After a few moments I heard a voice.
“Who is asking for admittance?”
The voice had the directionless character that told me that it wasn’t being reproduced electronically.
“Kline Maxwell,
Cleveland Press
. Leonardo Baldassare sent me.”
It was a long sixty seconds before the elevator began moving. The upward acceleration was sudden, unexpected, and unpleasant. The little LED display ran floor numbers by too fast to read, until it hit thirty and began slowing down.
I rubbed my chin and looked into my reflection in the polished brass doors.
Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine . . .
The doors slid open.
Baldassare had said there was a moment where everything clicked, a point where it sank in how much the world had changed. I thought that I had passed that point long ago. I knew what the world had become.
But when I walked out onto the top floors of the BP building, it clicked. I realized that I knew jack shit.
The BP Building was late seventies, early eighties. The first major skyscraper built here after the city came out of default. First it was the Sohio corporate headquarters, then BP Oil bought them out and stayed long enough to rename the building. It was a high-profile address, right on Public Square, and the top floors were about as exclusive as you got as far as downtown office space went.
I had never been here before, but I could tell that the current tenant had ordered extensive remodling.
The fortieth floor no longer existed except as empty space three stories above me. In front of me was an atrium that enclosed almost as much space as the grand lobby downstairs. To my left and right were three stories of windows that looked down on the city from a dizzying height. Except for the heavy stillness in the air, the feeling was as if I stood on an urban mountain peak. The air smelled of roses and sulfur.
What affected me most wasn’t the grand space, but the single occupant of that space.
She—I wouldn’t have known gender if Baldassare hadn’t told me—was easily half again the size of Aloeus, though I was probably too close to her for an accurate measure of size. All I saw was a wall of muscular blue-black flesh that rose above my head and slid, slowly, from left to right. In the direction of motion, the wall narrowed to a serpentine neck that arched above her, ending in a head longer than I was tall. She lowered her head, pulling her body in an undulating motion behind it, so I glimpsed an arm stretching lazily toward the ceiling. Baldassare was right about feline body language, though the clawed hand I saw could easily break an eight-hundred pound Siberian tiger in half.
I realized the wall of flesh in front of me was her back when she completed the feline stretch by rolling over—in my direction. If the intention was to impress me, Theophane succeeded. I flattened myself against the elevator doors, as her enormous form rolled to face me. She came to rest about ten feet from the column that held the elevator shaft, but my hypothalamus was screaming to the rest of my body that I was about to be crushed.
Her head came down between me and the rest of her body. She looked at me with a heavy golden eye the size of my skull. She opened her mouth, and her voice filled the humid air around me.
“Fuzzy gnome stories?”
CHAPTER TEN
“
T
HEOPHANE?” I asked unnecessarily.
She blinked at me slowly.
I realized she had asked a question, and was waiting for an answer. “It’s slang,” I told her, hoping to God I wasn’t being insulting. “News stories that are predominantly about the paranormal.”
“ So I am a ‘fuzzy gnome?’ ”
I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see her reaction. “Strictly speaking, yes.”
I felt wet sulfur breath on my face and heard an ominous rumble. It shook the floor and I tensed, expecting to feel the dragon’s wrath at any moment. The rumble became louder, and when I wasn’t immediately torn limb from limb, I risked a peek.
Theophane was laughing.
She shook her head as she finished rolling to her feet. It took her body even closer, but she had enough control to avoid squashing me. She took a few steps away from me. With her stride that meant that there was suddenly about forty feet between us. I could now see most of her—a whiplike saurian body that seemed to cross a python with a T-rex. Her body shaded from black-blue on top, to a blue-white underneath. Her wings folded against her back like a cape, and her tail slid back past me and the pillar that held the elevator shaft. Her head sat on a serpentine neck that turned it to keep her gaze on me as she moved. Brimstone-scented steam rose from her nostrils as she laughed.
After a moment, she regarded me with her head cocked inquisitively,
“You do not find that amusing?”
“I see the incongruity of the statement.”
Sorry, but I’m a little too shit-scared to laugh right now.
“Where did you hear that phrase? I thought it was just some provincial jargon from the local press.” I was having difficulty keeping my voice on an even keel. Somehow it’d never occurred to me that seeing a dragon up close would have this kind of effect on me. Blame that on the little knot of ego that got me into situations like this in the first place.
“I have heard that you’re a journalist who does not do ‘fuzzy gnome’ stories.”
“The death of Aloeus is more than that.”
“We are all more than that.”
The great deep voice carried something akin to Columbia’s disapproval. Just like a flamethrower carries something akin to a Zippo.
“I didn’t mean offense.”
The dragon laughed again in a way that made my fillings ache.
“You are only human, Mr. Maxwell. Can I fault you for that?”
I got the feeling that I wasn’t completely off the hook.
I wondered again where she had heard the phrase.
“Mr. Baldassare called on your behalf last night. I agreed to meet you, knowing your aversion to ‘fuzzy gnomes.’”
“What do you know about that?” I asked her.
“I make knowing things my business.”
She lowered her head to be at a level with me. That was disconcerting, facing her beaklike toothy mouth.
“Mr. Baldassare said you want to know about dragons.”
“I want to know about Aloeus.”
“Are they not the same thing?”
There was silence for a moment before I heard a small alarm from behind her. She cocked her head.
“Pardon me a moment.”
She turned from me, the motion of her body vibrating the floor. Her tail slid by me with a soft hiss across the blood-red carpet.
“I must buy some more Microsoft shares before the NASDAQ starts upward again.”
I stood there and watched for a while, letting the past thirty seconds sink into my world view. Call me a racist, but I didn’t expect a dragon with a sense of humor. Theophane seemed to be getting a lot of enjoyment out of playing all my expectations false. Which was no difficult task, since she knew a lot more about me, and humanity in general, than the sorry bits I knew about her kind—and about her specifically, I knew nothing beyond name and address.
And she wasn’t lying about the NASDAQ.
When she moved aside, I could see another pillar in the vast chamber, twin to the one holding the elevator. This sole architectural feature seemed to serve as a combination office and entertainment center for Theophane. Flat screen displays covered most of the available space. Some showed CNN, C-SPAN, and other news and public affairs channels. The screens were all muted, dialogue transcriptions running across the bottom of their screens. Central to all of them was an inset display positioned at what must have been a comfortable level for her, about four feet above my head. I could catch a few glimpses of a computer display showing windowed bar graphs and columns of figures. Across the top I could clearly see a stock ticker running.
Theophane maneuvered an oversized mouse with a few well-placed claws. I don’t know why I found it incongruous.
“So can you answer some of my questions?”
She shook her head as she stared at the screen. The display was twice the size of my TV, but it seemed too small for her.
“Your distraction cost me fifty thousand dollars.”
She must have sensed me backing up, because her head turned my way just as I felt the warm muscular wall of her tail along the small of my back.
“No matter, the entertainment value should be worth as much.”
Her head lowered to be just slightly above my level, and I had the uneasy sensation of being surrounded.
“What is it you want to know, Mr. Maxwell?”
“I want to understand dragons.”
Theophane’s head drew back and tilted slightly in my direction. There was a distinctly saurian cast to her face, especially with the heart-shaped bony ridge of her forehead facing me. The nose and mouth were very like a skin-covered beak with teeth. Her voice was eerie, coming from deep inside her throat, with little help from tongue and near-nonexistent lips. I might have suspected that the sounds weren’t even coming from her if not for the feel of moist breath on my forehead as she spoke.
She raised one hand and drew her clawed fingers together at its point, the gesture disturbingly human.
“An interesting synchronicity. I wish to understand humans. I feel we both may have embarked on an endless task.”
Conversing with her was helping me recover from the initial impact. With that came the feeling that she was playing with me. I didn’t feel that levity—even the levity of a two-hundred-foot lizard—was appropriate. I took my notebook out of my pocket.
“Theophane, I am investigating the death of one of your fellow dragons. I need to know why he died.”
“Perhaps you do, Mr. Maxwell. Do I?”
“Do you what?”
“Need to know why?”
“Aren’t you concerned at all about Aloeus’ death? He was one of your own.”
“You are right to believe you do not understand dragons.”
Theophane shook her head and withdrew it. When she moved, I was no longer surrounded, and I breathed a little easier. She moved away from the video pillar, toward a vast wall of windows that overlooked the eastern city.
I walked up next to her, the view an antidote to the claustrophobia I’d been feeling. Below us, the arched glass roof of the Old Arcade flashed sunlight back up at us.
“There is no reason the death of Aloeus should concern me more than the death of anyone else.”
She shook her head.
“We are not social animals. We do not form tribes, cities, or religions—any trappings of such things we undertake for the sake of others.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Of course you do. You have been trained from birth that another man must have authority over you, that other men define the codes you shall adhere to. You exist in a prison made of other human beings.”
There was something very cold in the way she said that. My hand shook a little as I took notes. “You mean that dragons don’t?”
There was another of her snorts that I took to be laughter. This one held less humor than her prior ones.
“Consider me, Mr. Maxwell. You look at a creature supreme in physical prowess, in intellect, in mystical ability. Perhaps that sounds immodest, but modesty is a human virtue. To have a tribe, one must lead, and others must be willingly subjugate themselves.”
She drew herself up and spread wings that reached from one end of the cavernous space to the other.
“No dragon is a slave.”
This was not what I was expecting, and it didn’t feel quite right to me. “You mean to say that there’s no social connection between dragons at all?”
“We are not human beings.”
A statement that any good newsman would recognize as a non-answer answer. She had sidestepped the question as adroitly as any politician. It prompted me to push slightly. “Aloeus’ death means nothing to you?”
“We are sovereign creatures, each one’s fate is his own.”
“Even if it wasn’t an accident?”
She looked down at me, then turned her serpentine neck to look out at the eastern horizon.
“There are no accidents,”
she said. A clawed finger touched the ground near my feet. It was disconcerting, the black talon was almost the length of my forearm.
“Ask me about dragons, Mr. Maxwell.”
There was something in her voice, a burning emotion that I could feel in her words, but couldn’t identify. Rage or grief? I didn’t know, and its intensity frightened me. “Tell me why you came here, through the Portal.”