Teazle’s nostrils flared in disapproval; he had a demon’s typical taste for gore. The tip of his long, lilac tongue flickered briefly against his lips. He gave Zal a dismissive glance. ‘I suppose you can walk?’
Zal slithered off the bed, only his natural athleticism saving him from a bounce onto hands and knees. He gathered himself and walked reasonably well towards the bath. ‘Like I’d been doing it all my life.’ He bashed Teazle’s shoulder with his own, slightly higher one, in passing and left a smear of tacky coagulated blood on the pristine tunic. Their faces were close enough to have touched, but they angled away from one another, eyes downcast, snorting and growling with a soft tone that only Lila’s exaggerated hearing could have caught. She saw them inhale one another’s breath to take the measure of their condition and then Zal had reeled lightly into the bathroom on his toes, dancing as he shed his clothes in piles on the floor, and she was left with Teazle brooding at her.
‘I didn’t know you two were cosy,’ she said, watching him so closely, but even so she didn’t see the movement as he crossed the few metres between them. One second he was there, the next he was beside her, his hand sliding under the dress’s deep scooped back onto her buttock.
‘You are in great danger,’ he murmured softly, his breath warm on her ear. ‘I feel your instability. I can taste its slow changes. You are weakening. Your anger fades and with it your discipline is fading. Sadness eats your resolve. Grief wounds you. Your need for control saps your strength. You are bleeding into the water. I smell you everywhere. Zal knows – the part of him that’s demon and the elf too. We have spoken. Our mark will protect you. Not for long though. Take it or leave it. Without it you will fall to the hungering darkness that surrounds you. Its claws are deep in you already. What elves call Sleeper. There it is. Lila, I would not see you fall, yet I would stop you and cannot. All I can do . . .’ His fingers caressed her skin lightly at the edge of the high collar she wore but he didn’t finish the sentence.
She’d been naked with him before, a lot, but now she felt more so, even with the robe still on. It was intimate, and that was new for them.
‘You exaggerate.’ She put her hand up and it served to hold the dress in place at her chest although it caught his hand beneath. His skin was cool and soft. He leaned in towards her readily as her hand touched him with an eagerness that sent a jolt through her. She felt heat rising in him.
‘All this talk,’ she said, in an effort to deflect him – a foolish effort because it wasn’t entirely sincere. ‘As if you were my imp.’ Her attempts to become, in his words, immaculate, kept falling over their feet. An imp would keep score. They always knew who was strongest in magic, or in spirit, or where your energy was going, into what locked circles of the mind. She was prey to Teazle and his kind now, kill them as she did. She might slay them all, but she was on the back foot and they knew it. Teazle was trying to tell her how much worse this would be with Ilya, and she felt that he was honest, even though Teazle’s method was seduction and his intent clear.
‘What I am can’t be helped,’ he replied, his lips brushing her forehead at the hairline. He slid his hand free at her neckline and cupped her breast in his hand. His breath deepened. ‘Nor who you are. I know this and still I return to you. Faith drives me. I am not free. The marriage was a legal device. The bond is a bigger game.’ She knew that she didn’t appreciate the difficulty he had in saying this to her, and that is why he could say it, because she was no demon to spring into all the openings that it presented. He was a fighter, and this was the equivalent of him laying down all his weapons and declaring himself handicapped.
On her breast his fingers were supple as he stroked her. She loved his touch. It was like Zal’s. They shared the same directness and self-command. They knew who they were and what they were doing. She envied that with a strange hunger that prevented her from saying no to this new binding between them. She would have eaten them both if their wholeness were something that could be got that way – and with a shiver of surprise she realised this was exactly what they were proposing. Their energy could lift her above self-doubt for a while.
It was a user’s fix, a crutch. For demons to offer it to another demon would have been sufficient insult to start a war. But she didn’t count herself demon. Shame flickered in her nonetheless. Her walks in the demon world had always had more front than a luxury department store, and about as much depth. She was a penitent here and the priests were offering her a brief burst of respite through possession. The strangeness of this hit her, an exotic intoxication, a sudden jolt of vision switched through one hundred and eighty degrees so that she saw her usual comfort around them as a foolish illusion of a creature spellbound in the glamour. Vertigo made her falter on her feet.
Teazle’s lips brushed her cheek close to her mouth. ‘It is good you react so readily to us. Already you begin to see.’
She looked up into the pale lights of his eyes; doors open into heaven. She dared honesty, for a moment, feeling that she stepped into nowhere. ‘The more of you the less of me. I’m afraid I will drown in you. In Zal. It’s what I wanted.’
‘Nothing can touch you unless you agree,’ Teazle said, the movements of his lips kisses on her temple and across her forehead.
‘But I want to agree,’ she said.
His gaze flicked back to meet hers and she saw movement in the fire that lit it from the world behind them. His mouth was slightly open, lips full. The breath from his nostrils bathed her face with animal warmth. ‘Then you are indeed in the greatest danger from your old friend.’ His body was tensing up to contain something.
She looked into the light. ‘And you?’
He exhaled slowly. ‘It calls to me.’ He kissed her mouth very gently. ‘Through you and your abilities, think what I could become . . . But I am the master. And . . . ’ He kissed her again with a tenderness she couldn’t reconcile with him at all. It disarmed her, confused her and tripped her up so that when he did finish this line she finally understood the meaning of something he’d said to her often. ‘I’m your dog.’
She’d thought he was joking.
He smiled, a cold expression directed at himself. ‘What a filthy secret for a demon, wouldn’t you say?’
She put her hand to his face and felt the hard bone under the muscles and skin. She felt, with all of her senses, the beginnings of its shift in form from man to demon. It was constantly beginning, being suppressed. She opened her mouth to speak but he was already shaking his head.
‘Better I am a man for you now. You’re too quick to rush into your sleeping darkness, Lila.’
His forbearance touched her the most. She put her arms around his neck. The dress fell around her ankles and she felt his long, soft hair tickle across her shoulders and neck.
Zal came through the door, naked and rubbing his head with a towel, transformed from fool to the rock star’s sanguine cockiness, as though water and soap had been enough to wash off everything and return him to the figure she remembered when they first met. His tread was strong and sure, not a trace of poison in its conviction as he came to them. The dark flow of his shadow body was integrated into his skin, giving him the metal-in-oil look she was getting used to, but at the same time she saw it was necessary – a kind of fortification. His physical body was evanescent; it was beginning to fade, losing matter. Anxiety for him fought with her attraction and admiration and won. He was so damn slender.
He showed no concern for himself as he draped the towel on Teazle’s shoulder, turning him away from Lila so that the two of them faced each other. ‘Take off the shades,’ he said. ‘Pump me up.’
Lila’s eyebrows were raised so far they were nearly in the roof. She was more surprised when Teazle actually pushed her behind him, saying, ‘Close your eyes.’
She had an inkling of what was going to happen but she was almost too slow. The light shock made her stagger backwards, body convulsing on itself in an effort to reduce exposure as Teazle let the searing radiance from h
is eyes pour onto Zal’s naked skin. For a few seconds she was blinded in all her senses as systems shut down and then, as the cascade of failures built up she lost contact altogether and found herself conscious but unable to perceive anything other than that she was still alive. There wasn’t even darkness. There was nothing.
Slowly, painfully slowly, things came back. Out of a half-second blackout she discovered her body was still there, lying on the floor. Something like dust covered her. She wanted to brush it off long before she could move. Then she felt herself being lifted and the vibration of the men’s voices like a report of distant weather. She was moved and brushed over, the dust gone. Then she felt how hot she was and knew that if she’d been an ordinary human she’d be burned.
Hearing returned with sudden, total clarity.
‘It does qualify as fire, then,’ Teazle was saying nearby.
‘Apparently so.’ Zal, much closer. ‘But next time there’s no need to overdo it.’
Teazle laughed. ‘You’re my bitch now, elf.’
‘I don’t think I swing that far,’ Zal replied.
Lila felt herself swaying, but that was replaced quickly as her orientation found gravity. Everything came together rapidly after that until only the emotional shock was left. She opened her eyes and saw that except for several shadowed spots in the shape of their bodies every surface in the room had been turned to ash. Flakes of it fell from her eyelashes and lips as she tried to say, ‘What happened?’ and stopped before she started.
Zal was standing in front of her, holding her up by the shoulders. His grip was faultless but this wasn’t what silenced her. He had become as solid as the demon behind him, a fully fleshed and healthy creature, brimming with energy, as vital as the moment before Jack the Giantkiller had crushed all but the life out of him. His andalune moved around him, a confident ten centimetres above the surface of his skin and extended into transparent black flames shot with yellow and orange lights that grew over his shoulders into two vaned wings that spanned the room from wall to wall. Their slightest movement caused whirls and eddies of white ash to rise.
He smiled into her speechlessness. At his throat the demon sting was no more than a fading mark the size of a small coin. ‘Lila? Are you all right?’
She was, though she had to take an inventory to feel confident about it. ‘What happened to you?’ She looked around Zal to Teazle who was glowing, his expression smug. ‘Did you . . . supercharge him? How?’
‘I have fire affinity,’ Zal said. ‘Part of my aetheric nature, which Jack couldn’t take away. Teazle has inner fire.’
‘Oh yeah,’ she said, nodding. ‘That explains it completely. I’ll file it under Closed Cases.’
‘Aether can become matter, temporarily,’ Teazle said. ‘Unfortunately it isn’t permanent. Any fire would do.’
‘Inner fire?’
‘He’s an angel,’ Zal said, as though this were obvious and uninteresting. ‘Their eyes are the windows onto the light of creation blah de blah etcetera.’
‘Yeah,’ she said again, with elaborate emphasis, ‘I knew that. Everyone knows that. Demons are angels. Primary school stuff.’ She glanced at Teazle. He looked amused.
‘Oh he’s still a demon,’ Zal said, slowly releasing his hold as though he were afraid she was going to fall over without his help. ‘Angel is the ascended form.’
‘I thought angels were bound to serve god, or whoever, without will of their own.’
Teazle shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. There is only one will and it feels very much like mine.’
‘From a threesome to barfly theology in less than two minutes,’ Lila said, looking around to help herself acclimatise. ‘That’s some going.’ She became aware of the distances between them – a metre to Zal, one between him and Teazle. The emotional gap had widened too, the intimacy of a moment before crisped to nothing. She searched their faces for signs, saw that they were waiting for her to settle into one response or another. For the first time since she’d known them she felt the balance between them shift into a position of equals, a triangle of even sides.
‘Now I’m lost,’ she said and ran her hands through her hair. Ash flittered down. ‘But I don’t want to be the one who’s helped. I don’t like it. That’s the world on a wrong axis.’
‘Do you want to bet your life on it?’ Zal asked.
She thought it through, said finally, uncertainly, ‘Ilya wouldn’t really kill me.’
They glanced at each other. None of them were what they had been.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lila thought of armour; knights in plate, infantrymen in mail, leather-strapped gladiators testing their range, textile flak jackets full of smart gel, being cheerful when you were sad all through, your smile deflecting every threatened sympathy like a shield of shiny happiness. As she thought, her hands worked, the tips of her fingers pulling and stretching, rubbing and smoothing as she spun strands of what appeared to be metallic cloth out of her skin.
She didn’t do it in front of the demons. She sat in the bathroom on the toilet lid and worked silently. She could remember Zal’s measures in perfect detail and enough elven manuscripts from the archives that she could copy a typical Jayon combat harness down to the last buckle and glyph. Her glyphs were not magical however, they were forgeries without power. The power was in the harness itself. It was her clone.
When she was done she held it up and looked it over. As an afterthought she fashioned a dagger for the belt. Then it seemed finished to her. She put it down and looked for the last time at her arms and hands before she got dressed. She couldn’t stop looking ever since she’d got out of bed and noticed what her husbands had done for her.
The demon marks ran in her skin in networks of tiny fire, markings in an ancient script of simple dashes and crosses. They flowed in chaotic rushes, met, diverged, dissolved, blossomed and died. She could feel their effect, a kind of precision constant tuning to frequencies and melodies that the machine could not reach on its own. The script talked her into calm. She was the eye of a strange storm.
The demon data networks were full of designs. She picked some out and reprocessed her usual black body armour and military fatigues through their ideas. Bigger boots and gloves were in, gleaming leather zipped up the neck in high collars, plate inserts made to look like they had been ripped off the bodies of monsters. She toned it down and resized it, checked her hair, got distracted when she realised she could put any colour she liked anywhere on her face, then settled on red lips, bigger blacker eyelashes and pink cheek tints.
Then she took the harness back into the bedroom and stood for a moment watching Zal and Teazle sleep. Their efforts had exhausted them. She wasn’t about to wake them while she was running on their donated powers. She left the harness lying on the end of the bed and glanced at the white demon’s face.
He was chalky and ordinary looking, like a tired human man taking a nap at the end of a hard day’s labour. She wanted to leave something for him but she couldn’t think of anything. In the end she bent over him and left a kiss on his cheek. He didn’t stir.
On the way out she caught sight of herself in one of the many vanity mirrors and stopped. It wasn’t beauty that snagged her. It was that, for an instant, she’d thought it was a painting moving because the figure seen from the corner of her eye had a resolute, confident stride, so determined and forceful that it had triggered her combat protocols before she realised it was herself. The lipstick and the red shock in her hair stood out lividly against the ash-white dust of the room.
She knew then that she could do anything. The notion filled her with a cautious sadness. Without limitation whatever borders she ran up against would be her own. Surely this is what Teazle had intended for her to understand and what Zal had ever understood. She wondered if she could die.
Out on the causeways around the house the demons of the canal traders and the mansion servants were entangled in the day’s
bargaining, waves of colour moving through them in ripples of emotion that she could read as easily as the day’s papers. There was an under-current of tension in the city, a strip of violet blue, grey with the load of uncertainty it carried. She felt it everywhere, even on the main promenades where the Maha were gathered for the day’s combat of beauty and wit, talent and chutzpah. The ones who still recognised her got out of her way and the others followed. She got attention, but no challenges. Instead, a resentful deference ensured that her way was clear. She was followed, until she turned and offered a fight. Then, miraculously, the streets were empty.
The way into Madame’s old house was simple. Lila didn’t have the keys, but she made them and opened the locks. Teazle had bought the property and left it empty, knowing what it protected. It was maintained as though it was occupied by a small group of servants he paid to watch over it, though nothing had changed since Madame Des Loupes had abandoned it decades before, perhaps through a vision of what would happen there. In one of the living rooms she found a large throw of woven silk, thick and heavy. She pulled it off the chaise it was adorning and threw it over her shoulder before following the way through the halls to the place where the secret door waited. In a moment she had opened it and went down into the dark, dank tunnels of the labyrinth.
The mirror chamber was as they had left it too – crowded with the stone remains of demons who had stumbled here searching for treasure only to be unfortunate enough to find themselves looking into the chamber’s sole and very particular treasure; the Mirror of Dreams. Even in total darkness the mirror had the power to suck the beholder out of their body and into the potentially endless mind-scapes within. Lila knew it well, hence the throw.
She moved between the stone figures – unlike normal demon statues these were genuinely empty, having no spirits left to be imprisoned within for the ages of their deaths – and eased in reverse up to the mirror’s majestic span. It took a few moments of careful work and jigging around but she was finally able to cover its face completely with the cloth and secure it to her satisfaction so that it wouldn’t fall by accident, but a good yank from either corner would get it off easily.
Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Page 28