Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  A bee landed on the taped-tight bundle of plastic sheeting on the edge of her hole. She shooed it away and kept digging.

  Along with marketable skills, she’d also found a bit of higher purpose in Otis’s warehouse. Some of the other little thieves Otis took in weren’t as self-sufficient as she was. They’d eat sugar three meals a day if you’d let them, or they’d get stupid and try to filch little nuggets of the osteomancy Otis trafficked. They needed a big sister, and Cassandra accepted that as her job. Without anyone to take care of her, she found she was good at taking care of others.

  There was one boy in particular who needed her more than most. He was a dark and quiet kid who never spoke at communal dinners up at the big kitchen table. The rumor was that he was the son of some big, high-level osteomancer who worked with the Hierarch himself and grew so powerful that the Hierarch had him killed. In the more sensational version of the story, the Hierarch dined on the boy’s father.

  As Cassandra later found out, the stories were true.

  “That was Daniel, of course. And what a weird, damaged kid. But you know what? He was also sweet. And it turned out we had the same way of dealing with not having anyone to take care of us. We took care of the ones who needed it most. Me and Daniel, and then Moth, and Punch. We took care of each other. We became a little family. And you liked that, Otis. You encouraged it. You teamed us up on jobs, and you made sure we had skills or magic that complemented each other, and we became a really tight crew of thieves. You made an awful lot of money with us.”

  Standing shoulder-deep in the hole, she threw her shovel over the top and lifted herself out. It was now a couple of hours past noon, and she’d still have to hike about a mile back to her car, and then a few more hours to the park-and-ride, and depending on traffic, more hours navigating the L.A. canals back home.

  “I don’t hate you, Otis. And I’m not scared of you. You’re not my boogeyman. And as far as my business concerns go, I don’t even see you as a rival. In fact, I’m grateful to you. That’s how big of a person I am. I can set the immensely shitty things you’ve done aside and see the things you gave me. You gave me skills, a family, and a purpose. I take care of my own. I do things for my friends that they can’t do for themselves. Or won’t do, because they’re too decent. Daniel should have killed you years ago. You sold him to the Hierarch. You’re the reason he lost Sam. If you’d done that to me, I would have killed you without hesitation. But that’s Daniel. Anyway. Hey, you remember what you gave my parents when they handed me over to you?”

  She picked up her shovel and slid the blade under the plastic-wrapped bundle. With some care, she leveraged Otis’s body into the grave.

  “You gave them a receipt.”

  She threw in the first of many shovelfuls of dirt.

  SIX

  Sam journeyed to the firedrake’s belly. He crawled on his hands and knees through moist tunnels and followed twisting passages and descended ladders made of bony ridges embedded in red tissue. He’d never studied dragon anatomy, much less dragon architecture, so all he had for guidance was intuition. But he knew the belly was important.

  Trying to control the dragon from the cockpit was useless. All the levers and wheels and knobs and valves did nothing. He couldn’t land the dragon, or crash it, or get it to stop burning things, and if this kept up, the death toll would reach into the tens of thousands.

  So, Sam decided to give up on piloting the dragon. But maybe he could sabotage it before it hurt someone else he cared about, or even a total stranger. Sabotage was just breaking things with purpose. Sam knew how to break things.

  His boots squelched on the soft floor of a down-sloping passage. Like the other parts of the dragon he’d explored, it was littered with bones and fragments of bones. He picked up a triangular shard that came to a terribly sharp point. A strange urge took hold of him, and he scraped his name into the side of the tunnel. Ancient cave paintings, prison-wall scrawls, graffiti on the sides of buses, and names gouged in the internal tissues of monsters: Sam was now part of a very old tradition of defacing surfaces for reasons that were hard to articulate. He understood the human need to communicate, but communication required an audience.

  “Well, I just tagged a dragon,” he said. And then he regretted opening his mouth. He hadn’t spoken out loud in a long time, and his own voice unsettled him. It sounded like that of a stranger he ought to know, or a person familiar to him who ought to be a stranger.

  He continued his descent, marking his way with more slashes in the dragon’s tissues. He didn’t want to get lost inside here.

  The sound of pumping blood grew stronger, humming behind the tissue walls. The scent of pyrogenic fuel grew stronger.

  It was also getting hotter, the air cooking his skin, his eyes, his gums. Sweat rained down his face and the back of his neck. He felt like soup. Osteomancers should strive not to sweat, bleed, or weep. Osteomancers liked to keep their magic essences contained inside their bodies until needed. Daniel taught him this when Sam was seven years old and they were camping in the Inyo Forest, on the run from a leech gang. Sam had tripped on a sapling and cut his knee open. He bit his lip to cry silently, and Daniel told him how an osteomancer was a vessel of precious magic, and that the vessel had to remain whole, and even then Sam could tell that Daniel himself thought this was a ridiculous thing to say to a child with a bleeding knee.

  Sam sponged his face with his sleeve and kept going.

  He arrived at a vast chamber where the walls bent inward and soared to a pink ceiling some fifty feet high. A gigantic fleshy sack hung from tubes the color of raw beef.

  There was a smell here. Old, deep osteomancy, like refined bone simmering for days on the back burner, breaking down into pure, rich magic. Lights wavered like flames behind the translucent skin of the bag. This must be the source of the dragon’s flames.

  He craned his neck to peer into the murky air above. The fuel likely passed through the tubes, and from there to the lungs, then to the air pipe, and out the mouth. So, what if Sam climbed the bag and severed the tubes?

  They were the width of wine barrels, so he’d need to craft a good saw.

  Not to mention climbing gear.

  Some climbing skills might be useful as well.

  He walked around the sack, pushing through searing heat. If he cut through the tubes or the sack, the fuel might gush out, but not without burning or drowning him or maybe both.

  He missed Em. She was pretty good at things like climbing and running around. She had all those commando and saboteur skills that Sam found sexy.

  She was also good with ideas. And she could make Sam feel like the fate of the world didn’t rest solely on his narrow shoulders. He wished they’d had more than just a few days together. He’d never even gotten to kiss her.

  “Who the hell are you?” A girl jumped out at him as he rounded the curve of the bag. Rosy-cheeked, she wore a high-necked white blouse and a plaid skirt, with a matching ribbon in her curly black hair. She gripped a femur of some creature like a ball bat, and the way she was holding it made Sam think she was very close to tee-balling his head.

  Sam gathered his composure. He didn’t know what was going on, who or what this girl was, what kind of threat she presented, but instead of fear, his overwhelming emotion was one of relief.

  He wasn’t alone.

  “Hi. My name’s Sam,” he said.

  “Sam. Well, you scared the hell out of me, Sam. You must be the one banging around upstairs.” She didn’t lower her club.

  “How long have you been … here?” he asked.

  “Let’s get out of the fire belly before we talk. It’s hotter than the devil’s crotch in here.”

  Sam was only too happy to. She made him lead the way back out to the passageway, far enough from the chamber until the heat was more bearable.

  She considered him a moment, then lowered her club.

  “Annabel Stokes,” she said, wiping her hand on her skirt and offering it for a shake.
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  The feel of her calloused palm startled him.

  It felt real. It felt like a hand.

  It was too much for Sam. “Am I dreaming you?”

  Annabel Stokes frowned. “You have vivid dreams, do you? Been practicing dreaming things into life? Working hard at it?”

  “No.”

  “Then what makes you think you suddenly got a brain that can dream a whole person into life?”

  “Sorry,” Sam said. “It’s just that, I don’t really understand how things work in here. I figured I was sort of dreaming myself, maybe, and now you’re here, so maybe you’re a manifestation of some other compartment of my consciousness.”

  Annabel didn’t seem to think much of Sam’s explanation.

  “Well, anyway, I’m glad I finally found someone. How long have you been in here?” he asked again.

  She gave him a guarded look, as if trying to decide if she should answer him or crack him over the head.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Days, weeks, years … there’s no day or night here, no chronometer. And I’m pretty sure my sleep cycle’s glitched. The last day I clearly remember was Monday, June fifth. I was in the Ossuary, getting my work station ready—”

  “The Ossuary?” Sam interrupted.

  “I work for the Council. I’m an osteomancer.”

  Only high-level osteomancers actually worked in the Ossuary, and if she worked there, that meant she’d worked close to the Hierarch himself.

  Sam concentrated on keeping his face neutral. “Sorry, go on.”

  “I’d been having such a good day, too. Nice bones to work with, my mixtures were coming out right … I was working with hydra regenerative.”

  Sam played dumb. “Regenerative?”

  “Yeah. It’s a healing agent. We extract it from hydra bones. The job is teasing the most essence out of the least possible amount of raw bone, which is really important when you’re trying to spread it across four dozen frontline field hospitals.” She paused. “I’m talking too much. I’m so used to babbling to myself, I forgot there’s actually a poor sap stuck here listening to me.”

  “I don’t mind,” Sam said. “I haven’t had anybody babble at me in a long time.”

  Her mention of the front line, and of field hospitals, and the way she was dressed, all added up to make Sam think the Monday she remembered happened a very long time ago. Maybe more than half a century past.

  “A runner came up to me with a note. An invitation.” She seemed reluctant to continue.

  “An invitation,” Sam prompted.

  “An invitation to dinner. From the Hierarch.”

  “Oh,” Sam said, fully understanding. “Oh.”

  “Right. So, I did what any sensible gal would do. I went to the ladies’ room and tried to escape out the window. Didn’t get far.” Her hand drifted to her belly. “That’s the last thing I remember before finding myself here.”

  Sam had a feeling she remembered more, but he didn’t push. Everything that came after the Hierarch’s dinner invitation wasn’t anything Sam needed to hear about.

  “So, what about you, Sam? What’s your story?”

  Daniel would have warned Sam to reveal nothing because Daniel’s world was one of enemies. And what would Annabel think about him once she found out he was the golem of the man who ate her?

  On the other hand, Sam was lonely, and he had to tell her something that was true.

  “I’m late of Los Angeles, the Salton Sea, and just about everywhere else in Southern California. The thing we’re in, the firedrake … it was a project of the Northern realm, with help from some jerks in Southern California. I was trying to sabotage it. But it didn’t work out the way I hoped, and here I am. I came down to the belly hoping to disable the dragon’s ability to make fire.” He glanced back toward the chamber housing the fire bag. “I figure the big sack is part of its fire-generation system.”

  “Yeah. But why do you want to disable it?”

  “Don’t you know what the dragon’s been up to?”

  “Raising hell, from the sounds of it.”

  “It just annihilated a whole neighborhood,” Sam said. “There must be hundreds dead.”

  “And that wasn’t your aim? To burn everything down?”

  “No,” Sam said, outraged. “Why would I want that?”

  “Hm. My mistake. I thought it was you piloting. Who’s up in the cockpit, then?”

  “Well, me, usually. But I’m not in control.”

  She puffed out air. “This train’s a runaway volcano, that’s for sure. Well, mind if I have a look upstairs? I’ve been dying to know what’s up there.”

  “Why didn’t you just come up?”

  “I tried to find it a few dozen times. Always got turned around and lost. How long did it take you to make your way down here?”

  “I don’t know. Not very long, I don’t think.” The journey from the cockpit to the fire belly seemed like a half hour or so, but without a way to keep time, he couldn’t be sure. He’d heard of people being trapped in coal mines for weeks and thinking only a few days had passed.

  This wasn’t fun to think about. If he ever managed to get out of here, would Em and Daniel still be around? Maybe they’d be long dead and crumbled to dust.

  “Well,” Sam said, “come see my part of the world.”

  * * *

  The earth was in shadow and the sun hung on the far western horizon, bathing the sky with purples and pinks and golds. Granite ridges dusted with snow loomed ahead. Pine trees fringed the base of the mountain, and beyond them sprawled a valley of dry, fissured desert.

  Annabel cast her gaze over Sam’s control panel, clucking and humming in a way that could mean she was impressed with what she saw, or else just the opposite. She squinted at the view outside the dragon’s eyes.

  “What are we doing over the Sierras?”

  “The dragon roosts here sometimes,” Sam said.

  Annabel took this in, knowing and worried, like an old mariner witnessing the early warnings of a typhoon. “You ever read Yang’s treatise on the transitive essences of dragon species?”

  “That one must have been checked out of the library.”

  “Where were you schooled, anyway? You’re not an academy brat?”

  “No. I learned from…” He almost said Daniel’s name. Probably not a good idea. “I had a private tutor. What about you?”

  “I’m self-taught. No money in my family for academies. But I found an old osteomancer’s library and workshop in a locked-up building my grandfather used to rent out, and that was enough to get me started.”

  “That must have been a hell of a good library,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Came with everything I needed.”

  Sam would bet her education was a little more complicated than that. A lot of osteomancers began their careers by feeding on other osteomancers. Finding yourself a nice, old, juicy sorcerer to eat could give you a good leg up.

  “So what does Yang say about dragons?”

  “Firedrakes like mountaintops,” Annabel said. “Even the ocean-born. They like to perch on high and search out suitable prey.”

  “It can’t be hungry again already. We just ate a gray whale.”

  “Food’s not the only thing dragons hunt.”

  Just as Sam began to wonder what else the dragon might be after, a blast of air rushed into the cockpit, strong enough to flap Sam’s pant legs.

  “It’s scenting,” Annabel said, and her face looked grave. “It wants something bad.” She took three sharp sniffs. “You smell that? That’s some strong osteomancy.”

  Sam did. Not just magic, but a magic as familiar to him as his own. He’d grown up with that smell, and it brought a mix of emotions: comfort, and fear, and resentment, and love.

  There was no other osteomancy quite like this. There was no osteomancer quite like its source.

  He was smelling Daniel.

  The firedrake climbed a few hundred feet and wheeled around, aiming for a stony
peak shaped like a weathered flint ax.

  “Ah, that’s Mount Whitney,” Annabel said with warm appreciation. “Tallest peak in the Southern realm. A very fine place for dragon.”

  Sam leaned over the controls. Even in the fading light, he made out three human forms, bundled up against the howling cold.

  Daniel was looking back at him through binoculars.

  Daniel had done it.

  He’d found Sam. He’d crossed the kingdom, he’d figured out a place where the firedrake might show, he’d baited the air with his own scent, and he’d climbed more than fourteen thousand feet to find Sam. And of course Moth was with him, his ridiculous, giant shadow. And Em, not because she was loyal to Daniel, but because she was loyal to Sam.

  Sam raised his hand in a greeting he knew none of them could see.

  “You know those folks?” Annabel asked.

  “Friends of mine,” Sam said.

  “Looks like two of your friends are fixing to fire a harpoon at us.”

  Sam smiled. He’d wondered what Daniel was planning to do once he tracked down the dragon. He bet Daniel had gone through quite a bit of trouble to obtain whatever bone was on the end of the harpoon.

  Sam wanted the firedrake to hover there and take whatever was coming to it. He only wished he could find a way to let Daniel know it was okay, because if things went wrong and Daniel ended up killing him, Sam didn’t want Daniel to spend the rest of his life moping around with guilt.

  The harpoon flew at the dragon. There was not so much as a bump, a shudder, or even a noise when it struck the dragon’s belly. But Sam could tell right away something was happening. The dragon’s wing beats slowed.

  Annabel sniffed the air. “That smell like alp to you?”

  “No. What’s alp?”

  “It’s a shape changer. Doesn’t even have a native form. But you can cook it into a powerful tranquilizer.”

  “Powerful enough to put the firedrake to sleep?”

  “Not unless it’s mixed by a phenomenally good osteomancer. Are your friends phenomenally good osteomancers?”