Dragon Coast (29 page)

“Treasure Island.”

Two words that made Gabriel's heart sink.

Near her lips, Cassandra held a thin, hollow bone, half the length of a pencil.

“No need to call Daniel,” she said. “I just did.”

 

TWENTY-SIX

The Northern realm was such an absurd place, thought Daniel. Back home in the South, you got ahead by killing whoever was in your spot. There were no rites, no gilding of tradition and ritual to obscure the bloodstains. Naked aggression was easier to figure out. What the hell was Cormorant doing, challenging him?

There was a sharp stab in Daniel's ear, and then a voice: “Treasure Island.”

That's all it said, but the two words were significant. The voice was Cassandra's, spoken into a small fenghuang bone, and picked up by Daniel through an even smaller bone he'd shoved deeply and painfully in his ear canal.

The official plan had been for Gabriel to contact him, but Cassandra hadn't liked the official plan and insisted on this backup.

Hearing her message meant a few things:

She was still alive.

And she'd found Sam.

He wanted to murder Cormorant for throwing a complication into his plan when he was so close to stealing the
axis mundi
bone.

Daniel spared a glance over to Moth in the back of the grand chamber. Moth maintained his glower, which helped Daniel affect his own.

He descended a single step down the Hierarch's dais.

“Is this a jest, Professor?”

“No, Paul. Not everything is.”

Allaster looked back from Cormorant to Daniel, his mouth hanging open.

Cynara squinted at both of them as if trying to solve a puzzle.

“Her Majesty has made her choice clear,” Daniel said, loud enough for all to hear. “Do you believe your judgment superior to hers?”

That sounded sufficiently starchy. What he really wanted to say was, “Damn it, I've almost got my hands on the
axis mundi
; why do you have to reveal yourself as an asshole
now
?”

Cormorant bowed toward the throne. “I ask Her Majesty's forgiveness. I hope she trusts my profound devotion to her crown, and all the tradition it protects.”

The Hierarch acknowledged his words with a regal nod, and Allaster and Cynara moved away to one side of the room.

Daniel never expected a challenge from Paul's mentor, but he was actually relieved it came from him instead of Cynara. This would just be a brawl with no emotional complications. No need to drag around additional anguish over Ethelinda.

He thought there might be some ceremony, some ritual, at least a recitation of the rules, but mysterious smells of osteomancy already crackled in Cormorant's bones. There was no jolliness in him, just the dark nerves of someone prepared to do ugly things. He exuded threads of oily, indigo smoke, like squid ink. It came from his mouth and nostrils and pores, accumulating into an opaque cloud around him.

Before he lost sight of Cormorant in the miasma, Daniel reached for sense memories of monoceros. The beast weighed three tons. It ran at speeds topping seventy miles an hour. He brought it to the surface, letting it flow into his muscles, and launched himself at Cormorant. His fist made contact with Cormorant's jaw. It was like striking mud. He found himself wrist-deep in icy flesh. He lost feeling in his hand, a numbness traveling up his arm, past his elbow, all the way to his shoulder.

Cormorant shook his head like a horse. He snorted and lashed out with his own fist, smashing Daniel's cheek. Daniel saw spots. Pain thundered in his face, sharp spikes digging into his neck and between his shoulders. Blood filled his mouth.

He staggered away, trying to get distance before the next blow came, and wrapped himself in odors of reflection and refraction and confusion, the essences of the sint holo serpent. He treaded a wide circle around Cormorant's ink cloud. There was no movement in response. Either Daniel's sint holo cloak succeeded in making him invisible, or Cormorant was just waiting for Daniel to commit to an offensive move.

Daniel drew griffin essence from the small bones in his hands. His fingers curled into claws, sharp enough to rip open the hides of the crocodilian monsters that griffins preyed upon. He lunged at Cormorant, and the ink cloud shifted, like a swatting arm. Daniel's stealth magic was torn away, newspaper in the wind. He was exposed.

Cormorant turned his bulk, and the tail of some creature slammed into Daniel like a steel beam. His torso seized up, as if gripped in a giant hand, and he struggled for air.

A panicked thought took him: He might lose. He would die here in a foreign land, in pain and fear. And Moth would be alone in the enemy's palace, without resources and Daniel's protection. And Sam would remain lost.

“Don't toy with him, Paul. He's cleverer than you. Burn him.”

Daniel tried to blink his vision clear. The voice was Allaster's. Allaster was coaching him, in full hearing of the entire court. He was declaring his allegiance to Daniel.

Daniel reached for his oldest magic. It was the first magic his father ever fed him, from the spine of a creature feared by whales. One to rival dragons. A great weight settled on his shoulders, a column of ocean a mile deep. He did not buckle under it. He was at home in the sunless sea, the eye of unseen storms.

He sent bolts of kraken lightning into the ink cloud. A cry of pain and the smell of boiling blood rewarded him.

Cormorant wanted to be High Grand Osteomancer? Over Daniel?

Daniel had held a Hierarch's beating heart in his hands. His teeth had sunk into a Hierarch's aorta. He knew what the heart of sorcery tasted like. He wondered about the taste of its brain.

He exhaled a hot gust and dissipated the ink cloud.

Cormorant's skin blistered and bled. Blood trickled from his nose, from the corner of his mouth, dribbling from his chin.

“Kraken magic,” he croaked. “This is not you.”

Daniel struck again with a blinding white bolt. Then another. And another. He let Cormorant eat lightning.

Cormorant fell.

He was still breathing, still moaning, conscious. Even now, electrocuted and burnt, rich magic wafted from him as he tried to draw upon the osteomantic stores deep inside his bones. His power was old and deep. Sweet, viscous odors wormed through the air to Daniel's nose. Cormorant's magic crawled out of dark nests.

Cormorant pushed himself up to one knee but fell back down, and Daniel felt pity. His strongest adversaries suffered the most painful deaths. He would have to skin Cormorant. He would have to rip his bones out through his flesh. This was what you did to an enemy. To someone who had wronged you deeply, to someone who had hurt you. Daniel had done this to the Southern Hierarch, because he'd killed Daniel's father and was trying to kill him. Daniel would have done this to Otis.

But Cormorant meant nothing to him. He was just some guy, and whatever grievances he was acting out of were not with Daniel, but with Paul. He was suffering for nothing.

Daniel turned to the throne.

“Your Majesty, he is defeated.”

“He still lives.” The Hierarch's voice was the chilled edge of a knife, tainted with mirth.

“Only because I have learned to be thankful to those who have served me.”

“He was your teacher. Not your servant.”

“His tutelage served me, Your Majesty. I ask your permission to spare him. Perhaps I will dine on him later.” Those were cold words, and they sounded too natural coming from his lips.

“He is yours to do with as you desire, my High Grand Osteomancer.”

Daniel bowed deeply, displaying gratitude for the Hierarch's gift of bone and meat.

“Take him away,” he snapped to Cormorant's attendants. “But he doesn't leave the palace. His body is no longer his own.”

Uncertainly at first, but then picking up the pace when Daniel showed his displeasure, they came forward.

“Stop,” Cynara said. Her voice was soft, but its sound filled the entire chamber, pushing away any relief Daniel felt at not having to kill Cormorant. The fight had just been a bitter appetizer.

“Cynara, please. I don't want to do this. Not in front of our daughter.”

How could such dishonest words be the truest thing he'd spoken since arriving to this realm?

Cynara dismissed this with an irritated wave of her hand.

“This is what I've been waiting for,” she said. “This aroma. This magic. You've revealed yourself. Was it the duress of combat, or your arrogance?”

She knew he wasn't Paul.

Electricity sparked in Daniel's finger bones.

“Don't you recognize it?” she said to him. “He's redolent with it.”

“Oh,” Daniel said. “Oh.”

She wasn't talking about Daniel's unfamiliar scents. She was talking about Cormorant's.

He sniffed the fumes curling up from Cormorant's bloody flesh. It was the same spider scent from Ethelinda's would-be assassins.

Cormorant had tried to kill Ethelinda, and Daniel thought of someone doing that to Sam, and his anger was strong enough to numb his lips.

He let the electricity in his bones come to the surface again. Painful sparks flared under his fingernails. Blue webs arced between his fingers.

He knelt before Cormorant. “You tried to kill my daughter.”

Stepping closer, Allaster nodded, as if approving of some daring polo move.

“Ethelinda is the common bond between you two,” Allaster said to Cynara and Daniel. “With her death, there'd be no reason to maintain an alliance. Or maybe in grief you wouldn't want to be High Grand Osteomancer at all. That would leave only me in Cormorant's way. And me, he could beat.”

“Look at me, Professor.”

Cormorant moaned and sagged.

Daniel moved his sizzling hand near the old man's face. “Why?”

Cormorant smiled. His gums were bleeding. “Why? Why else, dear boy? Because I wanted to be High Grand Osteomancer.”

And that was enough reason for him to murder a child. This was the world, as it was. This was what people were. They were not good. They were not evil. They were less than either. People were merely consumers.

Cynara took a few steps toward the throne. “Your Majesty. This man tried to murder my daughter. I want his life.”

The Hierarch looked down at her, serene and beneficent.

“Lady Cynara. He belongs to my High Grand Osteomancer.”

Cynara turned to Daniel. She searched his eyes, and he felt she was looking for something that she used to find in them.

“Will you make me ask, Paul?”

Daniel shook his head no.

“Thank you,” she said, as if Daniel had done something wonderful. “Ethelinda, come here.”

Ethelinda's footfalls made tiny clicks across the floor. She took her mother's hand and reached the other out to Daniel. He took it. It was small and warm.

“This is the man who tried to hurt you,” Cynara said, her voice ringing to the very top of the glass room, so powerful Daniel wondered if she'd bring down a rain of shards. “Show the kingdom what happens to such people.”

Ethelinda drew herself away and approached Cormorant. With him still on his hands and knees, their eyes were level. She placed a tiny, pink hand on each of his cheeks.

“Make it quick, girl,” he said.

She turned his head to the side. His breath quickened, and she kept turning. There was a startling scream, but it soon choked off, and she kept turning.

In sorrow, with the sounds of snapping tendons and fracturing vertebrae, Daniel watched Ethelinda claim her place in this world.

*   *   *

Palace servants came with mops and buckets and sponges and a crate for Professor Cormorant's body. The court looked on hungrily as they packed Cormorant away and wheeled him off. He'd make a richly magical meal for someone. A cloth and bowl of water were brought to clean the blood from Ethelinda's hands.

Moth still stood down at the far end of the throne room, ready to proceed. The duel with Cormorant had been an interruption, but the job was still on. Moth touched a button on his jacket. Daniel looked down and saw a partially undone button on his own. He fastened it, straightened his jacket, and ran a hand through his hair. He wanted to look appropriate when he knelt before the Hierarch.

From the foot of the dais, Lord General Creighton gave Daniel an approving nod. “The High Grand Osteomancer will approach our liege,” he said in his commanding-the-troops voice.

It was time to claim his prize.

With each step Daniel climbed up the dais, his body grew heavier. The Hierarch let her magic be known to him now, wafting from her body in potent waves of griffin and fenghuang and fucanglong and mammoth and baku, and dozens of other creatures. When he reached the top of the dais, something happened with the light. The flames in the braziers flared and danced, throwing shadows on the Hierarch's face, and her crown of griffin teeth no longer seemed like a crown. The teeth grew from her head and cheeks.

The flames lowered, and the crown was once again just a crown. She allowed a hint of a smile, and Daniel got the message.
Don't get too puffed up, High Grand Osteomancer. I'm still your boss
.

That's fine, boss, thought Daniel. I'm going to pick your pocket anyway.

Some circumstances were better than others for theft. Daniel liked dark basements when nobody was home. He liked places where he could use magic, undetected. Stealing something when all eyes were on him and he was inches away from the most powerful osteomancer in the land was not a good set of circumstances.

Something on the far end of the room clattered, the sound echoing through the chamber. Eyes went in that direction, where they would find a serving dish on the floor and a mortified servant standing near it, courtesy of Moth and a well-timed shoulder bump. Daniel used the distraction to dip his fingers in his pockets.

Tucked with his thumb against the palm of his left hand, he held the counterfeit
axis mundi
bone, set in a bezel of melted gold rings. In his right palm, he had his spring-loaded pry bar.