Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (57 page)

Over the next couple days, the trees started looking shorter and scrubbier, and water sources became harder to find.

It was tough to keep putting one foot in front of another, knowing that we were increasingly exposed to whatever might fly overhead. Reminding myself that we had come here in order to be found didn’t help. Something hardwired deep into my brain kept screeching,
Hide!

After the constant, nagging terror, our first sighting of a dragon was sort of anticlimactic. We were trudging along when Ghosteater pointed his nose to the south and said, “There.”

Williams and I stopped and looked. Eventually I picked out a dark dot weaving among the clouds.

“Is that a dragon?”

The wolf chuffed.

“It’s so far away. How do you know?”

“The wind says.”

I shot Williams a mystified look.

He shot me a this-is-the-creature-you-know-nothing-about-but-trust-anyway look.

I made a concerted effort not to roll my eyes and turned back to watch the dragon as it disappeared over the horizon.

“Do you think it saw us?” I asked Ghosteater.

“No.”

“What do we do when one does see us?”

“As I say.”

Williams grunted in approval. The wolf was speaking his language.

The next day, in the late afternoon, Ghosteater stopped mid-step and twisted his head like a listening dog. “A dragon is coming.”

I followed his gaze. Directly to the west of us, a large herd of tusked, beaked herbivores were grazing on ferns. They looked like a cross between a rhino, a hippo, and a potbellied pig. Beyond them, I could see something in the air — a small, dark shape.

Ghosteater said, “Barrier-maker.”

Williams nodded. “No problem.” He turned to me. “Dragon’s probably going to stampede those things. They come our way, lie down and be still.”

I nodded and eased my pack to the ground.

A light breeze blew over my face, and I blinked. When my eyes opened, the shape that was the dragon was quite a bit larger. It seemed to be coming right at us. The breeze stiffened. All around, the low vegetation bent eastwards.

The rhino-pig things lifted their heads and looked around, making quizzical lowing calls. After a moment, they started moving. The movement became a stampede, slow but relentless. They were headed right for us.

Oh shit
. Each one of those things probably weighed a thousand pounds.

“Williams …”

“Lie down and stay still. I’ll take care of it.”

I sat down. Then I took a deep breath and lowered myself onto my back. Williams lay on one side of me and Ghosteater on the other. Williams put his arm over me, pressing me down.

The ground was vibrating.

I lifted my head, and my eyes went right to the dragon. It banked to the north, and I saw its shape — a huge, rectangular head; short, thick neck; stout, tubular body; powerful hind legs; and shorter, more delicate forelimbs. Its tail made up more than half its length. There were no wings. It seemed to be swimming through the air like a crocodile, with great, serpentine sweeps of its tail. It was dark gray, like a storm cloud.

Every cell in my body started screaming at me to run away. If Williams hadn’t been holding me down, I would’ve made a panicked dash for it.

The wind streamed over us more strongly, blowing dust into my eyes. I blinked and realized the rhino-pigs were on us, grunting and bawling. A weight pressed me to the ground, and the stampede passed right over us. It went on and on. My senses were overwhelmed by thunderous noise. Then they were past.

I saw bright sunlight, red behind my closed lids, and opened my eyes. The wind increased to a gale, and there was a sudden darkness as something huge swept over us. I heard an impact, and seconds later, the earth bucked, bouncing me an inch off the ground. The impact must’ve dislodged the barrier Williams had used to shield us from the rhino-pigs, because a storm of dust and pebbles and shredded ferns enveloped us, blotting out everything. I buried my face in my sleeve, trying not to cough.

As soon as I could breathe, I rolled over and pushed up onto my hands and knees. I was shaking so hard I could barely manage it.

Beside me, Williams was kneeling, looking east. Ghosteater rose up behind me.

The dragon was on the ground. It appeared to have landed right atop the fleeing herd. When it rose, I saw that many rhino-pigs — dozens, maybe — lay crushed beneath it.

The dragon turned, surprisingly light on its feet, and began methodically gulping squashed rhino-pigs down whole. After fourteen, it paused. Numbers fifteen and sixteen were consumed more slowly. It surveyed the remaining carcasses and chose one more. After swallowing, it stretched its head out, working its massive jaw this way and that, as though its last morsel wouldn’t quite go down.

Then its head swung our way.

I felt Ghosteater brush past me. He advanced a few paces, lay down, and rolled onto his back, showing his belly and stretching his head back to expose his throat.

For a good minute, the dragon looked at us.

Then the wind picked up. The dragon shifted its weight onto its hind legs and rose up, holding its body just a few degrees above the horizontal. It started swaying slowly back and forth, almost like it was dancing. After a few more seconds, it pushed off with its hind legs and, with a lash of its tail, shot into the air.

I watched as it gained height and headed west, the clouds swirling violently as it passed.

Then it was gone.

An odd silence descended.

I turned to Williams and was struck by the awed look on his face. He glanced at me and then looked away.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. My mind was too busy trying to find a way to grasp what it had just seen.

Ghosteater stood and shook himself vigorously. Then he licked his lips and trotted off in the direction of the remaining rhino-pig carcasses. No reason to look a gift horse in the mouth, I guess.

I licked my fingers and looked remorsefully at the last few bites of roasted meat on my plate. I was too full to finish.

Williams had cut a few big steaks off the unsquished portion of a dead rhino-pig before we traveled on. I didn’t know if the species was reptile or mammal or something older than those groupings, but it was definitely tastier than the dinosaurs we’d eaten.

Ghosteater lay next to me, staring into the fire. He’d eaten his fill at the site of the kill.

Williams had already asked him if the dragon we’d seen was the right one. The wolf had said he didn’t recognize it but that it smelled like kin to the she-dragon we wanted. He said she would probably come looking for us within a few days. In the meantime, we should move on. Juveniles would show up to feed on the dead rhino-pigs, and being discovered by a rival faction wouldn’t be good.

Dragon politics. Of all the world’s most wretched thoughts.

After that, we hadn’t found much to say. Frankly, the dragon had overwhelmed me. It wasn’t just terrifying. I mean, that was part of it, but it was also just … incomprehensible.

The closest analogue I could find was a moment in my freshman year of high school. I’d been sitting in my biology class, and the teacher had gotten into how big the universe is. He’d shown us a picture of an apparently dark spot in the sky that turned out to contain ten thousand galaxies. Some of those galaxies were thirteen billion years old. He’d said their light had been traveling all that time to reach us, so we were seeing what they looked like thirteen billion years ago, not what they looked like now. They might not even exist anymore. I remembered him saying, “You’re looking back in time, back to not long after the Big Bang. Your eyes are time-machines right now.”

As a fourteen-year-old, I’d wrestled with the idea that the sky showed us the past. Even glancing up at the sun meant “time-traveling” back eight minutes. I knew it made sense, but it was still disturbing. For several weeks, I’d find myself feeling weird at random moments, and when I’d try to figure out why, I’d realize my mind had been poking at the ideas of time and space again.

The dragon was like that. Its age could be figured in geological epochs. Its size in blue-whale-lengths. Its power in … I don’t know what. Kilotons? And its mind — what kind of mind would something like that have?

And that had been a smaller one, according to Ghosteater.

That thought made the hair on my arms stand up. I shivered.

“Pup. You are troubled.”

I reached out and stroked his fur. I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words for him.

“The dragons — they’re not like us.”

Funny how Ghosteater had joined the “us” camp, in my mind.

“They are other,” he said.

“Are there even older things?”

He looked at me in silence for a long while. Finally, he turned his head back toward the fire. “Things from before the time of beasts. Roots of beasts. Centerless things.”

“Gods?”

The skin on his shoulders twitched. “Your kind has called me god.”

“Are you one?”

He laid his head down on his forelegs and closed his eyes. “I am a beast.”

“No delusions,” Williams said.

I started. “What?”

He hadn’t spoken to me unnecessarily in quite a while.

“Only human powers claim godhood. Never heard of a beast doing it.”

I’d never heard Cordus make such a claim.

“Do most human powers do it?”

“Not now. Used to do it all the time — ran around playing Zeus or Astarte.”

His tone suggested such behavior was ridiculous.

It wasn’t. Repugnant, yes, but not ridiculous. Plenty of people would choose to be worshipped, if they could get away with it. And there had to be many powers who could do everything Zeus was supposed to have done, from tossing lightning bolts to becoming a swan.

“So a lot of the figures in mythology were actually powers goofing off in the F-Em?”

Williams shrugged and looked away.

I guess the détente was over.

Too bad, because I had one more question:
What about dragons?

There were plenty of those in myths and legends too.

Three days later, Ghosteater came to attention in the lee of a rock-strewn hill.

A dragon had come for us.

Williams made a barrier against the wind-borne debris, and we crouched down, watching it approach.

It came on straight, then banked and descended in a series of vast loops. Instead of crashing to the ground, it slowed to a hover and set its feet down — first the heavy rear quarters, then the shorter, lighter front limbs. Like the one that had discovered us, it was built downhill — shoulders well lower than rump. Its hide was a paler gray, mottled with black, and it was half again as big.

It turned toward us, moving as fluidly as the other one, despite its greater bulk.

Its head was the size of a couple mobile homes stacked on top of each other. Its mouth opened. The inside was whitish and lined with teeth designed to puncture and tear. The biggest were longer than I was tall.

It gave a long, bubbling roar, have hiss, half raspberry.

“Wrong dragon,” Ghosteater said.

Uh-oh.

One of Williams’s hands closed around mine. The other moved slowly toward the stock of his shotgun, above his left shoulder.