Cruel Zinc Melodies

by Glen Cook

  I caught movement from the corner of my eye. I spun to face nothing. Relway told me, “I'll be watching.”

  “I won’t let it bother me.”

  Saucerhead, over there trying to look small in the doorway, must have gotten a better look at what I thought I’d seen. He made a frightened noise and broke trail for Relway as the little terror left.

  I muttered, “Head, that must be some brutal bad memory you have.” Hard to imagine a tough guy like him not being able to hang in there against what he knew was mostly inside his head.

  92

  It was like Dean felt me coming. He had supper ready. Singe had me a spot set up in the Dead Man’s room. The beer was perfect and plentiful. The downside was, Dean had made stuffed cabbage.

  I’m not a cooked cabbage fan. A raw cabbage heart can be tasty.

  John Stretch’s efforts today proved gratifying. We have fulfilled that part of our commitment. No bugs were found. A handful of live grubs and pupea were, too few to mean anything negative. No viable eggs were discovered.

  “None?”

  The dragon appears capable of protecting itself from the younger forms. John Stretch’s rat encountered their ghost counterparts doing the same work while ignoring the nutritional opportunities.

  “Ghost rats wouldn’t need to eat a lot. You’re sure?”

  They had no odor.

  Which would mean a lot to the rats.

  Miss Penny made herself invaluable again today, too. She acquired a great deal more information on the previous awakenings.

  “The little witch seems able to charm her way in anywhere.” Sourly. That was my specialty. “She identify any eyewitnesses? Or find out what became of the dragons after they broke out?”

  No eyewitnesses. But a lot about the sort of places where dragon awakenings happen. And about what happens once they do.

  I forced cabbage down. I wouldn’t taste it now. But, for sure, I’d be tasting it later.

  Because of their restrictions on information, what we can learn about the Venageti incidents is limited. But Penny did determine that the Venageti sites resembled those in Oatman Hwy and Florissant. All four lay beside broad bends in wide, slow rivers where there are vast deposits of deep, rich silt laid down atop limestone. Each roll-up exposed rich metals deposits. Silver in the more recent Venageti incident. Tin that they’re still exploiting in Oatman Hwy, where they also had traces of silver, copper, and lead. In Florissant they got lead with traces of tin and silver. The first Venageti roll-up probably included a lot of copper with some silver and gold.

  I can make some remarkable connections sometimes. “Given that, maybe they caused the Great Roll-Up on purpose.”

  Old Bones closed in on himself. I ate cabbage and tried to smile when Dean came to see how I was doing.

  Given the essential tropes of the dragon hoard story, that could well be the case.

  Close your eyes. I need the use of your mind briefly. And I need it undistracted by outside visuals.

  I didn’t get a chance to argue.

  My eyes closed, like it or not. A frighteningly detailed three-dimensional picture of the world beneath the World coalesced inside my head. I don’t know how I managed to grasp it. It took all his minds to shape it. It was built of everything he had been able to dig out of John Stretch. Which was an amazing lot.

  This is still little more than speculation. Rats are not good on time, distance, or shapes. They are better on temperature, taste, and smell. Smell especially. I could not put that together inside my own head because I needed the full capacities of all my minds to translate rat sensory inputs into data a human mind could understand.

  I had to take his word for all that.

  I have built the picture now but can make nothing of it. Where is the dragon?

  My head filled with a three-dimensional hundred-gallon ink splash sprawl in saffron. Without knowing how I knew, I understood that this was a fragment of a larger whole. This was all that John Stretch had been able to see within short rat range of the World.

  This is all within the silt deposit. The bottom of that rests on limestone, which lies far deeper here than it does down under the brewing district. The dragon must be in a cavern beneath the silt.

  “You’re losing me, Old Bones. You might even be losing yourself.”

  Sarcasm is a sign of?

  “A sign of impatience with those who won’t admit that they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  As you will, then. Go play the hand you have dealt yourself. When you return we will begin developing a new strategy.

  I sensed impatience with my failure to subscribe to the dragon theory.

  Might be interesting, someday, to dig around in the old records and see if a Loghyr wasn’t somehow connected to one of the old-time roll-ups.

  Though I doubted strongly that this Loghyr had been.

  Singe joined me in the hallway as I shrugged me into my new royal beaver coat. “You are going out again? At night?”

  “I need to do something at the World. When nobody else is around.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I was hoping to ask you about some things. I could go along.”

  “I have to do this without anyone else being there. Maybe tomorrow night.” I opened the door and went outside.

  The door chunked shut behind me, anger-driven.

  Old Bones didn’t clue me. I guessed it had to do with her book. She kept bringing that up, tentatively.

  93

  Saucerhead’s guys were on the job. Which they proved by spindling, folding, and nearly mutilating me after I failed to check in at the guard shack before trying to go into the World. I avoided being choked long enough to let them know I was the guy who brought the money around.

  Tharpe mused, “What’re we gonna do with you, Garrett? I’da felt bad for days if we’da killed you.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “So, what’s up?”

  “I’m going to spend some time inside there seeing what happens when there isn’t a crowd.”

  “You sure? All right. I always said you got more balls than brains. I'll have the guys come charging in when they hear you screaming.”

  “I appreciate that, Head.” I didn’t remind him that nobody outside heard anything when Belinda Contague did her screaming. I didn’t want to recall that myself.

  I borrowed a lamp from the guard shack. It looked remarkably like the lamps used inside the World. I headed in there.

  I found and lighted two lanterns the workmen used when they had to do without daylight. Those cast circles of light that failed to push the darkness back very far.

  I built a seat from loose flooring. I sat and waited.

  Not for long.

  The beautiful woman in the old-fashioned clothing came out of the darkness smiling, pleased to see me. My heart spun. We were old friends. She settled beside me on the lumber, the little lamp between us. Eleanor.

  I said, “I guessed right. It worked.”

  “It worked. But you may not be pleased by what it will cost. This may be the end.”

  I moved my left hand toward her right, let it hover, not sure I wanted to find out.

  “You probably shouldn’t.”

  “Um.”

  “It would seem real. Right now I’m as real as I was when we met. But you have another obligation today.”

  I did. I’d been going around blurting out stuff about her being my fiancée. “You’re right. But you'll never know how powerful this was. What I had for you.”

  “I do know. It’s why there’s always so much of me still here with you.”

  My hand floated toward her again. She did not shrink away. All choices here would be mine.

  I raised the hand, instead, to brush the moisture out of my left eye. “So what do we know about the dragon? It’s clear you’re in touch. He made me the woman I hoped he would.”

  “It’s not a dragon. It’s nothing like anything you might
guess. It’s vast and it’s slow and it’s more alien than you can possibly imagine. It’s older than you can imagine, too. It has no sense of time. It can’t remember ever not being. And it’s never lived anywhere but right where it is now, down there in the ground.”

  I felt no special elation about having been right. It not being a dragon probably only complicated things.

  Faintly, right on the edge of imagination, I thought I heard music.

  Eleanor said, “You might call it a god. It has some of those attributes. But it would be the most bizarre god ever to plague this world.”

  “There were others like it. Still might be.”

  “Others?” Some inner light brightened her face.

  I told her what I knew.

  “Others.”

  I wasn’t speaking to the thing directly through Eleanor’s doppelganger but it would know what she knew. And she would know what it knew.

  It enjoyed emotions but didn’t understand their source. It had no true idea of the world up here in the light, but it did sense the feelings of the creatures that wandered in and out of that small window it had found in the part of the World that it was able to reach. It created phantoms to reflect and stimulate emotions. Mostly those turned out to be unpleasant mirrors.

  Music again, a tiny bit louder.

  I started to take a fright.

  “It’s all right. It’s just concentrating hard on trying to see and understand.”

  “What is it? Tell me the best you can.”

  “I don’t know if language has the means to express it. It’s like a leaf-mold. Or a fungus. It lives on the organic matter in the silt, more of which comes down slowly to it as water seeps through. It’s vast. It might extend forty or fifty miles back up the river.”

  “To where there’s not much bottom land.”

  “Yes. It’s all one great being that exists entirely in the dark and damp.”

  The music was a little louder. And it wasn’t that harsh metallic clank.

  Eleanor told me, “It isn’t intelligent in any human way but it has thoughts. And it uses thoughts to shape its world.” She stood. “It isn’t possible for us to be what we were, love, but we can share tonight as the dear friends we are now. Dance with me, Garrett. Relax. Let the entity do what it needs to do and learn what it needs to know.” She extended her arms.

  “This is all right?”

  “This is all right. This won’t be Garrett and Eleanor. This will be TunFaire and what lives beneath the roots romancing.”

  Eleanor’s touch was real. It was as warm as life.

  That startled me. That frightened me.

  I became more attuned to the music, no cruel zinc racket but a melody wisping out of a fairy wood. Music unlike any that had plagued the World before. Unlike any I’d ever heard. It was the music of beauty, not anger. It had an orchestral feel, beyond anything known in even the great playhouses.

  Eleanor moved in close. She placed one of my hands on her hip. She placed one of hers on my shoulder, then held on to the other. She caught my gaze with hers. She trapped it.

  We danced.

  She never spoke. She just smiled that beautiful smile, crafted by angels. But we communicated because I have that opening into my mind worn smooth by daily exposure to the Dead Man.

  That three-dimensional golden ink splash that Old Bones had wrought returned and expanded in all directions, including thin fibers that followed the bug and rat passages up to the World. It became a hundred times more detailed. It entered me and tried using me to find others like itself. The information was in me but useless to it because we shared no common referents.

  Eleanor and I danced. And I communed with the entity beneath.

  Dragon was a fine description of that prodigious intellect. Devil or fallen angel might be equally apt. Though it set no temptation greater than Eleanor before me, I had no trouble seeing how, had it had any knowledge of the world above, it might have touched receptive minds and served as the Tempter adversary resident in many modern cults.

  Eleanor said it might be a god.

  She and I danced. And I learned. And I taught. I couldn’t fully encompass what came my way. Old Bones might, though. He had minds big enough, and a different romance with time.

  Eleanor and I danced. The music! Ah, that music! I hoped the Dead Man could extract that from me, isolate it, and find a way to pass it on to someone who could bring it to life.

  We danced. And I learned the secret of the metal deposits. I think.

  The entity, in its glacial metabolic process, separated out infinitesimal bits of metal as it fed. Those came down the river in the mud it carried. There were caverns in the limestone way down below where it deposited those metals. It had done so for tens of thousands of years.

  I could not ferret out which metals were there.

  Zinc might be important among them.

  The spark that remained Garrett and sane forced that out of mind.

  There might be a true treasure that could lead to a city-destroying roll-up if a greedy mob started digging down through the entity, which could not possibly be recognized as an intelligent being.

  It didn’t suffer human-style emotions itself, however much it enjoyed those. It responded to harmful stimulation by growing hotter, like a human body fighting disease. Prolonged heat caused it to dry out. Too long dry and hot, spontaneous combustion occurred. The resulting explosion might be mistaken for a dragon wakening. And, like a mushroom, might put spores into the air.

  We had missed disaster at the World by a thin margin. Cold air going down the bug tunnels saved the day.

  I tried to make the thing understand that it was far too vast to suffer real harm from puny humans, however hard they tried.

  Eleanor laughed. And we danced. And the beautiful music played. Music the dragon found in my true love’s head.

  I was possessed.

  Next day was a holiday. A general, royal holiday in celebration of the accession of the current dynasty. Nobody came to work. Saucerhead and his crew were outside but they had no reason to look inside.

  Finally, somebody somewhere noticed that I was missing and started asking questions. Scouts went out looking for bodies in the slush.

  Eleanor and I danced. I communed with the dragon. They narrowed the search.

  I wasn’t dancing when they found me. I was just lying there in the dark, on wood as hard as stone. I hadn’t been down long. And could not get back up, even with help. My legs were knotted with cramps. I was too groggy to make them understand what I wanted when I tried to find out what had happened to Eleanor.

  94

  I was in my own bed. My head felt pleasantly empty. The Dead Man had flushed me out while I slept. My legs still hurt bad.

  Tinnie was there. Her mouth moved too slowly to shape words. I heard an inarticulate bass roar.

  The Dead Man touched me. The world and I matched speeds.

  Tinnie’s presence made everything bearable. She told me, “We thought we were going to lose you this time, Malsquando.” She struggled with something inside. “Did you really want to get out of it that bad?” Then, “I couldn’t help that. I didn’t mean it. You scared me so much.”

  I made a noise. Hoping it was good enough. Hoping she wouldn’t demand explanations. I couldn’t manage that. Nor did I remember what I had to excuse.

  Turn off your You. Stop being Garrett. Some things are best left untold. Some explanations, however true and sincere, are inadequate.

  In simpler words, keep your big damned mouth shut.

  I had only one foot in the real world but had no difficulty grasping the wisdom there. And for once was able to keep it shut.

  Over the next half hour every member of the household wished me well, asked if there was anything they could do, then left looking worried. Even Melondie Kadare made a drunken buzz-through, accompanied by several more serious pixies. They made up an annoying swarm of oversize mosquitoes.

  Oh, joy. The pixies were out of hibernat
ion.

  So. Winter was over.

  “I spent a night in Elf Hill,” I told Tinnie, thinking I was being clever. Unfortunately, rural folklore doesn’t resonate in the city. People see elves every day and can’t imagine them living inside mounds in the wild wood. City elves bear no resemblance to the dark, cruel folk our ancestors knew. Not in public.

  Only Old Bones understood. Only he knew what I’d gone through. He promised he’d let me know what that had been, too.

  He knew what happened after the dancing stopped.

  You saved the city. You and your ghost woman. The dragon... the entity... did not go back to sleep, however. It is much too excited to sleep now that it knows there may be others like it. I sensed uncertainty. What might even be fear. It knows there is a world outside itself now. Which it understands only through two minds and two souls, one of them a woman murdered long ago and the other a... a you.

  That didn’t sound so bad to me.

  You became immortal that night.

  “Just a hero thing.”

  Desist. This is serious. And you are not going to be pleased.

  That was his “Dire news ahead!” tone. I shut up.

  Your ghostly friend warned you that you would not like the price. You thought that might mean losing the essence that lived on in her portrait. And you were correct. But the entity did not just take Eleanor. It took you, too.

  I was too worn down to argue or question. But it sounded like he was full of something.

  The thing couldn’t have taken me very far. Here I was, right here.

  There is a copy of you, of the Garrett inside the flesh, identical to a percentage point so remote that it would be a waste of good numbers to state it. That Garrett will live on inside the entity forever. With Eleanor. Quite possibly never understanding that it is both a copy and the template by which the entity builds its new worldview and responds to the outside that it has just discovered.

  No one else knows this. Nor ever will, so long as you control your tongue.

  He then fed back selections of what he had harvested from my head once Singe and Saucerhead dragged me home.