Zal's childhood was not a happy one.

He rarely considered it these days but it snapped to the front of his mind with the clarity of a fully digitised recording that you could get off an Otopian Berrycam. He was rather amused to find that his brain considered itself sufficiently near extinction to warrant a quick review, and slightly more sobered to notice that this was the edited highlights version and not the director's cut.

The only physical sensations he had were the grip of his hand in Mr. Head's much larger, grittier hand and the greyish void of the Void—which was the universal experience everyone produced when their senses continually searched for something and came up with nothing. In the absence of all stimulation and without any knowledge when the nothingness would end, it was good to have an internal entertainment system willing to do some overtime. He didn't miss the irony of himself clinging to Mr. Head as a child to a parent, hoping to be led out of trouble. He didn't mind it. Elves had no ability to engage with the Void, if that was a phrase that even made sense. Other beings did, and maybe Mr. Head was one of them. It was the only hope of survival, and so Zal was quite happy to go with it. In the meantime, the showreels were spinning and he was still full enough of breath that he wasn't suffering.

With the speed of light, his memories played out.

Due to his mother's constant need to avoid being poisoned by members of the High Light Hegemony she moved around a great deal between safe places when Zal was a baby. After his first five years he was handed to the care of an aunt who lived in the most distant, wild, and remote parts of the Tiger Isles off the coast of Verivetsay where even bold sailors rarely dared the ferocious reefs and deadly tidal flows. The voyage there took place in a floating ship that rode the air above the waves. Zal remembered his mother at the helm, her robes flying in the wind and hair whipping around like snakes of gold. Her pearly andalune body covered the entire vessel and sustained its flight as the winds blew it over the whitecaps. She was singing, and her words directed the wind as her voice lent it strength. There was no crew to tell of their voyage. It was the last time they were alone together. He sang with her and played his drum and she directed the little drum to move the oars that ranked the sides of the ship. Invisible galley slaves heaved the blades of shining oak through the spray-drenched air at the tap of Suha's fingers, and around their masts birds of the ocean and the land circled together. They had both been laughing, wild, without a care.

His first name gave away the cause for his exile: Suhanathir, Half Light. His mother had discarded the offers of noble elves of the line and taken off to the Nightside to find herself a shadowkin mate. At the time this was the equivalent of finding an animal mate to the Dayside elves but Tanquona Taliesetra did not have a moderate bone in her body. She acted directly on what she loathed, determined to correct stupidity where she found it, and nothing was more stupid than the vicious racism of the Dayside, in her view. She was one of the most powerful sorcerer priestesses of the line and had no intentions of doing anything reproductively that wasn't of benefit in demonstrating that the future of the elven peoples lay in uniting and not in their lengthy and bitter cold war. At the time her insistence on an evolutionary history for the elves (something she had picked up from Otopian study), rather than the notion they had sprung from an avatar of godhood speaking directly to the plants and creatures to unite their powers and bring forth a supreme form, was heresy. Also, she had a theory about power that needed testing—that crossbreeds would be better aetheric adepts and, Zal suspected, she had had distant visions of a united race brought together by her daring activities. Proof of spirit, proof of love. She was a romantic.

But although Zal was half dark, his half-light side was respected by the ‘kin and they didn't try to do anything other than put him far from polite society.

Zal was well aware of it all and tired of it by the time his aunt, Mysindrina, took over his care. She was also an exile. Where her sister Tanquo had been born with immense magical talents that were too valuable to let out of sight, Sindri had no aetheric power whatsoever in a race for whom such a thing was unheard of. Well, it was unheard of because they hushed it up, as Zal discovered when he made his home with Sindri and eleven others, who were all the same or worse. The blood of the dynastic families had suffered from voluntary eugenics. It threw up individuals of enormous power who were consumed by their own energies before middle age, and also individuals with peculiar weaknesses. The powerful rose to the top, because the Light worshipped power; for a bunch of creationists they had no trouble placing Survival of the Fittest as their watchword. Suha hated them all.

Sindri was slow, weak, and her andalune body was as delicate as gossamer and easily disrupted. Ordinary elven life was too stressful for her with its constant melding of one andalune flow and another; it would have torn her spirit apart. She wasn't the only one there. Around her others that Tanquo sent gathered themselves: the Hegemony's shameful runts without power or skill, barely able to survive their own world. Only among them Zal stood out as vital and strong, but because of his shadow parent he was without question one of them and they were his family and the windswept islands became their home.

It was because of them that Zal learned early how to completely control his aetheric self, to do no harm, and to heal if needed without destroying the other.

There was enough incident in those times to fill an easy hour of whole-life-before-you moments, but one stood out.

Between two of the islands, not more than ten metres apart shore to shore, lay a vicious strait that was as deep as it was narrow and through which the tides raced at furious rates. The islands themselves faced one another cliff to cliff and at some time in the past a rope bridge had been put across but in recent years it had rotted and fallen away. They were working on a new one. After Tanquo had made a visit that year and raised two pillars of stone on either side to act as anchors they had spent months developing cables using what materials they could find in the forested larger islands. Of course she could have raised a bridge, or even caused the islands to join together, but nobody wanted her to, not even Suha. It was a challenge they wanted to be equal to themselves. As soon as it was first talked about everyone's eyes lit up as they saw that here at last was something difficult that they had a chance of doing without outside help. In their minds the bridge already swayed, majestic and graceful, creaking and moving with the weather, secure under their hands and feet with the comforting texture of the wood and fibres that those hands and feet had crafted lovingly from the giving forest; a true elven bridge.

They spent many hours praying. Their prayers were movements. Walking, gathering, beating long branches and vines into fibre, knotting, twisting, carrying new fallen trees, swinging the adze to shape wood into planks. Their lives became the bridge. This is what Zal remembered. Long months and days of the dream of the bridge, the quiet, the single purpose, the single mind, the emptiness and stillness as if the world had stopped and was waiting for them and would wait forever if needs be. They forgot their own names. When work was done and night fell they sang and played their instruments together, letting the music rise out of them in its own form. Their happiness built the bridge and when it was done they all stood on it at once, without fear, over the hurtling torrents of water far below.

Zal remembered the Bridge of Creation, where he was made, that moment with all of them there, looking both ways, safe in their own making. They held hands, a bridge on a bridge, from side to side of the narrow way, and they had a foot on both islands.

It was not even an elven bridge, as they had dreamed. It was too rough and ugly for that with its clumpy ropes and warped boards. It was their own.

Nobody spoke. There was no need to. They were where they belonged.

Over the years that followed many of the friends died on the Islands, including Sindri, their fragile defences weathered away by time. An elf was an aetheric being. Without a strong andalune the body ran dry quickly on the meagre energies of food and drink and breath alone. It wore out. They were old when they died, though some were younger than Suha. With each one that departed the abilities of them all to survive, their will and their energy, grew weaker.

Their passing broke his heart and one night, sitting over yet another body in yet another Silent Hut, he felt an inner voice speak to him and tell him to get up and go. As he packed his few belongings he had no idea where until he stopped outside Sindri's old hut for a moment of parting and then he knew, just as if she had spoken, that it was time to find his father. He closed the door of his own hut and fixed it securely with a twig, then called his mother's name to the wind, because without her there was no way off the Islands.

But her ship did not return. By dawn the ocean and the sky were as empty as a dry skull.

The five strongest who remained found him sitting on the shore as the sun rose, looking out to sea.

“I will stay,” Suha said, knowing the truth of the white clouds and blue sky. She would never come. “You need me.”

“You will go,” they said. “We will find a way.” And then, without a pause, they all looked at the bridge.

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” they said and left him there on the shore. They cut down the bridge and made its planks and ropes into a raft with a tatty sail of canvas sacks. A boat would be destroyed but his vessel was draftless. A few pushes and shoves with a tough pole put it safely over the corals. He sang Tanquo's song to the wind.

Zal remembered the bright flag fluttering day and night, night and day, snapping in the breezes with the rhythm of the wind, its patchwork colours valiant against the vacant horizon, a black peace against the shocking brilliance of the stars. They had clothed the sky for him.

Suha sang for days and at night drifted, his father's name a mantra he repeated until he slept—Sharadar Zanhaklion.

He came ashore without the raft. He woke half buried in sand. It was dark. He was sick with salt and rubbed raw by the sea. It was a moonless night, clouded, and the place was humid and thick with the sound of insects and frogs. He lay awhile, letting his spirit find the spirit of the place, connect with it, and use it to help him purge the ocean from his body. As he did so a silence came over part of the night.

The silence moved like a snake in the grass. It flowed towards him in a strip like a new river. Suha felt the small animals leaving as the raw aether moved in vaporous charm through the dark towards him. The sounds of nature died away, leaving a vast, demanding silence like an exclamation mark. Along the path of magic something trod towards him, its feet placed with exquisite sensitivity and care, making no disturbance. He felt it only as a beat inside his own andalune, a scenting curious, hungry presence, a mind listening, hearing him as he heard it. In that second he knew for certain it did not follow the trail of raw aether, it laid the trail before itself as a hunter sends his best dog ahead to scent out the prey.

Zal remembered the taste of salt and grit, the cold fear of the stalking thing taking over his brief gratitude for being alive. Thinking how dark it was—he couldn't see his hands.

Suha tried to move away but the line of aether followed him, unerringly, and behind it came the stealthy and near silent tramp. He tried harder, stumbling through an unknown, scrubby landscape. It came on closer, not too fast. It had time. There was a steady confidence to it that made him weary as it made him try ever more risky moves to get away.

He fell into gullies. He twisted his ankles among loose rocks. He tried to go faster. There were moments it seemed to have gone, but the silence didn't stop, not once. And then the line of aether, and then the footfalls coming. His fear grew, his anger, his rage…but in time they wore him out and finally, as he crawled on hands and skinned knees, there came a moment when he found he had stopped. He sat down and accepted that there was no escape.

Zal remembered lying curled up in mud trying to think of a solution, some trick of magic or power he could use—but he'd been brought up far from the skilled sorcerers of the world. His sum total of aetheric knowledge lay in how to light fires, put out fires, conjure water to rise from the ground, and heal by laying on of hands, as long as nobody was seriously hurt. None of his family had been able to demonstrate more, and besides, he scorned the power. He wanted to be like his brothers and sisters. He remembered the touch of the raw aether—a vapour full of promise that made him feel more alive than ever. He felt the tread grow strong in the ground and then there was a smell like thunderstorm air and a faint animal musk. He felt a large creature very close. The feel of its hot breath against his skin. Stink of old meat.

He remembered a voice smiling as it said, “I heard you,” full of amusement and a slight uncertainty. “Get back, back, back Teledon.” There was the sound of a light smack and the big creature stepped away and was replaced by someone with an andalune that felt like vibrant cold water running and the shock of cold air on a winter morning.

That was the first meeting with his father and the Saaqaa who was his charge and tracker.

Suhanathir went with his father back to the Night Land, far from the reach of the Alfheim he knew, into an even older region, where the monuments to dead gods were five times the age of any mark that the Light had to offer and where there was no writing, only pictograms, and everyone remembered the history of the world, yes, even as far back as the Blind Aeon. That had come after the Winnowing, an event they knew only the name of, and before that they did not remember anything at all.

Flashes from that time were many in Zal's sudden picture show.

The huge saurian Saaqaa, twice the height of any elf, gathered in their tented village at dawn, their violet, blue, and grey hides as prettily patterned as tigers and jaguars. Families of them asleep in piles in their half caverns, snoring the day away, tails curled around one another. Teledon giving him a ceremonial armband, made out of fallen feathers from a bird of paradise that were picked for their feel and not their colour…holding the delicate thing on one thick, clawed finger, his ugly, eyeless hammerhead facing off to the side and moving, always moving, to keep Suha in focus. Saaqaa were legendary monsters. Things. He never forgot the second he learned that they were people.

Deep night. Never light in any home. Fires during daylight only, for cooking or making. A life of hunting and much lying around in the various layers of the forest; floor, median zone, and canopy. Sleeping the midday away. Map reading the stars. Finding a second family in his father's house. Forgetting he didn't look like everyone else.

His father trained his aetheric abilities, mostly in deep forest retreat. Zal remembered sitting in natural pools of raw aether until his butt ached and his knees hurt and his patience was long gone, waiting for the revelation of the true nature of aether that Shar insisted was the only necessary knowledge for any elf. He remembered realising it one day and then going back and asking Shar if that was it; “Everything is the same,” he said. “Every being is the same in eternal nature, in aether, but they're like crystal, and you can only be one facet at a time, outwardly, but really, you're the whole thing. And everything is like that. And the conscious things are more polished and definite, and the unconscious things are…like rough stones. And everyone is a facet of a much much bigger jewel…”

“Very wordy,” Shar said, nodding.

“Well, couldn't you just have told me?”

“Nobody can tell anybody anything,” Shar said, his hugely elongated and slanted eyes with their white inner membranes closed against the light looking ghostly and supernatural. “But everybody can find the truth. So, there's no need.”

Suha rolled his small, wide open eyes.

He met Dar there. They spent years alone together, living in shelters built each night anew, running in the Night Land.

There followed many years of which nothing stood out exactly until Demonia. None of the long times of planning and plotting he and Dar and others had made, all for the overthrow of the Light. This was not to occur by outward forces, but by inward revolution. The White Flower would be a group of elves who were distinguished by their actions. They would not take up the ways of the enemy. Years of training. Years to creep forward with the plan, infiltrating.

He recalled instead the musical instants where, in free time, he renewed his passion for singing.

Suha joined the Jayon Daga after many trials. Meanwhile the hidden business of the White Flower crept on. Finally he sickened of waiting and began to doubt his vision. He already felt old and weary by the time he entered Demonia, weary enough to do or die. Travelling there was an attempt he felt he had to make, to prove that hard-won obvious insight about everything sharing a common centre correct. If all beings were only a facet of themselves then the other parts could be manifest, and if they were then there would be no more point in the divisions that so plagued his world.

Zal recalled his father's face on being told of Suha's great plan and its reasoning, the day before his departure: Shar looked resigned and disappointed.

“It will not change anything,” Shar said, then hesitated.

“I am not trying to correct the past,” Suha protested, believing it until he heard it when he knew he was lying. “I am not just taking up where mother left off.” Twice.

Shar seemed to reach an inner conclusion. “If it is your desire, then I wish you well,” he said, which was all he ever said. And then he did something he never did; he smiled and rolled his eyes, just like Suha, because he didn't understand and thought the plan was crazy, but he didn't mind.

That made Zal smile, falling as he was through the Void to uncertain death holding onto Mr. Head's sandy hand.

He barely survived Demonia. He remembered waking up in a canal in Bathshebat, coughing lagoon water and clinging to a lump of floating rubbish as fifteen imps jumped up and down gleefully on top of him, fighting each other with unalloyed savagery for the privilege of being the next in line to his ear and shoulder. The floating rubbish turned out to be the dead body of a demon with whom he had a vague recollection of fighting on the bridge above. He pushed it down in the shallow water, pressing it into the mud as he stood on it and managed to get his fingers over the lip of the bank. The imps swarmed up and down his arms, chattering.

“He's mine! I was here first! No good you being here. He's a moronic idealist who wants to save the world. That's MY speciality!”

“No no no, he's a crazed pseudoscientist with visions of grandeur and that's what I do best. I know all the best works of misinterpreted data, statistical analysis, and wishful thinking in the entire library, and that's more than you do, you son-of-a-monk!”

“Both of you are wittering fools! His biggest problem is his idolisation of his mother and the longing to become a worthwhile son who wins her approval. Oi, as if you had an inkling of the trouble in this boy's poor weary heart! See how his longing to conclude that dear relationship has strangled every impulse he ever had to be himself! He's a lost hero whose cause is his own redemption and I am the imp of lost causes so get off…Oof! That's my spot!”

“Gah! You pithering toadfleas! He's got a persecution complex a mile wide, any fool can feel it. It radiates out of him like the insincerity of an insurance salesman's smile. Why else would he come here, knowing we would only torture him to death? He does it to himself because he feels he deserves punishment for his failure to save the world. Why, it almost reminds me of that stupid human…the one with the wood. They never learn.”

“Hey! He was mine! The point is, I saw him FIRST.”

“I didn't say not, did I? Anyway, I was right there second in line on that one and in this case it's my show, so back off dictator-maker!”

Amid the yelling in tiny voices Zal heard a soft, strange laugh and, in spite of the imp on his head, clinging to the mat of his hair, looked up. A girl with a wolf's head was crouched near his hands on the bank. Her jaws were agape, panting slightly in the dawn heat of a new day, her pink tongue like a petal over the lower incisors. She held out her hand to him and her clawed fingers beckoned him to take hold. He got the impression she was smiling.

The imps shrieked and scolded at her and made pretend moves to attack. She ignored them completely.

“I am Adai,” she said in a gruff, growling voice. “Come, pilgrim. Take my hand. Be not afraid that you near Hell's gate.” She paused and her grin widened to laughter. “You are in the land of the free now, where the scum also rises.”

He lay at her feet, vomiting pondweed while the imps screamed at her until she savaged one to death with a snap of her jaws.

The demons were worried he would die of his wounds so they let him accelerate Hell by taking him to a Hoodoo woman who gave him a dream vision; she sent his spirit into a parallel reality where he was more able, more lucky, better at being everything he had his heart set on.

Zal agreed because he thought accelerate meant it would soon be over.

He was in the alternate world for over a hundred and eighty years.

After the first month he reckoned they had stranded him for their own amusement. After the first year he gave up on getting out. He was a passenger inside his own head, a mute observer of his better self. He could only watch and listen as Suhanathir Taliesetra returned to the Lightside world and set out to gain power in Alfheim by approved methods, always intending, once he had it, to turn that power towards the greater good.

Zal in the Void remembered the Hoodoo woman. She was an ancient creation of driftwood tied together with ropes of seagrass, cackling, “I send him where all him dream come true!”

And so they had. Suhanathir Taliesetra rose to the top of the Alfheim tree and became High Lord, over all clans and all people of the Lightside. Along the way he didn't have to compromise too many principles, after all, when he had to lie to pretend to support the structure then it was getting him where he had to be, dragging key people with him. The details were not important in those years. The White Flower was a rose that would bloom late.

When it did, his reforms required the exile or removal of his opponents. He had thought surely they would all come to his way of thinking. It was so logical and, moreover, it was true. He applied magical persuasions in the manner he had learned from his peers: aetheric seduction of the mind was always used to bring in stray sheep to the fold. It would be better for them to live free and in harmony, so the mild deception did not matter. It simply speeded the inevitable.

But to his increasing disbelief there were always dissenters, the ones who wanted to return to the strong hierarchy of the High Light. To maintain the effects of his changes to the social laws governing the realm he was thus forced to keep that policed structure which many of his companions viewed as the source of all the trouble. So he compromised for authority's sake. He maintained the hierarchy to keep himself in charge. The Flower began to criticise him-where was his professed free land? He showed them, sadly realising its truth, how total freedom and equality would only give rise to another order because the elves only understood order. They wanted it. There was no limitation for anyone who wished to do as they will, but to protect what freedom there was it was clear that he must stay in control of what forces remained, as benefactor of course, as good spirit of justice. Better that they who wanted no order, except the natural friendliness of one spirit to another, be in charge.

A civil war fomented.

He prevented it by a quiet campaign of assassinations and bribes. Every day found him signing warrants, issuing exile commands, begging for a recant from someone who spoke out against his lunatic policies of open borders and the sharing of all Light lands and wealth with the shadowkin and even beyond, to Faery and to the hated and feared realm of the Demons.

As the shadowkin began to spread into the Lightside there began to be open fighting between the races. To suppress it Suha sent soldiers to police the region. He had to grow his army to keep the peace. He redistributed ancient stolen wealth and was accused of colluding with shadow leaders to strip the light of all its value—of grand treason, and corruption. He was taken to trial and further charged with crimes against nature when some of the Jayon Daga, his secret service, turned on him and told stories of the executions they had committed in his name.

Suhanathir sat in his prison cell, baffled by the stupidity that was all around him, pressing him down, which would surely now find a way to kill him and move on to a fresh field of bigotry and slaughter, incensed by the removal of so much money and land, by the threat of the removal of more. Stupid people. He wondered how he had got there, even at the same moment he could see the path so clearly and every stone upon it was a good intention, a hard moral decision, a righteous way. How could it be that you might offer a perfect way to the people, and they would throw it aside in favour of the momentary gratifications of their own petty interests? He had had no life of his own for the last forty years. It had all been consumed by the endless struggle to survive politically. The costs had seemed worth it for the goal. But the goal was lost, and suddenly it was clear that those costs could not be repaid in any kind. They were outstanding debts upon his soul. So many.

Zal remembered his imprisonment in Suhanathir's world crystallised in that one moment in the cell. So much struggle, Suha thought, lying down to sleep because he had nothing else to do. Suha dreamed of a coloured flag, flying against blue skies, and tears fell in his sleep.

Zal, always awake for a hundred and eighty years, missing nothing, stared at Suha with hatred and pity and wished him dead.

At that moment the dream fell apart. He found himself looking at the Hoodoo woman, lying drunk and comatose on white rum and blood. She snored like a bull elephant, which was strange for someone whose nose was only a dark hole in a rotting piece of wood. Adai took his hand and helped him to his feet. His body was as wounded and sore as he had left it eighteen decades ago.

Three minutes had passed in Demonia.

“Come,” said Adai in her growl, giving him no time to feel any of the joys of self-control again. “We must get you to Madame quickly.” She hauled him to his feet, her claws scratching his skin painfully as she pulled him with her down long streets and narrow ways where healthy, vibrant demons hooted and screeched at him and tried to rip his andalune free of his body.

At Madame Des Loupes's house they were granted audience immediately. She came out of her home to the street to meet them and looked down at him from one black eye. “Would you choose reality over the dream?”

“Always,” he croaked, leaning on Adai's side, the cluster of demons around them becoming a crowd as they sensed the brimming of Madame's power and saw that its focus was the unheard-of being—an elf. He wondered why they all rushed back suddenly to the limits of the little square as he staggered in the light on his unfamiliar legs and felt Adai at his back. Her hands had become iron on his arms, holding him up and still. His eyes watered so he could hardly see.

“Then be free,” said Madame kindly, and stabbed him in the forehead with her huge, black beak, splitting his skull.

Zal remembered that all right. It had hurt like nothing in the universe. She spoke into his eye chakra, the energy centre of all he perceived. “Let there be light.”

Much later, in another agony in another region of Demonia, he remembered becoming demon, his wings unfolding and setting his clothes on fire. Everything hurt a lot in those days. He cried like a little kid most nights, but that was his secret. And one day he was walking down the street, a full and respected member of demon society, imp-free, and heard Sorcha singing. He joined in and started to follow her. All day he followed her, harmonising on her tunes until she finally couldn't keep up her cold indifference trick and turned around.

“Are you like my shadow or something?” she snapped, melodious even in that.

“I'm your brother,” he sang, as though in an opera, more sure he was right about this than he had been about anything.

She laughed instantly, enormously, enough to double over and nearly fall on the floor. The demons with her looked at him with suspicion and nervousness and envy. Sorcha wiped tears of flame from her eyes and straightened up, sashayed across to him, and stared him in the face, opening her big, full, red lips.

She looked. And then she sang back, “You are, you are, you are!” on a rising major chord. And continued singing in light operatic verse,

“How very dear peculiar, I wish you were my junior,
but sadly this effluvia of flame dictates a ru-li-er…
of matters rather magical and terrible and tragical,
I must admit you're logical and right and true and ad-mra-ble…”

She paused for breath and stood back, looking him up and down.

“Your visage most inimical, your nature but a principle,

you're sadly near-invincible, your ears are truly wince-able,

but you're contemptible and sensible and all that you should be.

As brother dear I'll take you then, though sad my heart to know that when

I want to slake a thirst for elf I'll be hunting them all by myself.”

They stood facing each other, the entire street staring at them. A light jalopy fell out of the sky as its drivers forgot to keep windtalking in astonishment.

Sorcha grabbed hold of him and kissed him passionately on the mouth with a huge, audible-from-Mars kind of “Mwa!” at the end. She turned to the audience and sang,

“Be glad it's only me that has to suffer with the sibling curse,
for I can tell you all at once that at kissing he is not the worst!”

Then she added,

“Sons of the trees were once my favourite toys,
but now I charge each one of you to look out for Pinocchio-boy.
And if you listen not to me the fire of unrequited love shall burn
each and every one of you till you're done to a turn!”

She made the flourishing sign of a live curse with one red-taloned hand and the mark flared in the air before her. Then she turned to Suha and spoke normally, “So, bro, what's you called at home?” 

“Zal,” Zal said.

“Dinner's at six. Get lost, I need to hang with my girls and call everyone in existence to tell them I was forced to sing a fucking improvised aria by a hippie tree-hugger.” She pointed. “House is that way. They'll be expecting you by the time you find it.”

He remembered standing in the dark room at Solomon's Folly, full of a wretched desire to annoy the new bodyguard, to warn them that he wouldn't be followed, to push them out of the danger zone as the people who wanted him dead closed in. He remembered singing “Blame It On the Sun,” channelling Stevie Wonder's voice and then laying eyes for the first time on Lila Amanda Black as she came into his room, surrounded by huge magnetic fields that weren't all to do with her machinery. He remembered stopping dead, his throat shut, able to see her before she noticed him. She was close enough to reach out and touch and he wanted to kiss her so much that if she had only come one step closer, he would have.

Of course, she would have killed him. But it would have been okay.

It was a fitting final moment, Zal thought as he lost even the sense of Mr. Head's hand. He fervently wished Lila would be okay.

And then he heard a woman's voice singing, clear and true and light.

I saw three ships come sailing in…

“Heave to, my lads!” called a boy's voice from above him in the vast grey. “Look there, lubbers in the water! Fetch the grapples and nets and make haste! Turnabout turnabout, man overboard!”

A ship's bell clanged, mournful and true.

He heard the wash of the sea and felt the rise and fall of waves.

“What have we here?” said the woman's voice and he was suddenly being hauled up the side of a vast ironclad vessel that was as real and solid as true material but cold and weightless too. A ghost ship.

He landed on its deck shivering, his andalune half frozen by its gelid aether.

“What have we here?” echoed the boy, a coffee-coloured ten-year-old dressed in an outsize adult's navy uniform, adjusting his tricorne admiral's hat. His bare feet poked out beneath tattered blue trousers and a sword was fixed askew to his waist by a white leather belt wrapped around three times. It threatened to trip him up but he kept a firm grip on the hilt.

“Oh this is Half,” said the woman's voice, moving closer through the thick fog that shrouded them all. “But who is his companion?”

Zal looked up into the unknowable face of Abida Ereba and said, “This is my research assistant, Mr. Head.” He gave what he hoped was a winning smile.