Selling Out (26 page)

He had no urge to continue. He sat there for some time, contemplating the kinds of things you could stick into a whole skeleton, and he didn’t like the idea too much. He couldn’t have done it himself, but he was reasonably sure you could reposition a spirit body into their frame. If you were really good. If you were incredibly strong. He’d come across it when Ilyatath had Crossed Over. It was part of the necromancer’s bind, the way they anchored their spirit selves to their physical body when they chose to voyage in time.

There had not been a necromancer First Lord in Alfheim since times before humans had walked across their world. If this was the case, then these bones were more than old. They were ancient; prehistoric.

“Mr. Head,” Zal said uneasily, remembering standing guard over Ilya’s body long ago when he, Zal, was still playing the loyal pack animal, knowing that he could sunder the elf forever from the material planes with a single spoken charm. It had been his job to do so, Arië had instructed him, in case Ilya came back wrong. Necromancy was a chancy art. The best-trained adepts often went astray at the first voyage.

He’d never have said it, but he felt it come quickly to his mouth now: a sound, a call, a word that must be obeyed.

He turned to the earth elemental and said, wishing it were a longer line, “I’m going for a little journey. I may be some time.”

What did he have to lose? He could only die here with them. He had hours left at best. Nobody came to Zoomenon. Nobody left. So, what else to do but dance?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

L
ila?

She knew it was Tath, and Tath never used her name, so it was important.

She took her head out of her hands and savagely wiped her face on the backs of them. The synthetic skin felt a bit rubbery suddenly, and too cold. “Fuck,” she said and cast about for anything to dry her eyes on, but aside from ripping a few leaves off the nearest ornamental bush there was nothing. She yanked up her military vest and used the hem. “What?”

Little feet with claws on pattered on the bench next to her. It was a green imp, larger and fatter than the one she was used to and it looked at her with a contemplative greed. “Piss off,” she said, but it only sidled closer and reached out towards her with a clammy paw.

There was a pain in her ear and she felt Thingamajig suddenly explode, his voice shrill with atavistic, possessive passion, “Get off my . . .”

The green imp exploded. Bits of it splattered across the bench, the floor, and the pretty flowers. Lila looked at the gun that had assembled itself over her right hand and gently relaxed the fingers. The gun took itself apart and placed itself back into storage in her forearm. Her skin molded itself over the metal and carbon surfaces. It looked like putty. She curled her lip and flexed her fingers.

There was, she felt, a stunned silence from her shoulder, where a light weight swayed gently. “I want to be alone,” she said.

“Yeah,” the imp said. “I know. I was gonna go get you a pack of wetwipes. Be right back. Shops are all open late . . .” It hopped down and scampered over the balcony rail hastily, soon lost to sight in the growing dusk.

“Don’t bother,” Lila said to the empty space. She slid sideways, away from the worst of the mess, and then looked at her hands again. She made guns. She made grenade launchers. She made fists with spikes and fists with razors. She made hands that were almost but not quite right.

Lila.

“I know,” she said. “Tell me something, Tath.”

The elf waited. She could feel his attention all on her, for the first time, a cautious, careful attention. She thought that was a very bad sign. But she didn’t need it.

“Do you really hate me?”

There was a pause.
No.

“Oh,” Lila said, lightly, she felt, considering. A fragment of imp slid down her face like a piece of wet cake. She brushed it away absently and flicked it to the ground. “Then it must be me.”

Lila . . .

“Not now,” she said. “There’s a good boy.”

But the elf was unwinding. She felt his spirit body unfold and spread with liquid slowness through her chest, her guts, and into her limbs. He left her head alone but he could still hear her. Thanks to the metal elementals fused into her once-mundane prosthetics he could even reach through them without being nullified by the anti-aetheric properties of electromagnetic fields. It had been a long time since he had done anything but crouch inside her and hide. The last time he had been out was the day he ate the soul of Teazle’s brother.

She couldn’t help but cringe inside when she remembered, but the shrinking wasn’t from him alone. He was more than she ever realised. His presence was steady, and alive, as she shrank away from her own body, and tried to do what he did, and wall herself off somewhere deep within that had never been touched by magic or engineering. Tath unfurled. They might share physical space and one another’s thoughts and senses, but they were nothing like the same. To Lila he felt old, full of secrets, and young and full of unused potentials. He reminded her painfully of Zal and the facts of his unknown agendas, history, and abilities wore at her. She could go nowhere and do nothing without his witness.

These people are savages
, Tath said, lying calm like a smooth lime river in her veins and circuits.
You must understand their culture is nothing like yours. They hold life so high, but they throw it away in an instant. It is their pride.
His tone left no doubt in Lila’s mind that he despised this attitude, but also held a grudging admiration for it.
The dead woman isn’t someone cherished and lost to them, she’s a bargaining piece in an endless game. They will not judge you like humans. You should not either.

“What are you talking about?” Lila snapped.

Lila, do you know what this Hell is that they speak of?
He sounded less chiding now.

“Self-doubt or something,” she said. “I was never that great at analysis and the spirit stuff. I like to just,” she drew a line in the air with one fingertip, between her head and a distant spot, “let the doctor suck it out and see what she says.”

She felt Tath’s disturbance grow but he remained calm.
I know what it is
, he said.
And I only know one useful thing about it. Once you start to go through Hell, keep going. Lila, you are beginning to stop. But you carry me with you. I am in Hell too and I will not stop.

“Talk sense or shut up,” she said. “I’m sick of it already.” She felt wretched. She should go in, do something, report, write a paper . . . She sat on the stone bench.

You must stop pretending
, Tath said.

“Pah!” Lila spat, standing before she knew what she was doing, head down, stance ready. “How dare you of all people say that to me. We agreed to stay out of one another’s way. You’d keep your lying little secrets and I’d let you live. Or did you forget that deal?”

You cannot answer every challenge with death, Lila
, the elf said, for the first time in a tone that she could have sworn was laced with concern that wasn’t entirely for himself.
Will you shoot everything in the world that comes to tell you that you are running out of time? And I am not speaking of your job as spy or your personal need to discover Zal’s story or anything like that.

“I don’t eat people’s souls,” she retorted, not even sure how that was supposed to make sense except that she hated being taken to task by someone worse than she was. “And you’re not my conscience so shut up or . . .”

Or what?
A tendril of green
andalune
wound slowly out from the side of her right arm and enveloped a piece of imp flesh that lay seeping beside her on the seat.

Flesh without the spirit is such a strange thing
, Tath said. It has everything needed for life, but life. And the aether decays instantly . . . gone. The shadowkin would have consumed him by now. To her it would be a crime to waste what is no longer needed. They eat their dead, you know. The dead offer themselves to be consumed, and some of their memories pass with the substances of their being.

Necromancers use similar techniques, but we do not eat the aetheric body. We mine it for its unique organisation—for the soul. Souls are our mounts that we ride into death. Time stamps. Constellations. Compasses. We cannot get there without one. Only the dead may cross over. Or those shrouded in the mantle of a soul fleeing into death. But you have to pick the moment. Dar, for example. I could have gone with him. But I did not.

He had nobody to offer himself to when we took his life. All his line and their moments, wasted with him. Fifteen thousand years of brave and defiant continuity in the face of chaos and destruction, gone with the blow of our blade, as if they were nothing. But you were human. I was light born. And everyone else there was a bastard he wouldn’t give breath to. Who had he?

I would not make him my horse and save him, like I saved the demon I yet contain, for when I need an energy ride into the hidden land. But I have that demon. One ace in my hand.
His tone had become soft, but she could feel its spite as strongly as ever.
Once I was a boy who dreamed of other things.

As he said this last Lila found her mind suddenly suffused with soft pictures of incredibly high trees, their leaves a billion shades of green beneath the sun. She was running in the dappled glade beneath, watching her hands catch the golden coins of the light as it fell through the slowly moving foliage. There was an animal beside her, running too. Their spirits were joined in friendship and they were lost in the moment. Not far away others were around, higher in the branches, and their animal companions were with them; all kinds of beasts were there, each of them vivid to her. With no more effort than thought she could see through their eyes, feel the beat of their hearts. They were part of a special tribe. They were free and it was good to be alive.

Then the little montage of Tath’s lost dreams faded and she was left seated on the cold stone, the demon night around her, the forest replaced by the hoots and whistles and shrieks of endless struggle.

“Why are you telling me this?” Lila had felt herself slowly frozen during the revelation, all her resentful fire replaced by cold uncertainties and a sense of being so far from home. She was slow and calm.

The elf was still and silent, just spoke the words quietly to her, no rancour left.
I wanted to share one moment of my Hell with you. We are all alone in Hell. But we are not alone in being there.

Lila looked out into the night. “I don’t know why everyone else but me is so confident of that analysis. I don’t feel like I’m in Hell. I’m in Demonia on some assignment that got out of hand. Probably it’s no worse than what most demons face every day, I mean, look at them! I just screwed up a bit. I can fix it. I can do . . . things . . .” She realised she was scrubbing her hands against her leather leggings and stopped. She felt sympathy. It wasn’t hers.

“Don’t you dare fucking pity me!” she screamed out, leaping to her feet. It shocked her almost as much as it shocked Sorcha, who reappeared at the door, her hair blazing as she looked around for trouble.

“Who are you talking to?”

Tath diminished, swift and subtle. Lila stood staring out at nothing. “Nobody.”

Sorcha looked baffled for a moment, then shrugged. “Someone here to see you.”

Lila stared at her. She glanced down at the shackle.

“A friend,” Sorcha said.

“But I don’t . . .” Lila began and stopped. She took a deep breath and nodded. “Here?”

Sorcha stepped aside. Lila was astonished to see Malachi walk past her onto the terrace. He was the last person she had thought to see here . . . nearly the last anyway.

She felt a confusing surge of gladness and anxiety and then a moment of awe as he emerged fully from the dim interior into the torchlight. Malachi just looked like a jet black human being in Otopia. A jet black human with yellow eyes and a style not far short of the 1940s, suits and shoes always perfect, walking slightly off the ground sometimes, like walking on air. In Otopia she never saw the wings but here, like the elven
andalune
bodies, here they were.

Lila had never seen him in his natural fey form before. Malachi looked much more like a cat than she remembered. He had whiskers on his top lip that spanned out in ebon arches, shining, as wide as his shoulders. His hair was softer and more furry, it tufted at the sides as though he had ears like a cat. He had wings that transected his jacket and camel-coloured raincoat without damaging them; transparent, floating wings like the thinnest gossamer, veined with ink black lines so fine they seemed to draw the outline of wings on the air, two sets of them, butterfly shaped with ragged edges and glittering with rich grey anthracite dust, twinkling and soft.

His large eyes, orange, slit pupilled, took in detail and narrowed as he sensed the degree of disturbance in the scene. Above his eyebrows two long delicate lines she had taken for other whiskers revealed themselves mobile, questing through the air. They were mothlike antennae. After a moment they folded back and were lost in his hair. “Seems like you get in trouble everywhere you go,” he said, though he wasn’t entirely lighthearted about it. His face was taut.

Lila restrained herself from moving forward to greet him, because his hesitancy made her self-conscious. She brushed at something wet on her arm and then let her shoulders slump, “Ain’t that the truth,” she said.

Behind Malachi, Sorcha signalled a servant to go get something, or do something, but she didn’t leave. Malachi looked at Lila’s shackle and made an awkward hunching motion with his own shoulders, “I . . . Can we go somewhere?”

Lila gritted her teeth, “I don’t want to go out. People everywhere.” She prayed that Malachi would understand how it was when you were new and strange in town here. He seemed to, because after a second he moved towards her, his expression resigned but determined to offer her a sign of friendly affection. He put his hand on her shoulder and set to give her his customary kiss on the cheek but as he leaned in he was suddenly yawning instead. Lila felt awkward and did nothing. As usual fey proximity had a slight fogging effect in her circuits. He leaned back and covered his mouth with one hand, nails long and clawed upon it.