Chasing the Dragon (40 page)

It was Lila's turn to be impressed and envious. She paced the
familiar/unfamiliar track of the tunnel steadily, noting its turns, and
then, with surprise, she found it branching. The suppurating, stinking
air, old and foul with neglect and the seepage of generations of demon
sewage, formed sluggish intersecting trails. Lila scanned and scanned
again. She had reached a labyrinth. It was the treasure chamber. By her
calculation they were now beneath the lagoon proper, not far from a
major commuter boat route that joined the main city to Isle d'Ifritis,
a place given over to the more elementally attuned demons so that
they could experiment with Zoomenon energies at a safe distance from
the majority of the population.

Lila began to move forwards. Left, left, right ... the turns flowed
out of a memory that wasn't hers but which was confident of itself.
Occasionally she turned her face out of habit to "look" down an
untaken path. Sometimes she had a sense of knowing what lay that
way, but most of the time she was not sure. As she went she created a
clear map in her mind, marking all this down, and soon she began to understand that the labyrinth's ways were masterfully planned. She
twisted and turned, crossed and recrossed ways-this route was one
discovered by intuition working on old traces; it was not "correct" in
the sense of being the only way to the destination. The labyrinth was
not a true single trackway. It was a complex set of routes that met and
parted, met and parted, revolved, reversed.

She hesitated suddenly. A faint smell had come to her, over the taint
of the air that she'd become numbed to. She knew it. Her heart leaped, surprising her. He was here! She began to move faster, but then a possessing
caution and a curious impulse made her slow down and pause once more.
Ahead of her was a chamber that had light. But she must not use her eyes
to see. She must shut them. Something was in there that was very important. Madame was excited but imperious in her warnings. This thing,
whatever it was, was key to her survival, as well as Teazle's. Lila would be
helping her in finding him, but it would be no help if she looked.

Lila closed her eyes-which made no difference at that moment.
She moved more slowly, utterly alone in the dark except for the occasional drip of water from the low roof barely an inch from her head. She
made more turns, descended a short stair, slid down a ramp, and was
there. What she "saw" on infrared detection made her stop dead in her
tracks. The chamber was small, but it was half full of demons. Teazle
was among them, at the back of their ranks. Aside from him, all of
them were stone dead. He was not moving. As if he were one of them,
he was caught, motionless, balanced with grace in a pose that was
moving eagerly forwards, all the better to see what every single one of
them was staring at, each in their own individual pose of rapture. At
the front of the queue was an unusually large statue of an Amazonian
female demon of mixed draconid and human descent, her hair a mass
of finny tentacles writhing, her eyes and mouth open in an expression
of strange delight as she balanced on her clawed feet like a dancer, her
hand outstretched to touch the large and beautiful frame before her
from which her other hand had just pulled free a heavy covering silk.

That silk was now a few rotted strands in her eternal grasp. Inside
the frame sat something so infinitely black that none of Lila's ur-lights
or frequencies could penetrate it. It was there but ... she had no idea
what it was. It bore no properties of anything in the physical world she
could measure.

It was the Mirror of Dreams.

Of course it was, she thought and surveyed the scene once again,
closely, before stepping carefully towards Teazle. He might have been
made of rock for all the movement he made. She thought of moving
him, but a recoil struck through her bones. No. He must remain
exactly where he was when he had been trapped. Otherwise he would
never get out.

Madame herself had never come this far.... Lila was surprised.
She had expected to find her too, but after sensing what lay around the
final turn Madame had stopped her exploration of this particular
tunnel. Her question had been answered. This was where the pirate
queen had been lost, and her crew after her, and a couple of other lucky
discoverers after that, until in time they had all been forgotten. It was
the heart of the labyrinth. The pirate had brought her greatest loot
here and, in defiance of all warnings and in a good deal of ignorance,
had thought she would have a look at a legendary object for herself.
And it had looked at her. And that was that.

Teazle had somehow got himself down here and he had done the
same. He couldn't have known. He wasn't stupid. Lila checked him
over. Apart from some muscle wastage and fatigue he was still alive.
He was breathing. His heart was working fine. Soon he would become
badly dehydrated and later he would starve to death or else ... she
turned around and looked closely at the other demons. They didn't
appear to have died of starvation. They all looked rather lifelike, if not
lively. She was forced to conclude that something had happened before
that. She waited for more knowledge to rise from her contact with
Madame, but the clairvoyant knew nothing about it, only a vague notion from an old story that one might die whilst dreaming and so
die in reality. Lila scanned back into the still darkness within the
frame. It gave out nothing. Were they more than paralysed?

This the clairvoyant knew. She was impatient with Lila's obtuseness. Of course they were inside the Dream! Their bodies remained in
the real world, but their spirits were gone. Lila didn't know if the body
died because of that severance or if something in the dreaming was getting to them and killing them there. At this a sense of urgency so acute
overtook her that she started to gasp for breath and her heart began
racing of its own accord. Madame's fear overwhelmed her, and in that
instant she saw what the demon saw. Madame was pursued! She must
run and hide! Futures whirled before her in which the thing that came
behind her overtook her and consumed her from within.

There was a brief burst of energy that flung Lila across the room
to hit the wall. It snapped her out of the contact. Lila found herself
back in her own body. The bikini had become a tight-fitting leotard
in its efforts as it pulled her from the brink, and she felt it slithering
crossly around her skin like a snake that she'd annoyed. In her hand
the blue-and-white feather was smoking ash. She was really and truly
on her own.

alachi returned to Solomon's Folly with a heavy heart and the
sinking feeling that would usually drive him away from any
matter that brought it on. He wasn't sure if it was a case of premonition,
but the pall of foreboding was so thick he could almost taste it. He did not
care if it was a great insight for the future or his own dread. His guts felt
uneasy. As he parked the car and got out into the heavy atmosphere of the
house itself he thought it had sunk even further. The sun-a bright dayfailed to light even half the windows. At the periphery of the overgrowing
gardens the forms of wood elementals hovered, gathering bodies, trying to
see him and nose out his business or his strength. They rustled hungrily.

He knocked and waited. Vines had begun to grow over the door
hinges, he noticed. There was also a kind of activity moving across the
surface of the walls, a restlessness he had rarely felt before but that he
had found in some graveyards. He didn't know what to call it, and
didn't want to know. At last he heard soft footsteps and the scrape of
a slipper on the tiles, then keys and bolts on the move, and finally the
door opened once it had been given a good pull.

The ghoulish face of Calliope Jones stared up at him from its surround of bird's-nest dreadlocks with a slight impish smile on her lips.
She looked cold as winter, though it was warm inside and out, enough
to be jacket-only weather.

"You look like hell," Malachi said in spite of himself, shocked by
her cadaverous appearance. Worse than the physical was the air of desperation that emanated from her, a vibration that anticipated nothing
good or safe. He wanted to put his arms around her, but she still held
herself up with that damned, brittle defiant anger shimmering even
through all her suffering, so he made some gesture towards her with
open hands and, seeing it, she turned quickly and padded back into the
gloom of the hall. He followed her and started as the fey charms shot
all the bolts and keys to slam and rattle at his back.

"S'where I've been," she whispered as she led him swiftly through
the unfamiliar halls, passing several pale flickering copies of Azevedo,
whom she ignored and even walked through at one point in her haste
to reach what turned out to be the kitchen. It was a mess-an awful,
cluttered, unwashed mess with everything out of the cupboards, used
or left where it lay. But at the centre of it was a long black iron range
burning scented wood, and around that was a small space with a chair,
a footstool, and a teapot in it. She almost raced to the stool and
crouched on it, huddling close to the stove and wrapping her filthy
layers of wool cardigans and multiple skirts around her. She didn't
smell, but even so he was repulsed at her slovenliness. He sat in the
chair after assessing it for cleanliness. She rocked herself for a second,
then leapt up. "I must make tea! You want some?"

"No. Just a few answers would be fine," he said, wondering if he
would ever learn to loosen up around her. It was hard. He longed to be
protective. She would have had his eyes out. Wryly he thought of Lila
and then pushed the thought away.

Jones fumbled awkwardly with a kettle, water, the teapot, tea
caddy, and spoon as if they were an advanced alchemy set and she had
never used such things until yesterday. Her clumsiness stood in stark
contrast to the slick expertise she'd had aboard that ugly ship in the
Void, he thought, and her soldier's toughness in her camp. She was like
a shell of herself. It was hard to watch and not try to help but he sat on his hands. Eventually she managed to get things in some kind of
order and turned around, leaning heavily on the range, the oven door
bar clutched in both red-knuckled hands. "You might as well have
'em," she said, still in a whisper. "No use to me anymore. I liked keeping a secret from you. It felt like fun. A bit of fun. But ..." She hesitated, took a breath, and fought some inner impulse that he could see
wanted her to turn away and run. He waited. He knew when to wait.

"That thing is the Admiral's Octant. Actually it's more of a ninesided thing, but you know, I don't know the right words, the lingo for
that kind of stuff. It's what he used to navigate. Without it the lead
ship don't know where to go, can't reliably get anywhere. Lost at sea.
And the rest follow it or the Admiral's orders. So nothing's goin' anywhere without it. Understand?"

Malachi nodded. Jones flexed her hands on the bar, gripping it as
if it were a weapon. Her breathing was light and fast, her gaze darted
everywhere, like a rat leaping from stanchion to stanchion of a sinking
vessel. "It was good. Your faery money. It was good. They let me back.
Sort of. We spent it all on gear and supplies. We found out lots of
stuff, Malachi! Lots of good stuff!" She tapped the side of her head.
"Like the ghosts are made in zones that spontaneously occur in the
Void, always at coordinates that only make sense in planar metaphysics." She paused and swallowed a self-aware giggle. "You'll have
to look that up, Malachi, it's not faery stuff. But they're made by
thinking, made by minds, moments of focus, of longing and all that
goes through a place that's always and everywhere, like the planes, a
plane nobody talks of much, you know, like it was unpopular or not
necessary or something. So we discovered it, kind of, we described it,
we fitted it into the mathematics, Mal, and then of course I had to
walk there!" She paused, alight with the pleasure and joy, the raw
thrill of the memory, as if her adventure were happening now. He was
infected by the feeling, but the light in her eyes warned him not to
give her pause.

"So I went," she said, and waved her hands, shivering them like
butterfly wings. "I went to the edge, out there, in the void, where they
come from, I stood on the edge and I walked it and looked over into
... but I couldn't go there. I was stopped."

"Thanatos?" Malachi asked, unable to stop himself.

She shook her head no, her mouth open with slack wonder. "No no.
I said a new place. No dead people there, well, not exactly. No, you are
there now, the part of your spirit that lives there, the part that is most
upper and least lower. It is a place"-she paused, searching for words"of dreaming. Close to Zoomenon, it is. Close. Closer than your own
blood to you but you're never never able to cross over until you lose
your mind. Do you see?"