Dragon Coast (15 page)

Daniel refilled Cormorant's empty coffee cup. “You know how much I value your counsel. How should I proceed?”

“Just as we agreed before your departure. My blades are still ready. They only await my word.” Cormorant added sugar and cream and stirred with concentration, as if he were mixing an osteomantic formula.

Daniel found himself hating Paul more with every new thing he learned about him. Paul would have made a fine successor to the Hierarch.

But maybe Daniel's hate was misplaced.

What the Hierarch was to Daniel, Daniel had become to Ethelinda: a killer of fathers.

“Paul? My blades. Shall I employ them?”

“Hold off. Just a few more days. There will be repercussions, and I must prepare myself. Until then, I'll keep the Dorings at arm's length.”

“That will be impossible, assuming you keep them alive. Oh, I volunteered to deliver something to you.” Cormorant reached into the folds of his robes and produced an envelope. He placed it on the table as if it weighed tons and slid it toward Daniel. It was sealed in wax, and the stamp was of a human skull with a dragon's frill. This was the seal of the Northern Hierarch. The letter came from the palace.

Opening it, Daniel felt as though he were unsealing his own death sentence.

He read it.

The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by the Hierarch to invite Baron Osteomancer Paul Sigilo to court reception, dinner, royal audience, and investiture, commencing Monday, 21
st
April, 6:00
P.M.
, and to conclude Friday, 25
th
April, noon.

Oh, god. Not a death sentence. Even worse. A party invitation.

“A whole week of formal rum-mummery,” Cormorant said, wiping his lips with a napkin and throwing it down, his breakfast good and well conquered. “By Friday, either you or one of the Dorings will be High Grand Osteomancer. And I do like my library privileges, Paul, so try to curb your resolute disregard for etiquette. Don't pull a book out of your pocket and read at the Hierarch's supper table.”

“Disregard for etiquette. Yes.”

Cormorant let out a long breath of existential weariness. “Well, at least try not to be murdered before your investiture. Can you do that, at least?”

Daniel promised he would try.

With dread and solemnity, he took a silent oath, to which he was the only witness.

He wouldn't just save Sam.

He'd save Ethelinda, too.

 

THIRTEEN

Sam could see nothing out the dragon's eyes. No stars, no moon, no furtive movement of prey below. Nor could he hear anything outside the cockpit. And most disconcerting of all, no smells reached him. He could only assume the dragon was still dangling from the airships and being hauled away to some unknown destination.

“We're blind,” he said, trying to tamp down a burgeoning panic. “What's capable of blinding a Pacific firedrake?”

Annabel lay on her back with her legs sticking out from beneath the control panel, like a mechanic under a car. “No osteomancy that I know of.”

Sam fiddled with the steering yoke, just to see if by some near-miracle the controls worked now. They didn't.

“So, let's proceed from there,” she said, crawling out from under the panel. “Who's got enough big magic in quantity to do something like this, and access to airships? Sounds like the North to me.”

Sam got up from his chair. “Well, we can't have that. If they can neutralize—or tranquilize, or paralyze, or whatever-ize—us then they probably have the know-how to gain control of the dragon. Which means they'll have their weapon. Trying to stop that from happening is how I ended up in here in the first place. So we keep trying to pilot this machine.” Sam gestured at his worthless control panel. “Any ideas?”

Annabel's smile made Sam nervous. “Have you ever been to the brain?”

And so, Sam and Annabel set out to find the firedrake's brain.

It turned out Annabel did not actually know the way to the brain.

The obvious direction was up and back, deep into the skull. But the meaty passageway from the cockpit didn't lead that way.

As they moved along, Annabel tapped a bone against the wet walls and put her ear close to listen.

“Looking for hollow spaces,” she explained. “Rooms, chambers, some place big enough to house a brain.”

That sounded reasonable to Sam. “And if we find it?”

She waggled the piece of bone in her hand. “We don't have a manual, so if we do get to the brain, we'll just have to monkey with it.”

“Monkey with a dragon's brain. What could possibly go wrong?”

They kept on, Annabel tapping away, and Sam searching the air in vain for a telling odor. There were still no obvious noises from outside the dragon, but inside, a low bass hum and subterranean rumbles persisted.

Annabel tapped another tunnel wall, pressed her ear against it, and came away disappointed. They'd been at it for hours. Sam's hamstrings burned from steep climbs.

“So, what's your life like?” Annabel asked him. “Or what was it like?”

“Why? You think there might be some clue in my past that'll help us figure out the dragon's layout?”

“No, but you're the only human contact I've had in a long time. Make conversation with me, please?”

“Talking. Oh. Okay.” Talking was not something Sam ever did much on the outside, much less talking with girls near his age. Practically every time he did, he fell in love with them. If he was asked the time of day, or road directions, or asked if he could stop blocking the soda fountain at a gas station, he would often find himself smitten for days.

Sam discovered he wanted to tell Annabel everything.

But Daniel's voice in his head told him not to tell her anything.

“My uncle raised me,” he began. “We moved around a lot. He was sort of a … what would you call it … a thief. So we were always on the run, trying to stay ahead of the law. I didn't go to regular schools or anything like that.”

There. That was largely true. Just a lot of omission.

“So, your uncle. He was a great osteomancer.” She said it as though it were incontrovertible fact.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because you're a powerful osteomancer yourself, with no formal schooling. Powerful enough to dive into a Pacific firedrake's osteomantic essence and not lose your own magical coherence. So your uncle must have taught you. And it takes a powerful osteomancer to train another one. Was he the guy who shot us down on Mount Whitney?”

“Yeah. But he was trying to help. Daniel wouldn't do anything to hurt me.”

“Hm” was her only response. They continued down a narrowing passageway. “What about the other two on the mountaintop? The big guy and the girl?”

Moth and Em.

He'd fallen hard for Em. They'd spent more than just a few moments together. They'd spent days, and they'd shared danger and pain. Also, she was so … so
Em.

“Friends,” Sam said.

Maybe Daniel was right and Sam should have kept his mouth shut. He didn't want to go into Moth's and Em's biographies, much less Daniel's.

Annabel saved him with another question. “Okay, what's your earliest memory?”

“Earliest. Let me think.”

He didn't have to think hard. His earliest memory was also one of his clearest. He remembered waking up fully submersed in a tank of fluid. Later, he would learn the fluid was osteomantic medium, a soup of magical essences designed to accelerate cellular growth and turn him from a scrap of flesh into a fully formed body. And what he remembered most was how delicious it was, a chimerical blend of creatures. He remembered opening his eyes and looking out on a kaleidoscopic world as the medium boiled around him. After a while, he became aware of a fleshy umbilical cord winding around his belly and chest and entering his body through the back of his head. And there was a small square of glass in the tank. A window. And through the window, the face of the Hierarch looked in on him.

He wanted to tell her what he was. How long was it okay to keep secrets from the only other person in the world?

“I remember a birthday,” Sam said to Annabel. “My first.”

“That sounds nice. Presents? Cake? Ice cream?”

“Nothing like that. I was born in a tank. I'm a golem. I'm a magically grown duplicate of the Hierarch. The guy who ate you. So, whatever magical essence the Hierarch absorbed by consuming you is also in me. Which is probably why you're here now, in the dragon. The Hierarch ate you, I'm grown from the Hierarch's substance. The firedrake consumed me, and so here we are, together.”

There. It was out, all in a gush of honesty, and he wished he could scoop it back up with his hands and shovel it in his mouth and make it disappear.

She looked at him, stunned. Horrified. Maybe repulsed. She walked a few steps away from him, then turned.

“How was I?”

“What do you mean?”

“As a meal. How was I? Tasty? Nutritious?”

“That wasn't me. That was the Hierarch.”

She tilted her head, like someone trying to understand a painting with no obvious appeal. “You
are
the Hierarch. I don't know how I missed it before. But it's right there in front of me. Your nose, your chin … He was a lot older than you when he ate me, but it's so clear now.”

She resumed walking, now at a fast pace. Sam struggled to keep up, hunching beneath the low, fleshy, wet ceiling.

“So, is he still in charge of things?” Annabel said without turning her head.

Sam dreaded having to give her the next bit of bad news. “No. A lot of time's passed since he consumed you.”

“I figured. You have a weird haircut. And you're dressed like Buck Rogers.”

Sam was still in the black fatigues and tactical boots he'd worn for the Catalina mission.

“So what's it been, Sam? Ten years or a hundred?”

He didn't say anything right away. She stopped and turned.

“More than a hundred?”

“About seventy,” Sam said. Enough for everyone she'd known and loved to have died, for the places she found familiar to have been razed and rebuilt upon a dozen times over. History and architecture weren't sacred in Los Angeles. Not much was.

Annabel continued down the passage. Sam didn't know if he should follow or let her be alone, until she spoke again.

“Seventy years wouldn't be much to the Hierarch. Did another osteomancer finally gather the bones to do him in?”

“My uncle, Daniel. He's not really my uncle—”

“So, you lied about that.”

“Er. Yeah? I guess. Anyway. The Hierarch was going to put his consciousness in my body—”

“Just like you put your consciousness in the firedrake's body. Oh, but you're nothing like the Hierarch, are you?”

“Look, do you want to know how the Hierarch died or not?” Sam had a hard time accepting guilt just for having been born from the Hierarch's essence. Yet his power came from everything the Hierarch ate, and one of those things—those people—was Annabel. Could he deserve her anger even without having done anything wrong?

Annabel walked faster.

“Daniel killed the Hierarch,” he said to Annabel's back. “He reached into his chest and pried his heart out. And then, like I said, I grew up on the run. Daniel kept me away from all the shitty people who would've eaten me.”

“I wish I'd had a Daniel on my last day of work.”

Ducking her head, she stepped through a gap in a pink wall, like a bulkhead partition.

“So do I,” Sam said, following.

He knew he should let her be, at least for a while. If he'd found himself in an afterlife where the only other person was the closest thing remaining of the sorcerer who'd eaten him, Sam wouldn't want to spend another second with that person. But what if he left her alone and never found her again?

He needed an ally.

He needed someone. Anyone.

And maybe he owed Annabel.

He opened his mouth to say something, not knowing what he was going to say, but remained silent when he took in their surroundings.

The space was a jungle of white trunks and branches and tendrils. Pulses of light traveled along them, a great, crackling forest. Sam's skin prickled. The hair on his arms stood erect.

“I think we've found the brain,” Annabel said. Loose strands of her hair floated in a halo. “I'm going to go deeper in.”

Sam restrained himself from reaching out for her hand. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”

“Hell, no,” she said. “You got me into this mess. If I'm getting deeper in it, you're coming with me.”

Not letting her see him smile, Sam followed Annabel into the firedrake's brain.

 

FOURTEEN

Things were going decently well until Max got shot.

Gabriel's sigils had gotten him and Cassandra and Max through black tunnels and cold shafts, down decommissioned aqueducts and raging subterranean rivers. They had just inched past hydroelectric turbine blades whose barest touch would have removed a limb or a head or a bellyful of guts when Cassandra started getting uncomfortably inquisitive about his magic.

“That's quite a bag of tricks you've got there,” she said chirpily.

“They're not tricks. They're tools.”

“So, you packed the bomb nice and safe, right? You're not going to jiggle it and kill us all?” She remained chirpy. Maybe that was bothering Gabriel more than her nosiness.

“It's inert unless activated, and I activate it with a tuning fork. And, before you ask, the tuning fork is packed in a nice, padded case, if by chance I fall down again.”

“That sounds real good,” she said, and Gabriel hoped they were done.

Cassandra wasn't done.

“It's really a powerful bomb, right?”