Whiskey and Water (31 page)

"One on the back too?" Kit
asked, bright-eyed.

Matthew nodded. "Not a unicorn?"

"No," Kit said. "But
nearly. Angel." He stood, and shrugged. "You get your Christ
symbolism where you can."

It broke whatever tether held Matthew's
trembling hand at his collar. He let it fall to his side and sighed in relief,
and then chuckled, shaking his head.

They started forward again. Some little
time later, they came out of the trees alongside the stream, on a grassy moor
that bordered a high, stark hill—the first in a serried rank of hills just like
it. Downs, lonely and empty, their silhouettes more ragged than the smooth
curve of Horsebarn Hill, and a gloomy mist tangled around their shoulders,
though what Kit and Matthew had just left behind at the edge of the wood had
become broad midday. Kit slowed their pace, and let go of Matthew's hand.
"Not too much farther."

He crouched to slip the stone from his
boot, while Matthew set his hands on his hips and looked around. The cold
landscape did not invite visitors, but he could see the path, wending beside
the stream into a gorge between the downs, as promised. He breathed damp air
scented with moss and chlorophyll. "So Morgan wants power."

Morgan wants control of herself." Kit
scratched behind his ear. Control of her story. She always has — "

He stopped short, and Matthew turned to
see what had distracted him —and froze as if his blood had crystallized. The
hillside was pale brown and yellow-green, high-summer colors contradicting
spring-sour air. And there on the brow of the elevation, surrounded by soft
gray mist and watery light, gleamed the small white shape that had arrested
Marlowe midsentence. "Oh."

"You summoned him," Marlowe
murmured. "He heard you speak." "She," Matthew said.
"She's a jenny."

"You've seen her close enough to know
a stallion from a mare?" The poet didn't take his eyes off the animal.
Five hundred yards if she was an inch away, and she stood out as crisply as a
mother-of-pearl figurine in a stained-glass window. What light there was caught
her, glittered off her shoulder and horn as if someone on the ridge flashed a
mirror into the vale. Matthew could
feel
her looking back at them, could
feel her vast bottomless eyes and her shivering feral presence, could feel her
warm, solid flesh against his hand.

"Close enough," he said.
"She put her horn through my heart, Sir Christopher."

"I cry thee mercy," Marlowe
said. It had the sound of something mouthed by rote, an apology out of habit.
He was not hearing his own voice. And then cracked disappointment. "Oh,
she's gone."

And so she was. Matthew breathed deep, and
looked down, blinking as if she'd left an afterimage in her brightness. He
stood for a moment, silently, as Marlowe scuffed his palms on his trousers. The
silence was breathtaking.

"You're sure that was
your
unicorn?"
Marlowe said, finally, when it seemed like sound might carry again.

"Hard to tell at a distance,"
Matthew said. It fell flat. It felt cheap. But there were no words for the ache
in his breast, like a wild thing pulling its chains.

"That explains what Morgan wants with
you, then. She desireth a leash on everything, up to and including Lucifer. And
since I didn't suffice, you could be that, very well."

"Lucifer?
Me?"

"A Promethean Mage bound to a
unicorn?" Kit asked.

"Yes, but—"

Kit placed a warm hand on his elbow.
" 'What would be now the state of us / But for his Unicorn?' You listened
not to what I said regarding Christ, Matthew Magus."

"Sir Christopher—"

"Kit." Kit," Matthew
echoed. "I'm not a Christian."

"Neither is Morgan, but she's not the
sort to let worship interfere with damned practicality." "And
you?"

Kit turned and smiled at him, sunlight
through the mist that rolled along their path. "Oh, aye, I am that. Both
Christian, and damned." He pushed his hair back again. The damp air
annealed it in strings clinging to his brows and his cheeks. "Come along,
Matthew Magus. Your Dragon awaits."

They picked their way downstream along the
dirt path, which wound between cracked flint and granite boulders, worn
testimony that the water ran high in flood season. Kit went first, sure-footed
and possessed of two good hands, and Matthew followed less nimbly. The cliff
Carel had described loomed before them, a louring face roped with thick vines,
green and glossy in the mist rising from the stream. Kit drew up before it, and
Matthew paused at his side. If he hadn't seen the outline of the mouth behind
the vines, he would have felt it. A warm draft, dry and scented like heated
stone, turned the leaves on their stems and brushed a few stray strands of
Matthew's hair against his face.

"Coming?" he asked Kit, who was
in the process of leaning against a boulder and folding his arms. "I'll
pass, if it's all the same," Kit answered, as if bored to tears by the
prospect of bearding a Dragon in her lair. The prickle of humor in his voice
gave him away. "I shall stay right here."

Stay in the old sense.
I will wait for
you.
Matthew smiled as he turned away and squared his shoulders, that blank
fear lessening for the first time since he'd stepped through into Faerie. What
an unlikely place to have found a friend.

He pushed the vines aside and entered the
cave, while Kit pretended not to watch him go.

His first thought was that he'd been
foolish not to bring a flashlight. The tunnel was broad, the floor not precisely
flat underfoot because it was worked in a pattern of briars and tended to a
downward slope. The light through the heavy foliage obscuring the mouth was
filtered and dim and Matthew could tell the cave went a long way back.

He rested the knuckles of his right hand
against the wall and began to walk, sliding each foot forward and testing his
weight against it before trusting the floor. He could call light; he felt the
potential like an itch in his fingertips, but he didn't trust his own strength,
and he didn't wish to disturb what dwelt here any more than necessary.

He'd see how far he got in the dark.

And it grew very dark. The blackness of
caverns has a quality all its own. A texture. Time is suspended in that
darkness. The space between heartbeats grows enormous. Matthew felt it, the slumbering
awareness that surrounded him, the warm dry air stirring his clothing.

There is a curious phenomenon known to
meteorology as the foehn effect. Dry air cooled by a glacier becomes a
katabatic wind, which is to say that the heavier, colder atmosphere drains away
from the peaks. Sinking from the mountain slopes, this frigid exhalation is transmuted
through the alchemy of adiabatic compression into a hot, ionized
dragon's-breath reputed to provoke madness, wickedness, and sickness where it
blows. These winds have names:
Chinook, Sirocco, Koembang, Simoom, Samiel.
And
those names are stories.

Matthew, descending like Inanna in the
darkness, breathed the mother of them all.

It was good that he trailed his hand along
the wall, for the passage curved on the broad pleasing arc of a grand
staircase, spiraling down. His sweat was not all from the warm air. His neck
felt clammy, and his heart jostled painfully against his ribs. It seemed a very
long time before he saw a faint red glow ahead, painting the wall, picking out
the details of relief carving that his numb knuckles and shod feet were too insensitive
to discern. The dark-adapted eye picked out new brightness easily and a scent
arrived alongside: a bitter sun-baked smell, a mineral reek with overtones of
heated metal, of petroleum and juniper and incense. Rosewood, sandalwood,
dragonsblood, myrrh.

He'd been smelling it for some time, he
realized, as some atavistic awareness halted his foot in midair. Fear coiled
and slid in his belly, rising behind his pounding heart to close his throat.
Static as a hare in a lamper's light, reduced to a bunny's defense: stare,
crouch, gather. Be ready to run.

He heard the predator breathing.

Just around the curve.

Matthew inhaled shallowly through his
mouth, through the panic in his bowels, and dropped his hand away from the
wall. One step at a time, he closed the distance between here and there, moving
into the light. Into the presence of the Dragon.

It would have been arrogance to consider
himself prepared, and he knew that. But standing there, framed in the high,
arched gateway to the abode of the mother of dragons, her carnelian glare
painting his face with blinding brightness, he understood that it was arrogance
even to come here. Arrogance merely to force her acknowledgement of his
existence. Arrogance to so much as allow himself to come to her attention. The
sort of arrogance that would be paid for sooner rather than later, he feared.

He took a breath, and came the last five
steps to the cliff edge.

The tunnel didn't open out at ground
level, and for that he was grateful. Instead, he had a view of a chamber big
as a football dome. It seemed at first firelit, although there was no fire in
evidence. The coals across which the glow crawled were the scales of the Dragon
herself.

She hung from the cavern's domed cathedral
ceiling like an enormous bat, furled in massive wings, drowsing over the banks
of her treasure. Matthew steadied himself on the lip of the tunnel left-handed and
craned his head back to observe her slumber. She seemed to shift before his
eyes, her cabled hide scaled and ropy as ironwood boles, the skin shimmering
under char-dark scales with an ember heat. Her head was pulled up between her
shoulders, her eyes closed. The fog sliding around her glowed rosy with her
furnace light.

He swallowed the fear in his throat, and
tried to find his voice. "Mist?"

The name cracked coming between his teeth
and fell broken at his feet. He swallowed painfully and said it once again,
failing his attempt to draw a breath. "Mist!"

One eye slit. The wings fanned wide,
stirring the hot wind, two long fingers on the leading edge grasping at air.
The pops as her joints responded to the stretch resounded like the cannonball
thunder of river ice breaking.

Matthew flinched. The bat wing morphed,
smoothed back into her shoulder, one spiny five-taloned foot on a twisted pillar
of a leg reaching to the floor. Claws flexed sleepily through heaps of
misshapen coin and cracked, discolored jewels, marred by the heat of her flesh.
She arched her back, long and lithe, wingless and then winged again—this time
with a third set of limbs at her shoulders. Her sturdy neck elongated into a
snaky curve as she slithered to the cavern floor. Her back feet released their
grip only after her front half was securely on the ground, weasel-lithe, unholy
grace in a beast the size of a jetliner.

The thump of her hind feet striking
knocked Matthew into the cavern wall. He braced himself, scrambling back from
the lip.
She could bring the whole cave system down with a breath.

She settled on her haunches like a
gargoyle, wings flicked tight, and brought her muzzle down beside the opening.
"Matthew Szczegielniak," she said. Her voice was a mountain's voice,
a bass choir or an arrangement for viola and cello, a dozen voices in one, deep
and slow and dull as iron even as it sparked rich brutal harmonies.
"Mage," she said, turning her head to inspect him with each eye in
turn. "It was your folk who bound me here, before I was freed. Have you
come to make amends ? "

He hadn't thought of it, but an apology
cost him nothing. He bowed low and spread his hands, feeling like a mountebank
in his gaudy finery. "On behalf of what remains of the Prometheus Club, I
do, O Dragon.

"Plain talk suffices," she said.
The dizzying stench of charred meat washed over him. "You do not speak for
Prometheus. Or for the Prometheans."

"I am one-quarter of them," he
answered, swallowing against his rising gorge. "My saying so is as good
as anyone's. And I am sorry we, bound you. I did what I could to end that
binding. Not without cost.

"Magus, you disturb my rest."
Her nostrils flared. Her breath curled his eyelashes and scorched his eyebrows
until he could smell the burning hair. He might have stammered. He might have
apologized again.

Instead, he opened his mouth to speak, and
said nothing, because he realized that he did not know what he intended to ask
for. He almost squeaked on a sharp, hysterical giggle, because it also occurred
to him that if there were anything more dangerous than lying to dragons, it was
probably waking them up without a very good excuse.

He managed a painful inhalation. The
breath that should have settled him reeked of Mist. A flawed plan, obviously.

"Speak," she instructed, and
coiled back just a little, as if to give him space. Or perhaps to strike, like a
snake. There was that anticipatory tautness in the curve of her neck. A low
hiss followed the flicker of a tongue. "Matthew Magus. Ask."

Matthew braced himself, tugging his
topcoat closed. He couldn't hear the jingle of talismans over the rasp of the
Dragon's scales on gold, but it would have to do. He might be a bad Mage, a
broken and disloyal one, but he was Promethean and he had his pride. There were
so many questions.
How do I heal my magic? How do I free myself? How do I
stop Jane Andraste? How do I protect the iron world from Faerie, even now?