Buch lesen: «The Book of Dragons»

INTRODUCTION

When my two daughters were very young, I used to tell them bedtime stories. I’d make the stories up each night but never managed to write them down (much to my youngest daughter’s frustration). They were stories about a girl named Jasmine—who lived not far from their grandmother’s house and who kept her dreams in a snow globe on her bedroom dresser, safe from a witch who sought to steal them—and of her best friend, a small orange dragon named Marmaduke, who was wise and brave and helped Jasmine to understand how she could save herself. Marmaduke even engaged in some glassblowing, not too long after a family vacation during which we watched a glassblower at work. The memories are hazy, but I think the glassblowing had something to do with the unmaking of the world, which seemed a lot for such a tiny dragon, but magic can make heroes of us all.

My own first memory of dragons, if it’s possible to isolate such memories, given how pervasive dragons are in our culture, is probably Pete in the not-particularly-excellent Disney film Pete’s Dragon, in which a young boy finds an invisible friend, Elliot, who helps him when he needs it most and brings adventure into his life. If I can’t quite be sure about the first dragon I encountered, it’s hard to forget the many that followed: the greatest wyrm of them all, Tolkien’s Smaug, raining fire down on Lake-town in The Hobbit; followed by Yevaud and the archipelagos of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea; the white dragon, Ruth, from Anne McCaffrey’s Pern; Naomi Novik’s Temeraire; and George R. R. Martin’s dragons of Westeros: Rhaegal, Viserion, and Drogon.

What do all of these great and mighty dragons have in common? Perhaps that they reflect some aspect of ourselves back to us through story. They can be wise friends and counselors, devious enemies and fiery opponents, and pretty much everything in between. Mayland Long in R. A. MacAvoy’s Tea with the Black Dragon is a wealthy older man who simply wants to help a mother find her daughter, but it seems he is also a two-thousand-year-old dragon. Lucius Shepard’s great and maligned Griaule from The Dragon Griaule, possibly the greatest dragon to enter fantasy literature in the past thirty years, is a slumbering beast the size of a mountain range on which towns and villages are built, and whose human population both depends upon and hates him in equal measure. Dragons, it seems, have always been with us in story, and although I am not a researcher of folktales or an ethnologist, I could be convinced that dragons can be traced back to the first fires around which our distant ancestors gathered, inspired by dark places beyond the light of the fire and the reptiles that lived there—I’m much more skeptical that they are some sort of species memory of dinosaurs, but let’s not rule that out.

Regardless, the way we see dragons depends on where we are in the world. In the West, the image of the fire-breathing, four-legged, winged beast arose in the High Middle Ages. Perhaps a variation on Satan, the Western dragon is often evil, greedy, and clever, and usually hoarding some terrible treasure. There are the dragons of the East, long, snakelike creatures seen as symbols of good fortune and associated with water. Serpentine dragons, like the naga, are found in India and in many Hindu cultures, and are similar to the Indonesian naga or nogo dragons. Japanese dragons, like Ryūjin, the dragon god of the sea, are also water creatures. And so on and so on around the world.

Lizardor serpent-like features are a constant, but the dragon itself may or may not take human form; can be a creature of any of the four elements (air, earth, fire, or water); may crave wealth or not; and may or may not be able to take flight. But it will live at the heart of its story, as the dragons do in the stories in the book you now hold. The Book of Dragons grew out of my desire to spend some time with a new group of dragons and the people who encounter them, and so I turned to some of the best writers of science fiction and fantasy of our time and asked them to tell you the story of their dragon, the one that filled their dreams, and they responded with a bestiary of dragons as rich and varied as you could wish for. In these pages, you will encounter dragons on distant worlds as they follow us out to the stars, in the rain-drenched mountains of the Malay Peninsula, in the barn, and living just next door. They are alternately funny and fearsome, fiery and water-drenched, but they are all remarkable.

The stories and poems in the pages here, from Daniel Abraham, Kelly Barnhill, Peter S. Beagle, Brooke Bolander, Beth Cato, Zen Cho, C. S. E. Cooney, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott, Amal El-Mohtar, Sarah Gailey, Theodora Goss, Ellen Klages, R. F. Kuang, Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky, Ken Liu, Scott Lynch, Todd McCaffrey, Seanan McGuire, Patricia A. McKillip, Garth Nix, K. J. Parker, Kelly Robson, Michael Swanwick, Jo Walton, Elle Katharine White, JY Yang, and Jane Yolen, are all I could have wished for, and I hope you will love them just as much as I do!

JONATHAN STRAHAN

PERTH, AUSTRALIA, 2019

WHAT HEROISM TELLS US

Jane Yolen

There is the smell of the heroic in the air:

a pair of hawks circling their nest at feeding time.

Rabbits escaping the talons and claws of destiny.

The flesh of impala laughing in the hyena’s mouth.

Flash of sword repeating in the dragon’s eye.

The princess repelling down the tower on a rope of her own hair.

Even more, I think it’s the sight of you, my friend,

pulling love out of despair,

snatching happiness from the ash of winter,

pushing open the closed door, letting in spring.

MATRICULATION

Elle Katharine White

Elle Katharine White (ellekatharinewhite.com) was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, where she learned valuable life skills like how to clear a snowy driveway in under twenty minutes (a lot easier than you think) and how to cheer for the perennial underdog (a lot harder than you think). She is the author of the Heartstone series: Heartstone, Dragonshadow, and Flamebringer. When she’s not writing, she spends her time reading, drinking tea, and having strong feelings about fictional characters.

She should have been ticketed.

The cop stationed on the roof stared at her as she flew past, heedless of the portable speed-scryer screaming in her hand, her mouth open in a perfect O. Melee caught the briefest glimpse, only heard the radar’s beep as a smudge of sound whipped past by the wind, but she blessed whoever had assigned a rookie to this route. Clearly the cop had never seen a dragon before. By the time she had recovered, Melee was already out of sight.

Landing in Pawn Row was always tricky, and Melee sensed rather than saw the undead eyes peering at her from under stoops and out of upstairs windows, curious to see whether they would be contacting their insurance companies before day’s end. She shifted her weight, and the dragon banked. The steel and alchromium bones supporting its wings caught the red rays of the evening sun, and the light licked along the dragon’s chassis with the faintest crackle of magic. She felt it like static, raising the hairs on the back of her neck.

“Down, buddy,” she whispered, and signed the symbol for descend on the thaumium plate by her right hand. The dragon folded its wings and dived. The stone spires of the university and surrounding shops melted into a salty, grayish blur as the wind tugged tears from her eyes and gravity lost meaning and for one perfect instant she was free and all was right with the world.

Then the world remembered itself and gravity caught up and it was all she could do to sign the landing sequence before the dragon joyously sent them both crashing onto the roof tiles below. Its wings snapped out, billowing like swollen kites, and Melee heard the scrape of metal on stone. Her finger left glowing lines on the thaumium as she traced out the symbol for perch, and with the hiss of steam and cooling steel, the dragon settled on the edge of a roof overlooking Pawn Row. She unhooked her harness and swung out of the driver’s cockpit.

“You know, there are fines for scratching the façade,” a voice from the cornice said.

Melee yelped. She managed one stuttering step toward the roof’s edge before catching herself on the dragon’s outstretched wingtip, as an image of tomorrow’s headline flashed through her mind’s eye in all its ironic glory: YOUNG MAGITECHNICIAN’S SCHOLARSHIP WINNER PERISHES IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT TWO DAYS BEFORE TERM STARTS.

“Careful now,” the gargoyle said dryly. “Forget the fine—you don’t want to take a tumble.”

Yeah. I’m not that lucky, she mused, glancing over the tiled parapet. It was only two stories to the cobbles of Pawn Row below. A fall from that height might merely result in a mess of broken bones and bloody gashes, especially if she hit the roof of the stoop first. Not that that would improve her situation. Spilling blood on Pawn Row was as good as a death sentence anyway.

“You could try a sign,” she muttered.

The gargoyle crouched on the corner of the building, tilted its head, and peered at her with one obsidian eye. “You could try not parking on the roof, love.”

“And miss the view? Nah. He likes it.” She pulled off her flying goggles and patted the dragon’s chassis. “Dontcha?”

The gargoyle gave a pointed look at the guano-streaked crenellations of the row of shops opposite them. Beyond, just visible through the smog of wood smoke and industrial alchemicals, the spires of the University of Uncommon Arts and Sciences rose to dizzying heights above the city to which it had given birth. He sniffed. “Ah, well, can’t fault him for that.”

She smiled slightly. She didn’t make a habit of smiling, but then, who was the gargoyle going to tell? If she had to guess, he was up here for the same reason she was. It would take a dedicated vandal to paint obscenities on anything parked on the roof, dragon or gargoyle.

“You’re not going for, er, dinner, are you?” the gargoyle asked as she stuffed her goggles into the satchel at her side.

“No,” she said firmly. “Just a bit of shopping.”

There was a grinding sound as the gargoyle turned to face her. Expressions on gargoyle-kind rarely branched out into anything that couldn’t be described as “stony,” but even so, she could see he was surprised. “Starting at the university on Monday?” he asked.

It would have been so easy to lie. Just a nod and the conversation could be over, but then again, why should she lie? It wasn’t as if she wouldn’t be attending the university. The two were on the same grounds. “Institute,” she said. “Technical branch. Keep an eye on him for me, will you?”

The gargoyle’s eyes twinkled. “Good on you, love. The world could always use more magitechs. Sure I’ll watch your ride. Just don’t be long, and, please, if at all possible, be human when you get back. It’s awful disorienting when they’re not.”

“Don’t worry, I will be.”

“I assume you know who you’re dealing with down there?”

“Carl’s an old friend,” she said.

The gargoyle gave a gravelly chuckle. “Well, well, if you say so. You take care of yourself, all right? We’ll both be here when you get back.”

She thanked him again and turned to the dragon. It sat motionless on its haunches, surveying the street below with what she liked to imagine was a protective gaze. “I’ll be right back, buddy,” she whispered, and whistled the locking sequence her father had taught her: a few notes, carefully arranged, changed every month or so, and nonsensical to the casual listener. To a keener ear, or to anyone who’d been close to Melee for longer than six months, the random sequences might begin to form a pattern, just discernible as the beginning of a song. A more patient listener would find the entire tune laid out within a year, and they might wonder why such a pretty lullaby had earned this practical vivisection. Fortunately, no one ever managed to stick around for more than a few months. Melee made sure of it.

The golden light faded from the dragon’s eyes as it settled into standby.

“Back in a bit,” she told the gargoyle, and headed for the rusty fire escape on the side of the building.

The bell chimed softly as she opened the door. It was dim inside and crowded in a way that made Melee feel right at home. The dark wood of the floor and ceiling glowed in the light of the false electric candles on the walls, the sight of which very nearly made her smile again. Carl had renovated since her last visit. Shelves filled the shop from floor to ceiling, stuffed with the leftovers and hand-me-downs of centuries of university students. She passed piles of mended rucksacks, a bin of shoes made for non-human feet, old microwaves, taxidermy homunculi, heaps of mismatched dishes, and brass alchemical sets on her way to the back where the true treasures lived.

Melee slowed as she approached the last row of shelves. Just beyond shone the long glass counter, sparkling clean. There was the magnificent mahogany cabinet behind it, locking away the tools of Carl’s true trade. And there, laying around it in piles as tall as she was, were the textbooks.

Carl, however, was nowhere in sight. She picked her way over a liger-skin rug and began searching the nearest stack, eyes keyed for the distinctive orange cover of Dragons, Dynamos, and Dirty Jobs: A Primer in Magitech. It was only after combing through three stacks and nine copies of Necromancy for the Absolute Beginner that she thought to glance at the counter itself.

There, spread out on the glittering glass surface, was the primer.

Please, please, be readable, she thought, and eased a finger beneath the battered cover. Gingerly, she lifted it a few inches, waiting for the telltale movement. When no words scurried across the page and out of sight, she breathed a sigh of relief. The magical silverfish she’d found graffitied in the last pawnshop’s primer had herded the words into the spine each time it was opened. Probably the parting gift of a senior lexomancer to all those undergraduates who had to stoop to buying their books on Pawn Row. Imagining all sorts of miserable postgraduate fates on the fictional lexomancer, Melee hadn’t been able to resist adding a few lines of her own in the margins of that one before shoving it back on the shelf.

The text on the pages of this primer, however, stayed firmly in place, obscured here and there by patterns of oily thumbprints in various degrees of translucence. They testified to at least one previous owner with a love of pizza, and no hope of resale profit. She thumbed through the first chapter, wrinkling her nose at the faint smell of mildew and ensorcelled embalming fluid that wafted out. The pizza-loving owner must’ve been a necromancy major exploring their backup career options. Wonderful. She’d heard of senior students binding unpleasant little creatures within the textbooks they didn’t like as practice for their finals, and the last thing she wanted was a pseudo-djinn bursting from the pages and interrupting her studies.

The trouble was, she needed this textbook. Term started on Monday, and she was running out of pawnshops where she was still welcome.

“Interested, darling?”

Melee slammed the book shut and let out a stream of expletives her father would be shocked to hear she knew. The man standing behind the counter merely smiled and raised one perfectly manicured eyebrow.

“Good to see you again too, Melee,” he said when she stopped for breath.

“Carl,” she growled, “you can’t sneak up on people like that.”

“Says who?”

“Says me!”

He sighed. “Next time I’ll wear a cowbell. Now: Are you interested?”

She looked down at the fraying cover, the pizza stains, the torn pages. “Yes,” she said carefully, “but I think I should get a discount.”

“What?” At least, that’s what she assumed he meant. It came out more like, “Hwhaaaaaaa?”

“Look at it,” she said. “The professor’ll quarantine it as a biohazard.”

Carl sucked in his cheeks until she could see the outlines of his elongated eyeteeth, making him look more like a corpse. An impressive feat, given that Carl de Rosia had been legally dead for at least a hundred years.

“Melee. Darling,” the vampire tried. “Be reasonable. You’re going for magitech, aren’t you?” He waved a hand before she could answer. “What am I saying? Of course you are. I’ve known Instructor Groźny for … well, for a long time. She’s been teaching those technical courses since before I got my fangs. As long as you have it, she couldn’t care less about the state of your textbook. Besides, a little battering gives it character, don’t you think?”

“A little battering?”

He looked again at the weary cover. “I believe the proprietary term is ‘well loved.’”

Melee bit her tongue. He was probably right: about the book, about Groźny, about everything. No matter where one fell on the vital spectrum, no one earned a position at the University of Uncommon Arts and Sciences without enough life experience to fill a textbook of their own. Or a position at the institute technical branch, she reminded herself. Those who made it that far had learned to pick their battles.

“I’ll give you one hundred and twenty,” she said.

“One hundred and twenty? One hundred and twenty?” The words escaped with more than a hint of a whine, and Melee saw his lips twitch back from his fangs. She guessed he’d added a few more words out of the range of human hearing. “Do you want me to starve, heartless girl?”

“You’re being dramatic again, Carl. You’re not going to starve.”

“I might!” he cried. “I haven’t had customers in days.”

“Liar.”

“All right, hours. But I have a high metabolism and … and you don’t understand …”

Melee wondered if the University Theater knew what talent they had missed when Carl de Rosia decided to pursue the unlife of a pawnbroker. Really, all that was missing were tears and a lacy handkerchief.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You could get four hundred and fifty for that orrery set behind you, no problem.” Carl gave the delicate brass instrument a doubtful glance. She pressed on. “I know for a fact there’s a first year arithmancy student down the road who needs one before term starts.”

Carl’s theatrical despair evaporated. “Oh? And is this first year … hmm … healthy?”

She gave him a look. “Nope. Not playing that game—I’m not your dealer. If you want to know, you’re gonna have to ask her yourself. In the meantime, what would you say to a hundred and fifty?”

“I’d say you’re laughing at me.”

“Never. Two hundred?”

Carl tugged the primer toward him. It was all she could do not to follow it with a look as hungry as his. “Three hundred and fifty, and that’s generous. Call it a friends-and-family discount.” His expression softened. “For your dad.”

Melee swallowed hard. “How about two hundred and fifty?” she asked.

“How about you get out of my shop?”

He said it with a smile, but it was the smile of a cat who knew the score. Melee ran a silent tally of everything she’d spent in the last forty-eight hours, checking off the items on the crumpled list in her pocket. She’d had it memorized for weeks, ever since that final miraculous scholarship had gone through. Metallurgy for the Magitechnician, Twelfth Edition. One hundred and fifty. Nine Parts Iron: A Brief History of Thaumaturgical Transportation. One hundred and twenty-five. The Combustible Compendium. Fifty, but that was only because the pawnbroker had just sold a gilt alchemical set to a senior with three fawning hangers-on who agreed to split the exorbitant fifteen-hundred price tag between them, and he was more than satiated. Melee had been an afterthought.

Three hundred and twenty-five spent in the past two days, and all but one textbook purchased. She touched the cover again and watched the cheap cardboard dimple beneath her fingertips. It was ridiculous, really, considering the shape it was in. Carl was asking too much—he knew he was asking too much—but he’d stated his price and showed his fangs, and she knew better than to push now. Three hundred and fifty for family and friends? Yeah, that was certainly for her father.

“You won’t find it, you know,” Carl said, before she could step away from the counter. “This book. Anywhere else in the city. I know that for a fact.”

“How did you …?”

“Don’t worry, I can’t read your thoughts, though in this case I don’t need to. You were thinking of trying another shop.”

“You’d be surprised what’s out there,” she said, but her words sounded hollow, even to her.

Carl spread his long, spidery fingers over the glass countertop. They shone like old ivory in the dim light of the shop. His nails, Melee noticed, were very sharp. “I get the lists of all required texts from the professors at the university. And the institute,” he added, glancing again at the primer. “All of us on Pawn Row do, and, child, we fight fang and nail to make certain we have those books available for the dear, desperate students like you. When I tell you that I was the only broker to get a copy of this one, I can assure you it’s the truth. I have the receipt.”

Melee looked at his hands, looked at the primer, and drew in a long breath. Sometimes she really hated vampires.

“Three hundred. And,” she added over his faint growl, “and I’ll tell that arithmancy student to come to you for her orrery. That’s a guaranteed four hundred within the next twenty-four hours.” Then, because she figured she could hardly lose any more ground by it, threw in, “Take it or leave it.”

The growl deepened, wavered, and gave way to a throaty chuckle. “You are your father’s daughter, aren’t you? Well, then, darling, I’ll take it.”

She stuffed the book into her patched satchel as Carl turned to the cabinet behind the counter, unlocked it, and removed a long black box, its surface gleaming from repeated use. He set it between them and flipped open the catch. The faintest scent of antiseptic wafted up from the crystal vials, plastic tubing, and graduated cylinders tucked inside, the purpose of each Melee had learned intimately, repeatedly, and painfully over the last few days. She rolled up her sleeve—her right one, as she didn’t want him seeing how much she’d already paid with her left—and rested it against the glass.

The one thing you could say for Carl, or any vampire in business on Pawn Row: they worked quickly. Leather cuff and tourniquet, iodine swab and tubing laid out, needle drawn (“Brand-new and sterile, I promise,” he said at her look) and a stool dutifully pulled up. Then the needle prick, the slow bleed, and the world narrowed to the warm red line traveling from the crook of her arm to the cylinder carefully spread with anticoagulant, the reflection spilling across the glass in strange patterns she felt certain any signometry major would tell her spoke of life and death in no uncertain terms.

“Make a fist, darling,” Carl said absently, his eyes fixed on the rising red line. “Helps it move faster.”

Melee obeyed. Three hundred milliliters was more blood than she’d thought. It was always more than she thought. She closed her eyes. The last purchase. This was the last thing she needed today, the last thing she needed at all. Tonight, she would recover, stuff herself silly with ice cream and sticky rolls and wine, watch her dad’s favorite movie, maybe take the dragon out for a quick flight beyond the edge of the city. Tonight would be a good night.

Tomorrow, she would worry about the upcoming term.

“There you are, my dear. All done.”

She opened her eyes at the sharp pinch of the withdrawing needle. Carl pressed a square of gauze to the inside of her arm and directed her to bend her elbow as he busied himself with cleaning up the residual payment on his equipment. His touch was cool and firm and clinical, but she knew better than to expect gratitude, or even gentleness. She didn’t know a single vampire with good counter-side manners. A thick feeling crawled up the back of her throat at the sight of three hundred milliliters of her swirling in that glass cylinder. Only it wasn’t her, not anymore, and certainly not by the way Carl was eyeing it. She hoped he’d at least have the decency to wait until she’d left to start drinking.

Melee reached across the counter and tore a piece of tape from its dispenser near the gauze. “Thanks, I’ve got it.” She slapped the tape over the gauze and hopped down from the stool. Now—

That’s strange. For such a fastidious vampire, Carl’s liger-skin carpet was in terrible need of dusting. Her nose itched, and ten thousand pins prickled along her spine, and she wondered how many dead skin cells she had just inhaled. There was a rushing sound in her ears. Her arm hurt. Is that a dust bunny, or something alive? He really needed to vacuum, and—

Why am I on the floor?