Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Yes?” Daniel said, somehow making his apprehension sound like impatience. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  Her eyes didn’t blink. Daniel wondered if she even had eyelids.

  She dipped her boulder-sized head in a slight bow.

  “I am commanded by Her Majesty the Hierarch to bring His Lord Baron into Her Majesty’s presence for the purpose of audience.”

  “Oh,” said Daniel. “Of course. And … when?”

  Her eyes seemed to grow smaller without the assistance of a squint. “At once, my lord.”

  “Very good. I’ll just need to change, then.” He lifted the tails of his untucked shirt and wiggled the toes of his stocking feet to emphasize his slovenly and unfit-for-royal-audience appearance.

  Her eyes shrank to pencil dots.

  “I am commanded to bring His Lordship to Her Majesty now, my lord.”

  Moth came over with a dressing gown of gold silk and a pair of black loafers polished to an obsidian gloss. He helped Daniel step into his new costume, picked a speck of lint from Daniel’s shoulder, appraised him, and graced him with an approving nod.

  “Lead the way,” Moth commanded the woman, stepping into the hall to follow.

  The woman put a massive paw on Moth’s chest.

  “You’re touching me,” Moth said.

  “I am not commanded to bring anyone save His Lord Baron.”

  “You’re still touching me.”

  “I can assure His Lord Baron’s manservant that His Lord Baron shall be delivered to Her Majesty the Hierarch’s presence safely.”

  “I notice you didn’t say delivered and returned. And you’re still touching me.”

  Her eyes grew yet smaller and her voice dipped deeper. “His Lord Baron’s manservant should know that His Lord Baron is in the care of Her Majesty the Hierarch’s captain of the guard. To insult Her Majesty the Hierarch’s captain of the guard is tantamount to insulting Her Majesty the Hierarch.”

  Daniel buried his hands in his face. “I’m losing track of all these possessives. I am perfectly confident in my ability to keep myself safe.” That was an assertion so patently untrue Daniel almost choked on his own words.

  “My lord,” Moth began.

  “You are commanded to remain here and await my return.” Even as Paul, Daniel couldn’t subject Moth to such high snottiness. More gently, he said, “Take some time off. Enjoy your sandwich.”

  He could tell Moth was exerting extraordinary muscle control to keep from reaching out and smacking Daniel.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  The guard captain took Daniel up a staircase that spiraled around the outer perimeter of the palace. Glowing braziers lit the way, the light changing color with the hues of the glass walls. It struck Daniel that, despite being made of glass, the palace provided no views to the outer world.

  He wondered if he was imagining scrutiny or increased interest from the guards posted at various stations. He was a candidate for the office reserved for the second most powerful osteomancer in the realm, and he was being escorted to a private audience with the first most powerful. On such occasions, word must spread through the palace. There were probably bets placed on whether or not Paul would return from the audience with all his bones still inside his skin. Daniel would have hedged and wagered both ways.

  Higher and higher they climbed, and when his hamstrings burned and he was certain they must have reached the top of the tower, the staircase continued. Finally, they reached a door. Not a grand thing, just another pane of blue glass, hiding whatever it hid. The guard captain stood away and clear of it.

  “You are to enter, my lord.”

  “What, you’re not coming with me, stalwart captain?”

  “Your presence is commanded, my lord, not mine.”

  Daniel put his hand on the door handle. It was all of one piece with the door, either crafted by an expert glass master or formed through some esoteric geological process, and touching it, Daniel found he did not wish to go any farther.

  He had faced a Hierarch before. On the last occasion, he’d walked away with his opponent’s still-beating heart clutched in his hands. If he desired a throne, he could be the Southern realm’s Hierarch now, and this would be a meeting of two kings.

  He did not fear her power. He feared making a mistake.

  He couldn’t remember if he was supposed to bow to her on the left knee or the right knee. What had Moth told him? The left knee. Yes, that was it. He was pretty sure.

  He pushed open the door.

  The chamber was high and claustrophobically narrow. Not a place for large assemblies. More for private audiences. The walls leaned inward, soaring to a point some fifty feet above. A single horn anchored to the floor rose with graceful undulations. Daniel had never seen such a thing, had no idea what gigantic creature it might come from, and under ordinary circumstances, it might have drawn all his fascination. But at its pinnacle, more felt than seen, sat the Hierarch on a throne. There were familiar magics in her smell, dragons and griffins and mammoths and monsters of sea and mountain and underground, but even stronger smells of osteomantic creatures unknown.

  Daniel dropped to his left knee. “Your Majesty.”

  There was no answer, just a rush of air. Whether it was wind from outside or the breathing of a colossal animal, Daniel couldn’t tell. At last, a voice commanded him to rise, and he obeyed.

  He craned his neck, peering up at the figure on the throne. He saw black skirts draped over the top of the horn. White hands rested on the bone-white arms of a throne.

  “I see a great deal from here,” the Hierarch said. A black hood concealed her face. “I see out across my realm, the waves battering my shores, and all the pinpoints of light, and all the blackness between.”

  Somewhere, out in all the lights and the blackness, Cassandra and her team were working to find Sam. Daniel looked at the opaque glass walls and grew afraid for them once more.

  “Who are you?” the voice demanded, like bats shrieking from a cave.

  “Your Majesty. I am your servant Paul.”

  “I knew Paul. He is the man I sent afar, to build me a firedrake, and to sit at my right side. To wield my weapons, and to be my weapon. And, one day, to climb my throne, to take my crown, and leave me to my rest. That was Paul. But who is this man at my feet? You are not the man I sent. You are not Paul, the Hierarch’s flame. You are not Paul, my finder of secrets.”

  Daniel readied himself for the fight. He called up sense memories of kraken, of bear, of mastodon and monoceros, of dragons and spiders, every magic he’d ever eaten, all the magic he’d breathed, all the magic he’d consumed from the Southern Hierarch’s heart. He let it remain in his bones.

  “You are a different Paul. You are a Paul who hides in his library rather than banging on the doors of my throne room until I let him in. You are a Paul who cannot rule his own house. A Paul who lets scavenger beetles attempt to assassinate him. You were to be my dragon-crafter, and my dragon is lost.”

  Daniel let out a breath he hadn’t been aware he’d been holding.

  He was still okay. She still thought he was Paul. Just not Paul as she remembered him.

  “I remain your servant, Majesty.”

  The silence was long, and air moved around him. He could almost feel molecules being tugged from his body and drawn to the presence high above him. She was smelling him.

  “You are not the High Grand Osteomancer I wished for. Not yet. If you wish to be, you will have to fight for it.”

  He bowed. “Your Majesty.”

  A full minute passed before Daniel realized the Hierarch was gone. A vanishing magic, or a hidden portal. It didn’t matter. He’d been dismissed.

  The guard captain opened the door for him and remained some paces behind as he returned to his suite.

  He would be named High Grand Osteomancer, and he would take the axis mundi and run away with it, and no one would stop him. And if he had to fight both Dorings or even the Hierarch herself, he wo
uld.

  His hands shook, but not with fear, and he wondered what their hearts tasted like.

  EIGHTEEN

  To climb out of a sewer grate on a bright, blue day felt more like an announcement than an infiltration. Gabriel couldn’t help but feel conspicuous as he and Max and Cassandra emerged from an alley near the corner of Clay and Stockton after days of creeping through dark tunnels and navigating underground rivers. The sun warmed his face, and his spine and shoulders were happy to have traded his heavy pack for a lighter tool bag.

  They melted into the lunchtime crowd. The men filling the sidewalks and getting on and off the elephant-drawn coaches wore a lot of tweed—coats, trousers, vests, and hats. Their socks were argyle. The women wore hats festooned with netting and cherries and little apples and feathers.

  In a white, collarless, button-down shirt, gray cap, short jacket, and trousers tucked into boots, Gabriel felt ridiculous, a feeling made worse by Cassandra and Max wearing identical outfits. But Cassandra had picked their wardrobes, and he had to trust her. They were costumed as “fixits,” registered roving repairmen and -women who were paid a government salary to take care of whatever small jobs needed doing, whether on public lands or private.

  Marking the condition of the well-paved streets and sidewalks, the colorful bursts of fresh flowers in baskets hanging from the lampposts, the lack of broken glass and graffiti, Gabriel wondered if he should implement such a system back home.

  Cassandra kept them moving. Escalators with lacy wrought-iron rails took them up to the sky-cable platform, where they boarded a car. Gabriel tried to imitate Cassandra’s nonchalance, holding on to a strap near the back and gazing vacantly out a glassless window as the city passed below. Keeping his gaze vacant was the biggest challenge. This was Gabriel’s first time outside the Southern realm, and he’d dreamed of visiting San Francisco since he was a child.

  He drank in the views, the terraced buildings of Chinatown with their half-authentic Oriental filigree, rebuilt after the 1904 Earthquake War; the solid white-stone edifices and domes of government buildings and museums and skycar stations; the narrow Queen Anne houses lining the steep streets, painted in canary and flamingo and robin’s-egg colors.

  The Golden Gate Chain stretched across the strait between the San Francisco Peninsula and the Marin Headlands, its gigantic links blazing orange against the blue Pacific. Outside the chain, crane barges lifted cargo containers off a Siberian-flagged ship. Formations of tugs waited to tow the barges through the gaps in the chain guarded by sea patrol gunships.

  Gabriel sighted the lush, green belt of Golden Gate Park, the Hierarch’s seat of power. Her Jewel Palace soared like a stained-glass candle above her transplanted sequoias.

  Max leaned toward the window, taking quiet, controlled inhalations. Gabriel wished he could smell all the new aromas Max did—a stew of new foods, new magics, distinct strains of sourdough yeast from the bakeries.

  Los Angeles could be a disheartening sprawl with no semblance of rational layout. But Gabriel had spent countless hours poring over canal maps to understand and maintain and expand the mandala, and he’d learned to appreciate L.A.’s beauty, like dragon fire, perilous and apocalyptic. San Francisco was different, neatly contained by its hills, its bays, the Pacific Ocean. This was a place he could get his arms around.

  They disembarked and walked a few blocks to arrive at Kapp & Street’s Tamale Grotto and Refined Concert Hall. Above the door hung a bronze plaque emblazoned with the city’s motto: GOLDEN IN PEACE, IRON IN WAR. A thin veneer of patriotism on the outside of a building probably didn’t do much to deflect suspicion of illegal activity inside, but it couldn’t hurt.

  Before entering, Cassandra gave the team a last bit of coaching. “I know this isn’t anyone’s first piñata party, but I’ve been to this particular party before, and as dangerous as these people look, it’s just show. They’re actually far more dangerous than that. They smell something they don’t like, they’ll beat us to jelly before we can say, ‘Please don’t beat us to jelly.’ Max, you’ll be smelling all kinds of bone, a lot of it probably unfamiliar. So, keep it to yourself. I don’t need reports.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go in alone?” Max said. “I actually wouldn’t mind a lunch break.”

  Max did his best to hide residual pain from the gunshot wound, but the steep streets presented him with a cruel challenge.

  “My contact has her own hounds,” Cassandra went on. “They’ll smell you and everyone else on me, and before they’ll deal with me, they’ll want to know who I’m working with.”

  “No lunch, Max,” Gabriel said.

  “And you,” Cassandra concluded, fixing on Gabriel, “just try not to do anything stupid.”

  Gabriel waved at her. “Chief Water Mage of the Southern Kingdom, Master of the Mandala, Bringer of Waves, Quencher of Thirst, Giver of Life. I’ll try not to trip over a chair.”

  Cassandra knocked. The door was answered by a man Gabriel took for a cook by his apron and meat cleaver. He wore a necklace made up of dark lumps—dried fruit, or nuts, or roots, or desiccated animals, or fingers.

  “Auntie know you’re coming?”

  “Auntie never knows I’m coming,” Cassandra said. “That’s not how Auntie and I work.”

  The man considered this, if raising and lowering his cleaver could be interpreted as consideration.

  “Auntie’s not here” was his verdict. “Make an appointment.”

  “Auntie is here. Auntie is always here. Let us up.”

  “Let you up? Let you past Emerson the Knife? Show the world you can get past him without paying Emerson’s price? Southern girl’s got thin brains, she thinks Emerson the Knife will allow this.” Emerson smiled. His teeth were sharpened to points. He drew a finger along the edge of his cleaver—his none-too-spotless cleaver—and blood streamed down the blade like melting candle wax.

  Cassandra was a model of patience. “I’ll pay your price.”

  Gabriel watched with surprise and then dread as Cassandra extended her hand, as if offering it for a kiss. She let an object fall from her palm. The man, Emerson, turned his cleaver flat and caught it in the slick of his own blood. It was a withered, purple-black thing, and whatever it was, Emerson grinned sharp teeth, pleased.

  He stepped aside.

  “Every time, Emerson. We go through this every time.” Cassandra climbed the stairs.

  Gabriel followed. “What was that?”

  “It’s a mummified osteomancer who died in the form of a sparrow. They don’t come cheap.”

  “Oh, come on, I know my bone magic, and that’s not possible.”

  “More than is dreamed of in your philosophy, water mage.”

  Upstairs was a wide and cluttered space of worn furniture and ceiling fans that did little to freshen the stale air. A brood of monsters lived there.

  Gabriel, who took comfort in numbers and neat columns and rows, tried to count them all—the ones with fur-covered faces, the ones with more than two eyes, the ones with claws and the ones with tusks and the ones with horns, the ones with blue veins visible beneath butter-yellow skin, the ones with scales, the ones in a rubber tub of water flapping wing-arms like stingrays, all contributing to an anarchy of chirps and clicks and whistles. They were the size of children.

  Gabriel had never seen so many humans bodily transformed by magic in one place, and now the idea of dying in the form of a sparrow didn’t seem so implausible.

  And there was Auntie, an ordinary-looking woman of fifty or so, with black hair and strong hands and dark circles under her eyes. She seemed harried.

  Max stood ramrod straight. All the new smells stressed him.

  Cassandra had briefed the team on what to expect here. Auntie was a purveyor of osteomantic materials, with supply lines to Russia, Africa, the Far East, even to explorers of esoteric Antarctic magic. No one was quite certain about the origins of her children. Orphans, some said. Experiments, said others. Quite possibly both were true.
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  “I’m not doing business today.” She struck Gabriel as brusque but not unfriendly. He sympathized, knowing what it was like to find his days more full of things needing done than hours in which to do them.

  Cassandra patted the head of a girl who came up to her on four legs, sniffing her thigh. “I’m not here on usual business.”

  Auntie lifted an infant from a crib, and Gabriel caught a glimpse of golden, faceted eyes before Auntie wrapped it up in a swaddling blanket. “Very well,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “I can give you five minutes. Beatrice, watch your brothers and sisters.”

  “Okay,” the four-legged girl said.

  Auntie took them into her kitchen. The baby mewled, but Auntie quickly put a stop to it with a bottle from one of her apron pockets. “You’ve always come to me alone, Cassandra, and now you’re working with people. A hound. And a clerk of some kind. You’re not here on trade. What kind of information are you looking for?”

  “I’m looking for unusual movement of osteomancy, especially to large places. Big factories or warehouses. Shipyards hidden from public view. Airship hangars.”

  “What kind of osteomancy?”

  Cassandra handed her a list that made Auntie raise her eyebrows.

  “This has the look of a major project. Are you trying to be the customer or the dealer?”

  Cassandra sidestepped the question. “The activity may be opaque to most, but you have children all over, eyes and ears in every corner of the city. Have they mentioned anything like this?”

  “You exaggerate my reach.”

  “I saw three of your children just on the ride over here. They were on the same skycar as us.”

  Gabriel didn’t know if she was bluffing.

  Cassandra reached into her bag. “I can pay.”

  But Auntie handed Cassandra back her list.

  “I don’t sell my children’s services, and I’m busy enough with my own affairs.”

  Gabriel thought Cassandra might start pushing, but instead, she seemed to accept Auntie’s decision as final.