Chasing the Dragon (10 page)

But Lila was not going to be deterred. "So what happened to
Poppy and Vid? Jack killed them."

Malachi winced and shuddered. He made a warding sign and Lila
felt the car engine catch for a second. "Gone," he said.

"Dead."

"Gone," he repeated with slow solidity. "Not dead. Gone for all
time gone. It wasn't Jack that killed them, remember." He slammed
on the brakes suddenly, barely managing to stop at the light, and
swore under his breath.

The last line was a warning to her not to mention what he was
speaking of. She knew what he meant. The Hoodoo. That had killed
them because they had violated the terms of Zal's trial and tried to save
him against the too-powerful force of the Giantkiller. She resolved to
know and understand more about this, but it wasn't the moment.
Malachi was gentle, but she took him seriously enough to know when
to stop. His tension signalled fear and he was rarely afraid. She sank
into the seat and felt one of its springs pop underneath her.

Lila asked for a detour to get takeout. Mal paid for it and they
stopped to eat it streetside in the busiest part of downtown, watching
people go by.

"Were you dead?" he asked finally after she'd gone through half a
box of special noodles and he'd picked over and not eaten monks' vegetables.

"I don't think so," she said, taking hold of his box of dinner and
starting on that too. Sauce dripped on the dress but she was glad to
spite the thing.

Mal delicately opened a box of Faerie Flumsie and began to spoon
it into his mouth. The stuff was sickly. She didn't think she'd ever seen
him eat it before. "Bad day?"

He snorted at her. She crammed bean sprouts into her mouth; she
just couldn't seem to get enough in fast enough. Who knew that a
brush with death could make her so hungry? She wasn't even sure that eating was a habit more than a necessity. The food was so good. Her
piglike manners made him squirm and she grinned to herself.

Malachi almost choked on the Flumsie and at last admitted defeat,
dropped the spoon into the gooey sticky mess, and dumped the box on
the backseat. "I thought you were dead," he said, looking through the
windscreen at the city street. "I had this feeling, and I'm not wrong
about these things. Just for an instant. It wavered. I put it down to my
imagination. And then the report came through about the accident
and I ..." He beat the steering wheel softly with the thick paw palm
of one hand and took a breath. "I felt like there was suddenly no purpose for me anymore, like it was time for my name to be wiped off the
roll of interesting things, unstitched from the pattern and put to the
edges where the colour's all flat and finished. The strings pulled. I
almost didn't come out to see. I figured if it had happened you'd have
meant to do it and you'd have done it right."

Lila stopped eating. Noodles hung out of the side of her mouth.
Her throat felt too big, stuffed up. She couldn't swallow. His tone was
so hurt.

"Did you do it on purpose?" he asked, turning and staring at her
with an intensity that was way out of character for him. Through the
black lenses of his shades the orange fire of his eyes blazed bright
enough to show like embers.

A flare of shame at her secretive self-destructive ways made her face
heat up. With great difficulty she bit through and gulped the salty,
slimy mass in her mouth. She wanted to shake her head no, but she
thought he deserved the truth and gave the merest nod.

"Goddamnit!" He snatched the food cartons from her hands and
flung them overboard onto the pavement, sending her chopsticks after
with such force they splintered on contact with the ground. Amid
loud complaints from passersby he started the engine and with a
squeal of tires and a gout of smoke yanked them into the heaving
traffic.

Noodles slid down her chin. "I'm sorry," she said, honestly and
very quietly, contrite.

He was too angry to talk. He just drove. They reached the depths
of the agency lot and there, in the dark and musty quiet, he took off
his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The engine chuntered along until he
stilled it with the key. "I don't know how much more of this I can
take," he said. "But know this. I don't intend to stick around and
watch you play chicken with the Moirae."

"I'm not ... !" Lila began, but then shut up because she wasn't
sure he wasn't right.

He nodded into her forced silence. "You are still having your romance
with death. I guess that's understandable after all that's happened."

She felt that she was foolish. "I wasn't serious," she said.

He softened slightly and began to polish his glasses on a piece of
silk from his pocket. "There are some things that just can't take a joke,
Lila. Well, they don't take one, let's say. And you might think you're
right, but some bit of you is serious. That bit will kill you and I won't
be around to see it happen. That's all I'm saying. You have to get a grip
on it. You must."

"I drove too fast." She dismissed the idea as nonsense. "It was an
accident."

He shook his head. "There are no accidents."

Her hand went to her waist. The pen was still there. She thought
of the message and saw once again the black tendrils of the letters in
her writing curl themselves like lush vines around her hair, and each
other, in a knot. But Malachi was still speaking.

"You humans," he said with a wan smile. "You think only talk is
talk and only words are meaning, but everything is talk, everything is
meaning. There is nothing that isn't talking, nothing that isn't calling,
signalling, to everything else all the time. Words can lie, but nothing
else lies, even the mouth telling the words. Faeries don't lie with
words. We swore long ago after the first words that we'd never be their prisoners, you see. Words are the best trap there is and the strongest
gaol, and we'd have none of that. Some of us took vows of silence, but
the rest of us just knew it wasn't worth the penalty to even try lying,
for anything, to anyone. After that we had to learn Forgetting, but
that was relatively easy, because we'd mastered Losing Things already.
You lie, Lila. Your words lie. You must never have any business with
people who use words to make their magic until you stop lying.
Nothing like an elf, for instance. No elvish things. And not what
killed Poppy. Words will bend power of any sort to their own ends and
if you can't see when a lie is in front of you, you'll be their victim and
not their master. Ask Teazle. He'll tell you. The devil is a creature of
words and nothing else. Evil is made of them and will try to take form
at the slightest opportunity."

"Did you read my mind?" She was astonished, and not a little
frightened.

"Of course not," he said. "That's my point. You told me what happened." He leaned forwards and wiped her mouth with his handkerchief brusquely before dropping it in her lap. "But not with words.
With those you lied to me. And yourself." He got out of the car and
slammed the door shut and began walking slowly towards the door,
hands in his pockets. He looked slumped and sad, saggy, if such a thing
were possible. She strove to hear the meaning of what she saw, but it
was obvious enough without any effort at translation; she had let him
down badly, betrayed him, and he was hurt and confused. She longed
to rush after him and fix it, but she didn't know how. Promises sprang
to her mind, but they were empty. In that second she saw that all promises were empty, must be, for they were never fulfilled in the second of
their making. They were words meant to persuade, tokens for something that didn't yet exist and might never. They were useless.

She had to watch him walk away and let him go.

n bed with Teazle, Lila ran her hands over her arms. The white
demon slept the sleep of temporary satiation, halfway between man
and monster, his tail coiled possessively around her lower leg. His
dominance over her was growing. She felt it, and knew why, without
being able to put it into words. It was because she was lying. The imp
wasn't there to act as her soul barometer, but neither of them needed
him, nor Malachi, to feel the change of the weather. Her dealings with
Teazle were honest at least: honestly needy, honestly desperate, honestly angry, honestly destructive. He respected that, but still there was
no disguising it as anything but a weakening position. She pressed her
face to his hot, dry shoulder and felt the fine vibrations of the energy
in him that would never sleep until he was dead.

In the dark she felt more comfortable assessing her human-feeling
skin. Beneath it, however, the shapes of muscles were clearly a skim, a
token to forms that were unnecessary. She was warm, she had a kind of
softness, if suede was soft, but it didn't go too deep. An unrelenting iron
was inside her, and a minor prodding revealed it. She gave and yielded, but
only so far. She wished it were a metaphor for her character. She wanted to
be good, strong, competent, able, a rock under a gentle and lovely exterior.

She wondered what time it was and the answer came immediately: a minute to midnight. She was losing only a fraction of a second every
century. Into that fraction, is that where things had gone? You could
lose an eternity in that kind of time; Jack the faery had said so and it
was true. Like the white rabbit, your spirit might fly down such a little
hole. She'd been down one, into Under.

The key glowed ice cold at her throat and without being able to
see it she was suddenly aware of the pen in the pocket of Tatterdemalion's dress. A chill crept across her, making her press more closely
to the demon's burning, arid body. His tail increased its python grip
automatically and she heard his breath come once more deeply though
he didn't wake up. She was suddenly afraid to look at the wall beyond
the foot of the mattress.

A flash made her jump. A few moments later thunder cracked and
rumbled over the sound of the waves. Lila swore at herself for all this
stupidity, opened her eyes, widened, and refined them to see well in
the ordinary night. The dress was off its hanger, standing by itself
halfway between the bed and the wall. It was full-figured, a fine gown
around an imaginary body. Tight sleeves of ebony velvet shrouded
nonexistent arms. They stretched out towards her, their lacy wrists
supporting the crosspiece of a shining silver sword.

Lila leapt to her feet. The sheet went flying. Teazle grumbled at
the yank on his tail, which slithered around her ankle and squeezed her
painfully. He played dead, though she could feel the energy in him
rising all the time and knew he was fully alert. The stormy air was
ticklish and cool against her bare skin. Lila jumped forward and
snatched the hilt of the ornate zweihander in her right hand. The dress
fell to the floor in a richly velvet Miss Havisham puddle. "Goddammit, I hate this faery shit!"

"Do you now?" said a voice from the cave mouth. It was conversational but sly. "I'd say you liked it more than me-"

Sitting in the doorway was a grey, smooth-bodied female humanoid with reflective steel-plate eyes. The point of Lila's sword was digging into its throat, which is why it hadn't finished the sentence.
Her makeshift metal door was still in its hand where it had been
silently working it loose in order to get in. It put that down now,
slowly and carefully, as if it were dynamite.

Lila looked at the rogue down the length of the blade and was
momentarily distracted by the sight of flowers blooming in the flat
silver world of the sword's surface. "How did you find me? Who are
you? What do you want?"

The figure didn't move except to speak. "We've met before. Serve
and Protect. You might not remember...."

"You were on the meat table in the agency medical centre talking
robocrap along with that guy when I went in to check up on you and
prove to myself that I really was part of a long-term dark project that
humans had been manipulated into. That was fifty years ago, give or
take a week. You had auburn hair, a nice wave in it, the same
Mideastern accent. I didn't read your records, but you must be around
eighty years old now and one of the first to survive."

"Actually, you were the first to survive," said the rogue, conversationally, as if she were welcome. She almost sounded reverent. "In our
world, you are legend."

"What do you want?" The cold air made Lila feel strong, despite
being naked. In front of this creature she didn't even feel that. It had
a surface, not even a hint of clothing. It was like a mannequin that had
been smoothed over so no details remained, just basic contours.

The cyborg moved her bald head and looked in Teazle's direction.
"I wish to speak with you alone. You are very successful at blocking all
transmissions, so I had to come here."

Teazle pretended to wake up and stretched himself out, stripping
the sheet away in doing so as if by accident though it was nothing of
the kind. He revealed his powerful human-seeming body, allowing
himself to glow so that he lit the room up. His roll exposed the
extraordinary hard musculature of his torso and limbs to perfection as they started shining and, in typical demon showmanship, the slightly
curving hard line of his erect penis. His tail coiled higher up Lila's leg
and he relaxed, resting his head on his hand, supported on his elbow.