Chasing the Dragon

by Justina Robson

  He was too angry to talk. He just drove. They reached the depths of the agency lot and there, in the dark and musty quiet, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The engine chuntered along until he stilled it with the key. "I don't know how much more of this I can take," he said. "But know this. I don't intend to stick around and watch you play chicken with the Moirae."

  "I'm not ... !" Lila began, but then shut up because she wasn't sure he wasn't right.

  He nodded into her forced silence. "You are still having your romance with death. I guess that's understandable after all that's happened."

  She felt that she was foolish. "I wasn't serious," she said.

  He softened slightly and began to polish his glasses on a piece of silk from his pocket. "There are some things that just can't take a joke, Lila. Well, they don't take one, let's say. And you might think you're right, but some bit of you is serious. That bit will kill you and I won't be around to see it happen. That's all I'm saying. You have to get a grip on it. You must."

  "I drove too fast." She dismissed the idea as nonsense. "It was an accident."

  He shook his head. "There are no accidents."

  Her hand went to her waist. The pen was still there. She thought of the message and saw once again the black tendrils of the letters in her writing curl themselves like lush vines around her hair, and each other, in a knot. But Malachi was still speaking.

  "You humans," he said with a wan smile. "You think only talk is talk and only words are meaning, but everything is talk, everything is meaning. There is nothing that isn't talking, nothing that isn't calling, signalling, to everything else all the time. Words can lie, but nothing else lies, even the mouth telling the words. Faeries don't lie with words. We swore long ago after the first words that we'd never be their prisoners, you see. Words are the best trap there is and the strongest gaol, and we'd have none of that. Some of us took vows of silence, but the rest of us just knew it wasn't worth the penalty to even try lying, for anything, to anyone. After that we had to learn Forgetting, but that was relatively easy, because we'd mastered Losing Things already. You lie, Lila. Your words lie. You must never have any business with people who use words to make their magic until you stop lying. Nothing like an elf, for instance. No elvish things. And not what killed Poppy. Words will bend power of any sort to their own ends and if you can't see when a lie is in front of you, you'll be their victim and not their master. Ask Teazle. He'll tell you. The devil is a creature of words and nothing else. Evil is made of them and will try to take form at the slightest opportunity."

  "Did you read my mind?" She was astonished, and not a little frightened.

  "Of course not," he said. "That's my point. You told me what happened." He leaned forwards and wiped her mouth with his handkerchief brusquely before dropping it in her lap. "But not with words. With those you lied to me. And yourself." He got out of the car and slammed the door shut and began walking slowly towards the door, hands in his pockets. He looked slumped and sad, saggy, if such a thing were possible. She strove to hear the meaning of what she saw, but it was obvious enough without any effort at translation; she had let him down badly, betrayed him, and he was hurt and confused. She longed to rush after him and fix it, but she didn't know how. Promises sprang to her mind, but they were empty. In that second she saw that all promises were empty, must be, for they were never fulfilled in the second of their making. They were words meant to persuade, tokens for something that didn't yet exist and might never. They were useless.

  She had to watch him walk away and let him go.

  CHAPTER FIUE

  n bed with Teazle, Lila ran her hands over her arms. The white demon slept the sleep of temporary satiation, halfway between man and monster, his tail coiled possessively around her lower leg. His dominance over her was growing. She felt it, and knew why, without being able to put it into words. It was because she was lying. The imp wasn't there to act as her soul barometer, but neither of them needed him, nor Malachi, to feel the change of the weather. Her dealings with Teazle were honest at least: honestly needy, honestly desperate, honestly angry, honestly destructive. He respected that, but still there was no disguising it as anything but a weakening position. She pressed her face to his hot, dry shoulder and felt the fine vibrations of the energy in him that would never sleep until he was dead.

  In the dark she felt more comfortable assessing her human-feeling skin. Beneath it, however, the shapes of muscles were clearly a skim, a token to forms that were unnecessary. She was warm, she had a kind of softness, if suede was soft, but it didn't go too deep. An unrelenting iron was inside her, and a minor prodding revealed it. She gave and yielded, but only so far. She wished it were a metaphor for her character. She wanted to be good, strong, competent, able, a rock under a gentle and lovely exterior.

  She wondered what time it was and the answer came immediately: a minute to midnight. She was losing only a fraction of a second every century. Into that fraction, is that where things had gone? You could lose an eternity in that kind of time; Jack the faery had said so and it was true. Like the white rabbit, your spirit might fly down such a little hole. She'd been down one, into Under.

  The key glowed ice cold at her throat and without being able to see it she was suddenly aware of the pen in the pocket of Tatterdemalion's dress. A chill crept across her, making her press more closely to the demon's burning, arid body. His tail increased its python grip automatically and she heard his breath come once more deeply though he didn't wake up. She was suddenly afraid to look at the wall beyond the foot of the mattress.

  A flash made her jump. A few moments later thunder cracked and rumbled over the sound of the waves. Lila swore at herself for all this stupidity, opened her eyes, widened, and refined them to see well in the ordinary night. The dress was off its hanger, standing by itself halfway between the bed and the wall. It was full-figured, a fine gown around an imaginary body. Tight sleeves of ebony velvet shrouded nonexistent arms. They stretched out towards her, their lacy wrists supporting the crosspiece of a shining silver sword.

  Lila leapt to her feet. The sheet went flying. Teazle grumbled at the yank on his tail, which slithered around her ankle and squeezed her painfully. He played dead, though she could feel the energy in him rising all the time and knew he was fully alert. The stormy air was ticklish and cool against her bare skin. Lila jumped forward and snatched the hilt of the ornate zweihander in her right hand. The dress fell to the floor in a richly velvet Miss Havisham puddle. "Goddammit, I hate this faery shit!"

  "Do you now?" said a voice from the cave mouth. It was conversational but sly. "I'd say you liked it more than me-"

  Sitting in the doorway was a grey, smooth-bodied female humanoid with reflective steel-plate eyes. The point of Lila's sword was digging into its throat, which is why it hadn't finished the sentence. Her makeshift metal door was still in its hand where it had been silently working it loose in order to get in. It put that down now, slowly and carefully, as if it were dynamite.

  Lila looked at the rogue down the length of the blade and was momentarily distracted by the sight of flowers blooming in the flat silver world of the sword's surface. "How did you find me? Who are you? What do you want?"

  The figure didn't move except to speak. "We've met before. Serve and Protect. You might not remember...."

  "You were on the meat table in the agency medical centre talking robocrap along with that guy when I went in to check up on you and prove to myself that I really was part of a long-term dark project that humans had been manipulated into. That was fifty years ago, give or take a week. You had auburn hair, a nice wave in it, the same Mideastern accent. I didn't read your records, but you must be around eighty years old now and one of the first to survive."

  "Actually, you were the first to survive," said the rogue, conversationally, as if she were welcome. She almost sounded reverent. "In our world, you are legend."

  "What do you want?" The cold air made Lila feel strong, despite being naked. In
front of this creature she didn't even feel that. It had a surface, not even a hint of clothing. It was like a mannequin that had been smoothed over so no details remained, just basic contours.

  The cyborg moved her bald head and looked in Teazle's direction. "I wish to speak with you alone. You are very successful at blocking all transmissions, so I had to come here."

  Teazle pretended to wake up and stretched himself out, stripping the sheet away in doing so as if by accident though it was nothing of the kind. He revealed his powerful human-seeming body, allowing himself to glow so that he lit the room up. His roll exposed the extraordinary hard musculature of his torso and limbs to perfection as they started shining and, in typical demon showmanship, the slightly curving hard line of his erect penis. His tail coiled higher up Lila's leg and he relaxed, resting his head on his hand, supported on his elbow.

  "The demon stays," Lila said. "State your piece or make some move. I'm not patient."

  "I came to tell you what you are for. What your future is."

  "That's not the answer to my question."

  "I want you to listen to what I have to say."

  "I'm not interested. How did you find me?"

  "The signal," the rogue replied as if it were obvious.

  "Okay, here's what," Lila said. "If you can tell me how to get invisible so that no bugger can find me, even inside the signal or whatever, I'll let you leave here alive."

  For the first time the rogue showed anger in the way her head flashed around to look directly up at Lila. Teazle's light shone off her glossy high cheekbones, her plastic lips, and caused them to be reflected in the sword's blade. Lila listened in spite of herself, but at the same time she saw the lips reflected on the blade say words that were quite different.

  "I know everything about the machines you don't know," the rogue said, sounding offended by Lila's attitude. "I know about Zal and keeping the worlds together, about the quantum bomb, about the rise of the ghosts and the creatures in the Void, about the demon you serve...."

  Lila tilted the sword. There was a noise like shukk. The rogue's head rolled on the floor, bumped against the mattress, and rocked to a still point. Its body didn't move at all, save for some blue electrical discharges at the neck. The hands started to reach out, but Lila flicked the sword. There was a high, whining sound that made her hair stand up. The head and body became two-dimensional, like flat drawings. They slid into the blade and were gone.

  "No you don't," Lila said into the quiet that followed. She looked at the blade of the sword in her hand, its silver all gone flat and dull for a second. Then she tossed it up in the air. It went up, pounds of solid metal, turned, and came down to land in her palm an old screwtop fountain pen, black with a small gold pocket clip.

  "Lila!" Teazle murmured, mildly scandalised. "She might have said something worthwhile."

  "Yeah, she might have," Lila admitted, putting the pen down on the cardboard box table. "But she wouldn't state her reasons, and that to me means a big agenda that doesn't have my interests in it, so now we'll never know." She washed her face and hands, dried them on her cheap towel, and added, "I guess I've gotten a bit trigger-happy maybe. But I told them not to come." She picked the dress up off the floor and put it back on the hanger.

  Teazle looked long at the pen but didn't move to pick it up. His long hair moved like heavy white silk in the cold wind. The tower vibrated faintly with the beating the sea was giving to it even though now the night itself was calm. Lila replaced the metal door.

  "You're as bright as a torch," she said, going back to him, kneeling over his hips. All over her the air was chill. He was still slightly wet from taking her earlier, and now when she slid onto him he felt like an icy spear: sticky, piercing, exquisite. She liked the cruelty of his ready size, her own utterly surprising willingness to take him all the time he was there. She shuddered with excitement. He moved with a snake's strike, turned them over, pinned her down, his mouth open wide, sharp inhuman teeth at her throat.

  She dug her fingers into his neck and he shuddered, weakening as she cut off his arteries, murmuring his pleasure at the sensation of slowly descending darkness. Every day they went farther. It was never far enough. She always came back. But she didn't come back the same. Possessed by Teazle's body, his curiosity, his insatiable energy, she felt that she still had some reason to live. She didn't examine too closely what that reason was. There was a danger of putting it into words that she sensed as keenly as she'd sensed the danger in letting the rogue live.

  Its lips in the mirror had said, "Do you remember Dar, Lila?"

  There was much to remember about Dar, but she knew what was meant. One steamy hot night in Alfheim, Dar had planted his dagger in Tath's heart. His eyes on Lila's had been desperate, sad, utterly lonely. "You must never let them talk," he'd said. Words were so important to the elves. When you talked and put things into words, you made them real. Tath alive could only have led them into failure. He complicated things too much. This woman complicated things too much for Lila. To leave her alive, whatever she knew, however useful it would have been to know, was to come into the influence of something quite uncontrollable and beyond Lila's ability to deal with. If she thought of it she'd feel anguish at the unknown life she'd ended, so she didn't think about it.

  Then the lips in the mirror had said, "He remembers you."

  The cyborg had some connection to the dead. Or the sword did.

  Now her eyes flew open. Teazle was half slumped, his light out. She released her grip and a screeching breath flew into his lungs. His body bucked and she felt a sharp pain deep inside, and glanced unwillingly at the black dress on the wall and then the pen on the table. Better to know what you were the servant of. But there were too many masters for her. Killing the rogue hadn't killed the machines, but it had silenced one of their voices and she was glad of that. She felt no remorse. She'd made it more than clear the first time they tried to kill her that she wasn't interested.

  The severity of her discipline on him had caused Teazle's body to start to change. Without his conscious effort he couldn't maintain a human form. Now his eyes opened and he was half demon. He stayed that way, panting, his breath hot and reckless. People would have called him hell ugly now. He looked like a beast wearing a man's skin, pushing it out from the inside.

  She embraced him, ignoring the brief pain of quill stabs and scale tips where they were growing out of him. Uncontrolled saliva from his jaws spilled onto her collarbones. It burned a little. He brushed her face with the soft feathers underneath his chin and with a few swift hard strokes came, snarling his pleasure. In a few seconds he became the human form again, shedding light faintly, though more of it came from his eyes, apricot and gleaming, their pupils invisible to her for the radiance.

  "You don't have to," she said.

  He mapped her body with his fingertips. "You were easier to see when the lines were clear," he said, finding all the places where once the obvious machine parts had been fused to her ordinary flesh. "Now it's just for show. Now you can be one, or the other."

  "But there's a form that's true," Lila said, and he looked into her eyes and nodded slowly. Under his caresses she became soft warm skin, and metal under leather.

  "My body is too hard for yours," he said, matter-of-fact, and kept his changed form with its supple, strong fingers. He examined her minutely all over, his gaze shining light on her and making her glow and gleam. The touch of the light was so faint, but she could feel it. It excited her unbearably. She became shameless under it, completely open to him. He stroked her with infinite patience, detached, observant, interested, only stopping when she was right on the edge.

  She snarled at him, grabbed his head, kissed him, bit his lips hard.

  "You think you want that, but you're not ready," he said, patrician and gentle because they were still not equals. He entered her forcefully and she came.

  The fuel of the orgasm mollified her anger. She growled against him, curled in his arms. It was dark
when he closed his eyes, but she was shining on the inside.

  By dawn he was his demon self. Sleep had done what he refused and changed him to his true shape. She couldn't move because she would have sliced herself open on his claws. He snored lightly. Her leg hurt where it was pinned under his bony shin and she was far too hot. She tried a few wriggles but they were ineffective. She opened her mouth to wake him up but stopped on her indrawn breath with a start. Sunlight shone past the metal sheet and onto the rough wall where clear, neatly scribed black ink spelled, "Hurry up!"

  It was Zal's writing.

  Her skin crawled. She stared at it, half expecting the lettering to move. On the hanger Tatterdemalion's dress, or whatever it was, had formed itself into a dashing military uniform of black jacquard complete with ebony buttons and braid work. The pattern was Chinese dragons, all roiling around each other. She waited to see if they moved but they didn't. She looked for the detestable pen and saw it smugly resting where she had left it on the box, disguised as an investment banker's antique Mont Blanc.

  Inside her head her phone alarm started to go off. She answered.

  "You need to get here." It was Malachi.

  Her pleasure at hearing him was so great she almost forgot to ask why and where.

  "You'll see." He hung up hesitantly. She read into that that he was at least considering some kind of forgiveness.

  The call had woken Teazle. He released her and rolled over. "Did I imagine you slaughtering-"

  "No," she said, getting up and looking for her underwear. "Read the wall."

  He narrowed his long slanted eyes even further and looked about him as he stretched out, three metres from nose to tail tip. "Did you write that?"

  "It's Zal's writing."

  "Maybe," he said, sitting on his haunches and slowly rubbing both sides of his heavy head against his forelegs before shaking himself out until his quills rattled.

  She stopped with her arm half into a sleeve of the jacket, "Who else's?" It hadn't occurred to her to doubt it.