The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  The Language of the Dragon

  Dragon Speech Book 1

  Margaret Ball

  Galway Publishing

  Copyright 2019 Margaret Ball

  Published by Galway Publishing

  ISBN Paperback: 978-1-947648-20-3

  ISBN eBook: 978-1-947648-21-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover art: Cedar Sanderson

  Formatting: Polgarus Studio

  Also by Margaret Ball:

  The Applied Topology series

  A Pocketful of Stars (Book 1)

  An Opening in the Air (Book 2)

  An Annoyance of Grackles (Book 3)

  A Tapestry of Fire (Book 4)

  A Creature of Smokeless Flame (Book 5)

  A Revolution of Rubies (Book 6)

  A Child of Magic (forthcoming 2019)

  The Dragon Speech series

  The Language of the Dragon

  Dragon Scales (forthcoming 2019)

  The Harmony series

  Insurgents (Book 1)

  Awakening (Book 2)

  Survivors (Book 3)

  Other books

  Disappearing Act

  Duchess of Aquitaine

  Mathemagics

  Lost in Translation

  No Earthly Sunne

  Changeweaver

  Flameweaver

  The Shadow Gate

  The Language of the Dragon

  Table of Contents

  1. Crazy lady with a cannon

  2. The language of the dragon

  3. A Faustian bargain

  4. This thing disappears

  5. The girl is scared stiff

  6. Taking the relationship to a different level

  7. Secret energy

  8. Dead man’s shoes

  9. The projectile is accurate

  10. I worked for a living

  11. Real estate agents and danger

  12. The wrath of Cath Palug

  13. Right angles and cutting corners

  14. Never show an open house by yourself

  15. This thing burns

  16. Summer storm

  17. We have to stop him

  18. Words of power

  19. Vodka and ammunition

  20. The lake of the dragon

  21. A failure of hospitality

  22. Words of great power

  Also by Margaret Ball

  1. Crazy lady with a cannon

  After the long, hot drive back to Austin from Port Aransas, I decided to skip dinner in favor of a nice long shower and falling into bed. It was late anyway, and not bothering with dinner would save me the trouble of finding something in the pantry, cooking it, and washing up afterwards. Totally worth it. I still had sand between my toes.

  While using up the house’s hot water supply, I reflected peacefully on the benefits of my week-long escape. My mind was made up now: there was no way I was going to let Craig move in with me under the pretext of renting the vacant room on the other side of my bathroom. In fact, if I could swing it financially I just might not rent that room out at all. The previous tenant, Koshan, had turned out to be a nice enough guy right up until he took off without paying the last three weeks of his rent, but sharing a bathroom with a total stranger had made me feel crowded. Better to refurnish it as a nice little private sitting-room and claim that whole side of the house for myself, the way my friend and long-term tenant Laura had done with her side.

  I dried off, slipped into a long cool nightgown of super-thin white lawn and wrapped a towel around my hair. Sat down on the bed to give some serious attention to my fingernails…

  … And heard a clunking sound from the bathroom I’d just vacated.

  Oh, well. It was probably Cath Palug, expressing his dissatisfaction at having been left with only Laura to take care of him for a week. He’d knock a certain number of things off flat surfaces before condescending to knead my chest and purr.

  A louder clunk was followed by a string of curses.

  I froze, and all the little hairs on my arms stood up. The week before leaving for the beach, I’d chased a daytime burglar out of the house. Had he come back to try his luck at night? It certainly wasn’t possible to write the voice off as the doings of a disgruntled cat-monster. Nor was it my absconding tenant come back without warning. His voice had been higher, and his English not so smooth. Whoever was cursing was clearly fluent in English. Certain kinds of English, anyway.

  I reached into my bag and retrieved my cell phone, held it up in front of my face and waited for my new app to unlock the phone.

  No dice. It didn’t recognize me with a towel wrapped around my wet hair. I knew I shouldn’t have let Blossom talk me into installing that oh-so-convenient facial recognition app. She’d pointed out how it would save me the trouble of typing a passcode every time I used the phone. And I’m such a sucker for saving trouble, I actually took the advice of a girl called Blossom with a twin sister named Floss.

  Setting the phone down, I reached down between the mattress and the box spring where I’d just stashed my other favored accessory. The one I started keeping handy after I decided that no one was ever going to invade my space again. I tiptoed to the bathroom door, threw it open and took a two-handed shooting stance. “Hands up and behind your head!” I shouted.

  A white-faced stranger straightened up from the sink, banged his head on the open door of the medicine cabinet, raised his hands and slowly backed away from me.

  Well, so much for the faint hope that it had only been Craig, seriously overstepping his bounds and earning a well-deserved shock. I’d never seen this man before.

  He was young, well, about my age anyway. Average height, dark hair, blue eyes, jaw nearly blue with what looked like permanent five o’clock shadow. Might have been good-looking if he hadn’t been white and shaking. Not that I minded. Terrified was, in my view, a very good look on men who sneaked into my house in the middle of the night.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” I demanded.

  “Lady, I don’t know what you think you’re—”

  “I’m asking the questions here!” I interrupted with a little twitch of my Smith and Wesson .38 Special to emphasize the situation.

  “Look, lady, I paid for my room, and if there’s some kind of house rule about not using the bathroom that opens right out of my bedroom, somebody should have mentioned it, okay? And do you have to keep pointing that thing at my face?”

  I lowered the gun until it was pointing at his legs. “You paid?”

  “First and last month’s rent and deposit. And who the fuck are you, anyway, crazy lady? Does the landlady know you run around threatening the other tenants with that baby cannon?”

  “You know the landlady?”

  “Nice lady. Georgia Brown. She—”

  I lowered the gun even more, to point at the floor. My breathing was just beginning to get back to normal. “No, she was just the rental agent. I’m your landlady – Sienna Brown, her niece. This is my house.”

  “Yeah? I bet you get a rapid turnover in lodgers if you greet them all by shoving a gun in their faces. Crazy lady.”

  “You startled me. I’ve been out of town. I didn’t know the room had been rented.”

  “Well, I’ll be very careful not to startle you again,” he said. Some color was beginning to come back into his face. “Can I put my hands down?”

  “Oh, go ahead.”

  “My name is Michael Ryan,” he said, cautiously lowering his hands an inch at a time, “and I can show you my copy of the rental agreement if you’ll let me go back into my room and unpack it.”

  I went with him; I wasn’t ready to let him out of my sight yet. I was startled ane
w by the sight of Koshan’s clothes spilling out of an open carton. “Who told you that you could mess with the previous tenant’s effects?”

  “That wasn’t me,” he said promptly, “it was that way when I moved in this afternoon. I was going to talk to Georgia about getting that stuff out of my way, actually.”

  His eyes shifted around the room while he told me this. I had a feeling he was lying, but couldn’t figure out why he’d bother. It’s not like Koshan had owned anything worth stealing; even the people who had broken into that room, the week before I went to the beach, hadn’t bothered to take any of his stuff.

  I looked at the rental agreement. It was solid. Naturally. My aunt was a professional; she didn’t do sloppy work. Renting out rooms in a house wasn’t, strictly speaking, a realtor’s job, but Aunt Georgia had rental property of her own and, being the efficient and competent type she was, managed it herself. She’d probably felt she was doing me a favor by managing my own property while I hid out at Port Aransas.

  What it added up to was, I’d have some trouble evicting him. A lot of trouble, possibly, if he decided to hire a lawyer and make a big deal about the fact that I’d been a little bit startled to hear him in the bathroom. I handed it back to him.

  “Okay, you can stay—for now. We can go over house rules in the morning.”

  “Like ‘Don’t surprise the landlady, she’s crazy,’” he muttered. Not quite under his breath; just low enough that I would seem quarrelsome if I picked up on it.

  Back in my own room, I shot the bolt that prevented anybody coming through from the shared bathroom. Then, after thinking it over, I fished a tissue out of my purse, crumpled it up and stuffed it into the keyhole whose key had been lost when I was in grade school. Then I replaced the gun and lay back on the bed. After that episode, it was going to be a long time before I got to sleep.

  Cath Palug had been waiting on top of the tall bookcase. He launched now and landed hard on the bed, all four legs out and stiff. It was the kind of maneuver he executed to add bruises to his vocal complaints about life. Fortunately, he was kind of predictable; I’d started rolling over as soon as I glimpsed the yellowish-gray fluff at the top of the shelves. Immediately after hitting the mattress, he executed a sideways fall against the small of my back. I reached behind myself and shoved. You couldn’t let Cath Palug start pushing you around; he’d once pushed me clean off the bed with a series of those sudden collapses, edging me a few inches at a time until my last move took me right off the mattress.

  “Cut it out,” I whispered. “Laura fed you already.”

  He kneaded my back, deploying claws.

  Sighing, I rolled back towards him and skritched under his chin. How come everybody up to and including a previously homeless cat could push me around so easily?

  Well, my life had been excessively complicated ever since I let an old client who’d become a friend talk me into a short-term rental to her foreign friend. First Koshan had been bouncing around some conference on campus and inviting total strangers to visit him here; then he’d disappeared and somebody had broken into the house to ransack his room. The cops hadn’t been interested in either event. First they said that foreign visitors on short-term visas disappeared all the time and since Koshan’s laptop had also gone missing, his departure had clearly been voluntary. ICE might want to find him but the Austin city police had better things to worry about.

  You’d think the break-in would have changed their minds, but it worked the other way. Because Koshan had taken off of his own free will (they said) there was no reason to assume the break-in had anything to do with him. These old houses near campus got burglarized all the time, and I didn’t even have anything missing.

  Then Blossom invited me to visit for a week in the house she and Floss had rented in Port Aransas, Craig announced his intention of protecting me by moving into the spare room and my life, and I took off for the beach.

  And now I had a total stranger clumping around my bathroom.

  It was like that thing you do with dominos. I let an old friend talk me into renting a room to somebody I didn’t know, and the dominos started falling, one after another.

  Chaotically.

  I don’t like chaos; it fools you into doing things that are way too much trouble.

  I had no idea, then, how far back the roots of that chaos went. Or how much more complexity and danger it was going to bring into my life.

  2. The language of the dragon

  The old German professor who was paying for this trek into the Pamirs was probably certifiably insane, but Koshan didn’t mind. Guiding foreign trekkers paid a lot better than tutoring other students in English – the only other kind of work he’d been able to find since graduating with that shiny degree in psychology – and he hadn’t had that many guiding jobs since the unpleasantness last fall. It hadn’t been his fault that he and two of his trekkers were taken hostage by terrorists from that Religious Liberation Party. And despite their blood-curdling threats to bomb Lake Shaimak and flood half the country, nothing had actually happened, had it? The lake was still there. None of the hostages, even that American woman who kept trying to reason with their captors, had been harmed. And rumor said that the unstable mass of rocks that had been threatening the lake ever since the earthquake that created it was… gone. Crumbled into dust. Although nobody seemed to be quite sure how that had happened.

  But his fellow Taklans were extremely sensitive on the topic of Lake Shaimak; it had been the scary dragon of their parents’ stories for generations. And as a result, he discovered, even the slightest connection with the terrorists who’d threatened the lake made people revert to their infancy, when they’d been frightened into good behavior by the threat that “The Dragon of Shaimak will flood the whole world and drown you!” Most of the regular employees of Silk Road Treks didn’t even like to be seen talking to Koshan these days.

  So a rich foreigner who actually asked Silk Road Treks to find guides with experience in the Shaimak area was a gift from Allah.

  All right, so Koshan hadn’t actually been at the great lake when the Russians and Americans killed the terrorists before they could detonate their bomb. He, together with all but one of the other hostages, had been left at the village of Tireza, which wasn’t even inside the Shaimak Restricted Area. But that was closer than anybody else had been, and he did have a distant relative whom he called “Auntie” in Tireza and even more distant connections whom he called “Cousin” in Shaimak itself… and the German paid extra for his inside knowledge.

  Definitely a gift from Allah. He could get out of Mirzadeh, where there were too many people he owed money to after a lean winter and spring. And if he could spin out the trek past the planned month’s duration, he might even come back with enough money to pay his creditors – well, the most urgent of them, anyway. It was a waste of money to pay all one’s debts.

  The drive up to Tireza in one of the comfortable jeeps belonging to Silk Road Treks was a vast improvement over his enforced journey of last fall, made partly in an unpressurized airplane and partly in the back of a dilapidated truck where he’d shared space with boxes of Semtex and wild-eyed terrorists who always seemed on the verge of shooting someone. The season was better, too. That last trip had been made in late October, when winter was just around the corner. The outside air had smelled like snow and the houses were smoky with burning yak dung. As a ragged boy in the Pamirs he’d taken the use of dung as fuel for granted, but the years in Merzadeh had taught him to think of that smoke as an unpleasant stench, the smell of poverty.

  Now, in June, most of the snows that blocked access to the high valleys were gone. The air was fresh and green and even, at least in the sunshine, warm. Smiling girls came out at each village to offer them bread and salt, and between villages old Professor Teller bent Koshak’s ear with his theories about the Shaimaki, Alexander the Great, precursor languages, and ancient religions. He had a notebook – an old-fashioned narrow bound ledger with a green cover – conta
ining a few words in the old language that he thought only a few people in Shaimak village still spoke. It was not, he said authoritatively, related to Farsi or Taklan.

  “It is like Greek?” Koshan said tentatively. He’d encountered this breed of professor in the past. The ones who came on treks liked to talk about Alexander the Great and how the fair-haired peasants in the Pamirs were probably descendants of his army. If every blond in Taklanistan was descended from someone in Alexander’s army, Koshan was surprised the soldiers had had time to do any actual fighting.

  Herr Professor Teller waved that suggestion away, shoo! Shoo! As though he were brushing that idea out of the window. No, old Shaimaki had no possible relationship to Greek; it was, he said, a much older language. As for Alexander, he had been a madman, a destroyer. He had smashed the people and their culture, had driven their last remnants to hide in these remote valleys. Rukshana, now, Alexander’s supposedly Sogdian wife, had probably really been Shaimaki, the last high priestess of her people and the last who truly understood the secret power of the language…

  Koshan mastered the art of nodding at intervals and emitting a thoughtful “Hmm,” whenever the professor’s spate of theorizing slowed. What he found much more interesting than these fantasies about ancient people was the ease with which they passed the guard posts protecting the Shaimak Restricted Area. Professor Teller must be very rich indeed, to have bribed enough people to get the four people and two jeeps comprising this trek into the area on a few days’ notice. True, if the rocks called the Dragon of Shaimak had indeed crumbled as rumored, the integrity of the lake and its earthen dam were not menaced as they had been for the past hundred years. But requirements and permissions and passes did not change just because reality did; generations of government workers had made a good thing out of the bribes they took to let anyone past the boundaries, and they would probably still be requiring special passes and taking bribes a hundred years in the future.