by Tom Holt
Ten minutes later he had a shortlist.
Hiroshige’s quantum chicane; possibly. The chicane allowed you to zip backwards and forwards between alternate realities it was basically the same technology that had enabled him to keep track of Emily’s deaths and resurrections without getting hopelessly confused, although he had the Read-Only version, rather than the one that actually took you there. Even so; it was really only an observation-and-research tool, with academic and tourism potential. You could look at alternate futures or even visit them, but you couldn’t change anything while you were there, and you certainly couldn’t reprioritise the defaults and replace your own time-line with a different one that happened to suit you better. So, unless the mysterious someone had found a way of banjaxing the safeties and reconfiguring the entire feed mechanism, it couldn’t be the chicane.
Mississippi Micro Industries Synthetic Angel: a distinct possibility. Using advanced wish-fulfilment technology which some authorities declared was still only theoretical, the Angel allowed you to rewind unsatisfactory episodes in your life and record over them inside a bubble of very high-resolution synthesised reality that overlaid your original time-line. It meant you could go back and edit out your mistakes, even potentially fatal ones, but with the significant drawback that you had to spend the rest of your life isolated in a world of your own; and if you wanted to do that, there were easier and cheaper ways. What you couldn’t do (as far as Colin knew) was transfer the effect to anybody else. Which more or less ruled out the Angel. Oh well.
The Acme Portable Door.
The what? Oh, right. That.
Colin Gomez had heard of it, naturally. Everybody in the trade had. He just wasn’t quite sure he believed in it. If it really did exist, then it shouldn’t. It broke all the fundamental rules of the business, and to a serious practitioner like Colin, it was virtually an insult to his years of training and patient study. If there really was such a thing, of course, and if some irresponsible idiot had got hold of it and was using it to mess about with time-lines and raise the dead-well, it fitted all the known facts, you could get the job done with it. And there weren’t any other possibilities. Therefore, as Sherlock Holmes would have said
Index again: Door, Portable. He found the place and started to read.
The Carringtons office-procedures manual devoted forty pages to the Portable Door. Eight of those pages were a closely reasoned explanation of why the Door couldn’t possibly work and therefore had to be mythical. A further twelve set out in considerable detail the letters you had to write and the file notes you had to make in order to notify the firm’s insurers if you came across one. There were nine pages of awful warnings, ways in which careless use of the Door could spell the end of sentient life in the galaxy, and ten more setting out the firm’s procedure for getting the senior partner’s written approval before using it, should you ever get your hands on one. The remaining page gave a very sketchy history of the thing: how it had been developed in total secrecy by the brilliant maverick and former J. W. Wells partner Theo van Spee, late professor of magic at the University of Leiden, how he’d originally made two (using the prototype to copy itself; but see page 277, note 3) but only one had survived, and its whereabouts were currently unknown, although there were unsubstantiated rumours connecting it to a former JW W employee (name unknown) who had used it to defeat the Fey and unmask and then defeat Professor van Spee himself. Anomalous Mortensen readings had been interpreted by some authorities to mean that the Door had recently been used somewhere in New Zealand (but see page 1,866 and Appendix 12), although their findings had been disputed by other researchers in the field.
There was a final paragraph, in bold type:
It is the policy of the firm that the Portable Door does not exist. Any member of staff coming into possession of it, or having information concerning its location or recent Door activity, should notify the senior partner without delay.
Not many grey areas there. If he was right, Emily Spitzer was being helped by someone with the Door-whether she was aware of it or not was another matter entirely-and the book said, quite explicitly, recent Door activity. A memo, at the very least, seemed to be called for. Colin reached for the microphone of his dictating machine and cleared his throat.
And hesitated. Because Amelia Carrington was much, much more intelligent than he was, otherwise she wouldn’t be the senior partner; in which case, it stood to reason that she must also have applied her noble mind to the problems he’d just been chasing round his mental mulberry bush, and had reached the same conclusions. In which case, if she’d figured out that the Door was involved, why hadn’t she seen fit to brief him on the subject? He obviously had a need to know if he was supposed to get rid of Emily.
Oh dear, he thought.
Colin didn’t phrase it more strongly than that, because you don’t swear at the senior partner, even in the privacy of your own mind. It took significant effort to restrain himself, though. For one thing, it didn’t make sense. Why on earth wouldn’t she tell him about something so important? Clearly she wanted the Spitzer girl disposed of-she hadn’t said why, but was under no obligation whatsoever to provide reasons, just as the brain doesn’t have to justify itself to the hand. But the brain doesn’t tell the hand to reach out when it knows perfectly well that there’s an armoured-glass window in the way.
Pause and rewind. The brain wouldn’t do that, sure; but it might order the hand to pick up a lump of metal it knew was red-hot, and not tell the hand because it suspected the hand might not feel like getting burnt.
Colin Gomez believed in the divine right of management. Part of that right was sacrificing the occasional pawn in the interests of the grand strategy; all very well, assuming you’re not a pawn. He liked to think of himself as a bishop, though if he was going to be realistic, a castle would be nearer the mark; in any event, a major piece, as opposed to cannon fodder. Expendable, though; somehow, he’d never quite imagined himself as that. Other people, yes. Himself, no.
He was jumping to conclusions, he knew that. Even so. Why else would Amelia Carrington keep him in the dark about the wretched Door thing? All right, maybe it wasn’t necessarily as sinister as he was assuming. But even if he wasn’t for the chop … terms such as scapegoat, fall guy, cat’s-paw, deniability, unwitting tool splatted like summer flies on the windscreen of his mind. He frowned, and upgraded Oh dear to Damn.
Slowly, very reluctantly, he got up from his chair. This wasn’t right. Part of him was bitterly ashamed of the rest of him for thinking this way. Instead, it should be saying something along the lines of ‘My deepest regret is that I have but one life to give for my senior partner.’ It was what he’d have expected someone else to say: the junior clerical grades, the assistant magicians, even the associates and the non-equity partners; and the higher the rank and dignity, he couldn’t help feeling, the greater the obligation. All fine and splendid, except when it applied to him.
Bloody woman, Colin Gomez thought.
Oh well. He left his office, closing the door behind him, and pottered slowly along the corridor and down the stairs, eventually ending up outside the strongroom. He turned the various keys and recited the various security spells, walked in and nosed around for a bit until he found what he was looking for: a small brown paper bag half-filled with long pointy teeth.
Ironic, he thought, as he locked up behind him. These were the teeth that Emily Spitzer had personally gouged out of the mouth of the last dragon she’d sorted out. According to the strongroom inventory, there were forty-six of them, each one conservatively valued at twelve thousand US dollars. He did the maths and shuddered. It was an awful lot of money. Premium-grade dragons’ teeth were greatly in demand, especially these days, with the boom in the private security sector. Phil Hook would skin him alive at the next finance meeting. Maybe it wouldn’t need all of them just to get rid of one short girl.
Down two flights of stairs, unlock a huge steel door whose rusty hinges groaned as he forced it op
en; down the vertiginous spiral stone staircase that seemed to go on for ever. At last he reached another door: oak studded with ancient hand-forged iron nails, its parched grain scarred with scorch marks and axe cuts, to the point where the little printed notice saying No Admittance was probably a bit superfluous. This door had no key, because it had no lock. Unnecessary. It was a genuine, original Parker-Shaw Uniface, and existed on one side of the wall only. Colin Gomez laid his hand on the blackened iron latch and pressed down.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The dragon stirred.
Curious animals, dragons. Awake, they have the intelligence of a small rock. Being much closer in evolutionary terms to their dinosaur ancestors than most of their contemporaries in the animal kingdom, they retain the subsidiary brain at the base of the spine, to which the majority of motor functions and other mundane day-to-day concerns are delegated. The tennis-ballsized lump of grey splodge in their heads barely ticks over during the day; it operates the eyelids, handles sneezing and a few other respiratory odds and ends, and keeps a subconscious track of the stock market and commodity prices, using the inbuilt organic modem located down and a little to the right of the bladder. Otherwise, it just sits there not doing much, until consciousness puts the chairs up on the tables and closes up for the night. And then the dreams come, flooding the upper brain with thoughts so huge they’d blow out the walls of a human mind: thousand-year thoughts, intricate as clockwork and lace, deep as oceans, teeming with precepts and hypotheses, paradigms, abstracts and equations, concepts so utterly alien to a two-ton forty-foot lizard that it could never begin to understand them in its conscious state.
Dragons dream in at least seventeen dimensions, drifting like wind-blown leaves from past to future, soaring like birds over the dividing lines that separate alternate realities, sampling base-eight gravities in continua where sound moves faster than light and the universe isn’t so much curved as dimpled, flirting with the possibilities of movement in the z-squared axis, redefining every constant a million times each second. This goes some way towards explaining why dragons love dark, cool places where they can sleep undisturbed, snuggled up on golden batteries from which their forebrains draw the vast quantities of raw power needed to fuel their imaginations; because without the gold, silver, jewels and other isotopes of wealth the dreams simply won’t come. Nobody knows why this should be, although accountants seem able to understand it on a purely intuitive level.
Amelia Carrington’s dragon was, of course, slightly different from the rest of its kind; hardly surprising, since it had been conceived and born in a vat of green slime in a lock-up garage in Ravenscourt Park. Its dreams were wild, fast and dark, and saturated with disturbing images of its own imminent death. Not that it minded that particularly; when the future is as real and immediate as the present or the past, the end is no more intimidating than any other arbitrary point on the circumference of the circle. What prompted it to stir, shiver and grunt was nothing at all to do with fear, a sensation as irrelevant to dragonkind as income tax. It was something small, a tiny inconsistency, an equation that failed to balance at the twenty thousandth decimal place. A human brain simply couldn’t have registered it.
The dragon woke up.
Snarl, it thought. Hungry. Cramp in big flappy flying-with thing. It stretched its neck and snapped up a mutton carcass from the overhead rack so thoughtfully provided by the management, spread and refolded its wings, yawned to the melting point of glass and went back to sleep.
A human. The dragon placed her on the table of its mental centrifuge and spun her until the future separated from the past. The residue was quite interesting; strong influences, restraining rather than inspiring, so that it saw them as clamps and buckles.
The precipitate was a confusing jumble of shapes and colours, red for blood, silver for tears, black for anger and a faintly nauseating pink for the purely human emotion whose name temporarily escaped it. Lots of pink; it tinged the edges of everything, like the marinade in Chinese pork. The dragon wondered how so much emotion could be fitted into such a small container without breaking something.
Its own death. Smaller than it would have expected, rounder and smoother. There would be a moment in a dream when the circle was welded shut. No bad thing, since the dream would go on for ever, uninterrupted by the distractions of consciousness. The human’s death, by contrast, was a messy thing, like the frayed end of a broken rope. In fact, there was an unusual quality about it, so different from the sad peterings-out of ordinary humans. It wasn’t a whole number, it was a fraction. It was recurring.
None of our business, the dragon thought, because we won’t be there to see it. By then, the circle will have closed, excluding all irrelevant data. But still
The prophecy. The greatest dragon ever born, only the strongest, bravest hero that ever lived will prevail against it. Of course, all prophesies are garbage, apart from the true ones.
The dragon grunted and shuffled about. Under its vast, smooth belly, krugerrands clinked and share certificates crinkled; six dozen infra-red movement sensors woke up, accessed their programming, grumbled and went back to sleep.
And the dream swept on, riding the lightning into far galaxies of intervals, sequences and primes until the human was too small even for a sleeping dragon to see. Humans; so what? Their salvation was their ignorance of their own supreme triviality, without which the sheer bulk of proportion would flatten them into faint smears. In spite of that, however, a flavour of her stayed with it as it danced on a five-thousand-light-year-diameter pinhead. It would know her again when they met, and for the first time the dragon would feel (permeating right through into its inert forebrain) compassion.
When is a door not a door? When it’s a wall.
The wall opened, and Colin Gomez, of all people, walked in through it. Emily looked up from the corner where she’d been sitting and stared at him for a moment, too stunned to be relieved or angry. Anybody else, but not him
‘What the hell,’ she demanded, ‘is going on?’
He looked at her, and in his eyes she recognised the comforting thought that he wasn’t going to have to try and explain himself, make excuses, apologise politely, to somebody who’d be dead in a minute or so. She sprang to her feet, but she wasn’t quick enough; he took a paper bag out of his pocket, emptied it on the floor, and dived back through the wall, which healed up as though it had never been breached.
Paper bag, she thought. White things all over the floor; cross between broad beans and bits of dried-up chewing gum. She knew what they were. Not good at all.
The reason why dragons’ teeth fetch such a high price on the open market is that, sown like seedcorn on any flat, non-ferrous surface, they sprout into savagely psychotic spectral warriors. There are drawbacks. The warriors come fully armed, but their equipment is hopelessly antiquated - sword, shield, breastplate, helmet, a spear or two if you’re lucky but don’t count on it-and although they fight with unbelievable ferocity until they run out of enemies or are themselves cut down, they’re not bulletproof. Clearly this limits their relevance to modern warfare, and they’re chiefly used as assassins, riot police and for crowd control at music festivals. To Emily, armed with nothing but a thermos flask and a plate of cheese sandwiches, they nevertheless posed a serious problem.
‘Colin,’ she called out. ‘Mr Gomez. Get back here right now.’
No answer, not that she’d really been expecting one (and besides, could sound pass through that wall? She doubted it). The teeth, meanwhile, were sprouting, little white arms and legs, little bumps, like the knobbles on potatoes, for heads. Spiders, she thought, and she lifted her foot and stamped on the nearest one. The pain was excruciating, even through the sole of her shoe, and the little white thing carried on growing. Oh, she thought.
A plate of sandwiches and a thermos. She could break the plate; that’d give her a sharp edge, and the thermos would just about do as a club, for one hit. It was what Kurt Lundqist or Ricky Wurmtoter or Archie St
Clair Lutterworth would’ve done. Bruno Schlager had taken out a whole platoon of dark elves with a plastic fork, and hadn’t the great Nepalese maestro Ram Lai Bahadur once disembowelled twenty Imperial Guards with a comb and a toothbrush?
The first couple of warriors were knee-high now; crash-test dummies with round featureless white heads and faint lines to mark where their armour would be. Two things that Lundqvist, Wurmtoter, Lutterworth, Schlager and Bahadur all had in common. One, they were all men. Two, eventually they were all killed.
Emily stepped back until the wall got in the way. They were at the badly moulded reproduction-terracotta-warrior stage now, just starting to acquire faces, their hair still just a faint pattern of impressed lines. Probably the spectral-warrior equivalent of teenagers, she thought. Yetch.
Now, she thought, would be a really good time for Frank to come through the wall.
So perfect, in fact, would the timing have been that she actually looked round, expecting to see the thin black lines spreading on the whitewashed surface like ink soaking into blotting paper. But they didn’t, and while she was looking the other way the first warrior must’ve finished growing, because when she looked back, there he was, six feet eight of lean muscle, shining armour and gormless expression. He had a short sword in one hand and a round shield about the size of a lollipop lady’s sign in the other. He hadn’t moved yet.
Right. Here goes. Emily smiled. ‘Hello, boys,’ she said brightly. ‘Who wants a nice cup of tea and a sandwich?’ Of course it shouldn’t have worked. If she’d tried it in the practical in her college mid-year exams, they’d have failed her on the spot. Spectral warriors, they’d have told her as they helped her pack, are programmed to be ruthless, unthinking killers. Try that in the field, they’d have told her, and they’ll be sending you home in a small plastic bag.
There were twelve of them, all motionless, looking straight at her. She took a deep breath.