Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because you’re a powerful osteomancer yourself, with no formal schooling. Powerful enough to dive into a Pacific firedrake’s osteomantic essence and not lose your own magical coherence. So your uncle must have taught you. And it takes a powerful osteomancer to train another one. Was he the guy who shot us down on Mount Whitney?”

  “Yeah. But he was trying to help. Daniel wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”

  “Hm” was her only response. They continued down a narrowing passageway. “What about the other two on the mountaintop? The big guy and the girl?”

  Moth and Em.

  He’d fallen hard for Em. They’d spent more than just a few moments together. They’d spent days, and they’d shared danger and pain. Also, she was so … so Em.

  “Friends,” Sam said.

  Maybe Daniel was right and Sam should have kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to go into Moth’s and Em’s biographies, much less Daniel’s.

  Annabel saved him with another question. “Okay, what’s your earliest memory?”

  “Earliest. Let me think.”

  He didn’t have to think hard. His earliest memory was also one of his clearest. He remembered waking up fully submersed in a tank of fluid. Later, he would learn the fluid was osteomantic medium, a soup of magical essences designed to accelerate cellular growth and turn him from a scrap of flesh into a fully formed body. And what he remembered most was how delicious it was, a chimerical blend of creatures. He remembered opening his eyes and looking out on a kaleidoscopic world as the medium boiled around him. After a while, he became aware of a fleshy umbilical cord winding around his belly and chest and entering his body through the back of his head. And there was a small square of glass in the tank. A window. And through the window, the face of the Hierarch looked in on him.

  He wanted to tell her what he was. How long was it okay to keep secrets from the only other person in the world?

  “I remember a birthday,” Sam said to Annabel. “My first.”

  “That sounds nice. Presents? Cake? Ice cream?”

  “Nothing like that. I was born in a tank. I’m a golem. I’m a magically grown duplicate of the Hierarch. The guy who ate you. So, whatever magical essence the Hierarch absorbed by consuming you is also in me. Which is probably why you’re here now, in the dragon. The Hierarch ate you, I’m grown from the Hierarch’s substance. The firedrake consumed me, and so here we are, together.”

  There. It was out, all in a gush of honesty, and he wished he could scoop it back up with his hands and shovel it in his mouth and make it disappear.

  She looked at him, stunned. Horrified. Maybe repulsed. She walked a few steps away from him, then turned.

  “How was I?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As a meal. How was I? Tasty? Nutritious?”

  “That wasn’t me. That was the Hierarch.”

  She tilted her head, like someone trying to understand a painting with no obvious appeal. “You are the Hierarch. I don’t know how I missed it before. But it’s right there in front of me. Your nose, your chin … He was a lot older than you when he ate me, but it’s so clear now.”

  She resumed walking, now at a fast pace. Sam struggled to keep up, hunching beneath the low, fleshy, wet ceiling.

  “So, is he still in charge of things?” Annabel said without turning her head.

  Sam dreaded having to give her the next bit of bad news. “No. A lot of time’s passed since he consumed you.”

  “I figured. You have a weird haircut. And you’re dressed like Buck Rogers.”

  Sam was still in the black fatigues and tactical boots he’d worn for the Catalina mission.

  “So what’s it been, Sam? Ten years or a hundred?”

  He didn’t say anything right away. She stopped and turned.

  “More than a hundred?”

  “About seventy,” Sam said. Enough for everyone she’d known and loved to have died, for the places she found familiar to have been razed and rebuilt upon a dozen times over. History and architecture weren’t sacred in Los Angeles. Not much was.

  Annabel continued down the passage. Sam didn’t know if he should follow or let her be alone, until she spoke again.

  “Seventy years wouldn’t be much to the Hierarch. Did another osteomancer finally gather the bones to do him in?”

  “My uncle, Daniel. He’s not really my uncle—”

  “So, you lied about that.”

  “Er. Yeah? I guess. Anyway. The Hierarch was going to put his consciousness in my body—”

  “Just like you put your consciousness in the firedrake’s body. Oh, but you’re nothing like the Hierarch, are you?”

  “Look, do you want to know how the Hierarch died or not?” Sam had a hard time accepting guilt just for having been born from the Hierarch’s essence. Yet his power came from everything the Hierarch ate, and one of those things—those people—was Annabel. Could he deserve her anger even without having done anything wrong?

  Annabel walked faster.

  “Daniel killed the Hierarch,” he said to Annabel’s back. “He reached into his chest and pried his heart out. And then, like I said, I grew up on the run. Daniel kept me away from all the shitty people who would’ve eaten me.”

  “I wish I’d had a Daniel on my last day of work.”

  Ducking her head, she stepped through a gap in a pink wall, like a bulkhead partition.

  “So do I,” Sam said, following.

  He knew he should let her be, at least for a while. If he’d found himself in an afterlife where the only other person was the closest thing remaining of the sorcerer who’d eaten him, Sam wouldn’t want to spend another second with that person. But what if he left her alone and never found her again?

  He needed an ally.

  He needed someone. Anyone.

  And maybe he owed Annabel.

  He opened his mouth to say something, not knowing what he was going to say, but remained silent when he took in their surroundings.

  The space was a jungle of white trunks and branches and tendrils. Pulses of light traveled along them, a great, crackling forest. Sam’s skin prickled. The hair on his arms stood erect.

  “I think we’ve found the brain,” Annabel said. Loose strands of her hair floated in a halo. “I’m going to go deeper in.”

  Sam restrained himself from reaching out for her hand. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”

  “Hell, no,” she said. “You got me into this mess. If I’m getting deeper in it, you’re coming with me.”

  Not letting her see him smile, Sam followed Annabel into the firedrake’s brain.

  FOURTEEN

  Things were going decently well until Max got shot.

  Gabriel’s sigils had gotten him and Cassandra and Max through black tunnels and cold shafts, down decommissioned aqueducts and raging subterranean rivers. They had just inched past hydroelectric turbine blades whose barest touch would have removed a limb or a head or a bellyful of guts when Cassandra started getting uncomfortably inquisitive about his magic.

  “That’s quite a bag of tricks you’ve got there,” she said chirpily.

  “They’re not tricks. They’re tools.”

  “So, you packed the bomb nice and safe, right? You’re not going to jiggle it and kill us all?” She remained chirpy. Maybe that was bothering Gabriel more than her nosiness.

  “It’s inert unless activated, and I activate it with a tuning fork. And, before you ask, the tuning fork is packed in a nice, padded case, if by chance I fall down again.”

  “That sounds real good,” she said, and Gabriel hoped they were done.

  Cassandra wasn’t done.

  “It’s really a powerful bomb, right?”

  “Very powerful. But safe. You’re safe. We’re all safe.”

  They trudged on in blissful silence. The bliss was brief.

  “Is it powerful enough to destroy a Pacific firedrake? Because it’d have to be a really powe
rful bomb.”

  She was still being chirpy. Max walked faster and moved ahead. He didn’t like chirpy any more than Gabriel did.

  “It’s a really, really powerful bomb, Cassandra. Look, see?”

  He unzipped his backpack and got out a foam-padded case. He opened it, showing her the little globe of silvery water.

  “Huh. It doesn’t look like much.”

  “Do you want me to strike the tuning fork now and show you?”

  She actually seemed to consider it.

  “No, that’s okay. You can put it back.”

  Gabriel did so.

  “Are you prepared to use it?” Now, she was not chirpy. Now, her look was as hard as hammers.

  “Yes. But that’s not the plan, is it? The plan is we find the firedrake, and it’s up to Daniel to extract Sam.”

  “That’s Daniel’s plan,” Cassandra agreed.

  The distinction was not lost on Gabriel. “But … that’s not your plan? The bomb is only supposed to be a last resort.”

  “My plan is to do whatever’s necessary,” Cassandra said. “I hope that means no more than telling Daniel where the dragon is.”

  She quickened her pace, leaving Gabriel behind.

  Gabriel truly did intend the bomb to be the last resort. But saving Sam was never part of his plan.

  And, if he wasn’t mistaken, Cassandra had just told him she was okay with however he used his bomb.

  He imagined she’d be less okay if she knew what he was planning to do with the memory water in his flask. The dragon was too dangerous to be left to its own devices. They could agree on that. But the memory water wasn’t for destroying the dragon. The memory water was for bending the dragon to Gabriel’s will.

  Max held his hand up and signaled the team to stop.

  Gabriel peered into the darkness ahead. “What is it? You smell something?”

  “No, but I heard something,” Max said. “There it is again.”

  “Echo of our own footsteps,” Gabriel suggested hopefully.

  Cassandra unholstered her gun. “But we’re not moving.”

  The last access hatch they’d passed was over a mile behind them. The next one was two miles ahead. That left them trapped inside a tube without a handy escape.

  “How far away was that noise?” Gabriel asked.

  “Close enough that I could hear it, far enough that you couldn’t,” Max replied.

  “But you still don’t smell it?” Cassandra was a little incredulous.

  “My nose is keener than yours, but it’s trained to detect magic. This could be a repair crew, or maybe a hobo camp.”

  “Well, we’ve got a distant early warning,” Gabriel said. “What do we do with it?”

  Cassandra moved forward, the barrel of her gun leading the way. “We keep moving.”

  “Wait,” Gabriel said.

  Max and Cassandra turned to look at him.

  There was no need to risk walking into an ambush or getting attacked from behind. Gabriel could erect a sigil and flush out anyone waiting to do them harm. Whoever got in the way of tons of water thundering down the tunnel like a freight train would be crushed. He’d probably never even have to see the bloated corpses.

  But he would always know what he’d done, without ever knowing whom he’d done it to: monsters, mercenaries, or Northern water department workers just trying to fix a leak.

  The other option was to continue down the tunnel. He and his team might be killed, and then there’d be nobody to destroy the firedrake, and the dragon might rage free, or the Northern Hierarch might discover how to wield it, and in either case, thousands upon thousands of people would die.

  Kill a few by water, or risk many dying by flame. It was at moments like this that Gabriel could let himself hate Daniel Blackland. Gabriel had to look after millions of people who considered him yet another tyrant, while all Daniel ever had to care about were his friends.

  “Cassandra,” he said. “I can take care of the threat.”

  She flicked a glance at him before returning her attention to the path ahead. “I know you can. I don’t want you to.”

  “Because…?”

  “We don’t know if they mean us harm.”

  “But what if they do?”

  She stopped to face him. “When we signed on for this, we accepted risk. Anyone who tries to kill us accepts risk. Maybe they’re guys with guns. But maybe they’re guys with wrenches. I don’t want to guess wrong and make someone pay for my mistake. You’d think someone with power over a whole kingdom would’ve worked out some of these ethical equations.”

  “I have a feeling, Cassandra, that you and I aren’t plugging in the same figures. By the way. How’s Otis Roth?”

  Max drew his pistol. “Closer now.”

  They hugged the sides of the tunnel. Max and Cassandra took up firing positions; Gabriel hadn’t even brought a gun. He barely knew how to use one and figured he was more likely to shoot himself in the crotch than hit an intended target. Instead, he reached into his pack to retrieve the components of a flash-flood-generating sigil.

  Out from the flickering light emerged three women, all with black guns outfitted with lots of textured grips and add-ons and built-in flashlights and things that emitted red beams. Gabriel noticed red dots on Cassandra’s and Max’s chest. He looked down to see one on his own.

  The women ranged in age from late-thirties to late teens. They resembled one another, their faces hauntingly familiar.

  The oldest of them stepped forward. She was the one whose gun was trained on Gabriel. “Have we caught you in a bad moment?”

  “Everyone holster,” Cassandra said, pointing her gun at the ceiling. “You’re Emmas.”

  Now Gabriel knew why they seemed familiar. They were golems of Emmaline Walker, the osteomancer who developed the technique of growing duplicates of living humans. Walker had worked for the Hierarch, and her progeny were scattered across the Southern realm. Daniel had left one of them—Em—guarding Sam’s gestating golem body.

  The Emmas redirected the muzzles of their rifles to less-threatening trajectories.

  “Who’s the one with the pipes?” the older Emma asked.

  “He’s a plumber,” Cassandra said. “How are you getting through the system without one?”

  The Emma didn’t answer, only smiled, and Cassandra smiled back. They trusted each other enough to stop waving their guns around, but not to share operational information. Gabriel was just happy the gun-pointing situation had improved.

  He let Cassandra handle the conversation, and she got from the Emmas that they were in the aqueducts to “do some recon.” Cassandra told them that she and Gabriel and Max were here “on business.”

  “Break bread?” Cassandra suggested. She passed around her ration of chocolate bars, and in exchange, the Emmas shared foil-wrapped lumpia.

  Max sniffed his lumpia thoroughly before taking a bite, and only then did Gabriel dig in. The lumpia was hot, even though it was cold here in the tunnels. The Emmas’ base must be close.

  “So how do you know us?” asked another of the Emmas. Her face was pink except for a mask of lighter flesh around her eyes, giving her the look of a reverse raccoon.

  “I know some of your sisters,” Cassandra said.

  The third of the Emmas, the youngest, had a pale, thin face and long, delicate fingers that made Gabriel think of harp strings, not guns. She spent most of the time looking down at her shoes and her food, taking only furtive glances at Gabriel and his companions.

  Cassandra asked what they could expect farther down the tunnel.

  “Way’s clear all the way to San Francisco,” the oldest Emma said. “Not counting running water and turbines and various other bits of engineering. But no human obstacles. Or anything odd. How about in the direction you came from?”

  “Clear sailing all the way to Hetch Hetchy.”

  The oldest Emma stood and offered Cassandra her hand. “Well, we should be off. Wherever you’re headed, good luck.”
<
br />   She and Cassandra shook. “Same to you.”

  Gabriel accepted an offered handshake with Reverse-Raccoon Emma. And the youngest Emma, the meek, reedy one, took out her gun and shot Max in the leg.

  The muzzle flash and thunder stunned Gabriel. But he heard Max cry out, and maybe he heard the tree-branch snap of his femur breaking, and he heard himself scream out Max’s name.

  Or maybe he inferred all these sounds. He felt as if he’d been clubbed in the ears by the gunfire, and everything was dim and far away.

  The only thing he knew for sure was that Max was writhing on the ground, his face and neck coated with sweat, with blood pouring out of him.

  * * *

  Gabriel begged the Emmas to save Max’s life. Their answer was no.

  The rain had finally stopped, but water still dripped and streamed from the silhouetted pine boughs, and the way was sloppy with mud. Moonlight came down between patchy clouds. Gabriel struggled along, carrying Max by his armpits while Cassandra carried his legs like the handles of a wheelbarrow. The Emmas made them haul their backpacks, as well, after determining that the weapons, gear, and provisions they contained were too valuable to leave behind. With their guns pointed at him, Gabriel couldn’t go into his pack to assemble a sigil. He couldn’t reach bottles of water, nor his tuning forks.

  “He’s going to bleed out,” Gabriel said, breathing hard. “He needs hydra regenerative, or eocorn horn, or surgery. Please—”

  “I bandaged him myself,” said the young, willowy Emma girl who’d shot him. “He’ll live. For a while yet.”

  Max was still breathing, but he hadn’t uttered so much as a grunt in a long time.

  “What is it you want with us?” Cassandra asked.

  “Not you. Him.” The oldest Emma made eye contact with Gabriel.

  “Me? What do you want with me?”

  “I used to live in Los Angeles,” she said. “I know what the South’s chief hydromancer looks like, Lord Argent.”

  Gabriel trudged through mud, his arms and shoulders and back screaming. Max wasn’t a large man, but he was dead weight.

  “I’m not a lord. And you didn’t have to shoot Max to take me captive.”

  The Emmas had nothing to say to this. Of course they had to shoot Max. He was unmistakably Gabriel’s protector.