CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
She did not have long to wait. After they had eaten and drunk in formal silence and the first course had been cleared away—by servants who were more like Dar than Arie, Lila noticed—then the guards who had escorted her to her talk with Astar opened the doors and escorted Zal into the room.
He looked no different to the way he looked when he was about to go on stage, Lila realised, with a physical shock that made her glad she was seated. Every fibre and electron of her thrummed in a moment of total harmony. Now that she was used to elfin faces she saw Zal’s familial relationships clearly written in his face. He was of Arie’s kind, although for such a high-caste elf he had stronger, more human features. It was his eyes that stood out the most, brown beneath dark brows. They were not Taliesetra eyes, for theirs came in all shades of blue and green.
A zing of disbelief ran through Tath and Lila felt his convictions waver. They used to be blue, Tath said. I have not seen him since he was in Bathshebat. I had no idea what had happened.
Zal didn’t spare the guard nor any of Arie’s court a single glance. He took the seat left for him at the nominal foot of the curved table with a distinctly human kind of carelessness, dragging his chair. He looked once at Dar, though neither of their expressions so much as flickered. He looked once towards Lila and her heart leapt up eagerly though she knew he couldn’t see her.
“Ilya,” he said, using the part of Tath’s name which Lila had come to understand signified a rather frostier relation than the more common version. “What an unexpected aggravation. Still licking the Lady’s boots for a living?”
If Tath had still had a body it would have gone from calm to full, bristling alert at Zal’s words. “Still protecting Sathanor from you,” Tath said smoothly, though Lila was aware that his feelings towards Zal were highly ambivalent. Tath was experiencing a definite chemistry of some kind, along with a most un-elven burn of curiosity.
“Still conspiring in my death, I believe you mean,” Zal drawled. “Got your eye on the throne, or the seat next to it”
Really? Lila demanded. Hardly, Tath said but she didn’t believe him.
During their brief exchange the second course had been served. Zal idly pushed the plate away from him and tipped it over the edge of the table onto the floor where it broke. Food splattered in all directions.
“Oh dear, how sad, never mind,” Zal said. “I just love these home-cooked meals and all of us here together like this. Gives me a warm glow, right here.” He tapped the centre of his chest with his fist. “And the conversation,” he said into the frosty silence. “How I’ve missed your empty posturing, Ysha, Elwe…” He named everyone at the table and gave them each a gleaming and insincere smile as servants hurried to clean the mess away.
Zal rested his elbows on the table and his face in his hands, staring flatly at Arie. “Is that what you brought me here for? To see my old Daga mates and eat here with you so that I never want to leave again?” He ran his finger across the untouched sauce on the plate of the elf beside him and stuck it in his mouth. Judging by his expression Lila could see he really liked it and guessed that he was actually starving. He pulled his finger out and wiped it on his neighbour’s shirt. “Not bad. Had better. Still want to leave. Still not going to entertain you.” He pushed his chair back and stood up.
“I am the one the Lady has brought you here to speak with,” Dar said and for the first time since he came in Zal looked at Dar, thoughtfully.
“Why hello, Dar. It must be all of two days since I last saw you.” Zal walked around his own chair and held onto its high back. He had more animation in him than the rest of the court put together, an energy that Lila saw didn’t match theirs. There was some kind of andalune tussle then, a ripple of power that ran around the gathering faster than thought. Lila caught the tail end of it via Tath. She knew now exactly what Zal had meant on that wooded hillside at Solomon’s Folly, when he told her he has to be in Alfheim, sometimes. It was home. People of aether could only be at full power on their own turf, but though this had at one time completely satisfied him, it transparently didn’t do so any longer. He was changed and they all felt it and recoiled. They didn’t want to know.
Lila knew she must get to the bottom of this pattern of magic and relationship between the aetheric formats, but now was not the moment. While she started considering breakout possibilities from the room they were in, Zal and Dar faced off.
“You know that the reason you’re here isn’t because any of us dislike you, though we may disagree with your chosen path, Zal,” Dar began, slightly moving his body so that it did not square against Zal’s, but deflected the pressure of attention sideways, less aggressively.
“Spare me,” Zal pushed the chair away and straightened up but he stayed where he was to listen to Dar’s speech, a curiously pained look on his face which Lila did not trust herself to interpret.
They are friends, Tath said. Whatever it looks like. Dar is playing to the Lady. Zal is waiting to see what the game is.
“Every one of us wants Alfheim to recover from the ills of recent years, just as you do.” Dar insisted, genuine appeal in his voice. “The wild aether burgeons. The Saaqaa population explodes out of Delantis with every passing moon and we cannot control their spread. Old lunar charms that cast spells for darkness or light have warped, and now break holes in the worlds bringing Thanatopic and faery magics leaking through. All tame creatures are growing wild. Isn’t this decay and pollution what the Jayon Daga have been sworn to end since the beginning of the Otopian Age? When the walls between worlds thinned we sent emissaries to the five realms to learn of their arts and magics, to become practitioners or to find trusted double agents whom we could turn to our ends. Wasn’t that how you were left in Demonia? And how you came to abandon us, your true friends and brothers, sweet companion of my heart?”
Sweet companion of my heart? Lila gasped. But Dar had said he didn’t know Zal personally at all… had explained to her that they could never be friends. She could hardly believe that he had told such a barefaced lie—and Zal was doing nothing to deny it. Why would Dar do that? She must have been a fool to trust him as much as she had. What else was a lie?
Trust nothing… The stakes are too high Tath said and then seemed to catch himself, as though he didn’t mean to speak it to her.
As she considered this, Lila’s Al-self was rapidly recalculating the scale of the gulf Zal had crossed in going over to the demons. She’d known it was significant but by their reactions here it was huge. He had done the unthinkable, more than breaking some cultural taboo.
Tath filled her in. Nobody in any realm had previously questioned the distinct separations of the people’s natures, Their essential forms are unsympathetic to one another, Lethally so at times. Zal has embraced an oppositional magical system and culture which his native land despises and fears, their antithesis. He has come back. and shown them that he lives, But they don’t know what he is now. They fear and despise him. They are more dangerous than ever. His desire to break down barriers has had the opposite effect. You can feel the truth of it and he can too.
Yes, but anyway, Lila shot back, fiercely proud of Zal, companion of my heart? She didn’t understand all the elvish terms of endearment, so many formal, so many intimate, so many degrees of meaning—she searched her AI database rapidly and watched Zal’s face. Did she see a flicker of emotion cross its rigid set? His ear tips bent towards the thick blond fall of his hair more closely.
Dar was still speaking, “It has been a miracle so far that the Daga have managed to keep so many secrets from the other realms, not least the Otopians. And if you are not another symptom of Alfheim’s disintegration, what are you? Really, Zal, set aside your self for a moment and consider how much of what you have done is motivated by our interests, as you claim, and how much it is driven by the general illness that is decomposing Alfheim from within. You are sick and you will suffer, if Alfheim continues to collapse.”
“Really
I think that you’ll find Alfheim’s problems with aether pollution started around the same time as the High Light Hegemony decided to go for partitioning and all that other separationist bullshit,” Zal said. His dark gaze, levelled at Dar like a spear a few minutes ago, had softened, though only a little. “I can’t believe you sit here with this unimaginative, frightened woman, who is merely hours away from throwing every value she had to the wind, in a mad effort to save what cannot be saved. But you have the healer’s skill so I hope you’re going to back me up when I prove to you that the last thing you have to worry about is demon aether and the last thing I am is sick.”
Lila and Tath sat as still and fixated as the rest, their food gone cold, as Zal pulled his shirt off and turned around. The fire flare on his back was a shocking blaze of yellow and orange. Chairs scraped and cutlery clanged as there was a universal and involuntary move backwards from everyone present. The massed andalune of the Lady’s party shrank back and even Lila twitched and pressed against the sturdy frame of her chair as what she had taken for some kind of magical mark opened up and two huge, dripping wings of fire emerged from Zal’s upper back.
The guards froze in their forward step, fixated.
Heat beat against Lila’s skin. The wings were enormous, batlike but covered in a thin sheen of what seemed to be lava that gave rise to feathers of flame. The laval substance ran and dripped towards the ground in strings and globs of orange. As these little pieces fell they shimmered. Small bits evaporated into the air, larger globs fell right to the floor where they instantly penetrated the charm of the surface tension and dropped into the depths in streams of boiling, foaming water. Steam rose in clouds. There was a strong smell of hot metal.
I can’t help wishing he mentioned this before, Lila said to Tath. Is it show or does it all do something? Think we can bust out of here by force? Her gun ports twitched.
You will not make it. Arie has at least five mages here and the lake to command. We have to distract her much more.
Zal turned around slowly and said, in a voice so convincing Lila barely recognised it, though she knew it was the start of an old song. “I am the god of hell fire, and I bring you…”
Nobody got the joke. Lila told Tath the song lyrics to “Fire”—Zal had recorded a version of it six months previously.
It is well they do not know those words, Tath whispered but his attention was barely on what Zal was saying. What he was seeing was plain impossible; a known high-caste light elf with demon attributes and vile Otopian habits living perfectly well in Sathanor. Lila could feel Tath as suddenly fragile, almost disintegrating. She wasn’t sure she was ready to know this truth either but there it was, ready or not.
Zal was having a fine time. He laughed. “Dar, do I look sick?”
Dar couldn’t answer. Like the others, he was transfixed. Even Arte was motionless.
Proof, Lila said. I saw it before but I thought…
Desperation, Tath said after a pause. It is all he has. It is proof indeed. But that will make no difference.
Why? Lila demanded.
Because the truth is immaterial in this case, Tath said. Arie will rule Alfheim and nothing that could threaten her claims can be allowed to stand. Zal is a fool He still thinks that his oriqinal mission has some value and that others in power care for the truth. He holds fast to his ideals and dreams. He has sealed his fate.
“Desist or I will drown you as you stand,” Arie said then.
But this has to be more important! Lila insisted. Look at what it means…
Your naive ways will get us all killed, Tath said coldly. Aloud he said, “Do as she commands.”
Zal turned to Tath. “And you, Ilya. Using your skill to preserve the crap that Arie wants all Alfheim to believe, when you know from your dealings with Thanatopia that it’s all bullshit. Serving two masters always; your caste and house, her and the Daga, scraping around accepting their condescension, believing that you are abusing yourself for their good when all the time you haven’t the faith to trust your own heart. If you did, you wouldn’t sit there waiting for my blood to fulfil Interstitial Warp spells when yours would be just as effective in the task. You could have secured power months ago without me if you had the guts to stand up to her and shove her worthless life into the endless dark. You’re not just a bastard but a coward. Did she promise you some family connection, promotion and power?”
“We do not kill kin. You are my family,” Tath retorted.
“Not any more,” Zal said, and his talent for vocal command lent his words a chill and regret that made Lila’s blood run cold. “We are long lost to one another.” He snapped his wings shut and they vanished suddenly, one second there, the next gone. In their absence the room was cold.
Tath’s hurt was piercing, old as it was, and his resentment and anger hard to contain.
Lila had to fight to concentrate. Companion of my heart—her AI returned to her at last: friendship affirmation, emotional intimacy (first degree), longevity distinction (adult friendship matches only), sexual rapport (second degree, intermittent), bond strength (first degree), con notation (appeasing, persuading), speaker willingly accepts temporary lower degree of power and kudos in relationship.
Then they used to be more than good friends! Lila thought. Very good. This gets more and more complicated by the second! How old is Zal? How old is Dar? But she had no time to put everything together, yet. She tried to ignore the stab of jealousy she felt towards Dar momentarily, though she couldn’t ignore her rage at his lie. Tath gloated, paying her back for her earlier disapproval of him.
“Alfheim’s power and strength all come from Aparastil,” the Lady was saying, as sweet of tone and manner as though she were hosting a party for her dearest friends. “As any other realm is likewise compelled, we must protect it with our lives. You cannot doubt that.”
“You’re an idiot,” Zal said, as every other elfin the room winced at his Otopian use of language, “What’s happening here is the result of policies you began years ago and it has nothing to do with other realms. The more you attempt to manipulate the Interspace, the more savage the reactions will become and they will tear Alfheim to bits. Ask any demon scientist. At least they check their facts.”
Arie’s pretty coral lips curled with anger. “You have abandoned Alfheim and turned your nature to the service of degraded magic and black arts. Your words could exert no compulsion on my mind. What proof have you of your claims? Does Demonia embrace the otherworlds and rejoice in perfect security?”
“Demonia’s borders are open…” Zal began patiently.
“Because no sane person would enter!” retorted one of the Lady’s companions.
“… open and yes, it does experience ghost crossings and visits of other creatures of the Interstices, and it’s fine. Demonia knows that I-space is the glue that binds us, as your willing little slave Ilya knows only too well. Leakage between all the realms is a proper part of their dynamic co-existence. No place can ever be pure. You can’t save Aparastil by refusing contact to anyone not descended from the Valar. You should re-open the borders immediately.”
“The Saaqaa were never so bad until the Otopians emerged,” Arie said. “Every degradation of Alfheim has occurred through contact with Otopia and Demonia, Faery, Thanatopia and the Void. In the days of earlier Ages we were many times near destroyed by unwise and ignorant efforts to explore the distant places beyond our borders and our eagerness to bring their treasures home. Other races value what we abhor. They all have their own homes and their own power. We have all seen one another and learned. Let them stay in the places they love the best, and not be polluted by what they so dislike in Alfheim.”
Zal pulled the chair back and sat down on it. His manner became weary but his intensity didn’t alter. “Look at me. I’m still all right. I’m half demon, and I’m still an elf. I can drink the water and I can breathe the air. I can cross into Zoomenon, like any other elf mage, and the elementals come to me. I can live wherever I choose.
”
“No elf can be half demon,” Arte said. “The magical systems are antithetical to one another. Such a harmony is your fantasy, nothing more. You have sustained yourself with frequent transits to Zoomenon, and you would ever be forced to do the same. You cannot live in another realm for ever, you will always be coming home and when you can’t you must bring it to you. That vile taint is killing you surely, even though you think it so wonderful.”
“I’m not dead yet,” Zal said and shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it before that happens. It’s a work in progress.”
“You do not deny your reliance on the elementals to restore you, however,” Arie said. “You are dependent on them.”
“Not nearly as much as you’d like,” Zal said quietly, his head dropping forward and jaw biting shut. The muscles in his face hardened.
Arie made a gesture with one hand and the guards came towards Zal. He stood up and the withering contempt in his words was physically painful, even to Lila, as though the words were real weapons. “Of all our family you were always the most fragile. I’d pity you, if I could be bothered, but my patience with you ran out a long time ago, somewhere around the minute you decided it would be better for all of us to scatter and do your dirty work for you at whatever personal cost it exacted from us.” He glanced at Dar and his accusation was no less damaging. “You surprise me. I thought you would have had more character than this.”
Dar shuddered and went a pale ashen colour. Lila’s heart went out to him, but Zal had already let himself be turned away.
Keeping It Real Page 27