Chasing the Dragon

by Justina Robson

  "Lila got a call from her sister."

  Malachi looked at Greer. They shared a moment of resigned weariness.

  "One we can deal with," Greer said flatly. "But nobody is prepared for this to become the next big thing. Not after the last big thing. Is it going to be the next big thing? Did your contact have an in on this?"

  "You could say he had an in," Malachi confirmed, nodding slowly. "Big thing? I hope not. I don't think so. He didn't say and I didn't ask." He made it sound like Tath was someone you didn't fool around with so Greer would drop the line, but mentally he cursed himself for not doing more prying into Tath's affairs. All the talk about cards and the fruit bowl and the CuSith had made him forget to be nosy enough. And the visit to Madrigal.

  "So what, is he the master of these zombies?"

  Dazed, Malachi slowly refocused on the conversation at hand. "They're not ... maybe ... shit!" He shook his head and stared at the cloak near his feet. It was possible Tath could use zombies, more than possible, but he'd never send these particular zombies. Or would he? Was there some reason he would want to torment Lila? "I just don't know. He surely didn't send them, and he has nothing to do with ghosts."

  "We need hard information," Greer said. "And fast." He moved one of his feet towards Lila in a dull pointing action. "She'll wake up in a few hours. I want something by then that I can use to keep her anchored in whatever passes for reality around here. All we need is a crazy agent with a sword that can rip holes in reality having a mental breakdown. Speaking of which pigsticker-cum-poetic accessory, I'm just going on what you wrote about it here. Nice brief. I'm still waiting for the page that tells me what I can do to get it off her or blow it to kingdom come should the need arise. And the page about how the need for that to arise can be avoided."

  Malachi finished his beer and twirled the last drops around in the bottom before he tipped it up and spilled them on the grass. A little gift. He decided to opt for the faery truth, that is, the real one, and not the ten tons of horseshit-in-a-binder that the boss was asking for. "Zal is her anchor. He's your answer."

  Greer made a series of faces that spoke clearly of how much he hated being at the mercy of others. His hands worked restlessly on the bottle as if he were testing it and retesting it, never satisfied. Finally he said with menace, "He'd better not be fucking dead."

  "He isn't." Malachi was reasonably certainish about that.

  "Find some proof." Greer chugged his drink and tossed the bottle on the grass. He got to his feet slowly and stretched his back with great caution. A joint cracked. "Before she wakes up." He began to go then turned around. "Oh, I nearly forgot, what happened to your tent?"

  "Friend left me something," Malachi said. "She was being followed so she made a mess to cover her tracks. I think she might be dead."

  "It's all the rage this season," Greer muttered. He went another few strides and then turned again on his heel and called as he walked backwards, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "She nixed Sandra Lane, you know." He gestured with his chin at Lila. "I'd be sorrier but I already gave at the office." Then he turned again, almost clocked the door with his head, stopped himself, yanked it open, and disappeared into the lit entrails of the building.

  Malachi looked at Lila. She was sleeping more easily now, the snore even lighter. Her face was tranquil and looked more of its real-time twenty-five years than he was used to. In fact, it looked a lot less. She might have been fifteen. The red splash of hair that looked so deliberate shone vibrantly in the dark against her pale skin and the faery cloak. Through one of the windows he saw the grey face of Bentley looking out and waved to her. She curled her fingers once in an awkward society-girl kind of wave and then turned away. None of the androids had slept in the last four decades. He wondered what that was like. Even angels slept, so he'd heard.

  He tossed his own bottle into the bushes and reached for another one, opened it, and let the drink sparkle on his tongue for a minute. The mildly intoxicating effects made all his troubles seem like enemies whose riling had become fond with age. It was interesting to know she could dispatch a rogue, more interesting that she'd done it and not spoken about it. The old Lila would have been mortified to crush a fly unnecessarily. He regretted her passing. On the other hand, he didn't regret the passing of Sandra Lane, not one bit. That left only four of them out there doing who knew what in the service of their mad credo. At least they'd kept quiet recently. Small mercies, he said to himself, but at least some mercies, and the Signal wasn't his business or his problem.

  He nibbled another nut and considered Zal. Find Zal. That was not going to be pleasant. Find Teazle. Hard to say if that would be more or even less pleasant, but judging by tonight's gore he would rather face the Lovely Ones on the chance of more mercy than take a trip to Demonia and meet the certain absence of it. Plus, whatever Zal had become it surely couldn't be more ominous than the all-glowing, all-overconfident slayer of darkness, bringer of light, destroyer of illusions, and so forth that Teazle seemed to have mutated into down in Under. Trust demons to overcook the egg and produce a monster. Did Teazle even know what he was rushing into as he accepted the offer of that blazing energy-did he know whose it was? Malachi would bet not. Maybe the idiot even thought it belonged to him. Then again, if he was aware of its source, would he turn it down? He was a demon. Surely not. Live fast, channel angels, and burn out not fade away. It was horribly, end-timely ominous.

  Surely, Malachi thought to himself gloomily, it was time that he stopped trying to lose all his information, as he had these hundred years or more, and tried to actually gather it like a good spy was supposed to?

  He finished a nut and counted how many were left. Lots. That was good. He wasn't sure he was ready to be a good spy. Being a bad one had had so many advantages. It paid not to be in the know. Knowing was a sure way to get yourself stupidly killed. See what people did the second they knew things: off they went, mission in mind, problems arising, solutions planned on an endless goose chase of cause and event. Whereas, know nothing and you wallowed around ignorantly, of no interest to things of power, of no use to people with schemes. A kernel of sense was enough to keep you out of the way of such things. Hadn't he been doing such enormously useful work all these years keeping knowing to a minimum, for everybody?

  It seemed a miracle then that he was in the middle of a churn of folk and effects that seemed unable to avoid the need to know and who were ceaselessly attractive to powers whose names should be still lost and long forgotten. One might remember them as individuals or loose gatherings of notions, but as long as they had no label you couldn't sum them up or summon them up in any way. They must not be the subject of conversation or even predicates. They had no business in the world of being, and namelessness kept them that way. Names were the most dreadful magic, with a force that enabled and made real. If some of those old things came back, the only way to get rid of them would be to lose their names, and that was almost impossible to do. He didn't want to be a part of any name-losing scenarios. Again. That had all been sorted out ages ago, and he knew exactly where not to look.

  But Lila was tenacious, if unstable. It was a constant job of work to direct her away from danger. Zal was a force unto himself, but easily distracted and sufficiently alert to mind his own business, always supposing he hadn't got himself killed. Teazle ... ugh, a wild card in the mix, all he needed. Teazle was unknown. Demons were usually deflected by better offers or higher odds. Ordinarily Mal was confident he could wrap demons around his fingers for as long as he needed to, but it looked like he wasn't going to be able to trump this one's fortunes, favours, or weaknesses. There must be something about him worth knowing, sadly, which Malachi didn't know and hadn't yet had cause to forget. He drummed his fingertips on his knees and frowned. Already he was thinking too much, and that way he'd never figure anything out.

  To distract himself he decided to consider Madame Des Loupes. She was an arresting proposition.

  Everyone seemed to have forgotten
about her recently, even though it was her disappearance and apparent murder that had almost caused a war as Demonia demanded Teazle's repatriation from Otopia and Otopia refused both because it didn't have a treaty or Teazle and because Lila was subject to the law but Teazle didn't have a status in Otopia except as potential deportation material and they weren't about to deport what they didn't have just because some stroppy demon president who was barely out of training pants decided it must be done. Then, when Demonia insisted they knew very well Teazle was there, any fool with a juju cell in their heads could see it at any seer's shop in any town, they started a particularly ugly line of accusations that were only stopped when Greer did his under-the-table deal to agree to locate Lila and force her to do the decent thing and slaughter her husband for the good of everyone concerned. Whether or not Greer was convinced the murder conviction was a fit-up Malachi didn't know, but he thought it wouldn't have mattered either way. It was the political thing to do.

  And it might not have been important if it weren't for the demon in question who had been, conveniently, forgotten.

  Malachi didn't believe Madame could be killed in the manner of the crime. Her psychic skills were too massive and all-reaching to permit anyone to get near her. So what was her motive in creating such a ruckus? He didn't think anyone had anything on her. Nobody alive anyway. She must have been the instigator, then. But why? Probably it was too late to see the crime scene, although he would bet there was nothing to find there. He sighed and ate another nut.

  How about a different stab? What if he, Malachi, had wanted to be forgotten? How would he go about it? Probably he would choose entropy and not catastrophe as his plan, for he was a cat and subtle by nature; but Madame was a demon, and a fine appreciation of the longueurs and uncertainties of entropy was not one of their strong suits. So, catastrophe then. The obvious path was to have oneself apparently murdered and vanish forthwith. In Demonia that would be easy to arrange, but for Madame, not so much. She would need someone of Teazle's calibre to be the villain of the piece because anything less was not believable. It was, very slightly, possible to imagine Teazle catching her off guard if he had managed not to have the idea of killing her until the very moment itself, in which case Madame's psychic mastery would have given her insufficient warning.

  And the motive? On such a plan only whimsy would do. That made no sense. Teazle was not old enough to have developed that level of fanciful malice.

  But what else had happened? Teazle had been on this impressive rampage. Malachi saw no sense in that either, and it was fact. However, the rampage itself had not really kicked off until Madame was dead. And he had gained nothing from killing her. She didn't have a house or own things or possess disposable powers. Teazle hadn't taken anything from her home. For a time there had been speculation that it was some kind of vengeance concerning Zal's first wife, the clairvoyant Adai, who had been universally known as Gift of Heaven We Know Not Why. But Madame had been Adai's teacher and friend and there was no suggestion of wrongdoings there, only a connection that linked Teazle, lengthily, to Madame. Gossip magazines had stated firmly that it was Madame's failure to predict Adai's death, or to tell Zal about it, that was at the root of this grudge. Malachi knew Zal did not hold grudges however. Could Teazle have known and decided to exact retroactive justice of his own?

  Malachi thought it unlikely. Everyone Teazle had ever killed had been for a cast-iron reason, not a flimsy one, but his subsequent tour of death might have been enough for a jury to reasonably suppose Madame was a necessary disposal if he were to carry out his long list of executions and takeovers. Yet that very takeover made no sense to Malachi. What was it all for? What could he hope to achieve? It could never last. Or could it? Suddenly he was flung into doubt. If Teazle really did command so much of Demonia's wealth and power, then socially their rampant alpha-wolf style of behaviour might give him enough status to override the conviction of any would-be assassin. Might Teazle have made himself actually invincible to demons? It seemed mad.

  And once again it had led him off the trail. He was sure Madame wasn't dead. So Teazle hadn't killed her, though now it looked like that was perfectly viable from a demon point of view. Suppose Madame had seen his rise to power lying ahead on time's path? Wouldn't that be a prime opportunity to put a vanishing plan into action?

  Malachi paused and closed his eyes. So much thinking and worrying was like being human. But the early morning was long and silent in the garden courtyard, and he didn't have much time to come up with a plan.

  Back to the wheel. Let's say she vanished herself. If dragons were stirring, she'd know about that and maybe a lot of other things. Was she scared? Gone into hiding? Or perhaps bored of her reclusive, prisoner's life? More likely she would want to be out and about at such a time, and that would mean finding a new identity under which to operate. If she were skilled, intelligent, and well supported she could manage a vanish, he reckoned. Seers could be fooled, accessories bribed or murdered, and aetheric signatures remodelled by top-flight necromancers. It was possible. Also, he thought, perhaps there was an extra bonus that wasn't apparent, namely, getting rid of Teazle at some nearish future date when surely the odds would turn against him and someone would kill him. Certainly the upheaval of his spree would create a diversion for a person wanting to slip away unnoticed.

  He took out his phone and called Suvidae, one of the Hunter's Chosen who had abandoned Otopia to live in Demonia where they felt more appreciated. A lot of Chosen had migrated there, or to Faery, even to Alfheim. Suvidae had a love-hate relationship with the agency, but his sense of loyalty to his home often won over his rage at their betrayal of him. After a few rings the Chosen's light voice answered hesitantly.

  "Yes?"

  "It's Malachi. Don't worry. I won't trouble you long."

  "Let's see. I'll do you two question-and-answers for a new personal techpad."

  "Midrange, no extras."

  "Midrange, with case of my choice, not to exceed a hundred Otopian dollars."

  "Yeah okay. What's the latest movements on the case of Madame Des Loupes?"

  "Case closed. Media covers the big white thing every day, but they don't refer back to that much now. Today is all about how he's missing, of course. Endless speculations."

  "People curious about Madame at all? Any investigations into her affairs going on?"

  "She left a will. Stuff went to relatives. Some money spent on public goodwills. House is empty. They like to clean them out here, clean them of magic, but apparently it's hard to find someone good enough to do the job so it's waiting on that. After it's done it's for sale, as I heard. Prime site. You interested?"

  "Definitely not. Thanks Suvi. Send me the bill for your toy."

  "As usual. Should I look around some more?"

  "Think you can be discreet?"

  "I don't know. If I'm not, I'll be dead so you won't have to pay."

  "Go on then."

  They hung up on each other at the same moment.

  Malachi finished his second bottle of beer and took out his nail file. He cleaned his fingernails and buffed them, noticing how thick they'd become-almost unsightly. As he flexed his fingers they lengthened, sliding like claws, then retracting. He hated that, but he hadn't found a way to stop it yet. Finally even that task bored him and he lay down on his spare overcoat on the grass and tucked his hands between his thighs to keep them warm.

  Proof of Zal's existence, position or otherwise? The thought of obtaining it made him shudder. Might as well go the whole hog and find the guy. It would be no harder. A simple task-find the Ladies, ask them. He had spent a long time avoiding them. But since he'd seen the Fleet massing off Jones's bows he'd known they were too close, and he was doing a bad job of it. Because who was on those ships, all three? Not Jesus Christ and his lady, as the modern human words would have it, that was for sure. The Fleet belonged to an area of aetheric potential. It was something to do with the Fleet that had caused him to ... but he'd forgotten exactly wh
at. Anyway, he knew they should be forgot. At least their emergence had nothing to do with him. But this was so little consolation it didn't even grant him a moment's peace. They were here, crashing into Otopian shores, running aground in the primaterial plane as if they belonged there, and that was just such bad news.

  He made himself stop thinking about it.

  Zal's zombie-summoned or sent? Calliope Jones, dead or alive? How to find the answers to these things without stumbling into the path of horrors and nightmares? He feared there was no way, because although these matters seemed weighty and important, in the wider scale of existence they were nothing. Two missing people, albeit ones with odd connections, didn't amount to a hill of beans. An age of chaos was coming, heralded by the bomb or whatever it had been, and if he stayed attached to these difficult people, these sticky people with their sticky trajectories and unfortunate tendencies to trip over disturbing objects from older ages, then he would not be able to slip away himself, like Madame, into the shadows and escape.

  He fell asleep and dreamed of rats; large, healthy, farsighted rats who rushed away from him down impossibly small channels that existed in the sides of everything, as if the whole world was a ship and all surfaces were its gunnels. With popping sounds like corks from bottles, they vanished down small black holes. He tried to winkle them out with his paw but he was too big even to fit that into the openings. After a while he tried a corkscrew that he found in his pocket and pulled out not a rat, but one of these corks. It left behind it a smooth, unbroken reality. He turned the cork over and looked at the other end. It was a tiny glass, through which he could just make out himself, peering inward, his orange eyes gigantic in the fisheye lens.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  al had grown used to the end of the world. It was not as glamorous as he had been led to believe. For one thing it was dirt poor. For another it was never really daylight. Even given that these ideas made little sense at this point, they both felt wrong to him.