Inside her rib cage Tath spread out and pulsed, his equivalent of a sigh—she knew it was because she’d hit the same nerve in him that the knowledge bit in her.
Some people are easy marks, he said and named them both.
Sometimes, she replied, as gentle with him as she would never be with herself. And sometimes they wake up.
“What do you want, Black?” Malachi said in his normal, easygoing tone, interrupting her gently. “We staying or going?”
She took a deep breath against the vast wall of sadness staring her in the face. “We’re staying. Park on the driveway and get ready to eat enough pasta to kill a horse.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Im the Admiral of the Fleet,” the coffee-coloured boy announced, sticking his bony chest out as he sat at the head of the table in the captain’s cabin of the enormous ship. He was perched on three cushions atop the chair in order to reach the table and was rather unstable as the vessel moved with stately rocking-horse motions through its imperceptible ocean but, oddly to Zal, this only lent him gravitas.
The seats and table were suspended from the cabin roof by iron chains. This meant that all of them seated there were quite still while the rest of the ship tilted around them. A fluttering, bee-winged fey sprite, also able to move independently of the vessel, served steaming mugs of drink from a tray, wiping up spillages with a tiny white cloth that hung over his wrist. His akashic presence was powerful enough for him to lift the tray fully loaded, Zal noticed, and that was no mean trick for a creature the size of a small dog. The only thing that prevented the situation from being enjoyable was the shivering cold that permeated his andalune as each of the others came close to him. That, and the intense low-range vibrations of the ship itself: they were all ghosts, with one exception.
Abida Ereba sat slightly apart from them upon a large circular bed that was suspended on golden chains. The bed was covered in pink velvet and pink ribbons festooned the chains. Cushions of every shade of lilac and violet spilled over its surface and many had fallen to the cabin floor where fey verminicules sprawled upon them, engrossed in satin luxury, grooming their ratty fur and engaging in brief but frequent and enthusiastic mating. Zal didn’t look directly at the Ereba. He was afraid he might be struck blind. The closer his eyes got to bringing her incredible form into view the more aroused he became and he was convinced that a direct stare—even one which didn’t attempt to take so much as a professional interest in her beautiful curvaceous breasts—would result in an orgasm of apocalyptic proportions. That would make him self-conscious, and he was scared about the effect it might have on the ghosts.
He was also sure it was only her presence that prevented the Fleet from consuming him and Mr. Head entirely and he didn’t want to upset her. The nature of ghosts was hunger. Even the one which had sucked from his hand had been impersonal and relentless. It wanted knowledge of form, and structure, akashic and material. It wanted to know itself. It longed to become real. Zal could survive minor ghostly maulings, especially as he was at the time tripping high on elemental energies, but he couldn’t survive being eaten all up. He didn’t think he would survive coming at the glance of the Ereba either. He’d looked right at her in surprise the moment she spoke on deck as he tried to smile and had immediately passed out as all the blood left his head. Also, he was reasonably sure she’d been smiling at him and the feeling had gone sweet and straight to his heart even if it was routed through his crotch first. He thought she’d looked rather like Lila and wanted to check but dare not.
The admiral took a long draught from his cup and stared with abandon at Zal, then at the immobile seated statue that Mr. Head had become. Ghosts were rarely sufficiently well formed to speak or exist for long periods so Zal stared back with equal interest at these beings he had never seen before. From her position at the side the Ereba regarded them all with mild amusement. Zal enjoyed the aura of pure creative bliss she gave off. It didn’t surprise him the verminicules were overpowered with sensuality. He felt that way so intensely he could barely get his mind to focus on anything other than generating soft-core imagery of Lila and the Ereba, individually, or together, undressing each other, the lissom elven goddess and feisty, human, angry girl Lila . . . which was surprising because, for him and Mr. Head, the ship and its crew really represented nothing so much as immediate and uncele brated death. Still, it livened up a tense moment.
Sailors flitted around the room, drifting through the walls and leaving again much more like usual ghosts than the admiral. Their impermanent membranes flickered and shifted between this uncertain material moment and the shifted temporal dimensions of Thanatopia where they flirted with death. Bells rang and the vessel creaked. Sails flapped as they turned about before catching the wind again. Deep in the hull, enormous engines began to turn with a steady thudding.
“But who is you?” the admiral demanded, looking at Zal and spoiling a moment of reverie where Lila, getting furious with Zal for choreographing a tantalising striptease without joining in, was about to throw a priceless antique at his head. He started, and forced his eyes not to stray towards the Ereba.
“He is Half,” Abida Ereba said again, as if that explained everything. “But I would like to hear his friend speak. What is his name?”
“Mister Friday Head,” Zal said quickly, wondering if this were an interrogation where answers mattered. He was reasonably sure it was for his benefit since she must know already—anything of importance was a thing she knew. In between takes of pornography in his mind he wondered what she was doing with the ghosts here. He thought about his conversation with Malachi, and a little chill made his ardour go limp for a moment. He didn’t even want to think about it in words. He didn’t trust anything that could have an effect on the aether not to give him away.
The Ereba wasn’t like other things; not of Void or any realm. She was Other. This fact screamed at him constantly, but it was largely blocked out by his body’s aching arousal which saw fit to make endorphins, opiates, and arcanoids thunder around his system like crazy horses, pretty much stampeding everything in their path flat.
“He look like a toy this thing,” the admiral declared, and Zal’s weakened attention span was dragged back to the present. “He like a ghost. Somehow I see ghost inside. Like he a doll full of spirits.”
“Yes,” Abida Ereba agreed. “That is just what he is. Zal, you have made a golem who carries the dead of the long past, just as this ship carries the souls long forgotten of the sea.”
“Then we and the elemental worlds is like each other!” the admiral declared, as if concluding a demanding puzzle. He looked at the Ereba with hunger for affirmation and she smiled at him. He seemed utterly unaffected by her, as if her generative aspects were unnoticeable to him. In fact as if any of them were.
She was birth, life and death. She was the in-between moments; time itself, and space.
Zal felt her watching him as she spoke to the admiral and knew she was once again doing something for his benefit. He began to sweat. The personal attentions of divinities was one more form of special treatment he felt he could live without.
“You ghosts are reborn of the living,” she said. “The elementals are not born. They rise from Akasha, from the formless to the form, and fall back, and rise again without mind. Those that are elemental spirit forms come into minds, but of their own kind. You are more like the living, because you are the children of the spirits of the living.”
“I saw primary elements,” Zal broke in because at that second he was unable not to, his thoughts unstoppable. He felt like the words were ejaculate from his mouth, as if the Ereba had caused a mindgasm. “In Zoomenon. Numbers. Things like ideas. Protean concepts. Propositional components. Functions. Grammatons.” He stopped, panting heavily, aware that his mind almost hurt with effort.
Energies in his nonmaterial bodies exploded out. Physically he was untouched but the rest of him was coming like a train. It was the oddest sensation he had ever had in his life, and he’
d had a lot. “Mmnuuh . . . Ghosts are constructs, and elementals are strip-downs! Opposition. Organisation and entropy. Mutually . . . uuuhhh . . . incompatible . . .” Pleasure and release of a great idea, a great thought, a great insight, thrilled through him from his heart to the furthest reach of his outerbody, a dangerous few centimetres from the Ereba. She caressed its periphery lightly with her fingers, as though touching air, and Zal convulsed with ecstasy, blacking out for several seconds.
He came to some sense with his face on the table. He felt pain in his fingers and realised that he had dug splinters out of the wooden surface with his nails. His groin was wet and sticky. He felt as though he was floating on a little cloud.
The admiral, as immune to Zal’s antics as he was to the Ereba, contemplated Mr. Head another moment and frowned. “He’s full up. Who are they? They’re not ghosts either.”
“Half?” The Ereba’s voice was lightly teasing. She stopped touching him and he found he could see again.
“Ah,” Zal said. He attempted to draw himself up to sitting, and discovered every movement he made strangely exciting. He reached out for his cup in an attempt to find a distraction. It seemed to be rum and Coke, and that was old enough as a cocktail to be a ghostly item. He breathed over the aromatic liquid and then hesitated, tired, euphoric, thirsty. “Can I drink this without turning into a . . . thing? Or getting stuck here for eternity?”
“Probably not,” the Ereba said and he sadly pushed it away from him. He could really have used a drink.
Instead he grabbed hold of the nearest solid object—Mr. Head’s arm—and tried to address the admiral seriously although he wasn’t able to speak other than in little spurts of words which were accompanied by jolts of delight through all his being. He had a stupid smile on his face. “I found them. Most of them. In Zoomenon. Lying about. In a kind of hole in the ground. Tripped on them. Lucky really. They’re not all here.”
“And what happened to the rest?”
He knew when he was being tested. “I ate them. Had to. Survival. Ohhh!”
The admiral’s astonished gaze now fixated on Zal’s face once more. “You ate spirits? Those not yet dead . . . like we have to!”
“You don’t strictly have to,” Zal said quickly, not sure if the admiral was fully formed yet or still needed a lot of filler to keep him sustained.
“And you could have strictly died,” the boy retorted, quick as a flash. So, not fully formed . . .
Zal shrugged. He wasn’t used to ghosts that could reason and talk back. He had no idea what fully formed meant in their terms, since no ghost had made it that far . . . “Half shadowkin. Vampiric nature. Sort of.” He was aware of the Ereba purring. The sound, barely audible, was vibrating his andalune body. He wanted to look at her to check if this counted as sex for her, just so he could know, but he also didn’t want to die at such an interesting moment.
“The dark elves have much in common with us,” the admiral said and stroked his chin as if he were much older, and bearded. It made Zal grin.
“The humans say we’re all figments of their imagination,” Zal said, trying anything for more common ground that might involve less dis combobulation in the future. And for something that might make the Ereba talk, so she might stop playing with him. It cost him every bit of energy he had. “They say we’re not exactly real.”
“They make good fodder, the humans,” the admiral stated, sitting back. “I like them best of all. The strength of their convictions is heady meat!” He thumped his own belly like a much larger man. “But let’s hear the spirits talk. I never came across real living dead!” His eyes lit up with glee.
Zal risked a flick of the eyes so that he could get a sidelong glance of the Ereba, who seemed also to be smiling and attentive. She was still purring. The purr and the aura together made him almost insensible to anything else in the room. Zal felt himself adrift on a sea of hormones that was once again starting to turn the tide against his self-control. “Ah, Mr. Head. How’s it going?” He braced himself against the swaying table and tried not to lean back from the clay creature too far.
Mr. Head opened his long, bow-shaped mouth and a thousand voices all spoke at once in a babble. He didn’t have to move his lips. The voices were elven, but of a kind Zal hadn’t heard before. Their voices had power. He could feel it beginning to affect the aether everywhere as soon as it started. He could feel it affecting him through his swoon even, in the fibre of his being. It was like being pulled in all directions, as if his insides were trying out different shapes. It hurt. He slapped his hand over Mr. Head’s mouth in an automatic gesture, not even thinking before he had done it, and gave a cry of agony as his hand grew a mouth on the back and started speaking.
“One at a time,” the Ereba said mildly in a voice that was sweet and quiet and carried through the din. Zal climaxed and felt the sensation shoot straight through his body into his damaged hand, obliterating the pain with pleasure as some part of the Ereba’s andalune body took it away from Mr. Head and set it back on the table. She closed Mr. Head’s mouth with her own hand and there was silence. “Little Star, why don’t you speak first?”
Zal snatched his hand back and cradled it in his lap, scared to touch it. It felt as if it was his penis, shuddering and jerking with strange delight as it remade itself into an ordinary hand again. He wasn’t surprised the Ereba could do that to him. She was the Namer and Naming was the summit of power. Most likely his reactions weren’t intentional on her part, but just because everything about her was too intense for his system. He knew her in this form because it was her elven aspect but she had more. She could have any.
She gave him a sympathetic glance that stroked his whole body with a touch he could feel and said, “Rub it, dear.”
Her joke made him look at her. Oh dear goddess, he thought, and blanked out.
Zal came to slowly, face on the table again. He was woozy with self-generated happy chemicals and saw no reason to move. Either the ghosts would eat them or they wouldn’t. A girl was talking in that strange old language next to him. He heard her through a haze. She was saying that some people called Idunnai had forged something called a Brink. They had put prisoners on the Brink and spirits had come out. Sorcerers had controlled the spirits and sent them into the prisoners’ bodies, to merge with their true forms and make a new kind of people. But it didn’t work very often. Most of the prisoners became mad. They were hunted and herded through portals into Zoomenon where they fell to pieces.
The Ereba asked how many, and the girl said very many people. All who did not have magical ability. All. She said that the successful ones became sorcerers of a different kind. Not Idunnai. She gave an elvish word that meant face of shadow. Lothalan. These Lothalan were few. They were interbred with Idunnai mages. Some of their children were strong in magic, Idun throwbacks with powerful aetheric control. But some were weaker and stranger. She said most of these were sent away, told they were going to a new world through portals. It was a story. But it was not true. They were herded up and killed, their bodies sent to Zoomenon for disposal where it was safe to let them decompose. A few escaped and ran free. Monsters, she said. Not Idunnai nor Lothalan. Monsters without faces.
By this time Zal’s ardour had cooled with the talk of aetheric engineering. He was only glad of the resistance that endorphins put up, and the fact that the Ereba’s caress kept them circulating. The story made him want to stay where he was and pretend to be asleep. He could sense the attention of the ghosts in the room, listening with the same vigour they pursued all information; sucking it up like dry sponges.
“How long ago?” the Ereba asked softly.
The girl called Little Star said she did not know. She had lost count of time.
Then the Ereba said, “What would you like now, lost one?”
The admiral straightened, “She can join the Fleet,” he said staunchly. “All lost ones may join. It’s so. I made it so.”
“She is no ghost,” the Ereba said.
; “She has a story,” the admiral corrected. “And no material form. Few memories. She is only a dream walking.”
“Is this the afterworld, is it the world of the dead?” the girl asked, hopeful. “We waited to get there. We thought it seemed long, but then, maybe it does to everyone.”
“Nah,” Zal said, eyes closed, face glued to the wood by drool. “This is the future. You’re not dead. You just lost your body and now you have to share one with . . . whoever . . . whoever I didn’t eat to stay alive. Welcome. Great to see you. Was I asleep there or did she just explain how the elves got into two different forms and that it wasn’t evolution, or, not the usual sort?”
“Elves?” The girl repeated the word. It was clearly new to her.
“Shadowkin and lightside. Night and day. Light and dark. A world of contrasts, and other bollocks,” Zal said. “I don’t suppose you remember any names from those days, do you? You and your friends?” He was rather impressed with his skill at remembering to exploit any moment for its information. Almost a fey skill. Malachi would be proud of him.
“The mage who left us there,” she said. “Lothanir Meyachi Saras Evayen of the House of Abhadha-Ilia,” and here she used a word Zal had never heard, only read about in old grammar books. A bi-gendered pronoun. “Shya was against the actions but shya had no choice. All the others were against shyam.” She paused. “You speak strangely. Are you one of the Lothalan?”
“No. Are you?”
“I was only a servant,” she said. “Idunnai-ap.” A girl of no power.
Zal was almost comatose. He was dimly aware that the Ereba was doing the equivalent of leaning on him because she didn’t want him to do anything now. He felt incredibly good and incredibly sleepy. His hand was still on Mr. Head’s arm and he was stroking it, and he hoped the girl could feel it. He would have liked to meet her and he wanted her to know he felt a bond to her, a complicated one, a personal one. But Mr. Head’s arm was only pottery.
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