Authors: Justina Robson
I
will goddamn well do i
t
. Wha
t
ever
t
he hell i
t
is,
Lila said. The only shred of self-respect left in
her demanded it. She could not let someone else take the blame.
She saw the things she held in Tath's glamoured hands: a length of bone carved into the ornate
handle of a pen, the nib point replaced by an obsidian flake of black glass; a hollow crystal needle,
like the ones she had used on Dar, but this one bigger and mounted between straps of fine leather
upon which magical writing oozed and ran like liquid
.
The needle was slant
cut
at
one end, ready to puncture, but
the other end broadened and fanned out, the
thin walls becoming liquid at their limits, then so thin that
they evaporated. They were light to hold, but
she felt them weigh on Tath suddenly and her hands drooped beneath the load.
The bone was his bone. The leather was his skin.
You're kidding,
Lila said. Tath didn't
say anything.
Around them in the ring the songs merged suddenly and became a single chanted line. Mesmeric
syllables spun the pearl wall faster and beside him Tath felt Arie's energy suddenly intensify
.
And then
the Lady of Aparastil began to sing.
She had the clear, sweet
voice of a young girl. Her melody was sad and lonely, a heartbreakingly
lovely lament such as Lila had never heard in her life. What words in High Elvish that
she sang were
borne on notes of such purity that they seemed to pierce all matter and Lila felt the song in her bones and
in her circuits, in every cell and unit, all resonating where they were able, amplifying and harmonising with
the spell until Lila was part of the charm, bound to it
in synchrony against
her will, and Tath with her, and
Zal with them. The faint
idea she had held of shooting Arte point
blank seemed impossibly distant
to her.
She could never destroy anything like this, and she wanted to listen to it go on and on in any case, to let
the song transport her to the places that
it
promised, so good and far from all this.
Tath bent
down before Zal. Lila felt her hands take Zal's right arm and rest the forearm on her knee.
The faintest
zip of wild magic, barely more than a flicker, ran down through her leg and up into her
body. The note Arie was singing wavered ever so slightly. Zal's dreamy expression didn't alter.
Keep
t
ha
t
in check!
Tath pleaded. T
his mus
t
no
t
ge
t
ou
t
of hand
He pressed the pen blade to Zal's skin and wrote quickly down the length of white skin from elbow to wrist in a series of flashing gestures.
Blood spat
from the nib. Zal groaned and his eyes rolled up in his head. The slashes stood out
clearly for
a moment
or two and then began to blur deep scarlet. The characters were all from the Thanatopic
alphabet
.
Where Zal's blood leaked from them it ran a short distance and then began to bubble and
evaporate into a fine dark haze
.
The haze coiled and flicked. It
drew wicked faces in the air and they
spoke to Tath, though Lila could not understand a single word.
Meanwhile Lila fought the lull of Arie's song, but
whenever the urge
to shoot
came close, the pretty sound pushed it away from her. She used the AI bypass, thinking Arie's
magic was working on her feelings, but it
made no difference when she locked herself in her AI mind.
Only Tath moved, and he let
go of that arm and took Zal's left arm up instead and wrote on that too, and
spoke to the dark faces that emerged
.
She had given up hope that Tath would help her now. She
doubted he even could, but she was wrong.
Play some
t
hing. Any
t
hing!
said to her.
You mus
t
dro
w
n her o
ut
a
n
d
t
ak
e back
your will.
At Lila's unspoken question he added, T
hana
t
opic
immer
si
o
n
a
t
leas
t
has
t
he vir
t
ue
of
blocking off o
t
her
charm.. If
you
are
t
o
do
any
t
hing you mus
t
do
it
soon,
Before her song is finished, for
t
hen
t
he p
e
arl
wi
ll break. and wha
t
ever is done remains.
Lila didn't have the energy to search for a song. She simply accessed whatever played last, and turned
up her internal systems as loudly as she could. Loud rock music beat through her head. The bass and
dram negated Arie's languorous rhythms and the piercing guitar took out most of her midline.
Lila's mind cleared a little. She remained inside her Al-self, and took a long, calculated assessment of
conditions. Then she searched every part of her systems.
Tath put
the pen nib into her mouth and she felt
a burning lick of pain as it
cut
her tongue.
A
ll
T
hana
t
opic magic requires
b
l
oo
d.
Aloud he Spoke again to the twisting figures that danced in the
burning of Zal's blood and now the words he used took on form also, and became creatures that
walked
across the air and danced with the creatures Zal made. It was most interesting.
A wisp of pale green energy appeared at
the junction of Lila's leg and Zal's dripping arm. Its
appearance made the dark dancers pause and eagerly look its way. One or two of them zipped down
towards Zal's wounds and began to burrow back in.
No!
Tath reacted instantly, his voice and speech changing
.
Faster than she would have thought him
able he slashed at
her upper arm with the pen blade where her flesh met
metal, and drew another ghostly
djinn from the wound with whispers. At
his direction it
darted forward and where it
touched Zal the
blood ran faster from him and the tiny genies were pushed back. They were pushed back, but they grew
larger, and stronger.
I
t
old you
to
k
eep t
ha
t
in check!
He was almost panicked.
I need my hand for a momen
t
,
Lila said, increasing the volume as Zal's voice began to sing in her
head, and replaced the pen in Tath's pocket. She put
her hand to the floor, where water supported them
above the gulf, the lake itself hidden completely by the pearl shell. She channelled the Mode-X music
down into the lake in a sequence burst: two, eight, eighteen pulses
.
If she was right, if she had started to
understand it, then magic was the user and their will, no more than that. A canticle was a summons, and
she was calling.
Give me
t
ha
t
back!
Tath reclaimed her limb immediately
.
He took hold of Zal's wrist in his hand, set
the crystal spike against the vein in his elbow and pushed it through the skin, not very hard. He didn't
need to, because as the instrument made contact it leapt from their hand and drove itself home, as though
it
was alive.
Zal shrieked, a terrible, multi-tonal cry of agony, as Tath bound the crystal to his arm. Bright
scarlet
blood ran down into the instrument's tiny pan and where it
fanned out
into the air its surface ran with
bright red and golden flames. No smoke or genies came from it. Where the crystal pen seemed to
become thin air the flames did too, vanishing from Alfheim, Lila realised
.
Flowing in
t
o In
t
ers
t
ice.
Tath said grimly, watching the Demon flicker. A
ll
do
n
e
,
b
ro
t
her
.
Arie's song stopped. There was a sound like the distant
boom of a buried atomic bomb and a second
later an aetheric wavefront passed through them, momentarily disabling Arie and Tath equally,
oblit-erating the genies that
had been skittering around, leaving only the burning flow from Zal's arm. Zal's
body seemed to waver, as though it was passing into another reality and Lila saw a shadow come over
him.
I
t
is h
is Deat
h
Tath told her.
With the passing of the wave the shadow drew away again, lost in the tide.
At
the same instant Lila began to rise and ready her guns, all pretences dropped. She felt within her
body the cool, insistent pressure footprint of a major spellcast
and then, as her metal and machine parts
continued their action, her flesh and bone suddenly stopped and there was a blinding and devastating
pain. It didn't entirely surprise her. She had suspected that
either the energy Arie had had to use for the
spell or the wild magic intrusion had given the game away.
Tath read the impact before she could.
Arie has bound your body not to oppose her. She can't command the metals, only the rest
of you. If you try to move against her physically now, you'll tear yourself to pieces.
Lila didn't
even pause. As she heard Tath, she re-targeted, gaining her freedom, and shot
the floor. The
bullets punctured the tension easily but it didn't break. Where they went
through it
weakened however,
and her foot
suddenly plunged downward to the knee into the bitterly cold lake water. She was almost
through.
At
that
moment
something struck the pearl shell from beneath and it
broke into a million glittering
shards.
Lila was falling, her feet
no longer supported by the water
.
At
high process speed she
stretched time out
for herself and felt
the Lady's willpower, strengthened and aetherised,
pushing her and Tath down into the lake. She didn't need them any more. Lila did not
attempt
to counter Arie's supreme force or struggle to stay within the palace. She simply placed her
hand around Zal's ankle as she fell past
his sprawled, bleeding body, and locked it in place,
dragging him after her into the icy water. Heavier than any human or elf, or any being twice
her size, Lila fell like a stone.
Gold and green lights far away winked at
her in the instant of silent
calm as they plunged into the
depths. She looked down and, on radar, sounded the bottom, only there was no bottom . . . She looked
up and saw the silver palace of air above them receding gently. And then the water convulsed around
them and boomed with a grating, grinding sound like planets colliding
.
A powerful electromagnetic pulse
follow-ed, so powerful that it momentarily knocked out all her machine self and left her reeling inside,
alone, with Tath
.
The ends of readouts and the simple obliteration made for an easy calculation of the
cause.
Faul
t
quake!
Lila shrieked at Tath.
Bu
t
Aparas
t
il. . .
he began
Sa
t
hanor's no
t
on a regular faul
t
or even an ae
t
heric ley, you idio
t
. Don't you do geology? The
whole thing is a crater. This is the Quantum Bomb crater as it manifests in this dimension and
we're falling into the biggest non-recorded fault in the whole history offaultlines! How could you
live in this thing and not know?
There was a second in which she felt Tath bristle
.
A
ri
e
was
t
he
keep
er of such knowledge and her word.
.
.
She lied!
Lila frantically tried to reconnect with her systems but all of
them had died. The reactor, presumably, ran on but
she couldn't
find it. She couldn't feel her arms below
the elbow, her legs below the first
few inches, half her spine seemed to be missing, her internal organs felt
as though they were being crushed by a deadly, numbing cold and she was suddenly very, very short
of
breath, T
a
t
h, you've go
t
t
o help me!
Now\
Lila screamed at
him. Her lungs and body were aching, burning. She didn't
know how much
longer she could prevent herself trying to breathe. A second trembling ran through the ground and the
lake.
Tath's
andalune
surged outwards. Though Lila could only sense it
in her human body she could feel
the desperate energy with which he focused himself and drove up through her arm and shoulder
.
At such
densities and concentrations the aethereal was capable of becoming corporeal and Tath's form of magic,
the lively art, was more able than most to manifest strong forces through the shaping of raw aether
.