Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan; Marianne S. Jablon

  Barrow was a giant fellow with a narrow face and a heavy cap of black hair that grew from his scalp and the back of his neck and between the blades of his strong shoulders. Born on one of the Northern Isles, he had left his homeland as a young man to escape one war, coming to this new country just in time to be thrown into a massive and prolonged civil conflict. Ten thousand miseries had abused him over the next years. But he survived the fighting, and upon his discharge from the Army of the Center, a grateful nation had given him both his citizenship and a bonus of gold coins. Barrow purchased a one-way ticket on the Western railroad, aiming to find his fortune in the wilderness. His journey ended in one of the new prairie towns—a place famous for hyrax herds and dragon bones. There he had purchased a pair of quality camels, ample supplies for six months of solitude, and with shovels enough to move a hillside, he had set out into the washlands.

  Sliding off the lead camel, he said, “Hold.”

  The beast gave a low snort, adjusting its hooves to find the most comfortable pose.

  Barrow knelt, carefully touching the dragon’s middle claw. Ancient as this artifact was, he knew from painful experience that even the most weathered claw was sharp enough to slash. Just as the fossil teeth could puncture the thickest leather gloves, and the edges of the great scales were nastier than any saw blade sharpened on the hardest whetstone.

  The claw was a vivid deep purple color—a sure sign of good preservation. With his favorite little pick, Barrow worked loose the mudstone beneath it, exposing its full length and the place where it joined into the front paw. He wasn’t an educated man, but Barrow knew his trade: this had been a flying dragon, one of the monsters who once patrolled the skies above a vanished seacoast. The giant paw was meant for gripping. Presumably the dragons used their four feet much as a coon-rascal does, holding their prey and for other simple manipulations. These finger claws were always valuable, but the thick thumb claw—the Claw of God—would be worth even more to buyers. As night fell, Barrow dug by the smoky light of a little fire, picking away at the mudstone until the paw was revealed—a palm-down hand large enough to stand upon and, after ages of being entombed, still displaying the dull red color made by the interlocking scales.

  The man didn’t sleep ten blinks. Then with first light he followed a hunch, walking half a dozen long strides up the gully and thrusting a shovel into what looked like a mound of ordinary clay.

  The shovel was good steel, but a dull thunk announced that something beneath was harder by a long ways.

  Barrow used the shovel and a big pickax, working fast and sloppy, investing the morning to uncover a long piece of the dragon’s back—several daggerlike spines rising from perhaps thirty big plates of ruddy armor.

  Exhaustion forced him to take a break, eating his fill and drinking the last of his water. Then, because they were hungry and a little thirsty, he lead both of his loyal camels down the gully, finding a flat plain where sagebrush grew and seepage too foul for a man to drink stood in a shallow alkaline pond.

  The happy camels drank and grazed, wandering as far as their long leashes allowed.

  Barrow returned to his treasure. Twice he dug into fresh ground, and twice he guessed wrong, finding nothing. The monster’s head was almost surely missing. Heads almost always were. But he tried a third time, and his luck held. Not only was the skull entombed along with the rest of the carcass, it was still attached to the body, the long muscular neck having twisted hard to the left as the creature passed from the living.

  It had been a quick death, he was certain.

  There were larger specimens, but the head was magnificent. What Barrow could see was as long as he was tall, narrow and elegant, a little reminiscent of a pelican’s head, but prettier, the giant mouth bristling with a forest of teeth, each tooth bigger than his thumb. The giant dragon eyes had vanished, but the large sockets remained, filled with mudstone and aimed forward like a hawk’s eyes. And behind the eyes lay a braincase several times bigger than any man’s.

  “How did you die?” he asked his new friend.

  Back in town, an educated fellow had explained to Barrow what science knew today and what it was guessing. Sometimes the dragons had been buried in mud, on land or underwater, and the mud protected the corpse from its hungry cousins and gnawing rats. If there were no oxygen, then there couldn’t be any rot. And that was the best of circumstances. Without rot, and buried inside a stable deep grave, an entire dragon could be kept intact, waiting for the blessed man to ride by on his happy camel.

  Barrow was thirsty enough to moan, but he couldn’t afford to stop now.

  Following the advice of other prospectors, he found the base of the dragon’s twin wings—the wings still sporting the leathery flesh strung between the long, long finger bones—and he fashioned a charge with dynamite, setting it against the armored plates of the back and covering his work with a pile of tamped earth to help force the blast downward. Then, with a long fuse, he set off the charge. There was a dull thud followed by a steady rain of dirt and pulverized stone, and he ran to look at what he had accomplished, pulling back the shattered plates—each worth half a good camel when intact—and then using a heavy pick to pull free the shattered insides of the great beast.

  If another dragon had made this corpse, attacking this treasure from below, there would be nothing left to find. Many millions of years ago, the precious guts would have been eaten, and lost.

  “But still,” Barrow told himself. “These claws and scales are enough to pay for my year. If it comes to that.”

  But it didn’t have to come to that.

  Inside the fossil lay the reason for all of his suffering and boredom: behind the stone-infected heart was an intricate organ as long as he was tall—a spongelike thing set above the peculiar dragon lungs. The organ was composed of gold and lustrous platinum wrapped around countless voids. In an instant, Barrow had become as wealthy as his dreams had promised he would be. He let out an enormous yell, dancing back and forth across the back of the dead dragon. Then he collapsed beside his treasure, crying out of joy, and when he wiped back the tears one final time, he saw something else.

  Eons ago, a fine black mud had infiltrated the dead body, filling the cavities while keeping away the free oxygen.

  Without oxygen, there was almost no decay.

  Floating in the old mudstone were at least three round bodies, each as large as the largest naval cannon balls. They were not organs, but they belonged inside the dragon. Barrow had heard stories about such things, and the educated man in town had even shown him a shard of something similar. But where the shard was dirty gray, these three balls were white as bone. That was their color in life, he realized, and this was their color now.

  With a trembling hand, Barrow touched the nearest egg, and he held his palm against it for a very long while, leaving it a little bit warm.

  2

  At one point, the whore asked, “Where did you learn all this crap?”

  Manmark laughed quietly for a moment. Then he closed the big book and said, “My credentials. Is that what you wish to have?”

  “After your money, sure. Your credentials. Yes.”

  “As a boy, I had tutors. As a young man, I attended several universities. I studied all the sciences and enjoyed the brilliance of a dozen great minds. And then my father died, and I took my inheritance, deciding to apply my wealth and genius in the pursuit of great things.”

  She was the prettiest woman of her sort in this town, and she was not stupid. Manmark could tell just by staring at her eyes that she had a good, strong mind. But she was just an aboriginal girl, tiny like all of the members of her race, sold by her father for opium or liquor. Her history had to be impoverished and painful. Which was why it didn’t bother him too much when she laughed at him, remarking, “With most men, listening is easier than screwing. But with you, I think it’s the other way around.”

  Manmark opened the book again, ignoring any implied insult.

  Quietly, he asked
the woman, “Can you read?”

  “I know which coin is which,” she replied. “And my name, when I see it. If it’s written out with a simple hand.”

  “Look at this picture,” he told her. “What does it show you?”

  “A dragon,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Which species of dragon?” Manmark pressed.

  She looked at the drawing, blowing air into her cheeks. Then she exhaled, admitting, “I don’t know. Is it the flying kind?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Yeah, I guess it isn’t. I don’t see wings.”

  He nodded, explaining, “This is a small early dragon. One of the six-legged precursor species, as it happens. It was unearthed on this continent, resting inside some of the oldest rocks from the Age of Dragons.” Manmark was a handsome fellow with dreamy golden eyes that stared off into one of the walls of the room. “If you believe in natural selection and in the great depths of time,” he continued, “then this might well be the ancestor to the hundred species that we know about, and the thousands we have yet to uncover.”

  She said, “Huh,” and sat back against the piled-up pillows.

  “Can I look at the book?” she asked.

  “Carefully,” he warned, as if speaking to a moody child. “I don’t have another copy with me, and it is the best available guide—”

  “Just hand it over,” she interrupted. “I promise. I won’t be rough.”

  Slowly, and then quickly, the woman flipped through the pages. Meanwhile her client continued to speak about things she could never understand: on this very land, there once stood dragons the size of great buildings—placid and heavily armored vegetarians that consumed entire trees, judging by the fossilized meals discovered in their cavernous bellies. Plus there had been smaller beasts roaming in sprawling herds, much as the black hyraxes grazed on the High Plains. The predatory dragons came in two basic types—the quadrupeds with their saber teeth and the Claws of God on their mighty hands; and later, the winged giants with the same teeth and Claws but also grasping limbs and a brain that might well have been equal to a woman’s.

  If the girl noticed his insult, she knew better than show it, her face down and nodding while the pages turned. At the back of the book were new kinds of bones and odd sketches. “What is this tiny creature?” she inquired.

  Manmark asked, “What does it resemble?”

  “Some kind of fowl,” she admitted.

  “But with teeth,” he pointed out. “And where are its wings?”

  She looked up, almost smiling. “Didn’t it have wings? Or haven’t you found them yet?”

  “I never work with these little creatures,” Manmark reported with a prickly tone. “But no, it and its kind never grew particularly large, and they were never genuinely important. Some in my profession believe they became today’s birds. But when their bones were first uncovered, the creatures were mistakenly thought to be a variety of running lizard. Which is why those early fossil hunters dubbed them ‘monstrous lizards’…”

  She turned the page, paused, and then smiled at a particular drawing. “I know this creature,” she said, pushing the book across the rumpled sheets. “I’ve seen a few shrews in my day.”

  The tiny mammal huddled beneath a fern frond. Manmark tapped the image with his finger, agreeing, “It does resemble our shrew. As it should, since this long-dead midget is the precursor to them and to us and to every fur-bearing animal in between.”

  “Really?” she said.

  “Without question.”

  “Without question,” she repeated, nodding as if she understood the oceans of time and the slow, remorseless pressures of natural selection.

  “Our ancestors, like the ancestors of every bird, were exceptionally tiny,” Manmark continued. “The dragons ruled the land and seas, and then they ruled the skies too, while these little creatures scurried about in the shadows, waiting patiently for their turn.”

  “Their turn?” She closed the book with authority, as if she would never need it again. Then, with a distant gaze, she said, “Now and again, I have wondered. Why did the dragons vanish from this world?”

  Manmark reminded himself that this was an aboriginal girl. Every primitive culture had its stories. Who knew what wild legends and foolish myths she had heard since birth?

  “Nobody knows what happened to them,” was his first, best answer.

  Then, taking back the book, he added, “But we can surmise there was some sort of cataclysm. An abrupt change in climate, a catastrophe from the sky. Something enormous made every large animal extinct, emptying the world for the likes of you and me.”

  She seemed impressed by the glimpse of the apocalypse. Smiling at him, she set her mouth to say a word or two, perhaps inviting him back over to her side of the great down-filled bed. But then a sudden hard knock shook the room’s only door.

  Manmark called out, “Who is it?”

  “Name’s Barrow,” said a rough male voice.

  Barrow? Did he know that name?

  “We spoke some weeks back,” the stranger reported, speaking through the heavy oak. “I told you I was going out into the wash country, and you told me to be on the lookout—”

  “Yes.”

  “For something special.”

  Half-dressed and nearly panicked, Manmark leaped up, unlocking the door while muttering, “Quiet, quiet.”

  Barrow stood in the hallway, a tall man who hadn’t bathed in weeks or perhaps years. He was grimy and tired and poorly fed and mildly embarrassed when he saw the nearly naked woman sitting calmly on the edge of another man’s bed. But then he seemed to recall what had brought him here. “You mentioned money,” he said to Manmark. “A great deal of money, if a hunter found for you—”

  “Yes.”

  “One or more of them—”

  “Quiet,” Manmark snapped.

  “Eggs,” whispered the unwashed fossil hunter.

  And with that, Manmark pulled the dullard into the room, clamping a hand over his mouth before he could utter another careless word.

  3

  Once again, the world was dying.

  Zephyr enjoyed that bleak thought while strolling beside the railroad station, passing downwind from the tall stacks of rancid hyrax skins. The skins were waiting for empty cars heading east—the remains of thousands of beasts killed by hunters and then cleaned with a sloppy professional haste. It was a brutal business, and doomed. In just this one year, the nearby herds had been decimated, and soon the northern and southern herds would feel the onslaught of long rifles and malevolent greed. The waste was appalling, what with most of the meat being left behind for the bear-dogs or to rot in the brutal summer sun. But like all great wastes, it would remake the world again. Into this emptiness, new creatures and peoples would come, filling the country overnight, and that new order would persist for a day or a million years before it too would collapse into ruin and despair.

  Such were the lessons taught by history.

  And science, in its own graceful fashion, reiterated those grand truths.

  “Master Zephyr?”

  An assistant had emerged from the railroad station, bearing important papers and an expression of weary tension. “Is it arranged?” Zephyr asked. Then, before the man could respond, he added, “I require a suitable car. For a shipment of this importance, my treasures deserve better than to be shoved beneath these bloody skins.”

  “I have done my best,” the assistant promised.

  “What is your best?”

  “It will arrive in three days,” the man replied, pulling a new paper to the top of the stack. “An armored car used to move payroll coins to the Westlands. As you requested, there’s room for guards and your dragon scales, and your private car will ride behind it.”

  “And the dragons’ teeth,” Zephyr added. “And several dozen Claws of God.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And four dragon spleens.”

  “Of course, sir. Yes.”

  Each of
those metallic organs was worth a fortune, even though none were in good condition. Each had already been purchased. Two were owned by important concerns in the Eastlands. The other two were bound for the Great Continent, purchased by wealthy men who lived along the Dragon River: the same crowded green country where, sixty years ago, Zephyr began his life.

  The spleens were full of magic, some professed. Others looked on the relics as oddities, beautiful and precious. But a growing number considered them to be worthy of scientific study—which was why one of the Eastland universities was paying Zephyr a considerable sum for a half-crushed spleen, wanting their chance to study its metabolic purpose and its possible uses in the modern world.

  Like his father and his grandfather, Zephyr was a trader who dealt exclusively in the remains of dragons. For generations, perhaps since the beginning of civilized life, the occasional scale and rare claws were much in demand, both as objects of veneration as well as tools of war. Even today, modern munitions couldn’t punch their way through a quality scale pulled from the back of a large dragon. In the recent wars, soldiers were given suits built of dragon armor—fantastically expensive uniforms intended only for the most elite units—while their enemies had used dragon teeth and claws fired by special guns, trying to kill the dragon men who were marching across the wastelands toward them.

  Modern armies were much wealthier than the ancient civilizations. As a consequence, this humble son of a simple trader, by selling to both sides during the long civil war, had made himself into a financial force.

  The fighting was finished, at least for today. But every government in the world continued to dream of war, and their stockpiles continued to grow, and as young scientists learned more about these lost times, the intrigue surrounding these beasts could only increase.

  “This is good enough,” Zephyr told his assistant, handing back the railroad’s contract.

  “I’ll confirm the other details,” the man promised, backing away in a pose of total submission. “By telegraph, I’ll check on the car’s progress, and I will interview the local men, looking for worthy guards.”