Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five (38 page)

‘Mal.’ Her preoccupation was so focused it was letting her bypass all his signals that tried to warn her of danger. She didn’t
notice his discomfort or register it as more than his previous discomfort with his changed state. ‘Will you come with me?’
In that question her voice sounded like the girl he’d first met years ago in her hospital bed, small, pale, deathly ill and
frightened of almost everything. In spite of himself and his own will to live,
in spite of it,
he knew that he would say yes but suddenly he felt tears rising in his bear’s eyes and to cover it he gruffly demanded,

‘Did you find nothing?’

‘There are three of them pushing through from Not,’ she said. ‘Wrath, Hellblade and Nemesis. They are coming.’

Then he knew what was wrong and he had all the words for it but no heart to say it. Her use of the old faery word for the
planes of the undead that lay beyond Last Water proved it. Not. A simple term for a simple thing. A place of things that did
not live, did not have form, that weren’t, in any sense, alive except that they existed and had intent. He’d never really
understood how this didn’t qualify as alive but he did understand that they were inimical to what he usually understood as
life. They were an antiform of a sort. The theosophy of it had always eluded him, even when he did have a much more scientific
kind of brain. Now it wasn’t important. The way to deal with them was not scientific. He’d believed Tath could hold them there,
but even the elf had fallen to their bleak souls. He couldn’t begin to imagine the force of their annihilative despair and
what Tath must have gone through and he didn’t want to, though he smelled and saw it on Lila now, hidden in plain sight. Not.

‘They’ll be here soon,’ Lila said urgently as Malachi dithered, silently wrestling with what he should do now.

‘Ah, that’s good, that’s good to know,’ he said, as if it was when it was anything but.
Names to faces,
he thought in a faery rede – a
charm to pull hidden knowledge into the open –
bones in their places;
yes, I see. He would do what he could do, which wasn’t much. He could play for time. ‘Yes, of course I’ll come. Meet you
there.’

She nodded quickly and he heard the jets igniting, felt the rumble of them and the force of the airblast in his fur as she
took off, arrowing quickly away into the twilight; a slight figure lost soon against the clouds.

‘Nemesis,’ he said to himself, picking the name that fit, the bone that he’d seen in its place. Nemesis it was that rode Lila
now. ‘Yes, I am coming.’

It had never in a million years occurred to him that Lila was not the opponent to a process, but the culmination of it. Even
as this revelation had built to its climactic failure in the story of the Titans he’d thought she was a part of the resistance.
But it looked as though heads had turned tails and maybe she was the Titan in its intended form. Without knowing the players,
he could not say which of these two, if either, were true.

Now Malachi wondered if Lila had just become the vessel of a being in the last moves of its own game – and whether that game
was to fulfil the ancient geas or not. He racked his brains to remember who had told him the story. Was it a faery or an elf
or a demon? Where had his information come from, and through how many mouths? How trickworthy was it, exactly? How credible
was it?

He was still searching for this vital detail as he dropped to all fours, ran around the nearest alley corner into the yards
where the bins were kept, and slid into the form of absolute shadow. There he was able to connect from one darkness to the
next and leap with the instantaneous connectivity of darkness to his desired location just beneath the locked and spellbound
door of Sarasilien’s old/new offices in the heart of the abandoned Agency building. At least in this form there was no horrible
trafficking with the Void in order to change form. He spread himself thinly in the millimetre-thin rectangle and considered.

He reckoned he had two minutes on Lila but this remembering business was a struggle. Without flesh and bone memory swiftly
unpicked itself. And then in the rooms beyond the door he heard the cyborg, Sandra Lane, uncharacteristically exultant.

‘At last! I have it . . .’

And then the elf saying, ‘No need to give me all fifty years of it. Just the highlights.’

Malachi figured that this meant Lane had cracked some or all of the Agency’s security controls and was scanning archives.

There was a brief pause and then Lane said, ‘She was here. They held her in the aether cell. Xaviendra is the registry name.
She left recently. To Alfheim.’

‘Alfheim?’ spoken with incredulity. ‘But why?’

‘She had no reason to think you were here.’

‘She would have known the moment she was out of the containment.’

‘Then it is a plan that does not immediately involve you.’

‘Rooks,’ the elf said wearily. There was a clinking sound of glass on glass, the neck of a carafe and the higher tone of a
cup, then a gulp of something being drunk.

‘Sorry?’ The android had gone back to her flat affect.

‘Come home to roost. It is a metaphor for curses.’

‘The phrase commonly uses chickens as its . . .’

‘Not in Alfheim.’

So, thought Malachi, he does know. They’re coming for him. Then there won’t be long to wait now.

Zal didn’t sleep that night. He was used to the semi lightness of Otopia, and before that the strange halflight that persisted
eternally at the edge of Under where the first weird sister’s house stood. Now it was so dark the sky looked like it was a
black paper pricked with thousands of varying-sized holes through which a brilliant white light was shining. He could see
his hand in front of his face only as a silhouette. Leaves splotched his vision with blank spaces. He drew strength from the
dark as he’d drawn it from Tath’s fire on his return from Under and later at the diner. It reminded him of his father who
had become twice as strong at night and ten times as fast.

To the true shadowkin Zal was a nocturnally challenged idiot. He wasn’t sure that was still true. He hoped it wasn’t, because
he could hear a lot of activity near the ground and it wasn’t all down to the night animals. A mindless shadowkin that was
nothing but predatory wasn’t something he wanted to tangle with. The continuing absence of their signatures from the greater
world
andalune
also bothered him. Even hunting creatures of the lowest kind had a clear presence in it. He could pinpoint elf activity because
it had none, the worldly sounds not matched by patterns in the spiritform. Just as the leaves blotted the sky, they were blanks
in the tapestry of the world. He
should be grateful it made them so easy to avoid and himself so hard to detect, but he wasn’t grateful at all. He shared
some of his thoughts with Lila and in response the harness spread and changed shape, flowing across the light shirt he wore
and over his back, arms and legs. At his wrists and neck she made contact with his skin. He felt discomfort on the point where
he’d been stung, and then a flash of lemon scent made his nose twitch and he sneezed.

Fortunately nothing heard him. The clone was silent – he found it hard to think of it as Lila just because the shape was so
wrong even though the sense of being held, even caressed, was so pleasing. She was also listening.

For a long time he lay on his mat of branches and didn’t move. Then, as certain kinds of noises grew fewer and more distant
he got up to get down (smiling involuntarily at the notion of himself as some kind of night soul demon) and after a moment
or two of consideration of the wind and directions, he set off through the forest alone. Wrapped around his torso and limbs
in blackened, silent platemail, the grown-out Lila clone rode him as a second skin.

They were a long way from Delatra now. The cliffs were lost in the mountain range whose jagged teeth bit the sky at the horizon.
Settlements in the boreal zone were more common but much smaller, threaded together by a variety of tiny paths. In such places
hunters or gatherers might head out for weeks at a time on their rounds. The high tops were littered with the remains of their
temporary bothies.

Zal hoped that somewhere among them he might find an escapee who had been away when this disease or whatever it was had struck.
He jogged along the hidden paths, following them by their strong
andalune
signature, watching for anyone taking the same routes. The idea that this devastation of the people was a blanket effect
persisted in biting him the entire time, saying he would find nothing, he should get back to Delatra and help do something
useful, with struggling, lonely Xaviendra. There was nothing to find here but more abomination. Running through the woods
in the dark was just that – running, and tempting fate, both top of the list of his class acts. Besides, there was something
fun about hurtling on at speed when you could only reliably see a few centimetres in front of your face. The armour plates
pushed and pulled gently on him, like horse’s reins, adding their extra guidance.

His reverie had reached a zoned-out space of perfect bliss – quite lacking any sense of danger or purpose – when he felt something
far
out and ahead of him; a presence like a brief sniff of water in a seemingly endless desert. Panting heavily with disgust
at his lack of fitness he stopped and came back to his senses. Yes, certainly, somewhere in the eastern valleys he was sure
that what he could detect was an elf presence. It was slight and it was alone but it was unmistakable. It made no reaction
as he reached across the distance – a vast distance, further than he’d ever noticed anything before – and he hoped that meant
it was asleep and not near death or worse. The land between them was filled with gorges and thicker forest that would take
hours to cross even at his best speeds and he wasn’t capable of those. He gave in to necessity over caution and summoned Unloyal
by radio Lila.

A wave of longing swept over him, taking him by surprise. For a second all he could think of was Xaviendra. He cursed the
charm of the poison and waited for it to ebb. Armour Lila kept him warm and said nothing, if she knew, for which he was grateful.
As his breathing returned to normal he heard the flap of giant wings overhead and felt the downwash of aether turbulence before
the air made the foliage overhead rustle and shake. A couple of strong upward leaps, assisted by branches and he was able
to jump directly to the drake’s side, clinging to the saddle like a monkey before swinging into it.

A faint, tinny sound of orchestral music filtered from the direction of Unloyal’s head as it bore upwards and made a turn.
It turned it off as it attuned itself to Zal’s aetheric body and the distant note to which he was listening. Within moments
they were gliding away from the mountains. The journey took a few minutes.

When they arrived there was no place to land but the presence of the elf was growing fainter all the time so without much
care Zal dropped straight down into the trees, trusting that his natural agility and some dumb luck would be enough to save
him from serious injury. The cracking pains he received as his back and legs hit the branches were a shock but he grabbed
hold of a few of them with relative ease and his light weight spared him from worse than bruises.

The sudden noise had made the immediate forest go silent, even the insect burr, but it resumed again a moment or two later.
By then he was moving much more adeptly towards the other person. Some climbing and jumping was required but he found them
within a minute. They were hiding in a shelter fashioned out of leaves at the highest point in the canopy that was reachable.
Zal perched outside, further down in the branches. He could tell by the agitation and terror
in the aura now confronting his that she had heard him but in spite of the link and his patient identification of himself
she was too hysterical to calm down. He could feel all her efforts to pull the
andalune
away inside herself, but she hadn’t got the strength or the skill to master that trick. If she had he’d never have found
her.

He broadcast reassurances but she was clearly able to at least detect either his shadow or demon traces because this made
no noticeable difference. She cowered in the tiny leaf tent, too exhausted to run away, so he moved up there, making plenty
of noise to show he wasn’t trying to attack. She was so tired that she didn’t manage to throw herself out the other side of
her makeshift hide before he grabbed her. A half-scream of fear escaped her, loud against the hum of the insects but he put
his hand over her mouth, gently.

‘I am not here to hurt you. Be quiet. It is not safe.’ This was to convince her he was on her side as much as it was a warning.
In fact he didn’t detect any of the absent blots that signalled danger, only the forest’s usual life. He took his hand back.

The elf whose arms he had hold of above the elbow lay back and curled in on herself, shaking. ‘Who are you?’ Her voice had
an accent he didn’t recognise and the words were archaic.

‘Zal, once Suhanathir, though that was a long . . .’

‘I know you,’ came the reply quickly. All the fear vanished and was replaced by relief and curiosity. ‘Ah, now I see. Yes.
How very odd . . .’ And with that she fainted.

It was so very dark that Zal couldn’t see anything of her except what his spirit body could sense and he recognised nothing
about her at all. She had fainted from exhaustion and there was nothing he could do but wait for her to recover enough to
wake up. The treetop was precarious. He decided to play safe and summoned Unholy for an evac.

By morning they were several hours’ flight time from Delatra at an uninhabited region of lush boreal forest on an island just
off the coast of some bit of Serinsey that Zal had maybe read about once in his boyhood and forgotten long since. He only
knew the place because Lila had maps and showed them in rich detail on the surface of his arms as he looked down. Although
the island was deserted it did possess one feature worthy of note, and that was a dry cave, free of bears, in an outcropping
large enough for Unholy to land on.