Zal found his father at twilight. He and Unloyal had searched the region for hours, sweeping back and forth across endless hills of billowing green foliage like clouds of life. They didn't fill Zal's senses as they once had, not now that he was attuned to the darkness and searching there, in the permanent penumbral gloom of the forest floor amid the swirling clouds of wild magic. Still, they filled it enough to make looking hard work, particularly when you were strap-hanging off the side of a grumpy drake who kept insisting that he could see perfectly well and there were people down there all right, why couldn't Zal identify them?

Zal could identify them, he replied, equally grumpily, they just weren't the right people. Mercifully they were at least people and he was infinitely grateful for that. His nightmare that the atrocity of Delatra had been visited on the entire world was proven to be just a daydream.

Just as he could see them, however, they could also see him and Unloyal swooping around above them. They were frequently mistaken at first for a demon hunter, and Unloyal's wing was holed by one of the many potshots that had been directed their way until those on the ground tuned in a little more sharply and found the oddness of Zal in their neighbourhood; weird, tainted, and heavily influenced by a soul dub that made him pulse like a throbbing wound in their consciousness, but still, for all that, elf and not, one bent on destruction.

Small parties tracked him, trying to keep pace, but even their leaping speed in the canopy was no match for Unloyal's aerial glissandos. Zal at least finally had the notion of trying to communicate more than his peacenik attitude and reveal who he was searching for. He wasn't helped by the fact that Unloyal had decided he liked to sing along. Like a mournful klaxon, he incompetently blared occasional phrases across the birdsong skies. It took a lot of swearing from Zal to shut him up long enough for them to lose their little audience and finish the hunt in silence once they'd received a tip-off. They were also pelted with fruit, which Unloyal said was helpful, but Zal insisted was for the crime of Unloyal's vocal murder of fine songs.

“I don't hear you singing,” the drake muttered as they soared far and high in a turn that would take them out of reach of the interested ground pursuit.

Zal gave him another mix to listen to to shut him up. He didn't say that he didn't feel like singing. He wasn't sure when he would again. They crossed a river, came to the fork they had been told of, and followed the line of water down a valley into isolated canyons that grew narrower until it was hard for the drake to fly in them without clipping his wings on the sides. Here Zal got out of the harness and hung down underneath the drake as it started to get dark and the river became a stream of golden fire in the sunset. He picked up the trace he was looking for and asked Unloyal to stoop lower. He didn't fancy another smash through the canopy, so he aimed for the water this time and prayed it was deep enough. When they came to a falls with a small pool he took his chance and let go.

For a second or two he was free in the air. He felt the Lila armour pulse around him and seal at his wrists, waist, and neck to protect the books that he hadn't even considered, and he thought that he slowed down, but it was hard to tell. Then he hit the water feet first and its cool enveloped him.

Unloyal was a receding mote in the distance by the time he surfaced and swam to the side where he pulled himself out onto the flat rocks and waited for most of the water to drain out of his clothes. The armour squeezed hard and pushed it out. It gave, he thought, a whole new meaning to the notion of being wrung out, and that made him almost laugh. Then he felt the presence of his father grow stronger and turned to face the tall, dark gaps beneath the nearest trees, tossing his head back to fling his wet hair out of his eyes.

The old Saaqaa companion of his came first, a saurian shape, still bigger than grown-up Zal as it paced over the marshy grass and stopped on three-toed feet a few metres from him. Its head, blind as Unloyal's, wove from side to side constantly, an axe shape with a mute savage mouth underneath. Feathers and beads covered its arms, and it rested the ends of its spears on the bank as it came to a halt, leaning on them a little bit. It smelled of the citrus zing of wild magic and greeted Zal with a cautious extension of its andalune body. This was articulate, though very quiet—serene in fact—it verified Zal and withdrew. Afterwards his father came out of the darkness and stood where the shade dappled the grass. Zal realised that he was avoiding the sun, and went forward. They met cautiously, and he felt uncertainty as well as warmth in his father's contact. He was astonished at the fact his father looked older. His face was deeply lined now, the skin loose, his hair dark grey instead of the true black of the shadowkin.

“Something changed you a great deal,” his father said. He still had a hunting bow and an arrow in his hand although they weren't joined. This was as close to effusive warmth as his father got, Zal knew. His spirit touch was much more affectionate than his stance or his expression. It felt no more fragile than it ever had, and Zal was grateful. “I barely recognised you.”

Zal moved forward, dripping, into the deepening shadows under the branches and stopped a metre away. “I got the shit kicked out of me a few times.”

His father's eyes narrowed. “But not the manners.” The merest flicker of a smile on his flint-edged mouth came and went.

“No fear,” Zal said, ducking his head. “That's what you always told me.”

“I hope one day you forgive me,” came the reply, quietly. “What is on your mind?”

Zal grinned. His father always said that, no matter how obvious or awful the situation. “Well, I found your name in this book here….” He pulled out the object from inside his dry jacket as his father looked at his armour very closely but without saying anything. The Saaqaa coughed slightly and cocked its head.

“He says your friend has gone.”

Zal guessed that they meant Unloyal. “Yeah well, he's not much use on the ground.”

“So I see.” He took the papers in his hand without looking at them and beckoned. “Come this way.”

Within a moment Zal was alone on the bank. The night birds, the frogs, and the insects filled the darkening air with sound. He followed the two into the purple, blue, and inky tones of the underforest and felt himself slide from view, not only from the huge open eye of the sky, but from other kinds of eyes. His trace in the rich energy currents of the forest ocean was all but lost to the most experienced senses. He could only follow his father because they had not let go of each other yet. Through the contact, Zal felt the years of isolation and withdrawal that had been his father's life, a hermithood of sorts, straying further and further from civilisation. He tasted how difficult it was for the old man to form sentences though his spirit touch was effortlessly sure.

Presently they stopped and sat down. There was nothing to mark the place as special except their presence. Zal realised that his father had no home at all and felt a wry correction pressed upon him—his father was at home everywhere. He thought he saw the man smile, but it could have been a moving leaf shadow.

“Your name is in the list,” Zal said. He didn't know if he would have to explain the book but apparently not.

“It is your great-grandfather's name, not mine, though we share it,” came the reply. The book was handed back to him. “I am scarcely so old, nor will be, and he is long dead.”

Zal was relieved, so much so that he just sat for a moment, holding the papers. “Do you know where my mother is?”

“No.”

He had expected as much. They both thought she was dead but had never said so. That was a relief too, in a way. There were fewer people to concern himself with now. “Do you know what's happening in the rest of Alfheim?”

“You mean Wrath's coming,” his father said. “Yes I know about it. I guessed that is why you are here. Again you manage to be at the centre of our greatest scandals.”

Zal frowned. “What happened to the ones at Delatra?”

“She took them for power and as punishment for her exile,” came the reply. “No doubt she came for the book. The other book, I should say.”

“What book?”

“The book of binding. Do you have that one also?” There was an edge in the voice now that was unmistakable, even though Zal felt no shift in his father's touch. Against his chest the second book pressed itself, uncomfortable under the armour.

“No.”

“Good. She will not stop until she has it.”

“What for?”

“The names of the phantoms, perhaps some other knowledge she has forgotten.”

The venom in Zal's blood pulsed suddenly, causing him to fall onto his knees as a wave of longing and sweet loyalty to Xaviendra filled him. It smothered all awareness. He started getting to his feet to rush to her, and then the Saaqaa's solid stave hit him and knocked him down again. The armour deferred only some of the impact and used the impetus to jolt him with a nerve shock of its own, across his entire skin. Lila was slapping him. The pain briefly cleared his head.

There was a pause, filled in by the world's cacophony, and Zal realised what an idiot he'd been. He'd assumed that Xaviendra was there on some foolish mission related to what had happened before, or because Malachi had sent her, or Sarasilien maybe, to save the library. He'd assumed that his father had been talking about Wrath when he said “she.” But now he saw it wasn't so. To save the library. Sure. Of course. That's exactly it. She wasn't heroically trying to save elvish culture; she was here to destroy it. It was not Wrath who had consumed the living. It was Xavi.

On cue the wound in his neck pulsed, and a wave of longing washed across him, undisguisable in all of its awful detail.

“Poisoned,” his father said after a moment as though he had just noticed a bee sting. “Come, let me get rid of it for you.”

As poultices were sourced and made and magical incantations muttered, Zal called Unloyal to ask for a pick up. His father bent over his neck, applying hot, vile-smelling mud. He slapped some leaves on the top of it and ordered Zal to lie still. “Is the offending demon dead?”

“Yeah,” Zal said, distracted by a sudden and horrible sensation of pulling at the wound site. He winced and put his hand up—it was firmly taken and moved away. “Lila axed it.”

“Lila?” said his father.

“My…wife,” Zal said. “We really are out of touch, aren't we?” He thought of introducing them, but given Lila's present condition he couldn't actually imagine himself doing it. For once he was lost for words and gestures.

“What beautiful armour,” his father said, careful not to touch it in any way, and then Zal felt himself a double fool because he could feel the old man laughing at him.

“Is that what you were doing all this time? Hiding in the woods to build up your psychic superpowers?”

He didn't get an answer. He didn't expect to. His father placed his hand on top of the leaves. “Hold this in place. If it stops hurting, you need a new one.”

“How long is this going to take?”

“Not fifty years,” came the reply.

It took about two hours of constant, nagging, inescapable pain which even Lila the armour could not undo. At the end of it Zal was sure he had ground half a millimetre off his own teeth. Then, to his disgust, he fell asleep.

When he woke up, it was full night. His andalune body had spread out completely, as it used to when he was young. His father was nearby, the old Saaqaa with him, sitting. They had eaten some mushrooms to enhance their night sight, but Zal didn't need these. In Alfheim, in the dark, he was less substantial but much more alive.

He communicated with them by the soul energy alone, and they got up and moved with him in silent passage through the hooting, humming forest.

Wrath approaches, his father told him, and the Saaqaa showed him the burst of grey that was the spirit plane in which the phantom moved. It was nothing more than a kind of cloud. He felt it looking, but it passed over him when it came close, rising to the surface of Alfheim's teeming fullness like a carp coming from the depths of a still pool. With a flick it checked them and was gone. It could not find Xaviendra, because she had the power to hide herself—after all, her soul wasn't here. She had no presence in its plane.

They led him to the wall of the canyon to a place where he could climb up to meet the drake.

His father asked him where he was going to go, and what he was going to do.

Zal asked to be shown the spirit plane again, to call Wrath. Through the shadow bond they shared he was allowed to move through his father's journey. He waited, saw shapes, moved forward, and was stopped by his father's strong presence.

No further. If you're lost here, you won't return.

Zal had to wait. Meantime beneath them in the thin aether of the plane hungrier things gathered, flashed their shining scales, the blades of their fins. Then the cloud returned, shark-sleek this time on the scent of something that knew its name.

An age ago, when he'd been a junkie making Zoomenon circles in the woods to ease his habits, when Lila had been a cute girl chasing him up the mountain, when Solomon's Folly had been visited by ghosts as a matter of mystery, Zal had fallen down and a ghost had sucked his hand empty of spirit. He had thought it was junkie's bad luck, chalked it up to stupidity and greed on his part. Now he knew it wasn't any of those things.

Zal offered Wrath his empty hand, and like a snake coiling into a crack in a rock the form of Wrath wound into it and fastened there.

In the night forest the insects sawed. They heard the heavy flap and shudder of Unloyal's precarious landing on the cliff high above, and then Zal was up and climbing with the armour's warm embrace on him humming an ultrasound song that filled his body with strange pleasures as it power-assisted him up the sheer face so that he felt he was flying.

“Junkie,” the drake murmured as he came up on it, laughing drunkenly, strap-hanging again like a teenager on a late date.

“Time to go,” Zal said. He thought of the girl he'd left on the island, but she was better off there.

“Delatra?”

His father released him. He felt the old elf and his companion subside into the forest. The spirit plane closed. There was only night, the drake, the armour's burring love.

“Fire first,” Zal said. He needed all the power he could get. And even then it wouldn't be near enough, but he had to try. “I need fire.”

“I am not an igniter,” the drake said. “And nothing here is dry enough.”

“Find a place,” Zal said. “Somewhere rocky. I'll do the rest.”

It was cold when they got to the dry desert of the mountains and landed on the raw scarp, and colder yet when Zal stripped the plate and clothing off his top half. He was shaking as he took the book of names and ripped out the pages, scrunching them up and wedging them between some stones. Unloyal sheltered the spot with the bulk of his wiry body and half-unfurled wings. Lila played the music Zal requested, and the night stopped to listen to the unprecedented sound of the most intense bass that had ever come to that part of the world. He needed it to start the fire.

The paper was protected from ordinary flames. Zal allowed his demon's wings to unfold from his back to ignite them. They were blazing already with the characteristic orange colour of his personal flare, brought to instant heat by the energy of the soundtrack. It was a fire that existed on several planes at once, and it was sufficient to start the process of disposing of the twin books.

“You didn't say you could fly,” muttered the drake.

“Never tried it,” Zal confessed, seeing their shadows thrown into stark shapes across the flickering yellow rocks.

Zal crouched down close to the small, smokeless pyre and added page after page, turning to the second book that his father had said she had to have and shredding it with his fingers before feeding all the bits into the flames.

He supposed it was a kind of sacrilege, but he wasn't prepared to run the risk of allowing them to survive. This was the last record of all those people who had died and what had happened to them and how it had been done. He was disposing of knowledge that had been bought with thousands of lives, with incalculable suffering. It was his own history. Some would say, maybe Tellona would say, that he was disposing of the past and dooming them to repeat the horror that even his generation had already forgotten.

They could say it if they liked. He turned to the final pages then and pulled them free, made sure they were well alight, then started to rip the rest at random, counting on luck to make sure the job was done right in case he was interrupted. At no point did he attempt to find or read the names anywhere. He just tore and burned and listened to Ska on the empty hillside with the drake in between him and the wind, a bitter grimace on his face; a two-tone funeral at high volume.

At last both the books were ashes. He rubbed these into dust and then he and the drake stood back and watched the wind blow it all away. Both of them felt slight misgiving, but not for what Zal had done; because they knew that it might still be possible to remake the books. Perhaps one or two beings in the universe would be able to, though he doubted they'd care to.

“Be bloody hard though,” Zal said after a minute.

The drake agreed.

Zal picked up the chestplate of his armour and put it on next to his skin under his elf jacket. “Funk it up please,” he said to her, and she obliged though she kept the beat steady and heavy and he could feel the bass resonating in his heart. The demon wings had no trouble passing through either Lila or the clothes without setting them alight. They were almost immaterial and caused no trouble to the drake either. Zal liked the way they made him look, even though he knew he was no match for Teazle on that score.

“Delatra?” Unloyal asked.

Zal brushed the last of the ash off his hands and tightened up the saddle straps one more time over his stiff legs. He longed for a hit of something strong, but he guessed he'd be better off with a clear head for once. “Thought you'd never ask.”

When they arrived in Delatra, it was almost morning and a heavy rain was falling. The elves upon whom Xaviendra had fed and visited her personal ire were all sheltering in the ruins or had run off into the lowlands. Everything was clad in a filthy, low light, grey and sliding. The smell of wet rottenness lay all over.

The one thing Zal couldn't get out of his head was Tellona. She had read the books and she was still alive, castaway or not. Leaving her alive was a gamble of stupendous proportions, and most of the risk lay in his ability to conceal the fact.

In his hand Wrath lay dormant—a promise of malice to come. He flexed the fingers, but they felt no different. Rain lashed the parapets and the wind howled its lonely notes through the tunnels. He squelched forward and began to retrace his steps to the library. Behind him in the streaming mud the drake sat back on his haunches and tuned his wires to Lila-armour's direct frequencies. At his back and given the circumstances, Zal didn't know if that counted as an extra stupidity or not. Any connection could be used against you.

Water sizzled and spat as it passed through his wings. He hoped their light and the memory of demon hunters past would keep the savages at bay, but he was disappointed.

He heard a scrape of stick on rock, the mutter of something going crazy with fear, as he approached the open doorway of the library staircase.

“Get lost,” he said. “I'm not interested.” At the same moment he drew out the dagger from his belt and felt himself lighten as his body moved into a defensive posture. “Really. Run away and no hard feelings.” There was a snicking noise that took him aback because it was so close to his ears, and in the glimmering winglight he saw that his armour had grown rills of blades on its outer edges. Steam billowed around him. He didn't fancy moving into the enclosed space, but he had no choice. Nobody came out, so he went in.

There were two. One leapt at him without weapons and screamed horribly as it sliced itself open on the armour. He saw, in a blur, a spear come stabbing at his face at the same moment, and he ducked aside. It passed his neck and through one wing but the thrower, perhaps distracted by the incoherent gibber of the other, cowered down in the corner with filthy arms over its head and seemed to be fighting itself.

Then as the bloodied one tried to come forward, Zal, disbelieving, saw the terrified one get up, moving with the jerky forced twitches of a marionette, and realised that they were animated by a will other than whatever was left of their own. He put his dagger in the throat of the first, ending it as quickly as he could before wrenching the blade out and spinning around. The spear-thrower faced him with total panic in its eyes. They were oval and white as the moon. The orange torch-flicker of winglight showed him a pretty girl. His wingtip had set her hair on fire, but she barely noticed. She was openmouthed, streaked with filth and blood, her teeth broken as her lips parted in a helpless grimace. Her hands lifted, gripping muck and rocks from the floor, and Zal jumped forward and headbutted her as hard as he could, hoping he didn't crack her skull. She went down in a heap without a sound, and he bent down for a second to put out the fizzling damp embers of her hair before he jumped over her on the way up the first flight of stairs.

His anger made the wings burn hotter still, now well manifested in the heaviness of Alfheim's material plane. They lifted him so that he skimmed across the ground. In the halls there were more of these living zombies coming to delay him, but he was ready and the fact that they were turned against their will made them slow and easy to incapacitate. Perhaps it would have been kinder to kill them. He thought so, but he let them lie and told himself that he could always kill them tomorrow if nothing changed. There was nothing like looking on the bright side.

At the library's greater doors, undamaged and ajar, he saw the first light that wasn't his own.

He pulled the nearest door wide open and looked inside. The light was bluish-violet and it was coming from an enormous bonfire, parodic in its size, a mountain of books, scrolls, and objects crawling with the aetheric flames of a consumption that wasn't combustion.

Xaviendra was standing at the side of it, a stack of fresh volumes at her side balanced on one of the library's carts. The writhing fire covered her as well, and snaked across the floor in a lazy oxbow to the bonfire. She checked a title and riffled the pages, shook it, and then tossed it over her shoulder onto the heap.

“Read any good books recently?”

He didn't even know that was going to come out of his mouth until it did, as laconic and dry as if he'd planned it. The landing book dislodged some from their places, and they came slithering down and slid across the polished stone floor towards him. He angled his head to look at its pages and wasn't surprised to see that they were blank.

“Mmn,” Xaviendra said and held out her hand, waggling it. She wasn't the least surprised to see him. “I really need a recommendation, I think. Is that why you've come back?”

He ignored this. “My, here we are at the book depository. It's not the way I pictured the end of the world.”

“Well, you have to take what you can get,” she said, throwing several more slim volumes on and then taking hold of the cart's handles and dragging the whole thing to the fire where she clumsily upended it and then righted it again, the cargo dumped and downloading into her.

Zal thought of Lila and in return he felt her vibrate against his skin, maybe laughing. “You won't find what you're looking for.”

“It wasn't the only copy I'm sure,” she drawled. She gave the cart a push, and a figure darted out from the darkness in the stacks and grabbed it with bloody hands.

“Zombie minions,” Zal said. “Classy.”

“Can't you think of any cracks about late returns and fines or something?” Xaviendra said, as though she was already very bored of him.

“Fresh out,” he said, wondering how this was going to go down. Wrath showed no sign of waking; it was waiting for something else and he had no idea what. “What are you trying to do?”

“Well, when you and your friends and lovers have finished bringing the phantoms here, I'm going to eat them all up,” she said, skimming a huge leatherbound and hand-gilded atlas into the fire.

She rubbed her eyes and sighed. “Very kind of you. I wonder if you'll be able to try to kill me as effectively as I've tried to kill you. Curious thing that ink and that book. You'd think I'd have recognised it, but apparently there are some artefacts that are still beyond me. And then I had to drink all the vile beer with you and all you could do was talk nonsense about dragons…ah ha…” she laughed, a tinkly, merry sound of girlish amusement.

“Imagine that,” Zal said, finding himself more than able to dislike her. “And after you eat these phantoms, what are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” she said, unrolling a huge, handpainted history scroll and squinting at the illuminated names of aeons past, arrayed with the pictographic details of their personal histories. She let it reroll itself and then wanged it end over end into the conflagration. “Having missed out on getting the mantle I might try for it again, although the Bloody Sisters have probably hidden or lost it by now.”

“Yeah,” Zal said, walking forward to see what it was that the keepers were handing her now as they kept coming out of the black stacks, dumping vases, caskets, more books. He picked up a thin, wide, illustrated children's story and flicked through the pages. “But what for? Where are you going?” He turned to the inside of his wrist as he read the book and tapped his finger there. Lila showed a playlist. He cued, started the music, and this time it played for the room as clearly and loudly amplified as if he had an entire tour's worth of gear in place for a concert of thousands.

Xaviendra actually jolted with shock. Her glare at him was pure poison. The shuffling in the stacks stopped abruptly.

Zal moved his head and shoulders to the beat of the old-style country rock—all goodtime swing beats and boot kickin' riffs—and began to sing quietly along, “aw-uh-uh-oh….” Inwardly he was smiling. At last they were on familiar ground. He glanced up innocently. “What?”

Xaviendra strode over to him and ripped the children's book out of his hands before throwing it on her blazing heap.

He looked at her without interrupting his groove. “And how is The Velveteen Rabbit part of your master plan?”

She bared her teeth. “To have to somehow feel a bond with you is so aggravating—I can't tell you just how much I HATE you! Trivial, pathetic, feeble little…”

He held up his hand. “Ramp up the B-movie script darling. After studying all this, I think you'd be up to something more eloquent.”

He wondered if she could literally explode from anger, but it seemed not, unfortunately. “But seriously, to get back to the subject at hand. Don't you think you deserve some kind of reward for creating a subrace, beginning a race war, and torturing thousands of people to death? I mean, it does seem like a whole big list of achievements in one sense but…”

He pulled his dagger out and stabbed it into her just above the collar bone with accuracy and force. Her eyes widened and then she took hold of his hand on the hilt and yanked it out. There was no blood. She glared at him and then let go, pushing his hand away forcefully.

“You're a moron,” she said and went back to heaving the collected works of ages onto her fire, apparently brushing him from her consciousness.

Zal put the dagger away. “I didn't think it'd work.”

“Treachery was always your strong suit,” she retorted though she seemed halfhearted, he thought. She beckoned, and the trailing not-yet-dead resumed their haulage from the library's dark recesses. Then she paused and looked up. “Ah ha,” she said. “Your robot girlfriend and her lackeys have arrived. Good. I won't have to listen to this dreadful cacophony much longer.”

He knew she could kill them, and there wasn't much he could do about it. Still, he had a minute or two left.

Zal looked at the fire. He walked across to the edge of the tumbled pile and crouched down. His orange wings and the blue creeping witchlight combined to form an ugly, smoglike colour on the covers of the books and the blank faces of the scrolls. He weighed up the chances of surviving what he was about to do versus it being an effective distraction and felt the armour quiver subtly as it connected to the Lila prime. She was nearly there. Malachi was shot in the shoulder, but it had only made him mad. He figured that if Xavi could suck the power from the books, she could suck it out of him too, but he could suck back—junkies have their uses after all.

Xaviendra seemed to have thought along the same lines because she dropped the book she was holding and fixed him with a stare across the flames. “Don't even think…”

Zal put his hand into the fire. Their aether bodies merged.

“Oh, you filthy…” Her disgust hit him like a blow.

Zal felt them connect, felt himself exploding into his full demon form, shadow and fire, the armour melting around him into its own liquid shapes as the music roared into deafening decibels and mixed up with all that Xaviendra was trying to pull out of the scripts. He didn't know how long the music archive would last, or him after it, but she was going to have a tough time chewing him up because he was going to taste as nasty as possible, he was going to make sure of that.

“Gonna getcha good…” screamed the vocal—Zal's own cover. He grinned into her face and gave her his best glam-rock wink.

Orange fire and blue met. The dry, heated paper beside him immediately burst into yellow flames. Zal felt Xaviendra scream as the orange fire of his demon flare burned her, and then he felt her gather herself and pull. It was like a millstone dragging on his heart. His strength began to drain inexorably away.

“Oh,” he was surprised. It was much, much worse than he had imagined. He realised he was an idiot of course. He should have used the other hand, where sleeping Wrath slept on. Trust a junkie to forget the important bit.

Then the violet fire of Xaviendra's consumption filled his entire aetheric form, and the coil opened in his hand.

“Pull back,” it said to him. It's voice sounded like a child's. It anchored him in his hand.

Xaviendra was going to stretch him out like cartoon toffee, but however much she tried, she wasn't going to get him after all.

Wrath wasn't angry. That surprised Zal too. Wrath was calm.

“Don't worry,” it said. “The others are coming. We will take her away and then we will die.”

That wasn't as comforting as it might have been intended to be, he thought, hoping that he wasn't included. He pushed as much clear focus into the demonic music as he could, forcing Xavi to slow down what she was doing, grinding at her concentration. Lila would be pleased, he thought, to find that the game wasn't just chance and determinism. Skill had something to do with it. And just when you didn't expect it, the rules changed. He thought he would have to fight this Titan, but it was going to fight for him.

The tug of war went on, Zal losing steadily, slowly, as the music ran through him and into her and was destroyed.

Lila felt the rain running down her face, at her side the beast in the darkness breathing heavily and Zal's life flowing away from her like sand through her fingers.

She snapped the two AI units shut regardless of the sensory distortion that resulted from being in two places at once, and let the black android Sandra Lane move ahead of them through the open doors. The sopping rags that bound her torso, legs, and head with their black dripping burnwater tightened like steel boning. She was dead, but walking. She knew it. She was dead, but not crossed over, because Tath was standing in the way.

This understanding had come to her in the office at some point when she understood how the phantom called Nemesis was able to cross over. The collapsing house at Solomon's Folly had fallen on her and the quantum forge had done the rest. Maybe the faery dress had pulled a divine intervention at its own cost. She didn't know, but she did know that she'd lost interest in Xaviendra's story around the time Sarasilien had been talking about the this and that of it, the organisation, the time, the game, the stake, because simultaneously she'd been with Zal in this vile place, reading the names, watching the papers burn, feeling the poison of the demon's last curse leaving him, and listening to the insane dub of his endless supply of music, and it had come to her that she could place bets wherever she liked but when it came to play there was only one way—forward. It was her move.

As she came around the door's heavy block on Lane's tail, she saw the inferno that the room had become, a war of lilac and orange fire in which the elven figures of a man and woman could just be discerned. One had wings and was on his knees. One had a tail and stood over him in a position of power.

Lila commanded her secondary body to release Zal and reattach. There was nothing she could do for him anymore.

Shards of metal flew out of the conflagration towards her as she did something she hadn't tried to do since she and Bentley had spent a few hours revising the plans and working bugs out of the systems: she activated her battle systems.

Lane stood, taking in a scene Lila was already on top of. From behind Lila the dark slinking shape of Nightbane oiled forward, strangely flat and two-dimensional as if he were no more than the bad dreams of children seeing shadows in their room at night. He leapt on Xaviendra's back, and the blue fire faltered. She staggered but only for an instant. The fire itself coiled around the catlike body, immobilising it and pulling it away in a web of force.

Malachi screamed.

“Clear,” Lila said to Lane, and watched the android perform an inhuman leap sideways out of range as she let two shatter grenades rip free of her arm and into the detonation point of Xaviendra's partially material rib cage. Fragments of super-hot, depleted plutonium reactor core charged with a faintlife aether frag capacity exploded in the confines of the shell's split-second forcefield, their violence contained within a three-metre radius well clear of Zal.

The elf's small body flew apart.

She knew it wouldn't kill Xavi. Nothing that Lila had would kill her, but it would buy some time.

Then the blue fire snapped back to its mistress with a single, backdraft surge, and it let go of Malachi and of Zal.

“Suppressing fire,” Lila said to Lane, who was in position now, on one knee, her arms opening up into the huge silvered fans of radiant reflectors as she shielded herself from the backwash of the light pulses coming from her fingertips. Super-focused beams sliced the blue fire into strips, strobing with a speed no eye could match.

Lila watched as Xaviendra, pulled herself together. Zal was much slower to do the same. They were almost out of delaying plays.

The light hit Xaviendra and for a few moments the form shuddered and seemed as if it shrank. Then with a pulse much brighter than before there was a returning bolt of purple violence and Lane was knocked backwards with a sharp cry, her reflectors wrapping and crunching around her. She did not get up.

From the white-hot burning cyclone that stood where Xaviendra had been, came a sharp pissed-off voice.

“Where is that damned book? You can save a lot of time and life if you just give me what I want, Lila. Then you can be free of that pathetic spirit and we can all go our lovely amicable ways.”

Lila reloaded the shell launcher in her arm. It was her last shot. She watched Zal, an agonised figure of light and shadow getting up, but so slowly. She willed him to move, but she could see he'd taken too much damage. He might be able to fuel himself on firelight or darkness, but Xavi could fuel herself on him much more effectively.

A line of blue-white flame licked out towards him. He fell down, agonised, and the coil began to draw him towards the whirling tornado of energy. She guessed it was too hard for Xavi to return to a physical form now, required too much of an effort to reconfigure all that detail, all that information. She waited as Zal clawed the floor, trying to escape, but was dragged relentlessly back by the white-lilac flares of Xavi's hunger. Cries of pain came from what was left of his mouth.

Lila shot the second grenade when she knew he was still safely outside the blast radius and watched Xaviendra falter and flicker. Zal breathed again for an instant.

Pop a few more of those and she'd collapse the local instability enough that there wouldn't be much of anyone left to worry about. She measured the time it took for the mage to pull it together. Not much longer than the first time. Meantime Zal hadn't moved an inch.

Lila backed a step and reached down to Lane. The android gave off no signals. When she touched the body, there was no response. She tried hacking a port, but there was no resistance in any channel. Lane was blown. Even her reactor core had shut down.

“Too late,” Xaviendra's voice said. The coil and the cyclone were back. Zal was unconscious now, the orange fire dying out quickly all across the dark form of his body. Lila picked this for a bluff, but she didn't know for sure.

Then there was a light behind her and a burst of quantum particles flaring their unpredictable tracks.

She turned and saw an angel behind her, radiant with white blazing wings and a halo so intense it burned out several photo receptors in her head. There were hints of metal feathers in its wings, razor-edged and gleaming with jewel glints of blue and yellow, and in its face two red eyes stared straight at her.

Zal woke up. He got to his feet slowly, swaying like a drunk and pointed accusingly at the angel. “You're late,” he slurred, falling to his knees.

Teazle held out a plastic food carton towards Lila.

Xaviendra saw the huge, spiked form of the armoured cyborg turn, glimpsed what was behind it, and then saw the carton. It was blue, scratched, uneven, unmistakable. Inside it was a single playing card. She didn't need to see it. She knew it. The Queen of Cups.

In those days she had liked a joke, and storing her soul in something that mimicked the fey queen's own tricks pleased her enormously, a perfect twist of fate. She felt sick, giddy. Her head was full of music and a sensation as if she had feet and was dancing, dancing, unable to stop.

She reached out and saw the cyborg's black metal gauntlet close on the plastic carton, crushing and melting it so that the running plastic and the card inside caught fire.

Strange, she thought, that you cannot feel a spirit, even when it is within. Strange, she hadn't expected to see so many moves turn out this way as she watched the machine open its empty fist and receive the angel into it in the form of a sword, a blazing shard of impossible light, existing equally and fully in all dimensions, the axis of the world at that moment.

Rooks, she thought. He said it would be like rooks. And he wasn't even here to see the victory of his one Titan in her revenant rags and scattered bodies.

Friends, she thought.

The possibility had never occurred to her after so long and all that was done. Lila's face was emotionless, impassive. Xaviendra wished for something else, anything but indifference. If she had had eyes, they would have cried.

Lovers, she thought, watching the blade swing free of the air, free of everything. Why wasn't he here? They had all come for each other. Not for her. He'd loved her once. Lovers. Why hadn't he come?

“It's not for you,” she said to Lila, meaning no and how could this happen and it isn't supposed to end this way and no. No. No. How could the blood that bound her all this time not hold this sword and this arm back? Friends. Lovers.

“It's my name,” Lila said, and her expression changed in that instant as the blade cut. “Friendslayer.” There were tears in those mirror eyes. And then they weren't mirrored, they were blue.

Mercy, thought Xaviendra, I…but then Render had her and she was no more.

Zal felt Wrath leap through him, a flash of power.

“Goodbye, friend,” said the child's voice, strangely exultant.

He heard other voices, an argument, stilled by that childish tone that said they all must go now, yes, time to go, long past time, it was late. And then he knew no more.

Teazle stood as Hellblade shed him. He felt all that power leaving him, all the ability, all the knowledge. It took some of him with it as the ghostly figure of the elf child standing over Zal's body held out its hand. He saw a tall elf and a huge demon for an instant, each touching their hands to that small one, and then they were gone. Wrath had consumed them, transformed them. In front of Teazle, Lila's huge armoured form locked into position with a solid, machinelike finality and moved no more.

“Nemesis, you cannot stay,” said the child's ghost. “Come away now.”

“Wait,” Teazle said.

But a tall shadow peeled away from Lila's body and paused. It looked back at him, dark pits for eyes. “It's been too long,” she said. “She cannot come back so far. I'm sorry.” She moved forward, a graceful curtain of darkness, touched the child's hand, and vanished.

Teazle stared at Lila's empty body in disbelief.

“Hello, angel,” said the boy, turning to him. The small face was peaceful and a little sad. “Because I am the Eater, I cannot eat myself. Only your blue sword can end me. The others are gone now. No more pain. No more tears. Don't worry.”

Teazle stared at him. He looked at Lila's immobile wreckage. Zal was a heap, almost invisible beneath the boy's glowing outline.

A scrape of claws made him turn around. He saw the strange drake Zal had ridden and was about to turn back when suddenly it wasn't there anymore. An old dwarf had taken its place and came hurrying across the stone, almost tripping on a discarded book.

“Do as he asks, boy, do as he asks; it's not done to make such as he is wait for their mercies, you know that.”

Teazle looked back at the boy. He looked at the dwarf with suspicion, a slow conviction growing on him, and then when he had the dwarf's attention he glanced at Lila. “You have to pay me if you want me to serve.”

The dwarf, an old man, bearded and clothed in green, glared fiercely at him with a yellowing eye. “Don't test my patience boy.”

“Don't ‘boy‘ me, granddad. You want me to serve. So you give me my favour.”

The dwarf stuck his thumbs in his belt and frowned, pushing his lips forward. He tapped his heels on the floor, but he wasn't wearing any boots, only striped socks, and this looked comical. Teazle wasn't fooled by appearances, however. He knew what, if not who, he was facing down.

The dwarf surveyed Teazle and then the entire scene. The book bonfire burned with ordinary fire now. The dwarf flicked a finger and the fire went out. Smoke rose in ugly clouds. He flicked a finger and the smoke vanished. He blew out between his lips and flapped them with a horsey sound, his attention coming to rest on Lila's motionless body. He narrowed his eyes and peered sideways at Teazle.

The ghost boy waited patiently meanwhile.

“Love,” the dwarf said with a snort, “you would hold a soul to ransom what's already waited lifetimes for peace, for this, would you?”

“I am no slave,” Teazle replied, folding his arms. He knew the fire and smoke were demonstrations of what could easily happen to him. “You pay me for all our service, old man. You pay us good.” He drew both the swords easily.

The dwarf eyed him, turning his head but not his body. “You threatening me?”

“Preparing to defend myself.”

“You know what my name is, boy?”

Teazle shook his head. “You know mine, I expect.”

“I do. So put your sticks away. Though they'll do for me when the time comes, it ain't now.”

“I thought you wanted me to finish this sad story?” Teazle looked at the elf ghost, which gave him a distant kind of smile.

“It's your duty, Lightbringer. Do this and the last of your demon days are over. Then you will be free to choose.”

“Free to serve,” Teazle said.

“Aye but free to choose a name,” the dwarf assented. “They call me Mr. V. That help you any?”

“I heard it,” Teazle said. “I still won't do it, unless you bring her back.”

“Not my power that one,” the dwarf said.

“You were sent to see this finished. If he lives on, it's not done. I think that the geas isn't paid out. Is it?” Teazle asked. He rested the swords' points on the ground and leaned on them.

The dwarf took a snorting breath and puffed it out with blown cheeks. “Damn junkie elf forgot to call Miss Arie too. So there's another loose end. What a goddamned mess.” His gaze darted suddenly to Teazle, and it was slitted and gleaming for a moment.

“Is she for the chop as well?”

“Well now, she's what you might call the full house,” the dwarf said. “If she'd been here, I don't doubt you'd have grabbed her and he'd have killed her. Leaving her alive's trouble indeed but killing her in cold blood…” He turned to the ghost boy. “This creature's right. You're one short of the number. Surprised the others let you take them.”

The elf ghost Wrath looked up at the dwarf and shrugged. “Dead's forever and nobody pays. Some stories need ending. Others might have twists and turns worth leaving in. When I die, the whole is ended. No geas. Except yours, old man.”

“Hmmm,” the dwarf muttered. “Do you expect me to kill Arie with my own hands then?”

“You did not when you had the chance before.”

“Eating's not my business,” the dwarf said, but he looked deep in thought. “Killin' neither.” He looked darkly at Teazle. “And now held to ransom, both of us, by this pipsqueak invention here. Death asks for life, for love.” He turned to Teazle again. “Why'd'you love her, boy? She's not your type.” He pointed at Zal's body. “Him was the one. Not you.”

Teazle looked down from his greater height, leaning on the swords. “That's my business. Pay me, or we're done here.”

The dwarf scowled even deeper. “And then what? You go rampaging until someone stops you in your petty vengeance?”

“It won't be petty,” Teazle reassured him.

“You must not leave me,” the boy said then to Teazle, his face serious. “My existence here in this plane is anathema, and anathema will be the end. Anathema is the cracking and soon nothing will hold.”

Teazle glanced at the dwarf. “Hence your geas, Mr. V? This is your duty, to ensure the survival of the worlds? Then I know you rightly. I want her,” he hesitated for a moment and then pointed across at Zal, “and him too.”

The dwarf sighed. “Very well. I grant your payments. Don't bloody ask me anything again, though?”

“Summon the King and Queen,” Teazle said, smiling without humour. He straightened and flipped both swords up into his hands. He put away the yellow blade and stood waiting.

The dwarf clicked his fingers three times, and two people appeared beside him. One was a tall elf with white-blond hair and a dog, the other a small, black human girl with messy dreadlocks. Both looked surprised. “Deal's good,” Mr. V said. He turned to the ghost boy. “Bless you on your way, lads.”

“Goodbye,” said the boy.

Teazle gave the dwarf one last, long look that promised much if this did not go well, and then stepped forward and cut through all the enchantment that held Wrath to that or any world.

There were no lights, or explosion or sound.

Wrath disappeared, and Teazle put the sword back in its baldric.

Mr. V looked up at Sassy and at Ilyatath. “I've got a favour to ask you,” he said to them both.

Behind them they heard a scrabble of claws and a yawning sound as Malachi rejoined the world of conscious things.

“Wha' did I miss?” he said, trying to get up.

“Nothing,” Teazle said, rubbing his chest as if easing a slight twinge and smiling at Mr. V.