“The dragon is too old and weak to . . . do what it needs to do. It cannot make its way through all the tons of rubble that now lie above it. It is dying,” said Ylane through the open door. “It gathers its remaining strength to breathe fire all about itself, in the hope that it can burn its way free. I do not believe your chief would like another fire such as the one that consumed the Oldgate tower.”
“No!” agreed Jaxon as he checked out the suit. It was a top-of-the-line model, fully certified, ready to go. It was hot inside, as always, but he was in peak condition and he figured he could carry thirty kilos of gold as far as the woman . . . the Dragonborn . . . said. Hell of a lot easier than carrying a casualty.
The breathing-apparatus rig would add to the weight, but again he was used to it. He checked the air cylinder, regulator, mask, and harness, before shrugging it on and adjusting the straps.
Ylane was waiting in the other room. She had changed her alligator-skin coat for a pair of coveralls marked “Hotel Maintenance,” but had kept the bug-eye sunglasses, which made an odd combination. She had what looked like a carrying case for fishing rods in her hand, a three-meter-long plastic cylinder, about fifteen centimeters in diameter, which unscrewed in the middle.
“What’s in there?” asked Jaxon.
“An explosive harpoon,” replied Ylane. “Get the gold. We need to go.”
Jaxon picked up the gold. It was too heavy to easily carry in one hand for any distance, so he cradled it like a baby and followed Ylane out to the elevator. Ylane used a key to turn the fire service on, and they went straight down to the car park.
At the lowest level, six floors beneath the lobby, they got out. Ylane led the way to an unmarked door, which she opened with another key, exposing a conduit stuffed with pipes and cables. There was just enough space to shuffle down the middle, though Jaxon had to watch his elbows, making sure the suit didn’t catch on anything and tear.
“So we lay out these coins in a pattern,” he said. “Distract this ‘dragon.’ What do I do then?”
“Run,” said Ylane. She didn’t look at him, and seemed distracted. Keyed up, like the guys when they were all racing to a hot one. But Jaxon didn’t feel a supercharged sense of things about to happen, partly because he still couldn’t believe it. He was even kind of doubting the golden eyes, now that Ylane had her sunglasses back on. The hotel room had been dim, maybe it was some sort of special effect, a promotion-day gag of some kind, and he was being filmed on a closed-circuit system or the woman had a spy cam and it would all be up on YouTube in a day or two.
But he wasn’t sure, and the captain had told him to do what the chief said, and the chief had told him to obey this woman, and neither of those guys was into punking juniors . . .
“How far do I need to run?” he asked, as they climbed down a metal ladder from the conduit into a sewer. It was one of the original tunnels, all nineteenth-century brickwork, like he’d love to have in his apartment, with patterns above the arches and everything, though here it was spoiled by the dangling electric cord strung between the 1950s utility lights, some of which were still working.
Maybe on a lieutenant’s pay he could move into an old building, get out of the plasterboard-and-sprayed-concrete hole he’d been renting the last two years . . .
“Run as far as you can,” said Ylane absently, answering his question a full minute after he’d asked it. He was behind her, so he couldn’t see exactly what she was doing, but it looked like she was sniffing the air. Which didn’t smell too bad, considering they were in a sewer. Or maybe it was a storm-water drain, because there was only a thin trickle of water—Jaxon was pretty sure it was water—running down the center of the tunnel.
“Stop,” said Ylane. She turned around, nostrils flaring, and bent down toward the tunnel floor. She inhaled deeply and said, “Yes. It is here, just below us.”
“OK,” said Jaxon. He put the bag of gold down, and flexed his arms. He didn’t need to do it, but it was a welcome stretch. “What now?”
Ylane took a stick of yellow chalk out of the pocket of her coveralls, and started drawing small circles on the bricks, on either side of the trickle of water. “You can take the breathing apparatus off first. Then you need to put coins down on these circles, until I draw the last one. For the last one, you wait, while I get the harpoon ready. Then you close up your suit, turn on your air and prepare yourself. You place the coin and you run . . .”
She looked along the tunnel in both directions. “Go back the way we came, I think. When you feel the flash, hunker down and hope for the best.”
“The best?” asked Jaxon. He wasn’t exactly apprehensive, but he was feeling the energy. Action coming. Life or death.
“Hope is always necessary,” said Ylane.
“If guys in damp cloaks made it in the olden days, I’ll make it,” said Jaxon. He bent down and opened the bag. The coins were in paper rolls. He’d never seen gold coins before, and was surprised when he tore open a roll to find out how heavy each one was individually. And the sound they made when they fell on the bricks—they really did “ring true.”
“Be careful,” said Ylane. “We’ll need all of them. Or almost all. There are nine hundred and sixty-five and we need nine hundred and sixty-four.”
She was working quickly, drawing circles. Jaxon concentrated on the job, following her with gold coins, trying to catch up. The pattern she was making seemed to be circles within circles, a kind of geometric pattern like the ones he used to make as a kid with a spirograph. She had a good eye, not needing any aid to get the curves right. He tried to do as good a job placing coins, getting them exactly on the small chalk circles.
It took about an hour and a half to get the coins down. When Jaxon had two left, Ylane stopped drawing.
“This will be the last one,” she said, her nostrils constantly flaring, her head moving as she sniffed the air. Jaxon thought he could smell something now, too, a chemical whiff, maybe sulfur. “There’s just one more thing.”
She came up close to him and he flinched a little, even though her eyes were still hidden. Then she leaned forward suddenly and kissed him full on the lips, an old-fashioned kiss, lips closed, though they felt hot upon his own. Kind of like after eating a Mexicana pizza, which he liked, the after burn of chili spreading across his mouth.
“What was that for?” he asked.
“Good luck,” she said. “For both of us. Get your suit ready.”
She opened the fishing-rod case and took out the harpoon. It looked old to Jaxon, the shaft a pale aged wood and the head a dark iron with a bulbous ridge to hold the explosive. Ylane checked it over, and screwed something into the bulb, while Jaxon got his breathing apparatus back on and went through his checklist, tasting the cool, metal-tanged air flowing through his mask, making sure his hood was closed, that all seals shut tight at wrist and ankles, his gloves secure. He had a gold coin in each hand. The one in his right hand to go on the circle, the one on the left he figured he could keep as a souvenir.
Ylane moved back about ten feet and took her sunglasses off, throwing them aside. Then she adopted an Olympic javelineer’s pose: legs spread, left arm forward, right arm with harpoon back ready to throw.
Jaxon knelt down carefully, balanced on the balls of his feet. He held the coin between thumb and forefinger, an inch away from the circle, and looked over at Ylane.
“Now!”
The coin went down. Jaxon spun half-around, already moving, legs stretching out as he went up one side of the tunnel, like a bicycle on a velodrome, and back down again to sprint along the middle, and even through the suit he heard a vast bellow and a wave of air pushed him in the back like the pressure wave from a subway train, sending him stumbling, and he glanced back, even though he knew it was a bad idea, and he saw the great orange snout break through the tunnel floor, sending bricks exploding like a Lego disaster, and Ylane, the flash of movement and
Bang!
That was the explosive harpoon, but the dragon didn
’t just die. Instead the air pressure in the tunnel reversed. A savage wind smacked against Jaxon, dragging him back. The dragon was breathing in, sucking in oxygen, oxygen to fuel a fire Jaxon just knew was going to be hotter than anything he’d ever seen or heard or even believed could exist upon the earth, and Ylane’s talk about the wet woolen cloaks was horseshit and he was going to die in this tunnel after all, and his name would go up in gold letters on the memorial board at his old company . . .
But he kept trying to run forward because you never gave up, not even when everything was gone to hell, especially then, because if you had to die then you did it doing something, not just giving up—
The flame was more than a hundred meters long, and in its hair-thin core, as hot as the outer reaches of the sun.
Jaxon dove for the floor a moment before the flash came, but he was too close and it was too late to make any difference. The straps holding his air cylinder vaporized, the cylinder itself deforming as it fell. The suit, the best money could buy, fared little better, though its makers could be proud that even as ash, small pieces of it clung together in useless clumps.
His skin, which should have charred through to the bone in a microsecond, did not char. His hair, short as it was, did not go up like a lit match. The soft, wet tissue of his eyes and ears and mouth did not instantaneously boil away.
He felt only pleasantly warm, though he was lying on bricks glowing as red hot as the day they left the kiln, and he was entirely naked.
In his right hand, he held a globule of molten gold.
Something fluttered in the air above him. Jaxon rolled over and looked up. There was a tiny . . . dragon, all scarlet and green, its eyes as golden as Ylane’s . . .
“Ylane?” croaked Jaxon. The croak was psychological. There was nothing wrong with his throat. He just couldn’t believe he was alive at all, or that he could speak. He looked at his hands, and saw that his skin was as red as the bricks beneath him, but it was whole, and he felt no pain.
Yes, said the dragon, though her voice was not audible. Jaxon heard it in his head.
“What the hell happened?”
You know, said Ylane.
Jaxon thought about it for a moment, and he did know.
“A dragon dies, a dragon is born,” he said.
Yes.
“I am a dragon,” he said, and as he spoke he realized he was OK with it, because he knew what it was to be a dragon and to be a dragon was immeasurably better than to be merely human.
He popped the cooling, misshapen gold disc into his mouth and ate it with some relish, the metal soft under his teeth. Then he jumped up, and in that motion, there was no longer a man with golden eyes and skin the color of dusk, but another small dragon, as resplendent as the first.
Yes, said Ylane. She led him into the hot bricks and the bedrock beneath, and they dove into it together, heading deeper and deeper toward the hot center of the earth where dragons lived and grew, till they became ancient, and rose like salmon to a waterhead, to seek their birthplace, and begin anew.
A dragon dies, a dragon is born. But sometimes they need a little help.
“Fire Above, Fire Below” copyright© 2013 by Garth Nix
Bad Luck, Trouble, Death, and Vampire Sex, by Garth Nix
I never thought Granny could die from the simple act of biting her own lip. Not that it was quite as straightforward as that, of course. She would have been fine if that single drop of blood hadn’t fallen in her brandy. Or to be fair, if I hadn’t then jumped to attend her with a handkerchief and knocked the glass so that it flew across the room, brandy and blood entering the small open mouth of the bronze gargoyle on the corner of the mantelpiece.
All of which would have been no problem at all if it hadn’t happened at the exact stroke of midnight, with the light of the moon falling just so through the dormer window.
I mean, how dumb is it to set up your immortality so that it can be rescinded as easily as that?
I looked down at the still corpse of the most powerful witch-queen in the nether-world, my own adopted grandmother, and was beset by a swirling mixture of powerful emotions, the uppermost one requiring me to vocalize it.
“Holy shit! What the fuck am I going to do now?”
The gargoyle licked its lips and answered me in a depressed monotone.
“You and me both. I’m gonna get my ass melted down for this. You, they’ll probably string up by the—”
“Shut up!”
“With silver mandolin strings,” concluded the gargoyle.
“They’ll have to catch me first,” I muttered. I bent down and took Granny’s original 1911 model Colt .45 from her shoulder holster and thrust it through my belt. Then I started to go through the secret pockets of her bullet-proof cardigan. Not that I expected to get much. Granny’s power had mostly been in her voice. She didn’t go in much for charms and objets d’art. But there was always the chance I might find some money.
Outside, wolves began to howl and owls hoot in curious unison, soon joined by the clamor of the bells that hung at the top of the elevator shaft.
“They know,” said the gargoyle. “They’re coming. You’re going to unscrew me or what? You don’t want to leave no witness.”
“I haven’t got time to find a screwdriver,” I muttered. There was nothing in Granny’s pockets so I ducked into the fireplace and checked out the chimney. It wasn’t wide enough for me to climb up unaltered, and there was a silver mesh grille across the top.
“There’s a bunch of stuff in Dextrise and Malboc, volume four,” said the gargoyle, indicating the bookshelf with its long, impressively scaly tongue. “Including a screwstone.”
“Why would I want a screwstone now, for fuck’s sake?” I hissed. There had to be another way out. The windows were barred with silvered iron rods. The fire door led not to a fire escape, but to a place no one would go without lengthy preparations, heavy-duty magical ordnance and a lot of backup. Well, no one except Granny.
“To undo me and the mesh on the chimney,” said the gargoyle. “What did you think screwstones were for?”
I didn’t waste time uttering a snappy retort, particularly since I’d have to think of one first. Where the hell was Dextrise and Malboc, volume four?
“They’re all D&M on that shelf,” said the gargoyle. “It’s the one with the big gold ‘4’ on the spine.”
“I know,” I snapped. The much heavier than expected volume slid out under my panicked fingers and fell open on the ground. A red leather bag with a gold drawstring lay inside the hollowed-out pages. I grabbed it and for a quarter of a second wondered if it would be wise to open the bag.
During this brief instant of caution, the elevator bell dinged, and the arrow above the door began to move from Z to A. The bells in the shaft ceased their jangle and the wolves and owls grew quiet. Little bastards probably didn’t want to miss hearing my screams.
I opened the bag. Inside there was a rough grey stone the size of my fist, a mouldy bean that looked like it’d come off the rim of a bachelor’s week-old lunch plate, and a copper coin green with verdigris. Or possibly a circular piece of verdigris that had got some copper on it.
I took out the stone and waved it in the direction of the gargoyle and the chimney, focusing what passed for my will on it to undo said items. Since I forgot to turn my head I was almost blinded by the rocketing screws that hurtled towards the stone, and one did scratch the middle knuckle of my left ring finger, which was probably a portent or an omen, or maybe both. What would I know, I failed Introductory Augury. Twice.
The gargoyle fell to the floor but managed to arrest itself with its tongue, ripping off most of the mantelpiece in the process. I hastily picked it up, shoved it in the red bag, put the bag in my mouth and transformed. I had a moment’s unease as the .45 got stuck full-size in my groin for a second, before it transformed into a pistol-shaped patch of hair.
“That’s your alter-form?” said a muffled voice from the bag, followed by a surprisingly girl
ish giggle.
“Shut the fuck up!” I snarled. Scotty dogs may not be very big and they may have curly hair but by god we can be vicious when we want to be. Just ask a rat.
On the other hand we can’t climb as well as a cat, or I’d have been out of that chimney in half the time. Or fly like a bat, enabling an even speedier escape. Or do other cool and useful stuff that would be very helpful when trying to get the hell out of the lair of She Who Must Be Listened To Until She’s Done.
I’d already been there for four hours when the brandy accident happened, and Grandma had hardly drawn breath the whole time. The key phrases in her diatribe were “Total disappointment,”
“I can’t believe you tried to fuck a vampire” and “cancellation of contract forthwith”.
That last bit wasn’t going to look good when they wheeled in the guy with the Frankenstein-sewn back-to-front ears and he had a listen to Granny’s last hours.
“They’ll think I did it on purpose,” I mumbled as I dropped the bag on the roof. Fortunately it only fell as far as the gutter. “Because she was going to cancel my deal.”
“You mean you didn’t do it on purpose?” asked the gargoyle. It had forced the top of the bag open with its tongue and I could see one baleful glowing eye peering at me. “It really was an accident?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Wow,” said the gargoyle. “You been having a lot of accidents lately?”
“I don’t think so—” I started to say, just as the tiles under my four little paws slipped and I flipped over and had to scrabble madly to avoid going over the side.
“You need to get checked out,” said the gargoyle.
“I need to get the hell out of here first.”
Getting out was going to be difficult. The rooftop was only a temporary haven and as I looked around it looked more and more temporary and less and less a haven. For a start, while the sky had been clear through the window, there were low, dark clouds clustering around the roof. I mean really dark clouds, the kind that usually flickered with internal lightning as they rumbled overhead and unleashed enough rain to make Noah piss himself. Which would only make matters worse when the lightning was unleashed. Conductivity-wise that is—
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 307