Read Online Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five by Justina Robson - Free Book Online Page B

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