Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  ‘. . . and a few million in the bank they don’t want to give you, you being officially dead. And I’m hanging around waiting for something to happen and trying to prevent Xavi getting any worse, which is hardly a mission.’

  Zal scowled at him. ‘Yes, when you’re here. Otherwise you’re shacked up with Jack’s wife, getting the benefits of spring and summer Green-man duties, and licking the cream off your whiskers. The last thing you want is for something to spoil that. But carry on.’

  Malachi scowled back. ‘Xaviendra is a mystery, but there’s no way I’d trust her to be out for anyone but herself. Ilyatath is indisposed as the Winter King until further notice, not that he can leave Winter. And Max is . . .’ Now he faltered and glanced at Lila cautiously, his mouth still half open in mid-sentence.

  ‘Max is undead, unemployed and unhappy about both of those things. End of,’ Lila said for him, moving her hand to her belly to ease a biting pain. ‘And you forgot Tatters,’ she brushed the ruffle of the blue and lilac ra-ra skirt that was sitting on her hips over the top of her biker’s leather trousers.

  Malachi glanced at the cloth faery and then quickly away, making a small sign of warding that everyone noticed and nobody commented on. ‘Tatters is as she is,’ he said with uncharacteristic vagueness.

  ‘And your point is?’ Teazle drawled, stretching his legs until one of the joints popped.

  ‘My point is that we don’t add up to much, countering Zal’s point that we add up to a hundred per cent and Xavi’s point that we are here as we are because of a rising dragon. Which is, incidentally also her theory for the state of the worlds ever since the cracking began. That’s several millennia by anyone’s calendar, so in summary, it’s hardly news.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s a rising dragon’s fart,’ Teazle said.

  Zal laughed. ‘No no, Ragnarok, like the press all say. Or Armageddon. The End-Times.’

  ‘Ragnageddon,’ Xaviendra’s voice said with withering contempt from the floor.

  ‘See, the resident speaker of prophecies says so,’ Zal said, peering to be sure that Xaviendra wasn’t about to be sick on his boots.

  ‘And all because of a few returning dead,’ Lila said with a shrug and mock exasperation. ‘And a few breakdowns in physical material laws here and there, and the inexplicable leakages, timepits and etceteras that have all appeared in the last fifty years, dated to within a few hours of the opening of Under. God, what a bunch of frothing exaggerators.’

  ‘Armarok,’ Xaviendra intoned as if playing the narrator in a school drama production.

  ‘Shazbat,’ Teazle said, sighing with longing.

  Lila sighed. ‘You’re missing the obvious.’ Her pleasant merry fug of tipsiness had dispersed as this occurred to her. ‘We were all united by Night’s Mantle when I wrote in that journal.’

  ‘I didn’t understand that part,’ Zal said. ‘Was Night the pen itself?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lila said. ‘And Night was the first dragon, out of which all the others sprang.’

  ‘They killed her in doing so,’ Teazle said. ‘The sisters, Zal, the daughters of Night, those ladies who kept you at their disposal doing bin duty and minding the cat. It was them, wasn’t it? Those faery ones?’

  Zal nodded.

  ‘Night can’t be killed, she was only sundered,’ Malachi corrected him in a grumpy, unhappy tone. ‘She’s in pieces, abstracted, objectified, separated, whatever, but she ain’t gone. She is the sum total. She is the system. She just doesn’t exist as a whole being any more.’

  ‘Did the faeries come from dragons then?’ Teazle scratched his head and examined his nails for findings.

  ‘Not like oaks from acorns,’ Malachi had to get up and turn around three times before he sat down again, looking pained as he made a variety of distracting signs with his hands in an effort to diffuse the aetheric vortices that gathered anytime anyone mentioned the faeries directly. ‘Please don’t discuss this in open air. It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Mmraah,’ Teazle said, which was a kind of apology, and sliced a hole in the rug with the nail on his forefinger. ‘I don’t mind being a dragon or part of one. It sounds like there’ll be fighting.’

  Lila took a long drink to try and quell a moment of severe stomach pain. ‘But I don’t get how this leads to divorce, Zal.’

  She leaned back on him and turned her face briefly into the curve between his neck and collarbone. She knew they all joked about the marriage being a sham anywhere except Demonia and that it was a convenience of state for Teazle and Zal, not the kind of white dress and romance life match that was the Otopian myth of weddings. But somewhere inside her she was deeply attached to it and she disliked any notion of separation from Zal even though he didn’t seem to be talking about an emotional divide.

  ‘That’s very simple,’ he said. ‘Whenever we’re together major shit goes down that threatens our lives. We should split up just to survive. At least if we got a divorce then that would nix the demon interest in us and that would be a good thirty per cent drop in the trouble.’

  ‘You’re very mathematical,’ Malachi told him. ‘Not like you at all.’

  ‘It’s the beer,’ Zal said. ‘And I want to live. Anything that ups the odds in my favour, that’s good. Dragons are not good in this case. They’re bad. They’re like a big neon sign saying Trouble This Way. Is this why the faeries created Under, to keep this stuff away?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Malachi said quickly, glaring daggers. ‘There might’ve been another reason.’

  Zal stared at him. They were well used to each other’s different forms of lying. ‘Yuh huh. The Queen’s Magic, I heard.’

  ‘Yeah!’ Malachi said, smiling a salesman’s smile.

  ‘I don’t understand fey,’ Teazle grumbled, resting his head on his crossed hands. ‘You wan’ it, you don’ wan’ it. You like it, you don’ like it. All at the same time.’

  ‘Yes,’ Malachi said with relief, as though he had found an unexpected soulmate. ‘Yes, that’s exactly it.’

  Teazle sighed heavily. ‘I’ll divorce ya, Zal. Way I see things going I’ll only become a threat anyway.’ He said this in a matter-of-fact way, with some regret in his tone. Another long sigh shrank his ribs and flattened his body to the floor. He stared morosely at the cooler. ‘And you, Lila,’ he added. ‘You’re free to go.’

  And just like that there it was, all done. Say married to a demon and you were. Say not and you weren’t. A word was all it took.

  For a moment silence rang through the room and made it seem smaller and grubbier than ever before. Lila felt there should be more to say and do, some fall in the weather to mark the shattering feeling in her solar plexus. She glanced at Zal and saw him look abruptly nothing more than tired, old. Teazle sighed a heavy sigh. His eyes were on Zal, she saw, watching him with something like regret.

  Lila’s heart sank. ‘Teaze,’ she said, but was unable to say any more. It was so unlike him to be down about anything, it felt completely wrong, as if the world had got a loose screw. She consoled herself with the excuse that probably he was regretting his loss of status and command in Demonia, but another part of her knew that wasn’t true. Teazle would have scorned the idea that he ever needed more than he already possessed. She and Zal had been a temporary kind of truce that worked to cover a bad political moment in history and that was all.

  Anxiety gnawed her and for a second the pain in her stomach made her speechless. Teazle’s arrogance was the rock she’d clung to in Zal’s absence, when Malachi chided her, when she’d felt herself falling to bits in the horrible days of their return. When the machines had whispered to her so much she felt they intended to drive her insane, Teazle’s body and willing lust had been there to anchor her. Since Zal was back that part of their relationship had been put aside but it wasn’t finished, merely suspended. She had wondered what it meant to him, but hadn’t asked. She felt it would be weak of her, and the bond itself was already one in which her position was inferior so she could not risk giving him
more power over her. In a human world this would have mattered much less. In a demon one it could lead to nasty things and that was why now, when she wanted to go and touch him and affirm something that felt threatened, she stayed in Zal’s lap, immersed in the sensitive shadow of Zal’s aetheric body, and watched the demon without speaking.

  ‘Hm, didn’t expect that,’ Malachi said after a while had passed. ‘I wish I thought it was worthwhile but I fear you might have bought more trouble, not less now.’

  He stood up and for an instant his body glittered as his moth aspect fluttered its wings and coal dust filled the air around him, turning and sparkling as it whirled into the familiar runes that would port him away. ‘To Faery with me. I see you all, adieu, anon. Rest well.’ He bowed, smiled and with a flourish of his hand turned to walk away and vanished around an unseen corner.

  ‘Goodnight!’ sang out Xavi’s voice from the floor, as sunny in disposition as she was not.

  Zal jumped. ‘I wish she wouldn’t do that.’ He put his half-finished beer back on top of the cooler. He looked at Teazle with misgivings.

  The demon looked back and Lila saw some kind of communication passing between them that she couldn’t understand.

  ‘Is that it?’ she asked. ‘We’re through?’

  Teazle’s head swung to her and he nodded. ‘You’re free of me, free of Demonia.’ His expression was inscrutable now though she tried hard to see into it. His face was set. ‘You wanted it.’

  And there was nothing she could say to that. She looked down, pushing the force of everything that was bursting her heart and which she didn’t understand down onto the sleeping elf. She had wanted it. Wanted things to be more simple. Now she had this and her insides were screaming that they didn’t want it at all and it made no sense to her. Tears flooded her eyes so that she had to turn her head from them both.

  ‘I should put her back, we can’t fall asleep here with her like that,’ Lila said, using her AI to subvert all her natural reactions and replace them with steady confidence. Above all she had to get out of that moment and move into the next. Any movement would do, so she wouldn’t have to ask Teazle if he was going now, if Zal was going now, if there was nothing left to keep them there now that the bond was broken. It helped not a bit that the two men seemed far less affected, almost as if it happened every day.

  She got up and went to stand over Xavi, wondering if she really was asleep or was pretending. The thing about Xavi was that she was new to them, and a daughter of someone they had learned to be far from the simple elf he had made out to be. They didn’t know her or what she was capable of.

  Teazle looked over at Xaviendra. In the light of his eyes they were all able to see her clearly but she made no move to indicate she was anything other than unconscious. Her mouth was open and she was snoring lightly. ‘I don’t trust her,’ Teazle said, his tone much less drunk and more thoughtful than had seemed possible a short while ago.

  ‘Having your life threatened by someone can do that to you,’ Lila said.

  ‘No, it isn’t that,’ the demon smiled. ‘She’s no threat to me whatever she may have thought. I can’t pin down what bothers me but I feel bothered, when I look at the two of you and her with you. On the surface we know her story but only what she has chosen to tell. It’s what she hasn’t said that itches my spirit.’

  ‘Think she’s dangerous?’ Zal asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Teazle replied.

  Zal frowned and his expression was very sad. ‘She is a creation of a very bad moment in elven history. Possibly the sole survivor of that time.’

  ‘All the shadowkin come from that time, though, right?’ Lila asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Zal said, ‘but the ones alive today, including me, are the descendants of the originals and a lot of us are half-breeds or some mix of shadow and light. She looks so young.’

  ‘Heh, and not like a badass raptor on speed either,’ Teazle said, referring to the Saaqaa, shadowkin elves who had been spawned far from their geneline and who were less elf and more of what they had been forcibly crossed with.

  Of those beings who had provided the non-elf material nobody was able to say very much, because they knew nothing about it. Xaviendra was the only one who would know, and she had stolidly refused to speak of it. This was one of the reasons for her permanent imprisonment within the containment of the maximum security cells at the Agency. They wanted her where they could see her, close at hand.

  Lila repressed a shiver. ‘She can hear you.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ the demon said. ‘I’d say it to her face.’

  But to Lila it seemed unfair, as if they were talking behind her back. At the same time, she felt an unerring curiosity prompting her to demand answers from Xavi while her conscious mind was apparently incapacitated and thus unable to stop her from replying.

  Zal beat her to it in any case. ‘Xaviendra,’ he said. ‘At the time you were made, what did they use to change you?’

  Xavi replied with a piglike snort and rolled onto her back, sending bottles rolling and chinking. ‘Elementals,’ she said. ‘And ektaluni.’ Here she used a word that none of them knew.

  ‘What’s that?’ Teazle asked.

  ‘Primal spirits,’ Xavi said.

  ‘Where from?’ Lila tried to get more information as this wasn’t helpful.

  ‘Phantoms,’ Xavi replied with the exaggerated patience of someone explaining basic material to lazy students. ‘They are a form of ghost, but a form generated by the application of disciplined and focused consciousness to the raw aether of the Void rather than random accretions formed by the natural processes of mnemonic evolution within the nonmaterial planes.’

  Teazle made a face. ‘Demons are made in a similar way at the moment of their conception.’ He glanced speculatively at Zal. ‘And here you are, elf in blood and demon by spirit. No accident that.’

  ‘My mother certainly thought it wasn’t,’ Zal said. ‘Though she never told me all the details. But why did the elves do it at all?’

  ‘They were under attack,’ Xaviendra said, smacking her lips as she settled down again. This above all made Lila convinced that she wasn’t faking the sleep. Xavi was fastidious and had impeccable manners, the sort that would persist through death rather than reveal anything other than someone in perfect self-control.

  ‘From what?’ Teazle’s tail lifted, cobralike, and swayed as he waited for the answer.

  ‘The sleeper within,’ Xavi said and abruptly rolled to her side and curled up again, hands tucked under her chin like a child. She frowned briefly and shivered before falling into a deeper kind of sleep; softness overtook her.

  As one they turned away to leave her in peace. Lila glanced at Teazle but he shrugged – he had no idea what that last phrase meant.

  Zal shook his head. ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘I thought you guys kept impeccable records,’ Teazle said.

  ‘Maybe, but we also had impeccable rewriting skills,’ Zal replied, ‘and our propaganda services were second to none. Until I found Friday back in Zoomenon all the elves I know thought the shadowkin were a naturally occurring race and not a genocidal experiment. They were made a long, long time ago.’

  ‘Still,’ Lila said. ‘It must have been one hell of a threat to do what they did.’ She felt even less comfortable with the idea than she had two minutes ago, before Xavi had put this strange label on the cause.

  ‘Or a hell of an opportunity,’ Teazle said, relaxing to roll on his back again. ‘Mages’ll fuck with anything for power. Elves doubly so. Gzzz, I feel sleepy. This beer is useless.’

  ‘I’ll take her back,’ said Lila, cancelling the effects of the alcohol on her system with a filter. She bent down and gathered the light form of the elf into her arms as unwelcome sobriety set in. She heard herself ask, ‘Are you sticking around?’ And then she felt so off balance that she almost staggered and had to fight to keep her feet.

  Teazle glanced at Zal and their gazes locked for a second, then got up
slowly. ‘I’ll take a rain check.’ He shook out his thick mane of white hair and composed himself, standing tall with his chin lowered in a manner Lila recognised as being his pre-teleport orientation. He looked at her, his gaze blazing. His nostrils flared for a moment and she smelled brimstone and the psychoactive tang of his personal poison as he said, ‘Have to be a dog about a man.’

  ‘Where will you be?’ She hated herself for asking, hearing her voice crack on the last word.

  ‘I’ll check the dropbox,’ he said and she felt kicked in the gut once again. Then he gave the merest downward flick of his eyelids in Zal’s direction, baffling her entirely because she’d assumed his submission to Zal would end now there was no more need for them to fool around with who had the power. He vanished from Otopian space with the finality of a gunshot. The sharp crack retort of the air closing on his space made Xavi jolt.

  ‘Bad dog,’ she murmured, her head lolling against Lila’s leather-clad shoulder.

  ‘I’ll be here,’ Zal said, lying down flat on the rugs. The ink spill of his aether body shifted around him like a restless pool and where his fingers came into contact with the empty bottles he tapped out a brief rhythm.

  Lila swallowed down to prevent the hole in her chest opening any further and stooped to clear the yurt’s low-slung doorflap. Outside the night was cool and a faint drizzle was falling. She could hear the soft murmuring swish of the city, a breath instead of the roar she kept listening for and never finding.

  The whispers of the machine, which had haunted her a long time from the edges of her mind, were also absent these days. They’d translated into silent knowledge. It was this, and not her connection to the Agency’s powerful AI systems that made her back shiver with sudden cold as she walked towards the lit doorway of the building’s garden exit.

  Tightening her grip on Xavi’s ragdoll form she picked up speed, linking briefly to the building’s internal sensors. The doors opened for her, mechanisms spinning into reverse at her command as she approached because she would pass them before they were even fully open and she wanted them shut at her back. As they swung wide she began to run.