Zal leaned his forehead against hers, looking into her eyes. He took her hands in his. ‘I’m sure there’s no need. He would
have known.’
‘Would he? I judged him for doing the same thing. And Zal, what if they all come back?’ She swallowed and gritted her teeth
briefly, sniffing as tears ran down her nose and dripped off onto their joined hands. ‘It feels all wrong to me. I’m scared
of it. I don’t know what it means. It’s wrong. They shouldn’t be here. When I look at this part of the world in the Signal
it’s like looking at a series of mistakes. I don’t know how to explain it better than that. It doesn’t add up. The numbers
eventually all fall apart and where the potentials ought to drop out they just keep on shifting values. At the farthest edge
there’s chaos. Nothing remains. Nothing adds up any more.’
Zal stroked her fingers with his thumbs. ‘We’ll ride it out,’ he said.
‘You idiot,’ she said, without rancour. ‘I tell you the world is ending and that’s all you can say?’
Zal thought before he answered and said, ‘There’s a book in one of the Elven libraries about dragons. I didn’t read it myself.’
He hesitated. ‘I only heard about it. It’s the lore of the dragon. Very short. It says that dragons are emergent beings, formed
out of the energy of living, conscious beings and gaining a separated existence of their own after they reach a critical level.
They can arise in the wild, accidentally, if a culture has a common purpose or need, spoken or unspoken, or even many of those.
They can manifest in dragon form.’
‘Sounds like that theory of ghosts,’ Lila said.
‘Yes it does,’ he said. ‘But these have enough directed intent to make a transition from energetic to material form, to have
independent life and consciousness. They are astral, but also material. They are immanent but also evident. And once they
have matter, a body, then they become subject to the law of Flesh and Blood.’
‘All usual rules apply . . .’ Lila said, echoing Xaviendra’s recounting. ‘What’s that?’
Zal did his best to translate what was an aetheric and esoteric theory into terms she would better understand. He interlaced
his fingers with hers and, through her gloved exterior, felt the hard grip of her bones on his.
‘Flesh and blood are living memory, but memory being refined, being changed, being forged anew every day, being tested. Flesh
and
blood are no longer potentials, like aetherial potentials, they are much more massive and have much greater inertia. Once
you have a body, once there is a ‘you’ then you can’t be subject to the laws that brought you into being as an energetic form.
You have your own life, your own personality, your own thoughts. You are alone. You are yourself. Dragons have awesome powers
at cosmic scales, which they inherited from their genesis, as a kind of waking dream, but they keep them when they are bound
to flesh, and that flesh and bone makes them like the rest of us.’
‘Do they really exist like that?’
Zal thought of Mr V, the dwarf, smoking his long pipe, his darned, stripey socks hanging over the ends of his toes. ‘Yes.
They’re alive like us.’
‘And do you think they’d want to make us – you, me, Teazle? For what? Into what?’
‘I don’t know,’ Zal said honestly, although it did occur to him as it must have to her that they were, in their own way, dragonish,
the three of them together. ‘Look at what humans do for entertainment, though. Maybe that’s what they do too.’
Lila nodded. She clasped and reclasped his fingers, still sniffing. She turned her head so that her whole forehead pressed
flat to his as though she wished to push through the bone. ‘And what’s the sleeper within? Is that something else again?’
‘I knew you’d ask that,’ Zal said. ‘I don’t know, but I know who would. Ilya would know. His magic is from the tradition of
which the sleeper was a part. He’s bound to know.’ He felt his face tighten as he spoke the next bit, knowing it for the truth.
The venom in his own tone was no surprise to him.
‘Arie wouldn’t have wasted a good elf for each of the deadly sorceries, she was a conservationist. She’d have wasted one and
made him learn all of the dark arts so she could keep the badness in one spot ready to be wiped clean when it had served out
its regrettable usefulness. I’d bet against the Hoodoo that he knows.’
They shared a quick glance at the mention of the Hoodoo, though they said nothing. It wasn’t something that could be spoken
of directly. The glance alone spoke the volumes of their unease about the Hoodoo’s absolute power, it’s unknown nature.
Lila gave a half smile, a small sniff of false cheer. ‘That’s good, ’cause I was hoping he’d help me out with Project Death
anyway.’
Zal grinned, his spirits lifting at her girlish manner. ‘Project Death?’
‘To find out how and why all these dead people keep coming back.’
‘Is that the name you gave it?’
‘Had to have some name,’ she said defensively.
‘Mmn,’ he smiled at her and pushed awkwardly at her until she lifted her face up and let him kiss her properly. He put his
arms around her and slid her up his thighs until he could hold her fully against him. This put her higher than he was so that
when she broke the kiss she was able to pull his head against her chest as she talked. He heard the words through the wall
of her body, resonating in frequencies that almost made him swoon so that what she said in her fast-as-thought worrying came
across like a kind of dream.
‘Anyway, stop getting off the point. Aren’t ghosts and dragons and all that other stuff the same somehow? I can’t see what
the difference is. Some intent causes a reaction in the fundamental energy goo of the Void or wherever it hangs out— Wait,
no, aetherial energy and the kind of energy you mean when you talk about people vibrating with joy or whatever, are those
things the same?
Zal pushed his face into her neck, cheek on the leather of her collar, lips against her skin.
‘If they’re the same why is there some load of it hanging out in the Void? Is that like energy spontaneously bursting into
empty space? Is the Void the aetheric or astral equivalent of outer space? Is there such a thing as outer space or is that
just a term meaning not-right-in-our-backyard-which-is-pretty-chock-full-of-matter?’
Zal kissed her, feeling the dull thud of her arteries below his tongue; ten-ton hammers.
‘If there’s an astral equivalent of the material and an energetic astral equivalent to . . . shit, no, that won’t work because
the energy of a person with intent and the energy released through fission surely isn’t the same thing and that would make
three energy things and only two types of plane. Is the personal energy even real in the same way that matter is real?’
Zal opened his mouth as wide as he could in a simulated vampire bite and pulled her hips hard into his own.
‘Could we not say that it was a feature of the inner world and not the outer world or . . . no, that would mean there had
to be some kind of method for it to affect both, which would be consciousness or mind or whatever, probably, right? But if
it comes from the inner world of the individual it vibrates somehow with the fundamentals of both aether and the baryonic
material?’
Zal sucked gently on her neck. She tasted faintly of sugar, and violets. His hand gripped the back of the silky sundress in
a threatening fist, warning it to back off. Her hands caressed his head, pulling him to her as she continued.
‘Or is it all the same energy arising in different places by different means but mixing together naturally because of being
the same thing? Is it the same, but manifesting differently across different spatiotemporal realities? Is the astral world
purely internal or a nonbaryonic zone accessible by certain energy patterns from here? And now that Alfheim and Demonia and
Faery all have some kind of definable spatiotemporal existence following relatively normal physical laws . . . mmmfmmmfmmfffffmmmm!’
Zal had put his hand over her mouth. ‘You’ve exceeded my short-term memory buffer,’ he said gently but firmly. ‘I think the
answer is probably yes. I don’t see where you’re going though. So, can you tell me?’ He eased up a finger at a time.
Lila caught and kissed his hand as she spoke. ‘Human beings,’ she said. ‘They must be aethero-active. Have to be. If all that’s
true. They’re not the dullards everyone says. Yes, magic doesn’t work here like it does in your world, but that doesn’t mean
nothing’s going on. The Burgis Hypothesis says that we created you, your worlds and all the other things, and the energy reaction
of the bomb made you quasi-material. It didn’t explode. It imploded. On us. Everything that isn’t human was once just a figment
of our imagination.’
She waited for his answer, looking at him with a pert expectancy that only made him laugh harder once he started.
‘Zally!’ she slapped his shoulder lightly, pouting. ‘It’s not funny. It’s real.’
He bounced her gently on his lap so that she could easily feel how hard he was through all their clothing. ‘I’m real. And
so what?’
‘What do you mean, so what?’ Her pout had turned sultry although she still had a way to go before she was prepared to give
up her outburst of intellectual defence.
Zal played around, trying to catch the zipper-pull of her biker jacket between his teeth as he spoke. ‘If it’s true, does
it matter? Does it change anything?’
She thought about it.
On the rocks below the glowing algae sloshed like weak paint, gathering in the crannies until the stones looked as if they
were cracking open to reveal green molten cores.
‘If the humans believed it, then it might matter,’ she said. ‘Look at how they treat us now. But if they thought we were all
creatures they made, who weren’t as real as they were, then they’d think they could do what they liked, that they were first,
better. Is what I think.’ She began to comb through his hair with her fingers in an absent way.
‘That’s what the elves would think,’ he said, the zip-pull caught firmly between his front teeth. He began to nudge it downwards
as he talked, the strange, zinging sensation of the metal and its odd taste covering his tongue, ‘Or I should say, what they
think anyway. To them humans are an upstart race lacking in most interesting skills, living in an impoverished world they
don’t appreciate, like starving beggars in the middle of paradise. Undeserving savages.’
She gave up on the wild tangles in his hair and pulled it into three roughly equal parts, beginning to wrap it into a rough
braid. ‘It doesn’t matter anyway, does it, because everything has gone wild and become its own thing now, hasn’t it?’
‘The Law of Flesh and Blood,’ Zal said, coming to the point where his neck couldn’t go any further and the lilac dress was
stretched taut, blocking the way anyway. ‘Once real, then free.’
‘But freedom doesn’t necessarily mean happy, or even able.’
He nosed his way between the sharp metal teeth of the jacket and kissed the warm body underneath. ‘Did you think it did?’
‘Yes,’ she said. She tied off the braid and let it fall against his back.
‘Ah, Lila,’ he said sadly and hugged her close, webbing them both in a sheen of darkness.
The sound of the water endlessly washing the shore surrounded them. The mist thickened, tinging at first rosy, then orange
as the sun struggled to break through.
‘I don’t want to live by the sea,’ she said suddenly. ‘Not this close.’
Zal bent low and kissed her over her heart. ‘Doesn’t matter to me,’ he said.
‘I don’t know how to go on,’ she said, her hands tight on his shoulders. ‘I don’t know what to do. Or why.’
He kissed his way back up to her neck and then went back for the zipper to pull it up again.
‘Welcome to the club,’ he said. ‘I find if you just keep breathing and deal with one minute at a time, that’s usually enough.’
He poked her in the ribs. ‘You’re not breathing.’
She forced herself to exhale. ‘I don’t actually have to breathe.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You do. It’s important. Only machines and the un-dead don’t breathe and look what happens to them.’
‘What happens to them?’
‘Nobody asks them to parties,’ Zal said, lifting her up and helping her to turn back around on the saddle. He put his hands
on her waist and saw the dress was looking at him with embroidered flower eyes. They were frowning, but they weren’t mean.
He stuck his tongue out at them and they unstitched themselves into ordinary pansies.
‘Now are we going to look at some houses or not?’
She grabbed a portfolio of rentals off the local hub and displayed them on the upper back of her jacket so that he could see
them.
As she pushed them off the stand and spun back onto the road she wondered who was going to sign off real estate to her at
six in the morning outside of town.
As it turned out Lila need not have worried about real estate agents. The process was handled entirely by the city network,
without the need for human intervention. In spite of, or more likely because of, its reputation as the hub of otherworldly
activities, Bay City and the surrounding country had a high transient population and properties that were empty and ready
to let were few. Those fitting Lila’s requirements were even fewer, so it didn’t take them long to pick a couple from the
fast-dwindling list and ride out into the forested hills of Lakewood.
Lakewood sat to the north of the island swarms and coastal inlets where the true grit of the continent finally got its act
together and heaved itself out of the lagoons to form dry, regular hills. Rivers disciplined by broad swathes of emergent
rock ran in wide beds and between them grassy glades and large patches of dense forest had sprung up. Needle and broadleaf
trees mingled on the lower slopes but it was higher up, where the land was rockier and the forest an older, pinewood type,
that Lila preferred. Beyond the reach of the shopping malls and estate houses that circled like wagons around manmade lakes,
in a region where the roads petered out into tracks, sat the house she had mentally ringed in red.
The bike crunched across the scattered gravel that made up the approach and halted. Before them sat a red wooden ranch house,
single storeyed and set on pylons that supported it so that it didn’t topple down the steep slope. A broad deck all around
it was set with deep green canvas chairs and awnings, all furled closed and tied down against the weather. The whole thing
backed onto a thick rise of dense evergreens and sheer rock. Above and beyond those was a scrappy grey-stoned cliff and beyond
that the sullen, misty glower of the sky.
Lila sat and looked and listened to the forest sounds, waiting for Zal to speak.
Finally he said, ‘I can’t see the moose head. There must be one somewhere.’ She felt him swing himself off the saddle and
then his sigh as he stretched and turned. ‘But it is a long way from the beach.’
She swung her leg over the handlebars and moved to his side. The clearing and the angles were as she had hoped. You could
see across Lakewood’s green clusters down all the way to the city’s blue and grey clutter and then beyond that to the fog
that hid the ocean. The smell of resin and damp mulch filled her nostrils. She liked the rock at her back. And beyond this
house there were no paths into the forest for wandering hikers to stumble over her. The house was alone up here, half hiding,
half poised to rush down and embrace the town.
She looked to Zal, waiting for his verdict on the energy, the subtleties of the location. She kept expecting to see him changed
when she did this, as though Otopia would gradually erode his strangeness and make him the blonde, tanned conformist elf of
his earlier days. Now he was dipped in a sheen of permanent ink and he looked downright alarming. In the dull daylight his
shadows were too intense, his colours unreal. When he looked at her, grinning, his eyes were so dark brown they looked black.
Their enlarged pupils seemed to bleed darkness. Lila couldn’t prevent a quick blink.
He saw it and that pleased him even more.
‘I see I am too glamorous to be allowed any closer to the lure of cultured pursuits,’ he indicated the city with a glance,
adding, ‘although I don’t really feel like partying much myself.’ He dropped the pose and turned back to the building. ‘It’s
a good effort, Liles. Okay, if you want it.’
‘Don’t you want to see inside?’ She didn’t. She couldn’t have cared less if it was bare boards but it seemed the thing to
say.
Zal shook his head. ‘It’s a bolthole, a treehouse, a retreat. It’s what you need.’
She felt humbled by his understanding, shy in an odd way, as though she were overexposed. She turned and saw that even from
their spot at the edge of the driveway you couldn’t see directly into any of the windows. The angle was too steep. ‘It might
be impossible in the winter,’ she said, in a token gesture at thinking things through.
‘You wish,’ he said.
She wasn’t sure how to say the next thing so she just said it. ‘Are you sure? I mean, that you want to be here all the time.
With me?’ The
ease of Teazle’s divorce and easy departure kept running through her mind.
One of his eyebrows quirked. ‘Is this a chink in the Iron Maiden’s armour? Are you saying, Lila Black, that you want me to
stay here all the time with you, hmm?’ His eyes were fiendish. ‘Are you actually asking me for something that matters to your
cold steel heart?’
For a moment she bristled but then she remembered two could play. ‘What poncery is this, elf? Games?’ She looked around but
there was no sign of the citrus fizz that signalled their old game was active. It had gone.
For some reason this chilled her. She couldn’t remember either of them reaching a victory condition – a state of abject humiliation
in which they were begging the other one for sex. It would have been sufficiently nauseating or alternatively so deliriously
sweet it would have stuck in her mind. Other things stuck in her mind all too clearly: the dead bodies of Poppy and Viridia
for two, rolling in the black, ice-clogged tide of Jack Giantkiller’s lake. That had been their penalty for cheating a deal
with the Hoodoo. The Hoodoo governed all magical games and forfeits. It never missed. It always collected. So where was it?
Even a slight rise in baiting each other should have caused the old bargain to flicker into existence, but she felt nothing,
smelled nothing. When had the surrender condition been validated? She looked at Zal but he was apparently oblivious.
‘Poncery,’ he repeated, wonderingly but not without pleasure. ‘Haven’t heard that in a long time.’
‘Now you have,’ she said, deciding not to speak of the game. It felt like it would be a terrible mistake, calling it to account
almost. She stuck to the facts. ‘It’s two thousand standard dollars a month.’
‘Poncery,’ Zal said, flicking his ears like a horse dislodging a fly. ‘I probably should mention that I have a strange feeling
about this place though, despite the crusty, rustic urban cowboy styling.’
Lila looked over the building again, then back at Zal. She reread the lease notes: there was no mention of anything strange,
although the place had been let three times in six months. ‘What sort of feeling?’ she asked, ignoring the sensation of sinking
that was going on in her shinbones.
‘The sort of feeling that suggests inhabitants.’
She tried not to be disappointed, almost managed it. She offered her last signal-flag of defiance to fate. ‘It’s billed as
empty. You mean squatters?’
‘I mean her,’ he pointed up to the windows of the woods-facing side. Their angle and the sun meant she couldn’t see anything
at first, but then she thought she might have noticed a movement.
‘Her? You saw someone?’
Lila reprocessed her image memory but was unable to find more than a movement of shadow, which no amount of fiddling could
resolve into a meaningful shape.
‘I
felt
her,’ he said. ‘We shadow elves have a built-in detector for living things, you know. Something to do with our unliving ancestors
and their hunger for vital energy. Quite good at shorter ranges. Specially if things are powerful.’
‘Not human then,’ Lila frowned. She felt cross, her discovery spoiled, the house almost as good as lost.
By unliving ancestors she knew Zal meant the spirits of the dead planes, things about which the human race knew very little
and had even less language for. ‘Spirit’ wasn’t a good term, but it was the only one they had. Even the grimoires of the demon
necromancers had few facts amid their screed of speculations and graphic accounts of the results of encounters with these
beings.
An image of her parents’ house flared into her mind’s eye, a shape like a sister behind the screen door, opening it up. .
. She pushed it aside.
‘Or not exactly human?’
‘Not entirely, that’s for sure,’ Zal replied. He wasn’t perturbed, only mildly interested, and he looked to her for a cue.
‘Want me to take a closer look?’
His heavy blonde hair, slicked with its jet sheen, framed his face and large eyes like a ghoul mane. The eyes themselves slanted
more than they used to, she noticed, as they glittered with vague amusement.
She wiggled her fingers. ‘Want me to pick the locks?’
He smiled and held out his arm, gentleman-style. ‘Sure.’
They moved around to where a set of steps led onto the verandah and climbed them side by side. The sun was shining weakly
through the low cloud and lit up the security lock – a touch pad.
‘If I were alone, this would be a window job,’ Zal said, looking at the metal with disapproval. His elven skills were actively
earthed out or repulsed by iron and its alloys.
‘You’re not alone,’ Lila grinned. ‘Although,’ she added, as she accessed the system via the estate agent’s portal, masking
herself as
a routine tax-office audit, ‘this means that whoever is in there isn’t using the door either.’
‘Back door,’ Zal said.
‘Don’t think so, they’re both active and unopened.’ She smiled, the job done, and gave the touchpad a brief press of her fingers.
They heard the locks clicking back and the door slid open. A smell of furniture wax and deodorisers met them. The interior
was dim, but a few of the storm shutters had been loosened and pried up from the windows, so not as dim as it might have been.
They stepped inside.
‘Hello?’ Lila called.
‘Genius,’ Zal murmured.
‘Well, it’s not like they don’t know we’re here.’
‘And now they know we know they’re here,’ he sighed but in spite of his light tone of reproach his attention was elsewhere.
Lila could see his aura, strong with the room’s shadows, flitting out and away from him like a cloud of black dust until it
thinned into the general atmosphere. She let him work while she reviewed the furnishings. The hunting-lodge theme was firmly
established – heavy wooden sofas and chairs surrounded a log table, which in turn was set before one side of a double open
fireplace, the stone chimney acting to support the roof in this room and the next one, which looked to have some kind of dining
set up.
She wandered towards the kitchen, alert but more interested in seeing appliances than squatters. She’d never really lived
away from home, if you excused a month at an anonymous apartment block, and it was kind of exciting, in a small way, to consider
that she could have her own stuff again, even if someone else with a taste for white with gingham-and-red-roses accessories
had chosen it.
She was just nosing inside a cupboard, looking at a nice set of red-stemmed wineglasses and a clearly never-used fondue set,
when she heard Zal’s hiss and then the almost inaudible patter of his run across the boards. She was out of the door in an
instant, following his back as he ran around the chimney’s heavy shape.
There was a brief scuffle and then Zal fell into the light coming from the window that he’d pointed out from below. He landed
on his feet, catlike, his hands held out in a protective stance in front of him. His shadow aura was completely reabsorbed
and in the sunlight he looked remarkably solid, almost human in tone.
He had flushed out a small girl, who was in the corner. She was
screened by a big tartan beanbag – one of several that made up an obvious nest in this, the least overlooked part of the
house. She was possibly nine, or even twelve, Lila thought, coming to a slow halt behind Zal. Her hair was tied up in a scarf
and from beneath its azure line her large eyes stared at both of them, wide and unblinking. Her skin was as dark as the old
oak floor, and there was a faint sheen on it that Lila recognised as faery bloom, a touch of pearly lilac that showed only
in the light.
‘I’m not gonna hurt you,’ Zal said, lowering his hands and backing up into Lila’s shins.
‘No, I know,’ the girl replied. The beanbag muffled her tone a bit but not the resentful contempt it contained. ‘It’s obvious.
You don’t need to shout about it.’ Her eyes narrowed and she briefly scrubbed her face with the beanbag cover as though she
was rubbing away tears or exhaustion. ‘Are you an elf?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well you look like a demon and you smell like a vampire.’
Lila had to admit that, in spite of the cornering and the bag, the girl didn’t seem terribly frightened. She saw Zal’s right
ear twitch, which was a sign he was suppressing a laugh. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said.
The girl’s gaze flicked to Lila and she pressed back against the two walls. ‘You’re iron. Sort of. Living. Kind of. Elemental.
Freaky.’ She sniffed and her eyes rolled up briefly into her head in a disconcerting manner, a flash of white.
‘I’m human,’ Lila said.
‘Hell you are!’ the girl replied. She really did have a talent for vocally flipping the V sign, Lila thought.
‘She’s just a cyborg kind of thing,’ Zal said casually. ‘She’s harmless. We only came to look at the house. She wants to rent
it.’
Lila kneed him in the back for the harmless remark and said, ‘Speaking of which, why are you here?’
‘Is that a faery dress?’ the girl said, staring at Lila with frank and open disbelief.
‘What, this old thing?’ Lila plucked at a ruffle of her over-the-leathers miniskirt and felt the cloth twitch of its own accord.
The girl stared at her, at the dress, at Zal. Finally she shook her head and said with feeling, ‘I never seen anything like
you two.’ She frowned. ‘Never thought anyone’d catch me so easy.’ She was completely disgusted with herself. Then, ‘Are you
going to send me away?’
‘Where to?’ Lila asked. ‘Why are you here?’
‘’Cos I can leave fine on my own,’ the girl added firmly. ‘Got here by myself, can leave by myself, find another place, no
worries. I don’t hurt anyone. I don’t do
nothing.
’
Lila reviewed the details on the house’s previous occupants. Both listed an early departure because they ‘just didn’t like
it as much as we thought’ and ‘too rustic, rather be closer to town’. Their personal logs mentioned other things however;
bad feelings, sudden chills, a sense of being watched, a presence . . .