Never Deal with a Dragon

by Robert N. Charrette

  It took several minutes, but he did open his eyes, blinking them rapidly in confusion. As he started to sit up, she reached out a hand and laid it on his shoulder to force him to lie still.

  “Take it easy, dear,” she said in her most soothing tones. “You’ve had a rough time and shouldn’t be moving about yet. You nearly died.”

  Without turning to look at her, he said, “I thought I did.”

  “You should have, with those wounds.” She moved around where he would be able to see her. To her surprise, his eyes remained placid, his expression calm. Her size was intimidating enough, but most norms reacted to her fangs and talons as though she might eat them on the spot. She had always found that reaction amusing. This man was acting like he was in shock, though her treatment should have removed any physical reason for his detachment. She hoped his spirit hadn’t fled too far to be healed; he was wanted elsewhere. “You’re lucky I found you when I did. If you’d been exposed much longer, even my healing song wouldn’t have helped.”

  “Healing song?” he asked weakly.

  “Yuh, healing song. It’s the shaman’s way of attending a sick or injured person. You don’t think someone bounces back like you did just from some antibiotics.” She raised one hand, which held a hypodermic. “Though they help. Lie still now and this will only hurt a little.”

  He didn’t even quiver as she inserted the needle. He just lay there staring at her, his soft hazel eyes thoughtful and curious but calm as a mountain lake. He waited until she had stowed the syringe away in her bag before he spoke, his voice stronger now.

  “Who...what are you?”

  “Tactful fellow,” she sniffed. “My name’s Jacqueline. I’m what you would probably call a sasquatch.”

  His brow furrowed. “Never heard of a white sasquatch. Or one that could talk either.”

  “My, my, we are parochial. We sasquatch were certified as a sentient species by the United Nations Advisory Council on Metahumanity in 2042. That august body did not find our inability to use Human languages to be a barrier, and our delegates still did not have even the Perkins-Athabascan sign language to rely on. Since then, some of us have taken advantage of the benefits of technology.” She pulled back the mane-like fur around her head to reveal a gleaming datajack. A permanent skillsoft cap protruded and a pair of wires lay against her dark skin and burrowed through the fur in the direction of her neck. “It’s a custom job. A Renraku speech synthesizer linked to a Mitsuhama expert system capable of translation between symbolic concept and verbal expression. The software has got an idiom-handling subprogram that’s a bit idiosyncratic, but it does help smooth out the rough spots. Still, I think that it’s much more socially acceptable to say ‘Pass the vegetables’ instead of ‘Me food want.’ Don’t you agree?

  “As to the fur color, do you think we’re all black-furred like those yokels from the coastal forests? That would be awfully boring and hardly in keeping with reasonable expectations of adaptive biology. Up north in the Yukon where I was born, white fur is common. Useful for camouflage in the snow, I suppose.”

  He seemed satisfied with her answer. Several minutes passed quietly. She was content to check astrally on the progress of his healing.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Taking care of you, my boy.”

  A flash of irritation crossed his face. “No. How did you come to be here?”

  “Pretty much the same answer, really. I was looking for you.” She watched his annoyance shift to suspicious concern. His emotional guard was down, lowered by her drugs and spells. Reading him was almost too easy.

  “Why?” he asked.

  She smiled at him, remembering not to let too many teeth show. “Let’s just say it was business.”

  “A bounty hunter,” he said acidly.

  “Now, that is jumping to a nasty conclusion. As to how I came to be here, I’d rather not get into specifics.”

  His eyes went hard.

  “Yuh, O.K.,” she said in a conciliatory tone. “I’m just doing my job. Even sasquatches have to work for a living, you know. I do what my boss tells me, and my boss, he tells me to find this guy calling himself Twist. Says he wants this guy alive and healthy. That he’s got a few words he wants to put into this Twist’s ears.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Genomics.” She smiled inwardly at the confusion that brought to his face.

  “But that’s...”

  “I know, dear. How do you think we found out about you?”

  “What do you want with me?”

  “That is a rather complicated matter and I think I’ll let my boss explain.” Sam’s sour look made her decide to add, “Let’s just say that he is a possessive sort and that your, shall we say, enquiries brought a certain matter to his attention. Before he acted, he wished to know if you had other information he might find useful. He seemed to believe you might have, shall we say, interests coincident with his in this matter. He wants to have a chat, so he sent me to fetch you.

  “I was a bit tardy in locating you in San Francisco and, by the time I had identified your, ah, residence, you had departed in Mr. Begay’s panzer. How unfortunate that the feathered worm found him first. But fortune is fickle, and she let me find you before those mercenaries did. They would surely have taken you to Mr. Drake, if they didn’t kill you on the spot.”

  “So now, once you’ve recovered a bit more, you and I will travel to Quebec. I’m taking you to meet my boss.”

  “I look forward to it,” Sam said with a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “But for now, you got any water?”

  She fetched a canteen and held his head up to drink. “Not too much at once,” she cautioned.

  He was quiet then for some time, but still quite awake. She debated giving him a sedative to make the travel easier. Finally, his eyelids began to droop as he succumbed to exhaustion.

  “You going to do your healing song again?” His words were soft and slurred.

  “If necessary.”

  “I want to be awake when you do.”

  “Yuh, sure.”

  He grunted his satisfaction with her answer, then closed his eyes and slept.

  That was just as well, for he needed rest. It would be another day before it was safe to move him to the chopper. Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to hear her healing song.

  While doing her magic, Jaq had gotten an inkling of Sam’s power. His aura was strong, reacting and shifting defensively during her ministrations. But she sensed that the activity was instinctive and as yet unfocused. The discovery tickled her curiosity because neither the dossier nor the Renraku records she had mentioned him being magically active. More curious still was that he carried a case with instruction chips designed for someone following the path of a hermetic mage. Her sensing of his potential seemed to indicate more a tendency to her own shamanic path.

  Satisfied that he was deeply asleep, she gave him another shot, a tranquilizer. She didn’t want him awake until they reached their destination. After making sure he was well-covered, she walked to the edge of the mesa and stared out over the badlands. She wanted to think about this.

  She stripped off the bogus speech synthesizer, scratching at the itch the adhesive raised, then groomed her mane smooth. From her satchel, she took the bundle of pics that had been bound to Verner’s chip case. The old photographs were stained and warped from their exposure to storm and mud, but the newer pics on their plastic film were still in good shape. The images were mostly snapshots, with a few formal portraits of varying vintages. They seemed to be ordinary family pictures, a chronicle of people and events that had been part of Verner’s life. They would, of course, have to be analyzed for hidden data.

  Stuffing the pics away, she took out the chip case and turned it over in her hands. It too would be analyzed, but she suspected that, as with the pics, nothing of note would be found. At least nothing hidden. Among the instructional chips there was a Bible. Most magicians, whatever their magical tradit
ion, had little to do with organized religion.

  Then there was the Narcoject, a pacifist’s weapon. Not a common choice among shadowrunners, but then this one was new to the underside. He was a curious fellow, full of contradictions. Such a personality was rarely predictable or reliably controlled. Verner hardly seemed a suitable pawn for her master’s game.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The note had said, “Go to the doors at the end and wait.” Sam walked in the direction the nurse had pointed, the corridor empty and quiet. With its dim lighting and rough, dark cement floor, the place looked far from high-tech. He passed a few doors, most of them large enough to admit a truck, though a few were the size of his cell-like recovery room. All the doors were unmarked and the watchful cameras hanging from the ceiling in clear plastic globes discouraged him from trying to open any. His footsteps echoed off the widely spaced walls, marking a steady rhythm. If his pace was slower than usual, it was because his side was still stiff and the muscles weak from lack of use. The rough fabric of the new clothes chafed, and his leg muscles felt mushy. His ankle no longer pained him, but he had walked little in the last few days.

  While he lay recovering from his ordeal, Sam’s only visitors had been a doctor and a pair of nurses. He had learned little from them, for they spoke only French and seemed not to understand his English or Japanese. The only sign of Jacqueline had been a note from her bidding him to be patient and recover. Had the words not been on paper, he might have thought her a part of his strange dreams on the mesa.

  The first thing he had done on awakening was to get out of bed to try the door controls. That they were inoperable distressed him, but he was too weak to attempt running away. Where would he have gone? Sam didn’t even know where he was. And the only clothing in the room was a hospital gown hardly suitable for traveling.

  The doctor and nurses had been efficient and solicitous, but uninformative. Their language was circumstantial evidence that he was in Quebec, but far from definitive. They hadn’t even twitched when he had mentioned Quebec or Genomics, both words that would have been understandable even if all the rest were not. Had Jacqueline lied when saying she would take him to Genomics, claiming it was her employer? Wherever he was, the medical equipment in the room and the attention he received were top-notch. He had rapidly regained his strength.

  Sometime during the second day, one of the nurses brought a tray with a datareader and the few belongings Sam had carried with him in the Little Eagle. These included the Narcoject, which had been cleaned and oiled. The ammunition had been removed. It was distressing to see how poorly his old photographs had fared, but when all this was over, he would try to get them restored.

  Nothing was missing from the chip case, whose contents were the only alternative to staring at the walls. He reread Bible passages that had comforted him in the past, but now he saw odd interpretations for them and caught himself wondering what Dog would think of them. Thoughts of Dog had turned to thoughts of magic and so he had begun to scan the professor’s instructional chips.

  Some descriptions of the astral experience awakened disturbing memories of his dream on the mesa. Cautiously, dreading success, he had tried the exercises for astral projection. His first attempt had brought on an airy feeling while the colors in the room shifted, much as the colors had done on the mesa. From the texts, he expected to be able to pass beyond the walls of the room, but stayed right there on the bed, unable to move.

  In the midst of one exercise, the doctor had entered the room. She had seemed full of a green light that, except for a dimness on her right index finger, glowed brightly through her skin. The apparition had startled Sam back to wakefulness, where he saw that her finger was bandaged. He had husbanded his strength and practiced further, but never again achieved that state while another person was in the room.

  Now, as he approached the great double door that sealed the end of the corridor, he wondered if his astral perceptions had been only more hallucinations. If real, they should enable him to see what waited on the other side. What harm in another try?

  He composed himself and willed the shift. The light muted and the color shift began, then everything jerked back to normal, with Sam suddenly lying on the floor. The result brought back memories of the Dwarf mage in Laverty’s guardroom and Sato’s magical bodyguard. Both had seemed to slumber, giving Sam the impression they were lackadaisical about their work. Now he realized they might have been working after all, using astral projection while their bodies seemed to sleep. He picked himself up, stepped to the corridor wall, and leaned against it. The exercise text hadn’t warned that he would lose control of his muscles, only recommended lying down to practice. Now he knew why. Braced, he tried again.

  Once the colors shifted, he forced his point of reference to the door, hesitating a moment before pressing forward. His vision blackened for a fraction of a second, and then he was perceiving the chamber beyond the doors. Or at least thinking he was.

  The immediate area was an antechamber that opened onto a larger space. On the walls hung paintings of great beauty, their emotional content varying wildly. The lure of those images and the pulsing sculptures that stood beneath the paintings at first distracted him, but once his view touched on the prominent occupant, he had eyes for nothing else. Behind a transparent wall of blue and enthroned on a mound of gold, silver, and jewels, lay a Dragon.

  The beast seemed made of golden crystal that sparked power with every motion. Distortions of light like tiny auroras flickered in the air about its head. The Dragon was in conversation with a tall, hairy figure that Sam recognized at once as Jacqueline, though she looked different. The sasquatch carried a tasseled shoulder bag and an amulet of intricate design around her neck. At her side flashed a smaller aurora. Sam had no time to register more, because the sasquatch bowed as though receiving orders. With the conversation over, Sam feared the Dragon would somehow see him if its attention turned his way. He dreaded discovery, for his spying would be considered impolite, at best. He knew the stakes had gone up and did not want to compromise his position with his apparent host, whatever that position might be. Besides, his new ability was an asset, all the more potent if kept secret. He retreated.

  Sam was standing in the middle of the corridor when the doors swung open and an attractive woman with silver-blonde hair exited the chamber. She wore a business suit, but her necklace pendant was identical to Jacqueline’s amulet.

  “Ah, Monsieur Verner,” she said. “You may go right in.”

  There was no recognition on her face, and no sign that she had noted his intrusion. He nodded and walked past her, wondering what kind of game this was.

  The moment Sam crossed the threshold, his eyes were riveted on the Dragon. Its golden scales glinted brightly, seeming to reflect and merge with the sparkling wealth that made its bed. Its long neck was arched and its chin rested on a peninsula of treasure near the edge of the mound. It appeared to be asleep.

  Sam drew nearer, treading softly. Of the rippling auroras there was no sign, but he suspected that whatever magic they represented had not gone away. The blue wall was also invisible, but he felt a tingling as he stepped past where it had stood. Looking down, he noted a strip of arcane symbols inlaid in the floor.

  Nearing the Dragon, Sam became truly aware of the beast’s size. Its head was longer than he was tall, and several of the teeth, jutting past the scaly lips, were longer than one of his hands. It was the first Western Dragon he had ever been near, but something about it was familiar. He put it down to general dragonishness because its odor was similar to Tessien’s. He took another few steps closer, stopping when he felt the breath sighing through the Dragon’s nostrils ruffling the light cloth of his trouser leg. The beast’s presence was oppressive, and Sam longed to flee, to escape from the great predator. He held his ground, though his knees felt weak and his legs rubbery.

  Should he speak? What does one say to a Dragon?

  The eyes opened, regarding him with pools of liquid opa
l.

  “I am Lofwyr.”

  It was as though Sam’s ears heard words, but he recognized that the Dragon’s voice was only in his head. He had not realized it before, but Tessien spoke the same way. This creature, however, was far more menacing than the feathered serpent. That worried Sam. It lay before him almost dormant, while Tessien had destroyed a panzer with flame and magic. He swallowed nervously, then hoped his voice would remain steady. “They call me Twist,” he said.

  “Your they are not many, Samuel Verner.” Amusement rippled in the air. “Though I expect their numbers will grow.”

  Startled by its attitude and use of his real name, Sam forgot some of his fear. “You know who I am?”

  “Obviously.”

  The dracoform had the advantage of knowledge while Sam was in the dark. How did this beast come to know about him? Emboldened by his annoyance, he asked, “What do you want with me? Why have you brought me here?”

  “You are here because I wish to help you.””

  Help was the last thing Sam expected from a Dragon. “Why is that? We’ve never even met before today.”

  “My reasons are my own. As Jaqueline informed you, we have a mutual interest in the affairs of Genomics Corporation.”

  Unless the creature could read his mind, denial seemed the safest course. “I have no interest in Genomics.”

  “You had a decker inquiring into its affairs and personnel.”

  “What is that to you?” Sam asked with a brashness he really didn’t feel. “Are you a cop? Are you going to charge me with data theft or something?”

  “So belligerent.” The Dragon’s expression remained placid. If that fixed, toothy smile could be called placid. Sam felt its disdainful tolerance. “A. A. Wilson, an employee of Genomics, seems to be someone who interests you particularly.”