Shadow Scale (51 page)

The picture flickered off and the lights went out. Brisi shrieked like a child.

Eskar’s instructions—as per Mitha—were for the quigs to stay put, fighting only if the fighting came to them, but no sooner was the generator down than they swarmed out the door, looking for trouble. “Tho much for discipline,” said Mitha, although he didn’t seem particularly surprised. “Seraphina, it occurred to me that even if Orma had been here and his recordth deliberately erased, surely the Censorth would not have gone to the trouble to excise every doctor who dealt with him. One of the doctorth might know where Orma went next. I expect the medical staff will all be
avoiding a firefight. We might be able to corner one in the operating theater. Would you like to try?”

I could not imagine how a quigutl, a human, and a … Brisi were going to corner a full-sized dragon, but surely doctors could be reasoned with, and might answer our questions. It was better than sitting here uselessly. I said, “Lead on, friend.”

Mitha scampered out of the room and up the service corridor. I grabbed Brisi’s elbow and dragged her along; she had a strange expression on her face, as if she were listening hard. All around us, draconic screams reverberated through the living rock. Brisi quivered—though with excitement or fear, I couldn’t tell.

Mitha darted up a dark side corridor, so narrow my elbows brushed the walls, and pulled a lever to open a thick stone door. We were immediately blown back by terrible heat, blinded by a cascade of fire in front of us. I choked, barely able to breathe, as if the dragon fire had burned the life-giving air. Mitha pushed me back, crying, “Wrong way! I didn’t think they’d be fighting in this corridor yet.”

But I couldn’t move. Behind me Brisi was pushing the other direction, wriggling, squirming past me; she shoved me hard into the rock wall in her haste to get by. She stopped in the doorway and stripped off her clothes. Her silhouette stood out starkly against the firefight behind her. She was all skinny arms and legs, and then she was more. She elongated and uncoiled into a terrible spiky shadow and leaped without hesitation into the fray.

I cried out, afraid for her, but Mitha was pulling the lever, closing the door. Tongues of flame licked around its edges, then
were extinguished as it tightly closed. “Well, good,” said Mitha, a slight tremor in his voice. “She belongs there. It is right. Come—I’ve thought of a better route.”

He led me through some extremely tight tunnels; I crawled on elbows and belly and tried not to imagine getting stuck. At last we popped out of a trapdoor into an operating room, empty but for the hulking metal tables and surgical arms; they cast malevolent shadows in the light of my wrist lamp. A pool of silver blood glinted on the floor.

A dragon screamed in the surgery next door. Mitha scampered ahead, but I was loath to approach. I crept up to the enormous doorway and peeked into a room eerily illuminated from all angles by quigutl wrist lanterns. In the center was a full-sized dragon, its eyes wild. It snatched up a quig in its jaws and shook it like a terrier, snapping the smaller lizard’s neck. Two dead quigutl lay sprawled across a large metal table nearby, silver blood dripping off their dangling legs and congealing on the stone floor.

Around the dragon, on the walls and ceiling, under the cabinets and the sinister-looking surgical machinery, dozens of quigutl swarmed. The dragon tossed the dead one into the air and snapped at another; it dodged out of reach under the metal table.

“Dr. Fila!” cried Mitha. He’d reached the middle of the room, brandishing a dragon-sized scalpel in each of his four hands. They were like swords to a quig.

The dragon doctor turned, quigutl gore hanging from his teeth.

“Remember when you neutered my brother?” said Mitha,
waving his surgical tools. “Remember when you removed my mother’th voice box?”

The doctor spat fire. Mitha dodged; the flame hit an operating table and sent it flying. I ducked back, terrified.

“Remember the acclaim you received for the machine my uncle built?” called another quigutl from behind the dragon. “Remember how you don’t remember we exist until something breakth or you decide to break one of uth?”

From all around the room, the quigs began to croon Mitha’s song:
But we are not so helpless now
.…

Mitha did a waggling dance around the room, avoiding Dr. Fila’s jaws. The dragon doctor kept his wings folded; there wasn’t room to spread them without getting entangled in wires and dangling instruments. Mitha capered upon a metal table; the doctor struck, missed, and bit the table. The clang reverberated sympathetically up my spine, setting my teeth on edge. For a moment the doctor seemed disoriented.

The quigs all pounced at once.

They moved so fast I saw nothing but streaks of light, the wrist lamps writing danger in the air. Within seconds they’d bound Dr. Fila with thin, strong flesh-flensing wire, shutting his jaw so he couldn’t flame and immobilizing his limbs.

Once they had him tied up, they did not taunt or harm him; they scurried about the room, mopping up blood, righting toppled equipment, and—absurdly, to my mind—making repairs. They removed the bodies of their fallen kin.

I approached cautiously. The constant movement of their
lights made it difficult to navigate the maze of broken metal and glass; the room reeked of quig breath and sulfur. The dragon fixed his shiny black eyes on me. Smoke leaked from his nostrils.

Mitha looked up from scooping broken beakers into his mouth and waved at me. He gestured toward a metal basin full of water. I handed it to him and he spat melted glass into the water, which cooled and hardened into a long, transparent noodle. Mitha ran his tongue over his lips, scouring them with its ignited end, and then said, “Shall we question thith fellow?”

“Will he be in any mood to answer?” I said, sounding more flippant than I felt. I was still shaken. “They’ve wired his jaw shut.”

The dragon’s head was on the floor. Mitha clocked him on the nose with the basin, then climbed up and sat among the spikes with a scalpel aimed at the doctor’s eye. “We’re going to unfasten your jaw,” the quigutl explained. “You will answer Seraphina’s questionth nicely. If you make any threatening move, I will pull out your eyeball, climb into the hole, and eat your brainth. My mate will lay eggth in your sinuseth.”

“Enough, Mitha,” I said. Mitha chirped, and one of his fellows began working on the wires around Dr. Fila’s jaw, loosening them until the dragon could form understandable words through clenched teeth.

“Seraphina,” he said thickly. “I know your name. I have a message for you.”

Fear bloomed over my heart like frost. “From whom?”

“Your sister half-human. General Laedi,” he snarled. “She has your uncle. We sent him south to her. You are to return to Goredd at once. She is done humoring you.”

“Did you excise his memories before you sent him south?” I asked, my voice low and fearful.

Dr. Fila snorted. “Would he be a lure to you if we had? It’s you she wants, Seraphina. If she had known the mad lengths you’d go to in order to find him, she never would have had us bring him here. She’d have kept him at her side from the start.”

Mitha, for reasons known only to him, hit Dr. Fila again with the basin and knocked him out cold.

Within the hour the lab had surrendered to Comonot and his exiles.

Eskar explained it to me later: the stronger fighters, storming the gates, had drawn the best of the Censors’ guard to the main entrance. The weaker fighters, sneaking into the escape tunnel, had relied on stealth and deviousness, ambushing Censors and scientists one by one. They’d reached the heart of the mountain virtually unopposed, and the Censors had had no choice but to admit defeat.

Well, most decided they had no choice. The Censors were not untainted by the new ideology Comonot and Eskar had observed. Five Censors fought to the death and took three exiles with them, injuring four more. Others seemed to subscribe to the extreme anti-human ideology but couldn’t quite make up their minds to die for it. They were herded down into holding cells deep
underground, where they would have ample time to reconsider their political affiliation.

I was still with Dr. Fila when two exiles came to collect him; I followed them through twisting, darkened hallways to an enormous atrium at the heart of the mountain. Here, at least, light trickled in through several small windows in the ceiling, so far away they looked like buttonholes. Hundreds of dragons milled around the atrium, patching each other up and inventorying supplies. Dr. Fila, who still seemed woozy from his encounter with Mitha, was sent across the room to line up with scientists, technicians, and a dozen deviants from the holding cells.

“You are called upon to aid your Ardmagar,” Saar Lalo was screeching at them. “The world is changing; you may yet change with it.”

The quigs restored power to the ceiling lights, to my immeasurable relief. It surely reduced my chances of being trampled in that room full of milling dragons.

I needed to find Comonot. Orma had been sent back to Goredd, so that was where I needed to go; I only hoped the Ardmagar could spare someone to carry me south. As I searched for him, I passed Brisi and the four Porphyrian hatchlings. They’d shrunk into their saarantrai again and were excitedly recounting their first dragon battle to each other. “I bit a scientist right in the rostral protuberance,” boasted one.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Brisi. “I torched an auditor’s cloacal vent.”

I asked after Comonot everywhere, but only Ikat, who was patiently instructing quigs in the application of cobwebby
bandaging, had noted where they’d gone. “Eskar took him up the north passage to the Censors’ archives.”

She indicated a wide ascending corridor, so steep it was like climbing a mountain itself. I was sweating and breathless by the time I reached a cavernous archival chamber, and then was utterly appalled by the sight of the Ardmagar—wearing his humanity and nothing else—dancing around in the middle of the floor. Behind him, in her natural shape, Eskar operated a viewing machine similar to the one Mitha had used, but scaled to dragons. Two other full-sized dragons lurked in a corner of the room: an exceedingly antique specimen, his eyes filmed over by cataracts and with strange wart-like growths on his snout, and a smaller hatchling, his head spines sharp and gleaming. The oldster leaned heavily on the young one, like an aged grandfather being helped about by his grandson.

Ardmagar Comonot caught sight of me and bounded over. I tried not to stare, but he was blubbery around the middle. “Seraphina!” he cried, and for a horrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me. “We did it! The lab is ours, and soon every Censorial secret will be, too.”

“You’re in your saarantras,” I said, aiming my eyes at the distant stony ceiling.

He actually laughed, which drew my gaze, and I saw him ripple all over like a bowl of aspic. “I wanted to feel it,” he said. “Triumph, right? I like this one. It’s inspiring.”

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“Soon,” he said, holding up a hand. “Eskar is looking something up. She has made an extraordinary claim, based on a snippet
of information stashed in a mind-pearl, and I require correspondingly extraordinary proof.”

Across the room Eskar waved a wing in acknowledgment.

“What did she claim?” I asked, suspecting I knew. “Was it that the Censors secretly imprisoned a half-dragon here and experimented on her?”

“How would you have heard about it?” asked Comonot. Eskar arched her spined neck to look back at me.

I darted my gaze toward the two unfamiliar dragons in the corner. I didn’t like to talk about this in front of strangers. “The quigutl told me she was Eskar’s reason for leaving, although Eskar herself neglected to mention it.”

Eskar’s third eyelid fluttered in confusion. “I didn’t think it relevant.”

“She’s been planning this subterfuge for years,” said Comonot admiringly. “She quit the Censors because of a reasoned, moral objection.” I forgot I shouldn’t look at him; he winked appallingly. “Oh, you humans may prefer
empathy
and
mercy
, but that’s like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.”