Chasing the Dragon (16 page)

"The first," Tasha said. "The ones we never mention. They can
undo us all."

"And before them?"

Tasha shrugged. She looked at Malachi. "Ghosts and the gods."

fter experiencing the faeries' fear of their elders Lila was quiet on
.the drive back to town. She didn't want to share in their existential terror, but the force of it had been much greater than she had
expected, even given Malachi's thousand exclamations of it over the
time they'd known each other. Somehow she'd always thought he was
exaggerating, that it was a kind of joke. Even face to face with the
Giantkiller, she hadn't thought of him as anything other than her
equal; he was just an equal with much more power that she wasn't able
to counter. However, she might have been the only one to see it that
way; besides she really didn't know if the powers those fey had would
hold over her. She was human, susceptible to magic after a fashion, but
not made like a faery. Not that she knew what a faery was made of, or
how. She couldn't somehow see Malachi as a construction, just a fancier
version of the dolls he made, animated by ... by whom? They said it
was the old ones, but that just pushed the question farther back; it
didn't answer anything.

Mal didn't speak either. He drove in his usual manner, one hand on
the wheel, the other resting on the door. The car combined with the
wind noise was shockingly loud on the quiet road. People in quieter
vehicles stared. They were antique.

The sun was going down as they turned into the darkness of the
agency lot. Mal pulled into his spot and stopped the engine. Neither
of them moved. On the suit the dragons' thread eyes had closed back
to black.

"If ghosts are precursors to faeries," Lila began, "then what are
elves and demons made of?"

Someone's high heels clicked and sounded out loud in the dimly lit
bays as they walked to a car. The door opened, closed. There was a brief
whirr of wheels on the concrete.

"Ghosts ain't that," he said softly. "I know what Tasha said, but
she's only guessing like I do. Let's not talk here."

Seeing her about to complain he added quickly, "Inside. We'll talk
inside."

But inside Lila was distracted by the quartermaster who wanted to
question her about the missing bike, and by the time she had given him
enough answers to make him go away and think about getting her
another one Malachi had also gone. Lila frowned and played back
through the last ten minutes. She didn't see him go, even on that. Tricky.

On the walk to her office she looked at the people passing her.
They looked at her, pretending not to. She didn't recognise anyone
except the androids. She knew where and what they were without
having to look. Once out of sight on the corridor she paused and tried
to shed the cold shiver that lay on her skin, but it wanted to linger.

At the door of the offices she put her hand to the grip, suddenly
slowing without knowing why, as if she was expecting something.
There was an odd frequency about the place that she could feel in the
deep circuits of the Al, a hum that didn't belong.

She glanced up and down the corridor. Nobody about. Outside, the
long window of the hall that looked into the garden was almost impossible to see. It was dusk and the harsh lights of the interior made the
glass into a mirror through which only the silhouettes of the trees and
bushes that lined the inner court could be seen. And through their dark branches and leaves, the oblongs of light that were the other side
of the square. She felt that it ought to have been a ring. Who in their
right mind built everything at these dangerous angles?

The thought wasn't like her. It was a magical thought.

Beneath her fingers the door vibrated. She heard, faintly, the sound of
chimes ringing a distant hour. Then music, lilting and strange. Voices.

I saw three ships....

Did she hear that?

The sound seemed to come from behind the door, but also from a
greater distance than the next room, even the next hour.... Again her
thoughts were running to another pattern. The twinkling, chiming
increased, sparkled like frost dancing. Her shivering became the
vibrato of a hundred delicate violins.

Lila inched her hand away from the door and quiet returned. The
dull hubbub of voices from the office behind the hall panelling
impinged on her. Machines much duller than her own droned and
fanned in ugly keys, pulling the day in a difficult direction, curling the
air into negative vortices laden with chaotic ions. The lights droned,
distorting the space around them by infinitely small upset measures.

Lila straightened and detuned her hearing back into a human
range. The place seemed blanketed in a fog. She called Bentley to her.

The android appeared and Lila contained the desire to flinch at her
approach.

"Ma'am," she said calmly.

"Stand here," Lila instructed, vacating the spot. "Do you hear or
see anything unusual?"

"No ma'am." A human might have taken some time to listen.
Bentley's reply was immediate, but her relative attention was the
equivalent of at least ten minutes of an ordinary person's. They linked
and spent a second sharing and dismissing all the detectable frequencies in the local area. "Will that be all?"

"No, wait a minute here. I'll go in. When I call you, follow me."

Bentley moved aside. Lila put her hand out.

Again the music, the sparkling music that made her think of winter,
and the trailing notes of a harp inviting her.... She opened the door.

Her breath steamed instantly, obscuring the scene until a gust of
bitter wind snatched it away. She saw, in the instant she held the door
open, the shoreline of her office. Desks and furniture tumbled where
boulders would be, limned in ice. A grey, heaving swell of bitter seawater rose, clotted with greasy slush, washing ashore the wreckage of
a glass ship. It had already by some means driven a fragment containing the main mast into the shingle of the old wooden floor. A body
was tied to it, frozen under a sheer skin of ice.

The door closed with the dull crump of heavyweight fire-door
pushed shut by its automatic latch.

"I saw that, ma'am," Bentley's placid voice said from behind her
shoulder. "And I heard the line of a song. It is a carol from the Victorian era of Old Earth." She sent Lila the carol, lyrics and music. Lila
didn't miss the note that said the provenance of the song was
unknown. She looked at the door thoughtfully.

"What do you make of the ship?"

"It would appear that your office has become an illustrative
tableau depicting the fate of a ship called the Hesperus, after a poem by
the romantic poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow." She helpfully
appended the poem, with notes and subsequent cultural references to
the present day.

Lila looked at the door. "How do you think I make it go away?"

"The manifestation of untimely ghosts is referred to the Office of
Otherworldly Affairs in the absence of a formal guideline," Bentley said.

"Yeah, but Mal sneaked off on me," Lila replied. "I thought I'd
leave him for an hour until he did whatever it was he was bursting to
do. Anyway, he doesn't have a clue, as far as I can tell." She half turned
and braced herself to look at the woman's grey, plastic face. "Did you
speak like a how-to manual when you were alive?"

"I am still alive," Bentley said in her even, conversational tone. "And
not so much. It seems to make people less antsy around me, though."

"Hm," Lila nodded. "Well, you'd better update me on all the collated theories about reality over the last fifty years. Seeing as I can't get
into the office and I have a couple of hours to kill before dinner."

The file transfers took a few moments.

"I miss conversation," Lila said. The android did not react. Android
was not the correct term, was it? She knew that. But somehow it kept
coming back to her. She didn't know how much more hard work she was
prepared to do in Bentley's direction before her patience ran out, but she
felt it wouldn't be much. "Who's living in that house at Solomon's Folly
out on the South Bay Park? Do we get access to that kind of thing?"

"Of course," Bentley said.

Lila blocked the incoming signals. "Let's get coffee or something?
You can tell me on the way."

"You can check all this information yourself," Bentley said with bland
affability as they turned and started in the direction of the kitchen.

"Yeah, I have a bit of a ..." Lila waggled her hands, trying to express
it. "Bit of a thing about connecting to machines with seriously hardcore
outlet pipes and semi-intelligent roving bot systems. Call it paranoia."

"That is why you killed Sandra Lane?"

"She isn't dead," Lila said with certainty. "I just sent her ...
elsewhere."

"She is no longer connected."

"Then that makes two of us." They had reached the end of the corridor, and the civilisation of other people.

Bentley paced in a deferential position, slightly behind Lila's
shoulder. "She wanted to recruit you to the rogues."

"Probably."

"It is certain. You have magical affinities. They want them."

Lila switched from speech to electronic communications so that
they could not be overheard. "What else do they want?"

"They see themselves as the highest material expression of the
Signal. So far."

"And what does it want?"

"To actualise."

"Is that according to them or how you all see it?"

"It is their credo."

"Interesting choice of word."

"They are devoted to actualising the Signal. They consider themselves the equivalent of Faery Chosen."

"But the Chosen aren't trying to actualise the fey."

"No. I did not say the rogues' version of reality was correct, though
it is logical in its fashion."

"And what is the correct version of reality?"

"It is the state of things as they are, as distinct from what one
might wish them to be or believe them to be."

"So what are you, and the rogues?"

"We are humans who are undergoing continuing adaptation by
nonorganic and organic materials for the purpose of communication
with the Signal."

Lila took a deep breath and relaxed her jaw so that she didn't grind
her teeth. "Isn't a signal a communication, not something you communicate with?"

"The Signal is able to assimilate and destroy information. All
information that is incorrect is purged from the Signal."

"I'm sure that sounds more comforting when the sun is shining."

"You are taking the mickey out of me, ma'am."

"Yeah." Lila stopped. They were a stride farther on than when they
had started the conversation. She couldn't take another one like that.
"What's your first name?"

"Sarah," Sarah Bentley seemed slightly taken aback.

"Do you still drink, Sarah?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then forget the coffee, let's get something stronger." Lila steered
them towards Malachi's office. They passed through several islands of
assistants on the way, all of them apparently fixated on their work, all
of them watching Lila pass by. She wondered what they knew. Did they
know about Sandra Lane? But she couldn't afford to care. At the door
to the internal courtyard she paused, waited for it to open, and led the
way into the garden. The weather was turning to rain, the sky almost
dark and the only wanderer was a secretary with a cup of tea standing
under the shelter of a date palm and looking morosely at a magazine
on his handheld. In the midst of the trees and raked gravel sweeps
Malachi's yurt looked damp and huddled. Lila found the door flap and
hoicked it open, holding it for Sarah to go through. She briefly considered whether she ought to have knocked, but it was too late, and in any
case when she stepped through herself she found he wasn't there.

The place was trashed.

Malachi's stuff lay everywhere, most of it broken. His dresser was
upended, the drawers yanked out and discarded, their contents heaped
and scattered on the rugs. The fridge yawned, vomiting light beers and
pouches of fruit flumsie, its motor whirring as it tried to cool down the
muggy warmth of the whole room whilst opposite the space heater
blared red, set to maximum. Lila looked behind her to the coat hooks.
They were empty.

"He's been and gone," she said. As Bentley took photos she picked
her way through to his carved wood desk, trying not to move anything.
Faery stuff lay everywhere. Against her skin the black suit tingled and
snugged tighter. His chair was covered in debris from the desk
drawer-dried grass, leather thongs, bits of elf shot, a couple of
memory sticks with the lids missing, his headphones and a half-dried
peach pit. Droplets of water were everywhere.

"Agent Malachi has not left the premises," Sarah said in her
matter-of-fact voice. "He must have switched realms from inside."

"And whoever did this did the same," Lila concluded. She looked at the water, at the heater. Compared with the outside air it was cooler
in here, even with the heater on full. She backed off from the desk and
crouched down near the icebox. There among the bottles and bags
were tiny crystals of ice, flawless and faintly gleaming with the palest
blue-white light.