The Iron Dragon's Daughter

— 19 —

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.

A star.

Without fanfare a second star appeared and then a fourth, more and more until there were billions of suns arranged in galaxies and nebulae, and those arrangements contained in still larger structures. Jane seemed to be standing somewhere aside from Creation, watching dispassionately while everything shrank toward nonexistence. Or else it might be that she was rushing away from everything at unimaginable speed and ever-increasing acceleration. Until finally all the stars and their attendant worlds merged into a single structure whose shape she could hold in her mind.

Jane saw the universe whole then, all of space and time pulled by the totality of gravitational forces into a saddle-shaped solid. Melanchthon rotated the vision through the higher dimensions so that the universe fell in upon itself, growing in complexity from the saddle into a nine-dimensional butterfly and finally into an n-dimensional ziggurat. It was the summation of futility, for the ziggurat was all there was. It had no exterior, no beyond. It was not that there was nothing outside it, but that an "outside" did not and could not exist.

Staring at the radiant involution, Jane realized that here was the perfect and exact model for her life: She was caught in an ascending spiral maze, always coming around to familiar places she had never been before, always returning to dilemmas that in retrospect she should have seen coming. She was moving in diminishing circles, being twisted around in ever more limiting ways, until by some final twist or kink she would arrive at the omega point of inertia, with no options, no directions, no future, no way out.

It was obvious at last how thoroughly, how pitilessly, she was trapped. Everything she tried—trickery, compassion, inaction, patience, ruthlessness—led inevitably to failure. Because that was simply the way things were. That was the way the game was rigged.

The stars had melted together into solidity. The universe burned in Jane's sight like a monstrous white seashell. It was not the first time she had looked upon that shape. With a sickening lurch of revelation, she recognized it and put a name to it.

Jane looked upon Spiral Castle and despaired.

Melanchthon must have been waiting for exactly that, for now at last he spoke. His voice surprisingly gentle, he said, "In the Riphaean Mountains there are still wild trolls, their primitive tribes protected from modern culture and their territories held as vast preserves. They are brutal creatures who lead simple lives. Their males are savagery personified, but the otherwise admirable character of their females is diluted by an inexplicable love of beauty.

"Knowing of this weakness, hunters will leave moonstones alongside the mountain trails. A day goes by, a week, and a troll shambles innocently by. She sees a glimmering in the dust. She stops. She is caught by the subtle interplay of colors. She wants to look away, but cannot. She yearns to snatch the bauble up, but she fears to approach it. Hours pass and her strength wanes. She sinks to her knees before the moonstone. She is helpless, unable to look away even when she hears the approaching feet of the hunters.

"What makes this a sport and not mere slaughter is that there are two breeds of trolls, outwardly indistinguishable. One of the first breed will die with her eyes fixed on the moonstone. Ah, but in the second the love of beauty is overmatched by her strength of hatred. This troll will gouge out her eyes with her own fingers to free herself of the tyranny of the stone. Blind, she could then escape to the lightless caverns of her birth. But she does not. Instead she crouches unmoving for as long as it takes, though it be days, awaiting he who set the trap. She knows she will die. But she is determined to take at least one of the hunters with her.

"Which is why you should never approach a captive troll alone but always in the company of a friend. A friend who does not realize he is a little slower than yourself."

For a long time the dragon did not speak. The air was chill in the cabin; the air-conditioning had been set too high. At last, fiercely, he said, "The time has come for you to choose. What breed of troll are you?"

"Can you really kill the Goddess?" Jane asked.

"You stupid gobbet of flesh! Don't you understand yet? There is no Goddess."

"No!" Jane cried. "You said yourself—"

"I lied," the dragon said with a fearful complacency. "Everyone you have ever met has lied to you. Life exists, and all who live are born to suffer. The best moments are fleeting and bought with the coin of exquisite torment. All attachments end. All loved ones die. All that you value passes away. In such a vexatious existence laughter is madness and joy is folly. Shall we accept that it all happens for no reason, with no cause? That there is nobody to blame but ourselves but that accepting the responsibility is pointless for doing so cannot ease, defer, or deaden the pain? Not likely! It is so much more comforting to erect a straw figure on which to blame it all.

"Some bow down before the Goddess and others curse her every name. There is not a fart's difference between the two approaches. They cling to the fiction of the Goddess because admitting the alternative is unbearable."

"Then what—why—what do you want me for?" To her dismay, tears coursed down Jane's face. Oh how Melanchthon must be enjoying this, she thought. What satisfaction it must give him. "You've toyed with me, made promises, gone through Hell-knows-what machinations to bring me here. Why? What's the point of it?"

"I want your help to destroy the universe."

Jane barked a short, bitter laugh. But Melanchthon neither spoke nor by any other sign indicated annoyance. A cold sizzling sensation ran up her spine. He was serious. In a small voice, she said, "Can you really do it?"

The seashell image burning in the swimming darkness lap-dissolved to a schematic of Spiral Castle, lines diving dizzyingly into one another, swooping in wild curves, always returning to converge upon a central point. "The universe is built upon an instability. A point source of weakness at the beginning of time and the birth of matter. One trembling instant from which all else arrives. A child with a sling could upset that point if he could only reach it. And it is upon the centrality of that instant that the entire system derives its structure. Disturbed, all collapses."

It was unimaginable, and yet hooked into the dragon's systems, Jane could not doubt his sincerity. "What happens then?"

In the iron depths of darkness an engine came online. The couch trembled. "You ask a question that cannot be answered without knowing the nature of the primal chaos from which being arose. Is Spiral Castle like a crystal, once shattered, forever destroyed? That is what I prefer to believe. Or is it like a still pond, whose mirrored surface may be shattered and churned, but which will inevitably restore itself as the waves die down? You may believe this if you choose. You can even believe—why not?—that the restored universe will be an improvement on the old. For me, so long as I have my vengeance I care not what comes after."

"And us?"

"We die." An involuntary rise in the dragon's voice, a slight quickening of cadence, told her that she had touched upon some unclean hunger akin to but less seemly than battle-lust. "We die beyond any chance of rebirth. You and I and all we have known will cease to be. The worlds that gave us birth, the creatures that shaped us—all will be unmade. So comprehensive will be their destruction that even their pasts will die with them. It is an extinction beyond death that we court. Though the ages stretch empty and desolate into infinity and beyond, there will be none to remember us, nor any to mourn. Our joys, sorrows, struggles, will never have been.

"And even if there is a universe to come, it will know naught of us."

So all-encompassing was the dragon's nihilistic vision that Jane could not at first speak. It reduced her to inconsequence, made her feel clownish, a triviality, a ridiculous squeak. By slow degrees Melanchthon had shut down his external senses, leaving her afloat in the void, her ears stuffed with silence, her eyes blind and unseeing, her mouth and throat choked with paralysis. There was only his voice and, when it ceased, the reverberations it left behind on the silence.

Then there was nothing.

"All right." Jane took a deep breath. She felt cold and hard as a stone. "All right. Just so long as we understand each other."