Going Under (42 page)

Stupid, he thought, and then other thoughts that had been dammed up a long time spun uncontrollably after: yes, it was a stupid fall, but that was no surprise surely, because he had been looking for it, waiting for it, for a long, long time and naturally here it was at last, just as he'd said to Lila in the cave.

What the rockstar lifestyle and denial hadn't softened, love had. Sorcha, Lila, they mattered, and he wasn't free as he used to be. He resented them for that.

Hadn't he, even when they were sailing on that fated airship with its treacherous crew, been glad of the fighting, the risks? He'd known quite clearly that they could be eliminated there by some chance that was purely accidental, and if they were then he'd be liberated. And he could feel what that would be like and it would be good. For what use was a warrior when he was prisoner? No use. Weak. Anyone could have leverage against him. The savagery of the violence that followed had been born from his anger.

But even before that, he'd sold himself, hadn't he? It had happened in that moment when what was now clear in his thoughts had been born as a feeling. It had occurred to him that his desire to be free-and safe, yes, let's say safe, Zal, because when you have nothing to lose you cannot be bought and nothing holds you, so safe from what you fear most, Zal, which is to lose what you love. You'd solved this problem very neatly before, by not loving at all until you met Sorcha. Elves are commonly coldhearted, who knew? Then you'd solved it by denial when you married Adai and pretended it was all a wedding of convenience, rushing straight off to Otopia and leaving her with the Ahrimani, thinking yourself a bit of a hero. And finally you'd solved it with a stroke of genius, when Lila came along, by pretending that you had grown nerves of steel and a will of iron in the interim (since you became a demon and abandoned your entire race and land in a massive first strike rejection), and anyway, she was safety itself because nobody could get her, surely, and she was a pushover, desperate for love, so you were at no risk of rejection or loss. Lila was bulletproof and you could love her without a twinge of fear, except that suddenly she's been targeted by every freak in the city and you realise one of them only has to get lucky once.

Yes, your intent in that heady afternoon, two days ago aboard the airship, had been not to save and protect them, Sorcha and Lila, but to proxily kill them, and with them destroy your growing sense of weakness ... ah, it was that, and not your sister's death, which has slaughtered your abilities now and left you hanging off this ledge, and which led you to take Lila's place in the hunt. You had longed for Jack to follow, so that you could prove to yourself that you'd done your best, run the gauntlet, faced the worst, and then failed through no fault of your own. You'd fall at his mercy and have him execute justice upon you, because you could not bear to do it for yourself. And Jack saw it. In one second. And you lied. And then you ran.

All this ran through his mind in a second as he hung on the edge of the fall. He knew that all he had to do was let go and it would be over. He would be free, as he wanted, as he had planned; even Jack would not get to finish him. He would choose it for himself, the honourable demon solution to a moment's mistake in which he had discovered himself vulnerable and sought to run away, letting Sorcha pay with her life. Nothing in the world could be easier than letting go. His fingers hurt even holding his slight weight, his nails were starting to crack. The rock was slippery, its purchase pathetic so that if he hadn't been shadow he'd already be dead. His forearm burned and began to weaken. He stared at the rock. An image of the imp played across his mind and then, from the extreme distance, carried by the following wind, he heard the sound of hounds baying. The sound was gleeful, delighted, excited, and looking for his death.

A fierce anger overcame him. He swung his free arm once, twice, and caught hold of the rock's edge with two more fingers. There was no easy way up. The overhang was blunt, but it offered a small crack for a foothold. The pain in his arms only made him more determined, even as he felt them failing. He kicked up and jammed his boot into the toehold, ignoring the pain. The slight easing of the weight on his arms and the change of position was just enough to let him get a better handhold on the top of the rock. After that it was relatively easy to climb up and over. He lay on the boulder's edge, feeling the wind buffet him and the shocking burn of his tendons, the ache of his foot, the spite in his heart, and smiled.

He gave himself twenty seconds, and then he was up and running again, along the ledge, along the cliff, across the icy rocks and hills, back into the woods ...

The hounds of Moguskul tracked by means Lila couldn't detect. It wasn't smell, for as a shadow creature Zal had lost his. She had no description or adequate explanation for what form he was now. Immaterial was too little, and material too much. As she kept pace with Madrigal through the trees of the winter woodlands Lila was reminded of the information the researcher had attempted to pass on-and she realised how ignorant and how limited the human comprehension of aether really was. Tonight's drama at a deep level of aetheric involvement only proved something that had been building a long time in her mind; aether was mixed up with consciousness, with mind, and spirit. It was the stuff of these things and it flirted with matter in different ways in different regions. Time and space were only two of the expansions. She was now racing through a third, whose name she didn't know, which was intimately connected to those others and which would never be undone from them. Before the Bomb, that was when this region was closed to humans and the gross matter of her realities. After the Bomb, things had opened, but nothing was there now that hadn't been there before. She wanted to rush back and conduct tests, experiments, find volunteers, discover the truth.

She held that in her mind as she wove between the trunks, ducked boughs, and burst through thickets, cutting swathes where she could not move freely or jumping in huge, gazellelike bounds over logs and streams that were so similar to the ones she knew from home, but were essentially different because these were features of Jack himself. The land, the forest, everything in it was an expression of the faery's nature. He hunted through himself for sport alone. Of course he knew where Zal was. Even the dogs and the birds were just for show. It was a cruel game, and the more strange dales and bizarre formations the trail led them through, the more she understood the lie of the land. Here things were both exactly what they seemed and not at all as they appeared.

Try as she might she could see no way to turn that to their advantage. Suddenly ahead of them there was yelping and cries. They were brought up short, the wolf making a brute turn that unseated Madrigal and sent her flying to the hardpacked snow at the foot of some boulders. Lila transformed her forward momentum into an upward and slightly backward leap, activating her jets to keep her aloft as she looked over the edge of an enormous, concealed drop where two hounds were still falling over and over down into the darkness below. Those that were left barked excitedly and fussed over some ground where traces of blood were marked on the ice. Jack bent down and traced these almost lovingly. He brought his hand to his mouth and licked the tips of his fingers, then threw his head back and howled in a bloodcurdling crescendo that made the ground vibrate. Ice fell from the trees in the aftermath and the hounds went into a frenzy, boiling over themselves until one of them found the trail and went galloping off into the night.

Madrigal cursed Jack profusely as she recovered herself. He ignored her and let the dogs run for a moment, before setting off himself. He was unnaturally fast, of course, and nothing got in his way even though he huffed and puffed like the big man he was pretending to be. The blood was not much, Lila thought as she bent to examine it. Minor. She tracked back over the rocks, following the marks more carefully than the dogs had, and found the place at the edge where Zal had hung. The exact size and shape of the tiny spots, the skin cells left on the edge, the taste of it all-she pictured him dangling there and knew it was no feint.

At the bottom of the ravine the two unlucky hounds were dead. Already their bodies were decomposing and falling apart into tiny whirls of shining ash that were spun away on the wind. To rejoin the rest of Moguskul, she assumed, or simply returning to the greater aether out of which he had summoned them. It didn't matter. The only deaths here that would be true were their own, not the faeries'.

Lila straightened and narrowed her eyes against the wind. Zal had had the chance to die here, she was sure of it. But he hadn't taken it.

She put on a concentrated burst of speed to catch up with the rest of the hunt, and for the next hour in the Spartan trail of bloody drops, bent twigs, and curiously melted footprints, she read the increasing rise of his anger and fire. By the time they took the westerly turn she had anticipated, back towards the Twisting Stones, smoke was rising from bushes and trunks that were blackened in his wake. As time grew short he gave up on any effort to conceal his tracks and instead they found branches lit like torches, blazing to show the way. Zal's contempt wasn't lost on Jack, whose howls now transformed from the smug lust of victory to seething rage. He began to storm among the hounds, forgetting them entirely in his haste. As they fell back Lila found a brindle wolf running alongside her, its tongue lolling out of its mouth.

"Thank you," it said to her, before falling behind. As it peeled away from the main line and diverted into the deeper woods all the hounds and the birds in the sky abruptly spun to follow. She stopped to watch them arrow down on Moguskul's spirit form, vanishing into the grey and white canopy of the frozen trees. The quiet was eerie in the absence of their voices.

This time she took to the sky to regain her lost ground. She barely felt the cold, though she knew it was terrible, and at her speed the wind increased its chill steeply. Ahead of her Jack burst from the treeline and onto the absolute whiteness of the frozen lake. Zal's trail was a clear straight line of dark meltwater reflecting the sky, at the end of which, near the far shore, she could see his running form-a black silhouette outlined in orange fire against the glowing blue white of the snow under the starlight. Her heart caught in her throat at the sight.

He was so fast he was almost flying. Every part of him was working as hard as it could to keep up his incredible speed, but it was slowing, and the tension that was creeping into him was so visible she could almost feel the huge burden of the pain as his body began to fail. Jack saw it too, and in reply he began to undergo a series of transformations, the form of his man shape dropping away into a leaping cat, then a bear, then a cloud of snow like the onrush of an avalanche that began to rip all the surrounding snow and ice into its wake. Behind him the white wolf and Madrigal peeled off rapidly to the side, inexplicably heading in the wrong direction towards the closest bank. At the same moment Zal reached the bank and stumbled. He fell heavily, somersaulting as he missed his footing, and the lake rose up behind him in one enormous wave, vast blocks of ice breaking up in its grey black flow.

And something twisted in the water of the wave, stalling its upward rise.

As Zal tumbled over, flames dimming, and clawed his way to his feet, shapes became distinct in the turbid water, huge, unlikely shapes of things that might once have been horses but were now mutated into monstrous forms. Their bodies shone, scaled and muscular as they turned in the wave, tearing at the empty air with their long, crocodilian jaws agape, teeth like needles and as long as Lila was tall punching through the water. Their manes and tails coiled with life of their own and it was then Lila realised that this wasn't Jack in the water, it was kelpies, bringing the wave to try and throw him down into the depths where they might grasp and drag him down to drown. Jack was lost in the tumult.

Lila saw Zal reach the top of the far bank as she came directly over the lake. He stopped and turned around to look back. Halfway to shore Madrigal and the wolf leaped gamely from block to block of ice but the fury of the artificial tide was too great. The cracks became canyons. One moment they were there, the next they simply vanished into the black mass of freezing lake. Zal was shouting, though none of them save her could possibly hear him.

"Poppy! Vi'dia!" He was anguished, and then she saw why and heard the doll's singsong voice.

"Help's a cheating, takes a beating." The soft and eerie witchlight of the Hoodoo reached up from its place in the lake with Madrigal and suffused the lake briefly, illuminating it from within so that for a moment everything seemed inverted, the ice shining below, the bodies of the kelpies flying in their element. Then it went out and with a rush the wave subsided in all directions, creating a series of gigantic ripples that went speeding towards the banks. One of these effortlessly smashed into the shallow rise where Zal stood and swept him off his feet. Lila saw him scrabbling for a hold on the frozen ground as he was sucked backwards into the heaving water. Behind him Jack's form rose effortlessly from the pristine snow. Far out in the lake the tiny shapes of the wolf and Madrigal struggled amid ice blocks that rose higher than their heads.