Chasing the Dragon (53 page)

The elf had his head on one side slightly, chin drawn back; his eyes
were deeply puzzled. "Zal, is that ... concern for me on your face?"

"No!" The captain's wail of disappointment almost drowned him
out as she surveyed the missed shot and witnessed the severing of her
lines by the angels. At the same time the dark shades plunged forwards
across the gulf, a boiling, indistinct mass like a cloud come to cover
their skies. "Man the blasters! To stations! Get ready to fire nets."

Zal was shaken, but the moment with Ilya felt more compelling
than his impending doom. "Shouldn't it be?"

Ilya looked at him with something approaching wonder. "Did you
forget ... ?"

"Yes," Zal snapped. The black cloud had blotted out most of the
sight of the Fleet now. It was speeding towards them. "I did. I forgot
everything. But apparently not you. Now isn't the time for a reunion.
If you want that you have to act. What should I do? More concern?"
He darted forward over the last few metres that separated them and
hugged the tall thin frame, just able to feel its bitter cold surface,
though that didn't lessen his grip. "I love you. I need you. I want you
to live. Don't die. There, now please, stop her! Stop her." The strange
thing was that as he talked he found he meant what he was saying. He
really didn't remember any details, only the feelings. For the first time
in a long time, he knew that he was telling the truth as it was meant
to be, without regard for incidental things, like facts.

The faery had begun to try and reason with the ghost but she was
fighting him. Her face was distraught, a ruin, tears running down it in
big, black inky lines. "No, no no!" she was moaning as her hands mas tered the difficult controls and brought them around so their starboard
side faced the huge sailing ship. The demon and elf and other ghosts
were all set, seated on swivelling gun mounts, their odd barrels taking
aim, the hum of the power generator becoming a scream. Zal had no
idea what they even did.

"Jones," the faery said, holding onto her even though she was
fighting and swearing at him. Her crew looked to her. All their faces
were so sad. Zal didn't understand. "Jones. For me. For the crew. For
what you learned. Maybe there's more."

"There is no more!" she cried. "Don't you hear her, in your mind?
You didn't. You don't know what she's like! She ate us, Mal. She
destroyed us! And him, he's like her. Shadow!" She wrenched her head
around and opened her mouth.

Zal knew what was coming. He slapped his hand over her face and
pressed on it with all his might, pulling hard on every scrap of shade,
every bit of the Void's natural dark, on the black tears running on her
cheeks. He stared into her narrowed eyes as she glared her hate and
rage at him. Then he thought he had heard right after all. "She?" He
looked away from her terrified face at the other two. "She?" He looked
over his left shoulder.

Glinda stared at him fixedly through a haze of Old Havana. "Ahha," she said slowly. "I didn't think Xavien was all that great a demon
name. I think our necromancer is playing a game of charades. Figures
they're not brought up in the best schools of meddling with dark
forces. Who in their right mind would piss me off that much?"

Unable to move in his grip Jones rolled her eyes toward the Temeraire.
Zal realised he was crushing her. He could feel the substance of her
melting against his insistence, literally, her glow fragmenting, fading. He
let her go and backed away in despair. She reeled against her control deck.
The oncoming wave struck the ship, and where it touched its glittering,
glowing edges the light was instantly consumed. Ilya, who had been
gazing at Zal, raised one hand without even turning around.

"Get back," he said in a tone of command that was as gently
spoken as it was absolute.

The captain, Jones, spat at Zal and took hold of her wheel again,
bracing herself for the onslaught as if for a hurricane. But it never
reached them. Like mist rising and clearing with the sun, Ilya's command had dispersed it into primary particles. Zal felt it wash past him
invisibly, too discontinuous and disparate to be any more than an
unpleasant, itching chill. In seconds that too had gone.

"What the hell?" Zal said, an echo of Glinda, but the effect hadn't
gone unnoticed aboard the other ship. One of the angels had suddenly
crossed the gap. Its explicit examination of Ilya was obvious, even
though it hovered above and in front of him without making any significant movement. He stared back at it, watchfully, with what Zal
thought was intense bitterness rather than rapture.

Nobody was staring at it with more awe than Jones however.
"What ... what is that?" she whispered hoarsely to the faery who was
standing behind her, supporting her. "It looks like ... is it ... ?"

"Yes," he said, as elegant and insouciant as if they were in a
pleasant lounge and not at the brink of extinction. "It's an angel."

"I never saw one this close." She gave a snort, an almost noiseless
one-shot laugh. "Isn't that just the shits? They chased me. I was too
scared to turn around and look."

"Not entirely without reason," Ilya said dryly.

The angel abruptly vanished and reappeared some five hundred
metres away on the Temeraire's deck. The two of them spiralled up suddenly in a rush of light and remained close to the crow's nest there.

Abruptly Jones slapped a switch and the power generator quieted.
The ship stopped thrumming and they slowed to a halt with a brief
hum. The two ships floated a hundred metres apart and the Fleet massed
around them, gathering close on all sides so there could be no escape.

"Captain?" her demon crew asked from his position at the front gun.

"Stand down," she said. "We died once out here. It's enough. We're done." She pulled away from the faery and walked away from the helm
and ran down the steps in the centre of the deck, followed closely by
the demon, while the rest of the crew reluctantly went about the business of disarming.

The faery glanced uneasily at the Temeraire and then more urgently
back at Zal. "Zal, what happened, did you really forget everything?"

"I don't know," Zal said. "Did I know you?"

The faery seemed disturbed. His cat ears flattened to his head.
"Yeah." He glanced at the deck hatch and then back at Zal.

Zal felt awkward. He looked to Ilya, who was still staring at him.
"You're not ..."

"He's an avatar," Glinda said behind him with undisguised surprise and what Zal thought might be professional envy. "Jack's supplanter. The twice-dead Winter King. It's complicated. Faery remade
him. It does that. Long story."

"Oh right." Zal nodded at her. "I thought he was Ilyatath Taliesetra. An elf. But yeah. Something happened to him."

"Who are you talking to, Zal?" the black faery asked, peering
around.

"The Three Sisters," Ilya answered for him as Zal said, "Glinda."
They paid no attention as the cat fey hissed and muttered under his
breath. For a moment there was only the two of them.

"What happened to you?" Ilya asked him.

"I ..." Zal began, but he couldn't go on because there was only
blank space in his head, not even lint. "There was a girl," he said. "She
had silver eyes." It was what came into his thoughts first. At this he
saw Ilya's face tighten slightly and take on a look of caution. The
faery's even more so. "What?"

"We can have a reunion later, as you said." The faery pointed to
himself. "Malachi. Now that ship is coming this way, and when it does
any chance we had to act will probably be gone so tell us what's going
on from your end and make it fast."

Zal looked and saw the Temeraire's crew making ready to board.
"There is something going on over there that isn't what it looks like.
Demon, necromancer, manages the beasties, superior mastery of
ghosts, strange behaviour, using people's insides to create doppelgangers ... but that woman just said ... she said she ... and those
angels. I don't think two angels would be here if this were what it
looked like."

"And what's that?" Malachi asked, folding his arms.

"An attempt to seize the ultimate in aetheric power and re-create
the world. I mean, is that what you thought?" He looked at the faery,
who was mulling it over, his jaw jutting, and at Ilya.

"There is only a chance of that," Ilya said. We are here and ready
to fight because we have been used and fought. It is possible those
things are unhappy chances that came in the wake of deeds done for a
greater good, but they did not feel that way at the time. But look, they
are here. We have stopped. You got your wish as usual, Zal." That bitterness touched his mouth again. "Now we will see who is right or
wrong in their guesses." He reached out almost compulsively to touch
Zal and their hands met and Ilya's passed through Zal's.

"Tingles," Zal said, sorry. "I'm only partly material enough."

"All material form here is largely illusory," Ilya said. "And the longer
we all remain present in planes not suited to us the worse it will get."

"I thought you were right at home."

"I am still relatively low on the rank," the elf replied with wry
humour. "I am not an angel or a Titan"-he discreetly flicked an eyebrow as he glanced over Zal's shoulder-"to be dotting around at my
whims without a price."

Zal looked back at Glinda. She was sitting with her feet up, glass
in hand. She waved him back regally to his conversation. He glanced
at Ilya and whispered, "Can you see her?"

Ilya shook his head. "No. I see only you but I know what happened to
you in Under, so it is no surprise to me that you are ridden by the Three."

"It isn't like that," Zal said. "There's only one of her."

"Of course there is," Ilya said.

By now they were surrounded by the Temeraire's freebooter crew
holding various weapons pointed at them. Other vessels of the Fleet
were so close they also could have boarded, but they held off with poles
and ropes, tying up the ship fast so she could not move.

"Take them below," the demon said from the Temeraire's deck.
"Except that one." It pointed at Ilya. "This one is too dangerous."

"Ah no," Zal said, mouth ahead once more. "If he stays I stay."

"Three for me," added the faery, as though he were lengthily and
heartily bored of such affairs and would much rather have done something else.

Glinda whispered in Zal's ear, her breath warm on his neck. "Get
me closer to it. Closer."

They were marched across a narrow board, on either side of which
the infinite Void fell away into forever. Zal would have liked to stand
on it longer, but he was between Ilya and Malachi so he crossed. This
route took him past Xavien, so he pretended he was interested in Ilya's
back, stepped closer, and tripped himself on Ilya's heel, falling sideways against the demon. Xavien leapt aside with great speed but he
wasn't fast enough and Zal's hand touched him. Immediately he felt a
shock go through his arm. As he made to get up he found the angels
on either side of him, pushing him back, but he knew then and there
what was going on. As he got up he was looking into the demon's face,
seeing it for what it was, a mask ... and the demon was staring at him
with horrified shock and a loathing so intense that it was difficult to
meet it and still rise to his feet. In that second the Fleet wavered, a
ripple of dissent running through it like the weak buck of a trapped
animal's one free limb.

"No," the demon said, backing away one step from Zal as he
straightened. "No. Stay away from me. For that you shall die." His
gaze swept around quickly. "All of you." Its hand shot out, fingertips pointing at them. Zal felt a dark thing like a doubt or a question
skitter around in his chest, find his centre, and take hold.

The drawing on the combined powers was so fast that none of them
could counter it.

The demon's fingers clawed and it had them. "Die," it hissed and
drew its fingers slowly into a fist. And Zal was dying, his connection
to everything pouring away, scratching away down the thread that
bound him to the shadowkin's hand. She was so strong there was no
counter to it. Beside him he felt Ilya's hand and took it in his own. He
felt himself falling on the faery's collapsed body and inside him the
roaches of his own words, all the things he had said, went rushing
around talking about him, babbling his short, dull life away before
they poured across the line into the demon's closing hand. He saw the
light of the angels and wondered why they had taken to her and abandoned him. And along the line he felt how much his slayer hated him,
how she had let him live only out of morbid curiosity and now she was
glad that she was undoing the last of him, pathetic as it was.

At that second he felt the last thing he expected to feel. He knew
her. He knew her because she was like every rotten high elf that had
ever hated him and she was like all the darkness that they had hated
him for, with power enough already to make anything of herself that
she wished, and she made this. Her genius dream was so small she had
nothing but death to give him. And he already had death. He saw
Glinda step in front of him.

She looked cross. "Not that close, you arse," she said, jamming her
cigar stub into her mouth.

"Is this the end?" he asked her.

"Yeah in a minute." She flicked her shot glass out into her hand and
then, in a mockery of the demon, closed her fist on it so that it burst into
shards. She shook the pieces out of her hand and cut the cord.

Xavien screamed with rage. He turned to the crew. "To the Deep
with all speed!" They rushed to obey and the Fleet began to re-form about them as they got under way. Ilya and Malachi lay on the deck,
still not moving though their presence was enough of a sign they had
been spared along with him.

"Hey Zal," Glinda said, picking the rest of the glass out of her
palm. "Gimme that book a second."