Kiss of Angels Page 6

  "An ancient history," Darri said. "One in particular, dragonlord. What knowledge do you seek?"

  "A history," he agreed in a mutter. "If I find it before any of my own so-precious memories slip loose, you'll release me and let me take the mask. If instead I add something to the gestalt, then I'll admit you've the better of me and return your mask with all due apologies, and a promise to never steal from the dreamers again."

  "A fair bargain." Darri flashed her brilliant smile and spread her fingers wide. The landscape shifted, smoothing into plains again, then rippling into ocean-bound mountains which smoked and spat fire at the sky. "This is the land of your birth, is it not?"

  "The ring of fire." He could feel the changes Darri wrought, but trying to make them himself was like trying to clench water. Distance should show him the ever-changing shape of the Pacific Ocean, but he couldn't force himself higher in the Dreaming, to take that longer view of the ocean's attendant volcanoes and fault lines. Those were the birthplace of his people, indeed: dragons came from the fires of the world, as the gargoyles came from the mountains, or the selkie from the seas. "Does your Dreaming contain all the knowledge that ever was, or only what we visitors bring to it?"

  "All that ever was," Darri said, but turned a palm skyward. "All that could ever be comes from within us, dragonlord, and we come from within the Dreaming. It's one and the same. Can you take the dragon out of the man?"

  Exasperation roiled through Janx, gratifying in its simplicity. "I hate philosophers."

  Darri's laugh drowned him out. "If you seek an answer it will be here. Whether it can be found before you unearth or expose a secret of your own…"

  "Aye, there's the rub." The impulse to take wing caught him, but the ability wasn't there. "How am I to find anything if it's your will that guides me?"

  "Choose a quest, dragonlord. Once your goal is fixed in mind, you'll have a free hand to pursue it. But I won't let you pretend you're after one thing when it's another you want. What do you seek?"

  "Dominance over my enemies and a hoard any emperor would envy," Janx said, discon-certingly truthful, and Darri smiled.

  "I don't think you'll find that here."

  "I might find the hoards my sleeping brethren have hidden." The idea lingered, shifting in his thoughts, until more softly he said, "I might find my brethren themselves. Do you know, I'm unsure of how many of us are left?"

  "Then seek them." The phrase, almost ritualistic, released him skyward in a burst of displaced air and sweeping wings. It was her will, without question, which propelled him; in other circumstances that would distress him beyond reason, but there was little time now. Janx was not a creature of the Dreaming, nor of the gargoyle gestalt, and another chance to explore it would never be had.

  It didn't behave like the world he knew: a few wingbeats brought him impossibly high, showing him the great ocean ringed by continents and peppered by mountains. His people wouldn't all be resting in the lands they'd been born of, but many would; they would find it comforting. He wished—and that was the best word he had for it—that the world would turn beneath him, spinning to show him the other places they might hide, and it did, a whirl that dizzied him. He could navigate here, then, this land controlled by his desires.

  Amusement rippled through the Dreaming, rejecting the very thought. He wasn't a dreamer, wasn't built to connect to the memory that ran as deep as the earth's core here. The gargoyles were, and for a moment, through the very world's laughter, he felt what it might be to be connected. It made the gargoyles who they were, solid, reliable, and in Janx's opinion, frequently dull as stone.

  Darri's voice, sounding very much like the humor of the Dreaming, murmured, "You're wasting time, dragonlord, and you might not know it, but you're leaving thoughts behind. See it this way: maybe it will help."

  A handful of scales shed from his spine as she spoke, leaving cold patchy spots of skin. Janx yelped, painfully aware it was a child's sound, and brought his focus more sharply on the world below him. His kin numbered in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds: they could be found, if he had time and wit enough.

  Begin with one he knew: his daughter, lying beneath Krakatoa's heated peak. He had left her only a few days ago, still admiring the gold sheen of her newly-adorned talons; she would remain there yet, and possibly for months longer, before any impulse to leave took her.

  Oh, but she was a spark, barely visible. That was her youth, not yet four hundred years in age, and perhaps her human blood as well, diluting what strength she would have. But she was a spark, a pinpoint of light, and that, at least, told him what he might look for when searching out the others.

  With that knowledge, pinpoints lit up all the world around, smears of light that were hardly more than promises. Dozens, even more, with some small handful of them clustered, which was no more likely than a gargoyle walking in daylight. Janx dove toward one of those clusters, wings folded, and gasped shock as wind ripped his scales away.

  "Oh, Pompeii," Darri whispered. "London, and Chicago. So many cities burned and ashed, dragonlord. So many dreams lost to the Dreaming. So many women," she added, surprise in her voice. "And so many laws disparaged. Wars fought between the Old Races. Children bred outside them. How many more scales will fall away before I learn you've killed one of your own, dragonlord?"

  Janx grated, "All of them," and hit the earth gracelessly, his wings in tatters and claws breaking rough and raw as he tumbled across the ground. "Search all you like, Dreamwalker. That's a crime you'll never uncover." The Pacific coast; California, for pity's sake. A dragon in San Francisco was likely, but an enclave lay beyond the bounds of reason. Perhaps if they all slept, tangled along the fault line and leeching heat as it rose from the bowels of the earth, but even so, the sparks of life he saw numbered five or more, and that was nearly impossible.

  And there were so many; so many others, scattered around the globe. Not an uncountable number, except he lacked time. Each step forward shed more scales; each one brought another exclamation from Darri: names, places, events he had long since left behind, all coming raw as he worked his way forward.

  So it was not these five in specific who were important, but all of them: the sum total number of surviving dragons. He spread his wings again, rising into the air a second time, but only a little, this time; only a little. The Dreaming was shaped by need, not by action, and he needed the numbers, some ghost of their locations, so he might later find and waken sleeping giants.

  With closed eyes, with agonizing concentration, the world retreated, points of light turning again to guiding beacons. They were there, difficult to count, but coming clearer with every passing moment. One moment, more, and—

  "Oh," Darri breathed. "One moment more, dragonlord, and I'll hold your dearest secret of all."

  One moment more and he would know what he came for; would have the chance, finally, to number his people. To seek them out and wake the sleepers, to invite them back into a world so many had long since abandoned. To reach, for the first time in crumbling memory, for a future instead of mere grim survival.

  And yet she was right, and he knew it. Scales were stripped from his body, and the fire gone from his belly. He was tender and naked to the elements, a snake of unimaginable size, but without even the weapons those lesser creatures might have. Vulnerable. That was a state his heart could manage, but not his body; only once in the past millennium had he found himself in physical danger, and even then whether he might have died was a question for debate.

  He could, today. Here in the Dreaming, torn away from the physical world that dragons belonged to, he could be taken apart sinew by sinew, claw by claw, until all that was remained was a bleached skeleton on volcanic shores. Dragons knew, in the world, when one of their own died. They came to take the body, to return it to the fires it was born of; to burn it, so mankind would never know they existed at all.

  No one in the Dreaming would burn his bones. He did not move, save to turn his head back, not quite looking at Darr
i's near-distant form. "What do you know already?"

  She all but sang the response. "It is the witch's secret, this one you carry so close. Perhaps it's the secret that would be her undoing, but certainly it's the one that would be yours. One step more, Janx. One step more, and I'll hold in my hands the knowledge of how to capture a dragon."

  The memory of a Russian winter turned his stripped skin to ice, more literally than a dragon could like. Hoarfrost cracked and bit at unscaled skin, built feeble claws where he had lost his own, steamed from his throat where fire ought to have lived. The price, the price to bind a dragon was so rare, so dear, it could almost never be used against him, and the chance to return his people to the world so rich that for a fleeting moment, the one seemed acceptable recompense for the other.

  For a moment. Only for a moment, because to find them in the Dreaming was to waken them to a world where they could be bound, and that would never do. Better to sleep until the earth burned, and rise up masters of a changed land, than to give into human magic the knowledge of how his people might be conquered.

  Ancient, alone, angry, Janx stepped backward. Frost retreated, scales returned, and if it was Darri's will and not his own which permitted him to slip on his human form, he let nothing of that knowledge show in his expression as he sauntered back to her side. "Which witch is it, who discovered the secret of binding a dragon?"

  Darri sat on the mask, the damnable troublesome mask, her smile a bright crease across her face. "Another step might have told me."

  Janx dropped his chin to his chest, such a human action. That was the dreamwalker's influence, not his own body language of choice, but the chagrin inherent in the motion was unmistakable. "You bluffed."

  "And you folded."

  He couldn't remember the last time someone had played him so smoothly without herself faltering. He lifted his gaze again, rue and admiration in his smile. "The mask, my dear, is yours, and I foreswear any foolishness with your people in my very long and profitable future."

  "Are you a man of your word, dragonlord?"

  "Oddly enough, yes."

  "Then waken." Her lips were against his forehead, warm and soft, but when he opened his eyes there were only stars above him, and no woman. No mask, either; his fingers flew for it without thought, and were left fondling sandstone and nothing more.

  Fingers, when he ought to have been still a dragon, and therefore clawed. Nothing, not in time immemorial, had been able to force the change on him unwilling; nothing save a dreamer, and a witch.

  Human magic, it seemed, was dangerous. Or human women were, though that was so obvious as to be beyond discussion. Janx tapped fingertips against the mountaintop, then, a slow grin sliding into place, got to his feet to judge the horizon's light, and sunrise's distance. There was so much to do, in this world. So many of his own people to find, so much of a new future to shape. And so many more games to play, now that he could be so wonderfully certain of finding worthy adversaries.

  With a thunderous clap of wings, he went to meet the day.

  THRENODY

  A thing lay at the bottom of the hoard.

  It smelled of power. It smelled of human, which little in her father's hoard did anymore; it had all been his too long for any mortal scent to remain. But the thing still smelled of human, and of power, and Kate had been swimming toward it for nearly a year now.

  Not constantly, no, of course not: even Janx's hoard wasn't that large. But she had bathed in molten gold until it cooled and bedazzled her claws with jewels until they glittered, and when she was bored with that, she had nosed her way through texts and scrolls so old she couldn't begin to imagine the languages they were written in, much less read them. They smelled, of old dust and ancient paper and bitter inks, smelled so strongly she could catch the scent easily, even in her human form. That was the only shape she was allowed to come near them in: Janx had not saved them from Alexandria, Kate was informed, so that a careless spark could now set them alight. She had stared at him a moment before demanding to know if there were any notorious historical fires for which he was not responsible. He had declined to answer and sauntered off with a sniff, leaving Kate with the taste of dust and curiosity in her mouth.

  It was with that flavor lingering that she first caught a hint of the human magic. She had followed it, lips peeled back, mouth open, inhaling like a cat and holding the scent in her throat. It faded: it always did, only to come again from a different angle, carried on some faint breeze made by changing temperatures in the caverns beneath a sleeping volcano. She circled and edged and dug and explored, often distracted by other treasures within the hoard and yet always returning to the hunt.

  She found it in a space too small to be considered a cave. A fissure: hardly more than a crack in the wall, and far too small for a dragon to fit through. The scent was strong there: Kate thrust her face forward, nostrils flaring as she dragged in deep breaths of the stuff. Human magic smelled human, not the dry crispness of dragons or the old blood of the vampires, not the arid wind of the djinn or the fresh-broken stone scent of the gargoyles. It came closest, perhaps, to the salt-water odor of the selkies, but then, the selkies had been inter-breeding with humans for generations. And even so, it had a little of all of those things, and more besides. There was a breath of ice and snow, of wet humid greenery, of fresh-tilled soil and sour milk. She could stand there and breathe its scent for days, weeks, months, and find new things with each breath; that was humanity, ever-changing, ever-adapting. That was half of her blood: perhaps that was why the scent nagged at and called to her. She shifted to human—the fissure would never allow her dragon shape to pass through—and pushed a shoulder into the breach before inhaling and squeezing forward.

  Crushing a dragon, even one in human form, was nearly impossible: their mass remained, shifted a step out of alignment with the visible world but always there. The narrow passage still pressed in, until the only thought that kept her moving forward was that her father had fit through here at least once, and he was bigger than she.

  She popped through the other side in a scrape of blood and skin, whistling with pain and resisting the urge to snap into dragon form and heal the injuries. The slickness would only help her get out again, prize in hand. In the darkness—because to human eyes, even half-human eyes, the dark was nearly complete—she knelt in the tiny room, hands extended, mouth open again to catch scents. Her sister clicked like a bat in the darkness to find her way; Kate had never had the knack of it, always trusting Ursula's guidance when they explored dark places together. Still, there wasn't enough space to become lost; the tantalizing thing sat in the center of the small cave and she could reach it from where she sat beside the fissure.

  Her fingertips touched wire strings, first. Notes rippled, unexpectedly pure in the darkness. That, Kate thought, was absurd: this thing had been in the heart of Janx's lair for centuries, at the least. No instrument could hold its tune that long.

  No instrument could keep its strings that long, for that matter. Her fingers danced gently upward and outward, finding the shape of the thing. A harp; not a harp. A lyre. They had still been popular when she was a child, four centuries earlier, though they had since fallen out of favor. Almost no one would know how to play one.

  Bemused, in darkness, Kate drew the instrument into her lap and pulled a few more notes from it, relying on ancient memory to guide her fingers where they needed to be. Eight strings: an octave, no more. The body of the instrument was wood or stone; she thought stone, because wood should have warped or disintegrated in the years it had spent here. But then, the strings should have rusted away too, even in the dry constant temperatures of the hoard caves, and the thing did smell of magic.

  She was better with it than she expected, after not playing for centuries. Old songs came back to her fingertips, finding depth and resonance in the notes. They reverberated off narrow walls, filling the chamber with music even after she stopped. When the sound finally faded, she turned to the fissure, preparing
to leave.

  An enormous green eye stared at her from the fissure's other side. Kate shrieked in surprise, then fell into laughter as Janx slammed from dragon to human. He carried no torch, but a glow of fire radiated on his side of the crack regardless, as if his very being brought forth the light. Which it did; Kate had not, and might not ever, master that trick. Still laughing, she slipped the lyre along the bottom of the crack and followed after, nudging it with her foot until Janx, exasperated, reached in and took it so she could scrape her way out again. Rubbing her chest, she muttered, "I don't know how you fit through that," before changing swiftly to dragon form and back again to ease the sting of the wounds.

  "I didn't," Janx said beneath the explosions of air. Kate paused in rubbing her chest and his eyebrows darted upward. "I pushed it in with a stick, Katherine. I had no intention of taking it out again, and even if I had, I would have slid a wing-tip in to draw it out. Why abrade my tender flesh when it wasn't necessary? I admire your dedication, though," he said with solemn mockery. "Perhaps you should have considered not playing it, though, if you were planning on stealing it from me." The mockery left his voice, leaving a growl in its place. Not a wholly convincing one; children were rare and precious to the Old Races, and Janx would probably not destroy his own daughter over an artifact.

  Probably, Kate thought, and gazed at the lyre now in his hands. "I didn't mean to steal it."

  "No? You've spent half a year and more working your way here out of happenstance? You just went to a great deal of trouble to squeeze yourself into a crack because you had no interest at all in the thing hidden inside? You took it out because you only wanted to see it in the light?" Thunder grew in Janx's voice, until dust began to shift and fall from the cavern roof.

  "I took it out because it called to me. It's been bothering me almost since I arrived. And if I was going to steal something I certainly wouldn't do it while you were here."