Chasing the Dragon (42 page)

Teazle could not have got here the same way she had, she was sure
of it. Madame had already gone, and the combination lock showed no
signs of use prior to her appearance, nor any trace of Teazle's DNA on
it, or she would have found it. He might have searched the house
briefly and left the feather as a sign of his presence, or even by accident,
although it seemed unlikely it would fall to a place like that by acci dent. It was peculiar to think of him having the foresight, or the lack
of certainty about his future, that he would leave a sign for her. In fact,
it was so unlike him she felt it must have been prompted by an exterior source, that which would have convinced him he was heading into
a possible trap. What could that be?

She made a more thorough search of his person and found that his
right hand was clutching something very tightly. It was a parchment,
a folded one, very old judging by the degradation of the cells that
made it up. She tried to prise his clawed fingers open but they were
absolutely rigid. If she persisted she'd break his hand. A few tugs on
the thing and she was sure it would tear long before she could free it.
Then she'd have to guess it was what led him here, a map or a letter.
From the house above? There were too many unanswerable questions.
One thing, however, she was sure about. Nobody in Bathshebat knew
of the existence of this labyrinth-at least no one who wasn't already
here. Teazle had teleported in, not walked, only she could be followed,
though her threats must hold good for a while yet, even if she didn't
come back. She betted it would take time to follow her. And what at
the end of it? Without foreknowledge you would enter the room, look
at the mirror, and be lost. Clearly Teazle had not known about the
mirror. Therefore, with the small caveat that the mirror seemed to
promise death by its own devices, he was as safe as he could possibly
be from all harm. She could leave him here and return.

It was quite a caveat. She stood with her hand on Teazle's warm
back and looked at him in the green simulation of her infrared vision,
taken by her skin and not by eye. Her feelings for him were warm, but
were they love? Of a kind, she thought. But she would not die if he
was lost. She could survive it. He wouldn't blame her; he knew the
truth better than she did. She liked his affections, she loved his allegiance, but in the end that didn't amount to soul partners. It seemed
mean indeed to think so at this moment, when he had only come here
in service of their deal, to find a way to find Zal.

And was this it? She stared at the black void of the mirror. Was the
answer in there? Had he finally found it? If she didn't follow what was
she going to do instead?

Follow Malachi's leads, she intended, always hoping he had some out
of that annoying, arrogant Jones woman, the strandloper. Whoever sent
her that zombie, that was who she had to find. Because this seemed a
viable, less immediately fatal thread, she decided to take it. She hugged
Teazle's immobile form and kissed his long, ugly dragonish face. She was
about to speak and tell him she would return when the faintest sound
from the labyrinth came to her. She stopped and listened.

It was the tap of a stick on the walls and the floor of a tunnel. Mapping and predicting the changes that the known regions of the maze
would make, her Al calculated that it was coming from the other side of
the puzzle. There was another entrance, or exit, and whoever was walking so carefully with the expert aid of their stick was headed her way.

The room was low and already getting crowded for its size. There
were no corners or cubbies. There was nowhere to hide. The sound suddenly became nearer and she realised the distance effect had been a
mistake on her part. They were not far away. They were nearly here.

She moved to the far side of the room as rapidly as she could in
silence, assisted by every microadjustment her supersensitive body was
able to make. She prayed to the dress and to her own systems as she
remade her armoured shell into something more like smoothed stone
and dropped her surface temperature to that of the surrounding air.
Then she moved into a position like Teazle's, even copying the surprised expression of his face, and locked herself like that with her
breath on internal recycling. The benefits of losing her human body's
properties had never seemed so apparent. She made sure the connection
to the camera systems in her eyes was shut off, then opened her eyes so
it seemed she looked into the mirror's plane.

The tapping grew loud and then more cautious as it checked the
turn around the doorway. She saw a small demon carrying a sizeable cloth pack on its back come into the room and inch its way towards
the first comfortable marker of one of the statues. Here it set its cane
with a practiced movement, hooking it safely in the crook of the dead
demon's arm. Then it reached up and tightened the heavy cloth that
was tied around its head, covering it completely to just above its nostrils. It unslung its pack and, using one hand, found its way around
the first couple of stone bodies with a steady patting. Then it sensed
something, probably heat, and hesitated, but not enough. It blundered
into Teazle's arm and leaped backwards with an ear-splitting shriek,
cannoning into the body behind it and hitting stone spines. A second
shriek of a more comprehensive horror and distress followed. She could
only imagine that, as she had, it supposed nobody knew to come here.
The shriek was followed by a howl of pain. Both were sufficiently fast
and ready to let Lila know that the creature was already very jumpy
before it had even got into the room.

It muttered to itself, panting and lying still on the floor. Then it
groped its way back to Teazle and touched him again, moving just
enough to reassure itself that who it had found might be new but they
were entirely stuck fast. Its gibbering continued and she couldn't make
out what it said, but this was typical of demon speech. It sounded like
music or nonsense to whoever was not intended to hear it.

There followed a few minutes of jabbering and general fussing
about before it pulled itself together and resumed its business. It
moved forwards, very, very slowly this time, until it reached the pirate
demon queen, and then it turned its back on the mirror and pulled its
cloth bag free of its shoulders. In a moment it had brought out what
Lila decided was another mirror, but an ordinary one. It slowly, slowly
removed the covering from its head and still with eyes tightly shut
lifted the mirror up so that it would be able to see the reflection of the
huge pane behind it, had there been any light.

There followed a scene that was completely surreal to Lila. She saw
and heard the demon talking in a rapid, urgent way, looking in the mirror. During the gaps in its gibber she heard a very different voice
speaking in Demonic. The visitor sounded upset, bad tempered, and
put upon, if she was any judge. Demons rarely spared their feelings.
The other speaker, however, sounded amused, contemptuous, but
above all frightening. There was a quality to the voice that issued from
the mirror that was as relentless and insidious as the penetrating water
of the lagoon itself. You could put rock in the way, but it would worm
itself through given a little time. You could put any amount of resistance in the way of this voice and it would find you and convince you.
It was utterly compelling. She was glad she couldn't understand a word
it said. She knew it could say anything and she would believe it.

After a series of crabby retorts and sighs and agreements in which
she could clearly distinguish an agitated discussion of the newcomer
the visitor packed up the mirror, replaced its hood, tightened the
strings, and set its pack and then, with the same deliberate and now
much slower and more resentful actions, it inched its way back to
where it had left its stick. A few more minutes and its progress was a
faint ticking in the breathless corridors beyond.

Only then did she find herself with the urge to shout, "Boo!"

The moment passed. She unlocked her position and remade her
more common shape. Moving as quietly as she was able she followed
the demon's path, able to find the way easily by smell and temperature
and the disturbances of the air rather than the confusing rebounds of
the sound. Obviously now that it knew Teazle was there, it had to die,
but she wasn't about to let it die without talking. She moved closer,
cautiously. She knew she had to make her attack before it moved into
public areas because she was too well known, but even as that thought
formed unsatisfyingly she felt herself warmed by the thin cloth of Tatterdemalion. It shifted and moved around her, coating her in ninja
wrappings, in bandaged clothes that covered everything except her
eyes. Following the hint she made herself small and lithe, and gave
herself a demonic set of eyeballs with a slit pupil and green irises. The sword folded up into its Mont Blanc incarnation and she slipped it
inside the coverings on her forearm.

It would be much better to find out where this demon was going,
what it was doing, and who for. And besides, she persuaded herself,
there was a chance it hadn't recognised Teazle. A chance. After the
storm of death she had waded through before, now she found herself
reluctant to kill. The messenger wasn't to blame.

She paused. She was so used to the sound of the Signal, the white
hiss of constantly repeated information. It had made her miss the
whispering of another kind of sound. Yes, her thoughts were hers, but
they had, for a second, been reinforced by a doubled intensity. That
voice from the mirror, she thought, putting it together faster than she
was able to put it into words for herself. It had found her. Even though
nothing it had said was meant for her some insidious part of it had
leaked into her mind. It would be nice to find her conscience, to feel
good, to be doing right. She longed to feel those things but had given
up on the longing as an impossible thing. Those were for scholars and
people who were not involved personally in an ongoing war for survival. She would have blood on her hands and blackening her heart
every day, some kind of stain....

She stopped herself. Insidious really wasn't the word for this kind
of self-recriminating negativity. She had to get a grip.

The demon was almost out of reach. She hurried after it on her
light feet, now easily silent on the padded perfection of her silk slippers. She used the Al to automatically terminate any thoughts that
tried to make themselves into words. She had an inkling that words
were the vehicle. An absence of language would be a firewall it
couldn't jump across. She hoped.

They followed a different route out that came up in the cellars of
another house on the far side of the lagoon near the dockyards where
the vaporetti in public use were maintained and refuelled. It was an
area favoured as artistic, where artistic leant to the illusion of suffering in penury and isolation from the common throng of society. Isle Saba
was full of self-styled outcasts and rebels, philosophers, painters, sculptors, thinkers, and a surrounding coterie of style-conscious aesthetes.
Zal used to say it was where critics were spawned, and he and Teazle
fantasised about bombing it into the bottom of the lagoon when they
got drunk together. Apart from artists it also had a large number of
outcasts of a similar bent from the scientific and magical communities,
and it was into this area that she emerged, in a house one street back
from the waterfront.

If her prey had any ideas about the new demon in the labyrinth
being Teazle it showed no desire to broadcast the news or even share it.
It spent some time putting its mirror and head cloth down, dressing
in warmer clothes, setting the cane in place, and then fiddling with
powders and the various ingredients of a serious magical ritual that,
she realised from her hidden position in the darkness at the bottom of
the final staircase, would close and hide the exit in a very major way.
Her only advantages were rapidly disappearing. She watched the
arcane putterings going on, and when she was more than convinced
there would be no chance to slip out unseen she lost her patience and
ran up the stairs in two bounds, the second one powerful enough to
launch her over the top step so that she landed right on top of the
startled demon.

It was drawing breath for a yowl when she clamped one hand over
its face and anchored its arms with the other, pinning it against her.
She had thought she would interrogate it, but that would have
required talking and talking required words and she was sure that
would be a mistake since the thing in her head might be alerted in
some way or would use them against her. The demon struggled, but it
was no match for her strength. She could tie it up, she thought, feeling
ridiculous. Fortunately they were alone and there were no other sounds
in the house. She ought to kill it. Every reason said so. And yet the idea
jarred a bad note in her. Was she losing her will? Days ago this path had been clearly the one she embraced. Now, now of all times was the
moment to get guilt?

The demon wriggled a few fingers free and stabbed her with the
quill it was holding. The sudden slight made her jump. There was a
hollow, dull clunk noise, and she realised she had broken the demon's
neck as it fell limp in her grasp. She pulled the quill out of her skin
and looked at it with misgivings. It had been dipped in the blood of
various dead individuals to become a ritual object, but her wound was
already rejecting the alien proteins.

She let the body slide to the floor and searched its bandolier and
vest, uncovering a large assortment of strange tools and bits, some of
which she recognised because Tath had had them on his body when he
died and she'd found them when she wore his clothes. They were
necromancer's artefacts.

A flip of the corpse's major limbs revealed no significant scars, so
they were not his own. The basic tools were made from bone, and in
necromantic cases, always the 'romancer's own. This demon hadn't
filleted so much as a splinter from itself, so he was using borrowed
items. That made no sense. She sat back on her heels and stared down
at the motley collection. Somebody else's instruments would not work,
but it had just a moment ago been planning a closing spell.