Selling Out Read online

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The flare and storm of demons fighting with the elements lit the dawn cloud over Bathshebat with many pretty colours and boomed through the air from the distant Playing Fields with soft vibrations that shook the crystal light catchers around the lamps in Lila’s room. The elf, securely tied by the net but with head and legs freed, sat on her bed propped against the headboard with her eyes shut. Lila sat on the floor opposite, her wrists resting on her updrawn knees and her hands loose. They had been like that for some time.

  The elf was not like others Lila had known. Her skin was grey-blue, her hair quite black. She had Dar’s features, typical of the shadowkin, their faces seeming to be stretched from the tips of nose and chin, their ears also sweeping back like those of bad-tempered horses. She was dressed in poor, ragged clothing and was stained with soot and coloured earths in various ochre shades though much of this had run in the lagoon and become a muddy film. Her long, wiry body lay utterly still, as if she was dead, betrayed only by the slightest movement of breath in her belly. A soft shadow like the spill of ink onto wet paper covered her and, except where it was held fast to her by the net, spread from her into the air and over the bedclothes. It shifted and flickered slowly, larger than she was by several inches at all dimensions. This andalune, aetheric body, the only one Tath had left, was utterly unlike any Lila had seen before, and she had seen a few. They were not generally visible in Otopia, nor in Alfheim, but in Demonia, apparently, they were. Lila had watched this for some time and saw it changing frequently, forming appendages almost like fingers or tentacles, or spongy, diffuse portions that spread wide, or other shapes; a Rorschach mystery. She could not see it without remembering Zal’s touch, and shivered.

  “Zhid’nah,” said the elf suddenly. “Tubbuuk nan shivvuthek. Zhayadbhalja mik seppukha.”

  Lila had never heard the language before but Tath translated uneasily, She asks for mercy at the cost of her honour. She wishes you to bring her something to write with so she can put down her death poem and something sharp so she may end her life with honour.

  I’m not going to kill her. Give me the words . . .

  Tath supplied Lila’s mind with the right phrases and his memory guided her lips and tongue to the strange syllables. She only had to think of what she wanted to say and, almost as normal, she spoke, “You are my prisoner for now. You won’t be harmed.”

  The elf sighed through her long nostrils and said with contempt, “It will not be your choosing. You cannot protect me in this land.”

  “Of course I can . . .”

  The elf opened her eyes for the first time. They were dead white with fine slits in the centre and she had to squint horribly in the light. Her voice was contemptuous. “You are lucky to be alive. The aura of the white demon ruined my shot. It was a fine shot. Your death was in my hand.”

  “Seeing as we’re on the subject,” Lila said. “Why do you want me dead?”

  “Not I,” the elf said, closing her eyes again and turning her head away from the window. “I am the hand of another. If you do not kill me the demons will, if they do not then he will and if he does not then I will. Bring me paper and a pen. I demand a final request.”

  Do not give her any opportunity to make symbols. She may be sincere in her will to die but I doubt she wishes to go alone.

  “Enough,” Lila said. “I was going to haul you to the market and buy a spell to keep you at my side where I could see you. Then I thought I would get one that made you into a guard of mine, something along the lines of Do Me No Harm. Then I thought I’d add one that made you tell me the truth. But actually I’m sick of the whole business.” She sat down on the end of the bed and looked at the prettily damasked walls, the beautiful curtains, the soft sweep of majestic loveliness that ran in a perfectly judged theme of reds and ochres through furniture, decoration, and placement of things. She did not look at the elf but addressed her with conviction.

  “You don’t want to talk but I do. You want to kill me for reasons I have no clue about and I think you don’t know me at all, so as far as I see it you can damn well listen to me. I’ve been here a few weeks now. Most of what goes on here I miss because I have no ability with magic. Everything means something. That chair being there, for instance, it has a special meaning I can’t remember. Something to do with the flow of aether in the room but also the significance of waiting and resting in relation to the outside air. See, I don’t get most of what demons do, I just know that it’s important to them to set the table right and important to them to kill for passion and those two things are about the same. Now to me they’re nothing like the same but what can I do about that? Sorcha was supposed to help me out too, but all she wants to do is go to parties and shows. I get the feeling she’s trying to put me off of something. So that sucks because I like her but I think she’s in my way.

  “And you elves—well, I know next to nothing about you either. I know there are day and night species or races or cultures or some kind of distinction and that there are castes and hierarchies that make you uptight as hell all the time because your social standing is so bloody complicated and important to you. And you hate the demons and the demons hate you because, as I understand it, basically you are savers and they are spenders. But the two of you aren’t in opposition really. This is how Zal can be both elf and demon. You aren’t different in the important ways. It’s all in the expression. You are somehow the same. That’s what I think.

  “And I don’t get how you relate to the rest of us, to the elements or to the faeries, but everyone is so preoccupied with how they’re different I think that what bothers them just as much is how they’re connected. And this story about the Bomb, that’s just crazy. How could all the worlds’ histories be different and still join? No doubt you wonder about that too. You say at no time in your past was Otopia not there. Demons say the same. Faeries say the same. Elements say nothing, obviously and the dead, well, we never met any of them after the crossing. And there’s the hardest thing of all for me, you know. The realm of the dead. They say it’s parted from us in temporal dimensions only, that it is panspatial and pantemporal, a dimensional ’verse transecting all points in which beings like us cannot move, though there are beings that can. Perhaps dragons do, and ghosts, maybe they do. But I wonder, how can it be? I can’t even imagine it. Yet you say it’s a place necromancers go.

  “And all that’s very interesting, kind of. But the thing is, elf, I don’t care. The truth is I wish I wasn’t here. I don’t want you to tell anybody this, because it’s important everyone thinks I’m a good worker and full of confidence and okay as a person, fearless and full of pep, but I’ll be honest with you, since it doesn’t matter a damn; I’m tired and I want to go home.”

  “Mizadak zhuneved?”

  She says why don’t you, then?

  “Because there is no way but on,” Lila said and then went silent. She moved the fingers of her right hand and heard the not quite inaudible sound of the machineries that moved her. She felt the slide and strength of metal and the responsiveness of electron flows. Her shoulders felt tense and heavy but her arms and legs and all her robot self was unchanging, numb to emotion of any kind. Her stomach was gripped by the cold understanding that her self-pitying, bleak statement was the truth. It tried to close around the fact like an oyster around a sharp piece of sand, to protect her from it. Her flesh felt it but there was so much of her that felt nothing at all.

  “I have dreams,” she said, without knowing that she was going to, “in which I run around looking for my arms and legs in the forest, until I realise what I’m doing. Then I fall flat on the ground and suffocate because I can’t move my face out of the earth. Then I wake up. And it’s a disappointment. I should be telling this to important people, you know, like Dr. Williams and Zal. But I could never tell them that. Just think of how disappointed they would be, how hurt, and how they would struggle to fix it and make it better. And I can’t be fixed, so they can never know.”

&nbs
p; “Urshanta, hibranta mikitak nozherosti. Felyzi maszharan zhuneved.”

  She says that as long as she was able to live nothing could stop her return home if she wished to go there.

  “I can’t go home for the same reason neither you nor anyone else will succeed in killing me. For the same reason I can do what I have to do in this job,” Lila told her wearily, staring unseeing at the beautiful things and thinking about Zal, suddenly realising that this was the reason she had been bold enough to try and love him when he was clearly far beyond her in so many ways and she so far beyond that kind of contact with any ordinary human. “Because I’m already dead.”

  Malachi returned to his office, a place that was often the first port of call on any visits to realms beyond Otopia. It was an outdoor room in the gardens, shielded on three sides by walls of old stones and on the other two sides by glass which could be clouded to prevent onlookers gazing at him from the other offices of the security forum. There was no roof, instead the open sky looked down on a floor of close-cropped grass, groomed to perfection by three miniature sheep. The sheep were sheltered by boulders and a tidy shrubbery. Malachi’s shelter was a small yurt made from the hides of fey beasts and tented over poles of rowan, birch, and elm. Within its small circular gloom he lit candles and sat down in his ergonomically perfected seat—the one piece of hi tech he preferred. His smart modern suit of human design pleased him as much as the chair did and both, thankfully, didn’t impede business. He signalled to his secretary that he was going out for a while—a brief wave was sufficient for her well-trained gaze to pick up. She closed the windows to view with their blind of soft electrostatic fog and Malachi leaned back and let the chair tip and tilt him into a meditative recline.

  Finding a strandloper was no easy task. He had first to discover one of their small number by searching anywhere in the insterstitial and he could only do that by a process of half-shifting—moving into a state somewhere between his natural fey form and his human shape and waiting there, neither one thing nor another, in the hope that one of the ’lopers would notice the disturbance this caused in I-space and come to investigate it. A faery was able to assume their own shape in Otopia, if they wished to. Because of their natures, most of them who stayed for any length of time did not wish to. In addition to the fact that their appearance could be off-putting, once in their true form they became more vulnerable to the charm of the elements, of places and opportunities that their natures directed them to want. Hence the faery singers of Zal’s band never showed their horse forms lest they be overcome by the need to drown young men in deep water, a temptation that would even exceed the distraction of armed police officers bearing down with lethal weapons let alone mode-X rock music. Malachi waited until he heard the door lock before he even thought about moving. It was locked from the outside and finally, in the moments that followed where he knew he could not get out nor anyone get in, he felt safe and relaxed. He let himself take a five-minute nap.

  On waking up he stretched and gently eased his joints. The wings of faery were present but not visible in Otopia but he felt them, like echoes of another life, and let them beat now slowly, shifting their soft pattern between Faery and Otopia, fanning the aether of I-space back and forth. The slow wash of disturbance in the magical element felt like cool water. He let its energy break beneath the surface of his skin and bubble upward. From the bone he shifted, the prickling and tingling of metamorphosis just a tease at first, but then suddenly a gripping flood of compressive and expansive forces. To halt halfway was a rare talent, one thing that anyone could learn but only a few could master. His long years of effort had led him to fortune. He stopped and balanced with seeming effortlessness, half fey man, half panther, his wings blue shadows vibrating with the finesse of hummingbirds. He saw with the triple vision of the half shifted, with human eyes, with his fey sight, and with the vision of his element: carbon.

  It was horrible. Malachi had never enjoyed the process of halting a change, nobody did. There was too much information and too little certainty. His senses were weakened yet expanded, mind barely able to comprehend what it was being told. He saw I-space yet did not see it, heard both Otopia and Faery, smelled the cold wind of Hibernia where his spirit ancestors dreamed the long dreams and breathed the thick, muggy atmosphere of an ordinary Bay City spring day. He was safe in his tent in the ground of the five-sided sanctuary and he was whirling particles connecting with aether in the fundamental realm and he was gifted with the carbon sense that attuned him to all forms of the element in life and matter so he could feel structures and taste life. He could not perceive I-space except as a feeling of suspension. It was a grey fog that resonated with echoes of familiar things that never resolved. It danced with potential that never brimmed into existence and he danced with it and there was in the dance a terrifying uncertainty that one day and maybe the brimming over the brink into one world or another would never come and he would be here forever until the winds of aether whirled him bit by bit away.

  Still, he was still with his fear because he knew that this would not come to pass. If you hung out long enough and withstood the feeling, you realised you weren’t being weathered away by the aether and that although the limbo of metamorphosis was disorienting and unpleasant, it wasn’t going to be fatal. At least, it had never been fatal so far.

  Malachi thought of eagles flying and wings soaring, of calls that pierced the sky. The only language here was imagination because there was no body. He had seen things here—the ghosts of course, and maybe what might have been a dragon in the distance once. Among the aetheric windstreams and fields he suspected there were many such things, living lives he couldn’t understand and barely glimpse. The common forms of beings from the I were only forms that happened to be able to move into other worlds. Their mysteries were still many. Ghosts destroyed those they touched and dragons—they were legendary and elusive and when they did speak it was difficult to make out a meaning. Their acts defied a story. He had been shocked to hear Lila’s tale of Arië being consumed by the lake dragon of Aparastil. Not that he guessed it was the dragon of a lake, nor that it had exactly eaten her for food. Dragons were frequently fatal encounters but he had never heard of one ingesting another being. He detected no trace of such a creature close by. Not far off he felt the chill of ghost movement. If one of those strayed too close he would have to abandon his visit for days. They were drawn to positions of transit—where the worlds had joined—and could loiter for a long time around the vortices in the aether that surrounded these phenomena. A storm of ghosts he could live without.

  His calls, animalistic so as to avoid distinguishing him as a creature of sentient power and aetheric potential, were well-known signals between himself and Jones. Like hunters pretending to be owls as they positioned themselves in darkness he and the lost girl of Illyria sounded off when they wished to call one another; sounded and waited for the answering retort. His vision of eagles drifted into the fuzz blanch of the aether. He waited, his vision of Otopia and Faery beginning to dim as he became attuned to the incomparable pecularity of I-space. Against his skin fragile vibrations in the aether spoke of distant motions in space, time, and energy. Wavefronts like sound and light, but neither, betrayed the conversations of those adept in magical arts, and creatures natural to the region, and, amid all that, the occasional strange whisper that Malachi had always thought must be the signature of one of the Others, because neither he nor anyone else he had spoken to knew what those strange frequencies and shifts could be.

  A shivering whistle came from far off direct to him, the ear it was aimed at. Jones. He called again, hooting, promising information—her only vice—and she piped a reply from a nearer point. He felt the familiar soft trill of her navigation, a kind of sonar which she could detect his unique aether trail along and follow to its source. Ghosts trailed from the deeps in response to it too. He could feel them forming like condensation in the spaces close by, coalescent, and drifted off, shifting uneasily like a swimmer on
the surface of an ocean who fears sharks. He recalled Lila’s documentary evidence of Zal’s encounter with a forest spirit, one of the ancient ghost forms that were most common in Otopia. It had taken part of his substance, but he had survived the loss relatively easily—only a handful of aetheric andalune strength gone and him able to regenerate it without trouble, probably because of the connection he had to Zoomenon. Now that was a phenomenon Malachi did not fully understand; even though he himself had a similar connection to the elementals he was not able to draw any energy from them, no. But elves could do it, if they knew the way or else had the talent. Like so many features of the various divided races, what was well known about each other was least powerful knowledge. Now, in exchange for her appearance Malachi would have to find some useful tidbits for Calliope to devour. For once he felt sure of a good audience. There was everything he knew about Zal for one.

  The ghosts were blooming. He felt the cold of their density expansion as a numbing chill. Aether around him was pooling and changing state in chain reactions of exponential power. He danced away, lightly, pummelled and betrayed by Jones’s sonar. Although nobody had detected any trace of sentience in ghosts, they were fearsome predators of organised aetheric energy—beings like Malachi, for instance, and beings like Jones. Malachi had learned to liken them to viruses for the purposes of explaining them to humans but although that was a good metaphor for explaining their similarity to parasitical life-forms it fell down when it came to giving good imagery for their particularities and their complexity. Viruses were RNA replicators. Ghosts were nothing like that. They agglutinated from raw aether—perhaps with some viral-like seed in the origin—and they took on shapes with meaning for the victims or locations they preferred to hunt. The mechanisms by which this occurred were the research remit of the Ghost Hunters, a crossworld organisation through which Malachi had first found Calliope. He had dealings with them through the secret service and she was one of their number.