Keeping It Real (25 page)

forgotten what
it
felt to be this tired and this full of pleasant, whooshy, relaxed feelings. 'Elf sex must be

amazing.'

'In my limited experience it possesses all the thrills and boredoms of any other activity,' Dar said. 'For

one thing most
elves do not
run on tokamaks, unless I have mistaken them. But I do not wish to belittle

your experience, nor mine. It
was as unusual for me as for you.'

'No,' Lila said from the floor. 'I get it. In fact, I don't think you need to explain anything like that to me

ever again.' And she didn't need to ask how he was either. She knew that. He was fine. Exhausted, but

fine. 'That bioluminescent drawing-on-the-source-of-life thing really takes it out of you, doesn't it?' she

said.

'Knocks off a year of your life every trip,' he said in another flip revert
to the Otopian style. 'But who's

counting?'

'Is there time to ... ? But
before she could finish the sentence Lila was asleep.

"They're coming
.
Get
up.'

Lila woke to find Dar shaking her and a peculiar zap running the length of her arm where he touched

her, which she belatedly processed and recognised as a kind of bite or nip from his aetheric self. She got

up from the floor and ran a full upgrade at the same time, so that when she had made it
to her feet
she

was awake, alert and feeling fine. Dar pushed handfuls of wet plastic tubing and first aid at her.

'I don't know how to pack these. You must carry them. They shouldn't know you've been here.'

Lila took them and saw that they had been flushed reasonably clean. The floorboards were drying from

a scrub, but they were stained. She worked as fast as she could to put everything together and back in its

place. She caught Dar staring openly as her leg compartments opened and closed with soft whirring and

clicks, a silvery blur of motion that made her hands look slow, a whisper of sound like leaves stirring in a

light breeze. He was fascinated and there was no trace of his earlier repulsion towards her on his face.

She smiled
.
'Want me to sand the floor for you?'

'No. There is no time, even for you. If you are ready then we must go.' He stood by the door, tall and

straight
in new, clean clothes, a variety of bladed weapons stored across his back alongside the

sweep-ing curves of a bow and two quivers full of arrows
.
Their fletchings were of various hues of

brown, grey and green, notched and nocked in varying ways her master-at-arms system identified as

being intended for a wide variety of purposes besides simple killing.

She found herself glancing at
Dar's face uncertainly. His eyes, now the colour of noon sky and nothing

like the midnight of earlier, were

clear and full of the need for urgent
action. She glanced at
his skin - it
was pale, like daylight
through flat,

thin cloud.

'Ready,' she said.

He looked at
her for a long moment
.
'Mmn, not quite.' He went to another cupboard and pulled out

some clothing. 'Your armour will reflect too much light, though I do not know if this will fit.'

'It's done,' Lila said and he turned, frowning, as she changed the surface of her metallic body parts to

partial camouflage
.
Microscopic scales in the metal structure turned to reflect exact wavelengths of light,

each different, to produce perfect reproductions of flat colour, very similar to those of her surroundings
.

It was a step down from full camo, which resulted in complete invisibility for her metal parts and the

disconcerting sight of her head and torso floating around unsupported. She took a long shirt off him and

put that
over her khaki underwear.

Dar almost
grinned. He put
the rest
of the clothes back. 'Your hair will need some mud before long, I

regret
to say. It
is a very un-elven colour.'

'Not
yours?' She found she was teasing him easily, as though they had been the best
of friends for

some time.

'Mine is close enough to mud,' he said, listening for a moment
or two before opening the door.

Outside, the forest still dripped, although the rain had stopped some time ago. It
was so lush and green

that
Lila paused to look at it, to smell it, to feel the peculiar intensity with which things got
on with

growing. Leaves showed her that
plants here were the same as those in Otopia, but here they were

bigger and more healthy looking. When she listened and tuned out
her own and Dar's sound, she could

hear everything growing; a susurration of slow but immeasurable power. It was dis-concerting. In a way

that no Otopian forest could have been, this one was alive. It wasn't intelligent, nor even particularly

aware - she didn't feel watched - its biology simply dwarfed hers in scale and appetite. It thrived, and her

flesh body responded to that with joy.

They travelled fast, like Zal used to, running at an exhilarating pace through the trees and across open

clearings, along the banks of streams, across rivers, through dry gorges choked with old glacial rocks and

up moorland hillsides where the heathers grew higher than their knees. All the time they ascended and,

when Dar stopped to point

out
the views, Lila could see more and more of Lyrien, a beautiful green map, rolling out from her feet

like the most sumptuous of carpets.

Lila marvelled at
Dar's recovery, and her own. She had never felt
better. With the sweat
running down

her face they came to a rocky outcrop which Dar called the Star Rocks. This tower of stone stood out

from the surrounding land which had eroded around its harder sub-stance. It held the two of them

balanced on a finger of granite five thousand feet
above the lowlands and Lila could see back into Lyrien

and forwards, to Lilirien and Sathanor, hidden by clouds
.

'Sathanor is a valley landscape within a ring of mountains,' Dar told her
.
"The place you last came to

here is a village set against the foot of those mountains, where the pass into Sathanor begins. You can see

it from here, right on the eastern edge of the range. Those lakes mark where the river runs out. You

remember their shores? I saw you walking there, taking the rowboats out on the last day of that

conference.'

Lila nodded. She did remember. It had been sunny and warm, the lake still as a mirror, all the boats

graceful and smooth as everyone took turns at
pretending to be good with oars. She had no idea that

Dar had been there then. He could have been anyone. She hadn't
been able to tell who was what, there

were so many strange faces, and anyway, all the elves looked the same to her then.

'We cannot
go that
way. We will cross the land as directly as we can from here. Quickly, we must
get

down from here.' He led the way back, across steeply sloping grassland and into the line of trees which

crept as far as they were able up the knoll. Lila looked back as she descended and saw the heat trace of

three human-sized bodies far back across the hills they had covered.

'Someone's following,' she said.

'No doubt,' Dar agreed.

'Dar,' she said as they began to jog downhill. 'Do you know Zal?'

'Not personally,' he replied. "Though I have watched him a long time.'

Something in Dar's voice made Lila hesitate. 'You're a fan?' she said, unable to believe her ears.

'We are not so far apart, politically.'

So, not exactly the kind of fan Lila was used to, screaming and knicker-throwing, but
still. Fan. 'Is he

from Alfheim?'

'Of course.' He snorted with what
may have been a laugh.

Their descent levelled off and Dar led her sloshing upstream through a narrow gully. She could see a

high sandbank far ahead, pocked with the holes of swifts' nests, although it wasn't the season for them

and the holes were empty. Another small way-hut
stood atop the bank almost
hidden in a drapery of

vines. 'Wait
here,' Dar said. 'I'll go steal the things we need.'

Lila stood up to her knees in cold flowing water and shivered with pleasure. Soft green leaves danced

above and around her in the light
breeze. She wondered what
was going on with the agents back home,

and how poor Jolene was going to manage when Zal failed to show up for Frisco. Her clock showed her

that
she had two hours left
to get
Zal there on time. No way. And she wondered if Malachi had found

any more out about the peculiar recordings from the car back in Bay City. But
it
was a relief to only be

able to wonder, and it
occurred to her as she stood alone there that
these few minutes, in which nobody

knew where she was and couldn't contact her, were a gift of freedom.

Dar beckoned her silently from the top of the sandbank and she started forwards obediently
.
It was

already over
.

Lila climbed to meet him and followed his lead into the depths of a vigorous holly thicket. There was a

small hollow inside the bushes, covered in flat, brown leaves and dry. They sat there and ate furiously.

Lila's hunger was overpowering from the second she smelled the food and, even though it was diy rations

that had to be chewed with a lot
of water, they feasted.

'No lembas jokes, if you please,' Dar said when he could swallow and not
bite again immediately
.
'I

have heard them all.'

'Wouldn't
dream of it. Perfect,' Lila said with her mouth full. As she slowed down and recovered her

senses from the delicious intensity of filling her stomach she realised how close they were, actually

pressed shoulder to shoulder in the tiny place, knees bunched up, like kids hiding out. She glanced at Dar

and found she didn't hate him one bit any more, even if she tried. It made her smile. 'Do you do this

often?'

'All the time,' Dar said dryly. 'It is my continual misfortune to lan-guish thus whilst dreaming of

white-tile bathrooms and luxury king-size vibrating-massage beds and four-hundred-thread-count

Egyptian cotton sheets and five-star room service.'

'You're kidding.'

'I am.' He licked his fingers and swallowed and listened. Lila saw his ears move. The long, pointed

tips free of his hair made micro fine

adjustments in their position. It
was rather comical, but
she didn't
laugh. She realised that
he was filtering

some magical dimension she wasn't aware of. But his humour had surprised her and she didn't feel like

laughing at him.

'We have to go.' Dar slid out of the bush hideaway on his stomach and waited for her. "The ones who

pursue us have tracker elementals working for them and it's possible there's nothing we can do to conceal

you if there are metal elementals among them. We will have to keep running.'

He paused and drew a small packet from a pocket inside his jerkin, shaking some dust from it onto his

hand. Lila flinched, remembering that he had once overcome her that way, knocking her out with a word

and a single breath that
blew the dust in her face. This time he blew it more gently over the holly trees and

across the path that
led to the little hut. She heard him whispering elven syllables she couldn't
quite pick

up.

"That
should slow them,' he said but
he didn't
look happy. Lila avoided touching any of it
and went the

long way around to follow him uphill again as he kept to the contours, trying to place solid hillsides

between them and those who followed.

'What
was that?'

'Zoomenon dust,' he said. 'Elementals dislike being removed from Zoomenon. They can only be run

like pets by good elemental hunters. The dust is like catnip to them. They will not
be persuaded to leave

here until they have gathered it all back. The spell will tell me when that is done.'

Like the animal spell in the car boot, Lila thought. She asked him about that kind of magic.

'Such cats are fey agents,' Dar said, shrugging as though everyone must
know that. 'Or they are

Thanatopic messengers.'

'Forgive my magical dunceness,' Lila said, 'but
what
about cats that
change into rats, or mist?'

'That could still be either. Unless it was a ghost or a spirit.'

'No,' Lila said. 'I don't think so.' She remembered the animal spirit at Solomon's Folly with a shudder.

The cat
in the car had been nothing like that. 'Do elves have any affinity with Interstitial creatures as a

rule?'

'No,' Dar said. 'But
some demons do. Not
any that
you would wish to meet
however. Why, have you

seen one in Otopia?'

Lila didn't answer at first. She wasn't sure how much she could really trust Dar, although she felt a

bond with him now that made it too easy to talk to him, and his apparent candour made her want to tell

him everything. She had to remind herself that he worked for a foreign power, and was no doubt highly