Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  ‘They’ll be here soon,’ Lila said urgently as Malachi dithered, silently wrestling with what he should do now.

  ‘Ah, that’s good, that’s good to know,’ he said, as if it was when it was anything but. Names to faces, he thought in a faery rede – a charm to pull hidden knowledge into the open – bones in their places; yes, I see. He would do what he could do, which wasn’t much. He could play for time. ‘Yes, of course I’ll come. Meet you there.’

  She nodded quickly and he heard the jets igniting, felt the rumble of them and the force of the airblast in his fur as she took off, arrowing quickly away into the twilight; a slight figure lost soon against the clouds.

  ‘Nemesis,’ he said to himself, picking the name that fit, the bone that he’d seen in its place. Nemesis it was that rode Lila now. ‘Yes, I am coming.’

  It had never in a million years occurred to him that Lila was not the opponent to a process, but the culmination of it. Even as this revelation had built to its climactic failure in the story of the Titans he’d thought she was a part of the resistance. But it looked as though heads had turned tails and maybe she was the Titan in its intended form. Without knowing the players, he could not say which of these two, if either, were true.

  Now Malachi wondered if Lila had just become the vessel of a being in the last moves of its own game – and whether that game was to fulfil the ancient geas or not. He racked his brains to remember who had told him the story. Was it a faery or an elf or a demon? Where had his information come from, and through how many mouths? How trickworthy was it, exactly? How credible was it?

  He was still searching for this vital detail as he dropped to all fours, ran around the nearest alley corner into the yards where the bins were kept, and slid into the form of absolute shadow. There he was able to connect from one darkness to the next and leap with the instantaneous connectivity of darkness to his desired location just beneath the locked and spellbound door of Sarasilien’s old/new offices in the heart of the abandoned Agency building. At least in this form there was no horrible trafficking with the Void in order to change form. He spread himself thinly in the millimetre-thin rectangle and considered.

  He reckoned he had two minutes on Lila but this remembering business was a struggle. Without flesh and bone memory swiftly unpicked itself. And then in the rooms beyond the door he heard the cyborg, Sandra Lane, uncharacteristically exultant.

  ‘At last! I have it . . .’

  And then the elf saying, ‘No need to give me all fifty years of it. Just the highlights.’

  Malachi figured that this meant Lane had cracked some or all of the Agency’s security controls and was scanning archives.

  There was a brief pause and then Lane said, ‘She was here. They held her in the aether cell. Xaviendra is the registry name. She left recently. To Alfheim.’

  ‘Alfheim?’ spoken with incredulity. ‘But why?’

  ‘She had no reason to think you were here.’

  ‘She would have known the moment she was out of the containment.’

  ‘Then it is a plan that does not immediately involve you.’

  ‘Rooks,’ the elf said wearily. There was a clinking sound of glass on glass, the neck of a carafe and the higher tone of a cup, then a gulp of something being drunk.

  ‘Sorry?’ The android had gone back to her flat affect.

  ‘Come home to roost. It is a metaphor for curses.’

  ‘The phrase commonly uses chickens as its . . .’

  ‘Not in Alfheim.’

  So, thought Malachi, he does know. They’re coming for him. Then there won’t be long to wait now.

  Zal didn’t sleep that night. He was used to the semi lightness of Otopia, and before that the strange halflight that persisted eternally at the edge of Under where the first weird sister’s house stood. Now it was so dark the sky looked like it was a black paper pricked with thousands of varying-sized holes through which a brilliant white light was shining. He could see his hand in front of his face only as a silhouette. Leaves splotched his vision with blank spaces. He drew strength from the dark as he’d drawn it from Tath’s fire on his return from Under and later at the diner. It reminded him of his father who had become twice as strong at night and ten times as fast.

  To the true shadowkin Zal was a nocturnally challenged idiot. He wasn’t sure that was still true. He hoped it wasn’t, because he could hear a lot of activity near the ground and it wasn’t all down to the night animals. A mindless shadowkin that was nothing but predatory wasn’t something he wanted to tangle with. The continuing absence of their signatures from the greater world andalune also bothered him. Even hunting creatures of the lowest kind had a clear presence in it. He could pinpoint elf activity because it had none, the worldly sounds not matched by patterns in the spiritform. Just as the leaves blotted the sky, they were blanks in the tapestry of the world. He should be grateful it made them so easy to avoid and himself so hard to detect, but he wasn’t grateful at all. He shared some of his thoughts with Lila and in response the harness spread and changed shape, flowing across the light shirt he wore and over his back, arms and legs. At his wrists and neck she made contact with his skin. He felt discomfort on the point where he’d been stung, and then a flash of lemon scent made his nose twitch and he sneezed.

  Fortunately nothing heard him. The clone was silent – he found it hard to think of it as Lila just because the shape was so wrong even though the sense of being held, even caressed, was so pleasing. She was also listening.

  For a long time he lay on his mat of branches and didn’t move. Then, as certain kinds of noises grew fewer and more distant he got up to get down (smiling involuntarily at the notion of himself as some kind of night soul demon) and after a moment or two of consideration of the wind and directions, he set off through the forest alone. Wrapped around his torso and limbs in blackened, silent platemail, the grown-out Lila clone rode him as a second skin.

  They were a long way from Delatra now. The cliffs were lost in the mountain range whose jagged teeth bit the sky at the horizon. Settlements in the boreal zone were more common but much smaller, threaded together by a variety of tiny paths. In such places hunters or gatherers might head out for weeks at a time on their rounds. The high tops were littered with the remains of their temporary bothies.

  Zal hoped that somewhere among them he might find an escapee who had been away when this disease or whatever it was had struck. He jogged along the hidden paths, following them by their strong andalune signature, watching for anyone taking the same routes. The idea that this devastation of the people was a blanket effect persisted in biting him the entire time, saying he would find nothing, he should get back to Delatra and help do something useful, with struggling, lonely Xaviendra. There was nothing to find here but more abomination. Running through the woods in the dark was just that – running, and tempting fate, both top of the list of his class acts. Besides, there was something fun about hurtling on at speed when you could only reliably see a few centimetres in front of your face. The armour plates pushed and pulled gently on him, like horse’s reins, adding their extra guidance.

  His reverie had reached a zoned-out space of perfect bliss – quite lacking any sense of danger or purpose – when he felt something far out and ahead of him; a presence like a brief sniff of water in a seemingly endless desert. Panting heavily with disgust at his lack of fitness he stopped and came back to his senses. Yes, certainly, somewhere in the eastern valleys he was sure that what he could detect was an elf presence. It was slight and it was alone but it was unmistakable. It made no reaction as he reached across the distance – a vast distance, further than he’d ever noticed anything before – and he hoped that meant it was asleep and not near death or worse. The land between them was filled with gorges and thicker forest that would take hours to cross even at his best speeds and he wasn’t capable of those. He gave in to necessity over caution and summoned Unloyal by radio Lila.

  A wave of longing swept over him, taking him by s
urprise. For a second all he could think of was Xaviendra. He cursed the charm of the poison and waited for it to ebb. Armour Lila kept him warm and said nothing, if she knew, for which he was grateful. As his breathing returned to normal he heard the flap of giant wings overhead and felt the downwash of aether turbulence before the air made the foliage overhead rustle and shake. A couple of strong upward leaps, assisted by branches and he was able to jump directly to the drake’s side, clinging to the saddle like a monkey before swinging into it.

  A faint, tinny sound of orchestral music filtered from the direction of Unloyal’s head as it bore upwards and made a turn. It turned it off as it attuned itself to Zal’s aetheric body and the distant note to which he was listening. Within moments they were gliding away from the mountains. The journey took a few minutes.

  When they arrived there was no place to land but the presence of the elf was growing fainter all the time so without much care Zal dropped straight down into the trees, trusting that his natural agility and some dumb luck would be enough to save him from serious injury. The cracking pains he received as his back and legs hit the branches were a shock but he grabbed hold of a few of them with relative ease and his light weight spared him from worse than bruises.

  The sudden noise had made the immediate forest go silent, even the insect burr, but it resumed again a moment or two later. By then he was moving much more adeptly towards the other person. Some climbing and jumping was required but he found them within a minute. They were hiding in a shelter fashioned out of leaves at the highest point in the canopy that was reachable. Zal perched outside, further down in the branches. He could tell by the agitation and terror in the aura now confronting his that she had heard him but in spite of the link and his patient identification of himself she was too hysterical to calm down. He could feel all her efforts to pull the andalune away inside herself, but she hadn’t got the strength or the skill to master that trick. If she had he’d never have found her.

  He broadcast reassurances but she was clearly able to at least detect either his shadow or demon traces because this made no noticeable difference. She cowered in the tiny leaf tent, too exhausted to run away, so he moved up there, making plenty of noise to show he wasn’t trying to attack. She was so tired that she didn’t manage to throw herself out the other side of her makeshift hide before he grabbed her. A half-scream of fear escaped her, loud against the hum of the insects but he put his hand over her mouth, gently.

  ‘I am not here to hurt you. Be quiet. It is not safe.’ This was to convince her he was on her side as much as it was a warning. In fact he didn’t detect any of the absent blots that signalled danger, only the forest’s usual life. He took his hand back.

  The elf whose arms he had hold of above the elbow lay back and curled in on herself, shaking. ‘Who are you?’ Her voice had an accent he didn’t recognise and the words were archaic.

  ‘Zal, once Suhanathir, though that was a long . . .’

  ‘I know you,’ came the reply quickly. All the fear vanished and was replaced by relief and curiosity. ‘Ah, now I see. Yes. How very odd . . .’ And with that she fainted.

  It was so very dark that Zal couldn’t see anything of her except what his spirit body could sense and he recognised nothing about her at all. She had fainted from exhaustion and there was nothing he could do but wait for her to recover enough to wake up. The treetop was precarious. He decided to play safe and summoned Unholy for an evac.

  By morning they were several hours’ flight time from Delatra at an uninhabited region of lush boreal forest on an island just off the coast of some bit of Serinsey that Zal had maybe read about once in his boyhood and forgotten long since. He only knew the place because Lila had maps and showed them in rich detail on the surface of his arms as he looked down. Although the island was deserted it did possess one feature worthy of note, and that was a dry cave, free of bears, in an outcropping large enough for Unholy to land on.

  The elf he had found was rather young to be knowing about him, he thought as he watched her sleep. The morning sun warmed things up nicely and it woke her, streaming through the cave mouth in golden bars as though everything in the world was perfectly all right. She jolted, froze, sucked her breath in through her teeth as she realised things had changed while she was away, and then relaxed enough to close her eyes and breathe normally for a minute or two. At last she rolled onto her side and opened her eyes again. They were green and they stared at him with avid intensity, so much so that he found himself blinking for her. Once she glanced upwards, in the direction of the sleeping drake, and then back at him.

  ‘From Demonia,’ she said, in a whisper.

  ‘Yes,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Real,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He could feel her tentatively expanding, trying to search the area for danger. ‘There’s nobody close,’ he said. ‘You can rest.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No time for that. We have to stop it.’ She tried to get up but it failed as an effort and he held out his hand quickly.

  ‘Rest there, at least a while. You must.’ He handed food across to her and she grabbed it quickly without noticing or caring that it was from Otopia and not much like elven food.

  In between mouthfuls she said, ‘It’s why you came, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘There’s only me.’

  She stopped eating mid-bite and lay prone and motionless for a moment, then spat the food out onto the sandy ground. ‘Only you?’ All the animation went out of her and she lay like a doll, eyes closing and her mouth curving into a disbelieving half smile. ‘Only you.’ She laughed silently with a couple of quick moves of her ribs. He counted more than ten serious bruises and scrapes on her exposed skin. She was wearing light clothes, something suited for indoor living, and they were mostly ripped and dirtied. Her braided bronze-coloured hair was a mess. He betted she’d been running for a while. Though they were well separated and she looked all given up, her andalune body clung fiercely to its contact with his, drinking in all she could about him. He guessed there was a lot to drink, given Lila’s presence and all.

  ‘And are you all that’s left? Only you?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said after a while and coughed, so she had to roll back to her side. She pushed the spat food reluctantly away from her, and took another bite of the cereal trail mix bar from her hand. She chewed it slowly, deliciously, enjoying it in a way he wouldn’t have thought possible. He hated the things himself. ‘Am I the last elf?’ she asked rhetorically, taking another bite. ‘I asked myself that so many times I thought I would go mad.’

  ‘You’re not. So do you know what happened?’

  She swallowed, went for another bite, thought better of it and licked around her teeth so that he could tell her gums were sore. ‘Meaning you’re here I suppose. Did you find others?’

  ‘You’re the first,’ he admitted. ‘But I only got here yesterday.’

  ‘You saw the people here.’

  ‘Yes.’ He held his impatience in check. ‘Yes,’ she said and her hands began shaking. ‘I . . . was . . . I am a librarian, at Delatra. All the others went . . . as you see, after the creature came. It asked for some records. Looked like an elf, of course it did or we, but anyway, I went to look for them because the Master Librarian was arguing with it. There was something strange about it you see and . . . I went looking and I was in the rooms when I felt them all disappear.’ Her green eyes were round, completely ringed with white. It was the only outward sign of the freezing horror that gripped her. He felt it and flinched, but he was still on guard and the despair and sadness that followed didn’t infect him.

  ‘But not you,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Not me.’ She dropped the food bar and her hand went to a pocket on her beaten trousers and fished around quickly. ‘I had this.’ She held it in her fist and wouldn’t let go but he could see it, a pinkish stone object. The smile of slight hysteria play
ed across her mouth again. ‘It’s a soulcatcher. There can’t be more than four in the world and I was holding it because I was looking for those cursed records and it was with them in the box.’ She stared at it in disbelief.

  ‘And what does that do?’ He’d almost forgotten what it was like to be in the Jayon Daga but now he remembered. Questions, efficiency, action; it felt so comforting.

  She caught the tail end of this emotion and smiled for a moment – a more genuine smile. ‘Yes. I thought it was a paperweight. The only reason I held onto it was because I was so frightened that I couldn’t let it go.’ She regarded the object – not carved really, more like a smoothed rock polished lightly into a suitable shape for a hand. You could have thrown it down on a pebble beach and lost it for ever on the instant. ‘Later I understood. I realised that there must be something important about the ledgers. I thought that it was a temporary attack on the library you see, not a full-scale war. I could not imagine what could do such a thing as wipe everyone out like they were chalk marks, for ever. I still do not entirely . . .’ She broke off. She was shuddering convulsively and couldn’t keep speaking. Zal maintained his strong, compassionate energy but he didn’t move closer to her. Their andalune bodies twined like ivy meanwhile.

  After a minute or two she was ready to continue, the stone held in her hands, over her heart. ‘So. I took the ledgers.’ She released her hold briefly to pat what he saw were large inside pockets on her soft jacket – booksized pockets. ‘And I took the stone and I went through the rooms by the back ways until I was able to get out, thinking I’d hide until the worst was gone and come back when everyone woke up. I’ve been at the library for over fifty years so I knew every inch of it back to front. It would be possible to find someone there hidden in any of its places so I went down the mountain through one of the long tunnels that led to the forest. There’s an energy sink not far from the mountain, at Orlinn, a water place. It felt right to go there. I went and hid there and when it passed over it didn’t find me. I tried to pull everything in but I do not have your skill with that. There was never any need to hide before.’ She paused. ‘I wonder why it did not see me. I think it was not really looking. It swept over and killed them all and it was gone. That was all. But it wanted these.’ She put the stone back in her pocket and slowly, one at a time, drew out two old and battered sheaves of manuscript.