Chapter 36: Intermission – Eastward
Eastward, away from the dragon’s mountain.
The pastures ran flat and wide between low ridgelines, the grass there pale and dry from the summer's heat. A farmhouse sat alone in the middle of it, its walls thick and its shutters bleached from years of open-country sun. The anqa pens ran along the eastern side of the property, fenced in weathered timber, the large birds inside moving in their slow, stupid circles.
"What's a dragon?" asked a small voice.
The ranching woman turned from the stove and looked down at her daughter, who sat at the table with her toys arranged in a scene that made sense only to her. The girl was holding a small wooden shape up to the light, turning it. It was a tube with two flat pieces nailed to the sides to suggest wings. Crude. She had made it herself from scrap timber and nails.
"Nothing you need to worry about," said the woman. She set a bowl down on the table. "Did you finish your chores?"
The girl's eyes moved sideways.
"No," she admitted.
The woman said nothing. She just looked at her daughter.
It was enough.
The girl swept the toys off the table and into their box with both arms, shoved the box under the bench, and ran for the door. It banged shut behind her.
The woman stood at the window and watched her daughter cross the yard toward the anqa pens. The birds moved away from the girl's approach and then back again, their heads bobbing. Her eyes moved past the pens, past the fence line, and past the tree break at the far edge of the property.
The black mountain sat on the horizon where it had always sat. But it felt different lately, like it was just somehow getting closer and closer every day.
She watched it for a moment, then turned back to the stove.
Further to the east still.
The city street was busy enough in the mid-morning that the baker's cart had to move carefully to avoid running its wheels over feet that stopped in front of it without warning.
"Get your dragon buns! Hot dragon buns here!"
The cart was full. Trays of baked pastry sat in rows, each piece shaped by hand into a rough dragon form, an elongated lump with two wings and a tail that curled under the body. The glaze was deep brown from the oven and the inside, if you broke one open, was filled with cream set through with flakes of cheap regional gold-salt that caught the light and held it. It had nothing to do with actual gold, except for the colour.
They sold faster than he could restock the trays.
The dragon had done something to the nation's imagination that no campaign or decree had managed before. It had made itself interesting to people who had no direct contact with it and no personal stake in its activities. The stories came first, and they were the kind that grew in the telling, each person adding the detail that made their version better than the last version they had heard.
Knights had started wearing red plumes on their helmets. The fashion had begun in the capital and moved outward through the usual channels, and now even minor city guards were adding the colour where regulations allowed it. Toymakers were producing dragon shapes in wood and fired clay, painting them black with red eyes that were sometimes just dots of paint and sometimes small chips of coloured glass depending on the price point. The churches had been replacing their stained glass in stages, older scenes giving way to new ones that incorporated a dark-winged figure somewhere in the composition, usually in the upper or central apex.
The taverns were either the worst or the best, depending on one's commercial perspective. Every establishment had its version of the encounter story, where some local drunk would swear up and down that he had seen the dragon up close.
"Hot cream-filled dragon buns!" the baker called as a cluster of customers arrived with coin already out.
Even further to the east than that, along the coast.
The harbour port was wide enough to accommodate vessels of any size in the world.
A merchant stood at the end of a dock with a piece of black obsidian in his hand. Across from him, a ship's captain. "I'm telling you," said the merchant, "this is straight from the Black Mountain itself. Dragon breathed this into existence herself, she did."
The captain looked at the black, glassy stone on offer.
The merchant took a small sliver from his pocket, a chip thin enough to be translucent at its edges, and held it against a cord of rope sitting on the dock post. He drew it across the cord in one short stroke.
The rope parted. Cleanly, without resistance, the fibres separated.
"Fragile," said the merchant, setting the chip down with care. "But the edge is beyond anything I've seen from any grinder. Knives. Tools. Cutting equipment for fine work." He let the captain pick up the sliver if he wanted, which he did, turning it carefully between two fingers. "They'll pay well for it across the blue."
The captain turned the sliver, watching its edge catch the harbour light. "How much do you have?" he asked.
The merchant looked over his shoulder. His apprentice, who had been standing by a covered cart at the dock's land end, pulled the cover back. The cart's interior was stacked from floor to top with black obsidian, organised in rough blocks and wrapped sections and loose chips packed in straw. A significant quantity.
The captain studied the cart for a while.
"How much do you want for it?" he asked.
The merchant clasped his hands together. "A smaller fortune," he said.
Far, far to the east, far across the great span of the ocean that separated the halves of the world. It was as far to the east as one could go before the dead waters spanned on forever past that.
The throne room was deep and long, its walls carved from dark stone in the style of an older era, before the current dynasty had made its particular aesthetic decisions. Braziers burnt at intervals along the walls, their smoke rising to a ceiling high enough to be partially lost in the dark.
The emperor sat on his throne and drew from a long golden pipe, the smoke leaving his lips in a slow, directed stream.
Behind him, a jade-stone dragon ran the length of the chamber.
It was not a sculpture in the usual sense. It did not sit or stand or coil in a decorative arrangement. It moved through the room as if the chamber had been built around it after the fact, its body entering through the wall to the emperor's right, running along the ceiling in a sinuous path that crossed the room twice, and disappearing through the wall to his left. Its head was positioned directly in front of and above the throne, its open mouth framing the emperor's seat so that visitors to the chamber addressed their ruler from within the jaw of a dragon rendered in jade.
It was old, yes. But the dynasty was older.
"It seems our western foe is crumbling from within," said the first advisor. He stood at the prescribed distance, his head angled. "The worm in their belly is chewing through their bones, as written."
The second advisor bowed his head. "As written, the beast does appear to be unifying the crowns." He paused. "Yet in contrast to prophecy, we see no crowns of substance. Its collection consists of minor bloodlines. Unimportant houses."
The emperor drew from his pipe and held the smoke for a moment. The jade dragon above him was old enough that its artisans were centuries dead now.
His dynasty had been waiting.
A dragon had returned to the world. After generations of reports that turned out to be about lesser creatures, after centuries of his line maintaining the readiness that had become ritual, a real dragon had once again surfaced in the west. It had even arisen in the same mountains. Powerful, yes. The destruction it had caused was not small. But the dragons of the old accounts, the ones his ancestors had recorded in the years before the catastrophe, had done things that did not compare to these minor mischiefs he had been given reports about.
This new dragon was young. Possibly that was why. Or perhaps it was just weak. That was also possible.
He exhaled.
"Wait longer," he said. "Let it grow fat and comfortable on our enemy." He drew again, the ember at the pipe's end brightening. "Then we remove both together. One strike." He leaned back against the throne. "I will avenge my ancestors by reaping both of their foes."
Both advisors bowed. Low and long, it was the formal depth that marked the end of an audience.
The emperor looked at the map his first advisor had unrolled on the floor of the chamber. The western nation with its black mountain was marked in the old style, a small brushstroke symbol that the mapmaker had probably copied from an older map without knowing what it meant.
He looked at it for a while.
Then he looked up at the jade dragon above his head. At its open mouth looming above him.
Many times has he pondered what it must have been like for the princess of his bloodline to have been devoured by the dragon just like this all of those generations ago.
That was why this place existed.
The palace itself was a monument to the dishonour and disgrace his family had undergone by her absconding and then by her death and, worst of all, to the fact that the beast in question was ultimately killed by their sworn enemies, leaving his family’s need for an honourable revenge unfulfilled. But now, the time was almost here. He could lift the burden of his house and ancestors.
A new dragon had arisen, and by slaying it, the honour of his dynasty would be restored.
The emperor drew from the pipe again and blew the smoke up into the statue’s mouth.