Chasing the Dragon

by Justina Robson

  She flew above the battle, fighting with all her senses to penetrate the heaving forms, sometimes several bodies deep, the scale of the largest dwarfing the smallest. Then she found him in the midst of a concerted attack by a group of half-demons armed with everything from swords to machineguns; temporary allies against his blinding power.

  He fought in human form with his faery swords, white hair lashed into a braid at his back, his body glowing with light gold and white, bleeding moonlight in trails that glimmered as they fell through the air and into the mud. Then in an instant he was dragon, his swords claws and the spike blade of a lethal tail that cut down four or five in a slash, his breath a fire that blackened the faces of those who stood before him and left them screaming, balls of unrecognizable flesh and bone condemned to final moments of agony. He trampled them. He became a creature of flame that cauterized all before it, a miniature sun. And on the cleared mound of smouldering ruin he stood again, the human fighter, ablaze, his face alight with joy and a smile she would have loved to see turned to her even though he used it now, along with his hands, to beckon the next enemies to the attack. Light ran out of his wounds, shone from him in lethal bands of red and violet destruction. He was magical, unstoppable. And there she'd thought that Lightbringer was the term for a good thing.

  They were not put off by his prowess. Each believed him- or herself the best and had no sense of self-preservation. They threw themselves at him-monsters, men, creatures of iron and earth, and things for which she had no name. But Lila was able to see that although he was magnificent, they did hurt him, and degree by degree he was getting slower, weaker though he didn't seem to feel it. He stood on glowing trails of his own life force. The enemies in their endless supply saw it too. Each wave of them came with more determination, more conviction. Gradually they would wear him down like water on rock. It was only a matter of time. How much time had already passed? He had been gone for days in her worlds, but that meant little in this place; dreams that took years in themselves could pass in minutes of the clock. Did that mean he had been here for so long?

  She cast a glance over the dreamscape, but there was no visible end to the number of fighters. They crowded the land, and as they fell more sprang from the air fully formed and armed or crawled up from the ground, clawing through the dead, their hands and heads sometimes cut off before they had even made a stand. If anything there were increasing numbers of ever larger and more powerful foes emerging. And the sun did not shift in any degree, as if time itself were not moving.

  Teazle danced through his fight in glory. Any way she could think of for getting his attention might easily get him killed-there was no second for a mistake in his moves-besides, she didn't think he'd thank her for breaking this dream. It, and not she, was his heart's desire. It occurred to her that her interference, whatever the outcome, might not be wanted. In the midst of the killing he looked alight with life. She could tell by the look on his face that he was exultant. There was no better place for him to be.

  Her heart felt the pierce and bite of loneliness. Did it matter that it was a dream? Did it matter if he died here, and not above in the much less clear-cut worlds of the material planes? Should she save him now if he returned to an existence that was grey compared to this? Was this his heaven? At first she'd been convinced she had to bring him back. This was saving him, wasn't it? If she could even do it?

  She thought of Zal, determined to run against Jack's hunt, knowing it was fatal, could not be outrun. She gripped the sword hilt in her hands. She missed him so much. Her own life was a struggle every day with the greyness that she'd found in his absence. Why should it be that way? She raged against it, but her rage was useless.

  Was this to be the way they found him? Was Zal in a dream somewhere, a dream like this one, something that for him was better than reality? Teazle had conjured this because he was a simple being, a creature of easy power. Would Zal's dream be like this or was he lost, a stain on some faery's bit of cloth, forever beyond her reach and not even able to dream? She had no way of knowing. And the years that had passed, the years of nothing. It was unbearable. He was as lost as he had ever been to her, and at this moment it felt like an unbridgeable gulf, a search without end, futile, the kind you had to kid yourself about until the last of your friends filed away, bored of your obsession. Mom, Dad, Max, Tath, Zal ... even that stupid imp ... she could hardly believe their loss, and she'd flung herself into the days so she didn't have to feel it; she'd killed Sandra Lane so she didn't get distracted from her distractions. Well here was a distraction, and she didn't want to wait.

  With a scream of rage she dived down, the sword before her, and plunged into the fray. If this was the Akasha's dream, then let it fight to survive and prove itself worthy of her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  fter Ilya had tended his dogs he walked outside. The snow was falling again, soft and silent, covering the red ice gently with its million caresses.

  "I thought you were godly. How the hell did they get the drop on you?" Malachi asked, looking at the spot and trying not to imagine what agony must pass when you could not stop living but you had lost that much blood.

  "I didn't expect them. Vampires, creatures of the emptiness, those I am used to. Angels, I was not used to. Next time it will be a different story. Their blades can destroy faery flesh; they are pure aether made to an edge by a colder mind than mine. They had a kind of distant perfection, in their way." His voice was wistful. He turned away towards the higher mountain, where the peak towered over them. "This glacier is built of all the memories of the dead. I think it is many miles deep. But at the bottom is the first memory of any being. If legend might stand in some form, there we could expect to find the snows belonging to Night herself. Then you might at least answer the question about what to expect from one who wears her mantle."

  "You're kidding," Malachi said, staring at the forlorn peak. "But how would we..."

  Ilya held up his hand and beckoned. Malachi followed him for some distance through the gentle drifts as around them the soulfall continued, their soft imploring touches something he turned from. He felt himself a defiling presence in a sacred place, and wanted to apologise for every footstep he made, but at last they stopped at the foot of a wide swath of snow.

  Ilya made a sweeping motion with one arm, and Malachi almost fell over with shock as the snow responded to his command and swept aside in an avalanche of dislodged chunks that hurtled to the side even as it started a fatal burst of energy heading downslope, ending in a thunderous roar that shook the mountainside as it went foaming and plunging down the pass. Trees and rocky outcrops vanished in its soft clouds. Around them the air sparkled with tiny crystals turning in the sunlight, and before them lay a sheer plane of ice, turquoise and azure and pink in astonishing radiance, clear as glass.

  "The Mirror of Forgetting," Ilya said to him quietly. "Of course it would be here, close to the Hall of Champions and Under, where everything is lost that must be."

  Malachi stared at it. For once he was confounded. "This was only a story. Nobody I know has ever seen it. We thought it was an imagined thing."

  The elf stretched out his thin, white hand towards the face of the glacier, fingers extended but gentle as if he were reaching to clasp hands with a friend, and in answer light rose from the blackness far below where the ice met the rock of the mountain, shot through the flaws in the structure, and made them shine like stilled flags in the depths.

  "Watch closely," he said. "For once the light is released it cannot be caught again."

  Malachi's eyes were wide and he felt the cold air strike tears in them, but he didn't flinch. He leaned close to the tall figure at his side as the surface moved suddenly with images from a past so long ago he felt it steal his shape away from him so that all he felt so sure of became liquid and ran in his mind.

  Darkness was alive. The light there was showed only the extent of its reign. It moved like fluid, was sticky and elastic. What he saw defied ration
al description. He could barely understand what he was looking at. Unlike his shaped memory of the Fates at their butchery of the mad chaos that Night's avatar had become, creating order from the storm, this was a roiling sea of constant changes in which raw energy became aether or matter or both and fled away to nothing again, evaporating as fast as it was spawned. Stars and the like, bodies and forms flitted in and out of being. Everything bled together. There was no distinction-that was what he saw-only change. Even light itself revealed its own birth in the foam of dark's silent boil and turn, a radiance bursting out spontaneously from the clash of powerful forces. Night's hands were making and breaking, her body was the universe itself, all he could imagine. Her dying was the birth of things as he understood them, her ceaseless turning stilled into space and time and ordered moments where matter might rest and grow complex before entropy drove it back to the beginning again.

  As the vision faded he tried by some impossible measure to print it forever on his mind, but its strangeness was already sliding out of his grasp as he turned to the elf.

  "In the wrong hands that could be very, very bad indeed."

  "We should go; time is fleeting," the elf replied, as though it wasn't of much account to him personally. His indifference was calming. He let Malachi lead him down through the snowy passes to where the beginnings of spring were melting water at the gateway to Under. By the time they were in the low country Malachi was almost composed.

  Madrigal was there. It was cold, in spite of the rise in temperature and the increasing light, and she was still in her layers of winter furs, her guns hanging by their straps on her back as she stood waiting for them at the tall Turning Stones. There was no magical portal to see here, though the ground was uneven and Malachi wouldn't have trusted his own footing on the Lock. Nonetheless it was the gate he intended to use to get Ilya to Otopia, since he couldn't take him any other way.

  "Malachi," Madrigal said as they neared. She was smiling and his heart leaped, though he tried not to notice.

  "We cannot linger," he said, almost cross with her for not being at her camp when he'd arrived. He stayed pacing in his cat form, on all fours.

  "Oh." She didn't seem disconcerted. "I hope you return soon."

  "I thought you would have had to shoot this one," Malachi said grumpily, nodding at Ilya. "But seems you don't need to bother."

  "I don't think shooting him would kill him any further." She grinned and opened her backpack. "Would you like a fish? Fresh caught. You look hungry."

  In other times he would have enjoyed the beginning of this game but instead he found himself saying crankily, "I would like a kiss. I think I've waited long enough."

  Behind him he heard Ilya cough into his hand, smothering a laugh. He lashed his tail, shocked that he'd allowed himself to make the admission and regretting it. But Madrigal put her bag down and crouched by his head. "You bad cat." She wagged her finger at him. "First you must-"

  As she was speaking he had already changed form, and even though it was freezing and he was naked without a stitch to enhance his style he was holding her tightly and kissing her on the lips. Her clothing was cold and damp and she was trussed up like a burrito, but holding her was as satisfying as he had always dreamed it was. He was pleased to find he had surprised her.

  "Well," she said after they were done. "I will look forward to your return much more eagerly now." She stepped back and observed him with a huntress's eye. "Really."

  "Good," he said. "Come on, Ilya. Try not to die as we get to the other side. Would be really inconvenient."

  Madrigal put one of her apples into Ilya's hand and whispered to him to eat it as they passed her. Malachi hoped it would be enough magic to survive Otopian climes and that his clothes were where he had left them. They stepped onto the soft earth between the stones and it swallowed them up.

  And ejected them in Malachi's car. The hood was up, but he felt ridiculous as he fought into his shirt and trousers. The traffic had returned to the street. The cordon was being taken away. He had been longer than he intended. He flipped on his phone set as Ilya sat in the passenger seat and ate his apple slowly. In his ear Temple Greer said, "All quiet on the western front. He got his wish. We got our dead. What's the score?"

  "I'm just here to pick up some gear," Malachi said, pinning the phone with his shoulder and backing out of the lot. "The game's not up. Score not available."

  "Setting's open then?"

  "I wouldn't put a dollar on us."

  "Bad as that?"

  "Worse."

  "Did you hear from Lila?"

  "Nothing."

  "Goddammit. I don't want to send agents to Demonia after we got this beating here. Nobody to spare. And she's started up some war with the rogue agents. Or was that just to keep me busy and off her back?"

  "I'm guessing it is."

  "Crafty bitch. I could almost propose to her, if I knew where she was. Keep in touch."

  "Yes, sir." He turned his head as he flicked the phone into his pocket just in time to see Ilya flip his booted feet up onto the dash and lean back in the seat. His long white hair whipped around his head. He ate his apple in thoughtful bites and watched Malachi in turn.

  "So this is a car," he said after a moment.

  Malachi sighed and wound down his window, resting his elbow on the door. "Yeah."

  "Noisy."

  They turned onto the freeway and headed out to the bridge. "She's a good girl."

  Ilya looked around the interior pointedly and stroked the upholstery. He smiled and ate the apple core, then spat the seeds out on his side. "I have missed such things. I miss her."

  Malachi knew who he was talking about. "We all did." He tuned the radio to a rock station and watched Ilya's long ear tips flick as the tough bass came blasting through his state-of-the-art speakers, hidden in the dash. He was usually a soul or a blues cat, but today that didn't seem the right mood.

  The elf sat back and let the wind drive into his face. He looked like he was enjoying it. Malachi put his foot down and they sped out over the glittering water of the bay.

  He avoided the house and drove them farther down the coast where they could walk up the beach and find Jones's ship without going back to the Folly. As they got out of the car the sun was starting to slide down the sky. It was warm, balmy. The sea was quiet and a few people were out walking. A kid was flying a kite with a long tail, and they both paused to watch it for a moment before they turned and Malachi led them along the tideline and around the headland.

  The ship was waiting, ground into the sand, her decks at a thirtydegree angle, her bodywork already starting to rust. The ghost glow was gone, but she had been Jones's ship and real enough before her capture by the Fleet's massive quantum gravity, so she hadn't fallen apart yet, though she looked more wrecked than many a vessel on the scrapyard and nothing like seaworthy. Her hull was more hole than metal, and the gaping spaces where her aetheric charms had been ripped away to leave bare wires promised no protection from the Void either.

  But when Malachi turned to see the faery elf's reaction he found Ilya staring at the beach and the sea, at everything but the ship. He looked inland.

  "That house," he said slowly, moving his long fair hair out of his face with one hand and shucking his fur coat with the other, letting it fall to the sand. "The shear is strong here, very strong."

  Malachi recognized the term for a place of thinning between realities. "Yes. Earth sink, some say."

  "It will need to be. This world is more dead than I remembered to my senses." He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply through his nose. His eyes flashed open. "Who is there?"

  "Just one of the walkers," Malachi said.

  "She is in many places at once."

  "You're starting to freak me out, and that's something."

  Ilya's smile was bleak. "I see a lot more than I used to. She is the Hunter's get. What do you know about her?" His eyes were alight with interest. His nostrils flared.

  "Ilya, we don't h
ave time for this. After, then we can pay a visit."

  "I will insist."

  "We have to go."

  The elf suddenly turned to the ship. "What is her name?"

  "She is the Matilda."

  Ilya nodded and went down to the water. In the sunlight of the bay afternoon his rough clothing looked even more primitive and worn, his glory changed to ordinary without the glamour of his faery home. He bent down and put his hands in the shallow water as the waves came to shore, and when he lifted them out he was holding a disc of ice he had made. He held this up, dripping, to the sun's low gaze and focused the sharper light that came out of it on the Matilda. Malachi saw him murmuring to himself, words in every elven magic, and then he had to jump back because the ship righted herself and lifted clear of the beach in one unencumbered move. A soft ghost glow began to appear around her points and edges.