by Eileen Wilks
The instinct to change to female is cyclic in nature. As we grow older, that cycle grows longer and, in a general way, more readily controlled. It never disappears, however, and can be triggered by . . . I will say by external events, although that is a gross simplification of a complex cascade. Fortunately, this is rare. When it does occur, there has usually been another dragon, currently female, who could serve as efondi. Not, however, every time. Unattended hatchings have occurred. Over a period of time longer than your recorded history, we have tried many ways to alleviate the condition of our mind-dark offspring. Nothing worked. We always ended up having to kill those who survived beyond the first few decades. We are . . . Sam’s pause was brief. In a less precise speaker, it would have gone unnoticed . . . highly averse to killing our young, however damaged, yet it seemed all the mercy we could offer, and their suffering was clear. It has been our custom to do so jointly, so that the burden did not fall on only one or two of us.
A time came when I could no longer accept this. I devised a possible solution—imperfect, yet I judged it preferable. It took me some time to master the magic involved, but I had time. Such hatchings do not occur often. I was ready when, roughly seven hundred years ago, a clutch of hatchlings emerged from second birth without the presence of an efondi. After some discussion, the other dragons agreed to attempt my solution.
We turned them into humans.
“You—” Lily shut her mouth on the stupid thing she’d been about to say. Clearly such a transformation was possible. Three hundred years ago, Sam had turned her grandmother into a dragon—then at some point, turned her back into a human.
It is important to note that, by “human,” I refer to their physicality. Obviously we could do nothing about their mental states. They remained mind-dark, and we were unsure how their innate natures would be translated by their transformed brains. Our hope was that their needs would be sufficiently human to be met by normal human parenting. We believed that, at a minimum, they would acquire speech and thus not be trapped in permanent isolation.
We called our altered young Lóng Luăn.
Lily translated aloud for Rule. “Dragon spawn.”
Yes. They were placed with a handful of human families in a remote village in the territory of the dragon who’d birthed them. At first the transformation seemed to work as we’d hoped. Their mother reported to the rest of us occasionally; none of them displayed early signs of psychosis or self-destruction. They learned auditory speech easily and seemed to relate to the world realistically. She did observe behavior which distressed their human caretakers, but some traits which are considered mildly sociopathic in humans are normal for dragon young. She believed these behaviors were a reflection of their innate natures and not a serious problem.
She was wrong. The spawn were not mildly sociopathic. They were psychopaths.
Lily’s breath hissed in.
“I don’t understand the difference,” Rule said.
Lily had done some reading on the subject once she realized how many of the Great Bitch’s agents seemed to be psychopaths or sociopaths. The current thinking was that psychopaths and sociopaths both suffered from antisocial personality disorder, which was now the official term for both conditions. In practical terms, however, there was a difference. “Sociopaths can form emotional bonds, though usually not healthy ones. The opinions of others matter, though often not in a healthy way. Psychopaths don’t give a shit what we think. We aren’t real to them.”
“I see. You use the term in the human sense, Sam?” Rule asked.
I use it to indicate a complete lack of empathy and conscience stemming from the inability to grasp the reality of other sentient minds. The spawn had no concept of right and wrong. For each of them, there was only one real person in existence, one “I” who was the center of the moral universe. Each spawn considered his wants and needs the definition of good; whatever displeased him was evil. What others wanted was irrelevant unless they could enforce their will.
It was several years before their mother was forced to acknowledge their true state and reported more fully to the rest of us. I was prepared for her revelation, having monitored them myself, albeit infrequently and with great circumspection. All dragons are territorial; she was rabidly so, and my intrusion into her territory would have rendered her extremely uncooperative, had she been aware of it.
This proved to have been a mistake on my part.
I suggested that the spawn should be killed. She would not consider it, nor would most of the others. I expected this. The spawn were troublesome and hard on the humans in their village, but most felt that the occasional death of a human did not warrant killing our offspring. I then proposed that we make sure they received no magical instruction. Their mother agreed to this, as did the others. The spawn would never use mind magic, but they were powerful and possessed what, in humans, is called the Sight.
Oh, shit. The ability to see magic was the definition of sorcery. It was extremely rare in humans. Not so with dragons.
“They were powerful sorcerers,” Rule said. “And they were psychopaths.”
You perceive the problem.
“Adepts?” Lily ventured.
No, nor were they able to become so. While adepts may become mad, the mad cannot become adepts.
She blinked and tried to sort that out.
However, high-level mages are capable of causing a great deal of trouble. Moreover, I was unable to predict their actions or the potential results of those actions. Their magic, like that of true dragons, acts on the patterns in such a way as to render them extremely difficult to read. So while our concern was theoretical rather than empirical, we believed that, given magical training, one or more of them would establish themselves as despots or demigods. We strongly disliked such an outcome.
We did not know they would be able to reproduce.
Lily frowned. “But if you made them physically identical to humans, you had to guess it would be possible.”
We had altered the vasa deferentia while they were prepubescent so that sperm were unable to enter the seminal stream. However, they were capable of consciously directed healing, an ability that dragons do not develop until they are fully adult—a process of one or two centuries. Their mother knew they had developed this ability. She did not inform the rest of us, and it did not occur to me or to the others that the spawn’s magical abilities might mature on a human time frame rather than draconic. We assumed they would die long before they were able to direct their healing.
This was appallingly lazy thinking. Hypotheses are tested; assumptions often remain unnoticed and go unchallenged. We did not check on the maturation of their healing and so didn’t realize they had discovered the tampering to their vasa deferentia and healed it.
By the time the last of the original dragon spawn died, they’d had thirty-two offspring. Most of those offspring inherited varying degrees of magical ability; all were mind-dark. The subsequent generation, however, was substantially less powerful, and less than half of them were mind-dark. The number displaying clear psychopathic—
“Wait a minute,” Lily said. “You let them go right on having kids?”
Given their ability to heal and their determination to breed, we were unable to do otherwise unless we killed them. My solution had proven far more imperfect than we’d hoped, but they didn’t suffer as much as earlier mind-dark offspring. It was clear that the passage of time and thinning of their blood would eliminate the problem. We did not want to kill our young or their descendants.
Lily couldn’t say he was wrong. No sane parent wanted to kill their young.
Rule spoke. “You mentioned the spawn’s determination to breed. That was significant, I think?”
Yes. Several of us had visited them by this time, so they were aware that we considered them flawed.
“I thought their mother didn’t allow you to enter her—” Ru
le broke off when Lily elbowed him in the ribs. He gave her a quizzical glance.
She shook her head. She’d explain later, but she thought Sam referred to parental visits. The brownies had told her about those. The father of a dragon hatchling was allowed limited visitation rights by the mother, but these were never spoken of. Dragons considered parentage extremely private.
Sam continued as if there had been no interruption. Conversation between us and the spawn was indirect. We could not mindspeak them, so we had to use a human intermediary. Yet they knew the basics of their history. They understood that their lack of mind magic would have left them unable to communicate had they remained dragons; they did not consider this sufficient reason to condemn them to a human existence, however. They fervently wished to be returned to their natural state, to be full dragons. The very nature of their other flaw—the psychopathy—rendered it invisible to them, and so they created their own explanation for our actions. A creation myth.
Like human psychopaths, they considered empathy and emotional attachment weaknesses. In their mythos, they were the perfected beings, and we exiled them to ignorance and humanity because we recognized their superiority. Logically we should have killed them, but our own weakness prevented it. It is a tidy syllogism. If you ignore their basic misunderstanding of the nature of weakness, the logic is consistent.
Grandmother snorted but didn’t comment. Not out loud, anyway.
They passed this mythos on to their offspring, who in turn passed it to theirs, somewhat embellished.
“For how many generations?” Lily asked softly.
The mythos persisted past the point that any of them were readily distinguishable from pure humans. By the time we left for Dis, the draconic heritage of those descended from the spawn had become so diluted that only rigorous study could detect it. None were wholly mind-dark, although they remained unGifted in mind magic; none possessed enough magical power to pose a significant threat to the human culture; and the percentage of psychopathy among them was only slightly higher than in the general population.
A startling thought occurred to her. “Am I—”
Grandmother gave Lily a look. “Think. The spawn had no mind magic. You do.”
Li Lei is correct. Your heritage is magical, not genetic. Through all the generations we observed, the spawn’s descendants remained incapable of any form of mind magic. You are not descended from them.
“I’m wondering,” Rule said slowly, “how this connects to the reason you brought us here. To Tom Weng.”
Your surmise is correct. He is a dragon spawn.
For a long moment none of them spoke. Rule broke the silence. “And he’s working for the Great Bitch.”
So he informed Lily Yu, although I suspect he considers himself her ally rather than her subordinate.
“Cousin,” Lily said suddenly. “Weng called me cousin, which must refer to my magical heritage and his genetic heritage. That was right after he flew or floated or whatever—which is dragon magic, isn’t it?” Dragons used their wings to fly, but various experts had determined that wings alone couldn’t lift such large bodies. “Plus he’s a sorcerer, he sure acted like a psychopath, and I couldn’t sense his mind at all, which suggests he’s mind-dark. That adds up to a dragon spawn, according to your description. Not a descendent of spawn, but the real thing.”
You are correct. All the evidence—which includes the results of tests Mika has made and shared with me—indicates that he is a true dragon spawn, like that first generation. This should be impossible. There have been no botched hatchings in over seven hundred years, and all the spawn from that hatching have long since died. This is why—DOWN!
It didn’t occur to Lily to disobey. She hit the ground. Rule landed on top of her.
The earth jumped. The mountain groaned. And Sam moved.
That much dragon shouldn’t be able to move that fast. Coils of dragon unwound like thread from a spool as he shot off down the tunnel. If she and Rule hadn’t been flat already, they’d have been flattened.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Lily’s heart pounded as her body urged her to fight or flee or do something, anything, other than lie there. She turned her head to check on Grandmother.
Li Lei Yu lay flat on the floor like her, although without a couple hundred pounds of lupus sprawled on top to protect her from all the nothing that was going on. She muttered something in Chinese that Lily didn’t catch, then said more clearly, “It would be useful to question him.” Then she grimaced, mouthed what might have been a curse, and sat up. After a brief, frowning pause, she rose to her feet with more grace than a woman her age was entitled to.
Lily poked Rule. “Off.” After a moment he complied and they both stood.
“Were you addressing Sam, Madame?” Rule asked, pulling out his phone.
“Hush.” She tipped her head, her gaze distant.
Lily translated Grandmother’s earlier comment for Rule, who was trying to call out on his phone. Unsuccessfully, to judge by his expression. “I don’t know who she wanted to question, but if that earthquake—”
Grandmother snorted. “Do not be foolish. That was not an earthquake.” She continued to frown, aiming it at the still-glowing tunnel. “I doubt it is blocked. Sun went through it. As to whether it is safe . . .” She shrugged and started walking. “We shall find out. It is most unsatisfactory to remain here.”
Lily followed. Rule didn’t. He put his phone up, said, “I need to know about the men,” and took off running. By the time Lily and Grandmother entered the tunnel, he’d vanished around the nearest bend.
“Did one of the other dragons make the ground shake?” Lily persisted, avoiding the obvious term for “shaking ground” since Grandmother had objected to it. “Is that who Sam went after? He thought one of them might—”
“Not a dragon. A missile.”
“A what?”
“I am not familiar with military terms, but Sun referred to it as a missile. He is not often imprecise in his speech.”
“No, but—but we would have heard it. There would have been a huge explosion, not just that little groan.”
“I assume Sun’s defenses account for the lack of noise, although it is possible he suppressed the shockwave himself. A plane fired it at us.”
“Someone in a plane fired a missile at a dragon’s lair. At the black dragon’s lair.” Was there even a word for that level of stupidity? And who had missiles sitting around to use in such a complex form of suicide?
And that wasn’t the most critical question. What kind of missile had it been? Not nuclear, she thought—hoped—since they were all still alive. But undoubtedly destructive, only for how wide a radius? Their guards weren’t at the lair, but they weren’t far from it. “Grandmother, ask Sam if—”
“Sam is busy. He has gone after the plane. I advised him to preserve the pilot for questioning. I am not sure he will, however, once he has extracted what he wishes to know from the man’s mind.” She shook her head. “He is extremely angry.”
SEVEN
NO one would expect a winged creature to catch up to a jet—no one who hadn’t seen one outpace jets in the past, that is. Whatever allowed dragons to fly let them move ungodly fast when they were motivated.
Sam was sure as hell motivated.
The two women tramped up the long tunnel in silence for a few moments. Then Grandmother sighed. “Zhēn kĕxí.”
Roughly translated, that meant “what a pity,” which applied to all sorts of things at the moment. “Pardon?”
“The pilot destroyed his plane before Sun could.”
“I don’t suppose the pilot ejected first?”
“No.”
Dammit. Lily scowled at the floor of the endless tunnel. “Did Sam get any information from his mind before he died?”
“He was in the process of doing so when the pilot blew his pl
ane up.”
“Why is Sam talking to you? Only to you, I mean.” Lily couldn’t mindspeak more than one person at a time, but Sam did it all the time.
“He is doing several things at once. He is well able to do so, of course, but why add unnecessary chores to the list? He tells me, I tell you.”
“What else is he doing?”
“Checking the patterns. Checking his defenses. Keeping the other missile from exploding. Speaking with some foolish general. The plane—”
“Other missile?” Lily said sharply.
“You interrupt,” Grandmother said sternly. “The plane was of the U.S. Air Force. He wishes the general to explain how one of his planes came to shoot missiles at us. The general does not believe him.” She sniffed contemptuously.
The plane’s origin was important, but Lily knew the difference between important and urgent. “What other missile?”
“I do not badger him with questions when he is busy.”
She considered that for two heartbeats, then took off at a run—only to see Rule running back to her as she rounded the nearest bend. They both called out at the same moment.
“There’s a missile—”
“There’s a missile—”
They both broke off. “Sam is keeping it from exploding,” Lily said, stopping.
Rule stopped beside her. “I’m relieved to hear that, since it’s embedded in the rock about thirty feet above the entrance.”
She digested that briefly. “The men?” she asked.
“They felt the blast, but took no harm from it. Sean came to check on us. I sent him back to the car. The only thing that seems damaged is the mountain itself. Sam’s landing pad is a mess. Pieces of mountain fell on it, and the peak looks like a stone-eating giant chomped on it.”
She whistled. “I don’t know anything about missiles. You?”
He shook his head. “I’m guessing they were both aimed at the entrance. Sam or his defenses deflected the one that took out the peak. He may have deflected the other one, too, but not enough, so he did something to keep it from exploding.”