Dragon Coast (11 page)

“He's still your dog, and you're his master. He'll have to take directions from me and not expect a biscuit.”

Despite the chilling rain, heat rose to Gabriel's face.

“He's not a dog. He's a man. And he's my friend.”

“All right. That was … yeah, I'm sorry.” They trudged on a few more steps in the muck. “Just the same, do whatever you have to do to keep him in line without undermining my authority.”

Gabriel might have said something else if he hadn't tripped over another root. This time, Cassandra let him fall, and he tasted wet, frigid earth.

*   *   *

Dawn cast an amber glow over O'Shaughnessy Dam, a four-hundred-foot wall of concrete holding back the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Perched on a granite ledge above one end of the span, Gabriel felt the thundering power of the water in his belly. It blasted from the dam's eleven jet-flows, some into the Tuolumne River, but most of it diverted into an aqueduct that filled toilets and water glasses over 180 miles away in San Francisco.

In the early light, the water glinted with iridescent blues and pinks. The spire of Kolana Rock and the 2,400-foot Hetch Hetchy Dome stood as monumental grave markers for the valley that had been here millions of years before the construction of the dam. Submerged beneath the reservoir were what John Muir called the “rarest and most precious mountain temples,” a place where eagles had soared, where bobcats and bears hid from the shrieks of wyvern echoing through the valley. Water killed worlds.

Max inhaled sharply and squinted, his head darting back and forth like a pigeon's until he fixed on something. “Problem,” he said. “Smells predatory.”

They huddled behind a fallen pine tree and waited until a large, gray dog came into view, climbing the cliff face toward them. Deep-bellied and lean, the dog passed its gigantic nostrils over the ground, vacuuming up air and scents. It was a garm hound, the kind of dog Max was osteomantically altered to emulate. In the Southern Kingdom, they were used to sniff out contraband magic. Here in the North, for all Gabriel knew, they were trained to kill anyone who possessed it.

“Max?” Gabriel said, and Max unholstered his gun.

“No,” Cassandra said. “I got this.”

She unpacked a pair of tubes and screwed them together, forming a blowgun. Max returned his gun to its holster and seemed relieved.

With a puff of air, she sent a dart flying into the garm's neck. It let out one sharp whine and climbed a few more feet, but then its rear legs got wobbly, and it lay down on its belly, its big head resting on its front paws. Gabriel couldn't tell from this distance if it was still breathing.

“Dead?” he asked.

“Sleeping,” Cassandra said. She turned to Max. “I hope that's okay with you.”

“I can't object to sparing the life of a hound.”

Max never smiled, but he came about as close to it as he ever did, and Cassandra returned his non-smile with half a grin. Something passed between them—an understanding, or an appreciation. Gabriel should have been happy about it, but for some reason it made him feel uneasy.

“Clear now?” Cassandra asked Max.

He grunted, and Cassandra took the lead down the cliff face to the valley floor.

Despite Gabriel's osteomantically treated boot treads, the terrain was crumbly and treacherous, and after his third slip, it occurred to him that he could simply bring down the dam and create a cataclysmic flood that would rip sequoias from the ground, push over buildings and send them smashing into bridges, deliver a cargo of cars and bloated livestock carcasses and human corpses hundreds of miles below to San Francisco, and Gabriel could arrive behind the flood, like a general walking through the gates of a conquered city.

But he didn't want to be that kind of water mage, so he continued to slip and struggle down the cliff side.

Eventually they made it to the canyon power tunnel, a conduit that conducted water ten and a half miles to a power station downriver.

Kneeling in the crawlway maintenance shaft above the tunnel, Cassandra worked the bolts of an access hatch. Meanwhile, Gabriel assembled a maze of copper pipes, each barely wider than a drinking straw. Using the wrench he'd found among his predecessor's tools, an object he'd named the Wrench of All Purpose, he tightened fittings: S-curves and U-curves and corkscrews, funnels that concentrated water flow to laser-fine jets inside copper skin. Max crouched beside him, impatient, searching out aromas.

“Done,” Cassandra announced, dragging the hatch cover off to the side. Down the hole, fewer than three feet below them, the water roared.

Gabriel threaded a valve wheel into place. A long straight pipe fed into one side of the configuration, and another fed out the other side: an intake and an outtake. He maneuvered the two pipes into the water.

Cassandra gave him a skeptical frown. “How's the crazy-straw work?”

Gabriel fed more pipe into the water. “Water magic comes from patterns. Signs, mandalas, even the letters of the alphabet, they all conduct power. Flow and current and eddies and whorls and hydrokinetic energy. Physics, engineering, and,” he said, turning the valve, “sorcery.”

He slowly brought his hands away from his sigil of copper knots and watched the contraption, ready to grab it should it begin to tip over. But it remained in place, as if planted in secure ground.

The quality of sound changed, less a roar of water now than the wet breath of a giant through a deep chasm. The copper tubes vibrated, and a profoundly deep bass note reverberated through the rock, through the water, through every cell of his body. His skin chilled.

The water blasted off to the sides of the tunnel like the Red Sea parted by Moses, leaving a walkable path in the middle.

“We can go in now.”

He went down first, descending a chain-link ladder to the tunnel floor. Only a few inches of water remained on the tunnel floor, flowing over cobblestones that sloped downward toward distant turbines.

Gabriel wasn't surprised by his success. In his decade as water mage he'd spent many thousands of hours studying hydromantic texts, questioning the older water mages on his staff, experimenting with sigil shapes and mandalas. Of course, magic wasn't just pipes and valves. Magic demanded sacrifice. And Gabriel had sacrificed himself. He lived alone. He had no children. He hadn't been on a date in more than ten years. He didn't take hikes on sunny days, his bike was rusting in his garage, and he hadn't read a book for pleasure or switched on his stereo in longer than he could remember. He didn't even have a cat.

But he could work water.

Max and Cassandra joined him down the ladder.

“You sure all this water's not going to come crashing down on us when we're halfway through the tunnel?” Cassandra said over the roar.

“Sure enough that I'm in here. If my magic fails, I'll be as drowned as the rest of you.”

“Water mages can drown?”

“You'd be surprised. It usually starts with a squabble between rival mages, and before you know it, someone's facedown in a swimming pool.”

Cassandra surprised him by allowing a little bit of humor in her eyes. “I love it when wizards die ironically. Please lead the way.”

“I cheerfully obey,” he said.

*   *   *

Laden with their heavy packs and trying not to twist ankles on the slippery cobblestones, they moved through the tunnel at the fastest pace the slowest of them could handle. That was Gabriel. He'd designed his water sigil to stand for five hours before its seals burst and it collapsed like a tower of straw, and then there'd be no spell to keep the water from falling away from the tunnel walls and drowning them. Gabriel checked his watch and began taking longer strides. He didn't want to die, and he didn't want to be the reason anyone else died.

Cassandra walked beside him. He expected her to snarl at him for slowing the group down, but instead, she struck up a conversation: “Daniel tells me you and he have some things in common.”

Cassandra was a challenge. Her manner was grim, reserved, even cold, with flashes of anger and violence that made him think of land mines under thin, frosted earth. But Gabriel had been in her house. He'd seen her cheerful rooms, decorated with handcrafted chicken figurines and furniture piled with blankets and pillows that invited lingering over mugs of tea and naps. He'd seen her cat.

“Daniel and I do have some things in common,” Gabriel answered. “His dad, my mom, both killed in the Third Correction. I was a few years older than Daniel when that happened, and I wasn't hunted, but I imagine Daniel and I could sit down over a few beers and trade war stories.”

“I don't know about that. Your differences seem bigger than your commonalities.”

“Daniel's afraid of power.”

Cassandra laughed a little, obviously knowing that Gabriel had gotten it wrong. “He's not afraid of power. He just doesn't like the kind of people who seek it out.”

“That's because he's never had to go looking for it. He was born with it in his bones.”

“And you were the Hierarch's nephew.”

“Grand-nephew, and the advantage of the family relation was questionable after he ate my mom. Listen, you want to know why I seized power? People either assume the answer's obvious, or else they're afraid to ask me.”

“Shouldn't I be afraid?” Cassandra made a circular motion with her finger, pointing out the tube of open air Gabriel's magic had created.

Gabriel shrugged an acknowledgment. “When Daniel slew his monster, he created a power vacuum. He didn't step in to fill it, so other monsters did. Is the Southern realm better off now than it was eleven years ago? It is not.”

“And when you killed the old water mage, you became the next monster,” Cassandra said.

“But unlike him, I don't knock down dams and kill hundreds of people just to make a point. I may be a monster, but I'm a monster who's trying to make things a little better. That's why I'm in power. It's the only reason.”

“Mm,” was Cassandra's only answer.

“You're chattier than I expected,” Gabriel said after a few minutes of sloshing. “What's this conversation really about?”

“There's a military aspect to this operation, but I'm not a soldier. If it ends up I have to risk my life to save yours, I'd like to think there's something likable about you.”

“Max, tell Cassandra something likable about me. Lie if you have to. My life may depend on it.”

Max stopped dead in his tracks. He held out his arms and turned a slow circle, sniffing. Cassandra started to say something, but Gabriel cut her off with a raised hand.

“Let him work.”

Max stopped turning and peered into the dark. “We're not alone.”

Cassandra unsnapped her holster. “What is it?”

“Osteomantic. Predatory. Not a hound, I don't think.” He shook his head. His vision was good, his hearing, better, and his sense of smell, magical. He didn't like it when his tools failed him. “I'm not sure what it is. The magic is different here. I don't know all the smells.”

“Can you tell how far off?”

“No. But it's ahead of us. Waiting for us, maybe.”

Cassandra took only a few seconds to consider. She drew her gun. Taking the lead, she moved forward, deeper into the unknown.

 

ELEVEN

By their second day in the castle Moth had menaced the staff enough to know the lay of the land.

“Basically, they all hate you,” he said, tearing into a roast chicken in Daniel's private dining room.

“What'd I do to them?” Daniel found himself feeling bad, even though it was Paul they hated, not him. How could they hate him? They didn't even know him. They didn't know what a swell guy he was.

“You've been gone for more than a year, doing your big, important osteomancer stuff. Meanwhile, they've been mowing your lawns and dusting your chandeliers and feeding your zebras.”

“I have zebras? Why do I have zebras?”

“To keep the yaks and the ostriches company. And your staff has been taking care of your menagerie without pay.”

“Why without pay?”

“Because you're a control freak and you're the only one authorized to unlock the vaults for payroll. But your staff can't leave for greener pastures because you made them sign lifetime employment contracts. It takes three years of nonpayment before it's considered dissolved.”

Daniel stole a drumstick off Moth's plate. “Wow. I hate me, too.”

“Then it's unanimous. But labor problems aren't your biggest worry. I learned some things about the Northern sorcerers' chain of command. It involves the spooky woman you saw in the entry when we arrived. The one with the hair. God, this chicken is magnificent. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, not paying a cook this good.”

“I'm a bad man. Apparently. So, tell me.”

“The top osteomancer in the realm is the Hierarch, of course. Beneath her is the High Grand Osteomancer, her second in matters of magic. That person was a woman named Gloria Bai.”

“‘Was'?”

“She died fourteen months ago of natural causes. I'm assuming ‘natural' is loosely defined around here.”

“Fourteen months. That's when Paul was on Catalina, constructing the Pacific firedrake.”

“Exactly. Which complicated things. There were four candidates to succeed to her office.” Moth produced four framed photographs and set them on the table.

“Where did you get those?”

“They were sitting on a shelf in the snooker room.”

“And you just took them?”

“You don't have to say ‘took' like that. I didn't steal them. I appropriated them in my capacity as your steward.”

“What else have you appropriated?”

“Nothing,” Moth said, wounded. “Nothing that they'll miss right away. Anyway, there's you.” He set aside a photo of Paul. It was like looking in the mirror at a better-fed version of himself. “Then there's this guy, Nathaniel Cormorant.” The photo was of an older man, high forehead, huge nose, sharp eyes hooded by a thick, white-fringed brow. He looked exactly like the kind of man who deserved a title like High Grand Osteomancer. “You and him have some kind of teacher-student relationship. He's highly respected, even admired among the staff.”