The Iron Dragon's Daughter (29 page)

Jane's anger was long gone. She read the flimsy only to drain it of power, to purge herself of the last traces of emotionality, to ensure that she did what she had to calmly and alertly. Then it was time.

The University library opened its doors at midnight and closed at dawn. The rationale given for such extraordinary hours was that they discouraged dilettantes and idlers from wasting the library's facilities. Jane suspected darker motives were at work, but this once she was just as glad for the privacy of its empty halls and echoing rooms. By side passages and wrought iron spiral stairways, she traced a labyrinthine path to the more obscure reaches of the collected lore.

To make the most of limited floor area, the older stacks were fitted with electric bookshelves. Only one pair in ten had an aisle's worth of space between them; the others were all pushed together like old furniture in a storage room. Jane walked alongside them, reading the placards, until she came to the one she wanted and flicked a switch on the side of the shelf. A hidden motor hummed to life. Slowly, clumsily, the other shelves huddled away from Jane's, closing the existing aisle and making a new one where she wanted it.

The books were all old and browning. Some were held together with string or with rubber bands so ancient they broke when they were touched but did not fall away for they had over the decades melted onto the book covers. The more valuable were preserved in folded acid-free cardboard containers carefully cinched with ribbons. Even these, though, were rotting at the core, falling away in flakes, inexorably oxidizing, as were all the books, in a process so pervasive that Jane could smell it, an autumnal haze that clung to the stacks like smoke from a distant grass fire. They were all, without exception, dying by degrees.

So it was with no sense of violation whatsoever that Jane used a razor blade to slice the security strip from the spine of one particular volume.

Her contact met her by the main elevator bank. He was wearing a shabby brown leather flight jacket with patches from the Broceliande campaign, old jeans, and older boots. "Puck Aleshire," he said. "You got the thing?"

"In my purse."

"Then let's go."

Puck, as it turned out, was the control from Jane's Comp-and-Spec class. His eyes were dark, overserious, all but unblinking. To make him smile, Jane said, "The last time I saw you, you were naked and standing next to a corpse."

He looked at her, said nothing.

In silence they went up ten floors and across a skywalk to Hindfell, where they caught a clanky public elevator down to street level. "Why couldn't we just go down to the ground floor and out from our own lobby?" Jane wondered.

"That's Crip territory. You really don't know anything if you want to hit Crip turf at night."

"Oh."

Hindfell's lobby was bleak and vacant. The store windows had been emptied for the night and a lone dwarf in doorman's red stood yawning and oblivious to their passage. A sheet of newspaper spread its wings and leaped at Jane when Puck opened the door, but was caught by a crosswind and flew sideways into a wall. She clutched her parka tighter about her.

They stepped out into a dark and fearsome emptiness. Streetlights struggled in vain to reach the ground. Neon reflected blurrily from the rain-slicked asphalt. The air echoed with the growls of unseen behemoths and the ugly yak-yakking laughter of streetcorner gnomes in a nearby bar. Somewhere a door swung open, releasing a snatch of music, then, closing again, swallowed it back. Nobody was out on the street.

Jane had to scurry to keep up with Puck's long stride. "You're a rude one," she remarked.

"And you're a rich bitch."

"What?"

"You heard me. I know your kind, with your prep school attitudes and your down-filled quilted parkas. Laughing at the likes of me because the arms of my jacket are pulling apart at the seams and I have to take whatever work comes to hand. Well, let me tell you something. There are worse ways to make money than by standing naked next to a corpse, as you so charmingly put it. And what money I
do
make goes to pay for my education, not because I want a little extra pixie dust to shove up my nose."

"I never—"

"Sure, sure." Puck's anger burned down as quickly as it had flared up. He hunkered his head. "Forget I said anything. No business of mine anyway." The signs glowed bright over the stores they passed—AMBROSIUS, GRANDFATHER TROUT, GNOMOLOGICA, THREE SILK SHOES—but the shops themselves were all dark as caves behind their locked security grates. "Here we are."

Their destination was a stone mansion with gabled roofs and terra-cotta trim. It was squeezed between two skyscrapers, a lone revenant of a bygone era. Graffiti disfigured the first floor. Five empty beer bottles huddled in the shelter of the steps. "She's expecting us," Puck said. He knocked.

The door opened.

Within was one vast room, cold and unlit. The interior walls had all been ripped out. In the dim light from the street Jane glimpsed distant brick, scorch marks, a rotting mattress, and a sarsen stone twice her height. The stone stood not far from a tiled fireplace.

The door closed, immersing them in blackness.

With a sudden spasm of panic, Jane realized just how thoroughly she was at Puck's mercy. Anything could happen to her here. She wondered how she could have been fool enough to put herself in this position.

"It's not usually this bad," Puck muttered. "Shit." A soda bottle rattled and rolled away from his boot tip. "
Hey
, you old dingbat! We're here—turn on the fucking lights!"

The lightlessness intensified odors, the rots and mildews from mattress and wallpaper, the smell of charred wood, and beneath them all a pervasive ophidian stench. Could there be snakes living in this ruin? Jane fervently hoped not.

"One second, please."

The flat, sexless voice came from the heart of the living darkness. There was a metallic clank, the smell of kerosene, the
skritch
of a sulfur match. Light flared, dazzled, resolved into a lantern. It hung in midair, suspended from a scrawny brown hand. The sarsen stone's shadow leaned toward them and then away.

"You may advance now into our presence."

Behind the lantern, where Jane had to squint to see, floated the ghost of a face. Parchment skin stretched over a fleshless skull. It was the mask of a crone, high forehead, heavy lids housing shadow. Aeons of weariness nested in the corners of those eyes. She wore a black turtleneck so that her upper body could only be inferred and not seen; of her body below the waist Jane could make out nothing. A lipless mouth moved, said: "Where is it?"

The expression that spread across that face as Jane removed the book from her purse was as lean and hungry as a candle flame.

She stretched out a hand.

Jane put the offering in it.

The creature raised the book to her nose and sniffed. She riffled it open, tore out three pages, and stuffed them in her mouth. Sourly, she chewed. Skipping forward, she hesitated over another page, then decisively tore it out and ate it as well. Finally she ripped a page from the index. When her mouth was empty again, she returned the book to Jane. "The rest is of no interest to me." The brown hand disappeared, reappeared with an envelope. "Here is your quittance. I trust it is sufficient."

Jane stuffed the envelope unopened into her purse. She hesitated, then asked, "Why are you doing this?"

"Those pages contained a name. One I wish forgotten."

"But why did you eat them?"

"I am destroying my past."

"But why?"'

With a dry rustle, as of silks on marble, the face floated nearer her. The mouth hung open in a parody of despair, tightened into a determination that was truly frightening. "I smell iron, cold iron, hard fate, and betrayal." She jerked the lantern into Jane's face. "You are not one of my children! What are you doing here?"

Jane shrugged, frightened.

The lantern withdrew. "It does not matter. Sit down by the hearth, and I will tell you all."

Shadows leaped as she thrust the lantern into the empty fireplace. From nowhere she produced two small chairs. "Fucking waste of time," Puck grumbled as he and Jane settled uncomfortably down on them. A cold breeze gusted from the chimney's throat without throwing up any soot. It had been a long time since fire had dwelt therein.

Their hostess did not sit.

"Things are not as they were," she said. "I ask you to picture an age when there were no dwellings taller than a long spear, no machines more complex than a loom, no calendars but the Moon herself. It was a time when all women lived in harmony."

Puck snorted.

"What about the men?" Jane asked.

"There were no men. We had not invented them yet." The face twisted toward the sarsen stone. The stone reflected no light but drank it all in, a looming darkness within the darkness. "That was my sin, in fact, the separation of women into male and female. It was the first sin and the most hideous, for it was that which set the Wheel in motion."

A cabinet door clicked open and she removed a cut glass decanter and poured herself a drink. She tonged ice from a bucket, then replaced its lid. Gracefully she glided to the sarsen stone and with a slithering sound circled it three times. Each time her face and hands reappeared, they had risen higher in the gloom. "I was powerful then, yes, and beautiful beyond your imagining, as fair and pale as Lady Death. We had no rulers in that long ago age, nor any authority other than the honor of old age, but my standing was great among the mighty, and for my accomplishments the Council of Seven made me their Lamia."

She waited until Jane said, "I don't know what a lamia is."

A rustle like dried newspapers. The face rose yet higher. "It was a very great title, child. And a great responsibility. For we controlled such sorceries then as this sad and disenchanted age cannot even remember. With these two hands"—she held them palms upward—"I could command the mountains to open and the seas to part. I summoned stars to the surface of the earth, that I might walk and converse with them and so learn.

"Nobody died in those days. There was no need for it."

With a rattle and a sizzle, an electric heater came on by Jane's feet. Startled, she stared down at it. The heating elements glowed in red circles, casting a dull crimson light upon the wall. A stain in the wallpaper shrank away to nothing. She had missed a few words.

"—did not listen to it at first. It was just an idle fancy, a voice in the back of my head."

One side of Jane's body was cold and the other overly warm. The smell of kerosene was overwhelming. The lantern flickered and the sarsen stone seemed to flare, as if it were sprouting gray butterfly wings. In Jane's swimming vision it wavered between two irreconcilable forms, between monolith and two-bladed ax head.

A great weariness settled over Jane. "It seemed impossible to me that evil should come of so simple an idea," the Lamia said. Jane was finding it hard to follow the meaning of what was being said. She yawned, pinched the corners of her eyes, shook her head. By slow degrees the quietly monotonous voice lulled her into a half-dreaming state where it seemed to her that all the room dissolved to nothing, leaving only the sarsen stone unchanged.

In her imaginings, Jane was standing on a bright plain, and the Lamia had grown young again. From the waist down she was a serpent. Her coils wrapped three times around the stone. But so beautiful was she, so innocently naked and sweet smelling, that Jane was not at all frightened. The scales were bright as jade. They glittered in the sun. Her eyes were green and unblinking.

"Where am I?" Jane asked.

From above the Lamia said, "This is the Omphalos, the unturning pivot. All the world revolves about it. The farther from the center you go, the faster and less tolerable the motion becomes. The easier it is to fall. Look about you."

Jane looked. To every side the world fell away from the sarsen stone. She could see to its very end. Highways ran like threads to cities laid out in perfect miniature, and beyond them were mountains, oceans, and ice. It was just like the plaster-and-lichen tableaux the sophomore geomancers put together every year to illustrate such themes as Electricity in the Service of Industry or Allegory Enlightening the Masses. "It's round!" she cried. "The world is round!"

"It is round because it is only an illusion. The world does not exist—not in any important sense—and so it takes on the shape of change." Now the disk was turning, slowly but visibly spinning under the cloud-studded bowl of the sky. "This is change made visible—what the wise call the Wheel. You are seeing existence now as the Goddess herself sees it." Jane was beginning to feel dizzy. Quickly she shifted her vision down from the horizon. Still her stomach felt queasy.

The Lamia's voice grew wild and visionary. "It was I who set the Wheel in motion, through my pride and folly, and so I was punished, condemned that my children should walk on two legs, condemned to be scorned and disbelieved by my descendants, condemned cruelest of all to immortality, so that I might see the consequences of my deed." The lands spun faster. Jane staggered, caught her balance. "As a mercy only slightly less cruel than the punishment itself, I have been promised that some day, when I have destroyed the last trace of my existence, I shall be granted surcease. But that day is long, long in coming."

Winds shrieked up from the spinning lands. "Meanwhile, the Wheel turns. The humble are exalted and the mighty are humbled. The best are inevitably defeated, and the scum always rises to the top. Here is the source of all the world's pain, that restless turning, ever accelerating, always bringing us around again to where we were before, but older, changed, scarred, and sorrowful. Had I only known the identity of the whisperer, I would never have listened. The Wheel would not have been set in motion."