Going Under

by Justina Robson

  A sad tune pierced her right eardrum and she glanced around to see Thingamajig pretending to play the violin at her. Without cracking her grim expression she held out her hand to the creature and he ran up it gratefully.

  “Made in Hell,” she said.

  “Amen,” said the imp.

  She followed Zal’s narrow shape through the complex of the Mousa District until he came to the edge where he had left the Ahriman airship to wait for him. They stepped aboard it and with a holler the captain had the first mate heat the balloon and pull them free into the steamy noon air of the city.

  The door creaked as Malachi tried to close it silently behind him. He swore under his breath. He was usually good at these things. His secretary did not look up, although he fancied she knew perfectly well that he had tiptoed past her to the garden doorway and was trying to get into his office unobserved. He might as well not have bothered however. The first thing he saw was the back of his beautiful ergonomic chair and a pair of rough leather boots parked on the top of his desk with a small pile of crumbled white salt scattered around them.

  “Losing your touch,” murmured the gritty voice of Calliope Jones as she kicked off the desk with aplomb and spun herself around to face him. She tutted and steepled her bony fingers beneath her pale face. Curtains of stringy and unkempt strawberry blonde hair hung around it and dark rings under her eyes stood out as if she’d been lately punched. She looked more like forty than twenty. There was a faint whiff of raw aether about her, as if it was imbued in her scratty, unkempt clothing. Perhaps it was—he had no real idea just exactly how she worked her magic.

  “Just the person I wanted to see,” he countered, taking off his jacket and whisking it onto the hanger behind the door. He smoothed the fabric and then turned back to face her, hand checking the lie of his tie.

  “Beat you to it then,” Jones said, crossing her legs and getting comfortable. “What was your problem?”

  “You first.”

  “I was wonderin’ how the cash was coming along,” she said, rubbing her fingertips together on both hands.

  Malachi had agreed to try and find cash from the fey to pay for continued research into the formation of ghosts. He’d thought at the time it was just a spur of the moment offer meant to save Jones’s ass from a pasting at the hands of her fellow Ghost Hunters when they discovered she hadn’t played straight with them and had led their bona fide research down a personal alley. She was one of nature’s obsessives even before she’d become a Strandloper and now her passion for the science of the deep aether and certain of its creations knew almost no boundaries. She was the one human being who made Malachi’s bones shiver and he hadn’t bothered to stop and analyse why.

  Now her pale eyes drilled him with a gaze that was physically difficult to move under, but he had to move; his cat nature didn’t like being stared at one bit. He slunk sideways and pretended to make an adjustment to some disconnected and useless bits of old aetherdetecting equipment that were gathering dust on top of a side table. That made the cut glass bottles of coloured drinks catch his eye and his hand strayed to the lock on a fine walnut Tantalus filled with three identical crystal decanters.

  “Drink, Jones?”

  “Water,” she said, disappointing him.

  He bought time by pouring himself a shot of Sweet Envy and swirling it to see the fine green tones mingle and shimmer, just a hint of poisonous lees falling to the bottom of the glass. Faery spirits were something he rarely took these days, although once… but he didn’t want to think about that. He got her water and handed it to her in his gnomish tea mug.

  The Sweet Envy burned gently down his throat as he sipped, racing to his heart where it gave a piercing feeling of desire and a glow of incongruous satisfaction that was energising and brought on a kind of lazy battle awareness. He didn’t in the least envy Jones, so the drink brought him back to a kind of strength.

  “We’re running on empty,” she said, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her cotton shirt. “The fact is, if you don’t give me something today we’ll have to abandon I-space for the time being, and resetting the rig when we get back out there won’t be easy.”

  Malachi found a piece of string in the pocket of his trousers, a cord he’d made of seaweed that he always kept there just in case. He was able, through long practice, to knot it with the fingers of one hand into a small doll. He took the mug from Jones and put it back on top of the cooler, at the same time letting a drop of water from the rim where she had drunk fall on his finger. He slid his hand back into his pocket and moistened the doll with this. A little dust and energy and it came to life with a wriggle. It was the most basic form of Tell and probably as much Hoodoo as he could get away with in her presence but he wanted insurance on his instincts.

  “Did they forgive you for the Fleet?” he asked, to distract her.

  For a moment her eyes bugged out. “Don’t you ask the sweetest questions?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” he said, and it wasn’t. He hadn’t been the one who was trying to summon a massive spectral manifestation into being, thus endangering the lives of all the Hunters, not to mention himself. He’d just been the one to point out that was what she was doing when she was only supposed to be making recordings.

  Jones scowled blackly and flung her boots back up onto his desk with another shower of salt. Rime, he thought, from a nonexistent sea. Salt was supposed to proof against ghosts, but not these ghosts. He shuddered but she was too annoyed to notice.

  “We’re getting along fine.” She glared at him.

  Underneath his fingers the Tell became hot. She was lying. By the looks of her she might well be here in a last effort not to be thrown out of the group, if she hadn’t been already. Not that he cared about that too much: with money she could buy them back or recruit others who were more willing to risk their lives.

  “I might be able to lay my hands on some cash,” he said and set his butt down on the perfectly polished surface of his desk, hands in pockets, head low and thoughtful. “In return the Fey Court will accept any news you have on the Three.” He didn’t and wouldn’t name them properly—the Three Sisters. I saw three ships come sailing in…: the damn tune ran through him before he could stop it and he shivered uncontrollably. “And the ghost details,” he added.

  “Ghost activity has increased two hundred percent in the last three weeks,” she said. “More manifestations of greater density and articulation, plus more variants. And many more inside world-envelopes, not just out in I-Space. There are a lot of new apparitions. And the major spectral constellations and their various minor entourages are migrating out of the deep towards the shores, away from the void and towards material planes; world spaces and specific locations. We know that much.”

  He couldn’t stop himself asking, “The Fleet?”

  “Grows with every appearance. Sailed off its usual path. Heading for an ocean near you.” She grinned, the wild light back in her eyes that made him go cold inside.

  “Otopia?”

  She nodded once, slowly, never taking her eyes off his.

  “Is the Admiral’s guest…?” He meant the sister, the one Zal had oh-so-casually mentioned to him as if meeting them were a common thing and not a one in a billion chance. Zal had been picked out of I-space by the Fleet when by rights he should have drowned there, lost down some unknown tributary between Zoomenon and the other worlds or Zoomenon and nowhere. His rescuer appeared to have been one sister. Malachi didn’t like to think about that. Having such a thing take a personal interest in someone he knew, even if only slightly, was far too close for his comfort. And the middle sister too; pregnant with creation.

  “Still aboard,” Jones said, ending his reverie.

  “What happens when they dematerialise?” Ghosts dematerialised all the time, but the sisters were not ghosts.

  “Don’t know.” She held out her hand, palm up.

  “Where does she go?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “The
y keep their history,” he said almost to himself, thinking of the Fleet’s vast dimensions and all the vessels it contained; seafaring, airborne, spacebound. “Are they all actualised versions of objects that existed or will exist in time?”

  “Don’t know.” Jones stabbed the fingers of her hand towards him and pointed into her palm. “But I suggest we find out fast because they’re not the only things on the move out there. And some of them make the Fleet look like bath toys.”

  “What do you mean?” The Tell had suddenly gone so icy cold that he had to snatch his hand out of his pocket or be burned: important information, and true.

  “I mean dragons and Other things. Ghostforms I haven’t seen before. Not actual yet. They stay deep but they’re very active. I can feel them. And I’ve been to the Edges myself. You may think you’ve got problems with openings to the void from the established worlds, but the Edges are becoming permeable too. I can run them a lot faster than I used to be able to, and with less effort. Don’t even need portals to get into Alfheim now—I can just push through. Probably why there’s a lot more than simple Mothkin out running around Otopia. You should get onto that shit. Before it all goes amok. The soul eaters will follow them.”

  The Tell remained cold. Malachi drew a slip of paper from his pocket; old paper made from painstakingly handcrafted reeds and worn to softness by millennia of sticky fingers. “Go to the Faery Grim and give this to The Knocker. He’ll get you enough for a few weeks.”

  Jones’s eyes crinkled with mischief. “Not going to your human masters? Well, look lively, because I will talk to them if you let me down,” she said, placing the strip inside the grimy line of her bra, beneath the checked shirt’s open neck. The buttons dangled by a thread.

  The string doll warmed up and he smiled faintly. She was too human and too keen on him to be quite as fast as she claimed, though he had no expectations of loyalty from her. Maybe it was the humans she felt some kinship to, in spite of her change. “Don’t worry. You’re not going out of business yet. Oh, and one more thing.”

  She waited.

  “I want you to talk to my friend.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “She needs information. Give her what she wants and I’ll get you a year’s worth of funds.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Faery gold can find its own way home.”

  Jones stood up and moved close to him, within a few inches of his face. Her breath stank of cheap hot dog. She looked so tough it was hard to believe she was only young, younger even than Lila. Her eyes looked a thousand years old. “We’ll see. Call me when she’s here,” she tapped the chair with her fingertip. “If your money talks, I might too.” She transmigrated, replaced by a sudden furl of air and a slight mist of grey un-ness that remade itself into reality after a few seconds.

  Malachi sat still as he pulled the line and extinguished the doll in his pocket. It fell to limp string again and he identified the smell that lingered most in his nostrils. Jones had shed it all the time she’d been here and only his human form had been slow to recognise it immediately, although the cat knew its primal scent with a predator’s conviction: fear.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Aboard the airship with Lila and Zal were several of the Ahriman higher-ranking family, most notably the large, charismatic figure of Sabadyon, Zal’s nominal uncle, and his two spawn, Mazarkel and Hadradon. They had brought several friends each and were having a party below decks involving a lot of eating, drinking, and debauchery. Sorcha was alone on the foredeck as Lila boarded, her hair unusually greenish, signalling introspection, her clothing a neat ironical showcase of human military fatigues loaded down with belts of weatherbeaten but live ammunition and strategically placed, diamante studded grenades.

  The shipmaster—a wiry reptilian sort—cast off and glanced at Zal out of hooded, lizard eyes, “Cruising, master?”

  “No,” Zal said, cocking one ear to the sounds of the party and then narrowing his eyes against the light from the sun as he turned his head towards it. His voice was the powerful commanding tone of a fleet master and still made Lila blink every time she heard it. When moving in society here he exuded effortless dominance, whereas in Otopia he was more like a court fool than any kind of authority. It was difficult to imagine him ordering takeout there; almost as difficult as imagining him ever being an effective Alfheim agent. Now he even stripped Teazle of his name in deference to his own house colours. “Otopia Portal, but first we must locate the Sikarzan.”

  The shipmaster ducked his head nervously, “May I be gifted with some knowledge as to his whereabouts?”

  As they were speaking Lila had been standing behind Zal and now she saw over his shoulder that Mazarkel had come up to see what was going on. His narrow, green face was bland with drink, almost affable. Of all the Ahrimani he was the most human looking, his demon nature expressed in a few horns and whiskers. He belched as he spoke, “Ah, long ears. There’s been no fun with daggers and guns since you wedded the White Death. It’s almost as if nobody wants to bother us any more. Will you be taking him with you out of town?”

  Lila frowned. Why was everyone still picking on her if they had quit bothering Zal’s family?

  “And the little lady,” Mazarkel tried to wink but he was too drunk and had to resort to blinking and nodding, his small horns fizzing with sparks. He reminded Lila of walking roadkill that was animated by electricity.

  “Fear not,” Zal said idly, “we’ll all be leaving you soon enough, if we can find Teazle.”

  Mazarkel nodded with the collective sagacity of thirty pints of beer. “Not that we don’t enjoy your company, cousin coldheart. It’s just like… well… better when it’s just us. You make us look reserved. Nothing personal…” He tapped Zal’s chest. “Ah, Teazle. It is said he has the Country Vice. The tragedy of people like him. No doubt he is off sating it if he’s agreed to go back to the miserable human world or that overgrown greenhouse you call home. At least you married into something worthwhile on that score. No’ffence, luv,” he leered at Lila.

  At this Zal’s expression darkened and she thought she saw the shipmaster actually flinch. Mazarkel gave some kind of parting gesture and slithered back down the steps into the hold. Lila listened to the flap and snap of the Ahriman banners as they turned into the wind. She sighed, “So, what’s the Country Vice, dare I ask?”

  “Fighting,” Zal said, pointing south with his arm to direct the master. He reached back and took Lila’s hand, drawing her close to him at the rail. The wind blew his long hair back out of his face. “No weapons. But no duels either. The demons who live beyond civilisation aren’t like the demons you’ve met so far. They’re much much nastier. The Country Vice is to fight these wild demons alone and unarmed. Nature to nature.”

  “I thought that would be approved of. Why is it called a vice?” Lila asked, enjoying the warmth of his body next to hers.

  “Because the high of surviving the fight is addictive, and addictions are slavery,” he hesitated and shared a wry look with her. She knew he was thinking about his own problem with fire elementals. “To be honest, Teazle probably has no match in the cities. I doubt many people would consider fighting him now. He’d have to go into the outback to find something that could test him.”

  Lila, who’d done a lot of workups in the safe ranges of her AI simulator on possible tactics for fighting Teazle, none of which resulted in victory, wasn’t surprised. “Why do those demons stay outside the cities?”

  “Most of them are feral and kill anything on sight,” Zal said. “Some of them are hermits, working on alchemies or arts of their own. Some of them are mad. Those are the easy ones. Teazle kept talking about going beyond the Gulf of Sighs. It’s a place where there’s a long inlet of ocean that cuts off a spar of the continent. The city demons walled off the land bridge ages ago and they police it vigorously. Convicts do tours of duty there. Beyond the bridge is a wilderness and beyond that are the Demons of the Waste. You won’t find them in a tourist boo
k. We don’t like to talk about them.”

  “The poor relations?”

  “Not exactly.” He turned to the shipmaster who was still watching him with a hopeful expression. “Turn to the highlands and bring up the guns,” Zal said, disappointing him. “Prepare a Scatterwhisper Shot.”

  The wizened old demon nodded but hesitated and said, “And if the Sikarza Master is not there in the country?” He looked very much to Lila as though he was hoping that they would soon be going home and was too bothered to cover it up with a show. Agitation made strings of saliva hang from his ragged jaws.

  “Then we’ll make for the wall and bring up the bigger guns,” Zal said.

  “And if he does not answer then?”

  “Then you can send for the House Drake and I will look alone.”

  At this the old demon sighed and nodded eagerly in relief. He turned and began to bark orders at his crew, who began to open deck hatches and heave at various kinds of extraordinary-looking weapons.

  “We could just leave him a note,” Lila said, watching.

  Zal shook his head, “You need him.”

  “What?”

  “To help with the Mothkin. He may be even more impotent in Otopia than he is here but he’s still going to have some power and you need that.”

  “What would you know about Mothkin?”

  “I know that they’re a faery subrace and you don’t get rid of a plague of those without a lot of trouble,” he said. “Alfheim has had a few invasions.”

  Lila sighed, “Madame mentioned something about the faeries preparing for war.” She rubbed the rail with her fingertips, feeling its fine polish. Her sense of unease kept deepening all the time.

  “They often fight among themselves,” Zal said, but he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

  “They won’t be after your lot,” the imp suddenly said from her shoulder. He was as small as he could make himself, his bright eyes narrowed against the wind. “All magical items is what they was carryin’ and no need for that kind of thing with humans. No offence.”