Chasing the Dragon Read online

  "Good question."

  "I have to go to work," she said, feeling how strange the words sounded coming out of her mouth, as if she were about to do something quite normal. "Mal called."

  "I heard." He waggled one long horsey ear.

  "We can't come back here." She pulled on the trousers and buttoned them up. Inside the jacket was a pocket just the right size for the pen. She stuffed the pen down the front of her bra so it rested on the band and then marched to the door, picked it up, bent it in half, and tossed it out of the cave mouth. "I can't hide from them."

  "I will fetch you tonight," Teazle yawned. "There are no machines in Demonia that aren't our own."

  "As far as you know."

  He thought on that a moment while she looked around pointlessly. It occurred to her that she'd been happy in the cave, that she'd felt safe there. Inside her chest where Tath used to live she felt herself crumpling and compressing at the realisation she would never come back here. She had no idea what to do with the pain. She walked to the wall and put her finger out towards the ink.

  Teazle was suddenly there, his hand holding hers in a shocking grip. "Ah ah ah," he said lightly. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."

  She stared into his white eyes, surprised and frozen with it but angry too. She wrenched her hand out of his hold with a twist, and what shocked her most was the burning remembrance of how good it had been to cut that rogue's head off and not have to listen to it, to just end something before it began.

  She became aware of the demon watching her with his oddly understanding gaze. When he spoke again he was gentle. "It's still wet," he said, nudging the cruel point of his beak at the writing and letting the movement of his head shine the light from his eyes onto the black lines. They gleamed like glass.

  Lila swallowed hard. "What is that stuff?"

  "I don't know," he replied, "but it sure as hell isn't ink."

  She recounted for him the way she'd seen the same substance from the pen make words that twisted and furled like vines, or ropes, or threads, when she'd hit the motorway flyover and seen Tath's emissary.

  "Yeah," Teazle sighed. "Then we both know what it is, even if we don't know its name."

  "The Void? Voidstuff." No way was she leaving it at that, in doubt. She wanted it definite.

  "The Void is the endbeginning fromwhich and towhich and out- ofwhich. Yes. But Void itself is only emptiness, potential. This is voidinthemakingbutnotmade. Essential. But somebody's. It didn't come here by itself. There always has to be a mind behind it. And for this, a very powerful mind. Of all the aetheric races very few individuals would ever touch this stuff, or want to. The pen ... the weapon ... that you have, uses it because it is the instrument made to ... hn ... made for it, I suppose."

  "By god." She really didn't want him to say yes to that, not least because she didn't want to have to tackle theology on top of everything else.

  "No." He shook his head. "I said before. Not made by god. It is of god. But we could say that about anything, even this mattress, of course. Anyway, that doesn't matter. It's not the what but the why that's the trouble. For some reason it is with you. Like the dress. Toppling." He sighed again. It was so uncharacteristic she frowned and her suspicion was roused.

  "What's the matter?"

  He was slumped, his head low. He shook it slowly again. "I'm running out of time and places back home," he said. "And I don't like what's going on with you and these articles. It feels bad to me, in my bones. But it's your call." He looked at the writing one last time. "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to find Zal," she said. She said it very definitely, to make it true, and tried not to notice the enormous pit of doubt under neath the statement. "That's what. And I'm going to figure out about these rogues and the other 'droids. My part of the deal. I'll do that today. And right this minute I'm going to work."

  "I'll see you tonight," he said, and vanished.

  She stood in the backwash of air that rushed in to fill his space. Trust him to get the last word. His discontent bothered her though. She was certain he was keeping something from her. Her alarm signalled again. Mal was getting furious. She took one last look at the bleak little bolthole and then launched herself out of the door into the fresh morning air.

  A hundred metres out she turned back, equipped a shell into her right arm launcher, and watched the little missile streak a trail of smoker's breath to the dim circle of the door before it exploded in white-hot fire and chunks of rock. A plume of filthy smoke rolled up and the black-stained stone went crashing down in white foam into the high tide.

  Lila turned and made for Malachi's signal. She felt colder and emptier than she had ever been.

  The cause for concern became obvious before she even arrived. Malachi was with some other agents on the beaches a few miles up the coast, where the city gave way to empty land owned by the wealthiest individuals. Here lush forests covered the rolling hills and dips and islets, giving way occasionally to designed glades or constructed grottoes, waterfalls and other features that looked so natural but were anything but. Even the beaches had been groomed, the sand whiter and finer, the rock pools more interesting, the docks perfect, their chromed mooring posts gleaming in the weak sunlight.

  The tide was just starting to go out. At a point midway along this Gold Coast by the high-water mark the dark, whalelike body of a ship had been beached. The shape was unmistakable; it was a galleon with three masts and a narrow, square tucked stern in which leaded coloured glass still glowed. The masts were ruins, however, barely stumps, and as she flew closer Lila identified the twenty-two rotted and rusted guns at her portholes. She was waterlogged, as if she'd crawled up from the bottom of the ocean, and on her sides her paintwork was worn away almost to nothing, although on the stern Lila could just make out the picture of a blue ground and a golden deer.

  She landed twenty metres from the fluttering cordon ribbonshardly needed since the beach was private property-and walked towards the cluster of agents standing on the hull's leeward side. The sea was soft and quiet, the light brilliant on the waves, so much so that it was difficult to make out the faint light the ship itself emitted. This was noticeable to human eyes in dark shadow, as a faint gleaming on the edges of things.

  Lila gave the whole object a wide berth and joined Malachi at the edge of the group. Among them the stocky figure of Bentley stood impassively, her face turned towards the sea.

  They knew, Lila thought to herself. Of course the machines all knew everything that happened to their number. For a split second she almost found herself moving forward to speak but then glanced at Malachi and saw his amber eyes were frowning.

  "There's another one, several more ... farther down." He gestured at the coastline.

  Lila watched with him as one of the human agents went forwards under orders and poked the vessel with a stick. They all heard the tap.

  "Pretty damn solid for a ghost," she said.

  "You know what it is?" Malachi asked.

  "The Golden Hind," Lila replied. "But it's a wreck. Why?"

  Malachi folded his arms. He was wearing a camel coat that was too heavy for the day but he still looked cold. "Don't know."

  The stick-poker came back looking grey and tense. "Feels funny,"

  he said, putting the rest of the team between him and the ship. Lila looked back at the house this plot belonged to. It was snugged in halfway up a steep hill, about a hundred metres from the water, standing on long poles though it looked like most of it was cut into the hill. Expansive, expensive, she thought, and caught the flash of sunlight off a pair of high-power binoculars looking back at her.

  A man Lila didn't know came up to them and asked Malachi to take a better look. "We need your kind of vision here," he said, nodded to Lila as if she were just another colleague, and then looked back at Malachi, his expression taut with discomfort.

  "Come with me," Mal said, so fast Lila almost didn't catch the words. If she hadn't known better she'd have thought he wa
s afraid.

  "'Kay." She nodded, glad to be useful or, indeed, glad to be anything positive this morning for however long it could last.

  He led the way over the wet sand to the point where the stick man had stood. The hull listed over them here, but was broken down enough that the lower decks were exposed. Seeing it from there made it quite clear the thing was a ruin. Water dripped from it, and Lila copied Mal's studious avoidance of the fall. It was black and difficult to make out any details inside. The witchlight that shone from its vertices was so weak that the contrast with the sun rendered it useless. The whole thing gave off a chill that made the air around it noticeably colder-almost three degrees colder, Lila noted-and there was a smell like metal but no smell of anything else. She put her hand out and touched her fingertips to its hull. The cold there was actually blistering, but she was able to stand it long enough to get plenty of information.

  "That's not wood."

  "Yeah, no shit," Mal whispered, keeping his words from the others.

  Lila looked at the stern of the ship, where a large portion of it was still in contact with the water. For the first time she noticed the tiny alteration in sound where tiny pieces of ice were washing in the lukewarm waves. White ice formed jutting spars just above the water line. Where the sun shone on the bulk of the wreck however, water was running freely.

  "How could a ghost stay this solid here?" It didn't make sense to her. She'd seen ghosts before, but not like this one. They had forms made of light and air; sometimes they could use small particulatessand, dust, snow-and small items to make their forms, but this was unheard-of. "I mean, it isn't wood, but it looks and feels like it. It has the same molecular structures, hydrocarbons, water, mineral traces. It's got the same properties as something you'd cut from a sizeable tree. It's even been splintered by cannon shot. The light is in the midrange for ghostlights." She would have gone on, but analysis of ghost forms was an incomplete, almost un-begun science.

  "It's part of the Fleet," Malachi murmured. His eyes searched and searched it relentlessly. "But the Fleet was never wrecked. All the vessels were whole. I don't understand...."

  "What's the Fleet?" she asked.

  "Trouble," he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat and slowly backing up, all the while keeping an eye on the ship.

  "Are you expecting someone to come out of it?"

  His eyes flashed as he turned abruptly to look at her. "No. No."

  "So, you're done?"

  "Hardly."

  "Someone has to go into it."

  "Yes."

  "Do a proper survey. See the insides."

  "Yes." He nodded vigorously.

  "We can wait until noon. Get some scaffolding. If you think it'll last."

  "Good idea." He backed off from it so fast he was giving orders to the support crew at the fence line before she had time to make another suggestion.

  She was pleased, kind of. It seemed that in a crisis they were bud dies again. At least he was talking to her. That was good, she felt, but she didn't hope for a lot more, though she needed it. Above her the ship creaked and groaned as the water left more and more of it on the beach. Lila scanned it and reanalysed the information her fingers had gathered.

  It was the oddest thing. There was no scientific framework that dealt with this, to her knowledge. Ghosts spawned in the Void, by methods that were imperfectly understood. The relation of the Void to the worlds wasn't understood. Ghosts had always previously appeared and vanished on their own schedules, even if they could be logically attached to places, and some tests had said they were clearly composed of aether. Here, in this ship, the aether had started to resemble matter. It was doing a fake job, like any glamour, but it was a remarkably good fake in the making. It was almost ... real.

  Nobody in Otopia had ever seen anything like it before.

  Lila's mind skipped back uneasily to the day years ago when she had followed Zal into the woods to watch him tripping out in an elemental frenzy. Aside from the sheer weirdness of witnessing that odd event, there'd been a ghost present. It was a large forest spirit of the kind that experts liked to refer to as Archetypal, as if that helped. In the form of a stag it had crept up on the flipped-out Zal and put its nose against his hand. When ghosts touched living beings bad things happened. For elves, their entire form was susceptible to being consumed, and Zal had lost some of his hand. Now the fundamental bizarreness of it struck home. The outline of his hand had remained, but it was like it was glass and the contents had been vacuumed out. But an elf was blood and bones, as well as aether. What had happened there? She could kick herself for not paying more attention.

  And then there was her own close encounter with a thing like that. It was before she was this cyborg Lila. Far away in Alfheim, when she was just an overexcited assistant to a diplomat, thinking she was getting into the daring world of espionage.... Anyway, in the forests there she'd got caught by the infinitely more experienced and cunning elf secret service. They'd tied her and her "fixer," Vincent, and left them in the dark at the edge of their camp, apparently unguarded, though she was too much involved with the conviction she was about to die to bother trying an escape. And then, at some point in her terrified reverie she'd felt the bitter chill and the unmistakable icy touch of a ghost approach. There was movement in the pitch darkness, bushes moving, twigs snapping, and some sharp cries in incomprehensible Elvish that had let her know she'd had a guard all right, and now it was running off in terror. An eldritch flicker illumined the ground for a second or two. Screams then and Vincent shoving at her, getting to his feet, starting to run blind into the woods. She was too slow. She hit a tree. She fell over. There was the singing note of an arrow over her head, a thump, an outbreath and she knew Vincent was dead. It was her first day in Alfheim. Her first day at being a spy.

  Brushing aside the memories that wanted to swamp her anew with their horror she realised that their guard had been the one attacked by the ghost, if attack was the right word. She knew nothing else about it. Zal had recovered quite easily from his incident and she'd never asked any details. Now the only people she could interview about her own experience were the remaining members of the Elf spy band, and she had no idea who they were, but surely someone in Alfheim knew something about ghosts? Sarasilien, she thought ... and then remembered he was gone. She was in his place. Time she checked out what he'd left her more closely.

  But first ...

  "Hey." She followed Malachi to the far edge of the cordon, where he was making a call back to the office. "What's got you freaking out?" Fey didn't concern themselves overly with ghosts, and as far as she knew faery didn't really experience many of them.

  He finished talking and closed the call. "That was Greer. We're to see the rest and head back. He's gonna let the juniors keep an eye on things." For once he met her gaze and his lips made an unhappy shape as he thought over what he was about to say. His seriousness was almost enough to make her smile. "The last time I saw the Fleet I was standing on the deck of a Hunter ship out in the Void. They ran from it. And I keep hearing ..." He paused, and his discomfort became acute on his face. "The damn thing haunts me. I don't know why. Ever since I was out there. It's got something to do with the three sisters." He made a warding sign as he mentioned the Fates "The middle sister was in the admiral's boat with Zal. She's the one fished him out of the Void before he was killed, just like she's the one using him as a hanky now."

  "I don't get what your problem is with her ... them ... ," Lila said. "They're no different to other faeries."

  "Yes they are!" Malachi made pressing motions with both hands, telling her to keep it down. "We shouldn't even talk about them. Not even without names. They don't like it. And what they don't like has a way of ending up like Zal for eternity, or worse. You think you got remade by the stupid humans and their will to know about the machines. Well, that's nothing compared to what they'll do to anything they take a fancy to change."

  "Okay, if you say so," she hissed in r
eply, feeling faintly stupid at having a whispered chat like schoolkids. "But it would help if you could find a way of sharing what you know about them with me."

  The black faery narrowed his orange eyes and peered at her. "Still fixated on getting him back?"

  "I know you don't want to be involved, don't worry." A chill fled over her.

  "Bit late for that," he said, but without rancor. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.

  She glanced back at the ship. "Do you really think this is personal? About you, I mean?"

  "No," he said. "Not this manifestation. Doesn't mean they forgot me, though." He smiled weakly and shrugged. "There's only one place I'll discuss this, and it ain't in Otopia or any of the places we usually hang out, I can tell you." He looked down, deep in thought, and scuffed the sand with the sole of his pristine leather shoe. "Probably time you got taken up-to-date with what's around here anyway. It'll make a nice day out. Get a lot of things done. Yeah. Okay."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow we are going to visit a few people. For today let's just get through today. How's your spouse?"

  "Still alive," she said, hoping it was true.

  "Nice suit." He gave a quick glance at her outfit, which, as usual, cut a reasonably odd line over her tough-girl leathers. "Good tailoring." He paused suddenly on the last word and bit it off.

  "What now?"

  "Just ... nothing." He smiled his sudden, dazzling smile that was so charming it made you forget everything you'd been thinking about.

  "Faery mind tricks," she muttered darkly at the winter white of his teeth. "Don't you hold out on me."

  "All in good time," he said with something of his old dashing ways and twirled about to sweep away in an elegant line of camel coat, navy slacks, and immaculate shoes. "Come along," he called over his shoulder. "Work to see. People to do."

  Lila followed obediently, ten steps behind. Fifty years, she thought. Fifty years of waiting here and he was not a day different to her. What had he done with all that time?