The Iron Dragon's Daughter (48 page)

"Oh, don't be so stuffy," Incolore said. "Jayne, take off your blouse and show my brother what nice breasts you have."

Jane felt her face redden. But Rocket only said, "Don't insult the girl, Lesya. You won't manipulate us into each other's affections with such cheap tricks."

Smiling sternly, Lesya Incolore folded her arms. Her long, black nails dug unpleasantly into the flesh of her forearms. "It is most vexing," she said, "to be thwarted."

A touch of humor animated Rocket's expression. "By definition."

"Oh, don't chop words. Here you are, surrounded by reminders of death and mortality and here's Jayne provided with as nice a proof of your blockishly loyal nature as could be wished. You two could save me a lot of trouble by falling madly in lust."

Ignoring his sister, Rocket went to the coffin and laid a hand on its surface. Briefly he stood there. Then he turned back. "With your permission," he said, "I'll leave by that same way which you came." He groped in the air. Something clicked, and a portal opened into shadow. "Fata Jayne," he said meeting her gaze steadily. "I remain your devoted servant."

"His haunch and thighs are dappled," Incolore said. "Like a fawn's."

He slammed through the portal, shivering the air in his wake.

Incolore sighed. "The loyalty of the systematically betrayed. Is there anything sadder?"

"I can think of a few things." Jane put the daisy behind one ear. She patted the stray hairs into place. "Just what the fuck were you trying to do?"

Fata Incolore shrugged angrily. "I was meddling, of course. That's the source and summa of it. Nothing more. I thought you two had the potential to complicate each other's lives enormously. It would have been amusing."

"Amusing? What kind of shit is that? You're a power—don't you have anything better to do with your life?"

"It is important for me to involve myself in the ephemera of your little lives. To convince myself that they matter. To anchor myself—" Incolore stopped. "To—" A spasm passed through her body. One arm trembled uncontrollably.

Suddenly she cried out. Light poured from her eyes, blazed from her open mouth. It was as if a god had seized her by the hair to reveal the nuclear fires burning within. The light splashed against the wall, and nicked Jane's eyes. Wincing, throwing up an arm to shield herself against it, Jane cried, "What's happening? What should I do?"

"I have… pills," Incolore gasped. "Back in… back in House Incol—" She bit off the words, forcing eyes and mouth tight. When she opened them again, the fires were quenched, and her features once again appeared normal. But they were not the same features she had had an instant before.

"Gwen!"

With a smile of recognition, Gwen placed a finger to her lips and winked. Jane wanted to ask her old friend how she had survived the sacrifice on the football field, how she had come to be reborn in the Incolore. But then Gwen's face slackened and turned gray. Horns sprouted from her forehead. When Jane seized her by the shoulders, she hissed and bent a needle-toothed mouth toward Jane's neck.

Jane jerked away. "None of that now!"

The creature swayed and straightened, thinning, growing taller. For an instant Jane thought she was turning into a serpent. But then her face stabilized into distinctly male features.

"Oh, this is a nuisance," Lord Corvo grumbled. "Tell Incolore that if she can't control herself any better than—" He choked in midsentence, bent over, and became someone else.

Jane waved an arm back and forth in the air, groping for the portal back to House Incolore. But however one found it, whatever the trick might be, it was beyond her. She could not hope to fetch Incolore home by herself.

Then Incolore underwent one final transformation. She hooked a finger under Jane's chin to force up her gaze. With horror, Jane recognized the sharp intelligence of her new features.

"Oh, my!" Jouissante laughed. "This is an opportunity."

She touched velvet fingertips to perfect lips. "Where to start? Shall I trim a bit of this and that from you, little darling, would you like that?" Then, when Jane took a frantic step backward, "Pooh! Of course you would, if I wanted you to. But let's not waste this on such a trifle. We must do something memorable, something truly wonderful."

With a sudden gesture, Fata Jouissante opened the shadow portal.

She seized Jane by the arm and dragged her back through the door into House Incolore.

Straight through the house of shadows Jouissante hauled Jane, and up an endlessly twisting spine of stairs. "We are all bubbles of earth," she said. "Did you know that?"

"Please!" Jane cried. Desperately, silently, she called upon Melanchthon. He could not be invoked. She reached into the primitive depths of her brain, where he normally lurked, quiescent, alert, waiting.

The dragon was not there. He had abandoned her again.

"You are an alchemist and understand that everything is made out of the same component parts. The difference between a tree and a troll is one of organization only." Cold mists blew over the stairway, lit only intermittently by braziers that were smears of silvery light in the harsh sea-fogs, charcoal-smelling with unsteady pinkish hearts where the coals contended with the moisture. "If a tree's understanding of itself were great enough, it could fart and eat meat."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I should think its applications were obvious." The landings flew by. "Do you never wonder why the powers are so quick to anger, desire, and envy? Why we suffer so many feuds, affairs, and scandals? We have them by choice. Our comprehension of the world and of ourselves is so great that there is no clear distinction between the two. We are in constant danger of dissolving altogether. And Incolore—never doubt it—is great among us. There are those who whisper that—well, never mind. Our flaws are the friction that keeps us from sliding right off the surface of existence."

Jane lost her footing and was dragged up a dozen stairs, struggling like a rebellious rag doll. Jouissante paused at a landing just long enough to let Jane get her legs under her, then plunged upward again. Her heels struck sparks from the stairs.

"But if—if—if you're not really you—" It was hard to think clearly under these conditions. "—if you're really Fata Incolore, then why—why are you behaving as if—?"

"Are you retarded?" Jouissante demanded. "Am I speaking to myself? Identity is a fiction. Surely you can grasp that. The Fatas Incolore and Jouissante are simply games that matter chooses to play. I am no more Lesya Incolore than you are."

They were still climbing. Fata Jouissante's vigor was apparently bottomless. Jane, however, was short of breath. Her head swam dizzily. For a second it seemed as if the ghosts of all her victims thronged about her, plucking at her hair, pinching her with their small, mean fingers, silently demanding the return of their stolen names. She shook her head and they were gone.

"—you may well ask. Occasionally a child is born without a true name. It has no subtle body—you understand? No self. It has eyes, brain, fingers, and organs in the proper place and number. But it is insensate. It knows nothing. It responds to nothing."

Give me back my name said Esmeree. Jane turned and she was not there. I want said Wibble said Apollidon said Gandalac. Give me said Lip back my said Gloam life said Hypallage. There were too many to keep track of and they were none of them there and Jouissante was speaking.

"When this happens the child is claimed for the good of the State. A dragon is sent through Dream Gate to raid the lower world and harvest the subtle bodies—they are there called souls—of mortal children. Nothing material may be returned to the upper world. Ah, but souls—!"

I don't feel guilty, Jane told the phantoms. Go away. They swirled about her, less substantial than the skeletal remains of autumn leaves, rattling angrily against her side, batting against her lips with all the force of a wayward moth. It was astounding that Jouissante couldn't see any of them.

Jouissante glanced back over her shoulder. "If you're not going to pay attention, I shall be forced to gouge out your eyes."

"Please!" Jane gasped.

They came at last to a final landing. Breathless and exhausted, Jane gratefully stumbled to a stop. Jouissante flung open an ivory door. "This is her seat of power—the chancel of the skull."

They stepped within. Cool white light scattered and banished the phantoms.

The walls were lined with ivory chests and the floor had off-white rugs. A low ceiling supported track lighting. A pale wall divided the room into two chambers in such a way that one could look into one chamber or the other, but never both at once. Each chamber had a single straight-backed chair facing the leaded-glass windows that were set into the eye sockets. Jouissante yanked her into the left-hand chamber. "We are standing within the skull of the first Incolore. If you hold very still, you can feel the force of her personality humming deep within the bone."

If so, then Fata Incolore's ancestor had been stranger even than her remains would have led one to think. For an overwhelming sense of the tenuousness of existence throbbed through Jane from all directions. Here, she sensed, nothing very dearly wished to remain itself. It made no matter to the albino maple escritoire whether it held letters or motor oil, stood stock still or burrowed in the earth, screamed for blood in the pouring rain or merely burst into flames. An alabaster crocodile trembled on the brink of flight.

"What—what are you going to do to me?"

"That's what I've been trying to explain to you, small lack-wit. I'm thinking of destroying your gross body and incarnating you in the flesh of a thrush or a wren. With your own wicker cage." She began rummaging through the cupboards. "Or better yet a little pink pig. Incolore could lead you about on a ribbon." She glanced up briefly. "Oh, don't look so! You'd have ever so much more pleasant a life as a pig than a wren. You could be potty-trained, for one thing." Bottles clanked and clattered. "Sit in the chair but don't stare into the window. You wouldn't like what it might choose to show you."

Jane had no choice but to obey, though she did risk one quick glance anyway. The window looked upon an empty room with a lone pair of work boots resting to one side of center. They cast a pale shadow. One lay on its side. Mud clung to its sole. Its laces were filthy. For the life of her, she could not imagine why the window should focus on such a thing. And yet her captor was right. For some indefinable reason, the sight of it filled her with an irrational terror.

"There are two windows in the chancel; one looks upon lies and one on truth. Not even Lesya Incolore knows which is which." Jouissante tipped over a chest. She kicked its spilled contents across the room. "Not here either! Where in the name of Maga Argea can it be?"

Something in the chair or possibly the room itself was conducive to lethargy. Jane stared down at her lap, unable to stand.

"Aha!" Fata Jouissante held up a cordless phone in triumph. Numbers booped. She waited, then said, "This is Fata Incolore. I would like you to send up a pig. Yes. No, the creature must be personable. Sweet, yes. Its disposition is very important to me. No, female."

Listening, Jane knew she ought to be upset. But it was hard to care. The apathy that held her to the chair was spreading through her body. If she didn't do something right away, she'd never do anything again.

In a detached way, Jane's fingers meandered to her hair and combed from it the daisy that Rocket had given her earlier. She looked down at the blossom and closed her fingers about it. Crushing the petals.

"How soon can you have it here? Oh, and a satin pillow too!"

Staring down at her hands, Jane concentrated on Rocket's true name and performed a summoning. She had never tried so powerful a spell before, but she knew the theoretics inside out. Tetigistus, she whispered in the Arctic stillnesses of her hindbrain. Come to me.

Jouissante whirled, phone in hand. "What have you done?" she cried. "You've done something! What have you done?"

Jane smiled vaguely up at her. The summoning had burned up the last of her volition. She was entirely passive now. She lacked even the will to speak.

There was a step on the stair. The door opened and Rocket entered.

He was masterful. Rocket took in the situation at a glance. He acted without hesitation. Striding forward, almost too fast to follow, he struck the telephone from Jouissante's hand. With a cry of dismay, she flew at him, raking her nails across his face, reaching for his eyes. Deftly, though, he seized her wrists, forcing her arms back. She thrust her body forward, striving to reach his jugular with her teeth. This was what he had been waiting for. Briefly, her ear was alongside Rocket's mouth.

"Kunosoura," he murmured in a voice so low that under ordinary conditions Jane could not possibly have heard him. But Jane knew his true name and with it had summoned him. His whispered word went right through her.

Kunosoura. It meant dog's tail.

It was Lesya Incolore's true name.

At the sound, the delusion of Fata Jouissante's persona fled from her face. Features melted one into another, some hardening, others softening, yet others growing sharp and keen. When they were done shifting, Incolore had stabilized as herself once more. Her eyes closed and her limbs went limp. Rocket hoisted her slumping body in his arms.

He gestured with his chin. "Open that door, please."

With the return of Fata Incolore, whatever force had held Jane passive was gone. She sprang from the chair and opened the small door he had indicated.

It took them to a room whose walls were lined with carnival masks. There were no windows. Rocket eased his sister down on a couch. "There's a medicine chest in that cabinet," he said. "When she comes to, we'll give her two of the white pills. That'll be enough."