onto the sleeping elf. She had wanted it. Wanted things to be more simple. Now she had this and her insides were screaming that they didn't want it at all and it made no sense to her. Tears flooded her eyes so that she had to turn her head from them both.
“I should put her back, we can't fall asleep here with her like that,” Lila said, using her AI to subvert all her natural reactions and replace them with steady confidence. Above all she had to get out of that moment and move into the next. Any movement would do, so she wouldn't have to ask Teazle if he was going now, if Zal was going now, if there was nothing left to keep them there now that the bond was broken. It helped not a bit that the two men seemed far less affected, almost as if it happened every day.
She got up and went to stand over Xavi, wondering if she really was asleep or was pretending. The thing about Xavi was that she was new to them, and a daughter of someone they had learned to be far from the simple elf he had made out to be. They didn't know her or what she was capable of.
Teazle looked over at Xaviendra. In the light of his eyes they were all able to see her clearly but she made no move to indicate she was anything other than unconscious. Her mouth was open and she was snoring lightly. “I don't trust her,” Teazle said, his tone much less drunk and more thoughtful than had seemed possible a short while ago.
“Having your life threatened by someone can do that to you,” Lila said.
“No, it isn't that,” the demon smiled. “She's no threat to me whatever she may have thought. I can't pin down what bothers me but I feel bothered, when I look at the two of you and her with you. On the surface we know her story but only what she has chosen to tell. It's what she hasn't said that itches my spirit.”
“Think she's dangerous?” Zal asked.
“Of course,” Teazle replied.
Zal frowned and his expression was very sad. “She is a creation of a very bad moment in elven history. Possibly the sole survivor of that time.”
“All the shadowkin come from that time, though, right?” Lila asked.
“Yes,” Zal said, “but the ones alive today, including me, are the descendants of the originals and a lot of us are half-breeds or some mix of shadow and light. She looks so young.”
“Heh, and not like a badass raptor on speed either,” Teazle said, referring to the Saaqaa, shadowkin elves who had been spawned far from their geneline and who were less elf and more of what they had been forcibly crossed with.
Of those beings who had provided the non-elf material nobody was able to say very much, because they knew nothing about it. Xaviendra was the only one who would know, and she had stolidly refused to speak of it. This was one of the reasons for her permanent imprisonment within the containment of the maximum-security cells at the Agency. They wanted her where they could see her, close at hand.
Lila repressed a shiver. “She can hear you.”
“I don't care,” the demon said. “I'd say it to her face.”
But to Lila it seemed unfair, as if they were talking behind her back. At the same time, she felt an unerring curiosity prompting her to demand answers from Xavi while her conscious mind was apparently incapacitated and thus unable to stop her from replying.
Zal beat her to it in any case. “Xaviendra,” he said. “At the time you were made, what did they use to change you?”
Xavi replied with a piglike snort and rolled onto her back, sending bottles rolling and chinking. “Elementals,” she said. “And ektaluni.” Here she used a word that none of them knew.
“What's that?” Teazle asked.
“Primal spirits,” Xavi said.
“Where from?” Lila tried to get more information as this wasn't helpful.
“Phantoms,” Xavi replied with the exaggerated patience of someone explaining basic material to lazy students. “They are a form of ghost, but a form generated by the application of disciplined and focused consciousness to the raw aether of the Void rather than random accretions formed by the natural processes of mnemonic evolution within the nonmaterial planes.”
Teazle made a face. “Demons are made in a similar way at the moment of their conception.” He glanced speculatively at Zal. “And here you are, elf in blood and demon by spirit. No accident that.”
“My mother certainly thought it wasn't,” Zal said. “Though she never told me all the details. But why did the elves do it at all?”
“They were under attack,” Xaviendra said, smacking her lips as she settled down again. This above all made Lila convinced that she wasn't faking the sleep. Xavi was fastidious and had impeccable manners, the sort that would persist through death rather than reveal anything other than someone in perfect self-control.
“From what?” Teazle's tail lifted, cobralike, and swayed as he waited for the answer.
“The sleeper within,” Xavi said and abruptly rolled to her side and curled up again, hands tucked under her chin like a child. She frowned briefly and shivered before falling into a deeper kind of sleep; softness overtook her.
As one they turned away to leave her in peace. Lila glanced at Teazle, but he shrugged—he had no idea what that last phrase meant.
Zal shook his head. “Never heard of it.”
“I thought you guys kept impeccable records,” Teazle said.
“Maybe, but we also had impeccable rewriting skills,” Zal replied, “and our propaganda services were second to none. Until I found Friday back in Zoomenon, all the elves I know thought the shadowkin were a naturally occurring race and not a genocidal experiment. They were made a long, long time ago.”
“Still,” Lila said. “It must have been one hell of a threat to do what they did.” She felt even less comfortable with the idea than she had two minutes ago, before Xavi had put this strange label on the cause.
“Or a hell of an opportunity,” Teazle said, relaxing to roll on his back again. “Mages'll fuck with anything for power. Elves doubly so. Gzzz, I feel sleepy. This beer is useless.”
“I'll take her back,” said Lila, cancelling the effects of the alcohol on her system with a filter. She bent down and gathered the light form of the elf into her arms as unwelcome sobriety set in. She heard herself ask, “Are you sticking around?” And then she felt so off balance that she almost staggered and had to fight to keep her feet.
Teazle glanced at Zal and their gazes locked for a second, then got up slowly. “I'll take a rain check.” He shook out his thick mane of white hair and composed himself, standing tall with his chin lowered in a manner Lila recognised as being his pre-teleport orientation. He looked at her, his gaze blazing. His nostrils flared for a moment and she smelled brimstone and the psychoactive tang of his personal poison as he said, “Have to be a dog about a man.”
“Where will you be?” She hated herself for asking, hearing her voice crack on the last word.
“I'll check the dropbox,” he said and she felt kicked in the gut once again. Then he gave the merest downward flick of his eyelids in Zal's direction, baffling her entirely because she'd assumed his submission to Zal would end now that there was no more need for them to fool around with who had the power. He vanished from Otopian space with the finality of a gunshot. The sharp crack retort of the air closing on his space made Xavi jolt.
“Bad dog,” she murmured, her head lolling against Lila's leather-clad shoulder.
“I'll be here,” Zal said, lying down flat on the rugs. The ink spill of his aether body shifted around him like a restless pool and where his fingers came into contact with the empty bottles he tapped out a brief rhythm.
Lila swallowed down to prevent the hole in her chest from opening any further and stooped to clear the yurt's low-slung doorflap. Outside the night was cool and a faint drizzle was falling. She could hear the soft murmuring swish of the city, a breath instead of the roar she kept listening for and never finding.
The whispers of the machine, which had haunted her a long time from the edges of her mind, were also absent these days. They'd translated into silent knowledge. It was this, and not her connection to the Agency's powerful AI systems, that made her back shiver with sudden cold as she walked towards the lit doorway of the building's garden exit.
Tightening her grip on Xavi's ragdoll form she picked up speed, linking briefly to the building's internal sensors. The doors opened for her, mechanisms spinning into reverse at her command as she approached because she would pass them before they were even fully open and she wanted them shut at her back. As they swung wide, she began to run.
Xavi's cell was a long elevator ride away. Lila felt two choices emerge from the silent knowledge as she started to pass through the open-plan office section where administrative staff processed the Agency's billions of daily documents. She could run to where she perceived trouble coming, and take Xavi with her to save time, or she could dump Xavi beyond the reach of all physical and most magical harm first. She chose the second option for a host of calculated reasons that had already bypassed her conscious mind several times on their way through her AI synapses.
At the elevator doors a secretary was standing, yawning, her tray of cups indicating that she'd picked the short straw and was on the coffee run. The elevator car was a couple of floors above, descending. Lila bypassed the control system and opened the doors to the empty shaft. The secretary staggered forward on automatic and jolted as Lila shouted, “Stand still!” on her way past.
Lila turned as she jumped and saw the cups falling with her, the sight of their impact on the carpet cut off abruptly as her head passed the floor level. Only the lingering cry of the swearing woman trailed after them down into the abyss. Above them the car eased down and stopped. Lila turned her attention to the subbasement and opened its doors up. Jets in her boots slowed them down with a deceleration she had to be careful of—she was pretty unbreakable in this gravity but Xavi was twiglike—and then she was in the corridor of the security wing, sprinting for Xavi's door, the guards already plastering themselves to the walls in accordance with orders that she'd sent belting through their earpieces moments before.
The only hitch in the matter came in the form of the duty shaman who had been woken from a catnap to release the aetheric binds that master mages had emplaced upon that part of the prison. She was stammering her way through some chant, trying to get something out of a bag and shake a fetish stick all at the same time. A plate of half-eaten biscuits lay on the floor next to her. Lila was sympathetic but had no time to show it, nor did she feel the need as Blondine was one of the greater shamans of the post-Moth era, even if she did look like a frazzled housewife from the Bay. She shoved Xavi at the woman, more or less dropping her directly into her lap, and said, “Pack her in tight. Come to my office soon as you're done.”
The journey back was a blur, executed on automatic as Lila fine-tuned to the sensation that had upset her in the first place. It centred on her office—the place that used to house Sarasilien, the elf mage who was Xaviendra's father and who had been Otopian liaison to the elf world since the Quantum Bomb had burst Earth and opened up the hidden worlds.
But Sarasilien was long gone and there was no sign of him anywhere. He hadn't left a note, just a big fifty-year-old hole where he used to be. He was another one Lila missed every day, the office a memorial, mausoleum, reminder, storehouse, hideaway, library of secrets, and epicentre of residual energy that was the obvious hotspot for any aetherial interventions to occur, or invasions to strike. Her only true aetherial helper was the flimsy scrap of ra-ra skirt around her hips: Tatterdemalion, the faery.
Now Tatters was a worn-out relic from an age where Zal's music had held sway. She was worn and washed out, but as Lila ran through the open plan again, dodging staff, she felt the sudden shift of fabric around her waist and within a few moments the skirt was gone and she was wearing a doublet and surcoat, stitched with the symbols and signs she had learned to associate with protection charms.
The locks and bolts on the door shot back at her approach along the lengthy corridor that separated this volatile place from the rest of the human offices. The foreboding weight in her shoulders increased as she made herself slow down to a walk and survey for traps. There was nothing she could detect, nor did the faery cloth react, so she pushed the door open with a flick of her fingers and crossed the threshold.
The office was made up of three rooms, each leading to the next. Lila kept the doors open because she knew the place could guard itself without her help, and besides, she liked it to look friendly. Now she could see a light in the farthest room, one she hadn't left on. It was something cheap to decorate boudoir side tables, and she thought it was a present from Sorcha, the succubus, to the office's old master. It had a rosy, golden gleam that made everything look warm and comfortable and it cast a direct path of fading beams to Lila's feet.
She felt her teeth slide together. Invitation plus invasion—that really rubbed her up the wrong way. But at least it meant intelligence and not the wholescale space-time disruption disaster movie that had started playing itself in her head on the way down here.
Never one to be cautious when she could be bold, Lila straightened her shoulders and put her chin down. She walked forward along the designated line, though she'd have preferred to do anything but obey the summons. Even this irked her. As she turned the final corner around the study door, she wasn't ready for what she saw or the blood-draining shock that it started before her mind had even put names to the faces. All she could think of was that it was two in one day. Two.
Sarasilien was standing in the corner, reading at his lectern. His long fox-coloured hair was loose and his clothing was unfamiliar to her, though it had the cast of elvish fashion about its skirted coat and leggings, its cloth boots. He was surprise enough to her, but nothing had prepared her to respond to his companion and the pair that they made. Beside his tall, rangy figure stood the shorter, sleeker, and infinitely more plastic charcoal female form that Lila knew to be the rogue leader she had beheaded and doomed with the sword of Night months before.
It was Sandra Lane.
No, she thought a second later. It was Lane's clone.
A perfect clone. So, which one of them was Lane? And how many of the things were there? But there wasn't time for that thought. They were turning to her now.
Lila might have forgiven Sarasilien if he'd reacted with heartfelt emotion, with something other than the grim seriousness that he offered as he raised his head, but his look was calm, self-contained, businesslike, as though she were just some official he'd come to see on an important matter. She didn't want him to run across the room in hysterics or anything, but this left her with the feeling, once again, that she could stand with her guts out and he'd be passing her a tissue. It struck her there and then just how one-sided their relationship had been. She'd needed him so badly, anything had seemed like it must be enough. How cheaply she'd been bought. The revelation washed through her like ice water, freezing what was left of her heart.
Meanwhile Lane stood there with her hands grasped together like the master's toy. Her immaculate, basic features held no individuality but they managed an expression of grave disappointment as though she were a teacher who had caught Lila out in a naughty prank. Only the confirmation of her machine self, one robot to another, convinced Lila this was the real deal and not some other creature in masquerade, because she'd been sure Lane was beyond the reach of the material world and finding her in one piece was disconcerting to say the least. But she recovered fast from her disappointment.
“Well,” she heard herself say with a cool bite in the words, “if it ain't the returning dead.”
“Lila,” Sarasilien said, a beat too late, not warm enough, not anything enough to make up for his defection. “Don't be alarmed. We can explain.”
In response Lila manufactured guns from her hands and raised them in a single, exacting motion.
“Yeah?” she aimed one at his forehead, one at Sandra's. “I'd like to hear that.”
She looked him in the eye and saw there the same warm compassion they'd always held only this time she wasn't grateful for it. Maybe it was getting to see Xavi and her pain, hear her crazy thoughts, or maybe it was the feeling of being treated like a caretaker, left in the cold on a need-to-know basis that was burning her gut. No, it was all of them. “You got twenty seconds.”
Then she flicked her gaze to Sandra Lane. “And you got two.”