Going Under (9 page)

To remove her advantages this demon-a blueblack creature with a huge wolfish ruff, a lion's head, and the four-armed body of a Hindu godhad chosen to establish hand to hand fighting. She knew that was its best chance. At close range her metal body could not be damaged significantly but her remaining human body was vulnerable if it could get through her guard. At base she wasn't a fighter at all-she was a secretary with addons and attitude. At times like this that didn't seem so comforting.

The demon stood on its starting spot, twenty metres away. She stood on hers, behind the line cut in the rock. It put down its gun and knives, undid its belt of strange-looking devices and threw it aside. She showed her empty hands. She could no more throw down her weapons than remove her limbs, but the gesture was considered enough. She'd been here before.

I should probably turn off the Al, she said guiltily to Tath, her shoulders sinking as the demon readied itself and raised its arms.

It rushed her, completely ignoring the usual steps of the first encounter. To Lila its approach took an age. Her Al mind accelerated and time slowed down. She had a year to step forward, block, and strike. It was over just like that. The demon fell dead to the stone, leaving its head in her hand. The heavy thing swung at the end of her wrist, dripping, her fingers in its eyes and her thumb in its mouth in the bowling grip she had used to wrench it from its neck.

if Yd y;unot?

There was a scuffle as onlookers and casual fighters suddenly rushed forwards in the usual frenzy to appropriate another's possessions. She sidestepped them.

Because then it'd kill me, she said and took off, going back for what was left of the other demon corpses.

She smiled for the photographers. She put the heads of the defeated demons on the Telltale poles outside the Library, for the benefit of browsing students of the Vicious Arts. There were a large number of poles by now, most of them featuring heads she'd put there. It was extremely unpleasant, thick with flies and the stench was unbelievable. The little Hoodoo priest who oversaw the place briefly looked up from his popular romance novel and gave her a friendly nod, "Miss Friendslayer."

"Hi Shabaoth. How's the headshrinking going?"

"Great. Thanks to your persistence I have nearly perfected the art. Soon I will be able to leave this place and move to the country."

"Great." She had no idea what the shrunken heads were for. She didn't want to know.

With grim patience she paid her Victory Tax to the City Courthouse politely and then she went to the Mousa District, where she'd been headed all along to find Zal because he would surely be there playing. And he was there, in the classical concert hall, fooling around on a full-size golden harp while a bunch of other demons practised alongside him, jamming a little with their violas and bassoons and other things she didn't know the name of. She tiptoed up into the gods of the auditorium, took a seat, wrapped her freshly washed hands around her knees, and listened.

unlight streamed through the high windows, falling through a faint sparkle of dust before lighting on the orchestra. The reds and ochres of the vast concert hall glowed with warmth and Lila's mind was filled with the soothing beauty of variations on Sicilienne, a popular piece by the human composer Faure. The demons' nontraditional instruments only added to the serenity of the piece as she watched the light fall on the straight, near-white hair of the lone elf at the side of the stage. He sat among the string players with the harp a darker shining gold against him and his burning demon-wings softly moving in time, their light shimmering on the harp. He was quite lost in the playing and the music, his longer than human fingers plucking their way easily along the huge wall of strings between them. Occasionally he smiled or nodded as different sections of the makeshift orchestra took a new variation upon themselves and led the melody away in another direction. The cellos and basses and forzandas sang and then a green demon came in, opened the case on the piano, sat down, and the music shifted towards his sudden new improvisation; a song both wonderful in its calm and piercing in its sweet sadness.

Lila listened with tears falling down her face. She barely moved to breathe. If she did she felt that she would fall apart. The strength and self-discipline that had maintained her resolve not to dwell on the events of recent days could not stand against this music. Her throat hurt as though it was being broken from within and she felt that if she moved it would not hold down what it had to hold down. She had thought she would just wait here until the practice was finished, that's all. She'd never expected anything like this and now she was fixed to the spot. Anyone could have shot her dead without trouble; she'd almost welcome it.

In front of her Thingamajig had crept forward, leaving her to sit on the railings looking down, his small feet and hands wrapped around the bar. His fires were barely flickering. He was as hunched over himself as she was. She wondered if his chest hurt as much as hers did, just there beneath the breastbone.

Tath was motionless, a sargasso of quiet power. She'd never felt him so acutely. Usually her own activity blocked out his presence-something she practised since it kept them notionally apart. Now she realised how strong he'd become from eating the souls of the demons she had killed. She suddenly saw an image of two reactors in her mind, one the tokamak that had replaced her womb, the other a sphere of strange atmosphere around her heart, filled with its own weather systems.

Tath noticed her noticing him, and the image too, but didn't speak or change his state. He watched Zal with the same fixity that she did, through her eyes.

The music changed as they played on, moving faster, gaining intensity, shifting into a suddenly more charged and forceful mood as though all the players had had the same turn of heart from sorrow to a sadness sublimated with joy and determination. It was a mystery to Lila how they knew to move that way. Nobody had the lead, but everyone went. She clung to the music yes, pull me away ... I want to forget ... and I don't want to feel anymore. Let there be only the music and not myself.

They sat for a long time until at last the musicians closed the melodies and slowly, a few at a time, packed up their things and wan dered off. When Lila checked the time, she saw that hours had passed. Her tearstained face had become dry and crackly but she felt better.

She stood up-even after all this time she did it cautiously, expecting her knees to crack-but only her back felt stiff. She gave it a stretch and then vaulted lightly over the rail and floated down to the stage on a cushion of warm jet air, making sure to drop the last metre so she didn't burn the wooden floor.

Zal, tall, willowy, and thin, was standing and talking to one of the viola players. His wings had disappeared into the flare on his bare back and he looked slightly out of place among the luxuriantly coloured demons. At this short range and in such company his ears-their long mobile tips level with the top of his head-could be easily mistaken for horns until they moved, which one did now, like a horse's, picking up on Lila's footsteps. He turned and his shadow-dark eyes glanced towards her.

"Hey, Metallica," he said in a low, quiet voice with his usual teasing tone. "What's up?"

"I have to return to Otopia," she said, going up to him, feeling unaccountably shy suddenly. She took his hand when she had intended to kiss him.

He frowned slightly, "Already?"

"You were supposed to be there days ago," she said, feeling annoyed by the defensive edge in her voice. "Malachi came," she added. "The Agency are asking for us all to do something about the Mothkin."

"Hah!" Zal said. His fingers gently caressed the backs of hers. "I knew the life of an interdimensional superhero would be a thrill a minute." He paused to say goodbye to the violinist who had sat beside him and then let go of Lila's hand to place the harp back in its box. When he had done it, he walked with her to the door, "You don't look happy."

"Oh, I was jumped on the way here by three desperadoes. They only had an MV and nothing much else after that. I feel like a mur deter," she found herself wiping her hands on the dull black leather finish that she'd made instead of shiny chrome machine legs and stopped. "And ..." she glanced around and then up and saw Thingamajig still asleep up in the roof. Zal followed her gaze and frowned.

"One day I will have you all to myself," he said. "Speaking of which, where's Teazle?"

"I thought he was with you."

"He said he had to see a man about a dog," Zal said. "He was still in the house when I left. So, you're still going to jump when the Agency speaks?"

Lila frowned, irritated. "I have to keep up a semblance of loyalty if I want to stay in their good books long enough to learn anything of any use. Besides, I'm not giving anyone an excuse to remote control me until I find a sure way of stopping that in its tracks."

Zal nodded, "And the aches and pains?"

Lila's annoyance deepened. Zal smiled-he knew she couldn't stand any suggestion that she might be weak.

"They're the same," she said.

"Wanna play rock-paper-scissors?"

"No."

Zal stretched and yawned, "I sup pose I could go back to Otopia." He made it sound like the dullest chore in the world.

"You could ask Poppy and Viridia what they know about moths while you work on the next track."

"Bleah!" his stretch collapsed into a slump, strings cut. "Yes, I could, though your partner could be more forthcoming about why he hasn't tidied up a few moths. Big Hoodoo guy like him should have some plans. You should ask him."

Lila didn't miss the slight narrowing of Zal's eyes that indicated he was thinking very acutely even though he gave no other sign of it.

"Faeries," Zal muttered and shook his shoulders out as if shaking them off.

"Everyone likes them," Lila said, remembering the faeries who had been involved in Zal's kidnap and who were now trading in the Souk for magical items on an unusual scale. But everyone in Otopia did like them. Faeryware had brought an end to recycling problems and excess waste, not to mention boring and unpleasant food. Faery entertainers and gamblers kept to every letter of every law and never failed to charm. Faeries performed a lot of services for the humans in Otopia. There were stories of the usual things-changelings and so forth-but since it had become a requirement that the faeries deal fairly with humans in accordance with human understandings, as part of the negotiations to permit migrations, there had been surprisingly little disturbing activity. However, as she was thinking this she couldn't help recalling Poppy and Viridia changing from their beautiful humanoid shapes to the vicious, slime-cold horses with their tangling manes that had sincerely tried to drown her and Zal in Aparastil Lake. She shivered.

"They've got features," she mumbled. You didn't speak ill of the fey. That had been the first thing drummed into her when she started her first agency job.

"Not many people have them as friends though," Zal observed, almost offhand.

"They do. You do," but even as she spoke Lila wasn't so sure. People did have faery acquaintances and colleagues but real friends? Were she and Malachi real friends? They'd only been working together for a year and outside of that-well, she had no outside of that and truthfully she didn't know much about him personally at all. "Well, what about you and the girls, and Sand? You've been together for years."

"And they are as shallow, devious, and unreliable today as they've always been," Zal said. The living flame "tattoo" on his back where his wings lay when they were idle flared orange.

"Shh," she said automatically. Lila looked up orange on her large Al chart of Demon Palette Communications and discovered that orange in the flare indicated a burst of creativity. Or possibly madness.

"Why would you say that if you thought they were perfectly safe?" he demanded, eyebrows raised at her contradictory ways.

"They've always liked and been loyal to you," she said.

"In their way," he replied. "I'm not saying they aren't friendly. I'm saying they're faeries. It won't do to be your too-human trusting self around them. I know you think that's some kind of affront, but it's the only advice about them I've got. Even they'd tell you that. Even Malachi. Even about himself." He pressed his mouth into a flat line as he saw her stubborn expression. "I'm not badmouthing them, Sprocket. They're completely fair and honest. As they see it, it's other races who can't manage the truth. Trust isn't something they deal in. At all. Trust is for idiots, they'd say, because trust is like debt. Sane people nail down every detail of a deal and idiots go on trust. And an idiot, to a faery, is someone who is ripe for the picking. Fair fruit, they say. They're not like us. You have to trust me on that." He laughed at himself.

Lila rolled her eyes. "Think we can leave a note for Teazle?"

"Itching to go already?" his gaze became more serious and assessive.

A faint heat crept under her skin and she realised with anger that she was caught. She did want to go. Guilt made her want to bluster but she didn't want to lie so she kept her mouth shut instead. How could she tell him she wanted to get back to the distractions of the Agency and its problems rather than stay with him here?