The Brass God

by K. M. McKinley

  “I am drawn to complex systems and complex people.” She gave him a sidelong look. “It is a personal failing.” Her eyes were gritty with fatigue, and she rubbed them with her wrist as her hands were covered with rust. She realised she must look frightful. Her hair was everywhere, and she smelled terrible even to herself. “I apologise if I am being rude, captain, but what is it you wanted?”

  “Yes, that,” he said. “I came to ask you a question.” He gave her an impudent smile that made her heart skip a beat.

  “Well, what?”

  “Have you ever ridden a dracon before?”

  “MISTRESS, MISTRESS, ARE you sure this is a good idea? They are dangerous!” said Hovernia.

  “I can get the dray carriage ready for you, countess,” said Holless. He shot a mistrustful look at Qurion. “The dogs would appreciate the run.”

  “Do stop flapping.” The countess slapped her gloves into her bare palm. The creature she was to ride did look dangerous. It was man-high at the shoulder, with long legs that though slender at the bottom were bunched with muscle at the thigh. Its forelimbs were powerfully developed, with short, triangular claws tipping three fingers and a rudimentary thumb on each hand. The mid-limbs were underdeveloped, and folded close into the thing’s— she had no idea if it were male or female—greasy coat of feathers. The real danger came from its mouth, which was lined with razor sharp teeth, its feet, whose upraised big toe sported a killing claw as big as a sickle, and the tail. There was no knobbed club or spikes as one found on some wild draconic species, but it was long and muscular. One flick would smash a human ribcage. So the claws were sheathed with leather, the mouth muzzled, and the tail’s movement restricted by a brake, a harness that ran lines through hoops to the rear of the tall saddle. These were long enough to allow the tail to be carried straight or curved, as the animal needed it to balance, but too short to allow it to be swung.

  “I am sure I will be fine,” she said. “Look at it, the poor thing is covered over in leather. It must be uncomfortable. It probably can’t breathe, never mind bite me!”

  Qurion was already mounted on his own dracon.

  “I assure you Femis can’t tell. The dracons are raised to the brakes and sheaths. She’s perfectly happy, as is Donda.” He scratched his dracon’s neck affectionately. It chirruped happily and shook out its head crest. Now it was dry, its plumage was deep green. Her own’s was a dull brown with white patches.

  “I have been promising to visit the village for a while and look over affairs there. Arriving on the back of a dracon will certainly set tongues wagging.” She grinned wickedly. She was feeling herself again. “We will be back as soon as the captain has posted his orders, and I have spoken with Ullvis.”

  “Yes mistress,” said Hovernia.

  Qurion’s second-in-command, Druvion, held the dracon steady for her. The beast was his, and he advised her where to place her feet and how to haul herself onto the saddle. She mounted on the third attempt, flinging her left leg over its back and settling gingerly onto the saddle ridge. Her wounded leg twinged with the effort, but small pains were all she suffered. The injury was nearly healed. The dracon felt remarkably delicate underneath her. It moved suddenly and she gave out a little cry of delight.

  “Steady there goodlady,” said Druvion, who was a good-natured sort. “Femis here has eaten today, so she is at her least dangerous. She’ll follow Captain Qurion, you won’t have to do much at all. Hold on, and try to match her movements with your hips.” He thrust in and out with his own by way of demonstration, though it looked like he were showing her something else.

  She laughed. “If that is all there is to it, I should be a natural,” she said. Being outdoors after so long secluded in the keep was an unexpected pleasure. The soldiers and her servants had been hard at work. Mogawn’s bailey looked better than it had for years. Much of the rubbish had been gathered up into a bonfire on the northern shore, where the island’s small birch wood filled in the space between wall and cliff. The barracks had a new roof, the gates had been replaced, and the soldiers had set themselves to many other improvements. She felt giddy for a moment, swept up in the notion that she were a warrior woman of ancient days about to sally from her castle.

  “Are you ready?” asked Qurion.

  She nodded.

  “Then let’s go.”

  With a kick of his heels, Qurion set his own dracon running. Hers followed without any encouragement.

  The dracons accelerated from a dead stop into a fast run. The gatehouse whipped by, and then the stone bridge beyond, then they were into the spiral tunnel carved through Mogawn’s bubbled rock that led down to the mudflats. The dracons’ croaks echoed from the walls. Light let in by holes in the stone strobed by. They were through quickly, running out over the drawbridge at the island’s base and onto the slippery plaza that terminated the causeway linking Mogawn to dry land. The dracons managed the change in terrain easily, and galloped out onto the road.

  Lucinia glanced behind her. Mogawn rose up, huge and imposing, far bigger than it felt when she was in the castle. The lower parts of the island were black from submersion in the sea, the upper white with the sun. The rock was full of trapped bubbles of gas that gave floatstone its buoyancy and the isle was covered in hemispherical cavities and sword-sharp ridges of stone where they had eroded through. She caught a glimpse of the towers rising over the edge of the cliffs before her twisting in the saddle upset the dracon’s stride, and she turned herself to look forward.

  For half its length, the road ran on a mole of heaped stone that kept them high off the mud. Iron posts, carved with warding marks and linked with chain, deterred the drowned and the ghosts that haunted many foreshores. The metal was heavily corroded, and caked with shellfish. Bright orange and blue oxides painted the cobbles around the base of each.

  The mudflats either side of the causeway shone like silver. A small tide was due that night, and already sheets of water were pouring themselves in slicks of silver over the mud. Temporary sand dunes fronted the low hills that marked the end of the beach. Behind were tumbled hills marching arduously up to her estates on the land; gradual elevation defeated the great tides at Mogawn rather than bastion cliffs.

  Cold, southerly winds blasted at the countess, buffeting her as they intersected with the draughts caused by the dracon’s progress.

  The countess had never ridden anything before.

  History taught her that there had once been animals called horses, who were kin to the goats who provided meat, milk and hides to the peoples of Ruthnia. Not much was known about the creatures in modern times, though their skeletons were often unearthed, sometimes in vast numbers. A manual on horsemanship had survived the violent eras since the fall of Maceriya. By this one account, it was known horses were herbivores who were difficult to care for, being easily poisoned by common plants, and were not at all the fantastical beasts of folklore. Their fate had been sealed by the adoption of the predatory riding dracon by Ruthnia’s armies, for the horse had no claws or sharp teeth, and was no match in battle for the reptiles. Too expensive and difficult for commoners to keep, too weak for war, the horse had died out thousands of years ago.

  As the larger species of dracon used for food were too large and ponderous to ride, and the lesser dracons were too dangerous, all transport before the advent of glimmer engines in the western Hundred was by dog drawn conveyance. Dracons were ridden commonly in the eastern Kingdoms, where the open plains and sparse population limited the potential for fatal accident, and giant dracon cattle were employed to draw vehicles in other lands. But in Ruthnia, the dog ruled supreme, and dogs could not be ridden.

  Had they not been moving so quickly the countess would have shared this information with Qurion. She didn’t try. The streaming wind snatched her words from her mouth. Her clumsy attempts to match the surging motion of her mount made her breathless. Actually sitting on a creature bearing her was more exhilarating than being drawn behind one, and though she judged they we
re not moving any faster than her dray coach, it felt like she were running as fast as the wind.

  She was grateful for the complex saddle. That, more than her own efforts, kept her seated.

  A coat of salt-tolerant grasses and spiky, semi-aquatic bushes covered over the flats as they drew nearer to land. The broken shoreline of Mogawn approached. The rock there was weak with faulting, and broken into huge blocks as regular as tumbled bricks.

  Birds wheeled screeching into the sky. They too differed to the draconic species, even to the dracon-birds they shared the skies with. Thinking on the horse and the dracon, the countess idly considered how such differing animals came to be living cheek-by-jowl. The creatures of fur and feather such as birds, or the goats, or the rodents that plagued mankind’s settlements were taken to be simply animals, bracketed with and no different from the reptilian creatures. But there were obvious differences in their anatomies.

  Another thing to explore. There were possibilities for study wherever she looked. If only life were longer!

  The road remained level while the land rose up. Mud was replaced by a pleasant sandy beach marked by lines of debris from the dance of the tides. Drifts of sand built up in the wind around the debris, becoming dunes that were erased next time the sea came in.

  A bastion ridge of permanent sand hills marked the beginning of land proper. By the time Lucinia and Qurion were a half mile out from the dune wall the causeway was level with the sand, which there was scarred by deep, short-lived creeks. This was the furthest extent of all but the greatest tides. Pale sand sifted down from the dune wall onto the flats. Mogawn’s road acted as an artificial inlet, its verges crunchy with dried seaweeds and shells. Upon meeting the shore it rose up, lost its straightness, and switched back upon itself a couple of times, rising sharply up mature dunes dark with young soils and hairy with marram.

  Qurion reigned his dracon in at the summit of the ridge. The dune wall held back the sea on one side, and a maze of shifting hills and half-buried stone blocks on the other. Wind blasted off the Tiriatic Ocean at a constant speed, its passage blocked by nothing until it hit the Karsan Isles. Curls of sand blew up from the beach, snaking their way into the labyrinth. Patches of dark cloud broke up the blue sky. Sunbeams turned like the spokes of a wheel, rolling over the land and foreshore in golden procession. Five miles across the flats Mogawn occupied the centre of the vista, its castle a model atop stone luminous in the sun. At the edge of vision beyond Mogawn the white line of the sea advanced for its modest raid on the shore.

  “A good view made better from dracon back!” laughed the countess. Her mount paced on the spot, scraping long furrows in the sand blowing over the road.

  “Now you can say you have ridden a dragon, more or less,” shouted Qurion, who was as exhilarated by the ride as she. He turned his dracon from the view, toward the rattling grass. The hills of Mogawn stepped their way up to the interior, becoming thick with wind-stunted trees and yellow grasses away from the dunes. The road was a line shaved into the landscape.

  “Not far now,” said the countess. “We should press on before we lose too much of the day.”

  She turned reluctantly from the view. Copying Qurion’s technique, she spurred her mount into a loping trot ahead of him, eliciting shouts of approval.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  A New Development

  THEY WENT TO the railway station first, where the sending office was located. Qurion filled in a confidential military message form and passed it on to the magister who manned the sending desk, a minor talent whose sole gift had been trained to serve the machines.

  “I’ve asked for stone and more lumber,” said Qurion to the countess outside. “I’ll be lucky to get half of what I ask for. Incompetence takes a half of everything in the army, corruption a quarter more.” He looked up at the sending tower projecting from the top of the office, a bronze pole covered with mysterious spheres and delicate arrays of metal. “I can’t get used to this modern world. When I was a boy, if you had an urgent message you had get someone to do this with their mind alone. Cost a fortune.”

  “The science of magic changes everything,” said the countess. “Man is the author of change. Our species alters everything.”

  “You approve then. Sometimes, I wish for a simpler life.” He remounted his dracon.

  “I don’t approve of every advancement,” said the countess. “No change is without price.”

  “Where’s your man then?”

  “Ullvis. His name is Ullvis. He lives this way, on the way out of the village.”

  They rode down narrow lanes bordered with hedgerows so dense the wind was a feeble sigh through the leaves, and a permanent green twilight shaded the way.

  “These roads are ancient,” the countess said. “Older than mankind’s presence on the islands. They were carved into the landscape by the passage of Tyn feet, so they say.”

  “Are there Tyn in these parts?” said Qurion.

  “Not any more, no. Although the villagers would disagree. They say everything that goes wrong here is the fault of the Tyn, and any pile of stones is said to be an abandoned Tyn house. The villagers believe the Tyn dwell still further out on the peninsula, towards the end where there are only grasses, goats and seagulls. But I do not know if they are really there still, or a figment of overactive imaginations. The land is mine, and I never saw a living soul, Tyn or otherwise out there. But I used to enjoy the stories when I was a child.”

  The road opened out a little, winding its way over a landscape of gentle downs divided by more hedgerows. Worn outcrops watched over cornfields and pasturelands grazed short by herds of goats and dracon-cattle, who shook their horned heads and grumbled as the riders pranced by. The people they saw were even more wary of the carnivorous reptiles than Lucinia’s servants had been, most removing themselves from the road with such haste they almost forgot to doff their hats to their mistress.

  Ullvis dwelled in the mill by Mogawn brook, a half mile from the village’s diffuse heart. He was a solid, uncomplicated man with little sense of humour and a dedication to the village that bordered on the pathological. He was also the miller as well as the mayor, both jobs he’d inherited from his father. The former because the mill had been in his family since the time of King Brannon, the latter because nobody else wanted to do it.

  If he was surprised to see his lady, he hid it well, and gave the dracon no more than a second glance. He greeted Lucinia with respect before launching into a long list of what he called concerns, but which might more accurately have been named complaints. Qurion stood aside quietly as the miller went through the various issues facing the villagers. The countess’s smalltalk dried up as he went on. It was clear to her that she had neglected her estate quite badly. She apologised, which mollified him somewhat.

  Lucinia sincerely promised to make good on her responsibilities, and bade Ullvis goodnight. The meeting took longer than she had expected. As they rode back down the country lane from the mill to the village centre, she broke her silence.

  “I am sorry, captain. I have been a bad landlord. There appears to be as much work to do here as there is at the castle.” She pulled a thoughtful face. “I had a servant who left my employ last year. He took care of most of this for me. I did not know how much he did. Ullvis was right to keep me so long, but we will now have to stay here overnight. Today’s tide is a small one that will not cover the causeway, but there is the issue of the unghosted dead, even so far out in the country.”

  “I am glad you recommended it, goodlady,” said Qurion. “If the drowned do have designs on Mogawn, then they may be scouting the castle as we speak. I cannot rule out an opportunistic attempt on your life. If we stay over at the inn, then I can take a further look around tomorrow. It may do us well to ensure the villagers are prepared as well as we.”

  “You think the drowned will strike this far inland?”

  “At the highest of tides, the village is only five miles from the water, so it is possible, y
es. On most days, the drowned will not be able to come so far from the sea, but on the night of a great or a major tide? I think they could, if sufficiently motivated.”

  MOGAWN-ON-LAND’S CENTRE WAS eighty houses and other buildings around a derelict temple. There was a store, and a physic had his practise there, as did an animal doctor, Guider and the other professionals necessary to service a rural community. Dusk ushered in a cold autumnal night. Warm rectangles of candlelight broke up the blue dark. The largest building after the temple ruins was the Old Count, Mogawn-On-Land’s tavern. From the sound emanating from within, most of the village’s population were patronising it.

  Qurion handed off the dracons to a terrified kennel maid, with strict instructions on their care. When they entered the smoky common room quiet dropped like a stone. The inhabitants mumbled greetings to the countess as she strode to the bar.

  “Umi! Umi!” she banged on the wood, summoning the surprised proprietor from a back room. “Give us two rooms for tonight, would you? It’s too late to go back to the castle.”

  “What a pleasure! The countess visits us!” said Umi. “I shall have rooms prepared immediately for you goodlady. I am glad you are here. There’s talk of strangers around. I wouldn’t want you riding back at this hour.”

  “The captain will protect me,” said Lucinia.

  Umi gave him a beady stare. “I’m sure he will,” he said. He was suspicious of all outsiders, as is the habit of country folk. “Will you be dining with us? I only have the usual simple food, but I can find something good for you...”

  She leaned over the bar and slapped him playfully on the shoulder in a breach of etiquette. None of the villagers batted an eyelid. They were used to their mistress’s ways. “Your usual food is fine enough for me, Umi, just put us in the private dining room would you? The captain and I have things to discuss. It’s not what you think, before any of your silly tongues get away from you. He’s here to keep us all safe, not keep me warm.”