Chasing the Dragon (33 page)

"Here we are," she said briskly.

"Nice," Zal said. "Minimalist. Austere." He felt so drained that he
sat down where he was and hoped that the ground remained solid
enough. It did. He'd heard stories about planewalkers and travel in
various dimensions that weren't suited to the 4-D kind of person, but it was much worse to be there. Even more boring than it had sounded
at the time.

"Nice." A voice dripping with sarcasm, cynicism, and contempt
repeated from all around them. Apart from the tone it was a pleasant
voice, melodious, rich, and clearly belonging to a woman with no selfconfidence issues. It reminded him more than anything else could have
that he was not visiting some elder faery who had a place and a house.
He was in an elder faery who was part of a trio that had the whole creation and destruction of realities down pat, and the place was as much
part of her as the time and any other objects he might encounter. But
keeping that in mind was too hard, so he'd learned to let Lily and Mina
and Mr. V be themselves because his brain, or lint, preferred it that
way. He could deal with a girl, and a mad aunt figure with anonymous
hairdos and an ever-pending birth, and a white cat and a wretched
backdrop no better than a cheap computer game vision of the edge of
forever because it was what he was used to. Glimpses of what lay
beneath all the fabrications made him feel so ill he couldn't function at
all. He wasn't sure if it mattered, but now, as the still air started
moving and the ground heaved and grew a fancy black castle with
crazily high towers around him, he thought maybe it did.

"Maybe it does ...... the voice echoed.

There was a sound like an all-over snap and he found himself in an
almost pitch-dark castle room of some kind with vaults so high they
were invisible and a dais in the centre ringed by torches holding daylight flame. In the middle stood the third sister. She was tall, lissome,
and had the exquisite features of the most lovely of all the shadowkin,
including their nightskin, the colour of deep purple shadows cast in
the last moments of a golden afternoon. Her hair was platinum white,
with a midnight blue streak in it where it fell across her shoulders in
thick straight cascades, and she wore blue-and-silver robes in the ceremonial style of a Jayon Daga sword master, bound tightly to the
wrists and ankles and neck with cloth wrap, shielded by exquisitely worked heavy wool panels and braced with black leather belts and bandoliers. Like the red-haired girl in his dream she had metal eyes, but
hers were gold and they had an inner light that made them gleam like
a demon's. In her right hand she was holding a crystal shot glass. Ice
chinked in it. In her left hand she had the very end of a hand-rolled
cigar, its tip glowing. As he watched she put this to her lips, bit back
a drag, flicked a shred of tobacco off her mouth with one elegant finger,
and blew smoke in their direction in a long, unimpressed stream.

"You're an elf," he said with surprise.

"No kidding." She looked at him and began to walk towards them
regally. "If only we could say the same for you." Her merciless and
unblinking gaze turned to her sister, who was now only up to Zal's
shoulder. This put her a good three feet too short to meet Glinda eye
to eye. "Lost your nerve?" Glinda said coolly and made two air kisses
about a thousand miles too high and wide in the general vicinity of
where Lily's head would have been if she weren't so short. "Glinda,"
she said. "Hmm ..." and took another drag on the stub before she
flicked it out of sight and knocked back whatever was left in her glass.
By the smell Zal figured it was bourbon. "About time you brought
him around. What kept you? Armageddon or something?"

"We've had a visitor," said Lily very deliberately. She explained the
situation as Glinda ignored her and her golden eyes tore delicately into
Zal.

"Necromancers," Glinda said as Lily finished. "I hate them.
Making a mess of everything, fingers where they shouldn't be, fiddling
and twiddling." She rubbed the tips of her free hand fingers together
and narrowed her eyes. "Pulling and poking and twisting like naughty
little children because where there's a way there's always some fool
willing and some fool not paying attention." She gave Lily a cool
glance and rattled the ice in her glass. When she was done, the glass
was full again. She sipped and peered at Zal some more. "You'd better
leave him with me."

"But-"

"He's mine anyway, or did you forget who was yanking the strings
that day?"

"I saved him."

"I let you. I cheated Jack. That was sweet. Who'd have thought
he'd meet his end at the hands of those old swords of mine, not that he
didn't deserve it. I would have preferred something more drawn-out
myself but ..." She shrugged. "Can't have it all."

"What are we going to do about it?" Lily said firmly. "We have to
do something."

"Oh blah blah," Glinda waved her cigarless hand airily. "You make
it sound like a duty when it's a chance to have some fun. Aren't you
curious about who would go to such dangerous lengths for something
as trivial as making a zombie? Someone has their eye on things much
better than we do. Go and get back to the weft and see what's going
on up there in the old land. Make yourself useful and get that cowbrain of yours sharpened up."

Lily bristled and fumed, but she was under Glinda's command,
clearly, so after some fussing and a few mild ripostes about Glinda's
general state of being, she left. "You were too slow anyway," she said
as she made to go. "His memories are sketchy and most of him was
ruined. He's been nothing but cheeky and useless and he knows almost
nothing about anything. He hardly even knows who he is. So who was
careless that day, hm?"

Glinda said nothing, but smiled a crocodilian kind of smile, blew
out some smoke, and waved good-bye with a merriness that was only
in her hand.

"You forgot your cigar," Zal said, referring to the smoke.

Glinda shot him a look that made him wish his mouth was sewn
shut and not in a slightly ajar position. Then her expression softened
with self-deprecation and she grinned, which unsettled him even
more. "So I did." She stretched out her arms and looked herself over, smoothed her thick hair with one hand, and admired her bourbon
glass. "Could be worse," she said.

"Did I invent you?" There he went again, like there was no
tomorrow. Oh, there wasn't, he reminded himself, so it was okay.
Looking at Glinda he was really sure more than ever that there would
never be a tomorrow. Her stare was glacial, saurian, and fiendishly
intelligent, a combination that made his seams shrink even though he
couldn't really feel pain. Her eyes could rip you apart all on their own.

"Of course you did," she snapped, and released him, turning away
and looking around at the black castle. "Don't ask silly questions. I
don't know why you made Lily so bland. She isn't, you know."

"I had to live with her," Zal mumbled. "And Mina, and that cat.
And Mr. V." He felt the book in his pocket. It seemed heavy. He wondered how he could fulfill his promise now.

"Very oversightful of her to hang onto you so long," Glinda purred
frostily. "What is that thing in your pocket?"

"I ... hm ... what?"

Glinda turned around. "Play or nay?"

Zal's insides frayed. "P-play?" The idea of starting some game with
this particular fey paralysed him with terror.

Glinda's savage eyes narrowed. "We can play, and do guessing
games and question and answer and truth or dare. Or we can not
bother and move straight to Go, collecting the dry rewards of practical
creatures. Your choice."

Oh yes. He had to agree. "I ... er ..."

"Come, Zal. You were always a player. I have seen you many
times."

"Yeah, but ..."

"And you have played with me before."

"Have I? I mean ... are you ... who I think you are ... or are you
... not who I think you are but something a bit like it in a Faery-only
version?" He cringed, trying not to move backwards and shrink, though he was pretty certain that he was doing both. For all that he
had felt briefly that it might be worth throwing himself in the fire and
ending it all, even when he'd hung off the cliff and could have let go,
even at the worst of himself, he wasn't really into suicide.

"You see?" She chinked her ice and smiled. "You like to play. You
can't help it. I always liked that about you. Not many people like
playing with me. I consider it a compliment, from you."

"Good." She hadn't answered him. He badly wanted her to. He had
to know. "Right. Muses. Furies. Fates. Birth, life, and death. Beginning, middle, and end. Sort of thing. So, you'd be ..

"I would be the truly inspiring one," Glinda said with grace and,
to his surprise, genuine majesty. "Yes."

"Are you all rolled up into one, the three of you, not separate
really?"

She shrugged. "It may be something like that."

"But you are a faery."

"I am what came before faeries."

"You aren't part of the human world or the others."

"I was before that."

"You aren't universal?"

She hesitated. "Beyond what may be touched by aether, I cannot
go. So no, in that sense, not universal, not eternal either, though close
enough to tick the box on surveys. Is this enough?"

"Are there even more primal fey than you?"

"One surely," she said. "But that doesn't concern you, or even me.
Mother Night is the first."

"She's the queen?"

"No, you fool. The faeries elect queens by the moment and the
yard. Queens are ten for tuppence. Every female has been the queen.
Even brownies."

"They didn't used to. In the legend, the queen's magic turned the
lock and shut off Under." He stretched what he knew, to test it. In spite of the obvious danger, which he felt less dangerous somehow, he
was enjoying himself now.

"And those of us down there, yes. Tell me Zal, what do you
remember of music? And the light elf magic? And of demons?"

He struggled. He had a sense that there was something but it
refused to come clear. Blurred images flitted through his mind. "Music
is songs but I don't know any. Light elf magic is about harmonising
and using nature elementals by cooperation or something. Demons ..." He cast about again but there was nothing. He shrugged.
He had a great sense of failure but he didn't understand why.

She sipped her drink and looked around for somewhere to put it,
but there was nowhere. She sighed, staring at the blank darkness and
then up at the few sketchy tower tops against the bloody sky. "I see the
old sister wasn't lying. You really have been stripped bare by that old
bastard Jack. He meant to kill you the hard way. But at the time I
thought it better to let it go far. The years you must spend here would
be less kind to you if you remembered. So, what is in your pocket?"

"A book," he said, paying up for the information and not daring to
speculate on what she meant by "remembered." If there was something
to remember she must know what it was, so it wasn't lost, not really,
not properly. The sense of having had a life elsewhere was exhilarating.
"And that's all I know."

"Whose book?"

Zal, still sitting and shivering with a cold that was deep and
lasting though he barely felt any change in his stuffing, thought over
the deal. He could say no to it because he was certain that any contest
they might have she would win. He could say no to it because her
penalties might be dire although since he was virtually dead anyway
he had a tough time imagining much worse, although lots of pain
might be worse, surely. He could say no and break the habit of a lifetime. But he never said no. "Truth or dare?"

Glinda seemed to come alive. "Dare," she said, her eyes flashing.

Zal cursed. If he had had such wits as she implied in the past he
surely didn't have them now. Typical. Death comes asking for a dare
and he hadn't got two notions to rub together. Then a moment of pure
genius struck him. It was so pure and so delicious that he couldn't say
it for a moment. "I dare you to take this book to Lily's attic, pick up
what you find there, and leave the book in its place. On the way back
speak to nobody and give me what you return with."

Glinda jerked her head back on its swanlike neck. Her golden eyes
blinked. Then she narrowed them and drew a long breath in, calculating. "Can I read the book?"

What did he care? "I don't know, can you?"

He thought he'd gone too far. She got taller, darker, and the room
filled with a brimming sensation of power like a tsunami about to
break. Zal cowered, much more successfully this time, and got his
head under both arms.

Then she held out her arm, hand outstretched. "As you say. I agree."

He thought she was trying not to smile. Carefully he brought out
the volume Mr. V had given him. Mr. V hadn't said he couldn't give
the task to someone else, and anything specifically not in the rules was
fair. It was Faery, after all. He handed the book over to her and she
took it with care, as if it were precious or dangerous. She ran her long
fingers over it softly without looking at it.

"I think it would be a very short story if I were to read this," she
said in a more gentle tone than he believed she was capable of. "Do you
know what it is?"

Zal shook his head. He really had no idea but he reckoned she
wouldn't tell him for nothing. He had to work on more material.

"Well I do," she said, smoothing the cover. "And I will be very
interested to see what Lily's hiding away that is its equal. What a dark
horse she can be. And as for Mr. V, why, to part with this ... hmm
mmm ... interesting days indeed." With that she vanished. If Zal
hadn't known better he would have said that she was skipping.

In the minute that followed he looked around him at the bleak
barren gothic castle, its heights silhouetted against a blue moon and a
black sun, the shifting colours of the light clouds flitting behind them
in orange, red, and gold. It reminded him of a second-rate heavy metal
concert stage. He tried to imagine something less obvious, but in its
way what he already had was comforting. There were other ways to see
this place that he was sure were infinitely less so. He liked illusions.
He didn't want any more of them stripped away.