Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Well, sure, with a month of prep and a crew of dozens, we could maybe strongarm it.”

  “Instead, I’m a library patron. How do the books and junk fit in?”

  “I’m making my own axis mundi. Or at least something that looks like it. That way, when I get invested as the High Grand Osteomancer—”

  “You mean if.”

  “No, Moth. It’s gotta be ‘when.’ There’s no other way. The bone is in the scepter, and the scepter touches the new High Grand Osteomancer. So, that has to be me.”

  “And what if the Hierarch names someone else?”

  “Then I’ll be invoking the Rite of Challenge.”

  “The Rite of What the Hell?”

  “It’s a thing here. If you get passed up for a promotion you get a chance to prove yourself worthy.”

  “Like with a written exam?”

  “No, it’s an all-out fight.”

  “For crying out loud.”

  “You don’t like my odds,” Daniel said.

  “That’s between me and my bookie. Okay, then. What’s next on our agenda?”

  Daniel handed him a piece of paper on which he’d carefully drawn an exploded diagram of a device half the length of a pencil with a spring-loaded rod with a little hook on one end and a bladed tip on the other.

  “It’s a design for my new invention,” Daniel said, proudly. “I call it the Blackland Popper.”

  “It looks like a dangerous penny whistle.”

  “You’re holding it upside down.”

  Moth turned it. “Now it looks like a very horrible kind of catheter.”

  “I hope you contract ear cholera. It’s a tool for doing heisty things. Do we have anyone handy on staff who can make things?”

  Moth folded the paper and stuffed it in his pocket. “The guy who winds your clocks has a knack. I’m sure he can handle it.”

  “Good.” Daniel looked over the manuals and the tools Moth had brought him and felt some mix of panic and despair. “Okay, next job: We have to learn how to make first-class crown jewels. We begin with bezel mounting.”

  Moth went to pour himself a drink.

  * * *

  Morning light slanted through the windows of Daniel’s suite like daggers in his eyes. He tried to calculate how many hours it had been since he’d last slept but gave up when he realized he was too tired to do the math. Moth snored in his chair at the table, his head pillowed on his crossed forearms.

  Daniel stood, his spine cracking like thin ice. Today was a big day.

  He took a hot shower. It wasn’t just an indulgence: He couldn’t afford to look like someone who’d been pulling all-nighters, scheming in the dark. He was supposed to be a prince of the realm on the verge of claiming his just reward. He shaved and dressed simply in a white dress shirt and black trousers. He was starting to get used to Paul’s well-made clothes, the drapery and fit, the way they felt like more than just cloth wrappers. Daniel’s wardrobe always came from charity thrift shops, but Paul was rich. He wondered if being High Grand Osteomancer came with a raise, and what Paul would have done with even more money.

  Daniel bounced a grape off Moth’s head.

  “I will fucking kill you,” Moth roared, his eyes bleary and enraged. Then he saw it was Daniel. He let his head drop back to the table. “Fucking kill you,” he said again. “Where are you going?”

  “Cynara’s suite. I won’t be gone long.”

  “Figured you’d give her one last chance to stab you in the back?”

  “I think if she stabs me, it’s going to be in the face. Don’t worry, I’ll be okay. I just need to have a conversation.”

  Moth yawned and rubbed his face. He slid his chair back and stood. “Not without me.”

  “Stay here, get some rest. Drink some juice. There’s going to be a lot of running around tonight and I need you in top physical form.”

  “My physical form is the toppest, but it won’t matter if you’ve got a knife poking out of your eye. I demand you see the wisdom in this.”

  “I do, but I need some more burnishing out of you.”

  Crafting the counterfeit axis mundi had taken Daniel all night, molding the melted dragon bones into something that looked authentic as long as one didn’t really scrutinize it. Setting it in a border of gold from the melted pawnshop rings was actually the bigger challenge, but one at which Moth proved himself surprisingly talented.

  Moth inspected the bone with a loupe and reached for a burnisher.

  “Thanks,” Daniel said.

  “If you’re not back in fifteen minutes I start breaking down walls.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  Moth grunted and burnished.

  Daniel made his way to Cynara’s suites. Her people were tense when he arrived, and they left him standing outside the entry for minutes, certain he was here to do their mistress harm. He kept checking his pocket for the vial of lamassu bones he’d secreted there earlier. Here in the North, they called it the Sumerian sphinx. Paul had told him that.

  The captain of Cynara’s guard approached him. If looks could kill, Daniel would be a rotting corpse. There would be maggots and vultures.

  “You may enter, my lord.”

  He found Cynara eating breakfast, slicing a honeydew melon with surgical precision.

  “You’re dressed early,” she said. “Busy day?”

  “I actually can’t think of anything to do. The investiture’s in, what, nine hours?” He checked Paul’s watch.

  “You kept it.”

  “Kept … oh, this?” She meant the watch. He hadn’t given it much thought when putting it on. He’d found the watch in the same box with Paul’s cuff links. Glancing at it now, it seemed familiar, the creamy white dial, the Roman numerals, the sharp points of the hands. Had his father worn a watch like this? Daniel hated the feeling of everything being at once so familiar and so alien.

  “It’s a good watch,” he said.

  “Do you remember what I told you when I gave it to you?”

  Every time he talked to her, he felt they were fencing, only her blade was invisible and so sharp he never knew when he’d been cut. He wished she’d just throw her fork down and come for his head with a big, obvious swing.

  “I don’t, Cynara. I honestly don’t remember what you said to me. I’m sorry. Remind me.”

  “I told you I loved you,” she said. “And I did. I never told you a lie.”

  Daniel couldn’t answer to that. Not to any lies Paul might have told her, and not to the massive lies he, himself, had. He still didn’t know if she was his enemy, but there was no escaping that he had made himself into hers.

  “I came to see Ethelinda,” he said.

  Cynara took a bite of honeydew. “In her room.”

  “Will her governess let me pass?”

  “Of course she will. Aren’t you Ethelinda’s father?”

  He went to see Paul’s daughter.

  Four guards stood watch outside Ethelinda’s door, as well as the governess.

  “Still no progress finding out who’s been trying to kill my daughter?” he said, making it an accusation.

  The governess squared her shoulders. “This is not Lady Cynara’s house, my lord, and her questions only go so far here. And if I may ask, my lord, have you made any progress determining who is trying to kill your daughter?” She made it sound like an accusation, too, and even more, a challenge.

  And, no, Daniel hadn’t come any closer to figuring it out. In fact, he’d barely tried. He couldn’t save both Sam and Ethelinda. So, he’d chosen Sam.

  But he still owed Ethelinda something.

  “I’ll see her now,” he said, moving past the governess.

  Ethelinda was in a tiny rocking chair by a gently crackling fire, gazing out the window. Daniel stood behind her. From here, he could see the bay, with just a bare hint of the headlands emerging from the fog.

  “And what are we looking at with such rapt attention?”

  “Things I can’t see,” Ethelinda
said.

  “How can you see things you can’t see?”

  He surprised himself at how much he sounded like his father, asking one of his koanlike questions for which he expected a single, concrete answer.

  “You just look until you can see them,” Ethelinda said, as if the answer were obvious.

  “So? Anything yet?”

  She turned to him, staring with unsettling intensity. “I haven’t looked long enough.”

  Daniel paced the room, glancing at her toys and books and stuffed animals. Her mother must have brought trunks of her things, even her bed. He piled another log on the fire and worried it with the poker until he was satisfied with the strengthened flames.

  “So, we haven’t talked about what happened the other night. With the spider-person.”

  Ethelinda rocked in her chair, cradling a plush mallard in her lap. “I fought her.”

  “That must have been scary for you.”

  “I beat her. I killed her.”

  “I’m always scared when I fight,” Daniel said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m stronger, I’m always scared. Weren’t you?”

  The staff had done a good job of cleaning the blood and clearing out the body parts. Ethelinda’s face was pink. Freshly scrubbed.

  “I was scared. But Mommy says being scared doesn’t mean you don’t have to do the things you’re scared to do.”

  Such good, bitter advice. Daniel picked up a stuffed rabbit. “Trade you for the duck?”

  Ethelinda took her time considering this proposition.

  “Okay,” she said, and they made the swap.

  He went to the window, his back to her. It was easy to transfer lamassu particles from the vial in his pocket to the fuzzy fabric of the rabbit. It didn’t even require osteomancy. Just a thief’s sleight of hand. He steeled himself and turned back to face her.

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  Ethelinda nodded. “I do all the time.”

  “But this is a big one. You can’t tell anyone. Not even your mom. Can you keep a secret from her?”

  “I do all the time,” she said again.

  “I’m leaving after tonight. After the investiture.”

  She didn’t react to this. Paul was often not at home. This was only what she expected of him.

  “You can come with me,” he said.

  She looked up at him, this little girl in a little chair with a plush rabbit, who’d ripped apart an assassin with her bare hands. What was it he was seeing in her eyes? Confusion? Hope in conflict with caution?

  “Where are you going?”

  “South,” Daniel said. “The Southern realm.”

  “Is Mommy coming with us?”

  “No.”

  “When will you be coming back?”

  “I won’t be coming back, Ethelinda. This time, I have to stay away. And if you come with me, Mommy won’t be able to visit. And you won’t be able to come back and see Mommy. Not for a very long time.”

  “Why do you want me to come with you?”

  “Why do you think, Ethelinda?”

  She should have been able to come up with an effortless answer. Why would a father want to be with his daughter? Because he loved her. Because he wanted to take care of her. And Daniel didn’t love her, but he did want to protect her, because he’d killed her father, and he’d created a debt so deep he’d never pay it off. He could at least make some payments.

  “You want me to come because it’s dangerous here,” Ethelinda said. “Because of all the people who want to kill me.”

  Life would be no safer for her in the Southern realm. It hadn’t been for Sam.

  “It might be a little safer,” he said. “I’m stronger than your mom. And I have friends who will help me keep you safe. As safe as can be.”

  “Do I have to go with you?”

  A funny question. He could have just abducted her. But Daniel was a thief and a murderer, not a kidnapper.

  “No, Ethelinda. Of course not. You have a choice.”

  “Then I want to stay with my mommy.”

  Not “Mommy.” Her mommy. There was something about the way she emphasized that, as if marking a clear line around herself and Cynara that left Paul on the outside. And if Paul was on the outside, then Daniel was even farther away.

  “Well,” Daniel said. “Then it’s settled. Okay.”

  But things were not settled. He held the stuffed duck down near his waist where there was less danger of him accidentally inhaling the fumes coming off the lamassu particles.

  “Want your duck back?”

  She nodded. Daniel exchanged it for the rabbit, and osteomancy made contact with her chubby little hands.

  “There’s something else I need to tell you, Ethelinda. There’s really no easy way to say it.”

  She looked at him, and for the first time since meeting her, he finally understood something about her: She wasn’t stoic. Her flat, emotionless responses to attempted assassinations, to yanking limbs from sockets, weren’t because there was something strange or wrong about her. She wasn’t broken. She was just in a constant state of terror. And Daniel should have recognized it sooner. He’d been the same way after the Hierarch murdered his father. After he’d seen his father eaten, skin, flesh, muscle, and bone. The terror had never subsided.

  “Ethelinda,” he said, “I’m not your dad.”

  Her face registered no change, but she clutched the duck tighter. Holding on for dear life.

  “I’m like his brother,” Daniel went on. “But closer than that. We’re made of the same flesh. The same osteomantic essence.”

  “You’re a golem?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Where’s my daddy?”

  And now Daniel wanted to run. To leap from the window. To escape this moment.

  “I’m sorry, Ethelinda. He died. A year ago.”

  For a while, everything was silent except Ethelinda rocking in the chair. Each little thud of wood on wood like the bang of a gavel.

  “How did he die?”

  Lie to her, Daniel told himself. Why does she need to know? Will it make her happier?

  Maybe not. It would make him happier if she didn’t know.

  “I killed him,” Daniel said. “We were on an island, he was building a dragon, and he was … I don’t know what he was going to use it for, but dragons are very dangerous and … I don’t know if this helps. My father was killed by the Southern Hierarch. I don’t think there’s anything he could have said that … We fought, your dad and I.”

  He was babbling now, trying to explain without justifying, as if that would make things better.

  Ethelinda was glassy-eyed now, partially from shock, but also from the lamassu.

  “Look, here’s the thing. It’s not up to me to tell you what to think. To explain what your father did. Or how you should feel about it. In a minute, you’ll forget this conversation. I gave you lamassu.”

  “Sumerian sphinx,” she said, groggy.

  “That’s right.”

  Her eyes sharpened and she pegged him with a look of accusation. “You’re stealing my memories.”

  “Yes.”

  Ethelinda tried to rise from her chair but fell back. Weeping in frustration, she flung the duck across the room.

  “You won’t remember what we talked about. Not for a while, anyway.” Not until he was hundreds of miles away, his thefts accomplished. “But I’ll make sure you always know where you can find me. If you need help. Or if you need justice. Or if you need revenge. I’ll be there for you, to make sure you have whatever you need.”

  He stood watching her fight against sleep. Her chin dipped, and her legs fluttered with feeble kicks. It was nothing at all like watching a small child trying to stay awake past bedtime. It was exactly like watching her battling not to be a victim of his magic.

  She couldn’t win. She would sleep, and when she awoke, she wouldn’t remember his crimes. Later, he would send her a message. He would make sure she knew.

 
; He crossed the room to retrieve her stuffed duck. She had a lot of stuffed animals. Maybe she wouldn’t miss this one. Or maybe she’d grieve for its loss.

  He threw it in the fire and drew sense memories from his bones of lava, of diamond-hard claws and powerful muscles raking away earth and climbing to the surface. His lungs burned, and he breathed out a jet of blue flame, and now the toy was fully engulfed.

  Before leaving the room, he gave once last glance at Paul’s daughter. He couldn’t predict what would become of her, but he knew he’d changed her, as surely as the Hierarch changed him when he ate his father.

  Maybe the only difference between Daniel and the Hierarch was that the Hierarch had used a fork.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Gabriel’s team followed Messalina Sigilo.

  They rode the sky-trolley, one car behind her, to North Beach, where she browsed books at City Lights. Gabriel hoped to find her delivering or receiving a message at a dead-drop there, maybe in a hole carved into the pages of a thick volume on the history of Constantinople or something equally colorful, but Cassandra insisted no such thing had happened under her watchful gaze.

  It wasn’t until Messalina stopped at a fruit stand that they caught her making an exchange. She picked through a bin of Gala apples, and from Gabriel’s vantage point at a newsstand across the street, it looked like she was just shopping for an attractive specimen. Then a small white woman came up to the opposite side of the bin. Messalina slipped an apple from her pocket and placed it on the mound with the other apples.

  “It’s happening,” Cassandra said. “Keep your eye on the apple.”

  The stranger selected Messalina’s apple and tucked it neatly into her own pocket. Messalina chose another apple from the top of the pile, paid for it, and took a bite as she and the other woman parted company.

  Gabriel watched Messalina blend into the sidewalk crowd. “Do we follow her or her contact?”

  “We stay on Messalina,” Cassandra said. “If I’m reading this right, Messalina just passed an order. I want to be there when the apple-carrier reports back.”

  They rejoined the chase.

  Messalina shopped.

  She had lunch at a seafood restaurant.

  She visited an art museum, and as far as Cassandra could tell, did nothing but enjoy a gallery of Japanese woodcuts.