One of the escaped mages had come, it seemed, to Demonia, to find a necromancer able to sever the spirit so that it could
be hidden, come the inevitable day of Hellblade’s rise from damnation. The phantom had planned to scour Demonia to find this
soul canister, leaving no bone unturned and no blood unshed but Teazle, after a moment of exquisitely pleasurable revulsion
at the turn of events, deemed this unnecessarily dramatic and a waste of time. He knew necromancers and clairvoyants who had
inexplicably gone missing whilst hiding a Mirror in their cellar. Madame Des Loupes had made her exit early, but she hadn’t
been wrong about who was coming to call on her and what was likely to happen on that day. He had a very good idea of where
to start looking for that canister.
He spread his huge wings and took to the air, much as to feel the joy of being able to do it as for any practical need. Blood
and matter that still clothed him exploded outwards, scattered and fell around him as he thrashed higher, delighted by the
physical struggle and the air’s resistance. He beat slowly across the brittle rocks and then, when he was sated with the mastery
of flight, winked out. With every second Hellblade soaked him and the distinction between them grew more and more blurred.
He feared he would never be rid of the thing, but then he forgot to fear it, even as they appeared over the familiar greenish
muck of the Lagoon in a sweltering Bathsheban afternoon and descended, a white dragon slicked in gore, to the centre of the
city, at the square in the souk outside Madame Des Loupes’ house.
Lila found herself face to face with Malachi in the corridor outside what had been her office. She smelled of jet fuel and
her scowl was as black as her armour. ‘The mountain’s come to Mohammed,’ she said. ‘Let me pass.’
‘Wait,’ Malachi croaked. It was so difficult to speak now. He was forgetting words. ‘The phantom is with you. You carry Nemesis.’
She froze in a nonhuman way, utterly still, for a split second, then slight movements returned and he saw her eyes flick as
she considered this and all its ramifications.
‘That explains a lot,’ she said tightly. ‘It’s funny, I’m so used to silent knowledge I didn’t even think it wasn’t me. We’ve
got the same wishes. I guess that makes me a Returner, doesn’t it? Or does it make me Lila at all? Even so. The time’s come.’
She made to move past him
but he blocked the way. She gave him a long, even stare. ‘Move or be moved.’
‘Lila, think . . .’ But by the time he’d said this she had grabbed him and spun them around in a pirouette so that she was
at the door and he was behind her. It was locked but she unlocked it and pushed it open with a small kick of one boot toe.
She walked through, slowly, letting the sound of her boots on the tile sound steady as she moved into the new silence beyond.
Malachi followed her, a beast shadow.
‘Lila,’ Sarasilien’s voice was loud and startled as Malachi heard it, then he saw around her shoulder and the elf’s face was
stricken – by the sight of Nemesis, he was sure, even though this was only the faintest sheen of spirit light around Lila’s
figure by now. He stood up from where he had been reclining on the chaise. At its foot Sandra Lane moved forward from where
she’d been resting at attention, taking a flanking position. Lila ignored her.
‘Time for our little chat,’ Lila said. Her tone could have frozen steel. The voice was a fusion of hers and that of another
so that it sounded distorted. ‘Tell me about your daughter.’
Malachi edged around so that he was just behind Lila and to the side. Lane faced him as he manoeuvred but he stayed back.
‘Lila,’ Sarasilien said, his hands held forward, slightly open and a look of deepest concern on his features, ‘you are in
a very dangerous position.’
‘No,’ she said evenly. ‘That would be your position. Time to convince me you don’t deserve what I’m bringing. Your hell has
been visited everywhere and all I see is your running, lying back.’
There was a presence about her that Malachi had never witnessed before and he wasn’t entirely sure it was down to Nemesis.
It was formidable and the room felt so still he could feel his own heart beating, and that seemed like too much.
‘Either you talk,’ Lila said, ‘or I will take you apart to find out the truth.’
That was and was not Lila, Malachi knew. The promise was hers, the backup truth behind it was the phantom’s.
‘Judge,’ he said, holding just one hand out now, palm forward, placating. He moved very cautiously, as Malachi wanted to.
The sense of something about to spill over into violence was so acute that the air felt hard to breathe. Sarasilien spoke
quickly and quietly, ‘Judgement will not be necessary. I have one daughter and she is here.’
‘She is not here,’ Lila said. ‘She left and went to Alfheim to do something. What was it?’
Sarasilien blinked, ‘Do you mean Xaviendra?’
‘Is there another?’
He looked slightly blindsided and stumbled over the name. ‘Xaviendra is not my daughter.’
Lila might have hesitated, she might have debated the points for some machine aeon, Malachi didn’t know, but he saw her reach
forward and grab Sarasilien by the front of his jacket and lift him up and shake him an inch from her face as if he were a
rag doll. Finally she slammed him against the wall and moved in until her nose and his were a millimetre apart.
She spoke in a whisper that was soft and quiet, full of malice, ‘Say it ain’t so one more time. I dare you.’
Her anger was a crackle that ripped through Malachi’s fur like static. At the same instant Sandra Lane was there holding Lila’s
arms, trying to wrestle her off Sarasilien but she might as well not have been there for all the effect it had.
‘Look at me,’ the elf said, although his lips had gone white and he was holding her gauntleted wrists with yellowing knuckles.
‘With Lila’s sight, Nemesis, you can see the truth.’
With a bellow of rage Lila flung him down to sprawl at her feet. In a continuation of the same gesture, blasting off her feet
with power, she knocked back Lane, sending her flying into the far wall with a force that smashed plaster and made the entire
room vibrate. In inch crack shot up and down from floor to ceiling as Lane crashed to the floor and the walls and floor shuddered
but Lila’s attention was only for the elf as she spat, ‘What? How can this be? It was written in that book,
that book I wrote in,
it was all in there, her diary, the journal of Xaviendra Sarasilien, your name, the history, the experiment . . . it was
all in there! I read it. I see it now. Every line. Every word!’
Sarasilien made no effort to pick himself up. ‘I have only one daughter, and she is not the Mage Princess of Delatra, which
Xaviendra surely is.’
‘Then who is she? And what about that book? I wrote in it. Because . . .’ Lila stopped.
Malachi could see Sarasilien’s face. He expected avoidance, because a faery would twirl away through the gaps and elves preferred
to keep secrets but there was an odd light in Sarasilien’s eyes.
‘It’s you, Lila,’ he said, using the Otopian shortening of the words.
‘The second time you were born, I made you. I have no other off-spring. I never have had. There is only one person I had
a hand in making. It’s you.’
Malachi thought he saw Lane flinch a little as she stood up, plaster dust falling off her.
Lila drew herself up and back like a recoiling snake. There was a moment of complete stillness.
‘The book you had,’ Sarasilien said, still slumped like an old blanket on the floor. ‘Who gave it to you? Where did it come
from?’
‘Zal,’ Lila said, poised. ‘It was in his pocket. He got it from the Three Sisters.’
‘A faery book, Fate’s book,’ Sarasilien said in the same even tone. He didn’t need to glance at Malachi for the implication
of this to be understood – faery books of great importance almost certainly were able to write themselves as occasion demanded.
‘What did you write in it?’
‘I wrote . . .’ Lila said and hesitated. ‘. . . friends and lovers all . . .’
The slightest smile flitted through the elf’s face, a wry expression. ‘Xavi must have loved that,’ he said, almost to himself.
‘A perfect disarm. So written in such a book with Night’s blood, it became true as you wrote it and she who was your clever
adversary was suddenly your ally.’
‘She?’ Lila repeated, almost in a kind of trance although her posture remained balanced at a point of absolute threat over
him. ‘Who the hell
is
she, then?’
‘Xaviendra of Delatra is the greatest of the ancestral mages of Alfheim,’ he said. ‘She is the last surviving member of the
Final Council, except myself and the Lady of Aparastil. The opening of the phantom plane was her doing. She created the shadowkin,
and the phantom Titans. The original mistake was hers and she has sought to avoid the consequences ever since.’
Lila frowned, unmoving. ‘She said she was a consequence of the experiment. A victim. She is . . . shadow. Some kind of shadowkin.’
‘Yes,’ Sarasilien said. ‘She is, but at her own hand.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m afraid that’s a lesson in obsession with power that must wait,’ he said. ‘She has gone to Alfheim to finish what she
started before the phantom Titans find her. She knows they are coming, perhaps closer than she thinks.’
Now Sandra Lane’s black vinyl head jerked like a bird’s. ‘Finish?’
‘Godhead, dragonhood, one or the other, only that will do. She made her ambition everything, or it made her.’
Lila finally stood down from her stance and crouched to take his hand and pull him back up to his feet.
‘You did not mention a further motive,’ Lane said to him resentfully.
‘You never know what someone will do until they do it,’ he replied. ‘You can only guess and hope you are wrong. I thought
she might only try to save herself from Hellblade but I believe her actions at the time, in betraying the Titans and their
purpose, pointed at a new opportunity she—’
‘Cut to the chase, in Otopian,’ Lila butted in, still unforgiving. ‘Some of us aren’t immortal.’
He grimaced, standing stiffly. ‘If she can gain enough aetheric mass potential in her present form she would be able to consume
the phantoms. With their power and her own she would be in a position to make another try for ascendancy and I think it is
reasonable to assume that this time nothing would stand in her way successfully.’
He sighed with exasperation as they all stared at him blankly, not seeing what he was trying to say. ‘She intents to transcend
her present semi-material state for the plasticity of a true dragon, able to move in any dimension, in any manner, without
losing cohesion as an individual, all consciousness and memory preserved without the need for any material anchor. It is extremely
rare but it can happen.’
‘Yeah, but what is she doing in Alfheim that’s so important?’ Lila said. ‘And we still haven’t come to your part in her rise
either.’
‘I was the one who opposed her,’ Sarasilien said. ‘Perhaps it is why the three came for me last. I was against the entire
project. Later would be a better time to discuss these details.’
‘Sure,’ Lila said sarcastically. ‘Like there’s gonna be a later at this rate.’
‘She is correct,’ the Lane android said. ‘The instability of the fissures in the aether-time expansion are becoming critical.
There is a possibility of a quantum implosion event.’
‘I . . .’ Sarasilien began but Lila overrode him.
‘It’s all me me me with some people,’ she said, glaring at him, anger radiating off her in waves. ‘I hate that. Make me a
portal to wherever we have to be and let’s get this over with.’ She half turned to Malachi. ‘Come with me. I need you.’
‘I will come too,’ Sandra Lane said.
‘Not you,’ Lila commanded, looking at Sarasilien as he concentrated. ‘You stay right here.’
For once in his life Malachi couldn’t see the way it was going to fall. He wasn’t sure who was speaking now, Lila or Nemesis.
Burnt rags clung to her, edges alight with ember fire that flared in breezes he couldn’t feel. Her skin was white as snow,
the red of her hair, the magical scar and her lips blood red, the armour black as the void. Her eyes were perfect mirrors.
The portal opened and they passed through into a darkness so absolute that for a moment he wondered if the last joke was on
them and Sarasilien had routed them directly into the Endless that lay beyond all things.
But then he heard a dog bark.
Teazle found the mirror room in the labyrinth beneath Madame’s house by memory, his eyes closed fast all the way. Some superstition
had made him take the slow route inside. Now he patted his way around the rubble-strewn room like a blind man, only much more
ineptly. Relics of the dead were everywhere. Behind him he could feel the weight of the mirror’s stare all the time, like
a force on his back drawing him towards it, but he almost jumped out of his skin when he heard a voice from it say,
‘The object you are looking for is to the left. You will have to dig. It’s in the corner.’ It was elvish and fussy, and it
spoke Demonic as if it was being forced to eat excrement but it got the words right.
The weaving presence in his blood that was Hellblade reached out to seize the speaker and Teazle had to scream, ‘No!’ even
as it recoiled in response to his reaction. He didn’t know if Hellblade were capable of seeing in any sense that the mirror
needed but he didn’t want to get sucked in again.
The elf voice laughed, a merry and unrestrained sound that really rubbed Teazle the wrong way.
‘Who are you?’ he snarled even as he began to grope his way left, finding a large pile of dead-demon stone and bits of fallen
ceiling lying there. The rocks were damp and slimy. They slipped and clattered as he started to excavate. ‘And how come you
get to look out of that thing?’
‘My name is Ilyatath,’ said the voice. ‘And because I am who I am. I see you’ve changed, Teazle. The pure one is ridden by
the polluted. And there was I thinking you’d escape change and be yourself for
ever. I wish I’d known it was you they were looking for. Then I wouldn’t have tried to stop them, and I would have escaped
myself.’