by Devin Hanson
Andrew cocked an eyebrow at Ava and smothered his grin before it could form. He cleared his throat, said in an equally grave manner, “Jules Vierra asks permission to retrieve the package.”
Ava tilted her head to regard Andrew closer. “She has my permission. I do not know why she asks.”
“It’s, well,” Andrew struggled to come up with a good explanation that the dragon would understand. “Apparently she read in a book that it was the polite thing to do.”
“She is not wrong.” Ava said gravely, “But she is yours. She has permission.”
“Ah.” Andrew cleared his throat again, hoped it was too dark for Jules to see him blushing furiously. Speaking of awkward things to translate. “She gives permission,” he said to Jules, wondering, not for the first time, what changed about his voice that made his conversations between humans and dragons unintelligible. He wasn’t aware of making any different sounds, yet Jules and other humans didn’t understand him when he spoke to Ava, and vice versa. Thank the tiny gods for small mercies.
Jules straightened from her bow and approached the dragon, scratching behind the massive jaw on her way to the satchel crushed to the ground beneath one forepaw. Ava lifted her clawed hand delicately when Jules drew close and allowed her to untangle the leather strap from about the toes. There seemed to be an inordinate amount of leather strapping, actually a web of straps, Andrew saw as he leaned over to see what was going on. Evidently, Milkin had rigged up some contraption to tangle around Ava’s claws, ensuring the dragon wouldn’t drop the package en route.
Finally getting it free, Jules gave Ava one last scratch and retreated to a polite distance.
“She may stay if she scratches,” Ava said, a hint of longing in her tone.
“Business first,” he said, struggling to keep the laughter out of his voice and knowing he failed. “Then scratches after.” To Jules, he added, “Ava would like it if you would scratch her after we finish with whatever is in that satchel.”
Jules looked up from trying to untangle the webbing, surprised. “What? I mean, of course.” She swallowed, “She wants me to?”
“Begging, actually.” Andrew grinned at the flicker of confused emotion on Jules’s face. “Don’t let on, though, or she’ll be insufferable.”
Jules bent her head back to the satchel, finally working the webbing free and flipping it open. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to Ava,” she said as she pulled out the oilcloth-wrapped folder inside. “She’s like a puppy or something. That speaks. And flies and eats people.”
“And older than history and smart, too,” Andrew added. “But yes. Also like a puppy. Sometimes, I think it is her wisdom that lets her enjoy the little things. Only with age and experience can someone come full circle and get such enjoyment from something as simple as scratches.”
Jules looked at him, confused, then put her attention back on the folder. It held a sheaf of paper, closely covered with the precise, spidery scrawl of Milkin’s hand. She hefted the satchel, and it clinked with the sound of dozens of pureglass vials.
“We’ve got some work to do,” Jules said.
“Ava should smell those samples. Hold on, I’ll get a torch.”
Jules got her own torch out, and a few sheets of paper. “You want to call them off, and I’ll take notes?”
Andrew grunted in agreement and drew the leather vial bandoleer out of the satchel. It was full of vials, each one with a tiny ruby glint in the bottom. “Ava, we have blood samples. The ith is gathering allies and wants to be sure of them.”
“This is slow,” Ava said, “but right.”
“Okay,” Andrew called to Jules. “First one, Professor Kilpatri.” He ran his dagger around the wax seal and popped the cork free, then held it up for Ava to smell.
“It is clean,” the dragon pronounced.
“Chalk one up for the good guys. Next vial, Meria Yale.”
After the last vial was unsealed and Ava declared it was clean, Andrew worked his hand, sore from working the wax seals free. “You know, Ava says you don’t have to ask permission to approach her.”
“I don’t?” Jules put the papers she was reading down. “I understood dragons insisted on it.”
“They do.” Andrew struggled to find a way to communicate what Ava had said without coming across like an idiot. “It can go horribly wrong if someone fails to ask permission. But, uh, you, specifically, do not need to ask permission with Ava.”
“Why not?”
Andrew spread his hands in a weary gesture. “She gave me a reason, but I’m not sure you’d understand.”
Jules put the folder back in the satchel and stood, hands on her hips, “Try me.”
“She’s, uh, sensed that you and I…” he hurried forward, cringing a little at the look on Jules’s face. “Not like that. But more than that. She knows you wouldn’t betray me, and that I would do anything for you.” That came out totally wrong.
Jules’s face screwed up. “She’s just sensed that, huh? Are those your words or hers?”
“Uh, look. You’ve got this all wrong. Dragons form relationships very rarely, but when they do, they go quite deep. Like a husband and wife who’ve been married for sixty years, but at the drop of a hat. She senses something like that between us, and respects it. That’s all.”
“Married for sixty years?” Jules’s voice was incredulous, but she was smiling a lopsided little grin. Andrew couldn’t tell if her reaction was good or bad. “She knows I’m not that old, right?”
“She, uh, hasn’t mentioned it one way or another. I’m just trying to put human perspective to what she’s said.”
“Why don’t you tell me what she said, then? Without running it through this,” she rapped Andrew on the forehead with a knuckle.
“Ow. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t like it.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Well, okay. You asked for it. Verbatim, she said, ‘She is yours. She has permission.’ That’s what she said.”
“I see.” Jules eyed him for a moment, one hand on her hip, the other playing around the hilt of her knife. “And do you feel that’s an accurate summation?”
“Look, you didn’t like my translation. I’m just trying–”
“Is that what it means to you, then?”
“What do you want me to say, Jules? No, you don’t belong to me. But you’re one of two people in this world I trust fully. If you want me to put my own meaning to what Ava said, you are of me, part of me, equal to me. I don’t know. I’m not even making sense to myself anymore.”
Jules folded her arms and looked at Andrew critically. “All of that?”
Andrew shrugged, hands spread wide. “I don’t know, alright? It’s the best I could do. Maybe if I was a poet or something I wouldn’t make such a burning hash of it.”
“Hmph.” Jules looked up at Ava, and Andrew realized the dragon had been watching them interestedly throughout the whole conversation. He wondered how much the dragon had understood. She might not understand the words, but the tone and body language communicated plenty on their own. “Well,” Jules said, brushing past him and going to run her hands around Ava’s cheek spines, “keep working on it, let me know when you’ve got it figured out to your satisfaction.”
Andrew couldn’t see her face clearly, but he could have sworn she was smiling. Had he said the right thing? Was there even a right thing to say? His experience with women was entirely non-existent. He had had a few childhood crushes, even a girl that he had known in one of the villages his parents would frequent on their trading circuit that he had kissed once or twice. But right when he was just building any real interest in girls, he had joined up with the fateful airship crews to fight the dragon over Ardhal.
After that, he hadn’t really been in the position to educate himself on the subject. The types of women who showed interest in filthy dragon-dung haulers, half-starved and smelling of cinnamon, he had instinctively avoided for his own safety. Now he was in uncharted waters or flying
above the cloud layer with no landmark in sight, pick your analogy.
Jules hadn’t stabbed him, so things hadn’t gone totally wrong. He decided to take that as a benchmark for his relationship success. No stabbing so far. Maybe next time he opened his fat mouth he could try raising the yardstick a little higher. Maybe a smile or a laugh would be a good goal.
Jules said something, and Andrew came swimming up out of his spiraling introspection and had to ask her to repeat herself.
“I said the contents of the folder were interesting.”
“Interesting? You read all of it?” Andrew was having a hard time focusing on the new topic.
Jules ignored that, focusing on digging her fingers between Ava’s scales, much to the dragon’s evident pleasure. “No, but I can guess. Milkin wrote out a score of sheets of paper, both sides. If he had turned up specific names, those would have been right at the front of the packet. If he was in danger, it would have been brief. No, it’s probably a progress report, along with a blow-by-blow of how the Academy is reacting to there being a real Dragon Speaker.”
After Andrew’s display of alchemical prowess, Jules and Milkin had ventured out into the night in the early hours of the morning. They had found Andrew still awake, talking with Ava. Andrew’s explanation of the threat of the Kossante, or Incantors, was met by a complete lack of surprise on Milkin’s part. Andrew played back the conversation again, remembering his own astonishment at Milkin’s revelation.
“Yes,” Milkin had said, his silky white hair drifting about in the early morning breeze. “I know of the Incantors.”
Jules, standing by his side, spun about, her eyes wide. “What? You never mentioned them to me!”
“Of course not!” Milkin growled. “The secret of the Incantors was just the sort of thing you’d go chasing off after if you knew about it, and without the proper care. Best case, you end up dead, worst case you become one of them.”
“So you’ll give the blood sample?” Andrew asked.
Milkin whipped out a knife, a petite folding job with a narrow blade used for opening letters. Without a pause, he cut the ball of his thumb and held it up to the dragon.
Ava whuffed, sending sand swirling about their ankles. “He is no Kossante,” she proclaimed.
“You don’t need to, I don’t know, taste it or something?”
“The scent is plain. It is enough.”
Andrew conveyed the good news, and a tension Andrew hadn’t been aware of drained out of the group. He apologized to Milkin, and the old man got angry in return. “You had every right to demand it of me,” he snapped. “To fail to do so would have been a grievous mistake. Beware the man who tries to make you feel bad for requesting such a test, Andrew. That man has something to hide.”
“So, the Incantors are real,” Jules murmured, wrapping her arms about herself. “I had hoped they were an imagining of Ava’s… no offense.”
“Oh,” Milkin had assured her, “they are quite real.”
“So the stories are true?” Andrew asked. “Jules mentioned a few of the legends.”
Milkin paused, mulling it over. “I would say some are, for certain. Even my knowledge is second-hand at best. One thing they all agree on, an Incantor does not need a vitae source to perform certain alchemical actions. In a way, they are themselves a flux, though the exact details of how they store vitae and use it are vague.”
“Why don’t you ask Ava?” Jules suggested. “She probably knows all about them.”
Andrew looked up at the dragon doubtfully. “Perhaps. She was rather adamant about not sharing the information, though.”
“She is concerned about the spread of corruption,” Milkin said. “Same reason I didn’t tell you about the Incantors, Jules. The less that is known about them, the better.”
“Yeah, until we have to fight them,” Jules said sourly. “Then we end up dead.”
“We need a plan, some way to communicate,” Andrew said, “If we’re going to be fighting these Incantors, we have to have a way of sharing information. The mail is far too slow. It’ll take months for a letter to go from Nas Shahr to Andronath during a war.”
“Not to mention the Academy wanting news on what is happening with the Dragon Speaker,” Milkin said, smugly.
They had fallen to brainstorming, and it was Milkin who came up with using Ava as a relay. When Andrew put the suggestion to Ava, she agreed, allowing how it would be much faster if there was another kossirith on the other end. Dragons, it seemed, didn’t consider distance to be a communication block.
And now, Ava’s delivery of the satchel was proof that their plan was successful.
Andrew joined Jules at Ava’s side and showed her how to use her nails to get under the edges of Ava’s scales. “I was wondering,” he said eventually, “why we’re focusing so much on fighting rather than runes or alchemy.”
“You already know most of the runes on Ava’s scales. Alchemy is a powerful tool,” Jules replied, “and runes are as well, but when it comes down to a fight, it’s instinct and reaction that will save you, not the number of runes you know. Sword fighting teaches that.”
“What about when you fought Trent in Ava’s cave? If I had known more alchemy, things might have turned out differently.”
Jules shook her head. “Dueling with alchemy is just as reliant on reflexes as sword fighting is. More so, because you have the extra step of envisioning the exact result of your alchemy at the same time as you’re dodging and blocking.”
“Yeah, but –”
“No buts,” Jules said firmly. “Look, who’s the expert here? You or me? That’s right. So if I say you’re not ready to learn how to fight with alchemy, I know what I’m talking about. We’ll get there. If it makes you feel any better, tomorrow we can spend the day studying runes. You need to practice your Ba rune more. Some of your shields were sloppy.”
Chapter 8
Sandstorm
Iria glanced up at the sky as the siren went off, the long modulating howl of the sandstorm alert ringing through the streets of Nok Norrah and echoing back, giving it an odd two-toned quality. The sky was crystal clear, which meant exactly nothing. The man she was trailing hurried ahead through the suddenly active streets. There was no way she could follow him now without him noticing. So much for today’s efforts.
With a last bad-tempered look at the sky, she picked a restaurant at random and pushed her way into the foyer. A man in an apron was hurrying around, lashing storm shutters tight and lighting lamps. The restaurant turned out to be a noodle shop, and she got herself a table and a menu, preparing to wait out the storm. It could be a few minutes or it could be a few hours. You never knew what you were in for.
A waiter came and took her order. The language on the menu was something from across the eastern ocean, probably a knockoff in an attempt to charge higher prices, so she just pointed at something with meat in the drawing and left it at that. If it was too terrible, they had enough spices laid out on the table to make shoe leather palatable.
A boisterous crowd of men burst in the door, trailing a settling cloud of sand, shaking it out of their hair and clothes, talking loudly and laughing. Iria eyed them for a moment then shut them out of her thoughts. The waiter came by and deposited a wide, shallow bowl heaped with their signature noodles and piled with shaved pork. Chopsticks were laid across the bowl and Iria had to call the waiter back to request an actual eating utensil.
Sand hammered at the shutters, and the air slowly filled with fine dust. Iria ate quickly before the dust covered her food and eventually pushed the bowl aside when her mouthfuls started gritting between her teeth. The restaurant was quiet, the people stuck inside hunkering down and waiting with tired patience, except for the boisterous crew who had entered at the last minute. They were shouting drunken verses to some song Iria couldn’t bring herself to focus on and attracting a lot of dark looks from the other patrons.
The law demanded public establishments provide shelter against the sandstorms when the
y came, but if the men weren’t careful, they’d be facing a Ranger squad and a few days of forced labor for disturbing the peace. She started watching them out of boredom and frowned almost immediately, her balai training stirring sluggishly to life and starting to find flaws in the drunken performance.
First of all, they weren’t drunk. They were loud, rude, and giving a good act, but their feet were placed with care, the affected swaying never deviating from the center of balance. She watched as one of the ones sitting down tilted his head back and rubbed his eye.
Piroki.
Iria’s pulse started to pick up, adrenaline seeping into her bloodstream. The colors in the room seemed to sharpen as she felt her body rise up to a combat high. Instinctively she mapped the exits. With all the windows storm-shuttered, there was only the front door, blocked by the group of men and the rear entrance to the kitchens. Presumably there was another door that way.
One of the men standing up shuffled into the booth and dropped his drunken act long enough to dose himself with the cactus extract. They had identified their target and were preparing to make their move. Iria glanced around, already certain she was the focus of their attention. There wasn’t anyone else in the restaurant looking nervous or afraid.
They started to advance, then. It was clear they were made, Iria’s glancing around would have confirmed that for them. A trio of the men made their way up the aisle toward where Iria sat. They kept up the drunken act, stopping to harass a solitary young woman, making a big show of staggering and rudeness, but Iria could see the gleam of the piroki serum in their eyes, the telltale redness and swollen eyelids that signaled a recent application.
Iria wasn’t surprised when they stopped at her table and leaned in toward her, leering. It was a good cover. The other patrons were averting their eyes or had already written them off as petty thugs, not worth paying attention to.
“Say, pretty lady, why don’t you come home with us, eh? We will show you a good time, promise.” The man leaning over her had a big sloppy grin on his face, but his eyes were narrowed and his stance showed he was ready to reach in and grab her.
