Lila fought out of the water, digging her fingertips into the deck, melting holds and pushing them into molten glass, making claws as she was lost in boiling, spitting water and billowing clouds of steam. Cooling, heating crystal screamed and splintered under her and the black smoke of lace and the yellow, stinking smoke of burning fur obscured the ugly fight to pull tens of pounds of soaking satin out with her as it clung around her legs. She slid across the metre and a half on her belly, frightened in case the figure was frozen solid and in her haste or carelessness she might break it. But she made it, tearing herself free where cold stuck her repeatedly to the glass; the faery could look after itself now, she didn't care as she let her claws become blades and cut through the thin ropes that bound the mast and ship to their captain. Only as they parted around her fingers did she realise they were made out of hair.
She remodelled her hands, warmed them, tentatively reached for the shoulders, tried to lift as she crawled up to her knees, dress splintering and refreezing over her until suddenly it seemed to lose patience and heated up. The deck beneath them cracked in half as it failed to keep up with the change. The body was almost solid. Lila threw the remnants of the huge skirt over it quickly, willing the heat to find a trace of life and help it return. Under her hands she felt the outline of the face quite clearly, the shape of the bone under the flesh exactly as she had feared.
"Zal," she whispered. "Don't be dead. Wake up."
Suddenly a movement in the swell broke the deck apart and they were in the water. The weight of the mast dragged him down to the bottom. Lila plunged into the blackness, able to see with other frequencies, struggling with the sticking rope and the awkward shape of the huge crystal spar that tumbled away from her, its shattered end almost slicing her in half. She broke it to pieces with heat in her hands and then searched around. Ultrasonics showed the submerged shapes of solid things, including the curled body, and the slight movement of something inside it. She grabbed hold so carefully as it turned in slow water, and brought him to the surface. The seawater sucked viciously at her legs and feet, and then with the breaking of the ship the entire ghost seemed to have lost heart. It shivered, as one thing, and within a few seconds the whole biting reality of it evaporated into thin air, leaving her standing in the ordinary room, dry, surrounded by a tumbled mess of furniture and objects piled in heaps.
She was shaking. She daren't look down.
"Get him to medical," Greer said, holding the door for her. "I'll meet you there."
"Elf things," she said, aware that she wasn't making a lot of sense. "There have to be elf things here."
"Yeah, but meantime there's things and people there that can help. Nobody can touch this stuff except you. So take him to where he's safe and come back and look for it. Okay?"
No mention of Zal being dead. She feared he was. Or maybe not, but maybe not Zal either. She daren't hope. He weighed nearly nothing but then he never had. Could you survive those temperatures? That place? She didn't know. She did as she was told.
The armed guards who had arrived stood back to let her pass and took up posts at the door and in the hall, batons in their hands.
All the time she was walking she was talking, doing deals with faeries and powers in her head-if you let it be him, if you let him be alive, if you let me have this, if you're not playing headfuck games with me, then I'll ... but she didn't know what she'd trade or do; there was nothing big enough or that she had. And then there was the ultrasound she had once used in an ER to heal and charm another elf, playing through his body: yes it's material, yes it's flesh and bone, yes it has all the right parts in the right places if you don't count some breaks and a certain amount of violence and the crystals forming in the cells and the shadows that defy labelling. And his heart doesn't beat and his lungs are all but empty of anything you could call air, though they've got a lot of water inside them grinding their surfaces to pulp with its salt. And the air doesn't warm him but she does. If love was heat, then she had enough, didn't she? And where was that flicker of life she'd have sworn was real, no imagination ... not in the body but in the aether that was strong in ghosts. Could you have ghosts of the living?
There it was again. On her skin the metal elementals lit like butterflies, emerging, wings stretching. Yes. No mistake. But gone again now. How to catch it? How to hold it down and be sure it didn't leave?
She racked her brains for all she knew about Zal and saw him running in the woods, by that dreadful building, to the hill and the hollow where he'd pulled Zoomenon to him. His addiction was fire. Yes, and his demon affinity was fire. But no Otopian combustion was going to work. Elemental fire was what she needed now. Sarasilien had to have some. Must have some.
The medical centre had changed since her day. Where machines used to bank and encroach on every side there was space. White had gone, natural was in. It was like a hotel room in a garden. Even the doctor and the surgeon were dressed in scrubs that looked like casual clothes, faces groomed to smile and reassure. No stethoscopes or scanners here, just a few passes of the hands, sympathy.
They put him on a bed and trained some lukewarm heat lamps on him to thaw him out slowly because he could break like the glass, and someone said something about thermoshock and still nobody used the D word so, still praying, not looking in case it was too much, Lila left him there and ran back to the office with its guard, the androids in the hall, the wreckage of a lifetime's work waiting for her, and began to search.
She was fast, she knew that, but it felt like eternity as books and papers flew through her hands and in front of her eyes, meaningless, useless. The outer office had nothing. The laboratory-well, that took some time, even at hyperspeed. He had a billion things. Odd. Bad. Strange. He wrote in code that took her half an hour to figure out, and that was just for the lesser objects. Potions, herbs, plants, the place was thick with the worthless crap of ages. Poisons, there were a thousand. Antidotes a thousand and ten more. Magic circles and wands and swords and cups-what to choose? Does it matter if they don't match? It didn't matter, it turned out, as she couldn't cast anything. Human, machine, not magical at all, even in the dress, even holding the pen, even using every votive article lined up like the lich king's garage sale. No trips to Zoomenon for her, not even a flicker of hell.
Hell.
She looked at the clock.
Nine eighteen.
Where the fuck was Teazle?
Then she knew it was trouble. He wasn't late. Something had happened and she couldn't stop now, no, couldn't, because every second Zal might die. Still, if there was one place you could go to get magical things for cash or trade it was Bathshebat, capital of Demonia, and if there was one place elementals liked to congregate, it was Demonia. Teazle, how did he go? Teleport.
Useless! Think of something! The old portal used to be inside a military base outside the city, but they shut it down in the Hunter's Wild and now the only route into Demonia was through some bunker she didn't know the location of. Demons came in at will, who could stop them? But getting out, that was still embargoed.
"Is something wrong?"
Lila spun around, the corset making it more of a stiff jump than it should have been. Greer was standing there looking over a teetering heap of grimoires at her.
She put down the summoning manuscript she'd been reading from and turned off the burner under a failed alchemical experiment that some or other authority had suggested was good for concocting primal fire without burning the house down. "Where is your portal? The goanywhere, do-anything portal. You must have one. Where is it?"
"Where did you want to go?"
"I need elemental fire," she hesitated. "Zoomenon."
"Can't go there," he said. "Small matter of disintegration. Never found a containment field that could sustain itself here and there. Not a place for nonaethereals. No deal."
"Demonia then."
"That could easily be a one-way ticket."
"It's the only place."
"I'll send one o
f our demon pals. Fire elementals, you say?"
Lila felt herself outmanoeuvred. "I want to go...."
"If you go and don't kill Teazle then you don't come back." He shrugged. "I did a deal there. I don't want it broken by you. It's more important than you. Don't take it personal."
She didn't understand him at all.
"Besides, you should be here. If that's who I think it is. You should be here. I don't think he came to sign my albums."
Finally she gave a nod. Behind it her head was churning with what ifs. He hadn't said no to the portal, though, so there must be one and it had to be around here somewhere. She bet Bentley knew where. "Well there's nothing here."
Greer looked around him at the steaming jungle of the laboratory, the dozens of used bottles, fume cupboards, delicate concoctions of glass set up on every surface, many of them still giving off smoke or steam. "So I see."
The dress had allowed itself to become just a few rags hanging off the corset by now. She was able to walk around the equipment without causing any accidents. "I'll get back there then. Wait for whoever."
"Good idea. By the way, I nearly forgot to mention it. While you were working here there was a call for you."
"A call?" She was so wrong-footed that for a few seconds she wasn't even sure she'd heard him right.
He nodded, drawing a circle on the tiles with the toe of one worn shoe where she'd spilled water. "Yeah. Said she'd call back later and that you shouldn't get home too late."
"Oh." She wasn't sure if this was a test, wondered briefly if that brownie was having some unfaerylike attack of conscience or whether the rogues had discovered a way to find her again. Quickly she gathered up the few articles of elven clothing that her exhaustive search had uncovered. Greer kept working on his sketch as though there was nothing more interesting. Abruptly she was reminded of Teazle again. "Well, who was it?"
"Max," he said, looking up with a smile. "Your sister. Max."
CHAPTER TEN
ila stopped and looked at Temple Greer properly for the first time (that day. He was gazing at her thoughtfully from beneath his thick brows, his chin tucked down close to his chest, hands in pockets, just watching her, though the look was knowing and they shared a few seconds in which they both waited.
"Hoax caller?" Lila dared.
"On this number?" Greer made the slightest movement of his nose towards the com station that Sarasilien had kept next to the door, high on the wall out of the way of all his magical materials.
"Rogue impersonation?"
He nodded slowly. "Thought of that. Call came from your house. Sent a couple of boys over to check it out. No machines present. Asked the other converts here. They said there was no signature in the signal. Means if it was a fake it wasn't faked by a machine of that kind."
"Aethereal fake?"
"Must be, huh?"
She hesitated, confused by his suggestive tone. She felt queasy, furious at the same time. She wanted to scream, but she said, "Mustn't it?"
"I don't know," he said, finally straightening up to his full height. He pretended to inspect one of the alembics, tapped his finger on the glass, looked at the distillation apparatus, the little heap of useless red slag lying in the dish at the end of the line. "Voice pattern matches."
"You store ... ?"
"Everyone's voice, retina, iris, fingerprints. Yeah. All stored since just after the bomb and updated at three-year intervals over the course of a lifetime. Teeth too I guess. Verbal choice patterns. Anything that can be measured without undue intrusion. Never very useful actually, except when the dead come calling. Or when you have to rebuild someone."
Lila didn't know what to say. She didn't know what to think. She remembered writing the card, the flowers, dropping them on the memorial, swearing at the maintenance guy. Filthy coffee flavours haunted her tongue. Her guts, already knotted with tension, twisted up on themselves, giving her a spasm of pain. "And do they?"
Greer fiddled with a tiny glass tap and leaned around to look at the cloudy mixture in a vial. "Human beings make bad, weak necromancers," he began.
"Cut to the crap."
"I've seen a couple. Don't wanna see them again."
She felt her mouth hanging open, her body frozen with the need to rush and see Zal, to find elementals, to stay here and listen instead.
"It was in the Hunter's Wake," he said. "At least, we figured that his activities made it easier for humans and the half-fey to cross the brink and back. He had a lotta power. Lotta. It made the world unstable, kinda permeable to magic for the duration. Some nice things came out of it and a lot of bad. I'll keep it sweet-there were two incidents of human wannabe necros and wizards getting together enough mojo to move into and summon stuff out of Thanatopia. Both ended badly. The dead people in question passed every test, including all the ones you'd expect a living person to pass. They were just themselves in every single star. But they had this habit of suddenly not being themselves at all. And stuff happened around them: hallucinations, chills, arguments, violence, suicides.... My point is they weren't who they looked like, even though clearly they kinda were-they loved who they loved and they liked prawn crackers and all that stuff. And they didn't die easy. Lost forty agents. Three of 'em cyborg. Still don't really understand what those things were. The demon agents said they were things related to devils, but purer, like an elemental form."
"Evil," Lila said. She snorted, a laugh that wasn't allowed to be. "The evil dead. Isn't that what they say to schoolchildren to stop them fooling with Ouija boards?"
"Yeah. I can't say that officially of course, because we understand evil as a philosophical construction that's part of free will and a matter of individual choice related to one's identity as a spiritual being, or not, under the rule of reason, and not an actual external entity of any kind." He poked at some of the powders lying on their measuring saucers and watched his finger tip the balance of the grain scales. "That would be animism and externalising of internal conflict and completely ideologically and phenomenologically unsound. Even in today's world of supernatural creations and magical powers there's still no place for externalised forces of intent." He paused to draw breath and sighed, putting some weights on the scale, watching them tip. "So, although it has to be some kind of unliving entity from a dimension outside immediate human perception yet existing in spaces perhaps interpenetrating with our own on a genuinely material level, albeit an undetectable one, I understand there might be lots of similar kinds of things there. They're classed as not living because they don't have material forms or anything we'd consider living characteristics except a kind of agency, and a kind of intent. But for the sake of an easy life between you and me we'll call it evil and say we're talking demon if anyone calls us on it. I have heard that there are things out there that aren't evil, but where's the fun in believing all that relativistic realistic shit? The bottom line is that they aren't returners." He stopped playing around and looked directly at her. "You want me to call the duty necromancer? I mean, the duty World Five Technician."
She didn't know. "Is it possible that it isn't ... one of these things?"
He shrugged and smiled, utterly insincere. "Sure, I guess."
"Obviously call them. Let's find out."
"I might send some guys around to your house, just undercover, very discreet, keep an eye on things. You know."
"Okay." She felt numb. She remembered the grey boatman's warning and the way the words the pen wrote had twisted like live eels in his hand, like they were fighting to be free. She thought of Max, talking to her, what she longed to say, needed to hear. All the nights she had talked to the darkness and Teazle's insensible beating heart. She found her hands so tight on the elf clothes that they were about to tear and made herself let go a little. She was looking at the floor, anything but at Greer with his mocking, know-it-all stance that was always one step ahead of her, like it or not.
"Don't ... I mean, just be careful. If it is. Her. I know it isn't. But just."
Greer was looking at her, just looking now.
"What?" She pushed past the last desk, passed him, and started to walk out.
"Don't you ever get rattled, Black? You drag a lost love out of a ghost sea, your partner goes AWOL, your spouse under sentence, you murder a rogue agent, your sister comes back from the dead, and your clothes don't even like you, what? Nothing? When are you gonna crack?"
"Tomorrow," she said. Ordinary feeling was a gulf to fall into, or something to twist around and around until it all stuck together and became a cable of something like steel. Anger at him gave her the will to twist it.
He kept up with her in the corridor, but he had to add a trot step every few strides. "Things sure have been interesting since you got back, wouldn't you say? One day into the new job and it's like the world exploded."
"Are you blaming me?" she keyed the lift. It was slow. She accessed the computer, deleted the call chain on the car, and moved it into express mode. When the doors opened several wild-eyed admin staff were jabbing at the panel, talking about dying. As they saw Greer jerk his thumb at them they got out pronto. Lila stepped in and the doors snapped shut, almost catching Greer's heel.
"No." He paused, wincing. "I think I've pulled a muscle in my leg."
"Drop back if you can't take the pace."
"I like the tough girl act, personally."
"I'm grateful. Really." Lila applied the brakes. The car decelerated, hydraulics groaning. Greer fell over nursing a mild spinal compression, and then she looked down at him. "It seems like I have some personal matters I need to attend to before I can start the job. If you don't want me to use your stuff, just say the word. I can be gone in an instant."
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