by James Bennet
Dragon dreams are deep and dark. A dragon’s dream is like a cave, yawning into damp silence where the jewels of memory wink and glimmer. Echoes haunt the curving walls, the strata of wars and famous matings, wounded bellows and fiery mirth. Eggs crack and blacksmiths hammer. Wyrmlings mewl and knights scream. Damsels whisper, chained to stakes, their breasts heaving with fear and lust.
Dragon dreams are deep and dark. As dark as the gulfs of space. As deep as time itself.
In Ben’s dream, lightning flashed.
Silver raced through his mind’s eye, jagging between the towering clouds. Silver sparkled deep in the billows, illuminating veins of darkness, backlighting skulls, pyramids and burnt-out woods…Unmoored from awareness, Ben sailed through surging memories, a leaf in a gale, tossed by warring winds. But with the inner knowledge of dreams, he understood that the storm was not his, these passions foreign, due to another. He was lost in somebody else’s rage.
In the storm, voices muttered, snatched away by the jealous wind.
You’ve been asleep for centuries…
Fulk was a fool, but he was right about that.
You are not even worth killing…
The Queen laughed, lashing the skies with electric scorn.
And this was her storm, wasn’t it? His dreaming self grasped the fact in the shapes he couldn’t remember, the sights he could not name. This was her storm, and when she had probed his mind in the museum, it seemed she had shared her essence too – a doubtless inadvertent exchange – their consciousness fusing with the contact and tainting each other with strange, alien fragments of thought.
A skinny girl in football shorts. A ring of shacks huddled in a dust storm. An African woman without teeth, grinning and pointing a bird-like claw…
Ben didn’t want to see these things. He wanted to drift, unchained from his protean form, above his rekindling pain. Somewhere, ghosts howled impossibly in concrete, wolves loped into limousine doors and a man in black screamed and screamed. Each memory was an after-image of the sun, a negative in black and gold, making no real sense to him. All he could see were the clouds ahead, boiling into a sea of hands, every finger reaching towards him. Then the hands became a wall of mouths, lips stretched wide to swallow him. He could hear them moaning too: a susurration from parched throats, a song of hunger, loss and need…
Yes, it was a song. Or perhaps a prayer. A prayer for rain.
Into their gaping mouths he fell, the clouds closing over his head. Motes swirled in the dark like flies. Or maybe dust. Dust on dust on dust…
Lightning flashed.
Lightning laughed.
Lighting sizzled and screamed…
Ben awoke with a jolt. The coruscation continued, however, an intermittent neon pulse from behind a pair of long white curtains, ballooning and twirling in the breeze. The glass doors behind them stood open to the night, his only anchor in an otherwise dark and empty room. Even as the dream left him, fading into sparkling scraps, his extraordinary vision was kicking in, golden lamps piercing the gloom. Sitting up in sweat-soaked sheets, naked – naked again, of course – he rubbed his jaw and surveyed his surroundings. Where had his adventures brought him this time? Sanctuary, prison or tomb?
Blink, blink, went the neon. We’re not telling…
He sensed no threat in the bedside table and the overstuffed chair next to it, a cotton bathrobe thrown over one arm. The wardrobe and the rug seemed unfazed by his presence. Legs swinging over the side of the bed, his bare feet landed on wood. When he stood, muscles groaning, it felt as though someone had scrubbed his body with sandpaper while he slept, sparing no nook or cranny. Ditto his tongue. Some medicinal liquid coated his throat, the slightly syrupy turn of his thoughts betraying the presence of drugs in his veins. Thoughts of healing prompted memories of pain, and Ben’s hand trembled to his side. The flesh there felt tender and raw, but gradually on the mend. Red marks circled his wrists, fading in the winking light. His head ached like a broken tooth, and when he pressed a finger to his eye, a knife travelled back into his skull, his nerve endings stitching together, but still sulking over their wounds.
Fulk. The CROWS. They had chained him. Mocked him. Tortured him.
The balcony doors blinked red, black, red, alternating between the neon flashing somewhere beyond the discomforting darkness. As black as the hilt of Fulk’s sword. As red as the end of Miss Macha’s cigar. Black. Blink. Red. Hungry for air and a glimpse of his whereabouts, Ben shrugged on the bathrobe and walked into the light anyway, trying to recall the scenes in the car park. It wasn’t easy. His brain yelped like a kicked dog, shying away from the memory. Already a grim suspicion was forming, making him feel like a fool…
Then he remembered Rose. After all his precautions, he had failed her. His hands closed, curling into fists. He went out on to the balcony, glaring down at four floors of thick white stone, some faux-rococo building with his room at the top. He was too far up for anyone to see him, this naked statue leaning on the railings, his taut skin criss-crossed by scars, flesh so pale his head seemed aflame in the neon. To his left, a network of rooftops crowned an angular sprawl of streets. A fizzy-drink sign blinked on a wall across the way, the insistent source of the neon. To his right, a raised railway bridge with dimly lit trains crawling along it. Traffic dotted the road below, a sluggish, coughing tide. Damp hung in the air, but it wasn’t from the Thames. He would’ve known its brackish smell anywhere. Trees hushed beside arching street lights. Benches, mopeds and fast-food joints, the usual urban paraphernalia, slid under his questing gaze. The smell of bird shit laced his nostrils. So did the smell of grilled meat, and his stomach growled. When was the last time he’d eaten anyway? Before the Third Crusade?
The hunger in him was deeper, he knew, aroused by his clash with the Queen. It was the hunger of ages, a chasm of years spiralling without end…At that moment, his longing for Rose was a thorn in his chest. But that was not all. He sensed that another wound had opened, this one fresher and deeper still, awash with a yearning that Rose could not fulfil. Her humanity forbade it, her mortality a gulf between them. No matter how much they felt for each other, Rose would soon grow old and die. Like the flower after which she was named, the invisible worm would find her in the night, in the howling storm, and drag her down into the soil. Love could not change that. Rose would never know the solitude of ages, never need to hide in the shadows, forever unique, forever alone. Never know the memories that gave no warmth and the dreams that slipped out of reach. She would only ever know what it was to be human. Quick. Bright. Fleeting as dust.
And in his heart, this dark mirror. The Queen breathing his name.
Benjurigan…
Ben pushed the thought away, hating the stirring in his loins. How could he think of Atiya now? Rose was in danger. He couldn’t protect her. He could only hope that wherever she was, her captors were not hurting her. If he believed Fulk’s comment in the car park, that somehow Rose’s coupling with him had invested her with power, some useful residual force, then he guessed he could hope that. Perhaps he still had time to save her, make up for his mistake.
Three days from now, everything changes…
Whatever Miss Macha had meant by those words, three days didn’t feel like a lot. Scales rippled briefly over his skin like a split-flap display at an airport. His fists bunched tighter, newly formed claws digging into his palms.
Tenements rose across the road, some with balconies like the one he stood upon, bordering windows dark and lit. A plane roaring across the sky and faint laughter below offered no clues to his whereabouts. These days, one place was much like another. Cities grew more and more uniform, a collection of shops and office blocks with antique survivors hemmed in between them, cathedrals and castles gasping for air. All the same, there was something familiar about the view. When he closed his eyes, straining, his extraordinary hearing picked out words, guttural and clipped, rich with tones of feeling and intelligence. Over the din of a nearby stadium and the thump of dub
step a mile away, he discerned a European dialect. Gothic. Teutonic. Mentally riffling through his experience, he could only come up with one connection, and that connection was rather fond of this city. Fond? He would probably claim the city as his own, if not boasting that he’d laid the foundations, then at least taking credit for her survival. He recalled the Punchinello mask, the white horse, the flamboyant, prismatic display, the scattered impressions falling into place.
Berlin. He was in Berlin.
And if he was in Berlin, that could only mean one thing. “Son of a bitch,” he said, and stormed out of the room.
TWELVE
Four floors down a spiral flight of stairs and Ben found his unwanted saviour.
“Abend, Liebling!” Von Hart said as Ben strode through the purple swing door with the mirrored pentagram window. “I won’t ask you if your dreams were pleasant. I imagine they were darker than a rat’s Arschloch.”
Von Hart swivelled in his seat next to the catwalk, his sunglasses reflecting the bulbs that lined the velveteen walls. The catwalk itself was empty, a narrow black pier that jutted out into the equally empty club. Luminous paint shone on the walls, old symbols running around the seedy space, pink Seals of Solomon and blue mandalas competing with orange oms and yellow yin-yangs, a gaudy occult lexicon. The sight of them made Ben feel queasy, reminding him of his recent entrapment. He looked away, finding no relief in the gloom, where leather booths hunkered like bull-shouldered and shady patrons. Like Lurkers. Alcohol, dry ice and sweat, none of it quite stale, laced the dingy atmosphere. No doubt as planned, Von Hart was the centre of attention, the lecherous light picking out his hair, short, blonde and strictly parted. A too-generous section of thigh slipped out of his red silk kimono as Ben approached him through the vacant tables.
“You. Of course, you.” Ben threw up his hands. “I thought you agreed to mind your own business.” He crossed a small dance floor, no hint of disco in his movements, and came to a halt under the spotlight.
The man by the catwalk looked undaunted. Smiled, even.
“Yes. Chicago, 1931. Has it really been that long?”
“You promised. Swore on Titania’s tits. You said—”
“Oh come off it, Ben. When will you learn? Never trust the Fay.”
“Trust you? Is that a joke?”
“The only joke is your attitude. Is this how you thank me? It appears that your business,” maddeningly, Von Hart raised a hand and sketched quotation marks around the word with his fingers, “was about to get you killed.”
He resumed interest in the half-finished glass of bubbly at his elbow. A bottle rested on the table beside him, Dom Pérignon on ice. Next to the bucket lay a stack of euros and a deck of cards, the cash more than likely the takings from one of his high-stakes gambling games. In those games, the cards tended to favour Von Hart (and not always through chance), as Ben’s wallet had learnt to his regret in the past. You rarely played this man and won. His cheekbones were fine china, his skin as pale as sifted chalk. He had a natural, inscrutable poker face. Like most of his kind, Blaise Von Hart wore many guises, but in modern times, he favoured an aspect of aloofness and refinement. The stars printed on his kimono were only a feeble nod to tradition. A fairy living in the twenty-first century, he preferred to dwell in neon-lit realms, a young man who haunted bars and the edges of dance floors, where he claimed that magic could go unnoticed.
Like Ben, Von Hart had lived through centuries, a constant in the transient eras. The envoy extraordinary was older than him, much older. In comparison, eight hundred and sixty years would probably feel like a tea break. When the walls of Camelot rose, white and shining under the sun, they said that Von Hart was standing in their shadow. And when those same walls fell, when his fair and fickle race had left this world and strode off into the nether, he had remained behind, a reminder, an ambassador, a link between elsewhere and here. In a sense, Von Hart’s role mirrored that of the Guild; he served as a counsel, a confidant, a sympathetic ear for Remnants on their side of the fence. As such, the Fay representative was only a Remnant by appointment, by simple virtue of remaining behind when his people had left the earth. In truth, he was Fay through and through. All the same, like the rest of the ditched and the abandoned, he still had to live under the Lore. Once, long ago, he had told Ben that the Fay hoped to return one day. Lord knew enough of the Remnants had cleaved to that idea: that the Fay would come back after their nigh-on fifteen centuries’ long abandonment to restore balance and peace, announce that the dark days were finished, the great sacrifice was over…In fact that was the very reason so many of the Remnant leaders had agreed to the Pact in the first place. If it wasn’t exactly its selling point, the promise, the hope, had kept more than one fabulous beast grimly compliant for hundreds of years…
Had.
If Ben had heard some inference in Von Hart’s claim, some duty placed on the thin man’s shoulders, the envoy neglected to clarify, and even if Ben had pressed the matter, he knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer. Every now and then, every hundred years or so, fate or chance brought the two of them together. They were not exactly enemies and not exactly friends. In the same way one didn’t wake sleeping dragons, only a fool would trust the Fay. The magical creators of all Remnants, the masters of the “bound bestiary”, they were creatures of glamour, who only appeared human, after a fashion, but who remained inherently alien and other. If Ben credited myth – and why shouldn’t he? – the Fay had once been known as the First-Born, gods or something like gods, dancing in the void at the dawn of creation. As time went on, and the gods relied more and more on mortal belief, some vague cataclysm had come about, according to the myths. The Fay had lost much of their power, becoming half mortal, wanderers of the infinite worlds spinning through the universe. The tales were as colourful as the details were vague, but the Fay had certainly entwined their race with this world, creating the fabulous creatures and magical minions that had populated the hills, lakes and forests of the Old Lands. Since their departure, Von Hart – or whatever his real name was – had set up home in the land he liked best and slowly but surely taken on a Germanic mien, in a way that Ben couldn’t decide was affectation or admiration. These days, the Fay, or fairies, were the stuff of children’s storybooks the world over. No one could know that only one member of the ancient and nether-spanning race remained upon earth. Or just how interfering he could be…Who could say where the seemingly deathless race had really come from or how long they had guided, meddled with and, yes, on occasion, corrupted humans? Capriciousness was in their nature. So was a kind of thoughtless cruelty. When you added the role of envoy to the mix – a role appointed by the Fay high council shortly before their departure from earth – trusting Von Hart would be tantamount to madness.
Which was why Ben rankled at his rescue. Like it or not, he was in the envoy’s debt, and being in debt to one of his kind was not something that one took lightly. Unease bit at his wounded pride.
“I had everything under control.”
“Oh really?” Von Hart’s accent was crisp and Germanic, with a strange, sing-song undertone shared by nobody else on earth. And it conveyed knowing humour. “It didn’t look that way, Liebling.”
“You’ve been spying on me.”
“I kept an eye out for you.” The envoy took a sip of champagne and started to shuffle the cards, spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs slipping through his delicate hands with all the smoothness of poured milk.
“Spying.”
Von Hart pursed his lips, making it a moot point. “Since Thursday morning, the London papers have been screaming about a terrorist attack at the British Museum, hallucinatory gas, mass hysteria, you name it. People have yet to ask what point the terrorists hoped to make by traumatising a bunch of historians.” He cut the cards, blended them together. “Same as it ever was, ja?”
“I’m not in the mood for chit-chat.”
“Shame. I was going to tell you that there was also a murder. Sensational, to say t
he least. Later on, at the hospital. Your professor made like a human and…died.”
This broke through Ben’s umbrage. His eyebrows went up and his jaw hung slack, a discarded ventriloquist’s dummy. He fumbled for his own levers and springs, replying in a splutter.
“Winlock’s dead? He was alive when I left the museum, despite his nosedive off the stage.” The sound of cracked bones fired a popgun in his ears. “I knew he was hurt, but…” He stared at the envoy. “The Queen. She killed him.”
But that wasn’t right. Didn’t feel right. For one thing, where was her motive? She had already grabbed the Crook, smashed her way through the Great Court. Revenge drives her on… But was she so cruel that she’d take revenge on a feeble old man for the relic’s recent unearthing? Ben didn’t think so. After all, she had spared him.
Von Hart confirmed his line of thinking.
“No. Not the Queen.” The envoy was clearly aware of recent events. No surprise there. “Unless throttling noted scholars in their beds strikes you as her modus operandi.”
Ben winced at this casual description. He hadn’t known Winlock personally, never got the chance to speak with him, but no one would find such an end pleasant.
“Then who?” Pointless rebuking Von Hart for his flippancy, of course. “The CROWS? What would they have against Winlock?”
“Do the Three need a reason? Murder to them is a day at the races. Still, I think they were busy with you at the time.”
“Amazingly, something you don’t know.”
“Even I have my flaws.”
“And I suppose you found all this out through your spells and mystical scrying?”
Von Hart shrugged at the sarcasm. “Some. Mostly from BBC News.” He took a sip of champagne and feigned a glance at his wrist, watchless and alabaster smooth. “Tonight Club Zauber is closed to the public. All the same, I’m a busy man. And you were going to come here anyway. Right?”