‘Can you turn it off?’
‘Here.’ She held out her hand and a brief spark shot across from her to a part of the machine just under the tank. Suddenly
it came alive,
juddering and sliding under them across the surface. Then he had to fight to control it and keep the speed, dodging the sedate
lanes of AI-ordered cars and floats, setting off a dozen proximity alarms until he’d got the hang of the thing – too light
and overpowered – and found a path through. It was so much fun that he almost forgot he was freezing his ass off, starving,
aching and hungry. But then Lila tugged his hair and put her hand to his ear. She was playing music for him in the palm of
her hand – his favourite old track – but she interrupted it DJ-style to say, ‘Food!’
He obediently took a look around on the GPS, saw what district was closest and took a curve down the next off-ramp, easing
back until their speed matched the dawn traffic. Bay City had changed almost out of recognition since he’d been there last
but in recent days he’d been finding a new way around and this place was something that was so unusual he found himself pulled
to it easily. There was no lot so he parked on the street and they got off in the early, misty yellow light of morning as
a cleaner truck whirred past on automatic, almost spraying them with its washer jets.
Lila looked it over from its ordinary oh-so-subtle stone and glass front to its heavy, studded wooden door like a cathedral
vault entrance, and he was sure she was pulling all its files. He felt smug that he knew somewhere she didn’t.
‘An elf bar,’ she said, not quite believing it. ‘Isn’t that some kind of Alfheim statute violation?’
‘We’re not in Alfheim,’ he said and palmed the door. A trace of magic reacted to his aether body and the locks slid open in
five separate heavy-bar slams before it silently swung ajar.
‘Seeing that . . .’ Lila glanced up at him with a wry grin and real pleasure, the light flashing off her eyes into his. He
grabbed her wrist and kissed her hard as he moved her past him. She smiled up into his face before sliding beyond into the
dim glow of the oak-panelled room and its two fully armed elf guards. He didn’t blame them for overdoing it here.
The humans were in the middle of an agonising fall from a world that had been scientific and made sense to them, and the throes
of it vomited up some horrible scenes that wouldn’t have been out of place in an all-out war. Sometimes he wasn’t sure it
wasn’t a war conducted on very slow guerrilla lines. In any case, though Zal was
non grata
he was still a
persona
and a previous visit and some bloodied noses had gained him enough respect to get in a second time without questions.
The guard who had spat at his demon blood before was standing there now, looking straight ahead from his black eye as if
he was bored beyond belief. The other one, much more advanced, gave Lila a curious look that was a mixture of so many expressions
it was comical. Surprise, awe, disbelief, interest and the difficulty posed by being expected to do a pat-down weapons check
on her all warred for a moment and left him slack-jawed. Weapons weren’t allowed and Lila, well known among the worldly elves
at least by reputation, was nothing if not a weapon in herself. Also, they universally despised what he was wearing and the
condition he was in.
‘She’s with me,’ Zal said in elvish, quietly, as if that covered and explained everything.
Lila glanced at him curiously and returned the frosty guard’s icy glare.
The guard looked at Zal and their auras briefly entangled, communicating faster and more efficiently than speech. With a slight
blink of deference he moved aside and held open the heavy black curtain to let them pass. Behind the defensive one-way glass
surrounding the entryway Zal felt several more guards pursue a sudden curious interest in him. As they moved through into
the main room he felt them tracking him through their secret passages in the walls.
A familiar sensation of several very widely diffused
andalune
energies greeted him and he recognised the mages employed as wait-staff from his previous visit, briefly touching them all
before he withdrew into his customary silence, inside his physical body. They all turned to watch Lila, feeling the oddness
of her presence and he was aware of a degree of ill intent, which he ignored completely. Beyond the second room with its gentleman’s-club
arrangement of sofas and low tables, the bar proper opened out into an enormous glass-roofed conservatory entirely filled
with grass and trees like a tiny park. They sat at the edge of this on a huge floral recliner, Zal in the pit of it and Lila
in his arms, looking up through the roof at the clearing skies.
‘Too surreal,’ she murmured.
‘Just one of many things,’ he agreed, ordering for them both through the auric connection to the spiritual net that swirled
invisibly around them in a pale imitation of Alfheim’s own massive psychic presence. In the casual touches of the other elves
he read all the nuances of their feelings about him and they were deeply ambivalent. Only one mage had no animosity in her
signature. He asked her to
fetch the breakfast and a set of clothes from the room he used when he was staying in town.
‘What happens at night?’ Lila peered around, identifying the bodies of sleeping elves under and in the trees in the glasshouse,
a few human companions scattered among them and the odd faery. They kept human hours. Most of them were hungover, Zal guessed,
or exhausted.
‘It’s a madhouse,’ he said. ‘But on the plus side, lots of teenagers desperate to hook up.’
‘And do they get their wish?’
He shrugged, ‘No idea but there are plenty of predatory elves in the world and surely some of them are here. There must be
thirty in this room so hundreds potentially in and around the place.’
She shook her head. ‘Can’t believe it. It seems just . . . wrong.’
‘Times change,’ he said, letting the meaningless words slip out as he lay back and gave in to a minute of exhaustion. He wasn’t
as young as he wished he was. ‘Speaking of which – meaningless segue – you haven’t seen much of Teaz since we got back. Are
you avoiding him?’
‘Why, did he ask you to ask me?’
Which sounded defensive and some, so he took it as a yes. ‘He misses you is all I was going to say.’ Not exactly true but
he was going to have to fish here before he figured it out.
‘Hmm,’ she said, fiddling pointlessly with the rent front of his shirt. ‘He won’t mind, Zal. He’s got a billion things to
do.’ She made some slicing and dicing motions with her hand. A sigh escaped her nostrils.
‘I didn’t pick you for the jealous girlfriend type.’
‘What? That’s insane. I mean, when you were gone we . . . it was convenient Zal, and it was distracting and he just found
it terribly terribly entertaining and I . . .’
‘You?’ he prompted in the pause. His mage came up in her soft flowing robe and wordlessly handed over a set of towels before
laying his clothes out on the arm of the sofa and retreating. She tried quite hard to get a reading off him but he was closed
to her now and registered how much she didn’t like it. It was considered deeply impolite to remain aloof in that manner. Only
agents of the secret service from old – the Jayon Daga – were permitted to habitually contain their aetheric bodies. He hadn’t
served there for a long, long time but he was going to keep the privilege. ‘You?’ he nudged Lila and
handed her a towel for her hair, even though it was almost dry already from their ride.
‘I don’t know,’ she said unhappily.
Zal realised this angle was going nowhere. He knew perfectly well what was going on, but if she didn’t want to admit it to
him that was another thing. ‘I think you should talk to him.’
She made a ‘not now’ gesture and busied herself with the towel. ‘He’s full demon, Zal, he couldn’t care less. It’s a marriage
of convenience and politics. No need for the drama.’
Zal smiled under his own towel, gave up and tossed it aside. ‘If you don’t I’m sure he’ll come for you,’ was all he said.
‘Yuh,’ she replied, curling against him like a large cat.
‘How’s Greer?’
‘Fine,’ she said before she had time to think it over. ‘Why you—’
‘See, I know you inside out, Metallica. You can’t help yourself. The Agency fall in another pile of shit and you have to be
there to help them out.’
‘Yeah well, the pile of shit you refer to is walking around out there in its hundred bits of undead glory and it shows no
sign of stopping. As for cause, since I was instrumental in the cause I guess I do feel some responsibility towards finding
a solution.’ She was clipped with him. He felt duly rebuked but that only made him angry.
‘It was Xavi,’ he said. ‘Not you.’
‘She’s in the cells,’ Lila replied. ‘I’m in charge of her.’
‘It’s a fucking bad idea,’ Zal said. ‘Every time I go near her I feel the same thing and it’s not good. And yeah, you tied
her to us, to me, you, Tea, Tath and Malachi . . . but it remains to be seen how far those bonds will pull. I know lots of
friends and lots of lovers who are more than able to stab each other in the back.’
‘She’s totally contrite,’ Lila said in a tone that made him shut up, not because he wanted to but because he felt anything
more would only push her into a greater defence of the woman. ‘And she’s in prison. And she’s doing all she can to stop it.’
‘What’s that?’ Zal asked. ‘Is she reading a book on it?’ But he wasn’t going anywhere with it. Lila would always take the
underdog’s position first. It was something he liked about her, but now it was driving him nuts.
‘She’s explaining everything.’
Zal could only roll his eyes at this. No human had any idea of the nature of elf politics, which was infinitely long in its
centuries of
progress and infinitely complex. One reason he had left Alfheim behind. Still, maybe she could be right. The magical bond
was written in the blood of Nyx, the black dragon of creation. It was probably enough to alter time, space and more than a
few hearts. It could have the power to make a friend of an enemy, he didn’t doubt that. And yet . . . still he couldn’t rest
easy with it. ‘Your power is making you insensitive to other angles of attack,’ he said, in a tone that made her look around
at him.
‘You’re serious,’ she said, folding her own towel and laying it aside.
‘Always,’ he said, hopeless now.
‘Zal, that prison was built by Sarasilien and a hundred others, especially to contain aetheric beings. She can’t get out,
not any way. She’s got nothing. She’s going nowhere.’
He gave up. ‘Here’s breakfast.’
She looked down. ‘Oh god, what
is
that?’
He handed her a sealed, disposable hot cup. ‘At least I made them go out to the Italian place down the street for the coffee.’
She opened it and took a deep inhale. ‘You’re forgiven. I suppose this isn’t the time to mention that Malachi wants to see
us all.’
‘All?’
‘You know who.’ She poked him with her elbow, sitting up.
‘Is he going to ask us to hunt down the undead for Temple Greer?’ Zal’s heart was sinking.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. He seemed a bit disturbed. Wanted it to be soon. Today or tomorrow.’
‘You should see her before that,’ he said without thinking.
‘Who?’ She sipped the scalding drink in her hand, settling herself down against him again.
‘You know who.’ He was referring to her sister and he knew she knew it. The talk of undead never left Max far behind: she
had died of old age during Lila’s fifty-year blackout but a month ago Otopia had suffered an incursion of beings from the
undead planes and ever since then the numbers of Returners had increased steadily and unpredictably. Max was one of these,
apparently alive, full of memories and not a day over twenty-five. She had gone back to live in the house Lila had inherited
from her and he was sure this was the reason Lila had tried to live in Demonia with her husbands again, and taken to sneaking
back to spend any nights in Otopia sleeping at the office with Malachi and whoever else was unlucky enough to pull two shifts.
‘It’s fine,’ she said.
‘You can’t run from them for ever, Lila.’
‘Yeah well, it’s not for ever and it’s not even her.’
Except that he knew as well as she did that for her Max really was still twenty-five, alive as the day she’d been left behind
a few months previously. And there was more to it.
‘Zal,’ Lila said quietly after a minute. ‘I called them, didn’t I? I wrote that note in that ink with that bloody pen and
I called her back. And they followed.’
‘They didn’t follow without a lot of help,’ Zal replied, though he couldn’t deny it entirely.
‘Still. I did it.’
‘The pen did it. These things have minds of their own. You were just the fingers and the legs that delivered it.’
She took another drink and watched the sunlight come through the roof. ‘I wish I believed you.’
He pulled her against him closer. He wished he believed it too, but he didn’t have any of the feelings that equated with things
being over, finished and done. This brought him to a question he knew she’d know the answer to and which he didn’t want to
know the answer to. For all of them it was the elephant in the room these days. He guessed it was behind the elves’ rapid
incursions into Otopia – a
see it before it’s too late
kind of impulse. Since long before he had met Lila, before she was born, before he was even born, fissures in the space-time
fabric of all their worlds had started opening up. Some led onto the Void – a vast space brimming with creative energy from
which he’d seen the youngest of the three weird sisters pull the material she spun on her distaff to create reality. Some
others opened onto the least understood of all the worlds it was possible to go to.
Dubbed Thanatopia, rather fatuously, by the Otopian security agencies, as if it were some kind of paradisical death playground,
it was a place into which material beings could not pass. They said these days that things came out of it; invisible, immaterial
creatures – spirits and ghosts. But ghosts spawned in the deep Void so Zal didn’t believe that. He was familiar enough with
ghosts to know these fresh invaders weren’t that. And since those later cracks had opened up, creating tensions along the
planar divisions, it had been clear that unless something was done eventually a critical rip would occur. After that all bets
were off, no matter who you were or what power you had.