“I have no idea,” Clement said, as one who was above such crass concerns. I looked enquiringly at Dafira, who blinked, clearly surprised that anyone would need to ask, and said, “They manufacture night.”
“They . . . I beg your pardon.” I felt as if I had been hit in the head with the cognitive equivalent of a brick. “They manufacture night?”
“Of course,” Dafira said, still as a missionary explaining good hygiene and Sunday church-going to an unwashed savage. “We are nocturnal, and a very little sunlight will prove fatal to us. The sun blinds us, and burns us, and the daylight dragons who hunt us find us laughably easy prey. So we hired the shadows to make night in our factories.”
“Do they know that’s what they’re doing?” Clement said.
“It isn’t a secret,” Dafira said, tilting his head worriedly.
“You mean that they knew,” Clement said in a low, terribly even voice. “All the time that they were pleading for our sympathy at how harshly their masters treated them, they knew. They knew that the work they did ensured that those masters would retain their power.” The demi-angel came to his feet, his wings beating so wildly that I was obliged to crouch down on the floor to avoid being knocked senseless, and his voice rose into a shriek: “They lied to us! Selfish conniving beasts!”
I discovered Dafira was on the floor next to me. “I’ve never seen a dominie lose their temper,” he said, sounding rather awed.
“Can you, er, do anything?”
“I shouldn’t think so. But I can’t imagine this will last long. He’ll exhaust himself, if nothing else.”
Indeed, the frenzy of wings was already slowing, and I could hear Clement’s breath laboring in his chest beneath his howling rage. And then, abruptly, it was over; the demi-angel sagged back onto the bench. Dafira and I stood up cautiously, but Clement merely buried his face in his hands and wept, his wings wrapped protectively around his shoulders. Dafira took my elbow and tugged me down the steps.
“Mirach said she trusted me not to be cruel,” I said.
“You were not cruel. You asked a question Clement should have asked for himself long ago.”
“It looks like cruelty from here,” I said, gesturing at the bitterly weeping demi-angel.
Dafira tilted his head. “You are asking questions which we have not thought to ask ourselves, vampires as much as dominies. It is not surprising that you are causing disturbances, but neither is it your fault.”
“Is it not?”
Dafira tilted his head the other way, round red eyes unreadable. “We have found, in the past, that no traveller comes to this city without a reason. In general, those reasons have been their own, burdens they carried with them whether they knew it or not. But perhaps you have come here, not on your account, but on ours.”
“You, er, ascribe to me an ability I am quite sure I lack.”
The round eyes blinked consideringly. “And yet you have already made me consider a question I would never otherwise have thought to ask. Does our manufac—”
But what Dafira’s question was, I did not then learn.
I felt the vampires before I heard or saw them. They were silent as owls; when I looked up, searching for the source of the crawling oppression I felt, they were there, great pale shapes against the endless night. As I watched, they dropped lightly to the sidewalk around us one by one, a series of bat-winged Samothraces. I assumed that one of them was Mirach, but there were at least three female vampires among them, and I had no hope of telling them apart. And then their massed miasma hit me, and as I choked on it, the panic-white awareness of them as predators sent me to my knees, a foolish rabbit surrounded by foxes.
There was a perturbed muttering and shifting among them, and I quite clearly heard Mirach say, “Why is Clement weeping?”
“I told him the truth,” Dafira said dryly.
“About what?”
“About what our factories produce. The gentleman wished to know.”
“I thought his business was recovering the dominie’s relic.” Her voice was cold, laden with threat. I could not catch my breath, could not stop making dreadful undignified noises like a cat afflicted with a hairball. Could not defend myself, explain myself.
Dafira said, “It is not so simple. For if the goblins did not steal the relic, the shadows must have. And there are other matters.”
I realized that the softness brushing my hair and neck was the membrane of Dafira’s wing. He had put himself bodily between Mirach and me. I had not and would not have expected such a gesture, would never have expected a vampire to be my champion.
“Other matters?” Mirach said, as if she felt the matters already on the table were more than sufficient.
Dafira asked her, as he had asked Clement, “Do you personally know of any shadow who had succeeded in buying back their name?” And, raising his voice slightly, “Any of you?”
There was the faintest uneasy shuffling, and I managed finally to control my breathing. I did not, however, dare to raise my head, but remained as I was, sheltered behind Dafira’s wing like a child behind his mother’s skirts.
The silence stretched, twisted. No vampire spoke, though it was clear that each of them wished to; like Clement and Dafira before them, they could not. No one knew of a shadow who had sailed to Heft Averengh; no one knew of a shadow who had earned back its name.
“And that would be the answer,” Dafira said softly, “if we asked every vampire, dominie, and shadow in the city. It has never happened. Never.”
“But what does that signify?” one of the other vampires said. “We haven’t prevented them from doing so.”
“We quite intended them to do so, in sooth.” A third vampire, older, not as stentorian as Alhaior, but with a mellow, resonant voice, “and thus the fact that they have not is disturbing, if nothing more.”
“As is,” said a female vampire who was not Mirach, “the fact that no one has noticed.”
“Including the shadows themselves,” said another vampire, and then they were all talking together, theorizing and exclaiming and arguing.
I got very carefully to my feet, and Dafira murmured, “Are you well?”
Are you warm, my daughter? Are you warm? “Quite well, thank you. I, er . . . I apologize for . . . ”
“Most sentient creatures react that way to a blood of vampires. Only sapient creatures are foolish enough to try to apologize for it.” His tone was teasing rather than offended, and I managed a weak smile in appreciation of the distinction he was making. Then another vampire caught his attention; he turned away, and, not wishing to remain where I was, I mounted again to the portico and reclaimed my seat beside Clement.
“It is I,” I said quietly.
“What’s happening?” Clement whispered.
“The vampires are, er, arguing.” I thought of what it must be like for him, surrounded by the reek of charnal roses and the babel of voices and unable to see for himself what they were actually doing. “Do you, er, want to go back inside?”
“They won’t hurt me,” he said confidently, perfect faith transmuting to perfect arrogance. Although I knew it was wrong to feel sympathy for the vampires, I could not help it. The dominies had trapped them as neatly as any predator, and they had not even the reprieve of death to hope for. I wondered if any of the vampires—clear-sighted as they were—had yet realized that. I said nothing in answer to Clement, merely sat and waited for the vampires to come to some resolution.
I was still waiting when there was a clatter of tiny hooves and a triumphant bellow of “We got the shiny!” and a throng of goblins boiled out of the neighboring building’s cellar, a shadow struggling in their midst.
The vampires reacted like a flock of pigeons beset by an unexpected cat; they scattered and sought higher ground. Two of them ended up in St. Christopher’s portico, and it was at that moment I realized I had lost track of Dafira in the confusion and had no hope of finding him again unless he chose to approach me.
The goblins, o
blivious to the effect they were having, surged to a halt in the middle of the street; above their babble, I could hear the shadow protesting stridently but ineffectively, until one of the goblins cuffed it across the back of the skull. It said, “Ow!” and fell silent, sulkily rubbing its head.
With the streetlights lit, it was easy to identify the goblins’ leader; trousers that had seemed merely dark by the light of the little tin lantern were revealed to be bright purple, and it was that goblin who stood forward from the rest and shouted, “Where’s the bloke wiffout wings?”
Immediately, all the vampires were staring at me, politely appalled by the company I chose to keep. I felt myself blushing, but there was nowhere to hide, nothing to do but stand up and say, “I . . . er, I’m over here.”
They thronged around me like small children or dogs, both of which make me terribly nervous. But the goblins were purposeful; their purple-trousered leader said, “Cough it up, shadder,” and the others jostled threateningly, not quite butting but clearly ready to. And the shadow, a spindly creature even more exophthalmic than D-7-16 and with a look in its pop-eyes that boded trouble, dug unwillingly in its pockets and held out on its fishbelly palm a lump of glass, roughly spherical, with a mote of brightness dancing in it, a mote I might have thought a mirage of my own eyes if it had not been for the vampires, who had gathered close, shying violently, arms and wings both coming up to shield their vulnerable eyes. There were even one or two yelps of protest, high-pitched as the cries of bats, and I distinctly saw the look of malicious satisfaction that flitted across the shadow’s face and was gone.
I closed my own hand over the glass as quickly as I could, flinching away from the clammy touch of the shadow’s fingers. The vampires began cautiously to straighten; the glass was warm against my skin, smooth and uneven. I turned; Clement was standing, wings half spread, expression hopeful, frightened.
I said carefully, “The, er, goblins have found St. Christopher’s Glass for you, Dominie Clement. A shadow had it.”
And as Clement stretched out his hand and I gave him the relic, being careful not to expose the vampires to it again, the purple-trousered goblin said, “Tell ’im ’oo you are,” and the chorus chimed in: “Yeah . . . Give ’im your number . . . Speak up, shadder, don’t be shy.” I turned back and saw the goblins blocking the shadow’s attempts to sidle away. It looked more than a little panicked, and its pale pop-eyes blinked up at me beseechingly.
I found myself unmoved, and merely raised one eyebrow in my best imitation of my terrifying prep school Latin master.
The shadow quailed quite gratifyingly and blurted, “E-9-35.”
The vampires hissed, open-mouthed feral displeasure, and I clenched my hands until my fingernails bit into my palms to keep from succumbing to panic again. A female vampire came forward. I thought it might be Mirach, but her voice when she spoke was high and sweet, and cold with fury. “You are of my demesne,” she said, and the shadow looked quite ill with terror. “How did the relic come into your possession?”
It shook its head wildly, its mouth compressed so tightly it all but vanished. The vampire’s face did not change, but I read incredulity as well as rage in the movement of her shoulders and wings. She took a single step forward; the shadow shrank back, cowering against my legs and whimpering. I jerked away in disgust, and the vampire’s hand shot out, closing in the shadow’s collar, dragging it forward. It let out a shriek and began babbling, a torrent of words at first indecipherable, but gradually resolving into sense.
I did not fully follow the complexities and ramifications of the shadow’s explanation—although it was clear from their grim nods that the vampires did—but I got the general gist. It seemed there had been dissension among the shadows. Although they had not recognized the root of the problem any more than the vampires had, they had been becoming increasingly discontent, and had been unable to agree on how to proceed. I gathered, although E-9-35’s rhetoric became obfuscatory at this point, that most of the shadows favored the rational, reasoned approach of appointing a spokesman and petitioning for an audience with the Wisdom of the vampires, which seemed to be their ruling council. But this course of action—again for reasons I did not fully understand—was very slow, and some shadows, mostly low ranking technicians like E-9-35 itself, had become impatient. They had thought negotiations might proceed more swiftly and more in their favor if they had some leverage. And thus they had stolen St. Christopher’s Glass.
It had been D-7-16’s plan, E-9-35 insisted, and I was no longer surprised that D-7-16 had so cheerfully led me off on a wild goose chase. D-7-16’s plan, executed by a whole cadre of shadows, and the relic given into E-9-35’s safekeeping while they tried to figure out a way to use it. But since they could not come up with a plan that would not reveal their own guilt, it had been seeming increasingly likely that the relic would never be used at all.
The shadow’s voice faltered and trailed off; the vampires were closing in around it, eyes bright and opaque and implacable, and I thought, shivering, that revenge was a concept natural to predators. The female vampire hauled the shadow closer, her forearms cording and her mouth opening. But I was distracted at that moment by a tug on my sleeve.
I looked down; the purple-trousered goblin looked up at me and whispered hoarsely, “D’you think the domino will like us now?”
I said to the goblin, trying to sound kind instead of merely squeamish, “Let’s find out.”
Clement had withdrawn into the corner of the portico, his hands closed tightly around St. Christopher’s Glass, his wings spread like a screen.
“Dominie,” I said, “the goblins, er, wish to know if you will like them now.”
Clement’s white-blind eyes were falsely bright with tears. He said, sounding genuinely surprised, “Do the goblins wish me to like them?”
The heat and mass of small bodies was all around me, the weight of their yearning almost as palpable.
“Yes,” I said for them. “They do.”
Clement slipped St. Christopher’s Glass into his sleeve and said, “I have been wrong about so many things. Perhaps I have been wrong about them as well.” He sank gracefully to his knees, wings fanning wide for balance and surrounding us all with the scent of nutmeg. “Come,” he said, and his smile was breath-taking. “Let me meet these goblins who wish my friendship.”
They pressed past me, though I noticed they were careful not to crowd Clement. Their leader said, “Ta very much, guv,” and then I was on the outside of the newborn community of goblins and demi-angel. I had to remind myself sharply that I wanted to return to my home, not to be adopted by the goblins of the night city.
The vampires had moved away with their victim, and matters in that quarter were ominously silent. I sat down on the steps of St. Christopher’s to wait, and wished wearily that there were any point in waiting for dawn.
The lamplighters had come around to extinguish the streetlights, averting their eyes with obsessive care from the clustered blood of vampires, before anyone, goblin, demi-angel, vampire, or shadow, remembered my existence. But finally a single vampire approached the church; when he spoke, I knew him for Dafira, and I tried not to notice the darkness staining his mouth and chin and spotting the collars of his shirt.
“We have decided. We shall destroy the night factories and give the shadows back their names.”
“All at once?”
“If we try to take our time over it, it will not happen at all,” Dafira said grimly. “We may be short-sighted selfish fools, but we have at least learned that much from experience.”
“Ah. . . . Er, yes.”
“Will you come with us? We must explain to the dominies and the shadows, and we thought perhaps you would like to watch the destruction of the factories. It should be quite spectacular.”
It was kindly meant, and I could not deny that I was curious. “But then you will take me home?”
“Yes,” Dafira said without hesitation or hedging.
“I will tr
ust you,” I said, and shook hands with my second vampire.
After the Dragon
for Elise Matthesen
After the dragon, she lay in the white on white hospital room and wanted to die.
The counselor came and talked about stages of grief and group therapy, her speech so rehearsed Megan could hear the grooves in the vinyl; Megan turned the ruined side of her face toward her and said, “Do you have a group for this?”
She felt the moment when the counselor dropped the ball, didn’t have a pre-processed answer, when just for a second she was a real person, and then she picked it up again and gave Megan an answer she didn’t even hear.
The doctors talked about reconstructive surgery and skin grafts, and Megan agreed with them because it was easier than listening. It didn’t matter; they could not restore the hand that had seared and twisted and melted in the dragon’s heat. They could not restore the breast rent and ruined by the dragon’s claws. They couldn’t stop the fevers that racked her, one opportunistic infection after another like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Her risk of thirteen different kinds of cancer had skyrocketed, and osteoporosis had already started in the affected arm and shoulder.
They could not erase the dragon from her body, and she hated them for it.
In death, a dragon reverts to the minerals from which it rises into life. Rhyolite, iron, bright inclusions of quartz, and—stabbing through—the dragon’s terrible obsidian bones, every edge sharper than cruelty.
No dragon can be moved from where it dies; the last profligate expense of heat welds it to the geology of its death. The dragon that died on that strip of beach in Oregon turned the sand to glass for fifty yards. Strange glass, black and purple and green, twisted in shapes no glassblower could imagine. The government brought their Geiger counters, but there, they were lucky. This dragon had not risen from Trinity or the Nevada Proving Ground or Pikinni Atoll. Its poisonous heat did not survive it.
After the dragon, her mother would not look at her.
She came, and she yanked the curtains back, dazzling Megan’s aching eyes. She turned her smile like a call-me-Nancy searchlight on nurses and orderlies and doctors and interns; no one could escape, least of all Megan. She gossiped ruthlessly about women Megan knew, women who were healthy and successful and happy, women who were not lying in a white on white on white hospital room, women who had never seen a dragon. She brought flowers, daffodils and gaudy tulips and vast red roses, and the hospital room took them in and made them look fake and shrill, like her voice.
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Page 27