Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Daniel had a second strand, but he couldn’t afford to give it to Slough. He needed it for something else. “There’s more there than it looks like. The source’s magic is strong.”

  That was an understatement. Sam was possibly the most powerful osteomancer in both the Californian realms. A decent osteomancer should be able to extract more magic from a strand of Sam’s hair than you’d find in the entire corpses of any ten other osteomancers.

  Slough set the jar on the table with a sharp tap of glass on glass. “Okay. I’ve worked with less.”

  “I have some questions,” Daniel said.

  Slough smiled. “I would imagine so.”

  “What about age?”

  “Aging can be retarded, if it’s long life you’re looking for. It’s our most common request.”

  “I want the opposite. Can you accelerate aging to a specific point, and then reset the clock so the golem ages normally after that?”

  Slough nodded. “That’s more difficult, rarer, and more expensive. But, yes, I can do it. The magic from unicorn bones imparts immortality, or at least long life. I can prepare the bone to do the opposite. Rapid aging. If administered correctly, I can fine-tune the degree.”

  Slough presented himself as confident but not boastful. He seemed to know what he was talking about. And he didn’t answer in riddles, with the cryptic affect so many sorcerers put on.

  Daniel moved on. “Will he be … okay?”

  “You mean, will he be functional and healthy? Both mentally and physically? Will he retain the magic and intelligence and memories of the donor? That’s what you’re asking?”

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  Slough leaned back in his chair. It was identical to Daniel’s, but Slough seemed absolutely comfortable in his. “The golem will be alive,” he said, “with functioning organs and physiological systems.”

  “But will he be the person he was?”

  “It would be irresponsible of me to make that guarantee. About half the time, the golem is a perfect duplicate of the donor in every way. I’m oversimplifying, but it’s like rebinding a book. The content doesn’t change. Yet it’s not the most exact art. Many times things go wrong, and we have to start over.”

  “What happens to the ones that go wrong?”

  Slough said nothing. He’d probably learned that most clients didn’t actually want an answer to that one. Daniel decided not to be like most clients.

  “Can the ones that … go wrong … be recovered?”

  “With a great deal of effort and time, a failed golem can sometimes achieve trained response to simulation. Even a chicken can learn to play the piano.”

  “What about making a golem intentionally blank?”

  Slough frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I mean,” Daniel said, “a mentally blank golem. One with all the parts, all the systems, everything functioning, but the mind not turned on. Can you make a golem like that?”

  Slough eyed him, clearly repulsed. It was a repulsive thing that Daniel was asking.

  “I’ve never done it.”

  “That wasn’t my question. Can you do it?”

  “Of course,” Slough said. “But at this point, I have to tell you, what I can do isn’t the most important question. It’s what I am willing to do.”

  “I can’t pay you. Not anything like what you’re used to.”

  Slough smiled again, his thin lips and sharp eyes giving him a snake-like aspect. “I wasn’t aware this was just an informational interview.”

  “It’s not. I’m convinced you’re the best person for the job. The best person available, anyway. And I need you. I need you to make a golem from the magic in this hair, and I need the golem gestated to the physical age of a seventeen-year-old, and I need it to be mentally blank.”

  Leather creaked as Slough shifted in his chair. “And for this difficult, time-consuming, resource-costly work, you expect to pay … nothing.”

  “Let me answer that with one more question, Dr. Slough.”

  Slough flicked his hand in a gesture both impatient and indulgent. “Ask.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Of course I do. From before you walked into my factory. I employ very good hounds.”

  Daniel had presented himself in his customary fashion: thin, rumpled, and overdue for a haircut. He didn’t arrive like a king, and because he didn’t look or act like one, even people who knew his history forgot that all he had to do to claim a throne was remove a few dozen other osteomancers, a talent that he’d amply demonstrated a decade ago when he killed the most fearsome osteomancer of them all.

  Slough was cool, self-possessed, in control of himself. But Daniel’s nose was as keen as Slough’s hounds, and he smelled a wisp of fear.

  Daniel stood. “How would you like to make a friendly gesture toward the man who ate the Hierarch’s heart?”

  “I see,” said Slough. He took up the jar, and without being summoned, an assistant arrived with a metal case about the size of a lunch box. Slough delicately set the jar inside the foam-padded interior.

  “I hope you understand this isn’t an overnight job.”

  “I have some necessary travel. You’ll do a good job while I’m away.”

  “I will,” said Slough. “And not for your offer of friendship, or for the threat implied in it. I’ll do my best work because I’m a craftsman, and craft means something to me.”

  Slough escorted him back out across the laboratory and into the reception hall.

  “Normally I have clients sign a contract, but I have a hunch you’d prefer a handshake deal.”

  “You haven’t asked who the donor is. Who you’re building a duplicate of.”

  “I think I know. Back when you were a thief, what would you have called him? The goods? The score? The booty? We called him the Kingdom’s Treasure.”

  “You have a son of your own,” Daniel said. “He likes music. Plays the clarinet. I understand he’s good. Some kids, you have to force them to practice. But you have to force yours to stop so he’ll eat dinner and use the bathroom. His teacher says he might be good enough to play professionally someday.”

  “If you’re threatening me—” Slough said with real, incautious anger.

  “I’m not. I don’t threaten children. Ever. Yes, the source is what you call the Kingdom’s Treasure. He’s the Hierarch’s golem. But I call him Sam. He’s important to me, the way your son is to you. Do we understand each other?”

  A moment passed while Slough assessed him.

  “I’ll do my very best, Mr. Blackland.”

  “I know you will. And let me give you a word of advice, one father to another: Don’t bring your boy into the family business. Let him be a musician.”

  “That’s my hope, Mr. Blackland. That’s why I work so hard. And what about your son? Did you bring him into the family business?”

  “I’m still trying to get him out of it.”

  * * *

  Daniel made his way around the tombs and grave markers of Hollywood Cemetery. Palm trees stood in black silhouette against the flat coppery light from the sodium-vapor lamps lining Van Ness Canal. Some of the tombs were equipped with their own spotlights, little Greek temples built to honor entertainment lawyers and record executives. He passed a gravestone with a sexy, bare-shouldered woman carved in granite. She was falling out of her dress and clutching the grave marker with inconsolable grief. Other stones were less melodramatic, film clapboards and likenesses of the deceased depicted playing electric guitar or swinging a baseball bat. One gravestone was shaped like a grand piano. Install some holes in the lawn and the cemetery would make a fine miniature golf course.

  Dead osteomancers were generally not interred. Usually, their bodies were digested.

  He found the tomb he was looking for, another one of the Greek jobs with white fluted columns surrounding a solid block of white stone. The door was an imposing barrier of green patinated metal. For a thief like Daniel, the lock wa
s a joke and it fell apart after nine seconds of work.

  He pushed the door open just a crack and tossed three brittle pellets of gorgon bone inside. He waited and listened to shuffling, scrabbling noises, like the sounds of panicked rats. When the noises subsided, he pushed the door open wider and slipped inside.

  Two guards stood stiff as stone, their guns fallen to the ground through their unfeeling fingers. The flesh of their faces and hands was cement gray, their open eyes as brittle as eggshells. The gorgon bone would wear off in an hour or so, but for them it would be a long and rather horrific hour.

  As for himself, Daniel wasn’t looking forward to the next few minutes. This was not the first grave he’d ever robbed, and he’d had some unpleasant experiences.

  He slipped a screw jack beneath the sarcophagus lid, threaded in the crank, and jacked the lid up several inches. With a second screw jack, he performed the same operation on the wooden coffin inside. Please just let it be a mummy, he thought, clicking on his flashlight. He saw glossy black hair, a pink cheek, blue-gray fabric. Not a mummy.

  He jacked both lids higher and shined his flashlight over the body to examine it more thoroughly.

  She’d been young when she died, maybe nineteen or twenty, a birdlike girl with hands that looked like they should belong to a stronger person crossing over her chest. Her dress was a sober thing, long sleeves and a skirt down to her ankles, with a little bit of lace on the sleeve cuffs and the high collar. Was she wearing a maid’s outfit? Daniel wouldn’t put it past a rich old osteomancer to lay a favorite servant to rest in the same uniform she wore when waiting hand and foot on her master. It was probably supposed to be some kind of compliment.

  She was perfectly preserved, no gruesome wrinkling, no odd tightness in her face or hands. He smelled no putrefaction. Yet neither did he smell embalming oil or osteomantic substances.

  Unlike the girl, the padding of her coffin did show wear. The black velvet looked dull in the light and was dry to the touch.

  He continued his flashlight search of the body, hoping he wouldn’t have to touch it to find the bone he’d come here for. He wasn’t squeamish about corpses, but touching what looked like a sleeping girl would feel like a violation.

  He patted her down, tentatively at first, then, gritting his teeth, more thoroughly. Nothing. He pressed his thumbs into her jaw and hinged open her mouth. A glossy black disc about the size of a quarter rested on her tongue. Conscious of his breath on the girl’s face, he leaned in closer. The disc was odorless, but he could see cellular striations of bone.

  The body belonged to her maid, but the tomb was bought and paid for by one Angelica Chasterlain, heiress to a great Los Angeles oil fortune. Some people kept their greatest treasures in bank vaults. Chasterlain used her maid’s tomb to store a sliver of bone said to come from a creature at the center of the earth, the axis mundi dragon.

  It had taken Daniel seven months of hard footwork to discover where such bones could be found. The largest fragment was on the other side of the world in the vaults of the Chinese government. Another was in the Northern Kingdom. And the third, the least of them all, was here.

  “Sorry about this,” he whispered, plucking the bone from the girl’s mouth.

  The corpse drew a great, ragged breath. Her eyes opened slowly, her lids resisting decades of being shut. She reached out and clutched Daniel’s shirt. He stepped back, but she held tight, and when he saw the confusion and fear in her face, instead of prying her hand off him, he just covered it with his own.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay. You’re not alone.”

  Her hand was already growing cold. He didn’t know if it would be a kindness to put the axis mundi bone back into her mouth, to return her to sleeping death inside her tomb, or if it was better to let her finally pass. But it wasn’t uncertainty that made him pocket the bone. He needed it for Sam. So he would keep it, and she would die, and kindness would not be a factor.

  She worked her mouth, trying to say something, but she could only manage a weak garble.

  “It’s okay,” he said, over and over, trying to reassure her as her hand withered and the bones grew sharper under his warm palm.

  He should leave now. But he stayed and looked into her frightened eyes and said meaningless things to her as her flesh grew brittle and shrank away to little more than a thin wrapper around her skeleton. He looked into her eyes until they yellowed like fossil ivory and broke into thin cracks and flaked away like ash into the recesses of her eye sockets. Even after the girl was bones and skin and hair shrouded in a blue-gray dress, he murmured assurances that she would be all right.

  For Sam, he told himself.

  FOUR

  Daniel searched the sky for the dragon. Binoculars to his face, he paced a circle over jumbled granite and snow, not having any idea from which direction the dragon might come. At least the skies were clear, offering hundreds of miles of visibility. He stood on the peak of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain between Alaska and Mexico. Far down below, in the east, the desolate sprawl of Death Valley turned shades of purple and copper in the setting sun. To the north and south rose 14,000-foot crags of stone.

  Wind found its way past his scarf and balaclava and bit his skin through layers of wool and cotton. His head hurt and his lungs couldn’t get enough oxygen from the thin air. He was in Sam’s world now, one of sky and clouds and a view so vast Daniel’s dull eyes couldn’t encompass it. Except for the hair left with Isaac Slough, any remaining spark of Sam dwelled in the form of a flying god, and Daniel found himself a little envious of him.

  He tucked his chin against the wind and headed to the storm shelter. The Hierarch’s mountain brigade had built the stone-and-mortar hut a century earlier, and some genius had outfitted it with a corrugated-metal roof that served as a pretty effective magnet for lightning. But at least it supplied a break from the wind and it was free of vermin. Not that the construction deserved any credit for that; the only animals that ever made it up here were itinerant butterflies and a masochistic species of finch.

  Inside, Moth and Em were setting up the harpoon gun. Em did most of the work, adjusting small screws and swiping at Moth’s hands when he tried to help.

  Daniel pulled down his balaclava and warmed himself by the camp stove. “How’s it coming?”

  “The sight got jostled on the hike up,” Em said, taking another swat at Moth. “But I think I can fix it if you tell Moth to stop trying to futz.”

  “Moth, stop futzing,” Daniel said. “Em’s allowed to futz. You don’t futz.”

  Moth drew himself up to his full, proud height. “This is a finesse job, I get that. But I’m a finesse guy. Tell her, Daniel. Tell her how good I am at piano.”

  Actually, Moth could be quite a delicate tinkler on the keys.

  “Come help with the projectile, Moth.”

  Daniel pulled his balaclava back up over his mouth and nose, lifted one of the bags they’d hauled up the mountain, and went back outside.

  “Out there?” Moth wailed behind him. “It’s all windy-howly out there.”

  But Moth followed, as he had always done, through forest and river and city and suburb and desert, crisscrossing the realm in search of the dragon. Daniel and Moth and Em had spent weeks on a hired fishing boat and months in a string of motor-court motels and even more months sleeping in a van, and now that Slough was cultivating a body for Sam, and Daniel had possession of the axis mundi bone, there was only one thing left to do: bring the dragon down.

  Things felt right tonight. For starters, Daniel had a good feeling about the eyewitnesses he’d interviewed, from the fugitive inmate camping outside Lone Pine to the smuggler moving hippogriff bone by pack mule down Hogback Road. They described shapes in the sky and a noise that rolled through the valleys like high-pitched thunder.

  And there was a smell here. It reminded him of Sam. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

  Daniel had hoped Moth and Em would be home by now. But their homes had moved
on without them. Em’s golem sisters had abandoned their Mojave ranch hideout a few months back and hadn’t contacted her with their new address, which either meant their communications network wasn’t secure, or worse. And Moth’s boyfriend had sold Moth’s restaurant in Crumville, told Moth he could pick up half the money in cash at the Crumville bank, and headed out for more secure pastures.

  Daniel’s fault. And even though Em and Moth both insisted they were with him by choice, that they’d made their sacrifices willingly, how hard had Daniel really tried to convince them they had no further obligation to him or Sam?

  Not very hard.

  For Daniel, things hadn’t changed much. He’d been living like this for a decade.

  Tugging his gloves off with his teeth, he set up his osteomancer’s torch on a rock. He moved quickly, trying to get the job done before the cold stiffened his fingers. Once he had it lit, he passed his hands over the heat of the flame before putting his gloves back on. Next, he removed a thermos bottle from his pack.

  Moth stepped back, wary.

  “Don’t worry, this stuff’s not dangerous,” Daniel said. “It’s just a scent to draw the dragon.”

  “What’s in it?” The thin, whistling air weakened Moth’s voice.

  “Essences he’ll find familiar. Me, mostly.”

  Moth’s balaclava exposed only his eyes and the chapped bridge of his nose, but Daniel didn’t need to see the rest of Moth’s face to read his expression. They’d been friends for twenty years, and Moth’s mix of bewilderment, mockery, and concern was as familiar as a favorite pair of shoes.

  “Okay, Moth, what’s your problem?”

  “You’re using yourself as bait.”

  “If you know of a better way to draw out a dragon—”

  “Not my area of expertise.”

  “Not mine, either,” Daniel admitted. He poured the liquefied magic into a blue-speckled kettle set on a tripod over the torch. “It’ll take a while to vaporize at this altitude, so let’s get the rest set up.”

  Moth helped Em lug the gas-powered harpoon launcher from the hut, and together, with a fair bit of squabbling, they assembled the whole apparatus. The last piece to go on was the harpoon itself, a five-foot-long missile tipped with a bulb of alp dust.