Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  An age ago, when he’d been a junkie making Zoomenon circles in the woods to ease his habits, when Lila had been a cute girl chasing him up the mountain, when Solomon’s Folly had been visited by ghosts as a matter of mystery, Zal had fallen down and a ghost had sucked his hand empty of spirit. He had thought it was junkie’s bad luck, signed it up to stupidity and greed on his part. Now he knew it wasn’t any of those things.

  Zal offered Wrath his empty hand and like a snake coiling into a crack in a rock the form of Wrath wound into it and fastened there.

  In the night forest the insects sawed. They heard the heavy flap and shudder of Unloyal’s precarious landing on the cliff high above and then Zal was up and climbing with the armour’s warm embrace on him humming an ultrasound song that filled his body with strange pleasures as it power-assisted him up the sheer face so that he felt he was flying.

  ‘Junkie,’ the drake murmured as he came up on it, laughing drunkenly, strap-hanging again like a teenager on a late date.

  ‘Time to go,’ Zal said. He thought of the girl he’d left on the island but she was better off there.

  ‘Delatra?’

  His father released him. He felt the old elf and his companion subside into the forest. The spirit plane closed. There was only night, the drake, the armour’s burring love.

  ‘Fire first,’ Zal said. He needed all the power he could get. And even then it wouldn’t be near enough but he had to try. ‘I need fire.’

  ‘I am not an igniter,’ the drake said. ‘And nothing here is dry enough.’

  ‘Find a place,’ Zal said. ‘Somewhere rocky. I’ll do the rest.’

  It was cold when they got to the dry desert of the mountains and landed on the raw scarp, and colder yet when Zal stripped the plate and clothing off his top half. He was shaking as he took the book of names and ripped out the pages, scrunching them up and wedging them between some stones. Unloyal sheltered the spot with the bulk of his wiry body and half-unfurled wings. Lila played the music Zal requested and the night stopped to listen to the unprecedented sound of the most intense bass that had ever come to that part of the world. He needed it to start the fire.

  The paper was protected from ordinary flames. Zal allowed his demon’s wings to unfold from his back to ignite them. They were blazing already with the characteristic orange colour of his personal flare, brought to instant heat by the energy of the soundtrack. It was a fire that existed on several planes at once and it was sufficient to start the process of disposing of the twin books.

  ‘You didn’t say you could fly,’ muttered the drake.

  ‘Never tried it,’ Zal confessed, seeing their shadows thrown into stark shapes across the flickering yellow rocks.

  Zal crouched down close to the small, smokeless pyre and added page after page, turning to the second book that his father had said she had to have and shredding it with his fingers before feeding all the bits into the flames.

  He supposed it was a kind of sacrilege but he wasn’t prepared to run the risk of allowing them to survive. This was the last record of all those people who had died and what had happened to them and how it had been done. He was disposing of knowledge that had been bought with thousands of lives, with incalculable suffering. It was his own history. Some would say, maybe Tellona would say, that he was disposing of the past and dooming them to repeat the horror that even his generation had already forgotten.

  They could say it if they liked. He turned to the final pages then and pulled them free, made sure they were well alight, then started to rip the rest at random, counting on luck to make sure the job was done right in case he was interrupted. At no point did he attempt to find or read the names anywhere. He just tore and burned and listened to Ska on the empty hillside with the drake in between him and the wind, a bitter grimace on his face; a two-tone funeral at high volume.

  At last both the books were ashes. He rubbed these into dust and then he and the drake stood back and watched the wind blow it all away. Both of them felt slight misgiving, but not for what Zal had done; because they knew that it might still be possible to remake the books. Perhaps one or two beings in the universe would be able to, though he doubted they’d care to.

  ‘Be bloody hard though,’ Zal said after a minute.

  The drake agreed.

  Zal picked up the chestplate of his armour and put it on next to his skin under his elf jacket. ‘Funk it up please,’ he said to her and she obliged though she kept the beat steady and heavy and he could feel the bass resonating in his heart. The demon wings had no trouble passing through either Lila or the clothes without setting them alight. They were almost immaterial and caused no trouble to the drake either. Zal liked the way they made him look, even though he knew he was no match for Teazle on that score.

  ‘Delatra?’ Unloyal asked.

  Zal brushed the last of the ash off his hands and tightened up the saddle straps one more time over his stiff legs. He longed for a hit of something strong but he guessed he’d be better off with a clear head for once. ‘Thought you’d never ask.’

  When they arrived in Delatra it was almost morning and a heavy rain was falling. The elves upon whom Xaviendra had fed and visited her personal ire were all sheltering in the ruins or had run off into the lowlands. Everything was clad in a filthy, low light, grey and sliding. The smell of wet rottenness lay all over.

  The one thing Zal couldn’t get out of his head was Tellona. She had read the books and she was still alive, castaway or not. Leaving her alive was a gamble of stupendous proportions and most of the risk lay in his ability to conceal the fact.

  In his hand Wrath lay dormant – a promise of malice to come. He flexed the fingers but they felt no different. Rain lashed the parapets and the wind howled its lonely notes through the tunnels. He squelched forward and began to retrace his steps to the library. Behind him in the streaming mud the drake sat back on his haunches and tuned his wires to Lila-armour’s direct frequencies. At his back and given the circumstances, Zal didn’t know if that counted as an extra stupidity or not. Any connection could be used against you.

  Water sizzled and spat as it passed through his wings. He hoped their light and the memory of demon hunters past would keep the savages at bay, but he was disappointed.

  He heard a scrape of stick on rock, the mutter of something going crazy with fear as he approached the open doorway of the library staircase.

  ‘Get lost,’ he said. ‘I’m not interested.’ At the same moment he drew out the dagger from his belt and felt himself lighten as his body moved into a defensive posture. ‘Really. Run away and no hard feelings.’ There was a snicking noise that took him aback because it was so close to his ears and in the glimmering winglight he saw that his armour had grown rills of blades on its outer edges. Steam billowed around him. He didn’t fancy moving into the enclosed space but he had no choice. Nobody came out, so he went in.

  There were two. One leapt at him without weapons and screamed horribly as it sliced itself open on the armour. He saw, in a blur, a spear come stabbing at his face at the same moment and he ducked aside. It passed his neck and through one wing but the thrower, perhaps distracted by the incoherent gibber of the other, cowered down in the corner with filthy arms over its head and seemed to be fighting itself.

  Then as the bloodied one tried to come forward, Zal, disbelieving, saw the terrified one get up, moving with the jerky forced twitches of a marionette and realised that they were animated by a will other than whatever was left of their own. He put his dagger in the throat of the first, ending it as quickly as he could before wrenching the blade out and spinning around. The spear-thrower faced him with total panic in its eyes. They were oval and white as the moon. The orange torch-flicker of winglight showed him a pretty girl. His wingtip had set her hair on fire but she barely noticed. She was openmouthed, streaked with filth and blood, her teeth broken as her lips parted in a helpless grimace. Her hands lifted, gripping muck and rocks from the floor and Zal jumped forward and headbutted
her as hard as he could, hoping he didn’t crack her skull. She went down in a heap without a sound and he bent down for a second to put out the fizzling damp embers of her hair before he jumped over her on the way up the first flight of stairs.

  His anger made the wings burn hotter still, now well manifested in the heaviness of Alfheim’s material plane. They lifted him so that he skimmed across the ground. In the halls there were more of these living zombies coming to delay him but he was ready and the fact that they were turned against their will made them slow and easy to incapacitate. Perhaps it would have been kinder to kill them. He thought so, but he let them lie and told himself that he could always kill them tomorrow if nothing changed. There was nothing like looking on the bright side.

  At the library’s greater doors, undamaged and ajar, he saw the first light that wasn’t his own.

  He pulled the nearest door wide open and looked inside. The light was bluish-violet and it was coming from an enormous bonfire, parodic in its size, a mountain of books, scrolls and objects crawling with the aetheric flames of a consumption that wasn’t combustion.

  Xaviendra was standing at the side of it, a stack of fresh volumes at her side balanced on one of the library’s carts. The writhing fire covered her as well, and snaked across the floor in a lazy oxbow to the bonfire. She checked a title and riffled the pages, shook it and then tossed it over her shoulder onto the heap.

  ‘Read any good books recently?’

  He didn’t even know that was going to come out of his mouth until it did, as laconic and dry as if he’d planned it. The landing book dislodged some from their places and they came slithering down and slid across the polished stone floor towards him. He angled his head to look at its pages and wasn’t surprised to see that they were blank.

  ‘Mmn,’ Xaviendra said and held out her hand, waggling it. She wasn’t the least surprised to see him. ‘I really need a recommendation I think. Is that why you’ve come back?’

  He ignored this. ‘My, here we are at the book depository. It’s not the way I pictured the end of the world.’

  ‘Well, you have to take what you can get,’ she said, throwing several more slim volumes on and then taking hold of the cart’s handles and dragging the whole thing to the fire where she clumsily upended it and then righted it again, the cargo dumped and downloading into her.

  Zal thought of Lila and in return he felt her vibrate against his skin, maybe laughing. ‘You won’t find what you’re looking for.’

  ‘It wasn’t the only copy I’m sure,’ she drawled. She gave the cart a push and a figure darted out from the darkness in the stacks and grabbed it with bloody hands.

  ‘Zombie minions,’ Zal said. ‘Classy.’

  ‘Can’t you think of any cracks about late returns and fines or something?’ Xaviendra said, as though she was already very bored of him.

  ‘Fresh out,’ he said, wondering how this was going to go down. Wrath showed no sign of waking; it was waiting for something else and he had no idea what. ‘What are you trying to do?’

  ‘Well, when you and your friends and lovers have finished bringing the phantoms here I’m going to eat them all up,’ she said, skimming a huge leatherbound and handgilded atlas into the fire.

  She rubbed her eyes and sighed. ‘Very kind of you. I wonder if you’ll be able to try to kill me as effectively as I’ve tried to kill you. Curious thing that ink and that book. You’d think I’d have recognised it but apparently there are some artefacts that are still beyond me. And then I had to drink all the vile beer with you and all you could do was talk nonsense about dragons . . . ah ha . . .’ she laughed, a tinkly, merry sound of girlish amusement.

  ‘Imagine that,’ Zal said, finding himself more than able to dislike her. ‘And after you eat these phantoms what are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, unrolling a huge, handpainted history scroll and squinting at the illuminated names of aeons past, arrayed with the pictographic details of their personal histories. She let it reroll itself and then wanged it end over end into the conflagration. ‘Having missed out on getting the mantle I might try for it again, although the Bloody Sisters have probably hidden or lost it by now.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Zal said, walking forward to see what it was that the keepers were handing her now as they kept coming out of the black stacks, dumping vases, caskets, more books. He picked up a thin, wide, illustrated children’s story and flicked through the pages. ‘But what for? Where are you going?’ He turned to the inside of his wrist as he read the book and tapped his finger there. Lila showed a playlist. He cued, started the music and this time it played for the room as clearly and loudly amplified as if he had an entire tour’s worth of gear in place for a concert of thousands.

  Xaviendra actually jolted with shock. Her glare at him was pure poison. The shuffling in the stacks stopped abruptly.

  Zal moved his head and shoulders to the beat of the old-style country rock – all goodtime swing beats and boot kickin’ riffs – and began to sing quietly along, ‘aw-uh-uh-oh . . .’. Inwardly he was smiling. At last they were on familiar ground. He glanced up innocently. ‘What?’

  Xaviendra strode over to him and ripped the children’s book out of his hands before throwing it on her blazing heap.

  He looked at her without interrupting his groove. ‘And how is The Velveteen Rabbit part of your master plan?’

  She bared her teeth. ‘To have to somehow feel a bond with you is so aggravating – I can’t tell you just how much I HATE you! Trivial, pathetic, feeble little . . .’

  He held up his hand. ‘Ramp up the B-movie script darling. After studying all this I think you’d be up to something more eloquent.’

  He wondered if she could literally explode from anger, but it seemed not, unfortunately. ‘But seriously, to get back to the subject at hand. Don’t you think you deserve some kind of reward for creating a subrace, beginning a race war and torturing thousands of people to death? I mean, it does seem like a whole big list of achievements in one sense but . . .’

  He pulled his dagger out and stabbed it into her just above the collar bone with accuracy and force. Her eyes widened and then she took hold of his hand on the hilt and yanked it out. There was no blood. She glared at him and then let go, pushing his hand away forcefully.

  ‘You’re a moron,’ she said and went back to heaving the collected works of ages onto her fire, apparently brushing him from her consciousness.

  Zal put the dagger away. ‘I didn’t think it’d work.’

  ‘Treachery was always your strong suit,’ she retorted though she seemed half-hearted, he thought. She beckoned and the trailing notyet-dead resumed their haulage from the library’s dark recesses. Then she paused and looked up. ‘Ah ha,’ she said. ‘Your robot girlfriend and her lackeys have arrived. Good. I won’t have to listen to this dreadful cacophony much longer.’

  He knew she could kill them and there wasn’t much he could do about it. Still, he had a minute or two left.

  Zal looked at the fire. He walked across to the edge of the tumbled pile and crouched down. His orange wings and the blue creeping witchlight combined to form an ugly, smoglike colour on the covers of the books and the blank faces of the scrolls. He weighed up the chances of surviving what he was about to do versus it being an effective distraction and felt the armour quiver subtly as it connected to the Lila prime. She was nearly there. Malachi was shot in the shoulder but it had only made him mad. He figured that if Xavi could suck the power from the books, she could suck it out of him too, but he could suck back – junkies have their uses after all.

  Xaviendra seemed to have thought along the same lines because she dropped the book she was holding and fixed him with a stare across the flames. ‘Don’t even think . . .’

  Zal put his hand into the fire. Their aether bodies merged.

  ‘Oh, you filthy . . .’ Her disgust hit him like a blow.

  Zal felt them connect, felt himself exploding into his full demon form, shadow and fir
e, the armour melting around him into its own liquid shapes as the music roared into deafening decibels and mixed up with all that Xaviendra was trying to pull out of the scripts. He didn’t know how long the music archive would last, or him after it, but she was going to have a tough time chewing him up because he was going to taste as nasty as possible, he was going to make sure of that.

  ‘Gonna getcha good . . .’ screamed the vocal – Zal’s own cover. He grinned into her face and gave her his best glam-rock wink.

  Orange fire and blue met. The dry, heated paper beside him immediately burst into yellow flames. Zal felt Xaviendra scream as the orange fire of his demon flare burned her and then he felt her gather herself and pull. It was like a millstone dragging on his heart. His strength began to drain inexorably away.

  ‘Oh,’ he was surprised. It was much, much worse than he had imagined. He realised he was an idiot of course. He should have used the other hand, where sleeping Wrath slept on. Trust a junkie to forget the important bit.

  Then the violet fire of Xaviendra’s consumption filled his entire aetheric form and the coil opened in his hand.

  ‘Pull back,’ it said to him. It’s voice sounded like a child’s. It anchored him in his hand.

  Xaviendra was going to stretch him out like cartoon toffee, but however much she tried, she wasn’t going to get him after all.

  Wrath wasn’t angry. That surprised Zal too. Wrath was calm.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ it said. ‘The others are coming. We will take her away and then we will die.’

  That wasn’t as comforting as it might have been intended to be, he thought, hoping that he wasn’t included. He pushed as much clear focus into the demonic music as he could, forcing Xavi to slow down what she was doing, grinding at her concentration. Lila would be pleased, he thought, to find that the game wasn’t just chance and determinism. Skill had something to do with it. And just when you didn’t expect it, the rules changed. He thought he would have to fight this Titan, but it was going to fight for him.