Glen Cook - Cruel Zinc Melodies

This is still little more than speculation. Rats are not good on time, distance, or shapes. They are better on temperature, taste, and smell. Smell especially. I could not put that togetherinside my own head because I needed the full capacitiesof all my minds to translate rat sensory inputs into data a human mind could understand.

I had to take his word for all that.

I have built the picture now but can make nothing of it. Where is the dragon?

My head filled with a three-dimensional hundred-gallon ink splash sprawl in saffron. Without knowing how I knew, I understood that this was a fragment of a larger whole. This was all that John Stretch had been able to see within short rat range of the World.

This is all within the silt deposit. The bottom of that restson limestone, which lies far deeper here than it does down under the brewing district. The dragon must be in a cavern beneath the silt.

‘‘You’re losing me, Old Bones. You might even be losing yourself.’’

Sarcasm is a sign of—

‘‘A sign of impatience with those who won’t admit that they don’t know what they’re talking about.’’

As you will, then. Go play the hand you have dealt yourself.When you return we will begin developing a new strategy.

I sensed impatience with my failure to subscribe to the dragon theory.

Might be interesting, someday, to dig around in the old records and see if a Loghyr wasn’t somehow connected to one of the old-time roll-ups.

Though I doubted strongly that this Loghyr had been.

Singe joined me in the hallway as I shrugged me into my new royal beaver coat. ‘‘You are going out again? At night?»

‘‘I need to do something at the World. When nobody else is around.’’

‘‘Really?’’

‘‘Yes. Why?’’

‘‘I was hoping to ask you about some things. I could go along.’’

‘‘I have to do this without anyone else being there. Maybe tomorrow night.’’ I opened the door and went outside.

The door chunked shut behind me, anger-driven.

Old Bones didn’t clue me. I guessed it had to do with her book. She kept bringing that up, tentatively.

Saucerhead’s guys were on the job. Which they proved by spindling, folding, and nearly mutilating me after I failed to check in at the guard shack before trying to go into the World. I avoided being choked long enough to let them know I was the guy who brought the money around.

Tharpe mused, ‘‘What’re we gonna do with you, Garrett? I’da felt bad for days if we’da killed you.’’

‘‘That’s reassuring.’’

‘‘So, what’s up?’’

‘‘I’m going to spend some time inside there seeing what happens when there isn’t a crowd.’’

‘‘You sure? All right. I always said you got more balls than brains. I’ll have the guys come charging in when they hear you screaming.’’

‘‘I appreciate that, Head.’’ I didn’t remind him that nobody outside heard anything when Belinda Contague did her screaming. I didn’t want to recall that myself.

I borrowed a lamp from the guard shack. It looked remarkably like the lamps used inside the World. I headed in there.

I found and lighted two lanterns the workmen used when they had to do without daylight. Those cast circles of light that failed to push the darkness back very far.

I built a seat from loose flooring. I sat and waited.

Not for long.

The beautiful woman in the old-fashioned clothing came out of the darkness smiling, pleased to see me. My heart spun. We were old friends. She settled beside me on the lumber, the little lamp between us. Eleanor.

I said, ‘‘I guessed right. It worked.’’

‘‘It worked. But you may not be pleased by what it will cost. This may be the end.’’

I moved my left hand toward her right, let it hover, not sure I wanted to find out.

‘‘You probably shouldn’t.’’

«Um.»

‘‘It would seem real. Right now I’m as real as I was when we met. But you have another obligation today.’’

I did. I’d been going around blurting out stuff about her being my fiancйe. ‘‘You’re right. But you’ll never know how powerful this was. What I had for you.’’

‘‘I do know. It’s why there’s always so much of me still here with you.’’

My hand floated toward her again. She did not shrink away. All choices here would be mine.

I raised the hand, instead, to brush the moisture out of my left eye. ‘‘So what do we know about the dragon? It’s clear you’re in touch. He made me the woman I hoped he would.’’

‘‘It’s not a dragon. It’s nothing like anything you might guess. It’s vast and it’s slow and it’s more alien than you can possibly imagine. It’s older than you can imagine, too. It has no sense of time. It can’t remember ever not being. And it’s never lived anywhere but right where it is now, down there in the ground.’’

I felt no special elation about having been right. It not being a dragon probably only complicated things.

Faintly, right on the edge of imagination, I thought I heard music.

Eleanor said, ‘‘You might call it a god. It has some of those attributes. But it would be the most bizarre god ever to plague this world.’’

‘‘There were others like it. Still might be.’’

‘‘Others?’’ Some inner light brightened her face.

I told her what I knew.

‘‘Others.’’

I wasn’t speaking to the thing directly through Eleanor’s doppelganger but it would know what she knew. And she would know what it knew.

It enjoyed emotions but didn’t understand their source. It had no true idea of the world up here in the light, but it did sense the feelings of the creatures that wandered in and out of that small window it had found in the part of the World that it was able to reach. It created phantoms to reflect and stimulate emotions. Mostly those turned out to be unpleasant mirrors.

Music again, a tiny bit louder.

I started to take a fright.

‘‘It’s all right. It’s just concentrating hard on trying to see and understand.’’

‘‘What is it? Tell me the best you can.’’

‘‘I don’t know if language has the means to express it. It’s like a leaf-mold. Or a fungus. It lives on the organic matter in the silt, more of which comes down slowly to it as water seeps through. It’s vast. It might extend forty or fifty miles back up the river.’’

‘‘To where there’s not much bottom land.’’

‘‘Yes. It’s all one great being that exists entirely in the dark and damp.’’

The music was a little louder. And it wasn’t that harsh metallic clank.

Eleanor told me, ‘‘It isn’t intelligent in any human way but it has thoughts. And it uses thoughts to shape its world.’’ She stood. ‘‘It isn’t possible for us to be what we were, love, but we can share tonight as the dear friends we are now. Dance with me, Garrett. Relax. Let the entity do what it needs to do and learn what it needs to know.’’ She extended her arms.

‘‘This is all right?’’

‘‘This is all right. This won’t be Garrett and Eleanor. This will be TunFaire and what lives beneath the roots romancing.’’

Eleanor’s touch was real. It was as warm as life.

That startled me. That frightened me.

I became more attuned to the music, no cruel zinc racket but a melody wisping out of a fairy wood. Music unlike any that had plagued the World before. Unlike any I’d ever heard. It was the music of beauty, not anger. It had an orchestral feel, beyond anything known in even the great playhouses.

Eleanor moved in close. She placed one of my hands on her hip. She placed one of hers on my shoulder, then held on to the other. She caught my gaze with hers. She trapped it.