"There are more wood elementals, and bigger ones, there, than anywhere I've ever seen."
"Others too," Malachi said, keeping his eyes on the way as they burred off the hardtop and onto gravel, turning between low hills that showed no signs of ownership now, not even much vegetation save scrubby grass and the odd evergreen bush.
"Zal opened a portal there ... or he pulled ... I don't know the word. He made a circle and turned it into a bit of Zoomenon."
Malachi nearly swerved off the road. "He what? Oh, you mean he made a circle and called some elementals."
"No," she said.
He pulled over and they were briefly surrounded in a plume of ochre dust.
"Like I said. He made a circle and went into it and inside it wasn't Otopia any more, it was Zoomenon. Different sky, different ground, and lots of elementals. Hundreds. I don't know the name for that. Not summoning ... or is it?"
"Nah," Malachi said. "There is no name for it. Because people don't do that. They can't do that."
"I'm telling you, I saw-"
"I believe you."
Lila was puzzled. "You know he did it like ... he must have done it a lot. He was high on them. We know that. He went there to get a fix and he got one. It was no more weird than seeing a dealer, I thought."
"Did you tell anyone about this at the time?"
"No. I mean it was in the downloads that the doctor took off me."
"But human technicians would have looked at that. Sarasilien at the most? I didn't see it. Or if I did it was in some boring paperwork thing I don't usually bother with." He looked dissatisfied and puzzled, his mouth open. "How could he do that and not boast about it or anything?"
"You and he weren't exactly friends."
"Yeah. I know. But even so."
"He treated it as if it was normal."
"Did you ever see him do it again?"
She thought it over. "Um ... we survived a fire attack inside a circle he cast, but he said something about doing it wrong. It didn't change worlds. It was just a protective ring."
"Where?"
"Outside the city where the kidnap took place."
"Right." He took the wheel and turned them back onto the road, thinking. "You're going to take me there when we go back to that place and show me exactly where it happened."
She shrugged. "Okay, but I have to tell you, I think he really just did it for the hit. I'd even go so far as to say he might not have realised what he was doing. He was only fixated on getting charged up. He could have transported himself to the moon and not cared."
Malachi nodded and shook his head alternately, muttering to himself. "I bet. I wish I had more of a grip on that stuff. Faeries don't traffic with the elements. No need, really. They're very demon and elf things. You know what I mean."
"Not so much, but I'll take your word for it," she said as they twisted and ground through the last of the road's conniving turns for a while and began to cross some serious desert.
Apparently it didn't matter because he was quiet for the rest of the drive. After forty minutes they pulled up in the yard of a sizeable ranch, dotted with buildings of various kinds, neatly kept, but nobody in sight.
"Where is everyone?"
"They're here," Malachi said, and got out of the car.
Lila followed him as he walked towards the barn and saw him make a subtle hand signal that looked as if he might have just been checking his pocket for something. The air shivered, and the illusion of the ranch, its dusty yards and worn fences, vanished. What lay behind was not too different. There was a large house, a barn, some other buildings, but no tired fields of stones, instead a landscaped grass garden of hardy plants and standing in that garden ready to meet them a group of people in ordinary clothes. One was walking forwards to meet Malachi, her hand outstretched.
Lila measured her at six feet five inches tall. She was powerfully built, without a spare ounce of fat on her. Her hair was soft and long, a chestnut brown the colour of leaves and rich earth, but that was all that was soft about her. She moved with deceptive speed and a lightness that only came from a natural ability to spring and long years of training. Her face was a perfect oval, features strong, brows pronounced. Her pale green eyes lit on Malachi as they shook hands and seemed briefly too human for words; then she looked past him at Lila.
For an instant Lila was back in the primal forests of Under feeling the gaze of the Hunter between her shoulder blades, hearing his unvoice of grating branches. These green eyes had the same effect, almost like a prickly heat where their gaze lit on her. She'd never seen the Hunter himself. Perhaps he had no eyes. Now her first instinct was to look away and never let that stare through, but her demon habits were too strong, and she stared right back into the challenge. Around her the dragon-patterned suit shifted and slid, glittering marks coming to life in its weave. The weight of it increased, and it subtly tightened at her waist, loosened on the legs as if preparing for a fight.
The Chosen halted in her tracks, startled, and set her shoulders at an off angle, "Who are you?" Her voice was half wild, like a talking animal might sound. It took Lila a second to realise what she'd said.
"Lila Black," Lila said, not offering a hand as she moved up to Malachi's shoulder and stepped unwaveringly into the woman's personal space. "And you?"
"This is Tasha," Malachi murmured, quite relaxed but watching with deceptive acuity as Tasha stared at Lila's suit. "Tasha Baines."
"Chosen," Lila said, to clarify for sure.
Tasha looked up cautiously at Lila once again. "As are you." She didn't lower her eyes but lowered her chin in a greeting of equals.
Lila glanced at Malachi. "I'm sorry?"
Malachi turned to face her, nodding at Tasha. Lila saw that both of them were in on something that had just been tried, tested, and confirmed. Something about her. She elbowed Malachi in the ribs, anger warring with curiosity and gnawing conviction into an unruly pack inside her. "Spit it out."
"I am Chosen of the Hunter," Tasha said, beauty and the beast all in one. She must have been over seventy by Lila's reckoning but she looked not a day past twenty-five. She set her thumbs into the broad leather belt that held up her jeans and nodded with satisfaction, a grim smile on her handsome mouth. "You are Chosen of the Wanderer."
"Mal," Lila said. "She means the suit, right?"
"Yeah, she means the suit."
"I thought so."
"You might think it, but you don't understand," Tasha growled. It was a genuine struggle for her to speak, the voice coming as if she had to force it out to her mouth. In spite of this she still had a midstates accent. "I guess that's why you're here, Mal? To explain?"
"That and other reasons," he agreed. "Lila's skipped the last half century in Under and she doesn't know about you and the Children so it's an introduction. Also, we have a ghost problem. I wondered if you were able to shed some light on it."
Tasha peered at him. "Many favours," she said grudgingly.
"I'm doing my best," Malachi replied, but it was difficult, Lila saw. He was almost grinding his teeth. She could guess the story. Malachi was responsible for bringing the Mothkin to Otopia and necessitating the reign of the Hunter. The people here were outcasts as a result of that reign, living in a prison more or less, reliant on government protection and handouts. Perhaps they had useful abilities or saleable ones even, but they weren't on any official plan or payment schedule and they hadn't found any niche in Otopia that was safe from human fear. They were just outcast, and he was here, asking them.
"We can come back another time if it's not convenient," Lila said. Over Tasha's shoulder she saw the people watching them closely. Around her feet the wind stirred the ground. The high pampas grass that screened much of the garden soughed with the movement of invisible things. Though she had no magical senses, Lila could plot the positioning of the things that caused the movements easily, but that was all. As to whether those things were real or just their scare tactics, she couldn't tell.
"No, we'd like to meet you," Tasha said after her pause, and abruptly beckoned them towards the waiting group and the house. "Always interesting to hear another story." She waited, watching Malachi.
He nodded and took a step forwards. They took the path to the door, and from the garden the silent group followed them, breaking ranks into a more natural ordering of ones and twos and beginning to talk among themselves. Lila felt them at her back, keeping their distance, watching her so closely.
The house, white clapboard to look at, of the old-seeming style that had become fashionable again, was a huge, rambling place, full of the winding halls and odd nooks that Lila had come to associate with faery homes. She was not surprised to be led for a distance that felt upwards of a quarter mile along twisting ways, through rooms, across corridors, and up brief staircases until they arrived in a large living room whose expansive windows looked out on the same patch of garden, grass, and yard that they had just vacated. Here a sizeable fireplace held a hefty grate full of smouldering logs, despite the fact that it was warm outside and in. Sofas and chairs were at all angles. Tasha took a seat in a group of six or so and pointed briefly across from herself. Lila and Mal sat down, and as if there was nothing unusual going on, the group following them came in and settled, talking quietly among themselves though even at her most acute Lila could not make out one word of what they were saying.
"So, you're Agent Black," Tasha said, biting her thumbnail and spitting the result over her shoulder. "Mal told us about you. We figured you were a victim of a bad deal. But I see not." She stared at Lila with unending interest, gaze roving over all of her.
"Enlighten me," Lila suggested.
"It seems unlikely that you would broker any kind of deal with my ... maker. The likes of him aren't moved by creatures of such brief lives as ourselves. I couldn't figure that you were the one responsible." She glanced significantly at Malachi, who sighed tersely. "Now I see you're like me, hoisted to a rank you didn't aspire to by the whim of a greater being." She smiled. It wasn't a pleasant expression.
"And what are you?" Lila asked. "Besides bitter."
Tasha shrugged and spoke in the manner of someone reciting lines. "We Chosen are the humans the Hunter rode to do his work here in Otopia. We were first prey, and when we passed his tests," she hesitated and rubbed her shoulder, then continued, "then we were his mounts, his limbs, his voice. We were small and weak, so he chose many of us, and after he had gone we were left with different changes. Changelings, as you'd say, I guess."
"You said I was Chosen, but I'm not ..." Lila stopped and looked down at the suit. It had done nothing new since she arrived and merely lay immaculate and beautiful on her. She looked up again and Tasha was staring at her with a half sad, knowing kind of gaze, slightly nodding.
"The Hunter is from a long way Under," Tasha said, crossing her legs and leaning back. She examined the state of her boots as she talked, turning them as if there was going to be something worth seeing on the worn-out leather toecaps. Lila had seen Mal do this kind of thing enough times to realise it was a faery habit, distracting yourself from what you were saying, turning attention away from it in the hope that you could speak without being overheard by forces you didn't want around you. If he was going to say something important, especially about Faery, he always started doing something else at the same time.
Tasha continued, "Low enough it's before they have names, proper names. Before language is really up and running. Even calling him the Hunter is just a way of naming something that is really more like hunting, an active pursuit. Wanderer is the noun, but wandering is really the nature, and wondering. Tatterdemalion is a name that came later after the king took to naming things and in so doing began to fix their natures and move them from being actions into objects. Even so, it's of the ancient first forms, the kind that Malachi here would get to if he dropped out of the arse of Faery. Not that he would. Might forget who he was. Always they do, if they fall far enough. Lose their minds, who they are, all the stuff of higher things. That's right, ain't it? Fall back into the old times and lose your connection to the worlds of later." She transferred her half-friendly gaze to Malachi, who nodded, his face weary and resigned. "Till someone points the way for you, course."
"Or if you find a way up," Malachi said. "By accident on purpose."
Tasha nodded as if she supposed that were possible. "Finding by Getting Lost. Yes. That'd be the only way. To learn the first tricks." They both looked at Lila's suit.
"But where is she?" Lila asked. "If this is her dress, then ..."
"You have it wrong," Tasha said, her smile becoming broader. "That's her. Not her dress. She is the dress. You're wearing her."
Confirmation was worse than she'd thought. Everyone else seemed to agree. The room had gone silent and all eyes were on her.
"Mal?" Lila said, damned if she was going to buckle, though she'd have liked to leap up, tear the suit off, shred it, and jump on the pieces before burning them and then burying the ash.
He exhaled and shook himself loose, trying and failing to unsettle the weight that was bending him forwards. He set his elbows on his knees and held his palms up apologetically. "I thought it was true.... I came here to be sure."
Lila's skin had gone cold. She saw faces turn towards her, cautious, and for the first time noticed that they were not really human. As soon as she saw this on one, it immediately became apparent on the others too. Their eyes were too large, their chins too pointed, their hair wild, or missing, or instead of hair the wings of butterflies and moths opening and closing.... She tore her gaze back to the Chosen as the woman spoke again.
"She dealt you your fifty-year delay," Tasha added. "She was the broker. Just like he dealt me ... what I got. He came out at her bidding. You were just the agent setting terms, offered him a year and a day. I guess you didn't know what he could do in that time." She paused and the room paused with her. "So that's not your fault." She looked as if it ought to be somebody's damn fault, and ground the tips of her fingers into the tough sofa arms, almost ripping the material.
"But I'm not changed like you," Lila said, ignoring her own acute discomfort to press on while she was able. She stared into Tasha's amber, lion-coloured eyes that a moment ago had been green and knew she was looking at a caged animal, one that was prowling behind its bars. What it took to open the cage door she didn't want to know.
"I never saw anything as changed as you," Tasha replied, snorting. "But you're right. Tatter has a form here, so she didn't need to make you hers in the same way. But you're hers. Perhaps she's yours too. Both. The old fey are like that. They don't care for boundaries. All that matters is the play."
"How old is old?" Lila sensed the potential suddenly. "Three sisters old? As old as the Moirae themselves?"
If the room had been silent before it was deathly now. All the assembled gazed at her like so many statues, and then abruptly they each found something much more compelling to do: stretching, adjusting their collars, looking at their watches, picking up discarded magazines, or plumping cushions. The hair on the back of Lila's neck prickled. On her legs the dress shifted and the dragons' eyes were suddenly shot with silver threads.
She glanced at Mal, who was waiting like the others, as if an asteroid were going to fall on them. He was searching his pockets.
Lila pulled up a game of tic-tac-toe on her hand quickly, the crosses and circles forming like tattoo marks on her palm as she played against the Al part of herself. "I know, I know," she muttered, testy. "But I had to ask. You know I did."
Slowly the agitation around them softened as they puttered on with their little tasks. Finally she sensed them starting to relax as nothing untoward happened.
"Not that old," said Tasha finally through clenched teeth. She was tracing the pattern of roses on the sofa arm over and over again. "But close. We must not speak-"
"Yes, we must," Lila said, flipping out of the endless stalemates of noughts and crosses to a less discrete game and struggling to keep f
ocused on it as she tried to say what she wanted. "I want to know about how things are made, where they came from, in Faery. Where you come from. Who is the oldest?"
"You can want it," Mal said, taking out the pieces of his grooming kit and cleaning them: tweezers, nail clippers, buffer, comb...... That doesn't mean you get it. We can talk about this later."
"We are always talking about it later and never now," Lila said, losing chequers. "Where can we have this precious talk, when? Now is as good a time as any."
Mal's black face darkened and his orange eyes became narrow. Coal dust shivered from his skin. He placed the items back in their leather case. "I didn't come here so you could interrogate them. Shut up already. After all this and you won't trust me when I say to keep quiet. You don't know what you are-"
"Fine," Lila snapped. "Fine. Then let's get your business done with and go."
"You are the business, so just stay there and be quiet," he said. "I brought you because Tatter predates me. All right? I know a lot, but here is where my firsthands run out. Tasha is the only person we can talk to who knows something about ancient fey, and that only secondhand."
"I don't get it," Lila said, losing again. "Why can't you talk to it ... to her, yourself?"
Malachi scowled and broke from his fussing to look at her briefly. "Because it is a suit of clothes, Lila. It doesn't have ears or a mouth or language. It isn't that kind of a thing. The Hunter wasn't that kind of a thing."
"He spoke," Lila protested, and when they waited just repeated it. "When we did the deal. He spoke. It was kind of like the wind spoke, or something. He said Tatter. That's the last thing I knew before I got back here. He saw the dress and he said her name. And then he said yes. And here we fucking are. Anyway, it communicates quite well enough without talking." She swiped crossly at herself, slapping the cloth as if brushing off lint as she swapped chequers for backgammon. "The trouble is that I don't see what it adds up to. Elf this, faery that, don't talk about these people, don't use words, don't write things down, don't send life.... Why give me all these things and then say no? Why bug me twenty-four/seven with endless whiny messages and then try and spring me in the middle of the night like they're the Mafia and I owe them? I'm sick of it." She regretted the speech instantly and bit her tongue.
Chasing the Dragon Page 10