Selling Out (19 page)

“. . . well, they were more or less on the way anyway . . .” the imp added more quietly as the two approached with the slow measure of coming night. “I just helped a little bit. But I did help. I was very useful. They’ll remember that part.”

Lila shifted her weight into a ready stance and raised her daggers. The pair of raven demons halted just out of reach. They tipped their birdy heads and regarded the jellying mass of the ex-necromancer and his tail.

Before its ghost recovers the phylactery we ought to depart
, Tath whispered urgently to her.
It will not be caught like that twice, and now it will be furious.

The bird demons moved as one and lifted their heads upright. One extended a black, pincer-ended limb. It was holding out a white business card.

Lila extended the tip of a dagger and, after a moment, the demon impaled the card on it. Keeping her other blade ready she brought it close to read. The card simply said,

“Madame Des Loupes requests the pleasure of the company of Lila Amanda Black and her companions at her earliest convenience. Tea and small fancies will be served. Formal dress is not required.”

Lila read it twice—companions—and said to Tath, silently,
Don’t tell me I have to assassinate a perfect clairvoyant as well as a deathless necromantic fiend or I’m going home.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
he radiation counts in Zoomenon were high, always. Partly this was because of the raw lodes of uranium and plutonium that it contained, scattered hither and yon in patterns that defied analysis. That accounted for the electromagnetic interference that was like having elfin nerves scraped with sandpaper, let alone their flesh mortified by damage. Partly it was because of the aetheric concentrations and fluctuations that created enormous turbulence in the panspermic raw aether atmosphere. These concentrations took the form of elementals, both primitive and agile. Zal watched them with the apparent disinterest of a sated tiger watching deer in the forest. He nursed his sore body and the nauseating headache that the twin radiation had given him and from which there was no obvious respite. Inside his
andalune
body the surge and rush of the fire elementals whom he had permitted to transect him burned on, purging the worst of the damage from him with swift cautery. He knew that if and when their power abated he would soon sicken and die in this hostile, monophilic world. So he watched the elementals flock and disperse, watched their play, their moving and breath and death among the eerie perfection of the rocky world around him. Overhead the Zoomenon sun, a solar of pure white energy more powerful than any natural star with its endless raw fusion, flooded him with merciless light. He lay and considered his position with an ironic sense of the ridiculous that was rapidly growing old.

He had not been to Zoomenon before. Well, that was slightly inaccurate. He had been in Zoomenon. He had simply not been to it. When he created his magic circles and excluded the world from his universe he had summoned the place to him. It had come forth and enveloped him, spawning through the fissure he was able to open up with his small aetheric abilities. To his knowledge very few mages were powerful enough in their control or adept in their understanding to create genuine transits across the realms. But under the influence of the elemental storm, possessed by the essence of his own elemental relation, he must have been carried here as the beings themselves used their massed energy to return to their home. This was their nature of course; they enjoyed flitting among the realms, even Otopia, but as with every other creature, they felt best in their natural environment and, more than most, took every chance to trip back to it. He supposed it was something of a scientific coup to have discovered their ability to transport nonelemental matter (himself) with them in this manner. But it seemed he would have no chance to share his knowledge. Zoomenon was a place of purity and nobody with any sense came here, even if they could. Of course there were expeditions . . . but these were few, even among those who dared to scavenge here. The problem of Zoomenon was that it was the least permeable realm. And what came here in complexity tended to leave as components . . .

He got to his feet but that was horrible. The merciless glare shivered off the salt flats and glanced off outcrops of crystal. It hurt his eyes and that hurt his head and his head already hurt with the thrumming horror of the aetheric weather which seemed worse further off the ground for reasons he didn’t understand. On his hands and knees he crawled into a patch of shade. An earth elemental materialised beside him, as though it had been waiting for him to join it in its shelter. It condensed out of the aether with easy speed and sat with him upon a small stone, at his shoulder. It was a stocky humanoid with somewhat globular, muddy limbs and a potato-shaped head, black pebbles for eyes. It smelled of rich, wet, alluvial soil. Where it touched the ground it was one with it.

Zal didn’t speak. Elementals may take certain forms but the outer appearance was not matched by inner capacity. The best he had seen were about as intelligent and individual as cats, and with as much inclination to conversation. The worst were simply forms without reason of any kind. They did not need reason. They simply borrowed it, he understood, from millennia of elven research. But not always. They enjoyed aether. They were considered expressions of aether, as the elves were expressions of the divine will to intelligence and self-awareness; nature’s reach towards itself.

He didn’t feel like a divine intelligence. He felt hungry, thirsty, sick, and stupid. The earth elemental grew more solid and fixed him with a curious stare from its oddly attentive eyes. Perhaps it was looking forward to the entertainment of seeing him disintegrate. Zal wondered what he would reduce to. Humans that had been found here were patches of iron-rich dust surrounded by the white crystals of a few salts—their water having evaporated by the time the expeditions arrived. Demons left behind shards of various crystalline components and many curious globules of condensed aetheric matter, and various stains like shadows upon the places they left behind. Of elven fatalities there were no records but he suspected that these had been scrupulously erased by the secret service since it was hard to believe elves had not attempted to come here and died in the grip of the conundrum that faced him. Magic could bring you to Zoomenon, but it could not take you away. Nobody knew why. They came and went with the death of their fiendishly expensive portals and if they missed their moment the curious died here and left only their own elements to mark their passing.

“They say,” Zal decided to strike up a conversation with his new friend. “They say that the aetheric structure of this place is so tight to keep the electromagnetic problems under control that conditions don’t permit creative acts like enchanting.”

The small elemental stared at him with boulderlike calm and understanding.

“Yeah,” Zal said. “I’m with you. I think it’s horseshit. I mean, if that was true how would you guys just trip in and out so easily?”

The elemental kept its views to itself.

“I like you,” Zal told it, trying not to notice how much its smell was making him want to squeeze it until a drink of water came out of it, no matter how muddy it was. “Strong and silent. Just my type. I like when the bartender just listens. I have a lot to say and other people’s comments just get in the way of my thinking. That faery, for instance, the one who tried to beat me at cards. That cat. I got the feeling he liked my woman rather a lot if you know what I mean. Now, she’s gone into Demonia on some mission all on her own and I was meant to help her but I had a little party with your fiery friends and I’m here instead. I was hoping the guilt would eat me alive before something worse happens but I have a nasty feeling it won’t.

“Of course, the trouble with me not being there is that my woman doesn’t know about my wife. Or my other mates. Being a human she’s bound to assume it’s all about sex and that’s just going to make life a bitch when I have to explain it later and tell her why I didn’t explain it at first. I was hoping to be there, you know?”

The potato-faced creature tipped its spud head to one side gently as if it couldn’t be more concerned.

“Yeah, you see how it is. It looks bad. Probably it is bad. But there’s a lot worse things out there for her than just some horrible shock about demon lifestyles, as I’m sure you’ll be well aware. For a start there’s the vendettas. But she can handle them. The real shit in the fan is the necromancer she’s got stuck in her heart. Lots of demons will be able to see him. And he’s an elf. They’ll really like that in the worst kind of way. Ruins her status either as a journalist or a diplomat or even a party fiend. She could play it to her advantage but not if she doesn’t get some help fast and I don’t think she’ll tell Sorcha about it so that won’t be any good. Plus Sorcha’s obsessed with music and the Precepture problems she’s got so she might be busy. And that faery had the nerve to suggest that disco was unmanly. Can you believe it?”

The elemental oozed some mud from a side bulge and a couple of pebbles fell out of its body and clitter-clattered to the ground.

“Exactly. Total shit,” Zal agreed forlornly, pausing to put his head down and breathe. Internally, nausea and the foam of primal fire energy swirled and danced with each other. He felt blissful and disgusting at the same time.

“And here I am, stuck in Zoo with you and no idea how to get out. Facing death. The end of what could have been a rather promising career in the music industry. Soon I’ll be some kind of green ooze, like you.” He wallowed for a moment in the luxury of total self-pity, but then took a breath and brightened slightly. “Still, could be worse. I could be in Hell.”

Tea with Madame Des Loupes.

Lila sat in her black combat fatigues, dripping a little lilac blood onto the marble tile and the soft velvet upholstery of the exquisite chair upon which she rested. At her side the imp crouched on a tas selled cushion, eyes fixed upon the elegant form of their hostess as her slim, black human arms carefully handled a fine porcelain tea set. She poured milk into cups first, from a wide-mouthed jug, then the tea after, before placing two lumps of sugar and a silver teaspoon on the side of each saucer. Her huge raven head tilted almost entirely sideways so she could see what she was doing, the beak always facing away from her guests. As she moved with perfect grace Lila photographed her, capturing her from as many angles as possible. She was the most extraordinary being Lila had ever seen.

The sleek black feathers of her head fanned gently down to the base of her neck where their blackness, tinted with the oil sheen of many iridescent colours, became ever more blue and green until it blended seamlessly into the tiny vivid plumes of a hummingbird. These tapered along her spine, and branched out across the skin of her shoulders to become small wings that were tucked against her lower back and sides. At the base of her spine they fanned out suddenly into a broad bustle and train which Lila had at first mistaken for a dress but now saw was a train of real peacock feathers growing from Madame’s body. Where the eyes of an ordinary peacock feather would have glowed blue and purple as dark marks of reflective glory instead these feathers showed living eyes. They were not real eyes, they were images on the feather, but living images which blinked and looked about, every one differently coloured: human, animal, demon, fey, insectile, and of other kinds.

The front of her body was no less unique. Her neck feathers lay flat over dark, smooth skin that was faintly mottled with a pardlike pattern of spots in an even deeper, duskier hue. Generous breasts were supported in a delicate filigree of the loveliest green and blue lacework, like the wings of dragonflies, their cleavage a rich, warm, and sensual promise that played out down the length of a flat, powerful belly adorned with a single emerald placed in her navel. Her skin there was dusted with a kind of golden pollen caught in fine hairs that gathered and once again became feather along the length of her naked groin. Here their tiny prettiness jewelled her upper thighs where an open-fronted skirt of silk let her body show through to display, at their centre, a handsome, relaxed phallus covered in shining emerald scales and marked with rattlesnake diamonds in sapphire blue. Its head had scales of red that denoted eyes, but they were only markings, like those found in nature intended to deceive. Beneath the silken skirts shapely legs ended in soft, cloven feet like those of a camel, meant for walking in the desert. The two large toenails on each were painted and decorated with sugar pink varnish.

Madame Des Loupes lifted and held out a cup and saucer towards Lila. She kept her head with its massive beak averted but nonetheless managed to convey the tea with a gentle bow. Her voice was soft and warm, “You come battle-clad in the gore of your enemies. It is a high honour I will not forget, Lila Goredad.”

Lila stopped taking pictures and focused on the teacup. It rattled in the saucer as she took it and she had to cue some robotics to steady herself, trying and failing not to know she was alarmed by the presence of the demon itself. “Thank you.”