Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  The alp came from the kitchens of Mother Cauldron, the most brilliant mixer of osteomantic materials Daniel knew, and it hadn’t come cheap. He’d spent a full month of the last year breaking into vaults and warehouses and strongholds, stealing entire fortunes of bones for her. But she assured Daniel her alp mixture could tranquilize even a Pacific firedrake, and if she was telling the truth, the month of thieving would be a small price to pay.

  Smoke boiled from the kettle and threaded through the air.

  “Now we wait,” said Daniel. “You two should go back in the hut.”

  Moth looked appalled. “But what about s’mores?”

  “Yeah,” Em said, reaching inside her parka. “I brought s’mores.” She proudly displayed a box of graham crackers, a bag of marshmallows, and a giant chocolate bar.

  “You guys want to make s’mores in the flames of my torch? My osteomancer’s torch, an instrument with more moving parts than a Swiss watch?”

  “We figured it’d make really good s’mores,” Em said.

  Daniel eyed the kettle. It had stopped smoking and releasing Daniel’s scents. He took the kettle off the torch. “Okay. S’mores.”

  Moth rubbed his hands in delight, and then a great noise ripped through the sky, like the crack of a sequoia-sized whip.

  “Position the gun,” Daniel snapped. He looked to the sky. Nothing north, south, or east. But in the west, a shape came out of the sun: a sharp silhouette standing out against the red sky, with a slim serpentine body, sail-like wings, a long neck and undulating tail. Through the binoculars, Daniel could make out the shingles of its belly armor and licks of flame from its snout.

  “Em…?”

  Em peered through the gun sight. “I’ve got him but he’s not in range.”

  Moth stood behind her. “You guys never told me how close he has to get.”

  “Yeah, we kinda hid that from you,” Em said. “A hundred meters.”

  Moth sputtered. “Are you kidding me? We’re supposed to stand a hundred meters from a Pacific firedrake? I could throw the harpoon that far.”

  Em turned the crank to tilt the gun up. “I worked out the weight of the harpoon, its aerodynamics, and your arm strength. We’re using the gun.”

  Moth shook his head and planted his feet, as if readying himself for a body blow.

  The dragon climbed ever higher, just a dark smudge against a lilac band of sky pricked with the evening’s first stars. It froze there a moment, then dove.

  A shockwave of heat preceded the dragon, and the air swam with mirage. It spread out its wings, enflamed sky glowing behind translucent membranes. Every beat of its wings pummeled the air, and it hovered, its sleek, canoe-shaped head level with the mountain summit.

  Its eyes fixed upon Daniel, pupils like black fissures in burning orange irises.

  Daniel stared right back.

  He’d eaten dragon, and he felt his own flame rising up in his lungs, felt his fingertips crackle with lightning. He was an osteomancer, and the way to deal with power was to consume it. He wanted to flay the dragon of its flesh, and pry off its armor plates, gut it and scrape and shovel away meat until its fine, rich bones were exposed. Eat the firedrake’s bones, and Daniel would have its power to add to his own.

  A crushing pressure took his shoulder. It was Moth’s hand. “Daniel,” Moth said, low and gentle. “Em’s waiting for the order.”

  “God,” Daniel whispered, horrified. “It’s Sam.”

  “Yeah,” Moth said. “I’m sure he smells like a big banquet, but Em’s waiting.”

  Daniel looked at Em and nodded.

  She fired. The gun launched the harpoon with a bang, and the harpoon hit true, dead center in the cruciform of the dragon’s body and outspread wings. The bulb at its tip crumbled to chalky powder.

  The dragon roared with a fury that rippled Daniel’s pant legs and punched his heart like a battering ram.

  He and Moth and Em raced for the granite shelter, hoping to escape a torrent of dragon flame if the alp didn’t work like Mother Cauldron had promised.

  Once they reached the shelter, Daniel pushed Em and Moth through the open door. Before heading in himself, he turned to look at the dragon.

  Despite beating its wings harder, it was losing altitude. Its eyes had lost some of their gleam.

  The alp was doing its job.

  “Sleep,” Daniel whispered. “Just go to sleep, Sam. It’ll be better when you wake up. I promise you.”

  The dragon struggled to stay aloft. The claws of one of its hind legs touched earth and gouged deep runnels in the solid rock. It let out a strangled roar, both frightful and pitiful. Exhalations of searing heat warped its face behind the disturbed air.

  One wing scraped against the summit’s ledge, dislodging tons of stone and earth in an avalanche. The ground jolted with the crash of boulders tumbling, the world coming undone.

  Then, an eerie quiet, only the clatter of smaller rocks and gravel and sifting sand.

  Daniel rushed to the crumbling ledge and peered over. The dragon had slid to a stop about three hundred feet below, its body sprawled across a shallow part of the slope, head resting on an outcropping.

  Em ran over with climbing gear and helped Daniel get into his harness. She tugged on the straps, making sure they were secure.

  “He fell a long way,” she said. “Is he okay?”

  “That’s not a long way for a fully armored firedrake,” Daniel said, affecting his most reassuring tone.

  She wasn’t having it. “But what about Sam?”

  Daniel aimed his flashlight down the slope. The dragon’s scales changed color in the light, swirling with deep reds and blues and greens, as much a creature of the sea as it was of fire. Its body was a treasure horde of nearly unimaginable value, its bones and teeth and claws fairly crackling with magic. It seemed as durable as the mountain itself. But the essence of Sam, somewhere beneath the iridescent outer plating, was an ephemeral wisp.

  “We’ll see,” Daniel said, reaching into his pocket to make sure the case containing the axis mundi bone was still there.

  Em anchored the free end of the rope in a nest of boulders, checked her knots three times, and gave everything several violent tugs before deeming it worthy of her thumbs-up.

  With Moth belaying, Daniel brought his heels to the ledge and crouched.

  He paused there.

  There was always a moment when a job went to shit. Daniel’s instinct and experience told him such a moment was at hand.

  Moth gave him a questioning look, and then they both heard it: a low drone.

  “There,” Em said, pointing southward.

  Three airships approached.

  Daniel came away from the ledge and unclipped the rope. Em unzipped her duffel and removed the components of a rifle and began screwing them together. Moth cracked his knuckles.

  The bows of the ships rose above the south ledge like whale shadows, blotting out a good part of the sky. No longer muffled by the mountain, the propeller engines buzzed an insectile baritone.

  Who in Southern California had airships? There used to be a few freight companies that used them to get around Gabriel Argent’s canal tolls, but Argent put a stop to that.

  Daniel reached for the oldest, deepest magic in his bones, the first osteomantic substance he’d ever consumed, from a beach far away, when his father held his hand and began crafting him into a bone sorcerer. Electricity seared his nerve endings, building painfully till he could feel it in his eyes and in his gums. He longed to release it.

  “Hit the deck,” Daniel shouted. Moth and Em dropped, and Daniel unleashed bolts of blue-white kraken lightning, guiding them down the length of his arm.

  He targeted the main body of the leading ship, hoping to burn through the envelope and rupture its gas cells. Instead, the bolts were drawn to a spar protruding from the bow like a narwhal’s tusk. The arcs branched off from the rod, conducted down webs of wire running the length of the ship and away along trailing fronds. The ship c
ontinued to rise, revealing a gondola. The forward window was shuttered, leaving small portholes for the pilot. The only other openings were slits.

  With the noise of stuttering gunfire, the boulders at Daniel’s feet exploded in chips and powder. Moth crawled toward Em to protect her with his own body. He cried out, bullets tearing through his back and shoulders. Em scrambled over to him and deftly wrapped a length of rope through his armpits and around his torso to make a tow line. Only a quarter of his size, she dragged him to a cluster of boulders, bullets cratering the rocks around her.

  This was no longer a job going to shit. This was a job going fatal.

  All three ships had risen above the summit now, their great bulks passing fifty feet overhead. Daniel breathed fire at the nearest one, engulfing the gondola in a storm of blue flame, but it continued on, unaffected. The heated metal gave off unfamiliar aromas, the osteomancy of creatures Daniel didn’t recognize. These weren’t freight ships, but warships, equipped with magic Daniel had never encountered.

  An apple-sized thing fell from the gondola, and there was a flash of light and noise and then an echoing susurration, like waves in a sea cave. A cruel ache gripped Daniel’s head, and something gouged his spine. He’d fallen on his back against the jagged rocks. Through blurred vision, he watched lines unspool from the airships. Black-clad human figures slid down the lines. Daniel tried to stand but got only halfway up before he lost balance and crashed back to the ground. Then, like magic, he was in the air, floating.

  More gunshots and a grunt and hot blood splashing his face.

  He wasn’t floating. Moth was carrying him. The blood was Moth’s, from more bullets tearing through his body. Yet Moth ran, with Em alongside, firing shots at people in black fatigues. As Daniel’s vision cleared, he saw now that they were soldiers, armed and armored. Whose soldiers, he didn’t know.

  A blow struck his hip and he screamed out in pain.

  Moth got him to the shelter, collapsing to the ground as soon as they were past the threshold. Moth was in horrible shape, more blood than visible skin, and as soon as he dropped Daniel, he rolled onto his back and moaned. But he would heal. Moth always did. He had as much eocorn horn and hydra regenerative in his system as he had chili grease, and he would heal. But it would take hours. Maybe days.

  Em took up position, huddled to the side of the open doorway and dared a few shots when she could.

  Daniel checked his hip where the bullet had struck, using his knife to cut through the thick fabric of his insulated pants. There was no blood. The bullet hadn’t penetrated his flesh. It was worse than that. It had struck the case containing the axis mundi bone, flattening it.

  With dread, Daniel pried the deformed lid open. He gasped with relief. The little coin-sized bone remained intact.

  Still a chance to save Sam.

  “I can’t hold them off,” Em said.

  Daniel crawled over to her. “I just need a second.”

  He took a few breaths and thought of the black sea bottom, and crushing pressure, and the scent of whale blood. He forced more kraken magic from his cells until the charge coursed through his arms and blue sparks flared beneath his fingertips.

  The airships were equipped to deal with lightning. But what about the soldiers?

  At a break in the gunfire, he rolled into the doorway, rose to a kneeling position, and let lightning surge indiscriminately from his fingers. He brought down three soldiers. A few others scrambled for cover in the rocks, but the summit was emptier than it had been just moments ago. Where had most of the soldiers gone?

  The airships loomed overhead and lowered more soldiers, but instead of landing on the summit, they came down off the western ledge where the dragon had fallen. When one of the airships lowered a massive bundle of cargo netting and chains, Daniel finally got it.

  This was a heist. Someone was stealing the dragon.

  He charged out of the storm shelter into the howling wind, sending forks of lightning upward and outward. Renewed gunfire answered him, not from the soldiers on the ground, but from the airships themselves. Darting from boulder to boulder, Daniel made his way to the western ledge and peered over. Below him, dozens of soldiers clambered over the dragon as if it were terrain to be conquered. Two of them operated a hydraulic hoist to lift the dragon’s tail and position cargo netting underneath it. Another pair connected the netting to chains dangling from one of the airships.

  Daniel reached back to sense memories of a Colombian dragon, the sensation of wind whipping past smooth, scaled cheeks, the sight of mastodons stampeding in fright. Sam was a Pacific firedrake, and Daniel’s fire wouldn’t hurt him. But Daniel would burn these motherfuckers.

  He vomited blue flames.

  The flames fell short, the soldiers beyond his range. There was one thing to do about that. Without rope and harness, he edged himself to the ledge and began picking his way down.

  Digging his fingers into loose earth, he rested one foot on a pancake-sized protrusion of rock. Pain exploded in his calf. Blood ran down his leg. A single gunshot. He held on, the gloved fingers of one hand gripping rock, the other squeezing the axis mundi bone.

  More shots. One grazed his arm, and he squeezed the bone tighter. Another went through the back of his hand, and he screamed in agony and in frustration. He knew without looking. He could feel it. He could smell it.

  The axis mundi bone was powder, shrieking away in the high-altitude wind.

  Daniel’s foot slipped off the rock and he fell. He glanced off a knuckle of stone with rib-cracking impact, slid down gravel, and came to rest with his feet toward the summit and his head hanging over thousands of feet of nothing. He couldn’t breathe. Blood from his leg and arm and hand ran down the slope, pooling near his head.

  He was supposed to be a mighty sorcerer, and he wasn’t going to lose Sam again from a bullet and a fall.

  But it wasn’t just a bullet and a fall. It was a well-armed and -equipped squadron of quality fighters. It was three airships and lifting gear. It was osteomancy from creatures he didn’t know. This wasn’t Los Angeles. It had to be the Northern Kingdom.

  He tried to move and slipped another inch down the slope. His head hung even farther over the abyss, and only by pressing the palm of his uninjured hand hard against the ground did he keep himself from going over. Helpless, he watched the three airships dip below the mountain, engines straining, carrying Sam away.

  FIVE

  Cassandra Morales dug a hole. It didn’t have to be a deep hole, because down in this dry gully on the borders of Los Angeles and Riverside counties it didn’t take much work to hide things. There wasn’t a human settlement for twenty miles, just brown hills and dusty chaparral. Suburban enclaves with names like Quail Valley and Rainbow and Home Gardens had become ghost towns after Gabriel Argent decided bringing water out here was unsustainable and irresponsible, and once he shut off the spigots, the communities got handed back to coyotes and mountain lions.

  Now, here, it was just her and Otis Roth.

  “You remember the first words you ever said to me, Otis? I only remember them because you said the same exact thing to all the kids you took in. And you took in a lot of us. ‘I won’t harm you. I won’t beat you. I won’t rape you. Neither will anyone else who works for me. I’m Otis Roth, and nobody will dare.’ I guess some of us were comforted by that. In certain circumstances, it could sound kind of nice. But I heard it differently. I heard it more like, ‘I won’t harm you unless I want to. Nobody else will harm you, because you belong to me. I’m Otis Roth, and I own you.’”

  Her shovel bit into earth.

  Otis had taken Cassandra in because her parents owed him money they couldn’t pay back, and Cassandra was collateral. Her first night in his warehouse, in her bed with new, stiff sheets, she shoved her face into her pillow and cried as softly as she could. This was her life now. Her parents weren’t picking her up tomorrow. She knew how much money they owed, and how much money they usually made on jobs, because she often pret
ended to be asleep while they talked money and schemes. They would never be able to pay off their debt unless they took on bigger and riskier jobs. They’d probably die trying.

  She could run away, but then Otis would have them killed.

  As it turned out, they managed to die without Otis’s help, only a few months later. It wasn’t even a big job, just a payroll robbery that turned into a shootout. The take wouldn’t have even made a dent in their debt to Otis.

  And it was Otis who came to tell her.

  “You tried to lay it on me gently,” Cassandra said, wiping sweat off the back of her neck. She’d probably dug her hole deep enough, but she didn’t want animals undoing her work, so she kept tossing up shovelfuls of dirt. “And I think I took it pretty well, considering. No hysterics. No tantrums. There were some of your guys waiting outside my room in case I flipped out and attacked you. But all I did was ask if you were going to set me free now that my parents were dead. I didn’t want revenge. I wanted my mom and dad back. But you know me, always the realist. I wasn’t going to get what I wanted. So I was willing to settle for my freedom. And you told me, just seconds after I learned my parents were shot up and their bodies being hauled to the city furnaces, that the terms of the contract meant I would remain in your care until the debt was paid or my eighteenth birthday. I think that’s when I started crying. But not too much. Remember what you said to comfort me? I’ll never forget your kindness. You said, ‘Be patient, Cassandra. It’s just until you’re eighteen. And you’re almost fourteen now.’”

  Cassandra was not patient. She was industrious. True to his word, Otis gave her an education. Not in subjects like history and algebra, but his henchminions tutored her in marksmanship and nose-breaking and pickpocketing and, eventually, safecracking. She was a good pupil.

  Otis had his own reasons for giving her skills—there was no point in using someone if she wasn’t useful. She had her own reasons for accepting his tutelage. Once she turned eighteen, she’d need to make her own way in the world.