Spine of the Dragon

by Kevin J. Anderson

  But becoming a legacier would have limited her possibilities, and this way Shadri was now free to pursue any interests, wherever they might take her. She could learn about forestry or mining if she liked, could study the political history of the Commonwealth, or she could learn about the mythology of the wreths, their legends and their gods. Maybe she would research the Bravas, with their code of honor, their great skills, and their mixed heritage. First, she had to meet one, though.…

  Shadri packed up her things and left the remembrance shrine, bidding the legaciers farewell with tear-filled eyes. She took her pay, bought a few travel supplies and a pair of good walking shoes, then set off with a heavy pack on her shoulders. Humming, she followed the southern fork of the Crickyeth River away from Convera toward the Dragonspine Mountains. Along the way, she would find cities and towns, farmlands and orchards, craft bazaars and caravans, wreth ruins, and sparkling waterfalls. Everything she learned would become a new volume in the expanding library of her mind.

  That was why, in the next town, she found the dissected body of the dead man so fascinating.

  * * *

  In a village called Thule’s Orchard, Shadri used some of her spare coppers to buy a meal of soup and bread at the inn. After shedding her large pack and leaving it outside the door, she had brushed off the road dust and mud. She wore a patched cloak, a drab blouse, and layers of patched skirts that hid her age and the shape of her body. She didn’t want to draw much attention.

  Still humming quietly, she sat alone watching people, eavesdropping on their conversations, curious about them. She wrote down her thoughts in one of the journals from her pack; she had already filled several journals, all the way to the margins, but if she didn’t write down her ideas, she would forget them, and the very thought of lost ideas seemed a tragedy to her.

  When a distinguished-looking older man approached her, she was surprised. “Might I join you for conversation?” he asked. “You look like you’ve been on the road a long time, and you seem to be keeping a thorough account of your travels.” He nodded to the open journal on the table in front of her. The man was older than her father, with thick gray hair, a kindly but worry-seamed face, and a white scar on his chin. His eyes hinted that he had seen many things, and Shadri wondered what those things might be.

  “Hmm, I accept your company, but you’ll have to buy your own food,” she said. “I have only a few coins to last me on a long journey.”

  The older man smiled back at her. “To be honest, I see so few people with books here in Thule’s Orchard. If you tell me about your journey, I’ll pay for your meal as well as my own. I like to hear stories of other places.”

  Shadri warmed to him. “So do I, but people say I ask too many questions.”

  “Here now! There can never be too many questions!”

  She suddenly felt much happier to be there.

  The man introduced himself as Severn, the town’s physician. She showed him her journal as she pushed aside her steaming cabbage soup. “I’m on a journey to understand as much as I can about the world. Still a lot to see and do. I’m taking notes.”

  Dr. Severn let out a relieved laugh. “Our journeys have similar paths, young lady, for I am also a man of learning, primarily medical knowledge. I want to draw a complete map of the human body—the organs, musculature, skin, bones—to know how everything works.” He glanced around the inn’s common room as the conversation swirled around them. “The wreths created our race a long time ago, and I want to know how they did it. I can only work with the material I have at hand.” He lowered his voice. “I have recently come into possession of the body of a hanged bandit, and I intend to get started straightaway. Some people find such studies disturbing.”

  “Knowledge can be disturbing,” Shadri said, “but it’s still knowledge, and it has its own worth. I’ve often wondered about the human body myself.” She held a forefinger in front of her eyes, bent it, straightened it, then studied her fingernail.

  He leaned closer to her. “The way we learn is by investigating, and I intend to study the cadaver thoroughly. When the villagers asked what I was doing with an unclaimed body, I told them that the bandit would help me be a better doctor.”

  Shadri slurped her soup. “How can a dead man make you a better doctor? It seems he wouldn’t need a doctor anymore.”

  Severn’s bushy eyebrows rose higher. “If you have a severe cut and I need to sew you up, wouldn’t you rather I practiced on dead skin beforehand? If your arm is wrenched out of its socket, or you have a stomach wound, wouldn’t you prefer that I learned my craft on a dead criminal, instead of making mistakes on you?” Shadri had to agree with his logic, and Severn smiled. “But nobody here will help me. The villagers are too queasy and reluctant.”

  “Queasy and reluctant?” Shadri weighed her natural revulsion for corpses against the potential for so much learning on an unexpected topic. Yes, for the knowledge, she could do this. “I’m sure I can hold my own.” The prospect sounded more interesting by the minute. “I’ll stay a few days and help you. Medical knowledge should come in handy, no matter where I go, especially if I need to patch myself up on my travels.”

  Even as a little girl, Shadri had been curious about everything, much to her family’s exasperation. Her father ran a sawmill at a fast-flowing stream. Watching him cut lumber from logs, she had tried to decipher messages in the wood grain. She had plagued him with so many questions he would bend closer to the whining saw blade just to drown out her words.

  Shadri had four brothers and two sisters, all singularly lacking in curiosity. Her parents regularly took her into town for market day and let her run among the stalls, so she could ask other people her questions: How did potters fire their clay, how did metalsmiths work their gold and silver, how did glassblowers create their own kind of magic from ash and melted sand?

  When she grew into a young woman, finding no boys in the village who could tolerate her curiosity, Shadri left home with her parents’ blessing—and a sigh of relief—to see the world and pursue her own interests. It seemed a naïve and innocent thing to do, even dangerous, but she didn’t give it a second thought. On the road from village to village, she followed her fascinations like stepping-stones across a clear stream, and never looked back.

  After she finished her soup in the inn, she followed the doctor to his small clinic. Shadri and Severn worked on the cold cadaver late at night, so as not to cause too much consternation in the town. For Shadri, the work was a revelation. She had never seen inside a body before.

  Under the glow of bright lanterns set around the long clean table, the doctor made a deep, precise cut in the abdomen, then used a metal rod to push aside the knotted muscle fibers until he exposed the body cavity.

  “I served as a soldier in the war against Ishara years ago,” he explained. “I was young, apprenticed to a battlefield surgeon, and I learned how to patch basic wounds, how to save the people who could be saved, and how to comfort the ones who were going to die. I would sit beside those poor lads and write down their legacies, so I could deliver them to the remembrance shrines in their hometowns. That was why I wanted to become a doctor.”

  He pried the cadaver’s red abdominal muscles farther apart to expose coils of intestines. With a probing hand, he reached in and moved the guts aside. Shadri leaned forward, holding up the lantern to study the mysterious body in front of her. Severn asked her to hold open the incision so he could use a larger knife, and he worked with meticulous care. “Better not nick the intestine, or we’ll have a much more unpleasant evening.”

  The doctor continued to talk as Shadri helped. He seemed happy to have someone to listen. “When the wreths created us, they must have had a plan, but often it doesn’t make sense to me. I want to understand how the tiniest parts fit together and function.” With a bloodied hand, he pointed toward his chest. “The wreths must have known. If I can figure it out, maybe I can fix problems when our bodies go wrong.”

  She absorbed everyt
hing he said. “Did the wreths look the same as this inside, I wonder? The same organs and muscles? What was different about them?” She looked at the purple-red liver, the frothy pink lungs. “Did they consciously make us inferior to them, or were they just incapable of making beings as sophisticated as themselves?”

  Severn looked at her in surprise. “Their god created them, so they must be superior. We are just secondary creations.” He looked down at the interconnected organs, the mysterious forest of blood vessels. “Though it is still quite impressive work, I must say.”

  “But how do you know the wreths were superior? Just because the legends say Kur created them?”

  “Well, because he gave them souls, for one thing, and in all the bodies I’ve treated on the battlefield and all the cadavers I have studied, I’ve never found a human soul.”

  Shadri still wrestled with the question. “But would you even know where to look? Or how to recognize one? For that matter, how do you know the wreths had souls at all? How would they know?”

  She could tell that he was becoming flustered with her questions, as people often did. He said, “You go well beyond the boundaries of my knowledge, I’m afraid. As a doctor, I have to be pragmatic. A child with a broken arm doesn’t want to hear ruminations on where the soul might be hiding.” Keeping busy, Severn cradled the dead man’s stomach in both hands. “If you stay, I can teach you how to patch up an injury, sew shut a wound, apply ointment to a burn. That is knowledge I can share.”

  She nodded, considering. “Those sound like valuable skills. I’ll stay and learn what I can. This is very instructive.”

  She spent a week in Thule’s Orchard, as promised, helping the doctor with his patients, asking him a litany of questions about medicinal plants and salves, how to treat a rash, deal with types of diarrhea, bring down a fever, ease a sore throat, treat aching joints, mend a cracked skull. And on and on, to the point where the former battlefield surgeon had run out of answers. She could tell she was overstaying her welcome.

  Eventually, Shadri grew restless and wanted to move on again. She apologized to Severn as she packed her supplies, clothes, tools, and notebook into her increasingly heavy pack to head out again. “I’ll treasure the information you’ve given me, but I want to understand more than just the human body. I’ve studied with alchemists, natural historians, musicians. Do you know there’s even a mathematics of music? So much to learn.” She talked faster and faster. “I want to understand the puzzle of history. Why did so much magic disappear after the great wars? What did the wreths have in mind for our race? And there’s always that question about the soul…”

  The doctor stood outside his clinic, waving goodbye. “In all that, I’m afraid I can’t help you, young lady. You’ll have to follow your own curiosity.”

  She set off, humming to herself.

  38

  AFTER the tremors in Mount Vada stopped, the Scrabbleton miners cleared the tunnels in a frantic search for survivors. High up the mountain’s slopes, a fresh plume of gray smoke poured out of a new fissure above the tree line.

  While distraught workers carried out several smashed bodies, Elliel tended to the mysterious stranger she had rescued from the quartz-lined vault. She stretched him out on the ground in the open square, checking him for injuries as he revived. Without speaking, the man propped himself on his elbows and looked around in amazement.

  The pale, dark-haired stranger intrigued and frightened Elliel. His gray chest armor was some kind of hide with a fine stippling of reptilian scales. A thick black belt girdled his waist above silver leggings made of fine woven metal. His features were compellingly handsome, his face perfectly formed, as if a god had designed it. His eyes were a deep sparkling blue, as if the irises were made of crushed sapphires. His features were more exotic than her own half-breed appearance, and Elliel took a long moment to understand what that meant.

  Surely, he was a wreth.

  Even more astonishing, the symbol tattooed on his cheek—a circle connected by a web of interlaced lines and loops—was almost identical to the rune of forgetting that she herself bore.

  The stranger’s gaze communicated questions as well as physical pain, but he made no sound. Gingerly touching his leg, she identified where it was broken. “This needs to be set and splinted,” she said, hoping he understood her language. “It will hurt.”

  Without speaking, he gestured for her to get on with it.

  She bent over him, knowing what to do. Apparently, tending the injured was a skill that she had not forgotten, perhaps part of her Brava heritage. She put one hand high on his thigh and the other just above his knee. Grasping firmly, she pulled in opposite directions with a strength she was sure none of the other miners could match. When the broken ends of the femur were far enough apart, she aligned them and fit them back together.

  He let out a coughing hiss of pain, then breathed quietly. His crushed-sapphire eyes looked up at her with gratitude.

  Elliel splinted his leg, using torn cloth and flat pieces of wood as the miners cared for the many other wounded. Busy, focused on the immediate need, the distracted miners at first assumed she had rescued one of their own, but soon they realized they did not know this man from within the mountain, and that he wasn’t exactly human.

  Elliel found Upwin and was glad to see that her fellow miner had gotten out alive. “Help me carry that man back to my room? He can recover there.”

  Upwin looked from her to the dazed stranger on the ground. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know, but someone has to take care of him. He was inside that crystal vault I discovered.” She draped one of the stranger’s arms over her shoulder and Upwin took the other. They lifted the wreth man up and he limped along, trying not to jar his splinted leg. They made their way to the inn and carried him past Shauvon and his wife, who were busy preparing food for the exhausted townspeople.

  The innkeeper looked at the stranger in surprise, his eyes full of questions, but when a dusty woman poked her head in the front door and shouted for more hot water, he hurried away.

  After she and Upwin got the wreth stranger to her room, they gently laid him on her narrow bed. He stretched out his good leg on the straw mattress, and Elliel lifted the splinted leg up beside it. She found a blanket and tucked it in to make him comfortable.

  She thanked Upwin, and he hurried to go. “There’s more work to do out there. They haven’t found Jandre yet. I should…”

  Not having the heart to tell him she had seen his partner’s crushed body during her escape, Elliel gestured. “Go, I’ll take care of this one.”

  She went into the inn’s kitchen and put together scraps of fruit, bread, a lump of cheese, a tankard of ale, and a cup of water, then carried all the items back to her room so her patient could eat. She used a damp cloth to wipe his forehead and chin, swipe dust from the corners of his strange eyes, then wash the tattooed rune on his cheek. She hesitated there. “Who are you? Can you speak?”

  His brow furrowed as if he were wrestling with an uncooperative mind. Finally a word bubbled to the surface. “Thon.”

  “Thon? Is that your name? Why were you sealed in that chamber? Who put you inside the mountain?”

  He frowned again. “I don’t know.”

  She fed him a bite of cheese, waited while he chewed. “I barely got you out in time. Do you remember the tremors? Is that what woke you?”

  He winced, shook his head. “No. Is … is the dragon waking?”

  She pulled the wooden chair close to her narrow bed. “I don’t know either.”

  He extended a finger to touch the side of Elliel’s face, marveling at the similar tattoo there. She flushed, embarrassed. “I’m a Brava—was a Brava. I committed a terrible crime, so they stripped me of my legacy.” She stopped herself from confessing the entire massacre. He didn’t need to know. Elliel wished that she herself didn’t know. “Are you guilty of some crime, so that the wreths wiped your memory and sealed you away in that prison?”

 
Thon’s face went blank, and a sheen of tears glistened in his sapphire eyes. “I don’t know.”

  Elliel ate some of the bread and shared grapes with him. “You should rest and recover.” She set the tankard of ale at his bedside, next to the cup of water. “I’ll be here.” She had grabbed a second blanket from the main room and spread it out on the wooden floor. “I’ve spent plenty of nights on the ground. I’ll be comfortable enough.”

  After she blew out the lamp and darkness filled the room, she lay with her thoughts spinning, her body aching, the sadness of the disaster competing in her mind with the mystery of this ancient man. A wreth! She could sense him lying motionless on the bed nearby. He didn’t stir, even a little. His breathing was slow and even, but somehow Elliel didn’t believe he had fallen asleep.…

  The next morning she woke at dawn and lifted herself from the hard floor. Thon sat up in bed and swung both of his legs over the side. With his long slender fingers, he undid the bindings of his splint, pulled the rags away, and removed the wooden sticks that had kept his leg straight.

  Elliel jumped to her feet. “Don’t do that! Your bone needs to knit properly.”

  “It already has.” Thon rose to his feet and stood uncertainly, flexing his leg. He rubbed his hand down the fine silver-mesh legging, squeezed the middle of his thigh where the bone had snapped. Then he lifted the leg, stomped his boot down, and nodded. “Yes, that was what I needed. The magic here is weak, but it was sufficient.” He took an unsteady step toward the door. “I want to go outside. It has been so long, and there is … so much I do not know. Everything, in fact.”

  Elliel stood beside him. “I will introduce you to Scrabbleton. Here, let me help.” She took his arm, placed it around her shoulder.

  He insisted that he needed no assistance, but he leaned on her anyway. Taking slow steps, they walked into the inn’s common area.