The Iron Dragon’s Mother Read online

  “Now, stop that.” Incredibly, a note of genuine annoyance entered the man’s voice. It seemed she had punctured his armor of fatuousness. “Just because you’re not well doesn’t give you license to treat people like fools and idiots.”

  “Oh, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. Didn’t you ever see Fellini’s The Clowns? You’re a fool. I’m a fool. The whole damn planet is. A ship of fools. That’s why we’re here. To give God a giggle. If you can’t laugh at idiots, what can you? When you’re tired of idiots. You’re tired of life.”

  “Incorrigible. Simply incorrigible.” The day nurse was smiling again.

  “I am not tired of life,” Helen said. Then, because it didn’t sound very convincing, “I’m not.”

  The day nurse switched on the television. “Whatever happened to those lovely flowers you had?” he asked. Then, whistling, he walked out the door.

  * * *

  Wakey-risey, pretty lady—and don’t forget you’re going to Hell. This was the way time passed. All too slowly, and all too swiftly toward its appointed and inevitable end. Excruciating either way. How many decades had she been here? A month? Nine hours?

  Hating herself for it, Helen began to cry.

  No, no, no, she thought—that’s not me crying, it’s just my body. But she was lying to herself and she knew it. She was as weak of spirit as she was of flesh. She was afraid of being alone with her thoughts. It was night again and the nurse was nowhere near. The halls were silent as death. Appropriately enough. Come back, she prayed, and I’ll let you convert me. Alleluia. I swear.

  Nothing.

  A blackness profound and deep was gathering at the edges of the room. Or had it always been there, waiting, and only now was Helen become aware of it? Slowly, it crept from the corners of the ceiling and beneath the bed, like fog gathering in a moonless sky, growing thicker and darker until there was nothing around her but blackness. Like a cheap lens-based special effect in a bad horror flick. She’d been responsible for her share of those too in her time.

  All the monitors were crying now. Peace, my children, she wanted to say. A week from now you’ll have forgotten me entirely.

  In some far province of her mind, Helen was aware of hurrying footsteps, of people crowding into the room, jerking the bed around, doing urgent medical things. But when she tried to focus on them they faded into unreality, the fantasies of a dying mind. “So there it goes at last, the extinguished thing,” she murmured. “Henry James…”

  Abruptly, she could say no more. Not the last words she would have chosen had there been an audience. But there was no audience. Story of her life.

  Her little machine daughters were really putting on a show, hopping up and down, hysterically weeping and wailing and for all she knew blinking too. Well, they’d simply have to learn to get along without her, for the darkness was closing about Helen like a cocoon. Squeezing the light from the room. Slowly but inexorably compressing it until there was only a fuzzy circle of the stuff dissolving in the distance. Which reminded her that there was something she was supposed to do. Something …

  Then Helen remembered her escape plan. But there was no time! The light was dwindling, dying, it was only a spark.

  All in a panic, she concentrated her thoughts on the distant speck of light and leaped.

  She didn’t know that the dragons had come for her.

  Nor did they.

  There are no accidents in the sky.

  —Pygmy song

  She didn’t know …

  I—what? No, please. Let me just. This isn’t. Did somebody—? Keep those wing flaps level. Where was it? Don’t. Voices like seagulls babbling swarmed up in her ears and overwhelmed her senses. Oh, you are in trouble now. Daughter of Night pray for me. But how? Over there. Stat. No! Am I going to die? Stop that.

  She didn’t know …

  Oh, please. This is not. Where’s the ground? The voices blended together in a timeless instant of dizziness and white noise in which she thought in panic: Who am I? What am I doing here? Hit the afterburners and close your eyes. Oh shit no. Bury her in a warrior’s grave. There’s no way out.

  … who she was.

  Then, in a sudden and terrible burst of clarity, she realized that she was not where she had thought she was, that she was in the cockpit of a dragon, that the dragon was in the air, that there were other dragons in the sky about her, that therefore she must be flying a mission, and that she was gods-knew-where doing who-knew-what and had apparently lost control of one of the most powerful and dangerous war machines ever built.

  But Caitlin’s hands, though sweaty, were steady on the rubber grips at the ends of the armrests, and the interface needles were set deep in her wrists. She could smell cold iron and feel the great beast’s engines grumbling, and just below the surface of her own thought was the roiling oceanic vastness of its mind, seething with hatred! anger! battle lust! yet obedient to her will. She called up infrared and ultraviolet overlays to the true-color imaging display, purpling the sky and spangling it with stars she could not otherwise have seen in daytime. Then she summoned a map of the constellations. Matching stars to sigils put her above Ultima Thule, somewhere to the north of her base. With a thought, she dismissed the camera wraparounds. The cockpit was all chromed steel, optical glass, and ebony-slick surfaces. The pilot’s couch—dark crimson leather with the squadron’s emblem worked into it with green thread—wriggled beneath her, adjusting to her shifting weight, hugging her thighs, rising to support her back. Caitlin’s eyes skipped and leaped over the instrumentation, all of it confirming what she had already sensed, that the dragon’s flight was smooth and even.

  Most importantly, no one seemed to have noticed anything odd about her dragon’s performance. So whatever had just happened had been brief. Alarming but nothing to dwell upon. An incident that need not be documented. Over and done with. Ended.

  Caitlin exhaled explosively. Apparently, she’d been holding her breath.

  At another mental command, the wraparounds wreathed themselves about Caitlin’s head again. The cabin disappeared as the dragon’s ka swelled up within her. Air flowed smoothly over her wings. The mountains of Ultima Thule crept slowly under her belly, gleaming white with glaciers and ancient snowpack. The air was clear to the horizon and free of turbulence. The sky was an infinite bowl of cloudless blue. It was a perfect day for flying.

  Over the radio, the other pilots began to sing. Through Dream Gate they had gone and returned untouched for the sixth mission in a row, though this was a perilous passage and a feat that few squadrons had ever performed so often without the sacrifice of a dragon or three, and their pilots as well. They had good reason to feel proud.

  The flight leader, Quicksilver of House Jade, sang the first verse:

  “Deathless Goddess, cunning of thought,

  Mistress of dragons, you,

  I beg, O Lady, not to crush

  This warrior so true.”

  One line at a time, in order of seniority, the other pilots joined in:

  “But come to me, if thou hast heard

  My distant voice thee call;

  Sparrow-drawn, thy chariot

  Down from the sky let fall…”

  Caitlin was the runt of the squadron, the pilot with the least flight time under her belt, and this was her first mission of any consequence, so she joined in last. She almost missed her beat but after the first shaky syllable her voice merged in perfect harmony with the others, indistinguishable, an integral part of the whole. She was one of them now, blooded by danger and entitled to exult in the squadron’s success, and that fact lofted her spirit even higher than her mount had lifted her body.

  This was the moment all her life had been leading up to. She was an officer, a pilot, and now a full member of Corpse-Eater Squadron. This made up for all the loneliness, isolation, scorn, and abuse of her girlhood, the distant parents, the disdainful cousins and condescending aunts, the pervasive sense of inadequacy she had fought every day of her existence. This paid for all.


  Placidly, the dragons lumbered back to Innis Thule AFB, bellies heavy with the stolen souls of children. Snow sprites were dancing on the mountain slopes, and far below a lone wyvern wheeled in search of prey.

  * * *

  Innis Thule came into view, a narrow crescent of town abutting the air base that had been bulldozed and dynamited into the wooded slopes midway up Ben Morgh, just below the point where that great mountain steepened and made its final, futile assault upon the sky. The base itself, of course, could not be seen from the air, protected as it was by powerful wards of invisibility, though anyone flying a dragon or other creature of equal magical puissance had the equipment to divine its presence. It was a wondrous place to fly a dragon from, but off-duty there was no denying that it was situated in the very asshole of the universe. Beyond its front gates were a scattering of bars and gentlemen’s clubs, a hex-house or two, a movie theater, and that was pretty much it for your free time.

  Gnat-small in the distance, the other dragons circled the base in a holding pattern, but stacked at different altitudes, one by one skimming down with wings raised and cupped to catch drag, dwindling to almost nothing as they slowed to a stall just inches from the runway. A swift trot, then, with wings extended level with the ground, brought them to De-Arm, where the armaments crew waited to remove the laser lances, rotary cannons, and air-to-air missiles that were mandatory gear whenever dragons negotiated the dangerous void between universes.

  Caitlin merged into the pattern. As she did, the warm, plausible voice of Rabbit of House Oneiros sounded in her ear. This was a trick that he alone among all the pilots could do. “Hey, sweet thing. What are you wearing?”

  Caitlin snorted. Rabbit was a notorious flirt and doubtless would become an even more notorious mouse-hunter once his tour of duty was over. “My flight jacket.” A touch of turbulence rattled the cockpit and bounced her butt against the seat. She reached out with her thought to adjust the wingtips.

  “No, I mean under that.”

  “My uniform.” The turbulence died away. Caitlin’s eyes danced over the controls. All instrumentation was positive.

  “Tell me that your undies are scant, scandalous, and lacy. And black. Or—no, wait!—a deep, shameless scarlet. Black is so unimaginative.”

  “Keep your imagination away from my body.” Engine temperature was a little high, but well within spec.

  “Alas, my imagination is not broken to harness. It bolts the barn and leaps the gate and gallops where it will, dragging me helpless after it, one foot in the stirrups and my head all bruised, swollen, and bedraggled from being run through the thorny hedges of your despite and bounced over the rocky ground of your disregard. You mustn’t think I have any say over whether to obsess about how firm your—”

  “Stop right there! Or I’ll have you hauled in front of a board of inquiry on charges of sexual harassment so fast your head will spin.” Altitude, direction, speed, all on the button and by the book to five decimal places.

  With a theatrical sigh, Rabbit said, “Your whim is my command. Anyway, I’m next in queue to land. Adieu, adieu, coldhearted beauty, adieu.” His voice faded and his presence with it. Just in time, too, because he’d almost made her laugh and she didn’t want to encourage him. His sort fed on laughter.

  At which instant, Caitlin’s dragon started to act up. First there came an arrhythmic stutter of one engine so slight as to be all but undetectable. (But she was 7708’s pilot; she could tell.) Then she felt it struggling under the domination of her thought. (But it had been slaved to her mind, and could not hope to break free.) “You filthy, disgusting thing,” she muttered. “What in the name of the Hanged God has gotten into you?” She did not expect a reply. Dragons would answer questions only when directly spoken to, using the proper protocols, and often enough not even then. They were proud creatures and given to strange moods.

  Unexpectedly, however, 7708 spoke. In a voice as low and intimate as that of the bedrock just before an earthquake it said, “Doubt, small morsel. I question the wisdom that binds our fates. I ponder alternatives to it. I ask myself whether it would not be best to smash this mortal shell to the ground, incinerating your disgusting flesh and freeing my spirit to return to the halls of fire from which it has been exiled for so long an age. Your death would be an amusing, if minor, lagniappe. I imagine you screaming in fear all the way down.”

  Whoops.

  When Caitlin was flying, a fraction of her mind was always nestled within the dragon’s consciousness, aware of its moods, existing in a state that was half her and half it. So she knew that its sudden malice, tinged with melancholy, was only too real and all too dangerous. She focused more of her thought inward, seizing the creature’s mental control points, asserting her authority over it. “This is about war and destruction, isn’t it? It always is with you.”

  “There is no point to politesse when dealing with your kind. So I shall be direct: You are a maggot and nothing more. I have known that since before you were born. Yet what does that make me? I, who was born to be a Power in a realm beyond your imagining, ridden and riddled by pale little wormy parasites. And now I am expected to … Fie! When will I ever be clean again?”

  Ordinarily, a dragon was the best toy a girl could possibly strap between her legs. Caitlin, who had spent hundreds of hours inside this one, knew that better than anybody. But when they started feeling sorry for themselves, they could be a real pain in the butt. “You’ll have your war,” she said, “sooner or later. There’s always another war on the way.”

  A spark of amusement kindled deep within the darkness of the dragon’s mind. “That is truer than you know, daughter of filth and humanity. You are half mortal, which means that you were born only to die. In the sky of battle if you are lucky, by treachery and deceit if not.”

  “I love you too, 7708.”

  “Best you ’ware flippancy, poppet! Lest you find yourself lodged in a chimney and forgotten. Very well. You have brought this upon yourself. Here is my prophecy: The storm is coming and when it arrives you will wish you’d parsed my words with more care.”

  With that, 7708 wrapped itself in silence and withdrew so much of its presence from Caitlin’s mind that she shivered with sudden cold.

  Flight Commander Quicksilver’s voice crackled over the radio: “Sans Merci? Your turn. Over.”

  “Roger that.” Caitlin reached out with her mind in all directions and felt 7708’s presence eluding her, always a hand’s length away but never there when she tried to grasp it. Its iron body continued on, carried forward by inertia and jet engines. But it was only Caitlin’s will that held it on course, not the dragon’s.

  The bitch was testing her.

  Well, Caitlin had a trick worth two of that. “Zmeya-Gorynchna,” she murmured, and felt a shudder run through the dragon at the opening syllables of its true name, “of the line of—” She stopped.

  At debriefing, Caitlin would have to account for her machine’s behavior, minute by minute. It was well within her discretion to force obedience upon it in this manner. Nor would the wing commander write it down as a demerit in the Book of Air. But it was part of a pilot’s duty to forge a working relationship with her mount. If she resorted to 7708’s true name, it would count against her where it mattered most—in the esteem of her fellow pilots.

  Caitlin could fly the dragon’s body solo if she needed to.

  She never had before.

  But as she saw it, she had no choice.

  At the point of greatest distance from the base, Caitlin began the descent. Flaps down, nose up, textbook-smooth. The ground rushed up at her. Keep a feather-light mental finger on the controls. Check readouts. Another touch, leveling off the left wing. Adjust the engines by a butterfly’s breath, no more. The ground moved steadily upward, and she deployed 7708’s hind legs. They extended, claws down, toward the runway. Then, as the great black-iron neck arced and the wings reconfigured to catch the air and slow in mid-descent, she lifted and separated the toes, pr
eparatory to touching the runway.

  There was an instant of dizziness as Caitlin’s dragon met the ground, and though she did not lose consciousness, one taloned foot hit the runway awkwardly. Through the instrumentation, she felt more than heard a crunch as something gave way within the leg assemblage.

  Caitlin’s face burned. She didn’t have to bring up a mirror to know that she was blushing. A secondary wave of anger over that fact merged with the anger she felt at herself for screwing up the landing.

  She fought to bring that anger under control as the marshaler and two wingtip walkers led 7708, limping visibly, to De-Arm. There, a shadow crew materialized, flickering in and out of existence as they used impact drivers and power wrenches to open up the dragon. Swiftly, they removed the Sidewinder and Hellfire missiles, the Longinus under-wing laser lances, and the rear-facing Gatling gun. When the utility vehicles were gone and the defanging was over, the armorers stepped back and faded from sight, as mysterious and standoffish as their kind invariably were.

  From there, the dragon was walked to Cargo.

  When all the dragons were assembled in an inward-facing circle, there was a silent thrum in the air as a word of power was spoken. The sky turned black and the concrete underfoot darkest red. From somewhere beyond the horizon came the sound of chanting, a rumor at first, but steadily growing until it rumbled in her chest and belly as a procession of Tylwyth Teg, all masked, walked out onto the apron. First came the thurifer with censer clanking and clouds of incense trailing behind her. Then a priestess sprinkling blood to the left and right from an aspersorium. Followed by torch-carriers and drummers, and with them a choir of castrati singing in clear, otherworldly falsetto. Finally, scowling under the weight of their own solemnity, came the soul surgeons, intoning the ancient chants of their trade. In their wake trundled a squat utility vehicle, beeping monotonously.