Chasing the Dragon (54 page)

He abruptly felt his jacket on him and that it was heavy on one
side. The book was still there. He reached in and handed it to her. She
opened it and read. "Excellent," she said. "Now, in order for me to fulfil
my promise to that wretched girl there remains only a little more
trouble." He felt she was talking to herself there and tried to look at the
book though she twitched it away from him with an arch glance that
dared him to try peeking again. "Good of Mr. V to be so perspicacious
and find me such a volume," she said. "I knew he would. Only needed
the right incentive. Going to miss his Friday night chilli though."

Zal thought he'd take the opportunity to ask a question that was
on his mind while she wasn't making sense. "If you and an angel were
in a fight who would win?"

She stared at him, her golden eyes narrowed, and then shook her
head with a frown, relit her cigar on her tongue, again, and went back
to her book, vanishing slowly. He looked over his shoulder and she
made a filthy gesture at him. If he'd been corporeal he'd have been
embarrassed at his reaction.

He looked up to find the angels standing beside the three of them.
They seemed so beneficent it was hard to imagine they were there to
enforce Xavien's will. On the foredeck Xavien, still disguised, orchestrated preparations for her master stroke.

The Fleet, gleaming, shining, sailed into the precipitous dark. Zal
left Ilya and Malachi and went to the rail. Above and below him and
to the sides the ships were fully formed in every detail, running lights
and lanterns shining in the absence of stars. He looked forwards to
Xavien, now seated in meditation alone on the bowsprit. Ilya was
right. These things did feel different on the receiving end. It was one thing to kill someone who had been given fair warning and who still
chose to stand in one's way. It was another to torture them to death.
Xavien had a taste for cruelty that was high-caste in its casual manner,
a primal hunger for information and knowledge that was vampiric in
essence. Her longing was much more easily understood by him. He
had felt the same things, and turned to the demons in order to find a
way to them, long ago. In spite of everything, he felt sympathy for her
in her lonely journey. He knew how stupid you could get when you
hurt badly enough. He knew how much damage he had done. Glinda
had told him. The Dragon Mantle was a lovely idea but something
only a drunk or a desperate soul would aspire to find. Sober it wasn't
possible to believe in it, although he had already come much further
than he would ever have believed possible, so he felt no confidence in
his judgement on the chance of it being real. In spite of his admiration
for the heroic spirit of the effort and his initial enthusiasm, the last few
minutes had robbed him of his naive conviction and left in its place a
cold dread and sadness. He remembered in Glinda's story that he had
always been slow to see the negative, and it was comforting.

He moved forwards, leapt onto the rail, and walked its length as
the sails bowed out above him as though filled by a strong wind. In the
mizzenmast the harpoon's angry spike was still fast. The figure on the
bowsprit was immobile, alone, facing the blackness.

"I know what you are," he called out from a good distance away. "I
mean, that's kind of rude to say so, I don't know your real name, but I
know what you are besides being a cold-hearted murderer."

There was no response. Zal looked back along the deck and saw one
angel crouched over the elf and faery who lay senseless as they had
fallen. Close to him the other one hovered, casting a reasonable amount
of light. Zal saw most of it pass through him. He wondered if it was
trying to communicate with him but he was too low-level to understand or even hear it. Then he felt the telltale itch of the vampire's cast
as she trawled for his thoughts.

He replied in kind and felt her snatch herself back as if she'd been
burned, then turned his back on the angel and walked up to her.
"Won't work twice," he said, standing behind her. "I learned how to
do it now. You know, I just wanted to say that perhaps this isn't such
a great idea. I mean, it looks like a royal high road to self-actualisation
and union with the divine, but I have to ask you: Don't you think it's
easier than having to wade out here at the beginning of things and
doing some ... actually, I don't know what you have to do but it
seems to have got a lot of people killed so it must be really good,
involve some really hot gear. Don't you? I hope it's worth it."

"It is," Xavien replied. "It will be."

"How do you know?" Zal didn't know how long he could keep it
up. He longed for inspiration. He kept thinking of the girl with the
silver eyes. He sighed. "I think I did something once like this, and it
wasn't. Thought you should know. Have these angels been around
long? They're a bit pesky."

"When I am like them they will not bother you any longer."

"No no they're not bothering me. How will you know when we're
there?" The Void was impressive, he had to admit it, but in a way that
quickly faded from awe and left a strange emptiness in its place. He
didn't like the way it suddenly shifted in his sight from enormous
depth to complete flatness. It was not darkness. It wasn't anything. He
longed to be home. "Do you like songs?"

"Leave me alone. It will be done soon. Then you can go."

"I can't though," he said, sighing heavily. "There's a problem."

Xavien did not reply. He saw her shift uncomfortably. The tentacles didn't move much on their own. He should have seen it was a suit
the first time. "Since you ask so nicely I will tell you," he said, not
believing himself although he wasn't behind his mouth on this one.
"The problem is that there is no way that you are going to turn into
one of those. And you know it."

"I realise you think you are going somewhere with your talk," Xavien said, "but I do not expect to be transformed in that manner.
What I will be is akin to angels only in that it is a higher power. As
you say, such as we do not possess the ability to change ourselves so
utterly."

"We have infinite choice, and that has to do," Zal said. "I'd have
put you up for angelhood before I saw you move."

Now she did start slightly. "Are you threatening me?" She was
incredulous. In her position he would have been too.

"It's difficult," he said. "As a fellow monster I feel we should help
one another. I can only count myself sometimes among the lesser evils
and I regret the membership of that club, but I can't undo it. But your
problem is that you have no problem with being a monster."

"Ah, your moral concern is so charming," she said. "But your compassion is misplaced. Just because I have no compunction in overruling
those who stand against me I have no interest in those who go about
their business and allow me to mind my own. Surely a true evil or a
just victim in my position would seek to avenge itself on its creators
for the pain of its unique position as a sentient abomination, an exile,
an eternal outsider. But I will not take revenge. I have no interest in
it. I wish to leave my torment."

"Very noble," Zal said. "But you're not alone."

"The angels have aided me. Their presence has affirmed my
intent."

"Not them. The rest of us."

"You're nothing like me. A shadow nature, ease in the Void, subtle
energies, tuning to frequencies of lesser kind, ripping sustenance from
material things ... you are almost a true elf of a darker nature, hardly
a bastard born that isn't able to call Alfheim home. Even the Saaqaa,
brutes as they are, have their place in your world. As for your label, be
careful whom you call monster. I took no part in the atrocities that
birthed us. Those who did are worthy of a swift end."

"Spoken like a true elf," Zal said. "But your theoretical high ground isn't going to be worth jack. Intention doesn't matter. Actions
are everything, and the consequences. Surely you agree. And your
actions are everything your makers intended-focused on extinction.
You should be stopped if you won't stop yourself."

"So, do you threaten me, shadow? What will you do? What can
you do except worry over the state of my soul like some weak-kneed
priest? The only one among your group able to harm me is lying useless at our backs after breaking my grip. Why don't you go and preach
to him? You should be thanking him for your life."

"He can't hear me," Zal replied, pondering that she didn't even
know it was not Ilya who had stopped her. "But you're right. I have
nothing."

"You were not worth killing then."

"You've got that the wrong way round," Zal said. "What you mean
is I am worth keeping alive."

He knew he had failed. It wasn't ever likely that talk was going to
touch her. She was the success of the experiments that had produced
hybrid failures like himself, and her self-absorption was the only thing
that had kept her going. It was hundreds of years past the time for
talking.

She got up suddenly and walked back to the deck. "At last," she
said. "The waiting is over."

Zal looked around but saw nothing. Then, above them, a yellow
light winked on and began to grow in size. He peered at it with difficulty. He thought it was another angel, a brighter one, with less colour
change. There was a dark heart to it.

"Were you alone all that time?" he asked, as they both watched
and the crew and all the Fleet stopped.

"Yes," she said. "They cast me out when I would not work for
them. Forever." As she spoke she looked at the angel between them.
Zal saw what she expected. She would be one of them, whether or not
she was the same.

Then the descending light began to take on form and he saw it was
much more defined than the angels of the ship. It was a tall male
human figure, with enormous wings whose pinions were blades of
white, blue, and gold like shafts of sunlight on a cloudy day, their rays
spreading far beyond their form. In his arms and slightly in front of
him, so that it had looked as if she were carried, was a woman in dark
blue and purple armour. She was holding a huge sword with an odd
grey blade. A red flash shot through her dark brown hair and over her
shoulder, and her eyes were silver. As they neared the Temeraire they
separated and she descended by herself, the angelic figure drifting to
the rigging where he took a position, buccaneer style, one arm and one
leg hooked casually in the ropes. His face was handsome and fiercely
arrogant as he lounged there, glowing, naked to the waist with his
long hair falling around his shoulders, and resplendently full of himself. He reminded Zal of something, but he couldn't remember what
it was. It didn't matter. He only had eyes for the woman, whom he had
thought of as a girl but who now had nothing much of girlishness
about her except her size. She was petite and beautiful in her fierce
metal suiting, silk strands and scraps tied and banded all around it,
floating as if she had fought her way through a fabric emporium so that
she trailed gossamer strips of beautiful colour. Relief filled him. Here
she was, the girl with silver eyes, his love. If only he knew who she was.

Xavien seemed expectant, her attention focused on the woman and
the sword.

But the silver eyes ignored her in her demon guise and looked at
Zal instead. She touched down on the deck and walked towards him.
Her lips parted and she hesitantly smiled. "Zal? Is that you?"

"Yes," he said eagerly, coming forwards past the demon.

"Finally," he heard Glinda mutter behind him. His nose filled with
an alcohol shock of whiskey and he sneezed.

They stopped a few inches apart. He could see the angel moving
closer to them, backlighting him into a ghostly silhouette.

Her eyes changed suddenly, the silver resolving like a developing
photograph into human eyes that were blue, tinged with the strange
violet of the ribbons on her armour. She lifted her fingers up to his
face, and the spiked gauntlets on them melted away.

"Oh!" she said as she tried to touch his cheek. "Zal." It was his
name, that was all, but the way she said it made his heart burst into
fire.

He couldn't feel her hand.

ila couldn't feel Zal but she stood on tiptoe and kissed his mouth
lanyway, closing her eyes. The faintest shiver passed through her
lips. She looked up and saw him doing the same. His arms were around
her. She released her armour and suddenly was touched where he
pressed by a tingling rush.

Zal was grinning at her. "I must be a better kisser than I thought."
He looked down and she saw herself naked except for the ribbons of
Tatter, no hint of leather or metal anywhere on her. She still held the
sword lightly in her free hand. She was even shorter without the
armour, and even with the point of it resting on the deck her hand on
its hilt was by her shoulder. She blushed, but not for the nudity or the
onlookers. She looked into Zal's eyes, black on black as they were and
nothing like his former solid, blonde and brown-eyed self. She couldn't
stop smiling.