‘Junkie,’ the drake murmured as he came up on it, laughing drunkenly, strap-hanging again like a teenager on a late date.
‘Time to go,’ Zal said. He thought of the girl he’d left on the island but she was better off there.
‘Delatra?’
His father released him. He felt the old elf and his companion subside into the forest. The spirit plane closed. There was
only night, the drake, the armour’s burring love.
‘Fire first,’ Zal said. He needed all the power he could get. And even then it wouldn’t be near enough but he had to try.
‘I need fire.’
‘I am not an igniter,’ the drake said. ‘And nothing here is dry enough.’
‘Find a place,’ Zal said. ‘Somewhere rocky. I’ll do the rest.’
It was cold when they got to the dry desert of the mountains and landed on the raw scarp, and colder yet when Zal stripped
the plate and clothing off his top half. He was shaking as he took the book of names and ripped out the pages, scrunching
them up and wedging them between some stones. Unloyal sheltered the spot with the bulk of his wiry body and half-unfurled
wings. Lila played the music Zal requested and the night stopped to listen to the unprecedented sound of the most intense
bass that had ever come to that part of the world. He needed it to start the fire.
The paper was protected from ordinary flames. Zal allowed his demon’s wings to unfold from his back to ignite them. They were
blazing already with the characteristic orange colour of his personal flare, brought to instant heat by the energy of the
soundtrack. It was a fire that existed on several planes at once and it was sufficient to start the process of disposing of
the twin books.
‘You didn’t say you could fly,’ muttered the drake.
‘Never tried it,’ Zal confessed, seeing their shadows thrown into stark shapes across the flickering yellow rocks.
Zal crouched down close to the small, smokeless pyre and added page after page, turning to the second book that his father
had said she had to have and shredding it with his fingers before feeding all the bits into the flames.
He supposed it was a kind of sacrilege but he wasn’t prepared to run the risk of allowing them to survive. This was the last
record of all those people who had died and what had happened to them and how it had been done. He was disposing of knowledge
that had been bought with thousands of lives, with incalculable suffering. It was his own history. Some would say, maybe Tellona
would say, that he was disposing of the past and dooming them to repeat the horror that even his generation had already forgotten.
They could say it if they liked. He turned to the final pages then and pulled them free, made sure they were well alight,
then started to rip the rest at random, counting on luck to make sure the job was done right in case he was interrupted. At
no point did he attempt to find or read the names anywhere. He just tore and burned and listened to Ska on the empty hillside
with the drake in between him and the wind, a bitter grimace on his face; a two-tone funeral at high volume.
At last both the books were ashes. He rubbed these into dust and then he and the drake stood back and watched the wind blow
it all away. Both of them felt slight misgiving, but not for what Zal had done; because they knew that it might still be possible
to remake the books. Perhaps one or two beings in the universe would be able to, though he doubted they’d care to.
‘Be bloody hard though,’ Zal said after a minute.
The drake agreed.
Zal picked up the chestplate of his armour and put it on next to his skin under his elf jacket. ‘Funk it up please,’ he said
to her and she obliged though she kept the beat steady and heavy and he could feel the bass resonating in his heart. The demon
wings had no trouble passing through either Lila or the clothes without setting them alight. They were almost immaterial and
caused no trouble to the drake either. Zal liked the way they made him look, even though he knew he was no match for Teazle
on that score.
‘Delatra?’ Unloyal asked.
Zal brushed the last of the ash off his hands and tightened up the
saddle straps one more time over his stiff legs. He longed for a hit of something strong but he guessed he’d be better off
with a clear head for once. ‘Thought you’d never ask.’
When they arrived in Delatra it was almost morning and a heavy rain was falling. The elves upon whom Xaviendra had fed and
visited her personal ire were all sheltering in the ruins or had run off into the lowlands. Everything was clad in a filthy,
low light, grey and sliding. The smell of wet rottenness lay all over.
The one thing Zal couldn’t get out of his head was Tellona. She had read the books and she was still alive, castaway or not.
Leaving her alive was a gamble of stupendous proportions and most of the risk lay in his ability to conceal the fact.
In his hand Wrath lay dormant – a promise of malice to come. He flexed the fingers but they felt no different. Rain lashed
the parapets and the wind howled its lonely notes through the tunnels. He squelched forward and began to retrace his steps
to the library. Behind him in the streaming mud the drake sat back on his haunches and tuned his wires to Lila-armour’s direct
frequencies. At his back and given the circumstances, Zal didn’t know if that counted as an extra stupidity or not. Any connection
could be used against you.
Water sizzled and spat as it passed through his wings. He hoped their light and the memory of demon hunters past would keep
the savages at bay, but he was disappointed.
He heard a scrape of stick on rock, the mutter of something going crazy with fear as he approached the open doorway of the
library staircase.
‘Get lost,’ he said. ‘I’m not interested.’ At the same moment he drew out the dagger from his belt and felt himself lighten
as his body moved into a defensive posture. ‘Really. Run away and no hard feelings.’ There was a snicking noise that took
him aback because it was so close to his ears and in the glimmering winglight he saw that his armour had grown rills of blades
on its outer edges. Steam billowed around him. He didn’t fancy moving into the enclosed space but he had no choice. Nobody
came out, so he went in.
There were two. One leapt at him without weapons and screamed horribly as it sliced itself open on the armour. He saw, in
a blur, a spear come stabbing at his face at the same moment and he ducked aside. It passed his neck and through one wing
but the thrower, perhaps distracted by the incoherent gibber of the other, cowered
down in the corner with filthy arms over its head and seemed to be fighting itself.
Then as the bloodied one tried to come forward, Zal, disbelieving, saw the terrified one get up, moving with the jerky forced
twitches of a marionette and realised that they were animated by a will other than whatever was left of their own. He put
his dagger in the throat of the first, ending it as quickly as he could before wrenching the blade out and spinning around.
The spear-thrower faced him with total panic in its eyes. They were oval and white as the moon. The orange torch-flicker of
winglight showed him a pretty girl. His wingtip had set her hair on fire but she barely noticed. She was openmouthed, streaked
with filth and blood, her teeth broken as her lips parted in a helpless grimace. Her hands lifted, gripping muck and rocks
from the floor and Zal jumped forward and headbutted her as hard as he could, hoping he didn’t crack her skull. She went down
in a heap without a sound and he bent down for a second to put out the fizzling damp embers of her hair before he jumped over
her on the way up the first flight of stairs.
His anger made the wings burn hotter still, now well manifested in the heaviness of Alfheim’s material plane. They lifted
him so that he skimmed across the ground. In the halls there were more of these living zombies coming to delay him but he
was ready and the fact that they were turned against their will made them slow and easy to incapacitate. Perhaps it would
have been kinder to kill them. He thought so, but he let them lie and told himself that he could always kill them tomorrow
if nothing changed. There was nothing like looking on the bright side.
At the library’s greater doors, undamaged and ajar, he saw the first light that wasn’t his own.
He pulled the nearest door wide open and looked inside. The light was bluish-violet and it was coming from an enormous bonfire,
parodic in its size, a mountain of books, scrolls and objects crawling with the aetheric flames of a consumption that wasn’t
combustion.
Xaviendra was standing at the side of it, a stack of fresh volumes at her side balanced on one of the library’s carts. The
writhing fire covered her as well, and snaked across the floor in a lazy oxbow to the bonfire. She checked a title and riffled
the pages, shook it and then tossed it over her shoulder onto the heap.
‘Read any good books recently?’
He didn’t even know that was going to come out of his mouth until
it did, as laconic and dry as if he’d planned it. The landing book dislodged some from their places and they came slithering
down and slid across the polished stone floor towards him. He angled his head to look at its pages and wasn’t surprised to
see that they were blank.
‘Mmn,’ Xaviendra said and held out her hand, waggling it. She wasn’t the least surprised to see him. ‘I really need a recommendation
I think. Is that why you’ve come back?’
He ignored this. ‘My, here we are at the book depository. It’s not the way I pictured the end of the world.’
‘Well, you have to take what you can get,’ she said, throwing several more slim volumes on and then taking hold of the cart’s
handles and dragging the whole thing to the fire where she clumsily upended it and then righted it again, the cargo dumped
and downloading into her.
Zal thought of Lila and in return he felt her vibrate against his skin, maybe laughing. ‘You won’t find what you’re looking
for.’
‘It wasn’t the only copy I’m sure,’ she drawled. She gave the cart a push and a figure darted out from the darkness in the
stacks and grabbed it with bloody hands.
‘Zombie minions,’ Zal said. ‘Classy.’
‘Can’t you think of any cracks about late returns and fines or something?’ Xaviendra said, as though she was already very
bored of him.
‘Fresh out,’ he said, wondering how this was going to go down. Wrath showed no sign of waking; it was waiting for something
else and he had no idea what. ‘What are you trying to do?’
‘Well, when you and your friends and lovers have finished bringing the phantoms here I’m going to eat them all up,’ she said,
skimming a huge leatherbound and handgilded atlas into the fire.
She rubbed her eyes and sighed. ‘Very kind of you. I wonder if you’ll be able to try to kill me as effectively as I’ve tried
to kill you. Curious thing that ink and that book. You’d think I’d have recognised it but apparently there are some artefacts
that are still beyond me. And then I had to drink all the vile beer with you and all you could do was talk nonsense about
dragons . . . ah ha . . .’ she laughed, a tinkly, merry sound of girlish amusement.
‘Imagine that,’ Zal said, finding himself more than able to dislike her. ‘And after you eat these phantoms what are you going
to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, unrolling a huge, handpainted history scroll and squinting at the illuminated names of aeons past,
arrayed
with the pictographic details of their personal histories. She let it reroll itself and then wanged it end over end into
the conflagration. ‘Having missed out on getting the mantle I might try for it again, although the Bloody Sisters have probably
hidden or lost it by now.’
‘Yeah,’ Zal said, walking forward to see what it was that the keepers were handing her now as they kept coming out of the
black stacks, dumping vases, caskets, more books. He picked up a thin, wide, illustrated children’s story and flicked through
the pages. ‘But what for? Where are you going?’ He turned to the inside of his wrist as he read the book and tapped his finger
there. Lila showed a playlist. He cued, started the music and this time it played for the room as clearly and loudly amplified
as if he had an entire tour’s worth of gear in place for a concert of thousands.
Xaviendra actually jolted with shock. Her glare at him was pure poison. The shuffling in the stacks stopped abruptly.
Zal moved his head and shoulders to the beat of the old-style country rock – all goodtime swing beats and boot kickin’ riffs
– and began to sing quietly along, ‘aw-uh-uh-oh . . .’. Inwardly he was smiling. At last they were on familiar ground. He
glanced up innocently. ‘What?’
Xaviendra strode over to him and ripped the children’s book out of his hands before throwing it on her blazing heap.
He looked at her without interrupting his groove. ‘And how is
The Velveteen Rabbit
part of your master plan?’
She bared her teeth. ‘To have to somehow feel a bond with you is so aggravating – I can’t tell you just how much I HATE you!
Trivial, pathetic, feeble little . . .’
He held up his hand. ‘Ramp up the B-movie script darling. After studying all this I think you’d be up to something more eloquent.’
He wondered if she could literally explode from anger, but it seemed not, unfortunately. ‘But seriously, to get back to the
subject at hand. Don’t you think you deserve some kind of reward for creating a subrace, beginning a race war and torturing
thousands of people to death? I mean, it does seem like a whole big list of achievements in one sense but . . .’
He pulled his dagger out and stabbed it into her just above the collar bone with accuracy and force. Her eyes widened and
then she took hold of his hand on the hilt and yanked it out. There was no blood. She glared at him and then let go, pushing
his hand away forcefully.
‘You’re a moron,’ she said and went back to heaving the collected works of ages onto her fire, apparently brushing him from
her consciousness.
Zal put the dagger away. ‘I didn’t think it’d work.’
‘Treachery was always your strong suit,’ she retorted though she seemed half-hearted, he thought. She beckoned and the trailing
notyet-dead resumed their haulage from the library’s dark recesses. Then she paused and looked up. ‘Ah ha,’ she said. ‘Your
robot girlfriend and her lackeys have arrived. Good. I won’t have to listen to this dreadful cacophony much longer.’