Zal leaned back away from her and turned, looking all around them. ‘That’s so strange,’ he said, quietly, his words swallowed
instantly by the swamp of silence. They sounded deadened even as they came out of his mouth. ‘When I was here before I felt
the earth element, though it always had this tinge of something unusual about it. I didn’t really care at the time. Now that’s
much stronger, and the secondary elements are here in force: wood, a lot of wood, and that’s tainted too, with the same thing.’
‘I don’t see the ghosts.’ She scanned on maximum detection levels, all frequencies. Ghosts could sometimes register on extreme
electromagnetic spectra and occasionally traces of their passing could be perceived as absence of information, gaps in the
signals. But unless you were almost inside one or happened to catch it against a background of some strong radiation, you’d
be lucky to notice a thing.
‘They weren’t ordinary ghosts,’ he said. ‘This isn’t an ordinary wood, not even an ordinary energy sink. I kinda knew it was
weird when I could go out and find ways into Zoomenon. The gap between the worlds was so thin in places, you could nearly
step across without meaning to. But just between Zoo and here. Not to anywhere else.’ He hesitated, sniffing. ‘It’s gathering.
Did something happen here in Otopia or old Earth?’
Lila filed ‘gathering’ away under ‘ask later’ although she thought she’d guessed what he meant already – the site had formed
enough focus by the natural processes of being a sink to move from passive
collection to active – and flipped through the historical records. Accessing the city databases was difficult. ‘I’m getting
a lot of signal failure,’ she admitted finally. ‘And the long-term data on this site is in the slow archives. It could take
hours to pull it all out.’ She sent a message to Bentley, asking for the data to be readied, not confident it would get through.
‘Okay.’ He moved back into riding position. ‘Let’s roll.’
She eased the throttle and was almost surprised when they moved into a quick glide. With every turn their passage began to
feel more and more like an unwelcome intrusion. Boulders that had not been there previously had moved close to the corners
of the road, blocking sightlines. Trees near the edges leaned out precipitously, their largest branches stretching towards
each other across the gaps. In places the canopy cut out nearly all light and this effect increased as they neared the lowest
point of the hollow where the house lay in wait. Lila could hardly believe it was only weeks since she had been there with
Malachi. Then it had been spooky and unpleasant. Now it was as though another hundred years had gone by. Once she would never
have believed in the literal truth of such an observation.
She pinged the south-city transmitter and noted, with dismay, that there was a significant delay on the line. The reply was
late, weak and decayed, as if it were passing across light years and around gravity wells, not just a few miles. She requested
a time check. There was a ten-minute discrepancy to her internal clock.
‘Time’s accelerated in here,’ she said, to herself as much as to Zal, and then they came to the final curve and she hit the
brakes. They slid to a halt on the rough surface. Before them the vast, agglutinated mass of the house slumped in blackened
ruin.
Spars of old timbers jutted from it at all angles. Fitful smokes wreathed the air, oozing from crevices all over the crumpled
wreckage and rising up towards the open sky only to be shredded by minute gusts of a wind that moved erratically, unpredictably.
Lila suspected air elementals and then saw their angular, weightless shapes form and vanish in the darker gouts as they played
with the rising billows.
Now she noticed heat, faint at this distance, but certain, radiating onto her skin. And she saw the fire. It was hard not
to see it. It was everywhere, blazing in sheeted infernos, jetting sideways from the mouths of the ground-floor windows as
if fuelled by pressured gas. But it was not there. Transparent, nebulous, it stormed unceasingly
over the dead house whilst the tiny smokes rose through it unheeding; the ghost of fire.
‘What the hell is that?’
She felt Zal get off the bike and release her waist. At the same time a sudden slithering pressure ran over her, making her
hiss with horror before she realised it was the dress – forgotten Tatterdemalion – changing shape.
From the flimsy straps of the sundress a torrent of heavy cotton jacquard and linen went tumbling to the ground. It swathed
her arms and draped her to the floor in panels of perfectly pressed white fabric. Beneath them cream and gold robes came pouring
in a flood. They were so heavy she felt herself adjusting to take the weight. Peaks of stiff, stitched cloth constructed themselves
into a mantle with curious pagodalike edging over each shoulder and drew in a close-fitted high collar to the base of her
jaw. Undersleeves tautened, oversleeves billowed and edged themselves with silver and gold. Stitching ran like water into
the signs and sigils of magical texts Lila had never read and never would understand. She only identified them courtesy of
Sarasilien’s vast database. The marks predated his knowledge.
There was sudden pressure on her forehead and around her cheeks and nose. She found herself wearing a headdress, with a mask
and a veil and a kind of bandit facecloth that hung down in a point to her chest, where it was finished off with a silvered-charm
tassel, heavy with miniaturised icons. From the inside the entire effect was stifling but she knew better than to argue with
the thing. It must have its reasons, and for once they didn’t entirely seem mocking, although she wasn’t sure about that.
She looked like High Priest meets Samurai inside a wedding cake. It wasn’t what she’d have chosen, given a choice. There was
no choice however, there was only Tatters, a faery so ancient that even old faeries had forgotten her.
Through the winsome muslin of the veil and the mesh-covered eyes of the mask underneath it was hard to see much of anything
that Lila had seen two seconds ago. In its place what she saw made her wish she hadn’t come at all.
She got off the bike, with some difficulty, and faced the intense, confusing maelstrom in front of them with blank incomprehension.
She felt that too soon this would turn into horror and distress, but for the time being she could settle for incomprehension.
In the distance she could hear Zal say, ‘Nice frock, Tripitaka.’ He was looking at the
house however, and she wondered if he saw what she was seeing with the faery’s help.
The building was burning. The flames were furious, yellow and orange. They roared and snapped. The building was drowning.
Streams of black light poured from its windows and doors, through the holes in its roofs. They twisted around, consuming smoke.
The building was exploding. Every solid piece of it was bursting into motes of colour and light. All of this took place inside
the eye of a tornado, focused on the house. Spinning walls of energy sucked the debris – flame, smoke, darkness, colour –
towards themselves. They tore them apart and threw them together. The house was imploding. This destruction turned in on itself,
as if invisible fists were punching dough down into smaller and smaller rounds. It collapsed, became transdimensional, inverted
itself. From this pinprick at the heart of the storm, small as a hydrogen atom, something came leaking, came sneaking, came
winding like a thread of smoke. So insubstantial. So almost nothing. It was less than visible to the naked eye, less than
a dot. It was not light, not dark. The only reason she knew it was there was because something must be there and yet nothing
was. Her AI mapped it and made up something so that there was something to see.
‘I say again, what the hell is that?’ Her voice bounced back at her, hot, damp, small, scratchy. She snatched up the veil
and the mask and looked with her own eyes. The ghostly fire, the ruin was still there, smoking. No sign of any of the other
things, just the air elementals gyring slowly, speeded, she now saw, if they touched the places where the tornado whirled.
If you removed the complication of so much elemental confusion, of the layers and the temporal abnormalities and the rest,
the thing she couldn’t see directly looked a lot like a very, very small black hole.
Zal didn’t reply for a long time. When she assumed he had nothing to say, he said, ‘Who was living here? Were there people
in there?’
‘Azevedo, a worldwalker, and Jones, the same.’
‘Calliope Jones, Malachi’s contact,’ Zal said, filling in for himself. ‘Two strandlopers.’
‘Azevedo was time-lapsed,’ Lila said. Reluctantly she replaced the veil and mask and stared at the churning energy forms,
trying and failing to deduce a cause.
‘Before she came here, or after?’
‘I don’t know.’ It had all happened in the gap of fifty. She trawled the fire-service records, patching the files as they
came. Her suspicion
was rewarded in part. There had been a real fire here. ‘There was no callout. The fire service came only after someone reported
seeing smoke from the beach. Maybe it was empty when this happened.’ She called Azevedo’s number, yanking it from Malachi’s
database. It returned the disconnected tone.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
She didn’t ask why. She couldn’t see anything that looked remotely like a human survivor, although the ruin was extensive
and they hadn’t even begun a search. A few weeks ago she’d been here and it was overgrown, but the house was fine. In part
because she wanted to know and in part to stop herself having to look at the maelstrom any more, or deal with it, she walked
down the path away from the house towards the hillside where the terraced gardens and pool area dropped steadily to the beach.
The vegetation – it couldn’t be called a garden any more – had increased dramatically in the time between her visits. Years
of growth bulged and draped on all sides. Kudzu and other vines were consuming the abandoned furniture on the poolside and
creeping down into the empty pool itself. Green lines of algae followed a trickle of water where the fountains and bubbling
stream used to play. The path was choked with grass and on the poor ground where stone walls shored up the hillside to stop
it falling into the sea, huge glades of knotweed spread their diamond leaves. It made her nervous. She pinged the tower using
a tangled quantum signal to get around the local temporal eddies.
The tower said it was three in the afternoon. Six hours in about six minutes, she reckoned. One day every twenty-four minutes.
Almost three per hour. Given the growth rates and placing the start time back to her last visit just for theory, that indicated
that whatever the time-slip problem was, it was something that had started out slowly and accelerated, was possibly still
accelerating. Maintaining a constant signal measure, she began to run. The heavy robes caught on everything. She heard the
odd rip but didn’t slow down. At least the skirts were more like a fighter’s tunic at the bottom and left enough room to move.
A few moments later she pushed free of the last knotweed stems and emerged onto the rock-strewn sand of the small cove that
stretched to the limits of the Folly’s land.
The ghost ship Matilda belonging to Jones was still there. What was left of it had been dragged up above the high-water mark
and left to decay. As a structure that wasn’t truly material it ought to have
evaporated by now, if ghost research was to be believed. But the frame and remaining platework, though rusted and warped,
looked all too material to Lila. However, the liminal blue were-light of ghostly things that had clung to its every edge was
no more.
‘Ghost leaves a body,’ she said to herself. She went closer. The metal was iron but it was very thin and broke up when she
touched it, crumbling onto the sand where a large reddish stain of similar particles already marked the spot. ‘Blood of ships.’
Aside from that the cove was unmarked – nobody had been here. She took some measurements and left hurriedly, running to start
with and then adding power so that her strides almost flew her up the steps and over the pool terrace. The conflagration burned
on, half real, half done with, yet to come.
‘Zal?’ she shouted, though the fire wasn’t a loud one, barely a hiss. A sinking feeling accompanied the notion that once again
they had become separated, once again . . .
‘I’m here.’
She turned and saw him emerge from the thick foliage just behind her.
‘I was checking the woods for elementals.’
‘I thought you’d gone inside.’ She couldn’t conceal the relief in her voice.
‘No,’ he stared at the house with dislike. ‘I don’t think I can go in there.’
‘What about Friday?’ She didn’t relish the idea of trying to go any closer herself, but she wasn’t convinced it was impossible.
‘What about him? If he was in there he probably isn’t any more.’ He stood and stared at the conflagration, resigned.
‘I hate to leave without trying.’ But the time slip preyed on her mind. The veil sucked against her mouth as she took a breath.
‘And what about Azevedo, and Jones?’ But she didn’t leap forward with enthusiasm. She walked, slowly, inching her way forward
and felt a sharp increase in radioactivity as she neared the rubble where the door used to be. Aetheric charges became more
powerful. She began to experience the strangest feeling of bursts of deadness in her limbs. At the same time the faery clothes
became heavier, the linen a set of leaden plates, the delicate mask a helm. It cut down the trouble but it didn’t cut it out.
She reckoned she could last maybe two minutes inside the house. Maybe less. And then she didn’t know what would happen but
she was reasonably certain she wouldn’t be coming out.
Reluctantly she backed away. ‘If they were in there, they’ll have to stay. I don’t like the look of this. Let’s get the hell
out of here.’
‘We should put a ward around the perimeter of the property.’ Zal retreated to the bike. ‘Stop any accidental trespass.’
She nodded her assent. ‘So, nothing in the forest?’ The bike started on the fourth try. She had to supply extra charge. The
battery had run flat.