Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman
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.”
Across the chamber, the ancient dragon harrumphed, coughed up an enormous gobbet of phlegm, and spit it into a corner, where it smoldered. He wheezed as he spoke. “You’ll find its records under Experiment 723a … but I could find it faster … if you’d let me use my own machine.…”
“And erase anything else?” cried Eskar. “I don’t think so.”
“Routine maintenance,” screeched the old archivist, whining like a broken bagpipe. “Everything I erase is stored in my mind. I never forget.”
Eskar had called up the correct file on the reader and was skimming it rapidly, emitting impatient puffs of smoke from her flared nostrils. “Yes, this is it!” she cried at last. “General Palonn’s niece, born of his sister Abind, who died. The creature was locked up for twenty-seven years and used as a research subject.”
Comonot stood very still now, with his arms folded. “And for this action, which I agree is questionable, you think we should disband the Censors entirely?”
“She was intelligent, and intelligence has value,” said Eskar. “It’s the same principle you applied to humanity. A sound principle, Ardmagar, but it needs to be expanded, not contracted.”
“A ludicrous principle,” screeched an unfamiliar voice, and we all turned to look at the hatchling supporting the old archivist. He bared his teeth. “Other creatures may be intelligent, but only dragons are truly logical. Logic is pure and incorruptible. By engaging with non-dragon intelligences, dragons may be corrupted until they are no longer dragons. Consorting with humans degrades us; we must burn the corruption out of our own.”
His words made me shudder. I glanced at Comonot, as if he might have shared my sentiment, but he was staring intently at the youngster, clearly interested. “That’s it,” he said, nodding firmly. “That’s the new logic: I’m not a dragon in your estimation, and it’s worth your life to put an end to mine. Now I’ve heard it stated plainly. But where did it come from?”
“From that thing,” grunted the elder archivist, dribbling from a corner of his mouth. “Experiment 723a. You considered it intelligent, Eskar? It was too intelligent by half.”
I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Her name is Jannoula. She’s been helping them strategize. Remember telling me about General Laedi, Comonot? That’s her.”
“They’re taking advice from a half-dragon when there are perfectly whole dragons they don’t consider dragons at all?” said the Ardmagar, raising his bushy brows.
“Laedi is useful—for now,” screeched the archivist’s young assistant. “Don’t imagine we’ll let her live once the civil strife is over.”
“She has a talent for persuasion,” I said to Comonot. “She’s in the Southlands now, pursuing the Old Ard’s ends. She had Orma sent back to Goredd.”
“The Censors tortured her!” cried Eskar, pulling the control cups off her claws. “They made a monster.”
“A monster who does our bidding,” sneered the younger dragon.
Eskar gave him a withering look down her snout. “You hope.”
Eskar may have been baiting him, but she’d raised a crucial point. It wasn’t obvious that the Old Ard could rely on Jannoula. She hated dragons; I remembered how contemptuously she had spoken of them, how upset she’d been about Orma and me being friendly. She had talked her way out of prison at last, I suspected; the Old Ard believed they were using her, and she let them believe that.
Eskar had succeeded in provoking the youngster. Wisps of smoke leaked from his nostrils and he quivered all over, itching to fight her but unable to lunge because he was propping up the aged archivist. “You are a blot on draconic purity, Eskar. We know all about you, how you lived with a deviant in Porphyry and loved him, how you are afflicted with a creeping sympathy for quigs. We will burn out this cancer, to our last breath. It doesn’t matter how many of us die: two pure dragons are all we need to renew the race to its former—”
He cut off with a squawk. The elderly archivist, sudden as a snake, had clamped his crusty jaws upon the back of the youngster’s neck, just below his head. The hatchling’s jaws opened and shut reflexively, and his eyes rolled. The archivist held on until the younger dragon lost consciousness; when he let go, the hatchling’s head flopped to the floor, bounced once, and lolled grotesquely.
“I’d have bitten him sooner,” creaked the old dragon, “but I have trouble with my eyes. I had only one chance to hit that nerve, and I had to get it right.” The archivist limped closer to the unconscious hatchling and leaned against him; he sagged distressingly without support.
“I am too old for philosophy,” squawked the archivist. “And the half-human didn’t have to work as hard as all that. All it did was hold a mirror to our biases and say, ‘Look how right you already are!’
“Those disgruntled generals had been plotting against you for decades, Ardmagar. Things might never have gone beyond scheming and spying if the half-human hadn’t goaded them into action. Its uncle, General Palonn, visited once a year, but Experiment 723a didn’t require much time. ‘Comonot is impure, Uncle. You could set things right. If you had a spy in Goredd, he could put an end to this foolish treaty in one blow.’ ”
“She knew about Imlann?” I blurted, appalled by the idea that my grandfather’s attack on Comonot and the Queen last midwinter had been due to Jannoula’s influence.
The ancient dragon bared his broken fangs disdainfully. “Not by name, but the half-human was an uncanny guesser. It inferred that the generals must have a spy. Only I considered its intuitions dangerous; no one else took the creature seriously.”
The archivist coughed, a sound like crashing boulders. “And thus have we sullied our own nest. Only I am old and farsighted enough to see how the parts constitute the whole, to read the words etched into this mountainside. We Censors have enforced a species-wide amnesia, thinking to protect and preserve dragonkind, but it makes us vulnerable to flatterers and blind to lateral thinking. I may be the last dragon living who remembers the Great Mistake; those who overruled me by keeping this half-human alive are doing their best to repeat it.”
Eskar, who had been listening with interest, lowered her head submissively. “Teacher, what is this Great Mistake you mention? My memories from my time here were excised.”
“You wouldn’t remember it in any case; you would never have been told about it. I speak now only because it is clear that the Ardmagar intends to disband the Censors.” The archivist blinked his rheumy eyes, avoiding the Ardmagar’s gaze. “Nearly seven hundred years ago, my grandfather’s generation undertook a secret experiment. They captured human women and bred with them on purpose to see what would happen.”
My breath caught in my chest. Here was the experiment Orma had long wondered about. What’s more, its timing was roughly that of the Age of Saints. More corroboration for Orma’s theory about the Saints being half-dragons? “H-how many half-dragons did they breed?” I asked, my voice thin and small in the vast chamber.
“Four hundred twenty-one half-humans!” cried the archivist, testily correcting my terminology. Of course he knew the exact number; he was a dragon. I, alas, did not know how many Southlander Saints there were. One for every day of the year, at least.
That had been my sticking point with Uncle Orma’s thesis: interbreeding on such a scale had seemed unthinkable. If the Saints had been part of a deliberate draconic experiment, though, suddenly their existence made a lot more sense.
“Only the Ardmagar Tomba and his top generals knew about it,” the old archivist continued. “These half-humans had capabilities mere dragons did not. They were to be a race of weapon-creatures to wipe humanity out of the Southlands once and for all.
“Tomba and the others failed to consider that half-humans might take the humans’ side,” wheezed the archivist, his wings shaking with palsy. “They turned their minds against us, invented the martial art to fight us. War against humans was never the same again.”
That martial art was the dracomachia. I was convinced now beyond all doubts: Orma had been right.
The archivist snorted and spat on the floor again. “My grandfather bred three half-humans himself, and he helped found the Censors after dragonkind’s ignominious defeat. There was to be no more interbreeding. We Censors were charged with ensuring that the Great Mistake never happened again.”
“By suppressing all memory of it?” I cried.
“And by policing those undraconic inclinations that might lead someone like yourself to come into existence. Clearly we have failed in our mandate,” he snarled, his milky eyes squinting, as if that might help him see me. “I smell what you are, you thing. You also should have been eradicated. I would kill you right now, if not for Comonot and this fearsome female.”
“Do you hold my treaty to blame?” said Comonot, eyeing the older dragon warily.
The archivist flapped his spindly wings once, a species of shrug. “If our task had been to hold the plates of the world in place, we would have known it was doomed from the start. Perhaps our ideal, too, was futile. Some things you only see after the fact.”
He began coughing again and couldn’t seem to stop.
Eskar rushed to the archivist, knocked him onto his side, and jumped on top of him. “She’s trying to clear his airways by forcing his diaphragm to contract,” said Comonot at my shoulder. “Don’t be frightened. It’s very effective.”
I drew him away from the violence in the corner. “Ardmagar, I need to go home. I’ve learned that Jannoula—General Laedi, Experiment 723a—will be traveling to Goredd next. Could you warn the Queen? I haven’t been able to contact her because the quigs took my thnik.”
“Of course,” said Comonot, his gaze still drifting toward Eskar. “I’ll tell Queen Glisselda about Jannoula, and that you’re on your way.”
“Can you spare Eskar to fly me?”
Comonot drew back, giving himself a triple chin, and frowned. “Absolutely not. I need Eskar here. We have two more labs to capture on the way to the Kerama. The hatchlings can take you.”
I bowed. It would have to do. At least I’d be going home.
Comonot’s eyes had locked on Eskar again. She was still jumping on the archivist, even though he’d already coughed up a ball of yak skin and a small boulder. “Do you suppose,” said Comonot, leaning in confidentially, “Eskar would consent to be mated?”
I choked. The Ardmagar slapped me on the back. “I know about your uncle,” he said. “That gave me the idea. Eskar exemplifies what I want for our people: the reexamination of assumptions, the flexibility needed to choose unorthodox options.”
“She chose Orma,” I said throatily, still coughing.
“Nothing stops her from choosing me as well.” The old saarantras gave me a sly sidelong look. “Sometimes our reason will lead us to the same morality as your empathy and feeling, and sometimes it won’t. I find that …” His mouth formed not-quite words, waiting for his mind to catch up. “Exhilarating?” he offered at last.
I wasn’t sure about that, but then I was going home, and that was exhilarating enough for me.
I returned to the atrium, where the former exiles had built an enormous fire and, like true Porphyrians, were preparing a celebratory feast. Cooking was not a draconic art, by any stretch; dragons wolfed down their prey, warm and bloody, like all good predators. The exiles still relished grabbing a felldeer by the throat and shaking it until its neck snapped; I’d witnessed this many times on our journey. It wasn’t raw that bothered them so much as bland.
One of the things Porphyry had agreed to supply, and which the exiles had carried uncomplainingly, were sacks of pepper, cardamom, and ginger. They used these spices now to exquisitely season their roasted yaks.
Comonot arrived just as everything was ready. We feasted long into the night. I slept by Eskar, who’d been told I was going. “You should have asked me first,” she muttered, a sulfuric scolding. “I could have persuaded Comonot to let me go.”
She didn’t say so, but I suspected she would have stayed in Goredd until she found Orma. I rather doubted Comonot’s chances with her.
I was impatient to get going, but another half day passed before the Porphyrian hatchlings were ready to leave. “We had to make preparations,” Brisi—in her saarantras—explained, leading me by the hand to a smaller chamber off the main atrium.
I gasped in astonishment. The hatchlings had built a basket of woven wire and wood. “Do you like it?” said Brisi, bouncing on her toes. ??
I helped them move it into the atrium, where the hatchlings unfolded in a clutter of extending wings. Quigs scrambled to unlock and open a mechanical door in the ceiling. It let in an unexpected shaft of brilliant moonlight; I’d lost track of night and day down here. Grasping my basket with her front claws, Brisi flew me to the height of the mountain and out into the open sky. The other four hatchlings flew circles around us.
The palanquin was ingenious, but Brisi was not the strong, smooth flier Eskar was. I experienced every wing beat as a terrifying drop followed by a stomach-lurching heave. I was sick over a glacier. Brisi watched with interest and screeched, “A thousand years from now, that will still be there, frozen in the ice. Unless a quig eats it.”
We flew until dawn, hid and rested, and took off again in the late afternoon. Days passed in this pattern. The hatchlings carried me in turns, but none had Eskar’s wingspan. My stomach acclimated, but then I would toss and turn when it was time to sleep, unaccustomed to the stillness of the ground.
The hatchlings, to my surprise, seemed to have a clear idea of how to get to Goredd. I asked Brisi about this one morning when we stopped to rest. “Maternal memories,” she screeched. “I’ve always had them, but they didn’t fit in my head properly. They make sense for the first time, in context.”
We passed encampments, glacial plains filled with dragons of the Old Ard. My entourage took care not to fly too near, and kept a sharp eye out for scouts. It was easier to evade the eyes of other dragons than I would have guessed. Some instinct, or perhaps maternal memory, prompted my entourage to use the landscape to full advantage, skimming valley bottoms and ducking up ravines. Often the clouds hung low, a white ocean between grim island mountaintops, and the hatchlings used this for camouflage. More than once, they landed and held still, disguised as rocks or snow (after stowing my basket and me in the twiggy taiga or under a glacier).