Selling Out (35 page)

“Very wordy,” Shar said, nodding.

“Well, couldn’t you just have told me?”

“Nobody can tell anybody anything,” Shar said, his hugely elongated and slanted eyes with their white inner membranes closed against the light looking ghostly and supernatural. “But everybody can find the truth. So, there’s no need.”

Suha rolled his small, wide open eyes.

He met Dar there. They spent years alone together, living in shelters built each night anew, running in the Night Land.

There followed many years of which nothing stood out exactly until Demonia. None of the long times of planning and plotting he and Dar and others had made, all for the overthrow of the Light. This was not to occur by outward forces, but by inward revolution. The White Flower would be a group of elves who were distinguished by their actions. They would not take up the ways of the enemy. Years of training. Years to creep forward with the plan, infiltrating.

He recalled instead the musical instants where, in free time, he renewed his passion for singing.

Suha joined the Jayon Daga after many trials. Meanwhile the hidden business of the White Flower crept on. Finally he sickened of waiting and began to doubt his vision. He already felt old and weary by the time he entered Demonia, weary enough to do or die. Travelling there was an attempt he felt he had to make, to prove that hard-won obvious insight about everything sharing a common centre correct. If all beings were only a facet of themselves then the other parts could be manifest, and if they were then there would be no more point in the divisions that so plagued his world.

Zal recalled his father’s face on being told of Suha’s great plan and its reasoning, the day before his departure: Shar looked resigned and disappointed.

“It will not change anything,” Shar said, then hesitated.

“I am not trying to correct the past,” Suha protested, believing it until he heard it when he knew he was lying. “I am not just taking up where mother left off.” Twice.

Shar seemed to reach an inner conclusion. “If it is your desire, then I wish you well,” he said, which was all he ever said. And then he did something he never did; he smiled and rolled his eyes, just like Suha, because he didn’t understand and thought the plan was crazy, but he didn’t mind.

That made Zal smile, falling as he was through the Void to uncertain death holding onto Mr. Head’s sandy hand.

He barely survived Demonia. He remembered waking up in a canal in Bathshebat, coughing lagoon water and clinging to a lump of floating rubbish as fifteen imps jumped up and down gleefully on top of him, fighting each other with unalloyed savagery for the privilege of being the next in line to his ear and shoulder. The floating rubbish turned out to be the dead body of a demon with whom he had a vague recollection of fighting on the bridge above. He pushed it down in the shallow water, pressing it into the mud as he stood on it and managed to get his fingers over the lip of the bank. The imps swarmed up and down his arms, chattering.

“He’s mine! I was here first! No good you being here. He’s a moronic idealist who wants to save the world. That’s MY speciality!”

“No no no, he’s a crazed pseudoscientist with visions of grandeur and that’s what I do best. I know all the best works of misinterpreted data, statistical analysis, and wishful thinking in the
entire
library, and that’s more than you do, you son-of-a-monk!”

“Both of you are wittering fools! His biggest problem is his idoli sation of his mother and the longing to become a worthwhile son who wins her approval. Oi, as if you had an inkling of the trouble in this boy’s poor weary heart! See how his longing to conclude that dear relationship has strangled every impulse he ever had to be himself! He’s a lost hero whose cause is his own redemption and I am the imp of lost causes so get off . . . Oof! That’s
my
spot!”

“Gah! You pithering toadfleas! He’s got a persecution complex a mile wide, any fool can feel it. It radiates out of him like the insincerity of an insurance salesman’s smile. Why else would he come here, knowing we would only torture him to death? He does it to himself because he feels he deserves punishment for his failure to save the world. Why, it almost reminds me of that stupid human . . . the one with the wood. They never learn.”

“Hey! He was
mine
! The point is, I saw him FIRST.”

“I didn’t say not, did I? Anyway, I was right there second in line on that one and in this case it’s my show, so back off dictator-maker!”

Amid the yelling in tiny voices Zal heard a soft, strange laugh and, in spite of the imp on his head, clinging to the mat of his hair, looked up. A girl with a wolf’s head was crouched near his hands on the bank. Her jaws were agape, panting slightly in the dawn heat of a new day, her pink tongue like a petal over the lower incisors. She held out her hand to him and her clawed fingers beckoned him to take hold. He got the impression she was smiling.

The imps shrieked and scolded at her and made pretend moves to attack. She ignored them completely.

“I am Adai,” she said in a gruff, growling voice. “Come, pilgrim. Take my hand. Be not afraid that you near Hell’s gate.” She paused and her grin widened to laughter. “You are in the land of the free now, where the scum also rises.”

He lay at her feet, vomiting pondweed while the imps screamed at her until she savaged one to death with a snap of her jaws.

The demons were worried he would die of his wounds so they let him accelerate Hell by taking him to a Hoodoo woman who gave him a dream vision; she sent his spirit into a parallel reality where he was more able, more lucky, better at being everything he had his heart set on.

Zal agreed because he thought accelerate meant it would soon be over.

He was in the alternate world for over a hundred and eighty years.

After the first month he reckoned they had stranded him for their own amusement. After the first year he gave up on getting out. He was a passenger inside his own head, a mute observer of his better self. He could only watch and listen as Suhanathir Taliesetra returned to the Lightside world and set out to gain power in Alfheim by approved methods, always intending, once he had it, to turn that power towards the greater good.

Zal in the Void remembered the Hoodoo woman. She was an ancient creation of driftwood tied together with ropes of seagrass, cackling, “I send him where all him dream come true!”

And so they had. Suhanathir Taliesetra rose to the top of the Alfheim tree and became High Lord, over all clans and all people of the Lightside. Along the way he didn’t have to compromise too many principles, after all, when he had to lie to pretend to support the structure then it was getting him where he had to be, dragging key people with him. The details were not important in those years. The White Flower was a rose that would bloom late.

When it did, his reforms required the exile or removal of his opponents. He had thought surely they would all come to his way of thinking. It was so logical and, moreover, it was true. He applied magical persuasions in the manner he had learned from his peers: aetheric seduction of the mind was always used to bring in stray sheep to the fold. It would be better for them to live free and in harmony, so the mild deception did not matter. It simply speeded the inevitable.

But to his increasing disbelief there were always dissenters, the ones who wanted to return to the strong hierarchy of the High Light. To maintain the effects of his changes to the social laws governing the realm he was thus forced to keep that policed structure which many of his companions viewed as the source of all the trouble. So he compromised for authority’s sake. He maintained the hierarchy to keep himself in charge. The Flower began to criticise him—where was his professed free land? He showed them, sadly realising its truth, how total freedom and equality would only give rise to another order because the elves only understood order. They wanted it. There was no limitation for anyone who wished to do as they will, but to protect what freedom there was it was clear that he must stay in control of what forces remained, as benefactor of course, as good spirit of justice. Better that they who wanted no order, except the natural friendliness of one spirit to another, be in charge.

A civil war fomented.

He prevented it by a quiet campaign of assassinations and bribes. Every day found him signing warrants, issuing exile commands, begging for a recant from someone who spoke out against his lunatic policies of open borders and the sharing of all Light lands and wealth with the shadowkin and even beyond, to Faery and to the hated and feared realm of the Demons.

As the shadowkin began to spread into the Lightside there began to be open fighting between the races. To suppress it Suha sent soldiers to police the region. He had to grow his army to keep the peace. He redistributed ancient stolen wealth and was accused of colluding with shadow leaders to strip the light of all its value—of grand treason, and corruption. He was taken to trial and further charged with crimes against nature when some of the Jayon Daga, his secret service, turned on him and told stories of the executions they had committed in his name.

Suhanathir sat in his prison cell, baffled by the stupidity that was all around him, pressing him down, which would surely now find a way to kill him and move on to a fresh field of bigotry and slaughter, incensed by the removal of so much money and land, by the threat of the removal of more. Stupid people. He wondered how he had got there, even at the same moment he could see the path so clearly and every stone upon it was a good intention, a hard moral decision, a righteous way. How could it be that you might offer a perfect way to the people, and they would throw it aside in favour of the momentary gratifications of their own petty interests? He had had no life of his own for the last forty years. It had all been consumed by the endless struggle to survive politically. The costs had seemed worth it for the goal. But the goal was lost, and suddenly it was clear that those costs could not be repaid in any kind. They were outstanding debts upon his soul. So many.

Zal remembered his imprisonment in Suhanathir’s world crystallised in that one moment in the cell.
So much struggle
, Suha thought, lying down to sleep because he had nothing else to do. Suha dreamed of a coloured flag, flying against blue skies, and tears fell in his sleep.

Zal, always awake for a hundred and eighty years, missing nothing, stared at Suha with hatred and pity and wished him dead.

At that moment the dream fell apart. He found himself looking at the Hoodoo woman, lying drunk and comatose on white rum and blood. She snored like a bull elephant, which was strange for someone whose nose was only a dark hole in a rotting piece of wood. Adai took his hand and helped him to his feet. His body was as wounded and sore as he had left it eighteen decades ago.

Three minutes had passed in Demonia.

“Come,” said Adai in her growl, giving him no time to feel any of the joys of self-control again. “We must get you to Madame
quickly
.” She hauled him to his feet, her claws scratching his skin painfully as she pulled him with her down long streets and narrow ways where healthy, vibrant demons hooted and screeched at him and tried to rip his
andalune
free of his body.

At Madame Des Loupes’s house they were granted audience immediately. She came out of her home to the street to meet them and looked down at him from one black eye. “Would you choose reality over the dream?”

“Always,” he croaked, leaning on Adai’s side, the cluster of demons around them becoming a crowd as they sensed the brimming of Madame’s power and saw that its focus was the unheard-of being—an elf. He wondered why they all rushed back suddenly to the limits of the little square as he staggered in the light on his unfamiliar legs and felt Adai at his back. Her hands had become iron on his arms, holding him up and still. His eyes watered so he could hardly see.

“Then be free,” said Madame kindly, and stabbed him in the forehead with her huge, black beak, splitting his skull.

Zal remembered that all right. It had hurt like nothing in the universe. She spoke into his eye chakra, the energy centre of all he perceived. “Let there be light.”