“Joe?” he said. No one answered. There was an odd smell of blood in the air. With great effort, Tom opened his eyes. The first thing facing him was the baleful eye of an alligator. He thought Old Joe and that Joe didn’t look right. Then he managed to bring his eyes fully open and stared.
He closed them. It had to be a nightmare. It couldn’t be true. No one—no one—would want to kill Old Joe, certainly not by ripping him apart limb from limb. Not by splitting his skull and removing his brain.
But when Tom opened his eyes, the alligator was still there. There was no lying to himself that this wasn’t Old Joe, either. He’d known the old shifter long enough to know which teeth were broken, and the exact pattern of the scales. Even in the dim light, he knew it was Old Joe’s corpse he was looking at.
Grief and horror caught in his mind, paralyzing it, mingling with the throbbing pain at the back of his head. He wanted to throw up, he wanted to cry, and he wanted to be elsewhere, where Old Joe was still alive, and where he’d make that teeth-clacking sound and call Tom “dragon boy.”
And then Tom realized that overlaying all of this was the feel of the Great Sky Dragon nearby, very awake. And then, closer at hand, someone breathing.
He saw feet in shoes, beyond Old Joe’s corpse, by a piece of Joe’s mutilated foot. He swallowed, hard. He looked up.
She was blond and beautiful and—he remembered Rafiel’s description—had the sort of widely separated eyes and broad, clear forehead that the Renaissance had praised.
She was looking at him with unblinking eyes, somewhere between gloating and anger. “You were very clever, coming in here while I was busy with your ancestor. But your luck is at an end. Stand.”
Tom wouldn’t have been able to obey, but the feral shifter was near him, naked and filthy and with completely inhuman eyes, reaching for Tom, helping him up, then tugging on his hands—his hands were tied together behind his back—and leading him, dumbly stumbling and dragging after the woman. Was this Maduh? It had to be Maduh. She’d killed Old Joe, or perhaps let her son kill him. What they’d done to him … They really didn’t want Old Joe coming back.
She’d stunned Tom with a blow, while he was concentrating on the Pearl. She—
It was then he realized that Old Joe’s corpse was an alligator. You always reverted to your true form when you died.
No wonder the old man had had trouble with his human form and with living indoors. And yet—
Tom remembered Old Joe talking about how everyone had to learn to be human anyway. And he’d learned. Old Joe, whatever he’d been born, had been human.
A lump caught at Tom’s throat, and he felt tears run down his cheeks and wished he could wipe them away.
*
Nick’s place was half of a duplex in what had been a suburb of Goldport back in the fifties. Now it was close enough to downtown to be considered a walking neighborhood, with easy access to museums and restaurants.
Nick opened the door, turned on the light, and turned to admit them: Rafiel, Cas and Conan, who had insisted on carrying Rya, despite staggering under her weight.
Inside, the house had clearly been modified to accommodate more modern living. They entered a vast space that comprised a living room, dining room and an open kitchen at the end. The walls were a cream color that seemed weirdly rich. There were curtains and two dark leather sofas.
Nick directed Conan to one of them, and Conan laid Rya down on it.
“Is she hurt?” Rafiel asked, and felt stupid for asking. Of course, she was hurt. But Conan shook his head. “No. Tranquilizer dart. Still in her arm when I picked her up.”
“Oh. Same thing they did to Kyrie,” Rafiel said.
“Yeah. She’ll probably be fine. We heal fast.” He still looked very upset. He gave Rafiel a shaky smile. “I don’t think of myself as a fighter. I … I like to sing. But … they upset me very much. I thought I was going to eat them.”
“I thought you were going to eat them too,” Rafiel confessed, sitting on the sofa in front of Rya. He was relieved that Conan hadn’t.
“Coffee, whiskey, beer, eggs, bacon?” Nick asked.
Conan opened his mouth. Rafiel could see him considering saying that he was fine, really, but what came out was a small moan. “I’m so hungry I could eat someone.”
“I figured,” Nick said. “Just remember it’s bad manners to eat your friends, and if you eat your girlfriend … Well, that’s between you and her.”
“Huh?”
Rafiel bit his lip. Nick would have to be pulled aside at some point and told that Conan wasn’t likely to understand most racy jokes. While he hadn’t been raised in a monastery, he’d been raised in the Great Sky Dragon’s service, and that might be similar in its way.
Nick disappeared into the kitchen. Doors opened and closed, and shortly there was the smell of eggs and bacon and then the smell of coffee.
Moments later, Rya sighed and opened her eyes. She looked around, bewildered, then looked at Conan.
Someday, Rafiel wanted to have some girl look at him that way. Her eyes widened and filled with joy, as though Conan were the best and most wonderful sight she could behold. Rafiel realized it was Bea that he wanted to look at him that way.
“You saved me from those— They shot me … But you …” Rya said. And Conan seemed to grow at least a foot, as he hurried to her side.
*
Just before they reached the dragon ride—a sort of roller coaster with covered carts, whose designers had counted on the sense of disorientation of the passengers to make the ride seem far more exciting than a circular, up-and-down track (for in the dark everything seemed longer and more convoluted)—Tom realized that this was where the Great Sky Dragon was, and knew a full measure of regret and shame. He’d known the ride was here. He’d heard of it, even if he and Kyrie didn’t have much time for amusement parks and had never actually come to the park for the rides.
But what else could “I am buried beneath the dragon” be? Tom had been an idiot. A blind idiot, at that. He should have known. He should have guessed. He should have, long ago, stolen the Great Sky Dragon back and—
But he probably would have been captured trying to rescue the Great Sky Dragon, just as he’d been captured activating the Pearl of Heaven. And it hadn’t even done anything. All that knowledge, the dragon egg with its carefully nestled, compacted files, had been allowed to open, to pour out, but it had poured out of his head altogether. He no longer had the knowledge, or the feel. Perhaps it was the result of the Great Sky Dragon waking? Perhaps all it meant was that Tom was no longer the Great Sky Dragon.
It should have been a relief but it wasn’t. The real Great Sky Dragon was recovering from being … dead, which meant he couldn’t shift for a day or more. And in that time, he was human, and all too vulnerable.
Numbly, Tom watched the blond woman open the trap door to the side of the ride. He saw stairs, but he wasn’t given a chance to descend them normally. Instead, he was pushed, and landed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.
He was in a small, circular chamber. There were gears and things above. This must be how the maintenance crews accessed the ride to fix it.
The Great Sky Dragon lay trussed in a corner of the chamber.
But Tom wasn’t as completely bound. All that was tied were his hands, behind his back. In a hundred shows watched in his childhood, in a hundred books read, even in games he’d played, Tom had seen the bad guys tie the good guy’s hands behind his back, and then, the good guy would slowly work his hands free.
While being walked here, Tom had already tested the tightness of the ropes, and that beloved standby of adventure writers—the loosely tied rope—was not present. However from what he could feel of this, the rope was the same with which Tom and Old Joe—
He stopped and flinched before that thought. No. But he remembered the rope, all the more clearly because he was trying not to remember the baleful alligator eye, fixed in death, and the split cranium, with the brain missing.<
br />
The rope, he thought desperately, had been frayed, old, probably water-corroded, dropped there after service as a mooring rope.
Tom could probably—given the slightest protuberance in the walls, the slightest irregularity upon the walls—work his hands up and down and split the rope strand by strand. As tightly as it was tied, it was going to require him to rub his skin raw, too, but that could be endured, while this captivity had only one end.
They would either force him or the Great Sky Dragon to open the world gates. Tom had no idea how that worked—even if his mind insisted he did.
“Why did you let them capture you?” the Great Sky Dragon asked. He looked greenish, like someone who has been seriously ill and is not yet fully recovered.
Tom bit his tongue before saying, “Because I didn’t have anything better to do just then,” and instead said, “I believe they can hear every word we say, sir.”
The Great Sky Dragon closed his eyes and groaned. He said something in Chinese. Tom heard it, and knew it had been Chinese, but he also knew what the words were, which surprised him a little. It surprised him even more when his words found the answer, and he said, his tongue tripping on the unaccustomed sounds, “I believe there is no language we can speak they cannot understand.” He didn’t know why, but he had a feeling it was so, a certainty that they wouldn’t have put him and the old man together unless they meant to listen in, unless they meant to use what they heard. He was going to guess that the creature—Maduh?—hadn’t been successful with the Great Sky Dragon, or not as successful as she hoped to be.
He remembered Rafiel’s description of how Maduh had tortured her own cub to get the star beings’ attention and cooperation. She would probably be ready to do worse to the Great Sky Dragon, and to Tom himself. But the problem was that her torturing the Great Sky Dragon ran the risk of killing him. Tom could see that in the greenish skin, the strange pallor, the look which proclaimed the old dragon was barely back from the dead, and might go back into the shadows at a touch.
And she didn’t want to kill Tom, for the same reason. She meant to force one or the other of them to perform what she couldn’t.
“She is afraid,” the Great Sky Dragon said slowly, “that if she doesn’t hurry, someone else will find a way to open the world gates. I gather the … star beings have other agents on Earth, and that she’s afraid … You see, she’s repented ever wanting to be enfleshed, ever rebelling against the ruling ones of her people. And she wants to make sure she recovers her rank among the bodiless ones. Which I gather was very high indeed.”
For a moment Tom was alarmed, afraid the Great Sky Dragon had somehow read his mind, but as the Great Sky Dragon went on, Tom looked at him, and realized he was only talking because he didn’t feel well and he had to talk to someone—to confide in someone.
“I inherited by accident. The three Great Sky Dragons before me died suddenly. It was a time of great turmoil on the banks of the Yalu River, long before recorded history. I— I had just started shifting. I was thirteen. I hadn’t even been given over to the dragon people when I got all of my ancestors’ knowledge. Only I never figured out how to unlock it. The separate … the two ways of doing it …” He shrugged. “Maduh—oh, yes, I’ve known of her a long time. She was one of the ones who came from the stars, the first ones. But not, interestingly, one they trusted with the codes to the world gate. Not a clan leader. Maduh says that my knowledge, what I received from my ancestors, the scrolls in my mind, are too old, too … too set in their pattern to unfold. The Pearl of Heaven can no longer open them. She says the bodiless ones told her they could open yours.”
“Well, that would be nice,” Tom said pleasantly. He’d gathered himself up with difficulty, because it proved to be quite difficult to get up with your hands tied behind your back. But he managed it, and stood, and looked around. The place where the Great Sky Dragon was, the wall seemed a little rougher. Not that any of it was very smooth. It was the sort of place you’d create, on the base of something that needed a sturdy foundation. Cement blocks, held together by poured cement, none of it neatened up—what Tom had found craftsmen doing work around the diner called “making good”—because no one was expected to come down here except repairmen. He found a particularly rough area, and stumbled to a sitting position against it, casually rubbing the rope binding his wrists down the whole length as he sat very close to the Great Sky Dragon, where he could talk to the old man in a quieter voice. Not that he thought this would prevent their being heard, of course. “That would be very nice, sir, but I no longer have what a friend very happily nicknamed the dragon egg.” He felt a prickle at his eyes at hearing, in his mind, just how Old Joe had said it, but he kept his voice steady. “You see, when you woke up fully, it seemed to be gone.”
The old dragon lifted his eyebrow at Tom. “Indeed?” Tom could tell that somehow this made the old man very relieved. He could imagine why. The old Great Sky Dragon wouldn’t want a rival. And Tom thought in the unlikely event that they both survived this, he wouldn’t want to be the man that the Great Sky Dragon viewed as a rival.
But he wondered if the dragon egg was truly gone. Perhaps it was. Tom didn’t know. He didn’t feel the connection he’d once felt to every dragon. He’d tested. That sense was gone. He might be able to reach them with effort. He hadn’t made the effort.
Yet, he’d understood Chinese. And he felt … like he knew more than he’d known, that he now thought differently. He couldn’t put his finger on the feeling, and frankly, he was afraid to. It must be that they—whoever they were—could read his thoughts, and use them against him.
As though to make things worse, the Great Sky Dragon said, “She got in my mind. Riffled about in there. I don’t know exactly what she can see of my thoughts.” He paused. “That’s why I’m not sure she’d put you in here so she could listen to us. Not if she can see my thoughts.”
Not unless, Tom thought, she can’t see mine.
All the same, he positioned himself so that neither the Great Sky Dragon nor anyone looking at him from above—those boards on the floor of the dragon ride didn’t seem to be too close together—could detect the gentle up and down movement of his hands behind his back, rubbing the rope against the rough wall.
He had some vague idea that if he shifted, he could get right out through the floor boards of the dragon ride, up, away, into the sky, away from this damnable trap. But to shift, his hands must be untied, or else, if the rope weren’t completely rotted—and it wasn’t—he risked cutting the dragon paws right off. It was thick rope; he could do that.
So he rubbed away at the wall, while his wrists, too, became rubbed raw. At any rate, he might end up without wrists in one form or another.
He could smell his own blood, sharp in the air, and the Great Sky Dragon was giving him the look a shifter gives someone who smells tasty. The Great Sky Dragon opened his mouth, but before he spoke, the door opened, and Maduh came down the stairs.
“How cozy,” she said. Then she grinned at Tom. “But you’re lying. I know you’re lying, cub, because the star people say you’re lying. They say you are full of the old knowledge, and that you know how to unlock the world gate.”
Through Tom’s mind, unwilling, went a list of places, a glimpse of certain places where the division between worlds was thin, and a vision of how it had been sealed. Symbols and mental tricks that would flip the areas right open flitted through his mind. It didn’t shock him that the amusement park was one of those places, but he felt a sudden stab of fear. Had he just given away the secret?
But Maduh looked like sweet reason, as she sat down and said, “Now, are you going to cooperate, or will I have to turn your nearest and dearest against you? I can, you know.” She looked indulgently at the Great Sky Dragon who looked paler than ever. “I can. Anyone who can turn into a dragon is mine to call. I got it from his mind. I can call your friend Conan. How would you like to fight him to the death? I’m sure you could kill him easily. From his mind”—she g
rinned at the old dragon with malice—“I gathered that the red dragon is made of poor stuff. But all the same, I’m going to guess you, soft and young as you are—” Tom thought she pronounced it as though it were culinary specifications. “You don’t wish to have to kill your friend. Or do you?”
Tom didn’t. Fortunately at that moment, he felt the rope part behind him. He had to change fast, and he wasn’t even sure that he could. He didn’t know if the blow to the head that they’d given him might not have killed him—however briefly.
He willed the change upon himself and felt, with relief, the horrible pain that came with shifting, and the cough that caused his body to twist.
Taking advantage of Maduh’s momentary surprise, he ran past her and to the stairs. He was sure that she had locked the door behind her. But it would be nothing to the force of the shifting dragon, whose very mass, as it increased, would pop the door out like the cork of a champagne bottle.
Either that, or Tom would die crushed, from trying to shift in the narrow stairway.
CHAPTER 21
Tom felt the door give before him, and he exploded upward, like a popcorn kennel leaving its envelope.
He had practice now thinking as Tom even in the dragon’s body, and he was thinking that he needed to get away from here, fast. He needed to get reinforcements.
His wings felt abraded and bruised. His paws felt raw, and he could see spots rubbed clear of scales near his front paws. But he must fly. He spread his wings, to the blessedly cool breeze from the lake, thinking that it had stopped raining.
And then he realized he couldn’t fly away. He must kill Maduh. If he didn’t kill Maduh, she would hold the Great Sky Dragon hostage. Even if she couldn’t make Tom come to heel, she knew that he could open the world gate. Her semitransparent friends from other worlds had told her so. And while she was alive, she would keep him on the spot. She would kill or hurt everyone he cared for. If she truly could control dragons through the Great Sky Dragon, she would bring them, one at a time or all together, against him. And if she couldn’t, she would blackmail the triads to do it.
Noah's Boy Page 31
