Keeping It Real (10 page)

Lila closed her eyes for a second to search the databases
.
When she opened them she was looking

straight
into green eyes, clear as glass. 'Nothing there either. Not even things that
look like they could be

shortened to Zal.'

'It's not a syllable of modern elvish,' Sarasilien said. 'But does occur in older languages, when we had

more dealings with some of the other realms than we do now. Perhaps it's only a stage name. Did you

ask?'

'No,' Lila admitted. "There was never a right
moment.'

He did understand this time. His long eyes narrowed, became hooded. 'Lila, are you playing a Game

with him?'

'Are you playing one with me?'

His eyes narrowed with a flash of anger he didn't
bother to restrain
.
'You know better than that
.
'

'It
started before I knew I was even doing it!' Lila cried in anguish, sorry for hurting him and angry with

herself. 'When I realised ... it was already on.'

'And which one do you think it is?'

'I'm no expert,' she said humbly, picking at a loose thread where the magical messenger had clawed

her vest. 'I don't know how to read them.'

'Lila,' he said and waited for her to look at him.

How she hated that waiting! He would wait until sunset, midnight, the next day, until she did what he

wanted
.
So she might as well do it now and have to suffer the disappointment in his face. She looked up.

His serious, intent focus was all on her. She felt like she was being minimised in the bolt of a ray gun,

shrinking inside. But all he said was, 'Don't pretend to be a fool. You're nothing of the kind. It demeans

all of us.' Then he let
her go and turned away, getting up to go back to the still flames and the blade. 'This

can still be read, as long as the fire is stopped, but the fire can't be put out, so this will have to do. Not

that I need to read it
again. Do you want
to know what
it
says?'

'Yes,' Lila said, wanting to take on any burden he asked.

'It says that
Zal's blood will separate all the realms completely and

for ever, saving Alfheim from imminent
destruction, and that
he is the axis of a Great
Spell.'

'A magical Quantum Bomb,' Lila said.

'Just
so. The Great
Spell it
proposes here requires a living sacrifice, to maintain the Spell's power. It

also requires someone adept in two opposing magical disciplines, whose nature has been sundered from

any purity of line and become a fusion of two or more of the realms
.
You say Zal healed you with a

crow's feather? There is no such elvish magic
.
That is a thing of Demonia, or Thanatopia, depending on

the charm.' Sarasilien picked up the knife again from its place in the air, more carefully this time, and with

distaste
.
"This blade was not related to that threat, though. It comes from elsewhere. But it also has two

magics on it. Elvish and faery. As well as another, old word I cannot say.' He ran into another silence.

After a minute Lila said, 'There may be an old faultline running through the east
end of town. A Bomb

fault. Malachi found it. And somebody's recording everything in that studio. I put
a watcher on it. But
I

doubt
anyone will come to collect. I tripped a telltale.'

Sarasilien reacted as though he hadn't
heard her. "This Game with Zal, whatever it
is, must
be brought

to an end. If these papers are correct, or even if the people behind them t
hink
they are correct whether

or not
this spell is what
they claim, then the Game will get
in the way of you doing your duty, both of

protecting him and protecting the interests of Otopia, So whatever it is, and whatever the stakes are, and

however it must be finished - finish it.'

Lila bit her lip in silence. Inwardly she rejected his idea as though he'd suggested she drink poison.

That resentment
was the effect
of the Game, she knew, though that
didn't
make it
any easier to resist.

The power of Games derived from wild magic which could manifest in any time at any place, even in

Otopia. A Game was made when two players, at least one of them an aetheric Adept, came into conflict

of some kind within the influence of wild magic - the raw aether produced by the I-space vacuums -

which trickled through the space-times of the various realms as water trickles through gaps in the rocks

of a streambed. In Otopia raw aether was almost
undetectable to humans, being in its least manifest form,

and so they were particularly vulnerable to it and often snared, though two humans together, being not

Adept but Inept, never formed Games.

Most Games were like traps, some small enough to step right out of

on the instant
when you realised they were on, and others big and labyrinthine enough that the hapless

victim would never find their way free
.
You might end up in a duel, or promising away your worldly

goods, or falling in love, or slaved to a duty not of your own choosing, depending on what situation you

were in when the wild magic curled around the deepest and darkest motivations of your mind. Games

waited in moments of unacknowledged intent and personal conflict, especially when a person desired

something but
denied the desire
.
Wild magic wanted to manifest secrets, to bring the hidden into the

world.

All the Games so made had their rules of course, be they known or unknown to the players, and once

these were tacitly accepted - once a person made any move at all which confirmed their awareness of

one of these rules or their awareness that a Game was on - then they were committed to become a

player, and must play until the Game was ended by Victory, Defeat or Death.

The Great Otopian Downswing of 2020, in which the economy had almost
collapsed, had resulted

from a faery cartel using Games to dupe wealthy human business owners into selling their companies

literally for songs. The fraudulent use of Gaming was then made illegal, resulting in a rash of lawsuits in

which losing or bound players sought to sue for damages against their co-Gamers (though this did not

release them from the Games they were caught
up in). Finally, due to the lawyers becoming subject to

Games which required them to lose their cases and to a complete inability to enforce payments awarded,

all legal intervention had been abandoned and once more it was Player Beware
.
Gaming had become the

subject of science and was studied in Otopian Universities, though it was practised by the elves, the fey

and the demons more like an art
.

One feature that
was proven was that the rules were determined by the Opener's intentions, and thus

so were the conditions of victory and loss
.
It was not always clear who the Opener was . . . Lila did not

know whether she had started this Game or whether Zal had, only that elves and humans often fell into

them whether they liked it or not. Elves had the upper hand most of the time and enjoyed winning. They

liked to play though they denied liking it, unlike demons who were crazy about Games. Humans mostly

lost, but the Game magic made both sides do their damnedest to win. Sometimes at all costs. You could

get murder transformed to manslaughter with Game pleas, easy.

This all ran through her mind in the single moment
of her annoyance and rebellion.

Sarasilien caught
her arm as she stood up. He was close to her and his
andalune
stung her sharply

with the force of his will; a biting cold grip of compulsion, a taste of acid. 'End it Lila. Even if you have to

lose.'

She glared at him and tried to pull away, but he didn't let her. The look he gave her made her sure that

he pretty much understood all that losing might entail, and that
it
was very little short of her life. She had

almost lost that before by playing a deadly Game with elves, and he had freed her from it. Now she must

free herself, and he was not about to give her any more assistance until she did.

T understand,' she said finally and he let her go. The brief magic that
had bound them flared away,

silvering mist
to either side. Her spirits sank.

'We all know how it
feels to lose,' Sarasilien said, although his words were no apology for winning this

time.

Lila signed out her heavy armour from the Incon arsenal and loaded it into a backpack
.
She stowed her

additional weapons and other items on her vest and in her bike bags. The armourer, a friendly ex-SAS

officer, watched her strip and check each of her guns and their ammunition.

'Expecting trouble?'

'My assassination has turned into a likely kidnapping, I think,' she said. It
was difficult
to talk or think

because of the reprimand ringing in her ears. Well deserved, she felt, but
that
made it worse. 'I've

requested more field support, but I don't think I'll be able to persuade my clients to do the smart thing

and cancel their public appearances, so it's all looking somewhat fifty-fifty.'

'Do you trust him?'

'Who?' Lila saw the soldier nod his head in the direction of Sarasilien's rooms and the Forensics Unit.

Clearly from his face he wasn't
so sure. She nodded.

'Good. Got everything you want?'

'I can't carry any more,' Lila admitted. 'Who knows whether any of this will count
anyway?'

'You can
s
t
op
them with this.' The sergeant patted her pack, fifty pounds heavier
.
'Who cares if they

die or not, hey?'

'Yeah
.
' Lila gave him a tough grin - at
least, she hoped that's what it was
.
He was trying to show

solidarity with her situation, she assumed, but she'd have liked him a lot more if he'd never made the

remark. She shouldered the pack and bags on her own, and they were very heavy so that it was all she

could do not to stagger. The fleshy parts of her shoulders instantly hurt with the pressure of the straps.

'Have a great day, Sarge.'

'Sir, yes sir,' he said, giving her a friendly salute
.

Lila let her discomfort
show after she'd rounded the corner. She still couldn't get
used to outranking

people twice her age, and it
was weird commanding his respect
when she'd lost
Sarasilien's five minutes

earlier
.

The last thing she had to do was check in with her support crew: the medics and engineers who had

built
her as their first prototype cyborg officer. In the laboratories on the lowest level of HQ she

downloaded reports and they uploaded new programs
.
Experts in everything from computing to dentistry

checked the progress of the way that
she and the machine were assimilating one another.

'Got to do something about
this. Should get
some bushings to fit
onto the skeleton to take these kinds

of loads directly,' one cybernetics technician said, as they looked over the bruises on her shoulders. 'Can

you activate the gauntlet systems, Lila? Good. Again?'

Lila held out both arms and watched her fingers, thumbs, palms, wrists and forearms break up and

expand into a hundred different functional devices; a silent, silver storm of motion that was a blur even to

her boosted vision. Fanned out they looked a little comical, like the ultimate Swiss army knife. Like this

they didn't seem a part of her at all, and she was able to look at them dispassionately
.

They did the same with her legs and tested the heavy armour connections and the jet propulsion

systems in her lower legs and feet
.
Mostly the technicians didn't
seem to notice that Lila had flesh or a

head. They worked on their special little bit of her and muttered amongst themselves
.
She rather

preferred that to the physiotherapist's intensive attentions and warm conversation
.

'You're overdoing it on the cross-country,' said the medical doctor, gently assessing the state of the red

tissue where Lila's muscle and skin fused with the prosthetics engineered biosynthetics and metals.

'You're accelerating the rate of carbon uptake into your bone mass. We're risking them getting too brittle

unless we slow the crystallisation down. The muscle and tendon cells aren't
getting enough time to heal

either. Every time you push them they're going to keep tearing because these load stresses are still higher

than they can adapt to. It's not bad, but the armour power is always going to give you the illusion you're

stronger than your body can take. You'll break yourself in bits if you're not
careful.'

'Yeah,' Lila said, having heard it all before. She turned over, checking the time. 'Can we speed this up?

I have to go.'

'As soon as Doctor Williams says you can,' said Dr Williams, Lila's psych, who had been observing at