“Thanks,” she said when she had a moment that her stomach allowed her to stop and talk.
Zal swallowed. “We have to get back to Otopia as fast as possible. Arie has a lot of friends who are recovered and on the look-out for us, and the only reason they haven’t found us is that you flew most of the way here. The resistance are trying to hinder them but they have to maintain their covers so we can’t expect much.”
Lila opened the clothing bag and pulled out wet elven clothing—trousers, jerkin. She didn’t ask where they’d come from, only shook them out and started to put them on. She saw Zal watching her as he ate, his gaze lingering until he noticed her noticing and glanced down.
“Everything should have changed,” she said, referring obliquely to the night before but allowing herself to include the whole of the day before, because it seemed safer.
“Nah,” Zal replied. “It just feels like it because you’re a liminal being, like me, not one thing or another, able to go anywhere and be anything, without knowing where you’re headed. And then it fades away and there you are again, much as before.”
“Much, but not exactly.”
“Not exactly.”
From beyond the rise of the hill which sat between them and the long descent to Aparastil they could just hear voices. Some of them were very distressed, grieving and panicking. They were not coming to hunt Lila and Zal. They were looking for medicine in the rich undergrowth of Sathanor. She heard one shout out when they found the plant they needed.
“We should go back and help them,” she said, thinking it was the right thing to do.
Zal shook his head. “We can’t help them. They’d only want to kill us. The only people we have to worry about down there are Poppy and Dia and with any luck they’ll already have had enough of trying to drown her tenth-level zerg mages and be back in Otopia washing their hair,” Zal said. He had stopped eating, the pack of food half empty beside him. He rolled onto his stomach and lay, propped on his elbows, plucking fine stems from just below his face and eating the lower inch of them with many dissatisfied micro-expressions. “Grass?”
“I’m through my horsey phase.” Lila felt the tension between them stretch taut like a strange polymer. Her confession preyed on her mind. For the sake of her job—for the sake of her mind—she wanted to know why he’d killed someone and she wanted to find a reason why she’d done it so that she didn’t have to feel sick.
Zal flicked an eyebrow and twirled one long strand between his tongue and top lip before spitting it out.
“So, who did you kill?” she asked, dissatisfied with him, disappointed in his lack of heroic help, and her own.
Zal shrugged. “A faery man and a human woman. Both duty murders, in the days when I was more able to do that kind of thing.”
Lila waited for him to flip back the question, but he didn’t. He glanced at her in silence. She said the words to herself in her mind before she spoke them aloud, to try them out, see if she even could say them. “I killed Dar.”
“Ah shit!” Zal said softly and dropped his head forwards until it almost rested on the ground, hair sweeping forwards to hide his face. His body hung on the bony axis of his shoulders like wet paper. He bent the crown of his head into his hands and she saw his fingers drag through his hair and pull it hard, tight.
Lila was shaking with remorse and misery. “Who was he to you?” she whispered, dreading the answer.
“My friend. One of the only, in spite of our differences. What a fucking waste.” He groaned and collapsed flat, his hands over the back of his head, face buried in the grass.
“I didn’t mean to… that is, I was doing my… I didn’t want to do it.” Lila felt more anguish suddenly than she had even in the moment she had pressed the knife home, and her voice tightened to silence.
“Yeah, I know how it gets,” he said, muffled by the green.
“You were an agent,” she pursued him, going back to safer ground, fighting to control her urge to beg his forgiveness.
“You don’t have to explain,” he said quietly. “I understand.”
Lila picked up the empty clothing bag and flung it away from her. “Well I… I hate how we’re just talking about these things as if they’re all part of a great and noble job that somehow excuses them and makes them less than murder and less than people!”
Zal lifted his head and looked at her a long minute. “It’s a necessary skill. Push everything under until you can let it out somewhere else, more useful, where it can do some good. Just because you don’t see me crying doesn’t mean I won’t. We’re still in hostile territory, and this is far from over. If you want to validate yourself then get up. We both have to.” He got to his feet.
“Spoken like a true agent!” she snapped.
“I regret you dislike me because I will not say the words you long to hear. They are not mine to give you.” He held his hand out to her.
“Spoken like a true elf.” She stood up easily, unfolding her legs with hydraulic efficiency, keeping her hands to herself.
“Fuck you, Zirconia.” He picked up the food pack he’d abandoned. He took another mouthful, two, and then threw it away.
“Three’s the charm!” Lila said. A zip of magic snapped up through the side of her that was closest to him and she saw a grin flicker across his face. “What the… I thought it was gone!”
Zal shrugged. “What? The Game? Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t hear you screaming—no, I did hear that—but there was no total surrender moment…”
“Not me—you!”
“Me?” His smile was pure innocence.
“You were begging me…”
He snorted and smiled to himself. “Yeah, I was. But that wasn’t my essential spirit you heard talking, only my essential need to get off. And, though I’ll regret it until I die, I will tell you that that need has never been so fully answered.”
Lila was momentarily thrown by what she decided was a compliment. “Then what… ? I felt it. The wild magic”
“Whatever you felt, it wasn’t the Game ending.”
“And then what about that thing at the end?”
“Strange things happen when you shag your brains out in Sathanor. Especially with metal that’s already been fused with elemental forces in the most fiendishly unnatural way.”
“When I healed Dar.”
“When he healed you. He was good at that.” There was no trace of jealousy in him.
Lila felt awful. She felt exultant. Nothing here made sense, the switch from despair to joy, from anger to grief and back again, with all this beautiful living forest around them being nothing but surging, fermenting energy realising itself.
Zal waited. He still held his hand out to her.
She sighed and touched his fingers briefly with her own. “It was a nicer morning, before we started talking, when you were just chewing the cud.”
He caught her hands in his own and pulled her down to the grass with him. They rested on their knees. He leant forward and kissed her on both cheeks. “Lila?”
“What?”
“Play something.”
“What?”
“A tune. With your hands. I want to hear a song. You choose. Play me something.”
She put her hand against his head. As she cued the song she checked his eardrum with a fan of ultrasound and it was fine, perfectly mended.
Beyond the ridge somebody was crying and another several people were shouting names, searching for lost ones. Their voices were piercing and anguished.
“Louder,” Zal said, closing his eyes. “Ah ha. Cole Porter. Dar liked his songs, but then, everybody does.”
Lila listened to the elf voices through the music. After a while she heard people beginning to separate into parties, one of which started to move in their direction. She cut the feed and took Zal’s hand.
He stood up easily at her coaxing, light and graceful with the trademark antelope-poise. He handed her Tath’s jerkin and she put it on over the shirt, tightening it up as
far as it would go.
Lila signed to him about possible pursuit and he nodded and led off, taking a path that lay in a different direction to the way she had come before. It was only as she followed him at a steady jog, her feet remoulding themselves into broad, flat shapes to leave less trace that she heard Tath say, Where did the dragon go?
Still in the lake, as far as I know, Lila replied. She wondered how long he’d been awake. His presence was almost undetectable it was so compact.
I doubt that. Are we returning to Otopia?
I hope so.
Did you hear my sister among those you are fleeing?
Yes. Tath fell into a relieved, grateful silence, and Lila started to wonder what she was going to do about him.
She allowed Zal to pace her through the open woodlands of Sathanor’s enormous crater and her thoughts ran with her feet. She hadn’t let herself consider being bound to Tath for ever in any realistic way. But she couldn’t return him to the Daga because of what he knew about her, and for the same reason she couldn’t let him out into someone else. She certainly couldn’t contemplate killing him. She also had to admit how much their relationship had changed, and continued to change as time went on. She wasn’t sure that Tath couldn’t hear what she was thinking. He could certainly feel whatever she felt emotionally and physically, whether he liked it or not, and when she let him take control with his aethereal body then she felt him likewise. After all they had been through, though she couldn’t say she liked him and had no faith whatsoever either that she knew him or what other motives he may yet have hidden, she didn’t hate him.
They crossed a beck and Zal followed its line for a short distance until the vegetation on the bank grew too dense. She calculated their path was leading more or less directly towards the crater wall. She would have volunteered to fly but in Zal was keeping to the shadow of the trees. She turned from watching the erotic mechanics of Zal running back to the problem of Tath.
Resent him. That she could do. But what the hell was she going to do with him in Otopia? Could she even tell of his existence in her debriefing—should she? No. The NSA would want him extracted. They would compel it. She was certain about that. No way could they let a hostile agent of such unique experience and peculiar magical affiliation, an agent who had participated in an enemy action, run around with a spook like Lila. And how much could she trust him? She knew next to nothing about him, nor his powers. He’d tricked her before. He could do it again. Maybe he was in the middle of some unknown plan of his own serving whoever Arie had served, if such persons existed. Thinking of it all boggled her mind and defeated her. She knew why she would never be suited to running a spy agency, or a government—too hard to anticipate all the possibilities, even with an AI. But one thing she felt strongly: she was a fool to conceal him, but that’s what she was going to do.
Then again, the idea of trying to keep him hidden in the face of interrogation and, potentially, for ever, made her furious, but what choice did she have? And it was pure pie in the sky to imagine Tath settling down like some kind of internal pet elf or alternative AI resource, even if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t. Besides which, he was still a whole person, even if he was corporeally challenged. And his death still felt like her fault. And Dar’s death was both their faults. A grim thought that this was the thing that bound them more truly than any other… she dismissed it.
And maybe he was only waiting for the right moment to do something. Elves and their waiting…
Wishing I was Zal? Tath asked drily, clearly suspecting her thoughts were centred on his circumstances.
Oh no, Lila retorted. I like Zal with his own hands.
I noticed that.
Even though she sensed the edge of desperation in his snide remark Lila wasn’t going to let any precedents get past her. She hoped her nervousness about Tath’s true power didn’t show when she said, Let’s get something straight. You don’t start acting like my Aunt Madge after too many gin slings, and I won’t let Incon tear your memory to bits before they send you straight to the Long Ships. I’m not spending the rest of my life sniping with you like some old married couple.
I cannot spend the rest of my life like this! Intolerable!
All ears, buddy. All ears, Lila assured him, but Tath slumped into a sulk. If he knew a solution, he wasn’t about to share it.
Ahead of her the bright shine of Zal’s hair dimmed as he passed into shade and he stopped quite sharply on the summit of a small rise dominated by three ancient Lyrien beeches, their silvery trunks each the girth of five men, their elegant branches spread out in a single canopy of copper and magenta leaves. She ran to his side and stopped just behind him to look down. Below the slight hill lay a circle of brown, dead grass, as cleanly made as if it had been marked out with compasses. Tiny, almost invisible green shoots were just beginning to peek out here and there within the ring.
“A Thanatopian gateway,” she said, recognising the style from a field guide in her AI library. “In or out?”
Zal half turned towards her, “Tath, did you know of any Dead agents involved in Arie’s plans?”
“He says not,” Lila reported.
Zal flicked his eyebrows up and down in a flash of cynicism. “Well, there they were, or are, and in the heart of Alfheim no less. It’s not more than two days old. I’m guessing they used the distraction of Arie’s spell to slip past the defences.” He straightened up to his full height, listening. He sniffed and Lila felt his andalune body sink down and merge with the earth momentarily. “They’re not nearby. Let’s go. I don’t want to risk casting circles inside Sathanor. Too much unpredictability, too much power.”
“Where are we going exactly?” Lila said.
“To Frisco,” Zal called back as he ran down the slope. “Before I lose all my sodding fans.”
They spent the rest of the day crossing country. Zal picked and ate things on the way; fruit, nuts, berries. He shared them with Lila though she ate less, able to do all her running on reactor power. By the time it began to get dark they had reached the base of the crater rim where the gently increasing incline of the ground became a sudden, near vertical wall.
Zal, chewing the last of an apple, turned from his lead position and put his arms around Lila’s neck as she arrived beside him. “Okay, Rockets. Take us up.”
Lila braced her legs into the jet position and put her arms around him. His lithe, fit body was hot and damp from exercise and the way he moved as he panted softly was thrilling to hold. She liked his salacious grin too, as he pressed gently against her. She valued nothing more than his thudding heart and the transmission of his longing and fear into her skin through the contact with his andalune self. He was light and fragile in her embrace.
“Don’t let go.”
Lila jumped into the air, catching an even closer hold on Zal’s body, careful not to bruise him with the strength of her grip, They looked up as the machine system lifted them both towards the sky, out of reach of the trees and their high canopies, along the precipitous face of the cliff. Zal grinned at her suddenly and she was surprised when he wrapped his legs close and high around her waist. She realised his intention as he started to lean back and she leaned the other way to keep them balanced.
“You’ll burn your hair, you idiot.” She released him slowly, her hands behind his waist, and he opened backwards with the supple ease of a reed bending until he hung upside down, his head between her knees, hair trailing. He held his arms in a wide cross.
“To infinity and beyond!” he yelled.
Lila looked down at him, and tickled the sides of his waist where the piratical ragged edges of his stolen shirt and his waistband parted company. He giggled and shook them both so she had to work hard just to keep them upright. As they rose above the level of the crater rim they could both see the pink, orange and violet streaks of the sun setting, and just hear the calls of birds above the hissing power of the jets. Gentle winds blew into their faces from the heart of Sathanor, bringing the trac
es of burning and destruction from the lake shores. Lila’s hands stopped tickling and stroked across Zal’s naked belly instead. He lay calm in his invert cross as they stood and hung, supported on an invisible column of superheated air.
Lila stared at the beautiful sky. Their position, peculiar and unexpected but curiously right for this instant, had severed the moment from time before and time after. She longed to stay there for ever.
“Don’t stop,” he said and brought his arms up and back against his sides. Lila felt his hands take a confident hold against the back of her thighs.
She marvelled at the fierce colours, the skim of clouds that caught and shone with the sun’s fire. She caressed the tops of his legs, the curving bones of his pelvis, the length of him where his erection pushed the cloth up against her hand. She set them down on a span of flat, grassy earth on the cliff’s edge. Zal put his hands down easily on the ground, unwound his legs from her waist and put his feet down with a circus performer’s grace. He unfolded to face her and shook himself off. The tips of his longest strands of hair were black and frazzled.
“There are a lot of Saaqaa out and about,” he said, ears twitching. “Stand still.”
He sketched out a circle that circumscribed them both and then he sang a line like the call of an unknown bird from a distant time.
Lila suddenly smelled hot dogs. The air around them fogged. “Why didn’t you do that when Dar caught us the first time?”
“Hadn’t got any elf juice,” Zal confessed. “My fuel stop got cut short by that ghost at the Folly, but now that I’ve swallowed most of Aparastil I could even get you through to the Dead. Don’t they tell you anything at spy school?”
Andalune energy, but this is a demonic spell,
Tath said, jolting Lila with the sudden reminder of his presence; he had been so quiet.
We always suspected they had the power to form temporary transits through I-space. I trust you’ll be finding out how it works.
And then they were standing in a dark parking lot under a sodium streetlamp. The air was damp with rain and stinking with car fumes and the reek of charring onion and hot fat. With a disappointment that was much more acute than she’d imagined, Lila’s AI scan recognised the back of a burger stand, the bumpers of six SUVs, some curious human faces that were rather gaudily made up and the bulk of the concert hall which had been their destination days ago.
Keeping It Real Page 33