Chasing the Dragon (47 page)

"And your faery conscience is not biting you, of course. That is
why you are here and not rousing what powers you could from your
own house." There was no rancour in Tath's answer. Malachi saw he
was in a place of stillness and sadness that wouldn't be moved by small
insults. Perhaps it was a place where these matters were much clearer
than they were to a feral cat. He realised that here, in spite of the race
opposition, he might really have someone with insight into a mind
like that of the necromancer. "You know of the will to power?"

Tath almost smiled. "High elves are raised with it as mother's
milk. I would have been its good disciple if I hadn't had a more
demanding master. But yes, of course, yes I do. And I know necromantic art. Let me say that will is the wrong word and idea however.
Want is the word. It is stronger than will. What I wanted allowed me
to do anything because I wanted it with my whole being. To beat this
creature we would have to want to, and more than he wants to succeed.
I doubt that for all our losses either of us are up to that degree of
desire."

"Yes, so give me a stake that will make me want it, Tath!"

"Ilya."

"Ilya. Tell me what he could do."

"But that is the trouble. I would bet that the mantle of Night is
his obsession. Once he has it, then there is no goal left for him. At such
a moment there is no telling what would come to fill the vacuum." He
paused and Malachi felt despair. "But," Tath said slowly, and Malachi
hung on every word, "we might guess that he would not then stop all
effort for a life of contemplative withdrawal.

"You know the story of Rome burning?" Malachi asked, but in his
heart he felt the same nagging doubts, the same sense of being
wronged but also of seeking what might be an equal wrong. "I would
myself wait until the facts were proven."

"If Rome, so to speak, were actually on fire then I would have no
trouble," Ilya said. He bent down and picked up his dead dog.

"I know someone who will not have this dilemma." Malachi followed him outside. The ground was solid and no chance of digging.
They made a grave in the snow. As the body was laid it had already
begun to dissolve. The ruined fur and broken limbs became gossamer,
ice and sticks. Ilya watched what Malachi could not see-the golden
light-spiral up and out into the wide grey sky.

"Lila," the elf said. "He was calling her."

"Yes."

Ilya paused and looked directly at Malachi. "We need a ship."

"To join the Fleet?"

"Yes. Then it will not matter if he regains his ability to sail freely."

"But we don't have anything that can sail ... into the Void or ..."

"It will sail there with me at the helm," Ilya said confidently. "Just
find a vessel."

"Easy," Malachi nodded. "Come with me to Otopia. I know the
very one."

linda had stopped somewhere-Zal had no idea where-and now
she was watching something he did understand, and know, and
remember. Before them in the space of the Void massed thousands, perhaps
millions, of ships. He had once been aboard the command ship, as a guest
of its captain, the Admiral, and his guest who had been Lily, though she
wasn't called that then. He remembered the view from the top of her
mizzenmast: the Fleet spread out around him. Every vessel ever built
seemed to be there, on the invisible swell of water, the intangible currents
of the air, and below in the great depths. Higher craft were not visible
except through their signals, all of which appeared on the Admiral's master
chart as continuously moving dots of pretty golden light. Against the profound darkness of the Void their lanterns and beacons twinkled like a galaxy
of stars and their bells and klaxons measured the space with endless calls.

"In there?" Zal asked, delighted to see and know the sight.

"He has become master of the Fleet," Glinda said with disappointment. "This will not be so easy."

"What about the Admiral?" Zal thought of the mop-haired lad in
oversize pantaloons and tricorne hat that he'd met.

"Imprisoned, I would say," Glinda replied. "Not dead-that is not
really possible. But ruled by this creature, this upstart thing." For the
first time Zal thought she sounded uncertain.

"So obviously I free him, he reclaims the Fleet and we see off the
bad guy," Zal suggested, hoping this was not the plan.

"That would deprive him of the Fleet, but that is all."

A strong infusion of cigars and bourbon made Zal's thoughts spin
dizzily for a few seconds. "It's just floating here, doesn't seem to be
doing anything," he said.

"It is capable of transiting between Thanatopia, the Void, and the
Dreaming," Glinda said uneasily. "I would not have it captained by
anyone other than its intended master. You will sneak aboard and we
will discover the plot."

"What if there isn't one?" He was beginning to have a sneaking
admiration for anyone who was capable of hijacking the Fleet for his
own ends. Something in him answered that impulse with a jolt of fire.

"Surely there is," she said firmly, a smile in her voice as she registered his rise in energy. "If there wasn't why would he send a rat to
grab what's left of your innards? He made a doll. He used the hoodoo,
and competently too. He made an image of you and sent it on some
mission. The only reason he didn't call you and use the real thing is
that you are not dead and he does not know your true name. So, what
would he want with a copy of you? There's a question."

"You needn't make it sound like I was yesterday's newspapers."

"But darling, in every world, you're history. You haven't released a
record in fifty years. Everyone thinks you're dead, except for some of your
die-hard fans who think it's all a conspiracy and that you went back to
Alfheim or Neverland or whatever.... But look, that's not the point."

He felt unfairly humbled, although the idea of having fans somewhere, however mad, was heartening. "I thought you were on my side."

She growled like a sixty-a-day rock star, "Just get aboard the
Temeraire. Then we'll have something real to chew over."

"How?" He was beginning to have an uneasy feeling that there was
more to this than some simple tale about Glinda being annoyed by
someone she felt should be far beneath her.

"You are shadow," she said. "You are darkness. You may draw the
dark. You are an elf. You were a top-grade assassin. You are the inheritor of vampiric-"

"What?" he interrupted her. "Then it's true? The shadowkin are
crosses of the elf race with these things from Thanatopia. You didn't
say that in the story. You said I discovered that they were experimental
by blows but not how they were made. You lied." He was shocked.

"I omitted, for the sake of brevity and relevance. Yes. The living
ones are hybrids of high elf stock and these spirit-based entities; the
lowest of them, the worst, I am sorry to say. There are other kin of
yours, however, who were unable to persist in Alfheim and who are also
unliving. Angels of a kind they are. And there were also monsters
made, whom they banished to the deep Void before they finished their
foolish interference and tried to shut the gates on all they had called.
But focus, Zal. You have their abilities. Darkness, sneaking, stealth,
silence, agility ... talent to burn, darling. You can get aboard that
ship without being noticed. Come on! We may not have time. They
could depart at any moment."

"They look pretty marooned to me," Zal said, mostly out of pique.
He wasn't sure if he was appalled, horrified, thrilled, enchanted, terrified, or sick. He was all of them. It was a kind of rush, nauseating, but
high in its hit. He found a smile on his face.

Glinda showed no such tendency to miss a beat. "Zal, if I tell you
everything you will get distracted. I promised I would tell it when we
are done. And I will keep my word. Now would you just move!"

"Body, control of, relative space and time and mass, action equal reaction, problem with basic motor activity, travel et cetera," he muttered
crossly, not sure if he believed her, but not wanting to doubt. She was his
death. Surely of all things she wouldn't lie? When he went, she went too.

Suddenly he found he had his normal assortment of limbs and head
and was surviving reasonably well in a place he was sure wasn't suited
to him, no matter what Glinda said about it.

"I'm helping," she said. There was another mist of bourbon.

"Quit that," he ordered. "I need a clear head."

He felt her outrage, but the drinking stopped. The taste of tobacco
vanished. He felt something like a road under his feet, though he
couldn't see anything of the kind.

"Run then, health fanatic," Glinda snapped. "Run run run!"

He ran. He was the speed of dark, as fast as the turning world,
impermeable to the interference and telltale revelations of any frequency of light. It was exhilarating, the purest joy.

The Signal was the Akasha. Lila understood that. The Akasha was the
total informational sum of all organized energy. It had an intent. It had
will. No mind unless you counted her mind and that of the other constructs it had created, using them to ascend to a conscious state. She
was an avatar of its will, though she had no sense of it trying to move
her in any way. But the new claw that had her in its grasp like a fish
on a line was adept in using the Akasha, even though it wasn't a
machine, nothing like that at all. And the scraping, tugging, listening
of it was all some alien will at work in her. Words were its tools. She
had to stay clear of them until she found a way to be free. Something
like her could probably be useful if you found a way to run her, but she
wasn't about to let anyone do that again. One set of remote controllers
and their idiot button pushers was enough burden to deal with.

She put the crystal plate back in its bag and cursed its uselessness.
If she were stuck in her own dreams and Teazle in his how would she
reach him? She couldn't rely on something as unreliable as a wish to
dream of him or that he could dream of her. But the demon's dead servant told her by his existence that there was a way to manage it. He
must have shared his master's dream. Much as she longed to rush to
action she was going to have to sit and read the damned wordy tract on the mirror. And that meant standing like a deer in the headlights of the
hunter's great big 4 x 4 as it took aim at whatever it was going to hit
in her. Nothing in her system told her that was an acceptable idea.

Almost before she'd had the idea herself she felt the fabric of the
dress move in its snakelike way across her skin, tightening, thickening,
and twitching. When she looked down she saw that her bandaged ninja
gear was studded with sequin stars and the silver-and-gold stitching of
the night sky. It pulsed with animal eagerness. She drew the sword and
held it before her, and then as an afterthought bent down and picked up
the plate in its pack, slinging it over her shoulder. The only vision in
her head was of herself, a warrior of power, arrowing through everything
that lay between her and Teazle's lost spirit. As she turned around she
felt no doubt about what she was about to do. It could go wrong. She
could end here. It didn't matter because the alternatives were all forms
of slavery, to others or to fear or to what she didn't want. She would have
none of that. The cold certainty of her own determination was a
straight, strong line inside her. It ran down her arms, through her
hands, through their metal-to-metal connection with the grip, and into
the blade as she drove it forwards into the face of the mirror.

The battle that surrounded her was in full-tilt. Machines and monsters the size of tower blocks clashed and spat fire. Shrapnel and
flaming fuel was falling from the sky. The tortured ground shook and
split beneath her feet. She was small, a doll, a little thing in a storm of
giants and a hurricane of whirling debris churned by their struggle.
Filth and gore filled the air and blocked out the sun until it was a
crimson disk with a blurred edge, a battered shield too far away to help
anyone, an eye that stared without blinking on a field of death and
destruction. Screaming and roaring and the blast of sonic weapon discharges deafened her. She turned the sword in her hands, pointed up,
and engaged her jet boots. The falling limbs of titanic warriors
clashed, would have crushed her to smithereens if she wasn't faster,
smaller, more accurate than she had ever been. A body blotted out the sky. She pierced it, the blade of the sword cutting it in half just above
her so that she rose from the wound in crimson rain, blood streaming
off her razored armour body and weighting her hair in dreadlocks that
clung to her face and neck. As blood cleared from her eyes she looked
down into the carnage that stretched as far as she could see in all directions, bodies made the ground and the hills, blood and burning fuel
the rivers and lakes, where a mass of warriors, each as glorious and terrible as the last, fought for their lives.