by Jaida Jones
That was the most famous battle in the past fifteen years, and William’s eyes widened enormously. “Were you there, Uncle Roy?” he asked, all his sullenness forgotten.
“More or less,” the Margrave said.
“Would you like a seat?” I asked, admittedly eager to hear the story myself.
“If it’s no trouble,” said the Margrave, who seemed to have only just realized there was but one comfortable chair in the entire room.
“Papa broke the other one,” William said sagely. “He was very angry.”
“He’d lost his favorite horse,” I explained, then drew up the chair for the Margrave. I caught him looking at me with a curious expression—I couldn’t understand it—but by the time I’d thought to look again for any clues to the puzzle, he wasn’t looking at me at all, turning instead to helping William scramble up beside him on the chair. I sat at his feet, knees drawn up to my chest.
“Are you quite all right down there?” the Margrave inquired. “Surely—though this is the country—there are other chairs to be had somewhere about the place.”
“Hal enjoys sitting in strange places,” William confided.
I felt my ears grow hot, and knew without having to see them for myself that they were as pink as my cheeks.
The Margrave cleared his throat; not entirely in disapproval, I thought, but it hardly mattered, as I was still blushing. “Is that so?” he said. “To each his own, it would seem.”
“Tell the story, Uncle Roy,” William pleaded, and I was grateful for the distraction.
“Which story was that? Oh, yes, Cobalt Range.” The Margrave closed his eyes for a moment, and sighed—not entirely happily, but with a certain pleasure in remembering. “Yes. Ten years ago, almost eleven. It was only my second campaign, and the first had hardly given me any experience at all. Now, a curiosity of the mountains is that no one wants to fight there for long. Though the higher ground is what counts, of course, in a battle, it’s a lot of mean, close-in fighting. You can’t get any space to fight, trapped like that, and space becomes very important when, well”—he paused, with a glance at William—“when there are a frightful amount of explosions going off all at once.”
“Brilliant,” said William happily, and the Margrave looked relieved. If he’d been worrying over William’s appetite for violence, he needn’t have done. Mme was often chasing him away from Cooke when he told his stories of terrible riding injuries and horses with broken bones.
“On the other side of the Cobalts,” he went on, “there is a valley. Imagine it like this: The Ke-Han city closest to our mountains is like a blue bowl, carved deep and smooth into the earth.” He spoke of it like a beautiful thing, respect lighting his eyes and touching his voice, though I thought that where the Ke-Han were concerned every man was a barbarian and in no position to be concerning himself with beauty.
“Now, this city of theirs,” the Margrave went on. “We thought that if we could push them back to it, get out of the mountains and into the open space, those of us with . . . particularly useful Talents—skills that were doing no one any good all pinned together as we were like sardines in a can—the fighting would end more quickly. And we did need it to end, because while much of our battle magic was rendered useless by proximity, theirs was doing just fine, and many men were dying.
“No one quite understands the Ke-Han magic. We do know that it’s something unique, feral and uncultivated when compared to ours. Something to do with the elements, though, and they seem particularly fond of wind. I think they focus on that because they know our air force—the Dragon Corps—is so vital to our successes past and present.
“Seven days they hammered at us with everything they had. The Reds took it the hardest, being commanded to fight no matter what, and most of them with no knowledge of magic save what their grandmothers had told them about the Well.” He shook his head, as though the memory was painful for him, but it was clearly an old hurt, long since healed over, and nothing that I recognized of that deeper hurt with which I was already familiar.
“They’d only spared twelve magicians on the Cobalts, and there were two and a half times more than that against us. Their leader was a man named Jiro, and he was clever, as much as I hated to admit it. He was going to keep us holed up in those mountains until we died of starvation, or ran out of soldiers, or both.”
“What about the dragons, Uncle Roy?” William’s mouth hung halfway open as though he were under some spellbinding enchantment.
“I’m getting to them, nephew of mine,” the Margrave said, poking the end of William’s nose with a heretofore unseen affection. Then he looked at me.
I swallowed, feeling peculiar—as though I were under some kind of enchantment myself. I tucked my knees in closer to my chest.
“We moved just after noon,” he went on, and this time his eyes did not leave my face. “Waiting until night would have given us better cover, but those dragons you love so much, young William, aren’t worth piss in the daytime. Pardon my vulgarity. By then the Ke-Han had done us so much damage that they’d grown complacent—assumed they’d already won the battle. There were the eight of my fellows left, along with the Fourteenth Company of Reds and a handful of the Ninth. The rocks were sharp and loose from over a week of near-constant assault, and pushing down through the mountain passes became like sliding on an ever-shifting sea of shale. One of our members had a Talent for concealment; this may very well have saved all our lives.
“Intelligence and more than an appropriate amount of guesswork told us that the Ke-Han were operating from an elaborate network of tunnels in the mountains. Of course, those tunnels were the only spot on the whole damned mountain—don’t tell your mother I used that word, William—where wind hadn’t hammered the rock to death. We slipped into the tunnels silent as shadows, the other magicians and I, while the Reds advanced farther into the city. We’d been promised air support if the dragons could untangle their wings from their asses in time. If they weren’t there by nightfall, then it wouldn’t much matter, either way.”
He sighed, rubbing his long fingers over his forehead as though he were suddenly weary, though in a moment it passed and I was left wondering if I’d been seeing things. I still didn’t understand Margrave Royston and his all-too-mercurial moods, but he smiled with far more teeth than strictly necessary, and it was better than the resignation from days before.
“It all went wrong in the tunnels. Jenkins knocked over some rock-rabble shrine, and released some damned wind spirit that started howling like fury. Of course the Ke-Han woke up, came pouring in from every direction; it was like being trapped in a rat warren. We ended up racing for our lives. By some miracle we ended up outside. I—I went last, collapsed the entire setup behind us.
“By then, of course, we’d caused such a ruckus that the city below was sending off alarm fireworks, bright red like fire in the darkening sky. Our colors.
“With the element of surprise lost, many of us no longer had anything to lose. The sun was dipping below the edge of the mountain range at our backs; in a few hours it would stain the sky as red as the soldiers’ coats. We descended into the city, Ninth Company at our backs and the Fourteenth with me in front.
“I . . . operate better if there isn’t anyone in the way, you see, as it wouldn’t do any good to go blowing away our allies.
“I don’t remember who it was who started singing the anthem, low and rolling. It moved through our battered little platoon like a wave until we were shouting it to the skies, song punctuated by blasts of rock and the shouts of our enemies. We made it nearly to the gates before they’d mustered almost enough of a force to greet us. We’d caught them off guard, remember, and most thought our campaign in the mountains quite over and done with.
“Jenkins died with a spear in his throat; it was a terrible way to go. And that’s—Well, that was when I lost my temper and blew a hole in the cerulean wall surrounding the city. Nearly killed myself in the process, interestingly enough, as there’s
only so much a magician can do with his own Talent before it starts to tug at his blood, and the wall was built with a very old magic. Still, it seemed like we might almost be massacred then and there, after all, with the Ke-Han screaming bloody murder with their deep-throated war cries, and crashing their enormous war gongs, and pouring out from behind the city walls like an endless stream of ants.
“Then the dragons came.
“It started as a high whine, like the whistle of a kettle. Then the sound changed, became akin to that of the wind spirits that had rushed through the tunnels earlier that morning. It was, of course, the sound of wings, metal and magic, beating the air—and turning the tides of battle, I like to think. They covered the sky, streaking copper and silver, platinum and gold, flashing their bellies and glinting ferociously in the moonlight. I’d never seen anything so beautiful in all my life.”
“Do they really breathe fire?” William asked.
I realized my mouth had been hanging open and closed it abruptly.
“In a way,” the Margrave answered, and his eyes lost the distance they’d gathered with his story. “The city certainly burned, I know that much.”
“It’s a mechanism,” I said. My throat was dry, my tongue no more useful to my needs than a rock. “I . . . I think,” I added, very soon after that, for this was the Margrave’s story, and surely he knew better than I.
“Indeed, it is that,” the Margrave confirmed. “A complicated business—another story entirely—and perhaps one I’ll tell you tomorrow. What do you say?”
“Please,” William said, though he never liked to use the word unless he was coerced or tricked into it. I couldn’t help but smile. “Is that really your Talent, Uncle Royston? Blowing things up?”
“Ah,” the Margrave replied. “That’s . . . well . . . in a way. It’s very hard to explain.”
“Will you explain that tomorrow, too?” I was grateful for William’s questions, since they were the ones I wanted to ask for myself but couldn’t. I tried not to look too eager for a favorable reply.
“Indeed,” the Margrave said. It wasn’t the first time I found him watching me—as if he could see my wishes because I was very poor at hiding them. “I think, nephew, that I shall.”
That night I dreamed of the war cry of the Ke-Han, and Margrave Royston in the tunnels at Cobalt, at that time scarcely more than my own age, much as I would have dreamed of any favorite roman. When I woke, I was almost disappointed to recall it had no bearing on my life at all.
THOM
Chief Sergeant Adamo and Airman Balfour met me at the door. From within, I could catch wisps of a melody—one I didn’t recognize—as picked out on the keys of a piano. I could smell, too, the scent of the clove cigarettes certain professors and Margraves of the Basquiat smoked.
Above all that, though, was the smell of fire.
It wasn’t simply something as commonplace as the sulfurous gasp of a match struck or a candle lit. It was real fire, the killing kind, the sort that ripped through cities and trapped children in their little rooms—fire hot enough to melt metal—and the thick, dark smoke groaning at its heel, cruel and suffocating. I didn’t like fire of that unpredictable, violent nature. I had my reasons for that, too.
My stomach turned over at the scent, but it was a grounding revulsion, one that reminded me who I was and the relative insignificance of what I’d been asked to accomplish. I didn’t know where the dragons themselves were—I assumed I wasn’t important enough to see them up close—and rather than overstepping my bounds, I simply allowed a young, rather grimy man to take my suitcase.
“Your quarters’re this way,” Adamo grunted.
Balfour fiddled with the thumb of his left glove. “It’s only a couch,” he said. “And a sort of . . . standing curtain. It won’t be very quiet. Niall wakes up early and he likes to sing while he makes breakfast, but in any case—I wanted to tell you—if you wake up and your hand feels funny, wet sort of, whatever you do don’t bring it up to your face.”
“Oh,” I said, and I must have looked something awfully unhappy, because Balfour’s face fell.
Adamo stifled what might have been a laugh or might have been a cough behind the palm of his broad hand. “If you’re stupid enough to fall for it,” he said gruffly, “then you get what you deserve.”
“No one deserves a blue face,” Balfour said quietly.
I was inclined to agree with him.
As I already knew, the Airman was a hideous, blunt building, erected in the modern style and designed for efficiency over beauty. It was somewhat nicer on the inside, I was relieved to note, though not by very much. It was also a mess. There were boots strewn about the hallway, and coats in disarray, so that I almost tripped over one. There was even a shirt and what appeared to be a pair of ladies’ undergarments. I realized all at once that these men had no idea how to clean up after themselves, and no awareness that they even should. I wondered what unpleasant smells the permeating scent of burning and the clove cigarettes masked, and found myself quite relieved I might never have cause to know.
I wasn’t their nanny, and I wasn’t their maid. I was their instructor in the skeleton of basic decency; I would teach them how to interact as humans rather than animals. What they did with their women’s undergarments was up to them.
“And there’s Niall’s bunker, and Magoughin’s,” Balfour was in the process of telling me, “and there’s the first row of showers. You sign up in advance, unless you’ve been out on a raid, and then you’ve got first priority whether you’ve signed up or not.”
“Um,” I said, though I didn’t mean to sound stupid. “Why’s that?”
“Oh,” Balfour said, as if it were perfectly common sense, “to wash off all the ash, of course.”
“Ah,” I said, and promptly decided to keep my mouth shut.
“That’s the common room, the one for music and smoking—and there’s the private common room, for when you’re engaged with a . . . ah . . . companion for the evening, or the afternoon, or whenever you’ve got off-hours.”
A belch of perfume hit me from beyond the half-open door. It reminded me of my childhood, and I stepped quickly past it.
“That’s command,” Adamo said, jerking a hand toward a room across the way. “You don’t go in there.”
“Yes,” Balfour agreed. “No one goes in there but Chief Sergeant.”
“Duly noted,” I assured them both.
I wondered where the rest of my welcoming committee was, or if they’d sent Balfour and Adamo ahead to lull me into a false sense of security while they waited just around the corner like jumping spiders, ready to strike.
“And there’s my bunker, and there’s Rook’s, and there’s Merritt’s,” Balfour continued, still giving me the grand tour. I didn’t entirely see that it was necessary. I didn’t think I would be spending much time inside any of these forbidding little rooms, their doors staunchly, disapprovingly, locked against me. It was, however, good to make note of which room not to stumble into in the dead of night, thinking it would be the right place to have a drink of water or to relieve myself.
“You may notice the rooms are all scattered-like,” Adamo said. Indeed, I had, and I said as much. “The docking area’s below,” he explained. “Each man sleeps above his dragon.”
“When we’re needed, the air-raid bell sounds,” Balfour added. “There’s a trapdoor for each of us that lets us down into each of our private bays directly.”
“The long way ’round isn’t one you need to know, either,” Adamo said. “The docks are off-limits.” And that was most emphatically the end of that.
“Understood,” I assured him.
“Now, Rook’s out tonight,” Adamo added, privately, and I was embarrassed to learn how easily everyone had seen through me, embarrassed to feel Balfour’s eyes moving between the two of us. “We thought it’d be for the best. And, knowing him, he won’t be back for a day at the least.”
Before I could stop myself, I said, “But th
’Esar—”
Adamo’s look hardened. “We’re not much used to having th’Esar in direct command of us,” he said evenly. “Seeing as how he doesn’t pilot a dragon, himself.”
“Ah,” I said. As they’d have noted in Molly, I’d stepped in it. “Of course.”
I was quickly beginning to understand that conversation with any of the airmen outside of the requisite teachings would be akin to running the gauntlet. In a Ke-Han minefield.
“Here you are,” Balfour piped up, gesturing to a plain standing screen that had been pulled haphazardly across an alcove. This was where the couch was.
I examined my new living space—it could hardly be called a room—with trepidation.
It was a largish couch, I’d give them that. Of course, it made sense that th’Esar would spare no luxury when it came to his precious Dragon Corps. I wondered if he even knew the extent of what went on down at the Airman when his influence wasn’t physically present. I wondered if there would be certain things that I was to omit from my reports, and how I would know what was to be deemed information to which th’Esar didn’t need to be privy. I felt the onset of a headache creeping from my temples to the bridge of my nose, knowing that if I got it wrong, the airmen would likely feed me to the dragons.
You are accountable only to the Chief Sergeant, I reminded myself. I would make my report, then Adamo himself could discern what information he wanted to share with the head of the nation. That would save me from trying to navigate the pitfalls of that particular arrangement, and also from trying to understand the strange circadian logic that governed these men. I did not at all cherish the deep anxiety fostering in my gut that came from not knowing what to expect.
“Ivory’s on your left.” Balfour tugged his right glove on tighter, gesturing farther down the hall to another room, which had been placed as all the rest: with no real rhyme or reason. The man who had designed the building must have been a genius or a madman or both. “He’s very quiet, so you might not be . . . bothered.”
