Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  Her sonar battery had become an almost constant song. She was close. An icy chill crept over his wings. Malachi felt his anxiety, constant but denied, become fear. He hoped Jones was close enough to mark his position when he shifted out. He had the impression of a great ship, black and broken, bearing down upon him across a silent sea. Its ragged sails howled with empty mouths. Deadly frost broke and shattered from its blunted spars and slithered off the decks. Ahead of its bow a wave of bitter hunger pressed forwards and he was lifted and felt the suck and draw of a ferocious pull in the nonexistent water of the undead ocean.

  He flipped out without a second thought and opened his eyes wide, gripping the armrests of his chair and taking a huge breath of the warm, muggy atmosphere of the yurt. He still had all his fingers and toes. The presence of the ghost, transecting the space he had taken in the aether, was terrible in his mind, but only there. The narrowness of escape made his heart hammer and he grinned. It didn’t get much closer than that. A few more moments and it would have had enough of a grip on him to drag itself through to Otopia with him.

  “Still bottling out before the last second, pussycat?” said a soft, hoarse voice beside him, laughing with a dry rasp that became a giggle at the end.

  Malachi spun the chair towards the sound. Jones was sitting on the rug that covered his chest of magical items. Planes of light sheared off her, gold and silver, orange and white, bending into dimensions not visible to the eye. Amid these distortions her human form looked oddly vulnerable—a gangly sixteen-year-old girl, with skin both dark and freckled, long brown hair that curled a little at the ends, sprawling with the relaxation of youth in a pale pink T-shirt, jeans, and sandals as if she had just walked off a beach somewhere. The ghost with whom she had been intercised was a faint shimmer around her; clouds and rain, occasional lightning as if she lived in a perpetual storm. Her thunder was beneath his hearing but it made the floor tremble. She gave him a wry grin with crooked teeth. “The Fighting Temeraire again . . .”

  Malachi shrugged; the ship had appeared close by him before, most often of all the ghosts he had encountered in I-space. “Any closer to figuring out the attraction?”

  “We’re getting there,” she said vaguely with a careless wave of her hand that indicated a lot of effort and hardship. “What do you want? Trade me and maybe I’ll tell you.”

  “I had an interesting conversation with an elf today,” Malachi began.

  Calliope shrugged now, and smiled and spread her hands wide.

  “We were deciding whether or not to tell the Otopians about the others.”

  Hard light sheared from the girl, burgeoning and then vanishing. Her body was barely material. It was as hard for her to sustain form as it was for him to disperse it. The concentration it cost her being disrupted, she exuded plane bursts of light and when she did so her storm intensified and her hair lifted in the first breath of a hurricane he did not feel. “But you didn’t say a thing,” she concluded.

  “He knew about them,” Malachi said. “You know the elf I mean.”

  “Worldwalker. Yes, I know the one,” she said. “Ghostpuller. Demon-heart. We know him.” She considered for a moment, flipping her loose sandal, playing with a curl of her hair in her fingers. Thunderheads built around her temples. “But you are not here about the Others.”

  “No,” Malachi admitted. Calliope had a gaze that he couldn’t lie to, strange because he could lie to almost anyone else. She didn’t so much look at as through him and he felt her eyes pin his intents more closely than he knew them himself. It was probably an illusion of the way she drifted between planes but it worked well enough. “I called you because of Lila Black.”

  Jones frowned slightly. “And?”

  “Can you see anything about her?”

  The strandloper gazed through and at him, seeing things he was unable to perceive with her once-human eyes. He felt the temperature in the tent fall by a couple of degrees and the smell of rain suddenly filled the air. “You should spend more time with us, Malachi,” she said then. “You would find out many things that are better shown than told.”

  “Ah, I was hoping for some advice.”

  “And you got it, sadly for you not what you wanted after all,” Calliope sighed. “Come on, if we’re quick we can catch the Temeraire before she decays.”

  Malachi felt his jaw tense. The offer of a hunt was more than he wanted by a long shot but it was the kind of offer that came once in a lifetime. A trip to I-space was possibly more than he wanted too but as he thought about it Jones was already beginning to fade. It was his job to pursue all leads . . .

  “How long will it take, Jones? I have things I have to do back here by nightfall.”

  “A year, a day, who knows?” She was more than half translucent. The bending light of her form shivered like curtains of heat on the desert floor. “Say yes or no, cat.”

  Malachi cursed freely in his imagination. “Yes.”

  Jones stretched out her hand in beckoning and opened her mouth to sing. Malachi felt the sting of serious magic prickle across his skin and through his bones, printing him to her, remaking him into a form she could better keep a hold of and tow into the interstitial world. Lines of intent bonded them together—a good thing or he would not last long. He let himself be dragged after her, losing integrity and finding his wings once again stronger. In I-space Jones was no more than a streak of light surrounded by the bleak forms of the huge storm ghost that she had intersected; living lightning.

  The ship had sailed but the wake was there, a cutting in the grey strange of I-space that Jones followed without hesitation. Malachi was pulled after her, glad she was the one in front. He heard her calling to others in various spaces and their answering calls; as strange a mixture of voices as he had ever heard. From all directions and places, they came like arrows, like dreams, like rain.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lila left the elf in her room, tied up in the bed with orders not to move if she valued her life. Things being as they were this was far from certain but Lila thought it really wasn’t her business if the woman chose to die at the hands of demons. She went out of her window to avoid meeting anyone in the house and shinned down the building’s wonderfully ornate and climbable exterior. An imp, which had been dozing atop a bird-limed bust of Xenaxas the Impolite (an Ahriman ancestor), muttered and woke up as she passed it and hopped down after her.

  “Where ya going?” it asked in a high, curious voice, dropping from one stone sculpture to another with sparrowlike ease, vestigial wings flicking to keep its balance. It was hardly bigger than a kitten, looked like a scaly monkey, and was surrounded by a small aura of flickering red and orange fire.

  “Nowhere,” Lila said grimly, hoping it would go away.

  “C’n I come?”

  “No.” She moved faster, hand over hand, feet able to see for themselves with sensors in the soles of her boots.

  “You look like a woman in need of a familiar.” It danced after her. “Girl like you all alone in the city. Can’t come to any good. I’d do it for a nice rate. Make me an offer.”

  “Go away before I blow your head off,” Lila said.

  “All right. You’ve twisted me arm. I’ll do it for free,” the tiny thing said with a happy smile. “A quick exchange of names and the deal’s done.” It rubbed its hands together in proprietorial delight.

  “I’m the Queen of Sheba.”

  “No you ain’t. I met her and she was way prettier than you. Go on. You want me.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “You do. If’n you doesn’t why would you be climbing out a window the same moment I choose to wake from a beautiful dream about popping sheep’s eyeballs and rubbin’ me fingers through the hair of changeling children? That kind of a dream portends you know. Portends a moment of Significance in a demon’s life. I open me eyes and there you are. I know you want a familiar because you haven’t got one and here you are setting foot out alone in Bathshebat, Grandmother of Infidels and Br
oodmother of Extremities Beyond Imagination and you just a slip of a little anaetheric girl.”

  Lila had both her feet on the pavement now. She nodded calmly and activated the battle system in her right hand. Two guns, and an array of blades enabled themselves, transforming her human limb into a gauntlet of deadly promises. She held this up to the imp, at head level where it stood on the knee of a stone satyr. “Not today thank you.”

  The imp clapped its hands and hopped from foot to foot in delight. “Now that’s what I call a penknife! I knew you was sent by Hell for me. Just goes to show you have to have faith.” To Lila’s surprise it hopped neatly over her hand onto her shoulder and took a thorny-fingered grip of her ear. She could hear but not feel the crackle of fire. “Walk slow, I get seasick.”

  “I said no.” Lila reformed her hand and took hold of the imp. It dematerialised just as she felt its tough little form firm up in her grip. The hold on her ear vanished but the imp did not.

  “Ah, come on, no need to be such a spoilsport about it,” the imp whined. “I’ll see you right. Need me you will, see if you don’t. I charge nothing and I’ll be worth every penny.”

  Even with all her sensors on Lila couldn’t detect the imp by any electromagnetic means, but she could still see him on her shoulder and hear his irritating voice through the soft whuff and flap of fiery noises. She gazed at him stonily; rather difficult with her neck twisted around and her eyes at full turn. “What do I have to do to get you to leave me alone?”

  “Leave you? Leave you!” shrieked the imp, clutching its chest with both hands. “All this talk of love is breaking me up inside, lady. Just go where you’re going and I’ll trail along behind you with my self-respect dragging after me in the streets like yesterday’s chicken skins. Don’t you worry about me though. I can take it. Don’t even look back. But when you need me,” he thumped the centre of his chest with one fist, blinking tears of red, his voice hoarse with emotion, “I’ll be right there.”

  “Money?” Lila said. “Magic?”

  “You can’t buy love,” the imp said, beseeching her with large, burning eyes. “Don’t soil my soul with this talk. It’s like you haven’t got a heart.”

  “What I haven’t got is patience for this kind of garbage,” Lila told it. “Get this straight. I don’t want you now. I don’t want you ever. Get away from me. Scram.”

  “Here’s what it is,” the imp said in a more amenable tone. “I used to be a big all fire and brimstone kind of hellish lord but I fell foul of the damned Cassiels, providence rot them slowly painfully and eternally, and they put a curse on me so now I’m just an imp without any power at all. I can’t even hex. Look . . .” It waved its hands in a manner that might have indicated some kind of throwing action or spell cast. Little orange fires grew between its fingers, then fizzed out like damp fuses.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “See, that’s part of the curse!” the imp exclaimed dramatically. “Proves my point. Nobody believes me. So I’ve been on the streets for decades, waiting to find a way out, selling myself to the lowest bidders for any old errands like some kind of bat-sprite. I live out of restaurant dumpsters. And now I have the eyeballs dream and here you are and you are it, baby, you are my ticket and come heaven or high water I’m gonna make you proud of me! Come on, can’t you see? We’re made for each other.”

  “Okay,” Lila said, accepting the first defeat of the war. “You do what you like but at the first opportunity I am ditching you and if I have to end your miserable little life to do it, I will.” She straightened up and put her shoulders back.

  “That’s my girl,” the imp said with reassuring, paternal tones. There was a sharp pain in her earlobe and tiny claws stuck themselves into her combat vest.

  “I hate you so much already I want to spit,” Lila said and spat into the canal as she stood on the Ahriman jetty and watched the early morning light.

  “Don’t spoil me,” the imp said happily. “Remember I’m a familiar and overfamiliarity with a familiar could be counterproductive to a beautiful working relationship.”

  The minotaur who tended the family boathouse came clomping onto the jetty and gazed at her with slumbrous black eyes. He snorted in the direction of his gondolas, “You want a ride out?”

  “No thanks,” Lila said. “I’ll walk.” She hesitated. “On second thought, do you know how I can get rid of this imp?”

  “Oh my heart!” shrieked the imp, staggering on Lila’s shoulder. “The things she says!”

  The minotaur licked his muzzle with a long purple tongue and shook his heavy head, scratching at his sides with both cloven hands. “They are like the flies, mostly harmless, always irritating. You had better learn to ignore them.”

  “Fabulous,” Lila said and scanned her internal map of Bathshebat. With a purposeful, determined tread she set out for the Souk. She was aware of Tath only as a kind of grinding discomfort in the centre of her chest. He knew what was going on and hated it but daren’t uncurl even enough to speak to her with the imp in such close proximity. It was all just wonderful. She consoled herself with the idea that surely in the Souk there would be someone who was good at getting rid of imps. The thought cheered her up so much she found herself asking, “So, what are you the imp of?”

  “Imp of?” the imp repeated incredulously. “I am a lord of the infernal and master of the aetheric sciences, not some wharf rat of minor torment. I am not the imp of anything. I told you but do you listen? No. Just like all the others.”

  “So, you’re not the imp of anything. But you are an imp.”

  “For the time being, yes, it looks that way but looks are not everything. I may have been stripped of all the powers I have save that of my good looks and charm but I also possess all my knowledge and I was an old, old demon, almost starting ossification when this happened so I know a lot, baby, and that will come in very handy, you’ll see. For instance, you are best to duel on the Harbinger Bridge unless you are facing a withering demon in which case you must make them go outside the city bounds to Wulsingore. Never forget that in a hurry. No ma’am. Why, I bested the Dread Rage Brutorian Malsotis on this very—”

  “Not the imp of drivel?” Lila interrupted, striding across the bridge at ever greater pace, dodging the beautifully dressed demon traders who had prime site stalls ranged upon the broad span.

  “So rude,” the imp sighed sentimentally. “Almost like my own daughter. Now, on this street there used to be a whole frontage of the most beautiful late Rageblind architecture that was utterly breath-taking even though of course it was impossible to view directly without a slide into the most foul temper . . . I say, are you heading towards the Souk?”

  “Looks like it.”

  The imp pinched her earlobe between two claws.

  “Ow! By god you’ll have a painful death if you do that again!” Lila hissed at it.

  “We should discuss this,” the imp said in a tone of command. “Turn left here and go up to the second floor. The café is rather foul underfoot with roach and asp-nit feasting upon the droppings from the tables but the tea is first rate. Have mint tea, keep your shoes on, and listen to me. It will take but a moment.”

  “I doubt that,” Lila muttered but the pain in her ear was intense and she knew she would never hear the end of it or might possibly lose part of the ear if she didn’t so she turned left as instructed, went through a greasy beaded curtain and up a flight of rickety steps to a room every bit as filthy as promised.

  Three older demons were hunched in the corner, whispering and fussing over some cards and other items on a low table. They all smoked and were chewing some kind of herby stuff out of a jar, taking handfuls at regular intervals and spitting the result into an iron pot where it bubbled and gave off low vapours. They snorted this into their nostrils in a strict turn-taking round. As she took a seat at the least repulsive spot and feigned no interest in them they ruffled their feathers and spiked their quills but otherwise ignored her. Rough straw scattered on the
floor seethed with insect activity. There was a strong smell of burnt frying fat, incense, and espresso.

  “Well?” she muttered, watching the server appear from a hole in the ceiling. It was a spider form the size of a small dog, and clicked quietly across the roof upside down, extending a tattered menu to her on a long sticky strand of silk. Most of the hairs on its thick legs were singed and although it had no facial expressions she could detect among its eight eyes its body wore a strangely immaculate white band of apron that seemed to speak of a kind of hygienic pride. She took the menu and tugged it free. The line broke and clung to her fingers. She tried to wipe it off on the table but it just stuck more.

  “It’s enchanted. It’ll evaporate in a minute,” the imp said confidently. “Mint tea. And I’ll have the double shot with just a dash of mare’s milk.”

  But Lila was engrossed in the menu suddenly and not because it was stuck to her hand. “What is Essence of Humanity?”

  “They make it by mage-pressing grave dirt with fresh spring water. You don’t need to worry.” The imp called up to the server, “She wants mint tea. I’m going for the double Arabica, if you don’t have mare’s milk then yak or bat will do.”

  “Milks of the world,” Lila read, “see specials board . . .” She looked at the board. “Harp Seal milk?”

  “Too fattening. Also it tastes of fish which does nothing for coffee.”

  “Milk of Mother’s Tears . . . ?”