Attendants moved soundlessly beyond the veils that hung over the bed: men with pincers instead of hands, with scales and fish tails, with hair the color and hardness of mother-of-pearl, everything billowing in currents he couldn’t see.
I was there once, he thought, struggling to dredge thoughts through the morass of his brain. Swimming through pagodas of coral and algae, in gardens of basalt where volcanoes simmered, making the water warmer for just a moment; going over bridges with fish swimming under the rail, watching octopi nestle on gongs and drums, calling the faithful to worship…
He had been there once: a familiar memory, except that it wasn’t quite what it should have been. He couldn’t pinpoint why, but there was something — something he should have remembered.
As the fever sank down to a whisper, he saw more and more: the patches of dead scales on the skin of the attendants, that same oily sheen on the mother-of-pearl; the curious deadness in their eyes; the broken nubs of antlers at their temples.
Beyond the veils, the darkness waited. In every reflection on dull nacre, shadows lengthened, stretched, gathered themselves to leap, and he lay on the bed, too powerless to stop them — and every now and then Morningstar’s dreadful presence would press against his brain until he thought his head would burst. He wouldn’t actually see the Fallen, merely guess at the massive silhouette, sitting quietly just beyond the bed: watching, reproaching him for not using his powers, for being weak; for being all but dead, lost to the world.
One morning, or evening, he woke up, and his head was clear. He lay in bed, too spent to move; but alive, and not hovering on the cusp of Hell. His ribs had been bandaged, and smelled of camphor and mint; his hands likewise, and though flexing his fingers was mildly painful, it was nothing like the excruciating pain he’d once had.
“I thought we had lost you,” a voice said. The curtains of the bed parted, and a woman bent over him.
She was the same one he had seen by the bridge: dressed in a five-panel tunic, the pearl under her chin shining faintly in the gloom. Deer antlers protruded from her temples, and scales mottled her skin, here and there — here and there flaking off, like dried skin.
Dragon.
“There are no dragon kingdoms in Paris,” he said, slowly. “You don’t… You don’t need a dragon king to oversee the floods and the rains. You don’t receive prayers and offerings from anyone. How can you possibly—? How can you possibly live?”
The woman smiled, revealing sharp teeth. “You’re not the only one to have traveled far from the land of your birth,” she said. She opened her hand, to reveal three sodden incense sticks: they smelled like the rot of the Seine, with a faint afterodor of burned incense. “And there are still those who offer prayers, to stay the wrath of the Seine. Hawthorn, for instance, is built on low ground, and they have cause to fear floods.”
It was all too much to take in: that, and his near escape, and the visions he’d had…. He closed his eyes, willing himself to breathe slower. “What’s your name?”
“Ngoc Bich,” she said. Her voice effortlessly put the accents on words, giving meaning to things he hadn’t heard in years.
“Jade,” he breathed. “It’s a pretty name.”
Ngoc Bich made a face. “Father is very traditional,” she said. “At least it wasn’t ‘Pearl’ or ‘Coral.’”
“You knew my name,” he said. Not the one House Draken had given him on the conscription grounds; but the one he’d worn, all those years ago when he was a child, which still rang true even though he hadn’t used it in decades. “My real name.”
“Of course. Did you think you needed incense sticks to send prayers?”
“I didn’t pray to you,” Philippe said, obscurely embarrassed. In daylight the room was no longer diaphanous or mysterious; he could see the darker patches on the walls, the places where pollution had eaten away at the coral; and Ngoc Bich’s face, painted over with ceruse, couldn’t hide the places where her skin had entirely sloughed off, revealing the pristine ivory of her cheekbones. They were under the Seine; and like the Seine they were tarred with the pollution of the Great War, the cancer that had penetrated everything in the city.
Fallen again, corrupting everything they touched. He’d been part of that war, too — under orders, yes, but that didn’t make him less guilty of what had happened. “I didn’t know—” he said.
Ngoc Bich reached out, and closed his hand over the sodden incense sticks. Her smile was wide — like that of Asmodeus, that of a predator, but a very different one — someone who knew, without doubt, her place; and who was secure in her power, there at the center of everything. “When you crawl bleeding under the Heavens, all prayers are sincere.”
She was… old, not ageless in the way of Fallen; but with the weariness of someone who had seen too much, endured too much. “Ngoc Bich—”
“I’m not the one you should worry about, Pham Van Minh Khiet. Think of yourself, first.” She pulled the curtains back from the bed, and sat on it. “You can sit up.”
Philippe tried. He could; but it was an effort, and it was so much more comfortable to sink back against his pillow, staring into Ngoc Bich’s face.
“You should be mostly healed.”
Her prevarication was all too clear. “Mostly?”
Ngoc Bich grimaced. “The wounds, yes. The rest of it… I’m not sure what you have in your heart.”
He wasn’t sure either. A curse, a vengeance; something too strong to be exorcised, even by the magic of a dragon princess, it seemed. A dead human’s vengeance, slow and implacable and which would not be turned aside, since there was no reasoning with those that had gone on.
Then again, he was free of Silverspires now. He didn’t have to care about any of this. It should have filled him with joy; but like Ngoc Bich he merely felt weary, burdened with something he couldn’t name. He’d always known the Houses were corrupt, that they maintained their power on death and blood; but to casually betray their own… “I owe you a debt.”
“As I said—” Ngoc Bich closed her hand around his again. “Don’t think about it now. It’s not as though there is much here, in the way of entertainment.”
He was thinking about it, trying to remember old protocols, old rules. Dragon kings were old and wise, and lethal; and here he was in one of their courts, powerless and without even the clothes on his back. “I ought to pay my respects to your father.”
“Of course.” Ngoc Bich shrugged. “When you can walk. There’s not much hurry.”
“No.” Fragments of half-remembered lore wormed their way through Philippe’s brain, burning like molten metal. “This is his kingdom, and I’m here as a visitor.” An ambassador from the world above, he supposed, save that he no longer had any status they would recognize. “I should come to him bearing gifts: tree wax and hollow green weed and sea-fish lime, and a hundred roasted swallows, all the precious things from the mortal world, laid at his feet with the jade and the pearls….” Snake pearls and deer pearls, and all the rarities that would speak to animals; and those shining with the luminescence of the depths; and the one that, put in a rice jar, would fill it up again with the fresh crop of the latest harvest, smelling of water and jasmine and cut grass….
There was something else, too — something he ought to have remembered, precautions to be taken before entering a dragon kingdom. He was sure there were cautionary tales, the kind he’d heard ten thousand times as a child — except that his mind seemed to be utterly empty — wiped out of everything.
“You need rest,” Ngoc Bich said, gently; and drew a hand over his face; and darkness stole across him with the same gentleness as when it stole across the sky, and he sank back into confused dreams, struggling to name what he should have remembered.