He hid himself among the rubble of a fallen archway and watched them. They were living at ground level using the rooms in
the cliff wall as caves. They looked like elves, wore elvish clothing and used bows and small knife weapons. They didn’t talk,
but communicated by gestures alone, and few of those. They were, in every way, as unelflike as could be, but they were thin
and agile and fast. They moved in sudden darts and their eyes, brilliant, were empty and wary. They
reminded him of crows, or monkeys. Their caves were littered with scavenged junk. They cooked something over a fire that
was visibly constructed out of broken scroll woodwork and the ripped halves of large-size books.
He backed away very carefully, as he would from a pack of predatory wild animals, and dulled his brain yet further so that
he wouldn’t have to think about what else he saw – their public rutting, their vicious squabbling or the howling wind that
had occupied their empty eyes. They did not notice his shadow body although one of them looked around as he touched her foot
with it and promptly brought her hand down to scratch her ankle. In a second she was more interested by the activities of
a fighting pair of men on the far side of the tiny fire.
Another troupe of them were detectable, at the far side of the ruin. He saw tribal kinds of markings scratched on stones,
faeces left at prominent points, tracks and old bloodstains showing the site of ambushes. This time he used his skill to avoid
them and crept back upwards. The only other feature of Delatra he knew of was the library – a place containing a copy of all
documents or artefacts of interest. He knew, from his mother’s stories of girlish foolery, that it was located inside the
peak of the mountain in something like a bunker, inaccessible except through a narrow corridor. They had used to joke about
it being a fire hazard and the books in the fire had made him think of it again.
After an hour of searching had failed to find it he decided to give up and head back to his rendezvous with Unloyal. At this
point an arrow thudded into his back and knocked him off his feet. It had hit squarely between his shoulderblades but the
harness had stopped it, even though he was pretty sure there was no harness at that point. Even so the force was a blow that
hurt and winded him. He spun as he fell, landing on his side and springing up again with a move he didn’t know that he still
had. It left him facing his attacker, who said as she put up her bow and gave him a flat glare, ‘You’ve lost your reflexes.’
‘Xavi.’ He stayed where he was, feeling the arrow slump down from where its point was stuck in the harness.
‘And there I almost thought I knew what she saw in you,’ Xaviendra said, plucking the bowstring awkwardly. She held the weapon
up into the weak light coming from a high window and they both saw it was old and worn, the string frayed. ‘A good thing this
isn’t a real bow. But then, nothing much is real here.’
Seeing that she didn’t seem bent on more violence he straightened up and relaxed his defensive stance. ‘What are you doing
here?’
‘My job,’ she said, primly. She tossed the bow aside to clatter on the stone floor and composed her hands in a parody of demureness,
her head with its cascade of black hair on one side. ‘Librarian.’
Zal decided he wasn’t too interested in following her guidelines. ‘I thought you were in Otopia.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am, also there.’
He took this at face value. ‘What happened here?’
‘The city was—’
‘I mean the people. I don’t really buy the city.’
‘Oh.’ She seemed disappointed. ‘They are all that’s left. My father’s grand project. Excellent work.’
‘This is recent,’ Zal said, frowning. It was hard to discount the cold but then Xavi waved her hand and although there was
no change in temperature he was able to make out tables, chairs, shelving that was solid and held various items against the
walls. There was no snow and no ice.
‘I am protecting what’s left,’ she said. ‘It took them a while to get used to it. They woke up one morning to discover the
whole city devastated. Ran around screaming, fighting, fucking each other like crazy, but now they’ve accepted it. It keeps
them out of most of it, especially the centre city. They’re not very determined. They accept what they see. Within a day or
two they retreated to the places that seemed most welcoming. It was really no trouble.’
He digested this as he kept watching her closely. She seemed pleased with herself. ‘But the people,’ he said. ‘What happened
to them?’
‘As I said, my father’s noble goals happened to them. Wrath has been here. I guess he must have come here first, looking for
him of course. That would be several weeks, maybe a month ago.’
Zal laughed at her, hollow and rasping. ‘They can’t have come to this in a week or two.’
‘Of course they can,’ Xavi said. ‘Those you see here are the ones who survived. The bodies of the dead are in the crypts.’
She gave an odd kind of shiver and for the first time he noticed her hands were stained with darkness and her clothing was
ripped and bloody in places near the hem. ‘No mages survived. These are the servants you see.’
‘The ones without magical affinity,’ he said, feeling as if he were speaking the words of a curse.
Xavi nodded. ‘Just so. And now they have lost their minds and their memories, or perhaps it is only the memories, I am not
sure. They have lost something very important, that’s clear. Anyway, salvaging them is a project I can’t afford. All my efforts
are to preserve what is left. I’m sure you noticed that some of the materials from the library have already been destroyed.
I don’t even know how much we have lost. Whole areas are desecrated. It would be years of work simply to correct the catalogue.’
Standing in the freezing room, aware of what was happening outside, watching her prattle on about books made something in
Zal want to slap her very hard, but he was used to restraining these impulses in his Jayon guise and instead he felt the muscles
around his face tighten up as he kept to the point and released any notions he had had of her being of some use. ‘Have you
seen anywhere else?’
‘I came directly here.’ She was actually surprised at this. Her tail twitched as she sensed his displeasure and she became
impatient. ‘You must understand the importance of this place and what it represents now.’
Zal, who had considered reaching out to her, recoiled his
andalune
body very carefully within his own skin. A wave of desire for her swept over him, making him hot but he ignored it. ‘Now?’
She frowned and he was reminded of her singular, fixated expression aboard the Temeraire, when she had been flanked by angels
and determined to get her prize at any cost. For all their shared spirit she seemed not to have noticed his lust or his curse
and that in itself was interesting but she was already talking.
‘Now that Wrath is in Alfheim. Nothing can stand against him. Or the others. If all of Alfheim, or even most of it, falls
prey to this . . . plague of degeneration . . . then the only thing that remains of our whole culture and all its ages are
the records of this library and others scattered across the world. Would you see them burned in order to toast rats?’
Zal considered it. ‘I’d rather see it wiping shit and rotting than recreating this situation, yes I would.’
Her eyes narrowed and she spat at him. ‘What an ignorant slut of a creature you are! How you can be her son I’ll never know!
You have no idea of the beauty and the wonder contained in these things.’
‘Nothing of any importance, I’m sure of that. Sure as I am you’re
your father’s daughter,’ he said, as disgusted with her as she was with him.
She scowled with displeasure and glanced at the bow and then at him. Her voice would have stopped his heart if she’d only
had enough demon blood to transform its tone of vicious hatred into a literal lance of spite. ‘How dare you mention my father.
I wish I’d killed you. You’re not fit to be here.’
Zal bent down and picked up the bow. He was aware now of how powerful she was, and it was orders of magnitude beyond what
he had expected. It confused him, and the swirling vaporous desire in his body filled his judgement up with silty, suffocating
confusion. It took all of his focus just to unstring the bow, adjust the tension with a few twists and restring it correctly
before handing it to her. He let a little of his suffering flow into his own voice, so she’d understand he meant his next
words as a threat. ‘Don’t throw away the one useful thing you’ve got. There’re no angels at your back now. It’s only a matter
of time before they find you.’
She seethed at him.
‘You
didn’t find me.’
‘Lucky me.’ He turned on his heel and began walking away. His head pounded with agonising pressure that promised it would
ease if he only went in the other direction, back to her side.
‘Where are you going?’ she snapped.
‘To look for the living,’ he said without pausing or turning. The meeting with her and the demon’s curse had wearied him so
much he knew he didn’t have long left before he’d be fawning over her feet. Only the burning heat of the harness kept him
going; an embrace that was strong enough to hold him up when he felt that he was defeated. The succubus charm in his blood
shrilled at him that he must stay, take care of her, love her and he remembered Lila’s writing in that book – ‘friends and
lovers’, she had written, in her misguided, rushed, too-kind way. He grit his teeth and kept walking one step after another
and finally he felt he was clear of Xavi or at least had no idea where she was. Ideas, concerns about her role here, her relation
to her father, the meaning of her presence tried to rush him but he battered those aside too. Then it was only a matter of
half an hour to retrace his way to the landing platform.
Shrieks, almost but not quite torn away on the wind, found his ears as he turned through the shattered panels of the last
door and saw the blank arch of the indigo sky before him, framed in black rock. Unloyal, he wasn’t surprised to see, was not
there.
His hands and feet were painful as he sat down in the lee of a rock to wait for true night and final confirmation of his abandonment.
He folded his legs and wrapped his arms around them and put his forehead onto his knees, pack on his feet and the thin cloak
he had with him over all. The wind boomed and screamed around the cliff but his aetheric body told him there was nobody there.
He began to murmur a tune to himself and then, to his surprise, he found he heard the original track and realised it was the
harness. It hadn’t occurred to him that it would respond to sound, but then he thought of course it would. If it was Lila’s
clone then the way to communicate with it was to talk. Strange ideas began to come to him about what he might be able to do
with it and the pressure in his blood abated as he sang.
By the time Unloyal landed on the pitch-black platform, its own hide scoured and chilled beyond comfort, it was surprised
to see its former partner dancing across the empty space. It was wearing a strange, flexible suit of plate armour that was
radiating heat and trailed cloaks and streamers of shadow around it that acted as siphons on the darkness itself, drawing
it in and making it denser. Unloyal knew an ifrit when he saw one, even if it was using shade and not flame. The whirling
dance it did was also accompanied by wild music which Unloyal’s own
andalune
body could pick up even when his sharp ears could not. He recognised some of the rhythms from the demon city. Then the elf
noticed him and came waltzing up, a bizarre knight of darkness with a tattered flag of dirty blond hair.
‘Thought you’d forgotten,’ it said, recriminating.
Unloyal felt peeved but he put out his foot. The elf vaulted to the saddle without bothering to take it. Then Unloyal felt
they were squared again and wondered for a second or two at the ease with which he had accepted an
andalune
link with such a lesser creature. ‘Turn up the volume,’ he ordered, taking them both to the edge of the wall. The wind slammed
and sheared here, badly enough to rip off a wing if he were not careful or able to use more than aerodynamic means of support.
The strange aetheric disruption of the atmosphere made life difficult, but not impossible.
Then Unloyal felt something even more unexpected. The elf was winding a metal wire firmly around one of his neck spines. ‘There,’
he said. ‘Now you can listen yourself. Just ask it to play.’
There was a moment, poised on the edge of oblivion where the drake was honestly lost for words, but then it found two. ‘Thank
you.’
Its muscles bunched and its aether body swirled beneath it, gathering power, then they bolted forward and upwards. Within
seconds they were whisked far from Delatra, over the lower peaks of the mountain and down towards the continent below, Unloyal
making for places he had scouted out himself, wondering how he was to speak to a wire, and Zal with his streaming eyes watching
the familiar constellations glitter overhead.
Lila considered Bentley’s tape, Xavi’s face, Greer’s throwing arm and what it had felt like to stand in the bottom of the
seeping labyrinth with Ilya, hearing his boy’s voice promise her to leave his heaven so that he, the failed Lord of Death,
could track Sarasilien’s hounds of hell. They didn’t sit easily together.
Dusk was coming. In the offices the lights were on, showing people the way out. The evacuation processed silently. In the
garden a few blackbirds chattered and some cicadas set up their louder hum. Malachi went into his yurt and lit his lamps.
Through the open flapway Lila could see Tatters, hanging on the coat rack just as he had said.
She was the spitting image of the green tailored clothing Teazle had given her and Lila briefly put her hand to her sleeve,
realizing she’d been tricked. Tatterdemalion was already on her back. ‘You two faced sonofabitch,’ she said quietly. Bentley
glanced at her but saw the remark was an interior moment briefly breaking the surface and ignored it. Lila wondered if cursing
angels was some kind of sin. She got up.
‘You’re going?’ Bentley asked, signalling Greer with a wave of her arm.
The quoits game was long finished. Greer had been sitting near the pitch on one of Malachi’s deck chairs, taking the air.
He eyed Lila gravely. ‘So? As you can see, we’re all making tracks for the hills.’
‘Stay cool,’ Lila said. ‘I have to check something out. I won’t take too long. When I get back, then we’ll see.’ She saw Malachi
looking out at them. He’d finally admitted defeat and taken off the camel coat. He had hung it, closed the buttons and was
brushing it down with a velvet pad. She went across to him, ignoring Greer’s huff at her lack of detail.
Lila made a show of examining the green dress. ‘Were you in it with him?’
‘I don’t cross angels,’ Malachi said.
‘Never mind,’ she sighed and looked up into his ugly beast’s face. In the last few hours it had darkened further, becoming
almost purplish in its shadows, the eyes dimming from their lava burn to a sulphurous yellow. Around him the little woolly
cavern of the yurt was darker than it should have been given the prevailing light. There was a smell of pine forests and night-blooming
jasmine.
‘You should get out of here too,’ she said.
‘So saieth little red riding hood to the wolf? Get about your own business.’ His reply was one of those faery moment-turning
charms that was meant to avert a misfortune by belittling its possibility. He adjusted the sleeve of the perfected coat and
in doing so his claw snagged on the cuff button and tore through the threads, ripping it loose so that it hung by a single
strand. He growled at the ill omen and his own clumsiness. His massive shoulders slumped until his paws were nearly at the
floor. The velvet buffing pad dropped soundlessly from his other hand.
‘Yeah, so say she,’ Lila clapped him on the shoulder. ‘This isn’t your fight. Faery will be safe. It didn’t feature in the
story so far.’
His growl became nastier and he turned on her although she felt his malice wasn’t aimed at her.
‘Faery worked so hard to contain all the horror that has been spared and I have caused it to be freed. So long it was at bay
that even you humans had come to think maybe there was no such thing as true evil, but now you will find otherwise. I set
that in motion. I was the hand. It is my fight if it is anyone’s so don’t you boss me about.’
She lowered her voice. ‘Ilya was beaten. Even he didn’t say how. I got the impression he couldn’t. It’s not worth all of us
. . .’ She couldn’t finish the impossible sentence. ‘It isn’t worth it.’
‘No. It isn’t,’ he said firmly and flicked the button off its last thread with a lightning movement of his paw. It struck
the wall and bounced down onto the floor. ‘So what?’
She sighed and took her hand from him. ‘Take care.’
‘I wait for you here,’ he said and turned away as if he was very busy. Then he added, ‘That girl at your house. Did she tell
you her story?’
‘She said you sent her, you and Greer. You sent her to clean up the
house. And to clear out the previous tenants. Nice call, pussycat. You could always remodel yourself and become a real estate
agent.’
He made a low, swinging motion of his head that accepted his guilt and pushed it aside as necessary. He wasn’t about to apologise.
‘I must check on her,’ he said, more slowly and calmly. ‘You go your way. Your business is short?’
‘Short one way or another,’ Lila agreed, thinking of the Folly’s inferno. She must find Friday. She had to know the truth.
‘I should be back in an hour. Two at the most. If I’m not, you can cancel my rent agreement.’
‘Mmnnn,’ he assented, a sound that was half a purr and half a growl. He was down on all fours then and when he turned towards
her he had become entirely catlike, a panther of gothic and prehistoric proportions. ‘Don’t come back here. Go home when you’re
done. I’ll see you there. Zal too. No more coming here. Understand?’ He blinked once and then he flowed out of the door and
vanished into the twilight so completely that she couldn’t track him across the yard.
Lila took a bike out of the inventory, for old times’ sake. The quartermaster saw her coming and rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll order
another one shall I?’ he said as she passed him, smiling.
‘Several,’ she said, thinking that this might be the last time she’d ride one. She could have gone a dozen ways under her
own power but only the bike felt like the right way and she knew enough of what they were doing by now to know that however
dumb or pointless it seemed, it was most important to do things the right way. It was how you moved in the game.
The ride to Solomon’s Folly was the ride of her life. She’d been along it many times and every time had resulted in one turn
of fate or another. This wasn’t going to be different, even if she had to burn down the dusty edge of the highway to pass
the standing traffic. From the first turn out of the garage to the last slide on the loose gravel of the private road she
felt that she was running on a rail. The time shift separated her from the rest of the world again, but since she expected
it she felt no particular fear. It was only as she came to the depth of the woods surrounding the house and saw that the road
had grown over completely, didn’t exist any more, that she was forced to stop.
She dismounted and the green elegant folds of Tatterdemalion sank slowly round her legs, wrenched out of shape.
The trees of the scrub woodland that had surrounded Zal’s rented house had grown to full size, fallen, rotted and given way
to a new
and more vital forest, which was itself mature. Undergrowth as thick as hedging barred her way and the enormous trees vaulted
into a dark cathedral overhead. She thought that an hour was possibly too short a time to have allowed herself as she dismounted
and put the bike onto its stand. It looked forlorn and helpless in the shadow of the trees. She checked the time shift and
found that it had continued to accelerate. Tendrils of grass crept up the tyres.
Because what faced her was a wall of impenetrable trees, twined with brambles as thick as a man’s arm and tangled as a medusa’s
hair, she jetted up into the sky. Immediately wind buffeted her. Though nothing had stirred the branches a second before,
suddenly she was caught in a powerful cross-stream that flung her sideways out of her path. As she corrected, more and more
force gathered and then changed direction, sweeping her around the perimeter of the Folly’s elemental sinkhole. She swore
and rode it, ignoring the tornado’s gathering mass as long as she was making headway towards her goal at its eye. The dress
changed, coating her armour in a skintight sheen of lace. It formed a mask over her face, lace even covering the eyeslots
although it was so open it didn’t blot her sight.
The vortex picked at her, stripping off the superficial layers of her atoms. She remade them, watching for a place to set
down. Foreboding filled her but she wouldn’t proceed against Sarasilien until she had all the evidence in her hands. She had
to make one final attempt to locate Friday and his secrets.
Below her she saw that the land itself had begun to reform in pure elements; gold and copper littered a grey-pumice ground
between massive trees and running streams of clear water. The house, covered in the ghost of ancient fire, burned here and
there with real flames that licked on the final remnants of its timbers. The fire was weak however, since there wasn’t much
left that hadn’t been returned to clay or carbon. As long as clay was still good however, she had hope.
Try as it could to dissuade her the air elementals were only capable of increasing or lessening their force and changing direction
so she was able to punch through the diversion without trouble. Landing was difficult, right at the edge of the frying zone
where already she could feel herself responding to the radiation levels and the deep magnetic forces massing around the house’s
unknown core.
‘Suit up,’ she said to the dress. She didn’t know if it would respond to a command. It was as likely to fly off in a huff
and make itself into a paper bag but her rending of it seemed to have bought her a few
moments of repentance. The lace unfolded rapidly into the full white and gold priest’s outfit of before, complete with lead-plate
shielding and a surface of woven symbols. It vibrated constantly at a frequency she felt was almost desperate in its struggle
to maintain integrity against the entropic maelstrom before them. Even time was getting ripped apart in there.
‘This’ll just take a minute,’ Lila said, knowing that was true, regardless of the outcome. She pulled up the files on the
house’s morbidly confused floorplans and set off inwards.
The way was blocked by more than just debris, which she had to shove and kick aside. The entire structure flickered. Like
its one-time inhabitant the worldwalker Azevedo, it was yanked in and out of existence, at one moment solid and threatening,
at others insubstantial or even vanished entire so that she could walk through the ghosts of walls or run through fallen beams.
Tatterdemalion anchored her to the base reality of Otopian space-time, threads unravelling in all directions so that they
walked like a strange anemone through a roaring ocean of fire. Walls powdered at her touch.
She crossed the last spot where she’d seen Jones, Malachi’s friend. It was in the kitchen, with Azevedo flickering around
them, the house itself steeped in what felt like a sentient brooding. Its death throes had the same quality now, in spite
of the firestorm’s lively digestion, and Lila was almost running as she reached the head of the steps that led down to the
basement.
There was nothing but a hole in the ground left. The rim flickered with reflected light but that was lost immediately in the
billows of black smoke filling the cavity. Behind the facemask of the helm Lila gave up on human vision and went to infra
red, ultraviolet and radar. Microparticles and hostile frequencies beat relentlessly at her. She felt the dress, Tatterdemalion,
tighten and smelled that they were themselves on fire. Her skin temperature began to rise quickly. She jumped down the hole
before she could second-guess herself.
The basements of Solomon’s Folly were large – carved out in days before refrigeration when ice blocks in straw kept things
cool and because the owner had been a collector of wine. In Zal’s day they’d drunk the wine collection and everything that
was unwanted from the house had been shoved down here either through the kitchen door or the coal-hole trap outside. There
was nothing left of any of this except great piles of feathery ash, which billowed up around Lila in the sunburst heat, thickening
the air and bursting into radioactive
bomblets of ultrafine dust. This clogged the robes entirely and stopped the burning, though it began to eat at them in a
newer, more scientific way, as though it intended to render them fit for Zoomenon within the minute. She saw red warnings,
heard alarms, knew that in spite of all the aetheric and metallic shielding, the reconfiguration of her surface, she was beginning
to disintegrate.
Mostly blind she waded through the burning dust, feeling her way with her hands and Doppler. The time differential had increased
too – she calculated an hour passing in Otopia as she crossed the first room in a dart of movement that would have been fast
enough to blur. She discovered the cellar arches cracking under the load of the house rubble, because they were also being
rendered to dust. And there in the second room, lay a prone figure, humanoid in shape and about two metres tall, covered completely
in radioactive ash.
Friday. Being an earth elemental, and a golem of great power, this vortex of earth-based energies had done as much to build
him as to harm him. Victory gave her a final burst of conviction that he would still hold her answers.
As she approached him however the lintel behind her gave way and with a smashing billow of pumice and dust the forepart of
the house crumbled into the cellar, letting out a wave of new heat as it did so. Only the absence of almost all oxygen saved
her from burning like a torch. Above her head the ceiling groaned. She had no idea how much was up there, or what state it
was in. Even with all her senses the storm made everything into so much mud. Instinct told her she must get out. There was
no time. The ground shook violently and she was thrown off her feet onto her stomach into the smelting zone.
She reached out to touch the clay figure and her hand closed on the smooth shape of his foot.
Once, years ago, Friday Head had been nothing but a small earth elemental in Zoomenon who had happened to be next to a dying
elf. Then he had become a golem, occupied by the ghosts of Alfheim’s dead. Now, after a hundred years inside the furnace of
Solomon’s Folly he was melting. Under the pressure of her hand the foot slumped into a pool, dragging the leg with it into
a quickly forming puddle.
She’d imagined grabbing him and blasting her way out of there, but now it was clear that was never going to happen. Even if
she could pick him up, the cooling change to the outside world would shatter him in pieces.