‘Unless you have anything to say about Janie Six.’ Lila felt left out of things. It was too bad but she wasn’t sure she wanted
to see how this struggle was going to end if she left it unchecked.
‘Finishing a little police business? How nice for you. But what would I get for my kindness?’ Shivaud said, folding her hands
on her lap and adjusting her posture so that she could tuck her feet under the chair.
Lila watched the succubus place her long fingers either side of Zal’s hips. At this range the beautifully painted nails were
obviously claws, several studded along their central ridge with diamonds and tiny seed pearls. The claw tips grazed his skin
above his waistband, testing it. When she didn’t start burning she purred. Zal, mesmerised, was reaching with one hand towards
her face as if to caress it.
Lila turned back to Shivaud, her own hands folded in front of her, straight as a librarian. ‘You get to live and so does your
associate here. That’s generous of me, very generous indeed, considering that she is now on my territory and I am not known
as a gentle punisher back at the Sikarza house.’
The demon took a sudden inbreath and her languor became the poised anxiety of a squirrel in a second. Shivaud’s face fell
with surprise and both of the women looked at Lila with fresh appraisal. Lila smiled at them both. ‘Isn’t it interesting how
everyone always thinks the man is in charge?’
‘I am from Tantalor,’ the demon said quickly, recoiling from Zal with dancer’s grace but lightning speed. ‘I did not recognise
you. We are far from the capital and the great society. Forgive me.’ She bowed,
her face pushed into the pillows and her bottom down, tail curling quickly around her legs until it wrapped her all around.
When she came up she kept her face down.
Zal sighed heavily and bent down to pick up his soggy clothing. The flames died back to their normal position in a wing-shape
tattoo on his back as he straightened up and dressed. His disgust at his shirt and coat was only marginally less than Shivaud’s
expression as she kicked the demon with the toe of her shoe.
‘Roxa!’
‘It is no use,’ the succubus said, crawling back slowly to crouch over the unconscious body behind her. She seemed to gain
some strength from it and sat up again. ‘Tell them and let them go.’
Shivaud stared at her in disbelief. Lila could see that Roxa had always delivered in the past and was the undefeated champion
of these parts. Suddenly Roxa hissed at Shivaud and came up into a pounce-ready crouch, her tail quivering.
‘Do as they say and get them out of here!’
Shivaud’s expression became stony. She turned to Lila. ‘Janie Six was killed by one of the Viperblood, from Cedars West, a
guy called Haddon, half demon. He’s the Viperblood second. You touch him, you got a war with them. The portal is that way,’
she indicated her left with a wave. ‘Roxa will take you there.’
The demon looked vengeful at this rebuke to her status but she stood up obediently nonetheless.
Lila and Zal stepped over the prone man to follow her.
‘You aren’t going to demand I clear the roads?’ Shivaud asked sweetly.
‘I don’t care about the road,’ Lila said and let that sink into the silence that followed as she trailed the succubus along
a hall to a room at the far end of the building.
Roxa’s stride was long and businesslike. She reached the door she was looking for, breathed onto her hand, pressed it to
the cheap wood and then flung back a couple of bolts. She went in before them and gestured for them to help themselves.
‘All yours.’
The room did not have any windows, only the light from the portal shimmer contained within the glowing marks on its bare floorboards.
‘Where does it come out?’ Zal asked.
‘In a house on the Sangueste Canal, near Bladespark Bridge. There will be some liaison there but they won’t bother you, I’m
sure.’ She paused and then said with a teasing grin, ‘But in the stories that reached Tantalor they say you were a portal
opener. I suppose that must not be true.’
Zal’s hand on her arm prevented Lila from moving forward. ‘It’s true enough to recognise a rubbish chute from a gate. This
is a dumping ground and it goes to Zoo, where everything gets taken care of.’ He pointed at the demonic runescript edging
the broad ring. Blood and dust marked the boards, but that was only to be expected.
Roxa’s moment of confidence vanished and she darkened, becoming a yellow-green colour. Her tail whipped around, almost invisible
in the shadows, and a splatter of venom struck Zal’s face as the tip of the tail point stabbed into his neck. The sound of
Lila’s gun was almost deafening in the tiny space, followed by the plaintive last sigh of the demon as she slid to the ground,
almost severed in half through the waist. Zal slapped his hand to his neck, recoiling, and hit the door as he staggered.
‘Zal!’ Lila caught him by the shoulders. The gun had been and gone, a breath of violence and fear. It was an overreaction.
She was shocked by that more than the result.
His eyes were rolling up in his head but his teeth were gritted. ‘Just push her in the hole and let’s get out of here,’ he
hissed, breathing in gulps of air and snarling with the effort of resisting the poison. ‘You can shoot me with something,
right?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, feeling the strange surge of power as her body struggled to produce an antitoxin. ‘Not for the magical component
though.’
‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘It will wear off. I can live with that.’ He reached out towards the door and caught hold of it this
time but the effort was too much and it brought him to his knees. By his feet the demon’s twitching tailtip was still pumping
out the dregs of its venom sacs, filling the air with the heavy, musky fragrance of roses and myrrh, romance and death. ‘Why,’
he gasped in between breaths, ‘do I always get it in the neck?’
‘Just lucky, I guess,’ Lila said, bracing him with one arm as she injected close to the puncture wound with her other hand.
‘Ah, that feels as bad as the first one,’ he protested, but his arms had gone limp and he was quickly losing his ability to
hold himself up at all. He sounded drunk.
‘Wait a minute, it’ll work,’ she assured him, pulling him back so that she could prop him against a relatively clean bit of
wall. ‘Got demon all over your face again though.’
If something permanent happened to him she was happy to revise her verdict on overreacting. She walked back to the body and
kicked it across into the portal where it vanished immediately in a fine haze of light and subatomic particles. ‘This thing
has rotten containment. A couple of months chucking stuff in here and you’ll be dying of radiation sickness,’ she said. ‘Short
range though, mercifully for whoever lives downstairs.’ She went back and got Zal’s arm around her neck and one shoulder under
his to lift him. ‘Try to walk.’
He mumbled something inarticulate but he was light so she was able to carry him with her as she went back the way they had
come. The second door she kicked in was the right one. At least, it had a portal and was in a room considerably nicer than
the first one with a lot less in the way of x-ray bleed. The demon script was difficult to translate but after a while she
was convinced it wasn’t a oneway ticket to the Void and stepped into it because she could hear running feet, voices in the
hall and the click of automatics being readied.
*
At the house on Sangueste there were six demons in attendance at the portal waiting for them, armed with a variety of interesting
weapons and expectant faces. They attacked even before the portal had concluded transmission, which meant that one of them
got fried straight off by a combination of the circle ward shield and the portal’s outer rim microplasma, leaving five of
them in motion, bullets in the air, blades singing, jet of flame mid-erupt as Lila arrived with Zal hanging onto her side,
muttering gibberish.
She wished now that she hadn’t been so hasty in getting rid of Tatterdemalion. But it was a bit late for that. She spun on
the spot, turning her back on four of the incoming objects and at the same time spinning a shield of diamond filaments out
of the back of her body. Because they were moving at high speeds and vibrating at frequencies that distorted local space and
bent it almost double they didn’t need to be tightly packed to deflect the fast-moving bullets or the slower blades. A cloak
of the stuff swept from her arm to cover Zal, hooding him in sheeting white strands of crystal. For him it happened so quickly
it seemed no more than a white flash like a camera going off.
Meantime she drew her guns. By the time they were ready to fire there were six barrels jutting from the outer edge of her
forearm as she swung it around and they shot almost in sync and put six bolts through six foreheads. She used the recoil to
help her drag Zal’s deadweight around. It wasn’t enough to finish the job however. She caught the final shot in her hand,
a half-inch in front of Zal’s face.
It was an armour-piercing round and absorbing the impact was too much for her at close range. It punctured her hand right
through, although she was moving it as much as she could so that when it exited it did so at an angle that nicked Zal’s ear
on its way past him and then went on to sail effortlessly through the plaster and stud wall behind them and, by the sound
of it, into an innocent body on the far side – if a houseful of gangland demons could be considered innocent, and Lila doubted
that.
The smell of demon brains and overheated, distressed metal was noxious and almost overpowering in its own right. For a second
her eyes rolled with the stink. Zal wobbled on his feet.
‘I see nothing’s changed here,’ he rasped, clinging to her as he straightened up, forcing himself to regain full control of
his body even though he was quivering with involuntary muscle tremors. ‘And sh-shame on you, you name dropper. Talking about
Teazle to sc-core. That’s a l-low blow.’
She realised he was referring to Roxa’s defeat and calling her dishonourable for rank pulling. ‘We didn’t have time for the
triple-X version of the knockdown fight. And anyway, I was jealous.’
He blinked carefully at the room. ‘Didn’t ruin your aim, I see.’ He had a slight grin on his face. His eyes were as dark as
pits. She just managed to catch him as he fell.
‘Zal don’t faint on me, you big blouse!’ His skin was hot and his eyes already flickering back and forth in venomous dreams.
She cursed and lifted him up, over her shoulder. ‘This is MY position,’ she said to the empty room, as she stepped out of
the circle. ‘MY position is the girl who faints and gets thrown over the hero’s shoulder. Not yours. It’s so unsexy.’
Zal murmured something unrepeatable about positions and breasts, which made Lila think briefly of Xavi and her unconscious
genius for talking while out cold and that put her in an even worse mood. She couldn’t face a houseful of demon wannabe mafiosi
and their greedy, hopeful faces or their collapsing, bloodied corpses, so she shot out the ornate leaded-glass window, ignited
her boot jets and made a hasty exit upstage. They crossed the foul green waters of the canal, passed high over the masterwork
of tiled roofs that decorated Greater Sangueste with mosaics of cathedral proportion and made it to the relatively clear,
if reeking, airs of the Sheban lagoon.
To forestall any ideas about pursuit she paused to launch a rocket at the building and watched as it blasted three floors
into a healthy, smoking inferno. The fire was more firework than bomb, only to make a point. It might be a mistake, it was
hard to tell how the demons would react because she had no idea of her local standing in the ranks now that she wasn’t Teazle’s
wife any more – too small a blast insulted them, too large offended. Either way they might choose to follow her, as devoted
servants if they were impressed, and as assassins if they weren’t. She piled on the power and didn’t look back.
Across the lagoon the colours of the aircars and balloons, dirigibles and flitters, were gaudy and merry lights twinkled from
towers and palaces in the old town. She headed there. The streets were busy, the lagoon itself rather full of gondolas and
cruisers cutting the water this way and that with their competing wakes but she noticed changes that she hadn’t had time to
see on her previous visit.
There was less art and more smoke, less beauty and more savagery, a wildness to the place that hadn’t been there before. Guilds
and house banners with unrecognisable sigils crowded the markets, and
these were full, not only of the magical items that the city was famed for, but with the wicker cages of slaves and the gleaming
bottles and stone sarcophagi of imprisoned creatures whose nature was only guessable by the size and style of their pen. Whole
districts had changed, boundaries shifted. But as she came down to the old flat shapes of the manse roofs that she recognised
she saw the Sikarza flags flying strongly in the onshore wind. Beneath them ran a host of smaller colours, advertising who
was in and who was out. At the top was the blue-edged white bunting of Teazle’s personal flare. The master was home, then,
and still the master.
Relief filled her and she landed on their flight diamond. The deck officer saluted her as if she’d never been away, even though
he’d never met her and must have known about her change of status. Teazle himself hadn’t taken against them, at least.
She almost ran through the halls, checking doors, and sent a sprite she found watering a large vase of flowers, to find Teazle.
There were people living there she didn’t know, names, shapes, faces all unfamiliar but each one of them seemed quite familiar
with her and with Zal. Some even bowed. Being Demonia nobody batted an eyelash at the state of them and she reached her own
rooms without delay. Clean, immaculate, they were exactly as she hadn’t left them.
She put Zal down on the bed and saw that the hanging cocoon in which Teazle normally slept had been recently used. Shredded
bits of wool and fur hung out of it. There was a strange smell, of things that had been maintained but not used or lived in
for a very long time, a museumish kind of odour of beeswax, incense and neglect. She walked swiftly into the bathroom feeling
as if she might throw up, which surprised her because she’d seen a lot worse and done worse than today’s accumulated bloodshed.
She found herself shaking and though there was some reason for it with the chemical imbalance caused by the antivenom, she
knew the real cause was that she’d promised herself – dreamed, imagined, pretended – there would be an end to the slaughter
after last time in this place. Now she saw that when demons were involved there would never be any other way and there would
never be a stop unless she chose to die. It was the faces she couldn’t stand. Roxa, whatever else she’d been, had been healthy,
vibrant, interesting in the way of all living things, magical, fascinating, marvellous. And now she was disintegrating meat
under a Zoomenon sun, being unpicked into the elements from which she’d spawned.
Sure, Roxa could have chosen not to take them to that doorway, to take them to the real portal instead, Lila reasoned. She
just knew that to her it seemed an unforgiveable stupidity, such a waste. For that they deserved their fates and that alone,
she thought, but even this view of justice was faked and it didn’t console her. The truth was that there was no justice, no
balance, no law, no will except her own, and theirs.
Her loathing of the Agency and her own position crystallised out then, as she hung over the bathtub, watching the water run
into the huge stone basin. Her stomach calmed. She wanted justice, fairness, kindness, but it depended on the will of others
and she couldn’t touch that, not with any weapon in the world, nor any grace. Security there was none to be had either. Everything
could change in an instant. She washed her face and cleaned her teeth, decided to forgo the old ritual of the betrayer’s look
into the mirror and went back to see how Zal was doing.
The antivenom had done its work – the ugly purple swelling on his neck was down, the wound not much more than a pinprick.
His eyes still rolled in his head however, and his skin was hot. He babbled nonsense about pretty things, beauty and lust.
She stripped off his foul clothing and threw it on the floor. Then she noticed the shadow body that it had been hiding. It
rippled just over his own in smoky waves like a coat of oil. There was something about its movements that made her uneasy.
It looked as if it had purpose, senses and awareness of its own, separate from him now that he wasn’t in a fit state to master
it. It glided across him, as though searching something out. It flooded up his nostrils, from his ears and the surfaces of
his eyes. And he had told her that this was all that was left of him for the fifty years of his exile in Under. She didn’t
know what to make of it.
A powerful instinct warned her not to touch it. Her immediate impulse was to do the opposite, challenge the fear and the cause
of it, but this time she stayed her hands and threw a blanket on him instead. She had no idea what the magical potency of
the venom was. If she became poisoned by it that would make two of them who weren’t up to anything. Seeing that he wasn’t
going anywhere soon she went back for a bath.
The water was hot, there was soap and a brush. She changed to human skin form and watched the disturbing slither of black
leather and metal devolving to her old, pale tanned arms and legs. The blood and matter stayed where it was, coating her more
thickly now that she
had shrunk her surface, but in this form she didn’t have a hundred angular planes, seams and airvents so it was easier to
clean everything. She was struggling to get her hair to rinse clear when she felt a change in the air and looked up to find
Teazle walking in the door. His near-silent tread was thanks to the combination of his grace, human-form feet, and the carpets,
and he looked exasperated when all this effort wasn’t enough to sneak up on her.