Selling Out (7 page)

“Don’t even think about it,” the faery said.

Zal ground his teeth.

Malachi smiled and it was not entirely pleasant. He enjoyed Zal’s discomfort and Zal felt duly punished.

“Move back to your questions,” Zal said. “I liked them better.”

“As you wish,” Malachi shifted to a position of greater comfort and crossed his legs. He was, like all faeries, a great and showy dresser, but whereas many of their ideas about costume were extremely peculiar to alien eyes Malachi had chosen, in his human form, to adopt a human style of plain yet extremely expensive looking elegance. His immaculate camel-coloured silk suit draped his tall, powerful form with insouciant grace. Against the warm colour the ink blackness of his skin and hair stood out, shining faintly with what Zal’s nose told him was Unction: a rare and highly prized magical product, worn on the skin. It bestowed magical gifts, among them clairvoyance, protected the wearer from mortal harm, and it moisturised with a buttery sheen. He also radiated two contrasting attitudes in typical faery fashion—a good-humoured frivolity and a deadly serious self-confidence in his position. He was interviewing Zal in a more-or-less-but-not-exactly unofficial way on behalf of Lila’s organisation, Earth Security, and he was enjoying it.

Zal also felt himself examined as Lila’s new prospect, as if Malachi were her brother or father. He got this impression despite the fact that he did not know exactly what the relation between Malachi and Lila was about, but the fact that the faery was taking him so seriously made him resentful of the assumption and the intrusion and of the presumed closeness he must have with Lila in her working hours. And that led him to think about Lila on her own in Demonia and that made him crazy. So he stared at the flowers and willed himself calm.

“What we really want to know is why someone like you is in a place like this singing songs, Zal. And what does it mean to be both an elf and a demon? Surely you must understand your position here is almost intolerable to the authorities. Elven voices carry beyond the range of hearing and into matters no human even knows about. You and I—for all that either one of us claims to befriend them in their need to know our worlds—we haven’t explained the half of what we know about each other.”

“You keep quiet and I keep quiet,” Zal said.

“Exactly,” Malachi nodded. “All is honour among traders in secrets. No point ruining the delicate balances established over millennia for the sake of easing human anxieties. Trust must be gained with time and care. And there is so much to care about . . .”

Zal frowned. Malachi was starting to “wiffle” in the habit of faeries of his kind. Not that Zal had exactly determined his kind but he suspected from the clothes and the chat that Malachi was powerful. There were ways of discovering more . . .

“Want to play cards as we talk?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” The faery reached into his inside pocket and drew out a sealed deck of playing cards, breaking the plastic wrapper with his thumbnail as he did so and shedding the cards into his outstretched hand in a single, flowing movement. The box ended up on the glass table, the plastic in his pocket, the cards in his resting hands. Zal had not seen exactly what happened, he realised. Malachi looked at him expectantly. A soft furl of wild magic, summoned by Malachi’s invisible wings, crept between them—its presence was a guarantee the faery made that both of them would be able to detect magical forms of cheating in the other.

“No limits Texas Hold ’Em,” Zal said, sitting fowards, starting to like matters much better now they had dispensed with the ridiculous human manners of simple talk and were playing. He flexed his hands and found them stiff. It was too long since he’d played for anything worth winning.

“Questions for answers. One question per game. Stakes on the Hoodoo Measure Rule . . .”

“You got the Hoodoo?” Zal would have to fetch one.

“Always, my man,” Malachi assured him with a smile and from his jacket pocket produced a small handful of recently picked grass. With skilful fingers he fashioned a crude doll with the strands. He pulled a hair from his head and Zal did the same, handing it over so both were wrapped together before being wound around and around the grass to create a separation making head and torso; the hair was the noose that made its neck. “Good enough,” Malachi said and set the doll on the table under the shadow of a daisy. He blew on one finger and tapped the doll on the head with it.

There was a faint burst of the scent of old battlegrounds, steeped in bloody mud. A tiny voice said, “Don’t cheat and don’t lie, or if you do I’ll have your eye.”

“Cool,” Zal said approvingly. Whatever else he was, the faery was a good Maker, and Making was one of the most difficult of any magical art. He watched the black faery’s hands shuffle the cards and the tiny Hoodoo doll sat down to wait.

Malachi shuffled the deck, his fingers moving in a blur, the cards shifting like water, in and out, round about. He dealt two and put the rest aside. Zal studied his cards with a nonchalant air. Queen of Spades, King of Diamonds. The faery glanced at his and waited.

“Impersonal noninteresting,” Zal said, beginning with the obligatory stake of the lowest and least worthwhile kind of question.

“Impersonal interesting,” Malachi said, raising him two instantly. The faery watched him closely.

Zal shrugged and yawned. “Impersonal interesting,” he said, matching the stake.

Malachi dealt two cards on the table face up. Three of clubs. Nine of spades.

Zal felt a certain kind of sinking but strove to distance himself from it. He knew that everyone betrayed themselves but experienced liars only betrayed themselves to a practised eye that knew them and Malachi did not know him well enough. “Impersonal sensitive,” he said.

“Impersonal sensitive,” Malachi matched. He silently dealt out a third card.

“Impersonal acute,” Zal said automatically, always geared to risk. He looked at the card afterwards: ten of hearts.

“Impersonal acute.” The sixth card appeared.

Zal suspected the worst. They showed their hands.

“You had nothing,” Malachi said with satisfaction showing a ten and a nine; two pairs. “So, should we tell the humans about the Others, do you think?”

“Nah,” Zal said, gathering the cards up with a sigh and shuffling them himself. As he did so he watched the faery with considerably more curiosity than he had previously felt. How curious that Malachi would bring up such a taboo on the very first play . . . and something so apparently unconnected to his immediate concern. Zal added with some conviction, “They’d only worry unnecessarily and they have a lot of worries to get on with just through learning to know us in our least troublesome forms. Let’s not go that far just yet.”

“Mmn,” Malachi said critically. “I thought so too. Deal.”

Zal dealt with exact care and wondered if Malachi would take his word. In the faery world any of its ambassadors abroad might assume the diplomatic powers of the queen. Malachi did not only speak for himself, but for the entire universe he represented, even in minor dealings with a mere ex-agent like Zal, and his pronouncements had the force of law. It seemed a marvellously stupid arrangement of whimsical tyranny to Zal, but there it was. The faeries would not divulge a whisper about the Others to any human from now on. Zal was not sure that the humans really understood this feature about faeries or they would not treat them as powerless citizens so often. Still, buyer beware.

They played another round cautiously. Zal asked Malachi if there were remote activation codes for Lila’s AI-managed abilities, codes which might override her own will. He had worried about this a lot, particularly as he grew to understand how little Lila herself knew about the way she was made. To his great irritation she did not seem to care, whereas he burned with suspicion.

Malachi lounged in his seat, idly spraying a waterfall of cards from one hand to the other. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it does seem like something that would exist.”

“Lila wasn’t made anew to save her life,” Zal stated and the faery nodded slowly. “And if I made her I’d be sure to have some kind of insurance on my investment. Know why she was made, really?”

The Hoodoo doll sighed and said, “Rule violation. Do you really think it’s worth it, elf? Left or right eye? Hurry up, I’m not going to last all day.”

Malachi gave a broad smile and an expansive shrug. “Bet me for it.”

“Bah!” said the doll, disappointed.

Zal sighed. They played again. Zal got a five and a nine on the original deal and things never improved. He lost. Malachi had made impersonal extreme importance.

“What are you attempting to do to the people of this realm, through your music?” Malachi asked.

“No circumlocutions,” the doll snapped, still annoyed. “I can detect prevarication and dissembling at forty paces.”

“That’s not impersonal,” Zal said.

Malachi looked at the grass doll.

“Sadly, he is correct,” the Hoodoo confirmed, rustling. “And you’ve lost your go.”

“So, not a state matter. Not a Daga matter . . .” Malachi said, watching Zal scoop up the cards as he privately cancelled his long list of possible activities that the Jayon Daga, the elven security agency, might have been attempting through Zal. Since the outbreak of the civil war in Alfheim it was a mystery as to whose allegiance lay where. He had doubted the claim that Zal was Charming with his voice but now he wondered what it could be for. Money, fame, what?

The questions that followed took three more hours to play for.

Zal won an impersonal acute. “Who are you really investigating me for?”

“Human security and faery interests. And Lila’s interests are something I feel I have to look out for, inside the agency, her family, her partners . . .” Malachi gave Zal a long direct stare. “I don’t know if I think you’re such a great choice. You probably push every button she has and a few more. If there was a more unreliable character in the seven realms I find I can’t recall the name. Hardly what I’d call supportive material.”

Zal felt his hackles rise. He was not sure if Malachi was taunting him or interested in Lila for himself but he knew that Malachi could use influence with the agency to do pretty much anything he liked in terms of getting Zal incarcerated or exiled or whatever. He didn’t like the threat. “Stay out of it.”

“Unlikely,” the faery said and dealt the next hand.

Malachi won personal minor. “Do you love her?”

“It’s not minor,” Zal said.

Malachi looked to the Hoodoo doll.

“Have another try,” it said.

“That’s cheating,” Zal replied angrily. “That was a critical answer for a minor stake, and he gets another go?”

“Sue me, or offer me a limb,” the doll snapped testily.

“Are you truly demonic in nature?”

“Yes,” Zal said coldly.

The Hoodoo doll got up and began to shimmy with power.

“And no,” Zal said, feeling a stabbing pain in his right eye.

It sat down again.

Malachi raised an eyebrow.

He won again. “What’s your next single to be?”

“Disco Inferno,” Zal said without a flicker of irony.

“Do you not feel that’s selling out?”

“What am I, chopped liver?” the Hoodoo doll piped. “No extras. Faery eyes are as good as elf eyes any day of the week . . . better for some purposes. They last longer too, before they rot to mush.”

Zal smiled with half his mouth. It wasn’t a look Malachi really liked.

“I’m doing it with my sister,” Zal added in an ambiguous tone of voice.

“I heard that from the brownies,” Malachi said smoothly, “but I didn’t believe it.”

Zal dealt. Zal won.

“How many deep ambient faultlines have you found in Faery since the human bomb?” Zal asked.

The faery’s jet black face darkened in expression and for a moment its fine lines, smooth angles, and handsome features shifted into something at once more animal and strange. Zal had just assumed Malachi would be some kind of cat-spirit with his style and manners, but that was not what he saw in the form that revealed itself for an instant as the faery’s surprise beat his wit. He couldn’t have said what Malachi was, not that every faery wasn’t always faking something up for the sake of it and, as usual, that pissed him off. He listened to Malachi’s answer with a bad humour.

“There are six,” the faery said.

“An unstable number,” Zal remarked.

Malachi gave the slightest nod.

Zal shrugged, “There are nine in Alfheim, far as I know. Even less stable.”

The Hoodoo doll attempted to shake its head with disgust and fell over onto its side with a tiny, silent bounce.

Malachi conjured a vesper sprite with a wave of his fingers and sent it around the room, looking for bugs or telltales. When it returned and vanished he added, “Demonia has eight. And lucky old Earth has a hundred and nine. Mostly minor. So far. We haven’t really finished counting.”

Zal was privately astonished but he didn’t show it.

“They grow like weeds here. Spread like lines on a crone’s face come winter, and all the while in our old countries they creep on slow as ice marching, but still, creeping and listening to the whisper from the new land that talks of shredding and decay and the sundering of things to chaos. Ssssss, the web of the worlds undoing like silk slip-sliding and nothing to stop it yet,” the faery said matter-of-factly as he collected the cards, shuffled, and dealt.

“Fucking indignity,” the Hoodoo doll squeaked, “you don’t understand or respect my powers, you imbeciles!” If it had had a fist it would have shook it.

Malachi set it upright again and it quivered with unexpressed feelings.

“It’s nothing personal,” Zal said to it.

“Save it for someone who cares,” the doll hissed. “I’m drying out.”

Zal walked across to the suite bar, opened the refrigerator, located ice, cracked it into a tumbler, poured scotch on it, and then set it down on the table. He lifted the doll by its head and put it into the glass.

The doll snickered and leaned back as though in a jacuzzi. “Take your time, boys.”

This time Malachi took the cards and shuffled and did not deal. “I’m worried about Lila,” he said. “I think she’s cracking up.”