Chasing the Dragon (43 page)

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.

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 leading 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.

He found a missing stone. The space to the one beyond loomed
ominously far, tempting him to doubt. He leapt. He landed, wobbled.
He was fine. He could balance well with these light, flexible limbs.
"Am I the blade then?"

"Well, whatever you have to be you're it," she said.

He paused, seeing a bank coming up ahead. He looked down at the
water's sickly gush. It was too fluid to be like blood, only the colour
reminded him of death under different moons. He felt cold and empty
suddenly. He was sure he had killed and seen people dying. The lack
of firm memories made his body ache in the strangest way, as if it were
listening for the familiar sound of home, turning in all directions. The
water sluiced on, a muted roar, dragging mist with it. "I've killed
before," he said. He resisted the notion that he was lost.

"Yes I was there," came the reply. "Go on, the bank is just there."

He stood on the stone, balanced, both feet just fitting on the
narrow surface. "Was I a good person?" The tune he had sung in Mr.
V's presence stuck with him and he clung to it without singing it
again. It seemed out of place now, but it tugged at him.

Glinda did not answer. "I am not the judge of it," she said finally.
"That is your business."

"I can't remember," he said. Then his mind sharpened a little. "But
you intend for me to kill this person we are here to find."

"Let us find him first," she replied, her tone implying that he was
getting well ahead of things. "It is not certain until it is done."

But Zal still waited. "You, and Lily, you must know my life. Mina
knows what I could have been. Yes. What's gone is certain. And you
weave it and finish it. You must know."

She acquiesced reluctantly. "Yes."

"I want it back." Her impatience was growing; he could feel a
pressure in his back willing him on.

"I can only tell it to you, like a story. I can't return the memories
as they were. Those parts of you are lost forever."

"But you haven't," he said, now aloud. "So you have a reason."

"After we are through here, I will tell you what you want to
know," she said. "Now can we get along?"

Blackmail. At last, he knew where he stood. "And if I don't?"

"That is your choice," she replied.

"Tell it as we go," he said, watching the rush of the water. "I might
slip with boredom if you don't. Running water is so hypnotic. I could fall
in. You can always keep a few things back. There must be a lot." This place
felt bad to him, because perhaps he shouldn't be here and only Glinda's
will allowed it. He felt haunted, and not only by his own frailty and loss.
Beyond the line of the mist things without eyes watched him. Sometimes
he was sure he felt them brush close, though there was no warning of their
arrival, only a sudden rush of air past his face or the peculiar sensation that
invisible stuff like threads or straw was sweeping through him. The
trailing lines were sticky. They pulled at him, stripping off energy from
him. He was fished. But this happened so quickly he couldn't be sure.

He looked at the water. Dark. Endless dark that reflected the weak
grey light because it could bear none of it inside.

"Very well," Glinda's voice said sharply in the middle of his head.
"It may be a long journey, and if you keep trying to catch hold of those
vampires and gaunts who want to eat you you will be in trouble so I
will start at the beginning." She waited, but he didn't move on,
though he did look forwards at the next stone. She sighed with a longsuffering air. "You and I were born in the dark of the harvest moon, in
Alfheim, at a place called ..."

Her voice spoke steadily. He made the first leap and then another
and another. In a few minutes they had finished crossing the river and
dealt with his birth and parentage and the beginnings of the political
tangle into which he had appeared, controversial before he had taken
his first breath because of his mixed heredity and his mother's scandalous choice of father for him.

The story and her friendly tones acted as an effective shield, he
found. The pouncing and trawling activity that he suffered lessened
almost to nothing, though the watching sensation increased. They
travelled along stoney paths and through barren, monotonous moorland. Ruined buildings came and went like mirages at the sides of
their way, and they crossed streams that were all as black as the first,
the sound of their trickling greed the only thing to be heard. In all the
hours he ran and leaped he saw nothing but the landscape and felt
nothing but the cold air and the fierce intent of the invisible creatures
in the mist.

The passage was not in the least pleasant, but he found himself
enjoying his story, though he could not relate it to himself, much as he
tried. Images came to his mind, but he thought he conjured them up.
He couldn't even remember the look of his own face or what the places
she described had felt like. Very occasionally something would appear
that was unusually vivid and he felt a stab of happiness as he was able
to fit a fragment to the tale she was telling. At least he was convinced
she didn't lie. What she said rang true. In the twists and turns of
events he would not have taken other paths. He felt pleased by that, and by this proof that he was still alive even if it was only through a
fraying connection to his soul.