“You will? I—” She stopped. “You can’t tell anyone. Not a living soul.”
“I promise,” Skald told her.
He carried her up the slope, through the knifegrass. Below them, Wullfort was a blot on the hillside, lit here and there by faint gleams of torches, people up too late or too early. Moonlight gave way to pale dawn, and then to the first gleams of real dawn. The last stretch up to the basin wasn’t steep, but it was thick with knifegrass, so thick that blades began to find their way between the lacings of his leggings, scoring his legs with fine red lines.
Smell had never been the best of Skald’s senses, even before years of city smoke. So it wasn’t until they reached the very edge of the basin that he caught the hot bloody reek of dragon. He stopped dead, and Keia slid from his back with a cry of joy.
Fluttering gaunt wings and scaly hides filled the entire basin, a bowl scooped out of the hilltop maybe a thousand feet across. The closer dragons, gray and milky-eyed, turned slowly and without curiosity to look at them; on the far side of the basin, past a wide swath of knifegrass, a cluster of bright red and brown dragons twitched away, watching the sky like rabbits in an open field.
And between the clusters of dragons, knee-deep in thick knifegrass, Nona stood above a fallen dragon.
It writhed against the grass, shreds of gray gossamer peeling away from its wings. Nona bent over its neck, pinning it down with her knees. She raised her hand, and the blunted dagger caught the first of the dawn light.
“No—” Keia choked, but Skald caught her by the shoulder.
Nona brought the dagger down at the dragon’s eye with a sound like bones breaking. She pried at the dragon’s muzzle, then brought the dagger down again, and again. With each stroke, the thick plates of skin creased and folded, glittering like a freakish mask. It twitched beneath her, until the shreds of skin clinging to its limbs had fallen away to catch and tear upon the knifegrass.
Nona struck a last time, tucked her dagger away, and carefully stroked the dragon’s snout. Under her hands, the hard scales fell away to reveal bright new ones. The dragon closed its eyes and stretched like a cat, and Nona got to her feet, still holding thick fragments of horn and scale, rounded like stones.
“Dragon’s-eyes,” Skald said softly. “I’d wondered.”
Keia pulled away from his grasp. “Nona! Nona, I knew it—”
“Stay where you are.” Nona held up a fistful of dragon’s-eyes and crossed the knifegrass to reach her daughter. “They’re skittish just after molting. It’s not safe to come too close.”
Skald, not wanting to risk skittish dragons whether they’d molted or not, followed more slowly. Nona nodded to him. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Didn’t expect to come up here.” It was what Bronze Michel called a bloodless answer; information gained too easily, and therefore suspect. I believe you, but he won’t. . . . I suggest you start lying.He looked away, out at the dragons, and for the first time in weeks let himself fully remember what the man on the table had told him, before he’d left the city. The dragons had a language.
“Well, then.” She stripped off her gloves and turned to face her daughter, shutting him out. “So, you found your way up here.”
“I did.” Keia fairly glowed.
“Good for you. I’d planned to do this after molting, but we can talk now.” She nodded to the waiting dragons. “They know where to come for the molting, even if they don’t always do it. You can see a few have gone a while without it—like that one, with the horns. They can get most of the old skin off, but it always takes someone else to get the rest. Lucky us, we get to help.”
Keia wasn’t listening. Even though Skald had compared her to his nonexistent daughters all through the trip, for the first time he saw something of himself in her—the young razorman, new to the city, not listening to anyone who told him what could happen there. Not listening, and learning anyway.
She shook her head, smiling at the dragons as if sharing a secret with them. “That’s not why I came.”
Nona stuck her gloves in her belt and shifted the dragon’s-eyes from one hand to the other. “No?”
She beamed and bowed, ceremoniously, as if some ritual had begun. “Nona—mother—I’ve come to meet my father.”
Nona blinked at her. “Your father? The tinker outside Fenworth?”
Keia shook her head. “You don’t have to pretend any more. I can be trusted to know—I made my way up here—” She glanced back at Skald. “Skald, go away, you shouldn’t hear this.”
Nona still looked bewildered. Skald settled onto one of the boulders that dotted the basin. “She means a dragon.”
“What?”
“You guessed!” Keia laughed and gave Skald a quick hug. “I knew it—I knew you understood, even after what you said—”
Nona looked from Skald to Keia to the dragons and back. “Keia, girl, that’s not how it is. Maybe it was once, a long time ago, I don’t know. But it’s not—”
Keia turned back to her mother, the first hints of doubt breaking on her countenance. “You sent me away,” Keia said, almost pleading now. “You sent me away, but I still figured it out. I knew you always come to the Spring Festival here, and that’s when the Dragon’s Parliament is—and look, it’s here! And I knew there was more to where dragon’s-eyes came from, that you had to know their secrets to find them. And I was born at midwinter—” She caught her breath. “You had to be part of it, part of the great story of the dragons and the old royals—”
Skald thought of the Coldwell Sisters’ school full of fosterlings, all with some great tale behind them, some history illuminating the road before them. Of a young girl among them, who knew only that her mother ran a wagon train. No glory there. No mystery. And out of the stories of dragons that had so infested the land, she’d made her own legend, her own truth, her own special destiny. . . .
And he looked at Nona, who was so good at seeing what was really there. So good that she couldn’t understand how what wasn’tthere could have power. “Nona,” he said, getting to his feet.
“I don’t understand,” Nona said. “You don’t think—Keia girl, I come up here each spring to help with the molting. In return I get these.” She held up the dragon’s-eyes, red and gold gleaming through her fingers as if lit by their own fire. “There’s only a few places they come for the molting, and there’s only a few people who know how to help.”
“But there’s more to it. There has to be.” Keia flung her arms out toward the dragons, as if to draw them all close to her. “Why else would they come here, why else would dragon’s-eyes be royal?”
Nona shrugged. “If there was a reason, I never knew it, and neither did my old master.”
Keia’s face crumpled. “That’s it? That’s all there is—just some cheap trade?”
Like razormen are just glorified thugs.Skald took a step forward. “Nona, Keia, I think maybe—”
“It’s a long and proud tradition.” Nona reached out to her daughter, hands still brimming with horn and scale.
Keia knocked her hand away, scattering dragon’s-eyes across the grass. “No! No, you’re wrong—I’ll prove it, the dragons know me, they recognize me—”
She turned and darted toward the bright dragons, heedless of the knifegrass. “Look, I’m here, I’ve come! It’s me, Keia Dragonsdaughter—”
“Keia, no! Not that way!”
Skald was already on his feet, running after her—but he was too slow, or too old, or maybe, maybe, had too much of a sense of self-preservation to follow her with all his speed.
The newly-molted dragon reared up away from her. Keia didn’t see, or saw it as something else, a greeting maybe. It lashed out—Skald caught a glimpse of claws, this time white and clean—and Keia fell.
Nona’s scream caught as if snagged on those claws. Skald clutched her as she ran past. “No, no, stop. Let me do this.” He shoved Nona back and walked forward, arms outstretched.
The dragon blinked once
, sluggish as its unmolted fellows, and withdrew its claws. It nudged Keia’s limp body with the tip of one claw. The slim jaws parted as if to utter a malediction, but all that emerged was a confused, warbling hiss.
The dragons had a language, the man strapped to the table had told him. They hada language, a long time ago. But every time they killed a human, they lost another few words, and so eventually they forgot how to speak. They’re just animals now. It’s the truth, the truth, I swear it.
Skald hadn’t believed him then, in spite of what he’d said. But he knew it to be true now. He crouched by Keia’s body, as he had when pulling her from the knifegrass. Her eyes were open, still wide with conviction, and he closed them.
The dragon hissed again, almost but not quite forming words. I know you, he thought, and raised his eyes to meet the dragon’s gaze. I know how it works. You do something awful, maybe because you’re angry or you’re scared or someone told you it was the only way. And then you regret it, but not enough to keep from doing it the next time.
He got to his feet, Keia’s body in his arms. So you keep doing it, and regretting it, and the rust builds up and the blades thin under it, and one day you forget you ever could speak.Skald’s reflection in the dragon’s eye blurred, and he didn’t think it was the dragon’s doing.
He turned, crossed the grass, and laid Keia at its edge, then turned his back while Nona knelt beside her daughter. Her chest hitched twice, and she turned away, toward the dragons. “Get out!” she screamed. “Go, go, get out!”
The dragons flinched, a ripple spreading out from her. One by one, they turned and flew or crawled out of the basin, trailing shreds of skin and scale, straining wings that were too new to fly. The last few, graying and thick-plated, waited in futile hope, then dragged themselves away through knifegrass. In the shadow of departing dragons, Nona stroked her daughter’s brow and cried, and Skald turned away, not wanting to hear.
After some time, because Nona was a pragmatic person even in grief, she began gathering stones for a cairn. Skald helped without speaking, then as the cairn grew, took a seat beside it. Wail and Moan were easy to unstrap; Reap and Sow less so, and the lack of Mercy’s pressure against his back was like an ache. Cutting the toes from his boots took longer, but in time the two Surprises joined Keia, and he stood, an old unarmed man with nothing.
Nona returned to his side. “I thought I was doing it all the right way,” she said without preamble. “I thought she’d learn from the Sisters, and I could teach her what I knew, and it would be right. . . .” She covered her face. “What do we do, Skald? What do we do, when all our work comes to this?”
Skald set the letter from Wullfort on top of the blades and laid a last stone over it all. “The same thing the dragons do,” he said. “Shed our skins. Shed our skins, and move on.”
~ ~ ~~ ~
Margaret Ronald is originally from rural Indiana but now lives outside Boston. Her fiction has appeared in such venues as Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and Clarkesworld Magazine. Wild Hunt, the second novel in her urban fantasy series and the sequel to 2009’s Spiral Hunt, was released by Eos Books in January 2010.
KREISLER’S AUTOMATA
Matthew David Surridge
I.
WHENEVER THEODORE SMILED AT ME I might almost have imagined him an angel. When he leered at me then in the hall of mirrors, on that day of October in the year 17—, I understood certain grim truths about angels previously obscure to me. “Tonight, Ernst,” he said, “you will take her; despoil her of her virtue, ravage her, leave her without a hope in the world. It is all arranged.”
“No!” I cried. “It is monstrous!”
He chuckled and led me through the array of glass. “The Prodigy will play before the court tonight at the palace of Count H—. You’ll watch the performance, then find your way to a certain bedchamber. Olympia shall be awaiting you therein. You’ll ask her a question of my devising. No more than that! Speak the words, she will be yours. Helpless.”
I said nothing. “I know the greatness of your want,” he said. “I am your friend, am I not? I understand it all. Lust, desire; and then, she is beautiful.”
“Yes,” I murmured. “Yes, she is.” I could not imagine her beauty, could not frame it in my mind; I was helpless before the question it implied, that same question Theodore now demanded of me and which I dared not answer—what would I not do, to touch that grace? We walked on, watching ourselves watching ourselves.
The mirrored hall was the only entry to a wide fairground not far from the city of V—. A week before, the country field had been waste wilderness; then walls of iridescent metal had been raised, by whose agency none knew. A gatehouse was built in the center of the walls, and mirrors set within the gatehouse. Reports had spread that a fair was in preparation. Yesterday visitors had finally been allowed within the walls, following which the most peculiar rumors had spread, catching the imagination of polite society. Theodore and I had made the short walk to see the truth for ourselves, and to speak on weighty matters. “Do you know much of her history?” Theodore asked suddenly.
I shook my head.
“I have learned a fair piece, I think,” he said. “Some of her past. She has been a mystery since she came to court. But not to me. No longer to me.”
Together, we exited the hall of mirrors.
We confronted a clock-tower from which depended a banner bearing the words Kreisler’s Automata and the image of a black bird clutching a gear. Beyond was a clockwork city-in-miniature, its structures built not of masonry or timber, but of iron and copper and stained glass, jade and amber and turquoise; they glittered even in the dull grey light of day. The city’s inhabitants were automata: mechanical men and mechanical women, shaped like residents of all the far times and places of the globe. Wandering Turks, Chaldean astrologers, robed Confucian scholars—we set off walking among them, and they paid us no mind.
“There is a crime in her past,” said Theodore.
“I will not think evil of her,” I told him. He smiled.
“As all men say of women they do not know well,” he observed. “But there it is. A thing dark enough that even to hint at it would bring about her expulsion from court. Therefore, merely a question put to her alone shall serve to establish your knowledge. Your dominance. And that is what you wish. Is it not?”
I stared at the automata around us, very like living ensouled mortals, but also like waxworks, like mannequins, like ambulatory nutcrackers. Their flesh was brass, their eyes quartz, their expressions and fashions painted things. Mostly they were content to counterfeit the habits and motions of animal men, going about their business as normal townsfolk might, except that none of them spoke or made a sound; only, occasionally, one might see them pause, and tilt their heads, as though listening to a music too profound for human ears.
“I cannot believe what you say of her,” I said at last. “About Olympia there is a glory which lives forever. A glory I wish I might. . . .”
“That’s a fairy tale,” said Theodore. “Glory. What do you care for glory? You’re rich.”
I could not immediately answer him. Yes, I was rich; but that was chance and birth. It seemed to me that there was more to be hoped for, to be won or known or dreamed of. And: “Olympia cannot be bought,” I said. “Therefore the value of my wealth is less than absolute.”
Theodore laughed. “Do not say that she cannot be bought,” he told me. “Say only that you have not yet found her price. But it may be that I will be able to assist you in that.” I said nothing to this remark, suspecting a philosophical difference between him and I that was beyond my capability to enunciate.
Some of the mechanicals we passed interacted with visitors in a limited fashion. Before a vast tournament-grounds where automated knights jousted, I played a game at chess with a black king; I lost badly, for lack of concentration. We passed the atelier of an artificial painter who was the very image of a master from the Italian Renaissance, and he offered to
limn us, displaying for our edification works of his devising; the precision of their perspectives unnerved me. We walked through a bordello of fabricated queens, of Helen and Semiramis and Cleopatra and Beersheba, and observed their curious interactions; I was educated and saddened, and found myself imagining things I dared not dream of but desired still. The whole of the fair was marvelously strange, built with a craft beyond any science I knew. But I had heard so much in recent years of the progress of rationality and of understanding. Who could say what was to be defined as impossible?
I wondered what else might be built, there in that artificial paradise. Could a new Olympia be constructed, her body put together piece by piece, a machine made for beauty? I, a new Pygmalion, might then have my Galatea with the blessing of the Queen of Love; but no, I was not so far deluded—her identity was hers alone, and what I craved was beyond my power to copy, merely to adore.
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