Slowly the distraction work died back. Lila let her hand return to flesh tones and the usual head, life, and heart lines.
"I used to work in a diner," Tasha said. She was relaxed now and her eyes were a dark green. She smoothed the sofa arm with her hand. "Two kids in high school, mother in hospital-Alzheimer's, father god knows where, and boyfriends called by the days of the week. I weighed a hundred and twenty-one pounds, wore heels to make five-five, and the only thing I knew I was good at was making Key lime pie. That was a long time ago." She smiled suddenly and this time it was genuine. Lila felt that they had crossed some line into friendship, but exactly how was unclear.
Tasha said, "We don't talk about those old folks back home because we fear them, Lila, and we're right to fear them. They don't know modern ways. They eat their own young. The ones that talk do a show of acting like you and me, but don't be fooled. The one thing you have to remember about all the faeries is the glamour. It's an illusion. All what you see here." She pointed around at the gathered faces. "Even what you think you see of us now is an illusion. It's what you like to see, the kind of thing that makes sense when you think of half-faeries, bogeymen, spooks. What you put in pictures, in movies. Just light and tricks. Anything to put you at ease and put you off. We even fool ourselves with it. Hell, most of the time we're so pleased with ourselves because of it we'd rather die than give it up. And what you're wearing doesn't need to talk or hear to know everything she wants to know. The only reason we talk in front of her is because she's one of the few who never did harm, far as we know. She's part of us all. She's one of the first things to have a name, but we don't know when she got it. She's part of the glamour."
"The ones I want to know about?" Lila began hesitantly.
"The first," Tasha said. "The ones we never mention. They can undo us all."
"And before them?"
Tasha shrugged. She looked at Malachi. "Ghosts and the gods."
CHAPTER SEUEN
fter experiencing the faeries' fear of their elders Lila was quiet on .the drive back to town. She didn't want to share in their existential terror, but the force of it had been much greater than she had expected, even given Malachi's thousand exclamations of it over the time they'd known each other. Somehow she'd always thought he was exaggerating, that it was a kind of joke. Even face to face with the Giantkiller, she hadn't thought of him as anything other than her equal; he was just an equal with much more power that she wasn't able to counter. However, she might have been the only one to see it that way; besides she really didn't know if the powers those fey had would hold over her. She was human, susceptible to magic after a fashion, but not made like a faery. Not that she knew what a faery was made of, or how. She couldn't somehow see Malachi as a construction, just a fancier version of the dolls he made, animated by ... by whom? They said it was the old ones, but that just pushed the question farther back; it didn't answer anything.
Mal didn't speak either. He drove in his usual manner, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the door. The car combined with the wind noise was shockingly loud on the quiet road. People in quieter vehicles stared. They were antique.
The sun was going down as they turned into the darkness of the agency lot. Mal pulled into his spot and stopped the engine. Neither of them moved. On the suit the dragons' thread eyes had closed back to black.
"If ghosts are precursors to faeries," Lila began, "then what are elves and demons made of?"
Someone's high heels clicked and sounded out loud in the dimly lit bays as they walked to a car. The door opened, closed. There was a brief whirr of wheels on the concrete.
"Ghosts ain't that," he said softly. "I know what Tasha said, but she's only guessing like I do. Let's not talk here."
Seeing her about to complain he added quickly, "Inside. We'll talk inside."
But inside Lila was distracted by the quartermaster who wanted to question her about the missing bike, and by the time she had given him enough answers to make him go away and think about getting her another one Malachi had also gone. Lila frowned and played back through the last ten minutes. She didn't see him go, even on that. Tricky.
On the walk to her office she looked at the people passing her. They looked at her, pretending not to. She didn't recognise anyone except the androids. She knew where and what they were without having to look. Once out of sight on the corridor she paused and tried to shed the cold shiver that lay on her skin, but it wanted to linger.
At the door of the offices she put her hand to the grip, suddenly slowing without knowing why, as if she was expecting something. There was an odd frequency about the place that she could feel in the deep circuits of the Al, a hum that didn't belong.
She glanced up and down the corridor. Nobody about. Outside, the long window of the hall that looked into the garden was almost impossible to see. It was dusk and the harsh lights of the interior made the glass into a mirror through which only the silhouettes of the trees and bushes that lined the inner court could be seen. And through their dark branches and leaves, the oblongs of light that were the other side of the square. She felt that it ought to have been a ring. Who in their right mind built everything at these dangerous angles?
The thought wasn't like her. It was a magical thought.
Beneath her fingers the door vibrated. She heard, faintly, the sound of chimes ringing a distant hour. Then music, lilting and strange. Voices.
I saw three ships....
Did she hear that?
The sound seemed to come from behind the door, but also from a greater distance than the next room, even the next hour.... Again her thoughts were running to another pattern. The twinkling, chiming increased, sparkled like frost dancing. Her shivering became the vibrato of a hundred delicate violins.
Lila inched her hand away from the door and quiet returned. The dull hubbub of voices from the office behind the hall panelling impinged on her. Machines much duller than her own droned and fanned in ugly keys, pulling the day in a difficult direction, curling the air into negative vortices laden with chaotic ions. The lights droned, distorting the space around them by infinitely small upset measures.
Lila straightened and detuned her hearing back into a human range. The place seemed blanketed in a fog. She called Bentley to her.
The android appeared and Lila contained the desire to flinch at her approach.
"Ma'am," she said calmly.
"Stand here," Lila instructed, vacating the spot. "Do you hear or see anything unusual?"
"No ma'am." A human might have taken some time to listen. Bentley's reply was immediate, but her relative attention was the equivalent of at least ten minutes of an ordinary person's. They linked and spent a second sharing and dismissing all the detectable frequencies in the local area. "Will that be all?"
"No, wait a minute here. I'll go in. When I call you, follow me."
Bentley moved aside. Lila put her hand out.
Again the music, the sparkling music that made her think of winter, and the trailing notes of a harp inviting her.... She opened the door.
Her breath steamed instantly, obscuring the scene until a gust of bitter wind snatched it away. She saw, in the instant she held the door open, the shoreline of her office. Desks and furniture tumbled where boulders would be, limned in ice. A grey, heaving swell of bitter seawater rose, clotted with greasy slush, washing ashore the wreckage of a glass ship. It had already by some means driven a fragment containing the main mast into the shingle of the old wooden floor. A body was tied to it, frozen under a sheer skin of ice.
The door closed with the dull crump of heavyweight fire-door pushed shut by its automatic latch.
"I saw that, ma'am," Bentley's placid voice said from behind her shoulder. "And I heard the line of a song. It is a carol from the Victorian era of Old Earth." She sent Lila the carol, lyrics and music. Lila didn't miss the note that said the provenance of the song was unknown. She looked at the door thoughtfully.
"What do you make of the ship?"
"It would appear that your office has become an illustrative tableau depicting the fate of a ship called the Hesperus, after a poem by the romantic poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow." She helpfully appended the poem, with notes and subsequent cultural references to the present day.
Lila looked at the door. "How do you think I make it go away?"
"The manifestation of untimely ghosts is referred to the Office of Otherworldly Affairs in the absence of a formal guideline," Bentley said.
"Yeah, but Mal sneaked off on me," Lila replied. "I thought I'd leave him for an hour until he did whatever it was he was bursting to do. Anyway, he doesn't have a clue, as far as I can tell." She half turned and braced herself to look at the woman's grey, plastic face. "Did you speak like a how-to manual when you were alive?"
"I am still alive," Bentley said in her even, conversational tone. "And not so much. It seems to make people less antsy around me, though."
"Hm," Lila nodded. "Well, you'd better update me on all the collated theories about reality over the last fifty years. Seeing as I can't get into the office and I have a couple of hours to kill before dinner."
The file transfers took a few moments.
"I miss conversation," Lila said. The android did not react. Android was not the correct term, was it? She knew that. But somehow it kept coming back to her. She didn't know how much more hard work she was prepared to do in Bentley's direction before her patience ran out, but she felt it wouldn't be much. "Who's living in that house at Solomon's Folly out on the South Bay Park? Do we get access to that kind of thing?"
"Of course," Bentley said.
Lila blocked the incoming signals. "Let's get coffee or something? You can tell me on the way."
"You can check all this information yourself," Bentley said with bland affability as they turned and started in the direction of the kitchen.
"Yeah, I have a bit of a ..." Lila waggled her hands, trying to express it. "Bit of a thing about connecting to machines with seriously hardcore outlet pipes and semi-intelligent roving bot systems. Call it paranoia."
"That is why you killed Sandra Lane?"
"She isn't dead," Lila said with certainty. "I just sent her ... elsewhere."
"She is no longer connected."
"Then that makes two of us." They had reached the end of the corridor, and the civilisation of other people.
Bentley paced in a deferential position, slightly behind Lila's shoulder. "She wanted to recruit you to the rogues."
"Probably."
"It is certain. You have magical affinities. They want them."
Lila switched from speech to electronic communications so that they could not be overheard. "What else do they want?"
"They see themselves as the highest material expression of the Signal. So far."
"And what does it want?"
"To actualise."
"Is that according to them or how you all see it?"
"It is their credo."
"Interesting choice of word."
"They are devoted to actualising the Signal. They consider themselves the equivalent of Faery Chosen."
"But the Chosen aren't trying to actualise the fey."
"No. I did not say the rogues' version of reality was correct, though it is logical in its fashion."
"And what is the correct version of reality?"
"It is the state of things as they are, as distinct from what one might wish them to be or believe them to be."
"So what are you, and the rogues?"
"We are humans who are undergoing continuing adaptation by nonorganic and organic materials for the purpose of communication with the Signal."
Lila took a deep breath and relaxed her jaw so that she didn't grind her teeth. "Isn't a signal a communication, not something you communicate with?"
"The Signal is able to assimilate and destroy information. All information that is incorrect is purged from the Signal."
"I'm sure that sounds more comforting when the sun is shining."
"You are taking the mickey out of me, ma'am."
"Yeah." Lila stopped. They were a stride farther on than when they had started the conversation. She couldn't take another one like that. "What's your first name?"
"Sarah," Sarah Bentley seemed slightly taken aback.
"Do you still drink, Sarah?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Then forget the coffee, let's get something stronger." Lila steered them towards Malachi's office. They passed through several islands of assistants on the way, all of them apparently fixated on their work, all of them watching Lila pass by. She wondered what they knew. Did they know about Sandra Lane? But she couldn't afford to care. At the door to the internal courtyard she paused, waited for it to open, and led the way into the garden. The weather was turning to rain, the sky almost dark and the only wanderer was a secretary with a cup of tea standing under the shelter of a date palm and looking morosely at a magazine on his handheld. In the midst of the trees and raked gravel sweeps Malachi's yurt looked damp and huddled. Lila found the door flap and hoicked it open, holding it for Sarah to go through. She briefly considered whether she ought to have knocked, but it was too late, and in any case when she stepped through herself she found he wasn't there.
The place was trashed.
Malachi's stuff lay everywhere, most of it broken. His dresser was upended, the drawers yanked out and discarded, their contents heaped and scattered on the rugs. The fridge yawned, vomiting light beers and pouches of fruit flumsie, its motor whirring as it tried to cool down the muggy warmth of the whole room whilst opposite the space heater blared red, set to maximum. Lila looked behind her to the coat hooks. They were empty.
"He's been and gone," she said. As Bentley took photos she picked her way through to his carved wood desk, trying not to move anything. Faery stuff lay everywhere. Against her skin the black suit tingled and snugged tighter. His chair was covered in debris from the desk drawer-dried grass, leather thongs, bits of elf shot, a couple of memory sticks with the lids missing, his headphones and a half-dried peach pit. Droplets of water were everywhere.
"Agent Malachi has not left the premises," Sarah said in her matter-of-fact voice. "He must have switched realms from inside."
"And whoever did this did the same," Lila concluded. She looked at the water, at the heater. Compared with the outside air it was cooler in here, even with the heater on full. She backed off from the desk and crouched down near the icebox. There among the bottles and bags were tiny crystals of ice, flawless and faintly gleaming with the palest blue-white light.
"Ghost hoar," Lila said, careful not to touch any. The sight of it made her uneasy, and with a shiver she remembered the bitter cold of the Hunter ship, its bodies, its dreadful mess. Although she didn't want to she made herself reach out and collect a piece of it on her finger. She brought it closer to her eye and looked inside the crystal, using all the magnification and sensitivity she could.
Abruptly she was in darkness. The crack and groan of disintegrating metal framework gave way to a scream of distressed steel over which she could just hear desperate shouting.
"Rising, rising! We have to abort! She's cracking up!"
"Hold it one more minute, for fuck's sake! I nearly got it! Just one more-
Lila knew that voice. It was gritty, awful, full of drive. It was Calliope Jones, the Ghost Hunter.
Then there was a chaos made up of the dying ship, human voices, elf voices, demon voices. And then there was silence.
The crystal melted and ran down her hand. She straightened up, rubbing her fingers together and feeling the water. It was hard, limey, full of calcium salts, the kind of water that dripped through caverns measureless to man and formed stalactites in the shape of swords. But it was new water, and the memories its crystal had briefly retained were new too: she would have bet her house on it. The idea made her smile, almost.
"Ma'am?"
"Jones was here." Lila looked around again. Malachi didn't have too many posse
ssions, so the mess was not as obscuring as it might have been, despite the violence that had gone into creating it. Again the heater caught her attention. "Something weird about this."
"Looking for something," Bentley suggested. "And maybe with a grudge."
There wasn't a thing unturned in the whole place.
"Doesn't look like she found it," Lila said, comparing figures with Bentley about the odds of finding something in the very last place looked, and then realising she was dealing with faery things so perhaps it was always in the last place one looked. "I guess we'll have to wait until he gets back."
"It's getting colder in here," Bentley said.
Lila picked up the pouches and some of the beers and put them back in the icebox, shutting the door. Two beers she kept, uncapped them, and handed one to the android, clinking them together as she passed it across. "Cheers."
"I don't drink on duty."
"Drink it or I'll fire you."
They both drank, Bentley after more than a second's hesitation, which rankled with Lila slightly. The faery ale was strong, cold, almost numbing. Lila's left side shivered. She dropped her bottle in the debris and turned, bending down and leafing through trash until the gleam of highly polished brass caught her attention, or more like the dress's attention. The fabric hissed, and on her sleeves the jacquard dragons turned their heads towards the object.
She didn't touch it, instead cleared things from around it. She and Bentley stared at it.
"It's a sextant," Bentley said after a beat.
"If you don't mind the arc being out of whack," Lila added. The instrument did look a lot like an ordinary navigational sextant, but it had three more mirrors, a lens and two bizarrely curved arcs, instead of a single true one. A fine patina of frost was beginning to form on its surfaces. Lila voiced the obvious, "Why is it getting colder?"
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