Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five (7 page)

‘Whoah, it really
isn’t
his idea!’ Malachi said at the mention of these highly theoretical terms, his jaw going slightly slack.

Zal shook a fist in Malachi’s direction, but continued. ‘And if you add in Tatters it’s ninety. And if you add in Malachi
and Xavi it’s ninety-five. And—’

‘Tath,’ Lila said. ‘Add Tath and,’ she hesitated, stomach burning, ‘and Max and it is one hundred per cent.’

‘We,’ Zal said, including everyone mentioned, ‘are a . . .’

They waited.

‘I don’t know what we are but we are one hundred per cent and THAT is a bit scary; was my idea,’ Zal finished.

‘Dragon,’ said Xaviendra’s voice.

‘Shikba!’ Teazle snorted, laughing almost silently, faint beery bubbles coming out of his nose.

Lila looked up Shikba and found no human equivalent or translation, although the dictionary appended a symbol that indicated
it was highly perverted.

Malachi made a pfff sound with his lips. ‘It would be scary, if it added up to anything like a clear indication of trouble.
But there’s no direction, is there?’ He waited for a second, looking around at their faces.

When they didn’t reply straight away he faced them with a frank expression, ‘Lila, you’re fed up of serving the agency but
you’ve no clue about what to do with your life instead.’

Lila gave him a daggers look but she couldn’t find a riposte because this was the truth.

‘Teazle, you’ve become the demon who’s got a master, which is on the slippery slope to hell, although given the master (who
shall not be named, bless her soul) it could be that she’s grooming you to assume a role with an awesome reputation.’

Teazle glowed brighter with pleasure and rolled onto his stomach, rubbing himself on the scrap of carpet he was lying on like
a contented cat.

‘Zal, you’re a has-been musician without a band . . .’

‘I’ve got a song in my heart,’ Zal countered, theatrically, hand on his chest.

‘. . . and a few million in the bank they don’t want to give you, you being officially dead. And I’m hanging around waiting
for something to happen and trying to prevent Xavi getting any worse, which is hardly a mission.’

Zal scowled at him. ‘Yes, when you’re here. Otherwise you’re shacked up with Jack’s wife, getting the benefits of spring and
summer Green-man duties, and licking the cream off your whiskers. The last thing
you
want is for something to spoil that. But carry on.’

Malachi scowled back. ‘Xaviendra is a mystery, but there’s no way I’d trust her to be out for anyone but herself. Ilyatath
is indisposed as the Winter King until further notice, not that he can leave Winter. And Max is . . .’ Now he faltered and
glanced at Lila cautiously, his mouth still half open in mid-sentence.

‘Max is undead, unemployed and unhappy about both of those things. End of,’ Lila said for him, moving her hand to her belly
to ease a biting pain. ‘And you forgot Tatters,’ she brushed the ruffle of the blue and lilac ra-ra skirt that was sitting
on her hips over the top of her biker’s leather trousers.

Malachi glanced at the cloth faery and then quickly away, making a small sign of warding that everyone noticed and nobody
commented on. ‘Tatters is as she is,’ he said with uncharacteristic vagueness.

‘And your point is?’ Teazle drawled, stretching his legs until one of the joints popped.

‘My point is that we don’t add up to much, countering Zal’s point that we add up to a hundred per cent and Xavi’s point that
we are here as we are because of a rising dragon. Which is, incidentally also her theory for the state of the worlds ever
since the cracking began. That’s several millennia by anyone’s calendar, so in summary, it’s hardly news.’

‘Perhaps it’s a rising dragon’s fart,’ Teazle said.

Zal laughed. ‘No no, Ragnarok, like the press all say. Or Armageddon. The End-Times.’

‘Ragnageddon,’ Xaviendra’s voice said with withering contempt from the floor.

‘See, the resident speaker of prophecies says so,’ Zal said, peering to be sure that Xaviendra wasn’t about to be sick on
his boots.

‘And all because of a few returning dead,’ Lila said with a shrug and mock exasperation. ‘And a few breakdowns in physical
material laws here and there, and the inexplicable leakages, timepits and etceteras that have all appeared in the last fifty
years, dated to within a few hours of the opening of Under. God, what a bunch of frothing exaggerators.’

‘Armarok,’ Xaviendra intoned as if playing the narrator in a school drama production.

‘Shazbat,’ Teazle said, sighing with longing.

Lila sighed. ‘You’re missing the obvious.’ Her pleasant merry fug of tipsiness had dispersed as this occurred to her. ‘We
were all united by Night’s Mantle when I wrote in that journal.’

‘I didn’t understand that part,’ Zal said. ‘Was Night the pen itself?’

‘Yes,’ Lila said. ‘And Night was the first dragon, out of which all the others sprang.’

‘They killed her in doing so,’ Teazle said. ‘The sisters, Zal, the daughters of Night, those ladies who kept you at their
disposal doing bin duty and minding the cat. It was them, wasn’t it? Those faery ones?’

Zal nodded.

‘Night can’t be killed, she was only sundered,’ Malachi corrected him in a grumpy, unhappy tone. ‘She’s in pieces, abstracted,
objectified, separated, whatever, but she ain’t gone. She is the sum total. She is the system. She just doesn’t exist as a
whole being any more.’

‘Did the faeries come from dragons then?’ Teazle scratched his head and examined his nails for findings.

‘Not like oaks from acorns,’ Malachi had to get up and turn around three times before he sat down again, looking pained as
he made a variety of distracting signs with his hands in an effort to diffuse the aetheric vortices that gathered anytime
anyone mentioned the faeries directly. ‘
Please
don’t discuss this in open air. It’s dangerous.’

‘Mmraah,’ Teazle said, which was a kind of apology, and sliced a hole in the rug with the nail on his forefinger. ‘I don’t
mind being a dragon or part of one. It sounds like there’ll be fighting.’

Lila took a long drink to try and quell a moment of severe stomach pain. ‘But I don’t get how this leads to divorce, Zal.’

She leaned back on him and turned her face briefly into the curve between his neck and collarbone. She knew they all joked
about the marriage being a sham anywhere except Demonia and that it was a convenience of state for Teazle and Zal, not the
kind of white dress and romance life match that was the Otopian myth of weddings. But somewhere inside her she was deeply
attached to it and she disliked any notion of separation from Zal even though he didn’t seem to be talking about an emotional
divide.

‘That’s very simple,’ he said. ‘Whenever we’re together major shit goes down that threatens our lives. We should split up
just to survive. At least if we got a divorce then that would nix the demon interest in us and that would be a good thirty
per cent drop in the trouble.’

‘You’re very mathematical,’ Malachi told him. ‘Not like you at all.’

‘It’s the beer,’ Zal said. ‘And I want to live. Anything that ups the odds in my favour, that’s good. Dragons are not good
in this case. They’re bad. They’re like a big neon sign saying Trouble This Way. Is this why the faeries created Under, to
keep this stuff away?’

‘I don’t know,’ Malachi said quickly, glaring daggers. ‘There might’ve been another reason.’

Zal stared at him. They were well used to each other’s different forms of lying. ‘Yuh huh. The Queen’s Magic, I heard.’

‘Yeah!’ Malachi said, smiling a salesman’s smile.

‘I don’t understand fey,’ Teazle grumbled, resting his head on his crossed hands. ‘You wan’ it, you don’ wan’ it. You like
it, you don’ like it. All at the same time.’

‘Yes,’ Malachi said with relief, as though he had found an unexpected soulmate. ‘Yes, that’s exactly it.’

Teazle sighed heavily. ‘I’ll divorce ya, Zal. Way I see things going I’ll only become a threat anyway.’ He said this in a
matter-of-fact way, with some regret in his tone. Another long sigh shrank his ribs and flattened his body to the floor. He
stared morosely at the cooler. ‘And you, Lila,’ he added. ‘You’re free to go.’

And just like that there it was, all done. Say married to a demon and you were. Say not and you weren’t. A word was all it
took.

For a moment silence rang through the room and made it seem smaller and grubbier than ever before. Lila felt there should
be more to say and do, some fall in the weather to mark the shattering feeling in her solar plexus. She glanced at Zal and
saw him look abruptly nothing more than tired, old. Teazle sighed a heavy sigh. His eyes were on Zal, she saw, watching him
with something like regret.

Lila’s heart sank. ‘Teaze,’ she said, but was unable to say any more. It was so unlike him to be down about anything, it felt
completely wrong, as if the world had got a loose screw. She consoled herself with the excuse that probably he was regretting
his loss of status and command in Demonia, but another part of her knew that wasn’t true. Teazle would have scorned the idea
that he ever needed more than he already possessed. She and Zal had been a temporary kind of truce that worked to cover a
bad political moment in history and that was all.

Anxiety gnawed her and for a second the pain in her stomach made her speechless. Teazle’s arrogance was the rock she’d clung
to in Zal’s absence, when Malachi chided her, when she’d felt herself falling to bits in the horrible days of their return.
When the machines had whispered to her so much she felt they intended to drive her insane, Teazle’s body and willing lust
had been there to anchor her. Since Zal was back that part of their relationship had been put aside but it wasn’t finished,
merely suspended. She had wondered what it meant to him, but hadn’t asked. She felt it would be weak of her, and the bond
itself was already one in which her position was inferior so she could not risk giving him more power over her. In a human
world this would have mattered much less. In a demon one it could lead to nasty things and that was why now, when she wanted
to go and touch him and affirm something that felt threatened, she stayed in Zal’s lap, immersed in the sensitive shadow of
Zal’s aetheric body, and watched the demon without speaking.

‘Hm, didn’t expect that,’ Malachi said after a while had passed. ‘I wish I thought it was worthwhile but I fear you might
have bought more trouble, not less now.’

He stood up and for an instant his body glittered as his moth aspect fluttered its wings and coal dust filled the air around
him, turning and sparkling as it whirled into the familiar runes that would port him away. ‘To Faery with me. I see you all,
adieu, anon. Rest well.’ He bowed, smiled and with a flourish of his hand turned to walk away and vanished around an unseen
corner.

‘Goodnight!’ sang out Xavi’s voice from the floor, as sunny in disposition as she was not.

Zal jumped. ‘I wish she wouldn’t do that.’ He put his half-finished beer back on top of the cooler. He looked at Teazle with
misgivings.

The demon looked back and Lila saw some kind of communication passing between them that she couldn’t understand.

‘Is that it?’ she asked. ‘We’re through?’

Teazle’s head swung to her and he nodded. ‘You’re free of me, free of Demonia.’ His expression was inscrutable now though
she tried hard to see into it. His face was set. ‘You wanted it.’

And there was nothing she could say to that. She looked down, pushing the force of everything that was bursting her heart
and which she didn’t understand down onto the sleeping elf. She had wanted it. Wanted things to be more simple. Now she had
this and her insides were screaming that they didn’t want it at all and it made no sense to her. Tears flooded her eyes so
that she had to turn her head from them both.

‘I should put her back, we can’t fall asleep here with her like that,’ Lila said, using her AI to subvert all her natural
reactions and replace them with steady confidence. Above all she had to get out of that moment and move into the next. Any
movement would do, so she wouldn’t have to ask Teazle if he was going now, if Zal was going now, if there was nothing left
to keep them there now that the bond was broken. It helped not a bit that the two men seemed far less affected, almost as
if it happened every day.

She got up and went to stand over Xavi, wondering if she really was asleep or was pretending. The thing about Xavi was that
she was new to them, and a daughter of someone they had learned to be far from the simple elf he had made out to be. They
didn’t know her or what she was capable of.

Teazle looked over at Xaviendra. In the light of his eyes they were all able to see her clearly but she made no move to indicate
she was anything other than unconscious. Her mouth was open and she was snoring lightly. ‘I don’t trust her,’ Teazle said,
his tone much less drunk and more thoughtful than had seemed possible a short while ago.

‘Having your life threatened by someone can do that to you,’ Lila said.

‘No, it isn’t that,’ the demon smiled. ‘She’s no threat to me whatever she may have thought. I can’t pin down what bothers
me but I feel bothered, when I look at the two of you and her with you. On the surface we know her story but only what she
has chosen to tell. It’s what she hasn’t said that itches my spirit.’

‘Think she’s dangerous?’ Zal asked.

‘Of course,’ Teazle replied.

Zal frowned and his expression was very sad. ‘She is a creation of a
very bad moment in elven history. Possibly the sole survivor of that time.’

‘All the shadowkin come from that time, though, right?’ Lila asked.

‘Yes,’ Zal said, ‘but the ones alive today, including me, are the descendants of the originals and a lot of us are half-breeds
or some mix of shadow and light. She looks so young.’

‘Heh, and not like a badass raptor on speed either,’ Teazle said, referring to the Saaqaa, shadowkin elves who had been spawned
far from their geneline and who were less elf and more of what they had been forcibly crossed with.