Going Under (16 page)

"And you figured that out after it attacked."

"Yeah. Well, these things only come to me, like I say, in a mergency."

"How convenient," Zal said, his face rigid with control.

Thingamajig shuffled backwards off Teazle's motionless form and hopped away into some long grass to hide. "S'true," he mumbled, not taking his eyes off the elf.

Zal drew himself up to his considerable full height and breathed out, very softly, very slowly.

"What now?" Lila asked. She adjusted Sorcha so that the demon fell against her more evenly and her body would not get bruised. She would have said anything to break the deadly silence in which she felt that she was drowning. She was still reeling with the impact that what had seemed to be a frivolous game had gone so badly wrong.

Far off she heard shrieks of pain and alarm, and laughter, where the young ones were playing.

"We take her home," Zal said.

The long, sinewy form of the white demon slowly picked itself up. Lips curled with pain, staggering, Teazle made it to his four feet. One of his legs looked crooked and sticky fluid ran freely off him in several places. He steamed with feverish sweat. "You go," he said in his curiously civil voice, though it was cracking with the effort of speaking. "I just have some small business to attend to." He vanished and the air snapped closed after him. The ground where he had been was stained. Vapour rose from the spot.

For the first time Lila looked down properly at the dead woman in her arms. She tipped Sorcha's head back, so it wasn't hanging down as if she was defeated. Her eyes were open, black as pitch and empty, her lips parted in a feral grin of exquisitely charming ill intent. It made Lila smile for a second, to see that her spirit had left its mark so cleanly. She could almost hear Sorcha say, "Don't stare at me like you got no brain, girl, when you got two of the damn things ..."

Zal's white hand came into her vision and his fingers softly closed Sorcha's eyelids. And so they took her home.

alachi tried to rescind his edict on Mothkin. Of course, it didn't work. He had thought there would only be a few flapping off into Otopia, in a few places. That had been his intent. He had never dreamed they would come like this.

Entire villages were sleepy with dust, filled with visions and aether brimming on every threshold. Cities shivered, full of terrified witnesses and cold suspicion. Odd desires and whimsy crept up on people, filled their heads with dreams, left them bereaved with halfremembered lives that seemed to have taken place in other worlds long lost. Strange birds were everywhere. Some said they hunted and killed livestock and straying people, took children off and replaced them with dolls. They surely were the heralds of the wandering strangers who came, took on familiar guises to speak prophecy, and vanished, leaving piles of empty clothes at crossroads. In the morning only the dust remained to wash the pavements in fine grey clouds that sparkled in the dawn light and caught fire at noon. Some days the world seemed ablaze, though nothing ever burnt or was consumed by burning. You could walk in the fire and nothing. And at night sleep fell with darkness and told stories that never ended, packed one in another like Arabian puzzles until you were so turned about you didn't know what was who or if you were asleep or awake. Night and day lost their ends. Murder blossomed, and love. Fortunes blew away and the economy began to collapse, and not just in Malachi's part of Otopia by the Bay City. Across the Western Seaboards the biggest Otopian faultline visibly cracked open and cut across the half-drowned continent, one finger wide and forever deep.

Malachi regretted it. He couldn't withdraw them because-and he hadn't figured on this, thinking that his kingship would be minor, not worth such a response-the Mothkin didn't want to return and, most importantly, they were no longer in Faery, so whatever he willed even as king had no power to command them. He would have to hunt them down and drag them back the hard way.

The Agency was overrun and exhausted by the work. It had been a huge success, his plan to distract. But his star was missing while the show was on. Lila was still not back in spite of his visit. To be honest she had looked drunk with a mixture of powerful emotions, some of them new to her; those ones that hurried out of her face when he arrived like naughty children caught in an act of mischief. He betted they had to do with the sudden immersion in status, obligation, and desire that was her new life with the demons. It would take a duller and much smaller being than Lila to hold an unchanging course so close to Zal and Teazle's orbits. But she wasn't comfortable with it, oh no, he knew that for certain.

He worried about her and worry wasn't like him. Also, if they hurt her, he would have to kill them and he didn't fancy taking either one of them on. His natural fey instincts were to dissemble, to distract, and to avoid serious trouble by creating minor trouble.

He paced back and forth in his office, hiding from Williams and the mess outside. The news channels were full of accusation and blame. Fey were being rounded up and transported to "safe centres" or fled their homes for their own safety. Everything they had worked so hard to achieve at the Agency, to bring some order and calm to traffic with the other worlds, was all being undone. Portals had been transferred to the jurisdiction of the army and were under a state of high alert.

The elves had taken it badly and departed altogether-not surprising given the state of their civil war and eternal skittishness in the face of human curiosity. Sarasilien remained the only one of their kind known in Otopia, and he was quite cut off from communication. No one knew if they would ever return to formal contact with Alfheim or even contact of any kind.

To top it all on his desk lay the final verdict on the audio files that Lila had lifted from the spy job on Zal's studio. Human forensics had seen nothing in the frequencies and patterns of sound that lay in Zal's songs but a high-level fey disenchantment proved otherwise. Oh there was nothing conclusive enough to make a court case. Not yet. But he knew the Agency was working on it.

Then came word from Demonia. Sorcha Ahriman was dead, killed in some feud. Now Malachi understood Lila's delay, but he could wait no longer to take his chance, though he had thought she ought to be there when he moved. He had been looking forward to her gratitude, but it would have to wait.

As newsfeeds erupted with speculation about the beautiful demon's death, and all the rest of the gossip and scandal that she had been implicated with exploded; as millions of covetous and lusty hearts went into mourning for the loss of their favourite pinup, Malachi quietly slipped down the corridors of the Agency unnoticed. He used the password he had stolen from Williams's desk and took the elevator down to the underground levels, to the medical laboratories, libraries, and the armoury. In one of the forensics offices-an admin stationupon one of the desks, inside a grey report cover under the name "Flint pieces: miscellaneous," he found what he was looking for.

He palmed the microchip and replaced it with a flint arrowhead from his pocket. Elf shot, these were called, and of no note to anyone really, but his carried a spell in the stone; payment for the chip. He glanced once at the family photograph on the desk of the scientist he had scryed out weeks earlier. The father's face was thin and wasted from a cancer incurable by allopathic medicine, and his smile was strained. No human medicine could cure him, but a faery master healer was another matter.

Put the arrowhead under his pillow, he'd said to the scientist as she stared at him with unwilling hope. Just one night. That's all it will take. Don't look for a cure straightaway. These things take a few months, as long as it took to get sick. Yes, it would cost a great deal, this magic, and when he named it the scientist wife went paler than the photograph, but she nodded.

Some things were worth the price.

He was crossing the central hall when a voice assailed him, "Hi, Malachi! Wait up a minute. There's some guy here wants to talk to you."

He turned on his heel, brandishing a sudden sincere smile, his hand leaving the chip in the pocket of his jacket reluctantly. The voice belonged to Jessie Mark, one of Dr. Williams's assistants. She sounded harassed but was trying to compose it back to busy-but-efficient. He was a sucker for nice girls. She reeled him in effortlessly and introduced a nervous-looking young human in a grey suit and overcoat. It carried a briefcase and smelled strongly of breathmints and anxious sweat. Every sense of its gender or other identity was momentarily lost to Malachi's senses as its wave of furious intellectual energy struck him directly from the front. Some people had no control at all.

"This is Mister Paxendale. He's a Qua-"

"Quantum Consciousness Theorist. From Harvard," Paxendale put out his hand eagerly for a shake.

Malachi met his eyes and found them burning with intensity, quite out of place in his otherwise entirely unremarkable presentation. He had a face so ordinary it was hard to recall it even when you looked right at it. Vaguely amber coloured, brown eyes, brown chin shadow, with a strange amber afro parted in various directions by exact lines that looked like they were measured to the millimetre. On the authority of the eyes, Malachi shook the hand.

Jessie brimmed with relief and was so pleased with herself she gave Paxendale an indulgent pat on the arm as she said, "This is Malachi, our fey Liaison. He's second only to Dr. Williams. You can talk to him." And then she left them to it, closing her office door after her. Malachi got the impression she was leaning against it on the other side.

Inwardly he snarled with annoyance. Outwardly he put on the charm and forestalled a gush of extrapolation with a polite, "Shall we go somewhere more comfortable?"

The theorist was only too happy to have found an audience. He followed and Malachi took him to the little garden outside his yurt, made him sit down, and ordered Japanese tea because he could already tell, just by those eyes, that he was in yet more trouble and it was going to take time to understand it.

Wild aether snapped and crackled around Lila's head as she struggled to comb her hair. Every time she thought about Zal it surged around her. Their Game, almost forgotten in the aftermath of the Alfheim debacle, had chosen this moment to assert itself full force. She guessed it was because they weren't in tune anymore, and the magic was sensing opportunities to discharge itself and actualise. So Tath said, though she wasn't listening to him. In fact she felt almost speechless. She was furious with Zal, furious with Teazle, furious with Tath, furious with Thingamajig, and stricken over Sorcha. And then there was what she'd seen when they were all neither alive nor dead. Was that real? If so, why didn't it feel like it now? How could she watch Sorcha die with perfect calm and now want to rip up and destroy anyone that came in sight? She didn't know what to do, so she'd taken a shower, spent double time maintaining all her machine self, and was now stuck with combing her wet hair before she ran out of things to do while she waited for Zal. Not that she wanted to see him.

Lemon and lime scent sparkled in her nostrils as the magic brimmed up into the demonic atmosphere. A surge of hate filled her as she contemplated the stupid, pranklike nature of the game and how it just had to rise up at a time like this and remind her that it was Sorcha who'd identified the game's embarrassing nature-a bout of submissive sexual pleading ensures a loss-and Sorcha who'd slipped a million dollars her way on a bet to win and Sorcha who'd taken her into demon society on a winning side and Sorcha who had loved Zal so much on first sight because of their shared talent for music that even though he was a despicable elf she'd stood in the street and named him brother without a second thought.

Tath was primed to comment, but she squashed him down. The comb snagged in the scarlet streak of hair that had been finer and more sensitive than the rest ever since the magical attack that had almost killed her and the sudden sharp pain broke her grip on herself. She shrieked and flung the comb down with such force it pierced one of the million cushions scattered around the bedroom. At that moment Zal came in.