Keeping It Real

by Justina Robson

The beast turned to hiss at her, and even though it was noon she could see the faint smokiness of working magic around it. In the blink of an eye it became more like a weasel than a cat, and then suddenly more like a rat, changing shapes as it struggled with its own surprise and the fact that it found itself in daylight. Lila made a grab for it, but it was too fast. In a second it had broken up into a watery slither of shadows and flowed down through the rim of a drain into the comforting blackness of the sewers.

  Back on the underside of the trunk lid Lila could see faint bloody markings starting to vanish as their spell was completed. Whoever had left the charm would soon be receiving information as to who had disturbed their gear. Small, dark magics like this one were common in the criminal world. Faeries had no respect for law or order and humans bought them from the fey.

  Lila’s scalp smarted and she realised with annoyance that the creature had managed to snag a few of her hairs. She had to bite on her frustration that her help hadn’t appeared sooner so she could have caught and traced the charm, but she had no ability with aetherial creations of any kind, being simply human and simply machine. All she could do was watch the telltales flicker and die in the daylight, shut the lid and leave the car to continue doing its work.

  Back at her bike she met the faery special agent she’d requested. Malachi was a Rowan spirit, belonging to the Anthracite nation, his skin and hair as blackly sparkling as pure coal, his eyes a surprising ash-berry red, which meant he was often mistaken for a demon by humans; something which always delighted him. He was well used to running around after his human colleagues and seemed pleased to see her out of the confines of the office and the medical suites where she’d spent most of the last year. Lila had always found him trustworthy and kind. They chatted for a few minutes, catching up before she briefed him.

  “Just a feeling? Sure you haven’t got the…” and he shivered his hand back and forth to indicate a feel for magic.

  “I’m sure. Call it intuition.”

  “If there’s nothing to see I’ll have to put it down to the usual.”

  “Cheese, chocolate, pickles.” Lila smiled, feeling better with the old joke. “Haven’t had any in days.”

  Malachi got in and out of the studio on a faked engineer’s ticket and the diversion of his fey charm and returned in less than twenty minutes. His face was serious and he was almost trotting, his shiny shoes clipping the pavement like a tap dancer’s as he reached her.

  “Your gut must have faery sympathies, or something else,” he said. “There is something there, trouble is, I can’t say what.” His reflective skin and hair seemed to run with sunlight as he gave her a helpless shrug. “It’s very deep and very old and… I got this feeling off it that—this sounds crazy—that it was there before the Bomb. Way before the studio.”

  Lila stiffened. Before the Quantum Bomb there had been, allegedly, a single world with a single history. After the Bomb it had been divided into the Severed Realms. Each of the new realms lay alongside the first world, which had been Earth and was now called Otopia. Each realm had an immediate history as long as or longer than the Earth’s. And experience and archaeological study had taught Lila that the Bomb had peppered the time of all realms with fragments of things; the past, the future, objects, persons and above all, magic or I-space energy. Before the Bomb that kind of thing had existed nowhere but in human imagination. But Before the Bomb was a matter of extreme debate and political difficulty. She could feel her old diplomatic hackles rise at the thought of discovering an artefact that would cast doubt on the human version of history.

  “If I hadn’t been looking, I’d never have seen it,” Malachi said uncomfortably. “I’m not sure—it could be an echo fragment of the explosion, you know? Like a geological fault? Trouble with Bomb fragments is that they often look like they’re something they’re not, especially ejecta from so close to the original site, which is, unfortunately, pretty much everything from Bay City to Old Salt Lake. I need more help to find out. Probably have to dig down.”

  “But if it’s been there that long then it’s very unlikely to be anything to do with rock stars and their publicity is it?” Lila said, rather surprised at her own spitefulness as she spoke the words.

  “Getting up your cuff is he?” Malachi asked with a smile, glad to be changing subject.

  “Nothing I can’t manage.” Lila checked the time and got back on her bike. “Give you a ride back? I’m going to see Sarasilien.”

  “Darling!” Malachi objected and pointed to his smart clothes. “I’m strictly a car boy. Say hi to the old charlatan from me. And put a helmet on.”

  Lila waved and tried not to notice how Malachi had failed to completely quell her disquiet. She spun the bike around in an entryway and, as she passed him on the way back, saw him studying the ground of the parking lot outside the studio with such absorption he didn’t lift his head, only his hand in a farewell.

  Her ride to Incon’s facility was hot and dusty and full of lazy midday traffic. Lila was later than she meant to be when she finally rode into the subterranean garage of the undistinguished office block on the city outskirts. She took the express elevator down, bypassing the street levels and the administrative floors. Barely was the dust out of her hair before she presented herself before her—she didn’t know what he was any more; healer, friend?—before Sarasilien, the only elf agent within the NSA, and the one who had saved her from death of her magical wounds.

  His rooms were the largest and most peculiarly appointed of all the strangely outfitted rooms in the building. Technology and magical instrumentation fought for space across several tables and desks. Sand trays and inkstands lay under the glow of virtual keyboards, marked with the awkward runes of a dozen magical languages. Giant sized Berrypics covered the walls with manuscript, evidence charts, duty logs and glorious vistas of other realms. Server racks hummed quietly. Magical test rigs, filling the air with strange, light bending architectures, funnelled I-space contingencies out of the room and out of the universe. Sarasilien’s tall, blue-and-grey-clad figure stood at one of these.

  To Lila, even though they bore no physical resemblance, the elf’s tall, elegantly spare form and long, silvering chestnut and gold hair immediately reminded her of her father. When he turned to greet her the strong slanting of his features on their angular bones and the sudden small movements of his long ears—their attenuated tips were as high as the crown of his head—should have put paid to that impression, but they didn’t. She couldn’t even detect a trace of warmth in him as he came towards her, silver stitches in his clothing glinting, his face as stern as a patrician statue, manner as composed as a king’s.

  Sarasilien’s andalune body had always been tightly controlled—he kept it completely subdermal for most of his time in Otopia, she understood—but, since encountering Zal, Lila was suddenly much more aware of the possibility of its presence, and curious, since she had never witnessed Sarasilien displaying it. His control of it was, she knew, a sign of extreme self-mastery, a thing as rare in elves as any race. Its absence had been a key factor in the comfort she felt with him before. Now, that comfort seemed to be gone.

  Her awkwardness with him made her self-conscious, and that made her more awkward. She was suddenly ill at ease before his calm, and cast her eyes towards his boots rather than his face. She thought suddenly of Zal, though Zal had never once made her think of Sarasilien. Her reasons for being here, at all, were suddenly unclear to her. Now that she saw him she became more sure that the need she had to talk to him was nothing to do with the case, but entirely personal, and that seemed like a weak and insubstantial reason to be here.

  “Lila,” Sarasilien said and lifted her chin with his hand, so she must look at him. “Are you well?”

  His concern manifested as a much slighter expression than it would have merited on a human face. Even when moved deeply his face showed only hints of what he felt. But Lila was tugged by the care, mote than she wanted. “I’m fine. Sorry. It’s been tougher th
an I thought”

  Sarasilien looked down into her eyes and the ghost of a smile made his lips turn at the corners. His cheek dimpled very faintly and she saw the tips of his long ears turn more closely towards his head. He was really very glad to see her. “You look well, although your presentation has more of the urchin than the goddess about it. Town must be busy.”

  “It was,” she agreed and then she stepped forward impulsively and hugged him. She had missed him. She’d had no idea how much until that second. Perhaps it was to be expected, after they’d worked so closely for so long to get her fit again, mentally and physically at least. Emotionally she clearly had a way to go.

  She felt his andalune body very briefly on the exposed skin of her hands and face, like a breath of air that had come off the tops of a cold and lonely mountain. After a second of his normal reticence he embraced her back, and then he set her from him, not unkindly. “What brings you here?”

  She sat down on one of the guest chairs, looking around the familiar room with its oak-panelled walls, library bookshelves, and the largest of all the Berries, showing the white-capped mountains that Sarasilien called his home, very far from Otopia. “Isn’t seeing you enough?” she asked, not certain she could tell him everything on her mind.

  “Yes, but that’s not the matter.” He was standing close by a book table suitable for viewing very large volumes. He closed the one that lay open there and folded his hands in front of him.

  Lila was sure she had his full attention and it daunted her. “I don’t think I can carry through this job,” she confessed.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It’s too much like facing everything too fast.”

  “Because Zal is an elf?”

  “Because Zal is not an elf,” Lila countered, glancing into his green eyes and seeing the sympathy she was looking for, bound inside a world of strict expectations; emerald in ice. “I was ready for him to be like you. Not as kind. Even like the Daga agents maybe. But like you. And he isn’t. And he is. Oh, hell… I’m getting this all wrong!”

  “Tell me the facts.”

  That was more like it, Lila thought, wishing she’d done that to begin with. She found coherence now she was on familiar ground. “A lot of the hate mail the band receive is standard stuff, nasty but not dangerous. The letters that made Incon decide to act are still coming—I brought them.” She took them out of the pocket of her armoured vest and the dagger with them and held them out to Sarasilien.

  He took them, careful not to touch the knife but balance it on the envelopes. He set them on the book table and with one finger pushed them apart. As he inspected them and began to open the letters Lila continued.

  “I can’t read magic, despite everything we’ve tried. I can’t do that and I don’t think he tells me what they really say. And the knife…” She explained the whole story of that incident as Sarasilien read the letters, one after another. She could see him controlling his reactions carefully so that barely a twitch of one ear betrayed him. Nonetheless he sighed with relief when he was able to put them down.

  She didn’t tell him all about the knife. Not the part about Zal touching her or the remark he’d made. Or the Game they were playing. She willed Sarasilien to guess it, so that she didn’t have to admit making such a stupid move, so he’d take her off the assignment and she could avoid the shame. But her will had all the effect of her efforts at sorcery.

  Sarasilien examined the dagger very closely indeed. He spoke to it and Lila saw words deep within the metal rise to the surface at his command. Wisps of black and silver ran along the edges of the blade and dripped into the air at its tip only to swirl and vanish quickly. As he went to put it down, the knife twisted somehow in his fingers and she heard him take a sharp, short breath.

  Blood ran down the knife together with the white and black, the orange-hued scarlet of elf blood quickly deepening to crimson as it fell and bore magic with it onto the letter paper underneath. Immediately all the pages burst into flame,

  Sarasilien spoke a single word and the burning pages and the bloodied knife became frozen in space and time, as though in a photograph. He muttered over his finger and went into the bathroom suite that led off his rooms to tend it. When he came back he sat down beside Lila on the other guest chair and looked into her eyes, He seemed very sad and she braced herself, for she’d never seen him make a mistake before, and although the cut was small and the sleep charm already used up, she was afraid.

  “You did well to get them here. The blade was spelled to want to cut elf flesh. It was a magic of higher than the Seventh Level. I don’t doubt that if it had found its way close to Zal it would have done more than make him sleep. But you say an elf carried it and used it against you?”

  “That’s what Poppy—that’s what the faery said. But they were in league. She may have lied.”

  “There’s more than elvish magic in it,” Sarasilien said, pressing his cut finger gently with his thumb, a rueful expression on his face.

  Lila sensed he was calculating what to say so that he didn’t upset her, or perhaps for political reasons. Silences within Incon were even more obscure than ordinary elven silences.

  “I cannot tell you any more until all of this has been discussed with my masters,” he said. “Only that this is not about race hate, or anything to do with the purity of the musical industry. It wears those faces, even through the Daga, but they are only servants of another intent.”

  “I thought the Daga served Alfheim and its goals,” Lila said with disappointment, ignoring the flash of fear that had streaked through her like lightning when he spoke.

  “So they would have us believe,” Sarasilien said. Now his face was troubled and Lila really began to worry.

  “Isn’t it so?”

  “Possibly.”

  He was quickly lost in labyrinths of thought, Lila saw. Tentatively she reached out to touch his arm, the hurt one. “Talk to me?”

  He looked at her hand, smiled his slight smile that was never truly joyous because it held too many years. “I cannot. I will when I am able.”

  “Tell me at least if it’s personal or business then.”

  “Both. Come, that’s not all you had to tell me.”

  “Diverter,” she accused him gently. “Well, the other thing is that I’ve tried to find out who Zal is and there is no record. It isn’t his real name I suppose, but how do I get further? Like an idiot I already told him mine so I can’t even trade for it.” The words sounded efficient, unlike the beating of her heart which was far too fast for someone merely sitting in a pleasant room. Behind Sarasilien’s shoulder she could see the frozen fire of the vellum and the knife in mid-air, holding to his word.

  He didn’t question her research. “So, it’s not in the names of the living,” he said after a pause. “What about the dead?”

  Lila blinked. “You think necromancy? He’s not Undead. No way.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “Mistakes are made. Elves are hard to kill. Sometimes they are thought to be dead, are buried and rise again, alive, much later when time has healed them. Records aren’t always updated. Outright deaths are the only straightforward ones. Even great wounds and sickness aren’t always fatal, and the same goes double for magical attacks. Also, the magic of Resurrection does not always create Undead ones, though I am not versed in the Necromancer’s art.”

  Lila closed her eyes for a second to search the databases. When she opened them she was looking straight into green eyes, clear as glass. “Nothing there either. Not even things that look like they could be shortened to Zal.”

  “It’s not a syllable of modern elvish,” Sarasilien said. “But does occur in older languages, when we had more dealings with some of the other realms than we do now. Perhaps it’s only a stage name. Did you ask?”

  “No,” Lila admitted. “There was never a right moment.”

  He did understand this time. His long eyes narrowed, became hooded. “Lila, are you playing a Game with him?
”

  “Are you playing one with me?”

  His eyes narrowed with a flash of anger he didn’t bother to restrain. “You know better than that.”

  “It started before I knew I was even doing it!” Lila cried in anguish, sorry for hurting him and angry with herself. “When I realised… it was already on.”

  “And which one do you think it is?”

  “I’m no expert,” she said humbly, picking at a loose thread where the magical messenger had clawed her vest. “I don’t know how to read them.”

  “Lila,” he said and waited for her to look at him.

  How she hated that waiting! He would wait until sunset, midnight, the next day, until she did what he wanted. So she might as well do it now and have to suffer the disappointment in his face. She looked up.

  His serious, intent focus was all on her. She felt like she was being minimised in the bolt of a ray gun, shrinking inside. But all he said was, “Don’t pretend to be a fool. You’re nothing of the kind. It demeans all of us.” Then he let her go and turned away, getting up to go back to the still flames and the blade. “This can still be read, as long as the fire is stopped, but the fire can’t be put out, so this will have to do. Not that I need to read it again. Do you want to know what it says?”

  “Yes,” Lila said, wanting to take on any burden he asked.

  “It says that Zal’s blood will separate all the realms completely and for ever, saving Alfheim from imminent destruction, and that he is the axis of a Great Spell.”

  “A magical Quantum Bomb,” Lila said.

  “Just so. The Great Spell it proposes here requires a living sacrifice, to maintain the Spell’s power. It also requires someone adept in two opposing magical disciplines, whose nature has been sundered from any purity of line and become a fusion of two or more of the realms. You say Zal healed you with a crow’s feather? There is no such elvish magic. That is a thing of Demonia, or Thanatopia, depending on the charm.” Sarasilien picked up the knife again from its place in the air, more carefully this time, and with distaste. “This blade was not related to that threat, though. It comes from elsewhere. But it also has two magics on it. Elvish and faery. As well as another, old word I cannot say.” He ran into another silence.