Chasing the Dragon (28 page)

Malachi paused and closed his eyes. So much thinking and worrying was like being human. But the early morning was long and
silent in the garden courtyard, and he didn't have much time to come
up with a plan.

Back to the wheel. Let's say she vanished herself. If dragons were
stirring, she'd know about that and maybe a lot of other things. Was
she scared? Gone into hiding? Or perhaps bored of her reclusive, prisoner's life? More likely she would want to be out and about at such a
time, and that would mean finding a new identity under which to
operate. If she were skilled, intelligent, and well supported she could
manage a vanish, he reckoned. Seers could be fooled, accessories bribed
or murdered, and aetheric signatures remodelled by top-flight necromancers. It was possible. Also, he thought, perhaps there was an extra
bonus that wasn't apparent, namely, getting rid of Teazle at some
nearish future date when surely the odds would turn against him and
someone would kill him. Certainly the upheaval of his spree would
create a diversion for a person wanting to slip away unnoticed.

He took out his phone and called Suvidae, one of the Hunter's
Chosen who had abandoned Otopia to live in Demonia where they felt
more appreciated. A lot of Chosen had migrated there, or to Faery, even to Alfheim. Suvidae had a love-hate relationship with the agency, but
his sense of loyalty to his home often won over his rage at their betrayal
of him. After a few rings the Chosen's light voice answered hesitantly.

"Yes?"

"It's Malachi. Don't worry. I won't trouble you long."

"Let's see. I'll do you two question-and-answers for a new personal
techpad."

"Midrange, no extras."

"Midrange, with case of my choice, not to exceed a hundred
Otopian dollars."

"Yeah okay. What's the latest movements on the case of Madame
Des Loupes?"

"Case closed. Media covers the big white thing every day, but they
don't refer back to that much now. Today is all about how he's missing,
of course. Endless speculations."

"People curious about Madame at all? Any investigations into her
affairs going on?"

"She left a will. Stuff went to relatives. Some money spent on
public goodwills. House is empty. They like to clean them out here,
clean them of magic, but apparently it's hard to find someone good
enough to do the job so it's waiting on that. After it's done it's for sale,
as I heard. Prime site. You interested?"

"Definitely not. Thanks Suvi. Send me the bill for your toy."

"As usual. Should I look around some more?"

"Think you can be discreet?"

"I don't know. If I'm not, I'll be dead so you won't have to pay."

"Go on then."

They hung up on each other at the same moment.

Malachi finished his second bottle of beer and took out his nail file.
He cleaned his fingernails and buffed them, noticing how thick they'd
become-almost unsightly. As he flexed his fingers they lengthened,
sliding like claws, then retracting. He hated that, but he hadn't found a way to stop it yet. Finally even that task bored him and he lay down
on his spare overcoat on the grass and tucked his hands between his
thighs to keep them warm.

Proof of Zal's existence, position or otherwise? The thought of
obtaining it made him shudder. Might as well go the whole hog and
find the guy. It would be no harder. A simple task-find the Ladies, ask
them. He had spent a long time avoiding them. But since he'd seen the
Fleet massing off Jones's bows he'd known they were too close, and he
was doing a bad job of it. Because who was on those ships, all three?
Not Jesus Christ and his lady, as the modern human words would have
it, that was for sure. The Fleet belonged to an area of aetheric potential.
It was something to do with the Fleet that had caused him to ... but
he'd forgotten exactly what. Anyway, he knew they should be forgot. At
least their emergence had nothing to do with him. But this was so little
consolation it didn't even grant him a moment's peace. They were here,
crashing into Otopian shores, running aground in the primaterial plane
as if they belonged there, and that was just such bad news.

He made himself stop thinking about it.

Zal's zombie-summoned or sent? Calliope Jones, dead or alive?
How to find the answers to these things without stumbling into the
path of horrors and nightmares? He feared there was no way, because
although these matters seemed weighty and important, in the wider
scale of existence they were nothing. Two missing people, albeit ones
with odd connections, didn't amount to a hill of beans. An age of chaos
was coming, heralded by the bomb or whatever it had been, and if he
stayed attached to these difficult people, these sticky people with their
sticky trajectories and unfortunate tendencies to trip over disturbing
objects from older ages, then he would not be able to slip away himself, like Madame, into the shadows and escape.

He fell asleep and dreamed of rats; large, healthy, farsighted rats
who rushed away from him down impossibly small channels that
existed in the sides of everything, as if the whole world was a ship and all surfaces were its gunnels. With popping sounds like corks from bottles, they vanished down small black holes. He tried to winkle them
out with his paw but he was too big even to fit that into the openings.
After a while he tried a corkscrew that he found in his pocket and
pulled out not a rat, but one of these corks. It left behind it a smooth,
unbroken reality. He turned the cork over and looked at the other end.
It was a tiny glass, through which he could just make out himself,
peering inward, his orange eyes gigantic in the fisheye lens.

al had grown used to the end of the world. It was not as glamorous
as he had been led to believe. For one thing it was dirt poor. For
another it was never really daylight. Even given that these ideas made
little sense at this point, they both felt wrong to him.

He paused in the course of his walk now to look out at the only nondisappointing feature. His path traced the edge of the known world,
about a mile from the line where the geography and atmosphere of
Under broke up and faded away. Beyond it and, he thought, around it,
was a starry void not unlike deep space, except that instead of showing
vast tracts of black emptiness it was filled with shimmering, endlessly
flowing fields of faint light. The stars were not bright, but few, distant,
tiny, and remote. The light fields moved in all directions, and sometimes made him dizzy if he looked for too long. He thought at first they
were a kind of nebula, clouds of gas illumined by other objects. However, there were no other objects, so that theory hadn't lasted.

The path under his feet was bare and a little stoney. He put down
his two tightly stuffed sacks-this was the way back-and sat on them
to take advantage of his own speed. Lily (not her real name) did not
need him, well, at all if truth be told. Mina (not her real name either)
claimed she had to have a constant supply of materials or else there'd be damn trouble and he mustn't be later than the strike of six. It was
4:30-something. He had hoped to feel better for looking at the light,
but he felt sad. To the other side of the strip of land he inhabited there
was another zone of breaking and another miraculous spatial vast. He
thought Faery must be upwards, where there seemed to be sky. There
was no sun. Light came and went but cast no shadows.

He had sat here at 4:30-something every day for the last couple of
decades and stared out into the end of the world, looking for clues.
Around him the dull reddish ground was dusty, stoney, and uninteresting as the surface of Mars. It wasn't only figuratively dead, it was
aetherically dead as well. He'd tried to find the slightest trace of earth
elemental, but nothing had replied to his summons. Tests revealed the
entire place to be utterly without power or life. He couldn't understand why the Sisters stayed here. They didn't have to. He'd seen them
come and go.

He looked as far as he could out into the tracts. The light shimmered and waved its spectral colours, all hues, like dissolving rainbows. He tried to imagine them into shapes, but it wouldn't come;
they defied shape or else he couldn't make them fit. He wondered how
much longer he could stand it, how long he would have to wait. Those
two unknowns weighed on him every day. Were they the same, close,
far apart? Was it pointless to carry on? Was help about to arrive any
minute? Even an attempt to muster a sense of hope or urgency fell flat.
He was sure it was a feature of the Sisters, like this place-all of it was
them. Since he had been here, there had been no real intention in him,
no fancies, and at night no dreams.

He wondered if Jack the Giantkiller had pounded them out of
him. That was possible. The memory was very dim, but it was one of
his only ones. He recalled friends, but not much about them. Only a
girl stood out in his mind clearly. She had dark hair, with a red splash
in it, and robot hands, and a pretty dress. He wondered if she was a figment of his imagination, but he seemed to remember her standing close, alongside Jack, in the snow. Her silver eyes had reflected him
and in them he saw himself as he used to be and knew that way that
he had once been real.

He felt convinced they would come, but recently that conviction
had worn away and become so threadbare there was about nothing left
of it. His heart was heavy and sore. He was lost, and in Faery that
meant as good as forgotten.

He bent down and saw the writing he had made yesterday in the
dust. It hadn't changed-no wind-but he regrooved it with the end
of his finger now, his hidden prayer to the silver-eyed girl because he
was sure that she had been alive at the end. He didn't let himself think
that now she may be dead.

Hurry up.

That done, he resumed staring at the lights until it was time to go.
Then he got up, picked up the sacks, and walked along the path to
Mina's house. It was a tidy house, white stone, a slated roof, and a tall
chimney. The garden-a span of blue grass-was marked out by a low
white fence without a gate. He passed through this opening and
looked up to see the sky change. The closer one got to the house the
more the illusion of a blue sky or a night sky receded and the light
fields against the empty space revealed themselves. Directly above the
chimney, so high it must be miles up, was a black circle, almost a dot.
Around this the delicate webs of light spun, forming a spiral shape like
a hurricane or a galaxy. The light streaked thin, into distinct lines, as
it neared the edge of the circle, but the edge was sharp and what lay
behind or beyond it was impossible to see. The black hole permitted
no escape. The light poured up through it. He knew from long ages of
observation and question that this was Mina's distaff, funnelling
upwards into the loom of Faery. The sight was utterly enchanting and
it filled him with despair.

He tore his gaze away from it, the only route out of the place and
far beyond his reach, and hoisted the sacks through the door. Inside Mr. V was cleaning. At least he was supposed to be cleaning, but
Mina's house rarely saw either her or a visitor so there was almost
nothing to do day by day and he was, as usual, sitting in the front room
in the armchair beside a roaring fire, his feet up. His feet had to be up
because he was a dwarf and the chair seat was large. A book was open
in his tiny hands, his glasses at the end of his nose. His pipe was lit and
resting on its stand, the graceful curve of its stem almost as long as one
of Mr. V's arms. The smoke had already quietly perfumed the room.
Zal took a deep breath and smelled cherries, and toasted plum brandy,
and cinnamon and old roses. He said hello and Mr. V smiled his whitebearded Father Christmas smile that made his eyes crinkle and almost
entirely hide their light green sparkle.

"Master Zal. Got the day's allotted thread?"

"No, it's those people I murdered the other day. The rats dug up
the bodies and now I thought I'd put them down the waste disposal in
the sink."

Mr. V beamed. "Excellent." He picked up a feather duster from the
seat next to him and waved it around idly. "I'm working hard myself."

Zal couldn't dislike Mr. V, for all that he had tried to haul any kind
of sense out of the little old guy and never had managed to. The dwarf
was round, good-humoured, endlessly patient, and even kind.

"Come and look in the fire." He often said that.

Zal went over and looked. It was easier to do what Mr. V asked
because he'd keep asking until you did. The flames were roaring
heartily on a bed of coals. Zal was careful not to get too close. It was
extremely hot.

"What do you see?"

This was a difficult question. Zal knew that Mr. V was hoping he
would see something, but so far he hadn't managed to see anything but
flames. He'd tried lying a couple of times, but the dwarf had always
chuckled and called him a wee fiend of a fibber, a tinkus-minkus, a par-
celler of verily old ropies, and other such silly names. For a reason he didn't understand Zal wanted badly to please Mr. V and see something.
Mr. V seemed to have nothing at all in his tiny life except dusting
Mina's knickknacks, cooking the odd meal, and perusing an infinite
variety of small journals out of which he would read tall tales to Zal, if
it was late and Zal was particularly miserable. Also, apart from Mr. V,
Modgey the horse, and Tubianca the cat there was nobody to talk to at
all and nothing to do. Fire-staring was really quite appealing.