Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  In the old days, Mussalmian maps of those mountains had borne a warning inscription: HERE BE DRAGONS. Kyosti, something of a student of those days, had seen many such maps, some in the original, more reproduced by the law of similarity so the wider scholarly community could have access to them. The inscription never varied; that subjunctive never turned into an indicative.

  But this was a new age. If there were dragons in these tropic mountains, Mussalmi wanted to know about it. And if there were none, the Empire wanted to know that, too. Even if this expedition found none, even if it showed there had never been any, bards would doubtless go on spinning tales about them. That was all right with Kyosti. Bards and tales of ancient days were one thing. The worries of marshals and statesmen were something else again.

  Kyosti didn’t believe the explorers would find any dragons. He thought dragons were a figment of the bardic imagination—and of the imaginations of the tropical continent’s small, pale, skinny natives. Still, he recognized that he might be wrong. And even if he wasn’t, who could say what the expedition would discover, despite discovering no great fire-breathing worms?

  One of the native guides pointed toward the distant mountains. “You for dragons looking there?” he asked, scratching under his loincloth. It was all he wore. Along with the strangely accented, ungrammatical Mussalmian he spoke, that made Kyosti figure that he was none too bright.

  “Yes, we will look for dragons there, Sztojay,” the wizard answered. He might have been talking to an idiot child.

  Sztojay didn’t get offended—or didn’t act offended, anyhow. The natives had learned that bad things happened to them if the imperials realized they were angry. The little man just said, “You to mountains going, you dragon there finding.”

  “We’ll see,” Kyosti said indulgently. What did, what could, a jungle native know about the mountains?

  Sztojay said something else. Kyosti didn’t really hear what it was. A native girl—woman—ambled by, bare breasts jiggling. The women here wore no more than their menfolk. With their atrocious climate, that made sense in a way. Still, Kyosti wasn’t the only Mussalmian whose eyes kept bugging out of his head. Far from it.

  By imperial standards, the native women were easy lays. Someone had told Kyosti as much before he sailed south. Whoever it was—the wizard couldn’t remember now—he’d known what he was talking about. Kyosti smiled, remembering.

  “Come on! Are we ready?” That was Baron Toivo, who was in charge of the expedition. He had a place at the Imperial Academy in Tampere, not far from the capital, and was connected to the Emperor’s family. Even without all that, he would have been a bad man to cross, as he was large and strong and short-tempered. Kyosti wasn’t astonished, then, when no one told him no. Toivo took off his broad-brimmed straw hat and waved it over his head. “Well, let’s go!” Ready or not, they went.

  MUSSALMI ruled all the way down to the foothills of the mountains. That didn’t mean that imperials were seen in the jungle very often. Most of the Mussalmians who did go there had either started with nothing and were hoping to come home with something or had made a hash of something and effectively become nothing themselves.

  Bearers from one tribe or clan or petty chiefdom handed the expedition and its chattels on to the next one farther south. A few coppers, some glass beads, a petty spell or two: such things sufficed as payment. Sufficed? Here on the tropical continent, they might as well have been riches. The natives thought they were.

  Kyosti needed a spell from the healer, to cure a painful and embarrassing malady he’d come down with a few days after sleeping with one of those scantily clad native women. Not all southern diseases yielded to charms the imperials had developed, but this one did. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  The farther south the explorers went, the fewer the natives who spoke or understood Mussalmian. Another wizard, a cunning linguist called Sunila, devised a translation cantrip that worked … after a fashion. It worked better than pointing and gesturing, anyhow. Baron Toivo swore because it wasn’t perfect, but only halfheartedly, so he couldn’t have been too unhappy.

  “You need to watch out for the tsaldaris tonight,” one of this latest group of natives said. The cantrip didn’t translate the word the Mussalmians really needed.

  Patiently, Kyosti said, “Tell me what the, uh, tsaldaris”—he knew he made a hash of the foreign word—“is like. Tell me what it does.”

  The native was only too happy to oblige. He went into gory detail, in fact. Before long, Kyosti got the idea: the tsaldaris was some kind of vampire. That led to a good deal of talk among the Mussalmians, talk for which they didn’t use Sunila’s translating cantrip. At least half of them thought that the little blond man in the loincloth was either trying to scare them away, or, at best, passing on his own superstitions. Up in the Empire, vampires were as legendary—skeptics would have said, as mythical—as dragons.

  Those with a taste for arcane lore dredged from their memories things that might stop a vampire: roses, garlic, sunlight. The native who’d warned them agreed about the last one. Of roses he knew nothing. The tropical continent had flowers that blazed in every color of the rainbow, but none so ordinary as roses. He didn’t know about garlic, either. His folks had other spices. One of the cooks let him smell some. By the horrible face he made, he preferred vampires.

  But the Mussalmians didn’t. Several of them rubbed themselves with powdered garlic before getting into their bedrolls and under their mosquito nets. Kyosti was one of those who abstained. He wasn’t sure there were such things as vampires. Even if there were, he doubted whether a northern spice would deter a tropical bloodsucker that had never been exposed to it.

  Sunrise pried his eyes open the next morning. He’d come through unscathed. So had the native bearers. So had his countrymen who’d used the powdered garlic. So had his countrymen who hadn’t—except for a map-maker named Relander, who had two punctures on his throat and a look of eerily calm satisfaction on his face. He was the most contented-looking corpse Kyosti had ever seen.

  Maybe that was because he still lay in shadow. When the sun finally struck him, his features screwed up and his skin started to shrivel. That should have been impossible. Watching it happen, fighting not to retch, Kyosti saw for himself that it wasn’t. Relander might be a corpse, but he wasn’t quite dead.

  To make sure he got that way and stayed that way, the Mussalmians pounded a stake through his heart. The cook put a garlic clove under his tongue. They left him out in the fierce southern sun. His body mortified with unnatural—supernatural?—speed. “Gods grant him peace,” Baron Toivo said.

  “So may it be,” the other Mussalmians chorused.

  The natives watched what they did with the luckless Relander and what happened to his mortal remains. Kyosti couldn’t read the blonds’ expressions. The man who’d warned the explorers about the tsaldaris said something to his friend in his own language. Sunila’s cantrip wasn’t working, but Kyosti didn’t think he needed it to understand what the scrawny little fellow was saying. If it wasn’t I told them so, the Mussalmian wizard would have been astonished.

  Everyone, natives and explorers from the north alike, seemed delighted to leave the campground where Relander had found his end. “It could be that the vampire will not pursue us, and that we will meet no more of the foul creatures,” Baron Toivo said hopefully.

  Hope was one thing. Informed hope was something else again—something better, as far as Kyosti was concerned. With Sunila’s help, he translated the baron’s comment for one of the bearers.

  “It could be, yes,” the man replied, his voice grave. “But the tsaldaris will have seen that you strangers make easy prey. Why would it not come after you to feed again, eh?”

  Mussalmians commonly reckoned the natives of the tropical continent flighty and foolish. As far as Kyosti could see, though, this nearly naked bearer reasoned like a schoolmaster. The fellow might work for coppers and trinkets, but he was nobody’s fool.

  Trampi
ng south toward the mountains that might or might not harbor dragons, Kyosti kept looking back over his shoulder. The vampire wouldn’t, couldn’t, travel by daylight, but even so … He felt better after they forded a stream. Running water was also supposed to balk such creatures, wasn’t it?

  Sunila found a leech fat with his blood clinging to his leg when he came up onto dry land again. “All kinds of bloodsuckers in this miserable place,” he snarled, using a smoldering twig to make it let go, then bandaging the oozing hole it had left in his flesh.

  “Not the same. You can find leeches in the Empire,” Kyosti said.

  “You can find other vampires there, too. Have you ever seen a tax collector out by daylight?” Sunila retorted. Kyosti laughed. By the linguistic sorcerer’s expression, he hadn’t been joking.

  Down sank the sun. The explorers encamped with it still above the horizon; twilight didn’t last long in the tropics. After supper, Kyosti used the garlic powder he’d refused the night before. He hoped—he prayed—it would help. There was garlic in the evening sausages, too; they eased his mind as they filled his belly.

  All of which helped much less than he wished that it would have when he woke in bright moonlight and found himself face-to-face with the tsaldaris. Despite that moonlight, far more brilliant than it would have been anywhere in the Empire of Mussalmi, the undead creature’s eyes were two black sinkholes that gave back nothing … or did red flicker somewhere far down in their depths, like hellfire seen from heaven?

  “You are mine,” the vampire whispered. Sunali’s cantrip wouldn’t be operating now, but Kyosti understood even though the thing wasn’t speaking Mussalmian.

  “I am yours,” the wizard agreed, breathing garlic fumes into the creature’s face. Its features twisted, almost as Relander’s had when the sun touched them. The garlic hurt it, then—but not enough to stop it. Its eyes might have been embered darkness, but its fangs gleamed in the tropical moonlight. Kyosti knew just where they would pierce him. He could hardly wait.

  Fight! Run! Cast a spell! screamed a small, still-unseduced part of his mind. The rest, though, the rest was content to let whatever happened happen. He remembered how pleased with himself Relander had looked when they found him.

  The tsaldaris carried a reek of the grave. Where did it hide between sunup and sundown? Why hadn’t the natives caught it and given it a final death long before this? A singularly pointless thing to wonder as those fangs sank closer.

  And then, quite suddenly, the fangs disappeared. So did the terrible eyes. And so did the rest of the austerely beautiful face. As soon as Kyosti couldn’t see it anymore, it no longer seemed austerely beautiful. It was the most horrible thing he’d ever set eyes on. The spell it had laid on him—on him! a wizard!—was gone.

  “Help us, curse it!” Sunila said hoarsely. Kyosti realized that the vampire’s spell might not be altogether gone. The creature’s eyes hadn’t disappeared because it withdrew. They’d disappeared because Sunila and one of the little blond natives had thrown a big black sack over its head. Now they had to fight like a couple of demons to keep the monster from breaking away and fleeing—or, worse, from breaking away, using its strange powers, and avenging itself.

  When Kyosti’s wits truly did come back to what they should have been, he used a spell of his own. He was with the expedition not least because he was one of the Empire’s leading preservationists. Specimens he enchanted would stay as fresh as if they were alive for years, for decades, perhaps for centuries. With him along, the explorers didn’t need to carry dozens of heavy, awkward jugs of formalin (which was devilishly expensive) or strong spirits (which weren’t, but which were all too apt to be used for purposes unrelated to preservation).

  He’d never cast a spell that met such resistance. But then, he’d never before tried to freeze any creature, alive or undead, with a conscious will of its own. Storytellers spun tales about preservationists and the girls rash enough to scorn them. Kyosti had always thought those stories were so much nonsense. Now he was convinced of it. Even slowing the vampire down took all the magecraft he had in him.

  Slowing it down sufficed. That let Sunila and the native—and Kyosti himself, once he scrambled out of his bedroll—keep the black sack over its head, and eventually let them bind it so it could not possibly escape.

  Despite the spell, despite the bonds, it kept struggling to free itself. That was horrible to behold: it was like watching a man move deep underwater, or in the swaddling folds of nightmare. Kyosti watched anyhow. This … thing had come much too close to killing him, and he wanted to see it die the death. Some of the savants in the expedition had more dispassionate reasons to observe the vampire—or so they claimed, anyhow.

  Little by little, the eastern sky turned pale, and then bright. Stars faded. The moon went from gold to chalk. Under its shroud, the tsaldaris keened. It might not be able to see out, but it knew what was coming. It knew, and it feared.

  At last, after what seemed simultaneously a very long time and no time at all, the sun slid up over the eastern horizon. Sunbeams walked down the trees from top to bottom, then glided over the ground toward the vampire. It keened again and moved a little faster, but not nearly fast enough.

  A sunbeam touched a bound hand. The hand didn’t merely shrivel, as poor Relander’s face had done. It burst into flame. In an instant, the whole vampire was on fire. It burned hot and fierce, like fatwood. The glare was so fierce, Kyosti had to turn his face. The smell … He wanted to drool and to heave, both at the same time.

  It was soon over. The fire left little ash, most of it from the sack and the bonds. The morning breeze sprang up and blew away what there was. The tsaldaris might never have been there at all. But, in that case, why was Relander dead?

  “Well,” Baron Toivo said roughly, “let’s head south.”

  AS the land rose toward the peaks of the tropical continent’s spine, jungle gave way to more open woodland, then the woodland to savannas. Days stayed hot, though the hateful mugginess subsided. Nights no longer sweltered. They grew mild, then, sometimes, forthrightly chilly. Flies persisted, but the mosquitoes didn’t. Kyosti missed them not a copper’s worth.

  Few Mussalmian explorers had come so far south. Sunila’s translation cantrip got a workout. As before, it proved better than nothing, but not always good enough.

  One native tribe, seeing tall, swarthy strangers crossing their lands, wasted no time trying to talk to them but attacked instead. The natives promptly regretted it. Their spears and arrows and half-baked sorceries were no match for the magic and weapons the Mussalmians brought to bear. The handful of blonds from the raiding party who escaped fled, shrieking in terror. Naked-headed vultures spiraled down out of the sky to commence disposing of the natives who’d fallen.

  Vultures, yes. But Kyosti eyed the blue-enameled bowl overhead in hope of spying larger visitors. Some stories said dragons were four or five or ten times larger than the largest vultures. Others claimed they were four or five or ten times larger than that. Others still … Well, Kyosti didn’t waste his time even trying to believe those. Some talespinners had more imagination than they knew what to do with.

  The natives had managed to wound a couple of Mussalmians. Even that tiny success irked Baron Toivo. The baron didn’t mind losing a savant to a venomous serpent, or another to a striped beast that was to a house cat as imagined dragons were to vultures. By Toivo’s attitude, wild animals were some of the hazards explorers faced, but Mussalmians should outdo these southern savages under any and all circumstances.

  Imaginary dragons … Kyosti saw them in his dreams, and in his mind’s eye. With the eyes of his body, he saw vultures and hawks and crows and long-necked birds that ran on two legs like men and were even taller than Mussalmians. With sarcastic aplomb, one of the explorers dubbed them sparrows. Kyosti never found out who’d used the name first, but inside a day it was in everybody’s mouths.

  Those enormous “sparrows” made good eating. Their meat was red as beef and tast
ed much like it. A couple of their eggs could feed the whole expedition—if the cooks were patient enough to let them get done.

  Eyeing a broken shell with respect, Kyosti said, “Easy enough to think of a dragon hatching from something that size.”

  “Just because something is easy to conceive doesn’t make it true,” Sunila answered tartly. “I think we are chasing shadows here myself. If we find anything at all, we’ll find something like a large snake—or maybe a lizard—you wait and see. Exaggeration from people who never really saw the creature will have done the rest.”

  “Some people say men invented the gods that way.” Kyosti pointed toward one of the smoking mountains ahead. “What could that be but a god’s breath, after all?”

  “Yes, what?” the linguistic sorcerer agreed dryly. “As a matter of fact, I hold to that view myself—though not where the stuffier sort of priest can hear me do it, I admit. Exactly the same phenomenon here with dragons, I tell you.”

  Kyosti nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised. We’re learning all sorts of other things, though. That nasty vampire, and the ‘sparrows,’ and who knows what else we’ll come upon when we climb higher? We wouldn’t have seen any of it if we’d stayed at home in the Empire.”

  “You wouldn’t have almost got killed if you’d stayed at home in the Empire,” Sunila reminded him.

  That was true, but Kyosti didn’t care to think about it. “What’s the line from the old poet?” he said. “‘Man seeks the gods, and seeking finds them’—something like that, anyhow. What we learn on the voyage is what matters.”