Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan; Marianne S. Jablon

  “But how can you recover them?”

  “I don’t know yet. But give me the right promises, and maybe I’ll think of something.”

  Manmark was utterly confused. “What do you mean? If there are six of them, and if they defeated my security man… what hope do you have…?”

  “I fought in the war,” Barrow replied.

  “A lot of men fought.”

  “Not many did the kind of fighting that I did,” the dragon hunter replied. “And few of them fought half as well either.”

  Manmark stared at the hard dark eyes. Then, because he had no choice, none whatsoever, he blurted, “Yes. Whatever it costs. Yes!”

  6

  Here stood the best locomotive available on short notice—a soot-caked machine built of iron and fire, wet steam, and rhythmic noises not unlike the breathing of a great old beast. Since details mattered, Zephyr had hired workmen to paint dragon eyes on the front end and little red wings on its sides, and when the job wasn’t done with the proper accuracy, he commissioned others to fix what was wrong. Two engineers stoked the fire, while a third sat on top of the tender, ready to spell whomever tired first. Behind the locomotive was the armored car hired to move spleens and scales—a wheeled fortress encased in steel and nearly empty, carrying nothing but seven white eggs and six mercenaries armed with enough munitions to hold off a regiment. And trailing behind was Zephyr’s private car, luxurious and open in appearance, except for the small windowless room at the rear that served as a bath.

  The original plan for the dragons’ spleens was to travel east. But the eggs were too precious to risk losing among the barbarians. Which was why Zephyr ordered his little train to head for the mountains and the Westlands beyond. A telegraph message dressed in code had been sent ahead. By the time he arrived at the Great Bay, a steamer would be waiting, ready to carry him back to the land of fables and childhood memories.

  “I haven’t been home for years,” he confessed to his companion.

  The young woman smiled at him, and once again, she said, “Thank you for taking me.”

  “It was the very least I could do,” Zephyr allowed. “You were wise to ask, in fact. If Manmark realized you were responsible—”

  “And for this,” she interrupted, letting her fat coin purse jingle in an agreeable fashion.

  “You have earned every mark. For what you have done to help me, madam, I will always be in your gratitude…”

  There was only one set of tracks, with the occasional sidings and rules of conduct between oncoming trains. But Zephyr had sprinkled the world before them with bribes, and for the time being, there might as well be no other train in the world. As they picked up speed—as the engine quickened its breathing and its pace—he looked through the thick window glass, watching a hand-painted sign pass on their right. “You are leaving Summer Gulch,” he read. “The fastest growing city between here and there.”

  What an odd, interesting thing to write. Zephyr laughed for a moment, and again mentioned, “I haven’t been home since I was a young man.”

  “I’d love to see the Great Continent,” the aboriginal girl reported.

  What would become of this creature? Zephyr was of several minds on the subject, but his happy mood steered him to the more benevolent courses.

  She slipped her purse out of sight.

  “Do you know why we call it the Dragon River?” he asked.

  “I don’t,” she replied.

  Somehow he doubted that. But a prostitute makes her living by listening as much as anything, and this old man could do little else but talk with her, at least for the moment. “Of course there are some substantial beds of fossils along the river’s course, yes. Dragon bones and claws and the great scales are part of my people’s history. And we are an ancient nation, you know. The oldest in the world, perhaps. From the beginning, our gods have been dragons and our emperors have been their earthly sons and daughters.”

  The woman had bright, jade-colored eyes and a pleasant, luring smile.

  “My favorite story, true or not, is about a young emperor from the Fifth Dynasty.” Zephyr allowed his eyes to gaze off to the north, looking at the broken, rain-ripped country. “He found a flying dragon, it is said. The bones and scales were intact, as was her heart and spleen. And behind her spleen were eggs. At least two eggs, it is said. Some accounts mention as many as six, but only two of her offspring were viable. After three weeks of sitting above the ground, in the warming sun—and I should add, because the emperor was a very good man—the eggs finally hatched. Two baby dragons slithered into the world. Brothers, they were, and they belonged to him.

  “The emperor had always been cared for by others. But he made a wise decision. He refused to let others care for his new friends, raising them himself, with his own hands. A mistake took one of those hands from him, but that was a minor loss. He refused to let his guards kill the offending dragon. And for his kindness, the dragon and its brother loved the emperor for all of his days.”

  Zephyr paused for a moment, considering his next words.

  “It was a weak time for my great nation,” he reported. “Barbarians were roaming the steppe and mountains, and peoples from the sea were raiding the coasts. But it is said—by many voices, not just those of my people—that a one-handed emperor appeared in the skies, riding the winged monsters. They were huge beasts, swift and strange. They breathed a strange fire, and they were powerful, and they had to eat a thousand enemy soldiers every day just to feed their endless hunger. An unlikely, mythic detail, I always believed. Except now, when I read scientific papers about the biology of dragons, I can see where they must have had prodigious appetites.”

  The woman nodded, listening to every word.

  “As a skeptical boy, I doubted the story about the emperor’s warrior dragons. Great men didn’t need monsters to save their nation, I believed. But I was wrong. I realized my error some time ago. Two monsters could save my people then, and think what seven dragons could do today… particularly if several of them are female, and fertile, and agreeable to mating with their brothers…”

  The young woman gave a little shrug, saying nothing for a long moment.

  The train continued to churn toward the west, the locomotive sounding steady and unstoppable.

  “We have a story,” she muttered. “My people do, I mean.”

  “About the dragons? Yes, I suppose you do.”

  “Since I was old enough to listen, I heard how the world holds thousands of dragons in its chest, and from time to time, for reasons known only to the gods, one of them is released. Which makes sense, I suppose. If what everyone tells me is true, and their eggs can sleep for an eternity in the ground.”

  Even from a single fertile female, only one egg at a time would be exposed by erosion. Yes, it was a reasonable explanation.

  “The freed dragons die of loneliness, always.” She spoke those words with sadness, as if she knew something about that particular pain. “They kill and burn because of their longing for others like themselves, and then they fly too high in order to end their own miserable lives, and that is why the dragons cannot come back into this world.”

  “This is a very common story,” Zephyr assured her. “Maybe every place in the world tells fables much like that.”

  “But there is more to my story,” she said, her tone defensive.

  “Is there?”

  “Much more,” she promised.

  Neither of them spoke for a long moment. The young woman didn’t want to say anything else, and Zephyr wasn’t in the mood to let another people’s legends distract him. He looked out another window, toward the empty south, and then from somewhere up ahead came a dull whump as a heavy block of dynamite detonated. Instantly, the brakes were applied, and the little train started to shake and shiver, fighting its momentum to remain on the suddenly unstable tracks.

  The young woman was thrown from her seat, as was Zephyr.

  He stood first and heard the early shots coming from insi
de the armored car. Again he looked to the south, seeing nothing, and then he hunkered down and looked in the other direction. A solitary figure was approaching on foot, armed with a rifle that he hadn’t bothered to fire. He was marching steadily across the stunted grasses, allowing the mercenaries to fire at him. And while most of their bullets struck, each impact made only sparks and a high-pitched snap that seemed to accomplish nothing. Because the attacker was wearing a suit made from overlapping dragon scales, Zephyr realized. And with an impressive eye for detail, the man had gone to the trouble of stretching cloth between his arms and chest, as if he had wings, while on his masked face were painted the large, malevolent eyes of an exceptionally angry dragon.

  7

  This was what Barrow did during the war. With a platoon of picked soldiers, he would squeeze into his costume and pick up a gun that was always too heavy to carry more than a few steps, and after swallowing his fears as well as his common sense, he and his brethren would walk straight at the enemy, letting them shoot at will, waiting to reach a point where he could murder every idiot who hadn’t yet found reason enough to run away.

  This was the war all over again, and he hated it.

  His suit wasn’t as good as the one he wore in the war. Manmark’s students were experts at arranging the scales and fixing them to his clothes—a consequence of spending weeks and years assembling old bones—but there hadn’t been enough time to do a proper, permanent job. The scales were tilted in order to guide the bullets to one side or the other, but they weren’t always tilted enough. Every impact caused a bruise. One and then another blow to the chest seemed to break a rib or two, and Barrow found himself staggering now, the weight of his clothes and his own fatigue making him wish for an end to his suffering.

  That old platoon had been a mostly invincible bunch, but by the war’s end, those who hadn’t died from lucky shots and cannon fire were pretty much crazy with fear. Barrow was one of the few exceptions—a consequence of getting hit less often and doing a better job of killing those who wanted him dead.

  Through the narrow slits of his mask, he stared at the firing ports built into the armored car. Then he paused, knelt, and with a care enforced by hours of practice, he leveled his weapon and put a fat slug of lead into one man’s face.

  Two more rounds hit Barrow, square in the chest and on the scalp.

  He staggered, breathed hard enough to make himself lightheaded, and then aimed and fired again, killing no one but leaving someone behind the steel screaming in misery.

  The surviving men finally got smart. One would cry out, and all would fire together, in a single volley.

  Barrow was shoved back off his feet.

  Again, there was a shout followed by the blow of a great hammer.

  They would break every bone inside his bruised body if this continued. Barrow saw his doom and still could not make his body rise off the dusty earth. How had he come to this awful place? He couldn’t remember. He sat upright, waiting for the next misery to find him… but a new voice was shouting, followed by the odd, high-pitched report of a very different gun.

  The dirt before him rose up in a fountain and drifted away, and left lying between his legs was a single purple Claw of God.

  Damn, somebody had a dragon-buster gun.

  If he remained here, he would die. Reflexes and simple panic pushed Barrow up onto his feet, and on exhausted legs he ran, trying to count the seconds while he imagined somebody working with the breech of that huge, awful gun, inserting another expensive charge before sealing it up and aiming at him again.

  When Barrow thought it was time, he abruptly changed direction.

  The next claw screamed through the air, peeling off to the right.

  Three engineers were cowering on the dragon-eyed locomotive. Plainly, they hadn’t come here expecting to fight. Barrow pointed his rifle at each of their faces, just for a moment, and then they leaped down together and started running back toward town.

  The men inside the armored car fired again. But Barrow kept close to the tender, giving them no easy shots. A few steps short of them, he reached behind his back, removing a satchel that he had carried from the beginning, out of sight, and he unwrapped the fuse and laid it on the ground, shooting it at pointblank range to set it on fire. Then he bent low and threw the satchel with his free arm, skipping it under the car before he stepped back a little ways, letting the guards see him standing in front of them with barely a care.

  “There’s enough dynamite under you now to throw that car up high and break it into twenty pieces,” he promised. Then he added, “It’s a long fuse. But I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking before you decide to do what’s smart.”

  An instant later, the main door was unlocked and unlatched. Five men came tumbling out into the open, one of them bleeding from the shoulder and none of them armed.

  “Run,” Barrow advised.

  The mercenaries started chasing the train crew down the iron rails.

  The fuse continued to burn, reaching the canvas satchel and sputtering for a few moments before it died away.

  Barrow stared into the windowless car. The seven eggs were set inside seven oak crates, and he didn’t look at any of them. He was staring at the man whom he had shot through the face, his mind thinking one way about it, then another.

  A breech closed somewhere nearby, and a big hammer was cocked.

  Barrow turned too late, eyes focusing first on the cavernous barrel of the gun and then on the old foreign man who was fighting to hold it up. At this range, with any kind of dragon-round, death was certain. But Barrow’s sense of things told him that if he didn’t lift his own weapon, the man would hesitate. And another moment or two of life seemed like reason enough to do nothing.

  “I am a creature of foresight,” Zephyr remarked.

  “You’re smarter than me,” agreed Barrow.

  “Details,” the old man muttered, two fingers wrapped around the long brass trigger. “The world is built upon tiny but critical details.”

  Behind him stood one detail—a rather pretty detail, just as Barrow had recalled—and using a purse full of heavy gold, she struck Zephyr on the top of his skull, and the long barrel dropped as the gun discharged, and a Claw of God came spinning out, burying itself once again inside the ancient Earth.

  8

  Manmark had the freight wagon brought out of the draw, and he used a whip on the surviving camels, forcing them into a quick trot toward the motionless train. But there was a generous distance to be covered; open country afforded few safe places to hide. There was time to watch Barrow and the aboriginal girl with his binoculars, a little dose of worry nipping at him, and then Zephyr was awake again, sitting up and speaking at some length to the dragon hunter. All the while, Manmark’s students were happily discussing their golden futures and what each planned to do with his little share of the fame. They spoke about the dragons soon to be born, and they discussed what kinds of cages would be required to hold the great beasts, and what would be a fair price for the public to see them, and what kinds of science could be done with these travelers from another age.

  What was Zephyr saying to the dragon hunter?

  Of course, the crafty old trader was trying to top Manmark’s offers of wealth. And if he was successful? If Barrow abruptly changed sides…?

  “Look at that cloud,” one student mentioned.

  Somewhere to the south, hooves were slapping at the ground, lifting the dust into a wind that was blowing north, obscuring what was most probably a small herd of hard-running hyraxes.

  Manmark found the little pistol in his pocket, considering his options for a long moment.

  If it came to it, would he have the courage?

  Probably not, no. If these last days had taught Manmark anything, it was that he had no stomach for mayhem and murder.

  He put the pistol back out of sight and again used the binoculars, the jumpy images showing that Zephyr had fallen silent for now and Barrow was gazing off to the south a
nd all of the talking was being done by the prostitute who stood between the two men, arms swirling in the air as she spoke on and on.

  The worry that he felt now was nebulous and terrible.

  Again, Manmark struck the big camels with his whip, and he screamed at everyone, telling them, “We need to hurry. Hurry!”

  But the wagon was massive and one camel short, and there was still a long, empty distance to cover. The curtain of dust was nearly upon the motionless train, and inside it were dozens, or perhaps hundreds of aboriginal men riding on the backs of the half-wild ponies that they preferred to ride—an entire tribe galloping toward the treasures that Manmark would never see again.

  9

  She spoke quietly, with force.

  “My favorite fable of all promises that the dragons will come again to this world. They will rise up out of the Earth to claim what has always been theirs, and only those men and women who help them will be spared. All the other people of the world will be fought and killed and eaten. Only the chosen few will be allowed to live as they wish, protected beneath the great wings of the reawakened gods.”

  Zephyr rubbed his sore head, trying to focus his mind. But really, no amount of cleverness or any promise of money would help now. Even with a splitting headache, he understood that inescapable lesson.

  Speaking to the man wearing dragon scales, she said, “Your ugly people came into my country and stole everything of worth. You gave us disease and drink, and you are murdering our herds. But now I intend to destroy everything you have built here, and my children will take back all the lands between the seas.”

  She was a clever, brutal girl, Zephyr decided. And she had done a masterful job of fooling everyone, including him.

  Barrow turned and stared at the oncoming riders. He had pulled off his armored mask, but he was still breathing hard, winded by his fight and terrified. He might defeat half a dozen mercenaries, if he was lucky. But not a nation of wild men and women armed with rifles and a communal rage.