The Iron Dragon's Daughter (42 page)

"No."

The lounge was empty. Jane turned her back on the windows and surveyed the couches. Any one of them would do for a bed. Or else she could always sleep on the floor.

"I have to go now. If I'm not back at the plant soon, well…" The shadow-boy shrugged sadly.

"Yeah, sure, the plant." Jane did not release his arm.

"I have to go," he repeated.

"Who are you?"

The shadow-boy looked away. "You know me," he mumbled.

"What are you?"

He did not answer.

"Then suppose I tell you."

"No," he whispered, "don't."

It was a terrible thing that Jane was about to do. But she was drunk and wired and aching and crashing and she no longer gave a shit. She wrapped her arms around his thin, unresisting frame. He felt so cold and small. She was astonished to discover how much she had grown since leaving the dragon works. He looked up, stricken, into her eyes and trembled. Jane bent her head down and whispered her own name into his ear.

"I did everything I could," he whimpered.

"So did I. It wasn't enough, was it?"

He was shivering convulsively now. He didn't answer.

"If you want to hold a hippogriff captive, you clip its flight primaries. For a faun, you hamstring one leg. But how do you cripple a mortal without lessening her value as a laborer?"

"Please… don't." The shadow-boy writhed weakly within her embrace.

"Shush." Jane lowered her mouth to his. She pushed her tongue between his unresisting lips to open them. Then she sucked his tongue into her own mouth. She sucked more of him into her, and more. She went on sucking until there was nothing there.

When she looked up a faint brightness had entered the lounge. The sun was coming up.

The Teind was over.

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON BY THE TIME JANE MANAGED TO drag herself up from the couch. She was still dressed in yesterday's clothes. They were pretty rank, but not as nasty-smelling as herself. The sky outside was gray and the atmosphere within was oppressive. Her head ached. A crusty sensation had lodged itself in her throat and her bowels felt loose. On top of everything else, she had a hangover.

She needed a shower and a change of clothes. They must surely have removed Monkey's and Ratsnickle's bodies from her room by now. The shadow-boy had been right about that. It was exactly the sort of thing that the administration was good at.

She rolled her head in a circle a couple of times, listening to her vertebrae crackle. Then she dutifully scraped the worst of the grunge from her front teeth with a fingernail.

Then she looked at the time.

"Oh fuck!"

They'd be posting the lists any minute now.

Sirin's body had been found in Watling Street by Caer Gwydion. Somebody had thrown her out of a high window. According to the exegesis, the Lords of the University had needed her dental records to make a positive identification.

The notices were hung in locked glass bulletin cases in New Regents Hall. Along with many of the survivors, Jane was there to watch them go up. Her hair was still damp—she'd spent over half an hour in the shower—and her head throbbed. She went carefully down the lists looking for friends and classmates. It took time; for bureaucratic convenience they'd been listed by order of discovery.

Sirin.

Monkey.

Ratsnickle.

There was a slow, almost erotic isolation to the experience. Jane crept down the lists an inch at a time, running her hands over the glass, studying each name intensely. All about her others were doing the same. Nobody spoke. No eyes met. Nobody cared to make contact.

New Regents was an enormous space, barrel-vaulted and indirectly lit by hidden clerestory windows. The walnut paneling gave it an almost natural feel, as if Jane were but an insect creeping along the floor of a hollow log. But emptiness dominated. The scattered students seemed sadly few, the University depopulated.

A dwarf in a three-piece suit and cockatrice shoes briskly scanned the lists, moving down the cases with brusque, businesslike efficiency. It was—Jane tried to remember—Nant's friend, the one she had met that long ago night when she and Sirin first encountered Galiagante. Red Gwalch, that was his name. She wondered if she should say hello. But then he burst into tears and, throwing an arm over his eyes, turned away. So she guessed maybe not.

Nant.

Skambles.

Martha Falsestep.

Jimmy Jump-up.

Loosestrife.

Vinegar Dick.

Most of those on the lists were strangers to her. Others she knew only vaguely, by hearsay and repute. Up and down the hall students lingered over the listings. They were all puffy-eyed and stunned-looking. Some moved their lips as they read. Occasionally one began to sob. Abruptly, another laughed in disbelief. Nobody spoke. They all had their own stories to tell. Nobody was going to tell them.

Linnet.

Barguest Summerduck.

Itch.

The Cauld Lad.

Puck Aleshire.

There it was. Her heart thudded once, as if it had been hit with a brick. Then nothing. She felt no emotion at all. Only an awful gray sense that she really ought to feel something.

Jane discovered then that she had no tears in her to shed. She felt a monster, but there it was. A hogboon to her side shuffled his feet meaningfully and she drifted on to the next case. Automatically she kept on reading. Puck would never have encountered Wicked Tom if he hadn't come looking for her. He had thrown away his life for her sake. And he had died without even knowing how she felt about him. It was incomprehensible that she could not mourn for him.

Punch.

Lampblack.

Billy Bugaboo.

The Whiddler.

She stopped. What was that she had just read? She went back up the listing and found the entry again. She stared at it in disbelief.

Billy Bugaboo was dead. According to the exegesis he had been leading a faction of the mob—impossible to believe!—in an attack on the Stockbrokers' Guild when he was struck down by a Greencoatie bullet. An asterisk and dagger at the end of the citation meant that since he had died heroically, a posthumous degree would be issued.

Because it had never even occurred to her that Billy might be dead, the shock of seeing his name unfroze something within. Like a river breaking through an earthen dam the tears gushed out and overwhelmed her. They ran down her cheeks in sheets and streams.

Jane threw back her head and bawled.

She cried for guilt, for how badly she had treated her friends, and for loss. She cried for the sheer horror of existence. She was crying at first for Billy Bugaboo and the greater pain of Puck behind him. But somehow Linnet and Sirin and Monkey got mixed in there as well. And the shadow-boy too, though intellectually she knew he was only an aspect of herself. She was crying for them all, for the students she knew and those she did not, for all the victims of the Teind, for all the victims of a dangerous and hostile world.

Then, as rapidly as they had come, the tears stopped and she was emptier than before and drained of all emotion. I will never cry again, she thought, and almost immediately proved herself a liar. But these new tears, though violent, didn't last long either. And in their wake she felt flatly emotionless once more. This was how the rest of the day would go, she realized, sometimes rational and sometimes helpless with grief. But never rational and grieving at one time. There was a breach in her that would only be closed by time and sleep.

A taloned hand fell on her shoulder.

"Welcome to adult society," Dr. Nemesis said dryly. "Deserving or no, you are one of our order now."

Jane turned and for the first time actually looked past the repugnant pinches of pink flesh around her adviser's eyes and into the depths of those hard globes themselves. She saw culpability there and the sociable quality of shared guilt. It was repellent that a part of her responded to this with sympathy. "Thank you," she said.

Dr. Nemesis was wearing tinted glasses today with bluebottle lenses so thick they were almost purple. She pushed them up her beak and her eyes disappeared entirely. "I have good news for you. Your financial aid is being reinstated."

"Why?"

"It's customary after the Teind. Mere economics, really. With the abrupt drop in demand for the University's resources, there's enough of everything to go around. For a brief time, money flows freely. In your case it's moot, of course. A formality. But one that will look good on your permanent record."

"Why moot?"

Dr. Nemesis's hand dipped into a vest pocket. It emerged with an envelope held between two iron claws. "As your adviser it is my glad duty to inform you that your application for a sabbatical has been approved." She withdrew a document, examined the seals, and slowly read it over to herself. Then she nodded, replaced it in the envelope, and returned the envelope to her pocket. "Normally sabbaticals are not granted to students. To facilitate your case, we have issued a provisional degree in industrial alchemy and appointed you—contingent upon your successful completion of the program—to the teaching staff. Shockingly irregular." Her beak lifted in what on her passed for a smile. Light flashed darkly on her spectacles. "Fortunately for you, the administration is totally corrupt. Otherwise it would never have been tolerated."

"I didn't apply for a sabbatical."

"You didn't have to. The Fata Incolore applied in your name. The paperwork is done. All we need is your consent."

"Who is the Fata Incolore?"

"A great intimate, I gather, of the Lord Galiagante, who is himself a favored sponsor of many University activities."

"Ahhh," said Jane. "I begin to see."

"Come by my office anytime within the week and we'll get the paperwork out of the way. Your salary is suspended until you actually begin teaching of course. But you will receive a housing allowance and certain small discretionary moneys to cover your incidental expenses."

"Well," Jane said. "I guess this must be my lucky day."

With the aid of a small glass of vodka and a quarter-gram of hashish, Jane finally managed to doze off. She slept dreamlessly through most of the next day, awakening only as the sun set. A quick change of clothing and she left her room never to return again. She did not pack; she could send for anything she might later decide to keep. It was time for a long talk with Melanchthon. They had things to settle.

The dragon had moved from the basements of Bellegarde sometime during the Teind. Jane knew this, though she did not know how she knew. It was a deep knowledge that welled up from within. And she knew that all she had to do was to walk blindly, paying no particular heed to where she was going, and her wandering footsteps would lead her directly to the dragon. He was lurking in the blind interior of her mind. She could feel him back where her thoughts ever turned with the reluctant compulsion of a tongue to a loosened tooth.

He was hers again, as he had been before. This time she knew they would never be free of each other again in this world.

She found the dragon in Termagant, fourteen floors from the very top. It was an extraordinarily posh neighborhood and she got some strange looks just riding up in the elevator. Not that she cared.

Her feet came to a stop midway down a silent and preternaturally clean hallway. The brass plate on one door read 7332. It opened at her touch.

Large rooms, beige walls. Track lighting created textured densities of illumination on gleaming hardwood floors. Through an arch she could see the kitchen, all butcher block and built-in appliances. Everything had been freshly painted. There was no furniture.

"Hello?"

Only a dull echo answered her.

Jane let the door click shut behind her. She stepped forward into what must be the living room. By which logic, the almost equally large space beyond it was surely the master bedroom. Jane walked through the carved double doors. It was there she found the dragon.

Melanchthon waited, silent and grim, a wall of black iron that stretched beyond the limits of the room. He must fill most of this floor, she realized, and half the floor above. Just making the room for him must have been incredibly disruptive. Arranging the repair and furbishing of the apartments about him without alerting the Lords of the City to his presence was a trick worthy of the dragon himself at his most cunning.

The cabin opened into the room, a metal circle in the very center of the wall. Jane climbed the rungs and yanked down the hatch bar. It swung open for her.

"No games," she said. The interior was warm and gently lit. The pilot's couch awaited her. "No lies, no bullshit, no evasions." She sat in it, as she had done so many times before. "I've come to cut a deal with you. If you act cute, I'll walk." The wraparounds closed about her head. Everything was black. She spoke into an infinite void. "You only get the one chance."

No response.

Her hands closed about the grips. This was the point of no return. The rubber pads were dry and hard. Convulsively, she twisted them. The needles stung her wrists.

The darkness about her intensified, taking on a depth and texture it had lacked before. Otherwise nothing happened. Jane waited. She was old enough now to realize that Melanchthon was indeed communicating with her in his way. His silence was more eloquent than any words he might have chosen. It spoke to her of weakness and strength, of her helplessness when held up to his power. It said that their feelings toward one another were unchanged.

There was a gurgle as liquid freon was pumped from one part of the dragon to another.

Jane shifted in the couch. The cabin felt impossibly close. The smell of iron was everywhere. She sighed and scratched an itch on her shoulder with her chin and a spark of light was born within the wraparound. It was pale as a glowworm and small as a mote of dust.