Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  He did not mind the implication that he had revealed the existence of the Others to Lila, nor the fact it went against what he had agreed earlier with Zal, who was in no position to complain in any case since he didn’t speak for Alfheim, nor that it disagreed with his instruction to the other fey not to do so. No doubt they would heed his law as long as they remembered it (which in the case of the flower fey may be up to an entire minute) or until a countermand appeared, which was all one could ask.

  He did not feel disturbed by the fact that Delaware was probably attempting to cover up some demonic dirty work here, perhaps with plans of her own to use Lila’s parents as further experiments in her ever-experimental explorations of what power humans might wield in the newly formed (to them) post-bomb universe.

  He did not mind that Jones had double-crossed her friends for the sake of staying true to her self and her driven reasons. It was almost noble, given the stakes at hand.

  He wasn’t disturbed by Zal’s disappearance. Perhaps it would be temporary and perhaps not, but if there was another single being he was confident could take care of himself, it was Zal.

  He didn’t care if the tourism treaties being wrought with Demonia all failed due to a breakdown of relations here nor if the GDP of Alfheim threatened Otopian economies nor if the casual disregard of any rule by the fey was a matter he was supposed to be resolving, pointlessly, with the stone-minded humans. He didn’t even mind who had killed Lila’s parents, only that they had.

  He was not significantly concerned about his promises to the Ghost Hunters to provide faery gold to continue investigations into the Fleet. He was sure he could achieve it. He briefly considered the Nornir, the Moirae, but they were another matter entirely. No, they were far at the end of the list of concerns and in a separate category, marked Do Not Go Here Under Any Circumstances, No Really. So he wasn’t bothered about them.

  He was concerned about what Lila was going through, and this was the fracture point. He was concerned that Delaware’s bosses had created Lila in the first place and whether or not it would come to harm her more. The separation taking place was between his job, which demanded loyalty to Otopia (Vannish foolery to expect he was capable of it), and to Lila herself. He could feel Delaware as a heavy, dark presence over his right shoulder, where she sat in her own car, seething or doing some business, or both. Waiting in cars was the order of the moment whilst in front of them the empty house sat, door ajar, drapes swinging in the breeze.

  Malachi considered his position. It hardly served any fey interests to trudge along with human designs here. Besides which, what was eating him, like a slow worm in his gut, was Zal’s suggestion that Delaware and others might have a leak into Lila’s head. So, anything he said to her might trickle out of her and down some wireless link into a grunt’s daily stack of data to churn over and somewhere, somehow maybe they’d have drunk enough coffee or pumped enough smart drugs to figure out he’d mentioned the Others. And it might be two-way. He zoomed all his senses on Delaware for a minute and considered whether she was capable of ordering a takeover of Lila using her fickle AI. Would the woman have a secret code—the equivalent of a True Name?

  After about half a millisecond he concluded that of course she did. If he were a dumb human with no magical senses and had invested the value of a minor city into an experiment who was supposed to . . . aha! He realised. Supposed to be able to operate in any area . . . of course. They must have been waiting and hoping for a candidate . . . they must have planned it out. Now his curiosity really started to itch. Between the itch and the worm and the Pecadore he was in serious need of fey antidotes to his ills. And he realised with a smile that he hoped Cara couldn’t see in the mirror, that he had the perfect idea.

  What the humans really needed was a distraction, to give him enough time to snoop around and discover the scoop on Lila. Two scoops, but even so . . . he began to grin as his idea moved up a level and became a Very Very Good Idea. Faery wasn’t only home to the fey who enjoyed trips to the other worlds. It was home to a great deal more including many things that humans would consider monsters. But he didn’t want to kill anyone, not unless he had to upgrade to save his skin. Meanwhile he was starting to see how his Very Very Good Idea could fit rather nicely with his promise to Calliope Jones. It was in fact becoming an Excellent Plan. Fortunately time moved quite differently in Faery to the speed of progress it made in Otopia. He could get things done nicely and be back without anybody knowing better.

  He stretched and got out of the Eldorado to take a leisurely stroll around to Cara’s blacked-out window—as if she thought that made her invisible to anyone of importance! He knocked on it and it slid down. “I need to take a whizz,” he said. “I’m going to the garden at the back.” He was pleased to see a twitch of distaste at the side of Delaware’s mouth. She gave a nod and the window went back up. He didn’t like leaving her alone with the house—seemed cruel to the house—but it would hardly take a minute.

  Hands in his pockets, moving slow, he observed as much as he could as he passed between the wall and a fence, and into the backyard. The room where the parents had died was visible in the akashic range—the aetheric spectrum was disrupted and distorted, weak of course because it was in Otopia where aether barely permeated, but still, noticeable. The chaos focused on a single spot, where Malachi assumed the responsible party had stood and worked its powers. Must have been disturbed to create such a messy scene, but then, maybe it figured the investigators for mundane and stupid, so it didn’t care. An ugly, spectral shadow of grey-violet jags hung in the space, moving slowly, and he knew that for the aetheric time-signature of Thanatopia. It took a powerful necromancer to create ad hoc portals, drawing the dimensions together into a moment’s seamless whole. True collision would have negated the universe. You had to be very deft to avoid that. Very confident. Overconfident. A bit of a nutter, in fact.

  Malachi felt his face stretched by a narrow grin that bared his long feline eyeteeth. A nutter was good news. Nutters were unstable and you could get good leverage on them. Their instability might tip them into armageddon of course, but it was a whole lot better than the odds against someone who had attuned personal power under the harness of reason. Now, all he had to tangle with was Lila’s stability—an issue he fervently hoped could gain some resolution by this unhappy forced conclusion to her unwillingness to face reality.

  The presence of the imp bothered him, but not just because imps fed on the leaky energies of unstable people and accelerated their decline. It was just that he’d never known an imp to be able to shift form that way. Their MO was to ride the back of the victim, talking incessantly, until death. This one had a neat trick of knowing when to flip into mineralisation and when to shut up. In fact, the mineralisation was the most bothersome part. All demons who had attained purity of crystal shifted to another mode of being entirely. Those few Maha spirits who had become free left the purified residue of their existence behind as stone and became creatures of aether, the avatars of Akasha; and the rest were just dead or trapped for the ages inside their solidified carapaces like djinniya in bottles. It was quite an incentive to enlighten up fast. Not least because mineralisation was a one-way trip. But here was a demon who used it like a parking lot.

  And then it struck home—the obvious thing so close that he’d missed it all along. Just as he came into the roughly mown yard and saw its semineglected borders with all the shrubs overgrown, he realised how ordinary it was. Very few people in any kind of life were extraordinary, but Lila had picked up one and everywhere he turned now there they were, uniques, all becoming involved in matters that included her. Even this necro, possibly just executing a vendetta contract in the normal manner, was one big leap over the odds.

  He felt a momentary fall in spirits—he was not extraordinary, unless you counted extraordinarily well dressed. And then . . . with a shiver he recalled Teazle’s appearance. Not only the ex-Chancellor of Demonia, but a white blue-point demon on the verge of adulthood
who looked at Lila with what Malachi was confident was more than a friendly interest. No, Teazle was either in love or in lust and it was hard to say which was going to be worse to try and handle. He supposed it was only to be expected. Power called to power. Thankfully that was Lila’s problem.

  Malachi stared at the shrubbery contemplatively and pretended to spot a lost object in the shadow between a rhododendron and a laurel. He bent down and, as he felt the shade close over him, shifted scale into the vibrational frequencies of the flower fey. He removed his human clothes and stored them on a clean stone under an overturned leaf for safekeeping. Then he shifted form, felt an instant of the cold, grey, shining clutch of the Void, and emerged into Faery in his natural shape, in his natural place. That was the honest way to cross, through Akasha, none of this pulling things together, tying and cutting knots in a cosmic cross-stitch.

  He shuddered and stretched, yawning widely and then shaking himself before licking his whiskers to calm himself. Sewing made him think of the Moirae and the less they came into his awareness the better he’d like it. What was moved into one’s attention awakened . . . no, let them sleep on. He’d have to talk about them and that was bad enough without adding extra huge alert stickers all over his psychic self with big red arrows on them and signs saying “Primal Powers This Way, Look At ME!” Hunger came over him then, like a saving angel. He decided to think of food, but not to get any, since that would be a great help in keeping him alert. The worst thing would be to go out hunting and eat a bellyful of fresh meat, fresh, red, juicy meat, and then fall asleep in a sunny patch and spend hours in the dreamworld, unable to alter course away from what bothered him. He might be stuck for several eternities of dream on some dreadful hunt for the very things he most feared, then be pursued by them until . . . So, no dinner was a smart move. The jungle was safe for another day.

  He left his lair at a leisurely pace to begin with, following a favourite trail (one which only he could see) down towards the main pathway which connected this part of the jungle with all the other parts. It was a warm afternoon, but on the dry side. His black and khaki-grey tiger stripes fitted perfectly to the shadows, concealing him from any observer . . .

  “Hey, Mal! Long time no see you! What’s going in the human world?” The high voice belonged to a tree sprite, one of the hamadrayadi; his girl next door. She descended from the upper foliage of the Cycad in one long green dollop of transmuting aether and assumed her humanoid form leaning against the thick bole of alligator skin bark.

  Malachi sat on his haunches and commenced to clean a forepaw as he spoke. Fey voices did not require actual speech except for odd moments of calling attention, as the hamadrayad had done. Minds were enough, and the will to be heard. Given that language of the vocal kind was off, they communicated with a far more effective complex of meanings that were utterly unambiguous, transmitted from intent to recipient without the awful fouling of a medium.

  [Friend in trouble. Humans stupid in usual ways (he used a symbol here that was a nod fey used to signify a proposition of universally acknowledged eternal standing). They want power in all realms.]

  The hamadryad showed him a complicated visual joke about the humans trying to negotiate and/or build an embassy in Faery. They kept asking for the capital city. However, fey did not live in houses nor gather at any particular spots for any reason. Being creatures at one with the nature of their universe they existed in what, to human eyes, appeared to be a pre-Adamite unspoilt paradise. The dryad chuckled and told him the humans had been sent on a goose chase culminating in an audience with the fey who were pretending to be the Seelie Court—a thing noted out of a book that a faery called Detritus had once filched from an Otopian library about faeries. The humans were impressed and terrified and duly returned home to make more plans.

  In spite of the urgency of his situation Malachi took time to laugh about this with her. “Mapuko,” he said, using her daily name as she had his, “what will we do next time they arrive with a construction site?”

  [The fey built a giant ark on the Shiadasi River; a thing like a show-boat with sails, outfitted in the manner of an Otopian cruiser. It sails the world. Travelling players. Humans think it is parliament. Local fey get aboard, do business, get off. But is entertainment only. Calls to all ports. Job of interpreter most wanted job in Faery. All take turns to be Bamboozler. Broadcast of most funny moments.] She showed him one from memory: [“But who is the Prime Minister, or King?” a human official was demanding, rather piteously. “I am!” said the nearest fey, and all around nodded yes. “And me,” said the next one. “And me!” said the third . . . beaming with sincerity, so pleased to be of help.]

  He laughed so hard he thought he was going to burst something. Tears ran from his tiger face and his tiger jaw ached. He stretched out and raked the grass vigorously with his claws and did a little spray marking just to say he was home.

  The hamadryad sniffed and held her nose daintily, “I not missed that!”

  “Mmn, sorry,” Malachi said humbly. “Carried away.”

  Mapuko reached out her hand and scratched behind his ears and, thinking of the time sadly being so short, Malachi assumed sovereignty and issued his global statement to every faery in the world. He explained the Ghost Hunters, their project, the Fleet, and then, carefully, inserted a code into the thoughts that alerted the listeners to beware of the next statement since it contained the Name of A Great Being, and something they shouldn’t think of until it was quiet and they were alone and quite in control of things and certainly not all listening and hearing it at once and then being startled and repeating it to themselves all at once and creating one of the biggest summonings in the history of summoning. Then he said the least powerful of the names of the Moirae: the Graceful Ones, and put it into a neat image, thus reducing its power further. And fey curiosity about cosmic things of power, gods, and monsters would do the rest.

  He was immediately assaulted by a cacophony of demands and put his head under his paws, though it did no good. Eventually the shock wore off and people retrenched to places they felt secure enough to determine what the hidden name meant for them. Malachi’s mind became quieter and he was able to establish a comfortable psychic barrier between himself and the rest of the fey.

  Mapuko was still scratching his ears—she was a good friend—but now she was sitting beside him in a slight fug of expressed sap, staring straight ahead with alert interest, the quintessential pose of a faery on the trail of an idea. She was of the Mica nation and almost as black as Malachi with a gleaming lustre to her body that made it seem as if it was made from billions of tiny flat planes and not skin at all—a reasonable inference since that is exactly how it was. Her hair by contrast was thick strands of vegetable fibre, the same as her spirit tree bore in its thick leaf stalks. By necessity they were gathered into greenish grey dreadlocks. Her vivid green eyes moved with the soft dark shadows of the forest and her wings opened and closed gently by just a few millimetres, their vast butterfly architecture supported by networks of green and black vessels with clear crystal between. Their sheet facets made them look like huge crystal windows.

  When she spoke she was only repeating the words of any fey. “We have always longed to know more about the three.”

  “Aye,” Malachi said, purring gently and laying his head down upon his folded paws. “Almost as much as we want to know about the Others.”

  “And Agent Black.”

  [Humans are very curious also. Secretive. Busy doing something we need to know about. Need to distract them while I find out more. Major distract. Must involve security agency at major level.]

  Mapuko considered and came to the obvious conclusion. Malachi agreed with her and felt the glut of contentment that came along with an agreement—one of the fey’s most favourite sensations.

  [Mothkin.]

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Zal’s childhood was not a happy one. al’s childhood was not a happy one.

  He rarely considered it these
days but it snapped to the front of his mind with the clarity of a fully digitised recording that you could get off an Otopian Berrycam. He was rather amused to find that his brain considered itself sufficiently near extinction to warrant a quick review, and slightly more sobered to notice that this was the edited highlights version and not the director’s cut.

  The only physical sensations he had were the grip of his hand in Mr. Head’s much larger, grittier hand and the greyish void of the Void—which was the universal experience everyone produced when their senses continually searched for something and came up with nothing. In the absence of all stimulation and without any knowledge when the nothingness would end, it was good to have an internal entertainment system willing to do some overtime. He didn’t miss the irony of himself clinging to Mr. Head as a child to a parent, hoping to be led out of trouble. He didn’t mind it. Elves had no ability to engage with the Void, if that was a phrase that even made sense. Other beings did, and maybe Mr. Head was one of them. It was the only hope of survival, and so Zal was quite happy to go with it. In the meantime, the showreels were spinning and he was still full enough of breath that he wasn’t suffering.

  With the speed of light, his memories played out.

  Due to his mother’s constant need to avoid being poisoned by members of the High Light Hegemony she moved around a great deal between safe places when Zal was a baby. After his first five years he was handed to the care of an aunt who lived in the most distant, wild, and remote parts of the Tiger Isles off the coast of Verivetsay where even bold sailors rarely dared the ferocious reefs and deadly tidal flows. The voyage there took place in a floating ship that rode the air above the waves. Zal remembered his mother at the helm, her robes flying in the wind and hair whipping around like snakes of gold. Her pearly andalune body covered the entire vessel and sustained its flight as the winds blew it over the whitecaps. She was singing, and her words directed the wind as her voice lent it strength. There was no crew to tell of their voyage. It was the last time they were alone together. He sang with her and played his drum and she directed the little drum to move the oars that ranked the sides of the ship. Invisible galley slaves heaved the blades of shining oak through the spray-drenched air at the tap of Suha’s fingers, and around their masts birds of the ocean and the land circled together. They had both been laughing, wild, without a care.