Chasing the Dragon (25 page)

Over a thousand volumes in more than twenty languages, not
counting the mathematical ones. And not only were they illustrated,
they were illuminated with designs and pictograms of exquisite detail
and shimmering colours. The gift left her speechless with delight and
rent with loss. She would far rather have had the owner to talk to. That
feeling led to a place she couldn't go now, however, so she cut it off and
copied the whole to her own memory. Then she absorbed herself in a second of grace-put the stick back, closed the book, passed it over.
"He was such a technophobe."

"We've all tried touching it and even scanning it remotely,"
Bentley said, tucking the book back under her arm. "But like everything else, it was charmed to be just for you. Bet it's gone blank now."
She sounded sad.

"This is such a bad idea," Lila murmured, watching the demon cast
his circle, a generously sized one, around the inside perimeter of the
room. She forbade the medical staff to interfere and took a few minutes
to make sure they were all incarcerated in rooms with exits to the outside world. This forethought earned her the kinds of reprimands that
would have burned her ears off if she'd been paying attention and more
curses than she realised human beings even knew.

Meanwhile she was reading. The lore of the library said what the
demon had said, only in much more explicit details. She would have
been better off in a demon lab, using a host of other adepts as backup,
but even so her plan to revive Zal was as sophisticated a treatment as
wiring him to the mains and letting it rip. "I need a faery healer or an
elven one."

"We can get one," Bentley said. "But she lives out of town. Don't
you want to wait? I mean, he might recover. It's not unknown.
Cryostasis and-"

"No," Lila said with absolute conviction, unable to articulate to
herself why. She had begun to feel a deep, pressing unease that was
growing all the time. Hurry up, he'd written. Using the pen. Her pen.
It had occurred to her more than once that she could have created the
letters in her sleep, through some dreaming frenzy. It would be a
simple matter for her to forge his writing. In her nightmares as a child
she'd sleepwalked out of the house one time, taking a packed bag with
her. Even the pen could forge it all by itself. Just because it let her
carry it around didn't mean the thing couldn't serve other masters, or
itself. Who knew what such things could want? Meanwhile, as she glanced at the bed now she thought she detected a weakening of the
aether signature in Zal. The aetheric trace showed no signs of wanting
to reinhabit the whole of his body. His heart beat-ten beats a
minute-only because it lingered as if it also had misgivings or was
maybe waiting for a place where it could safely leave. God, she didn't
want to think it was that.

That erased any doubts she had over her timing. She moved
Bentley to a station near the door. "Stay right here and do as I say." The
doubts she had over her motives would have to wait.

"I'll have her called," Bentley said, meaning the healer, but did as
she was told and stayed put.

Lila took a long look at the demon. "Don't forget to seal the roof
off," she said. "And the floor. This is on the fifth level of ten storeys."

He glared at her, his mouth working incantations, his hands busy.
A moment of genuine hate. That was progress at least.

By now word had got around that the new agent was bossing staff
around for some mad experimental work. She could hear people gathering to watch through the one-way viewing deck above them, and in
the connecting rooms where more usual human medical equipment
was stored. Messages and suggestions that she ought to slow down,
follow procedure and generally stop came flooding in to her, but she
deleted them.

Who had she been kidding? The romance with the agency was
never going to last. They didn't want the same things at all. But at
least they had some nice gear.

A senior doctor issued her a direct order to surrender proceedings
to him, but she declined. She felt calm, thanks to the drugs, aware that
she might be making an awful mistake but determined to carry it
through, as if that determination would improve the situation and
render it virtuous. Again the knell of disquiet rang through her.

I am mad, she thought quite clearly as the demon finished
working on his containment ring and began to shape it into an invis ible but implacable sphere of aetheric force. He wasn't looking nearly
as perky as he had a few minutes ago. Sweat coated his face and he had
begun to shiver. Before he completed it she picked up the long handles
of the crucible's cage and carried it to the bedside, where she set it on
the floor.

Someone in the other room was talking about putting her under
arrest. She thought she probably deserved it, but checked all doors
were sealed on automatic, locking everyone out, then pulled Bentley to
the last corner of the room that was safely away from the demon's containment field. Finally he was done and backed up to join them. There
was nothing to see; Lila would have to take his word for it. "All ready?"

"Good as it gets," the demon muttered through clenched teeth. He
was panting and chose to slide down the wall and sit rather than keep
standing.

"Projectiles can get through it from here?"

He snorted, as if this was common knowledge. "Anything over a
hundred miles an hour has sufficient inertia to break through. It will
weaken the field at that-"

"Okay," she said, lifted her right hand, and took aim with the .45
it had efficiently become. She had her mind on Fate when she squeezed
the trigger. Come on then, let's see what you've got, she thought. Her own
private bets finalised in her mind. What had her mom used to say? Aces
high. Lila wondered what it meant. She shot the crucible.

Blinding yellow light flooded the room, making everyone duck or
shield their faces, except Lila, who had expected it and already closed
down her irises so that she would see the consequences of what she'd
done in all their detail. As the fragments of the clay pot blasted wide,
the toughened wire cage glowed white and then ran like water. Smoke
rose from the burning metal, and the front of some of the bed
machinery melted and failed. Alarms began to sound everywhere, but
nobody moved or spoke. They were all looking at the small, ribbonlike
shape of the creature that emerged from the pooling steel. It flowed in rings, disposed itself in fractal curls, balled itself up, and then
expanded into the chaotic shape of living flames as it felt its way curiously into the air. Almost as suddenly as it had reached out it contracted and became a distinct form, sinuous of body, with four legs, a
long neck, a long tail, and a small head each made of flame that turned
in on itself over and over as if it existed in a different, infinitely combustible universe.

The creature floated around. It attenuated, rose like a cobra, like
hot air or steam winding upwards. Its light danced on the silver
blanket and glistened on the wet gel that coated the near-dead body.
The body did not move, as it hadn't moved yet. The creature rose
higher, its posture attentive and giving every impression of acute listening. Its small head wavered, homing in on Zal's chest, to the heart
chakra, where the last of Zal was still hiding out. On one of the displays the room temperature reading climbed steadily.

Lila took a last look at it as it reached a sweltering ninety-nine.
Her Al mind was silently ticking off probabilities with every creeping
degree, and at this point she mentally cashed in her winnings. For a
moment she lingered, and looked at Zal. Yes, it would be easier to
watch him burn than see him live like that, that was for sure.

Her reasoning, sadly, was impeccable. Any flame of any kind was a
fragment of elemental fire-she knew that without reading it in
Sarasilien's books. A special form from Zoomenon was a second-order
being, it was true, one that had moved up one quantum step on the
evolutionary ladder towards the conscious awareness of Elemental Fire,
itself a singular collective entity composed of all its instances but selfaware in only one manifestation. An encounter with it would be unsurvivable. But the acceleration of heat in the room bespoke not of the tenuous heat of a living flame but ready combustion, something well into
a thorough burning. The temperature told her beyond question that
the little salamander wasn't what it looked like. It was not even an elemental, but a fire demon at full power, attempting to contain itself. She'd never seen or heard of one within civilised bounds. Therefore she
assumed this was one of those things from the Wild. Whatever way she
looked at it it was an assassination effort, and quite a good one. Her disappointment and rage gave way to cold calculations.

She reached out and grabbed a flare from Bentley's arms. She flipped
open the end cap and put her finger in the trigger release. With the
other hand she took the oxygen cylinder and flicked it around in her
palm until it lay along her forearm, nozzle pointing forwards ready to
spray. She moved forwards purposefully, towards the circle, then at the
last moment turned, ignited the flare, and opened the oxygen valve.

The water demon's head went up almost immediately in an explosion of steam and boiling liquids. It barely had time to scream its
agony before the best part of its flesh was vaporised by the intense,
unstoppable burn. Lila stood over it, her own arms lost to sight in
clouds of billowing steam and filthy smoke, guiding the oxygen jet to
ensure total consumption. The screaming of the humans and Bentley's
cry momentarily drowned out the area alarms, but in a few seconds
Vadrahazeen was dead and beginning to shrink. The stench of his
cooking body filled the room. Lila cut off the oxygen as he began to
decompose in the demon manner. She threw the cylinder at Bentley,
who still caught it in spite of her shock, then jammed what was left of
the flare into the smouldering eye socket of the demon's charred skull.
Sparks and flame shot out of the mouth and nose. Around her legs the
dress wraps shifted as they came close to the smouldering body, tiny
tongues of thread darting forwards to close gaps and taste the foul
smoke that was billowing around.

With his death the circle he'd conjured evaporated and so did the
glamour he had set upon the creature crouched on Zal's chest. It was
small, no bigger than a cat, and halfway in physiology between cat and
monkey. Its long, gibbonish arms were stretched out, hands on Zal's
face, the overly lengthened and sharpened index fingers moving
towards his closed eyes. Its body was wreathed in red, orange, and yellow fire that was so intense and brilliant it was hard to see any
details, but here and there the fire could be seen blasting out of its
body core through rents in flesh that was raw, suggestions of muscle
and tendon holding bones together over a blast furnace. The blanket
and everything near it was already catching light. On Zal's face the gel
was spitting and boiling with snapping pops.

Lila breathed out to clear her nose, took aim through the clouding
air, and shot the demon with a cold iron full metal jacket. The impact
flung it through the air and slammed it into the wall. It spun crazily,
recoiling and using its long legs to rebound back towards the bed.
Spatters of cooling metal trailed in its wake like blood, where the iron
had melted and run harmlessly out of its body. It landed lightly, fixated on its task, and with one febrile leap landed on Zal's head and
stabbed its clawed fingers down. Its tail coiled, and the spike tip drove
into the side of the silver blanket. The body jolted with the force.

Lila forgot the gun and reached for the pen. The heat in the room
was well above a hundred and thirty and soaring rapidly. It made her
faster, but she wasn't fast enough. She knew it but carried on with her
swing anyway, watching the shift of slim fountain pen to sword take
place in a time split too small to detect, the sword huge and curved in
her hand, the blade a thin, razor-sharp crescent of ice that grew and
grew in the arc until it was exactly the right size.

The demon screamed with fury and leapt straight up, clutching its
hands and tail into itself as it became a fireball. "Cheat!" she heard it
say in the oldest form of demonic, a wailing, desperate, angry, and
futile spasm of absolute hatred that cut short as the sword blade sliced
into it. The blade shook in her hand as the monkey thing vanished
into the splintering white of its surface. By the time it finished the
swing and her hand returned to her side it was the pen once more, cool
and undisturbed.

Zal was dead.

ila walked forwards and looked down at the corpse. She was numb.
The face was blackened now, gel turned to peeling, dried goo. It
was hideous and silent. After a time she was aware of Bentley at her
side. The android was holding a baton in her hand.

"I tried to stop it," she said, and for the first time since Lila had
met her she heard a hesitant, awkward human in the voice.