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.
94
I was in my own bed. My head felt pleasantly empty. The Dead Man had flushed me out while I slept. My legs still hurt bad.
Tinnie was there. Her mouth moved too slowly to shape words. I heard an inarticulate bass roar.
The Dead Man touched me. The world and I matched speeds.
Tinnie’s presence made everything bearable. She told me, ‘‘We thought we were going to lose you this time, Malsquando.’’ She struggled with something inside. ‘‘Did you really want to get out of it that bad?’’ Then, ‘‘I couldn’t help that. I didn’t mean it. You scared me so much.’’
I made a noise. Hoping it was good enough. Hoping she wouldn’t demand explanations. I couldn’t manage that. Nor did I remember what I had to excuse.
Turn off your You. Stop being Garrett. Some things are best left untold. Some explanations, however true and sincere,are inadequate.
In simpler words, keep your big damned mouth shut.
I had only one foot in the real world but had no difficulty grasping the wisdom there. And for once was able to keep it shut.
Over the next half hour every member of the household wished me well, asked if there was anything they could do, then left looking worried. Even Melondie Kadare made a drunken buzz-through, accompanied by several more serious pixies. They made up an annoying swarm of oversize mosquitoes.
Oh, joy. The pixies were out of hibernation.
So. Winter was over.
‘‘I spent a night in Elf Hill,’’ I told Tinnie, thinking I was being clever. Unfortunately, rural folklore doesn’t resonate in the city. People see elves every day and can’t imagine them living inside mounds in the wild wood. City elves bear no resemblance to the dark, cruel folk our ancestors knew. Not in public.
Only Old Bones understood. Only he knew what I’d gone through. He promised he’d let me know what that had been, too.
He knew what happened after the dancing stopped.
You saved the city. You and your ghost woman. The dragon . . . the entity . . . did not go back to sleep, however. It is much too excited to sleep now that it knows there may be others like it. I sensed uncertainty. What might even be fear.It knows there is a world outside itself now. Which it understands only through two minds and two souls, one of them a woman murdered long ago and the other a . . . a you.
That didn’t sound so bad to me.
You became immortal that night.
‘‘Just a hero thing.’’
Desist. This is serious. And you are not going to be pleased.
That was his ‘‘Dire news ahead!’’ tone. I shut up.
Your ghostly friend warned you that you would not like the price. You thought that might mean losing the essence that lived on in her portrait. And you were correct. But the entity did not just take Eleanor. It took you, too.
I was too worn down to argue or question. But it sounded like he was full of something.
The thing couldn’t have taken me very far. Here I was, right here.
There is a copy of you, of the Garrett inside the flesh, identical to a percentage point so remote that it would be a waste of good numbers to state it. That Garrett will live on inside the entity forever. With Eleanor. Quite possibly never understanding that it is both a copy and the template by which the entity builds its new worldview and responds to the outside that it has just discovered.
No one else knows this. Nor ever will, so long as you control your tongue.
He then fed back selections of what he had harvested from my head once Singe and Saucerhead dragged me home.
My ratgirl had been the only one to figure out where to find me. Maybe because I hadn’t told anyone else where I was going.
Tinnie sipped tea and stared at me over her cup, across the kitchen table. I gobbled oatmeal mush, taking time off to ask, ‘‘Is it all right for you to be away again, already?’’
‘‘That problem has been handled.’’
‘‘You locked Rose in a cage?’’
‘‘Not Rose. Though she did do the hands-on. My uncle Archer came up with the idea. Rose is too lazy. The cage is reserved for Kyra. That girl is going to embarrass us all if she doesn’t show a little more sense.’’
‘‘Turning into one of the fuddy-duddies, are we?’’ I’d once heard her departed uncle Lester make a similar observation about her.