The white dragon whipped among the pillars of the hidden crypt like a snake. She crashed forth in an explosion of dazzle and circled once above the snow-covered woods to get her bearings, silken wings spread. Gray clouds lay low over the white-choked vales, the wind-scoured fells. There had been snow last night, and more was coming. She rose into those silent vapors, blending with them, white as the mists and snow. She knew the land’s shape, and the way the hills wore their garment of heather, knew their stilled streams and ponds. Ears and heart and the memory of older dreams took her to the bare black trees where the bandits had laid hands on the boys.
The younger boy had cut a man with his child’s sword, and the blood lay glaring on the snow. The man he’d hurt was holding his bleeding thigh and cursing while the others held the boy and beat him. His brother, disarmed and weak from the poison, struggled against a dark-bearded bandit who bound his wrists with a thong. This bandit was saying to their leader, a stocky dead man with demon eyes, “Better be worth it is all I got to say.” Then as the white dragon dropped down out of the mists overhead, the dark-bearded man looked up and screamed.
The white dragon ripped with her claws at the bare treetops that prevented her from tearing straight down on them. One of the bandits grabbed the smaller boy and tried to run with him; the boy shoved his boot between the man’s legs, tripping him, and the man got up and ran without him. The demon leader, the stocky man once called Dogface, started toward the boy, but the white dragon ripped another tree and flung it between him and his prey. “Mother!” the older boy cried.
The bandits were gone. Their leader, after a moment’s hesitation, followed, though slower and looking back. The white dragon spat fire after them but did not pursue. She hung soundless above the trees, her opal gaze that could triangulate on a rabbit from five hundred feet fixing on the boys. Sinuous as a water snake, long tail swaying back and forth for balance, she cleared herself a place to pass through the interwoven branches of bare oak and bare elm, then raised her great wings and settled through the hole.
“Mother!” the older boy said again, and the younger, who’d gone to fetch his small sword where the men had thrown it aside, came limping up, his face mottled crimson from blows, holding his side. He looked up at the dragon in silence. Neither, it appeared, had ever heard that one should not look into a dragon’s eyes.
“Mother?” the boy said a third time.
“Are you really our mother?” the younger boy asked.
Absurd. Human infants.
Yet she knew them.
Ian, the wizard-boy was called. The warrior-child was Adric.
A third child. Surely there was a third?
Gently she extended her long neck toward the wizard-boy, who shrank back from her in fear a little. But because the bandits had bound his wrists and ankles, even had he not been weak from the poison, he could not run. He shivered, staring at her in wonderment and shock: staring at her narrow birdlike head framed in its mane of fur and ribbons, horns and whiskers; at the glittering razors that guarded every joint and spike and spine.
These boys seemed so fragile to her, and suddenly, curiously precious. She saw this boy not only as he was— weedy and thin with a nose too big for his face—but as a red-faced infant sleeping after the exhaustion of birth, as a toddler staggering across a flagstoned floor—where?— as a child huddled with his brother in the quilts and furs they shared in a tower room at night, telling stories about the exploits of a hero called Lord John.
As an old man, healing those who came to seek his help, blue eyes undimmed, with a mane of milk-white hair.
She reached her mind into his mind and body and wrapped his self in her power. With a touch, a whisper of her mind, she blew away the poisons from his organs and brain and blood, as she would have healed another of her own kind.
As she had healed another, she remembered, once upon a time.
She drew back her head and considered the boys again.
Human children. Not a thing of dragons.
I will trust the Lord of Time, she had once said, as humans must, who cannot will pain away by magic.
As humans must, she had said. As humans must.
She had spoken to a dragon then—a dragon as she herself was. It seemed to her that she had been a dragon as she said those words, but as the image became clearer in her mind she saw things differently.
Human. Woman.
Once a wizard. Once a dragon. Then only a woman, trusting in the Lord of Time like everyone else.
Ian? She spoke the word hesitantly into his mind.
“Mother?”
Power-circle path? She called to mind the route by which she had gone into dragon form from her woman’s flesh. It had in it an element of skill, like the adeptness that the hands learn in playing the harp, when the mind hears the music and the hands form it without reference to the single consciousness of this finger or that. Like the steady rocking motion of the spindle or the loom.
But she couldn’t touch either its beginning or its end.
“Do you want to come back?”
Magic, she thought, remembering. The comfort and wonderment of calling dreams forth from gold. The idea of surrendering again the glitter and glory of dragon flesh, dragon power, was unendurable.
But she knew, too, that if she remained in her dragon form, she would forget. Time is a different matter to dragons. It would be easy to return to the Skerries of Light and let the seasons pass over her like shining wings. When next she returned, Ian would be a man and John would be old.
Old without her.
Show me the path home, my son.
“Of course the regular medical establishment denounces the whole thing as chicanery.” Bort paused beneath the red-and-gold awning of a Happy Snack stand and handed the woman there his cred. She slipped the silver end into the reader and poked the square button marked with a single Happy Snack icon four times, then doled out the slightly flattened, greasy, cheesy balls of meat in their wrappers of dough. Clea had a Veggie Snack. John could detect absolutely no difference between the snacks and suspected there wasn’t any. “But the doctors at Free Life Institute do seem to have found a way to raise the dead.”
They took the Celestial Line subway to 509th Avenue, emerging to jostle well-dressed crowds of salarypersons and students, club-goers and civil servants bound for home or for work as if it weren’t an hour and a half short of dawn. Within the terminal below Garrypoot’s apartment, neon still flashed and music still blared. Ad screens, holos twice life-size, dazzling sculptures of light all proclaimed the virtues and wonders of Lovehammer and Ravage, Embody and Speedy-Cred. Everything smelled of damp concrete, and the echoes went through John’s head like an ax.
“Free Life is a joke,” Clea added as they made their way to the escalators. “The process is supposed to cost at least two million, plus a stay at a reorientation clinic out on the Purpleflash Line.”
“Is it, now?” Despite John’s warning, none of the quasi-wizards seemed to think twice about the fact that one of their number had been kidnapped. At least they seemed to regard themselves as perfectly safe in the crowd. John, maneuvering to stay on the outer edge of the little group, strained his senses trying to keep an eye in all directions at once, logging faces that looked briefly familiar, clothing that caught his eye more than once. Meeting, momentarily, the eyes of those who passed, seeking the demon glitter he’d seen in Ian’s, and Jenny’s, during last summer’s horrors.
Mostly they just smiled, peacefully engrossed in Brain Candy dreams.
“But nobody really knows,” Garrypoot said. “The institute has the families sign nondisclosure agreements, and I heard on Yammer—that’s SevenDoubleohNine’s talk show,” he added, seeing John’s puzzled expression, but the explanation, like many in the Hell of Walls, didn’t explain much, “that SixtysevenFiveThirtythreeFourteen’s girlfriend was harassed and sued when she leaked to the press that SixtysevenFiveThirtythreeFourteen was brought back after that stroke he had last year
. Sixty-sevenFiveThirtythreeFourteen?” he repeated, as if he expected John to have heard of that person, whoever he was. “The head of Op-Link? The guy who revolutionized global communication? There was all that hoopla about him dying and leaving everything to his girlfriend, whatever the hell her number was…”
“EleventyFive,” Shamble provided. The holo wavering above his cap did its three thousandth bug-eyed double take of the night. John had seen at least fifty identical versions in the subway and its stations, plus several hundred others equally silly. He had no idea how he was going to write those up in his notes.
“Eleventyfive. Except he turned out not to have died after all?”
“It was a hell of a scandal,” Bort said. “Surely you heard…”
“Oh, yeah.” John nodded. “That. Sorry.” But he saw Clea’s eyes cut sidelong to him.
Above the vast shouting cavern of the terminal, the underground lobby of the apartment building itself was nearly as large. Kiosks dispensed Jolly bites and Dazzleyummies, plex scarves and ointment masks and little vials of Have A Nice Day; the scents mingled with the sweet yeasty odors from the building’s Food Central on a garish mezzanine guarded by blank-eyed building enforcers in blue. The noise was awesome.
“Anyway, only the extremely rich can afford to get it done.” Garrypoot slipped his key into the slot of the elevator that led to the apartments themselves. The teeth-gritting vibration of ambient ether transmission was trebled in the enclosed metal box, made worse by the tiny relays in Shamble’s hat and the elevator’s ad screen, which perpetually received from the purveyors of candles, satin sheets, crimson underwear, or young boys and girls. “And they’re the ones who can afford to keep the wraps on whether they get it done or not.”
“And what’s the medical establishment got against raisin’ the dead?” John contemplated the commercial in fascination. The others took no notice of the on-screen proceedings at all.
“Their contention is there has to be some kind of large-scale organ piracy going on,” Clea said. “Cloned subs are pretty good—my mother’s had her colon replaced twice—but with systemic failure or a Type Three syndrome you can’t replace more than one. Free Life won’t say where it gets its organs from, or release any information. In fact they pooh-pooh the whole idea of raising the dead, at least in their public statements.”
“Wan ThirtyoneFourFour is the son of the head of Speedy-Cred.” Garrypoot led the way into his apartment, two rooms with a kitchenette and a small ad screen in the bedroom, turned down to low. Most of one wall of the living room was occupied by an enormous window that looked out over the white curve of a beach, pine trees rustling in the whisper of a breeze along green-fringed cliffs. Stars shone in the clear dark sky, winter’s constellations, a comet burning small and clear and low above the sea.
John wondered where that actually was, or if it existed at all. The colors had the overemphatic hue he’d learned to associate with animated vids.
Still, they had to have learned about beaches and cliffs and pine trees somewhere.
As always—as a thousand times in the days of riding, of climbing, of picking his way through this clamorous carnival—he caught himself making a mental note to tell Jenny of this, and thought, If I see her again.
The pain in his heart was so sharp he had to push the thought instantly away.
Jenny.
Ian.
Dear God, I hope Muffle’s looking after him…
But who’d look after Muffle and the folk of the Hold, if demons were truly on the march?
“Nobody wanted to say where ThirtyoneFourFour picked up AOAD syndrome,” Bort went on, “but it was in all the vids when he was brought into the Econo-Health Emergency Clinic and died there of it. Of course his mother denied it. Then about a month later they were saying, No, no, no, it was all a rumor and here he is, alive and well.”
Bort, John knew from nearly two weeks of observing him and the others of the league, was addicted to the sleazier newsvid shows. Pure gossip, Tisa had declared scornfully. Makes me sick. Yet she could quote rumors about the personal lives of celebrities for hours.
“ThirtyoneFourFour and his wife divorced a few months after his resurrection or procedure or whatever it was, and he left the place they had out on the Blueflash Line and got an apartment closer to the heart of the city. He’s been making the circuit of the clubs ever since, picking up the fancy girls. One of that little Tisa Three’s girlfriends dated him for a while.”
“You know where his apartment is?” Fascinated, John tapped a discreet button under the window’s sill. The shower in his apartment had cured his fear of touching anything, but he still half expected carnivorous butterflies. The image there melted into that of the subway station downstairs. It has to be a direct link, John thought.
He’d noted the fry-bread vendor with a holo-hat of the Ravage logo, and she was still on duty, dipping crimson syrup—which, Docket had warned him, was highly addictive—onto a platter of dough. This must be what it’s like for Jenny with a ward spell.
“The Universe Towers.” Garrypoot didn’t even look up from the enormous computer setup that dominated the other side of the parlor. “Seventieth through seventy-second floors. Give me another five minutes and I’ll have the entry codes.”
He touched through a series of blue, red, and green screens filled with symbols. John tapped another button under the windowsill and was rewarded with what had to be a view of the outside of the building: He could think of no other reason for reproducing a scene of gray monstrous monoliths and jammed streets lit by ad screens under a slow, steady rain.
How would you even make notes about this? he wondered, bemused and at the same time deeply sad. How could you make it make sense to whoever might have to come here again? He felt he’d wandered endless miles from the Winterlands, so far that nothing was left to refer to: no trees, no earth, no animals save roaches and rats…
How would he tell Jenny and the children about this? Always supposing he got the chance.
Be there when I get back, he willed silently, desperately. Just be there.
“Who are you?” Clea cleared a double handful of book chips off a small hassock near him and sat. “And where are you from?”
“I was just beginnin’ to wonder that meself,” John countered, finger-combing his long hair back to twist it into a warrior’s topknot. “Where’s anyone from?”
Clea shook her head. “You’ve dealt with demons before,” she said. “You know what you’re looking for and what it should look like. And you think magic is more natural than its absence.”
“What?” John grinned at her maliciously. “And the lot of you wizards?”
The older woman smiled. “You know as well as I do what I mean.” She glanced back at Bort and Shamble, bent over Garrypoot’s shoulders, kibitzing as the boy marked and transferred symbols to a handbox jacked into the main terminal. “We…” Her voice stumbled a little, stuck a little, on the words. “We were born knowing, born different. When I was a little girl, I felt like those children in the old stories, the stories they never make into vids: the ones where the sprites switch one of their babies for a human child. Well, I’ve always felt like I’d been switched.”
She looked down at her hands, big and soft and clumsy, hands that had never done work. Her voice grew wistful. “I always felt that one day I’d find my real people. But in the meantime I had to make the best of living with people who weren’t concerned with…” She shook her head.
“I can’t even say what it was that I was looking for, and that they had no notion existed. I can’t say ‘music’ because my mother listens to music and says she likes it. I can’t say ‘friendship’ because everyone I know has friends and wants friends, though … though not quite the kind of friends and friendships I’ve looked for all my life. Maybe it’s just hunger for affection I never really got, because my mother isn’t an affectionate woman, though she’ll claim she is. Magic is an answer. I’ve studied it all my life and it … it ma
kes sense to me. The idea of it helps me. These others…”
She gestured back to them with a sigh: Bort, dark and clumsy with his bristling beard and glittering spectacles; Shamble reaching down past Garrypoot’s bent, greasy head to stab a callused finger at the screen.
“They are my family. Sometimes they drive me crazy, but they understand. We are all seeking what we pray one day we will find. More than anything in the world, we just want it to be real. But you…” She touched his arm, turned back the edge of his sleeve where the sword scar he’d gotten at age nineteen from Balgodorus Black-Knife bisected his forearm, close beside a small red mark left by dragon acid. “You’ve found it. You know it’s real because you’ve seen it. And I’d like to know where.”
John smiled. “So would I,” he said. “Where, I mean, for I haven’t a clue what where is about these days.” He twisted an elastic band around his hair, which worked far better than a leather thong—there has to be some way, he thought, to manufacture it in the Winterlands. “If I said, it wouldn’t mean a thing to you because the place I come from, and the places I’ve been, don’t exist.”
“Are you a … a kind of demon hunter?” She laughed self-consciously and said, “There was a vid called Demon Hunter out a couple of years ago. Awful special effects—buckets of slime and fake eyeballs.”
John plucked at one of his spare elastics, stretched between thumb and forefinger like a crude bowstring, and thought about the Hell behind the Mirror of Isychros. “Is that me regular job, you mean?” He shook his head. “Not usually.” He linked his arms around his knees and leaned back against the vid screen, remembering the Winterlands: the gray moors rising and rising, one behind the other, with the rain sweeping their tops; the way the air smelled when he stood at his study window at night and saw nothing—no light, no buildings, no trees—just shapeless lands lost in darkness; the way his fingers hurt from cold.
Jenny, curled among the furs of their bed, dark hair like a sea among the pillows, all the cares she carried day to day smoothed from her face by sleep. Little Maggie, red haired and dark eyed, making spiderwebs of his aunts’ spinning wool.
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