Roxa's stride was long and businesslike. She reached the door she was looking for, breathed onto her hand, pressed it to the cheap wood, and then flung back a couple of bolts. She went in before them and gestured for them to help themselves.
“All yours.”
The room did not have any windows, only the light from the portal shimmer contained within the glowing marks on its bare floorboards.
“Where does it come out?” Zal asked.
“In a house on the Sangueste Canal, near Bladespark Bridge. There will be some liaison there but they won't bother you, I'm sure.” She paused and then said with a teasing grin, “But in the stories that reached Tantalor they say you were a portal opener. I suppose that must not be true.”
Zal's hand on her arm prevented Lila from moving forward. “It's true enough to recognise a rubbish chute from a gate. This is a dumping ground and it goes to Zoo, where everything gets taken care of.” He pointed at the demonic runescript edging the broad ring. Blood and dust marked the boards, but that was only to be expected.
Roxa's moment of confidence vanished and she darkened, becoming a yellow-green colour. Her tail whipped around, almost invisible in the shadows, and a splatter of venom struck Zal's face as the tip of the tail point stabbed into his neck. The sound of Lila's gun was almost deafening in the tiny space, followed by the plaintive last sigh of the demon as she slid to the ground, almost severed in half through the waist. Zal slapped his hand to his neck, recoiling, and hit the door as he staggered.
“Zal!” Lila caught him by the shoulders. The gun had been and gone, a breath of violence and fear. It was an overreaction. She was shocked by that more than the result.
His eyes were rolling up in his head, but his teeth were gritted. “Just push her in the hole and let's get out of here,” he hissed, breathing in gulps of air and snarling with the effort of resisting the poison. “You can shoot me with something, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, feeling the strange surge of power as her body struggled to produce an antitoxin. “Not for the magical component though.”
“That's okay,” he said. “It will wear off. I can live with that.” He reached out towards the door and caught hold of it this time, but the effort was too much and it brought him to his knees. By his feet the demon's twitching tail tip was still pumping out the dregs of its venom sacs, filling the air with the heavy, musky fragrance of roses and myrrh, romance and death. “Why,” he gasped in between breaths, “do I always get it in the neck?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” Lila said, bracing him with one arm as she injected close to the puncture wound with her other hand.
“Ah, that feels as bad as the first one,” he protested, but his arms had gone limp and he was quickly losing his ability to hold himself up at all. He sounded drunk.
“Wait a minute, it'll work,” she assured him, pulling him back so that she could prop him against a relatively clean bit of wall. “Got demon all over your face again though.”
If something permanent happened to him she was happy to revise her verdict on overreacting. She walked back to the body and kicked it across into the portal where it vanished immediately in a fine haze of light and subatomic particles. “This thing has rotten containment. A couple of months chucking stuff in here and you'll be dying of radiation sickness,” she said. “Short range though, mercifully for whoever lives downstairs.” She went back and got Zal's arm around her neck and one shoulder under his to lift him. “Try to walk.”
He mumbled something inarticulate, but he was light so she was able to carry him with her as she went back the way they had come. The second door she kicked in was the right one. At least, it had a portal and was in a room considerably nicer than the first one with a lot less in the way of x-ray bleed. The demon script was difficult to translate, but after a while she was convinced it wasn't a one-way ticket to the Void and stepped into it because she could hear running feet, voices in the hall, and the click of automatics being readied.
At the house on Sangueste there were six demons in attendance at the portal waiting for them, armed with a variety of interesting weapons and expectant faces. They attacked even before the portal had concluded transmission, which meant that one of them got fried straight off by a combination of the circle ward shield and the portal's outer rim microplasma, leaving five of them in motion, bullets in the air, blades singing, jet of flame mid-erupt as Lila arrived with Zal hanging onto her side, muttering gibberish.
She wished now that she hadn't been so hasty in getting rid of Tatterdemalion. But it was a bit late for that. She spun on the spot, turning her back on four of the incoming objects and at the same time spinning a shield of diamond filaments out of the back of her body. Because they were moving at high speeds and vibrating at frequencies that distorted local space and bent it almost double, they didn't need to be tightly packed to deflect the fast-moving bullets or the slower blades. A cloak of the stuff swept from her arm to cover Zal, hooding him in sheeting white strands of crystal. For him it happened so quickly it seemed no more than a white flash like a camera going off.
Meantime she drew her guns. By the time they were ready to fire, there were six barrels jutting from the outer edge of her forearm as she swung it around and they shot almost in sync and put six bolts through six foreheads. She used the recoil to help her drag Zal's deadweight around. It wasn't enough to finish the job, however. She caught the final shot in her hand, a half inch in front of Zal's face.
It was an armour-piercing round, and absorbing the impact was too much for her at close range. It punctured her hand right through, although she was moving it as much as she could so that when it exited it did so at an angle that nicked Zal's ear on its way past him and then went on to sail effortlessly through the plaster and stud wall behind them and, by the sound of it, into an innocent body on the far side—if a houseful of gangland demons could be considered innocent, and Lila doubted that.
The smell of demon brains and overheated, distressed metal was noxious and almost overpowering in its own right. For a second her eyes rolled with the stink. Zal wobbled on his feet.
“I see nothing's changed here,” he rasped, clinging to her as he straightened up, forcing himself to regain full control of his body even though he was quivering with involuntary muscle tremors. “And sh-shame on you, you name dropper. Talking about Teazle to sc-core. That's a l-low blow.”
She realised he was referring to Roxa's defeat and calling her dishonourable for rank pulling. “We didn't have time for the triple-X version of the knockdown fight. And anyway, I was jealous.”
He blinked carefully at the room. “Didn't ruin your aim, I see.” He had a slight grin on his face. His eyes were as dark as pits. She just managed to catch him as he fell.
“Zal don't faint on me, you big blouse!” His skin was hot and his eyes already flickering back and forth in venomous dreams. She cursed and lifted him up, over her shoulder. “This is MY position,” she said to the empty room, as she stepped out of the circle. “MY position is the girl who faints and gets thrown over the hero's shoulder. Not yours. It's so unsexy.”
Zal murmured something unrepeatable about positions and breasts, which made Lila think briefly of Xavi and her unconscious genius for talking while out cold, and that put her in an even worse mood. She couldn't face a houseful of demon wannabe mafiosi and their greedy, hopeful faces or their collapsing, bloodied corpses, so she shot out the ornate leaded-glass window, ignited her boot jets, and made a hasty exit upstage. They crossed the foul green waters of the canal, passed high over the masterwork of tiled roofs that decorated Greater Sangueste with mosaics of cathedral proportion, and made it to the relatively clear, if reeking, airs of the Sheban lagoon.
To forestall any ideas about pursuit, she paused to launch a rocket at the building and watched as it blasted three floors into a healthy, smoking inferno. The fire was more firework than bomb, only to make a point. It might be a mistake; it was hard to tell how the demons would react because she had no idea of her local standing in the ranks now that she wasn't Teazle's wife anymore—too small a blast insulted them, too large offended. Either way they might choose to follow her, as devoted servants if they were impressed, and as assassins if they weren't. She piled on the power and didn't look back.
Across the lagoon the colours of the aircars and balloons, dirigibles and flitters, were gaudy and merry lights twinkled from towers and palaces in the old town. She headed there. The streets were busy, the lagoon itself rather full of gondolas and cruisers cutting the water this way and that with their competing wakes, but she noticed changes that she hadn't had time to see on her previous visit.
There was less art and more smoke, less beauty and more savagery, a wildness to the place that hadn't been there before. Guilds and house banners with unrecognisable sigils crowded the markets, and these were full, not only of the magical items that the city was famed for, but with the wicker cages of slaves and the gleaming bottles and stone sarcophagi of imprisoned creatures whose nature was only guessable by the size and style of their pen. Whole districts had changed, boundaries shifted. But as she came down to the old flat shapes of the manse roofs that she recognised, she saw the Sikarza flags flying strongly in the onshore wind. Beneath them ran a host of smaller colours, advertising who was in and who was out. At the top was the blue-edged white bunting of Teazle's personal flare. The master was home, then, and still the master.
Relief filled her, and she landed on their flight diamond. The deck officer saluted her as if she'd never been away, even though he'd never met her and must have known about her change of status. Teazle himself hadn't taken against them, at least.
She almost ran through the halls, checking doors, and sent a sprite she found watering a large vase of flowers, to find Teazle. There were people living there she didn't know; names, shapes, faces all unfamiliar, but each one of them seemed quite familiar with her and with Zal. Some even bowed. Being Demonia nobody batted an eyelash at the state of them and she reached her own rooms without delay. Clean, immaculate, they were exactly as she hadn't left them.
She put Zal down on the bed and saw that the hanging cocoon in which Teazle normally slept had been recently used. Shredded bits of wool and fur hung out of it. There was a strange smell, of things that had been maintained but not used or lived in for a very long time, a museumish kind of odour of beeswax, incense, and neglect. She walked swiftly into the bathroom feeling as if she might throw up, which surprised her because she'd seen a lot worse and done worse than today's accumulated bloodshed. She found herself shaking, and though there was some reason for it with the chemical imbalance caused by the antivenom, she knew the real cause was that she'd promised herself—dreamed, imagined, pretended—there would be an end to the slaughter after last time in this place. Now she saw that when demons were involved there would never be any other way and there would never be a stop unless she chose to die. It was the faces she couldn't stand. Roxa, whatever else she'd been, had been healthy, vibrant, interesting in the way of all living things, magical, fascinating, marvellous. And now she was disintegrating meat under a Zoomenon sun, being unpicked into the elements from which she'd spawned.
Sure, Roxa could have chosen not to take them to that doorway, to take them to the real portal instead, Lila reasoned. She just knew that to her it seemed an unforgiveable stupidity, such a waste. For that they deserved their fates and that alone, she thought, but even this view of justice was faked and it didn't console her. The truth was that there was no justice, no balance, no law, no will except her own, and theirs.
Her loathing of the Agency and her own position crystallised out then, as she hung over the bathtub, watching the water run into the huge stone basin. Her stomach calmed. She wanted justice, fairness, kindness, but it depended on the will of others and she couldn't touch that, not with any weapon in the world, nor any grace. Security there was not to be had either. Everything could change in an instant. She washed her face and cleaned her teeth, decided to forgo the old ritual of the betrayer's look into the mirror, and went back to see how Zal was doing.
The antivenom had done its work—the ugly purple swelling on his neck was down, the wound not much more than a pinprick. His eyes still rolled in his head, however, and his skin was hot. He babbled nonsense about pretty things, beauty and lust. She stripped off his foul clothing and threw it on the floor. Then she noticed the shadow body that it had been hiding. It rippled just over his own in smoky waves like a coat of oil. There was something about its movements that made her uneasy. It looked as if it had purpose, senses, and awareness of its own, separate from him now that he wasn't in a fit state to master it. It glided across him, as though searching something out. It flooded up his nostrils, from his ears and the surfaces of his eyes. And he had told her that this was all that was left of him for the fifty years of his exile in Under. She didn't know what to make of it.
A powerful instinct warned her not to touch it. Her immediate impulse was to do the opposite, challenge the fear and the cause of it, but this time she stayed her hands and threw a blanket on him instead. She had no idea what the magical potency of the venom was. If she became poisoned by it, that would make two of them who weren't up to anything. Seeing that he wasn't going anywhere soon, she went back for a bath.
The water was hot, and there was soap and a brush. She changed to human skin form and watched the disturbing slither of black leather and metal devolving to her old, pale tanned arms and legs. The blood and matter stayed where it was, coating her more thickly now that she had shrunk her surface, but in this form she didn't have a hundred angular planes, seams, and airvents, so it was easier to clean everything. She was struggling to get her hair to rinse clear when she felt a change in the air and looked up to find Teazle walking in the door. His near-silent tread was thanks to the combination of his grace, human-form feet, and the carpets, and he looked exasperated when all this effort wasn't enough to sneak up on her.
He stood, white and pure as the finest snow, his hair a fall of frost, eyes glowing and face alight with the abundant energy—enough for a thousand demons—that was barely contained by his six-and-a-half-foot form. A knee-length robe of white cloth was all he had on, with the hilts of his two swords rising above his shoulders at his back like the stubs of wings. There was a change in him from the creature who had slipped out of Malachi's tent days ago. Then he had been tired, introspective (for him), and in a rare moment of rest. Now there was a vibration in him so fine and strong it linked him to dreams and to other worlds. He came to stand at the side of the bath and then crouched down and rested his arms along the rim. He put his chin on his crossed wrists and watched her with his white eyes; god's tautly strung bow.
“You're losing your edge,” he said, voice low and deceptively mellow. “Zal got suckied. Careless.”
At this range she could hear the hum of the twin blades—a sound well beyond most hearing, a foreboding in the nerves. “I'm surprised we're not dead. We didn't leave on the best of terms with ninety percent of the population.”
“Yes,” he said. “In spite of your undoing all my efforts and giving away most of our fortune to create a false sense of equality, they retained a marvellous amount of resentment, enough to fuel more stupidity than I thought I would ever witness.” He put a finger in the water and then into his mouth, sucking it thoughtfully for a second. She knew he was figuring out what she'd been doing. “It was hard work, but I have straightened things out.”
She looked at him from her position higher up the tub. “You mean you killed them.”
“Only those who resisted.”
“So how many didn't resist?”
“A handful. They have seen fit to relocate to estates further afield. Let me run you some fresh water, see the taps work like this—fresh in, seven-demon residue out.”
Lila moved her foot from its resting place to let him fiddle with the mechanics. “Is that why everything looks so different?”
“A couple of days can change a great deal,” he said.
“So, the old families bail out and in come the slavers and…who are all those others?”
“They are merely temporary scum.” He paused and gave her an exacting glance. “You're not going to ask me to kill all of them as well, are you?” He sounded wishful.
“It's up to you,” she said, watching as filthy water began to drain out and jets of clear come in. “You can exterminate them all. Then what will you do?”
“I'm not old and mad yet,” he said with some reproach. “Besides, you forget that 'shebat is not the only city. There is an entire world of demons, including those of the wilds who are far superior to the civilised kind. A few hundred off the register is nothing to be concerned about.”
“A few hundred.” It was so hard to accept demon reckonings. They were glorious. They were idiots. She didn't doubt they had all had opportunities to turn aside and stay alive. Their culture was their lifeblood. They were peacefully at one with it and all its consequences; it was only she, the outsider, who found it monstrous.
“I stopped counting after three hundred and forty-six,” Teazle confessed. “There was this airship battery, lots of guns, plasma rockets…I got distracted.”
“In, what is it…two days?”
“Three more like.”
They might have been talking about fish prices, in another world and time. She decided to move on to something more practical. “What exactly does succubus venom do? I countered the physical properties, but it has some aetheric components.”
“Usually it's some kind of love thing,” Teazle said. “Love or lust. Could be focused on the sucky or could be more general. They like to incapacitate and enslave. Rarely fatal. Suckies aren't into killing; it spoils their fun. They die very easy.”
“I noticed.”
Teazle watched her body reappearing from the brown water as it was diluted and cleared. “Inkies are different. They don't have tails. They have a breath with a similar effect to sucky venom, and voices that charm, though not as well as siren suckies, like Sorcha. Also they can dematerialise into a vapour form for short periods.”
She scanned her memories. “I never saw one of those.”
“Nah, they're one in a thousand, mostly in the employ of the big families, often used as assassins. And now even rarer than they were before.” He let his gaze slide over her and up to her eyes, and smiled. “They're hard to grab, easy to kill.” He briefly mimed wrenching something into two parts and throwing the parts aside.
“Is that the only way you classify anything?”
“Is there some other way?” he was candid. She had to look away from his eyes, and he blinked and toned down their gleam to firefly levels. “You summoned me.” His smile was rakish.
“Not for that. Zal needs arming for a trip to Alfheim and I need to get to Ilya. Kinda burnt my boats with Mal, so I might need a few alternative transport routes. What happened to that mirror from Madame's house? I could try that.”
“Still there,” Teazle said, with a slight shiver. “The house is owned by someone else these days, so you'd have to break in through the warehouse. Nobody knows about that part of it, even now.” Then he glanced towards the bedroom. “I suppose you'll stick with him now that he's back in some kind of body.”
“Jealousy?” she asked, sliding down to her neck in the steaming water, although she remembered their days and nights of passionate engagements in perfect clarity. “Doesn't seem like you. You don't love me. You're my ex.”
He frowned. It was nearly comical, as if he were puzzling over a difficult passage in a book. “I something you.”
She smiled and stroked his hair with one wet hand. “Aww, I something you too, honey.”
He growled slightly, quietly, and closed his eyes. “You smell of faeries.”
She peered at him, but he hadn't moved. How he could smell anything over the powerful smell of the soap and the demon blood she didn't know. “Well, I was wearing one for a while.”
“Ah yes, where did she go?”
“I dumped her.”
Now his eyes flashed open, their beams going straight into her face, and, it felt, straight into her soul. “Why?”
She found herself pulling a shamed face; the truth seemed so petty now that it was time to speak of it. “I was mad at the time. I felt like everyone I had trusted was keeping secrets from me, and that they'd betrayed my trust. She didn't, but she was damn near the last one and, anyway, she's never said anything about why she was with me.”
Teazle scowled and the room darkened. “That was very foolish. You should make amends. She was your ally.”
“She was my ally so far,” Lila corrected him. “Sarasilien, Malachi…hell, I don't know who else, but Sarasilien was responsible for introducing the Otopians to the cyborg programme in the first place and he kept damn quiet about that. Now he's back claiming some elf-Armageddon is about to hit, and surprise surprise, he expects me and Zal to go picking up pieces like we're his personal servants. Malachi knew it all along and said nothing, not a blind fucking word—he was more than happy to let me believe that I was a lucky survivor with a chance to help the world for as long as it played—and now he has the bare balls to sit there in a little bubble of beer and start pontificating about shitting tiger, hidden dragon, no, there's more, wait. Meantime Max is back, really, or as close to really as I can't tell, and there are faeries in the garden sitting waiting on toadstools to tell me that I need to get rid of her and the rest of the Returners because they're going to make the world fall apart at the seams. That's a message from all the faeries apparently, who can't seem to muster a soap bubble for themselves in spite of the fact there are several thousand of them living in the city and across the continent. No, they're occupied with covering up for various of their half kin who are deranged serial killers, or maybe just have some unfortunate life vectors, who knows? Greer expects me to do something about tidying up that. Even I think I should.”
He nodded slowly. “But 'Demalion did you no harm.”
Lila bared her teeth. “She enjoyed a lot of jokes at my expense.”
“No real harm.”
“No, no fucking real harm. Yet. You got off lightly with the faeries so far but I've seen their ways.” She felt bitterly unjustified in making the statement, regardless of the fact it was true. She could have countered it with equally accurate pronouncements in the opposite direction.
“You think so?” He trailed a hand in the water, making idle patterns. His calm was determined and steady, but it had a sultry quality like a cloudy sky on a still day, waiting for the change of the weather that would mass it into a storm. “What's got you this paranoid?”
She glared at him. He had been there, he had seen it; what was he asking for?
“The faeries and these others, they kept secrets, they withheld information, they played some tricks, but have they done you such a bad service, really, considering?”
Fresh anger flared in her. “Apart from stealing my life and using up the remains for their own ends? Keeping Zal for fifty years as some kind of talking doorstop? No, I guess not.”
“And if they had left you all alone, where would you be now? Six feet under, another ordinary human. Zal would have died along with Jack. You embraced the life offered, all of it. Else you wouldn't be here. Why do you keep returning to this as if it is the grave of your beloved?” The gaze he briefly awarded her was disappointed.
She folded her arms across her breasts and stared at him coldly. “Whose side are you on?”
He returned his eyes to the fascinating business of her bathwater and spoke his thoughts aloud as if they were a dot-to-dot puzzle he was slowly joining up. “Transitions are hard, but everyone must make them. You aren't always in a rage. I guess something else is bothering you.”
With an effort, Lila thrust away the sense of righteous unfairness that was making her so useless. She felt that he was angry with her but there was more important business, so he was containing his emotions and she could at least match the favour. It was difficult, but after a second or so she let her hold on the need to win slip, “Yes. There's this girl…” She told him the story of Sassy, leaving out no details, all the way up to the present moment.
As he listened he continued to swirl the water lazily. The ripples sparkled in the light of his eyes but they dimmed the more he brooded, and finally, when she was done, all his effulgence was gone and he looked at her from pale blue-grey irises, his hair and skin quite ordinary.
“That's an interesting story,” he said. “And something of a conundrum. We can't go near her without revealing ourselves entirely, but she can tell as many lies as she likes, and no doubt she will if it suits her. You agreed to help her, you say.”
At this distance that did seem rather foolish. She sighed. “I didn't have my fingers crossed at the time, but I wouldn't say it was one of my better promises. I thought it was the closest I could get to putting her on hold. Are you going to tell me to go make nice to her, too?”
“If you are the product of a long engineering process put in place by these players and the stakes are as high as they seem, then I wouldn't go throwing away my allies so carelessly, is what I say,” Teazle murmured. “Especially if you fancy playing as more than the virtuoso instrument of a greater hand. These childish fits of yours must stop, charming as they are.” He flashed her a look of amused indulgence that made her instantly hot.
She bristled. “People are always saying that.”
“Then they must be right.”
Lila knew it was true. She felt a tension inside her shoulders and upper back twist and turn—fish on a hook. The need to be belligerent, to fight and deny, to kick away from any kind of interference, no matter how well meant, was impossible for her to resist. It was a beast in her throat, in her chest, spinning in circles of panic. Sure, his statement was true. But there were other true statements that flew against it. She retaliated. “Is it childish to see the demon slaughter culture as a stupidity?”
She saw he considered the arousal of her body a good reward for his ongoing efforts and in return he was conversational, rational, and emphatic though he didn't attempt to touch her except with his gaze.
“If all you see is unfairness and feel pity, then it is. If you see it as a comic tragedy of loss and accept its transient moments of beauty and its ultimately pointless glory, then it is not. One slip now, one mistake about the nature of reality, and you will lose. I guarantee it. You can't afford to be anything less than a perfect warrior if you want to win. Pitiless. Merciless. Without compassion. Without fault.”
She was still in the grip of the beast within. “That's monstrous!”
He was unaffected. “It's the way of angels. All other ways are hellbound.” He looked at her once more with the kind of steady disappointment she'd hoped for but never found in her father. In spite of his hot and cold gambits, however, Teazle didn't mean to leave him self misunderstood and continued. “You've played around with hell a long time, especially in that part of it that is made of the dreams of kindness and mercy; the gold cloth of arrogance masquerading as the humble linen of the penitent. I think you must like it there. That is monstrous.”
An awkward, horrible kind of pain, a rod between heart and gut, made her anger-beast spiral around it, moth on pin. She was silent, brooding, grim. Thoughts went through her head: Were the angels monsters? Did he mean it? Was she a monster as he said, not because of any physical feature but because of her behaviour? She didn't even understand why she was so angry. She thought she was over all the things that could have made her angry.
Meantime, surely this talk of angels was his way of irony. A demon and an angel could not be the same thing at all. Angels were Others, even as far as demons were concerned.
She struggled to find something that she believed in, to counter the onslaught. She must prove herself, redeem herself, justify. She scraped around, searching for her reasons, looking under them, and found a surprising lack from which only one or two bits and pieces stood out. Her mind was not the well-honed home of reason but more like the bargain basement of hand-me-down platitudes. This was a crushing disappointment but she grasped what she could and said, sure of its power and rightness in spite of the fact she didn't even know where it came from, “I have faith in kindness.”
He dismissed this with the merest of head shakes. “Idiotic. Only the unassailable can afford to be kind.”
“Like you?” she spat.
He considered her stomach, head on his arm, waving the water with his free hand in a vague manner. “My kindness towards you has been unending.”
She assumed he meant that she was still alive. “Kindness and mercy build better worlds.”
“Kindness and mercy don't build anything. They foster weakness, and that weakness grows to consume everything in its path.” He let drips fall off his fingertips and made circle patterns. “Perhaps it would be sufficient, if everyone were kind and merciful, even if they were self-aware, but there is no population like that, though you won't find any who don't lie about it. Mercy is not a useful path to anything either, except your own death. It is a gate to corruption. Hell's royal road. I know you are thinking of the great priests of your culture when you bandy their terms about like banners, but let me assure you that only the immaculate can be kind and merciful without consequence. First be immaculate. Then you may be as cruel with your kindness and mercy as you wish. Let all manner of evils riot for your enjoyment and call it fair-mindedness.”
“So what do we do, kill everyone who isn't a coldhearted bastard?”
“Kill your own weakness. Hunt it, stalk it, root it out. That will be enough. Others can do as they want; they have the same opportunity. Their choices are their own. Any of them might be the perfect warrior.
The least and worst of them could be. Nothing stops them. Everyone has the power.”
As he said this her mind had churned with images of her own parents and their make-do lives, struggling. They had not done well, but they had tried hard to instill in her that kindness mattered, second chances mattered, there was always hope for a better future, and that things can be learned from mistakes. Where was the point of learning if one mistake was an execution offence? She burned with resentment, almost hatred for him, a protective fire inside her around the images of all the world's luckless victims. “Have you no empathy at all?”
Teazle considered and swirled the water. He watched the ripples he made reach the shores of her knees and then the far side of the stone basin.
“What you call empathy is merely the copying of suffering. You see someone in pain and you duplicate the feelings inside yourself and call that sympathy or empathy or somesuch. Then you wallow in it, and you feel pity and sorrow for the sufferer, first for them, and then for yourself. I know that you do this because it seems like a way you could lead them out. You go and join them, then you show the way out. But you can't lead from a weak position, and there you are, in the pit with them. You might change your state again, but they already chose their state. This braying about moral high grounds by thinking that your big heart is some kind of barometer of virtue is a junior alchemist's mistake.” He glanced at her stony face and shook his head slightly.
“I expect some idiot told you that through the effort of pitying and commiserating you can make the world a place of love, embracing everything with endless forgiveness. But at the same time you can't stop suffering yourself, though that's where you must stop it. That's how it is done, not by crying along and forgiving the unforgivable. I hear that even your churches praise suffering as a road to redemption, but it is nothing and goes nowhere. Bleed your heart as much as you like, all it will do is kill you and everyone around you that much faster. Fine, if sacrifice amuses you, then at least it has had some positive purpose. But that was never the human way, with the exception of a few deluded fools who thought they could achieve demonhood through vice. Suffer and sacrifice. Redemption for the irredeemable. Devil's creeds. It is abomination. You are like the elves. Trying to save themselves from their own hate by turning it inward.
Excellent prey for the devils. Those bastards are grown to their billions in you. In ages past we have come to exterminate the hosts of such plagues, lest they cover the world.” He sighed, and for a moment his shoulders sank down and he became briefly limp and gloomy with no prospect of a purifying slaughter in sight.
It didn't stop her blurting out, “Don't tell me that all the human kindnesses and mercies over the ages are meaningless nothing!” She was furious. “What about parents and children, kindness and love in relationships, or is that all crap and lies as well? You say this stuff like you have no feelings at all!”
“Love,” Teazle said, shifting position, breathing in and regaining himself. “Love,” he repeated slowly. “Is behind everything I say.”
Now she was completely confused. “Teazle, you despise every one and you kill everything and you don't care. What's loving about that?”
“I do that,” he said, looking at her as if she had surprised him, baffled him in fact with a blatant mistake. “But I don't want to. It isn't my geas.” He paused for another moment, searching her face, and she could see he was honest. “Is that what you thought about me all this time? That I am a demon of spite?”
The geas was a demon's primary calling. Zal's was music. Teazle's, she had thought, was killing. Now she didn't want to say yes and be wrong and even more shamed by her failure and the awful insult that it would be.
“What, then?” She felt small and worthless and that she must find an escape, of any kind, lest he find her out. Only a clear sense that he meant her no harm contained her disappointment and shamed her into biting her lips shut as she waited for the verdict on her own unkind judgements of him. So she was proven false or at least doubting, untrue where she claimed high ground, lacking. So what?
“Stop it,” he snapped, flicking water into her eyes suddenly with a snap of his fingers. He did look angry now.
“Stop what?”
“Feeling sorry for yourself.”
She wiped her eyes. “What's the answer, then?”
“I'm not going to tell you,” he said. “You can answer it for yourself.” He snaked his tail over the edge of the tub and around one of her ankles and gave her a swift tug.
She was jerked down into the water helplessly and could only watch it close over her face, screening his expression with a mass of bubbles. When she surfaced, he'd left the room. She got out and dried herself and then saw he had left her some clothes.
She remembered he'd done the same thing the day he and Malachi had moved her out of her old apartment. He'd laughed at her old clothes—even she marvelled at them—and thrown them down the garbage chute, every last piece. Then he'd made her new ones. Zal used to joke that Teazle had pulled them out of his ass because nobody saw him make them; they simply appeared. She'd realised since then that he teleported to get them, but he was so fast at it that nobody could see the joins.
She examined the one-piece after a moment of uncertainty. It was moss-green with some gold stitching, subtle, expensive, and soft. After a time she figured out how to put it on—it had many cutaways intended to expose various pieces of skin—and discovered it to be surprisingly tasteful and beautifully tailored. There was a kind of panelled jacket that went with it, and here she discovered a label showing Sorcha's personal symbol of a red flame. She and the demon had not been the same size, so she reasoned this was Sorcha's own brand. These things were antiques now. Collectible. She wished Sorcha were back again for one, fierce moment, and then put the jacket on and walked back to the bedroom in her bare feet.
Teazle was on the bed, reading something on a palmscreen and listening to Zal mutter in his fitful sleep. On the rug by the large windows lay a black sabretooth cat the size of a pony, idly licking the matte fur on the back of one gigantic paw. As it saw her from its orange eyes, it opened its claws and dug them deeply into the rug's ruby pattern.
“Mal,” she said, as neutrally as possible. She saw Teazle shoot a glance at her as he paged through his document and then look back closely at the demonic text, reading as though engrossed.
“…enormous…” Zal mumbled.
The huge cat stared at her, and the pupils of his eyes narrowed. “You are forgiven,” he said. His voice was garbled by the shape of his mouth and his teeth, but it was clear enough. She noticed a bearlike quality to him that hadn't been apparent before.
“You've changed.”
“I am changing,” he said in his deep rumble. It had a slight break in it as though his purr box was broken. “All the old fey are experiencing the same. It is slow, but inevitable.” He paused. “We are declining.”
Teazle looked up now, and Lila said, “What do you mean, declining?”
“We revert towards our primal forms.”
“Like you did in Under?”
“When you saw me there, we weren't in Under,” Malachi said. “We were in Umeval, the Time of Winter. It was a very old place, one of the few changeless places that sit at the axis. After it come all the ages of the human races. Before it come the older aeons, millennia without mark, which in your reference is in time, but in Faery it is geography, or direction, if you like. They progress back to the time before demons, before elves, before there was anything except the Void and…” he paused and looked away, whiskers twitching, “…the machines.”