He found a missing stone. The space to the one beyond loomed ominously far, tempting him to doubt. He leapt. He landed, wobbled. He was fine. He could balance well with these light, flexible limbs. "Am I the blade then?"
"Well, whatever you have to be you're it," she said.
He paused, seeing a bank coming up ahead. He looked down at the water's sickly gush. It was too fluid to be like blood, only the colour reminded him of death under different moons. He felt cold and empty suddenly. He was sure he had killed and seen people dying. The lack of firm memories made his body ache in the strangest way, as if it were listening for the familiar sound of home, turning in all directions. The water sluiced on, a muted roar, dragging mist with it. "I've killed before," he said. He resisted the notion that he was lost.
"Yes I was there," came the reply. "Go on, the bank is just there."
He stood on the stone, balanced, both feet just fitting on the narrow surface. "Was I a good person?" The tune he had sung in Mr. V's presence stuck with him and he clung to it without singing it again. It seemed out of place now, but it tugged at him.
Glinda did not answer. "I am not the judge of it," she said finally. "That is your business."
"I can't remember," he said. Then his mind sharpened a little. "But you intend for me to kill this person we are here to find."
"Let us find him first," she replied, her tone implying that he was getting well ahead of things. "It is not certain until it is done."
But Zal still waited. "You, and Lily, you must know my life. Mina knows what I could have been. Yes. What's gone is certain. And you weave it and finish it. You must know."
She acquiesced reluctantly. "Yes."
"I want it back." Her impatience was growing; he could feel a pressure in his back willing him on.
"I can only tell it to you, like a story. I can't return the memories as they were. Those parts of you are lost forever."
"But you haven't," he said, now aloud. "So you have a reason."
"After we are through here, I will tell you what you want to know," she said. "Now can we get along?"
Blackmail. At last, he knew where he stood. "And if I don't?"
"That is your choice," she replied.
"Tell it as we go," he said, watching the rush of the water. "I might slip with boredom if you don't. Running water is so hypnotic. I could fall in. You can always keep a few things back. There must be a lot." This place felt bad to him, because perhaps he shouldn't be here and only Glinda's will allowed it. He felt haunted, and not only by his own frailty and loss. Beyond the line of the mist things without eyes watched him. Sometimes he was sure he felt them brush close, though there was no warning of their arrival, only a sudden rush of air past his face or the peculiar sensation that invisible stuff like threads or straw was sweeping through him. The trailing lines were sticky. They pulled at him, stripping off energy from him. He was fished. But this happened so quickly he couldn't be sure.
He looked at the water. Dark. Endless dark that reflected the weak grey light because it could bear none of it inside.
"Very well," Glinda's voice said sharply in the middle of his head. "It may be a long journey, and if you keep trying to catch hold of those vampires and gaunts who want to eat you you will be in trouble so I will start at the beginning." She waited, but he didn't move on, though he did look forwards at the next stone. She sighed with a longsuffering air. "You and I were born in the dark of the harvest moon, in Alfheim, at a place called ..."
Her voice spoke steadily. He made the first leap and then another and another. In a few minutes they had finished crossing the river and dealt with his birth and parentage and the beginnings of the political tangle into which he had appeared, controversial before he had taken his first breath because of his mixed heredity and his mother's scandalous choice of father for him.
The story and her friendly tones acted as an effective shield, he found. The pouncing and trawling activity that he suffered lessened almost to nothing, though the watching sensation increased. They travelled along stoney paths and through barren, monotonous moorland. Ruined buildings came and went like mirages at the sides of their way, and they crossed streams that were all as black as the first, the sound of their trickling greed the only thing to be heard. In all the hours he ran and leaped he saw nothing but the landscape and felt nothing but the cold air and the fierce intent of the invisible creatures in the mist.
The passage was not in the least pleasant, but he found himself enjoying his story, though he could not relate it to himself, much as he tried. Images came to his mind, but he thought he conjured them up. He couldn't even remember the look of his own face or what the places she described had felt like. Very occasionally something would appear that was unusually vivid and he felt a stab of happiness as he was able to fit a fragment to the tale she was telling. At least he was convinced she didn't lie. What she said rang true. In the twists and turns of events he would not have taken other paths. He felt pleased by that, and by this proof that he was still alive even if it was only through a fraying connection to his soul.
"Stop," she said at one point, and he realised she didn't mean in her story. He stopped. "I smell something," she said. "Go slower." But after another step she stopped him again. "No, that is far enough. I must lead now. Stand still until I am ready. And beware, what you perceive must change now. You will see this place as I see it. As you have carried me with you, I will carry you. Do not attempt to do anything unless I tell you to. I must hide you so well even the land does not know you or we will not be able to go further. Only the dead or the unliving may pass beyond this point. We are at Last Water."
Darkness fell like a theatre curtain being drawn from behind him and moving through him forwards until it had consumed the path, the mist, and all he could see. He felt unusually light, and then weightless. He tasted the expensive flavour of Glinda's cigar suddenly, and a hint of bourbon. Then his perception of himself as a separate entity vanished. Floating lighter than air Glinda crossed Last Water and he went with her, at her shoulder, as if he were her shadow cast by a pale and unmoving sun.
She tracked life, he realised. She could smell it, taste it, feel it with the acuity of hawk sight. The vampires and ghosts she had named were just as easy to discover as they had been invisible to him. He was astonished that there were many kinds of undead things there. Undead was not the right word; neverliving would have made more sense, but he hadn't got the right words for these beings, because all his words about being implied life. These things existed on a plane without bodies but not without structure. They had forms, energetic and aetheric in nature, and they had will and intent, motion and various kinds of hungers, all of which behaviours implied life again so that he found his previous understanding of what death meant to be inadequate, or even in error.
"Life," Glinda said, growing impatient with the flossing about of thoughts that seemed to be the legacy of his natural thought style and not just a linty residue, "is perfectly good for them as a term if you would get rid of that insistence that only things with material forms on certain planes can be alive. Dump that and it's fine. They're things living on another plane, one in which the energy bodies of humans, elves, demons, and materially focused creatures of all kinds do not persist beyond Last Water without one sodding hell of a lot of effort. Most pass through without a scrap of trouble or awareness. They're dissolving before they know they're here." She flew like a gossamer cloak and there was no mist for her, just the swarms and mothlike flutterings of the unliving things and the spaces between them.
"Necromancers are usually the only individuals who make the effort. The creatures here are in their natural habitat, a plane of limited matter and energy, a place of transition where dissolution is easy and formation difficult. They have been known to penetrate the lower levels and gain themselves bodies now and again, and sometimes they parasitically attach to weak people, which is why you know them at all. Idiots summon them occasionally. They are attracted to living
energy forms, as you would call them, because of their complexity and abundance. They can live and become strong by consuming the energies of others."
Zal looked around the darkness, making out the drifting, sliding forms of the deathless things. All shape and almost all definition had gone. In Glinda's world there was, and there was not, and there was not much difference between the two. "I thought you said the living existed here."
"They're here," she said. "Everywhere. I just haven't been paying attention to them because they crowd the trail. I'm looking for a living thing that sustains good form in this plane without a material root, but you can see the others if you like."
For a moment the subtle blacks that had been omnipresent bloomed with radiance. It emanated from huge numbers of glowing egg-shaped vessels of light. They moved in clusters so vast they were like blooms of algae on a fertile sea, joined here and there by little tendrils of gold-some form of energetic connection. Scattered between them were clouds of dispersed dust, like glitters, which moved about as if in their currents. They were separated by dark flows of what he realised suddenly was malignant force. Meanwhile, around them like moths, the vampires and other beings fluttered and swam, trying to burrow into the patterns and shoals, thrashing in the dark streams like ecstasy-crazed dancers, clinging here and there to individuals as he'd once seen killer cells clinging to a virus as they consumed it; a feeding frenzy of sharks in a giant swarm of odd jellyfish.
Glinda turned off the life-o-vision, or whatever it had been. "You see?" she said, and wound her long tongue around her cigar, expertly switching it to the other side of her mouth. "Way too busy."
"Blinding," Zal said, content to stay superficially sardonic and not have to dabble too much in his real horror at what he had just seen.
Adrift, moving like the biggest predator in a bad ocean, Glinda smoothed her way onwards. "The Void Border," she said to Zal. "I would bet he is there, switching between places so he can hide." She began to swim with purpose, or walk or run-it was hard to say. They moved at a great pace.
Zal enjoyed the feeling for a moment. "But back to my story," he said, trying not to notice that the creatures they passed now were growing in power and form, size and intensity. Even through a solid coat of Glinda he could feel their polarity, and it was anti-him, razor sharp, malevolent. "Why did I go into military service?"
"It wasn't the military. It was defence," she said. "The best fighters went into the secret service, but it was there that the biggest part of the civil war was being fought, covertly of course. You wanted to tip the balance and that was where the action was, so you made yourself out to be a hundred percent High Caste, passed the initiation tests.... What now?"
"I was just wondering, if these things are bad things and they are all here, and you are here and travelling and ... well, aren't you one of them?"
"I am not," she said. "I exist in the same manner. Were you a high elf focused on the will for power?"
"I'm guessing not, but that's because of the tone of the question really."
"You were a bleeding-heart revolutionary," Glinda said impatiently. "But you were still an elf."
"I sound tedious and immature and a bit whiny, the way you speak of it."
"I'm glossing!" Glinda snorted dismissively. "It's not easy trying to tell you all this and hunt through the evil that has no name at the same time."
"You didn't use the e-word before."
"Well I'm using it now. I don't have time for a metaphysical discussion in addition to everything else. There. These things are evil. Can't you feel it?"
"I thought I was being living-ist and overly judgemental about it, but yes. Since you mention it. Why are they ... ?"
"Zal. We did this whole good-and-evil schtick already for twentyfive years living wild in the backwoods with your father's people, and you concluded that you didn't care about the causes or makings of good and evil; whether by individual choice or by preexisting influence of higher minds or whatever damn reason, you were going to do whatever you thought was right at the time guided only by the light of your own spirit and the vision of your own dream. And for good or ill or ridiculous you have done so relentlessly ever since without the slightest regard for anybody's opinion." She paused and the smell of bourbon suddenly burst around them. "So, do you want to know what happened after you became a leader in the secret service, or don't you?"
She sounded annoyed. They were now moving so fast that everything that was not them was a blur of unrecognisable malcontent. "Yes," he said, trying to be humble though he was rather excited at how heroic he had tried to be when he was young. "Carry on. But first, do you think you can sing the Gloria Gaynor song, the one you said was on the radio the first time I went into Otopia? The one that changed me forever."
There was a brief period of silence. "Some people felt you were a bit of a jerk," Glinda said, confidentially. "It's because you took very seriously your dream that you shouldn't take anything seriously even though the contradiction implied a passion that was relentlessly opposed to frivolity. You were contradictory. The song confirmed everything you hated about your own people. Although they were not really your people." She stopped her rant as he wondered why she was harping on, and said, "I don't sing." There was a desperate taint in her declaration, as if she secretly loved to and longed to be discovered.
Zal sighed. "You must. I used to. You must know every song I ever listened to." He tried hard, but the only tune he could recall was still the one Mr. V had made him think of, and he was saving that in case another one never stuck fast in his mind. Glinda had told him about his musical talent, but she needn't have. He would have loved music even if the only thing he'd ever heard was Mr. V's whistling as he laid the fire logs and made up Mina's dinners.
"You don't understand how very nearly dead you were," Glinda said quietly at this recollection.
"Sing it!" He thought he did understand. Years had passed like minutes, tens of thousands of days the same as the last without a trace of longing or anguish. "Go on. Sing it. Please."
"If I do, will you shut up?"
"Yes," he promised with confidence. He did want the rest of the story, but he had to hear the songs themselves in all their magical wonder. He wanted to feel alive.
Glinda had an amazing voice, like a foghorn full of gravel. Dark creatures fled before it.
"... At first I was afraid, I was petrified ..."
Lila took aim at the freezer door and shot it out with a rocket. She should have known that one second of mercy would lead to a hellish shovel of shit in Demonia. It might have closed itself, but she didn't think so. She was not surprised to find the scattered body parts of the demon whose neck she'd just broken in the debris. That figured, finally, she thought, wondering at how slow she was getting.
This place had no light because the occupants didn't need it. They were blind. The mirror clearly worked despite this on any unshielded eyes, which was worth knowing, but more worthwhile was the conviction that she had stumbled into a necromancer's house and zombie workshop. The fact that it connected to the mirror's hiding place and had a regular maintenance routine going meant Teazle wasn't safe. But the enclosure and the routine also meant that the master was both in residence and not in residence. She would have bet all Teazle's money that he was in the mirror.
Sadly, the only necromancer she knew or would have trusted was dead.
A quick search of the rest of the house revealed no more unliving servants, though she wasn't willing to count on the fact that some couldn't appear. There was a lifetime's supply of arcane books and equipment. She could search it, looking for information about the mirror, but if she were in charge of such an object she wouldn't have left any instruction manuals around, so she abandoned the idea.
She ran back down to the subbasement and found the servant's bag. Slinging it over her shoulder, she took a moment to kick around and ruin all his preparations for the big closing ceremony, then jumped down the stairs and took off through the labyrinth as fas
t as she could go. This time around she noticed that the tunnels here were much more recently carved out. They joined the old labyrinth after a few hundred metres of gradual descent, and their smooth sides gave way to ragged edges and lower roofs.
She reached the mirror room after a minute and made sure her eyes were shut and disconnected before she found her way back through the stone dead to Teazle. She rubbed his ear and kissed his face as she passed him and put herself where the servant had knelt, uncovering the mirror and holding it so that she could see the blackness and the frame behind her. Then, recording a brief explanation in case this was the most stupid idea ever tried, she opened her eyes.
Malachi drove back from the Folly with a headache that wasn't helped by the midtown traffic. For some reason rush hour had become a backlog that was dragging well beyond dinnertime into the evening. It was dark as he reached the city side of the Andalune Bridge, but that meant at last he could see the strings of police lights flashing and the glowing yellow of the redirection signs that blocked his way. Everyone was being forced to take the southern exit ramp from the speedway and make a loop. A few checks and he realised that the agency buildings were in the block that was central to the cordon. His heart sank, and a chill made him shiver as he parked illegally, flipped out his POLICE sign onto the dash, and abandoned his beloved to the mercies of the dock district.
A beat officer stopped him at the end of the street, "Sorry, you have to get on a transport and take the long way tonight." He scowled a little at Malachi's obvious faery features.
Malachi showed him his badges. "I've got business inside."
"Yes, sir." The uniformed officer led him beyond the yellow-andorange cones and onto the strange silence and darkness of Movida Street. Every storefront was closed, even the bar on the corner that had never been closed in all Malachi's many years in the city.
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