Going Under (37 page)

Lila stood for a moment with her mouth open, digesting this and queuing up her questions in order of curiosity. "You were here before?"

"The first time around," the imp said, waving his hand airily. "When it was new. Of course, being a demon, I knew the answer and the question straight off, which is more than could be said for the knights."

"How were you here?"

The imp sighed, "That's all tied up with the thing I can't remember."

"The matter of opinion that made you into an imp?"

"Yeah, that," he scowled.

"Who's the Middle Missus?"

"The weaver," Zal said. "Fate. So, here's an idea, when the time comes, you can do the talking. If it works you get to be a faery king."

"Ah, so thoughtful," the imp said, "but here's the rub. You and me and Lila girl here are all stuck. Jack's stuck. We're stuck here with each other and that's no accident. You know enough about the real world of magic to understand that one, elfshade halfblood thing."

At that point even the fire stopped crackling and there was a keen sense of listening.

"See? He hears me. He knows I'm right as only an imp can be."

Thingamajig stopped as he saw what Lila was doing. Zal watched her closely too.

"I thought you'd left that behind," he said uneasily.

She held the unpleasant object in her hand. It filled her with revulsion: Madame's Eye.

"I intended to," she said. "But then I found it in my pocket again, while we were walking. Which is odd, because I didn't think this armour had any pockets." She put it down-it looked like nothing much more than a pebble-and regarded it sadly. "Somehow it feels like this is calling someone to tell them where we are. You know, like when you're a kid and lost and you find you've got one coin left to dial home. I just need a feather."

"You can pull one out of Teazle's ass when he gets here," suggested a smooth voice from the darkness by the door.

With a jolt that frightened her almost as much as the sudden new sound Lila turned and automatically moved back to put the fire between herself and the creature that walked out of the shadows as if it was stepping through a portal and into a new world, visibly constructing its own body from the dark inch by inch along its entire, impressive length from the tip of its blunt, broad nose to the end of its heavy, twitching tail. The giant black tiger stood for a second, then stood up, in a way that completely confused her, onto two legs. Its torso shrank, its legs lengthened, in a second it was halfway to being a man, and then it stuck there.

She peered at it and that voice tagged onto a familiar object in her mind. "Mal??"

He gave a strange bow, sweeping one huge paw to his waist and bending slightly. Then he looked at Zal. "I see you too have receded along the evolutionary ladder somewhat, my friend."

"It's a kind of prebirth thing, for me," Zal said, recovering from his own shock at the sight of Malachi's transformation. "Good thing I just didn't wink out of existence."

"Nothing happen to you then?" the cat man asked, turning back to Lila.

"Only the usual," she said, fingering her collar self-consciously and finding it still damp and unpleasant. The weight of Malachi's gaze made it clear he'd like to ask more but she didn't want to talk about any of that. It was better to deal with the present trouble than any pending or historical anguish. She was relieved to be interrupted.

"I'm great," the imp said from his seat in the fire.

"Mmmnnnn," Malachi stared at Thingamajig for almost a full minute. "How interesting."

"Have you come to rescue us?" Zal asked laconically.

"No. To stand with you," Malachi said. "Can't go anywhere without Jack eventually hearing me so it seems pointless to prevaricate."

They spoke briefly of their separated adventures, filling one another in, until they reached another quiet moment into which the imp said, "So, Lila, can you talk to her through that thing or not?"

"Talk to who?" Malachi looked up suddenly.

Lila showed him the eye. "Need a feather to make it work." She shrugged and put the horrid thing away into the pocket that seemed to have grown itself for the purpose at the side of her armour, quite dainty, with a button top. She couldn't stop staring at him. He was suddenly so massive, so enormously, solidly physical, which was unlike Malachi. He virtually filled the hut with his presence, and wherever the dark fell he seemed to be crammed into that too. At least it made her feel relatively cosy, knowing that what she couldn't see was friendly here.

"I'm ... struggling with all this magical stuff," she said into the silence that followed naturally from their updates. "I feel like nothing I could do would make a jot of difference."

"Yeah, and don't forget all your thoughts are subject to Jack's depression," Thingamajig said. "I can see I'm gonna have to keep saying that until we're all blue in the face here and forget who's what."

"Mal," Lila said, in an attempt to find a positive lead. "Do you have any idea why we came here particularly, when we did, and how we did?"

"Show him what you've got on underneath," Zal drawled. "It will have a bearing."

The tiger raised its brows, a not uncomical gesture, lifting as it did an impressive array of eyebrow whiskers. Lila stuck her tongue out at him and lifted her foul T-shirt halfway up to show the slightly crazy looking hotpants and lower part of the corsetry that was her armour.

Malachi looked at it and then at Zal. "Your doing."

"Guilty."

"Fuck me," the imp said. "That's a serious bit of kit. Must have cost you ..." He fell sideways as Zal's foot connected surprisingly solidly with the end of a burning log and pushed him over.

"Right," Malachi said, garbling slightly around his teeth which seemed to have grown in the last few seconds. "Right. That, combined with the other thing, would probably equal some kind of very interesting noncoincidental activity. Who fenced you that armour, Zal?"

"I bought it at the store."

"The Bathshebat outlet. Very interesting. I ... Can I see it again for a moment?"

Lila lifted the shirt, feeling like some kind of naughty schoolgirl caught wearing nonregulation clothes.

Malachi looked for a long time, then licked his whiskers and settled down on his chest, all tiger again. He put his head down between his paws and gave a long, laboured sigh. "I knew I'd seen it before," he said. "All that fabric. The colours. The symbols. I don't know where the maker got hold of it but I bet it was some lucky find, some unexpected little windfall ... oh a spare bolt of ... look at this ... rather interesting ... who did you say gave it to you ... must have had it in the back of the shop ages and forgot it ..."

"Stop rambling!" the imp snapped. "Cut to the chase."

"I don't know how it got made into that," Malachi said heavily, gouging the dirt around him with the tips of his two very singularly large sabre teeth. "But that there material used to be Tatterdemalion's dress. I know it, because she was the only one who ever made magic fabrics, aside from the Three Themselves. And her personal magic was ...

"Tricky," Zal said.

Malachi growled an assent. "Answered your question. Now all that remains is to see how things turn," he put a special emphasis on the last word. "I don't doubt all our plans won't make a jot of difference, if that helps."

"I don't want to just sit here in someone else's clothes waiting to die at the hour written in some storyline somewhere," Lila blurted out suddenly. "I'm not saying we don't all deserve it or anything like that, like I would've about Sorcha." She paused and took a few deep breaths. "I mean, not deserve like being bad and deserving it but just being here uninvited doing stuff that we don't have that much business doing. Although maybe we deserve it the other way too. That's not important. I can't just sit and wait for it. I can't." She found herself rubbing her arms as if she was cold. Her fingers shot up her sleeves to find the point at which she became human, and it was so high now. "Let's do some thing now and finish it one way or the other. I don't want to be here anymore. I have to get back. I have things I have to do."

She sounded desperate and at the same time Zal and Malachi moved to comfort her, Malachi stopping short as Zal leaned against her, his arm around her shoulders. The imp pushed a piece of burning wood a bit closer to her boots.

"That thing about another player. I get it, I was thinking," she started, not entirely coherently. "I was thinking who could be more powerful than Jack and it's obvious. The person who's free to come and go when nobody else is. His wife. She has to be free to make him anew. But that makes her stronger."

Malachi growled unhappily. "It crossed my mind. But the lock isn't her doing. It was a great decree, made by everyone. If she's the power, it's a useless thing beyond these borders."

"What's needed to undo the lock?"

"I assumed it must be part of the process here," Malachi said. "Midnight on the solstice, Jack dies at the Twisting Stones and they turn to point in two directions, the past and future ..

"Okay, so we don't undo it," Lila said. "There are other ways. What say we pick it?"

"Lila, you're missing the obvious," Malachi said and stared fixedly at her neck.

She put her hand up and found the necklace. "I tried it," she admitted. "But nothing happens."

"What d'you mean, you tried it?"

"I thought about it working but it didn't. I touched it and ..." she felt stupid suddenly. "That's not how it works anyway, is it?"

"It ain't the fuckin' ruby shoes," Thingamajig agreed gloomily.

Lila got up suddenly, rubbing her hands on her T-shirt. She looked around them, at the floor, the walls, the roof. "Okay, Jack," she said. "Come out, come out, wherever you are. I know you're in there somewhere. It's been nice pretending we're alone but I keep feeling some thing missing from this conversation." As she did so she was aware of Malachi moving from relaxed to taut in less than half a second. But Zal wasn't affected, and he sat with his arms around his drawn-up knees just waiting. The imp jumped to his feet and backed even further into the fire.

"I really don't think this is a good ..." Malachi began with difficulty around his huge teeth.

"What?" she said angrily, stretching to her full height, chest out, shoulders back. "What's not a good idea? Talking to the only person who can get us out of here? Trying to keep a secret when every word, hell, every thought is open to eavesdropping?!" She gestured wildly around at the room itself and then in the direction of Zal's head. "Think we've got secrets? Think they're worth anything?" She turned around, her arms open wide. "Come on Jack, come on everyone, join us. A few hours until sunset, a few more until midnight. Not like any of us have anything better to do!"

There was a pause at the end of her call, a long pause in which it seemed that nothing was going to happen and no answer come. Bit by bit Malachi began to relax, the imp settled down to his haunches. Zal kept looking at Lila, his expression one of quiet care. Lila remained in her pose of appeal. A hint of a smell like singeing lemon peel touched the air.

Then every surface and every edge began to flow and bleed light.

he world turned upon every point where one thing met another, tumblers revolving until new contacts were made. The one point of stillness was the ticking seconds of passing time, regular in their ordinary pitches. Everything else sheared from its round. Lila saw this, but not with her eyes to which it appeared only as blurring light. She saw magic, and knew it to be perfect science, activated by an intent and forces that she had no command over. She saw Jack's will come into being, and the way that he made himself in that faery tradition, from the threads of almost nothing.

He was the new-made cave on the hillside that had always been there, the boy in the mouth of it standing to look at the sun falling over the lip of the world on the evening that was his first alone. He was the traces of self-doubt in his father, the pride of his mother, the hesitation and wonder of every man, woman, and child in his village and their nervous and certain conviction that there was better, and could be, must be more than what they could see and hear with their ordinary bodies. He was the wind in the shutters and the falling snow that silenced, the frost that slaved silently in the dark, the strange pressure on the chest at night that wakes the sleeper in panic and steals their breath. The gasp of fear, the cold clutch of dread, the death that stalks and the one that sweeps in without warning, every notion that dogs the spirit, every fatal turn of the mind, there was Jack, watching the sun set on his own.

"The real question in this case is why I am named Giantkiller," Jack said, the man's voice gone and in its place only the boy, thin and grubby and resolute, defiant with his cracking vocal chords and his anger. "We have fallen to particulars since the first day, imp."

Only the fire remained the same. Now they stood in a large cavern. Close by them Jack the boy stood, a sling hanging from his hand, ragged dark hair falling over his face. Behind him a little way off a shambling form, half bear and half man, stood on all fours, swaying side to side-Moguskul. Further back others suddenly crowded in to the edges of the light, small and tall, fat and thin, all shapes imaginable ... the thousands that Jack had taken over the ages. They waited, as if Jack were now their only voice.