Malachi played cards with the girl in Lila's house. After a few hands he had a reasonably good idea of who they were dealing with here, but he wanted to be sure so, when it seemed polite enough, he excused himself with a plausible tale about Greer and the office and some downtown work he must do before nightfall when the vampires would make it too difficult.
The girl, who answered only to the name Lila had given her, Sassy, folded the last of her cards delicately and collected up the rest of the deck. Under her fingers their pictures changed although he didn't look too closely at this.
“Look, pussycat,” she said, indicating the pile of empty takeaway cartons they had made, “that wasn't bad. What do I owe you?”
“It's paid for,” he said, backing away and minding the furniture. He had grown in size although also in darkness, and gained, if that was the term, a certain insubstantiality that reminded him of Zal.
She nodded, matter of fact, and wiped her mouth and nose on the back of her sleeve. “I don't suppose you've got any of those peaches around, you know the ones?”
She meant Madrigal's peaches, the fruits of faery's Summerlong. “I could find one maybe,” he said, which was as close to a promise as he was going to get between faeries.
Sassy grinned. “Can you check on my old folks in Cedars?”
“I can,” he said, a policeman doing his duty. He knew she meant the people she'd stayed with before some change beyond his understanding had set her free. Human people. That she cared enough to remember them made him kind.
“Then tell them I'm okay. I think they'll understand.”
He considered the address she'd scrawled on a ripped-off piece of cardboard carton. “This the name: Saija?”
“She was my pretend sister for a bit, when things weren't too bad. Saved me a lot of bother. Friend. That's all.” Sassy looked a bit sad, although she defiantly faced it out and he thought he detected a quiver in her lip and what might be a tear forming. “Tell me they're okay, won't you?”
“Sure.” He hesitated, considering the address and the precinct it was in; a magic shop under the thrall of a very pissed-off gangster community. Fortunately he didn't need a car because she'd just fleeced him of his last paypacket. He checked but Lila hadn't called. He knew it was late, very very late. He called Bentley, and she said there was no message. They were evacuating. Sarasilien refused to leave. Greer of course wouldn't go before everything sank. Nothing else to report.
Sassy watched him and then got up to see him out.
He felt quite wrong leaving her alone in the house and said so.
She smiled. “I'll be fine. All quiet. And if I hear anything, I'll run. No worries.”
“Where will you run?” he asked as they reached the door, testing the locks with great distaste.
“Away of course,” she said, her lips thinning and whitening. “Get lost.”
He sighed and agreed, sure that everything was as bolted and shut as it could be though he was no electronics expert. He guessed Lila would have fixed everything well enough.
Sassy was looking at him with great interest. He shook his head, but the other thing he'd lost that night had been several of his names. There was no point in pretending he wasn't what he was. With a sigh of misgiving he put his heavy paw to the crack between door and frame and flowed through it, softly as air.
“Goodnight, Nightshade,” she said, giggling.
“Goodnight,” he said and then he felt very foolish and a little bit embarrassed on the other side of the door. It was easy and a relief to melt away into the pitch blackness of the woods and flow down into the heart of the city where there were no girls whose fingers could change the shapes of fate.
As he emerged from the shaded trees at the corner of ninth and Cedar, he found it hard to get his form. Magic struggled here in Otopia, but that wasn't the problem. The trouble was that he was losing the ability. Before he'd been a beast of any kind, he'd been the shadows of the darkest night, an ephemeral creature who might come anywhere that light was not and the darker the better. He was a thing of corners and alleys, caves and everywhere there was night. He gathered under beds and in closets, among forgotten and hidden things. He was curiosity, and a body was no use to him for his work was subtle, the essence of shady business. He struggled to remember how to make himself solid and encumbered and slow and particular. The beast was the best he could do, because that was the form that came after Nightshade—Nightbane.
He looked down at his hands and saw the massive claws, the brute shapes that were more wolf than cat, but with a special hideousness of their own because they so resembled human hands and were not one thing or another. His feet were similar, his heels off the ground now as he fought to stand straight and ended half bent in a permanent forward lunge. The legs of the beast were cloven footed, soft like a camel's but also toed and clawed. He knew that he was in every respect terrifying, but at least his thick pelt and mane made clothing unnecessary. The worst part was that in the yellow gleam of his eyes he could see his little Leaf card—a delicate and pretty link to Otopian technology—lying in the palm of his massive paw, but he couldn't use it anymore. He didn't even have anywhere to carry it that wasn't in his hand. He debated smashing it but that seemed wrong, so he held it instead and turned towards the long parade of shops that led up to the apartment blocks of Cedars itself. He licked his lips and flexed them. He wasn't sure that he would be able even to speak and felt fresh humiliation pending.
In the last light of the afternoon he took one more look towards the south bay, hoping to see any trace or hear any sound of Lila. When there was nothing, he turned towards the storefronts and looked for the hanging sign of the pentagram and the violet roses that Sassy had described.
As they noticed him coming people fled, screaming. At the corner of Tenth and Cedars there was honking and shouting as car automatics narrowly avoided accidents caused by their drivers. Malachi prowled onwards, head down in an imaginary trench coat and fedora, pretending it wasn't happening. His little card kept signalling who he was, but he wasn't convinced it would be believed. Nevertheless responses were slow today, thanks to the surge of outworlder activity and the evacuations, so he didn't meet an armed response and made the shop door with everything except any sense of dignity intact.
He opened it on the third try and shouldered his way through, ducking and squeezing and turning around to be sure his tail didn't get trapped. It was a small, dark, cluttered place, full of shelves containing large numbers of fragile things. He barely dared breathe although he still sounded like a small steam train or a very, very large bull. Over this the tinkle of the door chime was barely audible. Fortunately there were no other customers.
Behind the counter a young man of about seventeen, coca brown with dreadlocks to his waist, was standing slack-jawed, eyes round. His mouth was working, but no sound was coming out.
Malachi held out his paw with the Leaf card in it so that the shop's master AI could verify him. The lad glanced at the counter screen to see this, but it didn't make any difference to his speaking ability. After a few moments he staggered backwards through a beaded curtain and into the back rooms leaving Malachi watching the swinging strips in silence, surrounded by scented candles, books, bells, and bones, plus posters advertising psychic readings, all genuine, good rates, forecasting available. Sassy's picture stared down at him from some of these, smiling. One of them winked at him now.
Malachi felt something touch his arm. He looked down and saw it was drool. He realised with absolute digust that he was slavering. His stomach growled suddenly as though it was reminded of meals past. He pretended to himself that he was not in any way thinking about eating the shop staff. Voices, rushed, high pitched, hysterical and slower, measured, calmer vied for positions in the unseen rooms beyond the curtain. Malachi swallowed firmly.
At last a human woman came out, cautiously but without obvious signs of mental disturbance. She was in one of those indiscriminate age zones that could be anything between twenty-five and forty given the dim lighting. She flicked a long hank of brown hair over her shoulder and fixed him with steady eye contact. He saw that she wore a name badge on the lapel of her beautifully tailored chinoiserie jacket: Saija.
“How can I help you?” she said.
He fixated on the precision handstitching of her collar for focus and presented the Leaf card. It was displaying an image of Sassy, just taken at Lila's house. Sassy had her thumbs up. Malachi let the leaf fall out of his paw onto the counter, and the woman picked it up carefully as the image came to life.
They both heard Sassy's short, definite message about her safety and apologies for absconding. The woman watched it twice and then expertly cued the card to Malachi's personal details. She studied these for a few moments and then looked back up at him.
“I think I have something you'll need,” she said. She sniffed and he saw her reach into her pocket for a tissue as she went back through the curtain. When she returned, she had a small thermoplastic card case and a lariat with her. She put his card into the case and attached it to the clip of the looped cord and then handed it back to him.
Awkwardly he settled it around his head and neck, giving up when the thickness of his mane made it impossible to tug further. “Thank you.”
The woman looked at him with misgiving. “Will she come back?”
Nightbane, who was Malachi in another, future life he could only just remember, considered the question as he tried to cling onto what remained of his civilised being by recollecting the feel of a cotton sock on his elegant foot, the slide of a perfectly polished shoe over the top of it, and the nimble thoughtlessness of tying laces. “I hope so,” he said. The words were garbled by his jaws and inept tongue.
Saija looked at him sadly, her face setting into a stalwart mask over its mixture of relief and anxiety. “She always was a pain in the ass, you know. Never could tell her anything. Best reader we ever had though.”
His long mouth cracked into a smile and split his self-pity in two. He grinned. “I can imagine.”
“I miss her. You can tell her that.” This was said with a defiant lift of the chin.
“You can tell her yourself when you see her,” he growled, unintentionally sounding much more aggressive than he imagined he would. He huffed an apology, muttered about the situation, the times, and left, backing out in a storm of his own blarney before he made a mistake and said too much in his effort not to become the go-between.
The shop bell rang merrily at his back as he closed the street door and blinked in the sudden glut of light. The rosy sky signalled the end of the day. He listened to the card, but it made no noises. Lila was still not back. He was considering where the nearest alley was in which he could find some dark corner to dematerialise when a whoosh and a streak of heat went past him. Then he heard the close-knit roar of high-powered jet boots and the clump of feet landing on the pavement, just before his eyes made their final adjustments and beheld Lila herself standing in front of him, a black silhouette in a stance of grim determination edged in blown rags and the short, heavy streaks of her hair on the wind. A heavy reek of brimstone and carbon wafted towards him, and he felt tiny flakes of ash patter onto the wet tip of his nose and across his whiskers.
“Mal,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. For a second he thought he saw right through her, but then she moved forward and he moved forward and they were both in the light. He almost recoiled in shock from the smell and the powerful aura that was coming off her in waves. Her black leather and tough-girl look were still there, but swathed in a mummy's worth of grave shroud wrappings of a dark grey fabric whose edges were burned and seared, some parts still smoking and winking where the ends were red embers. Elvish script swirled in the fabric, and the writing, unreadable to his eye, looked like the rise and ebb of silvery scum on a black tide.
Lila's face, pretty and human and unhurt, was frowning at him. The scarlet slash of the burn mark was brilliant red, and her eyes, normally silver, had become blue and grey with a deep ring of black around the iris that made him want to cross himself in front of her though he wasn't anything to do with Catholic and didn't believe in that sort of god. The aura, which he could more feel than see, was a miasmic thing, an aetherial spirit of a kind he'd never experienced before. It fairly boiled off her in waves that threatened to immolate him. He saw Lila, he knew her, but she was a dark revenant of a kind he didn't know at all, and in spite of himself he cowered back from her intense, angry stare.
“What happened to you?”
“I went to get Friday,” she said, rasping like an old woman. He realised her throat was burned. “I can't prove it was him, Malachi. What shall I do? What's the matter?” She looked down at her arms as if only just noticing them. “It's just a bit of burning. Nothing to worry about.”
He didn't know how to tell her that it wasn't. Apart from anything else, he didn't know the words. “How do you feel?” he asked, hopelessly. It came out as ‘r‘ow djoo 'ee-ul,” a beast-snarl of defensiveness.
Her distracted eyes flicked around, dismissing the street and all it held as of no interest. “Fine. I have to get to the office, face him down. Should have done it ages ago.” Her restless gaze lighted on him. “What is it? Did you see Sassy?”
“Yes,” he said. He was concentrating on putting what he was feeling into a frame he understood. The black radiation was like an onslaught. It smelled of pure terror. He was amazed that she seemed to be completely unaware of it. Gouts of it leaked from gaps in the bandages that wrapped her limbs and body and all the way up her neck to her skull. It came out of her mouth and nostrils. He wanted to touch her to find out more, but he daren't touch that. Some instinct told him he wouldn't survive it. It was anathema for his kind. Maybe for every kind. Looks like we won't be needing Tath anymore, he thought to himself, and the notion made him give a half bark of humourless laughter.
“Mal.” Her preoccupation was so focused it was letting her bypass all his signals that tried to warn her of danger. She didn't notice his discomfort or register it as more than his previous discomfort with his changed state. “Will you come with me?” In that question her voice sounded like the girl he'd first met years ago in her hospital bed, small, pale, deathly ill, and frightened of almost everything. In spite of himself and his own will to live, in spite of it, he knew that he would say yes, but suddenly he felt tears rising in his bear's eyes and to cover it he gruffly demanded, “Did you find nothing?”
“There are three of them pushing through from Not,” she said. “Wrath, Hellblade, and Nemesis. They are coming.”
Then he knew what was wrong and he had all the words for it but no heart to say it. Her use of the old faery word for the planes of the undead that lay beyond Last Water proved it. Not. A simple term for a simple thing. A place of things that did not live, did not have form, that weren't, in any sense, alive except that they existed and had intent. He'd never really understood how this didn't qualify as alive, but he did understand that they were inimical to what he usually understood as life. They were an antiform of a sort. The theosophy of it had always eluded him, even when he did have a much more scientific kind of brain. Now it wasn't important. The way to deal with them was not scientific. He'd believed Tath could hold them there, but even the elf had fallen to their bleak souls. He couldn't begin to imagine the force of their annihilative despair and what Tath must have gone through, and he didn't want to, though he smelled and saw it on Lila now, hidden in plain sight. Not.
“They'll be here soon,” Lila said urgently as Malachi dithered, silently wrestling with what he should do now.
“Ah, that's good, that's good to know,” he said, as if it was when it was anything but. Names to faces, he thought in a faery rede—a charm to pull hidden knowledge into the open—bones in their places; yes, I see. He would do what he could do, which wasn't much. He could play for time. “Yes, of course I'll come. Meet you there.”
She nodded quickly and he heard the jets igniting. He felt the rumble of them and the force of the airblast in his fur as she took off, arrowing quickly away into the twilight; a slight figure lost soon against the clouds.
“Nemesis,” he said to himself, picking the name that fit, the bone that he'd seen in its place. Nemesis it was that rode Lila now. “Yes, I am coming.”
It had never in a million years occurred to him that Lila was not the opponent to a process, but the culmination of it. Even as this revelation had built to its climactic failure in the story of the Titans, he'd thought she was a part of the resistance. But it looked as though heads had turned tails and maybe she was the Titan in its intended form. Without knowing the players, he could not say which of these two, if either, were true.
Now Malachi wondered if Lila had just become the vessel of a being in the last moves of its own game—and whether that game was to fulfill the ancient geas or not. He racked his brains to remember who had told him the story. Was it a faery or an elf or a demon? Where had his information come from, and through how many mouths? How trickworthy was it, exactly? How credible was it?
He was still searching for this vital detail as he dropped to all fours, ran around the nearest alley corner into the yards where the bins were kept, and slid into the form of absolute shadow. There he was able to connect from one darkness to the next and leap with the instantaneous connectivity of darkness to his desired location just beneath the locked and spellbound door of Sarasilien's old/new offices in the heart of the abandoned Agency building. At least in this form there was no horrible trafficking with the Void in order to change form. He spread himself thinly in the millimetre-thin rectangle and considered.
He reckoned he had two minutes on Lila, but this remembering business was a struggle. Without flesh and bone memory swiftly unpicked itself. And then in the rooms beyond the door he heard the cyborg, Sandra Lane, uncharacteristically exultant.
“At last! I have it…”
And then the elf saying, “No need to give me all fifty years of it. Just the highlights.”
Malachi figured that this meant Lane had cracked some or all of the Agency's security controls and was scanning archives.
There was a brief pause and then Lane said, “She was here. They held her in the aether cell. Xaviendra is the registry name. She left recently. To Alfheim.”
“Alfheim?” spoken with incredulity. “But why?”
“She had no reason to think you were here.”
“She would have known the moment she was out of the containment.”
“Then it is a plan that does not immediately involve you.”
“Rooks,” the elf said wearily. There was a clinking sound of glass on glass, the neck of a carafe and the higher tone of a cup, then a gulp of something being drunk.
“Sorry?” The android had gone back to her flat affect.
“Come home to roost. It is a metaphor for curses.”
“The phrase commonly uses chickens as its…”
“Not in Alfheim.”
So, thought Malachi, he does know. They're coming for him. Then there won't be long to wait now.
Zal didn't sleep that night. He was used to the semi-lightness of Otopia, and before that the strange halflight that persisted eternally at the edge of Under where the first weird sister's house stood. Now it was so dark the sky looked like it was a black paper pricked with thousands of varying-sized holes through which a brilliant white light was shining. He could see his hand in front of his face only as a silhouette. Leaves splotched his vision with blank spaces. He drew strength from the dark as he'd drawn it from Tath's fire on his return from Under and later at the diner. It reminded him of his father, who had become twice as strong at night and ten times as fast.
To the true shadowkin Zal was a nocturnally challenged idiot. He wasn't sure that was still true. He hoped it wasn't, because he could hear a lot of activity near the ground and it wasn't all down to the night animals. A mindless shadowkin that was nothing but predatory wasn't something he wanted to tangle with. The continuing absence of their signatures from the greater world andalune also bothered him. Even hunting creatures of the lowest kind had a clear presence in it. He could pinpoint elf activity because it had none, the worldly sounds not matched by patterns in the spiritform. Just as the leaves blotted the sky, they were blanks in the tapestry of the world. He should be grateful it made them so easy to avoid and himself so hard to detect, but he wasn't grateful at all. He shared some of his thoughts with Lila, and in response the harness spread and changed shape, flowing across the light shirt he wore and over his back, arms, and legs. At his wrists and neck she made contact with his skin. He felt discomfort on the point where he'd been stung, and then a flash of lemon scent made his nose twitch and he sneezed.
Fortunately nothing heard him. The clone was silent—he found it hard to think of it as Lila just because the shape was so wrong even though the sense of being held, even caressed, was so pleasing. She was also listening.
For a long time he lay on his mat of branches and didn't move. Then, as certain kinds of noises grew fewer and more distant, he got up to get down (smiling involuntarily at the notion of himself as some kind of night soul demon), and after a moment or two of consideration of the wind and directions, he set off through the forest alone. Wrapped around his torso and limbs in blackened, silent platemail, the grown-out Lila clone rode him as a second skin.
They were a long way from Delatra now. The cliffs were lost in the mountain range whose jagged teeth bit the sky at the horizon. Settlements in the boreal zone were more common but much smaller, threaded together by a variety of tiny paths. In such places hunters or gatherers might head out for weeks at a time on their rounds. The high tops were littered with the remains of their temporary bothies.
Zal hoped that somewhere among them he might find an escapee who had been away when this disease or whatever it was had struck. He jogged along the hidden paths, following them by their strong andalune signature, watching for anyone taking the same routes. The idea that this devastation of the people was a blanket effect persisted in biting him the entire time, saying he would find nothing, he should get back to Delatra and help do something useful, with struggling, lonely Xaviendra. There was nothing to find here but more abomination. Running through the woods in the dark was just that—running, and tempting fate, both top of the list of his class acts. Besides, there was something fun about hurtling on at speed when you could only reliably see a few centimetres in front of your face. The armour plates pushed and pulled gently on him, like horse's reins, adding their extra guidance.
His reverie had reached a zoned-out space of perfect bliss—quite lacking any sense of danger or purpose—when he felt something far out and ahead of him; a presence like a brief sniff of water in a seemingly endless desert. Panting heavily with disgust at his lack of fitness, he stopped and came back to his senses. Yes, certainly, somewhere in the eastern valleys he was sure that what he could detect was an elf presence. It was slight and it was alone, but it was unmistakable. It made no reaction as he reached across the distance—a vast distance, further than he'd ever noticed anything before—and he hoped that meant it was asleep and not near death or worse. The land between them was filled with gorges and thicker forest that would take hours to cross even at his best speeds, and he wasn't capable of those. He gave in to necessity over caution and summoned Unloyal by radio Lila.
A wave of longing swept over him, taking him by surprise. For a second all he could think of was Xaviendra. He cursed the charm of the poison and waited for it to ebb. Armour Lila kept him warm and said nothing, if she knew, for which he was grateful. As his breathing returned to normal, he heard the flap of giant wings overhead and felt the downwash of aether turbulence before the air made the foliage overhead rustle and shake. A couple of strong upward leaps, assisted by branches, and he was able to jump directly to the drake's side, clinging to the saddle like a monkey before swinging into it.
A faint, tinny sound of orchestral music filtered from the direction of Unloyal's head as it bore upwards and made a turn. It turned it off as it attuned itself to Zal's aetheric body and the distant note to which he was listening. Within moments they were gliding away from the mountains. The journey took a few minutes.
When they arrived, there was no place to land but the presence of the elf was growing fainter all the time, so without much care Zal dropped straight down into the trees, trusting that his natural agility and some dumb luck would be enough to save him from serious injury. The cracking pains he received as his back and legs hit the branches were a shock, but he grabbed hold of a few of them with relative ease and his light weight spared him from worse than bruises.
The sudden noise had made the immediate forest go silent, even the insect burr, but it resumed again a moment or two later. By then he was moving much more adeptly towards the other person. Some climbing and jumping was required, but he found them within a minute. They were hiding in a shelter fashioned out of leaves at the highest point in the canopy that was reachable. Zal perched outside, further down in the branches. He could tell by the agitation and terror in the aura now confronting his that she had heard him, but in spite of the link and his patient identification of himself she was too hysterical to calm down. He could feel all her efforts to pull the andalune away inside herself, but she hadn't got the strength or the skill to master that trick. If she had, he'd never have found her.
He broadcast reassurances, but she was clearly able to at least detect either his shadow or demon traces because this made no noticeable difference. She cowered in the tiny leaf tent, too exhausted to run away, so he moved up there, making plenty of noise to show he wasn't trying to attack. She was so tired that she didn't manage to throw herself out the other side of her makeshift hide before he grabbed her. A half-scream of fear escaped her, loud against the hum of the insects, but he put his hand over her mouth, gently.
“I am not here to hurt you. Be quiet. It is not safe.” This was to convince her he was on her side as much as it was a warning. In fact, he didn't detect any of the absent blots that signalled danger, only the forest's usual life. He took his hand back.
The elf whose arms he had hold of above the elbow lay back and curled in on herself, shaking. “Who are you?” Her voice had an accent he didn't recognise and the words were archaic.
“Zal, once Suhanathir, though that was a long…”
“I know you,” came the reply quickly. All the fear vanished and was replaced by relief and curiosity. “Ah, now I see. Yes. How very odd…” And with that she fainted.
It was so very dark that Zal couldn't see anything of her except what his spirit body could sense, and he recognised nothing about her at all. She had fainted from exhaustion and there was nothing he could do but wait for her to recover enough to wake up. The treetop was precarious. He decided to play safe and summoned Unholy for an evac.
By morning they were several hours' flight time from Delatra at an uninhabited region of lush boreal forest on an island just off the coast of some bit of Serinsey that Zal had maybe read about once in his boyhood and forgotten long since. He only knew the place because Lila had maps and showed them in rich detail on the surface of his arms as he looked down. Although the island was deserted, it did possess one feature worthy of note, and that was a dry cave, free of bears, in an outcropping large enough for Unholy to land on.
The elf he had found was rather young to be knowing about him, he thought as he watched her sleep. The morning sun warmed things up nicely and it woke her, streaming through the cave mouth in golden bars as though everything in the world was perfectly all right. She jolted, froze, sucked her breath in through her teeth as she realised things had changed while she was away, and then relaxed enough to close her eyes and breathe normally for a minute or two. At last she rolled onto her side and opened her eyes again. They were green and they stared at him with avid intensity, so much so that he found himself blinking for her. Once she glanced upwards, in the direction of the sleeping drake, and then back at him.
“From Demonia,” she said, in a whisper.
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“Real,” she said.
“Yes.” He could feel her tentatively expanding, trying to search the area for danger. “There's nobody close,” he said. “You can rest.”
“No,” she said. “No time for that. We have to stop it.” She tried to get up but it failed as an effort, and he held out his hand quickly.
“Rest there, at least a while. You must.” He handed food across to her, and she grabbed it quickly without noticing or caring that it was from Otopia and not much like elven food.
In between mouthfuls she said, “It's why you came, isn't it?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Where are the others?”
“There's only me.”
She stopped eating midbite and lay prone and motionless for a moment, then spat the food out onto the sandy ground. “Only you?” All the animation went out of her and she lay like a doll, eyes closing and her mouth curving into a disbelieving half-smile. “Only you.” She laughed silently with a couple of quick moves of her ribs. He counted more than ten serious bruises and scrapes on her exposed skin. She was wearing light clothes, something suited for indoor living, and they were mostly ripped and dirtied. Her braided bronze-coloured hair was a mess. He betted she'd been running for a while. Though they were well separated and she looked all given up, her andalune body clung fiercely to its contact with his, drinking in all she could about him. He guessed there was a lot to drink, given Lila's presence and all.
“And are you all that's left? Only you?” he asked.
“I don't know,” she said after a while and coughed, so she had to roll back to her side. She pushed the spat food reluctantly away from her, and took another bite of the cereal trail mix bar from her hand. She chewed it slowly, deliciously, enjoying it in a way he wouldn't have thought possible. He hated the things himself. “Am I the last elf?” she asked rhetorically, taking another bite. “I asked myself that so many times I thought I would go mad.”
“You're not. So do you know what happened?”
She swallowed, went for another bite, thought better of it, and licked around her teeth so that he could tell her gums were sore. “Meaning you're here I suppose. Did you find others?”
“You're the first,” he admitted. “But I only got here yesterday.”
“You saw the people here.”
“Yes.” He held his impatience in check.
“Yes,” she said and her hands began shaking. “I…was…I am a librarian, at Delatra. All the others went…as you see, after the creature came. It asked for some records. Looked like an elf, of course it did or we, but anyway, I went to look for them because the Master Librarian was arguing with it. There was something strange about it you see and…I went looking and I was in the rooms when I felt them all disappear.” Her green eyes were round, completely ringed with white. It was the only outward sign of the freezing horror that gripped her. He felt it and flinched, but he was still on guard and the despair and sadness that followed didn't infect him.
“But not you,” he said quietly.
“Not me.” She dropped the food bar and her hand went to a pocket on her beaten trousers and fished around quickly. “I had this.” She held it in her fist and wouldn't let go, but he could see it, a pinkish stone object. The smile of slight hysteria played across her mouth again. “It's a soulcatcher. There can't be more than four in the world, and I was holding it because I was looking for those cursed records and it was with them in the box.” She stared at it in disbelief.
“And what does that do?” He'd almost forgotten what it was like to be in the Jayon Daga but now he remembered. Questions, efficiency, action; it felt so comforting.
She caught the tail end of this emotion and smiled for a moment—a more genuine smile. “Yes. I thought it was a paperweight. The only reason I held onto it was because I was so frightened that I couldn't let it go.” She regarded the object—not carved really, more like a smoothed rock polished lightly into a suitable shape for a hand. You could have thrown it down on a pebble beach and lost it forever on the instant. “Later I understood. I realised that there must be something important about the ledgers. I thought that it was a temporary attack on the library you see, not a full-scale war. I could not imagine what could do such a thing as wipe everyone out like they were chalk marks, forever. I still do not entirely…” She broke off. She was shuddering convulsively and couldn't keep speaking. Zal maintained his strong, compassionate energy, but he didn't move closer to her. Their andalune bodies twined like ivy meanwhile.
After a minute or two she was ready to continue, the stone held in her hands, over her heart. “So. I took the ledgers.” She released her hold briefly to pat what he saw were large inside pockets on her soft jacket—book-sized pockets. “And I took the stone and I went through the rooms by the back ways until I was able to get out, thinking I'd hide until the worst was gone and come back when everyone woke up. I've been at the library for over fifty years, so I knew every inch of it back to front. It would be possible to find someone there hidden in any of its places, so I went down the mountain through one of the long tunnels that led to the forest. There's an energy sink not far from the mountain, at Orlinn, a water place. It felt right to go there. I went and hid there and when it passed over it didn't find me. I tried to pull everything in, but I do not have your skill with that. There was never any need to hide before.” She paused. “I wonder why it did not see me. I think it was not really looking. It swept over and killed them all and it was gone. That was all. But it wanted these.” She put the stone back in her pocket and slowly, one at a time, drew out two old and battered sheaves of manuscript.
“May I?” Zal asked.
She nodded and he moved forward and took them carefully. They were perfectly preserved and easily legible, but he couldn't read the ancient words. “What is this, Old Yashin?”
“Earlier actually. Shavic.”
“What is it, can you read it?” He handed them back to her and watched her smooth the curled edges carefully.
“Yes, I have read it many times now,” she whispered. “One is a ledger of names. The other is a mage's journal explaining exactly how to strip the spirit from a living person without killing them and to put something else in its place. And before you ask, yes, I do think this is the work of the Genomancers who made the shadowkin. It is not signed. There is no name attached to it. The ledger is, I think, the record of all those who were so used. But I cannot be sure of that. I do not recognise any of the names, except that they are commonly used.”
Zal thought of Xaviendra, and a wave of heat and discomfort passed through him. He pushed it away, but the other elf had noticed.
“You are cursed,” she said, startled.
“I've had worse,” Zal insisted. “Tell me more about this stone.”
“It anchors the spirit of the bearer in their flesh and bone. Lesser versions are used by necromancers in their studies, but this book,” she tapped her right breast, “says there are a few master stones that have much greater powers. They are a kind of lightning rod, earthing the spirit, or chaining it, depending on your viewpoint I suppose. It was after I read about them that I understood what this must be and what had happened to the rest.” She stopped and closed her eyes. Tears flowed out of them, and the shuddering returned.
“May I see the names?” he asked.
Without looking she fumbled the book back out and handed it across again. Zal addressed Lila quietly, “Can you read this?”
His left hand warmed. He lifted it on intuition and put it over the book, palm down where the soft skin of the black gauntlet could “see.” As she had shown the map she now showed him the words written in contemporary elvish characters. He was poring over them when suddenly he was crowded by the female elf, coughing and wiping her face as she stared at the back of his glove.
“Translation!” she said, astonished. “What is this? I thought you had some sort of barbarian armour with a demon inside it, but this is—”
“This is Lila Black, my wife,” Zal said, pulling a face as he did so because it sounded like stupidity even when he knew it was true.
The elf recoiled but stayed where she was, drawn to and repulsed by all the notions rushing through her feverish mind.
“Alive,” Zal supplied. “Human. Machine.” And after a pause, “Harmless.” He turned the page, hoping that Lila knew more than he did and would highlight something if it was important because, as the librarian said, to him it was a list of names that meant nothing and attached to nobody.
“I…” the elf began but was unable to articulate any more. She stared at him.
“We need to know who else is still surviving,” Zal said calmly as his survey went on through sheet after sheet.
“And then?”
“And then…” Zal said but he didn't know what happened then. “I am supposed to report back to Otopia and figure it out from there.”
“So they know. They are preparing an army.”
Zal continued reading. “Did you see this creature, as you call it?”
“It looked like an elf,” she repeated. “I was not paying attention. I was preparing some documents for…I am just saying that there was an elf who asked for these things, and she had a very strange aura now that I think about it. She was cold. Some people can be that way, you know, when they have had a shock so that was another reason I did not look at her, in case it was too much for her. I do not know that it was a she. I assumed…” She had started to babble, and the hysteria in her voice was rising.
“It seems a reasonable assumption,” Zal broke in firmly. “I would agree with it. In any case, it is all we have to go on at the moment. Later you said people died and it came for them. How did you see it then?”
“I saw it,” she used the word for seeing with the andalune body, rather than with her eyes, “as a wave of silence. And cold, but I think that the cold is only my feeling and there was no coldness as such. Silence came. But they were not dead. I heard them. They heard me. I had to run away. Very fast.”
Zal watched the meaningless names scroll across his hand. “When I met you, you were afraid of me even though we heard each other well in advance. Why?”
“I thought it was how she would hear me. That she would find me and kill me for the books and the stone.”
“How would she know that you even had them?”
“Because I was alive when I should be dead.”
Zal thought that was reasonably screwed up, but it made sense enough. “She has no reason to search for someone she doesn't know is missing though.”
“No,” the elf sat back and then lay down again in the sunlight, curling up small. “I think of her in the room, looking for the books, seeing they are gone.”
“I don't get it,” Zal said in reply, thinking aloud to himself. “What does this gain anyone?” The names rolled on and on. There was no mark anywhere to show what had happened to them—if they survived as shadowkin or were killed in the process. Then a name flashed at him and made him blink.
His father.
He got up and stuffed the paper booklet down the front of his shirt. “I have to go. I'll be back soon as I can. Stay here. It's safe.” He was already pressing the collar of the armour, signalling Unloyal so that the drake got up from its nap and came down to the sandy area in front of the cave ready.
Theelf…
“I don't know your name,” he said as she backed away rapidly from the drake, staring at it with loathing and wonder in equal parts.
“Tellona,” she said but had to say it twice because her voice was choked. “Will you be hunting us all down with that thing?”
Zal glanced at Unloyal's hideous mass, the eyeless head at an angle that suggested it didn't care for who said what about it. “If I have to.” The thought of exterminating the “survivors” had passed through his mind—his demon part wanted to do it badly—but he'd let it go along with all his sense of connection to the victims. It had been surprisingly easy. Why that should make him, the arch defector, so sad, was another mystery. Then he restated firmly, “I will be back.”
“What if it comes?” Tellona was suddenly holding out the other book. “You should have this.”
“To preserve it,” he said in a neutral tone, recalling Xaviendra again and her vivid insistence on the preservation of the library. He went back and took the paper.
Tellona watched him with thin lips. “The acid in your skin will hasten its destruction,” she said reprovingly. “You should take it because you have a chance of defending it. Whatever it wants I am thinking it should not have if only because I am vengeful.” Her look became a glare.
Zal stuffed the second book down the other side of his shirt and felt Lila press them close as her chestplate stiffened and moulded itself around the forms, sealing closed up to his jaw. He saluted Tellona. “You have the stone.”
“Yes,” she said, hand already around it, knuckles white.
“Keep it.” He saw relief flood across her face.
“You are immune?”
“I have no idea,” he said and went back out into the blazing sun, climbed to the saddle, and adjusted the leg harness so that he was held fast. “I am going to Halany. I hope not for long.”
“That's halfway across the world!” Tellona sat up. “What's there?”
“I don't know.” As an afterthought he took off the saddlebag that was loaded with most of the food and threw it down. “You'd better have that. There's nothing to eat here except what you can suck out of the aether.” They shared a glance for a moment, and he saw the slight hesitation of the light elf when faced with the prospect of drawing out the life force of living things by the shadowkin method of feeding. It was only a twitch though, not the whole nine yards of horror, so he guessed she was one of the progressive ones. He nudged Unholy and the drake took off with a leap that sent showers of sand in all directions.