Chasing the Dragon (13 page)

"What are you talking about?"

"Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow we are going to visit a few
people. For today let's just get through today. How's your spouse?"

"Still alive," she said, hoping it was true.

"Nice suit." He gave a quick glance at her outfit, which, as usual,
cut a reasonably odd line over her tough-girl leathers. "Good tailoring." He paused suddenly on the last word and bit it off.

"What now?"

"Just ... nothing." He smiled his sudden, dazzling smile that was
so charming it made you forget everything you'd been thinking about.

"Faery mind tricks," she muttered darkly at the winter white of his
teeth. "Don't you hold out on me."

"All in good time," he said with something of his old dashing
ways and twirled about to sweep away in an elegant line of camel coat,
navy slacks, and immaculate shoes. "Come along," he called over his
shoulder. "Work to see. People to do."

Lila followed obediently, ten steps behind. Fifty years, she
thought. Fifty years of waiting here and he was not a day different to
her. What had he done with all that time?

And then it occurred to her at least one of the things he might
have done (stayed with Max) and she began to wonder how she was
going to ask him, and what she'd find out. The notion was so important and made such a pressure in her chest she kept quiet about it as
they drove, and just watched the countryside and the city pass from
the windows of the ancient Cadillac and thought over a million different ways to start talking.

hey checked a further three positions on the coast. Like the first
ship, these ghosts were semimaterial, all wrecks. They were not
particular vessels like The Golden Hind. One was a second world war
minesweeper, one a millionaire's pleasure cruiser, one a stone age coracle barely distinguishable as anything but seaborne rubbish save for
its eerie glow and the frost surrounding it.

The last ship to come to shore had grounded on private land in the
nature reserve, closer to Bay City. They left it until last because it was
on the way back, and because they both knew the place. Coming over
the hill and down into the heavily wooded valley Lila recalled all the
curves from her high-speed motorbike rides. In contrast to that the
Caddy wallowed through them slowly. She looked into the trees. Sure
enough, in the darkness there were the shivery, shadowy forms of wood
elementals forming and unforming. She shivered compulsively.

"What do you think Zal wanted out here?" the words were out
before she realised she was thinking aloud. The road sucked them
down and down into the darkening glades, twisting them as if it were
the path through a maze.

Malachi shrugged, his fingers easy on the wheel, his elbow resting
on the door sill as relaxed as could be. "Junkie's paradise?"

"But these are all wood spirits." The sight of them made her
uneasy.

"You can feel this place though, right? And you said he was
approached by a ghost out here. Any place full of elementals is ripe for
doing the magic he could do. Makes it easy to trip out almost anywhere. Most places in Otopia you can't say that." Malachi turned the
car lazily around the bends as the woods crept closer to the road on
high banks until the trees created a continuous tunnel. The pieces of
sky between the leaves overhead formed the shapes of eyes until Lila
was forced to look down at the dashboard.

"But why here?"

"Every place has natural energy sinks made by the geology or the
wildlife." He was offhand about it but he kept a close eye on the road,
she noticed.

They passed a sign, almost covered in ivy and green lichens.
"Solomon's Folly. Private Property. Trespassers will be prosecuted." A
wire fence, marked with a single, straggling strip of white cloth,
snaked off into the undergrowth to mark the property line on either
side of the road. Lila didn't remember it being there before.

The house itself appeared, as it had before, to be a tumble of irregular blocks like large stones that had rolled down into a hollow and
sunk into the ground. Fifty years ago the effect had been stylish, yet
hideous. But now the place had been neglected. Moss and creepers covered most of the angles in curving growths of spongy green or vivid
purples. The sculpted lawns were thick meadows of standing hay,
roughly cut only at the edges where they met the driveway or the
courtyard. Malachi pulled up in the middle of the paving and got out
first. Lila looked around, renewing her loathing of the place, and followed him a minute later. The buildings looked as if they were bones,
rotting into the earth. On terraces below and to their right the land fell
in a series of gardens whose shrubs now almost obscured the pool deck
where she'd woken up one morning to find herself too stoned to move, Zal groping her, the sun pure fire. It felt like a million years ago to her.
Now a chink of faded blue pool cover just showed. Below that stony
walks dropped to the beach; she zoomed in on the sight, captured and
held by it.

"What's that?"

Malachi turned from where he had gone to knock at the door. His
debonair confidence ebbed from him as he looked with her at the
strangely bare metal decks and platforms, the things that looked like
outsize gunnery stations, the broken gantries, the strange, arched spars
that seemed to be metal ribs without anything to hold. At the end of
one a purplish red crystal caught the afternoon sun and glowed fiercely
as a beacon. Lila had never seen anything like it.

"There's no witchlight," she said, surprised, then tore her gaze
away to glance at Malachi.

He was standing with his hands relaxed at his sides, his shoulders
low, his stare fixated. The door behind him opened but he didn't react.

"Mal?" Lila said, puzzled.

"Are you from the agency?" the woman at the door asked at the
same moment. She was annoyed. Lila glanced at her and saw immediately that she wasn't human, though she was doing a reasonable job of
looking like one. At her attention the woman backed into the shadow
behind the door and said quickly, "You can go on down and take a
look. Just follow the path. The way's obvious."

"Yes ma'am," Malachi said as if he was in a trance, but then he snapped
out and showed his ID quickly. "We'll come back and report-"

"No need," their host said. "Just deal with it." The door shut and
Lila heard several locks and bolts being rapidly secured. She looked up
and over, but all the windows were curtained or covered with blinds.

"Later," Malachi said to her about-to-be-asked query. "For now let's
go and see."

Lila followed him down the winding, treacherous path to the shore.
Overgrowths and broken stones had replaced what she knew as perfectly manicured gardens. As they passed the pool she glanced and saw the
same iron furniture she'd seen before, but now rusted, the beautiful
mosaic paths covered in leaves and so filthy they were nearly invisible.
She had an urge to throw off the pool cover and see what was beneath,
as a dare, but Malachi was moving too quickly for her. He could get
through small spaces in a flash without moving anything. She bludgeoned after him, snapping branches and stripping leaves. Flies zoomed
heavily around her from their places in the dense, warm jungle. Finally
they met the sand and stepped out of the shade of the palms.

Malachi sped up. In a thought he was up to the huge, bulky sides
of the object, finding a ladder as if he knew it was there and climbing
up onto the first of the decks in spite of the ten-degree list. The ship
was doubly odd to Lila's eyes. It was flat bottomed, though there was
no plating on the sides. Nothing looked normal until she adjusted her
expectations and instead of looking for a ship made for the sea looked
at a ship made for space.

She jet-jumped onto the first deck and slid along it to where
Malachi stood behind a lump of ruined equipment, his back braced
against what was clearly a kind of a chair, if it had had any padding.
He ran his fingers across dials and screens, buttons and keys, switches
and LEDs. He looked out along a kind of bowsprit where another cage
was set at a position for operating some huge kind of spear gun. The
breech was empty and mangled. Lila looked back, and her Al put the
bits together and made an analysis in an instant. The gun had been
destroyed when the cable on the bolt had run to its limit, been yanked
out of the deck and slammed into the back of the barrel, where it had
broken as it was pulled free. Elsewhere other pieces of machinery
showed electrical burns and damage at the molecular level that had
made the metal porous and weak.

Malachi glanced at her and almost smiled for an instant. Then his
face greyed and he was suddenly up and off, slithering across the beaten
decking towards a hatch. She followed, magnetizing her feet to help her keep a grip, grateful for the afternoon heat that went with her until she
smelled the first trace of a sickly, musty odour that stopped her in her
tracks. Shadows clotted the gangways as Mal led her down into the hold.
The bitterly cold darkness made their breath billow. Lila could feel it
like warm clouds against her face; then her face cooled and became
clammy. It was like being inside a freezer, the effect intensified by the
glow of the witchlight that just let them see the cause of the smell.

Heaps of rubbish lined the walls of a room whose pristine centre
was a cluster of consoles. Their dead screens were crazed with frost. The
faery halted midstep, his nostrils twitching. He looked back at her for
confirmation and she nodded and moved past him. There was more
than just food waste rotting in the corners. She found the bodies after
scanning for likely shapes in the mounds of crumpled cartons and
moved forwards. Everything was stuck together with films of ice. Lila
pushed her way through, watching tiny crystals shatter as the mess
gave up its hoard to her hands. As she dug, the faery clothing tightened on her and she heard it hiss as if it made the discovery just before
she did. She ignored it and cleared enough, then stood aside and let
Malachi move forwards.

He shoved his hands deeply into his pockets and looked down for
a few seconds, then turned and walked out the way they had come. Lila
recorded the images of the dead demon and elf; then she followed him,
dusting her hands off compulsively, though because everything was
frozen solid there was nothing on her.

Back outside the heat was suddenly a sweltering oven, the light a
blazing glare.

"Who are they?" she asked once they were standing on the beach
again.

"Frie ... people I knew," he said, staring at the awkward shape of
the vessel.

"No obvious signs of death," she ventured. "But the demon
wasn't-"

Malachi interrupted her gently, with a raised hand to show that he
would talk to her without any oblique interrogation. "They're part of
her crew. She's a Void ship. Well, the material manifestation of it
anyway. She was a research vessel. Jones was her captain."

Lila sifted through her memories for the name and frowned. "Jones
as in Calliope Jones, the strandloper?"

He nodded. "She was for hunting ghosts out in the Void. Jones led
a research team, called themselves the Ghost Hunters. They surveyed
immanent hotspots-places where ghosts spawn out in the middle of
nothing. They'd watch them forming, try and record the process of
actualisation, reification. Everyone funded them a bit, but when you
saw her last time she was running out of money. She ..." He paused.
"She didn't follow policy, and I guess she pissed off too many people.
She wouldn't tell what she found. Hung onto her theories saying they
weren't tested enough. At least one time I know of she endangered the
crew. They didn't like her either."

"Charm wasn't her strong suit."

"I helped her out a bit. I thought it was too important just to let
it go."

"Mal ..." Lila decided to brave the question. "Were they killed by
ghosts?"

"Yeah," he said. "And now the whole ship is a ghost. I just wonder.
Maybe this isn't the actual ship."

"Like The Golden Hind back there isn't the actual ship."

"Yeah. It's a facsimile." He turned to her and fixed her with his
piercing orange eyes. "What do you know about ghosts?"

"Not a lot."

"Time we looked through what Jones thought then." He turned
his back quickly on the ship and began to walk over the rocks toward
the path. Lila followed him and they retraced their steps to the house.

Lila knocked on the door. After a time the woman inside said, "Go
away! "

"It's just us," Lila called through the heavy wood. She pushed at
the keyhole and tried to look through it but it was blocked. The door
did not open. "We need to send a team back here to take care of that
ship and quarantine the beach, ma'am."

"You can send 'em but don't let them call at the house. You don't
need us. You can use the path and the steps and the service road that
goes there from the gardener's building."