Chasing the Dragon (11 page)

"The demon stays," Lila said. "State your piece or make some
move. I'm not patient."

"I came to tell you what you are for. What your future is."

"That's not the answer to my question."

"I want you to listen to what I have to say."

"I'm not interested. How did you find me?"

"The signal," the rogue replied as if it were obvious.

"Okay, here's what," Lila said. "If you can tell me how to get invisible so that no bugger can find me, even inside the signal or whatever,
I'll let you leave here alive."

For the first time the rogue showed anger in the way her head
flashed around to look directly up at Lila. Teazle's light shone off her
glossy high cheekbones, her plastic lips, and caused them to be
reflected in the sword's blade. Lila listened in spite of herself, but at the
same time she saw the lips reflected on the blade say words that were
quite different.

"I know everything about the machines you don't know," the rogue
said, sounding offended by Lila's attitude. "I know about Zal and keeping
the worlds together, about the quantum bomb, about the rise of the
ghosts and the creatures in the Void, about the demon you serve...."

Lila tilted the sword. There was a noise like shukk. The rogue's
head rolled on the floor, bumped against the mattress, and rocked to a
still point. Its body didn't move at all, save for some blue electrical discharges at the neck. The hands started to reach out, but Lila flicked the
sword. There was a high, whining sound that made her hair stand up.
The head and body became two-dimensional, like flat drawings. They
slid into the blade and were gone.

"No you don't," Lila said into the quiet that followed. She looked
at the blade of the sword in her hand, its silver all gone flat and dull for a second. Then she tossed it up in the air. It went up, pounds of
solid metal, turned, and came down to land in her palm an old screwtop fountain pen, black with a small gold pocket clip.

"Lila!" Teazle murmured, mildly scandalised. "She might have said
something worthwhile."

"Yeah, she might have," Lila admitted, putting the pen down on
the cardboard box table. "But she wouldn't state her reasons, and that
to me means a big agenda that doesn't have my interests in it, so now
we'll never know." She washed her face and hands, dried them on her
cheap towel, and added, "I guess I've gotten a bit trigger-happy
maybe. But I told them not to come." She picked the dress up off the
floor and put it back on the hanger.

Teazle looked long at the pen but didn't move to pick it up. His
long hair moved like heavy white silk in the cold wind. The tower
vibrated faintly with the beating the sea was giving to it even though
now the night itself was calm. Lila replaced the metal door.

"You're as bright as a torch," she said, going back to him, kneeling
over his hips. All over her the air was chill. He was still slightly wet
from taking her earlier, and now when she slid onto him he felt like an
icy spear: sticky, piercing, exquisite. She liked the cruelty of his ready
size, her own utterly surprising willingness to take him all the time he
was there. She shuddered with excitement. He moved with a snake's
strike, turned them over, pinned her down, his mouth open wide,
sharp inhuman teeth at her throat.

She dug her fingers into his neck and he shuddered, weakening as
she cut off his arteries, murmuring his pleasure at the sensation of slowly
descending darkness. Every day they went farther. It was never far
enough. She always came back. But she didn't come back the same. Possessed by Teazle's body, his curiosity, his insatiable energy, she felt that
she still had some reason to live. She didn't examine too closely what that
reason was. There was a danger of putting it into words that she sensed
as keenly as she'd sensed the danger in letting the rogue live.

Its lips in the mirror had said, "Do you remember Dar, Lila?"

There was much to remember about Dar, but she knew what was
meant. One steamy hot night in Alfheim, Dar had planted his dagger
in Tath's heart. His eyes on Lila's had been desperate, sad, utterly
lonely. "You must never let them talk," he'd said. Words were so
important to the elves. When you talked and put things into words,
you made them real. Tath alive could only have led them into failure.
He complicated things too much. This woman complicated things too
much for Lila. To leave her alive, whatever she knew, however useful it
would have been to know, was to come into the influence of something
quite uncontrollable and beyond Lila's ability to deal with. If she
thought of it she'd feel anguish at the unknown life she'd ended, so she
didn't think about it.

Then the lips in the mirror had said, "He remembers you."

The cyborg had some connection to the dead. Or the sword did.

Now her eyes flew open. Teazle was half slumped, his light out.
She released her grip and a screeching breath flew into his lungs. His
body bucked and she felt a sharp pain deep inside, and glanced unwillingly at the black dress on the wall and then the pen on the table.
Better to know what you were the servant of. But there were too many
masters for her. Killing the rogue hadn't killed the machines, but it
had silenced one of their voices and she was glad of that. She felt no
remorse. She'd made it more than clear the first time they tried to kill
her that she wasn't interested.

The severity of her discipline on him had caused Teazle's body to
start to change. Without his conscious effort he couldn't maintain a
human form. Now his eyes opened and he was half demon. He stayed
that way, panting, his breath hot and reckless. People would have
called him hell ugly now. He looked like a beast wearing a man's skin,
pushing it out from the inside.

She embraced him, ignoring the brief pain of quill stabs and scale tips
where they were growing out of him. Uncontrolled saliva from his jaws spilled onto her collarbones. It burned a little. He brushed her face with
the soft feathers underneath his chin and with a few swift hard strokes
came, snarling his pleasure. In a few seconds he became the human form
again, shedding light faintly, though more of it came from his eyes,
apricot and gleaming, their pupils invisible to her for the radiance.

"You don't have to," she said.

He mapped her body with his fingertips. "You were easier to see
when the lines were clear," he said, finding all the places where once
the obvious machine parts had been fused to her ordinary flesh. "Now
it's just for show. Now you can be one, or the other."

"But there's a form that's true," Lila said, and he looked into her
eyes and nodded slowly. Under his caresses she became soft warm skin,
and metal under leather.

"My body is too hard for yours," he said, matter-of-fact, and kept
his changed form with its supple, strong fingers. He examined her
minutely all over, his gaze shining light on her and making her glow
and gleam. The touch of the light was so faint, but she could feel it. It
excited her unbearably. She became shameless under it, completely
open to him. He stroked her with infinite patience, detached, observant, interested, only stopping when she was right on the edge.

She snarled at him, grabbed his head, kissed him, bit his lips hard.

"You think you want that, but you're not ready," he said, patrician
and gentle because they were still not equals. He entered her forcefully
and she came.

The fuel of the orgasm mollified her anger. She growled against
him, curled in his arms. It was dark when he closed his eyes, but she
was shining on the inside.

By dawn he was his demon self. Sleep had done what he refused
and changed him to his true shape. She couldn't move because she
would have sliced herself open on his claws. He snored lightly. Her leg
hurt where it was pinned under his bony shin and she was far too hot.
She tried a few wriggles but they were ineffective. She opened her mouth to wake him up but stopped on her indrawn breath with a start.
Sunlight shone past the metal sheet and onto the rough wall where
clear, neatly scribed black ink spelled, "Hurry up!"

It was Zal's writing.

Her skin crawled. She stared at it, half expecting the lettering to
move. On the hanger Tatterdemalion's dress, or whatever it was, had
formed itself into a dashing military uniform of black jacquard complete with ebony buttons and braid work. The pattern was Chinese
dragons, all roiling around each other. She waited to see if they moved
but they didn't. She looked for the detestable pen and saw it smugly
resting where she had left it on the box, disguised as an investment
banker's antique Mont Blanc.

Inside her head her phone alarm started to go off. She answered.

"You need to get here." It was Malachi.

Her pleasure at hearing him was so great she almost forgot to ask
why and where.

"You'll see." He hung up hesitantly. She read into that that he was
at least considering some kind of forgiveness.

The call had woken Teazle. He released her and rolled over. "Did I
imagine you slaughtering-"

"No," she said, getting up and looking for her underwear. "Read
the wall."

He narrowed his long slanted eyes even further and looked about
him as he stretched out, three metres from nose to tail tip. "Did you
write that?"

"It's Zal's writing."

"Maybe," he said, sitting on his haunches and slowly rubbing both
sides of his heavy head against his forelegs before shaking himself out
until his quills rattled.

She stopped with her arm half into a sleeve of the jacket, "Who
else's?" It hadn't occurred to her to doubt it.

"Good question."

"I have to go to work," she said, feeling how strange the words
sounded coming out of her mouth, as if she were about to do something quite normal. "Mal called."

"I heard." He waggled one long horsey ear.

"We can't come back here." She pulled on the trousers and buttoned them up. Inside the jacket was a pocket just the right size for the
pen. She stuffed the pen down the front of her bra so it rested on the
band and then marched to the door, picked it up, bent it in half, and
tossed it out of the cave mouth. "I can't hide from them."

"I will fetch you tonight," Teazle yawned. "There are no machines
in Demonia that aren't our own."

"As far as you know."

He thought on that a moment while she looked around pointlessly.
It occurred to her that she'd been happy in the cave, that she'd felt safe
there. Inside her chest where Tath used to live she felt herself crumpling and compressing at the realisation she would never come back
here. She had no idea what to do with the pain. She walked to the wall
and put her finger out towards the ink.

Teazle was suddenly there, his hand holding hers in a shocking
grip. "Ah ah ah," he said lightly. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."

She stared into his white eyes, surprised and frozen with it but
angry too. She wrenched her hand out of his hold with a twist, and
what shocked her most was the burning remembrance of how good it
had been to cut that rogue's head off and not have to listen to it, to just
end something before it began.

She became aware of the demon watching her with his oddly
understanding gaze. When he spoke again he was gentle. "It's still
wet," he said, nudging the cruel point of his beak at the writing and
letting the movement of his head shine the light from his eyes onto the
black lines. They gleamed like glass.

Lila swallowed hard. "What is that stuff?"

"I don't know," he replied, "but it sure as hell isn't ink."

She recounted for him the way she'd seen the same substance from
the pen make words that twisted and furled like vines, or ropes, or
threads, when she'd hit the motorway flyover and seen Tath's emissary.

"Yeah," Teazle sighed. "Then we both know what it is, even if we
don't know its name."

"The Void? Voidstuff." No way was she leaving it at that, in doubt.
She wanted it definite.

"The Void is the endbeginning fromwhich and towhich and out-
ofwhich. Yes. But Void itself is only emptiness, potential. This is
voidinthemakingbutnotmade. Essential. But somebody's. It didn't
come here by itself. There always has to be a mind behind it. And for
this, a very powerful mind. Of all the aetheric races very few individuals would ever touch this stuff, or want to. The pen ... the weapon
... that you have, uses it because it is the instrument made to ... hn
... made for it, I suppose."

"By god." She really didn't want him to say yes to that, not least
because she didn't want to have to tackle theology on top of everything
else.

"No." He shook his head. "I said before. Not made by god. It is of
god. But we could say that about anything, even this mattress, of
course. Anyway, that doesn't matter. It's not the what but the why
that's the trouble. For some reason it is with you. Like the dress. Toppling." He sighed again. It was so uncharacteristic she frowned and her
suspicion was roused.

"What's the matter?"

He was slumped, his head low. He shook it slowly again. "I'm running out of time and places back home," he said. "And I don't like
what's going on with you and these articles. It feels bad to me, in my
bones. But it's your call." He looked at the writing one last time.
"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to find Zal," she said. She said it very definitely, to
make it true, and tried not to notice the enormous pit of doubt under neath the statement. "That's what. And I'm going to figure out about
these rogues and the other 'droids. My part of the deal. I'll do that
today. And right this minute I'm going to work."

"I'll see you tonight," he said, and vanished.

She stood in the backwash of air that rushed in to fill his space.
Trust him to get the last word. His discontent bothered her though.
She was certain he was keeping something from her. Her alarm signalled again. Mal was getting furious. She took one last look at the
bleak little bolthole and then launched herself out of the door into the
fresh morning air.