‘Saved,’ Lila said, feeling the word as Bentley said it too.
‘Yeah. Knowledge would have the answers. How could it be wrong?’ Bentley laughed gently. ‘And you know what? I bet you do
know . . .’
‘Tell me,’ Lila said.
‘The more I saw and looked at it from every angle, the more I saw that it was meaningless. I was trying to find the end of
a story and I was looking at numbers. I was looking for the happy ending but there’s no ending except the terminal numbers
and then after them an emptiness. There’s no meaning, unless I make one by the path I follow through the numbers, my pattern.
That’s the sum total of everything. It is truth, but it has no meaning at all. How can that be? I wondered at it and I tried
to make that into a meaning as well.’ She laughed harder this time and slapped her knee. ‘I think you are heading the same
way.’
Lila squeezed Bentley’s hand for a moment and felt an answering squeeze before they let go. For a second or two they watched
Malachi and Greer shuffling around each other and the faces in the windows, anxious, pressing, wondering.
‘But,’ Lila said, seeing a quoit fly erratically from Malachi’s claw and hit the mark nonetheless, ‘human beings do not exist
in the context of the sum total of all possibilities. They are finite and extremely particular. The world of relevance to
them is small, much smaller than they like to imagine. They have no aetheric skill. They have short lives. They are primates,
social, with extremely limited perception of their environment, which is nonetheless more than good enough for them to live
rich, full lives, if only they are able to live in tune with their own nature. But they don’t want to recognise their nature,
because it is so absolute, so definite and so inescapable. So they pretend it is something else, that they can be and do everything,
anything, and that they are fit to do it. They believe that science and technology has transformed them into masters of the
universe, or that surely it will in time, and think they have changed somehow from their foolish, ignorant ancestors who had
nothing but sticks and stones. They think I’m different. But I’m just a woman, human, with a lot of sticks and stones to her
name. Even if the sticks and stones of my body mean I will not die easily, nothing will prevent it in the end. And nothing,
no matter how marvellous, and I have been and seen some marvellous things, truly, nothing will change me from my self. I am
human and that is all. There can be no more for me. I know that you’re right. In the lens of everything there is no meaning
I could make that is of any use or significance except that I could maybe help someone else to live a more satisfying life,
but that’s a vain aspiration. The best I can do is live my own life as I feel it is best, as if it mattered more than anything
because it’s all there is, even though none of it is of the slightest importance.’
Lila grimaced. ‘Suppose the three Betrayed do come, and can’t be stopped, suppose they end the world as it is now, take their
vengeance, destroy Sarasilien, break the order in which humans live and die? You know, I try to care, but I can only care
for myself, and what matters to me. It really doesn’t matter what happens at all. But I can only carry on living if I feel
that it does. Action is purposeless, meaningless, but it is demanded of me, because I was made this way to act, not to sit
around talking and watching dead people walk and talk while others die, innocent or damned, well or badly, deserving or not.’
‘Another go?’ Greer looked over, held his rings out towards Lila. ‘You could play each other. Might be a bit of a long match—’
‘I’ll sit this one out,’ Lila called. Bentley gave him a friendly nod.
He nodded back, clearly wishing he knew what they were talking about but not insisting.
‘There is much satisfaction in action,’ Bentley said quietly, keeping her voice low.
‘It’s the consolation of the weak,’ Lila said. ‘Look at Xavi. Look at Sarasilien.’
‘You’re very angry with him.’
‘Yes I am. I prefer to believe that power is given to the strong and deserving. And he spits in the face of that belief. He
treads it and smashes it flat and throws it at me. I want him to be worth all that he has spent.’
‘Because?’
‘Because then there is justice and a happy ending to be found. There’s fairness. And I don’t have to pity him and destroy
him.’
‘Destroy?’ The whisper was so quiet nobody but Lila could have heard it.
‘Surely,’ Lila said, gripping the bench with her hands, her feet tucked under it together, her face set like a little girl
who has to endure being the outcast in the playground day after day. ‘But I will look very hard for any reason not to. Very
hard. But it will have to be such a good reason I doubt it exists.’
‘Revenge?’ ventured the android curiously.
‘Necessity,’ Lila said.
‘I don’t understand. You’re not the kind of person who does that.’
‘Yes I am,’ Lila said. ‘I am strong and I will not let evil run wild in weak creatures to spoil the world when I see it happening
and have the ability to stop it.’
‘Evil?’
But Lila didn’t answer Bentley this time. Her jaw was set. She watched Greer hustling through his game and Malachi grumpily
keeping pace. They were waiting for her, not the other way around. Slowly she relaxed her hands and let go of the wooden slats.
She sat back and rested, turning her face towards the sun and finding a patch of warm light. It shone through her eyelids
red, glowing, blood red. When she was a little girl she had found its colour and brightness so comforting, the heat and the
light soothing and calming. It still had that power. In the garden the quoits thumped and the men’s voices mumbled.
Lila leaned back and let the sun shine on her.
Zal watched the filthy black waters of Bathshebat lagoon pass under him and resisted the urge to turn and look over his shoulder
but he saw it anyway in his mind – the receding shape of Lila Black, growing smaller. The only thing he didn’t see was the
expression on her face. In his imagination he couldn’t get the grim resoluteness to change, or the misgiving to soften into
a smile.
The black water sparkled where it caught the nightlights of the Opera House – a building that still employed real flaming
torches, enhanced to brilliant whiteness by magnesium and other elemental powders. The vast glass dome above the auditorium
was glowing with colours and the rippling lights of a concert in performance and he could just hear the higher notes and feel
the driving thump of the bass as they angled overhead on their turn out towards the ocean. He wished he were there instead,
lost in the music.
As it was the drake was listening in to him though it didn’t make any observation. Its wings beat at the heavy, dead air,
stirring the miasma of smoke and cooking oil and spice up with the stink of the water. It was in some reverie in which its
emotions ran a similar line to his own. For reasons best known to itself Unloyal had its own regrets about parting with Demonia.
Years ago Zal would have solaced himself with a bottle of jack or a hit of elemental fire, but now he hadn’t even packed alcohol
in his bag. He felt the strange tidal pull of the succubus charm in his blood. It beat at the walls of his heart and threatened
to break it in bits, drumming love songs unrequited. The drake heard him and its amusement showed in its skin, as demonic
as any native creature; flaring blue and gold.
He touched the clone harness he wore with his fingertips, wondering how it worked and thinking he really should have asked
that earlier. But at the time he had wanted to convince Lila that he was
strong and fit, sure of himself, the old Zal, and he didn’t want to confess that her talk of clone material made him uneasy
and sad for reasons that he didn’t fully understand and wasn’t sure that he wanted to. He thought maybe it was that he was
surpassed now, and worse, that he didn’t mind.
As the drake pounded through the night, forcing great curtains of it aside, he saw the portal point opening far ahead of them.
Drakes like this made their own transit gates from world to world, limited only by their foreknowledge. He knew nothing about
them. He went on trust, on a whim, on the edge of a risk he couldn’t have calculated even if he did understand it. He grabbed
onto this moment with everything he was and felt the spark of an older and much more glorious feeling come to life in his
chest.
To his surprise the drake reacted to this and moved with fresh purpose towards the rapidly expanding veil. At the edges of
the gap Zal felt the aetheric turbulence of a critical wave and pulled his
andalune
. body as closely to his core as he was able. Still the riptides of the edge dragged some of it away into their odd gravity,
across other perpendicular planes and he was flayed as they passed through. Another reason not to take too many of this kind
of ride, he thought, wondering how many crossings it would take to pare him away to nothing and what would happen
then.
The drake, by contrast, suffered no degradation, possibly an improvement if its shift of mood was anything to go by.
They burst into the cooler, fresher morning skies of his home world and he looked around him for familiar landmarks eagerly
and found none. The only feeling of recognition within him was the drake’s presence. It knew the place very well.
A mountain range was spread beneath them from side to side, and to his left one of the lesser peaks bore the distinctive marks
of geomantic carving. Black pits filled it like a hundred sightless eyes and here and there regular lines showed where walkways
cut across the jagged, impassable cliffs from point to point. Tattered banners of purple and red hung down from several openings,
their symbols of gold thread too small to see at this distance. A bitter cold wind tore across the peaks, making Zal hunch
close in to the saddle although this did nothing to protect him.
‘Where is this?’ he spoke aloud though the words were ripped away and the drake couldn’t have heard him with its ears.
It told him the name of a place so old that he thought it was a
legend. It occurred to him that the creature could easily have moved them in time, but the drake assured him this was a perfectly
concurrent reality. He supposed it didn’t matter. One place was as good as any other to start. He wished it weren’t so cold
though. Fire and shadow might be his elements now, but he was elf enough to freeze his ass off, that was clear. He stuffed
his hands into his armpits and hunched even lower.
The drake banked them down, negotiating horrible shear off the cliffs with ease and took them towards the settlement, aiming
for the largest of the black openings in the rock. Above them the sky was a fierce blue, the sun a dazzling glare. It felt
so empty, and peculiar, a wild place – uninhabited, Zal thought, and only then realised it was because he felt no connection
or answering
andalune
, as if everyone and everything had died.
He pressed his lips together, biting them and narrowing his nostrils, eyes closed as they slowed and came to alight on the
ledge. A sudden darkness enveloped him, and the wind’s force eased although now it sounded like a freight train all around
him, booming and thundering enough to make his ears try to fold themselves closed. In the relative shelter of the hall he
let his aether body reach out. He was strong and it reached far, and it found nothing to connect to.
Gasping and holding onto the freezing saddle, his eyes open to see the world reduced to a blue archway of shocking brilliance,
Zal knew two things that made no sense to him. People were there and, in the most important way, they were not there. They
were alive, but to him and to the world around them they were dead. He was a jack without a port to connect to and there was
no sound.
The drake heard him perfectly and agreed. It affirmed what he already knew. Alfheim was silent. In communications terminology,
it was dark. Lila had said it but he hadn’t believed she meant this. He thought she meant the elves had sealed themselves
away behind a diplomatic wall, not a literal thing. What he knew of as life, as people, as Alfheim, was dead air.
With numb hands he fumbled the saddle straps and released himself, taking more time and care climbing down from the seat than
an old man descending steep stairs. When his boots touched the grooved stone his eyes had at last adjusted to the light and
he saw they were in a hall that was used to flying visitors and their mounts, though it wasn’t expecting them now. Old snow
had formed ice on the trash and debris of what had been awnings and furniture. Doors into the cliff
were closed fast or hanging on their hinges. Nobody had been here in a long time.
Delatra, he remembered its name as he saw its sigil on one of the banners – a silver leaf backed by a black sun. His mother
had told him about it because she was apprenticed there in her youth. It had been a seat of the highest learning, where everything
most precious to the elves was taken and lovingly stored, where magic was learned, developed and coveted. The legendary status
came from the fact that in the more recent years of governance Delatra had been reduced, saved from extinction at the hands
of the shadow uprising only with the sacrifice of many lives. Delatra had ended the worst of the conflict, because the shadowkin
had turned aside from destruction and surrendered there, on the verge of victory. The story had never made sense to him. The
offered reason for the change of heart was their awe at Delatra’s grandeur and riches, its unparalleled value. Zal didn’t
buy it then, and he didn’t buy it now. He was sure that there’d been a better reason, and no doubt it was one that was secret
to save important heads from the block. With something like remorse he felt his long-neglected Jayon Daga agent’s wits flood
back into his system full force.
The drake chuckled in his head, a soundless mirth that was knowing and watchful at the same time.
Zal shivered and slung his pack onto his shoulders. He instructed the drake to get out and look for other settlements or anything
in the area. He would meet it here again by nightfall. As he stood staring with misgiving at the broken doorway ahead of him
he felt the creature’s psychic presence increase and for the first time felt it as a predatory gaze between his shoulders,
but he didn’t turn around to see what it was doing. With a scrape of claw on stone he heard it move and then an airshock hit
him and knocked him forward as it took off. His misery would have been deep then but at that moment he felt the harness heating
up and it was better, not by much, but better.
By the time he reached the door he was his old self again, that watchful, careful, sneaky, angry and frustrated being he thought
he’d left behind for good. It was almost funny. And then the razor edge of his own spine’s sense of self-preservation returned,
waiting for blades, listening for lies and the breath of his doom. It spread its paranoid fingers out around him and in the
astral silence found foreboding. It was good the wind howled like a banshee. It meant he didn’t have to do it for himself.
The cliffs of Delatra’s hostile exterior did nothing to prepare him for what he found inside. A city had been carved from
the stone with vaults open in the high mountain above enough to light parks and gardens, farms and lakes. Zal stood, mite-tiny,
on the interior balcony that looked across this magnificence and imagined how it must have been when it was whole. He couldn’t,
because it was smashed to bits.
Rubble, covered in snow powder, buried in ice, was all that was left, with a few walls here and there to suggest what might
have been. The shadowkin had not left without starting their work, then. There looked to be nothing down there of any interest.
The vast hills and banks of ruined shapes were pristine. It was only the conviction of his aetheric body that made him stay
a second longer. It said there were living elves in these remains. Under normal conditions he would have been able to place
them within a few metres of their location because under normal conditions they were all subliminally aware of each other,
unless they were trained and in hiding. Here he could feel their presence but there was no response and no intelligence of
any kind in it, no sense of any awareness of the aether at all. They felt exactly like humans. Thus he set out to hunt them,
his tread silent, dull and already hopeless.
It had been some tale of his mother’s that Delatra was a great city of the most talented aether-rich individuals, served and
administered by the most dutiful and devoted servants, all of them united under the cause of progress and scholarship. She
had said it with a scoff in her voice and, after drink, that scoff turned to poison. He’d never understood why. To Zal it
had sounded boring. All his experience of the diurnal elves and their highly mannered, rigid society had rubbed him the wrong
way. The shining idea of Delatra was one of the first great ideas he forgot and he forgot it twice – once on the island of
the abandoned children, shamed for their lack of magic, and once when he escaped that place and came into his father’s instruction
in the night forests of Lower Hajaf.
In between those forgettings he did remember it, when he was forced back on the last stock of stories he knew in order to
survive the sea voyage to Hajaf with his sanity intact, but even then it had been hard work to speculate anything interesting
about it. His mother’s tales centred on her dormitory of female students and later on her dislike and then hatred of the ruling
mage priests. Since those priests had been the descendants of Sarasilien’s brood, he supposed there was probably a lot to
dislike about them. They had supported apartheid
and exiled his friends, so as far as he was concerned they were dismissible, worthy only of his utter contempt although he
rarely mustered the energy on their behalf. Now he wondered if he was going to have to get this hate out of his soul’s footlocker
of neglected things, though what magery was left clearly didn’t have the strength to set a single stone back in place.
Hate would have been more welcome than the leaden feeling he did have. He found a way through the wall’s considerable architecture
and discovered it was the administration centre, surely, with its endless meeting places, small burrowlike storage places
and modest little rooms. Ruined furniture and machineries of various kinds blocked his way but it was all old. Here and there
cupboards and chests showed signs of looting but for the most part it was a deserted place and the only thing filling the
passages was the boom and yowl of the wind. Even when you were used to it, he thought, it could drive you mad. Then he remembered
something about a pipe organ, that the wind played. Great music. That surely was broken too.
The day passed slowly for him. Only the harness kept him warm enough to move as he slowly wound his way towards the faint
sparks of energy moving about in the lowest tiers of the cliff. He knew, even with the urgency that drove him – Lila’s words
and the uknown fate of Alfheim – he was delaying but he could only keep the pace resolute rather than eager. All the time
the age of the ruin ate at his conviction. It was threadbare, iced, a coffin of a kind that was long past holding anything
but bones. That meant it must have been destroyed just after his mother left it, although even that time seemed too short
to account for the degradation. And then his foot caught on something and he fell forward, jerked out of this reverie and
into the necessary moment of cold stone under his hands and he looked back and there was nothing at his foot, nothing at all.
At this point he began to suspect an illusion. When he found the elves living there at last his puzzlement deepened, because
he was certain that any magic at work wasn’t theirs.