Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five (37 page)

‘That’s what the stones said,’ the old one rumbled. Its tail lay along the ground like an abandoned rope. ‘I waited for you.’

‘Further West there are still caravans with food and spirit,’ Teazle suggested, for form’s sake. ‘You could still reach them.’

The old demon turned its yellow eyes on him coldly. ‘I am no bumpkin for you to play the fool with. I have waited for you
to come and kill me. I deserve that much. Death at the hand of the Sikarzan, the champion of the mindful ones. My calling
meant I could not go anywhere of any use or note. My life has been wasted. My death won’t
be. You will take my remains and crush them. Anoint yourself with the dust. It will double your resistance to certain spirit
energies. You may live long enough to do something useful with all that wasted skill of your own.’ It sighed. ‘Are you waiting
for something in particular?’

Teazle was taken aback. He thought of Zal and realised he had grown more like the elf, less focused and less attuned to the
fine moments of demon feeling in which everything turned and fate fell one side or another. ‘Can you tell me anything of the
risen Titan?’

The demon took a rock up, turned it, crushed it and looked at the powdery results. ‘It is a jumper, moving from body to body,
searching for the strongest form. Sometimes it can hold several, or many. When it finds you, Sikarzan, then it will settle
there, and you might become the annihilator of worlds. One will shall prevail, its, or your own.’

‘But there must be a way—’

‘Must there?’ the demon interrupted him, brushing the dust away with a few flicks of its hand and scattering all its pebbles.
It stared at him with its flat gaze and he saw the endless years of patient work in them – a lifetime focused on a single,
simple task. It was a focus he didn’t have and probably never would and he believed that it was able to perceive things beyond
his ability to detect, including within himself. ‘Because you want it there must be a way? This is your preparation for the
fight of a lifetime? A childish wish?’

‘My life is my preparation.’ Teazle felt stung.

‘As was mine.’

‘For what?’

‘For death. Must you wait much longer? I am hungry and tired.’

Teazle blinked, confused. He had never considered his life preparation for anything but other people’s deaths. ‘I guess I’m
waiting for you to tell me something important, like the secret to defeating this thing and how not to destroy . . . what
you said.’

The demon stared incredulously at him. ‘And how would I know that?’

‘Because you are a master,’ Teazle said. ‘And a master may know what any master would know.’

‘Recognition,’ the demon snorted and then coughed and scratched its snout with both hands. ‘To hell with your recognition.
Do me the honour of the final silence and let’s move on. I told you the facts. If you want to wish yourself to a fresh hell
that’s your business but dreaming is not your mastery. Execution is. That is why I have stayed to ask the honour of you one
final time. You are insulting me now.’

‘What of the effigy?’ Teazle wanted to know about the stone remains the demon would leave. ‘Will you strike a pose?’

‘Scatter the pieces as you will.’ It nodded. ‘That would be an unexpected kindness.’

Teazle withdrew the yellow sword from the dead demon’s spine a moment later just before it petrified completely. ‘My pleasure,’
he said sadly to the empty square.

The second death took only a little longer. The demon’s power showed in the final stages of its stoneform – it hardly shrank
at all. Teazle could find nothing that would break it, or really even scratch it, so eventually he reformed himself in his
largest potential shape, and heaved the statue skywards with aether-assisted beats of his massive wings. He went high, to
be sure, and then let go.

The form plummeted towards the tiny town, struck true in the centre of the duelling ring and smashed on impact, leaving a
small crater. Bits flew everywhere. Teazle repeated the process with the larger chunks until nothing bigger than a fist was
left. He took up a handful of the brightly coloured dust and tiny stones that rayed out from the centre of the ring in bursts
of brilliance where chance had laid them and rubbed it on his chest beneath his tunic. The rest he left where it lay. From
high above it looked like strange flowers.

He felt better now that he had no hope of success any more and that was a blessing. He said a prayer for the old demon and
the gift of his death as he turned to the East and blinked out.

In the canopy of the night forest, ten metres above the ground, among shrouds of dense foliage, Zal lay on a mat of broken
branches and looked up through the last high leaves at the sky. He was safe and he needed a rest.

The drake had flown off somewhere more convenient for its size and preferences to fool around with its new wired horns and
figure out how to use the music library and the Otopia archive. Zal had figured that out already, and also that what he was
wearing might look like a harness of elven filigreed leather complete with silver buckles and glowing runic marks but it was
actually Lila Black wrapped around him like a set of softly flexible iron arms, a Lila Black who was a complete technical
masterpiece.

Zal liked contradictions of form and nature. He guessed she could be almost anything but for now he was content for her to
be his battle harness, maiden-holder of his weapons and general grip. They were
being stalked and he wanted things to stay simple. Through the whispering
andalune
of the forest, still alive and well, he could feel the movement of blind, stupid things searching for his trail of tantalising
order and coherence amidst their own chaos.

What had once been elves and were now something else tracked him with difficulty. They kept all the skills, all the sharpness
they had had before, making them formidable opponents, but they were hindered by their inability to comprehend anything of
the aetheric universe. He thought, judging by their behaviour, that they couldn’t feel it except as a vague kind of hint here
and there; they were blind. They were also stripped of everything that had bound them to an identity.

He suspected that their memories were gone. They reminded him of nothing more than the animated dead, but they weren’t dead
and never had been. They were relics, empty shells . . . he didn’t know what the hell they were, but they would be glad to
catch him and he’d seen what they did to those they caught all over the land in graphic, disgusting detail. They hadn’t been
quite reduced to beasts, unfortunately. They were organised, tribal, and if they didn’t speak they made up for it with signs.
In their primal competitiveness they reminded him of demons, and in their bloody killings, their furious couplings, their
frenzies of destructive rage in which their impulses could turn on a whim and rip one of their own to bloody pieces they were
perfect examples of demonic ferocity – an impulse unrestrained by any hint of conscience.

The worst part was that they looked exactly the same as before, their faces serene and intelligent-seeming under their masks
of green and brown mud and the splatters of drying gore. If he hadn’t known better he would have called it a demon vengeance
on his kind.

He wasn’t sure he did know better. He was sure that he wanted to find someone, anyone, to whom this had not happened but he
was a day out of Delatra and he hadn’t found anything except more of the same. Even the Saaqaa had run feral and alone. He
didn’t believe that he was but he felt like the only living elf on the entire surface of the world.

‘There is no contaminant and no contagion present,’ Lila’s voice whispered to him.

He stroked the belt under his fingers as a reply. Taking samples and having her analyse them had been something to do, in
which he’d had hope. Now that there was no biological or poisonous culprit to search
out and counter he felt a chill run over him that he was unable to stop. It wasn’t like he’d expected one. He hadn’t. After
the briefings he guessed this wasn’t going to be something simple like a disease. Now he was left with sorcery and necromancy,
neither of which he knew a great deal about.

‘No spectral or aetheric residues present,’ Lila said.

‘Sweet words of love,’ Zal murmured, flat of affect and exhausted. He didn’t even know what he meant by it. ‘Map?’

‘You didn’t search enough to make a pattern confirmation of cases,’ she said.

He rolled his eyes and watched the stars spin overhead. Maybe he’d get really lucky and fall flat on his face right on top
of the cause one instant before it fried him, he thought. Then at least Lila would know what happened although there wouldn’t
be much of him left to bother about it. He’d never had much confidence in the demon-immunity theory. Then again, he didn’t
believe the entire world could have fallen as fast and completely as it seemed. He knew next to nothing about this region
– searching it only made him more anxious about his home turf. If he were there, where he knew all the hiding places, all
the safe spots and everybody – if he were there maybe he’d stand a better chance than running around here.

The closed wound in his neck pulsed. He felt a wave of longing wash across him, as if he swam under it. It searched for something
to latch on to and for a perverse reason he couldn’t understand he found himself thinking of Xavi. He’d been short with her.
She’d been in the right too. Someone had to try and save something of what had been. She was vulnerable, and alone. He felt
a need to go and protect her, to shelter her that was nearly overpowering. Even reminding himself that she hardly needed protection
did nothing to defuse the tension that now pulled his guts taut, all their bowstring energy focused on that single point:
Delatra.

‘Your heart rate’s gone up,’ Lila’s harness said.

‘It’s that charm,’ Zal said. ‘No trouble.’ But the images of Xavi didn’t go away.

He thought of the elves in the ruins burning books and made himself remember the moment when a group of teenagers, playing
apparently innocently by jumping through windows in remaining buildings, had suddenly turned on one of the girls and smashed
a rock into her head over and over as she screamed. He hadn’t even seen what had made them turn. Some signal, a feeling so
like the one
they’d lost maybe, a signal of togetherness or of hate or of simple ferocity; he had no idea.

He’d seen a lot of things like that in his life; things that must not be allowed inside. A lifetime’s
andalune
sensitivity made sure most elves he’d known had been masters of boundaries, allowing only what they wished to affect them
and keeping everything else safely out of reach of any tender feeling so they could not be hurt, or involved. And still the
memory of the girl screaming, her erstwhile friends tearing the clothes off before she was dead, finding interest in her body
as her head, finally silent, shed an inordinate scarlet into the filth of the doorway.

He moved himself far away from this recollection, watched from a cold distance, a black and white distance, like a master
god. He made it shrink and cool until he felt nothing. He tried to push Xavi into this distance but the succubus charm resisted
him, locking his aether body to her vibration. Her colours gleamed at him and he felt her heart yearning, lonely, sad – she
was an exile, a monster, like him. She was a living elf. Like him. They were the only ones left. He must go to her.

‘Zal?’

‘It’s okay,’ he reassured the harness, stroking, but he wasn’t sure. The urge to go and be sure nothing happened to petite,
delicate, broken Xavi was almost intolerable. He remembered her
andalune
body with longing. He would have given a lot to feel the casual contact of his kind, the reassuring awareness of another
who could understand what it was to be a part of the whole; apart, together. But here was no other and maybe, the thought
came persistently – maybe there would be no other. He couldn’t allow that notion to rise yet. It was too soon for that.

He gripped the harness and felt himself beginning to sweat. He pressed on, covering mile after mile until he was so tired
that the only desire he felt was for rest.

Malachi played cards with the girl in Lila’s house. After a few hands he had a reasonably good idea of who they were dealing
with here, but he wanted to be sure so, when it seemed polite enough, he excused himself with a plausible tale about Greer
and the office and some downtown work he must do before nightfall when the vampires would make it too difficult.

The girl, who answered only to the name Lila had given her, Sassy, folded the last of her cards delicately and collected up
the rest of the deck. Under her fingers their pictures changed although he didn’t look too closely at this.

‘Look, pussycat,’ she said, indicating the pile of empty takeaway cartons they had made, ‘that wasn’t bad. What do I owe you?’

‘It’s paid for,’ he said, backing away and minding the furniture. He had grown in size although also in darkness, and gained,
if that was the term, a certain insubstantiality that reminded him of Zal.

She nodded, matter of fact, and wiped her mouth and nose on the back of her sleeve. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any of those
peaches around, you know the ones?’

She meant Madrigal’s peaches, the fruits of faery’s Summerlong. ‘I could find one maybe,’ he said, which was as close to a
promise as he was going to get between faeries.

Sassy grinned. ‘Can you check on my old folks in Cedars?’

‘I can,’ he said, a policeman doing his duty. He knew she meant the people she’d stayed with before some change beyond his
understanding had set her free. Human people. That she cared enough to remember them made him kind.

‘Then tell them I’m okay. I think they’ll understand.’

He considered the address she’d scrawled on a ripped-off piece of cardboard carton. ‘This the name: Saija?’

‘She was my pretend sister for a bit, when things weren’t too bad. Saved me a lot of bother. Friend. That’s all.’ Sassy looked
a bit sad, although she defiantly faced it out and he thought he detected a quiver in her lip and what might be a tear forming.
‘Tell me they’re okay, won’t you?’

‘Sure.’ He hesitated, considering the address and the precinct it was in; a magic shop under the thrall of a very pissed-off
gangster community. Fortunately he didn’t need a car because she’d just fleeced him of his last paypacket. He checked but
Lila hadn’t called. He knew it was late, very very late. He called Bentley and she said there was no message. They were evacuating.
Sarasilien refused to leave. Greer of course wouldn’t go before everything sank. Nothing else to report.

Sassy watched him and then got up to see him out.

He felt quite wrong leaving her alone in the house and said so.

She smiled. ‘I’ll be fine. All quiet. And if I hear anything I’ll run. No worries.’

‘Where will you run?’ he asked as they reached the door, testing the locks with great distaste.

‘Away of course,’ she said, her lips thinning and whitening. ‘Get lost.’

He sighed and agreed, sure that everything was as bolted and shut as it could be though he was no electronics expert. He guessed
Lila would have fixed everything well enough.

Sassy was looking at him with great interest. He shook his head but the other thing he’d lost that night had been several
of his names. There was no point in pretending he wasn’t what he was. With a sigh of misgiving he put his heavy paw to the
crack between door and frame and flowed through it, softly as air.

‘Goodnight, Nightshade,’ she said, giggling.

‘Goodnight,’ he said and then he felt very foolish and a little bit embarrassed on the other side of the door. It was easy
and a relief to melt away into the pitch blackness of the woods and flow down into the heart of the city where there were
no girls whose fingers could change the shapes of fate.

As he emerged from the shaded trees at the corner of ninth and Cedar he found it hard to get his form. Magic struggled here
in Otopia but that wasn’t the problem. The trouble was that he was losing the ability. Before he’d been a beast of any kind,
he’d been the shadows of the darkest night, an ephemeral creature who might come anywhere
that light was not and the darker the better. He was a thing of corners and alleys, caves and everywhere there was night.
He gathered under beds and in closets, among forgotten and hidden things. He was curiosity and a body was no use to him for
his work was subtle, the essence of shady business. He struggled to remember how to make himself solid and encumbered and
slow and particular. The beast was the best he could do, because that was the form that came after Nightshade – Nightbane.

He looked down at his hands and saw the massive claws, the brute shapes that were more wolf than cat, but with a special hideousness
of their own because they so resembled human hands and were not one thing or another. His feet were similar, his heels off
the ground now as he fought to stand straight and ended half bent in a permanent forward lunge. The legs of the beast were
cloven footed, soft like a camel’s but also toed and clawed. He knew that he was in every respect terrifying but at least
his thick pelt and mane made clothing unnecessary. The worst part was that in the yellow gleam of his eyes he could see his
little Leaf card – a delicate and pretty link to Otopian technology – lying in the palm of his massive paw, but he couldn’t
use it any more. He didn’t even have anywhere to carry it that wasn’t in his hand. He debated smashing it but that seemed
wrong so he held it instead and turned towards the long parade of shops that led up to the apartment blocks of Cedars itself.
He licked his lips and flexed them. He wasn’t sure that he would be able even to speak and felt fresh humiliation pending.

In the last light of the afternoon he took one more look towards the south bay, hoping to see any trace or hear any sound
of Lila. When there was nothing he turned towards the storefronts and looked for the hanging sign of the pentagram and the
violet roses that Sassy had described.

As they noticed him coming people fled, screaming. At the corner of Tenth and Cedars there was honking and shouting as car
automatics narrowly avoided accidents caused by their drivers. Malachi prowled onwards, head down in an imaginary trench coat
and fedora, pretending it wasn’t happening. His little card kept signalling who he was but he wasn’t convinced it would be
believed. Nevertheless responses were slow today, thanks to the surge of outworlder activity and the evacuations so he didn’t
meet an armed response and made the shop door with everything except any sense of dignity intact.

He opened it on the third try and shouldered his way through,
ducking and squeezing and turning around to be sure his tail didn’t get trapped. It was a small, dark, cluttered place, full
of shelves containing large numbers of fragile things. He barely dared breathe although he still sounded like a small steam
train or a very, very large bull. Over this the tinkle of the door chime was barely audible. Fortunately there were no other
customers.

Behind the counter a young man of about seventeen, coca brown with dreadlocks to his waist, was standing slack-jawed, eyes
round. His mouth was working but no sound was coming out.

Malachi held out his paw with the Leaf card in it so that the shop’s master AI could verify him. The lad glanced at the counter
screen to see this but it didn’t make any difference to his speaking ability. After a few moments he staggered backwards through
a beaded curtain and into the back rooms leaving Malachi watching the swinging strips in silence, surrounded by scented candles,
books, bells and bones, plus posters advertising psychic readings, all genuine, good rates, forecasting available. Sassy’s
picture stared down at him from some of these, smiling. One of them winked at him now.

Malachi felt something touch his arm. He looked down and saw it was drool. He realised with absolute digust that he was slavering.
His stomach growled suddenly as though it was reminded of meals past. He pretended to himself that he was not in any way thinking
about eating the shop staff. Voices, rushed, high pitched, hysterical and slower, measured, calmer vied for positions in the
unseen rooms beyond the curtain. Malachi swallowed firmly.

At last a human woman came out, cautiously but without obvious signs of mental disturbance. She was in one of those indiscriminate
age zones that could be anything between twenty-five and forty given the dim lighting. She flicked a long hank of brown hair
over her shoulder and fixed him with steady eye contact. He saw that she wore a name badge on the lapel of her beautifully
tailored chinoiserie jacket: Saija.

‘How can I help you?’ she said.

He fixated on the precision handstitching of her collar for focus and presented the Leaf card. It was displaying an image
of Sassy, just taken at Lila’s house. Sassy had her thumbs up. Malachi let the leaf fall out of his paw on to the counter
and the woman picked it up carefully as the image came to life.

They both heard Sassy’s short, definite message about her safety and apologies for absconding. The woman watched it twice
and then
expertly cued the card to Malachi’s personal details. She studied these

for a few moments and then looked back up at him.

‘I think I have something you’ll need,’ she said. She sniffed and he saw her reach into her pocket for a tissue as she went
back through the curtain. When she returned she had a small thermoplastic card case and a lariat with her. She put his card
into the case and attached it to the clip of the looped cord and then handed it back to him.

Awkwardly he settled it around his head and neck, giving up when the thickness of his mane made it impossible to tug further.
‘Thank you.’

The woman looked at him with misgiving. ‘Will she come back?’

Nightbane, who was Malachi in another, future life he could only just remember, considered the question as he tried to cling
onto what remained of his civilised being by recollecting the feel of a cotton sock on his elegant foot, the slide of a perfectly
polished shoe over the top of it and the nimble thoughtlessness of tying laces. ‘I hope so,’ he said. The words were garbled
by his jaws and inept tongue.

Saija looked at him sadly, her face setting into a stalwart mask over its mixture of relief and anxiety. ‘She always was a
pain in the ass, you know. Never could tell her anything. Best reader we ever had though.’

His long mouth cracked into a smile and split his self-pity in two. He grinned. ‘I can imagine.’

‘I miss her. You can tell her that.’ This was said with a defiant lift of the chin.

‘You can tell her yourself when you see her,’ he growled, unintentionally sounding much more aggressive than he imagined he
would. He huffed an apology, muttered about the situation, the times and left, backing out in a storm of his own blarney before
he made a mistake and said too much in his effort not to become the go-between.

The shop bell rang merrily at his back as he closed the street door and blinked in the sudden glut of light. The rosy sky
signalled the end of the day. He listened to the card but it made no noises. Lila was still not back. He was considering where
the nearest alley was in which he could find some dark corner to dematerialise when a whoosh and a streak of heat went past
him. Then he heard the close-knit roar of high-powered jet boots and the clump of feet landing on the pavement, just before
his eyes made their final adjustments and beheld Lila herself standing in front of him, a black silhouette in a stance of
grim determination edged in blown rags and the short, heavy streaks of her hair on the wind. A heavy reek of brimstone and
carbon wafted towards him, and he felt tiny flakes of ash patter onto the wet tip of his nose and across his whiskers.

‘Mal,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse. For a second he thought he saw right through her but then she moved forward and he
moved forward and they were both in the light. He almost recoiled in shock from the smell and the powerful aura that was coming
off her in waves. Her black leather and tough-girl look were still there, but swathed in a mummy’s worth of grave shroud wrappings
of a dark grey fabric whose edges were burned and seared, some parts still smoking and winking where the ends were red embers.
Elvish script swirled in the fabric and the writing, unreadable to his eye, looked like the rise and ebb of silvery scum on
a black tide.

Lila’s face, pretty and human and unhurt was frowning at him. The scarlet slash of the burn mark was brilliant red and her
eyes, normally silver, had become blue and grey with a deep ring of black around the iris that made him want to cross himself
in front of her though he wasn’t anything to do with Catholic and didn’t believe in that sort of god. The aura, which he could
more feel than see, was a miasmic thing, an aetherial spirit of a kind he’d never experienced before. It fairly boiled off
her in waves that threatened to immolate him. He saw Lila, he knew her, but she was a dark revenant of a kind he didn’t know
at all and in spite of himself he cowered back from her intense, angry stare.

‘What happened to you?’

‘I went to get Friday,’ she said, rasping like an old woman. He realised her throat was burned. ‘I can’t prove it was him,
Malachi. What shall I do? What’s the matter?’ She looked down at her arms as if only just noticing them. ‘It’s just a bit
of burning. Nothing to worry about.’

He didn’t know how to tell her that it wasn’t. Apart from anything else, he didn’t know the words. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked,
hopelessly. It came out as ‘r’ow djoo ’ee-ul,’ a beast-snarl of defensiveness.

Her distracted eyes flicked around, dismissing the street and all it held as of no interest. ‘Fine. I have to get to the office,
face him down. Should have done it ages ago.’ Her restless gaze lighted on him. ‘What is it? Did you see Sassy?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He was concentrating on putting what he was feeling into a frame he understood. The black radiation was like
an
onslaught. It smelled of pure terror. He was amazed that she seemed to be completely unaware of it. Gouts of it leaked from
gaps in the bandages that wrapped her limbs and body and all the way up her neck to her skull. It came out of her mouth and
nostrils. He wanted to touch her to find out more but he daren’t touch that. Some instinct told him he wouldn’t survive it.
It was anathema for his kind. Maybe for every kind.
Looks like we won’t be needing Tath any more,
he thought to himself and the notion made him give a half bark of humourless laughter.