Keeping It Real Read online

  “Someone’s following,” she said.

  “No doubt,” Dar agreed.

  “Dar,” she said as they began to jog downhill. “Do you know Zal?”

  “Not personally,” he replied. “Though I have watched him a long time.”

  Something in Dar’s voice made Lila hesitate. “You’re a fan?” she said, unable to believe her ears.

  “We are not so far apart, politically.”

  So, not exactly the kind of fan Lila was used to, screaming and knicker-throwing, but still. Fan. “Is he from Alfheim?”

  “Of course.” He snorted with what may have been a laugh.

  Their descent levelled off and Dar led her sloshing upstream through a narrow gully. She could see a high sandbank far ahead, pocked with the holes of swifts’ nests, although it wasn’t the season for them and the holes were empty. Another small way-hut stood atop the bank almost hidden in a drapery of vines. “Wait here,” Dar said. “I’ll go steal the things we need.”

  Lila stood up to her knees in cold flowing water and shivered with pleasure. Soft green leaves danced above and around her in the light breeze. She wondered what was going on with the agents back home, and how poor Jolene was going to manage when Zal failed to show up for Frisco. Her clock showed her that she had two hours left to get Zal there on time. No way. And she wondered if Malachi had found any more out about the peculiar recordings from the car back in Bay City. But it was a relief to only be able to wonder, and it occurred to her as she stood alone there that these few minutes, in which nobody knew where she was and couldn’t contact her, were a gift of freedom.

  Dar beckoned her silently from the top of the sandbank and she started forwards obediently. It was already over.

  Lila climbed to meet him and followed his lead into the depths of a vigorous holly thicket. There was a small hollow inside the bushes, covered in flat, brown leaves and dry. They sat there and ate furiously. Lila’s hunger was overpowering from the second she smelled the food and, even though it was diy rations that had to be chewed with a lot of water, they feasted.

  “No lembas jokes, if you please,” Dar said when he could swallow and not bite again immediately. “I have heard them all.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. Perfect,” Lila said with her mouth full. As she slowed down and recovered her senses from the delicious intensity of filling her stomach she realised how close they were, actually pressed shoulder to shoulder in the tiny place, knees bunched up, like kids hiding out. She glanced at Dar and found she didn’t hate him one bit any more, even if she tried. It made her smile. “Do you do this often?”

  “All the time,” Dar said dryly. “It is my continual misfortune to languish thus whilst dreaming of white-tile bathrooms and luxury king-size vibrating-massage beds and four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets and five-star room service.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I am.” He licked his fingers and swallowed and listened. Lila saw his ears move. The long, pointed tips free of his hair made micro fine adjustments in their position. It was rather comical, but she didn’t laugh. She realised that he was filtering some magical dimension she wasn’t aware of. But his humour had surprised her and she didn’t feel like laughing at him.

  “We have to go.” Dar slid out of the bush hideaway on his stomach and waited for her. “The ones who pursue us have tracker elementals working for them and it’s possible there’s nothing we can do to conceal you if there are metal elementals among them. We will have to keep running.”

  He paused and drew a small packet from a pocket inside his jerkin, shaking some dust from it onto his hand. Lila flinched, remembering that he had once overcome her that way, knocking her out with a word and a single breath that blew the dust in her face. This time he blew it more gently over the holly trees and across the path that led to the little hut. She heard him whispering elven syllables she couldn’t quite pick up.

  “That should slow them,” he said but he didn’t look happy. Lila avoided touching any of it and went the long way around to follow him uphill again as he kept to the contours, trying to place solid hillsides between them and those who followed.

  “What was that?”

  “Zoomenon dust,” he said. “Elementals dislike being removed from Zoomenon. They can only be run like pets by good elemental hunters. The dust is like catnip to them. They will not be persuaded to leave here until they have gathered it all back. The spell will tell me when that is done.”

  Like the animal spell in the car boot, Lila thought. She asked him about that kind of magic.

  “Such cats are fey agents,” Dar said, shrugging as though everyone must know that. “Or they are Thanatopic messengers.”

  “Forgive my magical dunceness,” Lila said, “but what about cats that change into rats, or mist?”

  “That could still be either. Unless it was a ghost or a spirit.”

  “No,” Lila said. “I don’t think so.” She remembered the animal spirit at Solomon’s Folly with a shudder. The cat in the car had been nothing like that. “Do elves have any affinity with Interstitial creatures as a rule?”

  “No,” Dar said. “But some demons do. Not any that you would wish to meet however. Why, have you seen one in Otopia?”

  Lila didn’t answer at first. She wasn’t sure how much she could really trust Dar, although she felt a bond with him now that made it too easy to talk to him, and his apparent candour made her want to tell him everything. She had to remind herself that he worked for a foreign power, and was no doubt highly trained in the art of faking sincerity. And so she told herself that, but it sounded a wrong chord in her heart which didn’t believe that Dar was lying. Her heart felt confident in its judgement, had done ever since the moment they had—well, what had happened?

  Lila was brought up short by the realisation that she didn’t have an explanation, in fact did not know what to call it or how to think of it. She had simply brushed it aside as irrelevant to the moment at hand. But now she had nothing to do but yomp along, watching Dar’s back, and it hit home just how far she was from what she knew in any direction. But on the bright side, her aching bones and sore muscles neither ached nor burned. When she concentrated, she couldn’t even feel a hint of pain where the medics had struggled to heal the junctions of metal and flesh mere days ago.

  Now, as well as stopping mentally and emotionally, she stopped in her physical tracks. Dar turned and looked back at her, questioningly.

  “Did you hear something?”

  “No,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Nothing.”

  He glanced at her with curiosity but didn’t ask what was on her mind. He waited.

  “How long would you wait?” she asked, turning the moment to test her heart and its judgements.

  “A long time,” he said. “Questions are always leading. So one never asks a question, if waiting will suffice, otherwise one gets the answer one expects, which is not generally the truth. What you want to say will reveal itself, if it is going to, when it should. You humans tend to think of it as some kind of superiority complex, I understand, when we keep our silence and give you our full attention. To an elf such a thing is a natural courtesy.”

  This was not the response Lila had been expecting. She felt conciliatory. “You must find humans most prying.”

  “It has been noted. But I think our curiosity levels are well matched. It is simply the case that we have different ways of dealing with it.” He wiped sweat from his face with the fabric back of one of the archery bracers which encased his forearms. “I am glad that you have stopped, as it happens, because we are about to step onto the foot of the true mountains which mark the border between Lyrien and Sathanor, and these are places where wild magic collects in great abundance. I wanted to warn you to be on your guard for its presence in whatever way you can. It would be very difficult for us if we were to become trapped in a Game, even a trivial one.”

  Lila’s high spirits sank somewhat. “I never saw the last one coming, an
d I was watching for it. Sort of. Anyway, I knew it was a risk. You lot always… I mean, you’re well known for catching humans in Games.” She stumbled over the end of the sentence in shame. Words that wouldn’t have seemed even slightly dubious a few days ago now made her sound like a galloping racist. Because that’s what she was. Or had been. She looked up, thinking she would see a flash of the real, haughty Dar now all right, but he only shrugged.

  “We are guilty of many foolish Games with Otopians, romantic gambles being only one. But do not say you are not pleased by it, or I think you will make yourself a liar.”

  That told me, Lila thought, and did not deny it.

  “Come,” he beckoned, looking back and glancing at the sky where the sun was going down. Shadows lengthened. “Night falls like stone at this time of year in Alfheim. We should find some shelter and rest soon. Some hours are not good to be abroad in this part of the country, and one of them is fast approaching.”

  “You make it sound extra spooky when you say it like that,” she grumbled gently, following him closely. “Why can’t you say, it’s getting dark, let’s take a break, and by the way the neighbourhood could use some work. That sounds much less imposing, you know?”

  “I…” Dar stopped. Lila felt the faintest prickle across her skin and a scent, like lemon, in her nostrils.

  “Oh,” she said, realising the sudden presence of wild aether. Then, suddenly, from a childhood moment she’d never recalled until now, “White rabbits, white rabbits, white rabbits…” She said it seven times.

  Saying the silly words broke the charm that she could feel forming between them, the one which Dar would have contracted for them both if he had answered her question. The air around them twinkled with tiny, firefly lights and she felt the prickling more strongly, almost as though she were being nettled. It swirled and she thought, for an instant, that it formed something like a face that pouted crossly into hers, but then it was gone, and the breeze became an ordinary breeze.

  “It worked,” Lila said with honest surprise, stunned. White rabbits never worked on anything. It was something you said on the first day of the month to ward off bad luck . , . she couldn’t imagine it really doing something.

  “Good,” Dar said, almost silently. He called her on with a nod and she concentrated on her step. The twilight had darkened, become blue. His skin had taken on the same hue, making him difficult to see. Around them the trees on this high ground had trunks that looked like pillars of ash as Alfheim’s moon rose. Its thin sickle shed barely any light at all. Dar became shadow, and then Lila switched on her night vision and stopped in total shock.

  Among the trees on the high hill, now restored to full detail and reprocessed by her Al-optics into realistic colour, she saw drifts of rainbow watercolours flowing across the landscape. Not like cloud, not like water, something of both, the transparent, delicate traces wound around objects, eddied and pooled. Sometimes they formed limb-like shapes and darted swiftly as fish, sometimes they diffused into thin air or fell in showers. They were everywhere. And then she looked at Dar and saw him encased in a blue and lilac and emerald radiance, clearly of the same material—his andalune body. It had a distinctive outline many arm lengths away from his body. She saw that he was holding it diffused and that its edges helped him navigate the land. He paused to look back, wondering what had stopped her this time, and with his intent to locate her she saw an indigo streak dive towards her almost as fast as an arrow. It brushed her torso, so lightly she couldn’t feel anything, and his gaze fixed on her at the same moment.

  “Hell’s bells,” she said to herself quietly. She’d never realised she could have seen magic just by shifting the sensitivity of her vision to different spectra. The wild aether followed Dar’s interest, clustering around the slender string of his regard. Now she began to see how it latched onto things. As he walked back towards her he trailed vast floating banners of it in his wake. Where it touched him it took on the colour of his andalune for a moment before furling softly away.

  “I can see it,” she said. “On the full electromag display. I can see aether. I think.”

  “I…”

  “Wait,” she said. “There’s a lot hanging around you.”

  “I know that,” he replied, whispering. “We should not talk. The safe place is not far from here.”

  Lila smiled. “I can see you.” A gout of sparkling pink seemed to leap forwards from her and pose just in front of his face. It looked as though it was waiting for him to reply. “Hey, d’you see that?”

  Dar shook his head and started away again, not looking back.

  Lila ignored his irritation and resumed the journey with a new lightness, recording as she went. This was so incredibly—well, she hated to say it, being a top spy with a mission, but—it was so cool! But then other thoughts occurred to her. Humans must have known about this—surely someone had tested it before? There had been years in which to scientifically address aether and progress was being made. But nobody had thought to tell her about it? She instantly tried to call Dr Williams to complain but, of course, there were no comms connections. The silence began to annoy her.

  She found that trees and patches of ground had their own magical signatures, that some plants were almost as actively involved in the wild magic as Dar was, that they had magical properties, clearly. She found a fungus that exuded a yellow vapour. She saw hidden animal dens by the gentle miasmas of green that surrounded them. It was a beautiful, unexpected delight. She didn’t turn around and look behind her until Dar led her up a steep and difficult path to a hidden door in an outcrop of rocks. Beyond him she could see this led into a shelter inside the hill above the woods. As she ducked under the ancient lintel and turned to take the handle and pull the door closed she glanced back at the forests.

  The lovely coloured washes of aether extended up into the sky, across the trees and the open ground. Alfheim under the slight moonlight was as lovely as in the day, but her attention to this beauty was quite lost as she caught sight of sharp-edged silhouettes moving quickly along the path that she and Dar had taken. They were four-limbed, slender, with long tails like whips and strange heavy heads shaped like axe blades which they swung side to side in the streams of wild magic. They had no eyes or ears. They followed in her tracks with the unerring single-mindedness of stalking predators. Where they left dark wakes that briefly obliterated even the trunks of the palest trees. She had the distinct impression they were filter feeding off the aether, tasting their way through it.

  Dar pulled her sharply backwards and closed the door. She heard bolts slide home and then his breathing, elevated from the running, relaxing now. It was utterly dark inside the shelter. She had to switch to thermal imaging. Dar stood easily close to her, taking the quivers off his shoulders.

  She told him what she’d seen in a rush, breathless herself, “What was that?”

  “Saaqaa,” Dar said, setting the quivers down in a niche beside the door, his bow next to them. “Night Prowlers. They were once hounds of the shadow elves but they have become feral in the last centuries. Now they cannot be tamed. They eat flesh, but also some kinds of magic. The andalune kind in particular. Elves per se are not at the top of the food chain in Alfheim. I told you there were hours of danger. This is one. The first two of the sickle moon. After that, they will still be there, but their power will be reduced until moonset. Then it waxes again and we must hide until dawn. They are, like their masters, nocturnal.”

  “And that door will stop them?” She thought that, maybe, if the door stopped the Saaqaa then the Saaqaa might stop the elves on their trail. It seemed too much to hope for.

  He tested the door and leant on it for a moment. “Any barrier of wood or earth or spelled natural fabric with an elemental charge of those types. They will not cross through those materials, but they will transect other substances. Not metal of course. They are not properly material.”

  Transect! She didn’t like the sound of that. “Is there anything else I should kno
w?”

  “Many things.” She heard the scrape of some part of Dar’s body on the wall. She could see him perfectly well from the heat he was emitting, and he looked tired. His body sagged and he made himself stand upright when he clearly wanted nothing but to stop. “Come with me. There is a room in this warren where we can both sleep. And water is there. And food, I hope.”

  The tunnel was quickly made but sturdy. Lila got the impression it had been dug in a great rush, and then fortified later in stages. There were no niceties about it. Rough beams supported its narrow roof and the relatively welcoming width of its mouth soon became the height and narrowness of an average elf, which was just about the same size as she was, fortunately. “Is this some kind of hunting lodge?”

  Dar snorted, “Hardly. No respectable elf would be seen dead in a lodge as rough as this one. This is a Night Shelter, an emergency post built by the light elves for when they are carelessly stranded in the wild at night. Many are scattered across these regions because of the Saaqaa. Our Daga pursuers will be in one, unless they have elected to travel under cloak and risk being hunted by the Prowlers. They are three, possibly including a necromancer I believe, so they may think it worth the risk.”

  “I didn’t think elves trafficked in the dark arts.”

  “Needs must,” Dar said, his normally fluid body stiffening. He turned suddenly and vanished. Lila saw from the faintest of temperature differences that the tunnel ended in four chambers and that he had gone through a door. She moved to watch him and saw, with a frown, that he walked directly to one of many niches, the only one which contained a lantern. He lit it deftly, shielding his eyes as he did so, then put it back. She saw blinding white, then changed back to ordinary sight and the dazzle became a soft glow.

  “You’re nocturnal… you’re one of the shadow elves,” she said wonderingly, pleased with herself, bubbling with excitement.