The Dragon Never Sleeps

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Lady Midnight drifted through the perpetual twilight of Merod Schene DownTown, tall, brittle as leaf gold beaten translucent. Her lavender eyes darted from one nest of gloom to the next. Her slim, pale, fragile face was dewed with sweat. Her thin white hands fluttered like panicky hummingbirds. She started at a rustle from a shadow's heart, clutched her hands to her breast, wrapped her shivering wings more tightly around her. The last hints of their usual silken glimmer faded to shades of lead.

It was hot and damp and musty down there, decayed and slimy, dark and deadly, with sudden patches of fetid air, like an old jungle battleground. Small things scuttled away.

Midnight was afraid.

Fear was a new feeling. Fear was not part of her design. She had been made for the salons and bedrooms of high society. Fear had had to be learned.

Lady Midnight savored new things. But this fear she did not like. It stole the color from her wings. It gnawed her innards like cancer. It took away sleep and robbed her of appetite. It was an assassin that butchered the rhythm of her dance-in-flight. It knotted her muscles till they ached.

"Fool," she murmured in an angel's voice. "You're Immune." She swished clothing of pastel panels as thin as imagination. "You can't be touched." The fear did not subside.

Merod Schene DownTown reeked of insanity. The madness was spreading. Immunity could lose its value any minute.

Scraping, clicking sounds came from the deeper darknesses. Things were following her. Crazy things, evil things, the worst discards and mistakes, that till recently had confined their predations to the deepest hours of the night. She felt their mad eyes measuring her.

They grew bolder all the time.

She paused outside the breezeway leading to her destination. The silence in there was more intimidating than the clicks and slithers growing louder behind her. She did not want to go ahead. But they were working themselves up back there.

Something moved in the breezeway.

Terror yanked a melodic whimper from Midnight's throat.

Dark dread rolled over her, filled her hollow bones with liquid nitrogen. Then warmth swamped her as she recognized the shadow. "Amber Soul!"

The shadow shifted shape, becoming something out of nightmare, rushed past. Clicks, squeaks, scrabblings, whines, the hiss of scales on decomposed pavement moved away hurriedly. Lady Midnight rushed along the dank passage, through a doorway, into a brightly lighted room, where she fell trembling into Turtle's arms.

Only after her heartbeat slackened and her shaking stopped was she smitten by the incongruity of being held and comforted by a creature so much shorter.

Strange as she was, Midnight was human. Turtle was not.

Turtle stood 1.75 meters tall and 1 meter wide. He massed 125 kilos, not a gram of it fat. He had skin the color and texture of a snake's belly. His features vaguely resembled a turtle's. But there was nothing slow or lumbering about him. He moved like a cat.

Amber Soul drifted inside, now wearing human form, draped in apparent golden brocade. Half a meter taller than Midnight, she seemed regal. Her psionic menace had gone silent. They grow bolder.

"It's the madness," Midnight piped. "It's spreading. It's into UpTown and even the High City feels its breath." Turtle had said that last time. She did not think of things like that herself.

"They got their messenger out?" Turtle asked.

"Yes. Aboard a Cholot Traveler. Disguised as the child of a High City lord from F. M'Cartica 5."

"So the infection bounds from world to world. They are fools. Where was the Traveler bound?"

"P. Jaksonica."

Turtle settled into a chair, for all his lethal mass a weary little creature. He picked at a button on his homemade shirt. "Yes. The thing will be fool enough to try it. P. Jaksonica 3. Still under the Ban."

Turtle always knew so much. He amazed everyone. How could he know, trapped here in Merod Schene DownTown?

He looked Midnight in the eye. "The cure will not be long coming if it tries to reach Cholot Varagona." He closed his reptilian eyes briefly, which was no closing at all, for he had only nictating membranes. "Bless the Concord. There is no saving fools. Ladies, it is time we saw to our own welfare."

Is there no chance for the Concord? Amber Soul asked. Just the edge of that thought was enough to make Midnight's head buzz. Amber Soul almost never communicated with anyone. When she did she knocked you down.

"None," Turtle said. "The thing is one of those jackstraw rebellions that come along every human generation. I have seen a hundred. They don't last. The Enherrenraat did not last a year and it was five hundred in the shaping." He paused, then asked rhetorically, "How old are the Guardships? They were old when I was young. Sometimes it seems the stars themselves are younger and the Guardships were created old and wily and deadly and there was never a moment when they were not invincible."

No one knew Turtle's true age. Turtle would not say. They joked that DownTown had been built around him.

Turtle seldom talked about Turtle. Whence had he come? What was he? The last indigene of V. Rothica 4? There were ruins in the deserts. Unlikely that he was of the precursor race, though. Nobody was that old.

An artifact, then? Like Lady Midnight? Created in a laboratory for some inscrutable purpose even he had forgotten? The warrens of DownTown festered with artifacts who had outlived the usefulness of their designs. And it was thick with mistakes. The hobby life designers seldom destroyed their mistakes. They just turned them out. And some were terrible. And some bred true.

If not an artifact, might Turtle be an alien, lost, stranded, planetbound far from home?

That was the popular theory.

Turtle told nothing about himself directly, but Turtle told stories, only to the very young, on the streets of DownTown. He mirrored childhood dreams, singing interstellar songs, spinning epics of great ships clambering the Web. He told tales of warmer worlds and far suns, of races no DownTowner would ever see, of great fires searing the deep between the stars as warships met in battles of unimaginable fury. Perhaps he spoke of the destruction of the Enherrenraat. Or perhaps he spoke of another struggle more remote in space and time. He sang his songs of far wars in shades of emotion that said he had seen them himself, that he might have been among those who had gained only shattered dreams.

Turtle broke a long silence. "If it does try to carry its message to Cholot Varagona it will be taken. Canon garrison will pulse P. Jaksonica station. Every Traveler out will carry a call for the Guardships. The first to arrive will pick the thing's brain to the last synapse. Then it will come sniffing up the creature's backtrail. First stop: Merod Schene."

Lady Midnight trilled, "Will they be that terrible?"

"Huh! Worse than you imagine. A Cholot Traveler picks up a shapeshifting illegal of a race supposedly eradicated from a Merod world and delivers it to a Cholot world under the Ban. They will be thorough. We must assure our own safety. Precautions never taken are the only sort that leave one with regrets."

Amber Soul paced. She radiated a harsh, almost angry concurrence backed by emotions dark and deep and so powerful Lady Midnight cringed away from her.

"We may be in for interesting times," Turtle observed. "I suppose it had to happen."