Chasing the Dragon (45 page)

Malachi drove back from the Folly with a headache that wasn't helped
by the midtown traffic. For some reason rush hour had become a
backlog that was dragging well beyond dinnertime into the evening.
It was dark as he reached the city side of the Andalune Bridge, but that
meant at last he could see the strings of police lights flashing and the
glowing yellow of the redirection signs that blocked his way. Everyone
was being forced to take the southern exit ramp from the speedway
and make a loop. A few checks and he realised that the agency buildings were in the block that was central to the cordon. His heart sank,
and a chill made him shiver as he parked illegally, flipped out his
POLICE sign onto the dash, and abandoned his beloved to the mercies
of the dock district.

A beat officer stopped him at the end of the street, "Sorry, you have
to get on a transport and take the long way tonight." He scowled a
little at Malachi's obvious faery features.

Malachi showed him his badges. "I've got business inside."

"Yes, sir." The uniformed officer led him beyond the yellow-andorange cones and onto the strange silence and darkness of Movida
Street. Every storefront was closed, even the bar on the corner that had
never been closed in all Malachi's many years in the city.

"I can take care of myself." He was starting to wonder if the cop
intended to follow him.

"Captain Greer wants to see you," the man said. "All of you.
They're at the Foley Centre."

Malachi almost gave a start. The Foley Centre was a drama and
performing arts studio that was the agency emergency port if anything
happened to the offices. He wasn't surprised when they got there and
no dancers were in evidence. Instead the building and its big, open
rooms were packed with staff and portable equipment. Power cables
trailed like intestines through every doorway and along the sides of the
staircases. They wouldn't risk transmitted power. That meant an
aetheric lockdown. He realised he had returned to a state of siege.

Greer was audible before he was visible. He was giving orders on
the second-floor landing. As Malachi closed in he saw Bentley appear
and lean close to Greer, talking rapidly. Greer's expression, always
grim, darkened further. He caught sight of Malachi and his arm shot
out to point at him. Agents scattered for the exits, their expressions
preoccupied or relieved.

"Here, here! The man himself. At long bloody last. Where have
you been? No, don't bother. Just come over here and tell me what the
fuck is going on."

"I'm behind you," Malachi said in his calmest and most agreeable
voice. "Fill me in on why we're here." He could guess, but he'd learned
to temper his guesses with a few facts.

Greer's phone rang, one of them. He searched his pockets and
stabbed at Bentley with a finger. "Fill him in up to the eyeballs and
then I want him back." He stumbled away over the lines of data cable
towards a relatively quiet space between two doors.

Bentley nodded and drew Malachi to the banisters where the old
staircase took a pause before turning again to ascend the next three
levels. "Pirates."

That was, Malachi thought, beyond the eyeballs. He could shovel the rest over the top of his head by himself. The Fleet had returned.
"Come for the sextant?"

"Yes."

"Casualties?"

"At least forty. They overran us very fast. We countered but were
unable to use sufficient force.... The material ones do not respond to
gunshot, only fragmentation grenades and in a closed area ..."

"Zombies." Loathing made his skin shiver.

"Yes. The others are ghosts or ... other beings," she said carefully,
keeping her voice steady and very very quiet as people bustled past them.
"Aethereal agents were sucked dry. Artefacts consumed. It made them
stronger. Antimagic devices stopped them, but the range was limited."

"Vampires." He was astonished. The Fleet was not merely ghostly.
It had features of the undead. That was utterly outside his experience.
He felt the first twinge of real fear.

Bentley shrugged. "They have occupied the agency and have
begun to quarter the surrounding area in a search."

"What for? I mean, the sextant was ..."

"It was in the safe room, yes. It still is. The safe room was locked
down as we abandoned the building. They are unable to penetrate it."

"Then ..."

"They have taken hostages and are looking for more. Some have
been added to their number. Others are being held as ransom."

"They want us to open it."

"That is correct. Until we do they are killing hostages at the rate
of one every half an hour. So far they have killed two."

"How did they get in?"

"Through the same route as the raft into Lila's office."

"Portal."

"Yes."

"Did you close it?"

"We did but it reopened."

Malachi was dumbstruck. Otopia was a place in which the operation of serious aetheric potentials was almost impossibly difficult. It
had little natural aether and an atmosphere that suppressed it further.
Porting in was a feat. Porting in aetherically dependent beings and
sustaining them in such a hostile environment successfully was
unheard-of. The power required baffled him. As one of the key aetheric
operatives he must come up with a solution to this, but at this moment
any ideas eluded him. "How many do you think there are?"

"At least fifty. We count ten of the things you call vampires and
the rest are ghost forms like the zombie that came through to Lila.
Except these are much stronger."

Malachi looked at the cables. "Power is coming from somewhere
and it isn't here. We have to cut it off."

"Or hand back the item."

He looked at her. It hadn't occurred to him, though he was getting
a clue as to why Jones had been so desperate. He began to appreciate
the magnitude of her daring in stealing it at all. The idea of whoever
was doing this having the thing back ...

"Well?" Greer snapped.

Malachi turned and found the man standing beside him. He'd been
so lost in thought he hadn't noticed him appear.

A uniform ran up. "People report kidnappings and ghost sightings
in Harristown and Noble Heights, Ponds Beach, Mariontown..."

Greer waved them off. Those places were all suburbs, far from the
local area. "Portals?"

Malachi nodded; it had to be.

"What is the thing that Jones brought?" Greer demanded. "What
is it for?"

"It's a navigation device," Malachi said, reeling. He put his hand
on the banister for support. "They came here because they followed
Jones. If they get it back ... I didn't even see it. I don't know what it
can do...."

"Wait." Greer held up his hand, paused, looked at his watch, and
then looked at Malachi. "Are you saying that the only reason this is
happening here is because whatever it is followed Jones here?"

"Likely ..." Malachi began and then gathered his breath once more
as Greer tapped the face of his watch. "I'm a faery. I don't deal with this
kind of thing. It's not our business. You need a necromancer."

"We don't have one. Did they manage to port here because she was
carrying the device?" Bentley asked.

"Maybe." Malachi was fishing for any clue in his old head. He
struggled. "But it could be that because she is a walker she left a trail
that was open enough for them to follow. You need to ask another
walker. I don't know...."

"Give it back, or not?" Greer asked him suddenly. "Twenty seconds before we kill someone through indecision."

Malachi opened his mouth, but no words came out. He was
thinking of the broken hull on the Folly's beach, the bodies rotting
inside it, of Jones, of Azevedo, of what he had seen once so long ago
that he might have forgotten it through natural causes and not simply
because it was too awful to bear.

t was as she opened her eyes that Lila realised the thing in the bag
was not a mirror. It was a crystal plate, about five centimetres thick,
fractured and bashed so that it was full of flaws that reflected light and
sound internally through hundreds and thousands of planar shifts.
Sarasilien's library knew of such things and catalogued them with
scrying objects-items that allowed someone to protect themselves
from detection as they nosed about in the frequencies and transmissions of other levels of existence. There was no danger of seeing the
mirror in its face. In fact, she saw nothing at all to begin with. Then,
slowly, tiny sounds and lights began to show in the angular facets.
After a few moments they began to noticeably migrate closer to the
surface.

Calculating, comprehending, she turned the plate rapidly in her
hands so that the emergent wavelengths would appear at angles that
she could see. They did so in pieces, every image shattered, every sound
broken to bits. She had to put it back together like a puzzle. The
library said there was a charm for this, but as she didn't know it and
would have had no ability to use it anyway, she had to do it digitally.
There was so much refraction she couldn't get rid of it all. The light
and sounds were bent. Blackouts in her reconstruction made the trans mission patchy. But they didn't in any way prevent her from understanding what she saw.

Over her shoulder, beyond the frame, lay a pleasant beach with a
clapboard old family house behind the dunes, and in that house, with
her family, Lila Black was making dinner with her sister, feeding the
dogs and drinking wine, laughing with her sober mother, her greyhaired and contented father, playing a hand of cards where it didn't
matter who won. She recognised herself immediately. Older, more successful, a bit wealthy, a bit heavy with the physical mass that comes
from being happy and grounded in who you are, careless of fashion but
not without style. Somewhere around, not visible but present, were the
boyfriends and girlfriends, smiling and healthy, happy and positive,
human and full of life; her date and Max's. It was Thanksgiving. The
thing on the table was a turkey, golden roasted, with wine and faery
dressings. The sun shone not only with the good light of a day well
spent but with the abundance and blessing of this life. She knew this.
It was her secret shame, this dream of a normal life, perfected through
thousands of hours of polishing in every black moment and struggling
second. As she saw, she was half transported. She experienced her own
body. She tasted the gravy and added salt. Max smacked her hand, not
too much! She threw salt over her shoulder against ill spirits and the
dogs snaffled it up and pestered for tidbits, for crisps and the jelly from
the top of the pate.

As she leaned on the edge of the sink and looked out of the window
she saw her car-a beautiful, sleek thing, parked in the drive. And her
friends were there, faces she'd nearly forgotten from school, the boys
who lived at the end of the road. They were in the garden, talking,
waving at her, and smiling, everyone ready for when she wanted to
come out. Happy to see her. On the radio there were only surf reports.

She watched the goings-on, half-absorbed, almost there. She
couldn't believe how real it seemed. Her mother's face. Her father's
shirt ... every stitch. Max's grin. The taste of that dinner. Night fell. They slept. Daydreams became night dreams, robbed of the organising
blinkers of the mind.

The house washed away into the sea, the beach was dark, the waves
were turning, rolling logs over and over, pushing the dead wood onto
the shore, and she was there with the empty city at her back, every
building a mass of opened eyes and mouths waiting for something to
come walking.... Meantime beyond the visible horizon the sea was
rising; she could feel it, rising and rising into a single, almighty wave.

An Al alert made her put the pane down. As she did so the trance
broke and all sense of being there vanished, leaving her with the
clammy dank drip of the labyrinth and the bad air of the chamber. Lila
sat with it on her lap for a second. She understood a little. Trapped in
dreams. In hers for her ... and presumably a different dream for
everyone else. Whatever she saw wasn't going to be what the zombie
servant had been seeing and hearing. It had spoken, and been spoken to,
she was certain. But she wasn't getting it right, if she was even able to.

Use of Mirrors: there was a big book on the subject of course, right
there in the library she'd so glibly scanned and copied. It even mentioned the Seven Great Mirrors and their various perils, of which this,
the Mirror of Dreams, was by far the trickiest. But reading about it first
proved too confusing. She had to go back. She started from the beginning, as fast as she could go. Every word that passed through her mind
brought back the itching, scratching feeling that someone was trying to
take a rubbing of her thoughts and was hoping to rub them away, but
she had no choice. Teazle was stuck in the mirror's thrall, whatever else
was going on here, and she was determined to get him out.