Lila considered Bentley's tape, Xavi's face, Greer's throwing arm, and what it had felt like to stand in the bottom of the seeping labyrinth with Ilya, hearing his boy's voice promise her to leave his heaven so that he, the failed Lord of Death, could track Sarasilien's hounds of hell. They didn't sit easily together.

Dusk was coming. In the offices the lights were on, showing people the way out. The evacuation processed silently. In the garden a few blackbirds chattered and some cicadas set up their louder hum. Malachi went into his yurt and lit his lamps. Through the open flapway Lila could see Tatters, hanging on the coat rack just as he had said.

She was the spitting image of the green tailored clothing Teazle had given her, and Lila briefly put her hand to her sleeve, realizing she'd been tricked. Tatterdemalion was already on her back. “You two-faced sonofabitch,” she said quietly. Bentley glanced at her but saw the remark was an interior moment briefly breaking the surface and ignored it. Lila wondered if cursing angels was some kind of sin. She got up.

“You're going?” Bentley asked, signalling Greer with a wave of her arm.

The quoits game was long finished. Greer had been sitting near the pitch on one of Malachi's deck chairs, taking the air. He eyed Lila gravely. “So? As you can see, we're all making tracks for the hills.”

“Stay cool,” Lila said. “I have to check something out. I won't take too long. When I get back, then we'll see.” She saw Malachi looking out at them. He'd finally admitted defeat and taken off the camel coat. He had hung it, closed the buttons, and was brushing it down with a velvet pad. She went across to him, ignoring Greer's huff at her lack of detail.

Lila made a show of examining the green dress. “Were you in it with him?”

“I don't cross angels,” Malachi said.

“Never mind,” she sighed and looked up into his ugly beast's face. In the last few hours it had darkened further, becoming almost purplish in its shadows, the eyes dimming from their lava burn to a sulphurous yellow. Around him the little woolly cavern of the yurt was darker than it should have been given the prevailing light. There was a smell of pine forests and night-blooming jasmine.

“You should get out of here too,” she said.

“So sayeth little red riding hood to the wolf? Get about your own business.” His reply was one of those faery moment-turning charms that was meant to avert a misfortune by belittling its possibility. He adjusted the sleeve of the perfected coat, and in doing so his claw snagged on the cuff button and tore through the threads, ripping it loose so that it hung by a single strand. He growled at the ill omen and his own clumsiness. His massive shoulders slumped until his paws were nearly at the floor. The velvet buffing pad dropped soundlessly from his other hand.

“Yeah, so say she,” Lila clapped him on the shoulder. “This isn't your fight. Faery will be safe. It didn't feature in the story so far.”

His growl became nastier, and he turned on her although she felt his malice wasn't aimed at her.

“Faery worked so hard to contain all the horror that has been spared, and I have caused it to be freed. So long was it at bay that even you humans had come to think maybe there was no such thing as true evil, but now you will find otherwise. I set that in motion. I was the hand. It is my fight if it is anyone's, so don't you boss me about.”

She lowered her voice. “Ilya was beaten. Even he didn't say how. I got the impression he couldn't. It's not worth all of us…” She couldn't finish the impossible sentence. “It isn't worth it.”

“No. It isn't,” he said firmly and flicked the button off its last thread with a lightning movement of his paw. It struck the wall and bounced down onto the floor. “So what?”

She sighed and took her hand from him. “Take care.”

“I wait for you here,” he said and turned away as if he was very busy. Then he added, “That girl at your house. Did she tell you her story?”

“She said you sent her, you and Greer. You sent her to clean up the house. And to clear out the previous tenants. Nice call, pussycat. You could always remodel yourself and become a real estate agent.”

He made a low, swinging motion of his head that accepted his guilt and pushed it aside as necessary. He wasn't about to apologise. “I must check on her,” he said, more slowly and calmly. “You go your way. Your business is short?”

“Short one way or another,” Lila agreed, thinking of the Folly's inferno. She must find Friday. She had to know the truth. “I should be back in an hour. Two at the most. If I'm not, you can cancel my rent agreement.”

“Mmnnn,” he assented, a sound that was half a purr and half a growl. He was down on all fours then, and when he turned towards her he had become entirely catlike, a panther of gothic and prehistoric proportions. “Don't come back here. Go home when you're done. I'll see you there. Zal too. No more coming here. Understand?” He blinked once and then he flowed out of the door and vanished into the twilight so completely that she couldn't track him across the yard.

Lila took a bike out of the inventory, for old times' sake. The quartermaster saw her coming and rolled his eyes. “I'll order another one shall I?” he said as she passed him, smiling.

“Several,” she said, thinking that this might be the last time she'd ride one. She could have gone a dozen ways under her own power but only the bike felt like the right way, and she knew enough of what they were doing by now to know that however dumb or pointless it seemed, it was most important to do things the right way. It was how you moved in the game.

The ride to Solomon's Folly was the ride of her life. She'd been along it many times, and every time had resulted in one turn of fate or another. This wasn't going to be different, even if she had to burn down the dusty edge of the highway to pass the standing traffic. From the first turn out of the garage to the last slide on the loose gravel of the private road she felt that she was running on a rail. The time shift separated her from the rest of the world again, but since she expected it, she felt no particular fear. It was only as she came to the depth of the woods surrounding the house and saw that the road had grown over completely, didn't exist anymore, that she was forced to stop.

She dismounted and the green elegant folds of Tatterdemalion sank slowly round her legs, wrenched out of shape.

The trees of the scrub woodland that had surrounded Zal's rented house had grown to full size, fallen, rotted, and given way to a new and more vital forest, which was itself mature. Undergrowth as thick as hedging barred her way and the enormous trees vaulted into a dark cathedral overhead. She thought that an hour was possibly too short a time to have allowed herself as she dismounted and put the bike onto its stand. It looked forlorn and helpless in the shadow of the trees. She checked the time shift and found that it had continued to accelerate. Tendrils of grass crept up the tires.

Because what faced her was a wall of impenetrable trees, twined with brambles as thick as a man's arm and tangled as a medusa's hair, she jetted up into the sky. Immediately wind buffeted her. Though nothing had stirred the branches a second before, suddenly she was caught in a powerful cross-stream that flung her sideways out of her path. As she corrected, more and more force gathered and then changed direction, sweeping her around the perimeter of the Folly's elemental sinkhole. She swore and rode it, ignoring the tornado's gathering mass as long as she was making headway towards her goal at its eye. The dress changed, coating her armour in a skintight sheen of lace. It formed a mask over her face, lace even covering the eyeslots although it was so open it didn't blot her sight.

The vortex picked at her, stripping off the superficial layers of her atoms. She remade them, watching for a place to set down. Foreboding filled her, but she wouldn't proceed against Sarasilien until she had all the evidence in her hands. She had to make one final attempt to locate Friday and his secrets.

Below her she saw that the land itself had begun to reform in pure elements; gold and copper littered a grey-pumice ground between massive trees and running streams of clear water. The house, covered in the ghost of ancient fire, burned here and there with real flames that licked on the final remnants of its timbers. The fire was weak, however, since there wasn't much left that hadn't been returned to clay or carbon. As long as clay was still good, however, she had hope.

Try as it could to dissuade her, the air elementals were only capable of increasing or lessening their force and changing direction so she was able to punch through the diversion without trouble. Landing was difficult, right at the edge of the frying zone where already she could feel herself responding to the radiation levels and the deep magnetic forces massing around the house's unknown core.

“Suit up,” she said to the dress. She didn't know if it would respond to a command. It was as likely to fly off in a huff and make itself into a paper bag, but her rending of it seemed to have bought her a few moments of repentance. The lace unfolded rapidly into the full white and gold priest's outfit of before, complete with lead-plate shielding and a surface of woven symbols. It vibrated constantly at a frequency she felt was almost desperate in its struggle to maintain integrity against the entropic maelstrom before them. Even time was getting ripped apart in there.

“This'll just take a minute,” Lila said, knowing that was true, regardless of the outcome. She pulled up the files on the house's morbidly confused floorplans and set off inwards.

The way was blocked by more than just debris, which she had to shove and kick aside. The entire structure flickered. Like its one-time inhabitant the worldwalker Azevedo, it was yanked in and out of existence, at one moment solid and threatening, at others insubstantial or even vanished entirely so that she could walk through the ghosts of walls or run through fallen beams. Tatterdemalion anchored her to the base reality of Otopian space-time, threads unravelling in all directions so that they walked like a strange anemone through a roaring ocean of fire. Walls powdered at her touch.

She crossed the last spot where she'd seen Jones, Malachi's friend. It was in the kitchen, with Azevedo flickering around them, the house itself steeped in what felt like a sentient brooding. Its death throes had the same quality now, in spite of the firestorm's lively digestion, and Lila was almost running as she reached the head of the steps that led down to the basement.

There was nothing but a hole in the ground left. The rim flickered with reflected light, but that was lost immediately in the billows of black smoke filling the cavity. Behind the facemask of the helm Lila gave up on human vision and went to infrared, ultraviolet, and radar. Microparticles and hostile frequencies beat relentlessly at her. She felt the dress, Tatterdemalion, tighten and smelled that they were themselves on fire. Her skin temperature began to rise quickly. She jumped down the hole before she could second-guess herself.

The basements of Solomon's Folly were large—carved out in days before refrigeration when ice blocks in straw kept things cool and because the owner had been a collector of wine. In Zal's day they'd drunk the wine collection, and everything that was unwanted from the house had been shoved down here either through the kitchen door or the coal-hole trap outside. There was nothing left of any of this except great piles of feathery ash, which billowed up around Lila in the sunburst heat, thickening the air and bursting into radioactive bomblets of ultrafine dust. This clogged the robes entirely and stopped the burning, though it began to eat at them in a newer, more scientific way, as though it intended to render them fit for Zoomenon within the minute. She saw red warnings, heard alarms, knew that in spite of all the aetheric and metallic shielding, the reconfiguration of her surface, she was beginning to disintegrate.

Mostly blind she waded through the burning dust, feeling her way with her hands and Doppler. The time differential had increased too—she calculated an hour passing in Otopia as she crossed the first room in a dart of movement that would have been fast enough to blur. She discovered the cellar arches cracking under the load of the house rubble, because they were also being rendered to dust. And there in the second room lay a prone figure, humanoid in shape and about two metres tall, covered completely in radioactive ash.

Friday. Being an earth elemental, and a golem of great power, this vortex of earth-based energies had done as much to build him as to harm him. Victory gave her a final burst of conviction that he would still hold her answers.

As she approached him however the lintel behind her gave way and with a smashing billow of pumice and dust the forepart of the house crumbled into the cellar, letting out a wave of new heat as it did so. Only the absence of almost all oxygen saved her from burning like a torch. Above her head the ceiling groaned. She had no idea how much was up there, or what state it was in. Even with all her senses, the storm made everything into so much mud. Instinct told her she must get out. There was no time. The ground shook violently, and she was thrown off her feet onto her stomach into the smelting zone.

She reached out to touch the clay figure, and her hand closed on the smooth shape of his foot.

Once, years ago, Friday Head had been nothing but a small earth elemental in Zoomenon who had happened to be next to a dying elf. Then he had become a golem, occupied by the ghosts of Alfheim's dead. Now, after a hundred years inside the furnace of Solomon's Folly he was melting. Under the pressure of her hand the foot slumped into a pool, dragging the leg with it into a quickly forming puddle.

She'd imagined grabbing him and blasting her way out of there, but now it was clear that was never going to happen. Even if she could pick him up, the cooling change to the outside world would shatter him in pieces.

“Are you in there?” she screamed in Elvish to the collapsing form. “Is anybody in there?”

Since she'd never known whether or not Friday himself was a person, she didn't know to ask him separately, but she figured in the circumstances all bases had been covered. Friday had once had the means of independent motion. If he'd wanted to save himself, he could have.

“Please!” she shouted, unable to feel her face.

Then that possibility had passed forever. The body became a flat ooze. The holes of the eyes and mouth and nostrils gaped for the last time and exhaled a final burst of scalding air into the ash clouds—and something else went with it. She saw a bright shadow streak towards her. Cinders furled in its wake just as Friday's remains pooled around her hand, glowing cherry and orange.

At the same moment the precariously balanced mass of the ceiling surrendered to gravity and the entire weight of the dead house crashed down upon her head.

No, she thought. No, this was a mistake. She took a breath and the shadow zipped inside her mouth in a fleeting second. Her mouth melted and then there was nothing as the entropy storm took her.

The spirits of the long dead had inhabited Friday Head the golem for fifty years. This was nothing compared to the time they had been interred within their own dessicating bones in the deserts of Zoomenon, preserved by charm against the chance of their discovery and the possible telling of their miserable tale. The command that had preserved them against Zoomenon's special case of entropic decay had also preserved them for the duration of Friday's immolation, although the same couldn't be said of Friday himself.

An earth elemental who had grown to semi-sentience under Zal's babbling insistence, he had long since deserted his insignificant form to join the wellsink of primal forces gathered deep within the cavities that honeycombed the region beneath the house and surrounding low hills. Tiny calderas of pure forms had been accreting there since the detonation of the quantum bomb. Bomb faultlines riddled the area of Bay City and the entire western seaboard of the collated states of what had once been America, and was agreed, in general story and some histories, to be the site of that astronomically unlikely explosion. Thus that part of Otopia was like a piece of rotted wood, decomposing to some interesting elements and propositions whilst at the same time being woodwormed by concentrations of aether. It was as curiously porous and also strong as a bone.

The quantum inferno at its heart was the marrow of this bone, generating fresh chances, fresh possibilities, and scattering them into local potentials. It was a place that was as close to being a raw furnace of creation as anything that had ever existed. It was the kind of place that, if you were going to make something very, very impossible, you would go to.

Most makers capable of this sort of thing stayed well away, because the furnace itself was as likely to undo them as help them. It had no mind and didn't take kindly to the sort of linear organisation that most minds required. Only a fool or someone who felt extremely lucky would try to use the furnace to fire a new being into existence.

Or someone who had no choice because they were stuck and temporarily stunned by several tons of falling rubble and because the last moments of their only protection from annihilation had just melted into a puddle of treacly, golden goo. You could go there to die in the hope of rebirth.

Lila understood all this to be true and concurrent as she regained consciousness. She was glad, because otherwise the feeling of being inhabited by screaming, endless planescapes would have thrown her presence of mind and prevented her from blasting out of the inferno in the form of a ballistic missile, engines on full throttle, moving from subground to high atmosphere in something slightly under ten seconds.

As she ascended, soaring, cooling, the tale of the lost elves and the Three Betrayed unfolded in her head. The Three Betrayed were three of several thousand who were put through the soul forge that the mages had created in the heart of Delatra. All were volunteers.

Some emerged as the forerunners of the shadowkin, but others came back deformed beyond recognition as the Saaqaa—more beast than elf—and in noncorporeal forms, which could only be detected or communicated with in andalune form. The vast majority were of these three sorts. For the purpose of defeating the horror of the intangible Sleeper, they were useless. The void energies and spirits that had been forced by pressure into them had remoulded them, but it did not make the spirit warriors that the mages needed. Not that they didn't try it. Those that were able to make the transit to the spirit plane didn't return. The embodied ones, who travelled astrally, died in their beds.

They added other beings into the mix, first separating out their parts with elemental fragmentation, then recombining them. This killed most subjects outright. It would have been abandoned altogether if they had not raided Demonia and captured the eggform of an archdemon of the wilds. Within the shell a physical aspect had not yet been determined, and this embryonic creature was the first to emerge and live as a successful hybrid.

It destroyed a large part of Delatra in a bloody rampage before it was subdued and imprisoned in a psychic cell. It spoke by telepathy in an unstoppable flood of hate that drove almost everyone who survived away from the city, glad to have their sanity merely shredded instead of consumed. It whispered, it cajoled, it played with them. Its name was Hellblade.

Eventually they found a way of putting it to sleep. And it lay there, flickering like a malefic fire between worlds as they worked feverishly on the geas that would bind it to the single task of slaying the Sleeper. Needless to say work of this scale consumed most of Alfheim's wealth and all of its greater minds. It was a time of plunder and raiding, of open war with the Fey in the name of acquiring artefacts of power with which to gain mastery over the new creatures. Since that first trial, Demon crossbreeds were abandoned.

Void elements created the next phantom Titan, patterning themselves on the flayed frame of a girl whose own spirit was pulled from the brink and left as bait in the Void ocean for all the forces to consume. This one named itself Nemesis and had no physical form at all. By the time it came into being, the geas was in place and it was bound, unable to act until the command to seek the sleeper was issued.

It was rumoured that Nemesis was held prisoner in Delatra, but this was just conjecture—how could a place hold a noncorporeal being? Nemesis didn't speak or rage. Nemesis was silent, though those who came close to the point of contact with her on Alfheim's plane reported experiencing an unbearable terror that forced them away.

A shrine of forgiveness was constructed upon the site of its prison, attended fleetingly by priests. Flowers and little texts, food and milk were left abundantly in peace—at least in peace as long as peace could be felt by someone delivering a plea for mercy whilst experiencing an inchoate terror. Every offering withered to ash.

The necessary third party was created with spirits that were lured from the dark night of the valleys beyond Last Water. It was thought that this would be a leader of the three. So it was. Only the best of the remaining candidates for adaptation was chosen to host their combined forces. He emerged, an elf worldwalker with only a few visible signs of his change and the ability to dematerialise. He was sane, apparently, and accepting of the task at hand, though he had sacrificed all memory of his previous life. Like the others he gave himself a name. If this gave cause for concern, it was too late for anyone to care. So Wrath was born.

They woke Hellblade, summoned Nemesis, and gave them to his command. He took them and vanished from Alfheim, never to return.

A few days later most of the participating mages, the pinnacle of elvish civilisation, died slowly, withering like spring flowers in an unexpected winter snap. But no monster from the unknown planes descended though they waited, sure it had all been for nothing. Night became day, days became years, and in the absence of any further incidents Delatra was abandoned, records of what had happened searched out and destroyed for shame, and the activity moved elsewhere, culminating in the long, grinding cold war of loathing between the shadowkin survivors and the remaining light elves.

This was the story, neatened, tidied, ordered, made sensible by the ghosts of that long-ago experiment, some of whom died at the beginning and some after the end. It was the last and only memorial, the last and only weapon, the last and only blessing that they had. With its delivery they were free.

The tornado of primal destruction took them and unmade them in the moment of their glad ending, and then Lila was alone.

Lila was left gasping, standing on a superheated airstack six miles above Bay City, abruptly enraged and bereft and frightened to such a degree that she froze there in the bitter cold, thin air, and for a few minutes dared not move.

Escape was so narrow for her. There had been none for her brief guests. She flipped through the story again and again, but each time it remained relentlessly stripped of most of its personality, all particulars that could have made it anyone's.

All that for what? There were so many dead, and each of them like her and they had not escaped. There was no happy ending and she could not revise one from it.

She hated this so fiercely and so fully that she felt her heart would explode. She stood in the sky, a useless metal angel filled with useless tricks. Wrath, Nemesis, Hellblade. She could have chosen those names for herself, feeling as she did, in the hope that so much pain could be focused through the lensing of the names, and might galvanise an angry energy that was enough to break any resistance and make a difference to the way things were. But she knew already that this would not be so. The monster was immortal and would go unslain forever, and still it must be faced.

She wished she hadn't let Zal go. She felt she wouldn't see him again, or if she did it would be in another time and place, not her. She was so sorry for herself that she couldn't stand it and, with a scream of rage, tore downwards through the cloud and darkening twilight.

In all of that bloody story nobody had mentioned a name. She still could not fit Sarasilien for the crime.

Around her heart a dark violet flame twisted and whispered, but she was so used to the Signal and so full of cares that she didn't notice.

Teazle teleported in chunks towards his destination on the far side of the world. He chose places carefully to observe the progressive effects of the rise of this strange Titan. At each site he stayed only long enough to observe the locals or chat a few minutes about conditions before he took off again. In this way he was able to build up a picture of the influence of his enemy and also he was able to pass unrecognised and thus unmolested by either duel challenges or calls for him to champion the civilised demon world—a call he felt he'd already taken and would have been annoyed somehow to be further spurred towards. For once notoriety had lost its appeal. He must approach in stealth since it was likely that his best or only chance of success lay in a surprise assault.

As he closed slowly on his target, however, his speed lessened and he found himself pausing at uninhabited sites. He moved forward and came to a town called Kvetchin, one of those jokey names at someone else's expense that were popular in this region.

Few demons here had any real talent or power since anyone with these abilities gravitated instinctively towards the capital cities, but it was apparent at once that someone with great artistic vision was resident. There were piles of stones everywhere, and they were stacked in great abstract sweeping shapes like little paisley hills, decorated by colour in infinitely subtle shades. The effect was beautiful and it propagated all over, in fields and on roads, cutting around and through buildings and the other structures of arable life. It was decoration for its own sake on a massive scale. Teazle expected the perpetrator to be somewhere on the madness borderline, as obsessive as it was possible to be without falling prey to devil possession—though that was possible. Out here in the wilderness all kinds of depravity could occur. He landed from his flight position—it never paid to materialise suddenly in the middle of things unless for the purpose of killing—and stood at the outskirts of the village where the blackened pits of the firewatchers were ashy and cold.

It didn't take much to see that most people had moved on in the last few days, driven by news coming from the East of the horrors wiping the worldface. He didn't expect that this creator would have abandoned their life work, however, and he was proved right. After a short search of empty pitbeds and locked halls he found the centre of town—a circle marked by torch posts and the wide expanse of the duelling arena.

Sitting in the middle of this space was an old demon, humanoid, tall and covered in tough skin and thick bony spurs, with a beast's hairy mane, massive shoulders, drooping wings, and a lizardlike head fitted with less teeth than seemed probable. It was dark purple, and its flare was dulled, a slumberous crimson streaked with the whitish-grey flecks of depression. It sighed as it saw Teazle, apparently without surprise.

“You are headed East,” it said, not so much a question as a statement that wanted confirmation.

“Yes.” Teazle was in his natural form, the least angelic or human of his potentials, the most in tune with his fellow demons. On all four clawed feet he paced across the old stones and sat down at an oblique angle to the old one. At this distance he could see its massive fingers with their claws worn almost to stubs playing with a few small rocks. As he watched, it absently crushed one and sifted through the pebbly results, sorting by colour gradations so fine they were nearly imperceptible.

“That's what the stones said,” the old one rumbled. Its tail lay along the ground like an abandoned rope. “I waited for you.”

“Further west there are still caravans with food and spirit,” Teazle suggested, for form's sake. “You could still reach them.”

The old demon turned its yellow eyes on him coldly. “I am no bumpkin for you to play the fool with. I have waited for you to come and kill me. I deserve that much. Death at the hand of the Sikarzan, the champion of the mindful ones. My calling meant I could not go anywhere of any use or note. My life has been wasted. My death won't be. You will take my remains and crush them. Anoint yourself with the dust. It will double your resistance to certain spirit energies. You may live long enough to do something useful with all that wasted skill of your own.” It sighed. “Are you waiting for something in particular?”

Teazle was taken aback. He thought of Zal and realised he had grown more like the elf, less focused and less attuned to the fine moments of demon feeling in which everything turned and fate fell on one side or another. “Can you tell me anything of the risen Titan?”

The demon took a rock up, turned it, crushed it, and looked at the powdery results. “It is a jumper, moving from body to body, searching for the strongest form. Sometimes it can hold several, or many. When it finds you, Sikarzan, then it will settle there, and you might become the annihilator of worlds. One will shall prevail: its, or your own.”

“But there must be a way—”

“Must there?” the demon interrupted him, brushing the dust away with a few flicks of its hand and scattering all its pebbles. It stared at him with its flat gaze, and he saw the endless years of patient work in them—a lifetime focused on a single, simple task. It was a focus he didn't have and probably never would, and he believed that it was able to perceive things beyond his ability to detect, including within himself. “Because you want it there must be a way? This is your preparation for the fight of a lifetime? A childish wish?”

“My life is my preparation.” Teazle felt stung.

“As was mine.”

“For what?”

“For death. Must you wait much longer? I am hungry and tired.”

Teazle blinked, confused. He had never considered his life preparation for anything but other people's deaths. “I guess I'm waiting for you to tell me something important, like the secret to defeating this thing and how not to destroy…what you said.”

The demon stared incredulously at him. “And how would I know that?”

“Because you are a master,” Teazle said. “And a master may know what any master would know.”

“Recognition,” the demon snorted and then coughed and scratched its snout with both hands. “To hell with your recognition. Do me the honour of the final silence and let's move on. I told you the facts. If you want to wish yourself to a fresh hell that's your business, but dreaming is not your mastery. Execution is. That is why I have stayed to ask the honour of you one final time. You are insulting me now.”

“What of the effigy?” Teazle wanted to know about the stone remains the demon would leave. “Will you strike a pose?”

“Scatter the pieces as you will.” It nodded. “That would be an unexpected kindness.”

Teazle withdrew the yellow sword from the dead demon's spine a moment later just before it petrified completely. “My pleasure,” he said sadly to the empty square.

The second death took only a little longer. The demon's power showed in the final stages of its stoneform—it hardly shrank at all. Teazle could find nothing that would break it, or really even scratch it, so eventually he re-formed himself in his largest potential shape, and heaved the statue skywards with aether-assisted beats of his massive wings. He went high, to be sure, and then let go.

The form plummeted towards the tiny town, struck true in the centre of the duelling ring, and smashed on impact, leaving a small crater. Bits flew everywhere. Teazle repeated the process with the larger chunks until nothing bigger than a fist was left. He took up a handful of the brightly coloured dust and tiny stones that rayed out from the centre of the ring in bursts of brilliance where chance had laid them, and rubbed it on his chest beneath his tunic. The rest he left where it lay. From high above it looked like strange flowers.

He felt better now that he had no hope of success anymore and that was a blessing. He said a prayer for the old demon and the gift of his death as he turned to the east and blinked out.

In the canopy of the night forest, ten metres above the ground, among shrouds of dense foliage, Zal lay on a mat of broken branches and looked up through the last high leaves at the sky. He was safe and he needed a rest.

The drake had flown off somewhere more convenient for its size and preferences to fool around with its new wired horns and figure out how to use the music library and the Otopia archive. Zal had figured that out already, and also that what he was wearing might look like a harness of elven filigreed leather complete with silver buckles and glowing runic marks, but it was actually Lila Black wrapped around him like a set of softly flexible iron arms, a Lila Black who was a complete technical masterpiece.

Zal liked contradictions of form and nature. He guessed she could be almost anything, but for now he was content for her to be his battle harness, maiden-holder of his weapons and general grip. They were being stalked and he wanted things to stay simple. Through the whispering andalune of the forest, still alive and well, he could feel the movement of blind, stupid things searching for his trail of tantalising order and coherence amidst their own chaos.

What had once been elves and were now something else tracked him with difficulty. They kept all the skills, all the sharpness they had had before, making them formidable opponents, but they were hindered by their inability to comprehend anything of the aetheric universe. He thought, judging by their behaviour, that they couldn't feel it except as a vague kind of hint here and there; they were blind. They were also stripped of everything that had bound them to an identity.

He suspected that their memories were gone. They reminded him of nothing more than the animated dead, but they weren't dead and never had been. They were relics, empty shells…he didn't know what the hell they were, but they would be glad to catch him and he'd seen what they did to those they caught all over the land in graphic, disgusting detail. They hadn't been quite reduced to beasts, unfortunately. They were organised, tribal, and if they didn't speak, they made up for it with signs. In their primal competitiveness they reminded him of demons, and in their bloody killings, their furious couplings, their frenzies of destructive rage in which their impulses could turn on a whim and rip one of their own to bloody pieces they were perfect examples of demonic ferocity—an impulse unrestrained by any hint of conscience.

The worst part was that they looked exactly the same as before, their faces serene and intelligent-seeming under their masks of green and brown mud and the splatters of drying gore. If he hadn't known better, he would have called it a demon vengeance on his kind.

He wasn't sure he did know better. He was sure that he wanted to find someone, anyone, to whom this had not happened, but he was a day out of Delatra and he hadn't found anything except more of the same. Even the Saaqaa had run feral and alone. He didn't believe that he was, but he felt like the only living elf on the entire surface of the world.

“There is no contaminant and no contagion present,” Lila's voice whispered to him.

He stroked the belt under his fingers as a reply. Taking samples and having her analyse them had been something to do, in which he'd had hope. Now that there was no biological or poisonous culprit to search out and counter, he felt a chill run over him that he was unable to stop. It wasn't like he'd expected one. He hadn't. After the briefings he guessed this wasn't going to be something simple like a disease. Now he was left with sorcery and necromancy, neither of which he knew a great deal about.

“No spectral or aetheric residues present,” Lila said.

“Sweet words of love,” Zal murmured, flat of affect and exhausted. He didn't even know what he meant by it. “Map?”

“You didn't search enough to make a pattern confirmation of cases,” she said.

He rolled his eyes and watched the stars spin overhead. Maybe he'd get really lucky and fall flat on his face right on top of the cause one instant before it fried him, he thought. Then at least Lila would know what happened although there wouldn't be much of him left to bother about it. He'd never had much confidence in the demon-immunity theory. Then again, he didn't believe the entire world could have fallen as fast and completely as it seemed. He knew next to nothing about this region—searching it only made him more anxious about his home turf. If he were there, where he knew all the hiding places, all the safe spots and everybody—if he were there maybe he'd stand a better chance than running around here.

The closed wound in his neck pulsed. He felt a wave of longing wash across him, as if he swam under it. It searched for something to latch on to, and for a perverse reason he couldn't understand he found himself thinking of Xavi. He'd been short with her. She'd been in the right too. Someone had to try and save something of what had been. She was vulnerable, and alone. He felt a need to go and protect her, to shelter her, that was nearly overpowering. Even reminding himself that she hardly needed protection did nothing to defuse the tension that now pulled his guts taut, all their bowstring energy focused on that single point: Delatra.

“Your heart rate's gone up,” Lila's harness said.

“It's that charm,” Zal said. “No trouble.” But the images of Xavi didn't go away.

He thought of the elves in the ruins burning books and made himself remember the moment when a group of teenagers, playing apparently innocently by jumping through windows in remaining buildings, had suddenly turned on one of the girls and smashed a rock into her head over and over as she screamed. He hadn't even seen what had made them turn. Some signal, a feeling so like the one they'd lost maybe, a signal of togetherness or of hate or of simple ferocity; he had no idea.

He'd seen a lot of things like that in his life; things that must not be allowed inside. A lifetime's andalune sensitivity made sure most elves he'd known had been masters of boundaries, allowing only what they wished to affect them and keeping everything else safely out of reach of any tender feeling so they could not be hurt, or involved. And still the memory of the girl screaming, her erstwhile friends tearing the clothes off before she was dead, finding interest in her body as well as her head, finally silent, shed an inordinate scarlet into the filth of the doorway.

He moved himself far away from this recollection and watched from a cold distance, a black and white distance, like a master god. He made it shrink and cool until he felt nothing. He tried to push Xavi into this distance, but the succubus charm resisted him, locking his aether body to her vibration. Her colours gleamed at him and he felt her heart yearning, lonely, sad—she was an exile, a monster, like him. She was a living elf. Like him. They were the only ones left. He must go to her.

“Zal?”

“It's okay,” he reassured the harness, stroking, but he wasn't sure. The urge to go and be sure nothing happened to petite, delicate, broken Xavi was almost intolerable. He remembered her andalune body with longing. He would have given a lot to feel the casual contact of his kind, the reassuring awareness of another who could understand what it was to be a part of the whole; apart, together. But here was no other and maybe, the thought came persistently—maybe there would be no other. He couldn't allow that notion to rise yet. It was too soon for that.

He gripped the harness and felt himself beginning to sweat. He pressed on, covering mile after mile until he was so tired that the only desire he felt was for rest.