The Iron Dragon's Daughter (47 page)

"Well?" Jane said testily.

For a long moment the silence held. At last, grudgingly, the dragon said, "You are right. We have little time left. We must complete our preparations as soon as possible."

"I know what you want and you can just forget it. Not tonight."

"Tonight," the dragon insisted. "I need more."

"More? I must've given you close to a hundred names by now. Just how fucking many do you need?"

"I'll let you know when it's enough."

Jane had a script to go over and lines to memorize. She'd been up late three nights running and it was beginning to affect her complexion. She'd promised herself she would go to bed early with a mud pack and a trashy paperback. "Cut me some slack. You can spare one night."

"Destruction," said the dragon, "is my all. Your screams would be as meat and drink to me, your torment sweeter than the blood of innocents, your slow death a lifetime of pleasure. Don't think the only sacrifices made have been yours. Do you want the Goddess or not? She's a tricky piece of business, and I won't go against her at anything less than full strength. If you won't cooperate, say so and I'll lower my sights. I may not have the power yet to kill the Lady, but I have more than enough to destroy the City and all that abide in it."

The reek of indignation and cold iron filled the apartment.

Jane sighed and glanced at the clock. She always lost these arguments. Maybe on some unconscious level she wanted to lose them. Maybe, living within the sphere of the dragon's aura, his passions were translated by her body into desire. In any case, Little Jane always silently sided with Melanchthon. And there was no denying that her duties in this phase of the conspiracy were proving far less onerous than she had expected them to be.

"I've got a shoot in the morning," she said. Her handlers needed publicity shots for an image makeover. So far as Jane could tell, her new image was the same thing as her old, only in red leather instead of black. But two weeks' scheduling had been shuffled to make time for a new set of glossies. Still, she could always pop an amphetamine with breakfast. Just so long as she didn't start making a habit of it. "I suppose I could pick up somebody in the bar."

"My little slut," Melanchthon said approvingly.

At the end of the shoot, while the photographer's assistants were packing up the equipment, Corinde came over and, putting aside his walking stick, placed an arm around Jane's shoulders. Corinde was the single most anorexic elf Jane had ever met, a stick figure in black, and such a bundle of mannerisms that it was hard to guess at the real personality underneath. Rumor was that he wasn't an elf at all, but some socially elevated variety of night-gaunt, and it was certainly true that Jane had never seen him in natural light. Still, he'd always treated her well enough.

Nattily tucking his cane under one arm Corinde said, "Darling, I have to say this. I've worked with the best—and you know me, I never flatter anyone if I can avoid it—the absolute best, and in all my years I've never seen anything the equal of you today. You were quite simply
dreadful
!"

"I'm sorry, I—"

"Yes, yes, yes. All this sex-drugs-and-glamour. You think I don't understand? You get to go to all the best clubs and take all those pretty young boys home and do whatever you want with them." Jane held herself expressionless. "Believe me, sweetcakes, I understand perfectly. But listen to me. Your wealth and notoriety—they're simply borrowed against expectations. They could vanish in the morning light. You haven't earned them yet. It's like shooting up speed." He raised his eyebrows significantly. "You feel fine and vigorous for ever so long. You look marvelous. You have the time of your life. But sooner or later, you have to crash. And then you will pay the piper, in exact measure according to how much you've drawn on account. Are you following me?"

"Yes, I—I think so," Jane said in a small voice.

"Good. Now go home and get some sleep."

"Oh, Corinde, I
would
, really. But I promised Fata Incolore…"

Corinde's eyes flashed. He slammed the floor with the tip of his stick and spun on his heel. Over his shoulder he snapped, "Somebody shorten the way for Fata Jayne. She has an important date uptown."

Under his prickly exterior, Corinde was really very sweet. It was a pity she had offended him. Jane hoped dearly that she hadn't won his enmity. The thought troubled her all the way to Pentecost.

The doorway to House Incolore—or, rather, to the physical expression of House Incolore's local nexus—was gray and unassuming. It opened at her touch and closed noiselessly behind her. She walked unsurely through a dimly lit narthex.

The hall Jane stepped into was overwhelming. It seemed to be carven of vaulted and arched shadows that lofted in great curves to the farabove gloom. The gray walls, which turned to granite when touched, were braced by slim white pillars that glowed faintly in the distant gray. At first Jane thought the pillars were marble. But when she brushed against one, it had the warmth and texture of ivory.

Startled, she looked up at the vaulting again, dizzy with recognition. She was standing within the buttressed chest of some enormous monster whose ribs and bones had been polished and reshaped to form the supports of the granite hall. How could such a creature even support itself? Surely its organs would collapse under their own weight. However could it have taken in enough food to keep itself alive? It must have had an incredibly sluggish metabolism. Perhaps its movements had been excruciatingly slow, centuries for a single thought, ages to complete an action.

"There you are."

Fata Incolore strode briskly into the hall, pulling on her gloves. "Shall we go?"

"Uh, yes. Why not?" Jane continued to stare curiously at the ivory columns. She could not help herself. Incolore followed her glance.

"My ancestor."

"Oh." Jane trailed her hostess into an ambulatory beyond the right-hand row of columns. They stepped into an open-work elevator the details of which were invisible in the murk and rose to an upper gallery. A narrow corridor led deeper into the shadows. With every step they moved farther from the entrance.

"I thought we were going out somewhere," Jane said.

"Yes. To that place you agreed to see."

"Aren't you going to have somebody shorten the way?" Incolore was a gray-paper silhouette just before her, in constant danger of fading away to indistinction. Her stride was long and Jane had to hurry to keep from losing her.

"No need. In my house there are doors that lead wherever I want." She paused, one hand extended, and glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes were twin sparks of predatory calm. "Through here."

Jane stepped through the door and was blinded by sunlight.

As her sight returned, a hospital room coalesced about Jane. The antiseptic smell was unmistakable, as were the half-drawn institutional curtains, before which dust motes danced in slanted light as thick and golden as honey. Yet Jane knew for a fact that there was no hospital within miles of Pentecost.

Shoes clicked loudly in the hallway. Incolore walked over and closed the door. Quiet returned. Behind her, the portal through which they had entered shut without a trace. At the center of the room, an IV drip idle by its side, was a glass coffin.

There was a woman sleeping within.

She was thin, drawn and desiccated, and her scalp was pink beneath wispy white hair. Her face was deeply lined. Jane thought at first that she was old and then that she was not so much old as used up. In sleep she had found a kind of sad peace. Her brow and the skin at the corners of her eyes were tense, as if she were peering into a great distance. But the mouth was relaxed and unworried. Hers was no joyous expression, but that of one who had attained after long struggle a hard-won cessation of suffering.

"She's a mortal," Incolore said. "A changeling like you."

"I'm sure I don't know what you're—" Jane began. Then, seeing the indulgent expression that spread itself across Fata Incolore's features, she said, "How could you tell?"

"I'm in the trade, darling child, remember? You could no more hide your nature from me than you could from Rocket." She laughed briefly. "Don't worry, your secret is safe with me. What's one bit of shrinkage when the inventory is so full?"

Jane let some time pass before asking, "What's the matter with her?"

"Sleeping beauty sickness." Fata Incolore ditched her cigarette stub in the water glass and knocked another cigarette from its pack. "It's endemic among changelings of a certain age. They don't really belong here. The world rejects them, or they the world. It's what will happen to you eventually. Does that frighten you?"

"Yes." Jane peered, fascinated, into the face of the woman. Trying to comprehend her, trying to fathom what alien dreams played in the theater of her sleeping brain. "No. I don't know. Who is she?"

"Her name is Elizabeth."

"Elizabeth." Jane tasted the name, savoring its exotic syllables. This was the first full-blooded mortal, herself excepted, she could remember ever encountering. "She looks like she's had a hard life."

"How could it be otherwise?" There was a small table by the window with a vase of browning flowers on it, Incolore's drinking-glass ashtray, and a twisted bonsai pine in a glazed ceramic pot. Incolore picked up the pot and held it in the flat of her hand. "This tree is over a century old. Do you know how it's stunted into the desired shape?"

"You wrap wires around its trunk, right? You restrict its intake of water and you don't give it much soil to grow in. You prune it too."

"Yes. It's only a plant, of course. A serviceable half blood takes ever so much more manipulation. But we have clever gardeners. They begin by transplanting the mestizo boys and their mothers to small huts on a walled estate maintained for this purpose on a Southern island of perpetual summer. It's a lovely place; you'd adore it. Life is pleasant there. The hills ring with laughter and the mothers are encouraged to bond with their sons. Some refuse, and these are weeded out and sent back to the same factories that absorb their daughters. Most, though—well. The Goddess has given them no choice but to love their own. They raise their sons as best they can. They try not to think of the future.

"But there are servants in the garden, storytellers and other attendants with subtle ways of reminding the children of the noble heritage of their fathers. When they are old enough, the boys are dressed in silks and taken to visit their elven half-kindred. In their father's mansions, they are waited on hand and foot. They taste wealth for the first time. They are denied nothing. They are treated by their grand relations with the utmost condescension and disdain.

"Then they are dressed in wool again and returned to the huts.

"By such small means are they shaped. Ambition is encouraged. Envy is unavoidable. With puberty there are cousins who will take them to bed, teach them courtly ways, and snub them in public. Their fathers make it explicit that they are of tainted blood, bastards who will never be acknowledged. It is left to their mortal mothers to wipe away the tears of humiliation. What do you imagine the upshot of this is?"

"They despise their mothers."

"Exactly. Let us skip ahead several years—you can imagine them well enough—to the day when the best and most cunningly warped of the young mestizos are invited to the Academy. To be a dragon pilot is a great thing, beyond any reasonable expectations they might have, and close, very close to their most unreasonable dreams. They have no idea this was intended for them from before their births.

"A messenger presents the invitation in a distant corner of the estate, in a cool wood, by a gate they have never seen open before. The recipient must leave on the instant. He must pass through the gate without going back for food or cloak or farewell. Knowing how she will feel, he must leave his mother without so much as a word of regret. He is told he will never see her again."

"So he betrays her," said Jane.

"He betrays her."

"But what is the point of such an elaborate exercise?"

"Guilt," said Incolore. "So rare a quality, so precious. I confess I don't understand it at all myself, though the fortunes of House Incolore rest upon it. But its workings are simple. Having denied their own kind once, the young warriors understand the pain of betrayal on a very deep level indeed. Their loyalty to that side of their heritage which remains uncompromised is fierce beyond belief. This is a most desirable trait in one who handles creatures as dangerous as dragons and must bathe in their treachery every day."

Gracefully, she put down the potted tree.

Jane studied the woman's face. It loomed in her sight, as large and mysterious as a new continent. She could fall into it if she weren't careful. "What is she looking at?"

"Well—"

The hall door rattled. It opened.

Rocket walked in.

He stopped, flustered, at the sight of her. He had a bouquet of flowers in the crook of his arm. "Excuse me, I wasn't—" he began. Then, puzzled, "What are you doing here?"

"I bid you good den, brother," Incolore said.

"Ahhhh." It was almost a sigh. "So that's it."

Jane frowned. "Would somebody mind telling me just what is going on here?"

"I come here every week. To visit my mother." Rocket turned away and placed the nosegay on the table. He removed the old flowers from the vase, freshened the water, and set about arranging the new blossoms. "My half sister knows this. Doubtless she has her reasons for confronting us with each other."

When he turned back his expression was stiff and formal. Bowing slightly he handed Jane a daisy. "I beg you forgive my family, madam. I recognize you are not a deliberate party to this farce."

Jane looked down at her hands, at the flower clasped in them.