Lila thought of armour; knights in plate, infantrymen in mail, leather-strapped gladiators testing their range, textile flak jackets full of smart gel, being cheerful when you were sad all through, your smile deflecting every threatened sympathy like a shield of shiny happiness. As she thought, her hands worked, the tips of her fingers pulling and stretching, rubbing and smoothing as she spun strands of what appeared to be metallic cloth out of her skin.

She didn't do it in front of the demons. She sat in the bathroom on the toilet lid and worked silently. She could remember Zal's measures in perfect detail and enough elven manuscripts from the archives that she could copy a typical Jayon combat harness down to the last buckle and glyph. Her glyphs were not magical, however; they were forgeries without power. The power was in the harness itself. It was her clone.

When she was done, she held it up and looked it over. As an afterthought she fashioned a dagger for the belt. Then it seemed finished to her. She put it down and looked for the last time at her arms and hands before she got dressed. She couldn't stop looking ever since she'd got out of bed and noticed what her husbands had done for her.

The demon marks ran in her skin in networks of tiny fire, markings in an ancient script of simple dashes and crosses. They flowed in chaotic rushes, met, diverged, dissolved, blossomed, and died. She could feel their effect, a kind of precision constant tuning to frequencies and melodies that the machine could not reach on its own. The script talked her into calm. She was the eye of a strange storm.

The demon data networks were full of designs. She picked some out and reprocessed her usual black body armour and military fatigues through their ideas. Bigger boots and gloves were in, gleaming leather zipped up the neck in high collars, plate inserts made to look like they had been ripped off the bodies of monsters. She toned it down and resized it, checked her hair, got distracted when she realised she could put any colour she liked anywhere on her face, then settled on red lips, bigger blacker eyelashes, and pink cheek tints.

Then she took the harness back into the bedroom and stood for a moment watching Zal and Teazle sleep. Their efforts had exhausted them. She wasn't about to wake them while she was running on their donated powers. She left the harness lying on the end of the bed and glanced at the white demon's face.

He was chalky and ordinary looking, like a tired human man taking a nap at the end of a hard day's labour. She wanted to leave something for him, but she couldn't think of anything. In the end she bent over him and left a kiss on his cheek. He didn't stir.

On the way out she caught sight of herself in one of the many vanity mirrors and stopped. It wasn't beauty that snagged her. It was that, for an instant, she'd thought it was a painting moving because the figure seen from the corner of her eye had a resolute, confident stride, so determined and forceful that it had triggered her combat protocols before she realised it was herself. The lipstick and the red shock in her hair stood out lividly against the ash-white dust of the room.

She knew then that she could do anything. The notion filled her with a cautious sadness. Without limitation whatever borders she ran up against would be her own. Surely this is what Teazle had intended for her to understand and what Zal had ever understood. She wondered if she could die.

Out on the causeways around the house the demons of the canal traders and the mansion servants were entangled in the day's bargaining, waves of colour moving through them in ripples of emotion that she could read as easily as the day's papers. There was an undercurrent of tension in the city, a strip of violet blue, grey with the load of uncertainty it carried. She felt it everywhere, even on the main promenades where the Maha were gathered for the day's combat of beauty and wit, talent and chutzpah. The ones who still recognised her got out of her way and the others followed. She got attention, but no challenges. Instead, a resentful deference ensured that her way was clear. She was followed, until she turned and offered a fight. Then, miraculously, the streets were empty.

The way into Madame's old house was simple. Lila didn't have the keys, but she made them and opened the locks. Teazle had bought the property and left it empty, knowing what it protected. It was maintained as though it was occupied by a small group of servants he paid to watch over it, though nothing had changed since Madame Des Loupes had abandoned it decades before, perhaps through a vision of what would happen there. In one of the living rooms she found a large throw of woven silk, thick and heavy. She pulled it off the chaise it was adorning and threw it over her shoulder before following the way through the halls to the place where the secret door waited. In a moment she had opened it and gone down into the dark, dank tunnels of the labyrinth.

The mirror chamber was as they had left it too—crowded with the stone remains of demons who had stumbled here searching for treasure only to be unfortunate enough to find themselves looking into the chamber's sole and very particular treasure; the Mirror of Dreams. Even in total darkness the mirror had the power to suck the beholder out of their body and into the potentially endless mindscapes within. Lila knew it well, hence the throw.

She moved between the stone figures—unlike normal demon statues these were genuinely empty, having no spirits left to be imprisoned within for the ages of their deaths—and eased in reverse up to the mirror's majestic span. It took a few moments of careful work and jigging around, but she was finally able to cover its face completely with the cloth and secure it to her satisfaction so that it wouldn't fall by accident, but a good yank from either corner would get it off easily.

Then she pushed the statues out to the edges of the space. The largest weighed several tons and almost stuck fast on the uneven floor so that she had to grow spikes down from the soles of her boots into the stone to get any leverage on the damn thing. After the work she listened until she was satisfied that there were no curious or accidental tourists in the labyrinth—it had openings up into the city and down into various underwater lairs that were probably known to some criminal groups even now—but only the drip and trickle of water and the distant burr of engines up on the lagoon permeated through to her. She was alone.

Lila put her back to the mirror's position. The reason those with aetheric power didn't want to give their names away was because they could be commanded by them. But she knew this one because its bearer had lived close to her heart once.

“Ilyatath Voynassi Taliesetra, come to me.”

She repeated it the standard three times, feeling that her voice was surely not enough. It barely carried beyond the confines of the room. At least it wasn't hesitant. After she'd finished, the deep quiet of the labyrinth returned and for the first time she became aware of its penetrating cold and damp qualities. Then air moved against her face and hands. It was cold too, but something about its steady push told her it was breath.

“Tath?” she said into the total, utter darkness and felt the sound of her voice immediately reflect back at her off something not more than six or seven inches from her face. An image of it did not resolve into anything resembling an elf. It didn't resemble anything. Inside her skin the demon runes grew agitated. She tried resolving the data on higher detail. It made no difference. The feedback was inconsistent, as if the sound were coming off moving mist.

“Tath,” she said, with a confidence that was difficult to muster. “It's me, Lila. I need to talk to you.”

She thought she heard something. It was so faint she wasn't sure. A kind of sigh or drawn breath. She retuned her hearing again, blotting out the ambient noise and amplifying. “Please say it again.” Her own voice nearly blew out her ears before she remembered to nullify that as well.

A fine line of cool, damp air crossed her face, and a much deeper and more penetrating cold wound around her. It had the sinuous grace of a boa constrictor, but it didn't grip. A feeling of dread permeated her, from the skin inwards. It was such a strange, unmistakable sensation, a different kind of cold sinking inward towards her bones, her flesh wanting to recoil. The hum of the runescript became a buzz, and abruptly the cold spirals around her withdrew.

This time she heard the voice. It was so fragile, as if the lips and throat that spoke it were constructed from vapour. “So long,” it said. “I…” and then it faded away, still speaking, the words lost.

All the time she was tuning and retuning, searching every wavelength, every frequency, every piece of information for something definite that she could detect and build on. Her mind's AI built her the image of the room and its forlorn objects and tried to place what it found within it so that she could see. Brief flickers of something like fine cloud came and went around her. She saw it manifesting almost randomly, but this was only because where it appeared it caused a sharp local temperature drop, which made the water in the air condense out for a moment. She was reminded of Zal and the way he threatened to fade out. She wondered if there was something that would enable Tath to manifest a body in the same way. “I must talk to you.”

There was a slow, general shift of the motes of cold. They began to gather and clump, winking in and out like fireflies. She was completely taken by surprise when they snapped together in front of her, their cloudlike clusters bursting into white shocks of vapour that quickly froze into tiny ice crystals. These were attracted magnetically towards an invisible surface tension that began vibrating at a high frequency—in a few seconds they outlined the shape of a tall figure. The head and shoulders were clear, but the rest was vague and ragged as if it was drawn by someone who could only block in the most basic shape. It had arms and a robed body. There were no features in the face, only two empty spots in the place of eyes. Darkness cloaked it. The empty air acted as shadows, making it look like it wore a hood. At its back, as though at a distance, the shape of curved crescent blades was sketched in the air. These moved lightly, vanes on an unfelt and restless wind. A faint keening sound came from their direction—the impersonal whine of resonating metal.

Meanwhile Lila was experiencing the most acute sensation of mortal dread. It was so strong that it blotted out almost everything else she ever remembered feeling at any time. There was nothing concrete to cause it. She was in no danger; all systems reported good conditions. The thing in front of her was barely an illusion—a few crystals, nothing more.

It was all she could do not to fall on her knees. She had the clear feeling that there was a rod of something fine and heated that ran directly through the vertical centre of her body from pelvis to the crown of her head. It reached through her legs and anchored her upright, on the ground. It stretched through her arms and automatically closed her hands into fists. Immediately the dread lost some of its grip. “Ilya,” she said in a warning tone. “Don't fuck around.”

The voice sighed—it sounded as if the room were sighing because it came from all sides at once, as though she were surrounded by open mouths. “I have dreamed…” These words came from directly in front, but they were continued by a lesser whisper slightly to her left. “…of the golden meadows of the sun, the silver lakes of the moon.” After that words came singly, from random directions. “I have been in the dark and I am dark. I know your name. But I do not remember you. There have been so many.”

“So many what?” Around her the air was moving now in more normal fashion as denser regions massed and pushed through lesser ones in a restless prowling. She tingled with the anticipation of something awful, and her fingers clenched tighter on one another until she felt her nails begin to cut her palms.

Phrases came again from all sides. “Longing. Waiting. I see them turning. Falling.”

She wanted to keep the conversation going. She was afraid of what would happen if this dissociation got itself organised. The rime-crusted face in front of her was deteriorating, its eye pits growing larger, more skull-like. “Who are turning? Where are they falling to?”

“Lost,” said the face thing, forming a mouth like a puncture wound. “I followed them so far. I felt…”

The sudden snap of cold caught her off guard again. It was direct this time, more sure of itself. Ice motes flew past her, tearing her skin on the way to the looming ghostly figure. Its sabred wings rattled. They looked feeble, powdery, but the noise was harsh and absolutely clear, ringing as though they were standing in a grand cathedral and not a rough hole in the ground.

“I…” said the voice, this time from two places at once. Elsewhere its whispers had sunk to babblings of emotional words, must and ought, must and have to, need…it rambled. The whispers lowered until they were a faint, indecipherable bubbling of sound all around her. She got the impression that although they sounded the same, they were not. They rose from a mass and subsided into it, and she couldn't know if that mass was even able to differentiate itself again.

“Ilya,” she said firmly. “Listen to me. You must find a way through.”

“Ilya,” repeated the ghost face as though the syllables were new. “Ilya,” it said again, more cannily this time and the bubbling subsided and vanished.

She felt a presence growing in the room. It wasn't just in front of her. It was everywhere. Weightlessly it weighed on her. Breathlessly it breathed. It coated everything in a purplish, sticky nothing that did not exist and reminded her of tar, feathers, burning flesh, and dust. Her nostrils and eyes became so thick with it she couldn't see, or breathe. She convinced herself this was an illusion. Her body and AI still thought everything was fine, just a few minor temperature fluctuations, nothing more. Nothing stopped her breathing, but she couldn't. Nothing blocked her senses, but they were failing. At a subconscious level she had been commanded to stop, and she was hypnotised and obeying. Fortunately, she did not need to breathe, or to sense, in order to survive.

The demon runes skittered, dancing, popping. She knew that death was moments away, but she didn't know how it would come. She felt unutterably stupid for not believing Malachi and taking his advice. But this paled in the face of the last moments. She wasn't afraid because it was too certain for that. Instead a sharp awareness came to her, so acute that time seemed to stretch itself thin, longer and longer, and it occurred to her that if she were going to do anything it must be now, no matter how pointless or idiotic it seemed.

“Remember the dog!” she shouted, waiting for the immaterial blades to cut her off from the world forever. “Remember you were running with your dog in the forests! Ilya!”

A vast agitation made the air thrum with a deadly, rising whine. Unstable to stable, it went in a moment. Lila couldn't see anything, but she felt pressure rise. The image in her mind was the blades of a food blender whirring up to maximum speed. The sense of threat peaked, and without knowing why she screamed, “Dar! What about Dar?”

In the context of the world Dar was ancient history. Zal's ally, he had led Lila to find Zal and she had been forced to kill him in repayment of this favour. Ilya's hand had, metaphorically, been on the knife with hers. It was a raw wound to her still. Perhaps the most raw. Any reminder was quick to flay the skin off it for her. She knew that it had been the same for Ilya. It was their deepest bond; that moment of horror and shame was a blade that could cut through anything. It was her only weapon.

The whining of the spirit blades became a scream. The pitch of it rose and rose unbearably and without warning reached a febrile height and then stopped. She felt whatever it was—she had no means of accurately describing it—shatter and the pieces, sharp and tiny, go flying everywhere in a storm of hurt confusion.

In a split second of silence the room was empty once more. She felt that she was alone. As her senses returned to themselves, she realised that the silk throw covering the mirror had been ripped to shreds.

“Lila?”

The voice scared her more than the huge show had done. She leapt a foot in the air, caught herself awkwardly in a panic, and felt herself flare hot with shock and fear. It came from behind her.

She could not turn to face the mirror, so she made herself stay where she was, in a half crouch. Her whole body burned to escape but she did not move. It cost her every bit of willpower that she had. She knew the voice, sort of. It sounded like Ilya, but it was odd, too high, too uncertain, and the elvish accent of its Otopian was very strong. It was young, she realised, that was it, and it was speaking to her from the mirror.

“It's me,” she said.

There was a pause. “Where am I?” the voice said.

“Who are you?” She didn't mean to be so untrusting, but there it was.

“It's me,” he said, shy. “Ilyatath. Where am I?” Now he sounded scared.

“I don't know,” she said truthfully. “To me you're inside a mirror. Mirror of Dreams. Do you know it?”

“It's so dark,” the boyish voice said and hesitated. Then, “Yes. One of the seven mirrors. I know it. Are you a dream, then?”

“No,” she said. “I summoned you here. This is Demonia. The mirror is in Demonia.”

Another pause, as this was digested. “Where was I, then?”

“I don't know,” she said, honestly. “Some place beyond Last Water. Don't you remember?”

“Last Water,” he repeated slowly. “Oh.” This was sad, and final. “Am I dead?”

“I really don't know,” Lila said. “You must remember something.”

“Dar,” the boy said. “I am old. But not here. I am dead, but not dead. Oh. Yes. I remember now. It was so long ago. Or yesterday. And it is there still.” He sniffled, and she realised that he was crying and trying not to show it.

“Ilya, something bad is happening to Alfheim, to Otopia and the other planes.”

“They are coming through,” he said. “The walls are breached.”

“Who are they?”

He coughed a little and cleared his throat. “Betrayed. That is who they are. Thirst, that is what they are. I followed them and ran beyond Last water. I tried to see where they were going. They ran through my domain, and I was nothing to them, not king, not shepherd, they did not stop for me. I didn't know what they were, so I followed. They are spirits, like those of the beyond, but they have all that the spirits crave and do not have; will, integrity, focus, mind, power. They knew me, but they did not speak.”

“You met them?”

“We hunted each other.” He was smiling, then he stopped. “They were better than I was, and my hounds. We stood in the forest. They were old, so very old. Angry, so very angry. But there was a moment when we ran together, side by side, and they knew themselves to be elves again. I saw their faces. I talked, but they didn't answer. Their eyes…” He swallowed with effort. “Their eyes are terrible, Lila, don't look at them.”

“Did you?”

A pause. “Yes. Don't you look at them. They do not live and they do not die. They are not of that form, but their gaze is death to the living. They consume souls and they possess what cannot be eaten until it weakens and falls apart. They took me beyond Last Water and left me there when I did not satisfy them anymore.”

“Ilya,” she said gently, trying to convey as much kindness in her tone as she was able. “The dead seem to be coming back. What is happening?”

“They are the host of the Betrayed,” he said. “When people die, their spirits pass quickly through my domain. Once they have gone beyond it, they don't come back. But where I am king there are many spirits of many kinds, including those that fail to pass and those that are yet to move in the other direction and become elements. The Betrayed are massing enough impulse to break through into the material worlds and regain their forms there, otherwise they will have no effect on those planes. The spirits you see returning are riders of their storm. They copy the patterns and memories of those passing who have died in your reality, and remake themselves in their images on the other side.”

She steeled herself. “So it isn't really…it's not really them?”

“In every aspect except for the spirit, it is probably an exact copy,” Ilya said. “But there is almost no chance at all that it is the same in its numinous or aetheric form. Mind, personality—these are things not of spirit, so they will be identical.”

She took the news with numb acceptance, moving on through the glum path of the facts. “They're young,” she said. “Not like when they died.”

“The spirit remembers itself in an archetype,” he said. “Most people do not associate their true selves with their physical age. The body, the mind, and the personality are one intricate device, a vessel for the spirit, a journey, a love. They feed and are fed by it. Ultimately they part. One passes onward. One ends and is recycled.”

“In Otopia it isn't fashionable to talk about spirits like that. It's like chatting about the existence of good and evil. People think you're nuts,” Lila said, but she took his word for it.

“Humans are in love with the machine because it is perfect and seems to offer the cure for every ill. They are at an elemental stage of alchemical philosophy,” Ilya said, and she could hear the dismissive shrug in the slight nuances of his emphasis. He couldn't care less. “I could hunt these stealing spirits down and bring them back to me. But I could not do anything with the Betrayed. They are beyond my reach because they are wavewalkers. Is that why you called me?” There was a hesitancy now, a tentative appeal that she felt as clearly as if he had reached out to touch her.

“It was one reason,” she admitted. She was beyond lying to him, even to console him. Still, it was hard to tell the truth, and she didn't know why. “But Malachi said you'd been out too long and were changed. I thought maybe you were lost and that I'd like to find you. He made out that you were some kind of monster.”

“Yes,” he said. “I am. You saw it, before I got caught here.”

She was tempted to deny this, but resisted. “What was that?”

“Beyond Last Water are the things of spirit that one would least like to encounter. Hungry, relentless, cold. They will consume anything. They will attach to anything. I resisted them a while. I thought I was their master. They beset me, and I fell. I was consumed. If you hadn't tricked them here, you would be theirs now because I would have killed you.” He sucked his breath in on the last word and waited.

She wanted to turn around, but she didn't dare. “Why?”

“In the world of the spirit no memories remain. I was only the walker of the dark valleys. Even that meaning was failing. There was nothing except thirst and hunger and longing and shadow. I would have severed you from mortal things and taken your body for my own. Ironic, wouldn't it have been?”

“What happened?”

“When the mirror appeared, we were caught. Only I could stay, because you summoned me. And here I am as I was in my dreams—the dream you named.”

“Can you get out?”

“In death there are no dreams,” he said. “I don't think I want to. I have been so far, so long. I never thought to get back to this place and these ways. I may never have the chance again.”

“I need you, to track the hunters for me,” she said.

“They will kill you,” he said. “They have no business with you. Leave them.”

“I have business with them,” she said. “What happens if they manifest in Otopia, and Alfheim, and Demonia? What then?”

“Then you will know what they want,” he replied. “But you will not be able to stop them.”

“We'll see about that,” she said. “But if you want to…will you die there, in the mirror, Tath?”

“If I stay, I will be only a dream,” he said. “And without a dreamer, then yes, I will be gone. I have no form to return to unless I return to Faerie to my haunt at the Soulfall where the snow and ice remember me.”

She wanted to say he could ride with her, for old times' sake, but she didn't know how he would take it. She didn't know how she'd take it. “Come on,” she said. “One last journey, one last hunt, one more time. We can always die later. Why hurry?”

She had to grate her teeth as she said it because suddenly she was in tears and she wanted to sob. There was a pain in her chest like a flat, crushing iron. The buzz in her skin spiralled inwards. She closed the fist of her will on the pain and extinguished it. She knew that the dream he was in was his heart's desire, no nightmare, but a heaven; a boy and his dog, in the forests, running. He could stay there.

She said, “For old times' sake. They're in Alfheim, I'm sure of it. For Dar's sake.”

There was a long pause, very long, in which she was glad there was no light at all to see by. “Very well,” he said at last, his voice small. “Call me, when you must.”

Then she was alone in the labyrinth. She ran out as fast as she could, given the low roof height, the twists and turns, the yawning empty mouths of its pit traps. In the room above she stood and gulped the stinking lagoon air with gratitude.

When she arrived at the Sikarza house, Zal and Teazle were on the roof deck. A drake was parked there, ignoring them and looking over the city, its ugly head turned away. Its rider was arguing with Teazle. Drinks had been drunk and spilled by the look of it, and insults were being exchanged. Zal was a bystander, cup in hand, lounging back in a sun chair as he watched the proceedings. His air of insouciance almost blanketed his exhaustion. Food was being brought out and laid with the golden plates, so Lila guessed they were in for a long deal. She took a seat beside Zal and accepted a cup of wine from a server.

“What gives?”

“We're buying a drake for me to commit suicide on in Alfheim,” Zal said. He leaned forward to a box of smokes and picked one, bit the end off it, and lit it with one of the candelabra. The flames danced lazily. It was one of those windless days where nothing seemed to move and the air sat over the lagoon like a toad on a rock. “Teazle wants to have an expedition to find a better one, but there isn't time for that so he's trying to find out if they have special stock they're not letting him see.”

Lila looked at the drake on the deck. “What's wrong with that one?”

“It's the trader's own. They're loyal. You can't jump on and off like bicycles.”

She saw he was wearing the silver harness. “You got your present.”

“Yes,” he grinned at her. “Kinky.”

“More than you know,” she said, taking a sip of wine and finding she was thirsty and starving. She got up to reach the table herself. Within moments she was stuffing her face with sliced roast meat. She picked up a beer jug by the neck and took it back to her place with her.

“You didn't find him,” Zal said, as a question.

“I did.” She met his iron-brown gaze and lost herself for a moment. “He will come when I call. I think.”

Zal watched her with narrowed eyes. “He was as Mal said?”

“Yes. He was.” She put emphasis on the final word and saw Zal take her meaning. “We will pursue this until we find out what it is that the dark Titans are after, and then we'll decide if it's worth being in Sarasilien's pay. So far it is all hints and coyness from every side, but having seen Ilya I think I'll take my chances as they turn. The whole game is like this place. It looks civilised and regulated, if you're standing at the top of the heap.”

“That's how you see it now, as a game?”

“Players are crawling out of the woodwork,” Lila said. “If it isn't a product of a game, then it's a sports field they want to be on. What do you think?”

He discarded his wine cup and frowned. “I wonder at what people will do to pass the time. Life is here, and they manage to be bored enough and cold enough to do all this. At such moments it is hard not to hate them.” He'd fallen back into an elvish way of talking, no shortenings, no common phrases. She wondered if he'd noticed. “I think they come for him.”

“Who?”

“For Sarasilien. And whoever else is still alive that was a part of their creation. That's what I'd be doing if they made me into a creature and sent me to hell to fight devils and left me to die.” The throwback moment was gone, his everyday self returned. “Wouldn't you?”

She nodded. “I would.”

Zal grinned at her, with the wolfish abandon that was both fierce and lighthearted. “And as a failed monster at least the pressure's off.”

“It has been suggested to me I might collect an army of lame halts to make an heroic stand,” Lila said, putting aside the empty beef plate onto the floor and taking a drink from the jug. “As if by banding together with a common goal of great goodness we will be lifted by valour into victory.”

“Did you swallow an elf on your way here?”

“No,” she said. “Sometimes I like to try it out and see how it feels. Well, it has. The thought popped into my head, much in the way they usually don't. Just now.”

“You're hacked?”

“Possibly. Anyway, since it's the stupidest idea I've heard in a long time I won't be doing that.”

“No,” Zal said. “Though it has poetic and moral appeal. It could be an artistic feat.”

“Not my style,” Lila said.

Zal stroked the silky smoothness of the harness and felt her skin. When he looked at her, she saw his memories of their lovemaking in his eyes. “I wouldn't say that. Is this what I think it is?”

“Wait and see,” she said, turning her attention back to Teazle's bickering. “I think he will resort to violence soon.”

Everything waits to break through.

The words, the idea, formed in Lila's mind as clearly as a voice speaking, so much so that she looked around for the speaker before realising that it wasn't to be found in Demonia. She'd had a lot of this kind of thing with Tath, when he had lived in her heart, so she quickly got used to the idea, but now there was no physical connection to whatever or whoever had spoken. If spirits spoke, then they spoke this way. She waited.

In her mind's eye she saw the surface of reality splitting and breaking open like ice, smashing into shards, also unfolding like complex bundles of cloth, unravelling like twine and reknitting into other forms that broke through the fine, thin crust of the real and stretched it, pulled it. Everything tumbled under and boiled up again, places remade like personal memories of themselves. From these places unrecognisable creatures appeared and wrestled free of the grey goo that formed them, fishlike, ottery, and went dashing away.

It lasted an instant, and then it was gone. It was nothing like the idea of forming the halt army—something she felt was a tease rather than a genuine suggestion, a test perhaps. She glanced at Zal, but he was unperturbed, watching Teazle with an expression of tolerant wariness that surprised her. She had turned a blind eye to their rivalry, much as they did themselves because it suited them temporarily, but it had not vanished.

Since she couldn't detect or stop these two messages, nor discover their route or author, she decided not to worry about this new style of communication or speculate pointlessly on it. She drained the beer jug and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.

Teazle gesticulated and dramatised and swore his way to a deal with the hardbitten figure of the drakewarden. At last, as the sun began to go down, they slapped each other's shoulders and turned away. The dragon behind them, which had gone to sleep, lifted its ugly eyeless head and sniffed the air before getting to its feet, claws grating on the stone roof tiles. For a moment it moved its attention to Lila and she felt as if it were looking at her, then it hefted itself into the windless air and was out over the lagoon leaving her wondering if it had been her secret speaker.

Around the city the lights were coming on. A cruiser balloon floated past, thrumming with engines and music. Somewhere in the twilight street below demons screamed and squabbled. Teazle said, “I'm going to watch. I don't trust them.” His wings opened as he took his natural form and then sprang into the air. Where the drake had flown so swiftly he arrowed even faster, gliding on nonexistent air currents. She was left alone with Zal on the roof.

“When you go out to Alfheim, I'm heading back into Otopia. You can talk to me anytime. I can be there instantly.” She hesitated, not wanting to ask the next question. “Did you get your cure?”

“No,” he said. “There isn't one. Teazle thought if he leaned hard enough on some of the mages up at the Eternal Light they'd be able to fix it, but they all said that because she's dead they can't do anything.”

“So stupid,” she said. “Why did she do it?” She tapped her fingers restlessly on her thigh.

“Demon,” he said, as if that was the answer to everything. “Forget it. I'll be fine.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “Don't get yourself killed.”

“I don't know what you're so worried about,” he said. “You didn't get yourself killed. Why would I?”

“Because you gave a lot of your energy to me. Worked too.”

“No it didn't,” he said and smiled, brilliantly. “That was just one of Teazle's cheap tricks.”

She peered at him. “What do you mean?”

“Well I am knackered, but it wasn't from any aetherical donations. That was a placebo. We fooled you.”

Lila felt the beer making her heavy but not heavy enough to stop her blood rising. “But it reacted to the…things…”

“Of course it did. But that's all it did.”

She sat, mouldering on her anger a little, settling into it, trying it on for size, and finding it didn't quite fit. “You tosser,” she said finally.

“Yes, well.” He lay back in the recliner as if bathing in the murky streetlight. “True to form, and that's what counts. Now you know how the world of the spirit works.”

“Trickery?”

“Trickiness,” he corrected. “If you believe it, they will come, and if you don't, then they won't. Or if they do, then you can be rid of them, as long as you keep your wits and don't fear them.”

Lila didn't remember fear. Dread wasn't the same. Fear had some kind of hope in it, but she had expected death so completely there was no point in that emotion. “Ilya said that the three Titans were migrating from beyond Last Water into the other worlds. Seems it'd be a lot easier to say no to them before that happened.”

“I guess he tried it and they ignored him.”

“Yes. Which makes your previous statement less persuasive.”

“Poor old Ilya, too much time with the undead and not enough with Tinkerbell. Always his trouble.” Zal turned the full force of his attention on her, and she felt his strength of will like a physical force breaking against her so that for a minute she was convinced that it alone had the power to remake her. His smile cracked the spell. “Never my trouble.”

“My trouble is that I don't know that it's my business to stop them,” she said. “These Titans may be special, but I doubt their motives are anything to write home about. Maybe all they want is Sarasilien's soul and maybe they should have it.”

“Yes, could be,” Zal said. “I'm curious to find out.”

This statement pleased her and soothed her more than she understood. “So am I.”