Chasing the Dragon

by Justina Robson

  And then it occurred to her at least one of the things he might have done (stayed with Max) and she began to wonder how she was going to ask him, and what she'd find out. The notion was so important and made such a pressure in her chest she kept quiet about it as they drove, and just watched the countryside and the city pass from the windows of the ancient Cadillac and thought over a million different ways to start talking.

  CHAPTER SIX

  hey checked a further three positions on the coast. Like the first ship, these ghosts were semimaterial, all wrecks. They were not particular vessels like The Golden Hind. One was a second world war minesweeper, one a millionaire's pleasure cruiser, one a stone age coracle barely distinguishable as anything but seaborne rubbish save for its eerie glow and the frost surrounding it.

  The last ship to come to shore had grounded on private land in the nature reserve, closer to Bay City. They left it until last because it was on the way back, and because they both knew the place. Coming over the hill and down into the heavily wooded valley Lila recalled all the curves from her high-speed motorbike rides. In contrast to that the Caddy wallowed through them slowly. She looked into the trees. Sure enough, in the darkness there were the shivery, shadowy forms of wood elementals forming and unforming. She shivered compulsively.

  "What do you think Zal wanted out here?" the words were out before she realised she was thinking aloud. The road sucked them down and down into the darkening glades, twisting them as if it were the path through a maze.

  Malachi shrugged, his fingers easy on the wheel, his elbow resting on the door sill as relaxed as could be. "Junkie's paradise?"

  "But these are all wood spirits." The sight of them made her uneasy.

  "You can feel this place though, right? And you said he was approached by a ghost out here. Any place full of elementals is ripe for doing the magic he could do. Makes it easy to trip out almost anywhere. Most places in Otopia you can't say that." Malachi turned the car lazily around the bends as the woods crept closer to the road on high banks until the trees created a continuous tunnel. The pieces of sky between the leaves overhead formed the shapes of eyes until Lila was forced to look down at the dashboard.

  "But why here?"

  "Every place has natural energy sinks made by the geology or the wildlife." He was offhand about it but he kept a close eye on the road, she noticed.

  They passed a sign, almost covered in ivy and green lichens. "Solomon's Folly. Private Property. Trespassers will be prosecuted." A wire fence, marked with a single, straggling strip of white cloth, snaked off into the undergrowth to mark the property line on either side of the road. Lila didn't remember it being there before.

  The house itself appeared, as it had before, to be a tumble of irregular blocks like large stones that had rolled down into a hollow and sunk into the ground. Fifty years ago the effect had been stylish, yet hideous. But now the place had been neglected. Moss and creepers covered most of the angles in curving growths of spongy green or vivid purples. The sculpted lawns were thick meadows of standing hay, roughly cut only at the edges where they met the driveway or the courtyard. Malachi pulled up in the middle of the paving and got out first. Lila looked around, renewing her loathing of the place, and followed him a minute later. The buildings looked as if they were bones, rotting into the earth. On terraces below and to their right the land fell in a series of gardens whose shrubs now almost obscured the pool deck where she'd woken up one morning to find herself too stoned to move, Zal groping her, the sun pure fire. It felt like a million years ago to her. Now a chink of faded blue pool cover just showed. Below that stony walks dropped to the beach; she zoomed in on the sight, captured and held by it.

  "What's that?"

  Malachi turned from where he had gone to knock at the door. His debonair confidence ebbed from him as he looked with her at the strangely bare metal decks and platforms, the things that looked like outsize gunnery stations, the broken gantries, the strange, arched spars that seemed to be metal ribs without anything to hold. At the end of one a purplish red crystal caught the afternoon sun and glowed fiercely as a beacon. Lila had never seen anything like it.

  "There's no witchlight," she said, surprised, then tore her gaze away to glance at Malachi.

  He was standing with his hands relaxed at his sides, his shoulders low, his stare fixated. The door behind him opened but he didn't react.

  "Mal?" Lila said, puzzled.

  "Are you from the agency?" the woman at the door asked at the same moment. She was annoyed. Lila glanced at her and saw immediately that she wasn't human, though she was doing a reasonable job of looking like one. At her attention the woman backed into the shadow behind the door and said quickly, "You can go on down and take a look. Just follow the path. The way's obvious."

  "Yes ma'am," Malachi said as if he was in a trance, but then he snapped out and showed his ID quickly. "We'll come back and report-"

  "No need," their host said. "Just deal with it." The door shut and Lila heard several locks and bolts being rapidly secured. She looked up and over, but all the windows were curtained or covered with blinds.

  "Later," Malachi said to her about-to-be-asked query. "For now let's go and see."

  Lila followed him down the winding, treacherous path to the shore. Overgrowths and broken stones had replaced what she knew as perfectly manicured gardens. As they passed the pool she glanced and saw the same iron furniture she'd seen before, but now rusted, the beautiful mosaic paths covered in leaves and so filthy they were nearly invisible. She had an urge to throw off the pool cover and see what was beneath, as a dare, but Malachi was moving too quickly for her. He could get through small spaces in a flash without moving anything. She bludgeoned after him, snapping branches and stripping leaves. Flies zoomed heavily around her from their places in the dense, warm jungle. Finally they met the sand and stepped out of the shade of the palms.

  Malachi sped up. In a thought he was up to the huge, bulky sides of the object, finding a ladder as if he knew it was there and climbing up onto the first of the decks in spite of the ten-degree list. The ship was doubly odd to Lila's eyes. It was flat bottomed, though there was no plating on the sides. Nothing looked normal until she adjusted her expectations and instead of looking for a ship made for the sea looked at a ship made for space.

  She jet-jumped onto the first deck and slid along it to where Malachi stood behind a lump of ruined equipment, his back braced against what was clearly a kind of a chair, if it had had any padding. He ran his fingers across dials and screens, buttons and keys, switches and LEDs. He looked out along a kind of bowsprit where another cage was set at a position for operating some huge kind of spear gun. The breech was empty and mangled. Lila looked back, and her Al put the bits together and made an analysis in an instant. The gun had been destroyed when the cable on the bolt had run to its limit, been yanked out of the deck and slammed into the back of the barrel, where it had broken as it was pulled free. Elsewhere other pieces of machinery showed electrical burns and damage at the molecular level that had made the metal porous and weak.

  Malachi glanced at her and almost smiled for an instant. Then his face greyed and he was suddenly up and off, slithering across the beaten decking towards a hatch. She followed, magnetizing her feet to help her keep a grip, grateful for the afternoon heat that went with her until she smelled the first trace of a sickly, musty odour that stopped her in her tracks. Shadows clotted the gangways as Mal led her down into the hold. The bitterly cold darkness made their breath billow. Lila could feel it like warm clouds against her face; then her face cooled and became clammy. It was like being inside a freezer, the effect intensified by the glow of the witchlight that just let them see the cause of the smell.

  Heaps of rubbish lined the walls of a room whose pristine centre was a cluster of consoles. Their dead screens were crazed with frost. The faery halted midstep, his nostrils twitching. He looked back at her for confirmation and she nodded and moved past him. There was more than just food
waste rotting in the corners. She found the bodies after scanning for likely shapes in the mounds of crumpled cartons and moved forwards. Everything was stuck together with films of ice. Lila pushed her way through, watching tiny crystals shatter as the mess gave up its hoard to her hands. As she dug, the faery clothing tightened on her and she heard it hiss as if it made the discovery just before she did. She ignored it and cleared enough, then stood aside and let Malachi move forwards.

  He shoved his hands deeply into his pockets and looked down for a few seconds, then turned and walked out the way they had come. Lila recorded the images of the dead demon and elf; then she followed him, dusting her hands off compulsively, though because everything was frozen solid there was nothing on her.

  Back outside the heat was suddenly a sweltering oven, the light a blazing glare.

  "Who are they?" she asked once they were standing on the beach again.

  "Frie ... people I knew," he said, staring at the awkward shape of the vessel.

  "No obvious signs of death," she ventured. "But the demon wasn't-"

  Malachi interrupted her gently, with a raised hand to show that he would talk to her without any oblique interrogation. "They're part of her crew. She's a Void ship. Well, the material manifestation of it anyway. She was a research vessel. Jones was her captain."

  Lila sifted through her memories for the name and frowned. "Jones as in Calliope Jones, the strandloper?"

  He nodded. "She was for hunting ghosts out in the Void. Jones led a research team, called themselves the Ghost Hunters. They surveyed immanent hotspots-places where ghosts spawn out in the middle of nothing. They'd watch them forming, try and record the process of actualisation, reification. Everyone funded them a bit, but when you saw her last time she was running out of money. She ..." He paused. "She didn't follow policy, and I guess she pissed off too many people. She wouldn't tell what she found. Hung onto her theories saying they weren't tested enough. At least one time I know of she endangered the crew. They didn't like her either."

  "Charm wasn't her strong suit."

  "I helped her out a bit. I thought it was too important just to let it go."

  "Mal ..." Lila decided to brave the question. "Were they killed by ghosts?"

  "Yeah," he said. "And now the whole ship is a ghost. I just wonder. Maybe this isn't the actual ship."

  "Like The Golden Hind back there isn't the actual ship."

  "Yeah. It's a facsimile." He turned to her and fixed her with his piercing orange eyes. "What do you know about ghosts?"

  "Not a lot."

  "Time we looked through what Jones thought then." He turned his back quickly on the ship and began to walk over the rocks toward the path. Lila followed him and they retraced their steps to the house.

  Lila knocked on the door. After a time the woman inside said, "Go away! "

  "It's just us," Lila called through the heavy wood. She pushed at the keyhole and tried to look through it but it was blocked. The door did not open. "We need to send a team back here to take care of that ship and quarantine the beach, ma'am."

  "You can send 'em but don't let them call at the house. You don't need us. You can use the path and the steps and the service road that goes there from the gardener's building."

  There was a tense pause.

  "Ma'am, could I come inside for a moment?" Lila asked, suddenly sure something important lay behind the door, in the house.

  "No!" The chains and locks were checked, firmed. The soft furl of faint colour that accompanied faery charms glowed briefly along the lintel. "Not so close to night and not today. Another time perhaps. Later. Yes. Much later. Go away now." The voice had a cornered, desperate edge to it.

  "All right." Lila gave up. She had no legal course to take her inside and could think of nothing to say, but at the last moment something prompted her. At her back Malachi's Cadillac was humming. She walked to the passenger door and leaned in.

  "Paper," she said, looking around the pristine interior.

  Malachi reached into his inner coat pocket and produced a small moleskin notebook. He meticulously tore a page out and handed it over.

  "Thanks." She hooked the pen out and wrote on it: Lila Black, then had no idea what else to put-friend, agent, safe person? The ink dried and went matte. She capped the pen and put it away. That would do. It was probably deeply unwise, but she felt she must leave something for the person behind the door. The house was terrible, the ship worse; nobody should be there alone.

  She folded the paper and tried to find a place to slide it, but the only gap was where the charm had glowed and eventually she was reduced to fiddling it through the smallest of spaces at the top, feeling the thin paper catch and bend on the rough brush of an insulating tape. It was the best she could do. Silence greeted her efforts.

  They drove out of the dip listening to the slow climbing notes of the engine as it built and changed gear, built and climbed over the hills and through the forest until they were back on the highway.

  "Who's in that house?" Lila asked as they turned away from the city and took a route inland. "Is it a faery?"

  "No, not really," Mal said. "Like I said earlier, some people you ought to meet. They'll explain it better."

  "I like you explaining it."

  He sighed. "Hunter's Legacy. They keep them out of sight whenever they find them, unless the community is one of those advanced kinds with a lot of Woken in it. There are two kinds of them. The Hunter's Chosen-those that he picked to be his while he was here. The Hunter's Children-that explains itself. The first sort were born humans but they ended up different, depending on how they were used. The second lot are part fey, but the form of the Hunter you unleashed here is one of the oldest and they share his old ways. It's not like with me, in my modern guises, and the others of us who are here and now."

  "It ... he ... wasn't even material," Lila said, remembering.

  "He had forms," Malachi shuddered. "But as you say, not very material ones. Nothing fixed. Some of the Children look human. Some don't. They all have powers that are feylike. That hasn't made them popular since he left."

  They were driving farther and farther into the country, passing out of the suburbs and into farmland and the rocky hills where wineries and health spas battled for supremacy. Lila knew he must be taking her to a place where these people were living.

  "How many of them are there?" She kept herself to the point.

  "Of the Chosen most have died. The ride killed a lot early. Just a few left now, but they're the strongest. Majority died of exhaustion and he left them where they fell. Some got killed on the hunt. Some he took a dislike to and killed himself. Some he liked and left them after just a short time. They were the ones who made it to forty and more years. Now the remaining ones are the ones he gave something to. Like Dar changed you, he changed them." His hands had gone tight on the wheel.

  "Are they ... ?"

  "Some live with the Children at the Solace Place," he said quickly. "Where we're going. They guard them, keep everything nice and quiet. Just one or two out there alone now. They don't need protection." His eyes narrowed. "More like extermination."

  Lila blinked in surprise. She didn't think she'd ever heard him say anything like that before. "Why?"

  "Just check the crime records for the Bay City area over the last fifty."

  She flicked through them. The machine buzz increased as she amplified her sensitivity to the Al part of herself. She listened to it for a second, then dimmed its rush and looked over the more prosaic information about her hometown's seedier side. "That's a lot of bodies in the woods."

  "Ours just kills them, we think. Over on the East Coast they have one that eats the victims."

  "You think?"

  "Some of the Chosen have heavy psychic powers. Physical death could be the least of their work. Across the midstates there are so many people turning up mindless and zombified we're betting there's at least one more who just likes the gooey centres. They started out putting the victims in
institutions, but a law got passed fifteen years ago that allows them to be classified brain-dead, even though they still breathe and move for themselves. The trouble is-"

  But Lila had accessed the records. "They're puppets."

  "Yeah. No discernible soul or personality or mind. Tested by experts on all three. Empty but fully working. Open to suggestion. Can use them for anything. Mostly they just make stuff in factories or menial labour. They can earn for the families that way. Or-"

  "Or you can shoot them."

  "Some people prefer that."

  "Christ." She closed the files and stared at the road.

  "There are others. Touched, they're called."

  "People with powers who won't leave their homes and be kicked out."

  "Something like that."

  Lila knew about that. The beach kids had told her all about it.

  "I thought humans couldn't do magic," she said.

  "Not really. It rarely goes well. They're not made for it," he agreed. They turned off onto an unmarked road. "Just twenty miles or so."

  "That woman in the Folly ..."

  "If she were our killer I'd be first in there," Malachi said. "I've thought she might be either of those things, but now I don't know. There's no bodies found up that way."

  "Maybe she doesn't like them in her backyard."

  "Did you get the impression she was a serial killer?" He looked at her candidly.

  Lila shrugged. "No, but I'm a dumb human."

  He snorted. "Not so dumb. No. She isn't that. The reason there's no bodies up there is surely because of her, but not because of that. She's there because of the house."

  "But it's a horrible place."

  "Maybe. It's a powerful place, that's sure. And some don't mind the flavour of things."

  "As long as they're stronger ..."

  "Yeah," he nodded. "You got it in one."

  "Is that why Zal rented it?"

  "Surely. He'd been here a long time. Starved of aether. What do you think?"