Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five by Justina Robson Page B

been a prisoner of the three sisters and their Mirror. He knew next to nothing
     about that one either even though he’d spent half a century living with its aspect – a dwarf who spent all his time looking
     after the littlest sister, doing her cooking and cleaning while Zal had ferried her yarns from one end of the world to the
     other. Zal had no idea at the time that Mr V, who smoked a pipe and snored in an armchair for most of every day, was a dragon.
     If it hadn’t been for a competitive spirit between the three sisters that had allowed him to free Mr V from his prison he
     would never have known. He had no idea why they had kept Mr V in the Mirror at the endbeginning of the world, but probably
     there was a good reason. He’d never even found out what V stood for, though he’d tried to guess. A true name was as good as
     a soul-bond for the ancient creatures, so maybe it was just as well he couldn’t divine it. Even so, he wished he knew it now.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Zal tried composing songs in his head. Music used to come to him so easily, but where it had been inside him there was now
     a soft, woolly deadness like the kind of snowfall that mutes every sound. He could only remember melodies he had recently
     learned, and other people’s songs that he had heard. The notes didn’t run together for him. He remembered that they used to,
     but not what the experience felt like. There had been music in his head, and now there wasn’t.
    He was sad, but not as sad as he might have been because of that. Worse than the dead music was a sudden lack of purpose.
     Even as a plaything of the faeries he had had the purpose of survival, the focus on an end to his imprisonment. Before that
     had been music. Before that his political passions, a zest for living, the world itself calling with its million wonders.
     Now he groped around for any of them, fumbling across the strangely flat zones of his inner world.
    Traces here and there, like the crumbs left over from a feast, were all he found. Their taste was almost undetectable and
     instantly gone. Jack the giantkiller had purged him of almost everything he had ever done, and the Three Sisters had sifted
     what was left and taken some of that. He remembered the middle sister saying it was for his own good. He wished he could remember
     what she’d taken, but he had no idea at all. He had been robbed, but what of?
Fifty years,
she said,
you’ll never manage it if you remember everything.
But that hadn’t prompted her to restore it when his time was up.
    Only Lila was sharp and clear. He felt a continuity with her. From the first second he laid eyes on her he hadn’t forgotten
     that. It had been the strangest and most unexpected thing he had ever encountered in his long life; a young human woman, barely
     a fifth his age, mostly made of metal, powered by a nuclear reactor, staring at him with disapproval from the top of her regulation
     Agency suit and himat the height of his fame, a demigod of the media, adored by millions and hated by a few hundred key players within interglobal
     politics. He elf, she robot, love at first sight.
    Hardly plain sailing, however. Lila didn’t take well to love. She preferred antagonism. Zal hadn’t minded. Antagonism meant
     she cared and he could live with that. It also made his demon side happy. He knew these things, and he remembered the red
     splash in her hair and her strange, cyberpunk mirror eyes, which he always thought of as blue, in spite of the fact he could
     only see his own eyes reflected in them; brown and earthen and full of self-mockery.
    Now Lila Black snored softly against him, the strange alloy of her body barely heavier than an ordinary human being, but as
     far from that as you could possibly be and still qualify for the term. Then he felt a strange sensation on his chest and realised
     his skin was wet, and that she was crying. The tears were silent and her breathing hadn’t changed, so she was trying to hide