She progressed at the centre of a storm of violence, leaving a slick trail of gore clotted with body parts in her wake. It was slow, slower than walking. It was more grim and exhilarating than anything she had ever known. As she moved forwards she seemed to have left the ground and left all traces of her body behind. It moved without her, at a distance, its signals perfect in her absence until it seemed like she directed the monstrous gyre as a conductor and lead dancer, everything moving exactly to her timing and not the other way around. They tried to move hell to kill her, each in their own way, and together in every method they could muster. But Lila flowed and blood rained. Magic died on her. Curses shot back to the mouths of their unhappy givers. Blows shattered weapons. Poisons faded. Plagues died. Fire and aether vanished into her shell as if she consumed them. Water evaporated, boiling unwitting nearby attackers alive and exploding them in outguttings of steam and viscera. Missiles were returned to the gun, the bow, the cannon, and the shooter, no matter how much they ran, turned, twisted, and tried to escape.
The woman, the machine, the dress, and the sword had become an unstoppable force. Lila rode them, watching from the quiet central eye of the melee and at the same time seeming to float above herself and see it all from a bird's-eye view. It would have been comical in its ludicrous excess if it were not unfathomably and unendingly horrible. She wished in that moment, feeling stupid, feeling sad, "I wish I played the piano instead of this. Or even cards. Or anything." It was the greatest freedom and glory to be so good at something but the execution of her ability gave her no pleasure now, in the peak of the experience. She felt they were fools to attack her. They posed no real threat. Killing them was a waste of time and their lives. Try as she might she was no demon in her heart and at last she knew it. She would never belong here, and now, after so much ample proof of her power, they would want her to.
Finally the assault ended and she walked free, the last of the bodies falling off her back and onto the unyielding stone. As she reached the central square and Madame's house she was alone in a quiet town, her footsteps sounding loud on the pavement. The green door that led off the street bore the marks of the police department and was locked, but she was equal to the picking, opened it and went inside, closing it behind her and locking it again. It was dark in the hall, and mercifully enclosed and quiet. She leant against the wall and closed her eyes for a moment and breathed out a long breath silently into the musty air.
I am never going home, she thought. Never.
After settling the sword on her shoulder she began to look at the rooms. They followed an orderly layout the same on three levels, with large square suites opening off a central hall and stairway. The crime scene, as she had seen in the photographs, was in Madame's favourite parlour that opened onto the square itself and commanded good views in three directions over the Souk and larger city. She stayed well back from the windows so that nobody could spy on her and examined what was left of the furniture. Most objects were dusted with telltale powders of various kinds and protected with hexing charms from disturbance. There was a lot of dried blood and signs of struggle. All the gracious items and lovely fabrics she remembered from previous visits were either chopped up, stained, or blackened by what had been a hasty but virulent fire. A lot was out of place, and she slowly pieced together from her memory, the photographs, and the present evidence that looters had been here several times over after the police had gone on their way. She found the balcony doors broken at the latch ... that explained that.
There was nothing to indicate Teazle was responsible now. And nothing to indicate that he wasn't. She gave up sifting and straightened, listening. The empty house listened back. And then she had an impulse to put her hand in her pocket, though bikinis didn't have pockets of course. But suddenly hers did-it had a small bag hanging from the flimsy strap across her hip. She was not surprised to reach inside and find the warm, unpleasant lump of fleshy stone that was Madame's Eye. It seemed infinitely long ago that she had sat here on a sunny day, with the imp cavorting in the milk jug, and accepted it from Madame's hand as if she were a rookie reporter being given an assignment. That was what it had felt like, though later she'd never actually used it. There was nothing to fear now, however.
A feather was what she needed to make it work. She searched a few more rooms-Madame had kept ravens as well as her suitors, who had feathers of their own. There was nothing on the top two floors, not even on the ground floor. She wondered if the police had cleaned out the place or if Madame had just made the suitors incredibly fastidious. Given their looks as risen dead, it seemed a bit incongruous if that had been how it was. She was mulling this when her eyes flicked back twice to something on the floor in the pantry.
She had to bend down and reach back into the deep shadows behind a grain bin to reach it, but there it was-a blue-and-white feather. One of Teazle's.
What the hell was it doing back there? Nothing in here had been moved. The air was fusty with mould and the floor covered in dust that showed no tracks. He would have had to put it there, she thought, but her spirits lifted at this sign of him. She was slightly loath to use it, but she moved back to the kitchen area, set the plume down on a sideboard, and then put the Eye on top of it.
Instantly the nodule sank down as if melting and became markings on the feather, transforming it into something rather like the end of a peacock's tailfeather. Then that marking moved and blinked and became a blue eye on a white background. The eye looked around, swivelling as far as it could, then fixed on Lila. She had no idea what to do. There had been no further instructions.
The eye stared at her, and its pupil dilated and then narrowed as it put her into focus. She was about to speak when the most peculiar feeling of being watched from the inside came over her. There was no centre to the sense of presence, and none of her Al systems registered or set off an alarm, but the hairs on her body stood up and a chill ran through her that made her shiver convulsively. She half expected a voice any moment: Tath had spoken to her easily when she had carried his spirit. Instead it was like occupying, faintly, another person. Faintly because in comparison her own senses were strong signals and this was a weaker thing, less than half the power. But it was good enough. She understood, because this occupying ghost understood, that she was connected to Madame's mind and it was a place of curious, unfolded dimensions, glimpsed vistas, winking possibilities, and the flickering half-lives of moments as they fell from chance to reality or into oblivion.
She took the feather, so as not to break the fragile contact-the eye did not seem to mind-and carried it in finger and thumb as she left the kitchen and moved along one of the halls to a particular spot. There she was now able to see that the light fittings where smokeless torches had been taken away and little solar glowbulbs fixed in place were the covers to a panel. She stuck the feather in her hip sash and levered the panel free. It was beautifully made. Even with her enhanced faculties she'd missed it. Beneath the fascia lay a small set of buttons, unmarked and unpowered. There was also an inlet socket. It was the work of a second to create a matching plug, jack it in, and run electricity through the system. As she keyed in the combinations it did occur to her to wonder where Madame was, why she seemed to be helpful. The answers that suddenly manifested in her mind were hard to grasp at first. Madame was in the back of beyond-a faery style of answer if ever there was one. She was assisting Lila because she was being hunted.
Lila paused at this and cast about looking for more details. A sense of reassurance came over her. All would be revealed. Prompted by her new thoughts she realised this part had concluded. She unjacked, replaced the panel, and went up to the second storey, to a walk-in cupboard where a new door had opened behind a rack of clothes, splitting the rack neatly in two. There was a narrow staircase, circular and stonebuilt, lying in the heart of the house. Lila had to shrink all her proportions very slightly and take in some of the bladed extravagance of her armour. Then she slid into the opening and closed the doors behind her. I
t was utterly dark, but this did not bother her as she had more than enough senses to cope without eyesight. She felt her inhabitant's slight twinge of envy and smiled as she started a long walk down.
As she descended she found that she knew this stair led past the house's single and obvious cellar and farther down to a tunnel that had been dug long before out of the friable bedrock of the city's foundation. Some ten metres below the surface she reached it. It was dank and her feet splashed in low water. Beneath the lagoon's surface the rock here was usually supersaturated with water, but spells kept most of it out. The house had belonged in much older times to a pirate queen, and this was the secret passage to her treasure chamber. Madame had discovered it via her clairvoyant skills, because prior to her purchase of the house all knowledge of it had died with the pirate herself. Madame had fitted the tricky electronic extra lock mechanism herself, as she had foreseen a police search of the house in which the cupboard would be scanned and its old lock system discovered.
It was Lila's turn to be impressed and envious. She paced the familiar/unfamiliar track of the tunnel steadily, noting its turns, and then, with surprise, she found it branching. The suppurating, stinking air, old and foul with neglect and the seepage of generations of demon sewage, formed sluggish intersecting trails. Lila scanned and scanned again. She had reached a labyrinth. It was the treasure chamber. By her calculation they were now beneath the lagoon proper, not far from a major commuter boat route that joined the main city to Isle d'Ifritis, a place given over to the more elementally attuned demons so that they could experiment with Zoomenon energies at a safe distance from the majority of the population.
Lila began to move forwards. Left, left, right ... the turns flowed out of a memory that wasn't hers but which was confident of itself. Occasionally she turned her face out of habit to "look" down an untaken path. Sometimes she had a sense of knowing what lay that way, but most of the time she was not sure. As she went she created a clear map in her mind, marking all this down, and soon she began to understand that the labyrinth's ways were masterfully planned. She twisted and turned, crossed and recrossed ways-this route was one discovered by intuition working on old traces; it was not "correct" in the sense of being the only way to the destination. The labyrinth was not a true single trackway. It was a complex set of routes that met and parted, met and parted, revolved, reversed.
She hesitated suddenly. A faint smell had come to her, over the taint of the air that she'd become numbed to. She knew it. Her heart leaped, surprising her. He was here! She began to move faster, but then a possessing caution and a curious impulse made her slow down and pause once more. Ahead of her was a chamber that had light. But she must not use her eyes to see. She must shut them. Something was in there that was very important. Madame was excited but imperious in her warnings. This thing, whatever it was, was key to her survival, as well as Teazle's. Lila would be helping her in finding him, but it would be no help if she looked.
Lila closed her eyes-which made no difference at that moment. She moved more slowly, utterly alone in the dark except for the occasional drip of water from the low roof barely an inch from her head. She made more turns, descended a short stair, slid down a ramp, and was there. What she "saw" on infrared detection made her stop dead in her tracks. The chamber was small, but it was half full of demons. Teazle was among them, at the back of their ranks. Aside from him, all of them were stone dead. He was not moving. As if he were one of them, he was caught, motionless, balanced with grace in a pose that was moving eagerly forwards, all the better to see what every single one of them was staring at, each in their own individual pose of rapture. At the front of the queue was an unusually large statue of an Amazonian female demon of mixed draconid and human descent, her hair a mass of finny tentacles writhing, her eyes and mouth open in an expression of strange delight as she balanced on her clawed feet like a dancer, her hand outstretched to touch the large and beautiful frame before her from which her other hand had just pulled free a heavy covering silk.
That silk was now a few rotted strands in her eternal grasp. Inside the frame sat something so infinitely black that none of Lila's ur-lights or frequencies could penetrate it. It was there but ... she had no idea what it was. It bore no properties of anything in the physical world she could measure.
It was the Mirror of Dreams.
Of course it was, she thought and surveyed the scene once again, closely, before stepping carefully towards Teazle. He might have been made of rock for all the movement he made. She thought of moving him, but a recoil struck through her bones. No. He must remain exactly where he was when he had been trapped. Otherwise he would never get out.
Madame herself had never come this far.... Lila was surprised. She had expected to find her too, but after sensing what lay around the final turn Madame had stopped her exploration of this particular tunnel. Her question had been answered. This was where the pirate queen had been lost, and her crew after her, and a couple of other lucky discoverers after that, until in time they had all been forgotten. It was the heart of the labyrinth. The pirate had brought her greatest loot here and, in defiance of all warnings and in a good deal of ignorance, had thought she would have a look at a legendary object for herself. And it had looked at her. And that was that.
Teazle had somehow got himself down here and he had done the same. He couldn't have known. He wasn't stupid. Lila checked him over. Apart from some muscle wastage and fatigue he was still alive. He was breathing. His heart was working fine. Soon he would become badly dehydrated and later he would starve to death or else ... she turned around and looked closely at the other demons. They didn't appear to have died of starvation. They all looked rather lifelike, if not lively. She was forced to conclude that something had happened before that. She waited for more knowledge to rise from her contact with Madame, but the clairvoyant knew nothing about it, only a vague notion from an old story that one might die whilst dreaming and so die in reality. Lila scanned back into the still darkness within the frame. It gave out nothing. Were they more than paralysed?
This the clairvoyant knew. She was impatient with Lila's obtuseness. Of course they were inside the Dream! Their bodies remained in the real world, but their spirits were gone. Lila didn't know if the body died because of that severance or if something in the dreaming was getting to them and killing them there. At this a sense of urgency so acute overtook her that she started to gasp for breath and her heart began racing of its own accord. Madame's fear overwhelmed her, and in that instant she saw what the demon saw. Madame was pursued! She must run and hide! Futures whirled before her in which the thing that came behind her overtook her and consumed her from within.
There was a brief burst of energy that flung Lila across the room to hit the wall. It snapped her out of the contact. Lila found herself back in her own body. The bikini had become a tight-fitting leotard in its efforts as it pulled her from the brink, and she felt it slithering crossly around her skin like a snake that she'd annoyed. In her hand the blue-and-white feather was smoking ash. She was really and truly on her own.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
alachi returned to Solomon's Folly with a heavy heart and the sinking feeling that would usually drive him away from any matter that brought it on. He wasn't sure if it was a case of premonition, but the pall of foreboding was so thick he could almost taste it. He did not care if it was a great insight for the future or his own dread. His guts felt uneasy. As he parked the car and got out into the heavy atmosphere of the house itself he thought it had sunk even further. The sun-a bright dayfailed to light even half the windows. At the periphery of the overgrowing gardens the forms of wood elementals hovered, gathering bodies, trying to see him and nose out his business or his strength. They rustled hungrily.
He knocked and waited. Vines had begun to grow over the door hinges, he noticed. There was also a kind of activity moving across the surface of the walls, a restlessness he had rarely felt before but that he had found in some graveyards. He didn't k
now what to call it, and didn't want to know. At last he heard soft footsteps and the scrape of a slipper on the tiles, then keys and bolts on the move, and finally the door opened once it had been given a good pull.
The ghoulish face of Calliope Jones stared up at him from its surround of bird's-nest dreadlocks with a slight impish smile on her lips. She looked cold as winter, though it was warm inside and out, enough to be jacket-only weather.
"You look like hell," Malachi said in spite of himself, shocked by her cadaverous appearance. Worse than the physical was the air of desperation that emanated from her, a vibration that anticipated nothing good or safe. He wanted to put his arms around her, but she still held herself up with that damned, brittle defiant anger shimmering even through all her suffering, so he made some gesture towards her with open hands and, seeing it, she turned quickly and padded back into the gloom of the hall. He followed her and started as the fey charms shot all the bolts and keys to slam and rattle at his back.
"S'where I've been," she whispered as she led him swiftly through the unfamiliar halls, passing several pale flickering copies of Azevedo, whom she ignored and even walked through at one point in her haste to reach what turned out to be the kitchen. It was a mess-an awful, cluttered, unwashed mess with everything out of the cupboards, used or left where it lay. But at the centre of it was a long black iron range burning scented wood, and around that was a small space with a chair, a footstool, and a teapot in it. She almost raced to the stool and crouched on it, huddling close to the stove and wrapping her filthy layers of wool cardigans and multiple skirts around her. She didn't smell, but even so he was repulsed at her slovenliness. He sat in the chair after assessing it for cleanliness. She rocked herself for a second, then leapt up. "I must make tea! You want some?"
"No. Just a few answers would be fine," he said, wondering if he would ever learn to loosen up around her. It was hard. He longed to be protective. She would have had his eyes out. Wryly he thought of Lila and then pushed the thought away.
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