Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Daniel and I do have some things in common,” Gabriel answered. “His dad, my mom, both killed in the Third Correction. I was a few years older than Daniel when that happened, and I wasn’t hunted, but I imagine Daniel and I could sit down over a few beers and trade war stories.”

  “I don’t know about that. Your differences seem bigger than your commonalities.”

  “Daniel’s afraid of power.”

  Cassandra laughed a little, obviously knowing that Gabriel had gotten it wrong. “He’s not afraid of power. He just doesn’t like the kind of people who seek it out.”

  “That’s because he’s never had to go looking for it. He was born with it in his bones.”

  “And you were the Hierarch’s nephew.”

  “Grand-nephew, and the advantage of the family relation was questionable after he ate my mom. Listen, you want to know why I seized power? People either assume the answer’s obvious, or else they’re afraid to ask me.”

  “Shouldn’t I be afraid?” Cassandra made a circular motion with her finger, pointing out the tube of open air Gabriel’s magic had created.

  Gabriel shrugged an acknowledgment. “When Daniel slew his monster, he created a power vacuum. He didn’t step in to fill it, so other monsters did. Is the Southern realm better off now than it was eleven years ago? It is not.”

  “And when you killed the old water mage, you became the next monster,” Cassandra said.

  “But unlike him, I don’t knock down dams and kill hundreds of people just to make a point. I may be a monster, but I’m a monster who’s trying to make things a little better. That’s why I’m in power. It’s the only reason.”

  “Mm,” was Cassandra’s only answer.

  “You’re chattier than I expected,” Gabriel said after a few minutes of sloshing. “What’s this conversation really about?”

  “There’s a military aspect to this operation, but I’m not a soldier. If it ends up I have to risk my life to save yours, I’d like to think there’s something likable about you.”

  “Max, tell Cassandra something likable about me. Lie if you have to. My life may depend on it.”

  Max stopped dead in his tracks. He held out his arms and turned a slow circle, sniffing. Cassandra started to say something, but Gabriel cut her off with a raised hand.

  “Let him work.”

  Max stopped turning and peered into the dark. “We’re not alone.”

  Cassandra unsnapped her holster. “What is it?”

  “Osteomantic. Predatory. Not a hound, I don’t think.” He shook his head. His vision was good, his hearing, better, and his sense of smell, magical. He didn’t like it when his tools failed him. “I’m not sure what it is. The magic is different here. I don’t know all the smells.”

  “Can you tell how far off?”

  “No. But it’s ahead of us. Waiting for us, maybe.”

  Cassandra took only a few seconds to consider. She drew her gun. Taking the lead, she moved forward, deeper into the unknown.

  ELEVEN

  By their second day in the castle Moth had menaced the staff enough to know the lay of the land.

  “Basically, they all hate you,” he said, tearing into a roast chicken in Daniel’s private dining room.

  “What’d I do to them?” Daniel found himself feeling bad, even though it was Paul they hated, not him. How could they hate him? They didn’t even know him. They didn’t know what a swell guy he was.

  “You’ve been gone for more than a year, doing your big, important osteomancer stuff. Meanwhile, they’ve been mowing your lawns and dusting your chandeliers and feeding your zebras.”

  “I have zebras? Why do I have zebras?”

  “To keep the yaks and the ostriches company. And your staff has been taking care of your menagerie without pay.”

  “Why without pay?”

  “Because you’re a control freak and you’re the only one authorized to unlock the vaults for payroll. But your staff can’t leave for greener pastures because you made them sign lifetime employment contracts. It takes three years of nonpayment before it’s considered dissolved.”

  Daniel stole a drumstick off Moth’s plate. “Wow. I hate me, too.”

  “Then it’s unanimous. But labor problems aren’t your biggest worry. I learned some things about the Northern sorcerers’ chain of command. It involves the spooky woman you saw in the entry when we arrived. The one with the hair. God, this chicken is magnificent. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, not paying a cook this good.”

  “I’m a bad man. Apparently. So, tell me.”

  “The top osteomancer in the realm is the Hierarch, of course. Beneath her is the High Grand Osteomancer, her second in matters of magic. That person was a woman named Gloria Bai.”

  “‘Was’?”

  “She died fourteen months ago of natural causes. I’m assuming ‘natural’ is loosely defined around here.”

  “Fourteen months. That’s when Paul was on Catalina, constructing the Pacific firedrake.”

  “Exactly. Which complicated things. There were four candidates to succeed to her office.” Moth produced four framed photographs and set them on the table.

  “Where did you get those?”

  “They were sitting on a shelf in the snooker room.”

  “And you just took them?”

  “You don’t have to say ‘took’ like that. I didn’t steal them. I appropriated them in my capacity as your steward.”

  “What else have you appropriated?”

  “Nothing,” Moth said, wounded. “Nothing that they’ll miss right away. Anyway, there’s you.” He set aside a photo of Paul. It was like looking in the mirror at a better-fed version of himself. “Then there’s this guy, Nathaniel Cormorant.” The photo was of an older man, high forehead, huge nose, sharp eyes hooded by a thick, white-fringed brow. He looked exactly like the kind of man who deserved a title like High Grand Osteomancer. “You and him have some kind of teacher-student relationship. He’s highly respected, even admired among the staff.”

  “So he might not hate me.”

  “Or he might hate you intensely. I wasn’t able to find out. On the other hand, this next guy hates you so much you could wring him out and make a paste for loathing soup. Meet Baron Allaster Doring.” The man in the photo was about Daniel’s age—Paul’s age—and was arrogantly handsome in a blond, blue-eyed Nazi sort of way. “He’s head of the kingdom’s shock troops, or some organization like that. Scary and much feared. But not as feared as her.” Moth tapped the final photograph, the long-haired woman who smelled of a hundred kinds of magic.

  “What do we know about her?”

  “We know her name is Cynara Doring, and that she’s Allaster’s older sister. Other than that, nothing. People clam up when you mention her, and I don’t have enough charm or psycho-face to pry anything out of them.”

  “What’s she doing here, in my house?”

  “Again, don’t know, but she’s been here a couple of months now. She stays in one of your guest cottages. And, by the way, this guest cottage is like twenty-three hundred square feet with twenty-two-karat gold-leaf ceilings. Me, I’m staying in the Celestial Suite, which is pretty plush, but it’s also right under the bell towers. Morning wake-up is like getting sledgehammered from the inside out.”

  “Well, I’m not getting any sleep at all. Paul’s bed is crazy.” The bed was an ornately carved thing of lustrous black walnut, outfitted with gold-fringed blankets.

  “That was Cardinal Richelieu’s bed,” Moth said. “You’re too delicate for Cardinal Richelieu’s bed?”

  “I’m a musketeer and my spine requires a firm mattress. Stop judging me and brief me, please.”

  Moth fanned the photos out like playing cards. “So, these are your rivals. The Hierarch held the office open, pending Paul’s hoped-for return.”

  “She didn’t know Paul was dead?”

  Daniel’s plan was for Paul to make a comeback and demonstrate that reports of his death were somewhat exa
ggerated.

  “I don’t know what the Hierarch thought. But next week she was going to officially give up on you and pick a successor. Your coming home is not making many people happy.”

  “Maybe I should just preemptively turn down the office.”

  “Not a bad idea. Step aside from palace intrigue, let the other gunslingers shoot it out among themselves.”

  Moth put down his fork and took a last sip of Paul’s excellent pinot noir. Sighing happily, he patted his lips with a linen napkin. “Anything else?”

  “Just keep digging. I’m going to go back to exploring Paul’s workshop. His gear is impressive, but I haven’t found his notes yet, not to mention any bone from the dragon at the center of the world. Oh, how are you getting along with Gorov?”

  “He’s forgiven me now that he knows he still gets to boss the maids around. Giving him his back pay didn’t hurt, either.”

  “I thought nobody was getting paid.”

  “Oh, yeah, forgot to tell you. I forged your signature and freed up payroll.”

  “So why does everyone still hate me?”

  Moth dropped his napkin on the table and stood. “I’m honestly not sure. But I know this: A lot of people are loaded for bear and you smell like grizzly. There’ve been assassination attempts on Paul in the past. We thought the dangerous part of this would be the risk of you being exposed as Daniel. But being taken for Paul might not be all that safe, either.”

  * * *

  It took clever magic to get into Paul’s workshop, and under normal circumstances, Daniel would have been content with his progress. The room was at least fifty feet long. Thousands of books and scrolls lined the walls, more extensive than any osteomantic library Daniel had ever heard of. Copper tubes came down from the ceiling like the pipes of a crazy organ, delivering flame and a dazzling array of gas mixtures with the turn of a dial. In ceiling-to-floor cabinets of honey-toned wood, Paul kept a collection of osteomantic bone that rivaled the Southern Hierarch’s Ossuary.

  But Daniel suspected he hadn’t gotten to the good stuff yet. A vault was set inside one of the walls, and so far he hadn’t managed to pry it open.

  He wished Cassandra were here. She was good at cracking boxes. And he didn’t like having her on this job but away from him, with Gabriel Argent and his hound. He hadn’t heard from her yet, not through the “water radio” Argent had configured, nor through the osteomantic method Daniel had cooked up because he didn’t want to be dependent on Argent for communication.

  He turned back to the lock. He’d tried swabbing it with more of Paul’s condensed breath, and he’d employed the most sinuous sphinx riddle oils, and he’d lifted Paul’s fingerprints from his furnishings and impressed them into shape-shifting bone keys, but all was still failure and sadness. The one thing left he hadn’t tried was the only thing he thought had a good chance of working. It was also the one thing he least wanted to do.

  Daniel couldn’t just act like Paul. He had to consume him.

  He settled himself in a leather wingback chair by the fireplace and unstoppered the vial of Paul’s condensed breath. “Down the hatch, brother,” he said, letting the drops fall on his tongue.

  Pausing a moment to reconsider, he swallowed his brother’s breath.

  He fell through the soft leather chair and the thick Persian rug and the hardwood floor. Like a cannonball through feathers, he crashed through the lower floors and the basement and subbasements and the castle’s stone foundations, through soil and sandstone and shale, through fossilized mammoth and whale and oceanic crust and mantle, to the molten core where the planet’s first dragons formed. He was seeing things that Paul had seen, but he did not understand them the way Paul did.

  Paul’s memories flashed by, and Daniel tried to capture them, like plucking flying splinters in a tornado.

  It was the first time Paul set eyes on Daniel. They were in the safe house, the place Daniel went after the Hierarch killed his father. Paul was frightened and confused by a face he’d only ever seen before in a mirror. He was still suffering from errors in his creation. He struggled with speech. He processed information slowly.

  And then he was with Daniel’s mother—his own mother—near the border of the Southern and Northern realms. They’d been running away but were caught, and now they were in trouble.

  His mother was put in a car with border guards while he was left alone with others. An older guard said kind, soothing things to him while Paul knelt in a strawberry field with the man’s gun to his head.

  “You like baseball?” the man asked, and Paul nodded, even though he didn’t know if he liked baseball and actually didn’t know what baseball was, and the man told him to close his eyes and imagine a gorgeous blue sky and green field at Candlestick Park, and the smell of hot buttered popcorn, and the sound of the crowd, like the rush of a river, and he told Paul to think of that as he curled his finger around the trigger, and Paul had never experienced these things except for blue sky, so he looked at the sky now.

  Lightning shattered the world. Blinding white daggers stabbed Paul’s eyes, skewered his ears, and he pawed the tilled earth and sobbed for minutes until he could see again.

  He was not burned.

  The kind man with the gun lay several yards away, smoke rising from the top of his head. The other guards were dead, too. Lightning had entered through the eye of one of them and blown out the back of his head, splashing curly red chunks of brain over the brown soil. Another lay facedown, his nylon jacket smoldering and stinking of melting plastic. But the most pervasive smell was cold ocean mud and salt. It wasn’t just in the air. It was coming off Paul. It was coming out of him. He somehow knew this was the scent of kraken magic, and that it resided in his own bones. He somehow knew this was the result of having been created from Daniel’s essence.

  His brother Daniel had saved him, and he loved him for it.

  Other, later memories came, less distinct, because they were further removed from Paul’s creation out of Daniel’s substance. Paul walked alone down hundreds of miles of highway toward San Francisco, where he found a cage and more guards and osteomancers who drew blood and stuck needles so far into his body they scraped bone. His meals came through a slot in a steel door. He wept for his mother, and she didn’t come, and he wept for Daniel, and he didn’t come. He shivered and woke in darkness, until one day, the door to his cell opened and the dim light of the hallway outside blazed like a sun. His mother stood in the light like an eclipse surrounded by a corona.

  After that, there were many homes, starting with a small house, and school dormitories, and makeshift cots in libraries and workshops when he couldn’t be bothered to stop studying and go home, and houses of his own and mansions and finally, this place, his castle.

  Daniel rose back up through the layers and returned to his own body. He was still in the chair by the fire. He sat there for a few minutes, dizzy and out of breath, weighted down by his own body, and yet feeling like stretched taffy, as if he were also thousands of miles away.

  He stood, and when he was reasonably sure he could walk without keeling over, he went to the vault door. He breathed on it, and he was enough Paul that hidden mechanisms moved within the lock. Pushing on the door with a little pressure was enough to swing it open. He stepped into another room.

  He’d expected it to be chilled like a mausoleum, a place untouched by human presence for more than a year. But it was warm with rich, osteomantic aromas.

  His gaze landed on a tall, slim figure, silhouetted by sunlight filtered through a stained-glass window. The magic smells were dense from that part of the room, and as the figure stepped forward, the smells came along with it.

  Coming away from the diffused light, the figure’s features revealed themselves, the curve of her hips, the movement of her legs beneath a long, tight skirt.

  She stopped and looked down at Daniel, mere inches away. Her magic pushed into his nostrils, pounded his sinuses, and overwhelmed his taste buds. She was the strongest osteo
mancer he’d met since Paul, or maybe Sam, or maybe even the Southern Hierarch himself.

  He felt himself swaying, and it took effort to steady himself.

  “Cynara Doring,” he said.

  “Paul,” she said. And then she leaned forward and kissed him.

  Daniel drew in her scents and tasted her tongue. Her body blazed with essences of sabertooth cat and mastodon and river dolphin and species of griffin and other creatures different from the Southern Kingdom’s varieties. She pressed against him, imparting the flavors of her magic.

  Hardening, losing breath, skin tingling, Daniel forced himself to pull back.

  “Uh,” he said.

  Her eyes narrowed in a frown, and the way the skin between her eyebrows wrinkled was perfectly ordinary and Daniel was utterly captivated by it. By sheer force of will, he recovered from the kiss and the flood of sensation from her magic and remembered that Cynara was Paul’s rival, maybe his enemy, and that she’d been waiting for him in a room Daniel had entered only by drinking his dead brother’s breath.

  He looked at her more critically, trying to see her in that light.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said.

  There were so many ways to answer that question. He decided to go with his cover story, even though it might make him look like easy prey.

  “I’m not quite myself yet. My injuries on Catalina were nontrivial. But,” he added with a bit of warning, “I’m strong enough.”

  “Strong enough for what?”

  Was that confusion in her tone, or challenge, or hurt feelings?

  “For whatever comes next.”

  She stared at him a long time, and he began to think he was right about her hurt feelings.

  “You’ve been gone for more than a year. I thought you were dead for more than a year. I’ve been on my own, fighting battles you started for more than a year. By all means, let’s brush all that aside and talk about what’s next.”