Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five (4 page)

The humans blamed the bomb they thought had created the entire
situation from their ordinary single space-time seventy years previously, but the elves and fey and those who’d been around
longer than Otopia knew it wasn’t the bomb’s doing. It was something else. There were even speculations that the bomb was
an indirect product of the abyssal formations that had permitted wild aether to leak into Otopian space somewhere too close
to a quantum-research facility. Otopia’s bomb was just some minor occurrence in a much larger pattern. Since the bomb however,
there was no doubt that the problem had accelerated. And since Xaviendra had made her ill-fated bid for godhood they had moved
into exponential figures. So Zal really didn’t want to know the answer, because it was like asking when the world was ending,
but he asked it anyway.

‘What’s the cracking rate?’

‘Five per cent acceleration per Otopian month,’ Lila replied without even having to check.

‘When’s critical break point?’

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Nobody knows. Weeks, months, years. Depends where the weakest warps are and what happens across the
cosmosphere. Inherently unpredictable and not even certain. There have been reports of temporal anomalies closing previous
cracks and stabilising local continua. It’s not possible to survey most of the worlds due to their size and some not at all
– Zoomenon for instance. Nothing survives long enough there to take readings that are reliable.’

Yes, that was a
far from over
feeling if ever he had one. ‘Can’t you hear it in the Signal?’ he asked her, hoping the answer was no. The Signal was the
machines, they were information and process, nothing more, nothing less.

‘Yeah,’ she said unhappily, putting the empty coffee container down. She leaned over him to look into his eyes and gave him
a lingering kiss and a wryly sad half-grin. ‘If only I had a clue what most of it meant.’ She cupped the palm of her hand,
shell-like, next to his ear, and played him the sound.

It sounded like white noise to him, a low hissing whisper of meaningless static like the sound of radio telescopes listening
to the echoes of the first moment. There was nothing to cling onto, no trace of a pattern that he could detect. But she was
a million times more suited to it than he was. Even so her face had a bleakness, a greyness in it suddenly as she listened
with him.

‘There it is,’ she said quietly over the wash of sound. ‘There it all is. If only I could understand.’

A flash of insight occurred to him and he said aloud, ‘You’re hoping that the rogues know, that they have an ability to listen
that you don’t. You want them to come and find you out in the middle of that industrial nowhereland, so you can take it.’
He wondered if all those components were more than bikes.

She fisted her hand and there was silence.

‘Lila,’ he said, knowing they were the only thing that really threatened her. ‘They’re more advanced—’

‘They just lived longer. They had more time. That’s all,’ she said stubbornly and put a piece of bread in his mouth.

He stuffed it into his cheek with his tongue. ‘Don’t get that look with me.’

‘What look?’

But his objection was cut off by the sudden commotion in the entryway – a wash of rage and energy coming through the
andalune
that jolted Zal half out of his seat and woke every last sleeping elf in the building, spilling them to their feet wide-eyed
and witless.

Zal was out of the seat and halfway there as he heard the snapping of teeth and the desperate sound of blades ringing out
uselessly on scale armour. Lila was close behind him, barefoot on the stone floor. He heard her dress catch and tear and her
curse it as steam and smoke billowed under the curtain, lifting it enough for him to see the guards’ feet in fighting stances
and the huge claws that feinted a savage strike at them, pushing them backwards into the weighted cloth. Their stumbling retreat
was echoed by running in the walls and the sudden high-pitched shriek of armour-piercing arrowheads slicing the air open.
Wooden shafts peppered the screen and fell clattering to the floor. There was a low, sinister hiss that became a snarl of
rage; a deep, bloodied sound of raw ill-intent that was formed into almost incomprehensible elven words by a huge, nearly
lipless mouth and a barbed mass of tongue,

‘Get out of way if want live!’

Zal didn’t think the owner of that voice was in a mood to be too careful with the Otopian armistice agreements. He caught
a swaying edge of the screening and pulled it back to let him through. The guard on that side tumbled past him, losing footing
and falling on his ass. Blood spattered from several shallow wounds, onto Zal’s boots and across the floor.

Before him, filling the confessional-box confines of the entryway, a draconid the size of a horse was busy pulling the last
of several
arrows out of his hide with his teeth. Their feathered ends were dwarfed in any case by his own blue quills, wet with poison.
These rattled and erected themselves with the slight pain of the attack. With a jerk of his long neck the demon yanked the
shaft out impatiently, leaving the head stuck in his skin. It was an impressive sight. Zal knew the shots could have gone
through a car door. Then the huge ugly head tilted towards him and glared at him with one and then another slitted white eye.
A slight pall of steam rose from the long lines of its face, up from the white mane of hair rising between its long horns,
and from the cramped lines of its wings. Its tail lashed around, striking long splinters off the panelling as the finned edge,
tipped with diamond, struck the walls.

More arrows were aimed from the hidden sconces but Zal was already extended into the
andalune
matrix of the place and waved them back. At his touch the remaining guard looked up at him with a faint dawning of horrified
comprehension running across his handsome features.

‘
This
. . . is . . .’ the guard started to say, sword still held out before him until the dragon head swung in his direction and
fixed him with its inscrutable glare. Yellow and white light radiated from its hide in sudden brilliance and then, in a motion
that was as smooth as it was impossibly awkward, the demon stood up on its hind legs, shrinking, changing until it was of
a similar size, height and form to the rest of them.

‘Yes,’ it said much more clearly from its human mouth, as unreal as a white statue talking from the pedestal of an ancient
gallery, ‘this is that demon you always wondered about. Yes, I will kill you without a care. Yes, I have come here for them.
Yes, you will get out of my way and make me very comfortable until I tell you to stop. No hysteria. No touching, unless I
say so.’ He paused and glanced unerringly towards the hidden elves behind the security panes. ‘No more arrows.’

The arrowhead that had lodged in his hide fell to the floor from somewhere among the narrow panels of blue cloth that now
draped off his shoulders and around his waist. His white hair fell over his shoulders unbound and at his back two long swords
were crossed, one gleaming yellow, the other a blue-white. A faint and nasty sound came from them but it was overpowered by
the distinctly visible, although translucent, white wings that seemed to grow from his shoulders out and through their sheathed
blades.

Zal pulled the screen aside wider and stepped back to let Teazle in.
As they drew level he moved forward again until they were chest to chest. This put them eye to eye as well. Teazle’s eyes
were almost completely clear, like crystal. They stared at one another and Zal felt the demon’s will pushing at him but he
didn’t move. It was going to be this way from now on. Even though Zal was pleased to see Teazle the demon was getting older
and that meant that his dominance would have to be kept in check all the time. If he got overconfident around Zal their tentative
equality – dodgy at the best of times with Zal’s elf nature in the mix – would tip in Teazle’s favour. At that point Zal could
expect to start watching his back and considering an exit strategy. One day in the future he’d lose one of these alpha-male
contests as Teazle altered from youth to maturity. One day he’d be in the fight of a lifetime and he knew that he’d lose it.
But not today.

The vertical slits in the demon’s eyes expanded slightly and only then did Zal slide his leg back and allow Teazle to pass
him. He felt Teazle’s hand on his ass briefly, in the kind of idle, suggestive caress that was inviting and submissive at
once and then figured they were in the clear for the length of his stay.

Lila, who never believed Zal when he warned her about how things were heading with Teazle, blushed and ducked her head for
a second as she moved forward to greet their husband. Zal rolled his eyes as he felt Teazle’s energy level increase.

Demon auras operated at different frequencies antagonistic to elven ones, hence the legendary hatred between the two races.
Zal had learned to tune to it and not mind the rasping disharmonics. Now touching Teazle that way was a familiar and not entirely
unpleasant feeling. He knew he could grow to like it and that this went both ways between them. Lila had no such contact available
but fortunately she noticed in time and lifted herself to her full height as she met Teazle and embraced him. She lifted her
hand up and twisted one of the demon’s sharply pointed and fan-edged ears that were the butt of a lot of elf-ancestry jokes
and pushed her face into his neck to kiss him under his jaw the way she liked. The demon’s long tail, tipped with a blunted
arrowhead point, snaked under the hem of her dress and Zal snorted in resignation and let the screen door go. He stepped over
the prone guard, ignoring the man’s open stare, and went back to the recliner and the food without a backward glance.

He hadn’t actually thought that Teazle would arrive for at least another day and felt annoyed that he’d spent so long lying
and freezing in a cold garage before announcing himself. For reasons
that largely escaped him he felt it was important the three of them did not experience any conflict that might lead to separations.
The conviction bothered him. Zal wasn’t possessive but now he found himself the unexpected arbiter of their relations and
peacemaker wasn’t his forte. Troublemaker used to sit much more easily on him, but that was before Jack Giantkiller had slammed
the life out of him on the bank of the frozen dead lake with his floating dead friends inside it.

He moved to the comfort of the sunny grass, newly vacated, and waited for the others to come and sit down there before lying
down with his head in Teazle’s lap. He found the demon’s tail with one hand and pulled it around and over himself like a blanket.

The chiselled, handsome face bent over him, speaking Demonic so that nobody could understand whom he didn’t wish to overhear.
Their aethereal bodies teased each other with a sensation like popping candy just under the skin. Teazle’s tone was affectionately
mocking, ‘Do you feel safe now?’

Zal ignored him and closed his eyes. ‘Don’t move around too much. I’m tired.’

‘You smell of each other,’ the demon said.

Lila moved up to Teazle’s other side and they found a position where they leaned on each other, heads close together. Their
conversation covered a lot of what he’d talked about before but there was a hesitancy about Teazle that was interesting. It
only confirmed what Zal had already seen. Teazle was in love with her. Whether the demon knew it hardly mattered. He knew
that Lila wasn’t conscious of the fact and wondered if it was going to lie dormant until some moment of crisis when it would
ambush one of them and get someone killed. He probably should have left them alone together, he thought, but then again he
actually found Teazle’s lap
comforting
of all things and Zal was bad at denying himself anything these days, especially something new and curious. Not that he’d
ever been remotely good at it.

It didn’t even occur to him who else might notice.

The elf who had served them before returned and gave a half bow, her eyes fixed on Teazle and steely with self-control. ‘I
must ask you to leave. Our guests consider this a place of refuge and you are severely disrupting the aether.’ She spoke in
beautifully precise Otopian as a clear deference to Lila but her discomfort and hostility was palpable.

Lila opened her mouth but Teazle beat her to it. He spoke elvish like it was a blade weaving in the air between them. ‘And
if I do not?’

‘Cut it out,’ Lila said sharply, placing her hand on his knee at the same time. His head inclined towards her and she felt
him relax slightly. ‘How about we stay long enough to finish what we ordered and then go quietly?’

The waitress composed her lips in a line and then said, ‘That might be possible if he would contain his aura as long as he
is in here.’ She looked as though she had a terrible taste in her mouth.

Teazle turned his gaze back to her, baleful, but the tension lessened and Lila figured he must have done whatever he was asked
because she started to hear voices again and then the movement of the other customers slowly creeping out of hiding. The woman
hesitated.

‘Thank you,’ she still hesitated, looking at Teazle as if she were watching something repellent but unusually fascinating.
‘You . . .’

‘Get lost,’ Teazle said in Otopian but with absolute finality. She departed although, Lila was glad to see, she didn’t actually
run. Under her hand Teazle’s body was solid as stone, temperature rising in reaction to his temper. ‘Elves,’ he snarled, back
in Demonic again, every ounce of contempt rendered so deeply in the utterance that she smiled – no other language had the
ability to enhance the world with its speaker’s feelings in quite the same way. For a split second she saw every elf in her
field of vision transformed into a strangely loathsome colour, all except for Zal.

‘Familiarity hasn’t softened your opinion then?’ she said, seeing him look down at her hand with the intensity that used to
both scare and excite her. It did so now although she tried to suppress it, and the memories of their unions in months past.
She felt abruptly angry with herself for being embarrassed, for being an idiot, for talking foolishly to cover up in front
of him. In front of Zal.