Cruel Zinc Melodies

93

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.

We danced.

She never spoke. She just smiled that beautiful smile, crafted by angels. But we communicated because I have that opening into my mind worn smooth by daily exposure to the Dead Man.

That three-dimensional golden ink splash that Old Bones had wrought returned and expanded in all directions, including thin fibers that followed the bug and rat passages up to the World. It became a hundred times more detailed. It entered me and tried using me to find others like itself. The information was in me but useless to it because we shared no common referents.

Eleanor and I danced. And I communed with the entity beneath.

Dragon was a fine description of that prodigious intellect. Devil or fallen angel might be equally apt. Though it set no temptation greater than Eleanor before me, I had no trouble seeing how, had it had any knowledge of the world above, it might have touched receptive minds and served as the Tempter adversary resident in many modern cults.

Eleanor said it might be a god.

She and I danced. And I learned. And I taught. I couldn’t fully encompass what came my way. Old Bones might, though. He had minds big enough, and a different romance with time.

Eleanor and I danced. The music! Ah, that music! I hoped the Dead Man could extract that from me, isolate it, and find a way to pass it on to someone who could bring it to life.

We danced. And I learned the secret of the metal deposits. I think.

The entity, in its glacial metabolic process, separated out infinitesimal bits of metal as it fed. Those came down the river in the mud it carried. There were caverns in the limestone way down below where it deposited those metals. It had done so for tens of thousands of years.

I could not ferret out which metals were there.

Zinc might be important among them.

The spark that remained Garrett and sane forced that out of mind.

There might be a true treasure that could lead to a city-destroying roll-up if a greedy mob started digging down through the entity, which could not possibly be recognized as an intelligent being.

It didn’t suffer human-style emotions itself, however much it enjoyed those. It responded to harmful stimulation by growing hotter, like a human body fighting disease. Prolonged heat caused it to dry out. Too long dry and hot, spontaneous combustion occurred. The resulting explosion might be mistaken for a dragon wakening. And, like a mushroom, might put spores into the air.

We had missed disaster at the World by a thin margin. Cold air going down the bug tunnels saved the day.

I tried to make the thing understand that it was far too vast to suffer real harm from puny humans, however hard they tried.

Eleanor laughed. And we danced. And the beautiful music played. Music the dragon found in my true love’s head.

I was possessed.

Next day was a holiday. A general, royal holiday in celebration of the accession of the current dynasty. Nobody came to work. Saucerhead and his crew were outside but they had no reason to look inside.

Finally, somebody somewhere noticed that I was missing and started asking questions. Scouts went out looking for bodies in the slush.

Eleanor and I danced. I communed with the dragon. They narrowed the search.

I wasn’t dancing when they found me. I was just lying there in the dark, on wood as hard as stone. I hadn’t been down long. And could not get back up, even with help. My legs were knotted with cramps. I was too groggy to make them understand what I wanted when I tried to find out what had happened to Eleanor.