Dragon Coast (23 page)

“Oh. I ate the bones of a woman named Dolores. That's the only one.” When Annabel didn't respond, Sam added, almost desperately, “She died in a car wreck, so I don't think that should count too much against me.”

“Okay, that's fair,” she said, much to Sam's relief. “I don't have anything against eating the dead. Any magic you gain from a dead osteomancer is magic they gained from something that preceded them in death. And good magic is rare enough not to waste.” She stopped and looked at him, her face serious. “You're telling me the truth?”

He ducked under a low, pink, meaty branch. Was it a synapse or a neuron or something else? He knew even less about brain anatomy than he did about aeronautics. His scalp tingled as a pulse of light sizzled through the branch.

“I'm telling you the truth, Annabel. I've never killed someone to take their magic. Daniel hated that sort of thing. He raised me to hate it, too.”

“I suppose a selfish person wouldn't have sacrificed his life to prevent people from being hurt by a weapon like a Pacific firedrake.”

“That's right,” Sam said. “I'm pretty much a hero. It should be obvious from my heroic physique.”

She laughed. It'd been a long time since he'd heard a laugh.

“What about you? You said you learned your craft by finding an osteomancer's library. Were his remains part of the collection?”

“Oh, I wish. Somebody probably got there before me. But I've eaten plenty of other things.”

“Such as?”

“I gorged myself in that library, Sam. Half-cooked bone, raw magic, I didn't care. I wanted to taste every kind of osteomancy there was. I couldn't get enough. And that was before I started working in the Ossuary.”

“And what did you eat there?” Sam was afraid to ask, but he had to know.

“I told you, my work in the Ossuary involved hydra. You know how an osteomancer works. To perfect hydra magic, you have to eat a lot of hydra. I figure that's why the Hierarch ate me. Instead of giving that magic to the troops fighting his war, he gave it to himself.” She stopped to assess him. “Do you see where I'm going with this?”

“Yes. I think so. Actually, no, probably not.”

“I'm hydra essence, Sam. Regeneration. The Hierarch ate me. You were generated from the Hierarch. Along with the other osteomancy you inherited from the Hierarch, you got my hydra magic. You got me. When you jumped into the firedrake's magic soup and dissolved, you must have reached for your hydra magic to save yourself. You reached deeper than you probably thought was possible. Your body was gone, but your magical essence survived, in here.” She tapped one of the brain tendrils with her stick of bone. “And by reaching for me, you brought me here, too.”

They walked on awhile, Sam trying not to let on that he was watching her face.

“You seem remarkably okay with this,” he said at last.

“We're magical constructs traipsing about the insides of a Pacific firedrake configured like a bomber made of meat. You've just got to roll with this stuff, Sam.”

Sam found himself not quite able to roll.

“We're not really alive, are we?”

Annabel came to a stop and faced him. “Of course we are. I don't feel like I'm something you made. I feel autonomous. I feel like I'm inside my own body. Like my thoughts are inside my own head. Don't you feel that way?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

“But you're not. You're magical trace elements. You're the vapors of what's left of you.”

“This is making me feel fairly awful. Can we talk about something else?”

She resumed her brisk pace.

“What I'm saying is: You still have consciousness. And a conscience. You have intentions and morals. That's more alive than many people I met before the Hierarch ate me.”

Sam liked when people said nice things about him. And he liked that he could still like things. He didn't think much about morals and ethics, except he knew he had some decent ones, and the man who created him did not.

He realized he should say something nice and encouraging to Annabel, preferably something that would help her feel a little more alive, and he was about to do exactly that when she gasped.

“Oh my god.”

Like a fly caught in a spider's web, an emaciated giant hung in a tangle of trunks and branches. Ribs as thick as baseball bats pushed against mushroom-white flesh. Limp white hair hung in his face. From the top of its head to its clam-shell toenails, it was twelve of fifteen feet tall.

Sam and Annabel crept closer.

“Is it alive?” Sam hoped the answer would be no.

But then the giant shuddered. Pulses of light flowed through the webbing, traveled along the giant's limbs, up his neck, crackling around his head like a crown of electricity.

Sam reached for Annabel's wrist. “I'm all for running away.”

“Wait.”

The giant raised his head. He blinked, staring out with eyes like fish bellies.

“Please don't go.” Its groaning voice echoed through the chamber. It seemed to echo through Sam.

And Sam saw it then: The giant
was
Sam.

The planes of its face, the set of its brow, even the voice, all a version of Sam.

When the giant smiled and began climbing down from its web of brain tendrils, Sam grabbed Annabel's arm, and they raced through the white forest of the dragon's brain.

“Please don't go,” the giant wailed. “I need your help.”

“Don't listen to him,” Sam said.

“Wasn't going to.”

He didn't turn to look back, but Sam could hear the giant crashing behind them. When the nest of white limbs grew too dense to keep running, Sam and Annabel climbed.

“Please stop running. I just need your help.”

“What for?” Sam didn't much care what for, but Daniel taught him that when people talked, they usually stopped paying as much attention to what was going on around them and started paying more attention to themselves. Getting someone talking could be a useful diversion if you wanted to palm a small item or make a getaway by chucking yourself out a window.

“Really, if you would just stop a moment.”

The giant was directly below them now, reaching up with white fingers the length of Sam's forearms. Its teeth looked like shovel blades.

Sam stopped climbing. He motioned for Annabel to scrabble up above him, and once she was clear, he brought heat to his fingers and poured flames on the giant below.

Its shriek of pain was very satisfying.

Sam resumed the climb, the brain tendrils thinning to carrot-width vines. The traveling light pulses sent painful shocks through his hands.

“Please,” the giant cried, pulling itself up on the web. “Please stop. I need you. I'm begging you.”

There was a moment, just a second, when Sam pitied the sorrow in the giant's voice. How long had it been alone inside the brain, tortured by light pulses of thought and sensation? What kind of help did it need? What kind of help could Sam give it?

Of course he shouldn't help it at all. He knew what the giant was.

Just as Annabel Stokes was part of him, so was the giant.

It was the part of him that had melted out when he threw himself into the firedrake's gestational tank. It was the oldest part of him. The part of him that preceded himself. It was the part of him that created himself. The magic that Sam was born from.

It was the Hierarch, and it was the part of him that was awful.

Sam rained down more fire on it.

The giant's flesh reddened and blistered and charred. Bleeding, smoke curling from its body, the giant stretched and reached up with its long, scrawny arm, past Sam. White fingers closed on Annabel's ankle.

“Sam!”

“You smell so green,” the giant said. “Is that hydra? Oh, yes, I think it must be. Just what I need.”

“Let her go!” Sam screamed. He loosed more fire, but the giant didn't release Annabel. Like plucking a suction cup from a wall, he pulled Annabel away from the tendrils. He upended her and stretched his jaws wide, and he put Annabel's head in his mouth and bit.

She didn't scream, because she no longer could.

But Sam screamed as the giant chewed.

 

TWENTY

Daniel spent the day in his suite, contemplating his reassembled diorama of the treasury while practicing palming skills. He'd warmed up with coins, moved up to shot glasses, and was now working on making candles disappear.

Moth watched him. “You'll never be as good at that as Cassandra.”

“The student does not always overtake the master.”

Moth stopped watching Daniel's hands and now watched him. “You okay?”

Daniel moved some of the archer-stand-in toothpicks, using the movement to snatch up a six-inch candle and conceal it along his right wrist.

“Of course I'm okay.”

“I said Cassandra's better at thiefcraft than you, and you didn't even get mad.”

“Why would I get mad? She's better than you, too.”

“I have the dexterity of a spider and the cunning of a rat. Also, thieving isn't hard if you just bang someone on the head and take their things. What I'm saying is, this is high-stakes stuff. Sleight of hand isn't your game. I like it better when there's lightning shooting from your eyes.”

Daniel reached up to scratch his head with his right hand and dropped the candle down the back of his shirt. “Hm.”

“We haven't talked about your audience with the Hierarch.”

“Yes, we did. Like I said, she's pretty scary, smells potent, and I didn't blow my cover.”

“Yes, that is what you said,” Moth agreed. “It's the stuff you're not saying that's bothering me.”

Daniel stretched his back, retrieved the candle from his shirt, and hid it along his left wrist.

“She may have gotten to me a little,” he admitted. “She made me feel … ambitious.”

“Thinking of taking a crown as well as an
axis mundi
bone?”

“Maybe a little. But that's just magic talking, not my brain.” Moving around some matchstick guards, he pushed the candle past his fingertips with his thumb and returned it to its original place. “Don't worry, I'm focused.”

“Yeah. Okay.” If Moth noticed the trick with the candle, he didn't say anything. “Better start getting dressed. You've got dinner in an hour.”

Dinner was an intimate affair for thirty. Daniel was seated only two chairs down from the head of the table, where a pair of thrones of interwoven fangs remained empty, presumably awaiting the arrival of the royal couple. On his left, Professor Cormorant stuck his nose deep down his glass of white wine and was either closing his eyes in concentration or dozing. Across from him sat Cynara and Allaster Doring, both keeping their arms rigid at their sides as if struggling against the urge to drive their elbows into each other. They wore stiff, black military dress jackets plastered with ribbons and medals and family crests. Moth had quizzed Daniel on all their meanings and significance, but considering he was trying to plan a heist and worrying about Cassandra's team and fretting about Ethelinda and assassination attempts, he couldn't even keep track of the medals and ribbons affixed to his own jacket.

At Daniel's right was an empty chair. They didn't use place cards here, so the identity of his missing dining companion remained a mystery.

Other dukes and barons and generals filled out the table, waging a silent battle of scowls, suspicious squints, and ostentatious avoidance of eye contact. Butlers and footmen kept the wineglasses full and brought an appetizer of slivers that looked like light-colored oyster meat.

“Impressive work,” Daniel said, indicating the stained-glass windows ringing the ceiling. They told a story in pictures, beginning at one end with a scene of devastation—a flaming city, buildings collapsed into piles of crumbled bricks and masonry, dead people and horses in the streets. In the next panel, a girl with skin rendered in golden glass emerged from a fissure in the earth. And damned if she wasn't wearing a halo. Other panels showed her quelling fires, healing the wounded, bringing back the dead. This was the benevolent Hierarch's rise to power.

Cormorant emerged from his wineglass. “I should think you'd find them impressive. They're by Nazaretti.”

Allaster's smile was positively vulpine. “I'm sure my lord Paul recognizes her hand. I've always thought the domes of your bell towers were her finest work.”

Daniel hadn't really taken notice of the stained-glass domes at San Simeon. Paul collected a lot of stuff in his big house.

“The reds in the flames are breathtaking,” he said, only slightly changing the subject.

“Well, she made the pigment with her own blood. We'll never see her likes again.”

Considering how many red panes of flame were in the windows, Daniel got a sense of why Allaster referred to her in the past tense.

Cormorant thoughtfully chewed a piece of his appetizer and closed his eyes in bliss. “Wherever did Her Majesty come by barnacle goose?”

“From the frozen Northern wastes.” The voice belonged to a new arrival, and without turning around, Daniel knew who she was. He wasn't sure how he managed not to react.

No one stood as Messalina Sigilo took the vacant chair next to Daniel.

“My lords and ladies,” she said. And then she turned to Daniel.

He'd known this moment would come. He couldn't expect to run around the Northern realm and not bump into his mother. Once he saw the empty chair next to him, he'd even suspected she'd end up sitting in it. He'd hoped otherwise.

And he knew this moment would hurt. Looking into her eyes was like looking into a mirror distorted by age. Her skin tone was his, only a little more freckled. Her nose was his, only never broken. People liked to remind him that he was Sebastian Blackland's son. But his mother had raised him till the age of twelve, and as painful as it was seeing his father murdered and eaten before his eyes, watching her take Paul by the hand and leave Daniel behind was worse.