The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  Bet you Michael can pick that lock.

  “It’s a combination lock,” I told the irritating voice in my head.

  All the same.

  “Well, I hope he does! Then it’ll go away, and he’ll go away, and my life can go back to normal!”

  Which was what I wanted. Really. Even if a return to the status quo did, just at that moment, seem depressingly bleak.

  I stared into my phone screen and slowly scrolled through the picture of that second page of the notebook. The phrase “The kindling burns” caught my eye. The translation was wrong; I now knew that the sentence meant, “The kindling might burn.” But it was easy enough to strip out the subjunctive markers for a sentence that would act upon reality. If I could find a word for “notebook” I could substitute it for “kindling” and turn the damned thing to ash. Yeah, well, not a good idea. If it was still in the gun safe with my loaded gun… I really had no idea what would happen. Maybe there wouldn’t be enough oxygen for a fire. Maybe the gun would explode. Maybe the language wouldn’t know which notebook I meant, since I wasn’t looking directly at it, and would do something haywire like setting all the notebooks in a two-block radius on fire. Ten-block radius. It would take a lot of experimentation to calibrate the effect of different phrases. Even if I figured that something like twenty-four hours between uses would allow my brain to recover from each use – and it might be forty-eight hours, or six weeks or worse for all I knew – I’d be in a nursing home before I’d tested everything properly.

  Or maybe Michael had already broken into the gun safe, and had that notebook in his hands right now, and wouldn’t it serve him right if it burst into flames? Now that would be a temptation worth succumbing to… but again, I’d need to be looking directly at the thing. Both for accuracy, and so I could enjoy the moment.

  I was relishing that fantasy, and staring into my phone, when a footstep behind me startled me. I sat up with a start… and possibly saved my life, because the blow that fell partly on the chair and partly on my shoulder would have hit my head otherwise.

  I wasn’t thinking about that right then, though. There was this amazing pain in my shoulder, and a moment later the chair was jerked out from under me and I hit the carpet so hard that the pain flared up to nova level, and then I did black out.

  When I came to, my shoulder hurt even more, and it had been wrenched into an agonizing position behind my back. Both my arms were pulled back, and there was something wrapped around my wrists that kept them there. My head had to be on the floor, didn’t it, because all I could see was carpet and the table Iegs. I moaned and the toe of a polished shoe moved into my line of vision.

  “I told you this was not over,” said Edward Osborne’s hateful, precise, gloating voice above me. “Where is it?”

  I rolled onto my side and craned my head so I could see him. “Not here.”

  “I know that.” He gestured beyond the table, and I saw the contents of my tote bag spilled out onto the carpet. My phone was underneath everything else. Good. It hadn’t occurred to him to look at the phone. Well, it wouldn’t would it? He was an old guy, he probably thought a phone was something black that hung on the wall. He certainly wouldn’t think of a phone the way my generation did, as a repository for data and photos and all the details of your life.

  “You are going to take me to your house and give me the notebook.”

  “That won’t work. I mean, the bank is closed by now.” It had to be after two.

  He shook his head and gave me a thin-lipped, terrifying smile. He reminded me of Frau Heilemann when she was about to tell some poor terrified student exactly how badly he’d done on the mid-term exam. Or of himself nine years ago, for that matter, castigating the entire class and recommending that we switch majors to Education or Music Therapy or something equally undemanding. Some people really enjoy delivering bad news.

  “I hope for your sake that it is not in a bank vault.”

  “Why?” The damn thing should be in a bank vault. If I’d thought of that in time, it would be.

  “Because I propose to hurt you until you are more than eager to hand it over.”

  I’d been way too casual about this notebook. Of course, I hadn’t realized just how dangerous it could be until last night. And then other things had driven it out of my mind. Little things like lies, and betrayal, and that sense of the floor falling out from under you when you discover that once again you’ve trusted the last person you should ever have believed in.

  Michael.

  The sense of loss was so strong that I actually hallucinated: thought I saw his face at the window beyond Dr. Osborne. I blinked away tears.

  “The OPEN HOUSE sign has been removed,” he told me, still with that chilly smile on his face, “and the doors are locked. We will not be disturbed.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said, “all the neighbors were dying to see the results of the redecoration. They mobbed this place all morning and there are still dozens of people who haven’t been by yet. They’ll be pounding on the door.”

  He picked up the visitors’ book and showed me the open page – blank but for the one sign-up and my three forgeries. “I don’t think so. If you had only four callers up to now, the interest in this place is not that great.”

  “And the family will be back soon.”

  “Oh? How strange, given that the open house was to continue until six o’clock. You do not make up very plausible lies.” He stepped back, out of my vision, and I heard paper rustling. “Just let me know when you are ready to give up the notebook.” The paper rustled again and he said, slowly and carefully, “Q!x ynd?mqd bze moq.”

  Subjunctive. He’d just said, “The girl might burn.” Naturally, nothing happened. I forced a laugh. “You don’t understand the language, do you?”

  “It should work! This page—”

  If he was working off a copy of just one page, he didn’t have enough context to figure things out as I’d done.

  “You idiot,” I said. It was marvelously refreshing to say that to a full professor. And how convenient that his reference was a verb I’d just been thinking about! “Your accent sucks, and what’s more you got it wrong! Let me help you out. O!dm ynd?moq.” The man burns.

  Shadows swept down on the room, and I felt my body being tugged sideways, then up. My head started hurting. But it worked: flames crackled and Osborne screamed. I heard him dancing up and down, and then he kicked me in the ribs. “Make it stop! Stop it!”

  I didn’t quite know how to do that. What was the word for ‘not?’ I could hardly look it up on my phone while I was tied up.

  He dodged and danced around the room, beating at the flames, then threw himself down on the rug and rolled, trying to put them out.

  “O!dm ynd?moq,” I chanted. My head was killing me, but I didn’t dare let up for fear he’d attack me again. I was so dizzy I might have been spinning in mid-air, and the shadowy room was bright with pinpricks of light like distant stars, and I couldn’t pause to think about any of it. “O!dm ynd?moq, O!dm ynd?moq, O!dm…” Damn! I couldn’t remember the rest of the sentence.

  When I shut up, I could hear other sounds: Osborne’s screams, and glass breaking.

  Glass breaking?

  A man came through the window, pushing the frame out of shape and cursing under his breath. He grabbed a throw off the living room couch and wrapped it around Osborne, stifling the flames. Then he knelt by me and sliced through the tape on my wrists.

  “Saving your employer?” I flexed my aching arms and sat up, looking from Michael to Osborne and back. “Why didn’t you just help him torture me?”

  “He’s not my employer,” Michael said between his teeth, “and I’m saving you.” He turned his head and snapped, “Stop that!” Osborne was whining in pain.

  Using that language had given me the usual headache, this time with a side of dizziness. Still sitting on the carpet, I said, “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “Not his.”

  “Ho
w many sides are there?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  I gave up. “My phone is under that little heap of stuff over there. Can I have it?”

  “What for?”

  “To call the police, obviously.”

  Osborne stopped whining and grated out, “M?n vlaad udjy.”

  And the throw that had been wrapped around him slowly subsided onto the carpet, empty.

  What had he said? ‘I become… udjy.” I couldn’t remember what udjy meant. A place? Somewhere else, presumably.

  Michael looked as white as he had on the night we met, even though this time nobody was pointing a gun at him. He kept looking at the patch of carpet where Osborne had been rolling, then at me, then back at the empty blanket on the carpet. He stepped over and prodded it with his toe. “My God,” he breathed, “Hank was telling the truth!”

  “And you’re in shock because you never tell the truth yourself, so you don’t expect it of anybody else!” I levered myself back up to the chair and shaded my eyes with one hand. “Who’s Hank?”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Who, Hank?”

  “The professor.”

  “I don’t know.” I glanced up at him. “And that also is the truth. I’m just explaining because you may not recognize it. Given your style.”

  Michael sighed, rubbed his eyes, looked again at the folds of the blanket. “Okay. I’m not working with that guy, but I admit that I didn’t tell you everything. Are you going to hate me forever?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Well, I did just save your life.”

  “I was saving my own life just fine,” I snapped. “I set Osborne on fire, and he made himself vanish. Your participation was minimal at best.”

  “Oh, well, excuse me for interfering! Want me to duct tape your wrists together again so you can continue from where I so rudely interrupted?”

  I put a hand over my eyes. The headache was so fierce that I was leaking tears. “I want…”

  But whatever I’d been going to say disappeared into the colorless, formless fluff that was filling my head. When I tried to remember what had just happened, the pain jolted through my forehead again.

  “I need to talk to Laura,” I mumbled.

  15. This thing burns

  It was getting dark outside when I woke up to Cath Palug’s affectionate kneading and purring. The kneading involved claws. Affectionately, of course. I was in my room, and somebody was sitting in the rocking chair.

  “Feeling better?” Laura asked. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw that she was dressed up as if she were about to go out. That cold-shoulder red dress of hers, the one with the sequins and the tight waist, would have been only marginally legal for normal street wear.

  I moved my head cautiously. “Yes. Why aren’t you singing somewhere?”

  “I do occasionally have a night off, you know.”

  “A Saturday night?”

  She sighed. “Paco’s drummer got arrested, he couldn’t find a stand-in, Harry at the White Horse said he’s never booking us to open on a weekend again.”

  “Oh.” After waiting a moment to see if the needles of pain were going to start up again, I added, “I’m sorry.” The only needles I felt were those Cath Palug was lovingly implanting in my back.

  She waved her hand. “Easy come, easy go. You planning to tell me how your fun-filled Saturday went?”

  Osborne screaming as the flames licked him. “I’m not sure I can remember all of it.” What had happened after that?

  “Mike brought you home.”

  “Mike?”

  “Michael Ryan,” she said impatiently. “Come on, I know it’s a common name, but how many Mikes are in your life right now?”

  “Well, not him. I hate him.” Unlike my memories of this afternoon, the memory of last night, my discovery of what a two-timing double-dealing bastard he was, was still crystal clear. “Wait, does he still have a key? I told him to get out.”

  “He brought you home, and you have a key to your own house,” Laura said. “He called me and said somebody needed to sit with you, you were confused and incoherent. But by the time I got here you were asleep.”

  “Oh… Laura. You didn’t cancel a gig to sit here with me, did you?”

  “No, I told you what happened.”

  “But that dress…”

  “I canceled a date,” she told me. “Duke – you know, Paco’s lead guitarist – and I were going to go out and drown our sorrows. Listen to a bunch of other bands and badmouth them, you know? Nothing that can’t wait. Why do you suddenly hate Mike?”

  I told her how I’d overheard him last night, as good as admitting that someone had paid him to spy on me because of that blasted notebook – “You know, the one with the language that you think doesn’t do magic? Laura, it does. I figured it all out last night.” That study session in my aunt’s office was much clearer to me than today’s events. “It’s a good thing that notebook only holds a small vocabulary and a few examples of sentences, because someone with a complete mastery of the language could… could probably conquer the world,” I said, with a chill going through me as I voiced what I’d been trying not to think.

  “Uh-huh,” Laura said, with a heavy layer of sarcasm. “Tell me again about the people who speak this language?”

  “I don’t know much,” I admitted. “They live somewhere in the Pamirs, in one of the high-altitude valleys that gets cut off from the world a lot, which may explain why the language hasn’t totally died out. I can deduce something about their way of life from the examples in the notebook. They care a lot about different grades of wool, they grow and harvest wheat, they have fruit trees and dry the fruit to help get them through the winter. They use sheep for wool and meat, yaks for transport, spread the dung on their fields and dry it for fuel, make butter from the milk and put it in their tea. That’s pretty standard, I think, in that harsh climate; people need the fat and calories in the butter.”

  “I see,” Laura said with her three-cornered grin. “Sounds like a hand-to-mouth existence. Lots of hard work and not many comforts.”

  “Life in the High Pamirs is hard,” I said.

  “So… if these guys speak a language that they can use to conquer the world, why are they living at the ends of the earth and trying to scrape a living out of some high-altitude valleys? Why are they burning yak shit and drinking butter tea? Why haven’t they used these great powers of theirs to get, I don’t know, central heating and grocery delivery? This doesn’t make any sense, Sienna. Just like all fantasies about magic, it falls apart when you look at the details. That’s what’s wrong with so many fantasy novels,” she went on, “too many of the writers don’t bother to design a plausible society and they have no clue how an economy works, so they can’t answer questions like that. I understand this is your first attempt at fantasy—”

  “Laura. This is not a fantasy. Okay, I don’t have all the answers yet. But I do have some theories. For starters, using the language to change the universe costs the user something. I’ve only done a few little things, but every single time I’ve paid with a bad headache. And the more I do, the more confused I get and the worse my memory is. If one of the Shaimaki tried to use the language to conquer the world, he’d probably kill himself before he got close.”

  “Using this language gives you a headache? So? Trying to speak Spanish gives me a headache! What do you call it, anyway? I can’t go on saying ‘this language.’”

  “Why not?” I thought back to the pages I’d studied last night. “Whoever collected the information in the notebook called it Alt-Shaimaki. In English, that would be Old Shaimaki. The people who speak it – the ones the writer studied, anyway – must live around Lake Shaimak.”

  “And where’s that when it’s at home?”

  I waved my hand. “Somewhere in Central Asia. The guy Thalia sent to rent a room from me, the one who brought the notebook with him, he was from Taklanistan. From the Pamirs. So… was he one
of the native speakers the writer studied? But then why would he need the notebook? There’s a Iot I haven’t figured out yet.”

  “Including why these uniquely powerful people spend their lives herding yaks and drinking tea with butter in it.”

  “No, I told you. There’s a price to pay for using the language. Just making Aunt Georgia’s antique wall clock disappear gave me a blinding migraine.”

  “You threw out your aunt’s Art Deco clock? You’re going to have a hell of a lot worse than a headache when she finds out!”

  “I did not throw it out,” I said. “I made it disappear without touching it. Granted, it wasn’t the best choice for an experiment.”

  Laura snorted. “Sienna. Let’s get back to reality. You cannot really make things disappear without touching them. Nobody can.”

  “Do you have a Kleenex?”

  “No.”

  “A bobby pin?”

  “I don’t use them. Sienna, what is this about?”

  “I’m not going to do anything big,” I said, “but… oh, never mind. Just sit there and watch.”

  Standing up was tricky; I felt a little bit dizzy. But after swaying for a moment, I found my balance. I turned on the bedside lamp – I wasn’t going to subject myself to the bright light of the ceiling fixture, even if the headache had receded – cleared a little space on top of my dresser and put an empty cough drop wrapper in the center of the space. “Watch this,” I said, and pointed at the wrapper. “Bu prdmt vlaad kzmtq!” This thing becomes nowhere.

  The ceiling fixture dimmed briefly as the wrapper disappeared. I rubbed my aching forehead.

  Laura blinked and reached into the empty space where the wrapper had been.

  “Nice trick!”

  “Laura,” I said desperately, “it’s not a trick!” I was getting too upset to remember caution. “Watch this time, I’m going to set something on fire!” I scrabbled in the top drawer and pulled out an appointment card for my last visit to the dentist, eight months ago. “Hold this.”

  As soon as she took it between finger and thumb I pointed at the card and said, “Bu prdmt ynd?moq!” This thing burns.