The Black Dragon

by Allyson James

  "lam possibly under a curse," Malcolm interrupted. "A white dragon has not tried to come here, has he?"

  Metz shot five feet into the air, indignation boiling off him. "A white dragon? A frost? Not bloody likely, not in my archive."

  "We have a mystery to solve," Malcolm said in his cool tones. "A white dragon sought out a witch to let him into the human world. He then killed the witch for whatever reason and tried to recruit Saba to help him, becoming violent when she refused. Several weeks ago, I began feeling the draining on me, which I dismissed until I found out that a frost dragon has been going back and forth to Dragonspace, up to something. And now something is wrong here."

  Metz had hung silently during this speech, his mouth open, but he suddenly hurtled himself around in a circle, coming to rest against Malcolm's head. "There's nowt wrong here. I keep a sharp eye out, I do."

  "Even you have to sleep sometimes, Metz."

  "Oh, you say. If you think I'm not good enough, then you can bloody well—"

  "Peace," Malcolm interrupted, more heat in his growl. "If anything has happened, I do not blame you. The archive is my responsibility. But there is something…"

  He scanned the air, putting his head to one side as he sometimes did when studying something in the human world. A dragon mannerism, Saba realized. One that didn't disappear when he changed form.

  Suddenly Malcolm opened his eyes wide, silver orbs catching the light of the crystals and throwing it back in a sweeping, outraged glow. "A book. He has stolen a book."

  Saba gazed at the clusters of crystals, thought about the enormous cavern from which they'd come and the hundreds of tunnels leading off it.

  "One book?" she asked. "How can you tell? This place has, Metz said, millions and millions of volumes."

  "Six trillion," Malcolm corrected her.

  "Even better. How can you know that one book has been taken without checking the entire collection? Which I'm betting would take years."

  "A niche was opened and the book removed," Malcolm explained in his cool Trust me until you catch up voice. "The amount of air the empty niche displaced has changed the pressure in the entire archive a fraction."

  Saba felt giddy. "You notice the difference in air pressure from the removal of one book?"

  "Yes," he answered absently, and she half expected him to continue, Don't you?

  Metz clearly didn't notice. "You must be mad, master. No one has come in here."

  "Go look," Malcolm said. "Twenty-seventh level, fifth corridor. The statistical probability of a book or scroll missing from that section is ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine-nine percent certain."

  "Bloody hell," Metz muttered, He slapped his wings together and hurtled himself through the opening to the main cavern.

  "I have the feeling I know which book it is," Malcolm said after he'd gone. "This will not be good."

  "I'm betting you know the statistical probability of its being that particular book within ten decimal places."

  "I do." Malcolm reached out with his claw and delicately touched a protruding blue crystal. Saba could not see what he read on it, if anything, but his eyes narrowed to slits. "And I am right," he said, almost under his breath.

  "About what? What is the book that's missing?"

  At that moment, Metz came zooming back in, his ugly face mottled red and white, his eyes sparking black rage. "He did it. Bloody thief got in past me. Damn his rotten-hearted…" Metz trailed off into barely intelligible words.

  "What is the book, Malcolm?" Saba repeated, trying to keep her voice calm.

  "The Book of All Dragons," Malcolm answered. "If a dragon has stolen that…"

  "Then you're buggered," Metz finished.

  "Why?" Saba asked, losing patience.

  Malcolm lowered his head to her. "Because anyone who possesses that book will be able to gain control over dragons. If we do not stop him, he can enslave all dragons, including myself, completely, or kill them, whichever he thinks is most expedient."

  In the tower room of the mansion in Pacific Heights, lit with witch light, the white dragon caressed the binding of the book with long, bloodless fingers. The Book of All Dragons.

  The witch Saba had thought him foiled when she refused him. The black dragon, Malcolm, thought him gone. Fools. Whoever held this book would have mastery over them all.

  He opened the book to a golden page that bore an etching of a white dragon, unfurled in all its glory. He read the name engraved on the opposite page, his own true name, revealed to anyone who found this book. Any dragon or witch that discovered his true name would have magical mastery over him, forcing him to obey all their commands, no matter how far physically they might be from him.

  The power of the true name was absolute, and now that Malcolm had returned to the human world, there was danger he'd find the book and learn the white dragon's name. And so the white dragon must make certain he never would.

  A frost dragon, beast of the north, clever, cunning, and hardy. White dragons did not possess the intellectual coldness of the black dragons or the warrior power of the goldens, but they did have one thing the others lacked. The overwhelming will to survive.

  A tray bearing a glass bottle and an eyedropper rested at his side. The white dragon unscrewed the bottle, an acrid odor wafting from it that made his eyes water. He took up the dropper, filled it, then carefully dripped acid onto the gold that bore his name. The lines began to blur, the gold smoking and running together.

  He let the page dry and harden, then he closed the book.

  Across the room, the drab little witch he'd found lurking near the house held a glass of champagne, but she didn't drink. Her hand shook, her muddy eyes fixed on him in terror. She wasn't much of a witch but she had a few talents, and with his mark on her, she'd be useful.

  The white dragon had the book. He had a witch.

  All was ready.

  He lifted his champagne glass, raised it to toast his new accomplice, and smiled.

  "If the book is so dangerous, why isn't it in a vault?" Saba demanded as she hurried after Malcolm toward the main cavern.

  "It was in a vault," Metz said, buzzing angrily behind her. "Locked behind the best magical security system in Dragonspace. In any space."

  In the cavern, Malcolm lifted Saba in his claw and flew with Metz to a tunnel that opened high above the cavern floor. They flew upward past honeycombed archives until the passage leveled out enough for her to walk again.

  As Saba looked around the relatively narrow tunnel, an eerie feeling swept through her like unbidden, unexplained panic. She stopped, her mouth dry, and Metz nearly ran into her.

  "I know this place," Saba rasped.

  The tunnel, lit by the magic crystal globes, ended in a blank wall about thirty feet from them. The walls glittered with gems and seams of gold like the cavern and database room below them, and niches that held books and scrolls and wax tablets pockmarked the walls. The end of the hall was empty, no passages leading right or left.

  Saba knew she had never been here—logically she knew that—but the image of the passage had imprinted on her mind, and with it, terror.

  "You know this place, do you?" Metz demanded, hovering. "Maybe she took it."

  Malcolm snaked his head down to her, light shimmering on the satin-black scales of his neck. "You have never been to the dragon archives. I told you there was no record of it."

  "I know that. I've never gone farther into Dragonspace than outside Lisa's apartment until today. But I've been here." She gazed at the walls and along the floor of the passage. "I have a very strong feeling of déjà vu, anyway. When I was here, I was scared out of my mind."

  "There's nowt to be afraid of in this archive," Metz said in a grumpy tone. "Excepting me."

  Saba ignored him. When she put her hand to the wall, she felt the huge pulse of energy of the archive, formidable, but not frightening. "I remember this corridor, and I remember darkness, very much like the darkness in the tower of that house where I did the s
pell with Annie."

  Metz zoomed to the end of the hall, then smacked his wings together, propelling himself straight upward. Saba saw that a vertical passage led upward at a right angle from this one. As Metz disappeared up it, Malcolm eyed her thoughtfully.

  "We should explore this memory you have. It might mean something."

  "I'm thinking so."

  Malcolm lifted her again and flew upward through the tunnel. He could move fast and with precision, despite his size, and wind rushed past Saba's face. They went up and up and up, a thousand feet and more, and emerged into another cavern, this one a little smaller than the one on the main floor.

  Saba felt thick and palpable magic in this place like humid heat on her skin. The wards had been carefully laid and then overlaid, probably throughout millennia, Malcolm's magic mixing with that of many other dragons. Anyone but a dragon would find the wards difficult to pierce, and even they would have trouble.

  "You see?" Metz said, flitting in front of a wide niche. "The securities are in place, all the protections, but the book is gone."

  "Let me see," Saba said.

  Malcolm rose until they were parallel to the niche. Only a flying creature could have come here; the walls were smooth and seamless, with no sign of boring or chipping where a human might have inserted climbing equipment.

  Saba felt it then, something wrong with the wards around the niche as though a thin spidery line had been drawn through them. She touched the wall beneath the empty hole. "A powerful spell did this."

  Metz puffed up. "None can do a spell in here without me knowing. 'Tain't possible, I tell ye."

  Saba touched the wall again. The ward had definitely been broken, but she could sense no aura of whoever had done it, not a human witch, not a dragon, no vestiges of lingering magic. This had been broken remotely.

  "Malcolm," she said, looking up at him. "I think you've been hacked."

  Metz hung at her eye level, his face bright red, eyes sparkling with fury. "Hacked? What the devil does that mean? Bloody witch speaks in riddles."

  "Hacked," she repeated. "Invaded by an outside force via computer. If you show me how to get into your database, I'll find out what happened."

  Half an hour later, she sat on a chair Metz had grudgingly dug up for her and looked at the bewildering readout on the LED monitor Metz had also found for her. In a back cave he had a collection of human computer parts he'd collected, using them as they helped, discarding them when they didn't. The result was a jumble that could be a collection for a computer museum.

  The interface was odd and cumbersome, but Saba soon learned the database's patterns. Programs, at their most basic level, were loops of simple commands, yes-or-no actions based on a series of questions. Databases asked for specific information from the user and decided answers to questions based on that input, or sorted data in increasingly complex ways based on answers to more questions.

  That was on the basic level. From there databases could become amazingly complex, but even so programs mostly broke down into two actions, Do I do this, or don't I?

  The archive computer was lovely, with magic built right into the design, the original programmers taking advantage of the natural vibrations of crystals and the various properties of the amethyst, quartz, gold, obsidian, and basalt already in the cliffs. Saba could linger for hours simply exploring the beauty of the system, but Malcolm and Metz stood behind her, both breathing down the back of her neck, Malcolm's exhalation being a little hotter.

  "There it is." Saba pointed to a string of code slightly different from the elegant lines Metz and other keepers of this database had woven. It was a virus meant to do nothing but disrupt a very specific loop in a very specific place.

  Metz peered at the screen, his buzzing wings perilously close to Saba's head. "How did that get there? I know nowt about it, I swear to you."

  "Of course you don't," Saba said before Malcolm could speak. "It's insidious and was done with extraordinary talent. They hooked up remotely, probably using a combination of dragon and witch magic—witch magic opening a portal to this computer—with one purpose, to steal that book."

  "No." Metz sounded heartbroken. He hung onto the rim of the screen as though he could make the code go away by glaring at it. .

  "Not your fault." Saba tried to be gentle. "Every programmer gets hacked, if only to prove how breakable the code is."

  "I disagree," Malcolm rumbled. "It was Metz's responsibility. And mine."

  "Malcolm." He wasn't helping.

  "His responsibility because he comfortably assumed this place was safe," Malcolm continued. "Mine because I left him here alone."

  "Because you thought you were the victim of a draining spell and needed to find out why," Saba argued.

  "Because I wanted to make sure you were all right."

  Their gazes locked, his exactly the same as when he was human. Saba's heartbeat sped, warmth flowing through her body. Her morning in the shower with him flashed through her head, his body so strong, his face set while he made love to her. She remembered the chill tiles on her back, the slick heat of his body against hers, the amazing feeling of him inside her.

  She made herself turn back to the database. "It doesn't matter whose fault it was," she said with effort. "We have to deal with what happened. The virus code is elegant, and what scares me is that I recognize it."

  Metz zoomed in a circle, his wings nearly knocking over the monitor. "You recognize it?" He waved a stubby finger. "She did it, she did it!"

  Saba's sympathy for him evaporated. "I didn't hack your system, Metz. I told you I didn't even know the dragon archive existed."

  "Not true. Up above, you said you'd seen it before."

  "In a dream." Thinking back in the haze of her mind, she realized she must have dreamed it. "A long time ago, probably. I can't explain. I certainly didn't sit down and devise a code to hack a system I knew nothing about."

  Malcolm interrupted. "What is the code, Saba? From where do you recognize it?"

  "From work. This code was devised by someone in my company. We found it in our own system early last fall and had a hell of a time getting it out. Tracing back, we figured out it had been done by someone who used to work there, before I started. Apparently she was a troublemaker, and when she was fired, she left a little time bomb."

  "She?" Malcolm asked, voice sharp.

  "Yes." Saba remembered the white-haired witch lying dead in the tower room of the mansion. "Her name was Rhoda… Rhoda Meyer. I never met her, but I'd be interested to see a picture of her."

  "So would I," Malcolm said softly.

  "I'll look her up when we get home. Don't want to risk it from here—you have enough problems without me tapping into the Internet."

  "The Internet," Metz spat. "A rudimentary network for base-born humans, so crude a two-year-old could destroy it. No, wait, a hatchling—"

  His diatribe was cut off by a rumble at the other end of the corridor, followed by a heavy odor of dust.

  "And what the bloody hell was that?" He shot away.

  Malcolm tested the air, his huge body expanding and contracting with his breath. He suddenly opened his eyes wide, expanding them into orbs of silver rage, the most emotion Saba had ever seen from him. "He dares."

  "Who dares what?"

  Malcolm swiveled his long body with surprising agility and skimmed across the crystalline room, one pump of his wings taking him into the tunnel. Saba's bangs stirred with the draft he created as she scrambled after him, scraping her hands on the rocks as she climbed back to the tunnel.

  "Malcolm!"

  He'd already disappeared into the cavern. She sped up just as another huge explosion sounded, this one larger than the last, followed by the sound of falling boulders and a cloud of choking dust. She heard Metz shouting, but no answer from Malcolm, not even a flicker of his magic.

  Saba sprinted down the hall in panic and emerged into the main cavern. It was dark with dust, the globes barely pinpricks of light in thick gloom. T
he entrance was gone, some of the ceiling collapsed, boulders and chunks of stalactites still clattering to the floor.

  "Malcolm?" she screamed. No answer. "Malcolm, where are you?"

  "Help me!" Metz's voice rang, and Saba ran for him, coughing. She found him buzzing madly around a pile of rubble made of slabs of basalt and thick boulders.

  "He brought down the cavern," Metz nearly screamed. "He's buried the master."

  "Malcolm's under there? What happened?"

  Metz hung in midair, wings flapping like crazy. "The entrance came down. Looks like another time bomb as you call it. The second explosion dropped half the roof on him. Help him!"

  Saba put her hands on one of the huge stone slabs that covered the floor of the vast cavern. The entrance was completely blocked, sealed fast by several tons of rock. If Malcolm was under there, even as a dragon, he was likely crushed, dead.

  She'd never move this rock, not by herself, not even magically. Yet, Metz hung next to her, wringing his hands, waiting for her to perform a miracle. Her heart tore. She couldn't lose Malcolm, not now, and she had no idea how to save him.

  She slapped both hands to the rock, leaving a smear of blood from her already scraped hands. "Malcolm," she said, tears in her voice. "What can I do?"

  MOVE!

  The thought struck her like a whiplash, ricocheting through the cavern and ringing from the ceiling. Metz recoiled and zipped to the topmost tunnel of the cavern and hung just inside it.

  The boulders began to shift. Saba dashed into the nearest corridor just as the mass of stone suddenly erupted in enraged dragon. Dust and rubble exploded through the cavern and streamed into the tunnel behind her. Saba fled deeper, dashing around a corner as the torrent of debris flooded the passage.

  Rocks rattled and dust cloaked the air. Saba turned her face to the wall and raised a quick power shield to keep the worst of the dust and flying pebbles from her. Shards of rock and crystal clicked on the shield and shattered to the ground.

  After a long time, the deluge of rock subsided, the rain of pebbles dying away into silence. Saba gingerly stepped into the corridor, pulling a fold of her shirt over her mouth and nose to keep out the dust. She made her way carefully back to the main cavern, her eyes stinging, broken rock and crystals crunching under her feet.