Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Tell me exactly what’s happening,” Sam demanded of their hostage.

  “The controlling agent … it’s the essence of an osteomancer. Not just any osteomancer. There’re maybe four or five in both Californias powerful enough. Maybe ours wasn’t. Or maybe he got delayed…”

  “Who? Who was the osteomancer supposed to be?”

  “Paul Sigilo,” the technician said as people dashed past them—more technicians, laborers, even uniformed security and praesidentum.

  Sigilo. Sam knew that name. Daniel’s golem.

  “Who is Paul Sigilo?” Em asked.

  The tech’s eyes fixed longingly on the hangar doors. “He’s the son of Messalina Sigilo, the intelligence chief of the Northern Kingdom. Please, let me go. There’s a chance I can get to one of the boats…”

  Sam wasn’t done with him. “What happens without the controlling agent?”

  “The firedrake is unstable.”

  “It’ll explode?”

  “That would be great,” Moth said with enthusiasm.

  “It means the dragon will do whatever it does,” the tech said. “Maybe it’ll dive to the bottom of the sea and sleep for a thousand years. Maybe it’ll annihilate the island and the mainland. It’s not our dragon anymore.”

  A great shriek of moist, hot wind blasted through the hangar, reeking of molten rock cracking through ocean floor. Spider cracks appeared in the sides of the tank.

  The tech shoved Sam away from him. “I’m leaving. Kill me if you want.”

  Sam let him go.

  “Fold or raise?” Moth asked.

  “Raise,” Em said.

  “Raise,” Sam said. “Maybe it’s not too late.”

  “I hate democracy,” Moth said. He began to say something else, but screamed and stumbled.

  Grimacing, he reached behind his back and pulled something from his shoulder blade: a knife. The blood-smeared blade was shaped like a griffin’s tooth.

  Behind him strode Sister Tooth, in a gleaming, black version of praesidentum armor. Her helmet, made from the skull of a minor dragon, was crowned by a ring of sharpened scales. Across her breastplate, a bandolier held an array of throwing knives. She gripped a talon-sword in her right hand and a dragon-scale shield on her left arm.

  Sister Tooth was one of the old Hierarch’s lieutenants, and she remained one of the great osteomancers of Los Angeles. She’d kept Sam constantly on the run, scurrying from motel room to motel room, robbing him of so many things. Daniel had taught Sam to fear her, and he did. And he wanted to test himself against her.

  Moth smeared blood from his hand across his face like war paint. “Don’t worry about what happens down here. I’ll handle Lady Bicuspid. Get up on that bridge and slay that motherfucking dragon. Got me?”

  Sister Tooth flung another knife. The blade penetrated deep into Moth’s thigh. His scream became laughter, and he withdrew the knife and hurled it back. It clanged off her shield.

  Sam searched his bones for dragon flame, and he began to feel the air in his lungs just beginning to warm when Sister Tooth surged forward and drove her blade into Moth’s chest. His mouth stretched in a scream that became a gurgle of blood, and he dropped his own sword. Em took aim at the osteomancer and fired four shots at close range, the sounds hammering an echo in the hangar. Her bullets made tiny pits in Sister Tooth’s armor. She barely seemed to register them.

  Moth turned his head to Sam. Blood gushed from his mouth. He made eye contact with Sam and winked.

  Still impaled on Sister Tooth’s sword, he let out a great wail of agony and twisted his torso around, yanking the sword from Sister Tooth’s hand. She reached to recover it, and he grabbed her wrist and snapped it like a broomstick.

  Through her howl of pain, he collapsed to his knees, coughing out blood.

  Sam rushed toward him, but Moth shot out his hand. “Go,” he rasped. “Go, or you’re wasting my life.”

  Sister Tooth reached for another of her knives. Tendrils of smoke snaked from her lips.

  Em took Sam’s hand, and they raced for the access stairway to the bridge.

  NINETEEN

  The poison stole its way into Daniel’s body. It unlocked the windows and doors of his defenses, snuck through his blood vessels, probed his cells, tested his osteomancy.

  The sensations were familiar: the gripping cold, and the tons of weight settling on his chest. The craving to sink beneath black waves. This is what dying of tsuchigumo felt like.

  He was dimly aware of the world around him. There were shadowed forms hovering over him, and he thought of the men who leaned over his father’s dying body, butchering him.

  “Don’t touch him, Mother,” someone said. “It works through contact as well as ingestion. Please come away.”

  “Help him.” Her voice was paradoxically distant but cutting.

  “I don’t even know what it is. It has tsuchigumo shape-changing properties, but I’m not familiar with this variety. I’m sorry.”

  The concerns of butchers.

  “You can’t let him die.”

  Daniel pieced together where he was. The little dining room, with his mother and golem. He’d tried to kill Paul, but Paul had done him back.

  Daniel tried to see. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. A shadow hovered in front of him.

  “I’m sorry, Daniel. I wanted to be your brother. I wish we had more time. I could have made you understand. We should have been brothers.”

  Daniel lashed out and grabbed the shadow with both hands. He tried to pull it toward him. He would spit and bite and spread the poison. He would kill the dragon. His vision cleared a little, and he saw Paul’s face.

  Daniel hardened his hand with monocerus hide and punched Paul’s monocerus-hardened face. Paul took the blow and returned it with the force of a car crash. There was no pain, just a sense of drifting through gauze, and Daniel knew he was very close to death. He exuded contact venom, but the venom couldn’t get past Paul’s hardened skin. Paul raked his hand across Daniel’s face, and Daniel screamed, losing ribbons of flesh to Paul’s fingers.

  Through the shocking pain, he heard his mother screaming. It must be very upsetting to see her boys squabble.

  Paul drove his fist into Daniel’s face. White flashes filled his vision. He hit him again, and Daniel’s teeth shattered.

  More screaming from his mother. Telling Paul to stop, or telling him to finish it. Daniel wasn’t sure.

  He heaved for breath. Blood ran down the back of his throat, and he choked on bits of broken teeth.

  He’d been through worse.

  He’d fought worse.

  Paul couldn’t beat him. He didn’t have a chance. He was an academic, an architect, an artist, a builder. Just like Daniel’s father.

  Daniel was more like his mother: a thief and a murderer.

  Beads of milky fluid condensed on Daniel’s skin. It was the poison, forced out by his body’s magic.

  He reached out and raked monocerus hide from Paul’s face and then, more gently, brushed his fingers across Paul’s forehead. Paul gasped, and his skin turned gray.

  Daniel gasped, too, but in surprise. He looked down on himself, separated from his body. The hydra and eocorn in his cells were already repairing the damage Paul had done to him. There was already new skin forming where Paul had gouged away flesh. Jagged nuggets of bone fell free from his gums, pushed out by the nubs of pristine new teeth.

  He saw himself through Paul’s eyes. Maybe it was because Paul came from Daniel’s flesh and osteomantic essence. Maybe it was an echo of the connection Daniel established when he’d eaten lamassu a decade ago. Maybe it was Paul lashing out with some ability of his own.

  No, Daniel decided he was in Paul’s thoughts because they were brothers.

  Daniel was Paul now.

  He was confused and broken. He’d only been alive a little while, and he was so young. His head hurt from having a bullet tear through it in the strawberry field.

  And now he was in
a little shop in Chinatown, sitting on a hard wooden chair. The shelves were packed with little jars and paper envelopes and little cloth sacks, all redolent with osteomancy, but nothing Daniel recognized. This wasn’t Los Angeles. This was San Francisco; the magics were alien to him. His mother was there, young again, in her full strength and ferocity. She demanded the man behind the counter give her and Paul a place to stay. She knew things about the man. She was a spy from this land, and she knew many secrets.

  There were basements with operating tables. He was strapped down, and there were cold metal instruments digging into his brain. He didn’t understand why he hurt, and he fought.

  Then, later, more dark rooms, more tables, but greater understanding of what was happening. They were fixing him, the parts not built right, and the parts damaged by the gunshot in the strawberry field. He fought less.

  His mother in a room of marble and emerald and bone, kneeling before a woman in a green dress and a crown of teeth: the wizard queen of the Northern Kingdom, the person whom, in Los Angeles, they called the San Francisco Hierarch. Paul was seventeen, and his mother was presenting him as a candidate for court osteomancer.

  There were experiences without context. Books and scrolls by candlelight. Feverish toiling in workshops. Service for the wizard queen. The thrill of discovery, but not much fun.

  And he looked at his scarred face in the mirror and saw more than one face staring back. He knew of Daniel, his lost brother in Los Angeles. They’d never met, but Paul loved him.

  He saw Paul through his own eyes again. And now, at this moment, Daniel loved him back.

  Paul looked up at him, silently pleading for his life.

  Daniel kissed Paul’s forehead and killed his brother.

  * * *

  He rose to his feet and stood over Paul’s corpse.

  “Heal him,” his mother said. Her voice was frighteningly calm, like a still mountain in the moment before an avalanche.

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re an osteomancer. You have eocorn. You have hydra. You healed yourself. Heal him.”

  “He’s dead. I killed your son.”

  She rushed at him, grabbed his face with both hands, dug her nails into his skin. “Heal him,” she roared.

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said. Streaks of blood ran down his face and his mother’s fingers. “There’s nothing I can do. I killed your son.”

  Her grip loosened. She took her hands away.

  “He was your brother.”

  There was so much dishonesty in her declaration. But also some truth.

  Paul’s tissues were breaking down. His skin looked like gray foam.

  She turned to go to Paul’s body, but Daniel took her wrist.

  “Don’t, Mom. It’s not safe.”

  She regarded Daniel’s hand and looked back up at him. He thought she would attack him again, and he would let her. But she closed her eyes and took a breath, and when she opened them again, he saw a little of what the Los Angeles powers feared in her.

  “You thought killing Paul meant the dragon couldn’t be vitalized. That the dragon couldn’t be brought to life. Kill the vitalization force, and the dragon dies. Was that it? What that your theory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, my son. You were ignorant. Vitalization doesn’t provide life. It doesn’t provide animation. It just provides control.”

  The osteomancer’s craft was drawing magic from bones. Capturing it and storing it, and using the creatures’ power. But always guided by human intelligence.

  Daniel realized his error.

  “You were worried about Otis having a bomb,” she went on, sounding like she was pronouncing sentence on a condemned man. “But you helped create a living bomb without sentience. Without Paul’s consciousness, there’s nothing to control it. If we’re lucky, it’ll just destroy the island. More likely? It’ll burn half the kingdom.”

  “Otis told you that, Mom. To convince you Paul had to die. Because he saw him as a threat.”

  “No, Daniel. I helped design the dragon. Just like I helped design Paul.”

  Ah. A nice sword thrust there.

  He turned his back on her.

  “Where are you going? We have to evacuate.”

  “Without Paul, the dragon has no consciousness,” Daniel said. “It’s even more dangerous. Isn’t that what you just said?”

  “Daniel … no. Come with me off the island.”

  “Who on this island can replace Paul’s osteomancy?”

  “I just lost one son. I won’t lose another.” She fell apart now, shuddering as Paul’s body dissolved before her eyes, as Daniel prepared himself to die. Her face red, her voice ragged, the smell of stress hormones and grief radiating from her, she was still the traitor and spy and manipulator, and the woman who’d given up Daniel and kept her secrets. But she was also his mother, and she was in pain, and she could still break Daniel’s heart.

  “You have a way off the island, Mom?”

  She managed a nod.

  “Use it. I love you.” Before he reached the door, he turned back to her for the last time. “You know what happens when you use people, Mom? They get used up.”

  TWENTY

  Sam and Em climbed the ladder to the bridge, and Sam became horribly annoyed with whoever thought it was a good idea to call it a “bridge,” because it was little more than a beam, maybe a foot wide, with no guardrails.

  “You okay with heights?” Em asked him.

  “They make me feel very tall. You?”

  “I have no quip,” she said. “I detest heights.”

  Sam stepped out on the beam, holding his arms out for balance. Em let him get a few feet out before following.

  The Pacific firedrake lay below them in the tank, a hundred feet long from the sharp blade of its nose to the tip of its flukes. Its outspread wings spanned an even greater distance. Wing membranes undulated hypnotically in the roiling tank, like the canopy of some great jellyfish, all kaleidoscopic whorls of blue and green and purple. Fronds grew down the dragon’s spine, anemone tendrils seeking fish to eat, and from its nostrils came bubbling gusts of super-heated water. Alive, the beast stirred, pulling against the heavy chains weighing it down and at the spaghetti of hoses pumping magic into its arteries.

  The firedrake sang out to the magic in Sam’s bones. His skeleton vibrated, as if it wanted to burst through his flesh and fly. The Hierarch had eaten the bones of dragons and wyverns and inferior firedrakes, and he passed these magical essences to Sam. The essences in him recognized the Pacific firedrake as their king.

  The dragon’s tail lashed out, breaking the surface of the fluid, and came down with the thud of a breaching whale. Waves washed over the sides of the tank. The concrete walls fissured and began to crumble. Arching its neck, the dragon raised its head out of the water and exhaled a storm of flame, billowing masses of orange and red edged with purple and black. The heat collided with Sam, blowing back his hair. He screamed, simultaneously terrified and exulted, and wobbled. Em reached out and grabbed his bicep, and they teetered together. Sam felt more than the tug of earth’s gravity. He also felt the dragon’s.

  In that tiny slice of a moment, he was transformed. Sam was a magical creature, created from osteomantic cells, not unlike the dragon, and the last few days had brought him closer to new magics, and to his own power. He’d found himself wanting to test it, and surrender to it, and become it. He didn’t simply want to be an osteomancer. He wanted to be osteomancy.

  But there was Em, gripping his arm. She would not let him fall.

  “I love you,” he said, regaining his balance.

  “Oh, hell, shut up and kill the dragon, Sam.”

  He removed the bone jar of poison from his bag. The odor pushed through the seal, thick and spidery with elements of tsuchigumo. He twisted the stopper out. Even now, it tried to change its form and leap from the jar into Sam’s hand.

  He hurled the jar. It made more of an indentation than a splash when it hit the o
steomantic medium in the tank—the stuff was more viscous than it looked. Wisps of smoke rose as the osteomancy claimed the jar, dissolving the bone into a talclike powder and releasing its contents, a tiny swirl of black ink.

  It seemed impossible that such a small quantity of poison could have any effect on the monstrously large creature, and Sam despaired that the endless span of the last few days had finally come down to a failure almost too small to notice. But then the little dark blot began to move. It spread in a slick over armored scales. Inky tendrils reached out, hungry and malignant and probing. It soaked into the dragon’s hide, as if its impenetrable shell were a sponge.

  The dragon’s brilliant colors dimmed, the pigments seeming to evaporate, and its wing membranes grew brittle and began to flake like autumn leaves. Its tail slowly sank to the bottom of the tank. Its head and neck rose slightly higher in the osteomantic medium, like the bow of a ship sinking stern-first, and then the rest of the dragon slipped below the surface of the calming waters. It lay there, no longer moving.

  Sam felt relief but no joy. Something magnificent had been lost. The life of the dragon measured against the lives of millions of people was not a difficult equation to work out, and Sam knew he’d made the right choice. But what was it Daniel always said about Otis Roth? Otis loved maneuvering people into making awful choices. This was Sam’s awful choice.

  Em gave his fingers a little squeeze and kissed his cheek.

  “We did good,” she said.

  But the job wasn’t finished. There were Moth and Sister Tooth. There was Daniel and his golem. He turned to climb down from the bridge when bubbles exploded to the top of the tank. Black water gushed from widening cracks in the tank walls, and a dreadful moan shook the hangar. The dragon raised its head from the tank. It stretched its jaws and screamed flames to the ceiling.

  * * *

  Chaos could be a gift. Daniel knew how to get things done in chaos. He found the hangar in a state of chaos, klaxons blaring, people running, the stench of osteomancy. He couldn’t see Sam or the Emma or Moth anywhere.

  The hangar was a vast maze of equipment, including the huge tank in the middle of it. This was the firedrake’s gestation tank. Osteomantic medium spilled over the sides, releasing scents of deep sea and fire and the thin, cold edge of high-altitude air.