Selling Out (43 page)

“Ready now?” the rider asked as the drake beat them out across the open ocean, wings adagio but their airspeed increasing beyond the physical limit of any living creature.

“Hit it,” Zal said and the rider nodded with satisfaction, calling out to her mount. The drake opened her long, crocodile mouth and her inaudible cry sundered the divisions between worlds. They flashed into aetherstream, protected by the drake’s aura of shattering disruption, and then she tuned herself to the frequencies of Alfheim and, with the sure power of like drawing to like, that place reached up and snatched them from nowhere. They soared in the dawn sky over the lumpy corrugation of a seemingly endless forest, the air colder and clearer.

The drake rested into a glide of satisfaction. The rider cleaned her lenses and listened to the compass. They turned and turned again and began to move silently away from the rising sun. Zal put the Songster over his right ear and adjusted the settings. Sorcha’s funk-obsessed drum and guitars punched into him, honing his intent to a sharp point that he focused entirely on the gleaming, blunted tip of the netspear. Ten nets around its shaft clung as lightly as spider silk, the aetheric potential of their charms making his fingers prickle as he adjusted his grip and practised casting it clear of the rider and the drake.

The rider set her spyglass into its case at her side. “Did you talk to a dragon, then?” she asked, folding her arms.

“It talked to me,” Zal said truthfully, trying to discourage conversation. He must have got better at demonic because she took the hint, or else she was already uncomfortable with the degree to which her curiosity had gotten the better of her professionalism.

She gave him a look of respect and nodded and for a moment he saw the drake look clearly at him through her eyes, a gaze much more penetrating and canny than any demon or human stare could have been. He looked back and the rider laughed.

“When will you stop your brief and petty squabbles then, I wonder?” she said, but it wasn’t her voice and both she and he knew it and neither of them made an effort to answer the question.

The drake sailed him effortlessly to a place deep in the Shadowed Forest, a place he fully expected to find an escaping shadow assassin. There, where two glades met across a narrow river, they saw a typical Saaqaa campground looking deserted as always in the burgeoning morning light, only their cats and other diurnal pets lying about in the sunshine alone.

The rider pointed out one hut as they passed to the west.

“If your mages are good enough you can make the cast,” she said.

He knew that she meant the spells on the spear would have to be powerful enough to pierce the physical barrier of the hut plus any charms that might be in its making, then accurate enough to find his quarry and tangle it without gathering bystanders into the merciless embrace of the net. She didn’t mention the basic skill required just to get the javelin flying in the right direction at a reasonable speed and he hoped it was a matter of confidence in his reputation and not just the fact that she didn’t care.

In his head it seemed like every musician in Demonia was doing their damnedest to make him feel like dancing; happy hard-core overdrive. In spite of the situation he found himself moving to the beat and the psychedelic sci-fi effect sounds that someone had gotten addicted to during the mix. Better that than anger or the grief; nothing made intent as pure as expanding, open, happy energies, whatever the source and whatever the target. They banked around for the pass and he readied the spear, turning himself and freeing some stiffness in his balancing arm.

The drake took a suicidally low line, aether streaming from her wings and scattering the birds. The sunning cats leapt and ran as her wavefront brushed them. Zal leaned out, sure and pure, the spot secure in his mind even as the actual camp flashed beneath him in a blur of earth and green tones. The spear flew from his hand, its line unspooling with a high whining sound from the reel attached to the drake’s harness.

He felt the detonation of the charms—as if anyone in a radius of several miles could miss the aetheric retort—and then the line went hard and the drake snarled and the reel screamed and smoked and reached its limit almost in one second. It felt like an invisible hand swatted them, but then they burst upward, not down, and the harness slid and complained but they dragged what they’d caught with them. The drake struggled for a few moments as various bits of forest fouled the catch but its strength was easily equal to a hut roof, a few canopy branches, and some tangling vine. Zal only hoped the same could be said for whoever was in the net. The rider handed him the winding handle from its place at her saddlebow and he locked it onto the spool and began cranking as she recovered her spyglass and reoriented them for Demonia.

If there was a response from the shocked camp it came too late to bother them. Zal worked the line until the net was within the streaming wake of the drake’s flight and aether stream, then they screamed their silent way home, leaving the fresh air of Alfheim’s beautiful day before anyone could find them. The elves had no smash and grab equivalent of drake riders, no airborne terror, and now that they were gone, no proof of anything. It had been a matter of contention among elven sorcerers for centuries—why would the drag onkin favour demons and the fey? Some said it was a crime against nature, but it was never clear whose the crime was or what and, besides, dragons themselves favoured parts of Alfheim whether their relatives did or not. It didn’t matter to Zal, only that he had the person he had to question.

At his request they steered away from Bathshebat and dropped him down at the Place of Stones, on the mainland, a region of bare rock that provided no cover of any sort for many miles. The marks of old duels were littered around like splashes of paint and he knew there were places where the ground emanated all the pain and dread of the defeated. With a shudder he felt himself reminded of Zoomenon as he dismounted.

“Return for me at dark,” he said as the drake hovered impossibly above the ground on shivering wings that shattered the air into tiny ripples all around. He felt her energy beating the ground away.

The rider nodded as he slid down and landed on the rock some twenty metres from the motionless net. He watched the drake glide away several miles along the shore and then settle down to bask in the sun. Then and only then did he turn to the net. He switched off the Songster and put it in his pocket.

“Did you think you would escape?” he asked quietly in the old language, taking a dagger out of his boot as the words forced him to a genteel precision of baiting he so rarely enjoyed, coming as it did from the ancestry of manipulation and spite he despised. “Or did your master persuade you it could be done and you were fooled? If that place was your home then you’re poor and stupid enough to be persuaded of almost anything. Tell me about your employment and maybe you can get out of this with your life, go back to foraging like an animal.” He could see the body inside the netting stir and struggle to perform the magical movements of the Shadow Dance wherewith it could make the spell to become shadow but it was effectively trapped.

Zal sat down where he was and waited, turning the knife over in his fingers. The blade was cool and the point shining with a lacquer of Sorcha’s venom—a poison that was harmless to him without her will to make it deadly. Not so for any of his enemies. For them it was attuned to his instruction. He could feel a fine thread joining him to its inimical substance, his heart to its aetherically bound molecules. There was so much about demons that was truly amazing. He found his interest focusing there for a time, to pass the moments as the elf in the net struggled with herself. The metal blade cut his
andalune
where it touched but he didn’t mind the weakening—had learned to heal himself rapidly from all the assaults of metal. Besides, the injuries seemed deserved, he reflected—he had failed Adai, and an aetheric flaying was less than worthy of the offence. But then he caught himself and stopped. He hadn’t become demon for nothing. The honour code of guilt and redemption was a futile path. Let the elves cling to it and their game of manners. He did not come so far to fall into it now.

He turned impatiently. “Must I wait forever?”

The sun was further advanced than in Alfheim and beat down with increasing vigour as it burned off the night’s hazy fug from the shore. The captive elf writhed in discomforts of various kinds.

“You will kill me anyway,” came the sullen reply at last.

“Do not count on it,” Zal said, reminding himself suddenly of his father. “I do not have a merciful reputation in these parts. Now tell me who sent you and to do what. I have no doubt Adai was not your target, since her death seems almost a misadventure. Sorcha informs me you attempted to murder Lila but after making so much effort to enter a vast gathering of demons you bungled your single rotten shot and made a pathetic getaway attempt across the water—which anyone might have told you was the worst possible course.”

“Anyone close to you!” the elf spat.

“I don’t think so,” Zal said smoothly. “Everyone in Alfheim could say that, although I suppose that if you had succeeded your reputation as an assassin might have come high enough to find the attention of a ruling family back at home. After all, for a little dirt grubber like yourself there’s hardly any easy way to get a name for yourself. Nobody in Alfheim would take a challenge from you, being shadow and of low caste and from nowhere and of no family. You wouldn’t even have been hired as a guard on a trade caravan.” He pushed the line as hard as he could, sure that at least he was right about that part of her story. “A pity your archery is so weak.”

“The white demon took my arrow!” she hissed. “My aim was sure. That creature had no way to avoid it. My poison was perfected. Nothing could have saved her.”

“Then it was a careless act to shoot when someone like him was standing next to her. Wasting all your life’s work on a moment’s bad observation.” He tutted.

“How was I to know he would sacrifice himself? He was of the family . . .”

Zal pounced. “Ah, he was of the family who set you up, you mean?”

“She had already killed the son. She was due to die. It was my job. There was no dishonour in it.”

“But the family in question has bred the most deadly killer in all the worlds for ten generations. Do you think they would hire some filthy little elf for a task of honour? What were you to do when you failed them?” He could feel her hatred of him like a second sun, and knew he was right again. He felt sorry for her innocence and answered for her. “Of course, you’d kill yourself, like a good assassin, leaving some great death poem about your tragic little life so we could all have a good laugh over it. Did it not strike you that you might have been the evening’s entertainment?”

She actually sobbed. “No! I had orders to kill her and if I could not then to kill you, your sister, or your wife. Any would do.”

He felt inspiration come, as if she was willing him to know everything and was passing it to him, which, in a way she was . . . “But if you succeeded, what would happen? Lila would be dead. You’d vanish back to Alfheim with something and never darken their doors again. The Principessa would have given me a mortal insult and I would be obliged to challenge the house of Sikarza. Teazle would have to take up the challenge and I would die. Lila would be dead so the Otopians would have lost their most useful agent, the only one with any potential to become powerful in Demonia. The elves would have lost the only one with any sense, me. And then the Principessa would be able to rightly say her family had saved Demonia from an influx of foreign power and would move up to the top of the ruling families. That was a risk worth taking, even on someone like you. But you failed. Because of Teazle. That’s very interesting. Like mother, like son, but a different game I’d bet. Teazle gains nothing much if his mother becomes a power in the region. Like her he’d be glad really to get rid of someone as annoying as his brother. His interests aren’t remotely served by assisting his mother’s schemes or Lila’s death. He’d be much better off trying to marry her. Then he’d have foreign power and influence first in Demonia, plus the kudos of the most powerful partner who was already significant before she even got here. He’s young enough to have a strategic brain left so of course he’d try that, and he’d be enough to scare off any other suitors for the time being. Except me. But I could be an added bonus if I also persuaded Lila to join with me. The combination of him, Lila, and myself would be a power structure unlike any other here, and possibly unassailable. It would be sufficient to found a new family line, one without any ties to previous or existing lineages. No more obligations to fulfil. And of course there would be Adai, the only one of us capable of producing heirs. What an interesting plan. The Principessa wanted you to forestall that, I’d bet, and you have. Anything you did she can claim is vengeance for that little runt of hers. She loses nothing no matter what happens and she stands to gain a lot. Unless Teazle does make it clean away, in which case she stands to lose her head. Of course, all that would rely on Lila being in any way marriageable, a thing the Principessa has probably failed to account for because she can’t imagine anyone turning down Teazle whereas I can’t imagine Lila saying yes to anyone. But whatever the reasoning, you’re nothing but an embarrassment, a living endorsement, and unless you’re prepared to make a full testimonial in court to clear Lila from any link to Adai’s death, you’re my business to dispose of.”

There was a moment of sobbing misery from the net.

“Cheer up, it might never happen. I’m notoriously insane. By the way, what
was
that poison on the arrow you used? I didn’t see too much of your shack but some of the totem poles had a medicinal look to them suggestive of some serious pharmacological interest. You’d find a very lucrative trade relation over here if you took the time to investigate it, should that be the case.”

Between sobs came the words, “You are an abomination.”