Going Under (5 page)

"Yes," she said, since the matter was impossible to deny.

"This interests me as much as your strange biology," Madame moved on her seat and her tail fanned out. A thousand eyes, all different, all alive, opened upon the pattern of the feathers. Some blinked and some did not. They all stared into distances beyond Lila's appreciation and seeing them do so made a cold shudder run down her spine. Madame clacked her beak, "I have seen such items before, though not for a long, long time. And I have seen something like your arm before also, with my other eyes, in other minds and other places. So I am minded to say-if you tell me where one came from, I will tell you about the other."

Lila frowned slightly, "I thought you knew all my thoughts."

"I know who gave you the talisman and that he placed some added charm upon it, but not how he came by it, for you do not know that either. I am sure he did not make it. If you tell me its story, I will tell you where you can find another piece of the machine. Meanwhile I can tell you that the talisman itself, however and by whom it was apparently made, is the creation of no demon, human, faery, elf, or deadwalker. Their hands might have put it together, but their minds did not. It blinds me."

Lila was momentarily nonplussed. "Then who?"

"There are others," the demon said. "If I were you and I wanted to find the answers I would search out a strandloper. They are most likely to be willing to talk about these things as they feel no allegiances to those who would prefer their silence." She brushed her hand almost carelessly against the plumage of her tail and plucked off an eye from the masses that blinked there. With a conjuror's flourish she opened her hand and held it out to Lila. A smooth stone lay there, clouded and softly coloured in shades of brown and cream. It looked like a pebble from the beach. "Take this. When you have news for me place it on a feather."

The imp on her shoulder went rigid but didn't speak.

Tath whispered, Jnae aoi you to become one offaer yes ... he sounded very doubtful and more than a touch frightened. By his tone of it Lila judged that becoming one of Madame's eyes might well entail a lot more than a few conversations. And now she must weigh where she stood and where the demon stood and if the deal was true and as it appeared, or was much more. Through the window Lila saw traces of sparkling lemon vapour brim momentarily and spill out of thin air. They brushed softly through the hanging veils of fabric there. Above them on the guttering a raven cawed suddenly, harshly, and there was a brief, deafening clatter of wings.

/'Y Zfiaet~rer.

There was a powerful conjunction looming here and the chance of a game. If only Lila had any sense at all for magic. But she was human, and she had none. The only reason she could detect the aether at all was through Tath; his senses on loan to hers. But if nothing else demons were creatures of their word, she knew this for a fact. Find some information and in exchange she would be able to get her hands on another piece of technology. This path seemed easier than trying to beat Dr. Williams, her boss, and others at the Agency to information that they didn't want exposed. She knew they held more pieces of the puzzle, but they also possessed systems that could directly contact and control pieces of her Al, and she'd do anything to avoid giving them more opportunities to use them. The wish she barely dared acknowledge to herself, which consumed all her energy, was that she could find a way to ensure her freedom from outside interference. She was not going to be the Agency's pet robot.

Lila looked at Madame but the bird eyes showed no trace of human emotions and the beak remained expressionless, of course. On her shoulder Thingamajig twitched and muttered a warning, making a warding sign with his free hand. Tath said, fft/ere is a game dyer t/an t ie one s~ie s .peaks of in t ie offin y, new Y wouJuEe less gran ~iasty to agree to it if wereyou.

Lila had to admit he was right. Madame was surely deadly and her schemes potentially far more cunning than anything she herself was going to think up, but she had no illusions that she was able to outsmart the demon. Game or no game, it was the only way she was going to get what she wanted.

She reached out and took the pebble. It was warm and felt so much like flesh that she almost dropped it straight away.

"Put it in your pocket," advised the demon. "A pocket you do not much use."

Lila found a small zip-up on her combat vest. She tried not to rush pushing the eye into it so she didn't offend the demon, but her nerves jangled with the urge to get its unctuous touch off her as fast as possible. At last the pocket was closed, the shaking of her fingers concealed as she pressed them hard against it.

"Good," Madame said conclusively.

Lila nodded and ignored the offer of an open door from the footmen. She walked to the open balcony and stepped over the rail, igniting her jet boots as she started to fall. Beneath her the warren of the Souk spread itself flat under the heat of the midday sky. She had no desire to set foot in it again so soon. Flight was easier and, she thought with a grim smile, more fitting for someone who had agreed to become one of the crows.

ila returned to their lodgings at the Ahriman house, dragging her feet as she considered whether or not doing a deal with Madame was a wise thing. Probably it was not. But she told herself she had no other leads and squashed the thought that kept springing up so eagerly-that two could tango, and if the Agency wanted to use spyware and controlware on her, she might as well try to use her own technological spells on them. Only the grim boredom of entering some titfor-tat security contest stalled her from trying it. That and a fear of finding information she'd rather not know right now, about herself, and Zal, and Doctor Williams, whose rather magnificent coup d'etat on the Agency's last director was disturbingly well planned and executed for a nice little old lady psychologist.

She was not surprised to discover Zal and Teazle were both gone. Once conscious they rarely wasted time loitering when they could be doing something suicidal or artistic. Her human self, she found to her dismay, reacted prissily and with uptight negativity in the face of most of their suggestions for recreational fun. She felt an overbearing urge to remind them that they had important business to attend to; music for Zal and intrigue for Teazle ... they should be getting serious and working, not loafing around all the time while their respective Romes sizzled merrily away with the smell of carbonized career. She hated that part of herself, so it was a good thing they weren't here or she'd probably have said something and given them one more reason to notice she was supremely mentally and emotionally unsuited for demonic life, and probably nowhere near as fun or attractive as they had been duped into thinking so far. And wasn't that twist of self-hatred just the peach on the cake? She was grim as she looked up and found they weren't there. And relieved.

In their place she was surprised to see the elegant figure of Malachi reclining and reading his personal organiser as he sipped a cup of tea. The black faery got up as soon as he saw her and set the cup down without a sound. His charcoal grey suit gave him a dashingly sinister air and his amber eyes glowed fiercely; a feature she had long grown used to. She barely noticed them, looking instead at the huge wings that were just visible behind him, like watercolours painted on the air. They were slightly ragged and butterfly shaped, veined with black, and moved in their own clouds of anthracite dust. The dust sparkled and tumbled and gave the appearance of being capricious-it whirled in little eddies and seemed not to want to settle on anything. Not for the first time Lila wondered exactly what properties it had and how powerful it could be in Otopia. She had felt more confident around him before Tath, when she couldn't see this aspect of him. There was a lot she didn't know about the faeries.

ou kwow afsotutety not/ ny, Tath corrected her with amiable
pedantry. a nrCifmorepeo
~ple who attempt to rCealavitf t ie fed/ assumed that from
the outset, the fetter it w'oufd-he. ven the elves, who Piave vast lore~iouses full of
coffecteifaery £nowfe4je, d not resume to knozv them.

They're old then? Lila asked him silently, at the same time as she moved forward with a grin on her face to give Malachi a hug. She was hoping that Tath would have to admit there was somebody older and smarter than the elves. Not because it mattered to her if there was or not, but because it would make him annoyed and for reasons she didn't like to speculate on too much, his being annoyed by her in small niggly ways made her happy.

Ofd, new. it makes no d fference, the elf replied with genuine unease,
giving Lila a sensation like her heart being lifted and lowered a millimetre-his equivalent of a shrug.

She frowned, unable to help it, both from the dismay of his not rising to the bait and also because she had learned that Tath's magical instincts were spot on. The idea of his being discomfited by the fey, including Malachi, who was her friend, annoyed and disquieted her. Tath could sense these feelings in her, but instead of notching himself another victory in their little contest he stayed quiet. That made her feel even more peculiar, since he never missed an opportunity to score points.

"Something the matter?" Malachi asked, withdrawing gracefully from the hug and adjusting the lie of his sleeve.

"No," Lila said. "Just one of those days in the making, you know, where you set out with a simple objective and then everything gets so complicated before lunchtime you wish you hadn't started. What're you doing here?"

"Can't a friend come to visit without a reason?" Malachi recovered his teacup and remained standing, looking around the place with interest. He was a picture of elegant distraction though Lila was not fooled. Malachi wouldn't appear without a good reason. "Where are the hubbies?"

"If you use that word again, I will kill you," Lila said. "I have no idea. And seeing as it is still my honeymoon, technically speaking, I would have thought you'd call ahead instead of just appearing godmother-style in my bedroom."

Malachi gave her a long, level look and then put the cup down. His voice became serious-as serious as it ever got. A few motes of dust scattered from his wings to the floor. "There's a lot of what you might call Trouble at the Mill, since we started our gang. The Otopians don't much care for the idea of you having so much freedom and are scampering through their paperwork for ways to make you come to heel. Things are tough for the Doc at the top and even more so because of the moths." He looked down for a second, and Lila wondered what was going on. In a human such a movement was a signal of guilt or dissembling, but it would be rash to read this into a fey. Malachi shrugged and continued, "They're proving more troublesome than it seemed at first. Doc was wondering if you'd return early and provide some help disposing of them. The boys too, if they're willing. Unofficially for them of course although Zal's manager is, I understand, regularly coming within inches of hospitalisation due to the lad's failure to turn up for band practice." He hesitated. "And I have someone you should meet. I was on my way here-halfway overwhen a little bird told me you'd be looking for a Strandloper."

"A little bird?"

"Mmn, about yay big," Malachi held up one hand over his head, about seven feet high. "Dark stinking cape, human body, long beak, maggots for eyes."

"She's keen," Lila said with a sense of dismay. She hadn't even got home and Madame was pushing her on her way.

"That's what I thought," the faery said, suddenly animated with interest, his casually aloof features losing their hauteur. Of course he knew all about Madame and her minions, it was only the humans who were ignorant about the "new" races, their ways, wiles, and celebrities. "D'you know why?"

Lila shrugged. "I invited her. She wants me to find some information for her, and then she's going to tell me about this," Lila lifted her left hand and held it out between them. She knew that Malachi was familiar with what her hands could usually do, including growing new skin on demand and performing a variety of interesting mechanical tasks generally reserved for laboratory precision robotics and armaments, but these all involved a degree of ordinary human activities such as adding components like blades to achieve the desired effect. Now she was wearing black leather gauntlets as part of her ever-ready duellist preparations for regular Demonian life, which would ordinarily have got in the way of anything particularly clever. She waited until Malachi gave the hand his full attention, and then created a bottle opener out of the end of her middle finger. She then reassembled it as a finger, before shaking the hand as though it stung. It didn't, but she felt it ought to have. A feeling of creepy satisfaction snuck through her flesh; haunted but loving it. Who wouldn't love the ability to spontaneously accessorise? Who wouldn't wonder why the hell they couldn't do it two weeks ago?

"Drinking bottled beverages is so important they made it a design priority?" Malachi asked, not really asking but covering the awkward moment with his best quip. His look was halfway between charmed and alarmed.