There was a brief flicker in his throat, but something odd about it. The apple was tart. He swallowed and bit again, suddenly starving, his stomach painful as the first bite went down. There was a convulsion of sorts in his midriff where the two central chakras of his body held sway and then the apple made contact with his buried body, caused the outward reaction he had hoped for, and it leapt free. Vivid yellow flame erupted from his skin. There was a flare of heat, a stink of burning, smoke in his eyes, and a tickling sensation all over as it burst free.
The smoke alarm went off with a sudden scream. Emergency lighting came on automatically. He caught sight of himself in the grand cheval mirror that had been hung over his vast bowl of fruit. He was naked, white ash collected like snow on his shoulders and dusting across his skin where his clothes used to be. He looked shocked and thin and satisfyingly like David Bowie.
The door opened and two faery faces peered around it, hands over ears.
“Don’t look at me,” he said, his voice sounding much more sanguine than he felt. “I didn’t do anything.”
Once the hotel had been satisfied no damage other than minor charring had been done he was permitted to go, but not before Poppy and Viridia had attempted to get the full story out of him as he dressed. They handed him items of clothing from arm’s length and when he attempted to go closer in an obvious play to put them to sleep they danced away and threw pixie dust at him, all of which he could not avoid. Finally, seeing that he would soon be falling under their spell if they managed to get him many more times with the enchanted powder, he beckoned them to the door of the bedroom and pointed inside.
“There is the greatest mystery of my journey, girls,” he purred smoothly, as though already fallen under their demands. “Mr. Friday Head. An elemental creature of a kind not seen before, formed by my own alchemical powers.”
“Pnyeh,” Viridia sneered, tiptoeing closer in spite of herself.
Poppy had more practice at resisting her curiosity, although not much. She wavered and looked at Zal with suspicion and admiration. “You? As if you aren’t already some wunderkind in every respect, you are a student of the transformative arts as well? It is too much. Even if it is all an accident of the sort that seem only to occur to you, I think I will soon hate you.”
“At last,” Zal replied with a heartfelt sigh of relief. “I thought you’d never get the message.”
Poppy bared her delicate little teeth at him.
Viridia, close enough to touch the golem, hissed suddenly and backed away, stamping a foot nervously on the floor. “Ack, it is a vessel!”
“Vessel?” Poppy was at her side in an instant, peering and sniffing at the immobile statue of Mr. Head.
Zal watched the two of them twine sinuously round and about the terracotta elf, keeping a safe distance as they traced and inhaled all they could of him. Their arms and fingers and the tips of their noses grew longer and more slender as they proceeded, beginning to sheer into spirit forms that shimmered like water. He felt the drawing, sucking force of their power rise from them as they vacuumed up aetheric information and permitted himself a fond smile. They were good and hooked.
As he slipped out, perfectly quiet and without incident this time, he heard them whispering to each other like two little girls.
“It’s a chalice.”
“A spirit chalice.”
“A spirit chalice of great power.”
“It is . . . it is a grail.”
“Yes! Yes, a grail! That is what it must be.”
“I never saw one before but I heard about them.”
“Me too, me too. Lost in the long ago lands the last one, taken there by silly Famka into the big dark for safekeeping, but of course she forgets where she put it.”
“It still counts.”
“Yes. We have them all. Every last one of them. Well, nearly all.”
“Not this one. We haven’t this one.”
“Yet. Yet we haven’t . . .”
Zal stored that information as he ran down the fire escape and then onto the back of the courier bike that had arrived for him. There was some trouble to make the rider understand where he wanted to go and that he wouldn’t wear a helmet, but after slipping the man a hundred Coast dollars he was on his way at a satisfactory eye-watering speed.
The Demonia portal was on the rise as he approached. He gave brief thanks for twenty-four-hour furnishing retail and slipped out of Otopian space and back to the park where he had set off much, much earlier. The park was blackened and stinking of fire. Where the flutes had been placed bare stubs of their bases poked from the ground. He saw the charred remnants of bone where some revellers had not been lucky and winced at the evidence that the elements did not necessarily treat their adepts well. His own escape seemed suddenly much more unlikely than it even had before and a brief swell of queasiness came over him so that he hurried even faster past the spot, ignoring his hunger and thirst, his contradictory feelings of strength and fragility. His flare burned with a spiritual heat that his andalune now merged with in a new way; though it was only visible on his back he could feel its peculiar fire all over him and where usually he would have felt his way as much by the living things in the area as by seeing where he was going—sparks and tranches of life vibrant and singing to his soul—now he felt everywhere the promise of combustion. He wondered if it would wear off.
Singleminded running brought him quickly through the busy streets where he ignored calls and rejoinders and demands for parties. He was deaf to everything, thinking only of Lila and where she could be. His ears picked up fragments of horrible things that made him run faster. Of course she should never have come here with only a giddy socialite like Sorcha for a guide, who had no idea how very different human values and minds could be from her own and didn’t care to reason why. He recalled his own introductions to demon life and shuddered. He knew he had survived simply through a willingness to roll with anything, and a lot of unexplained luck. He had no values he could detect, at least not ones which related to other people, and so it hadn’t been too hard. Even Hell was hardly more than a mild affront to the vestiges of his childhood assumptions and the relics of his elven upbringing, not the slaughterhouse of his entire identity as it was for some. He was shallow. It helped enormously. But Lila was not, and she was also cussed stubborn: he couldn’t imagine her understanding the relationship between the trivial and sacrosanct the demons valued, and that would be the kind of combination that Demonia ate alive.
However, when he came to the Ahriman mansion and saw the white banners flying he stopped thinking at all. The servants averted their eyes and stepped aside even as they were doing everything they could to take his shirt and coat, usher him inside, guide him directly to people who were going to tell him what had happened. So he knew it was someone connected to him. There weren’t too many of them. All reaction in him froze, waiting for information. It came too soon of course. Sorcha, alerted by her attendants, came running towards him in her mourning clothes. Like a crazy kind of antipope, he thought, marvelling at his own mind’s desperate inventions to distract itself. She said only one word, “Adai.”
And he breathed again, glad and agonised in the same moment. And then Sorcha explained the details and his pain and relief were overshadowed by anger. There was a still moment in which he knew that things between Lila and himself, hardly begun, would never be the same again. Guilt and grief sobered him, now that it was clear things were all too late. He collected the things he needed from his rooms in the house and instructed the chief of staff to summon a drake rider. For what he had to do he needed wings and the power of akashic flight through the interstitial. Then, finally, he went to the cabinet in the family War Room and took out the ivory compass that could always and anywhere find anyone who bore the Curse of the House of Ahriman, as Adai’s killer must.
Sorcha followed him, like a lap dog. She was apologetic, he could tell by her silence. She didn’t even try to ask what he was doing, just traipsed at his
shoulder as he set the compasses and only then, as he stepped out onto the roof deck, she took hold of him at his belt. “I have to come too.”
“It can kill you.”
“I have to.”
He nodded once and accepted her admission of guilt. “Don’t do anything unless I fall. Stay out of it.”
“Yes,” she said.
The drake rider grumbled at the sight of two passengers. His beast, a semi-intelligent, self-aware creature, had a wingspan that dwarfed the Ahriman aircar balloon and barely fitted on the landing pad. Like Zal, it had an aura of aetheric spiritual energy that was just visible in the Demonia night—a shimmering ripple of luminescence like deep-sea plankton streaming off its chromatic hide. Trails of magic, rendered raw by its disruptive surfaces, gave it a fey look. Only where the harness was strapped to its upper back between the wings was there a clear space of unalloyed air. Zal avoided thorns and spikes and sat down, locking his legs into the strapping. Sorcha got up behind him and he felt her tie herself in place. Before them the skinny form of the rider twisted.
“Vengeance ride is it, master?”
Zal nodded grimly.
“May we have the compass?”
Zal handed the slender object over and the rider flipped it expertly into position at the front of her considerably more luxurious saddle seat. The drake turned its huge, ugly dragon head around and Zal saw the fine skin over the holes where its eyes would have been on a real dragon, veins gleaming blue-black and everything in between shining with a fierce internal white light. The light shifted as if it was water as the creature matched itself to the power of the compass. The rider spoke to it and it spoke back to her with a strangely soft voice. Then the rider said to Zal, “She says you smell of Zoomenon. She won’t go there.”
“No fear of that,” Zal said, uncomfortably aware of the beast’s unique combination of physical and aetheric power, and its mind, watching him closely. He allowed himself a look back into the sightless head, and saw nothing there he recognised although it saw things in him.
The rider muttered. “She says you have a dragon’s mark in your mind.” She sounded jealous.
“Another time I’d be happy to discuss it,” Zal said with tight control, though it was news to him.
The drake tossed its head on the long neck with what was unmistakably the beast equivalent of girlish laugh; a natural predator recognising a kindred instinct. It kicked off the roof with a force that made the struts groan and creak. Tiles fell to shatter on the road far below as they rose with a dizzying speed and spiralled up and up and up into the thinning air over the city. Their way was full of small hover cars and the big forms of the main route zeppelins, but the drake navigated an effortless course between them, seeming to strafe the number 18 balloon and causing several of the more nervous passengers to scream and cower back from the rails of the viewing deck. The balloon pilot saluted the drake’s flight with envy even as his craft walloomed horribly for a second or two before righting itself.
The compass meanwhile whispered to the rider with its own peculiar music and the rider took out her charmed spyglass and began to polish its nacreous lenses with a soft cloth.
Clinging to his waist, Sorcha hissed in Zal’s ear, “We’ve worked on all the arrangements for the tracks. Even your recalcitrant DJ has let me bring her over. She’s been doing drum tracks with Mizjah. Which reminds me. Where the hell have you been?”
Zal twisted around, his hands working carefully on the netspear they held. He let his anger show, “You deserted Lila for a breakbeat?”
“She’s more than able,” Sorcha retorted, guilt making her response less forceful than it should have been. “Anyway not just any beats . . . ones that open the gate to Joy. Besides. Why did you come and then leave without a word? If you’d just turned up to fucking dinner none of this would have happened!”
The drake rider demanded quiet so she could listen to the compass. Zal set his jaw, his back bending with the sudden pain of Adai’s loss to try and protect his heart. Behind him Sorcha caressed his andalune with her hands in an attempt to soothe. Their small fight had had the effect they both needed—to bind them closer. He concentrated on letting the feeling flow through him as the drake abruptly changed course and the rider put the glass to her eye so she could see straight through every veil to the one physical dimension their prey had fled to.
“Alfheim,” she declared with easy conviction, her voice a drawl so slow it was almost a purr.
“This is where you get off,” Zal said to Sorcha, forcing himself to straighten up.
“No way!” she hissed, and she had a right to the pursuit if they kept to the letter of the law.
“Sorry,” he said, jamming the netspear under his thigh and turning round to take hold of her, all vibrant and powerful and fragile as a hummingbird at the same time, her energy making his own tingle and scream. Her strength was no match for his and he used the unfair advantage to dislodge her. “But if I don’t come back you’re not going to end up at the mercy of the current rulers of my old hometown. Their laws are anachronistic beyond your wildest dreams.”
She fought and scratched. The drake, sensing onboard mutiny, drifted low over the outskirts of Bathshebat, skimming the lagoon. Zal jerked Sorcha free and pushed her hard. She fell, her white clothes flapping and rippling like cloud around her. With the kind of presence of mind he’d always been surprised at finding in her she flung a small object back up at him, guided with a snatch of song. He caught it—her Songster—and with it the line she sent to his ear with the precision of tone for which she was famous, “Never go into battle unaccompanied . . .”
“Ready now?” the rider asked as the drake beat them out across the open ocean, wings adagio but their airspeed increasing beyond the physical limit of any living creature.
“Hit it,” Zal said and the rider nodded with satisfaction, calling out to her mount. The drake opened her long, crocodile mouth and her inaudible cry sundered the divisions between worlds. They flashed into aetherstream, protected by the drake’s aura of shattering disruption, and then she tuned herself to the frequencies of Alfheim and, with the sure power of like drawing to like, that place reached up and snatched them from nowhere. They soared in the dawn sky over the lumpy corrugation of a seemingly endless forest, the air colder and clearer.
The drake rested into a glide of satisfaction. The rider cleaned her lenses and listened to the compass. They turned and turned again and began to move silently away from the rising sun. Zal put the Songster over his right ear and adjusted the settings. Sorcha’s funk-obsessed drum and guitars punched into him, honing his intent to a sharp point that he focused entirely on the gleaming, blunted tip of the netspear. Ten nets around its shaft clung as lightly as spider silk, the aetheric potential of their charms making his fingers prickle as he adjusted his grip and practised casting it clear of the rider and the drake.
The rider set her spyglass into its case at her side. “Did you talk to a dragon, then?” she asked, folding her arms.
“It talked to me,” Zal said truthfully, trying to discourage conversation. He must have got better at demonic because she took the hint, or else she was already uncomfortable with the degree to which her curiosity had gotten the better of her professionalism.
She gave him a look of respect and nodded and for a moment he saw the drake look clearly at him through her eyes, a gaze much more penetrating and canny than any demon or human stare could have been. He looked back and the rider laughed.
“When will you stop your brief and petty squabbles then, I wonder?” she said, but it wasn’t her voice and both she and he knew it and neither of them made an effort to answer the question.
The drake sailed him effortlessly to a place deep in the Shadowed Forest, a place he fully expected to find an escaping shadow assassin. There, where two glades met across a narrow river, they saw a typical Saaqaa campground looking deserted as always in the burgeoning morning light, only their cats and other diurnal pets lying abou
t in the sunshine alone.
The rider pointed out one hut as they passed to the west.
“If your mages are good enough you can make the cast,” she said.
He knew that she meant the spells on the spear would have to be powerful enough to pierce the physical barrier of the hut plus any charms that might be in its making, then accurate enough to find his quarry and tangle it without gathering bystanders into the merciless embrace of the net. She didn’t mention the basic skill required just to get the javelin flying in the right direction at a reasonable speed and he hoped it was a matter of confidence in his reputation and not just the fact that she didn’t care.
In his head it seemed like every musician in Demonia was doing their damnedest to make him feel like dancing; happy hard-core overdrive. In spite of the situation he found himself moving to the beat and the psychedelic sci-fi effect sounds that someone had gotten addicted to during the mix. Better that than anger or the grief; nothing made intent as pure as expanding, open, happy energies, whatever the source and whatever the target. They banked around for the pass and he readied the spear, turning himself and freeing some stiffness in his balancing arm.
The drake took a suicidally low line, aether streaming from her wings and scattering the birds. The sunning cats leapt and ran as her wavefront brushed them. Zal leaned out, sure and pure, the spot secure in his mind even as the actual camp flashed beneath him in a blur of earth and green tones. The spear flew from his hand, its line unspooling with a high whining sound from the reel attached to the drake’s harness.
He felt the detonation of the charms—as if anyone in a radius of several miles could miss the aetheric retort—and then the line went hard and the drake snarled and the reel screamed and smoked and reached its limit almost in one second. It felt like an invisible hand swatted them, but then they burst upward, not down, and the harness slid and complained but they dragged what they’d caught with them. The drake struggled for a few moments as various bits of forest fouled the catch but its strength was easily equal to a hut roof, a few canopy branches, and some tangling vine. Zal only hoped the same could be said for whoever was in the net. The rider handed him the winding handle from its place at her saddlebow and he locked it onto the spool and began cranking as she recovered her spyglass and reoriented them for Demonia.
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