Selling Out (44 page)

“Oh, you’re not a believer, are you?” Zal summoned the energy not to groan and began to play with directing light beams over the surface of the rocks from the dagger blade, sending tiny focused golden glows over the netting. “Zal is a traitor to elves because he went off to discover what demons were all about and decided he preferred making music to waging war on his own people. Vulgar and tasteless . . .”

“You abandoned the shadowkin cause and the White Flower.” There was some fumbling and then the elf poked her grey fingers out of the net. Held between them Zal saw a small white daisy, quite dried and flattened. “You were one of us.”

Zal suppressed a shudder as a cold flicker went through him. “I
started
us,” he hissed back.

“Lila murdered Dar. Everyone knows. He tried to save you from the worst of the Jayon Daga and now he’s dead and you’re gone. You left us to rot. Who do you think remains behind to champion anything?”

“Nothing’s stopping you,” he said, aware it was weak even if it was true.

“Dar begged you to come back but you stayed here for . . . for what? Music?” Her contempt was like a knife in his side.

“The music is important. And the cause is just another problem featuring in the same tired old drama,” he said. “If we won we’d only take up power in the same form it has now and do the same wrong things over again. Besides, there was nobody with sufficient influence on the diurnal side to help us. We needed a better reason than simple injustice to turn them.”

“Yes, and now that the cracks are spreading there is even more reason to stamp out the shadow filth for they all know we follow the wild streams and where do they come from but the cracks to the Void and surely we are farming the cracks to gain enough power to topple the light! Arië was their great hope for stability and you took it away. Now they have no reason not to openly exterminate us and that is exactly what they are starting to do. But you wouldn’t know about that, since you are too busy singing songs and being adored by stupid humans who don’t even care their world is falling apart. I was glad of a chance to kill you. Seeing you like this is worse than having you dead.”

Zal didn’t reply. He already knew everything she said was true, of course, and he was used to the truth and its pain so it didn’t have the power to upset him now. He was thinking about Mr. Head, and his mother.

“Do you know how the shadowkin were made?” he asked, watching the sun’s heat make Sorcha’s poison gleam pale red. He moved across the rock to the net and poked the dagger through, making a small wound in the elf’s thigh with the point.

She flinched, “What is that?”

“This? This is an aetherically attuned intelligent protein which will perform whatever work on you I ask it to, within reason. A poison, if you like. I could even tell you what I was going to have it do, supposing you’d tell me what poison you tried to use on Lila. Was it demon, like this one, or one of your own devising?”

“I made it,” she hissed, trying to reach her leg and failing. She could barely breathe, the nets were so tight.

“And is Teazle carrying it now?” Zal asked languidly, as though they were enjoying the light and heat and the day. “Because killing him would be quite a coup. As much as a coup as finding out that the Saaqaa are elfkin, blood and aether, and that there could be no shadow if there wasn’t light.”

“How do you know that?” She gulped for air, beginning to pant now that the sunlight shone full on both of them.

“I found something.”

“Your word is not enough.”

“I have proof. And I will you to believe the truth when you hear it, just so we don’t waste what time we have left on any unfortunate misunderstandings.” He looked at her a long time to be sure she understood what he meant, that the poison was to have this effect, and as he saw her breathing calm he knew that she did. He could have lied about it and she wouldn’t know, he knew that too, but he felt too jaded by the day’s business to lie.

She waited, thinking, and then said, resentfully because he made her wait and ask, “So, how were they made?”

“By crossing light elves with ghosts. At least, I think they were ghosts. It’s hard to say. The language she was using when she told me was so very old. I might have got the words wrong. Something that came out of the interstitial after they opened a portal onto the akashic plane and made people stand in the way. It’s not always ghosts, is it? Anyway, the survivors were bred with various cocktails of other elves until they got the shadowkin. The by-blows who didn’t fit the expected mould are the Saaqaa. Everything else got ported to Zoomenon and dumped, dead or alive. That was the Winnowing part. I guess the first bit must have been the planting part, and then the harvesting part or whatever . . .” He stopped, feeling nauseous.

“Why?” she said after a long pause.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “But I’d like to. I have enough evidence, if I ever get time to go through it. That however would rely on me not being killed in the next few months. And we need to present it somehow in Alfheim. For that, people with brains will have to be alerted to the opportunity by people who know I’m telling the truth.”

“You were right. I don’t have any influence,” she said, taking his point.

“I didn’t say you could do it. I’m telling you this so you know I mean it when I say that either you get up on the stand and admit to killing Adai to save Lila from having to face a public trial or I will kill you. Your choice. The only one that interests me. I could care less about the shadowkin story. It’s waited for millennia, it can wait some more.”

“They will torture me until I confess the whole story,” she said bitterly.

“Then you can just tell it all straightaway. They’re not barbarians about it.”

“And then what will happen?”

“The Principessa has her get-out clauses lined up. She won’t care. She may take out some policy against you for failing to meet professional standards but given the thoroughness of the legal proceedings in the case against you I doubt it. Your shame will be enough for the demons. They’ll consider you a fallen creature, beneath notice, so after that you can just leave. They won’t pay you any more attention unless you fall foul of an imp. You can go home, do some gardening, brew a few more potions, turn into the mad lady who says the night hunters are elves too.”

The sun was burning hot now. Zal could feel her waves of agony at the intense radiation and he sympathised with that.

“Take me where I must go to speak,” she said.

He stood and signalled the drake rider.

“The drug was not a poison as such,” she informed him as he cut the net free just enough for her to stand by herself. “It was a thana tritic, to collect the mind after death and distil it. A necromancer’s tool, to extract information from corpses. It wasn’t mine. The Principessa’s agent gave it to me. The demon will carry it but it won’t harm him. It may not even be enough to be active when he dies.” She let Zal pull her to her feet and gave him a look of tired resignation. “I do make poisons. Just ones that kill.”

The drake landed a short distance away and feigned interest in the horizon as they approached and made their way to its harnesses. Zal set the elf in front of him and held her in position since she was unable to use her arms or hands. Exhaustion and fear made her
andalune
body weak and he let her lean on him, her black hair soft against his cheek, her long ear twitching gently against his neck. She gave him a sad look as he set her down in the company of the demon police and made the necessary statements. Before he left he glanced at her and saw her vulnerability suddenly. It made him angry with her. He didn’t intend to but he found himself saying, “I loved my wife,” in a strangled tone, before turning and leaving on foot to begin the long walk to the Otopia portal.

The drake had long since departed and the afternoon was hot and humid. He was tired and sweating by the time he crossed over.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

T
here was a shiver, as if the world had shuddered, and then Lila found herself inside the sitting room, just as before. But it was as she had never perceived it before. The room moved like an ocean. Everything that had been solid and material—the furniture, the walls—now possessed a quality she could only think of as subtle; their material certainty gone and their true nature as objects temporarily composed of energy in harmonious vibration exposed completely to her. And she was the same. And so was Tath. There was nothing in existence that did not have this evanescent charm. She saw at once how truly fragile everything was, how miraculous, how strange. And through everything that was surged deeper waves and movements, currents and flows, so slow and majestic in their tides that in an age of human time they would barely move at all, yet she could perceive their vital power, their unstoppable force.

Against this backdrop a burst of something as frail as a gnat’s wing and as strong as stone dispersed and vanished into the subtle sea. She realised it was what remained of the demon they had used to come here: its spirit traces flying into the aetheric wind, borne away, lost forever.

“Holy shit,” she said.

Tath agreed with her, grimly, his emerald and spring-green body enclosing hers. He was tense and wary, as if they were in danger. It seemed strange to her. Nothing here could be dangerous, because everything was revealed as part and parcel of one essential movement, one space, time, and wonder.

“Your parents are not here. Of course, we both would have known it if they had chosen to linger. To find them we can only go back to the last point at which they remained here, and then move into their afterlife time with them. We must use the room to move back in time,” the elf said quietly, his voice in her mind as soft as thistledown. “But I cannot do this myself. I must call one of the undead.” He hesitated.

“What’s the matter?”

He waited another moment and she felt his tension rise. “I can feel my death calling to me.” His voice was wistful. Tired, guilty, he wanted to answer. But he only allowed himself a second of that and then turned away with an emotional jolt, forcing himself to resist. She was about to speak but he cut her off, opening his mouth and uttering the strangest call she had ever heard; silent to her ears but strong in her heart.

“You don’t have to . . .” she began, determined to have her say.

“I do,” he said. “Now be quiet.”

They listened, still able to hear the small noises of the house, the retorts of the kitchen pans, the murmur of Malachi and Max talking, the scratch of a dog’s foot on the bare boards of the back porch, the engine of a passing car. Then, beneath these gentle sounds, a yet more gentle tread came, vibrating on frequencies that didn’t disturb the physical world of the living but only touched the subtle depths of this peculiar existence. Firm, steady, they came closer and Lila would have shuddered if her body had still responded to her feelings, which, she was surprised to find, it did not. In fact, she couldn’t feel it at all.

Panic surged up as she realised she had lost her link to her AI, even though she didn’t want it, and there was no contact with anything . . . nothing . . . she wasn’t sure what she was feeling now because she couldn’t . . .

Stop it
, Tath snapped harshly.
You’re fine. You’re just not in your body anymore.
And to prove it he stood up and she went with him as though she was his puppet. Behind her, her body sat on the couch, eyes shut, pale and apparently motionless. He moved around with the lightness of floating in outer space and she saw herself remain, a punk puppet with the strings cut, her skirt across her legs that looked so human except for the fact that they were brilliant chrome to the hard black tops of her boots.

She supposed the feeling of disembodiment was no worse than the weeks it had taken to grow sensation into her machine prosthetics. At least, it wasn’t too much worse and she took some odd comfort from the fact that then an elf had been with her too, in a similar role of care-taking: Sarasilien’s nonintrusive but constant presence had saved her from despair. She got a grip and waited for Tath’s instruction.

The footsteps reached the door. Through the material veil that interrupted it no more than a breeze, it crossed the threshold of the room and stood before them, human in form, its ears rather long, its body clad in nondescript grey clothing. It had no features: its form was blurred and full of movement like the most rough of pastel sketches that had been blocked with the basic colours and was awaiting a lot more work. The edges of it were uncertain. To Lila it seemed as if they simply faded into the space around them. And they shivered all the time, hazing the space around its body with an oil-sheen of flickering rainbow light.

It was surrounded by an area of influence—that was all Lila could think of to call it—in which everything of that place was under its control. Now she and Tath were included in that sphere and she felt its potential not only surrounding her but interpenetrating every part of her being. There was no need to speak, because all thoughts were understood, all desires known. Nothing could be hidden. She understood implicitly that she and Tath were being judged, though against what standards there was no knowing, and in this place of shared knowledge she realised the fine thread by which their lives clung to existence—this being had the power to sever them from the material world, to strand them here, or banish them far from either kind of reality, or sunder them to nothing. And there was no knowing why, or what it would do but now that they had drawn its attention they must endure its reasons because that was the cover charge for the living in Thanatopia.

Lila ought to have been more afraid now, she thought, but she wasn’t. When her fate was certainly outside her control, she felt only calm. Tath was resigned. She realised he didn’t expect to survive too many encounters with this place and its natural inhabitants, and that he had no idea why he had managed to become that most unnatural elven thing—a necromancer—when so many others had simply vanished from the face of existence for their presumption.