Forged by Fire (24 page)

I was not introduced to Jotan’s mother. That had merely been a ruse of Jotan’s to get me away from the dragonmas ter, so that she and I could visit her venom supplier in the Ondali Wapar Liru, the Academia Well of Malacar’s capital city. The ruse had been rendered unnecessary once Jotan had knocked the dragonmaster insensate.

“My supplier is a distinguished academician at the Wapar,” Jotan murmured as she pulled aside one of the palanquin’s curtains and peered out at the streets beyond. It was my first time within a palanquin, and I hated it. I felt ill from the rocking motion of the thing, balanced upon the shoulders of slaves, and disliked the confining, padded walls surrounding me. I tried to overcome my queasiness by concentrating on Jotan’s words.

“He’s one of Malacar’s leading authorities on dragons and venom, but he’s much disliked amongst his peers be cause he has no love for either the Emperor or politics. He cares only for the study of what he calls dragonscience.”

“Yet he’s allowed to teach,” I said. “He hasn’t been ar rested.”
“He’s fa-pim, and he’s a man.”
“What do you give him in exchange for the venom?”
She remained looking out her window. “You’ll see soon enough.”
We fell silent after that. To distract myself from the roll ing motion of the box we were enclosed within, I pulled back an edge of the curtain and watched the vast human beehive beyond.
Aviary keepers, musicians, astrologers, and necroman cers swept along the cobbled streets, their roles of office indicated by the baskets of birds or gleaming brass instru ments they carried, or the opulent gowns they wore. Bak ers and confectioners and butchers worked behind fragrant shops of carved stone, and palanquins sat outside milliners’ and jewelers’ boutiques, their rain-soaked, half-nude bear ers squatted beside them. Fa-pim bayen women with hair coiffed into outrageously tall topknots could be seen mov ing beyond the windows of fabric emporiums; when we paused at a corner because of traffic, I watched one woman examine herself in a mirror, passing judgement on a long brocaded robe faced with a black-speckled white fur from some northern beast.
We entered the central gate of the Wapar and crossed a garden court resplendent with flowering shrubs and tin kling fountains. The court was vast—as large as a small orchard—and tended by a clawful of Djimbi gardeners wielding shears and shovels and wheeling handbarrows. Up a flight of long, low stairs, past a saloon, a museum, a library, each grand building fronted by pillars and covered by friezes of geometric, floral, and hieratic motifs that in formed the learned what lay within the fine architecture.
Jotan whispered the names of each building we passed with a mixture of reverence and bitterness. “The Pavilion of Hieratic Arts. The Royal Chamber of Music. The Hall of the Wapar Treasury. The Court of Physicians and Connate Healers. The Seat of Cinai Theologians.”
It was before that last building we disembarked, and, concealing cowls up, we swept along a shadowy arcade of pointed arches, past fa-pim scholars engaged in debate and idle chat, into a cavernous corridor of carved marble screens. We passed a tight cluster of women, some brownskinned, some aosogi, some fa-pim, but all dressed much as we were, a few—the youngest, I could tell at a glance—with their hoods boldly cast back. They paused in their mur mured conversations to watch us descend a superb carved teak staircase.
The Wapar was not a place that welcomed women. I felt that in the shadows and dark spaces and the way the archi tecture dwarfed human life. I felt it in the spacious, austere courtyards visible beyond windows that barely let in light through dense stoneworks of arabesques. I felt it in how quietly the women had been speaking to one another, how closely they stood together, their shoulders hunched like the petals of flowers closed against rain.
I marveled at the boldness of those women, that they’d dared ventured within those cold walls to brave the Wapar’s imposing masculinity, all in pursuit of knowledge. That some women even taught impressed me further. It was not hard to envision Temple soldiers marching down the stone corridors and arresting a woman on a trumped-up charge.
Just like a rishi, a bayen woman faced immense chal lenges, should she long to break out of the rigid confine ment of Temple’s patriarchal regimen.
“He’s expecting me,” Jotan murmured as we stopped before two great wooden doors twice our height. We were down in the bowels of the Wapar. Water dripped along the walls, and whispers ran like rats down the gloomy corridor. “He has no students today, nor entertains no visitors save me. But if someone
is
within, keep your hood up, remain silent, and follow me out at once.”
The chamber beyond was shadowy and smelled of caustic soap and alcohol and sulfur. Watery light came in through the windows—high up, small, covered in perforated stone designs—and dust motes danced in the air. Our slippered feet
shushed
over the cool tiled floor, and the echoes whisked around the cavernous place. The doors squealed as Jotan shut them behind us.
Strange glassware cluttered tables alongside dripping alembics. Heavy ledgers lay alongside scrolls that were pinned open by rocks held in each of their four corners. Slates covered with chalked numbers and symbols and quantities of formulae covered the walls, between hex agonal scroll shelving and shelves laden with murky, inde terminate equipment.
“Who’s this with you?” a voice barked, and I spun to face a sanguine man whose eyes swam in his head. His dark, oily hair was speckled with white, and it took me a mo ment to realize the white was a surfeit of dandruff. He was dressed in layers and layers of shirts and pantaloons, each layer apparent by the different colors and textures of cloth visible beneath rips and inadequate patches. Stuffed into one pocket was a wilted bouquet of hoontip blooms.
Jotan tossed back her hood. Even in the gloom I could see that her cheeks were flushed. “This is Zarq-the-deviant. Zarq, meet Komikon Sak Chidil.”
Sak Chidil looked neither surprised nor perturbed to find the infamous dragonwhore from Re in his laboratory, though
my
heart thudded furiously at my identification be ing so glibly divulged. Jotan pulled back my hood so he could see me, and I slapped at her hand, but after a glance at me, Sak Chidil merely turned to Jotan. “Is she going to participate? I can’t give you more than the usual.”
“She doesn’t want recompense,” Jotan murmured.
“Come on, then,” Sak Chidil said, and he barred the doors we’d come through by dropping a heavy piece of wood across them, then wove his way through the labora tory to the far end, pausing here and there to adjust a spigot beneath an alembic, or the position of a rubbery pipe, or to stir something with a pipette.
Jotan followed him, and, after a few moments of trying to recover from the shock of being exposed, I trailed behind.
“The infamous dragonwhore, hey-o?” Sak Chidil said. “How many times have you performed bestiality, then?”
When I didn’t answer, he stopped fussing with an alem bic and looked at me.
“Answer him, Zarq,” Jotan murmured. “He’s interested for scientific reasons. You’re safe.”
“Safe as anyone is,” Sak Chidil barked. “Accident, ill ness, politics—something gets us all, in the end. Ten times? More?”
“I haven’t kept count,” I said frostily.
He waved the pipette he was holding at my face. “By your eyes, I’d say at least five times. That about right?”
I nodded. He looked pleased, placed his pipette down, picked up a ledger, inkpot, and quill, and turned to a small locked door. He handed Jotan the ledger and writing in struments, then withdrew a key from a dirty length of twine around his neck and inserted it into the lock.
“Inside, then,” he muttered, shoving the door open. He picked up a heavy leather case that was sat beside the door like a dwarf sentinel. He waited for us to enter.
A venomous dragon resided beyond.
I knew it at once by the smell of venom, maht, manure, and hide, even before I stepped into the small stone stable. Sak Chidil locked and barred the door behind us, muttered to the shadowy form of the dragon, and crossed the room to where a second door was located. He ensured that it was barred before turning to where a rickety teapoy was shoved in a corner. He picked up the teapoy and placed it into a spot of light that was weakly streaming through the lone stonework window high up near the ceiling. Jotan placed his ledger on the teapoy, set the inkpot and quill beside it, and began to disrobe.
Sak Chidil set his heavy leather case on the ground, crouched before it, and unbuckled it. Inside lay an assort ment of metal instruments and glass tubes.
“The dragon is docile,” Jotan explained to me in a voice gone husky and slightly breathless. “She’s both a pet and a study specimen for the theologians in the Wapar. Komikon Sak Chidil has trained her in the rite. He used whores be fore I came along. He’s the only theologian in the Wapar who has, through his research, learned of the rite.”
Her bitoo fell to the ground. Outer garment—ha! She was naked beneath.
The dragon—a placid dewinged female with clouded eyes—shuffled forward and nuzzled Jotan as if seeking a tidbit of crunchy snail or a fistful of sweet orchids. Her leathery snout bumped against one of Jotan’s full, heavy breasts. Jotan pushed the dragon away, a mixture of impa tience, disgust, and anticipation on her face. Her nipples were raised.
“You can have a turn after me, Zarq. Sak Chidil is inter ested only from a scientific perspective. Understand?”
I was staggered. Appalled. And envious. She would hear dragonsong.
Jotan lay on the floor and spread her knees wide. Sak Chidil crouched between her legs, carefully slid a steel in strument into her, then scraped what he’d gathered into a glass tube. He swabbed the inside of her mouth with an other small metal spatula and slid the saliva into a bottle. He examined her eyes, smelled her breath, made notes. Jotan lay compliant, knees spread, eyes glassy, and staring straight at the high stone ceiling.
I had no idea what Sak Chidil was doing, by scraping and gathering bits of Jotan and putting them into glass tubes and bottles. Such bizarre behavior was alarming in the extreme. It reminded me, vaguely, of the methodical way potters figured out the best manner in which to make new glazes and clay types. But what, for the love of the Dragon, could Sak Chidil possibly hope to create from the bits he was gathering from Jotan?
The dragon snuffled over to her and, without preamble, went to work between Jotan’s legs like a cur well trained but bored with its assignment, even as Sak Chidil kept touch ing Jotan’s wrist, counting under his breath, and scratching quill over paper at intervals.
I whirled about and faced the door, breathing heavily, legs as soft as wet clay, and I rammed my fingers in my ears to block out Jotan’s ecstatic cries and the wet snuffling of the dragon.
Afterward, Sak Chidil rewarded the dragon with the wilted bouquet of hoontip blooms he pulled from his pocket. The dragon serenely chomped them between her molars as Sak Chidil gathered more bits from Jotan’s vulva, carefully inserted them into various glass tubes, and neatly labeled them. He checked the color of her eye membranes, bled her from one wrist, and carefully decanted her blood into more tubes. He took copious notes in his ledger, the scratching of his quill and the champing of the dragon’s molars mingling with Jotan’s weeping and ecstatic bab bling.
“Your turn, now,” Sak Chidil said, looking at where I stood rooted in one spot, trembling and aroused and ap palled.
Would I?
Great Dragon, I wanted to hear dragonsong. I wanted it with every fiber of my being.
I stepped toward him.
Stopped.
“No,” I said hoarsely.
“Are you certain?”
I wavered. . . . It took a great effort to nod.
“Too bad, then. Fresh samples always impart new infor mation. Why not?”
“I . . .” I couldn’t answer.
He shrugged, slightly annoyed, slightly disappointed, but not unduly upset. “Waste of your time coming then, wasn’t it? Here, carry this back in for me. She’ll be a while yet recovering.”
I dumbly carried his ledger and quill and inkpot back into his laboratory. Jotan continued to writhe in ecstasy on the stable floor behind us.
“Good samples,” Sak Chidil murmured in satisfaction as he carefully set his tubes of Jotan’s blood and discharges in a rack on a table. “The whores’ diseases taint their samples. Jotan is a superior symbiont.”
“Symbiont?” I breathed. I found a stool and sat weakly upon it. I was drenched with sweat.
He glanced up at me with his swimming eyes. If he’d ever used venom himself, it must have been but once or twice. His sclera were as clear and blood-free as cooked egg white.
“A symbiont. An organism living in close physical asso ciation with another, yes? Here, roll these between your palms. I don’t want the blood to coagulate yet.” He handed me two stoppered vials of blood. I obeyed, dazed, over whelmed. The warmth of the blood seeped through the glass of the vials. I was cupping a small part of Jotan be tween my palms.
“A symbiotic relationship is mutually advantageous to the two species involved,” he continued. “There is the gilli bird and the screwbuck lizard. The remora and the shark. And the dragon and the human, yes.”
He placed his remaining tubes of blood in a small, round receptacle, closed a lid on it, and began vigorously pump ing a pedal with one foot. The receptacle spun around, faster than a potter’s wheel. The odor of the man—unwashed hair, greasy clothes, and sulfur—wafted from his pumping leg.
“Take the gilli and the screwbuck lizard. The screwbuck has poor eyesight, moves slowly, survives on a diet of mil lipedes and termites. It leaches poison from its skin and digs burrows to sleep in. It requires warmth to live. The gilli bird roosts in the burrows of the screwbuck, and the screwbuck’s poison wards away any egg eaters from its nest. The bird keeps the screwbuck warm during the cool Wet, and its excellent eyesight and skirl alerts the screwbuck to ap proaching danger. The seed eater does not compete with the lizard for food and is not affected by the lizard’s poison. An ideal relationship, yes? Maybe now and then a lizard foot crushes a gilli egg. Maybe now and then the noisy gilli inadvertently alerts a mongoose to the location of a screwbuck, and the screwbuck is eaten. But mostly it’s an ideal symbiosis.”
He stopped pumping. The receptacle slowly whirled to a stop. He unlocked the lid and withdrew the tubes of blood. Clear amber serum had separated from the thick red dur ing the spinning process.
“Now I ask myself, what purpose does it serve a dragon to sex a woman, hmm? So I look for answers. It’s easy to see how a woman is lured into the relationship: She re ceives sexual gratification and is imbued with feelings of puissance from the dragon’s poison. Of course, if she’s not been gradually habituated to the poison, she suffers blisters, swelling, blood poisoning, skin sloughing, infection, erratic heartbeat, lowered blood pressure, eventual death. But as the poison makes for a fine hallucinogen and analgesic when diluted, a woman can readily be made tolerant of di rect, undiluted doses of the dragon’s venom.”
He strapped a peculiar leather band around his head and screwed, above one eye, a glass lens into a round windowlike frame sewn into the leather. Carefully he lowered the bulging dome of the lens over his eye, magnifying his eye to many times its size. I stared.
“Keep rolling those vials between your palms, yes, like that.” He carefully tipped a little serum onto a glass plate and smeared it thinly across the surface. “Good. So. We shall say that a woman is lured into the relationship with the dragon, even though the benefits are few and the risks are high. This is not an advantageous relationship for the human, but it is a compelling one. So perhaps the dragon is a parasite, yes? But why? What benefit is it to the dragon, all this?”