The Dragons of Babel

Praise for The Dragons of Babel

“Swanwick's expert craftsmanship gives his fiction a brilliant, highly polished surface.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“The Dragons of Babel
will immediately capture readers' interest…. Earthy, bawdy, and often brutal, it's a story that will keep science fiction/fantasy fans involved till the end.”

—School Library Journal
(starred review)

“Swanwick's major accomplishment here—aside from his standard authorial equipment of finely honed prose, inventive plotting, engaging characters, and clever symbolical patterning—is to instantiate a world where BMWs and motorcycles can be parked side by side with hippogriffs and manticores without rendering either ‘vehicle' ridiculous…. The ride you get from [Swanwick's] dragons will be like no other.”

—Sci Fi Weekly
(grade A)

“Witty, inventive, written with enormous flair, this is one of Swanwick's most complex and rewarding novels.”

—Asimov's Science Fiction

“If you haven't read Michael Swanwick yet, you've been missing some wonderful prose…. Con men and ward heelers, cluricauns and hob goblins, and a stunningly beautiful elf-woman who rides a hippogriff all entice and enrapture Will, and the reader as well.”

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“I no longer read much fantasy but would return to it in a Babel minute if I could find more like this: elegant, erudite, slyly funny, hard-nosed, compassionate, propulsive, and capable of punching through overused conventions and sentimentalities, and delivering the jolt that restores the form to its primal power.”

—
Locus

“Pure magic.”

—
Strange Horizons

“Fusing high technology seamlessly with magic, Swanwick introduces us to a wide range of marvelous conceits, fascinating digressions, and sparkling characters. His language bounces effortlessly back and forth between the high diction of elfland and thieves' argot to create a heady literary stew. This is modern fantasy at its finest and should hold great appeal for fans of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys or China Miéville's novels.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Swanwick continues to turn traditional ideas of Faerie life upside down while remaining true to ancient Celtic Faerie lore. This masterfully written expansion of an iconoclastic vision belongs in libraries of all sizes.”

—
Library Journal

“A world at once familiar and bizarre, often reminiscent in feel, if not in content, of work from two other great originals, Gene Wolfe and Tim Powers—and as deeply troubling… In the fifties, stories by writers like Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, became a beacon in the blending of grainy realism—the stuff of daily lives—with the fantastic. Something of the same demotic impulse is at work, I think, in much of the best contemporary fantasy such as that written by Michael Swanwick.”

—
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

“Less bleak and angry than its iconoclastic predecessor… while still plenty dark and plenty critical of the un-reflective adoption of such genre tropes as quests and prophecies, to name but two, has a lot of the jaunty light-heartedness of the fairy tales that are its models… Readers will delight in Swanwick's inventiveness.”

—
Realms of Fantasy

MICHAEL SWANWICK

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE DRAGONS OF BABEL

Copyright © 2007 by Michael Swanwick

All rights reserved.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5913-1
ISBN-10: 0-7653-5913-8

First Edition: January 2008
First Mass Market Edition: May 2009

Printed in the United States of America

0  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For my father, John Francis Swanwick,
who gave me life

And for William Christian Porter,
who gave me something even more precious

As always, I owe thanks to more people than I have space or memory to acknowledge. However, I am particularly grateful to David Axler for assistance with folklore, Susanna Clarke for allowing me to borrow Fäerie Minor, Nick Gevers for the tokoloshe and the Jeyes Fluid, Vlatko Juric-Kokic for help with Croatian mythology, Greer Gilman for chimneysweepers and for vetting suspect passages, Boris Dolingo for introducing me to stone flowers, Ellen Kush-ner for the unwitting loan of Richard St Vier, and Tom Purdom for sage musical advice. The tourist brochure citation at the beginning of
chapter 7
is an almost direct quote from
The Worm Ouroboros
by E. R. Eddison. The excerpt attributed to the entirely fictional
Motsognirsaga
is taken from the Völuspa, a part of the Elder Edda. Will's horse-charm is a compilation of Anglo-Saxon rune poems. Other poetry and songs quoted or paraphrased herein include “Scythe Song” by Andrew Lang; “When the King Enjoys His Own Again,” a Cavalier ballad; “From the South,” a traditional Chippewa war song; the Book of Revelations; and, inevitably, Mother Goose. Finally, special thanks are due to the M. C. Porter Endowment for the Arts for inspiring those aspects of Alcyone that I find particularly admirable.

THE
D
RAGONS
OF
B
ABEL

East of Avalon

King Dragon

The Last Greenshirtie

Scythe Song

The Crows of Camp Oberon

Crossing Faerie Minor

The Tower of Babel

Jack Riddle

Great Mother of Horses

Lord Weary's War

The Fall of the Empire

A Small Room in Koboldtown

The Hippogriff Girl

The Petrified Forest

The Rousing of the West

Moonlight Sonata

A Prince in Ginny Gall

In the Shadow of the Obsidian Throne

The Dragon King

The End of the Story

1 E
AST
F
A
VAL
N

The dragons came at dawn, flying low and in formation, their jets so thunderous they shook the ground like the great throbbing heartbeat of the world. The village elders ran outside, half unbuttoned, waving their staffs in circles and shouting words of power.
Vanish
, they cried to the land, and
sleep
to the skies, though had the dragons' half-elven pilots cared they could easily have seen through such flimsy spells of concealment. But the pilots' thoughts were turned toward the West, where Avalon's industrial strength was based, and where its armies were rumored to be massing.