Chasing the Dragon (26 page)

"It's not your fault," Lila said. "Not even the demons' fault. It's my
fault."

"No," Bentley said. "Nobody would have been fast enough to stop
that thing."

Which wasn't true; Lila could think of one, but it didn't matter
now. There was nothing here she recognised anymore. A terrible feeling
was rising through her. For no reason she could understand the image
of a doll kept coming to her mind. She recognised it as a toy she'd
owned, never really loved, and one day "lost." It had floated relentlessly
when she tried to swim it out to sea. It just kept coming back to the
shore, the expression on its bland plastic face unfalteringly trusting.

"Zombie," Lila said, turning away from the rotting body. "It's a
zombie. Not really him. At least, not more than a partial copy. I just
thought when I saw him ... it ... I thought it was. I wished it was. I'd still think it was if the demon hadn't said so. Did me a favour,
really. Sorry." She moved her hand at the room, the stone figures lying
on the floor. "Mess."

How could she not have seen it was a fake? When the demon had
screamed that he was cheated and leapt from his attack with the intent
of doing some greater harm-that was the first time she'd even contemplated that this thing wasn't what it looked like. And it had even
been cheated of its revenge for being promised an Ahriman to eat,
because she'd already killed the double-crossing scum responsible.

If it had been the real Zal, he would be gone. She would have been
too late. She chose the wrong target first. It all left the question-if it
was a zombie, then where was Zal? Was he actually dead or was it worse?

Fabric moved quietly against her legs and she found she was
wearing conventional trousers, with pockets. She put the pen inside and
turned away, suddenly so nauseated by the stink of burnt flesh and
demon skin that she retched and only the fact she hadn't eaten in a long
time saved her from puking on the floor. At the door she almost blundered into someone, saw a black shirt, coat, the hint of a sparkle of dust.

"Mal," she croaked.

"I wish you'd wait for me before you have a party," he said with his
trademark insouciance. "I missed seeing everyone's faces when hell
exploded."

"Yeah, they don't get out much around here," growled Greer's
voice from just behind Malachi. He passed them both, grumbling and
giving orders to the staff who now streamed into the room and started
clearing up. "Gimme those paperweights."

As he took the demons' remains away Malachi grasped Lila's elbow
firmly and steered her out. She felt lightheaded with too many uppers,
dazed, as if she were floating. She counteracted them with a heavy dose
of tranquillizers.

"The dead people on your ship aren't real," she said to him, slurring drunkenly.

"Yeah, I figured," he said, walking slowly and calmly. They passed
along the halls, took the elevator, and made the turns to his office. "Nice
suit, by the way. Bit tight on the corset but the trousers are very smart."

"I don't like the corset," she said, eyes rolling. The sudden shift
from high to low made her feel like a hungover drunk who was still
swallowing the last dregs of the jar. "Too tight. Like being a sausage."

He snorted and manoeuvred her through the door into the courtyard.

She pointed at the yurt. Even the Al part of her was struggling to
keep her afloat. Her kidneys and other purification systems were overloaded. It was oddly pleasing. She felt warmly part of the human race,
able to say with genuine sentiment, "Your house got trashed."

"I saw that." He'd dragged out his furniture and made a room on
the grass, with chairs and a blanket for a mat and his little cooler, still
wired in and chugging away. "Siddown." He put her on the blanket.

The corset laces hissed and let out several inches. Lila slumped
sideways and lay on her side. It was rather comfortable except that the
wool was a little scratchy on her cheek and the bare skin of her arms.
How did sheep manage? It must be different from the other side, she
thought. "I'm really tired."

"Just fill me in; then you can sleep."

"You went missing." She yawned and lifted a finger, waving it to
conduct her performance of the last few hours. "I found your office,
searched it, found the sextant thingy, obviously Jones left it, gave it to
Bentley, couldn't find you, went to my office, Zal was there-anyway
I thought it was him-so I took him to medical, but he couldn't be
revived, and then I thought I should use an elemental because they're
like power and he needed power and it all seemed to add up and he's
used to mainlining fire thingies, so Greer sent the water demon agent
to get one, but he crossed me and brought someone to kill Zal and me
instead so's he could have a shot at taking over the Ahriman dynastic
line, but I had the sword so it didn't work out, though it would have
got Zal if it had been Zal because I picked the wrong target first, I was so angry I just had to kill the scummy little sucker, but anyway it
wasn't Zal, it was something off those ghost ships. Kinda lucky.
What're they called? Zombie. I have to read up on those ... I ..." She
trailed off, mind dissociating, the finger and its hand falling to the
ground. There was a moment of quiet; then she snapped alert for a
moment, startling Malachi and making him jump. "And Teazle is
missing. In Demonia."

She fell unconscious.

Malachi sat down on his best remaining chair and took a beer out
of the cooler. The early morning was almost fresh, with air coming in
off the sea over the city. There was no moon, just the stars and the office
lights. He leaned back, opened the bottle, and took a drink, looking up
at the constellations. They were different to the ones in Faery. He'd
always looked for similarities but never found any. Faeries weren't such
keen observers of these things as humans and demons and elves, but he
felt sure that some of those stars were the same ones he could see at
home. Just not in the same places. Perhaps, he thought, Faery was
round to the left some more. A turn could make all the difference.

At his feet Lila started to snore softly. Slowly, the purple fabric of
the corset stole up over her chest and shoulders, then down her arms.
Tiny silver motes, like the stars he'd been watching, came on in the
depths of the cloth nap and drew out the familiar shapes of Tigris and
the Boghopper. He tipped the bottle at the clothes in a half cheer,
thanking it for giving him a friendly sky. "Tatter."

As he watched the coat become a thick cloak-the sewn stars never
moved, just the cloth grew around them-he saw a shape drawn in it
by slightly lighter threads. It moved, rolling over, a huge circle, no, a
spiral. In the sky of the cloak it was a planet revolving, a mandala in
the shape of a dragon coiled on itself tightly, wings furled, claws
closed, eyes shut. It slept, but restlessly. Its handfeet twitched and the
end of its tail shivered. Ripples ran beneath its armour.

"Yeah," he said to it quietly. "Yeah that's what's going on."

The picture on the cloak faded, leaving the constellations.

Malachi put his hand into his jacket pocket and found the warm,
rounded shapes of hazelnuts. They were Madrigal's gift. He felt very
lonely and took one out, shelled it carefully, and ate it. Immediately
his spirits lifted a little and he was able to relax.

At that moment he heard steps and the door opened from the buildings. Temple Greer shambled across the path and over the grass slowly.

"Pull one up." Malachi gestured at his spare chair-a large chest
covered in a half carpet and a cushion. He pointed with the neck of his
bottle at the cooler.

Greer organised himself a couple of feet away next to Malachi and
sat down, twisting the cap off his drink slowly. "I missed the end of the
game," he said. "The Pirates won. Can you believe it? We were two six
up at the half. I swear, you take your eyes off these things for a second
and it all shoots to shit."

Malachi shrugged. He didn't follow human sports. They were too
dull and the rules never changed.

Greer sniffed and turned the bottle, pretending to read the label
with all its disclaimers. "So, was she right? Was it him?"

"Yes. No. Sort of." Malachi said. "Difficult to answer. Zombies
share a spirit with the person from whom they were called, but it can
be a piece without memory or feeling or awareness just as easily as a
major chunk of soul. They're like elementals in that way. Elemental
fragments. They can be put into corpses of the person, or other people's
corpses, or any vehicle, even dolls and constructs and mechanical
devices, but the last parts are hard. Mostly if there's no body to hand a
master will make one out of some elemental substance and cause it to
copy the physical memory of the fragment, so you get something that
looks a lot like the original. But it isn't. Chop it up and you'll see."

"It's being autopsied right now. I'll go hassle them in a minute,
when I get my breath back." He took a long drink. "Ghosts, zombies,"
Greer said. "Not something we've seen much of so far."

"You'll see a lot more," Mal sighed.

"Oh yeah?" The words sounded light enough. Malachi wasn't
fooled.

"That cracking that's been going on since the Bomb ... well, it
wasn't the Bomb," Malachi said. He tried his best not to fidget as he
revealed his suspicions, but it was very hard, the urge to confound, convolute, dissemble, weasel, and defraud was strong, as strong as the
information was important. If he couldn't do it verbally, it expressed
itself in his limbs as a manic need to get up and dance or run away. "The
Bomb was just a product of the same thing as the cracks. And this is
just the same. Fifty years went by here, you got bigger cracks in reality,
you got more and more leakage off the other realms, more instability
all over. Cosmic shattering. In that perspective it was only ever a matter
of time until the most distant worlds crept up on you and invaded your
space because all the worlds are starting to infiltrate each other, like
coloured lights crossing and making new colours." He hesitated. He
was not a great theorist but he was very convinced by this. Humbly he
added. "Actually, it coulda been the Bomb. You know that'd make
sense. But also, it coulda just been going to happen anyway."

Greer rubbed his face roughly with his free hand, snorting and
snuffling not unlike a warthog trying to wake up. He finished and
smoothed his moustache with a swipe of his index finger. "Skip to it.
It's getting early."

"S'probably dragons," Malachi said, very quietly. He knew how
statements like this went down with the scientific and by-theirfingernails-material-rationalist humans. If you didn't quickly provide
a scaffolding that allowed them to scramble safely from an atheist
world in which no invisible agents or aetheric powers existed across to
a point in which invisible agents could exist as parts of a psychological intentionalist stance et cetera, then you could enjoy a suspicious,
contemptuous, and frosted-over life as That Faery You Met at the
Party, Mad Like All of Them but Doesn't He Dress Well? He waited, but Greer made no sudden moves. "Either they started stirring around
a while back and lots of old things started to surface everywhere, inside
and outs, a result of that you were able to tune to the Signal well
enough to figure out how to build the bomb, set it off, and et cetera,
the rest is history. Or, you built the bomb all by your clever selves, set
it off, and that started to give them nightmares and wake them up.
Either way, don't feel responsible. They move around every so often by
themselves. And you weren't to know, were you?"

Greer stared down the neck of his bottle morosely. "Every so
often?"

"Every few thousand years, maybe as few as two, maybe as much as
a hundred thousand. Or a million. Or a billion. Now and then."

"Doing what?"

Malachi shrugged. He never understood the need humans had to
try and find the reason behind everything. Surely it was just an infinite
cascade of reasons that led back whimsically into the first moments of
time itself? What were they going to do, go back there and fix things?
The basics of the situation as it was were always more than enough for
him to react to. He supposed they fancied that knowing how a thing
happened meant they'd manage circumstances better the next time,
but there never was a next time; there was only the one time for everything. Why did a dragon? Why did a cat? It made no sense. He struggled and, because no answer wouldn't do, said all he could think of.
"Being."

"Who are ... What do ... Are you talking about cosmic scales of
being, no pun intended?"

"Can be," Malachi said, floundering and searching for any footing
he could find to get out of the question. "Or could be quantum scale.
Usually on all scales. The thing you call dragon that looks like a
winged lizard with claws and teeth is just a form. They like that shape.
I don't know why. Probably because it looks impressive and mystic and
keeps most people well away. But they don't look like anything left to themselves. They're not anchored to dimensions. Like angels. Only
angels aren't anchored to time either and dragons kinda are. They're
almost like manifestations of time, I guess. It's like you and god. So the
aetheric and the dragon." He stopped his mouth with a fierce chug of
faery lite and hoped that would be sufficient, but of course it wasn't.

"God?"

"Yeah. They're as far over the average aetheric being as god is to
you." He cursed himself for carelessly putting that in and added, "Not
that there is a god, of course, but if there were then that's how it would
be. So don't ask me about them because I don't know. They aren't
something ever bothered with me. Some people claim to channel them
and speak for them, but they might just be mad."

"People like Sancha Azevedo."

Malachi rolled his beer bottle in his hands. "I knew you were going
to mention her."