Chasing the Dragon (27 page)

"Then don't act all coy about it."

"I guess she's on her way here?"

"She wouldn't come. Not even though Sarah promised her a limo
and a month's pay. Mountains and Muhammad and all that jazz. Said
it wasn't worth it for a zombie nobody would want revived anyway and
would we please not call her until after ten in the morning about the
other one because she had to do her T'ai Chi."

"She said it was a zombie?"

"Yeah, and she didn't sound pleased. In fact, she sounded rather
like Mrs. Greer when I call her at three in the morning to ask her when
the hell she's coming home. I gave that up, by the way. It hasn't been
as much fun recently as it was for the first few years."

Malachi sighed. He took a drink and surrendered to the inevitable.
"What other one?"

"Lila got a call from her sister."

Malachi looked at Greer. They shared a moment of resigned
weariness.

"One we can deal with," Greer said flatly. "But nobody is prepared
for this to become the next big thing. Not after the last big thing. Is
it going to be the next big thing? Did your contact have an in on this?"

"You could say he had an in," Malachi confirmed, nodding slowly.
"Big thing? I hope not. I don't think so. He didn't say and I didn't
ask." He made it sound like Tath was someone you didn't fool around
with so Greer would drop the line, but mentally he cursed himself for
not doing more prying into Tath's affairs. All the talk about cards and
the fruit bowl and the CuSith had made him forget to be nosy enough.
And the visit to Madrigal.

"So what, is he the master of these zombies?"

Dazed, Malachi slowly refocused on the conversation at hand.
"They're not ... maybe ... shit!" He shook his head and stared at the
cloak near his feet. It was possible Tath could use zombies, more than possible, but he'd never send these particular zombies. Or would he? Was
there some reason he would want to torment Lila? "I just don't know. He
surely didn't send them, and he has nothing to do with ghosts."

"We need hard information," Greer said. "And fast." He moved
one of his feet towards Lila in a dull pointing action. "She'll wake up
in a few hours. I want something by then that I can use to keep her
anchored in whatever passes for reality around here. All we need is a
crazy agent with a sword that can rip holes in reality having a mental
breakdown. Speaking of which pigsticker-cum-poetic accessory, I'm
just going on what you wrote about it here. Nice brief. I'm still
waiting for the page that tells me what I can do to get it off her or blow
it to kingdom come should the need arise. And the page about how the
need for that to arise can be avoided."

Malachi finished his beer and twirled the last drops around in the
bottom before he tipped it up and spilled them on the grass. A little
gift. He decided to opt for the faery truth, that is, the real one, and not
the ten tons of horseshit-in-a-binder that the boss was asking for. "Zal
is her anchor. He's your answer."

Greer made a series of faces that spoke clearly of how much he
hated being at the mercy of others. His hands worked restlessly on the
bottle as if he were testing it and retesting it, never satisfied. Finally
he said with menace, "He'd better not be fucking dead."

"He isn't." Malachi was reasonably certainish about that.

"Find some proof." Greer chugged his drink and tossed the bottle
on the grass. He got to his feet slowly and stretched his back with great
caution. A joint cracked. "Before she wakes up." He began to go then
turned around. "Oh, I nearly forgot, what happened to your tent?"

"Friend left me something," Malachi said. "She was being followed
so she made a mess to cover her tracks. I think she might be dead."

"It's all the rage this season," Greer muttered. He went another few
strides and then turned again on his heel and called as he walked backwards, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "She nixed Sandra Lane, you
know." He gestured with his chin at Lila. "I'd be sorrier but I already
gave at the office." Then he turned again, almost clocked the door with
his head, stopped himself, yanked it open, and disappeared into the lit
entrails of the building.

Malachi looked at Lila. She was sleeping more easily now, the snore
even lighter. Her face was tranquil and looked more of its real-time
twenty-five years than he was used to. In fact, it looked a lot less. She
might have been fifteen. The red splash of hair that looked so deliberate shone vibrantly in the dark against her pale skin and the faery
cloak. Through one of the windows he saw the grey face of Bentley
looking out and waved to her. She curled her fingers once in an awkward society-girl kind of wave and then turned away. None of the
androids had slept in the last four decades. He wondered what that was
like. Even angels slept, so he'd heard.

He tossed his own bottle into the bushes and reached for another
one, opened it, and let the drink sparkle on his tongue for a minute.
The mildly intoxicating effects made all his troubles seem like enemies
whose riling had become fond with age. It was interesting to know she could dispatch a rogue, more interesting that she'd done it and not
spoken about it. The old Lila would have been mortified to crush a fly
unnecessarily. He regretted her passing. On the other hand, he didn't
regret the passing of Sandra Lane, not one bit. That left only four of
them out there doing who knew what in the service of their mad credo.
At least they'd kept quiet recently. Small mercies, he said to himself,
but at least some mercies, and the Signal wasn't his business or his
problem.

He nibbled another nut and considered Zal. Find Zal. That was
not going to be pleasant. Find Teazle. Hard to say if that would be
more or even less pleasant, but judging by tonight's gore he would
rather face the Lovely Ones on the chance of more mercy than take a
trip to Demonia and meet the certain absence of it. Plus, whatever Zal
had become it surely couldn't be more ominous than the all-glowing,
all-overconfident slayer of darkness, bringer of light, destroyer of illusions, and so forth that Teazle seemed to have mutated into down in
Under. Trust demons to overcook the egg and produce a monster. Did
Teazle even know what he was rushing into as he accepted the offer of
that blazing energy-did he know whose it was? Malachi would bet
not. Maybe the idiot even thought it belonged to him. Then again, if
he was aware of its source, would he turn it down? He was a demon.
Surely not. Live fast, channel angels, and burn out not fade away. It was
horribly, end-timely ominous.

Surely, Malachi thought to himself gloomily, it was time that he
stopped trying to lose all his information, as he had these hundred
years or more, and tried to actually gather it like a good spy was supposed to?

He finished a nut and counted how many were left. Lots. That was
good. He wasn't sure he was ready to be a good spy. Being a bad one
had had so many advantages. It paid not to be in the know. Knowing
was a sure way to get yourself stupidly killed. See what people did the
second they knew things: off they went, mission in mind, problems arising, solutions planned on an endless goose chase of cause and event.
Whereas, know nothing and you wallowed around ignorantly, of no
interest to things of power, of no use to people with schemes. A kernel
of sense was enough to keep you out of the way of such things. Hadn't
he been doing such enormously useful work all these years keeping
knowing to a minimum, for everybody?

It seemed a miracle then that he was in the middle of a churn of folk
and effects that seemed unable to avoid the need to know and who were
ceaselessly attractive to powers whose names should be still lost and long
forgotten. One might remember them as individuals or loose gatherings
of notions, but as long as they had no label you couldn't sum them up
or summon them up in any way. They must not be the subject of conversation or even predicates. They had no business in the world of being,
and namelessness kept them that way. Names were the most dreadful
magic, with a force that enabled and made real. If some of those old
things came back, the only way to get rid of them would be to lose
their names, and that was almost impossible to do. He didn't want to
be a part of any name-losing scenarios. Again. That had all been sorted
out ages ago, and he knew exactly where not to look.

But Lila was tenacious, if unstable. It was a constant job of work
to direct her away from danger. Zal was a force unto himself, but easily
distracted and sufficiently alert to mind his own business, always supposing he hadn't got himself killed. Teazle ... ugh, a wild card in the
mix, all he needed. Teazle was unknown. Demons were usually
deflected by better offers or higher odds. Ordinarily Mal was confident
he could wrap demons around his fingers for as long as he needed to,
but it looked like he wasn't going to be able to trump this one's fortunes, favours, or weaknesses. There must be something about him
worth knowing, sadly, which Malachi didn't know and hadn't yet had
cause to forget. He drummed his fingertips on his knees and frowned.
Already he was thinking too much, and that way he'd never figure
anything out.

To distract himself he decided to consider Madame Des Loupes.
She was an arresting proposition.

Everyone seemed to have forgotten about her recently, even though
it was her disappearance and apparent murder that had almost caused
a war as Demonia demanded Teazle's repatriation from Otopia and
Otopia refused both because it didn't have a treaty or Teazle and
because Lila was subject to the law but Teazle didn't have a status in
Otopia except as potential deportation material and they weren't about
to deport what they didn't have just because some stroppy demon president who was barely out of training pants decided it must be done.
Then, when Demonia insisted they knew very well Teazle was there,
any fool with a juju cell in their heads could see it at any seer's shop in
any town, they started a particularly ugly line of accusations that were
only stopped when Greer did his under-the-table deal to agree to locate
Lila and force her to do the decent thing and slaughter her husband for
the good of everyone concerned. Whether or not Greer was convinced
the murder conviction was a fit-up Malachi didn't know, but he
thought it wouldn't have mattered either way. It was the political
thing to do.

And it might not have been important if it weren't for the demon
in question who had been, conveniently, forgotten.

Malachi didn't believe Madame could be killed in the manner of
the crime. Her psychic skills were too massive and all-reaching to
permit anyone to get near her. So what was her motive in creating such
a ruckus? He didn't think anyone had anything on her. Nobody alive
anyway. She must have been the instigator, then. But why? Probably it
was too late to see the crime scene, although he would bet there was
nothing to find there. He sighed and ate another nut.

How about a different stab? What if he, Malachi, had wanted to be
forgotten? How would he go about it? Probably he would choose
entropy and not catastrophe as his plan, for he was a cat and subtle by
nature; but Madame was a demon, and a fine appreciation of the longueurs and uncertainties of entropy was not one of their strong
suits. So, catastrophe then. The obvious path was to have oneself apparently murdered and vanish forthwith. In Demonia that would be easy
to arrange, but for Madame, not so much. She would need someone of
Teazle's calibre to be the villain of the piece because anything less was
not believable. It was, very slightly, possible to imagine Teazle
catching her off guard if he had managed not to have the idea of killing
her until the very moment itself, in which case Madame's psychic mastery would have given her insufficient warning.

And the motive? On such a plan only whimsy would do. That
made no sense. Teazle was not old enough to have developed that level
of fanciful malice.

But what else had happened? Teazle had been on this impressive
rampage. Malachi saw no sense in that either, and it was fact. However,
the rampage itself had not really kicked off until Madame was dead.
And he had gained nothing from killing her. She didn't have a house
or own things or possess disposable powers. Teazle hadn't taken anything from her home. For a time there had been speculation that it was
some kind of vengeance concerning Zal's first wife, the clairvoyant
Adai, who had been universally known as Gift of Heaven We Know
Not Why. But Madame had been Adai's teacher and friend and there
was no suggestion of wrongdoings there, only a connection that linked
Teazle, lengthily, to Madame. Gossip magazines had stated firmly that
it was Madame's failure to predict Adai's death, or to tell Zal about it,
that was at the root of this grudge. Malachi knew Zal did not hold
grudges however. Could Teazle have known and decided to exact
retroactive justice of his own?

Malachi thought it unlikely. Everyone Teazle had ever killed had
been for a cast-iron reason, not a flimsy one, but his subsequent tour of
death might have been enough for a jury to reasonably suppose
Madame was a necessary disposal if he were to carry out his long list of
executions and takeovers. Yet that very takeover made no sense to Malachi. What was it all for? What could he hope to achieve? It could
never last. Or could it? Suddenly he was flung into doubt. If Teazle
really did command so much of Demonia's wealth and power, then
socially their rampant alpha-wolf style of behaviour might give him
enough status to override the conviction of any would-be assassin.
Might Teazle have made himself actually invincible to demons? It
seemed mad.

And once again it had led him off the trail. He was sure Madame
wasn't dead. So Teazle hadn't killed her, though now it looked like that
was perfectly viable from a demon point of view. Suppose Madame had
seen his rise to power lying ahead on time's path? Wouldn't that be a
prime opportunity to put a vanishing plan into action?