Dragons in the Earth

by Judith Tarr

  “They left France,” she said, “where they’d been for six hundred years. Through wars and revolutions, they stayed. Now they’re here. Why?”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to get in the middle of that ongoing sibling fight, but they didn’t seem able to focus on the hunter that emphatically wasn’t human.

  They were intuitives, they could hardly not be, with the kind of horse-training they did. They weren’t practitioners, that I could tell. They might, I thought with a small stab of cold in my gut, be susceptible to pressure from outside their protections. If their mother had died in her own warded house . . .

  I slid in with a question. “Do you have any priests left? Or teachers? Someone who keeps the memories and instructs the younger generation? Maybe who’s like me, with my kind of gift or curse?”

  “That was Mother,” Philippe answered. “We didn’t inherit it. Our sister did, but she—”

  “She died,” Elissa said flatly. “Accident, we thought. Now I wonder. A fall off a horse we might expect, but off a ladder while painting a ceiling?”

  “How long ago?” I asked. I should have offered sympathies, I realized too late, but it felt weird to think about tacking them on just then.

  They didn’t seem to mind, though I could feel the sharpness that was grief. Blunter than what they felt for their mother, but still painful.

  “It was years ago,” Philippe said. “Almost twenty. We were children. She was older, just out of school.”

  So maybe an accident after all. But gods might not see time the way we mayflies did. “There’s no one else? No more family?”

  Elissa shook her head. “The last world war was brutal for us. The ones who weren’t interned in camps were hunted and killed. Our grandmother hid herself and the horses in the mountains, and fought with the Basque Resistance. She married one of them. Her only child was our mother. Our father was French; he’d been in the Cadre Noir. His family had no use for what they called a pack of Gypsies.” She spat that word like the epithet it was.

  “And so there’s only you.” I could see the Reich and the Dragon working together, and the Basques taking in the Dragonslayer, too. There was history enough in that to make me dizzy with completely irrelevant academic glee.

  I wrenched myself back into this much weirder world. “We could spin around conspiracy theories till we all fall down, but I’ll tell you what I see. Whatever the reason, you’re down to just the two of you, the defenses you might have had are gone with your mother and your sister, and the Dragon is coming back. May actually be back, though I’m not sure . . .”

  I stopped for a while, trying to turn the whole tangled knot of information into a coherent pattern. I needed time, but I couldn’t tell how much I had.

  I realized they were still staring at me. Waiting. Twitching very slightly, in Philippe’s case.

  I wouldn’t have taken him for the nervous type, but the situation we were in was enough to rattle the calmest mind.

  “I’ve been picking up the other one,” I said. “The hunter in the air. It’s not human, I can tell you that. It’s huge. It’s passed over the ranch twice that I know of, and maybe more—since we’ve had the wards locked and loaded, it’s been harder to tell what’s prowling around outside. But that thing definitely is.”

  “It doesn’t know what it’s looking for,” Caro said, “or it would have made a move on him already.”

  Something in her tone made me ask, “You’ve picked it up, too?”

  “It’s here,” she said.

  20

  I can multitask most things, but the woo isn’t one. I had stories and memories and dreams and Chef’s food on my mind. I hadn’t been looking outward.

  That’s why I’d brought Caro. She’s years older in the woo than I am. She grew up in it, and she was studying it when I was nose down in academia. While I wallowed in stories, she patrolled the perimeter.

  Now she’d pointed me toward it, I felt it. It was right over us.

  It wasn’t picking us up, I didn’t think. We were inside wards—Caro’s, and the restaurant had its own set. Its focus was on the building we’d driven past, the TMA offices. It was feeding on something there. Or being fed.

  It was pure predator. It existed to eat, and what it ate was—

  Energy?

  A specific kind of energy. Power. Magic. The essence of a god.

  There’s a little of it in everything. Earth, air. Mountains are full of it. Animals. Corals. Reefs have powers that could shake the earth if they wanted to bother. Trees: single trees and forests. The aspens in Colorado that are all one huge organism—they’re holding that part of the world together.

  When I opened the eyes inside, I saw the predator coiled around the TMA tower like a dragon on a mountain. It wouldn’t be visible to most humans, but I could feel it with every sense. It made my skin shudder.

  I could lure it off the way I had the first time, tempting it with a storm. There was a nice little blizzard up in the Yukon that would keep it happy for days. But it would just come back.

  The questions I wanted to ask, I needed someone who really knew the answers. Elissa’s mother, or her sister.

  More food came in, but this time, for once, I barely noticed. “Caro, let’s take a walk.”

  It was dark. It was cold. There was a predator outside. Caro stood up, pulled her coat on, and slung her bag over her shoulder.

  “You stay,” I said to the others, as politely as I could.

  Philippe was already on his feet. Elissa hadn’t moved. She had more abilities than she knew.

  “Hold the space here,” I said. “Just be. The way you do when you’re in a horse herd, and you’re not sure about the stallion.”

  She nodded. Philippe’s male pride was up, but she shot him a glance that backed him right off. “We’re the castle at your backs,” she said. “We understand.”

  “Give us an hour,” I said. “If we’re not back, call out the search parties.”

  It was hard to leave that warm, bright place, but I couldn’t keep my head clear there. I needed the dark outside, the bite of the cold desert air, even the smell of exhaust from the highway.

  The TMA tower was still lit up. The thing on it wasn’t visible in the human spectrum, but I could feel it weighing the whole world down. The stars over it looked blurred and pale, as if it had fed on them, too.

  Caro and I stood under one of the porticoes near the tower. It was designed for shade in the blazing Phoenix summer, which meant it was chilly and dark tonight, but it offered a bit of cover—though I didn’t think the hunter’s sight was limited to the human spectrum.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked Caro.

  I felt her shrug next to me. “I think we don’t know anything about this enemy,” she said. “Just stories, thousands of years old, and a long tradition of hating each other.”

  “I can tell you what I see on that tower, and it’s nobody’s pet iguana. That thing is nasty. The least we can do is get rid of it. Then whatever else they send, there’s one less thing to worry about.”

  “Unless the next one is worse.”

  “Optimist,” I said.

  Caro took a deep breath. She wasn’t losing her temper, I didn’t think, but she wasn’t buying in yet, either. “If you try to kill this thing, supposing that’s even possible, you’ll draw their attention. And that will point them straight at the ranch.”

  “Not if I misdirect,” I said. “They don’t need to know we have any connection with either his lordship or the ranch. That thing has been trolling the planet for who knows how long. It must have won some enemies of its own.”

  “That’s a very thin string to hang a gamble on,” Caro said.

  “You have a better one?”

  “We could just let it go. Trust the wards, keep the horses safe, let it keep on failing to find them.”

  She was making perfect sense. The best strategy for dealing with a predator is to stay out of its way. The last thing you want to do is provoke it. />
  Sometimes you don’t get a choice. If the predator threatens you or your space or the animals or people you’re responsible for, you have to do something about it.

  This one wasn’t doing anything. It was just hanging on top of the tower, feeding or resting. It was over a hundred miles from the ranch, and nothing indicated that it was looking that way at all.

  Every horse person knows about the little voice that you had better listen to if you want to stay safe around a horse. The woo knows it, too. It’s the deep sense, the one that doesn’t depend on reason or logic. It puts together patterns the conscious mind can’t see.

  That’s what was telling me we couldn’t just let the thing go. Caro was right: if we messed up we’d make everything immeasurably worse. But the little voice told me to take the risk.

  But how in heaven or hell, and after who knew how many thousand years . . .

  “Caro,” I said, “don’t tell me I’m crazy. Just tell me if there’s a way to do this.”

  Then I told her what had come into my head.

  21

  My powers are strongest at night. That’s true of the academic side, too. My brain wakes up around 4 p.m., and by 10 it’s ready to rock.

  Which is a problem for the side of me that manages a horse ranch. Horses are all about the day shift. I don’t sleep much, but I have to sleep a few hours now and then. That usually eats the best part of the night.

  Up here in Phoenix, there weren’t any horses to feed in the morning. I’d been up since oh god o’clock, but I was wide awake and running on the adrenaline buzz.

  I topped it off with Chef’s wicked espresso. The shot of cinnamon and the spike of chile made my mouth sting in the most beautiful way.

  Elissa and Philippe were supposed to drop us off at the hotel and go back to their warm, safe beds. They weren’t supposed to know what we were up to, either, but Elissa pinned me to the wall in between the time we got back to the restaurant and the arrival of the coffee.

  “Somebody has to drive you there and back again,” she said. “You’ll be preparing on the way, and after you’re done, you’ll be in no condition to tackle the roads in the dark.”

  “How do you—” I shut up. She was like Caro. She’d grown up in this world I’d fallen into late and more or less against my will. She might not work the woo, but she knew how to run backup.

  Nice of her to assume we’d be coming back after we did the craziest thing I’d done since I had a heart-to-heart with a great white off Cocoa Beach. This was in the same general range of insane, but the shark was a mortal creature. She had more in common with me than I’d ever have with that thing on the tower.

  “It’s an elemental,” Caro said in the truck, while the road reeled away ahead of us. She sounded as if she was tuning in from another network. Reading energy on a level I couldn’t manage yet, and—I hoped—concealing what she was doing from the thing she was spying on.

  “Can they be that huge?” I asked her. “I thought they were like local entities. Spirits of place. Dust devils and water sprites. Not—whatever that is.”

  “Dragons count as elementals,” Caro said. “They can stretch across the whole sky.”

  I did know that. “This isn’t a dragon. I’m not even sure if I can—”

  She shot me a look that blistered me even in the dark. “Confidence, Claire. If you don’t trust yourself, this won’t work.”

  Caro was a firm proponent of the toughlove side of the teaching spectrum. She was also right. If I didn’t suck it up, we’d all go down.

  But what if this was the worst idea I could possibly have come up with? What if all I did was piss off the Dragon’s people and point them straight at the horses? What if—

  Trust yourself.

  It was my crazy idea. My way to do the job I’d been hired for, which was to protect the horses. What I didn’t know how to do, Caro did.

  Probably.

  Trust.

  I took the deepest breath I’d ever taken. I breathed in the whole world.

  That stretch of highway was long and barren. We turned off it into flat desert, featureless in the dark.

  This was Native land. I wanted that, because the old things were closer to the surface, and because we’d argued and then agreed that my first idea, to go all the way to Pichacho and then onto the peak, was not the best way to go about this. We were still a fair ways out, but close enough to feel the dragon sleeping under its blanket of earth.

  I could feel the rivers, too: the dry stream of the Gila that swelled up over the highway in flood season, every twenty years or so, and the many little washes and barren watercourses. Some of them had water underneath, streams flowing deep.

  One of them washed the dragon’s feet. It branched and branched again off the Gila, and fed the sleeping beast, before it flowed away into the same underground watercourse that lay under the ranch.

  It was all one thing in the end. Dragons, not so much. There are as many species of those as there are of mammals, and they can be as different from one another as a dolphin from a platypus. From tiny seadrakes, hardly larger than a seahorse, to the Dragon herself, they’re all over the world and probably the cosmos.

  They’re all different. I was banking on that tonight.

  Earth dragons, the kind that live under mountains, sleep even more than cats. But like cats, once they’re awake, their first priority is to hunt, kill, and eat. I had to make sure we weren’t dinner, and the hunter was—but to do that, I had to walk several very fine lines.

  If I stopped to think about it, I’d stop being able to do anything at all. I had to keep charging through, pretty much the way I rode Bel: on instinct and what body awareness I had.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  Nothing wrong with Elissa’s reflexes. Or her ability to follow instructions. She braked—not too hard—and eased off the road.

  They were all watching me. I couldn’t take time for words. I pushed the door open—it felt unusually heavy even for a pickup door—and slid out into a night that had turned bitter cold.

  The stars were icy overhead. I could feel as much as see the haze of light pollution that was Phoenix, but it wasn’t important here. What mattered was the ground underfoot, sand over caliche, and the river that ran deep under that.

  Water’s my sign. I gravitate toward it every time. Tonight I had to resist. I needed earth, and the powers that lived in it.

  The dragon was close enough to make my skin shiver. It was asleep, just as it had been for a thousand years, but I’d guessed right: it was aware of the hunter lurking on the edge of its dream. An intruder, another predator just outside its territory.

  The hunter had left the TMA tower. That was a good thing, but it was drifting away northward, drawn toward a tasty little blizzard in the Colorado Rockies. Also a good thing on any other night. Tonight—

  I almost let it go. The dragon wasn’t going anywhere. When the hunter came back, we could deal with it then.

  Not then. Now.

  Damned little voice in the back of my head. It sounded like Matina. It sent me pictures: the hunter going away, us trundling back to the ranch, a few days or weeks passing, then the predator coming back, bigger and badder and hungry enough to eat a whole circle of gods.

  There wasn’t anything about how it found out what we had in our pasture. Maybe that meant I was being lied to.

  I couldn’t take the chance. I had to trust, again.

  I also had to stop stalling. The hunter was picking up speed.

  Caro walked a wide circle around me, slow, lifting and putting each foot down with a cat’s precision. She started to chant. I didn’t know the words, but the meaning thrilled in my bones.

  She was warding us, but also setting up a beacon for the hunter to find. When the circle closed, the chant went on. Her feet turned the earth to a drum, beating a steady rhythm, like a heartbeat.

  I could feel my heart falling into the rhythm, and my own feet taking it up. Elissa was moving, too, and Philippe
beyond her. I hadn’t seen either of them get out of the truck.

  Almost too late, I remembered what I was there for. The circle was a lure, but it also concentrated energy. Caro had built and armed it. I had to do my best to aim it.

  I had to make sure the hunter caught sight of it. And only the hunter. God knew what else might come roaring in if I missed my target.

  When I was a baby medievalist I used to play at archery. I had a dream of doing it mounted, but that needed a horse with serious skills, and I never had one. I settled for plain old Robin Hood style, on foot and shooting at targets.

  That was years ago, but I remembered the draw of the bow, the bite of the string, and the way the arrow flew. My arrow was energy, which had no weight, but did have to allow for shifts in the currents between the circle and the hunter.

  I don’t visualize well. I’m more about feel. I felt the hunter pause.

  I almost overshot it. Unlike an arrow, this bolt could back and turn. It flashed past the hunter, laughing at it. “Can’t catch me!”

  That was it, that was the key. To be able to laugh. The hunter growled, a long roll of seriously pissed-off thunder, and lunged.

  I just barely ducked. The hunter spread wings so wide they blacked out the stars. In the light from the city below, I saw the glint of talons.

  Two sets. Its shape was like a bird, bigger than any that had ever flown. It beak was hooked like an eagle’s, so huge it could shred me with one lazy sweep of its head.

  Back in the circle, Caro’s drumming speeded up. It fed me energy and pulled the hunter toward it at the same time. I ran like hell, with the monstrous thing roaring after me.

  I didn’t want to know what it would do if it caught me. Just having it so close made my skin feel as if it was peeling off my bones.

  I crashed down into my actual bones and my shivering skin. What looked like a huge black cloud sped toward us against the wind. All I wanted to do was curl up in a tight ball and hide, but this was my circus.

  My hand closed around a small hard thing in my pocket: the little stone horse. The herd was safe on the ranch, warded and guarded and protected, but this image of Bel in all his stallion arrogance both reminded me of what I was there for, and grounded me in the earth under my feet. Six sister goddesses and one long-hidden god had power for me to draw on. They all but knocked me down and rubbed my face in it.