Going Under Read online

  Wild aether.

  There was a powerful conjunction looming here and the chance of a game. If only Lila had any sense at all for magic. But she was human, and she had none. The only reason she could detect the aether at all was through Tath; his senses on loan to hers. But if nothing else demons were creatures of their word, she knew this for a fact. Find some information and in exchange she would be able to get her hands on another piece of technology. This path seemed easier than trying to beat Dr. Williams, her boss, and others at the Agency to information that they didn’t want exposed. She knew they held more pieces of the puzzle, but they also possessed systems that could directly contact and control pieces of her AI, and she’d do anything to avoid giving them more opportunities to use them. The wish she barely dared acknowledge to herself, which consumed all her energy, was that she could find a way to ensure her freedom from outside interference. She was not going to be the Agency’s pet robot.

  Lila looked at Madame but the bird eyes showed no trace of human emotions and the beak remained expressionless, of course. On her shoulder Thingamajig twitched and muttered a warning, making a warding sign with his free hand. Tath said, If there is a game bigger than the one she speaks of in the offing, the I would be less than hasty to agree to it if were you.

  Lila had to admit he was right. Madame was surely deadly and her schemes potentially far more cunning than anything she herself was going to think up, but she had no illusions that she was able to outsmart the demon. Game or no game, it was the only way she was going to get what she wanted.

  She reached out and took the pebble. It was warm and felt so much like flesh that she almost dropped it straight away.

  “Put it in your pocket,” advised the demon. “A pocket you do not much use.”

  Lila found a small zip-up on her combat vest. She tried not to rush pushing the eye into it so she didn’t offend the demon, but her nerves jangled with the urge to get its unctuous touch off her as fast as possible. At last the pocket was closed, the shaking of her fingers concealed as she pressed them hard against it.

  “Good,” Madame said conclusively.

  Lila nodded and ignored the offer of an open door from the footmen. She walked to the open balcony and stepped over the rail, igniting her jet boots as she started to fall. Beneath her the warren of the Souk spread itself flat under the heat of the midday sky. She had no desire to set foot in it again so soon. Flight was easier and, she thought with a grim smile, more fitting for someone who had agreed to become one of the crows.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lila returned to their lodgings at the Ahriman house, dragging her feet as she considered whether or not doing a deal with Madame was a wise thing. Probably it was not. But she told herself she had no other leads and squashed the thought that kept springing up so eagerly—that two could tango, and if the Agency wanted to use spyware and controlware on her, she might as well try to use her own technological spells on them. Only the grim boredom of entering some titfor-tat security contest stalled her from trying it. That and a fear of finding information she’d rather not know right now, about herself, and Zal, and Doctor Williams, whose rather magnificent coup d’etat on the Agency’s last director was disturbingly well planned and executed for a nice little old lady psychologist.

  She was not surprised to discover Zal and Teazle were both gone. Once conscious they rarely wasted time loitering when they could be doing something suicidal or artistic. Her human self, she found to her dismay, reacted prissily and with uptight negativity in the face of most of their suggestions for recreational fun. She felt an overbearing urge to remind them that they had important business to attend to; music for Zal and intrigue for Teazle… they should be getting serious and working, not loafing around all the time while their respective Romes sizzled merrily away with the smell of carbonized career. She hated that part of herself, so it was a good thing they weren’t here or she’d probably have said something and given them one more reason to notice she was supremely mentally and emotionally unsuited for demonic life, and probably nowhere near as fun or attractive as they had been duped into thinking so far. And wasn’t that twist of self-hatred just the peach on the cake? She was grim as she looked up and found they weren’t there. And relieved.

  In their place she was surprised to see the elegant figure of Malachi reclining and reading his personal organiser as he sipped a cup of tea. The black faery got up as soon as he saw her and set the cup down without a sound. His charcoal grey suit gave him a dashingly sinister air and his amber eyes glowed fiercely; a feature she had long grown used to. She barely noticed them, looking instead at the huge wings that were just visible behind him, like watercolours painted on the air. They were slightly ragged and butterfly shaped, veined with black, and moved in their own clouds of anthracite dust. The dust sparkled and tumbled and gave the appearance of being capricious—it whirled in little eddies and seemed not to want to settle on anything. Not for the first time Lila wondered exactly what properties it had and how powerful it could be in Otopia. She had felt more confident around him before Tath, when she couldn’t see this aspect of him. There was a lot she didn’t know about the faeries.

  You know absolutely nothing, Tath corrected her with amiable pedantry. And if more people who attempt to deal with the fey assumed that from the outset, the better it would be. Even the elves, who have vast lorehouses full of collected faery knowledge, do not presume to know them.

  They’re old then? Lila asked him silently, at the same time as she moved forward with a grin on her face to give Malachi a hug. She was hoping that Tath would have to admit there was somebody older and smarter than the elves. Not because it mattered to her if there was or not, but because it would make him annoyed and for reasons she didn’t like to speculate on too much, his being annoyed by her in small niggly ways made her happy.

  Old, new, it makes no difference, the elf replied with genuine unease, giving Lila a sensation like her heart being lifted and lowered a millimetre—his equivalent of a shrug.

  She frowned, unable to help it, both from the dismay of his not rising to the bait and also because she had learned that Tath’s magical instincts were spot on. The idea of his being discomfited by the fey, including Malachi, who was her friend, annoyed and disquieted her. Tath could sense these feelings in her, but instead of notching himself another victory in their little contest he stayed quiet. That made her feel even more peculiar, since he never missed an opportunity to score points.

  “Something the matter?” Malachi asked, withdrawing gracefully from the hug and adjusting the lie of his sleeve.

  “No,” Lila said. “Just one of those days in the making, you know, where you set out with a simple objective and then everything gets so complicated before lunchtime you wish you hadn’t started. What’re you doing here?”

  “Can’t a friend come to visit without a reason?” Malachi recovered his teacup and remained standing, looking around the place with interest. He was a picture of elegant distraction though Lila was not fooled. Malachi wouldn’t appear without a good reason. “Where are the hubbies?”

  “If you use that word again, I will kill you,” Lila said. “I have no idea. And seeing as it is still my honeymoon, technically speaking, I would have thought you’d call ahead instead of just appearing godmother-style in my bedroom.”

  Malachi gave her a long, level look and then put the cup down. His voice became serious—as serious as it ever got. A few motes of dust scattered from his wings to the floor. “There’s a lot of what you might call Trouble at the Mill, since we started our gang. The Otopians don’t much care for the idea of you having so much freedom and are scampering through their paperwork for ways to make you come to heel. Things are tough for the Doc at the top and even more so because of the moths.” He looked down for a second, and Lila wondered what was going on. In a human such a movement was a signal of guilt or dissembling, but it would be rash to read this into a fey. Malachi shrugged and continued, “They’re proving more
troublesome than it seemed at first. Doc was wondering if you’d return early and provide some help disposing of them. The boys too, if they’re willing. Unofficially for them of course although Zal’s manager is, I understand, regularly coming within inches of hospitalisation due to the lad’s failure to turn up for band practice.” He hesitated. “And I have someone you should meet. I was on my way here—halfway over—when a little bird told me you’d be looking for a Strandloper.”

  “A little bird?”

  “Mmn, about yay big,” Malachi held up one hand over his head, about seven feet high. “Dark stinking cape, human body, long beak, maggots for eyes.”

  “She’s keen,” Lila said with a sense of dismay. She hadn’t even got home and Madame was pushing her on her way.

  “That’s what I thought,” the faery said, suddenly animated with interest, his casually aloof features losing their hauteur. Of course he knew all about Madame and her minions, it was only the humans who were ignorant about the “new” races, their ways, wiles, and celebrities. “D’you know why?”

  Lila shrugged. “I invited her. She wants me to find some information for her, and then she’s going to tell me about this,” Lila lifted her left hand and held it out between them. She knew that Malachi was familiar with what her hands could usually do, including growing new skin on demand and performing a variety of interesting mechanical tasks generally reserved for laboratory precision robotics and armaments, but these all involved a degree of ordinary human activities such as adding components like blades to achieve the desired effect. Now she was wearing black leather gauntlets as part of her ever-ready duellist preparations for regular Demonian life, which would ordinarily have got in the way of anything particularly clever. She waited until Malachi gave the hand his full attention, and then created a bottle opener out of the end of her middle finger. She then reassembled it as a finger, before shaking the hand as though it stung. It didn’t, but she felt it ought to have. A feeling of creepy satisfaction snuck through her flesh; haunted but loving it. Who wouldn’t love the ability to spontaneously accessorise? Who wouldn’t wonder why the hell they couldn’t do it two weeks ago?

  “Drinking bottled beverages is so important they made it a design priority?” Malachi asked, not really asking but covering the awkward moment with his best quip. His look was halfway between charmed and alarmed.

  “Strangely enough, no. Look,” Lila made a can opener from the same finger, then a socket wrench, then a screwdriver, then set it back to a finger, blowing on it because it was suddenly hot from the changes. A silver nimbus of agitated metal elementals shone briefly around her hand and then sunk back into the matte black illusion of a leather glove. Her hip twinged with an ache, like an old athlete’s joint sensing oncoming bad weather, and she frowned. She’d been ignoring small pains for a month, but there was no denying they were related to her new party tricks. She kept silent about them because worrying about it privately and suspecting the worst seemed better than coming out with it and having the worst formally confirmed by medical. Her own stupidity sometimes amazed her.

  “I’m thinking it didn’t used to do that.” The faery stared unhappily at her hand and then his eyes narrowed in speculation. She flexed her fingers and put her hand down.

  Lila gave him a slow, thoughtful nod. “You’re right. I was definitely much more like a robot with rubber gloves on a year ago. Now I don’t even need to bother requisitioning gloves. Or, come to that, boots and stockings.”

  Malachi raised his eyebrows, “Does it do other colours?”

  Lila imagined her hand wearing a red glove. The black became muddy brown and then mottled, as if cancerous. She went back to black quickly. “Seems I don’t have the hang of that. Or it doesn’t like it. Maybe it’s a goth technology.” She hesitated. “I don’t really like to dwell on why it will do some things and not others.”

  They shared a glance of profound discomfort and worry and then both looked away at the same moment. Lila felt strange again, as she had with Madame when she had showed the demon the same thing, and she tried to forget that just now she had referred to parts of herself in the third person, as if they weren’t really her at all. A shudder tried to get going in her back but she didn’t let it show and instead it closed on her spine with a cold grip—the fear she didn’t want to know about that kept on screaming silently “What if it’s alive? What if it’s not you but something else? Was it always like this? Did they know when they remade you? Or is it something made lately, in Alfheim, because of Zal, in Demonia… what is it? Whose is it? Why? Didn’t Spiderman once have this kind of trouble and look what happened to him…”

  No, she didn’t want to give in to that kind of fear. That was a luxury reserved for people who feared something they could actually flee from.

  Tath sighed an elfin sigh-long, soft, and so eloquent you could have sent it to a debating competition as an irrefutable speech on the folly of human nature. Lila imagined herself giving him a kick in the pants and sent it as a mental image, but he was impervious to taunts.

  Meanwhile, “On the plus side I don’t have to bother with two hours of medical and maintenance every night,” she said, attempting to be breezy and failing.

  “You still go back for ammunition, medical gear, or downloads?”

  It was a good question. She didn’t know the answer since she hadn’t used up any supplies since her last trip back to the Agency. In one of the wardrobes a large unopened holdall contained a field-base’s worth of spares. Of the duels she had fought during and since the wedding she used barehand and blade techniques to be on the safe side. She didn’t know what rounds were fatal and nonfatal to demons, and anyway, getting out a missile or bomblet seemed unsporting and not in the spirit of ritual mortal combat. At least the demons seemed to agree with her. None of them had made an attempt on her life with anything more accurate or long range than a single hand crossbow.

  “The AI processes go up almost a hundred percent when it happens,” she said because it was all the hard information she had.

  A voice said from her ear, “Yeah but even that’s been going down lately. I keep telling ya to change into something interesting like a speedboat and give it something to worry about but do you listen?” Thingamajig crawled out of his hiding form as a ruby, jewelling Lila’s ear, and stretched out on her shoulder to stare at Malachi with proprietorial interest. He was slightly hunched and stroked the backs of his own hands, eyes narrowed, like a villain in a pantomime.

  “He must be an interesting third party in bed,” Malachi said. “Unusually quiet today.”

  “I’ve got a name, you know,” the imp said sulkily, slumping back into his recent despondent state.

  “Yeah, when you know what it is give me a call,” the faery replied.

  “Myeh,” Thingamajig turned his back and buried his face in Lila’s hair, aiming his small rump directly at Malachi and briefly emitting a fart of yellow flame.

  “Can you turn into a speedboat?” Malachi asked.

  “No. When can I meet your strandloper?” Lila asked.

  “Soon as,” the faery said. He returned his cup to a side table and straightened his coat. “I have to be getting back. A few matters… well, you’ll see.”

  She guessed that his stiff formality was a signal to her that what ever was bothering them in Otopia was particularly irritating. He was usually so relaxed, this businesslike attitude was the equivalent of some other person’s major anxiety attack. So she nodded agreement and gave him a reassuring smile, hoping it didn’t seem to eager. On top of everything else she was fighting hard not to admit that going along with the Demon code of marry-to-payback might have been a mistake. Visions of having to live with Teazle and Zal forever danced regularly through her head like a tacky vaudeville show. But she didn’t want to think about it. The Ignore file in her brain would just have to get to gigabyte sizes.

  “Before you go. I wanted to ask. Do you know anything about this?” Lila reached into her neckline and pulled fr
ee the faery necklace with its spiral. The other was tangled up and came with it, but it was the spiral she held forward.

  Malachi glanced at it, almost nonchalantly although his wings gave a sudden flick and discharged about a pound of coal dust into the air in a glittering black cloud. The sooty bits spun and danced, forming curious storms. They would not sink down but circulated around him, globulating as if they wanted to make forms but couldn’t decide what. A tang of citrus flavoured the air suddenly. Lila recognised a local magical sink forming, her conviction boosted by Tath’s sudden nudge as the aether made him alert. The spiral tingled between her fingers as if it had been attached to a small battery and a tendril of white metal energy stretched cautiously forward from her fingertips towards it, but did not make contact.

  “Is that the one the eachuisge singer gave you?”

  Lila recognised the strange sound as the official faery name for Zal’s backing singers—water horse fey. “Poppy. The annoying one. Yes, her.”

  “Is it now?” Malachi had become almost somnolent, his eyes glazing with a look that was focused into the never. He stepped forwards with his usual grace but slowly and raised a hand up towards the spiral, stopping when he was inches away. “When did she give it to you?”

  “She gave it to Zal to give to me actually, before he tried to come here and ended up in Zoomenon instead. He gave it to me when he got back.”