Dragon Coast (2 page)

A searchlight mounted on the roof of a liquor store pinned the dragon in an illuminated beam, and an instant later a siren revved up and wailed. Lights snapped on in windows, and Sam allowed himself a drop of hope. Maybe there'd be antiaircraft. Maybe a shell at such close range would shatter the dragon's skull and end this.

But no artillery barrage came.

The dragon bellowed. Leaves shook from the trees, and panicked birds exploded from their perches. Cats darted under houses. Windows shattered, a noise no harsher to Sam inside the dragon than the impact of jacaranda petals floating free from the branches and landing on the surface of the canals. The dragon's call was an alarm clock. It wanted people awake when it visited horrors upon them. The spicy, sour tinge of terror floated up to him, and the dragon sucked it up, and Sam loved the smell.

The cockpit swung around on the end of the dragon's neck and pointed straight down. Sam fell forward, his ribs and knees crashing into the control panel. He looked out the dragon's eyes to see what the dragon would burn first.

No more than a hundred feet down was a little stucco house with maybe two or three bedrooms. The people who lived there had put in a nice garden. There were rows of tomatoes and peppers and a lime bush. Sam imagined weekend parties with homemade salsa and margaritas. Two boats were docked on the canal out front, which meant they were probably home.

The dragon exhaled, and the air danced in a heat mirage. Once again, Sam tried to tighten down the fire control wheels. They reminded him of oven knobs, made from chunks of gnawed vertebrae. He gripped them and turned with all his strength, fighting to make them budge even as skin tore loose from his palms.

Of course, it didn't help. It never did.

The dragon sent a massive ball of liquid flame onto the house. Burning with deep reds and purple-blacks and near-white yellows, the flame flowed down the sides of the roof like melting wax. The roof caught, tar shingles flaking and crumbling away. In only a moment, Sam could see burning rafters and insulation boiling with toxic smoke.

The dragon beat its wings, spreading a storm of glowing embers to the neighboring houses. More fires caught, but the dragon wasn't done.

It turned next to a two-story apartment building. Patio furniture and potted plants occupied the balconies. And on some of them, toys.

“Stop it,” Sam screamed, his voice bouncing off the sharp angles inside the cockpit. “Just stop it.”

The dragon shrieked fire down on the building. It caught even faster than the house.

By now the roar of flames and crackle of burning wood and plaster leached through the dragon's hide. Sam smelled the pleasant bitter odors of smoke, and he tried to suppress the satisfaction of having created more heat than he'd spent. Scrambling across the cockpit floor, he picked up a bone the size of a baseball bat. He'd been using it as source bone for various tools and hardware—screws, pins, handles, levers—all to devise new and better mechanisms to wrest control of the dragon. He wielded the bone as a club now, striking the cockpit windows. He wasn't sure what he was hoping to accomplish. But eyes were sensitive, weren't they? If he couldn't control the dragon, maybe he could hurt it from inside. Maybe he could turn its attention to him, away from more houses and buildings to burn. Maybe he could shatter the windows and crawl out the dragon's eyes.

And if he managed that, what would he be then? An escaped thought?

He bashed the windows a few more times, but the bone just bounced back as if he were hitting taut sheets of leather.

The dragon beat its wings, generating more wind and storms of embers. At least a dozen houses were in full conflagration now. Orange light danced behind windows. Roofs went up in whirlwinds of flame and sparks. People staggered on the sidewalks, or fled, barefoot. Some carried their most precious items or just whatever they could grab: photo albums, boxes of papers, crucifixes. One old man in nothing but his pajama bottoms clutched a fly-fishing rod.

Flames engulfed half the docked boats, and in the canal, a woman with three small kids threaded a skiff around burning debris. She kicked away flaming palm fronds falling on the boat and the water steamed around her.

The dragon swiveled its head toward her. It wheeled around in a lazy arc, flapping its wings just enough to hover above the little morsel. Terrified, the woman putted along as fast as the boat would go, and the dragon vented heat from its nostrils.

“Why are you doing this?” Sam screamed.

But that was the wrong question.

The purest expression of osteomancy wasn't just eating magical creatures, but becoming them. Somehow, in a way Sam didn't have the learning or experience to understand, he had become the firedrake.

The correct question, then, was why was
he
doing this?

He had no idea.

He climbed back into the pilot's seat. Grabbing the stick again, he tried to pull up, to lift the dragon into a climb. The stick moved, but the dragon didn't. Flames wavered on the edges of the windows.

There was no logic to this. No reason. This place, these people, meant nothing to him. It was just a place where people lived, a neighborhood like hundreds of other neighborhoods in Los Angeles. He had nothing to gain from their loss.

Flames swirled before him, as if the dragon were sculpting death, just for the mother and her children in the boat below. Why was it toying with them? Or with Sam?

He squeezed the stick, driving the bone into his bleeding palms, grinding his teeth so tight he was sure they'd shatter. There was a crackling like dry straw, and the control stick splintered and snapped off in his hands.

The dragon raised its great wings, the tips smashing into the sides of houses and shattering roofs. It brought them down again, and the waves they generated almost capsized the woman's skiff. But the dragon began to climb. It rose through smoke into clear air, where Sam could see flames still spreading to other houses and people crawling on front lawns and families holding hands and running away. He caught sight of the woman in her skiff. She was stuck now in a clog of traffic of other people trying to get away in their boats.

Whatever he'd done differently this time seemed to have worked. Somehow, this time, he'd managed to exert some control over the dragon. Sam wasn't steering the dragon, but at least it was flying away without immolating the woman and her children in the skiff.

The dragon rumbled with a vocalization. To Sam, it sounded like laughter.

 

TWO

The water mage disliked water. At least he did now, when there was far too much of it, especially when it was water he didn't control.

He stood at the bow of the fifty-foot shrimp boat as it rode swells taller than three-story buildings. The deck rose and then dropped beneath his feet, and he gripped the rail and reminded himself that he could have delegated this work to someone else, if he didn't mind it being done wrong. Right now, Gabriel Argent wished he had a higher tolerance for things being done wrong. But he was a control freak. Other people said that like it was a bad thing.

Spray obscured the wheelhouse windows, but he could imagine the glares of contempt directed at him by the captain and radio operator. Sailors knew better than to be out in this weather. Only the privilege of Gabriel's high office shielded him from complaint. They might think nasty things at him, but they wouldn't say them out loud. There was only one person who told him to his face when he was being stupid.

The bright orange life jacket the captain insisted Gabriel wear did little to make him look rugged, nor did his constant and futile attempts to wipe water off his glasses. He entertained no illusions about his appearance. He was a man thinned by late hours and skipped meals, with a physique well suited to the strenuous exercise of lifting pens and bending over engineering diagrams and grimoires. He pocketed his glasses and squinted into the wet gloom.

Beneath the surface, the Pacific Ocean churned, 760 trillion pounds of water that made Gabriel Argent's own network of aqueducts and canals and sewers and pipes seem like a dribble.

And there were other powers lurking among shipwrecks and whale carcasses: the magically potent remains of kraken, and dragon turtle, and horse-serpents sleeping in the crushing depths.

The only thing that made Gabriel even more uneasy than the sea was the sky.

A voice crackled through the intercom speaker: “We have visual contact.” It belonged to the pilot of the spotter plane, three thousand feet up and six miles downrange. He was probably hating the weather even more than Gabriel was.

Gabriel peered through the binoculars, but he could see nothing through the wadded low clouds.

“Max?”

Max leaned into the wind and lurched up the deck to stand beside him, water streaming from his oilskin hood and from the tip of his long, sharp nose. He gave Gabriel a deadpan glare of annoyance. Unlike Gabriel's other subordinates, Max wasn't afraid to call out Gabriel's mistakes, shortcomings, and bad ideas. That was only one reason Max was more than a subordinate. He was more of an equal who did what Gabriel told him.

“You think I can smell anything with all this water flying in my face?” he said over the storm.

“What's the point in having a great nose if you're not willing to use it?”

Max's grumbles were lost in the wind and wet. He drew in breath, closed his eyes, and analyzed the scents.

“I smell a heart pumping fire,” he said.

From his pocket, Gabriel took a ball of glass about the size of a baby food jar. It was filled with strangely silver water, so pure it glowed with its own light. In his other hand, he held a tuning fork.

“Dragon's climbing,” came the spotter pilot's voice. “I'm trying to keep it in range.”

“Max, I need to know if it's the firedrake.”

Gabriel knew what he was asking of his friend. The dragon, if it was a dragon, was thousands of feet in the air and miles away. Just to detect it at all, Max had to use every bit of concentration and sensitivity he could summon. And Max knew as well as Gabriel that they only had one chance to get this right. There was only enough water in the jar for one attempt.

Gabriel lifted the binoculars again and peered through the thinning low clouds. He saw a dot now. He couldn't be sure if it was the dragon or his plane or a pelican at lower altitude. This was the price for not using his resources to build a military force. Instead, he used them to deliver water and life through the realm.

“I smell the old Hierarch,” Max said, at last.

This is what Gabriel expected. The Hierarch, of course, was long dead. Daniel Blackland had killed him in a duel, and instead of taking the old wizard's place as ruler of the Southern Californian realm, Blackland had gone running, devoting himself to keeping the Hierarch's legacy safe. That legacy was a boy living in an osteomantically generated duplicate of the Hierarch's body: Sam Blackland.

Unlike Daniel, Sam had acquired a tendency to run toward trouble instead of away from it, and in trying to prevent a cabal of Northern osteomancers from making a weapon of mass destruction in the form of the Pacific firedrake, Sam had ended up being absorbed by the dragon. Or fused with it. Or some other magical thing Gabriel didn't quite understand.

In any event, killing the dragon meant killing Sam Blackland. Not something Gabriel was eager to do.

The pilot's urgency cut through the radio crackle. “Dragon's still climbing. Please instruct.”

“Is there anything else it could be, Max?”

Max held his head rigid, still sniffing. “It's the boy, Gabriel. You know it is.”

Sam wasn't the Hierarch. He was a kid. A very decent one. A courageous one. Gabriel wished he could let Sam live.

But the dragon had been ravaging the kingdom. It had breathed fire down on neighborhoods from Sherman Oaks to Palm Springs, from Anaheim to San Juan Capistrano. Whenever the dragon turned inland, houses burned and hundreds died.

All Gabriel had to do was release the silvery water from the jar and strike the tuning fork. A simple procedure that had taken him a year of preparation and thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars. He'd dug deep wells for it. He'd gone back to Catalina to recover the last few extant drops of the dragon's amniotic fluid. At great expense, he'd built a team of osteomancers and hydromancers who linked the water to the dragon.

The water contained the compressed vibrations of a force equivalent to 25,000 tons of TNT. Release the water, strike the tuning fork, and the dragon would die. And Sam with it.

Gabriel felt the ticks of his watch in his wrist bones, or maybe it was just his pulse. Cold brine sprayed his face, and the deck rose and fell.

“Target climbing,” the pilot reported.

Gabriel sensed Max watching him.

“Climbing fast.”

“Gabriel?” Max reached for the jar, maybe thinking Gabriel had suffered paralysis, but Gabriel moved the jar out of his reach.

“Target above five thousand feet,” came the pilot's voice.

According to Gabriel's calculations, the water would lose effectiveness at atmospheric pressures below twelve pounds per square inch.

“Go to the wheelhouse,” he told Max. “Please have them radio the pilot to break off pursuit.”

“Because you don't want to kill Sam?” Max said. “Because that would put you in Daniel's crosshairs?”

Gabriel didn't answer right away. He knew he'd just failed to do his job. “I didn't want to kill Sam because I didn't want to kill Sam. Because I wanted to be a good man, Max. But sometimes what I need to be is an awful man.”

“I'm not sure it's possible to be both. I think you have to choose. I think you chose right.”

Gabriel wiped seawater from his face. “Tell me that again the next time I have to walk through the dragon's ruins.”

*   *   *

The next time came less than twenty-four hours later.