by Jodi Taylor
‘Of course. I know everything.’
‘You knew that little girl was there.’
He nodded.
‘And you did nothing? You would have let her die? Get out of my house.’ I scraped back my chair, all ready to escort him to the door in righteous indignation.
‘Of course I did something, Elizabeth Cage. I sent you the dream.’
I wasn’t sure if that made things better or worse. ‘You did that? How could you do that? Are you messing with my head?’
‘Would you rather I had not sent you the dream?’
I thought of that little girl, alone in that tree. Hungry, terrified, thirsty, sitting on the bones of other children, crying for her mummy. ‘No. No, of course not.’
‘Then don’t accuse me of doing nothing.’
‘You could have saved her.’
‘I don’t interfere.’
‘She was a child.’
‘I don’t interfere.’
I blinked. ‘Never?’
‘Never.’
‘But why not? You have … you have power.’
‘So do you.’
‘Not like you.’
He shifted uneasily. ‘Let’s talk about you instead. Has anyone ever told you how the light plays on your hair …’
I slapped the table. I think the wine had given me the courage to be angry. And angry I was. ‘Stop that. I’m cross with you because you have power and you could help people and yet you do nothing.’
‘Just like you.’
The words hung in the air between us. I opened my mouth for an indignant denial, closed it again, opened it again, and finally said, ‘I didn’t want it. The power, I mean.’
He seemed surprised. ‘What has that to do with it?’
I thought about that. ‘Nothing, I suppose. But … every now and then … I get a … a warning … if I use it wrongly and …’
I tapered off.
‘Like a brake.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, just like a brake. The warning light comes on in my head, there’s a flash of pain and I know not to go any further.’
‘And you heed this warning?’
I shivered, suddenly cold and with the taste of angry snow on my lips and lied. ‘Yes.’
He nodded and topped up his glass again. ‘It’s probably best you don’t use your power then. Sit in your house and do nothing.’
We sat in silence. I looked at the dark red liquid in my glass and remembered I didn’t much like red wine, but this was good stuff.
I don’t normally ask people questions about themselves. Usually I don’t need to because their colours tell me what I need to know. And often lots of things I don’t need to know, as well. And certainly lots of things I don’t want to know. About Iblis, however, I did want to know. I wanted to know about his past. His silver colour, always so vibrant and lively, only told me about him now, in this moment, so I sipped a little more courage and said, ‘And what about you?’
He came back from wherever he’d been. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’ I remembered to ask open questions. ‘What’s your story?’
He smiled a sad smile. ‘It’s a long one.’
I reached out and topped up both our glasses. ‘Off you go then.’
I didn’t think he’d tell me anything. Nothing important anyway. I was expecting a few meaningless words that would probably conceal more than they revealed, and then he would find the bottle was empty, or suddenly remember a previous appointment and depart in haste, so I was very surprised when he said, in all seriousness, ‘I’m not sure where to begin.’
‘At the beginning,’ I said helpfully, tipping what must surely be the last dregs into his glass, but it seemed there was a drop still left in the bottle. I held it up to the light and squinted.
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘The Bottle of Utgard-Loki.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The Bottle of Utgard-Loki. Well, it used to be the Horn of
Utgard-Loki, of course, but we all have to move with the times, don’t we?’
‘The bottle of …?’
‘Utgard-Loki,’ he said helpfully, as if that made everything clear.
I stared at him.
‘The unemptyabling … unemptyingly … unemptyable Bottle of Utgard-Loki.’
I stared at him. ‘What?’
‘It never empties.’
I shook the bottle. It was at least half full and yet I was on my second glass and I’d lost count of his top-ups. I gave up and dragged him back on track. ‘The beginning?’
‘The beginning,’ he said softly, looking at me but seeing something else entirely. ‘The beginning is such a long time ago now. When everything was bright and new and the colours were dazzling and we had such hope …’
He was quiet for so long that I thought that was all I was going to get, but I asked the question anyway.
‘Who are you?’
He opened his mouth and I held up my hand. ‘And don’t say, “Iblis, man of many talents,” and so on. Tell me who you really are.’
He opened his mouth to answer and then changed his mind about what he was going to say. He looked at me for a long time and then said, ‘I’m a Hunter. We both are. Melek and me. We’re Hunters.’
My mouth suddenly dry, I asked, ‘What do you hunt?’
‘Things that make the world … unsafe.’
‘What sort of things?’
He shifted on his chair. ‘In the Old Days – before the first men emerged from their caves, blinking in the light, we had to make a world for them.’
‘Make for them?’
‘Well, I don’t mean manufactured for them, obviously. We had to prepare it for them. They were children. We had to make it safe. Childproof it for them, if you like.’
‘You childproofed the world?’
‘Exactly. You know. Remove sharp objects. Babyproof the toilet seat. Put a gate across the stairs. That sort of thing.
I leaned across the table. ‘How exactly did you make this world safe for them?’
‘Read the old stories, Elizabeth Cage. Read of the ice giants, the minotaurs, the trolls, the dragons, the ghouls, the golems, the djinn, the demons, the undead. There was great evil in this world, once upon a time.’
I opened my mouth to say that these were all legends, surely, and then remembered some of the things I’d seen recently. I still wasn’t completely sure I believed what he was telling me, but he wasn’t lying. He was telling the truth as he saw it. I’m not sure that made things any better. A part of me was still convinced I was drinking with someone who would benefit from a spell of psychiatric assistance.
I said carefully, ‘You killed them all?’
‘No. Oh no. Some departed quite willingly. Signed the treaty and went … elsewhere. Some fought to the bitter end of course. And their ending was bitter. Very bitter. It was a long, hard struggle. I lost many friends.’ He gazed into his wine glass.
He seemed to have forgotten me as he sat, staring into his past, so I said gently, ‘What happened?’
It was a non-specific question and I expected a non-specific answer, but I got more than I bargained for.
He sighed heavily. ‘I did something bad. Something very, very bad. And everyone suffered for it.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing at all.
He looked up at me and smiled that small, sad smile again. ‘You are quiet.’
I said honestly. ‘I’m surprised. A little surprised that you would tell me this and very, very surprised that you of all people could do anything …’ I couldn’t think of another word, ‘…bad.’
He looked surprised. ‘You think that of me?’
‘Why would I not? You saved me from Þhurs.’ I swallowed and said, ‘I can see your true nature and you are an honourable man.’
He hung his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’m not.’
His colour, usually so bright and lively, hung motionless around him. The edges were darkening. Tarnishing was the word that ca
me to my mind. And something else came into my mind – this was the real Iblis. Not the bouncing, silver Tigger, flirting outrageously with every woman who crossed his path, but this Iblis. This older, darker, sadder … broken Iblis who, long ago had done something very bad and it had ruined his life. Shadows began to gather in the room and not all of them were because the sun had gone down and the street light was shining through my front window.
He sighed. ‘There’s a rule. An unbreakable rule. And it was broken.’
‘By whom?’ And waited to hear him say, ‘By me,’ because if anyone belonged to the ‘See a Rule – Break a Rule Club’, it was Iblis.
But he didn’t. ‘By others. The ones who succumbed. The ones who told themselves there was no harm in it. The ones who fell. That was before my time. Before all our times. We were sent to deal with the consequences. To hunt them down and exterminate them.’
‘What consequences?’
He said in a whisper, ‘Their offspring.’
I trod very carefully. ‘So this unbreakable rule was …’
‘Broken. Many times. By those who should have known better.’
I stopped breathing because I knew what was coming.
‘And then by me.’
He hung his head. His colour was writhing with … what? Anxiety? No, not that. Guilt. Remorse. Self-hatred. Disgust. Loathing. Shame. A dreadful mixture that eddied around him. Suffocating him almost. His colour had darkened almost to black. I caught a faint sense of whirling, disorienting panic. Whatever he had done had affected him so deeply that even now he could barely think about it before tumbling headlong into a vortex of guilt and panic and remorse and a deep, deep, soul-sapping fear. I stared at him. Whatever could he possibly have done that was so bad … that had changed his life … that could cause him such horror? Even across the table I could see his distress. Normally, when people are agitated or afraid, their colour wraps itself around them, protecting and soothing, but Iblis’s colour was streaming away from him like a banner. Self-hatred, self-reproach, self-loathing. I could hardly believe this was the same noisy, cocky, confident young man who had so effortlessly saved me from the troll and flirted outrageously with everything in a skirt.
I needed to do something, so I picked up the unemptyable bottle, poured him another glassful, and gently told him to drink it up.
It was gone in three or four gulps. He placed the glass carefully on the table in front of him and then pushed it away as if he was afraid of what he might do with it.
I said gently, ‘Would it help you to tell me? But not if you don’t want to.’
He looked at me. ‘You’re a good person, Elizabeth Cage, but you wouldn’t be so good if you knew what I had done.’
‘Have you killed someone?’
‘Oh, I’ve killed lots of things. Some of them people, but usually they deserved to die so my conscience is mostly clear on that point.’
‘Did you … hurt a child, perhaps?’
‘No, of course not,’ he said, so irritably that I was reassured. ‘Well, I’ve thumped a couple around the head once or twice, but that was for their own good. You know – “How many times must I tell you not to play with dragons?” Or – “Stop annoying the leprechauns because they’ll turn the milk if you’re not careful.” That sort of thing.’
‘Yes,’ I said carefully. ‘The usual stuff.’
‘Exactly.’
I opened my mouth to say, ‘So tell me what you did,’ but that seemed a little judgemental, so I changed it to, ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I don’t want to,’ he said heavily. ‘I like knowing that you don’t know. That you have a good opinion of me. That you’re not judging me. Or recoiling in disgust. Or whatever.’
‘I’ll try not to do any of those things.’
‘You won’t promise though, will you.’
‘No, I can’t do that. Promises are serious things and I don’t know what you’re going to say, do I?’
He reached across the table for my hand. ‘Elizabeth …’
‘It’s up to you. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘I don’t want to, but I should. You should know what I am. And what I did.’
He seized the bottle and poured himself yet another glassful, said, ‘Well, here goes,’ and drained his glass.
Chapter Fifteen
‘In the beginning,’ he said slowly, ‘in the Old Days, it was all about the Fiori. You’d call them demons. There are many different types and the Fiori are the worst kind. The sons of the gods lay with the daughters of men and the stories call their offspring giants, but that’s because in those days they probably didn’t have the words to describe the cruel, vicious, vindictive brutality of them. The Fiori, I mean. They have no redeeming features. There’s no kindness in them. No gentleness. And definitely no compassion. There’s no redemption for them, either, Elizabeth. Their certain fate awaits them in the deepest, darkest places of the next world, and because they know it, nothing reigns them back in this one. They are the abominations of this world. I can’t tell you some of the things they’ve done over the ages, to other races, even to each other, but if you look back at the worst things that have happened here, in this world – and there are a lot of them – you’ll find at least one Fiori in there somewhere.’
He sipped his wine. ‘Anyway, it was our job, mine and Melek’s, to hunt them down and exterminate them – to make the world safe – and we did. We pursued them from one end of the world to the other and back again. We were a team then and we were unstoppable. They fled at our approach, and yet, no matter how many we slaughtered, or burned, no matter how many of their nests we destroyed, they never seemed to get any less. We pursued them without mercy and without rest. Through the snowy wastes, across vast deserts, in the high places of the world. We were relentless. There was no hiding from us.’
He paused to sip his wine. ‘Sometimes we would split up. She would go one way and I would go another and between us we’d drive them into a narrow place and into an ambush. Men were spreading across the face of the earth by this time, and many had suffered at the hands of the Fiori, so there were always those willing to help. Heroes, champions, demi-gods – everyone banded together to bring them down.’
He sipped at his wine again. Putting off the moment, I suspected. ‘Anyway, the ages passed, friends and allies came and went, but we – that’s Melek and me – stuck at it because, trust me, Elizabeth Cage, the Fiori never grow any less. And then … then we began to hear reports they were gathering in their traditional hunting areas. There were the usual atrocities, but there were also reports of women disappearing – being taken alive. That usually only meant one thing – they were being taken for breeding purposes – and that was something we really needed to do something about. So Melek went off to gather as much support as she could muster and I set off to follow their trail, which wasn’t difficult – I just followed the burning villages and dismembered bodies – to attempt to discover their breeding ground. We were to meet in Venice on Midsummer’s Eve.’
He stopped again. I sat very still but he made no move to pick up his story.
‘In Venice,’ I said, hoping to get him talking again.
He nodded. ‘Yes. Venice. Depending on what I found, we’d put together four or five small armies, hit the Fiori from different directions and destroy them and their nests before they knew what had hit them.’
He sighed.
‘What did they look like?’
He blinked at me. ‘Who?’
‘The Fiori. Were they as monstrous on the outside as on the inside?’
‘That’s the sad bit. They look just like ordinary people.’
‘But why haven’t I heard about them? Why hasn’t anyone heard about the Fiori?’
‘You have. You hear about them every time you switch on the news.’
I tried not to look horrified. ‘Hear? Present tense? They’re still with us?’
‘I’m afraid so. We’re stronger, but there are more of
them. It’s an age-long stalemate whose beginnings no one can now remember and whose ending seems equally far away.
‘Will it end?’
‘Yes. Not soon, but one day. Accounts of a final dreadful battle are widespread throughout many belief systems. Armageddon. Ragnarok. It will happen.’
‘But not today.’
‘No, not today.’
‘And not tomorrow.’
‘No, not tomorrow, either. But one day.’
‘One day you will win.’
‘One day someone will win. It might not necessarily be us.’
I resisted the temptation to look behind me. ‘So you never actually wiped them out?’
He compressed his lips and shook his head and I resolved to shut up in case he construed that last remark as a criticism. His colour was all dark now, churning about him. I wondered if I should stop him. Confession is supposed to be good for the soul, but not so much for the body, as far as I could see. And, I was asking myself, if it was that bad, did I actually want to know what he had done?
I opened my mouth to say, ‘Let’s drop the subject and finish off this bottle, shall we?’ but he was already speaking.
‘It was going well. I reckoned they were only about a day or so ahead of me. The weather was good. I was on their trail and closing every day because I knew the area quite well.’
‘You’d been there before?’
He smiled. ‘Actually, I don’t think there’s a square foot on this earth that I haven’t trodden many times, but yes, these were their hereditary breeding grounds and I knew them well.’
He sounded so sad. All his cocky irreverence had disappeared. He was just a bowed figure in the increasing dimness of my living room. Night had fallen, but I decided to leave the lights off and give him a little privacy. He was showing me his soul. I didn’t need to see his face as well.
‘I was making good time – I reckoned they were only about a day ahead of me, and then I emerged from the forest to find a river crossing ahead. There was a bit of a rickety bridge that dumped people in the water as often as it got them safely across, but there was an inn at the meeting of the ways, and I decided I deserved a reasonable meal. I pitched up just before noon. It was a warm day and the landlord had dragged a few tables and benches outside. Men sat around, talking and drinking. A nice peaceful scene and given the lack of blood and screaming, I could assume the Fiori hadn’t yet passed this way. I took a table under a tree, ordered an ale and whatever they had to eat, and leaned back to enjoy the scene around me. The landlord was dashing about with beakers and plates. His wife was in the kitchen dishing up the food, not very ably assisted by her young daughter. She was an angel with her long blonde hair and no one really minded that she brought the wrong food to the wrong table. She was probably about eight or nine. There was a boy as well, about ten, I think, feeding the pig around the back. A busy, happy family running a prosperous business in a pleasant spot.’