Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “So, what’s your plan for me? If you have some drains you need unclogged, you came to the right man.”

  “How much are you worth to your Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles? Or to your enemies in San Francisco?”

  “You’re going to ransom me.”

  “An underground network to free enslaved golems doesn’t run on hope and miracles,” said the oldest Emma. “We need funds for guns and ammunition, for food and safe houses, for bribing rangers and border guards.”

  Gabriel stepped into a knee-deep puddle. He managed not to drop Max, but just barely.

  “You’re doing this the hard way,” he said. “You’re murdering my friend, and it’s not necessary. Treat his gunshot wound before he dies, and I’ll submit to whatever you want to do with me. Let me talk to my people in L.A. I’ll negotiate the best price for myself. Or sell me to whoever you want. Help Max and I’ll be the best hostage anyone could want.”

  The oldest Emma stopped to check her compass. “You’re already the best hostage we could want.”

  “Then heal Max because it’s the decent thing to do.”

  “We can’t afford to be decent. I don’t know what it’s like in the South. Maybe your cupboards are stuffed with things like hydra and eocorn. Maybe you pick your teeth with griffin bones. We’re not so lucky. I’m sorry it was necessary to shoot him, but he would have fought to keep us from taking you. We didn’t shoot him in the head. We didn’t leave him for dead in the tunnel. It might not seem like much to be grateful for.”

  A twig snapped in the darkness of the woods. The Emma raised her fist and the group froze. Another snap. She motioned for everyone to get down. The two other Emmas crouched, peering through the narrow gaps in the trees. Cassandra and Gabriel carefully lowered Max to the ground, and Gabriel was ashamed at the relief he felt. Max had borne his weight enough times, and it seemed to Gabriel that he should be able to pay him back without complaint.

  The oldest Emma issued directives with finger gestures, and the other two Emmas crept toward the nearest trees with guns drawn.

  An antlered creature emerged from the woods to meet them, its fur silvered by the moon.

  “I’m not an expert,” Gabriel whispered, “but I think it’s a deer.”

  The Emma gave Gabriel a warning look, but after a moment of regarding the intruders, the deer moved off peacefully, and there were no more noises from the forest except the constant drip of water.

  “Pick him up,” the oldest Emma commanded, and the exhausting slog through the mud continued.

  Apparently the Emmas hadn’t noticed that when they were huddled on the ground, Cassandra had slipped her hand into his backpack, palmed something, and tucked it into her pocket.

  * * *

  The Emmas’ shack lurked among trees at the top of a slippery path. The windows were shuttered. The roof sagged under a pile of pine needles and pinecones. Milk crates and rusty spools of barbwire littered the yard like flotsam and jetsam in a muddy sea.

  When the oldest Emma unlocked and pushed open the front door, Gabriel realized the house’s slovenly appearance was costuming. The door was a solid slab of wood. The interior walls were concrete block.

  “Through here.” Reverse-Raccoon Emma ushered them into a bedroom and let them lay Max down. With the other two Emmas standing guard, she retrieved a pair of shears from a black leather bag on a bureau and split open his pant leg.

  The bandage over Max’s wound was filthy with blood and water and mud. If Gabriel hadn’t seen it applied with his own eyes, he would never have believed it had started out white. The Emma removed the bandage and revealed worse. There was no bullet hole. Instead, it looked as if someone had rammed a fist into a bag of blood, pounded it with a sledgehammer, and set fire to it. The rest of his leg was shades of black and pallid blue.

  Reverse-Raccoon Emma unzipped her med kit all the way open, revealing an array of gleaming surgical instruments. Gabriel’s eye fell on the long knife and bone saw.

  Gabriel caught his breath. “Hydra. If you have any, give it to him. If you don’t, get some. Quickly.”

  “Drop your packs and go with my sister,” the oldest Emma said. The youngest Emma’s gun was still drawn.

  “I am one of the great powers,” Gabriel said. “I am the darkest hydromancer of the Southern realm. You did this to my friend. Undo it, or you’ll die with water in your lungs.”

  “Come with me, or I’ll shoot her next.” The youngest Emma’s gun was pointed at Cassandra’s leg.

  “Gabriel, please.” Cassandra’s voice betrayed a thin shudder.

  Max wouldn’t have been scared, even if he’d been conscious. When Gabriel first met him he’d been under a death sentence, and he’d never shed the certainty that every day he lived was just a short reprieve.

  Gabriel found himself resenting Cassandra and her fear. It complicated his emotions and limited his options.

  But what were his options, exactly? What could he really do here? Expect the Emmas to simply watch him construct a sigil? Grant him access to a faucet?

  “Gabriel,” Cassandra said again, with unconcealed desperation.

  He dragged his eyes away from Max and from the Emma’s amputation kit, and only then did he remember that Cassandra had snuck something out of his backpack.

  “Please don’t cut off his leg,” he said before the Emmas took him away.

  * * *

  A few outbuildings stuck out of the sodden ground like mushrooms. The youngest Emma put Gabriel in a shed of concrete block where they stored bags of flour, road salt, and plant fertilizer. Rain clattered on the aluminum roof, but the shed remained dry. Never a bad plan to keep a water mage away from water.

  He kept his mouth shut as she handcuffed his wrists behind his back. He didn’t resist as she patted his back and chest, probed his armpits, felt her way up his legs, stripped his belt off, unfastened his pants, searched under his scrotum. He met this humiliation with silence until the Emma took her lantern with her and left him alone in the dark.

  He paced the shed, hoping to find a forgotten bottle of water, a spray bottle of window cleaner, a puddle from a leak in the roof. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if he found any such thing—not handcuffed with his bag of sigil pipes and puzzle valves locked up in the house—but a water mage must seek water.

  Max won’t die, he told himself. Max was strong, and smart, and fierce. He couldn’t die.

  But there was no rational reason to believe any of this. Max wouldn’t make it through the night simply because Gabriel wanted him to. Max was a man of flesh, blood, and bone. A bullet had plowed into his leg, possibly fracturing his femur and severing his femoral artery.

  Possibly? No, probably.

  Gabriel sat on the cold, dry concrete floor.

  Say the Reverse-Raccoon Emma managed to save Max’s life, he thought. Let’s just go all the way and say she even managed to save his leg. Max still wouldn’t be able to walk. Not for a long time. Not through woods and mud, not through the aqueducts.

  And what about himself? Would Gabriel’s underlings pay his ransom, or would they welcome his absence, pop some champagne, and throw a usurpation party?

  So far, this had turned out to be a really bad day.

  Gabriel shouldn’t have surrendered so easily. He should have stayed with Max, convinced the Emmas to administer whatever magic they had in their stores to save him. He was a coward.

  And, no, that wasn’t true, either. He let himself be trundled off because if he’d stayed to argue and fight, they would have shot Cassandra as well.

  So, not a coward.

  But weak?

  Yes, absolutely weak. Confronted by three guns, the great and mighty hydromancer, master of the mandala, bringer of life and destruction, was weak.

  The metallic sounds of lock and key and the rattle of a chain brought Gabriel off the floor. The door slid open, revealing Cassandra, standing in the moonlight like a goddess of the hunt with gleaming black blood spattered on her face and
a gun tucked in her waistband.

  “What happened?” Gabriel said, astonished.

  “Idiot tried to search me.”

  She uncuffed him with one of the Emmas’ keys and led him outside.

  “There’re still two in the house,” she said.

  “How do we deal with them?”

  “I’m good at locks and I can kick down a door, but the second they hear us coming, they’ll shoot Max.”

  “Right. You still have the thing you took from my backpack?”

  She dug into her pocket and handed him a brass nozzle. “Can you do anything with this?”

  Outwardly, it was just a nozzle, not that different from the kind of thing you screwed onto the end of a garden hose, with a simple-looking valve. But inside was a sigil over a hundred miles long. Gabriel felt its satisfying weight in his palm.

  “I can do a lot with this,” he said. “But it might kill Max.”

  “‘Might.’ He’s in there, dying right now. I’m sorry, Gabriel. ‘Might’ is the best we can do for Max right now.”

  They crept up to the house, Cassandra leading the way, but Gabriel stopped her when they were still a few dozen yards away.

  He bent down and dipped the nozzle in a puddle. The nozzle drank up the water, not just of the puddle at his feet, but from surrounding puddles, from deep underground. The mud around them grew dry and cracked as the nozzle drew up hundreds of gallons of water.

  The nozzle should have weighed tons. In fact, if you hung it from a scale, that’s what the needle would show. But the pattern inside the nozzle extended to the pattern of Gabriel’s own circulatory system, and the pattern of his own circulatory system drew strength from the water in the earth, in the trees, in the air.

  He aimed the nozzle at the front door. “Get ready,” he said, and he turned a valve.

  The water didn’t come out right away. It had miles of capillaries to travel first, hundreds of sigil patterns to run through and repeat inside the nozzle. Then, with an unnatural gleam, the water shot out in a laser-thin stream. The door collapsed into splinters. An instant later, the windows and half the roof blew out, and tiny fragments of wood and plaster rained down amid a diffuse mist of water.

  Gabriel trailed behind Cassandra as she raced up to the house. Inside, it was dry. The walls were cracked, with ragged holes where the windows had been. Gabriel saw stars through the remains of the roof.

  They found the oldest Emma facedown on the living room floor. Blood ran from her ears.

  They left her there and charged to the bedroom. The damage was less extensive here, the door hanging on one hinge but still intact. Max lay on the bed. A tourniquet of surgical rubber was tied around his upper thigh. Scattered over the floor lay the contents of Reverse-Raccoon Emma’s surgeon’s kit: hooks and probes and scissors and scalpels and saws for separating bones.

  Gabriel’s water cannon hadn’t taken out the last remaining Emma. She held a foot-long knife to Max’s ruined flesh. With her other hand, she raised a gun.

  Cassandra raised her own gun. There was a harsh pop. A small, red hole appeared in the Emma’s forehead. A trail of blood fell from the hole, like a fat, wet raindrop, and she pitched forward over Max’s body.

  Gabriel pulled the Emma off Max. He let her drop to the floor.

  Max’s skin was white wax. His gray tongue sat dry in his open mouth.

  Cassandra felt for his pulse and closed her eyes. “I just don’t know, Gabriel.”

  Gabriel sorted through the surgical supplies but found nothing of use. He pulled the drawers out of the small bureau and dumped their contents on the floor. Just towels and ammo clips.

  “I’ll look around,” Cassandra said. She left the room to search the house, and Gabriel despaired. Hydra was a treasure. Even if the Emmas had any, it would be well hidden, or buried under debris. Or maybe he’d destroyed it with the nozzle.

  He sat on the bed and gripped Max’s cold, white hand.

  “I need you to wake up now, Max. I know it’s a shitty thing to do, to need you when you’ve got your hands full just staying alive.” He pried loose some hair stuck by dried sweat to Max’s brow. “I know I ask a lot of you, all the time. You’d think after a bullet and all the blood and muck, I could take care of things myself, mighty sorcerer and all that. But I need you. And the only thing that’s going to help you now is hydra, or eocorn. We’ll probably need both, actually. So, I need your nose. You don’t even have to get out of bed. Just open your eyes, drink up some air through that magnificent beak of yours, and point. You can do that for me, right? It’s not like I don’t pay you well. It’s not my fault if you don’t know how to enjoy money.” He squeezed Max’s hand tighter. “I need you, Max, and you have to wake up.”

  How absurd it would be if Max actually did open his eyes. If his nostrils twitched and he raised himself up, leaned on one elbow, and said, “Under the kitchen sink.” What a strange world it would be, where good things could happen simply because you wished for them.

  Gabriel gently set Max’s hand down and released it. Max’s hand slid off the mattress, palm up.

  His index finger was slightly extended. Pointing.

  “Oh, come on,” Gabriel said, not allowing himself to hope.

  He followed the trajectory of Max’s finger to a floorboard and got down on his hands and knees. The floorboard didn’t look different from any of the others. He dug his fingernails in and tried to lift it, but the fit was too snug, and the floorboard wasn’t going anywhere.

  Cassandra found Gabriel on his knees.

  “There was a substantial safe in the basement,” she said. “I got it open, but it was empty.” She watched him for a moment. “What are you doing?”

  “I let myself believe Max pointed at this floorboard, and I find I can’t give up.” Blood welled beneath his fingernails. He scrabbled over to the surgeon’s tools and grabbed a scalpel. Jamming the blade in the seam, he tried to lever the floorboard out. It would not budge. No matter what, it remained stuck.

  “There’s osteomancy under here.”

  She gave him a pitying look.

  “Why else is this floorboard so tight? There’s something under there.”

  Cassandra moved him aside and crouched. She ran her fingers around the board. Taking the scalpel, she dug deep into the wood and gouged a long line.

  “You hear that?”

  Gabriel heard nothing.

  “Listen for it. It’s air moving around, like a whisper.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes. He heard his own breathing, and Cassandra’s. The softest of thumps: drops of the shot Emma’s blood hitting the floor.

  “I don’t hear it.”

  “That’s because you haven’t been doing this all your adult life. It’s sphinx oil. You don’t expend sphinx oil just to keep a squeaky floorboard in place. Go get my pack. They stashed it in the bathroom down the hall.”

  Gabriel ran, returning seconds later with Cassandra’s backpack.

  She found her pouch of lock picks and skeleton keys and osteomantic devices and took out a cube of bone. It was the size of a child’s alphabet block, etched with cartouches containing symbols and vaguely Egyptian animal figures. She placed it on the floorboard.

  Also from her pack came a folding knife with a serrated blade, much meaner-looking than the scalpel. She attacked the floorboard, stabbing, digging, carving wounds in the wood.

  And now Gabriel heard it: whispers floating on moving air, scratching like the claws of rats against the sandstone walls of a dark, dry tomb. The sounds resolved into voices, unintelligible at first, and then merely foreign, and then, not English, but somehow understandable.

  “The black eye watches but never sees,” Gabriel said, repeating words forming in his head.

  It was a riddle encoded into the sphinx oil. The Emmas would have known the answer, and speaking it would unlock the floorboard.

  “Do you know this one?”

  Cassandra shook her head. “The cube will. It was carved from the sagitta
l crest of an Akkadian cave sphinx. That’s the oldest of the sphinxes. All the riddles originate from it. It knows the answers.”

  With Max’s face the blue-white color of glacial ice, Gabriel couldn’t allow himself to hope. “There must be thousands of sphinx riddles.”

  “Tens of thousands,” Cassandra said.

  Another voice emerged, thin and weak, and the whispers grew stronger. The air became thick with the sense of an invisible battle waged with words, challenges and responses, a swirling, violent rush.

  Then, all at once, the voices fell silent.

  Cassandra inserted her blade in the seam. With only a little rocking, she lifted the floorboard free. In a hollowed-out space rested a blue velvet bag with “Wolfskill Whiskey” embroidered on it in gold thread. Gabriel loosened the drawstrings. Inside was a tiny glass vial of particles, like pepper flakes, pearly black. He could feel the warmth through the glass. There was also a small foil packet. He unpeeled it and found a wad of dark green paste, no bigger than a piece of bubble gum.

  He brought the items over to the bed.

  “Pretty good work for a sick day, Max.”

  He sprinkled the ground eocorn horn directly into Max’s wound. The hydra regenerative, he placed under Max’s tongue. Max breathed deeply, and Gabriel closed his eyes and swallowed to keep from weeping.

  FIFTEEN

  The highway up to San Francisco teetered high above coasts of jade and turquoise waters. Cypress trees clung to weathered crags, their trunks and limbs distorted into tortuous shapes by centuries of wind.

  “You call the Hierarch ‘Her Majesty’ or ‘Her Highness’ the first time you address her. After that, it’s okay to call her ‘ma’am.’ Remember, it’s just like I said it. Rhymes with ‘damn,’ not ‘mom.’”

  Daniel might have enjoyed the scenery more if Moth hadn’t decided to use the time in the back of the limousine to drill him on royal etiquette and protocol.

  “‘Damn,’” he said.

  “Right. She’s first in the line of royal precedence. That’s like the pecking order. Next comes her husband. His full name is Reginald Creighton, and following tradition, he’d be ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Your Highness,’ never ‘Lord Consort,’ even though that’s what he is. As a matter of preference, though, he likes ‘Lord General.’ Okay, next in precedence are those of the Grand Ducal ranks. But none of them go by ‘Grand Duke,’ because that would be too easy. For instance, the High Grand Osteomancer, who carries the rank of Grand Duke, goes by ‘High Grand Osteomancer.’ You won’t have to worry about that, of course, because the seat is empty. Now, as for Master of Bones, Master of Keys, Master of the Fire Eternal, you can call them ‘my lord.’”