Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  She caught a movie.

  It was edging on midnight when Messalina walked to a crowded late-night sushi restaurant in an alley near Union Square. She took a table on the patio beneath paper-lantern lights.

  From across the street, they watched a waiter bring her a menu and a glass of water. Messalina sipped and ignored the menu.

  Gabriel produced a small bottle of water from his bag. “Can you get this into her glass?”

  Cassandra took it from him. “What is it?”

  “It’s tuned water,” Gabriel said. “I just need you to get some on the table, and I’ll be able to listen in.”

  Cassandra pocketed the jar. “I’ll try.” And she was off. She joined a group of pedestrians crossing the street, and by the time they got to the other side, Gabriel had lost sight of her.

  “Is she lying about not being osteomantic? She just vanished right before my eyes.”

  “She pivoted when the big guy with the beard turned to talk to the guy on his right,” Max said. “Then she slipped around the other side of the blue moped—don’t bother looking for it, it’s gone now—and ducked into the alley behind the restaurant. She’s not magic. She’s just sneaky.”

  What Gabriel wouldn’t give to have her on his staff. There had to be something he could offer her. Everyone had a price, and Gabriel had gotten good at finding it.

  “There,” Max said. “Sigilo’s contact.” The woman from the fruit cart entered through the gate in the patio fence and sat opposite Messalina. The waiter brought a fresh glass of water, topped off Messalina’s, and Messalina said a few words. The waiter nodded without writing anything down and headed off to the kitchen.

  “It’s going to be twice as hard for Cassandra with the two of them there,” Gabriel said.

  “Wasn’t that hard.”

  Gabriel spun around. Cassandra stood behind him, a little out of breath.

  “I didn’t even see you get near her table. How did you…?”

  Never mind. She could explain all her methods and tricks to him later. And, yes, he would get her to work for him. If she was dead set against it, he would find a way to make her dead set in favor of it.

  But he was getting ahead of himself. With an eyedropper, he let six drops from another bottle fall in his ear. The water was cold and heavy, and each drop felt like getting punched in the side of the head. He tried to breathe away pain and nausea.

  Voices came at him, distorted echoes in a sluggish medium. It sounded like many people all talking at once, not just Messalina and her contact, but dozens.

  I only go to church on Sundays unless Walter is there … got good ball-handling but his defense is shit … and she says she can cook but I get there and it reeks of burnt fish …

  This wasn’t very helpful. Usually transhydraulic listening was clearer than this.

  “How many glasses did you dose the water with?” he asked Cassandra.

  “All of them. I couldn’t get farther than the service station so I spiked the whole pitcher. What, you thought I could just walk up to her table and say, ‘Hey, look over there,’ and dump shit right in her glass?”

  Gabriel covered his ears with his hands and looked across the street at Messalina’s table, trying to pick her voice out of a disorganized chorus.

  … leverage 10.9 percent of the third-quarter sales and redistribute … if you’d just brush your hair over the trash bin instead of the sink then maybe I wouldn’t have to start every morning digging out your clots … mauve or taupe or lilac or white or raindrop or parakeet … I’m not wasted … correlated ship passage through the Golden Chain with heavy fog activity … I don’t know why you thought chimp noises were such a good idea … okay, first of all, that wasn’t a chimp …

  Gabriel couldn’t read lips, but the voice talking about the Golden Chain and fog coincided with Messalina’s companion moving her mouth. He concentrated on her.

  … two miles offshore. It’s registered as a garbage scow and licensed for dumping landfill farther out to sea, but it’s been anchored for the last two weeks. My sources confirmed three airships heading for it eleven days ago.

  There was some more talk about a PO box and a promise of delivery from Messalina, wrapping up the exchange with confirmation of payment. As the effects of the drops wore off and the voices began to fade, a waiter arrived with a sushi platter. Messalina’s companion plucked up a morsel of something with her fingers, got up from the table, and walked away chewing.

  “Garbage scow, anchored offshore, possibly took delivery from three airships,” Gabriel said. “She also said something about shipping activity through the Gate coinciding with heavy fog.”

  “You can generate fog with osteomancy,” Cassandra said. “Thick fog would be perfect cover for deliveries anywhere in the bay, especially at night. Even somewhere surrounded by heavy traffic. Seems credible to me.”

  Messalina tossed some bills on the table and got up.

  “Do we question her?” Max asked.

  “No,” Cassandra said. “We question her source.”

  * * *

  They tracked Messalina’s contact to an amusement pier jutting out from the wharf. She had a bowl of clam chowder, then ducked into a video arcade. Beeps and bells and buzzes from the games played to a nearly empty arcade. The one attendant Gabriel spotted was preoccupied trying to drag a sleeping drunk woman out from under the air hockey table.

  Max found their quarry at a pinball machine. She was well into a game and gave no signs of ever losing a ball when Max set down a coin on the game.

  “I’ve got next,” he said.

  “You can have this one.” Without even glancing at him, she hurried off, and the game beeped mournfully as her ball passed through the flippers.

  She spotted Cassandra blocking the entrance and made a quick detour for the back of the arcade, but Gabriel beat her to the emergency exit.

  “We just have some questions about your dinner conversation.”

  “I talked to a sea gull. It was all, ‘I want your chowder,’ and I was all, ‘Fuck off.’”

  “No, we mean at the sushi place.”

  “Oh, that. Yeah, well, same thing I said to the sea gull.”

  “How much did Messalina Sigilo pay you?”

  “I don’t discuss business with strangers.” The woman took a step to leave but was stopped short by Max’s hand on her shoulder.

  She shook it off. Max reapplied it.

  “I’m not kidding. I’m a professional. I’m not discussing it.”

  “My proposal is this,” Gabriel said. “You tell me what you told her, and we’ll all be really happy. Happiness is good, isn’t it?”

  “If you’re going to beat it out of me, can you just get started? I’ve been beaten before. The worst part is the coy banter.”

  A great power who didn’t ever resort to torture was a rare thing in Los Angeles, and Gabriel had ordered people tortured on behalf of his bosses when he worked at the Ministry of Osteomancy. But not since he took charge of his own operation.

  Cassandra came over to join them.

  “I was hoping I could just bribe you,” he said.

  “Are you rich? You’d have to be rich.”

  “I’m pretty rich.”

  The woman looked at Gabriel from head to foot.

  “You don’t look rich.”

  “Looks can be deceiving. And I have deceived you. Ha!”

  She gave him a glare of weary contempt. “You can’t scare the intel out of me. You can’t hurt it out of me. And you can’t bribe it out of me. So, what have you got?

  “Well, for starters, I know what you told Messalina Sigilo.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Deliveries of osteomancy to a garbage scow outside the Golden Chain, cloaked in heavy fog. Ha!”

  “Why does he keep saying, ‘Ha!’?” she asked Max.

  Max looked embarrassed. “Because no one else is complimenting him on his cleverness, so he has to do it. It’s a cry for help.”

  “I
’ll pay you ten thousand crowns,” Gabriel said, hoping to avoid making this all about him.

  “No.”

  “Fifteen thousand.”

  “If you already know what I told Sigilo, what is it you want to pay me for?”

  “The truth.”

  “You can’t afford the truth,” she said.

  “Try me. Name a price.”

  “It’s not how much you can pay me now. It’s how much Sigilo’s paid me in the past. It’s what she’ll pay me for more work later.”

  “Thirty thousand.”

  That got her attention. But she still wouldn’t come to terms. “It’s also what she’ll do to me if she knows I told you.”

  Cassandra stepped in closer. She hesitated, as if she was trying to decide something. “What if I assured you that Sigilo won’t be around much longer.”

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow at her and Cassandra looked away.

  She wasn’t kidding. She was thinking about offing Messalina Sigilo.

  “I’d say good luck with that,” the woman said.

  Cassandra was not discouraged. “With Sigilo out of the picture, you’ll lose a lucrative client. You should reconsider my associate’s offer.”

  Gabriel jumped on that. “Fifty-three thousand, and that’s it, because that’s all the cash I brought with me, and we won’t be seeing each other again after this.”

  One of the arcade games rang a bell. It sounded a lot like a cash register.

  “Okay,” the woman said. “Where’s your suitcase of cash?”

  Gabriel reached into his fixit bag. “No suitcase. Just very large denominations.”

  He handed over a stack of bills. Once she counted them, the woman made them vanish into a pocket.

  “Treasure Island,” she said. “They’ve got the dragon on Treasure Island.”

  * * *

  They stood in the parking lot of an import/export warehouse across the bay from Treasure Island. Gabriel pressed the binoculars to his eyes.

  Treasure Island was the site of the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939. It had served as a naval base during the United States War and was decommissioned and abandoned after the Northern Hierarch secured her state. Most of the military structures were gone, but a few remained, as well as some buildings from the fair.

  The silhouette of a hill rose from the water next to the span of the Bay Bridge. A narrow roadway connected the hilly part to a flat apron of artificial island, crenellated with structures, some intact, some in ruins.

  Cassandra reached out her hand. “Pass them back.”

  “You look worried,” he said, while she peered through the binoculars across the water. “Is it really so bad?”

  “I don’t like islands. Landing is one thing. Getting off is another. But the dragon could be there. That big structure on the north side?” She gave Gabriel the binoculars back. He trained them on an Art Deco building composed of vertical concrete slabs. “That’s the Cavalcade of the Golden West in the Court of Pacifica,” she said. “It’s big enough to house a dragon. Or it could be one of those other big buildings. Several candidates, anyway.”

  “Assuming the dragon’s even on the island,” Max said. “Assuming our intel is good.”

  Gabriel sighed. “It’s as good as we’re going to get. And we’re on the clock now.”

  Cassandra packed her binoculars away and handed Gabriel a sheaf of papers in a leather pouch. She’d spent forty minutes prowling through the basement of the City Planning Office to steal the Treasure Island water and electrical diagrams.

  Gabriel paged through the diagrams. “These are only current up to 1979.”

  “Maybe we can request current ones through inter-library loan. Those were the only ones they had.”

  Gabriel traced his finger along pipes and drains and sewers, not just getting a sense of the layout, but looking for patterns. When he found them, he traced over them again and again, looking for things hidden among the obvious, things that tickled the parts of his brain he’d trained to understand sigils and labyrinths. The routes his finger took began to describe a mandala, and he imagined hydraulic energy traveling its path, and when he could feel the blood in his body traveling a route that matched the mandala, he knew he was ready.

  He handed Cassandra the papers back. “Okay. Follow me.”

  He found what he was looking for almost a mile away in North Beach, on a street corner near a liquor store and an Italian restaurant.

  Moments later, they were below the street in a tunnel lined with jade-colored tile. Inlaid brass figures of mermaids and tridents and spouting whales gleamed in Gabriel’s flashlight beam.

  “Pretty fancy for a sewer,” Cassandra said.

  Gabriel spent a few seconds orienting himself, then led off down the tunnel. “It’s not a sewer. The sewer runs parallel behind this wall.” He patted the tile. “That’s what caught my attention. Tunneling is expensive, so nobody builds this kind of redundancy. But we water mages like to have our own transportation systems. We don’t like depending on surface conveyances.”

  Gabriel wasn’t thrilled by having to walk beneath the bay. He didn’t know how structurally sound this tunnel was, not having had anything to do with its construction and maintenance. It’d be just his luck for an earthquake to choose this exact moment to strike and crumble the walls like a saltine, and then, water mage or not, he’d die in a crush of seawater.

  “Dawdling is death,” he said, and he hurried the team along the two miles to Treasure Island.

  The tunnel terminated at a marble staircase with an iron gate at the top. They hunkered on the top step and looked out through the bars. They’d surfaced about a hundred feet away from the Cavalcade of the Golden West building. Dominating a weed-cracked courtyard rose a monumental statue of a woman, at least eighty feet tall. She had a strong carved face reminiscent of an Easter Island moia mixed with classical features. A great span of dragon wings spread from her back. This had to be Pacifica, goddess of the Pacific. Gabriel’s mother had told him of this monstrous creature who devoured one hundred osteomancers every day. She was said to be patterned on the Northern Hierarch.

  A guard with a rifle slung over his shoulder paced around the base of the statue.

  Cassandra screwed together a length of pipe and poked it between the bars. She put it to her lips, and blew a strong puff of air. The guard let out a small squeal and put a hand on his neck before sinking to his knees. He fell forward on his face.

  Cassandra made quick work of the gate with bolt cutters, and they were on the island.

  Sniffing the air, Max motioned for Gabriel and Cassandra to come away from the tunnel. They sprinted across the courtyard and gathered at the feet of the statue.

  “It’s this way,” Max said, pointing across a field to a long building standing in a tangle of neglected brush. It might have been a factory or a massive barracks, but more likely, it was one of the fair exhibition pavilions.

  Max’s face shone with sweat, and his breathing was labored.

  Gabriel put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Max? Your face looks like cookie dough.”

  “Don’t you smell that?”

  “The dragon?”

  “Yes, the dragon,” he snapped. “How can you not smell it?”

  “Plug your nose and keep quiet,” Cassandra whispered. Then, she seemed to notice Max was suffering. She reached for her med kit. “What’s wrong?”

  “The magic’s hitting him hard,” Gabriel said. “It does that sometimes. He’ll be okay. Max, drink some water.” He offered Max his canteen, but Max pushed it away, splashing water on Gabriel’s shirt.

  “We shouldn’t have come here,” Max said, gasping. “Why did you ever think you could tame a dragon? It’s not an animal. It’s a god. It’s burning me, Gabriel.”

  “We need to get him away from here,” Cassandra said.

  She was right, of course. Gabriel had seen Max stricken by the presence of strong magic, but never like this. His eyelids fluttered, and
his breaths came in short, ragged gasps.

  “All right,” Gabriel said. “All right. Max, back into the tunnel, back under the bay.”

  “No,” Max murmured.

  “You’re no good to me like this. And I can go the rest of the way on my own.” He looked at Cassandra. “Take him.”

  Gabriel felt rather shitty right now. Of course he was worried about Max. But that wasn’t why he was telling Cassandra to get Max away from the thick magic overtaking him. He wanted her out of the way. He needed her out of the way. He couldn’t have her interfering when he tried to take control of the dragon.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  There were lots of buttons and buckles in places that couldn’t be reached without assistance, and Daniel had to rely on Moth to help him get dressed. The jacket was black as nothing, with silver epaulets and braids and stiff collar tabs, padded and cut in a way that gave Daniel an actual physique.

  “Where did all these clothes come from, anyway?” he said, as Moth puzzled out complicated cuff fasteners.

  “Your closets. Your tailors. Your seamstresses.”

  “I have tailors and seamstresses?”

  “You even have a valet. But I sent him on vacation to the wine country. I’m not letting anyone get close enough to you to insert pins.”

  Daniel examined himself in the full-length mirror. It was framed in bone, just because. “Look at us. We’re so fancy.”

  Moth was similarly dressed in a simpler version of Daniel’s black with silver doodads. “This hasn’t been such a bad gig in some ways. I like the threads and the nice cheeses and booze. I’m going to miss this life when it’s done.”

  “We’ve come a long way from scams and heists and doing incredibly dangerous and ill-advised things to take something that doesn’t belong to us.”

  Moth snorted.

  Their first heist together had been a complicated operation to steal beer from the back of Kelly’s Liquor on Centinela and Venice. They’d spent two days planning it: staggered entrance, a diversion involving Moth knocking over a jerky display, the snatch of one six-pack, and an exit that required running like hell with the beer tucked under Daniel’s arm. As jobs had a tendency to do, this one went to shit. Daniel got caught and Otis had to bribe a cop to get him out of the back of the squad boat. If he’d ended up being taken to jail as Sebastian Blackland’s fugitive son, he might have found himself dead and deboned in less than twenty-four hours.