‘Au contraire,’ Zal said, helping her to stuff the robes under both of them and out of the way of the wheels. ‘The forest
is nothing but one big ecosystem of elemental power. The only difference is that it isn’t manifesting higher forms any more.’
‘And in human-speak?’
‘In human-speak, there aren’t any more creatures. There’s just wood, earth, water, metal, fire and the rest of it, sitting
around in a huge weatherlike arrangement, gathering power. Around conscious beings, the elements behave a bit like ghosts,
and accrue features like living beings.’
‘Meaning there are no minds around here?’
‘Surely not for a long time.’
Implying that very shortly, there would be again.
She couldn’t get out of there fast enough but she made herself stop at the turn onto the road. Long afternoon shadows streaked
across the hardtop. ‘Does it stop here? At the property line?’
‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘It’s back from the road. And what’s with the sun, were we asleep?’
She explained the temporal shift to him, or rather, she stated it, because an explanation was far from her capacity. All she
could think about were the two women and Friday – who counted as a couple of hundred in his own right. Had they been in there?
What had happened?
‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ she said, feeling the press at her back, the urge to move forward inexorable as she let the brake levers
slip.
‘Pretty bad,’ he said, only the emptiness of tone in his voice giving away the impact it had had on him. ‘But you still owe
me dinner and dancing and I think we should focus on that, while there still is dinner and dancing.’
‘When in danger or in doubt, return to flip-mode and tune out,’ Lila said, scornful and envious.
Zal didn’t answer.
Her stomach burned. She appeased her need to do the right thing
by transmitting everything to Bentley and having a fast, data-only conversation about who should know and what to do. By
the time they were on the road the Agency was already mustering its response and she felt she had bought herself a window
of redress. If Zal had known what she was doing – but she thought perhaps he did, because he was sharp and knew her – he would
be angry, so to deflect that she said, ‘It might be hard getting a table dressed as Our Lady of the Violent Gateaux.’
He laughed and finally his hands found a way through the layers and rested on her waist. He gave her a squeeze that let her
know he did indeed understand that she was already trying to put together a one-woman posse against the problems of the world
and that she shouldn’t, but since she had, he could only squeeze her warningly in an effort to re-transmit his feelings on
the subject. He spat a mouthful of veil out. ‘In this town? You must be kidding.’
Privately she prayed to the dress for mercy. She hated to be noticed, or at least, hated to be noticed for looking like a
twinky bishop of the latter day morons, but as was its habit the faery had assumed a position on the day’s events and showed
no sign of a change. Today was Apocalypse Lite and Lila was the catwalk model.
The bathrooms at Pete’s Grill were big, which was good because getting out of the robes was a space-and-time consuming exercise.
Also, they refused to be got out of in the way Lila had hoped. The waistbands and shirts tightened up on her, the cuffs closed
and the collar threatened to choke. When she tried to pull the masks and veil off they tangled on her hands. After a few minutes
of this pointless fight she gave up with a furious roar and sat on the can in a stoney silence, acres of unsuitable ancient
material, richly tapestried, bunched around her waist. The glyphs and inscriptions glinted cheaply in the economy lighting.
An ancient ward against unseen evils rested against a graffitied tile bearing instructions that Angela would fuck for free,
and a badly drawn illustration of the same.
‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!’ Lila hissed to Tatterdemalion, although she could believe it only too well and
there was nothing left to do but roll her eyes and grit her teeth. She heard the door open and ordinary women in ordinary
clothing come in, talking and starting to fix their make up in the mirror.
At least Pete’s Grill was unpretentious. Celebrities didn’t go there, it wasn’t noted in Best of Bay City. It existed halfway
between the interstate and the suburbs in a part of town that was mostly made up of strip malls and light industrial units
in the middle of a district known as Moths – the last bastion of otherworld-friendly locales. It served old-style Otopian
cookery and outworld specials, had no menus other than what the waitresses could remember at any given moment, and was run
by Pete himself, a ruggedly handsome cowboy type of man, rail-thin and unshaven, who couldn’t have looked more out of place
anywhere other than in an apron in front of a pristine barbecue range.
Lila and Zal liked it because Pete hated everyone with simple
unmitigated contempt for all beings. He relished his hate as he lavished it verbally upon them through the kitchen screens.
He hated them so much and loathed them so dearly that he loved them all in a deep, philanthropic, unshakeable manner, primal
in its absolute nature, and they felt welcomed. Because of this it didn’t attract many people who couldn’t at least grasp
this basic fact of grill existence, but even among the enlightened Lila didn’t fancy being stared at and talked about. Not
that this wouldn’t happen because of Zal anyway. In fact the case was hopeless. She was just thinking she had to give up even
trying to have anything resembling a normal life, even for five minutes, when the chatter outside the cubicle caught her attention.
‘. . . being dead isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘Tell me about it. First they’re happy to see you, then they’re scared shitless of you and after that pretty much everyone
doesn’t know what to do with you.’
‘Yeah, I can tell they kind of wish I was dead again, you know? And I can’t help it that bits of their stuff goes missing.
I mean, it’s not like I’m taking it, you know? But as soon as anything happens it’s like – oh, let’s search Alice, she’s probably
evil.’
‘I know. And they’re always watching you, like they think you’re gonna freak out or something and nobody knows what to say.
It’s the shits. And they’re always asking—’
‘Yeah, like, what’s it like, being dead, and you say you don’t know because you’re not and you don’t remember, there’s this
gap and they’re so pissed because you can’t tell them anything. I mean. They totally got this priest out the other day to
exorcise me. And they’re all like – no offence, Alice, it’s just that we heard a lot of stuff about you dead people not really
being you and all. Can you believe that? I mean, we can’t be dead can we, because we’re like – here.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Hell, no. Nothing happened. He made them all guilty like it was their fault I was here and went off with six hundred bucks
on his card. The fucker.’
‘Totally.’ There was a pause and then the sound of the emergency door being pushed open and leant on as the two of them went
outside for a smoke. Faery weed and ’bacco.
‘D’you know what’s the worst?’ Alice said after they’d been quiet a minute. ‘I feel like a total disappointment. I can’t work,
can’t do anything, have to carry this stupid tag around everywhere to show I’m supposed to be dead. Sometimes I wonder if
I
am
evil. I mean, you
wouldn’t know, you’d just carry it, like a disease, like a cloud. Nothing’s good since I came back whether it’s true or not.
I’d kinda like to die just so I could fix things, but I’m too angry and . . . I don’t know how.’
‘Yeah,’ sighed the friend. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘When we get to the interstate we can get a ride. They won’t know.’
‘Yeah, you think north?’
‘Yeah, north or wherever. You know?’
‘Mmn hmm.’
Lila stood up and flushed, shook out the robes, exited the stall. The room wasn’t big enough for them not to turn and see
her. Against the brilliant light of the late-afternoon sun they were just slightly transparent at the edges. They stood and
stared at her, two teenagers in dated clothes with too much blusher on so that their faces looked like dolls’ faces. They
recoiled slightly, but when she did nothing they turned back to their smokey huddle.
Lila washed her hands and checked herself in the mirror as if she looked like this every day. Then she learned that her hat
was nun-like, a kind of gothic wimple with drapes. The mask was warriorish around the eyes, fierce, with gold flecks for exaggerated
lashes. For all she said about it being ridiculous it looked imposing. If you were going to invigilate the end of the world,
it’s what you’d probably hope to wear.
She dried her hands in the airblaster and watched her sleeves billow. Then, unable to prevent herself, she turned around and
saw the dead girls again. There was an intensity, a focus to them that was unnerving. They held the cheap smoke as if it was
precious oxygen and watched her, bold and strangely submissive at the same time, waiting for her to make her move. Since she’d
already earwigged their conversation and intruded more than anyone had a right to she felt bad, and because of Max she felt
double bad, and the nun outfit, which was another lie felt worse yet, but as the seconds passed she found nothing to say other
than a choked, ‘Bless you.’
And with that pathetic line she made her getaway.
Zal had ordered for both of them when she reached the table and for once she didn’t care. She slid into the booth next to
him, so shocked by the banality and horror of the conversation she’d just witnessed that she didn’t know what to say.
For the first time she really considered the question – why were they here at all? They hadn’t appeared until Xaviendra’s
intervention. Xaviendra had made and resurrected the dead as a temporary army in
Otopia. Certainly she was involved. But Lila’s written message to Max was equally powerful, she thought. All her thoughts
about causes led her consistently to one place: Under. But she dared not speak openly about Under, or even covertly, not anywhere
where there might be people capable of overhearing.
‘It isn’t your fault, Lila,’ Zal said as the waitress arrived with water and a jug of Faery Lite. She placed frozen mugs in
front of them, a plate of beernuts, a plate of some elf things Lila didn’t know the name of but which looked not unlike a
fruit salad and a bowl of potato chips. She didn’t give Lila a second glance.
Lila looked at each of the dishes, reached out and filled her mug with clear golden ale from the pitcher, gave the pitcher
to Zal and said, ‘Why does it feel like it is, then?’
He paused and took a long drink. ‘You know what’s interesting? I don’t need to name anything specific and you just assume
it’s your fault. I don’t even need to question that there will be something that fits the concept of ‘your fault’, whether
it’s the crap that passes for motorbikes these days or the change in the weather or the existence of some weird-ass wormhole
where my old house used to be. Or all of those.’
‘Still feels like it is though,’ she said quietly and defiantly.
Zal shrugged. ‘There are a billion people out there, of one kind and another, and about a million of them reckon themselves
players in whatever’s going down. Most of them are wrong. Everyone is a player, but few players ever have the trick hand,
and when they do have it, most likely they don’t know and never will know they had it.’
He paused and she noted that he wasn’t able to name Xaviendra, or was unwilling. ‘I got all this from Mal by the way. And
what happened to you makes it seem like you’re the middle of things, and you are. You’re the middle of your things, your life,
your stuff. But you’re not The Middle. There are about a million other fuckers out there fucking up everything regardless
of what you do. So relax.’ He was frowning as he pushed the plates away, pulling the beer and the pitcher towards himself
with slow reluctance.
‘Are you okay?’ She pushed the dishes to the other side of the table, trying to look into his face to calm a sudden feeling
of alarm. His hair hanging down made it hard.
‘Can’t eat,’ he muttered, anger a bad note in his voice. ‘I feel like I want to but . . .’ he tried again, picked up the fork,
brought it close, sniffed the fruit, opened his mouth. He threw it down suddenly with a
clatter that turned the faces of the closest diners towards them for a brief moment.
Lila realised she hadn’t seen him eat anything since their reunion. Drink yes. And she’d assumed he’d been feeding himself
– their schedules hadn’t exactly crossed much. ‘Can’t eat because you’re ill or—’
‘No,’ he bit out, filling his glass to the brim and watching a few faery suds roll over and down the side of the mug, their
iridescent bubbles showing tiny images of clouds that blew into the shape of dragons and then away. ‘Fucking dragons,’ he
muttered. ‘But it’s not their fault. Jack’s doing. Curse him to the seven hells.’ He picked up the mug and took a long draught,
but she could see it was a struggle to swallow it, as though it were mud and not beer, solid and not liquid, ten times heavier
than its weight. When he was done he was snarling and his hand on the mug handle was a fist.
She put her hand out to his, to touch his skin and make deeper contact. His fingers felt as they always had – bony and strong,
but now that she realised it, too light. Zal was solid enough. He had flesh, he was as real as the waitress or the table or
the food, but there was an insubstantial quality to him that couldn’t be measured in kilograms or density. It was like he
was made of something different altogether, something that was pretending to be a solid body very successfully, but wasn’t
good on the details. As there was no obvious data to confirm this notion with what she could consider factual evidence, it
had gone straight under the mental rug where she swept everything she couldn’t confirm. There was a lot under that rug.
She folded his hand into hers and felt him squeeze her gently, even though he kept staring straight ahead at the fascinating
pink naugahyde of the seat on the other side of the booth.
She tried prompting, ‘When we left the void ships you had to go back with Tath, through Under. This is why?’
His face was grim, a rare expression for him, and his voice was barely controlled, though quiet. ‘When the second sister lifted
me from Under, she didn’t take my body with her. It’s gone now, buried in Winter. Then the sisters made me a body out of cloth,
but when Glinda took me to the Fleet I lost that too. If I went to Demonia with you and Teazle directly I’d have been a ghost
or a shadow. Any bloody necromancer could have eaten me for lunch. But Glinda told me there was a way for me to get a new
body that would survive here. A dragon told me the same thing. I sat at Ilya’s fireside and the longer
I stayed in his firelight, the more solid I became. The element filled me up. But it’s not the same as the old one. It wears
away.’
‘It’s too light,’ she said.
‘Yes. It’s made of light. I’m not what I used to be. I’m more like an illusion or a faery glamour. Good enough to drink certain
things, if they’re magical enough. Good enough to fight and fuck. But not good enough to eat it seems. I can’t even put it
in my mouth. It’s like I’m blocked.’
Lila felt the distance between them increase. ‘Who’s Glinda?’
At that moment the waitress reappeared with the rest of their order and Lila had to lean back as the table was filled with
steak, ribs, potato salad and bread. Dishes of hot pie and ice cream filled the gaps. The smell rising from it all was thick
and sweet.
Nostrils wide, inhaling deeply, Zal said, ‘Glinda is my death. Atropos, the last Valkyr, necessity, destiny, What Must And
Shall Be – whatever you like to call her. Sister Number Three. Doesn’t matter. I’m still hungry.’ He drained the mug on the
second draught and gave a short, unhappy sigh.
Now that food was present and glorious Lila found that she was starving. It seemed wrong to eat when he couldn’t. She stared
at the food. ‘Destiny. And you’re not moved by her personal interference in your life? That doesn’t make you important?’
Zal picked up a rib and licked it forlornly. ‘It makes me important to her for reasons best known to herself. That’s all.
I didn’t ask her about it. Seemed – what’s that word you humans like to use – inappropriate. You had a dragon hanging around
your bra for weeks. Did you ask it questions? No. Quite rightly. Because you know damn well that whatever you want to believe
about yourself it wasn’t your instrument, you were just some legs and arms it wanted to use for a while. Now eat for fucksakes.’
‘Playthings of the gods?’ Lila said. She picked up a rib dripping in barbecue sauce and a cold, unkind pleasure rolled over
her as she imagined what that was going to do to the faery dress.
‘Not gods. Just bigger and badder than you in the scheme of things.’ Zal dropped the rib onto his plate and picked up the
steak in both hands, running his tongue over the dripping, peppered edge. He licked his lips then tossed the whole thing onto
her plate and wiped his hands meticulously on her immaculate sleeve. ‘Fuck ’em all to hell.’