‘May I?’ Zal asked.
She nodded and he moved forward and took them carefully. They were perfectly preserved and easily legible but he couldn’t read the ancient words. ‘What is this, Old Yashin?’
‘Earlier actually. Shavic.’
‘What is it, can you read it?’ He handed them back to her and watched her smooth the curled edges carefully.
‘Yes, I have read it many times now,’ she whispered. ‘One is a ledger of names. The other is a mage’s journal explaining exactly how to strip the spirit from a living person without killing them and to put something else in its place. And before you ask, yes, I do think this is the work of the Genomancers who made the shadowkin. It is not signed. There is no name attached to it. The ledger is, I think, the record of all those who were so used. But I cannot be sure of that. I do not recognise any of the names, except that they are commonly used.’
Zal thought of Xaviendra, and a wave of heat and discomfort passed through him. He pushed it away but the other elf had noticed.
‘You are cursed,’ she said, startled.
‘I’ve had worse,’ Zal insisted. ‘Tell me more about this stone.’
‘It anchors the spirit of the bearer in their flesh and bone. Lesser versions are used by necromancers in their studies but this book,’ she tapped her right breast, ‘says there are a few master stones that have much greater powers. They are a kind of lightning rod, earthing the spirit, or chaining it, depending on your viewpoint I suppose. It was after I read about them that I understood what this must be and what had happened to the rest.’ She stopped and closed her eyes. Tears flowed out of them and the shuddering returned.
‘May I see the names?’ he asked.
Without looking she fumbled the book back out and handed it across again. Zal addressed Lila quietly, ‘Can you read this?’
His left hand warmed. He lifted it on intuition and put it over the book, palm down where the soft skin of the black gauntlet could ‘see’. As she had shown the map she now showed him the words written in contemporary elvish characters. He was poring over them when suddenly he was crowded by the female elf, coughing and wiping her face as she stared at the back of his glove.
‘Translation!’ she said, astonished. ‘What is this? I thought you had some sort of barbarian armour with a demon inside it but this is—’
‘This is Lila Black, my wife,’ Zal said, pulling a face as he did so because it sounded like stupidity even when he knew it was true.
The elf recoiled but stayed where she was, drawn to and repulsed by all the notions rushing through her feverish mind.
‘Alive,’ Zal supplied. ‘Human. Machine.’ And after a pause, ‘Harmless.’ He turned the page, hoping that Lila knew more than he did and would highlight something if it was important because as the librarian said, to him it was a list of names that meant nothing and attached to nobody.
‘I . . .’ the elf began but was unable to articulate any more. She stared at him.
‘We need to know who else is still surviving,’ Zal said calmly as his survey went on through sheet after sheet.
‘And then?’
‘And then . . .’ Zal said but he didn’t know what happened then. ‘I am supposed to report back to Otopia and figure it out from there.’
‘So they know. They are preparing an army.’
Zal continued reading. ‘Did you see this creature, as you call it?’
‘It looked like an elf,’ she repeated. ‘I was not paying attention. I was preparing some documents for . . . I am just saying that there was an elf who asked for these things and she had a very strange aura now that I think about it. She was cold. Some people can be that way, you know, when they have had a shock so that was another reason I did not look at her, in case it was too much for her. I do not know that it was a she. I assumed . . .’ She had started to babble and the hysteria in her voice was rising.
‘It seems a reasonable assumption,’ Zal broke in firmly. ‘I would agree with it. In any case, it is all we have to go on at the moment. Later you said people died and it came for them. How did you see it then?’
‘I saw it,’ she used the word for seeing with the andalune body, rather than with her eyes, ‘as a wave of silence. And cold but I think that the cold is only my feeling and there was no coldness as such. Silence came. But they were not dead. I heard them. They heard me. I had to run away. Very fast.’
Zal watched the meaningless names scroll across his hand. ‘When I met you you were afraid of me even though we heard each other well in advance. Why?’
‘I thought it was how she would hear me. That she would find me and kill me for the books and the stone.’
‘How would she know that you even had them?’
‘Because I was alive when I should be dead.’
Zal thought that was reasonably screwed up but it made sense enough. ‘She has no reason to search for someone she doesn’t know is missing though.’
‘No,’ the elf sat back and then lay down again in the sunlight, curling up small. ‘I think of her in the room, looking for the books, seeing they are gone.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Zal said in reply, thinking aloud to himself. ‘What does this gain anyone?’ The names rolled on and on. There was no mark anywhere to show what had happened to them – if they survived as shadowkin or were killed in the process. Then a name flashed at him and made him blink.
His father.
He got up and stuffed the paper booklet down the front of his shirt. ‘I have to go. I’ll be back soon as I can. Stay here. It’s safe.’ He was already pressing the collar of the armour, signalling Unloyal so that the drake got up from its nap and came down to the sandy area in front of the cave ready.
The elf . . . ‘
I don’t know your name,’ he said as she backed away rapidly from the drake, staring at it with loathing and wonder in equal parts.
‘Tellona,’ she said but had to say it twice because her voice was choked. ‘Will you be hunting us all down with that thing?’
Zal glanced at Unloyal’s hideous mass, the eyeless head at an angle that suggested it didn’t care for who said what about it. ‘If I have to.’ The thought of exterminating the ‘survivors’ had passed through his mind – his demon part wanted to do it badly – but he’d let it go along with all his sense of connection to the victims. It had been surprisingly easy. Why that should make him, the arch defector, so sad, was another mystery. Then he re-stated firmly, ‘I will be back.’
‘What if it comes?’ Tellona was suddenly holding out the other book. ‘You should have this.’
‘To preserve it,’ he said in a neutral tone, recalling Xaviendra again and her vivid insistence on the preservation of the library. He went back and took the paper.
Tellona watched him with thin lips. ‘The acid in your skin will hasten its destruction,’ she said reprovingly. ‘You should take it because you have a chance of defending it. Whatever it wants I am thinking it should not have if only because I am vengeful.’ Her look became a glare.
Zal stuffed the second book down the other side of his shirt and felt Lila press them close as her chestplate stiffened and moulded itself around the forms, sealing closed up to his jaw. He saluted Tellona. ‘You have the stone.’
‘Yes,’ she said, hand already around it, knuckles white.
‘Keep it.’ He saw relief flood across her face.
‘You are immune?’
‘I have no idea,’ he said and went back out into the blazing sun, climbed to the saddle and adjusted the leg harness so that he was held fast. ‘I am going to Halany. I hope not for long.’
‘That’s halfway across the world!’ Tellona sat up. ‘What’s there?’
‘I don’t know.’ As an afterthought he took off the saddlebag that was loaded with most of the food and threw it down. ‘You’d better have that. There’s nothing to eat here except what you can suck out of the aether.’ They shared a glance for a moment and he saw the slight hesitation of the light
elf when faced with the prospect of drawing out the life force of living things by the shadowkin method of feeding. It was only a twitch though, not the whole nine yards of horror, so he guessed she was one of the progressive ones. He nudged Unholy and the drake took off with a leap that sent showers of sand in all directions.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It took Teazle a long time to understand what he was seeing. He watched from several vantage points high in the rocks of the waste-lands as a huge humanoid demon, some ten metres tall, staggered its gigantic way across the vast red tundra of the desolation, which lay between the true wilds and the borders of civilisation.
A miasmic crimson cloud flowed over and around it periodically closing in on its body where it would modify some part – growing larger hands, bigger claws or sprouting fans of razor edge bones from the processes of its spine. Meanwhile the figure was a drunken, leering monster who groaned and lashed its purple forked tongue as though it had been thoroughly poisoned. Sometimes it clawed at its face and opened large gashes. When the blood poured the crimson aura speeded into a cloud of blood drops and grew darker and stronger.
Other demons came to meet this creature, hypnotised into complete submission from afar. When they got close enough the giant would pick them up and rip them to pieces, gorging itself on blood and pain. The pain part interested Teazle the most. He would have bet that this demon of the wilds – a barbarian creature of sophisticated form but basic drives – would have gloried in slaughter and possibly had some skills at luring gamma-class demons into its clutches, but the aura it possessed immersed itself in the dying, tormented bodies with a lush devotion. Not that there weren’t tracts of demon lore and life devoted to torture but there was something about the crimson cloud that smacked to him of a fetish, which was absolutely not a demonic quality. No demon would be slaved to a desire.
After killing, the giant threw the bodies down with disgust – again, an undemonic kind of notion. It took time and some patience but after a while Teazle had found a name for what he was watching and it surprised him; he wasn’t used to thinking about anything in terms of evil.
Legions of demons with a bent for philosophy had done all the thinking about evil that needed to be done long before Teazle came along, so he had only to apply what he learned in school. He watched this monster lurching into shape over the course of several miles. It changed en route, gathering up the talents and abilities of those it consumed and adding them to itself. This rarely required a physical alteration, which is why it took him some time to figure out what was going on. When it paused and looked around, scratching but clearly bothered by some intuition that made it turn his way, he knew he was running out of time in which to stay hidden. Intelligence, talent and power were approaching a critical mass within it. If the old, dead demon he had met on the way was correct, Teazle could expect to be added to this collection, which is why he hadn’t gone in with a direct attack, but as time went on he didn’t perceive an alternative. And then he remembered that the cloud’s behaviour looked a bit like Zal’s shadow body when Zal was asleep and it remained wakeful.
Zal kept his shadow well away from Teazle at all times when he was conscious although Teazle had seen him envelop Lila in it completely. Great intimacy with Zal wasn’t something he wanted so he hadn’t given it any thought. If Zal was still mostly like other elves then it was an aetheric form that demons could fool around with destructively though they hadn’t got any other influence on it. Demons with a taste for elf got some pleasure from the buzzing pain that the ordinary elf aether body could inflict on them, but the general loathing between the races meant there was no science of the interaction. They only used it to torment one another.
Faeries of course were rendered unconscious by the elf aether body, so there need be no science of that. Some speculated the aether body was the spirit of the elf but this wasn’t quite correct because it had mass of its own. All Teazle knew is that when Zal slept sometimes his aether body spilled out of him. He knew because the buzz of it touching him had woken him up and made him drag himself off to sleep elsewhere on several occasions. When this happened he had briefly found himself dreaming Zal’s dreams. He knew they were Zal’s because they made no sense and were full of music.
Now he stared at the lurching hulk moving towards a distant town and considered what that might add up to, if the cloud were an elf body that had taken possession of a demon of the wilds, starting with stupid but powerful and ending up as a giant collective horror with the intellect of a master magus. He liked the notion, and he had no doubt that if he were included it would be a horror that could conquer worlds.
This, then, would be the legendary Hellblade moulding itself a body.
Teazle stayed back as the creature advanced. On his back the two swords hummed softly and he wondered, not for the first time, what they were. He knew they were only in the form of swords for a convenience, because the form suited their intent and that of their mistress whose instrument it seemed he was, and in that he was no different to the swords themselves. He knew he could expect no direct interventions from her. He was the intervention, as Hellblade was someone else’s.
With delight approaching ecstasy he stalked the beast and watched it grow. He delayed the precious moment of death or victory, savouring its approach. For him this was the perfect moment, predator and prey on the edge of for ever. He let it go and teleported.
At his largest and in his deadliest form Teazle was only half the size of Hellblade but he was more than big enough to blow its physical body to bits when he materialised in the centre of it, every scale a blade, vibrating on frequencies that shook apart what wasn’t shredded and burst by his arrival. A rain of bloody ruin fell around him, splashing down into a pile of ruddy, steaming gore. The thick, awful stench of half-digested flesh and stomach fluids filled his nostrils for a second before the aether body, in which he was now fully contained, snapped tight and cut off the air.
At the same time an awareness of Hellblade’s total existence filled him. He had expected frenzy but instead there was a calm that almost matched his own. They permeated one another and knew each other in an intimacy far closer than anything Teazle knew before. The wholeness of Hellblade’s story soaked into him with every nuance of retreading that the spirit had given it over the long years of its banishment and he knew its purpose at last, even as he began to asphyxiate. It was a simple story.
The three had been told that they were to face a horror beyond comprehension at the gate of death itself, beyond which even spirit would be dissolved for ever. The power they had taken on and the monstrous transformation they had endured meant that they could stand on this plane and give battle to the creature that was waiting there, slowly wearing away at the wormhole the mages had inadvertently created between Alfheim’s reality and the peculiar no-place of the unliving things.
They were made according to what they had absorbed. Hellblade had been a guard at Delatra once, so long ago it boggled the mind, and he had been as demon-hating a son of the trees as the next pureblood light elf. Some insanity had leaked in when he found himself fused with a demon of blood and necromancy. They had fought within the confines of their joined minds as their bodies disintegrated under Zoomenon’s pitiless stare and neither had exactly won or lost. They had come to be a new thing that called itself Hellblade and which knew only the geas of the command to kill the sleeper.
They went, all three of them, Hellblade, Wrath and Nemesis, incorporeal, transubstantial, into the lifeless no-space beyond Last Water where even the Void and its massive emptiness came to an end and there they found their quarry as promised – a darkness of exquisite malevolence and unbridled hatred. Because they weren’t hampered by the corporeal world any more and had what Hellblade laughingly recalled as The Sight, they recognised it immediately and realised the mages had got it all wrong. All of it.
The whole story was bullshit.
Yes, there was a place full of spirit forms. Yes, some of them had never liv
ed in the material worlds. Lots of them didn’t want to. Lots of them were beyond comprehension and most were below it in that they had nothing like a mind or an identity. They were things without names that would never have names. There were certainly beings that corresponded closely to the unmentionables mentioned in the geas. But none of them were what the mages had seen in their vision quests. The mages had seen something living. It vibrated lower, it existed closer to their own plane, they could see it from where they were, and what Magus Xaviendra and the rest of them had spied was a very dark thing indeed. But it was not a separate thing. They had created the Mirror of Souls and thought it was a window.
They had seen themselves from the other side, from spirit, and not recognised what they were looking at. Immediately they had judged themselves monsters. Correctly as it happened, but that was another irony not lost on Hellblade or the others. Their ambition and their lust for power was manifest in spirit form, visible, tangible, all of its tendrils and might illustrated. It was the stuff of spirit and the aether itself, from which all ghosts and constructs flowed across the totality of the dimensions.
The three phantoms understood that their mighty fight, their sacrifice and heroism was a goose-chase of a spectacular proportion, fuelled by blindness and fear.
The geas was a bond, and now it was also, for Hellblade, a revenge.
Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Page 38