Chasing the Dragon (48 page)

Yes, this was a demon's dream, day and night. She should have
expected to find him here, but the scale of it, the savagery, the relentless fury ... it took her breath and thoughts away. Nothing in her
experience of Teazle had prepared her for this. Its brutality was something he never showed outwardly, not to her anyway. He had been a
silent, deadly, sophisticated killer, she thought. This was nothing like
that, no gentleman's dance. There was no art here but the art of killing
as fast and efficiently as possible, though as she looked she saw that
was an art indeed. Everyone an enemy of everyone else. No quarter and
no mercy. Only the supreme fighter would survive here. Surely this
was not the dream of all the demons locked in that room, but surely
theirs had been no different in the degree of their excess. She was
awestruck at the scale, the madness, the purity of it. She knew, with
the conviction of dreamers in any nightmare, that this war would
never end until there was only one left standing on the pile of all the
dead, on the mountain it had made of its opponents. And because he
wasn't dead, somewhere here Teazle was fighting, determined to be the
one, satisfied to die at the hands of a better fighter, either end as good
as the other as long as he was tested to the limit and reached the peak
of his abilities, found the limit.

She flew above the battle, fighting with all her senses to penetrate
the heaving forms, sometimes several bodies deep, the scale of the
largest dwarfing the smallest. Then she found him in the midst of a
concerted attack by a group of half-demons armed with everything from swords to machineguns; temporary allies against his blinding
power.

He fought in human form with his faery swords, white hair lashed
into a braid at his back, his body glowing with light gold and white,
bleeding moonlight in trails that glimmered as they fell through the
air and into the mud. Then in an instant he was dragon, his swords
claws and the spike blade of a lethal tail that cut down four or five in
a slash, his breath a fire that blackened the faces of those who stood
before him and left them screaming, balls of unrecognizable flesh and
bone condemned to final moments of agony. He trampled them. He
became a creature of flame that cauterized all before it, a miniature sun.
And on the cleared mound of smouldering ruin he stood again, the
human fighter, ablaze, his face alight with joy and a smile she would
have loved to see turned to her even though he used it now, along with
his hands, to beckon the next enemies to the attack. Light ran out of
his wounds, shone from him in lethal bands of red and violet destruction. He was magical, unstoppable. And there she'd thought that
Lightbringer was the term for a good thing.

They were not put off by his prowess. Each believed him- or herself the best and had no sense of self-preservation. They threw themselves at him-monsters, men, creatures of iron and earth, and things
for which she had no name. But Lila was able to see that although he
was magnificent, they did hurt him, and degree by degree he was getting slower, weaker though he didn't seem to feel it. He stood on
glowing trails of his own life force. The enemies in their endless supply
saw it too. Each wave of them came with more determination, more
conviction. Gradually they would wear him down like water on rock.
It was only a matter of time. How much time had already passed? He
had been gone for days in her worlds, but that meant little in this
place; dreams that took years in themselves could pass in minutes of
the clock. Did that mean he had been here for so long?

She cast a glance over the dreamscape, but there was no visible end to the number of fighters. They crowded the land, and as they fell more
sprang from the air fully formed and armed or crawled up from the
ground, clawing through the dead, their hands and heads sometimes cut
off before they had even made a stand. If anything there were increasing
numbers of ever larger and more powerful foes emerging. And the sun
did not shift in any degree, as if time itself were not moving.

Teazle danced through his fight in glory. Any way she could think
of for getting his attention might easily get him killed-there was no
second for a mistake in his moves-besides, she didn't think he'd
thank her for breaking this dream. It, and not she, was his heart's
desire. It occurred to her that her interference, whatever the outcome,
might not be wanted. In the midst of the killing he looked alight with
life. She could tell by the look on his face that he was exultant. There
was no better place for him to be.

Her heart felt the pierce and bite of loneliness. Did it matter that
it was a dream? Did it matter if he died here, and not above in the
much less clear-cut worlds of the material planes? Should she save him
now if he returned to an existence that was grey compared to this? Was
this his heaven? At first she'd been convinced she had to bring him
back. This was saving him, wasn't it? If she could even do it?

She thought of Zal, determined to run against Jack's hunt,
knowing it was fatal, could not be outrun. She gripped the sword hilt
in her hands. She missed him so much. Her own life was a struggle
every day with the greyness that she'd found in his absence. Why
should it be that way? She raged against it, but her rage was useless.

Was this to be the way they found him? Was Zal in a dream somewhere, a dream like this one, something that for him was better than
reality? Teazle had conjured this because he was a simple being, a creature of easy power. Would Zal's dream be like this or was he lost, a
stain on some faery's bit of cloth, forever beyond her reach and not
even able to dream? She had no way of knowing. And the years that
had passed, the years of nothing. It was unbearable. He was as lost as he had ever been to her, and at this moment it felt like an unbridgeable gulf, a search without end, futile, the kind you had to kid yourself about until the last of your friends filed away, bored of your obsession. Mom, Dad, Max, Tath, Zal ... even that stupid imp ... she
could hardly believe their loss, and she'd flung herself into the days so
she didn't have to feel it; she'd killed Sandra Lane so she didn't get distracted from her distractions. Well here was a distraction, and she
didn't want to wait.

With a scream of rage she dived down, the sword before her, and
plunged into the fray. If this was the Akasha's dream, then let it fight
to survive and prove itself worthy of her.

fter Ilya had tended his dogs he walked outside. The snow was
falling again, soft and silent, covering the red ice gently with its
million caresses.

"I thought you were godly. How the hell did they get the drop on
you?" Malachi asked, looking at the spot and trying not to imagine
what agony must pass when you could not stop living but you had lost
that much blood.

"I didn't expect them. Vampires, creatures of the emptiness, those
I am used to. Angels, I was not used to. Next time it will be a different
story. Their blades can destroy faery flesh; they are pure aether made to
an edge by a colder mind than mine. They had a kind of distant perfection, in their way." His voice was wistful. He turned away towards
the higher mountain, where the peak towered over them. "This glacier
is built of all the memories of the dead. I think it is many miles deep.
But at the bottom is the first memory of any being. If legend might
stand in some form, there we could expect to find the snows belonging
to Night herself. Then you might at least answer the question about
what to expect from one who wears her mantle."

"You're kidding," Malachi said, staring at the forlorn peak. "But
how would we..."

Ilya held up his hand and beckoned. Malachi followed him for
some distance through the gentle drifts as around them the soulfall
continued, their soft imploring touches something he turned from. He
felt himself a defiling presence in a sacred place, and wanted to apologise for every footstep he made, but at last they stopped at the foot of
a wide swath of snow.

Ilya made a sweeping motion with one arm, and Malachi almost
fell over with shock as the snow responded to his command and swept
aside in an avalanche of dislodged chunks that hurtled to the side even
as it started a fatal burst of energy heading downslope, ending in a
thunderous roar that shook the mountainside as it went foaming and
plunging down the pass. Trees and rocky outcrops vanished in its soft
clouds. Around them the air sparkled with tiny crystals turning in the
sunlight, and before them lay a sheer plane of ice, turquoise and azure
and pink in astonishing radiance, clear as glass.

"The Mirror of Forgetting," Ilya said to him quietly. "Of course it
would be here, close to the Hall of Champions and Under, where everything is lost that must be."

Malachi stared at it. For once he was confounded. "This was only
a story. Nobody I know has ever seen it. We thought it was an imagined thing."

The elf stretched out his thin, white hand towards the face of the
glacier, fingers extended but gentle as if he were reaching to clasp
hands with a friend, and in answer light rose from the blackness far
below where the ice met the rock of the mountain, shot through the
flaws in the structure, and made them shine like stilled flags in the
depths.

"Watch closely," he said. "For once the light is released it cannot
be caught again."

Malachi's eyes were wide and he felt the cold air strike tears in
them, but he didn't flinch. He leaned close to the tall figure at his side
as the surface moved suddenly with images from a past so long ago he felt it steal his shape away from him so that all he felt so sure of became
liquid and ran in his mind.

Darkness was alive. The light there was showed only the extent of
its reign. It moved like fluid, was sticky and elastic. What he saw
defied rational description. He could barely understand what he was
looking at. Unlike his shaped memory of the Fates at their butchery of
the mad chaos that Night's avatar had become, creating order from the
storm, this was a roiling sea of constant changes in which raw energy
became aether or matter or both and fled away to nothing again, evaporating as fast as it was spawned. Stars and the like, bodies and forms
flitted in and out of being. Everything bled together. There was no distinction-that was what he saw-only change. Even light itself
revealed its own birth in the foam of dark's silent boil and turn, a radiance bursting out spontaneously from the clash of powerful forces.
Night's hands were making and breaking, her body was the universe
itself, all he could imagine. Her dying was the birth of things as he
understood them, her ceaseless turning stilled into space and time and
ordered moments where matter might rest and grow complex before
entropy drove it back to the beginning again.

As the vision faded he tried by some impossible measure to print
it forever on his mind, but its strangeness was already sliding out of his
grasp as he turned to the elf.

"In the wrong hands that could be very, very bad indeed."

"We should go; time is fleeting," the elf replied, as though it wasn't
of much account to him personally. His indifference was calming. He let
Malachi lead him down through the snowy passes to where the beginnings of spring were melting water at the gateway to Under. By the time
they were in the low country Malachi was almost composed.

Madrigal was there. It was cold, in spite of the rise in temperature
and the increasing light, and she was still in her layers of winter furs,
her guns hanging by their straps on her back as she stood waiting for
them at the tall Turning Stones. There was no magical portal to see here, though the ground was uneven and Malachi wouldn't have
trusted his own footing on the Lock. Nonetheless it was the gate he
intended to use to get Ilya to Otopia, since he couldn't take him any
other way.

"Malachi," Madrigal said as they neared. She was smiling and his
heart leaped, though he tried not to notice.

"We cannot linger," he said, almost cross with her for not being at
her camp when he'd arrived. He stayed pacing in his cat form, on all
fours.

"Oh." She didn't seem disconcerted. "I hope you return soon."

"I thought you would have had to shoot this one," Malachi said
grumpily, nodding at Ilya. "But seems you don't need to bother."

"I don't think shooting him would kill him any further." She
grinned and opened her backpack. "Would you like a fish? Fresh
caught. You look hungry."

In other times he would have enjoyed the beginning of this game
but instead he found himself saying crankily, "I would like a kiss. I
think I've waited long enough."

Behind him he heard Ilya cough into his hand, smothering a
laugh. He lashed his tail, shocked that he'd allowed himself to make
the admission and regretting it. But Madrigal put her bag down and
crouched by his head. "You bad cat." She wagged her finger at him.
"First you must-"