Authors: Justina Robson
“Binding, binding, binding . . .”
“Just pick someone,” Lila said. She had been about to make an excuse and ask the imp to do it all for her. The sight of the birds stamping down on the bits of flesh and tearing it with their beaks, gulping shreds, had almost pushed her to a place where she could not contemplate carrying on and she didn’t know why. She’d seen worse than anything here. Done things almost as bad without much more than a flinch.
A shadow crossed her shoulder, a cool patch running over her bare skin where the strong shoulder padding of the assault vest gave way to a short sleeve of net. It was her only warning but her instincts and her AI all told her to move and she was more than ready for that. She dropped her weight, slid her hips sideways, twisted and ducked, coming around and away in an arc that moved her towards the shelter of the closest building, its side in shade. The attack missed her by a millimetre. She felt a breath of air as a spinning blade clattered into the stone paving and shattered with the force. Its trajectory would have set it in her neck—a bold and accurate shot but one she felt could only have been half hearted, perhaps a distraction.
As she swung around she let her natural twisting motion carry her through a sweep of the area, her AI senses on full alert, looking for the patterns of reaction and movement in people over a wide area to detect not only her assailant but anyone responding to the incident. In the second it took her to slow and straighten, free the firing ports in her forearms, and arm up the weapons she had taken from her cache back at the Ahriman house she already knew the demon in the air who had distracted her wasn’t alone.
It was a small, agile-winged creature which was already fleeing the scene at top speed. She didn’t bother shooting at it. The others were in groups of two and three, walking as if they were not really together through each one of the arteries that led towards the square of Madame Des Loupes’s house. On the rooftops another three figures, lying close to the tiles, moved with spider confidence across sharp angles and over buttresses. They were converging on her with a clear purpose—to corral her in any of a dozen useful dead ends close to the square. In the sky no less than five airborne creatures spiralled out of the afternoon traffic and floated lower. The small number of pedestrians in the Souk who were not involved moved about a fraction more slowly, more idly. There were not enough of them to shield her.
The shadow of the large central route dirigible moved slowly across her, plunging her into a sudden pale fog of mystical advertising: words and images floated towards her with scents and sounds like fleeting dreams . . .
When you need a clean that’s fine, use Rapstallion’s Burnishing Powders. Suitable for all colours of scale and chitin. Does not scratch. Usual disclaimers apply.
Cheap, cheerful, and always ready. Punty Maroon’s Downhouse Tavern serves Surprise Meat of the Moment—at any moment!
Kiss of Death . . . this last was just a name and a feeling of closing cold, the image of a woman with black hair and purple lips leaning near, then darkness . . .
Lila moved with the last short-lived seconds of this shadow, crossing the narrow alley at its speed. She had no plan, there was no time to plan. She held out both hands, palm forward and in the last stride made her smart, artificial skin into speakers. She sent out sound waves in a specific pattern and read them as they returned. Without a pause she made both hands into fists, braced her feet, and punched through the wall. Demon stone was bonelike—friable and soft. She barged the edges of the hole with her shoulders and felt her skin tear but her strength and the speed of her blow was enough to create space for her whole body to fit through. In a flurry of dust and dry mortar she emerged into a dimly lit space full of incense. By the time the dirigible passed on and sunlight claimed the alley she was into the third room of the magehouse, going through any door that caught her eye.
Demons and other—things—shifted in the darkness and the flickering light of lamps and candles; mages and their clients started at her passage, though some of them were deep into whatever they were doing and did not notice her darting from one side of their room to the other. But, as she knew there must be, there was soon a room with no other door except the one she came in by. As soon as she stepped over the threshold she knew it was a mistake.
She had collected a trail of protesting demons who attempted to follow her to this point but once she crossed into this room they turned back without another word. Unlike the other rooms this one had only one lamp and it cast a faint violet gleam, barely enough to see by. It was a big room and it smelled musky and dry. There was no incense. Colours moved on the walls, all of them as near to black as could be. They shifted in patterns that made symbols and then undid them, created pictures as if by accident on their way past each other. At first she thought the room was empty but then, in the farthest corner, in the dark, she heard a movement and then looked that way and just made out the glimmer of lilac light sliding over a dark body; a spike, a scale, and then the surface of an ink-black eye.
Get out.
She hadn’t heard Tath’s voice in so long it startled her. She froze for a moment and in that moment she heard the hissing sound of a long intake of breath through narrow, refined nostrils. Something ephemeral, a spirit voile, brushed her shoulder where the skin was raw. On the wall in front of her the colours moved into an image of sudden clarity, dim and barely there but there nonetheless.
Get. OUT. NOW.
But she couldn’t move. She was frozen, staring at the sight of her mother, standing at the kitchen sink. She was in her nightdress and her hands were shaking. She held a glass in one and an open bottle of pills in the other. Lila knew it was twenty fourteen, the year before the bomb, and she was a little girl and it was the night that grandma died. Classical music was playing on the radio, a song she could hear right now—
Clair de Lune
. She hated that song.
Her mother looked at her, across time, across the night. She picked up the bottle of pills and tipped them down the sink. They weren’t needed any more. They made a tiny, tinny rattle in the metal bowl, exactly the sound they made that night. Water rushed from the faucet automatically and flushed them into the waste disposal. It made a sound like grinding teeth. The colours were so dark that Mum’s eyes were dark pits, her mouth a slice of black, like a skull.
This is one of your marker points
, Tath’s voice snapped, cold and powerful with a command Lila was grateful to hear. Move away quickly before the anchor is created. Think of a different time.
Because the association was so obvious she began to think of that, which led to the night they met, the night he died . . . Her mother vanished and she saw a pale, dead body lying with a blade in its chest . . .
Not that one!
By now, through AI and intuition she knew she had stumbled into the path of a necromancer. All the Otopian data on such people amounted to little more than a list of names and a few speculations. Even Tath himself, whom she had begun to trust almost as a part of her with her usual foolish disregard she seemed to bring to the essential spy armoury of personal boundary setting, had never revealed anything of his profession, except in that single moment he had slaughtered Teazle’s brother. The pale body had already dissolved and in its place she saw the twisted limbs of the demon, felt herself coated in sticky blood . . .
Not that one either!
She got it. Nothing involving death. But as soon as she tried to think of anything except death all the deaths she knew about shot through her mind at the speed of a bullet. She felt seasick. Around her the darkness thickened as the demon sensed so many potentials . . . Aether seethed like heavy vapour and smarted where wild tendrils snapped at her skin and investigated the elemental nature of her metal.
It searches for entry points to your life matrix. At least too many is almost as good as too few but if you are to save us think of the living!
Lila smelled citrus peel. The game potential rose at the same moment as she felt the demon—still invisible in its own darkness—prepare to pounce upon one of the fleeting images that raced across its charmed atmosphere; the traces of her past. She smelled fresh blood and only then felt the sting of a blade on her bare shoulder. As her blood ran, the images became suddenly three-dimensional and the room began to fade.
Without thinking she immediately sprang to the opportunity to start a game. “I bet you can’t beat me in a straight fight.”
What?!
The room returned. The citrus smell vanished. There was a clear, fresh burst of air and the static crackle of an aether discharge. In the ordinary gloom she looked across the stone floor to her adversary. The bleeding stopped as her enhanced platelets sealed the wound. The indigo demon slavered and stared up at her from its lizard sprawl, slowly getting up from its belly to its hind legs. The challenge was accepted. Her Game was on.
If there was a chance, you just lost it
, Tath informed her with the frigidity of shock.
But you sucked the life out of the other one
. . . Lila protested inwardly, battle systems activating in an almost silent explosion of perfectly operating components. She got bigger, stronger, faster. She armed her guns.
That was just an ordinary demon
, Tath said.
This is a necromancer and where it has spent its entire life practising the art of the pursuit of death in this room, I have done my best to avoid every opportunity to exert my abilities. It is a master and I am barely qualified . . .
Why NOW?!
Lila screamed at him inside.
Why do you never tell me anything important BEFORE it matters?
Who knew you would run directly into this lair? Necromancers are rare . . .
Tath, how do I kill it?
Decapitation. If that fails you have to find its phylactery.
Its what?
A special vessel, object, person, or document in which its life is stored.
Great, where’s that?
I do not know. If you had the whole of space and time to hide such an object in, where would you put it?
Lila stood for a moment and then put her guns away and took a large blade out of her left thigh and another from the inner right where it lay just beneath her armour.
The demon snickered and lifted its long saurian head, exposing its narrow neck. With one clawed finger it made a slashing motion across its own throat and cocked its head at her, eye glinting with grey and purple light. It stabbed the finger towards the imaginary line and hissed, “Cut here . . .” Then it laughed and raised its heavy, scaled brow in a clear, amused taunt.
“Oh that is so not fair!” Lila exclaimed and stamped her foot, letting her blades drop to her sides. “How does having a phylac . . . philac . . . life hidden away count as FAIR?”
The demon paused and said in a normal, much milder voice, “I had it before you challenged me. I didn’t conceal it and you didn’t ask. So according to the rules, it’s fair.” It then resumed its taunt pose, complete with glaring eye. Then it paused and relaxed again. “How did you know about that?”
“I . . . it was a good guess . . .” Lila said, bringing the blades up automatically as the creature suddenly advanced with a much more serious expression on its long, lizard face.
“My ass,” the necromancer said. It made a throwing gesture, languid and graceful, and a sheet of dark fell across her, and through her; a voile so soft it barely existed as a trace. Tath shuddered and twisted but he could not avoid its caress. Too late she recognised the aetheric equivalent of x-rays. It had scanned her for magic.
It pointed at her chest and fixed its gaze there. She set a defensive stance and prodded at its hand with the tip of her knife but it ignored her . . . it stared and gaped, yellow throat pulsing with basic reptilian surprise. “Acolyte!”
Now he has to die
, Tath said, doing the internal emotional equivalent of throwing his hands up in the air and casting eyes to the sky in despair.
All suggestions gratefully accepted
, Lila said and, without pausing, launched into a blur of normally fatal blows. Without hope of killing she thought she’d settle for a good mincing and see how that slowed it down.
At speeds beyond human perception, battle blades catching the grey light, her arms seemed to move in blurs the shape and density of faery wings, their lethal tips striking with machine precision. A haze of sickly purple flew from their dance as they sliced flesh and bone, and the spraying blood of the necromancer collided with itself drop upon drop smashing each other to ever smaller parts. Lila glided in a mist of gore and the clean form of the demon vanished into the lilac storm of slaughter with unnatural ease, as though passing through a flat plane that destroyed it; as if it had fallen into a shredder.
She stopped when she reached its tail.
Tath was a moment of frozen surprise. She felt him peering through her at the twitching, snakelike lump of meat left in the pool of chunky purple and lime goo. A faint patter of blood rain fell on her skin and hair, on her glistening armour and into the murky puddles. Lila felt the side of her mouth twitch with satisfaction at his response and some pleasure in her appalling ability . . . as bad as the Souk . . . yes . . .
“Now that’s gotta hurt!” The imp’s voice came from the doorway, full of delight and admiration.
Lila turned around, senses primed and the world seeming slow to them as they were in battle mode. Time was watery.
The imp scampered across the floor, up the wall partway and then leapt to her shoulder, sinking its claws into the padding. It beckoned to the ominous figures that followed it. To Lila it said, apologetically, “Boy, I thought you were way worse than that so I went to get us the only help I could think of . . .” It hesitated and the two shapes came out of the corridor and into the near darkness. Lila saw them easily. They were tall and narrow humanoids with hulking shoulders draped in black sacking that fell around them in tatty festoons to the floor. Their heads were the bare skulls of giant carrion birds, with ravenlike beaks. Instead of eyes, maggots moved in their sockets. They had limbs like insect arms poking through their robes. They stank of raw meat.