The Dragon Never Sleeps

— 6 —

The chamber was a perfect globe a thousand meters across. A great mass floated near its heart, slightly upward as gravity was oriented. Lightning leaped from the curved walls to the mass. Tin-sheet thunder beat its chest and howled around the cavity. Gouts of red, gaseous flame exploded across the darkness. Self-congratulatory devil's laughter pranced between the valleys of the thunder.

A woman stood in the mouth of a corridor ending at the wall of the chamber. "He's in a dramatic mood today." Her companion was a youth who looked seventeen. She looked twenty-one. He was. She was not. She was much older and more cruel. The sorrow of the torturer looked out through her pale blue eyes.

"When will we kill him?" The boy's dark eyes were not those of an adolescent. The rest of him looked naive and young and innocent, but his eyes were those of a predator.

She slapped him. "Don't say that! Don't even think it this close to him." She laughed. "Not soon. After he succeeds. If he succeeds." Though not as loud her laughter was as wicked as that racketing around the globular cavity. "Who wants to inherit a disaster?"

The boy shivered. It was cold there, and gloomy, and something in the air reminded him of graveyards before dawn. "Why did he summon us?"

"Probably because he needs to proclaim his genius, and Lupo Provik doesn't feed his ego because Lupo refuses to be impressed." She palmed a bright plate on the corridor wall. "Father! We're here."

The show doubled in intensity. Lightning arrows thumped the wall near the corridor's end. Hologramatic monsters slithered the air, snapping and clawing, breathing fire and spitting venom. A black gondola manned by a skeletal gondolier approached imperturbed through the fury. Backlighting betrayed the hologram. The thing was a grav-sled and humanoid robot tricked up by the imagination of Simon Tregesser.

The sled nudged the wall. The woman stepped aboard. The youth hesitated, followed. The wing of fear cast one brief shadow upon his face.

His features hardened into naive inscrutability. He was learning.

One learned if one intended to survive amongst House Tregesser's ruling family.

The sled glided toward the heart of the cavity. A closed, transparent bell filled with dark smoke hung from the machinery there, which supported the thing inside and made of its will realities. The sled stopped ten meters away. Search probes tickled its passengers.

A grotesque face pressed against the inner surface of the bell. The smoke faded, revealed the wreckage of a body, one arm withered, the rest gnawed by fire, blind, all the handiwork of an assassin who had been almost lucky enough.

"Ah. My loving child Valerena. And her plaything."

"My son, Father."

A shrill cackle surrounded her. "I have eyes that see farther and deeper than these blind scars. But who or what you bed is your own affair." A moment. "Are you Valerena indeed? Or her Other?"

"I'm Valerena Prime."

"That's a comfort. Sometimes I think you send your Other when your conscience bothers you."

Guilty, Valerena tried to change the subject. "Why did you summon us?"

"The most pessimistic projections suggest that the beast is down on P. Jaksonica 3 and has been recognized. That entire Presidency will be crawling with Travelers carrying the alarm. We count the game begun. Soon they'll come sniffing up the trail. And we'll seize a Guardship for House Tregesser."

"You underestimate them." Valerena sounded tired. She had argued this before. "You risk the existence of House Tregesser against a quantity you know only from fragmentary reports that survived the Enherrenraat."

"I have shielding the equal of theirs. I have Lupo. The rest is firepower. When the Guardship arrives it will be cut off from the Web and under fire so intense its screens have to overload. It'll be surrender or die. The only choice they give the rest of the universe. Then House Tregesser will have its Guardship, Hellspinners, and the secret of lifting so vast a mass onto the Web."

"That's the strategy of the Enherrenraat revenant. They thought they'd win with firepower. They're extinct. The Guardships aren't. And they're five hundred years wiser now."

"Five hundred years more senile, child. Five hundred years more frozen into old ways."

Blessed stepped in. "Why did you call me here, Grandfather?"

"You're the heir of my heir. It's time you learned why your mother and I doppelled; so we can work on this unconcerned by the jealousies of lesser Houses and the spiteful interference of the Guardships. They can't suspect us of schemes and duplicities if their spies see our Others devoting themselves to the interests of House Tregesser."

The thing in the bell roared, "A thousand years has House Tregesser prepared! In our generations the hour has come at last!"

"Yes, Grandfather. Grandfather, where did you find a krekelen? They're supposed to be extinct."

"I have my resources, boy. Valerena! I need a woman. Send me one. And this time make her one with some juice left. That last one was a crone."

Valerena flared. "She was twenty years younger than I am!"

"Ah? Then maybe I should use you while there's a dollop of juice left in you." A pendulous, maggot-colored, impossibly huge organ slithered through a sudden opening in the floor of the bell. "Come here."

"No."

"Then send me a woman who will please me. Or take her place yourself. Go away. I have no more use for you."

The skeletal gondolier began poling toward the corridor mouth.

"Noah!"

A black, winged man dropped down between the gamboling lightnings. He lighted on a tongue of metal protruding from the great machine. "Lord?"

"How was I, Noah?"

"You were madness itself."

"Were they convinced?"

"I believe so."

"Ha! And will they try to kill me, then?"

"Someday."

"How soon?"

"Not soon. They will wait till after you capture the Guardship. They will want to steal a triumph."

"And they'll want to avoid the consequences if I fail, eh?"

"Yes, Lord."

"Does Valerena know she's not the first Valerena?"

"I think not. You indulge her too much, Lord."

"I have no other heir."

"It's your funeral."

"If I become so lax as to let her reach me here, then House Tregesser deserves more alert, more aggressive leadership anyway."

"Such is the custom."

"Watch them. See their every hair fall."

"And the woman they send you?"

"Yours, if you want her."

"Grace, Lord."

Simon Tregesser's bell clouded. Outside, the show ached up toward a shattering crescendo. Lightnings and coils of darkness slithered around the bell till no eye could have pieced it out of the chaos.

The bell rose into the belly of the machine. Chaos died. Silence took mastery of the cavity. A lone winged form glided the stillness.

Simon Tregesser's prosthetic eyes stared through the bell wall at his special secret. The thing had adopted an especially repugnant arrangement, almost demonic, perhaps in response to the show outside. Tregesser smiled as much as he could with ruined lips. Valerena did not know, but this thing from Outside would give House Tregesser its Guardship.

He hoped.

Down in the shadowed heart of him he nurtured the very doubts his daughter had flung in his face.

And he did not trust this emissary from Yon, this ally whose urgings had led him to push House Tregesser's plans beyond endless preparation to considered action. Simon Tregesser did not trust anyone or anything he did not own completely, excepting Lupo Provik. Lupo was his good arm and good body and, sometimes, his brain.

An infantile display, Simon Tregesser. What do we gain by spawning machinations within machinations? There is but one goal. Let us devote ourselves with an appropriately holy fervor.

Tregesser sensed its contempt. The disgusting monster. A shot of oxygen into that methane murk would set it dancing in the fires. Someday ... the moment the Guardship surrendered. "You heard my daughter. Here, in private, between us, I second her doubts. You want me to dice with fate depending entirely upon your screens."

They are the ultimate possible within the laws of this universe. They are identical with those deployed by Guardships.

"So you say."

Our observations during the Enherrenraat incident leave no doubt.

"There's always room for doubt when you tempt the invincible. If you were that close to the action then, you were dead."

The thing did not respond.

"I suppose it's too late. I'm committed."

You are committed, Simon Tregesser. Forever.

Simon Tregesser's methane breathing ally set a thought vibrating along the Web. Every development must be registered lest it be lost.

The Tregesser creature was right. To observe the Guardship screens under pressure, it had been necessary for observers to be too close to survive. They had left their data vibrating on the Web.

This creature, too, would leave such a legacy if the time came.

What mattered was that the Guardship should come. That it should be tested and, if conquered, be rescued from the false ambition of fools and unbelievers.

The Guardships threatened to doom the truths of the Shadowed Path.

Death did not matter. Death was but a destination. The Shadowed Path led away in ten thousand directions but always ended in the same place, the maw of the Destroyer.

Always better to be the knife than its victim.