Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  Nobody came up.

  The Human Territory Interdict was a joke in comparison. The only remotely logical way for a mortal to get from the Four Realms to the Castle in one piece was to take the Elevator on one of her irregular flights up and down through the Face of the Deep. And when stepping aboard the Destarion, a vessel famed for being even nastier and more monster-filled than Castle Void itself, was considered the sensible alternative, one might begin to comprehend the enormity of the ideological gulf between Pinian and Darking.

  When someone in the Four Realms went ‘downstairs’, it was usually fairly clear from context clues that they weren’t talking about descending a level in their current building of residence. It was usually also fairly clear when they were talking about going somewhere relatively safe, like the seared realms.

  Gabriel had gone to the Rooftop.

  THE MONKEYS WITH OPINIONS

  It had been almost five weeks since her arrival at Warakurna, and the Drake was thoroughly annoyed. She was annoyed because the alternative was getting frightened, and that was an unusual enough feeling that it annoyed her still further.

  Everything she knew about Dragons, she had learned from non-Dragons. She’d read innumerable books, viewed innumerable interactives, interviewed scholars and biologists and priests and Angels. The closest she’d ever gotten to talking to an actual Dragon, though, was Ghador Ghorennes’s book Ady’i Adoña – The Monkeys With Opinions. And, as the name might suggest, it was mostly about humans.

  And it had been translated into Xidh from the Dragonish tongue, which she was sure took away a lot of its elegance. It certainly added to her annoyance. She couldn’t even read her own language.

  Anyway, from what she’d been able to learn, Dragons did tend to get annoyed before they got afraid, and their fear usually expressed as aggressive anger in any case. It was something to do with their evolved responses. Dragons had been the dominant predator on Earth since shortly after God had spun the flatworld from the Face of the Deep. They’d never really learned to fear humans, because humans had been more or less harmless for so long. Dragons had instead learned to disguise themselves, doing their best not to make humans afraid of them.

  Flight, Flame, and Flomp. And the flight had never been away from. Only after the Flutter, when Earth had been exiled into a solar system of spherical planets, had human and Dragon come into conflict on the isolated and – it soon became clear – doomed world. There had been very few Dragons on Earth at the time, since most had been left outside the veil. Within a few hundred years of the exile’s beginning, a priest by the name of Jorje of Sol had managed to kill at least one Dragon and the others, seeing that this was only the beginning, had simply withdrawn.

  That was what the Drake liked to imagine she was doing. Withdrawing, for a short time, to her safe underground trove. The Interdict may not have been as comprehensive as the veil, but the living guns were a lot more dangerous than the meagre stockpile of molecular unbonding lances ‘Saint George’ had found in the ruins of the Ashkelon Pentapolitan Military Academy. It made sense to withdraw rather than fight a final and inevitably fatal battle. Withdrawal was something a long-lived creature could afford to do. That was actually one of the reasons humans so rarely did it.

  Dragons, in short, had learned to fear humans far too late for their instincts to catch up, so every passing hour was a struggle for the Drake.

  She believed there were Dragons in Heaven, maybe even some in Hell. Old families that had never settled Earth, some survivors that had evacuated during and after the war. She might have been able to communicate with some of them. She’d observed some of them, or she thought she had – it was difficult to be certain how current some information was, through the Interdict. She’d watched the Dragons of Heaven, to a certain shallow extent, but it was too great a security risk to try to contact them, or find out more.

  Even if she hadn’t been discovered by the humans, her presence on Earth would have caused an outrage among her own people, and before she could be reunited with them the humans would have acted to contain the embarrassing diplomatic crisis. Probably by burning her out once and for all.

  That was why there were probably only two ways out of her current situation: rescue, or disposal. Her existence was not going to come to light, and if she tried to get out on her own her captors had made it very clear that they had the capacity to atomise her – and more than the capacity, the will. This threat just served to make her more annoyed.

  Again, she liked to believe her fellow Dragons would be outraged, and escalate the matter of her existence to diplomatic, Interdict-breaching levels even if it meant war between Heaven and Earth. It seemed to fit what little she knew of her proud, wise-yet-volatile people.

  It would be a war that Heaven would almost certainly lose … right up to the point the Pinians turned their attention back on the troublesome world and swatted it right off the face of reality.

  The truth was, however, she didn’t really want to contact the Dragons. She didn’t want to find out for sure. She didn’t want to be disappointed by them, and she didn’t want to disappoint them. And to be honest she rather enjoyed being the last and only one of her kind … as long as she knew the others were out there, somewhere.

  It all felt so temporary. Dragons, she had read, lived a thousand years or so – although some, depending on a variety of factors, had been known to live as long as Molren – so one or two hundred years spent in a human-occupied world was simply an interesting childhood. A withdrawal.

  Even so, Warakurna was boring … and underneath that boredom, the thrumming tension of something else. Something she really didn’t like.

  Her main contact with the administration – her jailer, she supposed – was an elderly human man named Doctor Friedleiber. Friedleiber behaved in a friendly manner but this did nothing to convince her other senses. Even in human form, a form in which she was encouraged to remain despite the fact that her cell was built to Dragon proportions, she had a merged sense of smell and taste that were far superior to those of humans. This was combined with an electromagnetic and pheromonal awareness of conscious intent that didn’t really have a name but would be considered tantamount to telepathy if the humans knew about it.51 She could tell that Friedleiber was operating from a position of well-trained psychology and had been specifically chosen for the role. He was aging and feeble, always unarmed, and everything in his manner and interactions was designed to put her at ease.

  And the fact that all of these attributes were designed, were tailored and intentional, served to achieve just the opposite. And the worst part was, by the five-week point she was more than half-convinced even that reaction was something her captors were intentionally cultivating.

  The cell, if you could call it a cell, was a cube-shaped block of reinforced and treated stone about a hundred metres on a side, with some minimal concessions to comfort like a chair made of the same material as the cell walls; a battered and heavily-secured entertainment pad; and a pair of big treated-stone troughs on one side of the space – one for drinking water, the other for urination.52 It was spacious for her in Dragon-form, and a vast, oppressive chamber of echoes when she adopted human guise.

  Her nest, under Adelbairn, was cavernous but cosy. The only light in this place came from deep-set lamps in the ceiling, the only air from a grille in each corner up there. The grilles, and the shafts behind them, would be barely wide enough to fit her arm inside, and that was only if she could get up to the ceiling in her human form. It was difficult enough in Dragon-form, but she had obviously been expected to try. Two of the vents sucked air out, and two blew fresh air in, constantly and just noisily enough to be irritating. It wasn’t particularly efficient, but it kept the atmosphere sluggishly mobile.

  The only actual access to the cell was a human-sized block that receded back into the wall like a tunnel at floor-level to allow visitors. She’d calculated, as they installed her, that the walls were perhaps twenty metres thick – and prob
ably transitioned from treated stone to regular stone just about everywhere but the access tunnel.

  It was enormous, and designed specifically for containing Dragons. She found it hard to believe that they’d built it only upon learning of her existence, which meant that this part of Warakurna had been originally designed with the intention of holding at least one Dragon. When it had been built, and whether it had ever contained a Dragon before her, was impossible to ascertain. The humans had encouraged, and then practically forced her to attempt to dig and burn her way out of the cell during her first few days, which was when she’d also checked the ceiling lights and vents. It had proved impossible to leave a scratch on the walls, and her flame left scorches that flaked off and settled in the corners without a trace remaining behind on the smooth grey stone. It didn’t even stay hot for long; within a couple of hours of her most ferocious attack, the temperature in the cell had returned to human-survivable levels and Doctor Friedleiber had been able to come back in.

  There had been no scent of other Dragons in the cell when she’d arrived, and in fact there was no scent of her now, except the scent directly emanating from her scales. It was like the stone was glass, simply shedding all trace of her. Having spent almost all of her life in a natural nest made of ordinary stone that took on her scent in a warm and homely manner, she found the cell’s neutrality disorienting. It was as if it was erasing her, denying her very existence. Even the soot that dropped to the floor after her fire attacks had no discernible taste.

  Once a week, so far, Doctor Friedleiber and a couple of blast-armoured assistants trundled a huge block of processed meat and a tanker of fresh water into the cell for her, and loaded her droppings onto the trolley once they’d deposited the food and refilled her trough. Everything was analysed, her nutrient and mineral requirements strictly monitored, and the meat adjusted accordingly. Its flavour and consistency had changed noticeably in the first couple of weeks, and then less and less so – although it still changed – in the three weeks following as they fine-tuned. She knew they were also analysing her leavings, because Friedleiber told her they were. He also told her the meat had a sedative in it, but that it was simply to ‘ease her distress’ rather than make her docile or sleepy. This appeared to be true, because she was still annoyed and wasn’t entirely sure what ‘distressed’ even felt like. And she was less sleepy even than usual, which was saying something. She’d slept twice in the five weeks since her arrival, and she normally got a solid fifteen- or twenty-hour slumber in every week. More, if it was cold.

  At the start, she’d tried to pursue a legal course of action. When that instantly revealed itself to be futile, she’d done her best to figure out her standing with whatever policies Warakurna Mine did follow. She’d pointed out that they had no right to hold her, since she had technically hatched under Adelbairn and the alien quarter regulations had been written around her. She was a local, and she’d never left.

  Unfortunately, her residence had not been confirmed, and never would be if she had any intention of going back there and finding anything but a charred, empty hole that smelled of monkey. And she had been apprehended outside Dumblertown, which was grounds for incarceration. The deadlock had seemed interminable.

  Then one day, Doctor Friedleiber arrived and told her that the Adelbairn alien quarter regulatory and security department had deemed her satisfactorily acclimatised to her new environment, and had approved the next step in their collaboration.

  FRIEDLEIBER

  “We’ve been very pleased with how you’ve cooperated and how well you’ve behaved,” Friedleiber said, and smiled. “I’m sorry, but that’s what they wanted me to say, it all sounds pretty pompous if you ask me. For my part, I’ve just been thrilled to get to know you, and privileged that you’ve tolerated my presence under such awful circumstances.

  “With any luck, if we keep working so well together, I’ll get more of my requests fulfilled and we’ll be able to give you a proper home under the alien quarter. You’ll be able to go back to your life – not a prisoner, as far as I’m concerned you never have been, but I admit that’s a tough sell while you’re locked up in here … but as a private citizen who has been of inestimable assistance to the scientific community and conservation efforts, not just for Old Meganesia or even Earth, but the entire Four Realms…”

  The Drake stood politely in the loose-fitting prison attire they’d supplied her, and listened to the human’s soothing, modulated tones.

  It had always been difficult to really put a finger on why, but right from the start Friedleiber had reminded the Drake of her friend Galatine. Not in his manner – Friedleiber was consistently jovial and friendly and fake, while Gazmouth was almost reckless in his authenticity – but in the underlying drive. She’d known Friedleiber was thinking about things, designing things in his mind, looking at her and seeing schematics and processes and possibilities more than he was seeing a person. And Galatine did the same, albeit in a more reassuring way because he made no pretence that he was doing anything else. In a strange sense she could tell he liked her because he was so frankly fascinated and made no effort to hide it in small talk. And Doctor Friedleiber was the opposite.

  Now, as Friedleiber chattered at her, she saw the rest.

  Galatine carried the unbearable weight of the things he had done, the knowledge of what his intellect and craft had wrought. He knew, and hated, what he had brought into the world. If the Drake had taken to Dragon-form and drawn in breath to burn him where he stood, Galatine’s final moments would have been an outpouring of gratitude, and a forlorn wish that his death could bring back even one of the lives he had taken. A wish that he could die a million times over. Ten million. If it would make things right.

  The Drake felt that same weight on Doctor Friedleiber’s soul, the same poison in his breath and behind his eyes. But while it was a burden Galatine Gazmouth longed to put down, for Friedleiber it was a challenge he relished. A burden he could hardly wait to add to, just to see if he could go on carrying it with such ease. And, when he finally brought that burden to bear, he could hardly wait to see how many of his rivals and enemies he could crush beneath its titanic mass. He was what Galatine might have been, might have continued to be, if he hadn’t realised the abomination he was responsible for.

  “Now, the brass have warned me that you might react violently to this, but I’ve convinced them that you’re calm and intellectually capable of distancing yourself from things – and that you won’t, ha ha, incinerate the messenger,” he said with a little twinkling smile.

  “It would require approximately thirty seconds for me to change form, build up a sufficient flame, and expel it,” the Drake said. “In less than twenty seconds, security can have a team in here with guns capable of subduing me. Most likely killing me. There would be no point in incinerating the messenger.”

  “Ha ha,” Friedleiber laughed again, although she could tell from the shift in his heartbeat that he hadn’t expected her to have such detailed comparisons on the timings. As if she hadn’t figured them out by day three. “Well, exactly. And that would be the greatest tragedy of all. Sad for me too, of course. Ha ha.”

  “You have bad news.”

  “You’re the last Dragon, Kat,” Friedleiber said. She had let them give her a name rather than bring any more suspicion on places like the Drake club, which were suspicious enough for the Dragon linguistic wordplay. Someone – Friedleiber’s boss, apparently – had decided on ‘Katla’ for some reason. “Not just on Earth. You’re the last Dragon anywhere. Up until we found you, we thought your species was extinct. That’s the truth.”

  “That is preposterous,” the Drake said. She had told them nothing about her real nest or her trove of information technology, and her inborn Dragonish honesty made it difficult to elaborate on her certainty without giving away information she didn’t want to. I quite like being the last, as long as I know there are others somewhere. “There are Dragon families in Heaven.”

  “On
ly figuratively speaking, ha ha – I’m sorry,” Friedleiber looked at his shoes. “This is no joking matter. The truth is, there are … complications … with the Interdict and the information that comes through it. On the last day of the war, though, you see … the Dragon families attacked Earth. They were angry after the appalling massacre of Darling’s Day, and they mobilised. And … we repelled them. If our intel is accurate, you would still have been in an egg at that point. How long did you say your gestation–”

  “If a human defensive strike had rendered an entire species extinct, it would have caused outrage,” the Drake said. The humans kept trying to get information from her – even basic things that they had to know. Those things, she suspected, they asked to see whether she knew them.

  “That’s just it,” Friedleiber said. “There were a few survivors. There were some Dragons who stayed behind – juveniles, the elderly and the lame. None of them are … since the war, it became apparent that none of them could breed. And since then, they have all … one after the other … perished.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “I’m sorry. I wish I had more data for you. And you’re right, of course – there was outrage. There was outrage … and there was nothing to be done. The Interdict held.

  “You were apparently in a unique position, able to live in seclusion in a … very unexpected manner. Don’t worry,” he raised his hands. “The brass wanted me to take one more swing at getting you to tell us how you managed to survive and tunnel from place to place for so long, but I told them it was inappropriate. The long and short of it is, you survived. The Dragons of Heaven and Hell have all perished. But,” he clasped his hands together, and his scent and energy changed. It was like blasting sandstone off a rock formation to find metal underneath. Friedleiber’s true passion was here. “It isn’t over. We are not going to let you be the last of your kind. Earth – humanity – will not be responsible for such a crime.”