He raised his hands and slowly unbuckled the bandoliers that held his swords in place.
Her own conviction wavered. ‘You heard what he said. You heard what I told you. Anyway, we’re not married any more.’
‘But we’re here now,’ Zal said and his hand slid over her lower back. The thin fabric made the gesture extremely soft, although
he had the most gentle hands she’d ever felt when he wanted them to be. His gaze was warm and sultry; he blinked as slowly
as if he were underwater.
‘No fighting,’ she said.
‘No fighting,’ Teazle agreed, advancing.
‘No,’ Zal said, pulling the drawstring that closed the back of her dress.
‘Wait!’ she slipped aside, pulling it with her. ‘You smell like you’ve been in the grave already. Get clean.’
Teazle’s nostrils flared in disapproval; he had a demon’s typical taste for gore. The tip of his long, lilac tongue flickered
briefly against his lips. He gave Zal a dismissive glance. ‘I suppose you can walk?’
Zal slithered off the bed, only his natural athleticism saving him from a bounce onto hands and knees. He gathered himself
and walked reasonably well towards the bath. ‘Like I’d been doing it all my life.’ He bashed Teazle’s shoulder with his own,
slightly higher one, in passing and left a smear of tacky coagulated blood on the pristine tunic. Their faces were close enough
to have touched, but they angled away from one another, eyes downcast, snorting and growling with a soft tone that only Lila’s
exaggerated hearing could have caught. She saw them inhale one another’s breath to take the measure of their condition and
then Zal had reeled lightly into the bathroom on his toes, dancing as he shed his clothes in piles on the floor, and she was
left with Teazle brooding at her.
‘I didn’t know you two were cosy,’ she said, watching him so closely, but even so she didn’t see the movement as he crossed
the few metres between them. One second he was there, the next he was
beside her, his hand sliding under the dress’s deep scooped back onto her buttock.
‘You are in great danger,’ he murmured softly, his breath warm on her ear. ‘I feel your instability. I can taste its slow
changes. You are weakening. Your anger fades and with it your discipline is fading. Sadness eats your resolve. Grief wounds
you. Your need for control saps your strength. You are bleeding into the water. I smell you everywhere. Zal knows – the part
of him that’s demon and the elf too. We have spoken. Our mark will protect you. Not for long though. Take it or leave it.
Without it you will fall to the hungering darkness that surrounds you. Its claws are deep in you already. What elves call
Sleeper. There it is. Lila, I would not see you fall, yet I would stop you and cannot. All I can do . . .’ His fingers caressed
her skin lightly at the edge of the high collar she wore but he didn’t finish the sentence.
She’d been naked with him before, a lot, but now she felt more so, even with the robe still on. It was intimate, and that
was new for them.
‘You exaggerate.’ She put her hand up and it served to hold the dress in place at her chest although it caught his hand beneath.
His skin was cool and soft. He leaned in towards her readily as her hand touched him with an eagerness that sent a jolt through
her. She felt heat rising in him.
‘All this talk,’ she said, in an effort to deflect him – a foolish effort because it wasn’t entirely sincere. ‘As if you were
my imp.’ Her attempts to become, in his words, immaculate, kept falling over their feet. An imp would keep score. They always
knew who was strongest in magic, or in spirit, or where your energy was going, into what locked circles of the mind. She was
prey to Teazle and his kind now, kill them as she did. She might slay them all, but she was on the back foot and they knew
it. Teazle was trying to tell her how much worse this would be with Ilya, and she felt that he was honest, even though Teazle’s
method was seduction and his intent clear.
‘What I am can’t be helped,’ he replied, his lips brushing her forehead at the hairline. He slid his hand free at her neckline
and cupped her breast in his hand. His breath deepened. ‘Nor who you are. I know this and still I return to you. Faith drives
me. I am not free. The marriage was a legal device. The bond is a bigger game.’ She knew that she didn’t appreciate the difficulty
he had in saying this to her, and that is why he could say it, because she was no demon to spring into all the openings that
it presented. He was a fighter, and this was
the equivalent of him laying down all his weapons and declaring himself handicapped.
On her breast his fingers were supple as he stroked her. She loved his touch. It was like Zal’s. They shared the same directness
and self-command. They knew who they were and what they were doing. She envied that with a strange hunger that prevented her
from saying no to this new binding between them. She would have eaten them both if their wholeness were something that could
be got that way – and with a shiver of surprise she realised this was exactly what they were proposing. Their energy could
lift her above self-doubt for a while.
It was a user’s fix, a crutch. For demons to offer it to another demon would have been sufficient insult to start a war. But
she didn’t count herself demon. Shame flickered in her nonetheless. Her walks in the demon world had always had more front
than a luxury department store, and about as much depth. She was a penitent here and the priests were offering her a brief
burst of respite through possession. The strangeness of this hit her, an exotic intoxication, a sudden jolt of vision switched
through one hundred and eighty degrees so that she saw her usual comfort around them as a foolish illusion of a creature spellbound
in the glamour. Vertigo made her falter on her feet.
Teazle’s lips brushed her cheek close to her mouth. ‘It is good you react so readily to us. Already you begin to see.’
She looked up into the pale lights of his eyes; doors open into heaven. She dared honesty, for a moment, feeling that she
stepped into nowhere. ‘The more of you the less of me. I’m afraid I will drown in you. In Zal. It’s what I wanted.’
‘Nothing can touch you unless you agree,’ Teazle said, the movements of his lips kisses on her temple and across her forehead.
‘But I want to agree,’ she said.
His gaze flicked back to meet hers and she saw movement in the fire that lit it from the world behind them. His mouth was
slightly open, lips full. The breath from his nostrils bathed her face with animal warmth. ‘Then you are indeed in the greatest
danger from your old friend.’ His body was tensing up to contain something.
She looked into the light. ‘And you?’
He exhaled slowly. ‘It calls to me.’ He kissed her mouth very gently. ‘Through you and your abilities, think what I could
become . . . But I am the master. And . . . ’ He kissed her again with a tenderness she couldn’t reconcile with him at all.
It disarmed her, confused her and
tripped her up so that when he did finish this line she finally understood the meaning of something he’d said to her often.
‘I’m your dog.’
She’d thought he was joking.
He smiled, a cold expression directed at himself. ‘What a filthy secret for a demon, wouldn’t you say?’
She put her hand to his face and felt the hard bone under the muscles and skin. She felt, with all of her senses, the beginnings
of its shift in form from man to demon. It was constantly beginning, being suppressed. She opened her mouth to speak but he
was already shaking his head.
‘Better I am a man for you now. You’re too quick to rush into your sleeping darkness, Lila.’
His forbearance touched her the most. She put her arms around his neck. The dress fell around her ankles and she felt his
long, soft hair tickle across her shoulders and neck.
Zal came through the door, naked and rubbing his head with a towel, transformed from fool to the rock star’s sanguine cockiness,
as though water and soap had been enough to wash off everything and return him to the figure she remembered when they first
met. His tread was strong and sure, not a trace of poison in its conviction as he came to them. The dark flow of his shadow
body was integrated into his skin, giving him the metal-in-oil look she was getting used to, but at the same time she saw
it was necessary – a kind of fortification. His physical body was evanescent; it was beginning to fade, losing matter. Anxiety
for him fought with her attraction and admiration and won. He was so damn slender.
He showed no concern for himself as he draped the towel on Teazle’s shoulder, turning him away from Lila so that the two of
them faced each other. ‘Take off the shades,’ he said. ‘Pump me up.’
Lila’s eyebrows were raised so far they were nearly in the roof. She was more surprised when Teazle actually pushed her behind
him, saying, ‘Close your eyes.’
She had an inkling of what was going to happen but she was almost too slow. The light shock made her stagger backwards, body
convulsing on itself in an effort to reduce exposure as Teazle let the searing radiance from his eyes pour onto Zal’s naked
skin. For a few seconds she was blinded in all her senses as systems shut down and then, as the cascade of failures built
up she lost contact altogether and found herself conscious but unable to perceive anything other than
that she was still alive. There wasn’t even darkness. There was nothing.
Slowly, painfully slowly, things came back. Out of a half-second blackout she discovered her body was still there, lying on
the floor. Something like dust covered her. She wanted to brush it off long before she could move. Then she felt herself being
lifted and the vibration of the men’s voices like a report of distant weather. She was moved and brushed over, the dust gone.
Then she felt how hot she was and knew that if she’d been an ordinary human she’d be burned.
Hearing returned with sudden, total clarity.
‘It does qualify as fire, then,’ Teazle was saying nearby.
‘Apparently so.’ Zal, much closer. ‘But next time there’s no need to overdo it.’
Teazle laughed. ‘You’re
my
bitch now, elf.’
‘I don’t think I swing that far,’ Zal replied.
Lila felt herself swaying, but that was replaced quickly as her orientation found gravity. Everything came together rapidly
after that until only the emotional shock was left. She opened her eyes and saw that except for several shadowed spots in
the shape of their bodies every surface in the room had been turned to ash. Flakes of it fell from her eyelashes and lips
as she tried to say, ‘What happened?’ and stopped before she started.
Zal was standing in front of her, holding her up by the shoulders. His grip was faultless but this wasn’t what silenced her.
He had become as solid as the demon behind him, a fully fleshed and healthy creature, brimming with energy, as vital as the
moment before Jack the Giantkiller had crushed all but the life out of him. His
andalune
moved around him, a confident ten centimetres above the surface of his skin and extended into transparent black flames shot
with yellow and orange lights that grew over his shoulders into two vaned wings that spanned the room from wall to wall. Their
slightest movement caused whirls and eddies of white ash to rise.
He smiled into her speechlessness. At his throat the demon sting was no more than a fading mark the size of a small coin.
‘Lila? Are you all right?’
She was, though she had to take an inventory to feel confident about it. ‘What happened to you?’ She looked around Zal to
Teazle who was glowing, his expression smug. ‘Did you . . . supercharge him? How?’
‘I have fire affinity,’ Zal said. ‘Part of my aetheric nature, which Jack couldn’t take away. Teazle has inner fire.’
‘Oh yeah,’ she said, nodding. ‘That explains it completely. I’ll file it under Closed Cases.’
‘Aether can become matter, temporarily,’ Teazle said. ‘Unfortunately it isn’t permanent. Any fire would do.’
‘Inner fire?’
‘He’s an angel,’ Zal said, as though this were obvious and uninteresting. ‘Their eyes are the windows onto the light of creation
blah de blah etcetera.’
‘Yeah,’ she said again, with elaborate emphasis, ‘I knew that. Everyone knows
that
. Demons are angels. Primary school stuff.’ She glanced at Teazle. He looked amused.
‘Oh he’s still a demon,’ Zal said, slowly releasing his hold as though he were afraid she was going to fall over without his
help. ‘Angel is the ascended form.’
‘I thought angels were bound to serve god, or whoever, without will of their own.’
Teazle shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. There is only one will and it feels very much like mine.’
‘From a threesome to barfly theology in less than two minutes,’ Lila said, looking around to help herself acclimatise. ‘That’s
some going.’ She became aware of the distances between them – a metre to Zal, one between him and Teazle. The emotional gap
had widened too, the intimacy of a moment before crisped to nothing. She searched their faces for signs, saw that they were
waiting for her to settle into one response or another. For the first time since she’d known them she felt the balance between
them shift into a position of equals, a triangle of even sides.
‘Now I’m lost,’ she said and ran her hands through her hair. Ash flittered down. ‘But I don’t want to be the one who’s helped.
I don’t like it. That’s the world on a wrong axis.’
‘Do you want to bet your life on it?’ Zal asked.
She thought it through, said finally, uncertainly, ‘Ilya wouldn’t really kill me.’
They glanced at each other. None of them were what they had been.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’
Lila thought of armour; knights in plate, infantrymen in mail, leather-strapped gladiators testing their range, textile flak
jackets full of smart gel, being cheerful when you were sad all through, your smile deflecting every threatened sympathy like
a shield of shiny happiness. As she thought, her hands worked, the tips of her fingers pulling and stretching, rubbing and
smoothing as she spun strands of what appeared to be metallic cloth out of her skin.
She didn’t do it in front of the demons. She sat in the bathroom on the toilet lid and worked silently. She could remember
Zal’s measures in perfect detail and enough elven manuscripts from the archives that she could copy a typical Jayon combat
harness down to the last buckle and glyph. Her glyphs were not magical however, they were forgeries without power. The power
was in the harness itself. It was her clone.
When she was done she held it up and looked it over. As an afterthought she fashioned a dagger for the belt. Then it seemed
finished to her. She put it down and looked for the last time at her arms and hands before she got dressed. She couldn’t stop
looking ever since she’d got out of bed and noticed what her husbands had done for her.
The demon marks ran in her skin in networks of tiny fire, markings in an ancient script of simple dashes and crosses. They
flowed in chaotic rushes, met, diverged, dissolved, blossomed and died. She could feel their effect, a kind of precision constant
tuning to frequencies and melodies that the machine could not reach on its own. The script talked her into calm. She was the
eye of a strange storm.
The demon data networks were full of designs. She picked some out and reprocessed her usual black body armour and military
fatigues through their ideas. Bigger boots and gloves were in, gleaming leather
zipped up the neck in high collars, plate inserts made to look like they had been ripped off the bodies of monsters. She
toned it down and resized it, checked her hair, got distracted when she realised she could put any colour she liked anywhere
on her face, then settled on red lips, bigger blacker eyelashes and pink cheek tints.
Then she took the harness back into the bedroom and stood for a moment watching Zal and Teazle sleep. Their efforts had exhausted
them. She wasn’t about to wake them while she was running on their donated powers. She left the harness lying on the end of
the bed and glanced at the white demon’s face.
He was chalky and ordinary looking, like a tired human man taking a nap at the end of a hard day’s labour. She wanted to leave
something for him but she couldn’t think of anything. In the end she bent over him and left a kiss on his cheek. He didn’t
stir.
On the way out she caught sight of herself in one of the many vanity mirrors and stopped. It wasn’t beauty that snagged her.
It was that, for an instant, she’d thought it was a painting moving because the figure seen from the corner of her eye had
a resolute, confident stride, so determined and forceful that it had triggered her combat protocols before she realised it
was herself. The lipstick and the red shock in her hair stood out lividly against the ash-white dust of the room.
She knew then that she could do anything. The notion filled her with a cautious sadness. Without limitation whatever borders
she ran up against would be her own. Surely this is what Teazle had intended for her to understand and what Zal had ever understood.
She wondered if she could die.
Out on the causeways around the house the demons of the canal traders and the mansion servants were entangled in the day’s
bargaining, waves of colour moving through them in ripples of emotion that she could read as easily as the day’s papers. There
was an under-current of tension in the city, a strip of violet blue, grey with the load of uncertainty it carried. She felt
it everywhere, even on the main promenades where the Maha were gathered for the day’s combat of beauty and wit, talent and
chutzpah. The ones who still recognised her got out of her way and the others followed. She got attention, but no challenges.
Instead, a resentful deference ensured that her way was clear. She was followed, until she turned and offered a fight. Then,
miraculously, the streets were empty.
The way into Madame’s old house was simple. Lila didn’t have the
keys, but she made them and opened the locks. Teazle had bought the property and left it empty, knowing what it protected.
It was maintained as though it was occupied by a small group of servants he paid to watch over it, though nothing had changed
since Madame Des Loupes had abandoned it decades before, perhaps through a vision of what would happen there. In one of the
living rooms she found a large throw of woven silk, thick and heavy. She pulled it off the chaise it was adorning and threw
it over her shoulder before following the way through the halls to the place where the secret door waited. In a moment she
had opened it and went down into the dark, dank tunnels of the labyrinth.
The mirror chamber was as they had left it too – crowded with the stone remains of demons who had stumbled here searching
for treasure only to be unfortunate enough to find themselves looking into the chamber’s sole and very particular treasure;
the Mirror of Dreams. Even in total darkness the mirror had the power to suck the beholder out of their body and into the
potentially endless mind-scapes within. Lila knew it well, hence the throw.
She moved between the stone figures – unlike normal demon statues these were genuinely empty, having no spirits left to be
imprisoned within for the ages of their deaths – and eased in reverse up to the mirror’s majestic span. It took a few moments
of careful work and jigging around but she was finally able to cover its face completely with the cloth and secure it to her
satisfaction so that it wouldn’t fall by accident, but a good yank from either corner would get it off easily.
Then she pushed the statues out to the edges of the space. The largest weighed several tonnes and almost stuck fast on the
uneven floor so that she had to grow spikes down from the soles of her boots into the stone to get any leverage on the damn
thing. After the work she listened until she was satisfied that there were no curious or accidental tourists in the labyrinth
– it had openings up into the city and down into various underwater lairs that were probably known to some criminal groups
even now – but only the drip and trickle of water and the distant burr of engines up on the lagoon permeated through to her.
She was alone.
Lila put her back to the mirror’s position. The reason nobody with aetheric power wanted to give their names away was because
they could be commanded by them. But she knew this one because its bearer had lived close to her heart once.
‘Ilyatath Voynassi Taliesetra, come to me.’
She repeated it the standard three times, feeling that her voice was surely not enough. It barely carried beyond the confines
of the room. At least it wasn’t hesitant. After she’d finished, the deep quiet of the labyrinth returned and for the first
time she became aware of its penetrating cold and damp qualities. Then air moved against her face and hands. It was cold too
but something about its steady push told her it was breath.
‘Tath?’ she said into the total, utter darkness and felt the sound of her voice immediately reflect back at her off something
not more than six or seven inches from her face. An image of it did not resolve into anything resembling an elf. It didn’t
resemble anything. Inside her skin the demon runes grew agitated. She tried resolving the data on higher detail. It made no
difference. The feedback was inconsistent, as if the sound were coming off moving mist.
‘Tath,’ she said, with a confidence that was difficult to muster. ‘It’s me, Lila. I need to talk to you.’
She thought she heard something. It was so faint she wasn’t sure. A kind of sigh or drawn breath. She retuned her hearing
again, blotting out the ambient noise and amplifying. ‘Please say it again.’ Her own voice nearly blew out her ears before
she remembered to nullify that as well.
A fine line of cool, damp air crossed her face and a much deeper and more penetrating cold wound around her. It had the sinuous
grace of a boa constrictor but it didn’t grip. A feeling of dread permeated her, from the skin inwards. It was such a strange,
unmistakable sensation, a different kind of cold sinking inward towards her bones, her flesh wanting to recoil. The hum of
the runescript became a buzz and abruptly the cold spirals around her withdrew.
This time she heard the voice. It was so fragile, as if the lips and throat that spoke it were constructed from vapour. ‘So
long,’ it said. ‘I . . .’ and then it faded away, still speaking, the words lost.
All the time she was tuning and retuning, searching every wavelength, every frequency, every piece of information for something
definite that she could detect and build on. Her mind’s AI built her the image of the room and its forlorn objects and tried
to place what it found within it so that she could see. Brief flickers of something like fine cloud came and went around her.
She saw it manifesting almost randomly, but this was only because where it appeared it caused a sharp local temperature drop,
which made the water in the air
condense out for a moment. She was reminded of Zal and the way he threatened to fade out. She wondered if there was something
that would enable Tath to manifest a body in the same way. ‘I must talk to you.’
There was a slow, general shift of the motes of cold. They began to gather and clump, winking in and out like fireflies. She
was completely taken by surprise when they snapped together in front of her, their cloudlike clusters bursting into white
shocks of vapour that quickly froze into tiny ice crystals. These were attracted magnetically towards an invisible surface
tension that began vibrating at a high frequency – in a few seconds they outlined the shape of a tall figure. The head and
shoulders were clear, but the rest was vague and ragged as if it was drawn by someone who could only block in the most basic
shape. It had arms and a robed body. There were no features in the face, only two empty spots in the place of eyes. Darkness
cloaked it. The empty air acted as shadows making it look like it wore a hood. At its back, as though at a distance, the shape
of curved crescent blades was sketched in the air. These moved lightly, vanes on an unfelt and restless wind. A faint keening
sound came from their direction – the impersonal whine of resonating metal.
Meanwhile Lila was experiencing the most acute sensation of mortal dread. It was so strong that it blotted out almost everything
else she ever remembered feeling at any time. There was nothing concrete to cause it. She was in no danger; all systems reported
good conditions. The thing in front of her was barely an illusion – a few crystals, nothing more.
It was all she could do not to fall on her knees. She had the clear feeling that there was a rod of something fine and heated
that ran directly through the vertical centre of her body from pelvis to the crown of her head. It reached through her legs
and anchored her upright, on the ground. It stretched through her arms and automatically closed her hands into fists. Immediately
the dread lost some of its grip. ‘Ilya,’ she said in a warning tone. ‘Don’t fuck around.’
The voice sighed – it sounded as if the room were sighing because it came from all sides at once, as though she were surrounded
by open mouths. ‘I have dreamed . . .’ These words came from directly in front but they were continued by a lesser whisper
slightly to her left. ‘. . . of the golden meadows of the sun, the silver lakes of the moon.’ After that words came singly,
from random directions. ‘I have been in the
dark and I am dark. I know your name. But I do not remember you. There have been so many.’
‘So many what?’ Around her the air was moving now in more normal fashion as denser regions massed and pushed through lesser
ones in a restless prowling. She tingled with the anticipation of something awful and her fingers clenched tighter on one
another until she felt her nails begin to cut her palms.
Phrases came again from all sides. ‘Longing. Waiting. I see them turning. Falling.’
She wanted to keep the conversation going. She was afraid of what would happen if this dissociation got itself organised.
The rime-crusted face in front of her was deteriorating, its eye pits growing larger, more skull-like. ‘Who are turning? Where
are they falling to?’
‘Lost,’ said the face thing, forming a mouth like a puncture wound. ‘I followed them so far. I felt . . .’
The sudden snap of cold caught her off guard again. It was direct this time, more sure of itself. Ice motes flew past her,
tearing her skin on the way to the looming ghostly figure. Its sabred wings rattled. They looked feeble, powdery, but the
noise was harsh and absolutely clear, ringing as though they were standing in a grand cathedral and not a rough hole in the
ground.
‘I . . .’ said the voice, this time from two places at once. Elsewhere its whispers had sunk to babblings of emotional words,
must and ought, must and have to, need . . . it rambled. The whispers lowered until they were a faint, indecipherable bubbling
of sound all around her. She got the impression that although they sounded the same, they were not. They rose from a mass
and subsided into it and she couldn’t know if that mass was even able to differentiate itself again.
‘Ilya,’ she said firmly. ‘Listen to me. You must find a way through.’
‘Ilya,’ repeated the ghost face as though the syllables were new. ‘Ilya,’ it said again, more cannily this time and the bubbling
subsided and vanished.
She felt a presence growing in the room. It wasn’t just in front of her. It was everywhere. Weightlessly it weighed on her.
Breathlessly it breathed. It coated everything in a purplish, sticky nothing that did not exist and reminded her of tar, feathers,
burning flesh and dust. Her nostrils and eyes became so thick with it she couldn’t see, or breathe. She convinced herself
this was an illusion. Her body and AI still thought everything was fine, just a few minor temperature fluctuations, nothing
more. Nothing stopped her breathing, but she
couldn’t. Nothing blocked her senses, but they were failing. At a subconscious level she had been commanded to stop, and
she was hypnotised and obeying. Fortunately, she did not need to breathe, or to sense, in order to survive.