Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

Mute, Daniel could only stare at her.

  “You disapprove?” she said.

  “Approval doesn’t come into it. Just … why, Cass?”

  “The question is why not.”

  He knew Cassandra well enough to see past her flat affect. She was practical. But she wasn’t cold.

  “This isn’t like you. I mean … we’ve both done things we wish we didn’t have—”

  “We’ve both killed.”

  “But it’s always been in the middle of things. With people shooting at us. With chaos and … did you drive him all the way out to the desert and then shoot him, or did you shoot him and … I don’t even know why I’m asking. I don’t even know what difference it makes.”

  Now he saw some anger in her eyes. With Cassandra, anger was always the surface layer of pain.

  “It makes all the difference. Everything about it makes a difference. Every second of it makes a difference. I killed Otis. Of course it makes a difference.”

  “Oh, Cass. Why?”

  She set the mug down hard. “Because he took me as collateral on a defaulted loan. Because he sold you to the Hierarch. Because Sam. Because Moth. Because Jo, and because Punch. Because alive, he would find a way to screw us over again. Because alive, he’d find a way to make sure you never get Sam back. Because he deserved to die. Because you wouldn’t kill him, so I had to.”

  Daniel set his own cup down, very carefully. “You didn’t do this for me.”

  “Of course I did it for you. I did it for all of us. Because you didn’t.”

  “I won’t thank you for it.”

  “I don’t want you to. And you’re welcome. You always come to me, not asking, but hoping—knowing—I’ll give you the things you’re afraid to ask for.”

  “Maybe you’re too generous sometimes.”

  Cassandra shook her head with impatience. “You’re misunderstanding. I didn’t kill Otis as a personal favor to you. I killed him for the same reason you ripped the Hierarch’s heart from his chest.”

  “I killed the Hierarch because he was trying to kill me.”

  “Exactly,” Cassandra said. “Survival. Otis never stood to your face and shot lightning at you, but he’s been doing us harm since we were children. You were about to give him another chance when you knew you shouldn’t. I took the chance away from him. For me, for you, for everyone. And now you’re here asking for papers. Goddamn papers, Daniel. Because you need me to do something else, and you won’t ask, but you know I’m joining you on the job. You came here knowing that. You need help to get the axis mundi bone. That’s Moth. You need someone to watch over Sam’s golem. That’s Em. And you need someone to make sure Gabriel Argent doesn’t screw you.”

  She drank down her coffee, and he drank his, both of them using the pause in conversation to recalibrate.

  “Ask me,” she said.

  He traced a finger along the wood grain of the table.

  “Cass, will you be on Gabriel’s team, to make sure he doesn’t screw me?”

  “My bag’s already packed, you idiot.”

  He laughed, and this was almost a nice moment they’d landed on, and he wished he could just ride it out like a gentle wave. But there was another elephant in the room, and he knew Cassie wouldn’t let it sit there, so he preempted her.

  “My mom will be in the North.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And some decisions will have to be made about how to deal with her. Hopefully by you.”

  EIGHT

  Gabriel needed to drown himself.

  He had Max drive him to the East Los Angeles Interchange along the banks of the Los Angeles River where the Golden State, San Bernardino/Santa Monica, Pomona, and Hollywood flumeways converged. This was not the geographical center of Los Angeles, but it was the focus of the mandala of canals begun by Abbot Kinney and William Mulholland and continued by Gabriel. For a water mage there was no more powerful place in the entire kingdom.

  Max docked at a utility inlet, and they climbed out onto a narrow pier.

  “It’s down here,” Gabriel said over the roar of water and boat traffic. He led the way through the ivy barrier and down a spiral staircase, to a platform beneath the giant nest of flumeway overpasses. The ground was sparsely littered with some shattered glass, a few cigarette butts, fast food wrappers, and a toaster, the kind of random objects that inevitably turned up in uninviting places like this.

  This wasn’t a secret place, but it was hidden away, and no one but Gabriel knew there was a reason to come here.

  He kicked away a scattering of dead leaves to clear a manhole cover. The ring of soot and plant dust around the perimeter indicated it hadn’t been disturbed since the last time Gabriel came by to check on it. The weld was still in place.

  “I’m going to lift it,” he said.

  Max leaned his tall frame over it. “How? We didn’t bring one of those hook-wrench things.”

  “It’s called a lift key,” Gabriel said, producing a metal hook from his jacket pocket. “And you know it’s called a lift key. But you insist on not using my jargon. Why, Max?”

  “Because your exasperation hormones smell like humility.”

  “Are you saying I need humility?”

  “I am. You’ve agreed to embark on an operation behind enemy lines with Daniel Blackland and his cohorts, and you seem to have forgotten you are an unathletic bureaucrat, not a commando.”

  “I’m actually one of the great magical powers of the Southern Kingdom, Max.”

  Max just looked at him.

  “Okay. I know. It’s not a lack of humility. It’s a lack of better options.”

  “You have other hydromancers. You could assign it to one of them.”

  “I have people who can move water around. And I trust them. To a degree. But not enough to put them near a weapon like the firedrake. I trust only two people for that: me and you.”

  “Well,” Max said, “I trust half that many.”

  Even after all these years, Gabriel couldn’t always tell when Max was kidding.

  He turned back to the manhole cover. “Anyway, it’s called a lift key. And it’ll take more than a lift key to pop this top.”

  He dug a small vial of water from his jacket and held it up before his face. It was clear, and when he swirled it, no sediments floated in suspension. It appeared unremarkable.

  He poured it around the weld. There was a sizzle. Threads of smoke unwound in air and the scar of metal boiled away. With the lift key, he pried the cover up and dragged it aside with a lot of grunting. He wished he’d asked Max to do this part, since Max sometimes exercised and was unfairly gifted with physical fitness, but he didn’t want to risk some sort of comedic and unpredictable mishap resulting in Max falling down the hole.

  Gabriel looked down into impenetrable blackness. He could hear the whirlpool roaring louder than any dragon, like an ocean forced through a tight conduit. The vibrations rumbled through his feet, through his entire body.

  “If I don’t come up, don’t go in after me,” Gabriel said over the noise.

  “If you don’t … wait. You’re going in there?”

  Gabriel unknotted his tie, pulled it free, and handed it to Max. He took off his jacket, then his belt, and unbuttoned his shirt.

  “Why am I being made to watch you disrobe?” Max asked, accepting each item of clothing from Gabriel as it came off.

  “I’m serious about not going in the well, no matter what. If I don’t pop back up after, say, twenty minutes, just put the cover back over the hole, go back to your office, and look in your pencil tray.”

  “Why, what’s in there?”

  “Cash, travel papers, dirty secrets on anyone you might need to extort for favors, keys to my house—”

  “I don’t need keys to get in your house.”

  “—all you need to live a comfortable life.”

  “I had no idea a comfortable life was so near to my grasp. Why don’t you stop talking and jump in?”

  Gabriel peeled out of his boxe
rs and laid them on top of the expensive, tailored fabrics now piled in Max’s arms. The socks went last, and a deep chill leeched into the bottoms of his feet.

  “Oh, hold this for me, too.” He dug out a steel flask from his inner jacket pocket.

  Max shook it. “It’s empty.”

  “Last time, Max. Don’t go in the water. Strict orders.”

  “I know how to stay,” Max said. “Why am I even here?”

  Max’s face tended not to betray his feelings, seldom straying from a look of weary concentration. He’d been made into a magic sniffer at a young age. Nobody was interested in his feelings. He was just supposed to smell osteomancy. But he’d been the closest thing Gabriel had to a friend for over a decade now, and Gabriel could tell when Max was angry or frightened, both of which were rare for him, and both of which he was revealing in his level gaze.

  “Max, I’d hate to die alone.”

  Max opened his mouth, said nothing, closed it again. Finally, he said, “I’ll be right here, Gabriel.”

  “Thank you, Max.”

  And before he could change his mind, Gabriel stepped over the edge of the hole and let himself fall.

  He hit the water, and the water hit him back, twisting his body like a piece of string in a hurricane. Everything was black and unfathomably loud, and the whirlpool consumed him and drew him down.

  It was an extraordinary relief not to feel as though he were drowning. He’d done research on drowning, having calculated a 63 percent chance that drowning would, indeed, be his eventual fate, and he’d lost sleep dreading the agonizing pressure on his lungs, and the spikes of pain generated by oxygen-starved brain cells, and the horror of watching his last-ever breath abandon him in a cascade of bubbles.

  So, yes, it was good not to drown. He never wanted to be one of those about whom people said, “That guy? Yeah, he did okay until he decided to take a swim in the well at the heart of the mandala. What made him think that could possibly be a good idea?”

  That was the kind of thing a sorcerer did, and even though Gabriel was the kingdom’s most powerful water mage, he never considered himself a sorcerer. He’d started out as an administrator and was proud of being a good one. By necessity, he became an engineer, learning everything about how water worked, how to design canals and flumeways and how to channel and control its magic. But to conquer the dragon, he’d have to conquer Daniel Blackland. And Daniel Blackland was a sorcerer, and a great one. Gabriel simply needed more direct access to his own power.

  A horrible necessity, and it went against Gabriel’s nature. His mother was an osteomancer, but she’d never raised him to be one. He asked her why enough times that she finally ran out of deflections and told him her truth: Magic is painful. She didn’t want her son to live by pain. At the time, he resented being denied gifts of power. But later in life he realized that magic sometimes made one great, but it almost never made one good.

  All his mother’s power, and she ended up on the Hierarch’s dinner table. All the Hierarch’s power, and Daniel Blackland tore his heart from his chest with his bare hands. All William Mulholland’s power, and Max shot him in the head.

  The water had a voice.

  In fact, it had many voices. The voices of all the boats traversing the canals. The voices of the water coursing through the kingdom’s plumbing, from its sewer mains to the capillaries threading behind its walls. The voices of every creature that drank and eliminated and swam in the kingdom’s waters.

  And there were voices from deeper waters, from below the city’s bedrock, and farther down, from below the earth’s crust.

  Gabriel had studied water, and though he was no osteomancer, he had studied osteomancy. He knew all forms of magic were linked, and that the voices of the deepest osteomantic creatures could be captured in hydromantic medium.

  To gain the power he needed, Gabriel would have to make himself the temporary medium for one of the deepest voices of all.

  He opened his mouth and let the water rush in.

  * * *

  Gabriel’s head broke the surface. Sunlight bored in through the manhole, searing his eyes. A hand emerged from the light, reaching for him, and Gabriel clasped it and surrendered to it as it lifted him up to the heavens.

  It was not a god who met him.

  It was only Max.

  Gabriel coughed and his stomach convulsed, trying to vomit, but his body refused to surrender its water.

  Max rolled him onto his back beside the manhole, and now he did feel as though he was drowning. His depleted lungs blazed and the air he drew in gasps provided nothing. Terrible pain seized every part of his body. Surely his bones were shattered. Surely the current had torn his flesh away.

  He reached out his hand, and somehow Max knew what he wanted. He handed Gabriel the steel flask.

  Gabriel vomited. Murky water came out in a tight, high-pressure jet, just enough to fill about half the flask. He capped it and clutched it to his chest.

  “Forty minutes,” said Max.

  After a while, when the pain subsided enough and he could speak, Gabriel croaked, “What?”

  “You were in there for forty minutes.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “I know. How do you feel?”

  In the water, in the storm and the dark, he had felt like himself. On land, he was dying.

  “It’s awful, Max. I think I may have made a mistake.”

  Frowning, Max knelt at his side and sniffed him.

  “Do I smell different?”

  Max nodded, and with the stiff, professional tone of an uncomfortable doctor pronouncing a terminal diagnosis, he said, “You smell like magic.”

  NINE

  Daniel and Moth landed ashore at San Simeon Harbor in broad daylight. Tan grass hills overlooked the broad stretch of coastline. Atop the hill rose twin white towers, like a cathedral against the bright blue sky. Spotters used to look for migrating gray whales from the heights and send men out with harpoons to kill them, and it was virtually impossible to arrive here undetected. As Moth and Daniel dragged their boat onto the beach, a dozen armed guards sped down the hill in all-terrain carts to meet them.

  “I suggest a change of plan,” Moth said. “You burn them all, and we dump the bodies and go have a vacation.”

  “Rejected. Get in character.”

  “Scowl,” Moth said. “Scowl, glower, frown.” Moth proceeded to do so beneath the nylon hood of his windbreaker.

  A nervous minute passed while Daniel and Moth waited passively for the guards to reach them.

  The carts came to a stop and the guards spilled out.

  “This is private property,” said one of them, leveling a rifle at Daniel’s chest. She had two white stripes on her sleeve, one more than the others. They all wore black body armor and combat helmets, and their guns looked like the kind that fired big bullets rapidly. There were a lot of fingers curled around triggers. People took property rights seriously around here.

  Daniel pulled his hood back. “I’m Paul Sigilo,” he said.

  He stared into the guard captain’s eyes through the clear lens of her helmet’s visor.

  She redirected the muzzle of her gun away from him. “Stand down,” she ordered, and the others did the same.

  “My apologies, Baron Sigilo,” she said. “Welcome home.”

  * * *

  Home was a white Mediterranean castle surrounded by fountains and plazas and splashes of colorful flowers. Every surface was carved with some filigree or naked Greek, and Daniel saw money in every chisel mark. The newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst had built it, and its opulence was famous even in the Southern realm. When Hearst died, the Northern Hierarch took possession of it, and the fact that it had been let out to Paul gave Daniel a real sense of how high in the regime his damaged golem-twin had climbed.

  Gardeners stopped clipping hedges at the sight of Daniel and Moth and the procession of guards escorting them across the plaza. Daniel tried to read their expressions. How did Paul’
s people feel about his return? No radiant smiles broke out. Nobody wiped tears of joy. So it wasn’t love. But he didn’t see fear, either. More a sort of curiosity, as if he were some kind of zoo animal. Maybe a little caution. So, they viewed him as a possibly dangerous exotic creature. Daniel could work with that.

  A pace behind Daniel, Moth was in his full, towering gloom, the embodiment of potential violence, muscles in his forearms like steel cables, his shoulders like boulders, his chest like stone slabs. Daniel would work with that as well.

  They went through a pair of massive wooden doors that must have been taken off an ancient European church and were met in an entry hall. Daniel nearly staggered. The scents of a hundred or more osteomantic creatures filled the air. Daniel scanned the assemblage for their source. Butlers and maids and cooks and tradesworkers and dozens of other members of Paul’s household staff waited with stiff postures.

  Of them all, one woman stood out, with striking cheekbones, eyes like pools of black ink, and black hair falling like a curtain to her knees. It wasn’t only her appearance that attracted Daniel’s attention. She didn’t regard Daniel with nervous uncertainty, nor with the curiosity of the others. Locking eyes with him, she gave him a look he couldn’t read.

  A man in a neat suit with neat silver hair and a precise mustache stepped up. His eyes watered, and he regarded Daniel with the surprise and delight of someone who’d just found a live baby unicorn in his sock drawer. Some nicely dressed functionaries flanked him, throwing him glances for behavioral cues. Chief of staff? Majordomo? Something like that.

  “My lord,” Weepy Mustache said with a bow. “I can scarcely believe my eyes. We thought you dead.”

  Daniel responded with one of Paul’s enigmatic blank looks. Weepy Mustache took it like a cattle prod.

  “Not that I ever lost hope,” he added hastily, putting the emphasis on I to make sure there was no possibility he could be confused with one of those disloyal, benighted idiots who presumed Paul dead, even though he’d identified himself as such fewer than three seconds ago. “It’s just … I don’t … How is this even possible, my lord?”

  “Magic?” Daniel said.