Authors: Justina Robson
He waited for her, a soft spot under his heart always open to her in spite of the fact he found her over the top and she had tried to kill him on at least one occasion. She had a great voice.
She paused the regulation metre away from him. “You’re going to see Lila, right?”
Zal made a face and sighed. She was sharp, despite having extreme blonde tendencies. He nodded.
Poppy bit her lip and drifted slightly across the ground, her invisible wings rendering her virtually weightless. She held something out to him in her hand. He took it. “What’s this?”
The small packet was wrapped in a silk cloth and unwound to show a hammered silver pendant in the shape of a spiral attached to a grey silk ribbon which glimmered with the faint purple gleams of magical marks. It was a delicate object and looked as though the spiral should easily slip off the ribbon although Zal suspected that no earthly force and certainly not one as obvious as gravity would separate it from its band. It had a weight that was heavy to his
andalune
, light on his flesh hand.
“Just something I got her,” Poppy said. “Kind of to say sorry from me and Vidia, you know, for the whole nearly drowning you both thing.”
Zal folded the cloth again and put it in his pocket. “I’ll give it to her.”
“Don’t be late back with Sorcha, me and V need some money.” This statement came with the kind of offhand casualness Zal knew signalled great importance.
“I can give you a loan . . .”
“Nah nah, just be back on time, cut the track, that’s good. Oh, and Boom asked me to give you this.” She pulled a crumpled piece of hotel notepaper out of the back pocket of her trousers and held it towards him. She wouldn’t meet his eye.
Zal flicked it from her grasp and read the scratchy pencilled handwriting. “What is this shit?”
“She wanted to keep true to her musical principles and . . .” Poppy began with rolling eyes and pulling her mouth into awkward shapes as she delivered the bad news.
Zal read aloud, “. . . will not record sub-vaudeville neo-romantic diva disco for the sake of a quick buck . . . spoiling the pure spirit of the hip-hop tradition . . . slave to corporate greed . . . less the spirit of punk than the seepage of neo-fascist marketing spunk . . . back to my roots in the souldance houses of Bay City . . . leaving your corrupting influence for the good of the genre . . .” He took a deep breath, “That superficial, ponced-up, jealous little two-bit hack programmer!”
Poppy bit both lips. “She was pretty good as a DJ.”
“Well, screw her. What does she know about souldance Mode-X crossover anyway? The closest she gets to creative is sampling tracks out of the Otopia Tree Library Least Listened archive. I can get a better sound out of a demon technician than some bloody human. Good. Another damn reason to go back. Tell Jolene I’ll find a replacement. Tell her I’ll find two!”
“Zal . . .” Poppy began in a patient tone, clearly about to ask for some understanding in what was a major moment of band history. They both knew Boom was good and that she was pretentious and that she was gone and this would be hard to get over.
“No.” He balled up the note and threw it on the ground. “We had this out. She was going to have as much leeway as she wanted to create a whole new sound and she bottled out of it. I don’t want this bullshit about creative freedom and the history of fucking music. Let her go back to working clubs and selling her sad little story.”
“The thing is, Zal . . .”
He looked into Poppy’s smile-to-cover-the-story face and her awkward manner. A slow, weary sinking feeling spread across him. “You agree with her, don’t you?”
“No, not exactly. But we were all, you know, feeling like it was bad to get attached to Sorcha’s image too much and you know you were absent for the tour date and that was really hard for us . . .”
“Enough excuses. Are you going to bail out too? And who else? Do I or do I not remember you just telling me to get back fast to make some bucks for whatever stupid problems you and V have got yourselves into now? So it looks to me like whatever you think you’re stuck with it.”
“No no no. We’re fine. We’re all ready to do it. It’s fine.” Poppy backed away from him, her hands held up and waving in front of her in airy little gestures. “We just . . . we’re worried, Zal. About you. That’s all.”
“Worry about yourself!” he snapped. “Worry about finding another DJ and worry about the money because I am not your damn problem.” He spun on his heel and walked fast away from her, seething. For once he was glad there was no chance anyone could contact him via one of the ubiquitous Berries that the others used as electronic lifestyle aides. The worst part was that Poppy was right to call him on his absence. Even so, it was stupid elitist crap to say that any kind of music couldn’t be good, no matter what style it was or what it was made with. Anyway, she was double wrong because disco was fantastic. He’d find some demon to help, someone who really understood the way all the grooves fit together, and had it branded in their soul like him.
His irritation made him more bad tempered, his awareness that he was bad tempered made him exasperated, his exasperation made him restless, and his restlessness pointed only one way. He walked the six blocks of back streets to where the warehouses of Ikea opened to the loading bays and climbed the wire fence onto the property. There was a shiver point so strong under the building that he could sense it even without trying. It lay along the same faultline that the recording studio in Bay City stood beside but here there was only the thinnest skin between Demonia and Otopia and a running torrent of free aether in I-space. Demonia’s border, like the wall of a giant cell, softly billowed up from the aether depths at regular intervals with magmatic slowness. By the time Zal had walked in, unnoticed, to the self-serve area where the endless cabinets were racked, it had risen on its ten-minute turnaround and was practically right there beneath his feet. The boxes and pallets of furniture shimmered and a couple of bits were stolen by demonic fingers, right before his eyes. They vanished from the stock without a whisper. It was pure devilment as no demon would be seen dead with mass-produced items in their homes.
Zal opened his hands, released his
andalune
body to the floor where the borders were thinnest, and opened what he thought of as the inner fire in his soul. This was not a literal thing. Whoever you were, to get to Alfheim you needed some kind of portal. To get to Thanatopia you had to be dead. To get into Zoomenon you had to summon and find a spot where elementals liked to gather in sufficient numbers to help you out but to get into Demonia, especially if you were a demon, you only had to stand close to it and tune in to the ever-present beat of hedo nistic joy in your heart—Demonia’s music that was never out of key and never entirely out of reach.
He had the brief sensation of falling. It was always like that, like the dream where you step off the pavement into an unexpected drop and there’s a heartstopping moment of being off-balance and out of control. It lasted a little longer than the dream, but not very much. He smelt brimstone and the sweet reek of rose-scented ifriti flowers, blooming with their love-drenched and fatal nectar saturating each petal and suffusing the air around them. Otopian Ikea gave way to Zhanzabar Walk’s gardens. Next to Zal two sturdy horned demons piled their looted flatpacks onto a wheelbarrow and hurried off.
“No scented candles?” said one with disappointment.
“They’re not close enough to the shiver point,” the other repeated in the tones of someone who has repeated it a thousand times.
Zal stepped quickly out of range of the flowering bush and quickly stripped off his jacket and shirt, allowing the flare on his back to be visible. He folded the clothes and carried them with him in one hand until a flitting sprite in the family colours came by, attuned to seek out higher ranks and offer service. He gave it the clothing and told it to send word that he was coming to stay at home for a few days.
The sprite took the parcel of cloth in its long fingers and rippled its scales and whiskers with purplish delight. “Very good, sir. I will have your things set out. Will you be dining at home?”
“Yes. As long as the guest Lila Black is attending.”
“We expect her to be there. No events are on the schedule for this evening. Drinks are served on the terrace at eight. Shall I alert your wife that you wish her company? She is at the house in Tartarus presently . . .”
“No, no,” Zal said. “Don’t disturb her. But if Zarzaret is in town, I want to see him.”
“As you wish.” The sprite flew away on its dragonish wings, bumping up and down with the weight of its burden.
The smell of the canals, thick and rotting, mingled with the far more pleasant scents of the gardens and the wafting traces of various spicy foods in the warm morning air. Zal took a deep breath and felt his ears prickle with the amount of waste aether drifting about from all the sorcery that burned on day and night in every house and corner. It was almost the antithesis of Alfheim but just as abundant in its way. Not far off, among a glade of deathflame trees, fire elementals spiralled like gnats in the thin branches. The blue hiss and flare of methane burn danced in the heart of the black flowers, carbon petalled. White and blue fire sprites darted between them, sipping, while their larger cousins whirled together into vortices of lazy fire, licking on the tar sap that oozed from the flat rubbery bark. Black smokes plumed lazily here and there.
At the centre of the gathering Zal, adept in fire, could feel the beginnings of a firestorm building. The outer elementals were whistling to their airy counterparts to beckon drafts into their midst, promising the lift of heat and a ride up through the muggy daytime into the cool, pristine heights of the upper atmosphere in return for a concentrated influx of oxygen. Between the roots of the oldest trees small pools of petroleum fractions shivered and hazed the air just beneath the fire blazers’ gathering tribe.
Events like this were reasonably rare and fire blooms even more so, since he could never see one in Otopia short of wantonly loitering around fire stations waiting to be called. In Alfheim it meant volcano walking. But Demonia was rich with hydrocarbons and life-forms which processed the same. He thought it couldn’t hurt just to take a look and moved closer. Other adept demons, attracted by the same sense of an impending surge, drifted in from the sky and across from various entry points into the park from the city. Two of them from the same Talent path as Zal, from the Mousa, had brought pyre flutes together with bellows-pump.
“Long-ears,” said one of them to Zal, even though his own ears were at least as large beneath his curling horns. “Longtime we not see you in the Guildhalls, you been missing us, heh?”
Under the demon’s attention and with proximity to the others, Zal felt the flare on his back grow warm and begin to blossom through his skin. Beside him the rest attuned themselves to one another and to the tone of the fires dancing in the trees, changing gently from reds and yellows to the hotter fires of blue and white. A surge of energy, the first ripple of a promise, went around them, passed from one to another like a torch. It lit their flares more brightly for the instant as it moved and with it the mages in the group began muttering some incantation to the elementals, attracting their attention.
The demon who had spoken to Zal produced a wind whistle and began to blow it. Compared to the tiny numbers of such beings in Otopia the gathering of elementals was shocking with its suddenness and ferocity. Within seconds the wind was strong enough to require an effort to withstand. Zal’s hair whipped around, blinding him and lashing his face. He heard the soft fluttering of fire in the glade become a hiss and then, as the pools lit with a soft explosion a wave of heat physically pushed him back into the onrushing wind so he was caught between the flame and the air. The hiss became a ferocious roar. He and the other watching demons were suddenly all sucked forwards to the blaze by the backdraft, the mischievous hands and tendrils of air elementals tugging at them in passing as they hurtled into the heart of the flame.
They did not burn. The fire caused the natural fire of their flares to ignite and spread out into sheets of incandescent energy; aether channelled into flame, as individual as a fingerprint and as harmless to the one enveloped in it as his or her own skin. It was the fire that touched the living flames of the elementals as they gathered and united into a single storm entity, fuelled on the energy of the demons and the sap of the trees, lent power by the sharing of the air.
A spinning column of fire shot up into the sky. The demons with wings rode on it as high as they could and those without, including Zal, floated in the rotating pool at its base like swimmers, each barely visible to the others through curtains of blazing plasma. From their places the musicians flung their pyre flutes outward and down where their enchanted bases sent ceramic roots down into the fuel source. Air and fuel mixed and shot up through the pipes, sounding two burring notes of continuous burn at pitches calibrated by demon technicians to induce an even greater waveform for maximum combustion. The two tubes vibrated with the incredible sound, there as invitation for the god of Fire to use as a voice.
Since his rebirth Zal had not experienced anything like it. Once the burn had reached a tipover point the energy for which he had been only the conduit from his aether connection to the fire suddenly reversed flow. Now the power of the mighty elemental and his fellow demons began to charge him with enormous, astonishing force. The moment it began to happen he became simultaneously aware of two things. One was that this was exactly what he hoped would happen when he first noticed the elementals and pretended he was only curious about them. The other was that it was far more powerful than he had imagined and there was a third thing—he realised he was out of practice and couldn’t handle it.
For a few brief moments the hit was joyous and a merciful release from the near-sterility of Otopian life. He couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to leave an aetheric region for such a place. Nothing could compare to the incredible vitality of this! And then it was too much and what had been ecstasy became pain in his nerves and pain in his
andalune
as the vibrations—frequencies not natural to its ordinary elven system—began to disrupt its normal flow. He felt fire from the flare begin to eat its way through from the realm of the aetheric into his flesh body. If he did not discharge it in some way it could easily burst across the gap into a different form, its physical form which was more than able to burn him to a cinder.