Chasing the Dragon

by Justina Robson

  "I can take care of myself." He was starting to wonder if the cop intended to follow him.

  "Captain Greer wants to see you," the man said. "All of you. They're at the Foley Centre."

  Malachi almost gave a start. The Foley Centre was a drama and performing arts studio that was the agency emergency port if anything happened to the offices. He wasn't surprised when they got there and no dancers were in evidence. Instead the building and its big, open rooms were packed with staff and portable equipment. Power cables trailed like intestines through every doorway and along the sides of the staircases. They wouldn't risk transmitted power. That meant an aetheric lockdown. He realised he had returned to a state of siege.

  Greer was audible before he was visible. He was giving orders on the second-floor landing. As Malachi closed in he saw Bentley appear and lean close to Greer, talking rapidly. Greer's expression, always grim, darkened further. He caught sight of Malachi and his arm shot out to point at him. Agents scattered for the exits, their expressions preoccupied or relieved.

  "Here, here! The man himself. At long bloody last. Where have you been? No, don't bother. Just come over here and tell me what the fuck is going on."

  "I'm behind you," Malachi said in his calmest and most agreeable voice. "Fill me in on why we're here." He could guess, but he'd learned to temper his guesses with a few facts.

  Greer's phone rang, one of them. He searched his pockets and stabbed at Bentley with a finger. "Fill him in up to the eyeballs and then I want him back." He stumbled away over the lines of data cable towards a relatively quiet space between two doors.

  Bentley nodded and drew Malachi to the banisters where the old staircase took a pause before turning again to ascend the next three levels. "Pirates."

  That was, Malachi thought, beyond the eyeballs. He could shovel the rest over the top of his head by himself. The Fleet had returned. "Come for the sextant?"

  "Yes."

  "Casualties?"

  "At least forty. They overran us very fast. We countered but were unable to use sufficient force.... The material ones do not respond to gunshot, only fragmentation grenades and in a closed area ..."

  "Zombies." Loathing made his skin shiver.

  "Yes. The others are ghosts or ... other beings," she said carefully, keeping her voice steady and very very quiet as people bustled past them. "Aethereal agents were sucked dry. Artefacts consumed. It made them stronger. Antimagic devices stopped them, but the range was limited."

  "Vampires." He was astonished. The Fleet was not merely ghostly. It had features of the undead. That was utterly outside his experience. He felt the first twinge of real fear.

  Bentley shrugged. "They have occupied the agency and have begun to quarter the surrounding area in a search."

  "What for? I mean, the sextant was ..."

  "It was in the safe room, yes. It still is. The safe room was locked down as we abandoned the building. They are unable to penetrate it."

  "Then ..."

  "They have taken hostages and are looking for more. Some have been added to their number. Others are being held as ransom."

  "They want us to open it."

  "That is correct. Until we do they are killing hostages at the rate of one every half an hour. So far they have killed two."

  "How did they get in?"

  "Through the same route as the raft into Lila's office."

  "Portal."

  "Yes."

  "Did you close it?"

  "We did but it reopened."

  Malachi was dumbstruck. Otopia was a place in which the operation of serious aetheric potentials was almost impossibly difficult. It had little natural aether and an atmosphere that suppressed it further. Porting in was a feat. Porting in aetherically dependent beings and sustaining them in such a hostile environment successfully was unheard-of. The power required baffled him. As one of the key aetheric operatives he must come up with a solution to this, but at this moment any ideas eluded him. "How many do you think there are?"

  "At least fifty. We count ten of the things you call vampires and the rest are ghost forms like the zombie that came through to Lila. Except these are much stronger."

  Malachi looked at the cables. "Power is coming from somewhere and it isn't here. We have to cut it off."

  "Or hand back the item."

  He looked at her. It hadn't occurred to him, though he was getting a clue as to why Jones had been so desperate. He began to appreciate the magnitude of her daring in stealing it at all. The idea of whoever was doing this having the thing back ...

  "Well?" Greer snapped.

  Malachi turned and found the man standing beside him. He'd been so lost in thought he hadn't noticed him appear.

  A uniform ran up. "People report kidnappings and ghost sightings in Harristown and Noble Heights, Ponds Beach, Mariontown..."

  Greer waved them off. Those places were all suburbs, far from the local area. "Portals?"

  Malachi nodded; it had to be.

  "What is the thing that Jones brought?" Greer demanded. "What is it for?"

  "It's a navigation device," Malachi said, reeling. He put his hand on the banister for support. "They came here because they followed Jones. If they get it back ... I didn't even see it. I don't know what it can do...."

  "Wait." Greer held up his hand, paused, looked at his watch, and then looked at Malachi. "Are you saying that the only reason this is happening here is because whatever it is followed Jones here?"

  "Likely ..." Malachi began and then gathered his breath once more as Greer tapped the face of his watch. "I'm a faery. I don't deal with this kind of thing. It's not our business. You need a necromancer."

  "We don't have one. Did they manage to port here because she was carrying the device?" Bentley asked.

  "Maybe." Malachi was fishing for any clue in his old head. He struggled. "But it could be that because she is a walker she left a trail that was open enough for them to follow. You need to ask another walker. I don't know...."

  "Give it back, or not?" Greer asked him suddenly. "Twenty seconds before we kill someone through indecision."

  Malachi opened his mouth, but no words came out. He was thinking of the broken hull on the Folly's beach, the bodies rotting inside it, of Jones, of Azevedo, of what he had seen once so long ago that he might have forgotten it through natural causes and not simply because it was too awful to bear.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  t was as she opened her eyes that Lila realised the thing in the bag was not a mirror. It was a crystal plate, about five centimetres thick, fractured and bashed so that it was full of flaws that reflected light and sound internally through hundreds and thousands of planar shifts. Sarasilien's library knew of such things and catalogued them with scrying objects-items that allowed someone to protect themselves from detection as they nosed about in the frequencies and transmissions of other levels of existence. There was no danger of seeing the mirror in its face. In fact, she saw nothing at all to begin with. Then, slowly, tiny sounds and lights began to show in the angular facets. After a few moments they began to noticeably migrate closer to the surface.

  Calculating, comprehending, she turned the plate rapidly in her hands so that the emergent wavelengths would appear at angles that she could see. They did so in pieces, every image shattered, every sound broken to bits. She had to put it back together like a puzzle. The library said there was a charm for this, but as she didn't know it and would have had no ability to use it anyway, she had to do it digitally. There was so much refraction she couldn't get rid of it all. The light and sounds were bent. Blackouts in her reconstruction made the trans mission patchy. But they didn't in any way prevent her from understanding what she saw.

  Over her shoulder, beyond the frame, lay a pleasant beach with a clapboard old family house behind the dunes, and in that house, with her family, Lila Black was making dinner with her sister, feeding the dogs and drinking wine, laughing with her sober mother, her greyhaired and contented father, playing a hand
of cards where it didn't matter who won. She recognised herself immediately. Older, more successful, a bit wealthy, a bit heavy with the physical mass that comes from being happy and grounded in who you are, careless of fashion but not without style. Somewhere around, not visible but present, were the boyfriends and girlfriends, smiling and healthy, happy and positive, human and full of life; her date and Max's. It was Thanksgiving. The thing on the table was a turkey, golden roasted, with wine and faery dressings. The sun shone not only with the good light of a day well spent but with the abundance and blessing of this life. She knew this. It was her secret shame, this dream of a normal life, perfected through thousands of hours of polishing in every black moment and struggling second. As she saw, she was half transported. She experienced her own body. She tasted the gravy and added salt. Max smacked her hand, not too much! She threw salt over her shoulder against ill spirits and the dogs snaffled it up and pestered for tidbits, for crisps and the jelly from the top of the pate.

  As she leaned on the edge of the sink and looked out of the window she saw her car-a beautiful, sleek thing, parked in the drive. And her friends were there, faces she'd nearly forgotten from school, the boys who lived at the end of the road. They were in the garden, talking, waving at her, and smiling, everyone ready for when she wanted to come out. Happy to see her. On the radio there were only surf reports.

  She watched the goings-on, half-absorbed, almost there. She couldn't believe how real it seemed. Her mother's face. Her father's shirt ... every stitch. Max's grin. The taste of that dinner. Night fell. They slept. Daydreams became night dreams, robbed of the organising blinkers of the mind.

  The house washed away into the sea, the beach was dark, the waves were turning, rolling logs over and over, pushing the dead wood onto the shore, and she was there with the empty city at her back, every building a mass of opened eyes and mouths waiting for something to come walking.... Meantime beyond the visible horizon the sea was rising; she could feel it, rising and rising into a single, almighty wave.

  An Al alert made her put the pane down. As she did so the trance broke and all sense of being there vanished, leaving her with the clammy dank drip of the labyrinth and the bad air of the chamber. Lila sat with it on her lap for a second. She understood a little. Trapped in dreams. In hers for her ... and presumably a different dream for everyone else. Whatever she saw wasn't going to be what the zombie servant had been seeing and hearing. It had spoken, and been spoken to, she was certain. But she wasn't getting it right, if she was even able to.

  Use of Mirrors: there was a big book on the subject of course, right there in the library she'd so glibly scanned and copied. It even mentioned the Seven Great Mirrors and their various perils, of which this, the Mirror of Dreams, was by far the trickiest. But reading about it first proved too confusing. She had to go back. She started from the beginning, as fast as she could go. Every word that passed through her mind brought back the itching, scratching feeling that someone was trying to take a rubbing of her thoughts and was hoping to rub them away, but she had no choice. Teazle was stuck in the mirror's thrall, whatever else was going on here, and she was determined to get him out.

  Light, the book began, is all there is in the universe. Nothing but light. A mirror reflects light. A glass may also refract light, splitting it up into its component frequencies and scattering them over a wider area, creating the appearance in the mind of the beholder of false images and misleading colours. Blah blah blah ... there were over eight hundred pages and illustrations. The more suited a being becomes for the passage of light, the more able and open to enslavement by higher powers it is; therefore as the individual ascends in refinement of the higher frequencies and energy forms it is paramount they guard against the unwitting inclusion and transmission of more able and subtle forms.

  She reread that a few hundred times and looked into the inky blackness where Teazle was standing, unseen. She would have said, "Oh, shit!" but that was more words and she'd already used far, far too many of them.

  Temple Greer was looking at him as if they had all the time in the world. Malachi knew that he didn't have such a luxury in this one, but if they were talking to someone here, someone who would be here at least in twenty seconds' time in order to speak and listen, then that someone wouldn't be anywhere else right then. He would know, for a minute, where trouble was.

  "Give it to him," Malachi said. "I'll work on it from the other side."

  He galloped down the stairs, leaping the cables, not waiting for Greer's reply or Bentley's thundering pursuit. Out in the street he turned corners, found shadows, the concealment of dustbins, and he was cat, then small cat, then moving through the darkness shared by all worlds and into the harsh, biting cold of a place he had begun to know very well. In the depths of Under time would stretch much farther than a few more seconds. But instead of a fire he saw ashes and the black of cinders. Madrigal's camp was gone. She had moved on. He cursed, cast about, and then began to run in the trail her wolf had made.

  In his mind's eye he saw a green sun and bronze shadows of three women. Their axes rose and fell, rose and fell, and the mountain they carved ran with black rivers; and all the creatures like him, whose kingdom was the dark of night, howled and screamed. The tallest woman, the oldest, turned. She had tiger's eyes and they looked right at him.

  The snows of Under were beginning to melt, but in the high passes the snow was resilient. He had hoped that Madrigal would be nearby so that he could have mustered her help or at least a kind word, but summer itself was coming and she had business in the lowlands, he guessed, so he must take the road to Tath's lonely outpost by himself. The brisk run gave him time to think of what he would say, but as he neared the turn of the path where it lost itself completely among the last pines of the steepening slopes he was stopped by the sight of scarlet on white. Instinct made him flatten himself down until his back was lower than the snowline and his belly was wet on the hard ground.

  It was not the ears of Tath's hounds, but blood on the snow. The smell of it was strong as the wind turned towards him.

  "Who would think we would still bleed red?" said a voice behind him wistfully. He turned his head and saw the elf not six metres away from him, all but invisible in the stand of white birches.

  "Tath?"

  "I guess your arrival means I am not the only one to have found something curious and regretted it." Tath came forwards and showed his empty hands. He was covered in a fine layer of snow, but it didn't disguise the fact that at least some of the red had come from him. He limped although he tried to conceal it. Hearing his master's voice a lone hound darted out across the bloodied hillside, but he waved it back and Malachi heard its whine of disappointment after it had vanished.

  "What happened?" Malachi hardly noticed his teeth now, almost was grateful for them in fact. He let himself get to all fours and shake off the cold.

  "I was careless with all my new power," Tath said wryly, and then as Malachi's stare urged him on he gave an uncomfortable sigh. "A necromancer came to find me. I have met them on occasion. Knowing the art I understand what I must look like from the other side. And I saw myself something that looked greatly interesting-so unusual for anyone to survive such regions for any time, Malachi, you have to understand, for someone who is not one of the angels or monsters natural to these places. Anyway, to cut to the point, I saw a necromancer's form surrounded by masses of the dark agents. He was a kind of focus for them. In common situations this would be the end of the necromancer, but they formed order for him and it seemed he spoke to them in their own way. I have only been able to do this since I was cast in Jack's shoes, so I thought I would take a closer look. Well, he saw me and he pursued me with the ferocity of a savage. There was no talk, just an assault. Took me by surprise." Tath paused. "He sent all his creatures after me. They hesitated. But then they came on anyway. His will was stronger than theirs. I fled here, thinking a material plane was a place they'd not follow me to. Most didn't. But he had angels with
him, Malachi. I don't know if you ever encountered one? No? Me neither until now. They have no trouble manifesting parts of themselves on this plane at least, let me tell you. We fought. Terrible weapons. My pack tried to save me and most of them are spirits on the winds now."

  "How did you survive?" Malachi looked at the figure before him more carefully.

  "I am not easily killed anymore."

  "Jack's power was godlike." This was speculation for Malachi, and not a little envy and awe. "Are you saying you are immortal?"

  "No, I think not. But the Winter King can't be defeated on his own ground. The land saved me. Its strength is mine while I stand on it. I think this is always so for the older fey, no?"

  "Yes." Malachi nodded. "Tell me about these angels. Are you sure about it?"

  "Not sure. I never saw one before, not close and never in a material form. They were weak here. Their blades only had spirit powers and the strength of normal iron. I am not iron-weak. But they were not either." He stopped talking suddenly and Malachi watched him ease his hip and cautiously move his arm. A fine tremor was visible on him. It shook the snow off his clothing and revealed its shredded tat ters. "They almost tore me to bits. Their blades have a righteous power; every evil you have ever done, every hurt, every torment, all awaken to their touch."

  "Some angels," Malachi muttered, though he was shaken. He realised Tath's checking was genuine surprise that body parts had not fallen off him, but in fact he seemed to be unharmed, physically at least. "But how did you best them?"

  "I am not sure I did. They left me here when it was clear I couldn't be killed. I healed too fast." His voice broke and he turned away. "Better to die in those circumstances, Malachi. So, now amuse me, have you come for my help?"

  Malachi explained the situation as he understood it. Meanwhile Tath beckoned him forwards and they walked a wide berth around the bloodied ground to the cave where they had sheltered before. It was quiet. Just two dogs ran to meet them. Others lay by the fireside, panting, their eyes closed, their coats blackening with gore.