Greyblade Page 7

  To Greyblade’s surprise, Gabriel sloped past the queuing partygoers and turned to confront the bouncer. Greyblade followed, glancing up at the pulsating phosphorescent sign above the door. THE DRAKE, it read.

  The crowd, if fewer than a dozen people could be called a crowd, murmured to one another and eyed the Archangel and the Burning Knight in fascination, but didn’t cause a fuss as the new arrivals bypassed the line. It was clear that Gabriel was not of the waiting-in-queues classes. The bouncer, at first glance a normal-looking human woman, was wearing comfortable black attire and sported a glossy row of fins on her head that closer inspection revealed to be artfully shaped hair. She nodded to Gabriel and folded her arms, and that was when Greyblade noticed the blackening of her left hand, the cracks and glazed patches that almost reduced it to a claw. He suddenly understood how a relatively feeble human could enforce crowd control at a club frequented by Gróbs.

  “Gabriel,” she said.

  “Sister,” Gabriel replied formally.

  “Sir Greyblade,” the bouncer continued, turning a chilly dark-eyed look on him.

  “Sister,” Greyblade responded in kind, and added, “my reputation precedes me, does it?”

  “Heard you flew in from Amazônia Capital this evening,” she confirmed. “Word gets around. Welcome to Sprawling Adelbairn,” she turned back to Gabriel. “You want a table?”

  Gabriel turned to Greyblade. “You hungry?”

  “I could eat,” Greyblade said.

  “They have cow here,” Gabriel said. “HarvCorp bred a strain back from some cultured stock or other. I don’t know if it’s as good as good-old-cow, but it’s not bad.”

  “I think I read something about HarvCorp beef on a data feed while I was flying in from Amazônia Central,” Greyblade said. He’d reflected, at the time, that the resurrection of an extinct animal so people could continue eating it had been a strange thing for the humans to put in their ‘information for visitors’ section. “I don’t remember eating cow on my last tour.”

  The bouncer was murmuring into some sort of surreptitious communication device, and now she turned and addressed the pair again. “Head downstairs,” she said curtly. “A room will be made ready for you when you’ve concluded your business,” she stepped aside, reached down with her good hand and lifted aside the brass-mounted velvet rope barring the entrance. “And welcome to the Drake.”

  “Thank you, Sister,” Gabriel said, and swept into the club entrance. Greyblade gave the woman a respectful nod, and followed the Archangel through.

  “She was a priest,” he said in a low voice as they moved into a dingy, smoke-filled bar crowded with customers. The wildly varied and colourful masses parted around Gabriel and Greyblade effortlessly, revealing floors that had not seen a decent cleaning crew in years. Gabriel nodded curtly. “Her magic still works?”

  “One of the few,” Gabriel confirmed. “Jalah still breathes fire through that one,” the Archangel grinned. “That’s how we can tell we’re on the right side, Kisser. Even now.”

  They navigated the bar chamber, and then a second room, before finding a staircase. This one was guarded by a pair of enormous amped-up Molren with tattoos covering one side of their faces and their bare upper right arms, but they had evidently been in touch over the same communication system as the bouncer at the door because they were standing to either side of the staircase and just nodded to them as they passed. Gabriel led the way downwards with a sweep of his wings.

  The staircase opened onto a second floor of lounges, but Gabriel continued down to the next level – this one divided up into out-and-out dens, no doubt more of the not-so-secret drug culture of Dumblertown – and then down to the next. The stairs ended at a dark metal door and another pair of Molren, these ones more standard-looking but clearly enhanced in some way. Their eyes glowed unsettlingly in the semi-darkness, and Greyblade’s visor outlined the pair in faint orange engage-with-caution highlights similar to the ones it had painted around the priest outside. These guards, too, moved to either side of the door and let the visitors pass.

  Then there was a corridor of grey reinforced stone that wouldn’t have looked out of place on board the Ladyhawk. Gabriel led Greyblade unerringly past a series of doors until reaching one that didn’t look any different from the rest, and opened it to reveal a truly ancient elevator box. Greyblade’s helmet flashed another quiet notification as he stepped over the threshold – the doorway, and the elevator, was rigged with compression charges. Homemade by the looks of the specifications his visor could make out, but extremely heavy-duty. If the wrong person tried to … how had Gabriel put it? … subject this elevator shaft to scrutiny, the staff could collapse the whole thing as though it had never existed.

  The elevator rattled as they descended, and when the shaft opened out into a cavern and the smoothly-sliding walls beyond the mesh door receded away into darkness, Greyblade wasn’t particularly surprised. Even before the smell of reptile and burned rock filtered through his visor, he’d guessed what they were descending towards. He’d had his suspicions, indeed, ever since seeing the name of the club.

  Gabriel glanced sidelong and up at him, and nodded when he saw – or sensed – that Greyblade had discerned the truth.

  “She’s not like others of her kind,” the Archangel said as the elevator spooled slowly and quietly down through the darkness, occasionally rattling past some metal scaffolds, then through another rock-lined shaft, then out into another cavern. “I know you’ve met them, fought side by side with them, been friends with them. The Drake … isn’t the same, Greyblade.”

  “Alright,” Greyblade said, recognising that Gabriel was deadly serious.

  “Her egg was smuggled here from the nest outside Detroit about twenty-five years ago,” Gabriel went on, “when the relocation was in full swing and the nest was … exterminated,” he grimaced. “Some of them went back to Heaven, some settled in Hell, and the rest died here. Most of them had already died on Darling’s Day. The Drake hatched a couple of years later. She’s the only Dragon left on Earth, and as far as we know the authorities have no idea she’s down here. She hatched here, and we’ve been sheltering her ever since.”

  “God almighty,” Greyblade murmured.

  The elevator rattled to a halt.

  HARVCORP

  Millennia ago, Dragons had learned how to fold their great scaly bodies into human form. Contracting their surface area, displacing their mass, altering their colouration and texture … a lot of reptiles had these abilities to some degree or other, and Dragons were the pinnacle of reptilian evolution. By the time humans had been living on Earth for a hundred years or so, the Dragons were good enough at it to actually adopt human guises capable of fooling their new worldmates.

  This had been back when humans looked like Gabriel, of course. So as the primate species developed, the Dragons – who enjoyed life expectancies in the centuries-range, if not millennia – were obliged to continue tweaking their disguises. And after a certain point, it really became an injustice to refer to it as ‘tweaking’.

  It was one part physics, one part contortionism, and one part natural magic that was just physics of a deeper kind. As a matter of diplomacy, as well as a matter of not wishing to have to defend their nests against quite so many increasingly-heavily-armed humans, the Dragons made learning the shift a part of their essential schooling for hatchlings.

  Somebody had dubbed the Dragonish education fundamentals Flight, Flame, and Flomp. Because the latter was the sound a taller-than-average and remarkably well-built human made when it relaxed its metaphysical muscles7 and turned back into a fourteen-metre reptile – plus tail – weighing in at several tons.

  So Greyblade wasn’t particularly surprised to be greeted by a human – or a humanoid, anyway – when the elevator door clanged open, rather than a gigantic crimson-scaled fire-breathing winged creature.8 The Drake, it seemed, assumed human form whenever the elevator began its descent. Just in case the other security measures h
ad failed and she was about to be ruthlessly scrutinised.

  “Archangel,” the figure said coolly.

  The Drake, as Greyblade had gathered from Gabriel’s explanation and as now seemed clear from her human guise, was female. It was not, however, a particularly good likeness. That was probably the nicest way to say it.

  His old friend and comrade Thelion, a Dragon of Oceaaña – as Old Meganesia had been named at the time – had lived not far from here, near the town of Vanning where the Ogres were now holed up. Thelion’s ancestral nest was gone now, demolished in the war, and Thelion himself … well. Greyblade still remembered the relatively youthful Dragon, though. His intelligence. His eagerness to seek a peaceful and harmonious coexistence with his amusing primate neighbours. His terrifying ferocity in battle. But most of all Greyblade remembered his grin, his flowing black toga, his polished humanoid muscles and tumble of tarry hair. Even centuries later, he never could quite get the hair right.

  Compared to the twenty-something-year-old Drake, however, Thelion had been a maestro.

  The Dragon was slightly taller than Greyblade, and looked like a washed-out charcoal sketch of a human being. Her body was gaunt and her skin bleached. This might have been nothing more than a response to a lifetime spent underground, but her head was topped with long, twisted spikes of pale hair almost like a Lowland Elf’s quills. Her teeth, when she talked, seemed too large and elongated to fit comfortably in a human face, but both face and teeth also seemed to waver and warp in order to remain viable. Her entire appearance was distorted, stretched in strange directions. Her hands moved restlessly, long-fingered but lacking in knuckles or nails or other definition, like roots. Or tentacles.

  The wraparound garment was similar to the one Thelion had worn – when you lived among creatures who were discomfited by nudity, but you also wanted to be able to explode into your gigantic natural form at any time, you tended to favour clothing that could flomp out into a scarf at a moment’s notice – but it was an age-stained white-grey in colour, rather than the glossy black Thelion had favoured. Greyblade wondered why the Drake even bothered, since nakedness could hardly have added to her disturbing image.

  “Drake,” Gabriel said, and gestured. “This is Sir Greyblade of the Ladyhawk. Commander of the Burning Knights of Brutan the Warrior.”

  “Retired,” Greyblade added.

  “Retired,” Gabriel agreed sombrely. “But here, instead of growing a pot belly on Barnalk Low while writing his memoirs.”

  The Drake turned disconcerting pallid eyes on Greyblade. Her eyes, in jarring contrast to the rest of her human guise, weren’t vague sketches. They were more like … it was hard to define. It was as though she’d taken a pair of scissors, and meticulously cut a pair of eye-shaped holes in the front of her head, then put pale blue glass in the holes. They looked more or less like normal eyes, but you could see something behind them. The Dragon, Greyblade fancied, coiled in its strange metaphysical hiding place, waiting to burst out.

  “Yes,” the Drake said, studying Greyblade. “I’ve heard of the Burning Knights, of course, but have never met one. Gabriel told you, perhaps, that I am only twenty-two years old.”

  “Yes,” Greyblade echoed unconsciously. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Is it,” the Drake smiled, and turned back to Gabriel. “Did you come here for information, or passage, or just steak?”

  “Information and steak,” Gabriel grinned. The Drake grinned too – a truly disturbing sight – and turned to walk them deeper into the cavern. The surface under Greyblade’s boots was clinker-dotted glass, the product of the Dragon’s fearsome burrowing process. “I told Greyblade he just had to try the HarvCorp beef.”

  “Is it true that the Burning Knights had clone livestock generators on their warships, and this fabricated meat served as their sole sustenance?” the Drake asked. “Are you humanoid organisms in armour, or are you mechanical sentients like the Char-bots, but with organic processing components?”

  “Bit of both,” Greyblade said easily, “but we did indeed have meatmakers on our ships. We take solid sustenance, and our root species – the Áea-folk – are carnivorous with a hint of side-salad.”

  “Ah,” the Drake said, looking back over her angular shoulder at Greyblade, “then you will definitely like the beef we offer here. There isn’t much more solid sustenance out there.”

  They walked through the silent caverns, footsteps echoing. Greyblade was tempted to ask whether the Drake had a treasure hoard down here. This thought reminded him of something the Drake had said.

  “You asked if we wanted passage,” he said to the Dragon. “Do these tunnels extend–”

  “Well beyond the boundaries of Dumblertown,” Gabriel confirmed, looking smug.

  “Is that why the nerve centre of Dumblertown is so far from the central districts?” Greyblade asked.

  “It’s one of the reasons,” Gabriel admitted blandly.

  “Did you think the Archangel flies out of here?” the Drake asked without looking back. “He would be about as likely to do that as I would.”

  “I’ve gotten lazy in my old age,” Gabriel admitted, and jerked his head at the Dragon. “Not sure what the kid’s excuse is.”

  “High-intensity anti-aircraft energy weapons,” the Drake said.

  “Yeah, that’ll do it,” Gabriel conceded.

  The strange Dragon led them down through a narrower side-passage built for humanoids, walled with metal plating and lined with alcoves, doorways and machinery.

  “The beef processors,” she said, pointing at the scratched gold HarvCorp logo on the side of one machine. “They’re fully automated, but require significant maintenance. If it won’t spoil your appetite, you can take a look at our product as we pass through. This is before it is processed, of course – the prime cuts are sent up to the club kitchens. I’m … less picky.”

  The Drake led them along a gantry to an open section overlooking a huge, scaffolding-lined staging area. Two levels down, between a resequencing machine like a giant jet engine and a gaping processing-plant intake, a conveyor belt was encouraging the product to move from A to B.

  “Now that’s a cow,” Gabriel said warmly, as Greyblade stared. “They sure didn’t make them like that back before the Princess.”

  “They didn’t make them at all,” the Drake said in amusement. “Back before the artificial virus that wiped them out, cows used to make themselves, just like everybody else.”

  “Not like that,” Gabriel reiterated.

  Greyblade watched the giant lurching centipede of beef as it lumbered, twisted, and stumbled on what few of its legs could reach the surface of the conveyor. Its head, vestigial and almost lost in the slabs of muscle and fat, didn’t say moo. It made a single blatting croak like a giant toad before it vanished into the intake. Its front end was already being processed by the time its rear, trembling and capped with a metal support frame, emerged from the resequencer. There was nothing in its digestive system, indeed it may not have even had one in an end-to-end sense, so there was no mess. Its life was over in less than a minute.

  It was like looking at mortality, given solid form.

  “The proper HarvCorp cows are smaller, but still more lab sample than viable animal,” the Drake explained as the great shuddering bulk was slowly chewed up. “They live long enough to eat a few meals of vitamin-enriched medical paste, put on a bit of definition, and then they’re reduced to cuts. I inherited these machines from a sympathetic local, and my tech-savvy friends have dialled up all the specs for maximum production at the expense of … shall we say, verisimilitude?”

  Greyblade chuckled admiringly. “When it became clear there was a Dragon living under Dumblertown, I did wonder what she was eating,” he said. “Guess this answers that question.”

  “It takes some raw material but it’s mostly carbon and water,” the Drake said. “And customers pay top yachut for prime cuts, more than enough to keep us in business. HarvCorp beef is a legitimat
e Earth delicacy. We get visitors from off-world who have come all this way just to try it. And I understand the process of getting here is somewhat laborious.”

  “It is that,” Greyblade agreed. Down below, the almost-but-not-quite-herd-of-cows vanished, and the machine went into a rumbling slumber of processing and preparation for the next round of fabrication. “Well, like I was saying to Gabriel earlier, the tourism people do actually mention the HarvCorp story as part of their welcoming spiel. I thought it was a bit of an odd thing to focus on at the time, but this … I look forward to trying some.”

  “A lot of the technology down there is a direct result of humans and Dragons having to live together,” Gabriel said, then grimaced. “You know, for the relatively short period they actually did.”

  “What do you mean?” Greyblade asked, as they continued on and turned back into the main cavern. This part sloped and curved gently downwards, illuminated by pleasant ruddy phosphorescents.

  “Up until the veil lifted, nobody had much success resurrecting the cows,” Gabriel explained. “They’d genetically modified some pigs and called it good. But that was a dead-end gene stem, and it didn’t have the potential that cows did. And the world’s population had reached a point where Earth could support humans, or cattle to feed humans, but not both. So they paradigm-shifted into survival mode and the big meats began to be redefined as delicacies. When the Dragons began returning to Earth, there was a big food chain problem. You can’t raise a Dragon on ground-up locusts.”

  “I’m told my kind used to eat whales,” the Drake said.

  “Yeah,” Gabriel grunted. “By the time the veil lifted, there weren’t many of them left. Certainly not enough to feed a few hundred Dragons on a sustainable basis.”