Authors: Justina Robson
She watched as Madame went through the same process of giving the imp his tea, but seeing as the cup was half his size and he had no chance of holding the saucer without tipping himself onto the floor she settled it in front of him in the fullness of the cushion. Although she had only the beak, Lila could have sworn she was smiling as the imp immediately seized hold of a sugar lump in both hands and began crunching on it.
Madame returned to her special seat—an embroidered stool—and picked up her own cup. “I know you don’t take sugar,” Madame continued, “and usually I don’t either . . .” She added two lumps to her own cup and stirred gently. “But I find that after trying moments or in new situations a little sugar doesn’t do any harm.”
Lila glanced towards the door of the room, where the two stinking raven demons still stood, then across to the open balcony where she had first seen Madame from a distance. She kept tracking in order to try and control her thoughts, even though a lot of different concerns fought for her attention. But they were always suppressed by the idea of Madame’s powers. Beside her the imp crunched frantically, spraying sugar everywhere. Lila put a cube in her tea, then the other one. She tasted—it was delicious and just what she needed. Then she half remembered something about not eating the food in the netherworld and glanced guiltily at Madame.
“You’re not there yet,” Madame said in her plummy, fruity voice—that warm mature woman’s voice that had no business issuing from a bird’s throat or a beak. “Merely in the waiting room. No need to go, if you don’t want to.” She sounded slightly teasing, because, Lila assumed, she really did know exactly everything that was going through Lila’s head.
“Can you just skip to the part where you answer my questions before I have to ask them?”
“Of course,” Madame said, “although I do rather prefer to have some small talk before we get down to business, you see, despite the fact all I wish to know is open to my sight it interests me much more to learn what you think about your situation, and mine, and the world. And that is something revealed only in your choices, about what to say and what to remain silent over. Do you see what I mean?”
“But can’t you see that too?”
“Perception is an act of creation,” Madame said, pouring some of her tea from the cup into a wide, shallow dish that Lila had thought was an empty biscuit plate. “And creation happens in the fall of the instant. It is unpredictable. Unknowable before it takes place. So no. I cannot. My talent only allows me to see what is, and some of what has been. But the truth of what is . . . appears differently to all who perceive it. I get close to its fundamental reality, but even my gaze is coloured and focused by what I am—an imperfect being in a perfected universe.” The demon bent down and laid her beak sideways in the dish, imbibing tea and then tossing her head back to swallow it down. She wiped her beak clean with a lace-edged linen napkin and composed her hands upon her lap, head to one side, listening.
Lila was not sure but she felt an exultant stab from Tath, somewhere near her solar plexus, and trusted that he would be able to fill her in at an easier moment. She took a second drink of tea and did begin to feel a little better. She let her thoughts spill out since there seemed little point in concealing them. “Are you married, Madame?”
“No,” Madame glanced, following Lila, at the raven demons. “Ah no. Such alliances do not interest me as I stand little to gain from them. I would marry for love, but I have not met the creature who stirs that passion in me. These demons in my house and who serve me in the world are minions, ones who came to me in the spirit of a marriage in spite of my refusal. Unrequited suitors if you will, they desired my compact at any price and so they willingly became my creatures. Once they were independent beings like yourself, but now their will is mine. They are enough of a responsibility that I do not require more.”
“Lonely at the fuckin’ top!” snickered the imp, coming to the end of the first cube and plunging his head down into the teacup with greed. Slurping and gulping sounds choked off his remark.
“No doubt you face the same problems,” Madame added, looking closely at Lila. Her black eye, so large for a bird’s, so dark, narrowed slightly from the bottom in an almost human expression of wry knowingness.
“Me?”
“One may marry or enslave anyone for business purposes, but true partnership can exist only among equals.”
“That was a compliment, ’case you missed it,” the imp said to Lila, scrubbing its face on the cushion to dry itself and starting in on the second sugar lump with gusto.
Lila found herself taken aback. What the demon said sounded so callous, as much of their culture seemed, and she had images again of the dead fetuses in their pots and jars, of the death she had dealt herself. She looked down and suddenly felt the sticky, congealing goo of blood on her hands, her shoulder, her face. She leaned forward abruptly and put her teacup down with a rattle and slam on the occasional table to her left. “I’m not your equal. I’m nothing like you. I’d never marry anyone like you. I couldn’t. I . . .” She stopped. Words jammed in her throat. For an unaccountable reason she was reminded of the shadow elf, tangled in silver netting, trapped in her mansion room. What time was it? How late was it? She looked outside at the sun and inside at her clock at the same moment.
“How interesting,” Madame Des Loupes said with more than a trickle of condescension. Her head did one of those sudden, birdlike motions that made both Lila and the imp start involuntarily.
Inside Lila’s chest Tath somersaulted with fear.
“What do you mean?” Lila stalled, grabbing inside for something chemical, something machine she could use to shore up her sudden and inexplicable sense of falling. Her AI came online and decanted stimulants into her bloodstream, and serotonin, to reassure her.
“You are a liar,” Madame said. “You are already bound to the elf-source demon of the Ahrimani. Not to mention the alfidic spirit with which you share your body. Further you entertain the marital interests of Demonia’s beloved son, the phase-shifter Teazle. Yet you speak with the passion of truth. You conceal much from your self. You use your alchemical power to enforce it. A strong will. It will be hard to break, more’s the pity for you.”
Lila was frozen with outrage, literally frozen, a thing until now she had considered something that only happened to people in books. “I’m not married to Zal! I certainly have nothing like that to do with . . . with . . . the elf spirit . . . and I never had any intention of accepting anything from that white monstrosity!” She stood up and involuntarily glanced at the imp who was cramming his mouth as full of sugar crystals as he could, hands clamped to his face. She gathered from his fear that one did not speak like this to the most powerful of demons but she wasn’t bothered by it. She was furious, but the drugs were taking hold too, and she knew that if nothing else this was no way to further her greater aim; to discover the truth of Zal’s demonic making. She mastered herself and sat down, the effort costing her any remaining ability to speak. Though she didn’t want to notice it she couldn’t help feeling that her responses were nothing short of racist, intolerant abuse but she pushed this notion down hard.
Madame casually poured herself another draught of tea and took it down. She was as lovely and studied as a geisha as she picked up a tiered tray of small iced cakes and offered them to Lila. “Petit fours? Dinner is served very late in Bathshebat.”
Lila declined with a barely managed shake of her head. The imp leaned over and seized the nearest, a lemon square, and plunged it directly into his tea cup where he watched as the soft cake soaked up the dark liquid, his face a rapt picture of pure, avid lust.
“Do you know my favourite human story of the devil?” Madame went on in a skilled effort to preserve social calm. “It goes like this: god and the devil are observing Adam as he takes his first foray out of Eden and into the wider world. Adam has recently eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, thanks to his wise wife, and is taking stock of all the things he is able to see. God says to the devil, ‘So, what will you do now? Steal all this marvel away from him and create in its place a chaotic nightmare?’ And the devil says, ‘Oh god, no. I’m going to help him organise it!’” Madame put her tea dish aside and cleaned her beak. “I mention this because you want to know about Hell, Ms. Black. I can tell you plainly all you wish to know, though it will not help you one bit because you are a liar.”
Lila stared with a terrible combination of loathing and attachment at the beautiful creature that was talking. The tension between her and Madame was a thing she could feel, like a long flat blade, resonating. She was not able to stop herself listening. She had to, but she didn’t want to. Of course a demon would play this game . . .
“I do not play with the aether, Ms. Black,” Madame said quietly. “I have no need to. I see what is, and that’s all. You feel I have insulted you, but I am only telling you what you already know. You are a liar, a cheat, a thief, a traitor, and a murderer.”
Lila had become still with fury. She wanted to move but the stillness sat upon her like a lead jacket.
Overcome by anxiety and desire the imp leaped up, grabbed two fistfuls of soggy cake from in front of him, and then sprang to the table in one froglike bound. He hopped into the wide, white maw of the milk jug and vanished from sight with a small splash. The jug wobbled briefly and then stabilised. In the ensuing silence piglike noises of gluttonous eating and drinking carried quietly across the room.
“You are untrue, reckless, and careless. You rage. You are love’s bitch, in heat as it is in heaven . . .”
“Enough!” Lila was on her feet. Her voice carried much further and louder than she knew it could have.
Madame looked at her from a single, gleaming eye. That eye stared at her, unbending, unblinking, uncaring. “This is all you need to know about Hell,” the demon said after a long moment. Neither of them looked away, though Lila’s eyes were burning. She would not, would not give in to this stupid fight . . .
“What are you talking about?” Lila said scathingly. “Stop talking in ridiculous riddles and slander and trying to get me off balance. Open the gate and send me to Hell. I don’t have time for this crap.”
Madame Des Loupes sighed. “As you wish,” she said, spreading out her hands upon her knees and sitting more upright. She gazed out of her balcony a moment in what might have been composure, though she looked as though she were listening to a distant drum. “Though you ought to know that there is no special entry point into Hell. And when you enter the world of the damned you enter it alone. Your companions may be with you, but they cannot help you in any way. Isn’t that so, Thingamajig?” And she looked at the milk jug.
The imp’s face appeared for a second over the rim. “You know my name,” he said, accusingly.
“I cannot tell it to you,” Madame shrugged.
Lila felt she was starting to lose her mind. “What? What has that to do with it?”
This time when the demon’s head turned to her it gave her a direct gaze from both bulging black eyes, the beak aimed squarely at the centre of Lila’s chest. “Because, Ms. Black, the fact is that it was never in my power to send you or anyone else to Hell. Thingamajig here is in his state because he entered that place and will not or cannot return. His only way out is to remember his name. If I tell it to him he will not be better off. And you, like him, like all the rest, need no portal to enter the realm of the lost souls, for you already have all the necessary prerequisites, to whit, you are a liar. My role here is not to show you the way into a great test or trial whose success I might judge and whose rewards I can bestow. My only power is to be the one who sees what is. I will be the one you come to when you are ready to leave. I am the one everyone comes to when they are ready to leave Hell. I am not the way in, I am the way out.”
Lila stared at the exquisite demon, feeling a wild hatred. She stared at the imp, wet and dripping as it rested its sad face on its paws, clinging to the lip of the jug. Towards it she felt rage and pity. “Talk sense!”
Madame Des Loupes shrugged airily, “There is never any need to conjure Hell, Ms. Black. We all go there in our own time. It is a place created in the moment, an act of perception. I am the keeper of Hell, for I see what is, and those are the limits of Hell. There is no need to send you anywhere, for you are already there, and you have been there since long before you came to Demonia.”
“What crap!” Lila snorted. She gave the imp another glance to see if it was coming, because clearly it was time to leave and she was leaving, no doubt about it. “Are you coming?”
“You cannot save him,” Madame said sadly.
“I don’t want to save him!” Lila snapped. “He owes me a mage spell.”
The bird demon tilted her head to one side and considered Lila. “There may be hope for you yet,” she said and then reached over and tipped the imp out of the jug onto the tray. She looked up at Lila. “Always beware of males who wish to return to the tit.” Then to the imp she said sternly, “That porcelain is made from the bones of my enemies. You were fortunate not to number among them on the day I had it made. Begone and do not hinder this one on her way. If I find you more meddling than ornamental I will have your hide for a handbag.”
The imp scampered across the furniture, leaving a trail of milk droplets, and raced up Lila’s arm to her shoulder. A familiar pain pierced her ear as he clutched hold. He was quaking.
“Return when you are ready,” Madame added to Lila. “I will await you.”
“Go to Hell,” Lila said.
“Been there, done that,” Madame replied. “Be firm with your minion. They don’t understand kindness.” Her beady gaze was fixed on the imp.
Lila stared at the demon for a moment, beyond speech, then turned on her heel and stormed out, barely noticing the hulking shapes moving aside to let her pass.
CHAPTER TWELVE
C
alliope Jones rode the crystal flow like an old rodeo hand easily taking the humpbacked punishment of a wild bull. She moved as Malachi watched her from the security of the Ghost Hunters’ barge and put her feet on the blazing torrent of aetheric hard light, changing from rider to surfer in a fluid move that she must have done a thousand times.