Chasing the Dragon

by Justina Robson

  Follow Malachi's leads, she intended, always hoping he had some out of that annoying, arrogant Jones woman, the strandloper. Whoever sent her that zombie, that was who she had to find. Because this seemed a viable, less immediately fatal thread, she decided to take it. She hugged Teazle's immobile form and kissed his long, ugly dragonish face. She was about to speak and tell him she would return when the faintest sound from the labyrinth came to her. She stopped and listened.

  It was the tap of a stick on the walls and the floor of a tunnel. Mapping and predicting the changes that the known regions of the maze would make, her Al calculated that it was coming from the other side of the puzzle. There was another entrance, or exit, and whoever was walking so carefully with the expert aid of their stick was headed her way.

  The room was low and already getting crowded for its size. There were no corners or cubbies. There was nowhere to hide. The sound suddenly became nearer and she realised the distance effect had been a mistake on her part. They were not far away. They were nearly here.

  She moved to the far side of the room as rapidly as she could in silence, assisted by every microadjustment her supersensitive body was able to make. She prayed to the dress and to her own systems as she remade her armoured shell into something more like smoothed stone and dropped her surface temperature to that of the surrounding air. Then she moved into a position like Teazle's, even copying the surprised expression of his face, and locked herself like that with her breath on internal recycling. The benefits of losing her human body's properties had never seemed so apparent. She made sure the connection to the camera systems in her eyes was shut off, then opened her eyes so it seemed she looked into the mirror's plane.

  The tapping grew loud and then more cautious as it checked the turn around the doorway. She saw a small demon carrying a sizeable cloth pack on its back come into the room and inch its way towards the first comfortable marker of one of the statues. Here it set its cane with a practiced movement, hooking it safely in the crook of the dead demon's arm. Then it reached up and tightened the heavy cloth that was tied around its head, covering it completely to just above its nostrils. It unslung its pack and, using one hand, found its way around the first couple of stone bodies with a steady patting. Then it sensed something, probably heat, and hesitated, but not enough. It blundered into Teazle's arm and leaped backwards with an ear-splitting shriek, cannoning into the body behind it and hitting stone spines. A second shriek of a more comprehensive horror and distress followed. She could only imagine that, as she had, it supposed nobody knew to come here. The shriek was followed by a howl of pain. Both were sufficiently fast and ready to let Lila know that the creature was already very jumpy before it had even got into the room.

  It muttered to itself, panting and lying still on the floor. Then it groped its way back to Teazle and touched him again, moving just enough to reassure itself that who it had found might be new but they were entirely stuck fast. Its gibbering continued and she couldn't make out what it said, but this was typical of demon speech. It sounded like music or nonsense to whoever was not intended to hear it.

  There followed a few minutes of jabbering and general fussing about before it pulled itself together and resumed its business. It moved forwards, very, very slowly this time, until it reached the pirate demon queen, and then it turned its back on the mirror and pulled its cloth bag free of its shoulders. In a moment it had brought out what Lila decided was another mirror, but an ordinary one. It slowly, slowly removed the covering from its head and still with eyes tightly shut lifted the mirror up so that it would be able to see the reflection of the huge pane behind it, had there been any light.

  There followed a scene that was completely surreal to Lila. She saw and heard the demon talking in a rapid, urgent way, looking in the mirror. During the gaps in its gibber she heard a very different voice speaking in Demonic. The visitor sounded upset, bad tempered, and put upon, if she was any judge. Demons rarely spared their feelings. The other speaker, however, sounded amused, contemptuous, but above all frightening. There was a quality to the voice that issued from the mirror that was as relentless and insidious as the penetrating water of the lagoon itself. You could put rock in the way, but it would worm itself through given a little time. You could put any amount of resistance in the way of this voice and it would find you and convince you. It was utterly compelling. She was glad she couldn't understand a word it said. She knew it could say anything and she would believe it.

  After a series of crabby retorts and sighs and agreements in which she could clearly distinguish an agitated discussion of the newcomer the visitor packed up the mirror, replaced its hood, tightened the strings, and set its pack and then, with the same deliberate and now much slower and more resentful actions, it inched its way back to where it had left its stick. A few more minutes and its progress was a faint ticking in the breathless corridors beyond.

  Only then did she find herself with the urge to shout, "Boo!"

  The moment passed. She unlocked her position and remade her more common shape. Moving as quietly as she was able she followed the demon's path, able to find the way easily by smell and temperature and the disturbances of the air rather than the confusing rebounds of the sound. Obviously now that it knew Teazle was there, it had to die, but she wasn't about to let it die without talking. She moved closer, cautiously. She knew she had to make her attack before it moved into public areas because she was too well known, but even as that thought formed unsatisfyingly she felt herself warmed by the thin cloth of Tatterdemalion. It shifted and moved around her, coating her in ninja wrappings, in bandaged clothes that covered everything except her eyes. Following the hint she made herself small and lithe, and gave herself a demonic set of eyeballs with a slit pupil and green irises. The sword folded up into its Mont Blanc incarnation and she slipped it inside the coverings on her forearm.

  It would be much better to find out where this demon was going, what it was doing, and who for. And besides, she persuaded herself, there was a chance it hadn't recognised Teazle. A chance. After the storm of death she had waded through before, now she found herself reluctant to kill. The messenger wasn't to blame.

  She paused. She was so used to the sound of the Signal, the white hiss of constantly repeated information. It had made her miss the whispering of another kind of sound. Yes, her thoughts were hers, but they had, for a second, been reinforced by a doubled intensity. That voice from the mirror, she thought, putting it together faster than she was able to put it into words for herself. It had found her. Even though nothing it had said was meant for her some insidious part of it had leaked into her mind. It would be nice to find her conscience, to feel good, to be doing right. She longed to feel those things but had given up on the longing as an impossible thing. Those were for scholars and people who were not involved personally in an ongoing war for survival. She would have blood on her hands and blackening her heart every day, some kind of stain....

  She stopped herself. Insidious really wasn't the word for this kind of self-recriminating negativity. She had to get a grip.

  The demon was almost out of reach. She hurried after it on her light feet, now easily silent on the padded perfection of her silk slippers. She used the Al to automatically terminate any thoughts that tried to make themselves into words. She had an inkling that words were the vehicle. An absence of language would be a firewall it couldn't jump across. She hoped.

  They followed a different route out that came up in the cellars of another house on the far side of the lagoon near the dockyards where the vaporetti in public use were maintained and refuelled. It was an area favoured as artistic, where artistic leant to the illusion of suffering in penury and isolation from the common throng of society. Isle Saba was full of self-styled outcasts and rebels, philosophers, painters, sculptors, thinkers, and a surrounding coterie of style-conscious aesthetes. Zal used to say it was where critics were spawned, and he and Teazle fantasised about bombing it into the bottom of the lagoon when th
ey got drunk together. Apart from artists it also had a large number of outcasts of a similar bent from the scientific and magical communities, and it was into this area that she emerged, in a house one street back from the waterfront.

  If her prey had any ideas about the new demon in the labyrinth being Teazle it showed no desire to broadcast the news or even share it. It spent some time putting its mirror and head cloth down, dressing in warmer clothes, setting the cane in place, and then fiddling with powders and the various ingredients of a serious magical ritual that, she realised from her hidden position in the darkness at the bottom of the final staircase, would close and hide the exit in a very major way. Her only advantages were rapidly disappearing. She watched the arcane putterings going on, and when she was more than convinced there would be no chance to slip out unseen she lost her patience and ran up the stairs in two bounds, the second one powerful enough to launch her over the top step so that she landed right on top of the startled demon.

  It was drawing breath for a yowl when she clamped one hand over its face and anchored its arms with the other, pinning it against her. She had thought she would interrogate it, but that would have required talking and talking required words and she was sure that would be a mistake since the thing in her head might be alerted in some way or would use them against her. The demon struggled, but it was no match for her strength. She could tie it up, she thought, feeling ridiculous. Fortunately they were alone and there were no other sounds in the house. She ought to kill it. Every reason said so. And yet the idea jarred a bad note in her. Was she losing her will? Days ago this path had been clearly the one she embraced. Now, now of all times was the moment to get guilt?

  The demon wriggled a few fingers free and stabbed her with the quill it was holding. The sudden slight made her jump. There was a hollow, dull clunk noise, and she realised she had broken the demon's neck as it fell limp in her grasp. She pulled the quill out of her skin and looked at it with misgivings. It had been dipped in the blood of various dead individuals to become a ritual object, but her wound was already rejecting the alien proteins.

  She let the body slide to the floor and searched its bandolier and vest, uncovering a large assortment of strange tools and bits, some of which she recognised because Tath had had them on his body when he died and she'd found them when she wore his clothes. They were necromancer's artefacts.

  A flip of the corpse's major limbs revealed no significant scars, so they were not his own. The basic tools were made from bone, and in necromantic cases, always the 'romancer's own. This demon hadn't filleted so much as a splinter from itself, so he was using borrowed items. That made no sense. She sat back on her heels and stared down at the motley collection. Somebody else's instruments would not work, but it had just a moment ago been planning a closing spell.

  She listened attentively and, on a whim, left him lying and went to search the rest of the building. What she found made her wonder a great deal.

  There were no masters hiding in the wings waiting for a grand entrance, though clearly this was the house of a master. A master what, though?

  For a start the house had no windows; it was built in the central well of a set of other structures that, by referring to maps and aerial photographs stored in her Al, she could see to be a series of warehouses. Ordinary businesses trading magical goods and luxury items operated a reasonably brisk shipping exchange through the outer layer, unaffected and maybe even unaware of a missing square footage near the centre of the huge cluster of buildings.

  The lack of daylight was not an issue, and there were no signs of lighting equipment anywhere. Air was funnelled in through vents channelled from the roof, the sounds of tinny fan movements high above just audible next to their openings when she put her face to the incoming stream of city smog.

  There were no doors. She amended that to probably no doors since they might have been magically concealed.

  There were floors of laboratories, well fitted-out, and rooms full of books, parchments, and all the study paraphernalia of any educated and committed scientist. All in the dark. There was a telescope in the roof observatory, but no opening to the sky. In other areas, closer to the subbasement and its trapdoor, she found operating rooms, a surgical area, and a workshop full of engineering gear and the remains of various kinds of intricate machines that looked to her like demon clockworks of the sort that they used in golem manufacture.

  The basements and some of the other rooms all held what she guessed were more necromancy devices or areas, judging by the circles and signs drawn on the floor. There was a kitchen without food in it. This puzzled her. She searched around and found a large door at the back with a sizeable latch. Opening it brought a cloud of bitter cold and pluming vapour. It was a freezer.

  She left the door open and went inside.

  It was full of body parts and some whole bodies. Humans and elves were there, many animals and birds, some vegetation, and, incongruously, a lone bag of frozen peas. This was nothing special considering the town and place, but at the back there was a large frosted chest, made of lead she discovered, as she found it hard to lift the lid. Inside it was sackcloth, blackened with fire and incense that had been ground into the thick weave. Inside that was a plastic bag and inside that was a collection of teeth. There were three of them, two fang teeth and a kind of shearing molar. Each was as long as her arm and their roots as long again. She knew they were teeth by their shape, but they were transparent and unflawed and they rang faintly as she clinked them against one another. At first she thought they were glass, but then, as she opened the bag and touched one, she found the shape of carbon and knew they were diamond.

  It didn't take a very long game of Whose Teeth Were These? to figure out that they were the teeth of someone very big and carnivorous whose jaws would be large enough to drive a car into. She put them back where they were and was sliding the lid into place when she heard a quiet sound. She turned but she was too late. With a thump and a click the door of the freezer closed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  he world of death was not as Zal had imagined it, not that he had ever spent much time doing that. He'd assumed it wouldn't be like anything at all. But it appeared to him in the same fashion that Glinda did, as a function of his own ability to comprehend its nature, so it was doubly surprising that it wasn't what he expected. He reasoned after some time that this must be because it wasn't entirely up to him to create the way he perceived it. It had a topology, a geography and features of its own that he rendered in terms of the familiar. Thus there was countryside and sky; there was water and land and buildings. They all seemed much more real than he had hoped; there was nothing vague, floaty, or ignorably evanescent about them at all.

  The land was craggy and bleak, its trees and copses shivering and bare. All was grey or in subtle shades so bleached they were nearly colourless. Water was invariably black, like ink. The sky was a deep, threatening mass of clouds that rumbled faintly and brooded with storms that never broke. Lightning backlit them now and again, leaving him plunged in what seemed to be increasing degrees of darkness, but the sense of it was alleviated slightly because he could only see for a few tens of metres before everything was lost in a mild but persistent soup of trailing mist.

  The building he had first come across, on walking out of the end of the world, had been a romantic ruined abbey-no roof left, only the frames of the windows and a few columns through which the mist wound with listless ribboned elegance. Its flagstones were cracked, and grass and thin weeds grew through. Saplings had broken part of the outer yard as if an orchard was trying to burst up through the paving, though all the trees were rotten. Below the abbey's hill there was a river and stepping-stones. As he crossed the abbey fell out of sight into the gloaming.

  "Go on," said Glinda with confidence, or else he would have gone back and tried to find a way of marking his position, because within a few more metres he could see nothing at all but rushing black water and the blunt, rough tops of the stones leadi
ng into the murk. He felt that it was cold but it didn't bother him. Looking down he saw his feet take steps that were so light he couldn't feel them. He almost drifted, like the fog. He looked like a black-lined ghost. He reminded himself of silk stockings, dark at the edges, lighter from a face-on view. It was so good to be without the lumpen cloth body, but at the same time he felt fragile and that if a wind came along he might blow away.

  Once he turned to look back over his left shoulder. Glinda was right behind him, looking impatient, although he had no sense of anyone's presence when he turned to face front again and kept on stepping. He wondered that there should be this kind of place, it was so material.

  "It isn't the material of atoms and such," Glinda said around her cigar. She seemed comfortable replying to his thoughts, even though he never spoke aloud. Her voice sounded in his head. His ears only heard the water's eager rush and the occasional tiny sound of his movement on the rocks if he caused unstable ones to shift in their beds. "And you can thank all the second-rate movies you watched for the special effects. Don't step in the water, whatever you do. It's soulreaving. It'll finish what Jack started and you'll be seeing me for the last time if you do. Nothing living can touch it and survive."

  Even a drop? he wondered.

  "It has to run to work," she said, "but yes. Might as well consider even a drop, because if it ever does reconnect with the rest then same result."

  "Not for you."

  "Pff, I'm not some mortal existing in so many planes at once with my energies scattered like a toddler's crayons. Of course not me. What do you think I need you for? My health?"

  He smelled the smoke of her cigar. "What do you need me for?" It had baffled him since she first said it. "Can't you just kill anything with a thought?"

  "I am the Cutter," she said, "but I am not the blade. I am the pathfinder, but I am not the first step. Whatever it is that sunders the eternal from its connection to your actual temporary organisation, it isn't me." She sounded immensely satisfied.