Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  “That doesn’t sound right to me at all,” she said. “One could never have eggs, always flying around madly from one place to another. And I want to see the war.”

  Antony shrugged cheerfully and drank the rest of the wine. He was half looking forward to it himself. He thought he’d enjoy seeing the look on the general’s face when he set down with a dragon in the yard and sent all the soldiers running like mice. Anyway, it would be a damned sight harder to get laid if he were an outlaw with a dragon.

  Two weeks later, they cleared the last alpine foothills and came into Gaul at last. And that was when Antony realized that he didn’t know the first damn thing about where the army even was.

  He didn’t expect some Gallic wife to tell him, either, so they flew around the countryside aimlessly for two weeks, raiding more farmhouses—inedible food, no decent wine, and once some crazy old woman hadn’t left her home and nearly gutted him with a cooking knife. Antony fled hastily back out to Vincitatus, ducking hurled pots and imprecations, and they went back aloft in a rush.

  “This is not a very nice country,” Vincitatus said, critically examining the scrawny pig she had snatched. She ate it anyway and added, crunching, “And that is a strange cloud over there.”

  It was smoke, nine or ten pillars of it, and Antony had never expected to be glad to see a battlefield in all his life. His stepfather had threatened to send him to the borders often enough, and he’d run away from home as much to avoid that fate as anything else, nearly. He didn’t mind a good fight, or bleeding a little in a good cause, but as far as he was concerned, that limited the occasions to whenever it might benefit him.

  The fighting was still going on, and the unmusical clanging reached them soon. Vincitatus picked up speed as she flew on toward it, then picked up still more, until Antony was squinting his eyes to slits against the tearing wind, and he only belatedly realized that she wasn’t going toward the camp or the rear of the lines; she was headed straight for the enemy.

  “Wait, what are you—” he started, too late, as her sudden stooping dive ripped the breath out of his lungs. He clung to the rope he’d tied around her neck, which now felt completely inadequate, and tried to plaster himself to her hide.

  She roared furiously, and Antony had a small moment of satisfaction as he saw the shocked and horrified faces turning up toward them from the ground, on either side of the battle, and then she was ripping into the Gauls, claws tearing up furrows through the tightly packed horde of them.

  She came to ground at the end of a run and whipped around, which sent him flying around to the underside of her neck, still clinging to the rope for a moment as he swung suspended. Then his numb fingers gave way and dumped him down to the ground, as she took off for another go. He staggered up, wobbling from one leg to the other, dizzy, and when he managed to get his feet under him, he stopped and stared: the entire Gaulish army was staring right back.

  “Hades me fellat,” Antony said. There were ten dead men lying down around him, where Vincitatus had shaken them off her claws. He grabbed a sword and a shield that was only a little cracked, and yelled after her, “Come back and get me out of here, you damned daughter of Etna!”

  Vincitatus was rampaging through the army again and didn’t give any sign she’d heard, or even that she’d noticed she’d lost him. Antony looked over his shoulder and put his back to a thick old tree and braced himself.

  The Gauls weren’t really what you’d call an army, more like a street gang taken to the woods, but their swords were damned sharp, and five of the barbarians came at him in a rush, howling at the top of their lungs. Antony kicked a broken helmet at one of them, another bit of flotsam from the dead, and as the others drew in, he dropped into a crouch and stabbed his sword at their legs, keeping his own shield drawn up over his head.

  Axes, of course they’d have bloody axes, he thought bitterly, as they thumped into the shield, but he managed to get one of them in the thigh and another in the gut, and then he heaved himself up off the ground and pushed the three survivors back for a moment with a couple of wide swings, and grinned at them as he caught his breath. “Just like playing at soldiers on the Campus Martius, eh, fellows?” They just scowled at him, humorless colei, and they came on again.

  He lost track of the time a little: his eyes were stinging with sweat, and his arm and his leg where they were bleeding. Then one of the men staggered and fell forward, an arrow sprouting out of his back. The other two looked around; Antony lunged forward and put his sword into the neck of one of them, and another arrow took down the last. Then another one thumped into Antony’s shield.

  “Watch your blasted aim!” Antony yelled, and ducked behind the shelter of his tree as the Gauls went pounding away to either side of him, chased with arrows and dragon-roaring.

  “Antony!” Vincitatus landed beside him and batted away another couple of Gauls who were running by too closely. “There you are!”

  He stood a moment, panting, then he let his sword and shield drop and collapsed against her side.

  “Why did you climb down without telling me?” she said reproachfully, peering down at him. “You might have been hurt!”

  He was too out of breath to do more than feebly wave his fist at her.

  “I don’t care if Jupiter himself wants to see me,” Antony said. “First I’m going to eat half a cow—yes, sweetness, you shall have the other half—and then I’m going to have a bath, and then I’ll consider receiving visitors. If any of them are willing to come to me.” He smiled pleasantly and leaned back against Vincitatus’s foreleg and patted one of her talons. The legionary looked uncertain, and backed even farther away.

  One thing to say for a battlefield, the slaves were cheap and a sight more cowed, and even if they were untrained and mostly useless, it didn’t take that much skill to carry and fill a bath. Antony scrubbed under deluges of cold water and sank with relief into the deep trough they’d found somewhere. “I could sleep for a week,” he said, letting his eyes close.

  “Mm,” Vincitatus said drowsily, and belched behind him, a sound like a thundercloud. She’d gorged on two cavalry horses.

  “You there, more wine,” Antony said, vaguely snapping his fingers into the air.

  “Allow me,” a cool patrician voice said, and Antony opened his eyes and sat up when he saw the general’s cloak.

  “No, no.” The man pushed him back down gently with a hand on his shoulder. “You look entirely too comfortable to be disturbed.” The general was sitting on a chair his slaves had brought him, by the side of the tub; he poured wine for both of them and waved the slaves off. “Now, then. I admired your very dramatic entrance, but it lacked something in the way of introduction.”

  Antony took the wine cup and raised it. “Marcus Antonius, at your command.”

  “Mm,” the general said. He was not very well-favored: a narrow face, skinny neck, hairline in full retreat and headed for a rout. At least he had a good voice. “Grandson of the consul?”

  “You have me,” Antony said.

  “Caius Julius, called Caesar,” the general said, and tilted his head. Then he added, thoughtfully, “So we are cousins of a sort, on your mother’s side.”

  “Oh, yes, warm family relations all around,” Antony said, raising his eyebrows, aside from how Caesar’s uncle had put that consul grandfather to death in the last round of civil war but one.

  But Caesar met his dismissive look with an amused curl of his own mouth that said plainly he knew how absurd it was. “Why not?”

  Antony gave a bark of laughter. “Why not, indeed,” he said. “I had a letter for you, I believe, but unfortunately I left it in Rome. They’ve shipped us out to”—he waved a hand—“be of some use to you.”

  “Oh, you will be,” Caesar said softly. “Tell me, have you ever thought of putting archers on her back?”

  Bob Choi’s Last Job

  JONATHAN STROUD

  Jonathan Stroud is one of the most popular and acclaimed authors in young adult
fantasy today. He’s best known for his Bartimaeus Trilogy, depicting the adventures and misadventures of a genie, and including The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem’s Eye, and Ptolemy’s Gate, but his stand-alone novels include Heroes of the Valley, The Last Siege, The Leap, and Buried Fire. He’s also written several illustrated puzzle books for young readers, including The Viking Saga of Harri Bristlebeard and The Lost Treasure of Captain Blood, and one nonfiction title: Ancient Rome, in the Sightseers series. He lives in Great Britain.

  In the powerful story that follows, he takes us along with a grimly determined dragon hunter out on a dangerous job—one that may turn out to be more dangerous than he had ever imagined it could be.

  OF the victim’s body, only scorched bones remained, and these had been neatly stacked in the refuse bag for disposal in the trash. The pelvis lay at the bottom, with the leg and arm bones set diagonally across to form a platform for the skull. The ribs, vertebrae, and smaller fragments had been piled around the skull in snug, intersecting layers, but the arrangement had collapsed when Bob Choi opened the bag.

  Bob made a sad, dispirited sound behind his teeth. He removed a glove, and, with the tips of his fingers, touched the dome of the skull. Just the faintest trace of heat. So—one hour since the feeding, maybe two. The creature would be soporific in its room.

  Bob bent low, so that his long coat sighed and whispered in the alley dirt. The smell upon the bag was fresh and strong: pitchstone, copper sulphate, a subtle mix of other mineral residues. Not a hatchling, then. An old one, subtle and experienced … Bob Choi clicked his tongue against his teeth.

  Straightening, he looked up at the apartment block that rose above him in the rain, a slight, stoop-shouldered man with dark, receding hair. Small drips of water beaded his forehead and ran across his face. He did not move to brush them away but held himself still and watchful. His face was doughy, soft and unspectacular, his eyes weary and a little lined.

  From a window on the fourth floor of the apartment building, an orange-yellow radiance gleamed. It might be a simple light or lantern; then again, it might not. Bob Choi shook his head, blowing out his cheeks. Why couldn’t they stick with legal meat? They didn’t have to kill, and no one would be any the wiser if they just stayed quiet—their cloaks worked all too well. But no, they were beasts, of course; their hunger was ungovernable. They had to screw up every time. Some of them took years to show themselves, but it always ended the same way. With his gloved hand, he patted the pockets of his coat to check the location of the weapons. Always the same way.

  He grasped the bag, and, heedless of the rattles and cracking of the shifting bones, dragged it down the alley to a recessed doorway out of the rain. Slinging the bag into the corner, he climbed the step and took up position, watching the apartment block. A few minutes passed. Drizzle dropped from an iron sky. A hundred yards away, the crowd noises on Bryce Street rose and fell. In the silence of the alley, Bob Choi allowed his hand to slip beneath the coat and draw out the silver flask. It was not a good time for it, but the cold and fear needed pushing back a little. No one would know. He set the flask to his lips.

  “Mr. Choi.”

  Bob Choi coughed, swore, jerked round, right hand darting to his coat. A young man stood beside him, close enough to touch. He looked the same as he had that morning and the night before: trim, blue-eyed, with blond hair slicked back behind his rimless glasses, his suit crisp, uncreased, his face bleached clean of expression. As on the previous occasions, he held a paper packet in his hand.

  Bob shoved the flask from view. “How do you do that? I should have heard you.”

  “That’s not your talent, is it?” the young man said. His brow corrugated above his little nose. “You know you’ve got to keep your gloves on, Choi. Regulations. You’re breaking the fifth protocol. Putting me at risk.”

  Bob put his glove on. He said, “What have you got for me, Parsons?”

  “Szechuan noodles. Beef and ginger. Coffee.” The young man opened the paper packet and took out a polystyrene tray, covered with film.

  “Good. I’ve been the only one round here not eating.” Bob indicated the bag.

  The young man inspected the contents, frowning with distaste. “The estate agent?”

  “I should think so. Noodles, please. I’m starved.”

  Despite the hand being safely encased in its black leather glove, the young man passed over the tray with ostentatious care, keeping his fingers out of reach and darting them back quickly. Bob said nothing. He bent a little forward to shield the noodles from the rain, picked up the little plastic fork, and began to eat. The young man stood silent, watching how the steam rising from the food veered sharply aside before it reached Bob’s face, how it rounded the contours of his head at speed and continued rising. There was a layer of cold, clear air around Bob’s skin that the steam could not penetrate.

  Bob’s mouth was full. He coughed and swallowed: “Coffee too, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  Bob nodded, twisting noodles savagely, forking them into his mouth. “Okay.”

  The young man said: “I’ll come again at nine. Will you be here or back in the street?”

  A shake of the head; the last of the food was shoveled in, soy juice drunk, the tray tossed aside. “I’m not waiting any longer,” Bob Choi said. “I know which one it is.”

  The young man had bent fastidiously and was picking up the tray. He looked up sharply. “You do? Who?”

  “The old man in 4A. He’ll be up there now, fat as a snake from the feast.”

  The pale brow furrowed. “Mr. Yang? Did you see him leave the bones here?”

  “No. I was round the front. I missed the drop. Give me the coffee, please.”

  The young man stared at his feet, moved a slim black shoe. “We don’t want another mistake, Choi.”

  “There won’t be another mistake. It’s Yang. I watched him on Bryce this morning, shuffling along in his little slippers, all white-haired and frail. Ahh! This is hot.” Bob wiped coffee from his mouth. “It’s in the way he walks, Parsons.”

  “I’ve seen him walk,” the young man said. “I didn’t notice anything.”

  “It’s in the way he walks,” Bob Choi said again. “It’s in the jerky way the shoulders swing, the way the skinny neck cranes out as the head moves side to side. You’ve seen crocodiles at the zoo, Parsons? Seen tortoises? Watch how they move. You can get glimpses even through the cloak, if you look hard enough. If you know what you’re looking for.”

  Parsons said: “I don’t like this. There are others it might be just as easily. Zhou on the fifth floor fits the pattern: he’s a loner too—solitary occupation, background hard to trace. All fits. And the woman, Lau, on the fourth floor opposite to Yang. Records say she was in Shanghai during the last hunt there. Lived in the same suburb as the victims. Now she’s here. No record of her travelling with the airlines.”

  Bob Choi shrugged; he stared at his cup. “Maybe she took a boat. Or walked.”

  “Or,” Parsons said, “she flew.” He folded the paper packet neatly with pale fingers, placed it in the empty tray. “If you wait till tomorrow, Burns can be here. They’re bringing him in from Hanoi.”

  “I’m not waiting for Burns. This is a fresh feed. Yang’ll be slow and torpid now.”

  “He’ll still be torpid when Burns gets here,” the young man said. “If it’s him.”

  “I’ve seen him walk,” Bob said, stubbornly. “There won’t be two of them.”

  The young man’s glasses flashed as he glanced toward the apartment block. His voice was bored. “Well, I won’t try to dissuade you, Choi. If it’s Yang, go kill him. But don’t run to me for help if you mess it up.”

  Bob had his head back, draining the last of the coffee. He held the cup out. “Here. Seeing as how you hate a mess.”

  He looked across. The alley was empty. The young man and the bag of bones were gone.

  IN the broad, lit canyon of Bryce Street, umbrellas were up against the rain.
A hundred gold and scarlet disks spun and bobbed above the pavement and across the thoroughfare, reflected to infinity in the mirrored glass of the cafes and pleasure-bars. There was a swish of skirts and a pattering of canes. Laughter tumbled over Bob Choi as he slowly climbed the seven steps to the entrance of the apartment block, a hunched figure in a long black coat, hatless, with weary pouches beneath his eyes.

  A gloved hand pushed gently at the door. No luck: locked fast, opened electronically by switches in each apartment. On the wall hung a rank of buzzers, each with its room and name tag, some typed neatly, others scrawled. The lettering for 4A: Yang, was written in blue ink—an ornately cursive script, sinuous and flexible. Bob stared at it briefly, then dropped his gaze to the lowest label. 1C: Murray, Caretaker.

  The noise of the buzzer was ugly and indelicate. While he waited, Bob Choi stared up at the rain and the wall of the building: big brownstone blocks, rough-hewn, easy enough to climb if necessary. A voice sounded in the intercom. “Yes?”

  Bob bent close. “Parcel delivery, sir.”

  “Who for?”

  “You, sir.”

  “I haven’t ordered anything.” The voice was curt. “Oh, hell—wait there.”

  Bob Choi waited on the step. From an inside pocket, he took a pen and a small slip of yellow paper. Then he removed the glove from his right hand.

  The door opened. A man in a crumpled brown suit stood there. He had fair hair, red cheeks, and bloodshot, raddled eyes. He regarded Bob Choi with blank hostility.

  “Where’s the parcel?”

  “In the van, sir. If you could just sign this.” Bob Choi proffered the pen and paper. Behind the man’s curtain of alcohol, he smelt faint traces of bitumen and sulphur—the usual chemical tang—drifting down through the darkness of the hall. He glimpsed the stairwell at the far end.