Dragon Coast (7 page)

It was too much for Sam. “Am I dreaming you?”

Annabel Stokes frowned. “You have vivid dreams, do you? Been practicing dreaming things into life? Working hard at it?”

“No.”

“Then what makes you think you suddenly got a brain that can dream a whole person into life?”

“Sorry,” Sam said. “It's just that, I don't really understand how things work in here. I figured I was sort of dreaming myself, maybe, and now you're here, so maybe you're a manifestation of some other compartment of my consciousness.”

Annabel didn't seem to think much of Sam's explanation.

“Well, anyway, I'm glad I finally found someone. How long have you been in here?” he asked again.

She gave him a guarded look, as if trying to decide if she should answer him or crack him over the head.

“I don't know,” she said. “Days, weeks, years … there's no day or night here, no chronometer. And I'm pretty sure my sleep cycle's glitched. The last day I clearly remember was Monday, June fifth. I was in the Ossuary, getting my work station ready—”

“The Ossuary?” Sam interrupted.

“I work for the Council. I'm an osteomancer.”

Only high-level osteomancers actually worked in the Ossuary, and if she worked there, that meant she'd worked close to the Hierarch himself.

Sam concentrated on keeping his face neutral. “Sorry, go on.”

“I'd been having such a good day, too. Nice bones to work with, my mixtures were coming out right … I was working with hydra regenerative.”

Sam played dumb. “Regenerative?”

“Yeah. It's a healing agent. We extract it from hydra bones. The job is teasing the most essence out of the least possible amount of raw bone, which is really important when you're trying to spread it across four dozen frontline field hospitals.” She paused. “I'm talking too much. I'm so used to babbling to myself, I forgot there's actually a poor sap stuck here listening to me.”

“I don't mind,” Sam said. “I haven't had anybody babble at me in a long time.”

Her mention of the front line, and of field hospitals, and the way she was dressed, all added up to make Sam think the Monday she remembered happened a very long time ago. Maybe more than half a century past.

“A runner came up to me with a note. An invitation.” She seemed reluctant to continue.

“An invitation,” Sam prompted.

“An invitation to dinner. From the Hierarch.”

“Oh,” Sam said, fully understanding. “Oh.”

“Right. So, I did what any sensible gal would do. I went to the ladies' room and tried to escape out the window. Didn't get far.” Her hand drifted to her belly. “That's the last thing I remember before finding myself here.”

Sam had a feeling she remembered more, but he didn't push. Everything that came after the Hierarch's dinner invitation wasn't anything Sam needed to hear about.

“So, what about you, Sam? What's your story?”

Daniel would have warned Sam to reveal nothing because Daniel's world was one of enemies. And what would Annabel think about him once she found out he was the golem of the man who ate her?

On the other hand, Sam was lonely, and he had to tell her something that was true.

“I'm late of Los Angeles, the Salton Sea, and just about everywhere else in Southern California. The thing we're in, the firedrake … it was a project of the Northern realm, with help from some jerks in Southern California. I was trying to sabotage it. But it didn't work out the way I hoped, and here I am. I came down to the belly hoping to disable the dragon's ability to make fire.” He glanced back toward the chamber housing the fire bag. “I figure the big sack is part of its fire-generation system.”

“Yeah. But why do you want to disable it?”

“Don't you know what the dragon's been up to?”

“Raising hell, from the sounds of it.”

“It just annihilated a whole neighborhood,” Sam said. “There must be hundreds dead.”

“And that wasn't your aim? To burn everything down?”

“No,” Sam said, outraged. “Why would I want that?”

“Hm. My mistake. I thought it was you piloting. Who's up in the cockpit, then?”

“Well, me, usually. But I'm not in control.”

She puffed out air. “This train's a runaway volcano, that's for sure. Well, mind if I have a look upstairs? I've been dying to know what's up there.”

“Why didn't you just come up?”

“I tried to find it a few dozen times. Always got turned around and lost. How long did it take you to make your way down here?”

“I don't know. Not very long, I don't think.” The journey from the cockpit to the fire belly seemed like a half hour or so, but without a way to keep time, he couldn't be sure. He'd heard of people being trapped in coal mines for weeks and thinking only a few days had passed.

This wasn't fun to think about. If he ever managed to get out of here, would Em and Daniel still be around? Maybe they'd be long dead and crumbled to dust.

“Well,” Sam said, “come see my part of the world.”

*   *   *

The earth was in shadow and the sun hung on the far western horizon, bathing the sky with purples and pinks and golds. Granite ridges dusted with snow loomed ahead. Pine trees fringed the base of the mountain, and beyond them sprawled a valley of dry, fissured desert.

Annabel cast her gaze over Sam's control panel, clucking and humming in a way that could mean she was impressed with what she saw, or else just the opposite. She squinted at the view outside the dragon's eyes.

“What are we doing over the Sierras?”

“The dragon roosts here sometimes,” Sam said.

Annabel took this in, knowing and worried, like an old mariner witnessing the early warnings of a typhoon. “You ever read Yang's treatise on the transitive essences of dragon species?”

“That one must have been checked out of the library.”

“Where were you schooled, anyway? You're not an academy brat?”

“No. I learned from…” He almost said Daniel's name. Probably not a good idea. “I had a private tutor. What about you?”

“I'm self-taught. No money in my family for academies. But I found an old osteomancer's library and workshop in a locked-up building my grandfather used to rent out, and that was enough to get me started.”

“That must have been a hell of a good library,” he said.

She shrugged. “Came with everything I needed.”

Sam would bet her education was a little more complicated than that. A lot of osteomancers began their careers by feeding on other osteomancers. Finding yourself a nice, old, juicy sorcerer to eat could give you a good leg up.

“So what does Yang say about dragons?”

“Firedrakes like mountaintops,” Annabel said. “Even the ocean-born. They like to perch on high and search out suitable prey.”

“It can't be hungry again already. We just ate a gray whale.”

“Food's not the only thing dragons hunt.”

Just as Sam began to wonder what else the dragon might be after, a blast of air rushed into the cockpit, strong enough to flap Sam's pant legs.

“It's scenting,” Annabel said, and her face looked grave. “It wants something bad.” She took three sharp sniffs. “You smell that? That's some strong osteomancy.”

Sam did. Not just magic, but a magic as familiar to him as his own. He'd grown up with that smell, and it brought a mix of emotions: comfort, and fear, and resentment, and love.

There was no other osteomancy quite like this. There was no osteomancer quite like its source.

He was smelling Daniel.

The firedrake climbed a few hundred feet and wheeled around, aiming for a stony peak shaped like a weathered flint ax.

“Ah, that's Mount Whitney,” Annabel said with warm appreciation. “Tallest peak in the Southern realm. A very fine place for dragon.”

Sam leaned over the controls. Even in the fading light, he made out three human forms, bundled up against the howling cold.

Daniel was looking back at him through binoculars.

Daniel had done it.

He'd found Sam. He'd crossed the kingdom, he'd figured out a place where the firedrake might show, he'd baited the air with his own scent, and he'd climbed more than fourteen thousand feet to find Sam. And of course Moth was with him, his ridiculous, giant shadow. And Em, not because she was loyal to Daniel, but because she was loyal to Sam.

Sam raised his hand in a greeting he knew none of them could see.

“You know those folks?” Annabel asked.

“Friends of mine,” Sam said.

“Looks like two of your friends are fixing to fire a harpoon at us.”

Sam smiled. He'd wondered what Daniel was planning to do once he tracked down the dragon. He bet Daniel had gone through quite a bit of trouble to obtain whatever bone was on the end of the harpoon.

Sam wanted the firedrake to hover there and take whatever was coming to it. He only wished he could find a way to let Daniel know it was okay, because if things went wrong and Daniel ended up killing him, Sam didn't want Daniel to spend the rest of his life moping around with guilt.

The harpoon flew at the dragon. There was not so much as a bump, a shudder, or even a noise when it struck the dragon's belly. But Sam could tell right away something was happening. The dragon's wing beats slowed.

Annabel sniffed the air. “That smell like alp to you?”

“No. What's alp?”

“It's a shape changer. Doesn't even have a native form. But you can cook it into a powerful tranquilizer.”

“Powerful enough to put the firedrake to sleep?”

“Not unless it's mixed by a phenomenally good osteomancer. Are your friends phenomenally good osteomancers?”

“One of them is,” Sam said as the dragon lost altitude. It reached out with a talon, tearing loose tons of rock, and kept sinking. The floor pitched, and Sam and Annabel grabbed on to the pilot's chair for balance.

“I think your friends might actually manage to put the dragon to sleep. What do you think they have planned for us next? You think they can kill us?”

The dragon's wings stopped beating. It fell, crashing against the mountainside. Boulders shattered into shrapnel. The dragon dragged massive parcels of rock and dirt in its wake as it slid down the slope to a precarious rest on a ledge.

“They're not going to kill us,” Sam said, trying not to hope too much. “I think they're going to save us.”

“How?”

“I don't know. But Daniel will.” Annabel's life was in as much jeopardy as Sam's. She had a right to know Daniel's name. She had a right not to have secrets kept from her.

Annabel made a skeptical noise. “I don't think those airships are part of his plan.”

Sam looked out the dragon's eye where she was pointing. Three enormous airships cruised in from the west across the desert.

They weren't from the Southern realm. They were from the North.

 

SEVEN

Gabriel lived in a windowed perch above the Mulholland Locks. His views spanned the San Gabriel Mountains to the towers of downtown, all the way out to the sea. On clear nights it was as if an entire skyful of stars had fallen and shattered across the Los Angeles basin.

He came home after an eighteen-hour workday to find Daniel Blackland enjoying the view from his living room couch.

Gabriel set down his briefcase and hung his coat. “Can I get you something to drink?”

Daniel lifted a bottle of wine to him. “No need.”

“Is that the ninety-three Wolfskill cabernet?”

“I didn't read the label. It tastes like smog.”

“The ninety-seven, then. You look beat.” Daniel always looked a little beat: thin, unshaven, hair cropped by a box cutter. One of his hands was bundled with a comically large bandage. “What happened to you?”

“Where's your hound?” Daniel said, ignoring the question because he always seemed to get a kick from evading questions put to him by authority figures, and despite the frightening power that resided in his bones, he considered Gabriel an authority figure.

“By ‘hound' I think you're referring to the assistant director of the Department of Water and Power?”

“Wow, you're starchy today. Isn't that what I said?”

“Not even close. To what do I owe this visit, Daniel?”

Daniel took a swig of Gabriel's wine. “I suppose you know where I've just come back from.”

“Well, I know you hired Isaac Slough to grow a new body for Sam. But I'm not actually spying on you. However, your face is pretty chapped, even though we've had wet weather the last two weeks. Out to sea? Mountaintop?”

Daniel raised the bottle at “mountaintop.”

“Mount Whitney. I found Sam there. Then lost him.”

“Lost him to whom?”

“The Northern realm.” Daniel took a swig.

Gabriel lowered himself into the opposite chair. He relieved Daniel of the bottle and took a long pull. “Tell me what happened on the mountain.”

Daniel told him about the airships and the Northern soldiers, and how he watched them carry the dragon away. He told him about his visit to Hollywood Cemetery, and how he obtained a small piece of the
axis mundi
dragon. Gabriel pretended he didn't know what that was.

“Basically,” Daniel said, “it's like a soul magnet. I hoped to use it to draw Sam's consciousness from the firedrake, store it in the bone, and then put his consciousness inside Slough's golem.” Daniel let out a small, bitter laugh. “It sounds so straightforward when I say it like that.”

“Maybe not straightforward in execution, but certainly in concept.” Gabriel liked it. It was neat, with clear objectives and mileposts. “So, the only thing that's changed is now instead of drawing the firedrake to a mountaintop, you have to find it in the Northern realm.”