The Iron Dragon's Daughter (35 page)

"What sorts of things do they talk about?"

"You'd be surprised. Shit they wouldn't tell their best friends. Most of 'em are just having a little flirt with danger. Others have got a serious self-destructive streak. They talk. I listen. They ask my advice. I give it. Every so often I manage to sweet-talk one over the edge. Then I eat. Nine times out of ten, that's what they were really after from the beginning. I got good hopes for the one who likes to come around here about this time."

A dark suspicion seized Jane. "You wouldn't know her name, would you?"

"Naw."

"Tall, good legs, long hair?"

"No offense, missy, but I have a hard time telling you guys apart."

"I see." Jane lapsed into silence.

For a time, they shared the view without speaking.

"So how about that Teind?" Sordido said suddenly. "You looking forward to it?"

Jane looked at him. "If that's the word for it. You figure it's bound to get somebody you know, maybe even a lot of them. So I'm not exactly anxious for it to happen. But then again, once it's over, it'll be over. You can get on with things. So maybe it'd be best if it happened and were done with." She paused. "What do you care about the Teind, anyway? I thought you guys were immune."

"It's the only time we get to eat our fill."

"Oh." She looked away.

"Oh," Sordido mimicked. "Oh dear. How terribly vulgar." Angrily, he reared up on his haunches and ponderously unfolded his wings. They were enormous. "Look at me. How much energy do you think it takes to get something this heavy up into the air?"

"Well—"

"A
lot
, that's how much. I'll tell you something else you don't know about the rock people. We only mate on the wing. Got that? So once every ten years you fill your streets with carrion and we get to climb down and eat our fill. It ain't pretty, I'll grant you that, but whose fault is that? We eat all we can. Then we start to climb again, back up the sides of whatever building is closest.

"It's a bitch of a climb. It takes hours. We've been at our business all day, so probably it's sunset. Them blood-gorged skies are as shiny bright as Hell Gate itself then. Clouds as purple as a bruise. We climb. Everything grows dark and the stars come out. By the time we get to the top, it's night.

"You've maybe noticed that the rock people ain't got many females. So when our ladies come into heat, there's a lot of competition for their favors. The moon comes up. We wait. Finally one begins to sing." He shivered. "Nekhbet! You don't know how beautiful their voices are. So sweet you want to fling yourself right off the building."

The door to Tintagel quietly opened and shut. Sirin walked out into the Campanile. When she saw Jane, she looked startled. But after an instant's hesitation, she sat down beside her on the railing. Together they listened to the gargoyle.

"… by one, the gents raise their voices in answer. Deep and low. We don't sound so lovely, maybe, but it's profound. Like thunder after larksong.

"Dunno how long the singing lasts. You kind of lose track. But at last she stretches out and looks around. Kind of teasing-like. She spreads her wings. She leaps. She flies. She soars high up into the sky, and she's still singing.

"That's when we totally lose control. We scrabble over the edge, and instinct takes over. Maybe twenty-thirty-forty of us will form up into a flock and fly after her. We're all feeling our oats, laughing and joking. She's only going to mate with one of us. So it gets rough up there. That's how I got this kink in my leg. That's how I lost two of these." He spread his claws, retracted them again.

"Now, it's the ladies who perpetuate the race. They got to raise the cubs, keep 'em fed, and kick 'em off the ledge when they get big enough to start killing each other. So natch, they're a lot stronger than the gents. Only the best of us can keep up. The flock dwindles. And of course there are ways of convincing the competition that it's maybe time to go home.

"Finally, there's just you and her. She's still ahead of you, but she ain't trying to get away. Fact is, maybe she slows down a bit. Maybe she glances back, kind of flirty, to see what you're like. She tilts a wing, and the moonlight is pale on her flank. Ahhhh, but she's long and as tawny-lean as a lioness. Her talons are like black glass daggers. Her breasts are two white skulls, and there's hunger in her eyes.

"She spirals upward, and you follow. The City falls away. The air is cold and clear. Your every muscle aches like fire, but you're getting closer. Her wings obliterate the sky. She reaches out her slender arms to you, and she's as beautiful and tender as Death herself. The smell of her musk is maddening. She wants you—she can't hide it—as bad as you want her."

Sirin was breathing shallowly. "It sounds lovely," she whispered.

"So the ladies tell us." Sordido heaved a long, deep sigh. "Then again, that's what they would say, innit? It's not as if the gent ever got to voice an opinion on the subject afterwards."

"I beg your pardon?" Jane said.

"Well, we don't survive it, do we? The lady's had a long night, and pretty soon she's incubating a brood of maybe a dozen cubs, she's going to need her energy. She's got to eat something."

"That's grotesque!" Jane said.

Sirin said nothing.

"Yeah, well, from your point of view, maybe so. But you can't blame them for it—the ladies. That's just our biology. They got no say over it." For a moment Sordido sank in on himself in gloom. Then, with visible effort, he straightened. A slow shrug. "Well. Look, I'm sorry if I'm depressing you. It's just that the subject is kind of—you know."

"I understand."

"No hard feelings?" He held out his hand.

"No hard—"

"
Jane
!" Sirin grabbed Jane and yanked her back as she reached out to take the gargoyle's hand. The stone fingers closed about empty air.

Sordido chuckled. "Damn."

Sirin led Jane from the Campanile. The granite corridors and marble halls of Tintagel closed about them with a faint exhalation of stale air. Jane felt tense and weak with aftershock. But she didn't thank Sirin for saving her life. So long as she didn't thank her, Jane knew, so long as the tension between them held, Sirin couldn't break free. And there were things that needed to be said.

They walked blindly down a passage whose ceiling was so low that Jane cringed whenever they passed under an air duct. Electrical cables were stapled to the gray walls in twos and threes, looping over the doorways to redundant classrooms converted to long-term storage. Cardboard boxes of outdated course guides and commencement addresses waited wearily by doors that would never open for them.

The passage dead-ended into a stairwell and they sat down on the top step. Voices arose from below, and the occasional clatter of hurrying feet, but nobody appeared. Above them, a dusty stuffed crocodile twisted slowly in otherwise undetectable currents of air. Gray stuffing oozed out where its seams were parting.

"Sirin, what in the world are you doing, meeting with that creature?"

Sirin stared at her knees, shook her head.

Jane took her friend's hands. They were like ice. Sirin had lost weight; her cheekbones were sharper, her eyes glittery-cold. She looked beautiful and doomed. "I know it's none of my business. But you've been missing a lot of classes lately. The girls are beginning to talk. They say that if your grade point average goes any lower, you'll be facing automatic expulsion."

"Expulsion. That's a laugh."

"That's exactly the attitude I'm talking about! Sirin, look, I've got problems of my own, I don't dare get too deeply involved in yours. Understand? If I try to help, it'll just drag us both down together. But I'm your friend. At the very least I can warn you of what everyone but you can see coming down."

Still as a pillar Sirin sat. Her face was white as salt. "I'm marked," she said. "For the Teind."

You don't know that, Jane almost said. But something in Sirin's expression convinced her otherwise. "How can you be sure?"

"I scryed it. Three times. Once in a virgin speculum. Once in a pool of ink. Once in a cupped double-handful of my own blood."

"You can't be certain! Prediction is an imprecise science, after all."

"Three times? That's pretty damn sure."

Now at last Jane began to cry. She couldn't help it. "Oh, Sirin, how could you? You know as well as I do how dangerous scrying the future can be. Half the time what it shows you wouldn't happen if you hadn't foreseen it." She released Sirin's hands, intending to hug and reassure her. But her feelings welled up and instead she punched her in the shoulder, just as hard as she could. It was all too awful. "Damn you! Why?"

Emotionlessly, Sirin said, "I didn't have any reasons. I've never had any reasons to do anything. Maybe other people have reasons. But when I look inside myself it's like there was an emptiness inside where something ought to be but isn't. Why? I don't know. Why not?"

The crocodile leered down at them both. An ironic sparkle glinted in one dull glass eye and a silent chuckle threatened to stretch his grin so wide all his gray cotton stuffing would fall out. Mastering herself, Jane wiped her eyes against her sleeve. "You can still take steps to protect yourself."

"I've already done everything. I even looked into buying an exemption, that's how desperate I was."

"You could—"

"But since I'm not going to, what would be the point?" Suddenly Sirin laughed, shook her hair, and said, "Not another word. Let's go hang out in the student center. We'll have a soda, play a few hands of cards, dish a little gossip. That would be fun. But with so little time left to me, I don't want to waste any of it just talking and talking and talking about this thing."

Jane bit her lip and nodded. Together they started down the stairs. The crocodile dwindled above them. She could feel its scornful regard shrink to a hot point source of emotion and then wink out.

"Sirin? What you said about an exemption. You mean I could buy my way out of the Teind?"

"Forget I said anything. It's more money than you've got anyway."

As it turned out, the money an exemption from the Teind would cost was exorbitant and then some. Jane stopped by Dr. Nemesis's office for information, though she doubted she could hack the cost. She had the brochure in her purse the afternoon when Ratsnickle came by to ask after the gloves.

He caught her as she was leaving her dissection lab. The metal door clicked softly shut behind her, closing away the chill rows of cadavers on chrome gurneys. The refrigerator rooms were at the bottom of an obscure cul-de-sac, and so late in the day there was very little traffic. The halls were quiet.

Ahead, where the corridor turned, Monkey wheeled her bike into view, blocking the way. Ratsnickle strolled alongside her.

Jane stopped.

Leaving Monkey behind, Ratsnickle approached Jane. She waited, ready for anything he might have to say.

"Have you heard?" he asked. "Sirin's on the bane."

"What? I don't believe you." Flustered, because it fit so well, Jane said, "She wouldn't. Sirin's not like that."

A shrug. "Believe what you will." Down the hall, Monkey leaned against her bicycle, eyes two burning smudges of hatred. "You and I have things to talk about."

"I'm not going to steal for you. Not now, not again, not ever."

"There are ways and ways to make us even."

"I don't owe you a thing."

"Oh?" Ratsnickle's eyebrows rose. He held out his palm. "Give me the faun-skin gloves and I'll call it quits. I'll walk out of your life and you'll never see me again."

Jane said nothing. There was nothing she could say.

Ratsnickle glanced over his shoulder to determine that nobody but she and Monkey were about. Then slowly he unbuttoned his trousers in what he obviously thought a seductive manner, and hauled out his penis.

Jane felt an involuntary thrill of revulsion. Penises had never exactly impressed her as things of beauty, but Ratsnickle's was particularly ugly and faintly green as well, doubtless because his standards of cleanliness had allowed some mold or microscopic moss to establish itself there.

He watched her avidly, an electric grin splitting his face. Down below, his penis was hardening in small jerks, like some ludicrous rubber toy being inflated by a hand pump.

"Better put it away before it starts to draw flies," Jane said.

Ratsnickle's face twisted with anger. "You hypocrite! I was watching—you liked what you saw. You couldn't get enough of it. You wanted to go down on me right then and there." But he scooped it back into his trousers and rebuttoned them anyway.

"Funny. I could have sworn what I was thinking was that there's never a pair of pruning shears around when you need one."

Ratsnickle drew himself up and for an instant she thought he was going to hit her. But instead he seized her hand in both of his and kissed her knuckles. "
Touché
, sweet lady. But one touch is not a duel, nor does a single skirmish determine the battle. We shall meet again on the field of combat—dearest enemy."

He swaggered away, without even looking back to see if Monkey would follow.

As soon as he was gone, Jane ducked into the nearest bathroom to wash her hands.

The bathroom was tiled and painted a glossy black. Graffiti were painstakingly carved into the paint. Several generations of angular runes were visible through successive coats, palimpsests of anger and flip obscenity. Curved mirrors leaned over the sinks, so that Jane had to stare up into a distorted image of herself to check on her makeup.

The bathroom door slammed. A ballooning and deflating Monkey swam toward her in the mirror.

Monkey was in a state, her face red and her fists clenched. Her hair was a mess. "You bitch! You cat! You get your fucking claws out of my sweetie!"