Dragons live for centuries; this has led many to believe they are immortal. The occasion of one’s death is a time of great activity. Scavengers of all shapes seek to partake of the residual magic in the flesh and bones of the dragon. Dragons are old and do not cross over gently, and the scavengers do not always wait for the end before they start.
—Foreword to “A Treatise on the Ecological Niche of Dragons”
• • •
A gust of wind tore Feng’s hat from her head and sent it over the railing, tumbling into the swirling mists below. The roar of the wind snatched the curses right from her mouth, denying her even that satisfaction, as the trailing speck of her headgear got swallowed by the roiling white miasma. Coming to the deck had been a mistake; getting on the airship had been a mistake; not earning enough credits for a degree in sorcery had been a mistake. The hat would be just another line in the litany of disappointments in her life, a song to keep her company when she lay in bed with her eyes open.
“You should tie your hat to your chin, girl.”
Da Kai loomed behind her. Looming was a natural state for the man, his shoulders so broad that he spent most of his time aboard the airship scuttling sideways down corridors like a crab. Yet he did not yell over the roar of the wind and the constant growl of the airship engines, his voice calm and deep. If a mountain had a voice, Feng imagined it’d sound a lot like Da Kai’s.
“How much longer?” she asked, straining to speak. The air was thin at this height, not that it affected Da Kai at all.
“Not much.” He pointed at a spire of rock in the distance, jutting out from the mist like a dead man’s finger. “The edge of the Tian Shan Reserve. You must excuse me—the professor asked to be woken before we arrive.” With that, Da Kai opened a door and vanished sideways into the bowels of the ship. Feng could not stand its motion or the smell of fuel that permeated the wood. She’d already vomited twice off the stern, just missing the propellers and hoping to the gods that they weren’t flying over anywhere inhabited: probably not, since entry to the reserve was forbidden. In any case, the presence of dragons and other beasts hinted at wild magic. Mist and razor-edged shale took care of the rest. Except for gangs of poachers, of course, and if poachers were under the ship, then a rain of half-digested food was better than they deserved.
The first mountain was a vanguard for many others. The word mountain seemed generous to Feng; those projections of sheer rock seemed as vertical as pillars. Folk tales suggested that they were columns for the vault of heaven itself.
If Da Kai was waking the professor, they’d be landing soon; Feng would have to get ready. She sighed and cast one last look at the mountains and the ocean of mist below. Somewhere beneath them lay a dead dragon.
• • •
Chao Mei-En sat hunched over the tiny table in the airship cabin, her knees pressed uncomfortably into her torso, like a monkey poring over a puzzle. In a sense, she was, though the puzzle was both within and outside the cabin. Under her hand, she produced a detailed sketch of the two dragons keeping pace with the airship. They undulated, riding currents of air that only they could see—them and their riders, the Dragonsworn.
Her cabin had belonged to the captain of this requisitioned trading ship: luxurious by the trader’s standards, but still cramped for her and her companion. Airship runs didn’t leave much time for ablutions and hygiene, and the smell of hard labour clung to the floorboards and walls.
“You’d be better off tabulating how many subjects we tested instead of wasting your time on that,” said Wei, her companion, a sunken-faced man in his thirties—Adjunct Professor Wei now, although he was little more than a pumped-up clerk. The military had inflated his title and given him a choice office on the campus for his services. So many offices had been left vacant after those who had objected to the war had left. Wei was the sort of administrator whose loyalty swelled when the military fed his ego, even if they could no longer afford to fill his belly. Or hers.
“The war will be over one day, and I’ll be back to working on dragons like I’m meant to,” she said.
“If that’s what you want, then you’d be better off working harder on the task at hand.”
The airship lurched as it entered a holding pattern, ready for disembarkation. The jerk sent a swatch of black ink halfway across her sketch of the dragons.
A group of soldiers had already gathered up all the children in the village who were of age and set up a field tent for her use, assembling a makeshift office out of mismatched furniture drawn from the surrounding houses. Chao set up her tools with practised ease—too much. How many people had she tested? How many children? One of the two dragons that escorted them here laid her head down by the tent, staring at the place where the candidates would sit.
A man in an ill-fitting uniform brought a skinny child to the tent and shoved him toward the chair. Chao glared at the soldier, who had the decency not to meet her stare and stepped out backwards, bumping into the dragon and then stumbling as he fled. Wei was probably elsewhere, lording over villagers and soldiers alike. But not the Dragonsworn, no—not those. The village was more dust than greenery, as though the dragons had taken the rains with them when they went to war. In a sense, they had. A colleague had made a career out of anthropology up in these provinces, where the old ways still held sway. Children much like the one beside her would fast for days when they came of age, and then they would be turned out into the wilderness where, starving, they had no choice but to call for help, with only the dragons to answer them. Those who came back served the villages; when they called, the dragons came and brought the rains with them. Now the dragons were long gone, but the children remained, and Chao knew how to find them.
“This will hurt a bit,” she said, pushing fine acupuncture needles into fixed points on the boy’s forearm and the side of his neck. He winced, more from the expectation of pain than pain itself; Chao knew the sensation was no more painful than a small ant bite. To the needles, she attached threads of copper, dipping the other ends of the wires into a small glass vial containing a pale blue liquid. If any of those tested could hear the dragons, the flow of qi through the meridians on their body would route through the needles and change the colour of the liquid. It was simple, really, part of Chao’s earlier research into the biology of dragons, although she longed to see them in their natural habitat, to see them live, feed, die. No one had ever seen dragons eat, leading some to believe that they dove deep beneath the seas and fed in their depths. Chao thought the opposite: that they fed in the skies, not on flesh and bone but on raw magic crackling through the atmosphere that, in dying, they brought back to the soil. But no one would fund her research. The only money available now was toward work that supported the war effort. Preparations completed, Chao nodded at the Dragonsworn outside.
If the subjects were strong enough, talented enough, she wouldn’t even need the vial to confirm their ability. She could see it in the tightening of the chest, the widening of the eyes, the quickening of the breath. Further testing wasn’t necessary. Besides, her equipment was experimental, the hastily cobbled together product of theses and research notes only a year old. In truth, Chao could already predict what the wires and needles would indicate with nothing more than two hours’ conversation and the right questions, but the empire preferred the needles.
The boy stood, trailing wires, and walked over to the dragon. He lay his hand on the side of her equine face, stroking her horns. “It’s all right,” he said. “This is what I want to do.”
Chao looked at her ledger. The boy’s family name was Ling. She would still have testing to do—there were other children—but her curiosity was piqued. “Ling, what did the dragon say to you?”
“She told me to stay calm and control my breathing, and there was a chance that I wouldn’t go to war.” Outside, the villagers had already seen that Ling had been chosen, and the wailing began to rise.
• • •
The ground was treacherous underfoot, shale chips skittering in small avalanches with every step, Feng’s heavy pack throwing her off balance. She missed the cobbled pathways of the great university where she worked, even if the halls of learning had rejected her: Feng, the darling of her village, smart enough to make it to the big city, the capital itself, to study with the empire’s finest. The scrawny, book-loving girl had indentured herself to her village’s barony, trading university fees for a decade’s service as an estate sorcerer. Feng’s physique carried the scars of countryside famines—she ate well at the university but remained as lean as the day she’d arrived, as though her body itself feared growing soft like the beds in the dormitories. She had been quick to find that topping the regional examinations meant nothing when it came to the level of rigor at the university, not when the students from the noble houses had their own servants to cook and clean, leaving them more time to study—if they even did. It was whispered that some servants had uncharacteristically soft hands and ink stains on their sleeves, and were perhaps better versed in homework than housework.
Feng would have been sent back to her village in shame or, worse, in debt, had the professor not noticed her penchant for magical ecology, the one bright spark in the morass of red ink that was her report card. Feng had been quick to accept the professor’s offer, a transfer of her debt bond to her university—exchanging one form of servitude for another, but with her pride intact. That made all the difference.
Feng was so deep in thought that she put her weight on what looked to be a solid slab of dark rock only to have it slough away, taking the ground out from underfoot. Only a backwards pull on her pack kept her from smashing her face into the ground.
“Got you,” said the professor.
Professor Chao was willowy and as tall as Da Kai. Holding on to Feng as she did, the woman must have been composed of steel cables. The professor was dressed in simple working attire, thick khaki cotton trousers and a blouse. Feng wore the same informal uniform, except hers was already soaked with sweat, dark patches under her arms, her hair smeared across her forehead.
Da Kai wore old military fatigues, scrubbed until all the colour had bled away. Alarmingly, he now sported a well-weathered rifle, its old steel smelling of gunsmoke and oil, the barrel ornately carved. His own pack dwarfed the women’s and likely held their camping gear, whilst Feng’s and the professor’s carried all they needed for their research.
“That gun has seen some action,” said the professor to Da Kai. The man grunted, his long strides eating up the ground, his gaze scanning the scant distance ahead of them that fog did not obscure. Wading through the mist made Feng feel like a shade, caught in some form of half-life between ghost and flesh—like herself, caught between servitude and destitution. The professor, birdlike in stature, had the tenacity of a seagull with food on its mind. “Not up here in the reserve, I hope.”
“It’s an army rifle, Professor. I assure you, it has spilled no innocent blood in the reserve, which is more than I can say about the war,” rumbled Da Kai. This silenced the professor, a rare enough occurrence that Feng made a mental note to avoid the topic.
When the professor next spoke, her voice was measured, breathed out like a sigh held in for too long. “The war stained sword and pen alike. If you remember, there was much science used in the war, much of it for no good.”
“Is it necessary, Sir Da Kai, to be armed? We are simple researchers, after all,” said Feng.
“The mist is not natural. There are many hungry things here attracted by the dragonfall—none quite so dangerous as man. As the professor said, this gun has seen action, and not just in the war.”
A soldier, then. Feng wondered if they would have been safer with a larger complement of rangers, but the Forestry Service was stretched thin as it was. The empire had little enough surplus to feed the poor, let alone guard this vast wilderness. She shuddered at Da Kai’s mention of the things in the mist; there were no trees growing in the black grit. The plants she did see looked petrified, their branches more akin to shards of rock than wood. She had not seen a single living thing other than her two companions, but if the ground birthed such trees as these, then perhaps that was for the best.
“You said this wasn’t natural; I argue the opposite.” The professor again—hard to keep that woman down. “This is old land, where the dragons roam and inhale the magic from the skies and wind and water. When they die, the magic is returned. I’ve read papers on expeditions to the deep waters, when the great whales of the sea die and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Another professor took a metal bell and stayed under the depths for a week, documenting as the seabed came alive to reclaim the whale. That is what we shall do.”
“The professor must have been quite mad, to stay beneath the waves for a week,” observed Da Kai.
“True. He nearly ran out of air, and the sailors hauled him up so quickly that the change in pressures ruined his joints. He’s never been quite the same.”
“What do you think you will give up, Professor, to bring the knowledge of the dragonfall back to your university?”
“I don’t know, but at least we don’t have to shit in bottles for a week.”
Feng coloured at the expletive. Da Kai gave a short, sharp laugh like a dog’s bark. Then silence overtook them, until the ranger held up a hand, pointing to an outcrop looming out of the mist.
“There—our dragonfall.”
They quickened their pace, throwing off puffs of powdered shale as they made haste. The carcass was easily a hundred chi in length, the scales of the dragon iridescent even in the dead light that made it through the clouds and the mist, blue like the ocean. A wild mane ran down the back of the giant snake of a beast. Da Kai made a sound, and the three of them stopped.
“Our dragon is not dead.”
• • •
The trips were getting less and less fruitful. Other than Ling, Chao only found two more likely candidates for Dragonsworn training. One of the two, a girl, was so weak that the testing solution barely changed colour, but Chao brought her back to the capital anyway. Chao was an ecologist: she’d seen this before, in fishing villages where spawning grounds had collapsed; where nets, once bulging, came up half-filled with struggling fry. The fishermen should have known better—the empire should have known better. But both were starving, and a weak Dragonsworn was better than none at all.
The training academy was ready to receive all three candidates. Chao never got tired of seeing the academy. Before the war, it had been a home for the arts, with columns of rare teak, tiled roofs, expansive courtyards, and gardens where giant koi broke the surface with gaping mouths to snap at lazy mayflies. What she really enjoyed seeing were the dragons, looping in the sky above, flying in formation. In the distant hills, where thunderheads swirled and lightning flashed, the Dragonsworn were learning how to fight.
A welcome party was waiting for her. “Major Zhang,” Chao said to the leader, a wiry military man with a chestful of medals.
“You return with fewer and fewer every time.”
“This is the third trip the army has sanctioned in the Lake Provinces. You’re welcome to send anyone else from the university down there. I guarantee that they wouldn’t have brought you three.” She seized his hand. “Major, look at them. You know Ling hasn’t seen fifteen summers, even if he says he’s seventeen. Reject them. Say they’re too young to be Dragonsworn. It’s that easy.”
A flash of discomfort crossed the major’s sharp features before his expression defaulted to parade-ground neutral. “The war is not going well, no matter what you hear. The dragons are one of the few advantages that we have left. If you send me children, I’ll take children.”
“Has the empire run out of honour? Must we now feed our children to the war, too?”
“If it’s the only way to win, then yes.”
“What is winning if we lose our souls in the process?”
“Winning is living, Chao. Boy! Ling! Come here.”
Ling was wide-eyed at the academy’s opulence. Perhaps he’d seen some teak before, but certainly not the marble and jade of these grounds, and definitely not the dragons overhead. The major pulled the boy to his side and laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Why did you come to the capital, my boy?”
“To be a Dragonsworn, to ride the winds and to smite the enemies of the empire.”
“So you will, boy, and your family will never go hungry again.” He ruffled the boy’s hair and sent him on his way. “Professor Chao has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? A big office with a view? Only if we win the war, Chao. Only if we win.”
• • •
Feng wiped sweat from her brow. The grounds of the Mountains of Heaven were cool and dry, but the work was hard, and she was constantly covered in sweat, though the thirsty air drank it straight from her skin. The great beast was indeed alive, his sides still slowly heaving. Dragons did not die easily. They lived for generations, so no single academic had pieced together the full cycle of a dragon’s life and death.
That was what the professor was here for. She’d admonished Feng not to interfere with the order of things: their role was to document, to sample, to measure. Besides, the dragon was beyond their means to save, and trying would only prolong his suffering. Only on circumnavigation did the grievousness of the dragon’s injury present itself—a wound through his side, a crater gouged out of flesh. The crash had aggregated other injuries: gashes from the razor sharp rocks of the mountain, shards still embedded in flesh. Blood had ceased to flow, but the shimmering green fluid pooled under torn scales, darkened by exposure to air. Da Kai had grown uncharacteristically quiet after seeing the injury, leaving them to scout out the perimeter.
The landscape, so devoid of life earlier, had sprouted all manner of creatures in the vicinity of the dragon. Sinuous arthropods, like lobsters but at least a chi in length, convened around the puddles of blood. A strange fungus coated the rocks adjacent to the body. When Feng scraped some off, a dense mycelial network throbbed underneath, pulsing with the colour of blood and glowing faintly. She collected a sample in a jar and stowed it with a dozen others in a cloth bag. The professor busied herself taking samples from the dragon’s side, picking up loose scales and moving up toward his head.
Feng had never seen a dragon up close. This one’s face was long and equine, with a jaw doubly lined with teeth as long as her arm. Long whiskers that had once trailed in the wind lay listless on the ground. The eyes of the creature were half-closed and unfocused. Even near death, the dragon elicited a sense of reverence from the pair; the magnitude of his passing was so immense that it compelled them, and the world around his body, to silence.
“Are you enjoying field work, Feng?” The professor approached her work like a chef at a restaurant. Not those who produced tiny dishes on ornate plates for the rich: no, the professor moved like a street corner chef, managing three open-fire woks at once, not pausing in her measuring and recording to speak to Feng. Even the professor’s normal ebullience was subdued, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I don’t think I’ll relish the flight back.”
“I’d like to say it gets better with experience, but my own professor never kept a meal down on an airship.”
“It’s not like I have a choice in being here.”
“Nonsense. You’re a research assistant, not a slave. You didn’t think I bought out your study bond out of the goodness of my heart, did you?” The professor looked Feng in the eye and tapped her own nose with a dirt-streaked finger. “I’ve got a nose for talent. Well, and for bargains.”
“Was that wound from another dragon?” Feng asked. Talking about her situation brought back uncomfortable memories that haunted her nights, and she’d rather they didn’t haunt her waking hours.
“No, dragons do not fight with tooth and claw. It was probably an airship cannon,” answered the professor, measuring a tooth with a length of tape.
“I thought that dragons were protected under the terms of the armistice,” Feng said. The histories were still shifting as successive governments decided what mode of victory fit the narrative of how they were best suited to hold the reins of power. The stories all agreed on one thing—the war would not have been won without dragons, or those who rode them.
“They are. They deserve better than…” The professor swept her arm around her. “All this. Barely enough rangers to keep the poachers at bay. The poachers know better than to take on the younger dragons. They tend to herd, and if a herd of dragons decides it’s time to storm, they could take out a chunk of the capital, let alone a measly airship. This dragon was old and alone. Wounding a dragon is one thing; finding it in the mists of the Mountains of Heaven is another. Even a single dragon can be a terror. The Dragonsworn… In the war, each could wreak as much havoc as a battalion of soldiers.”
“I thought they were a legend, government propaganda. The older folk still think the dragons are sacred.”
“The Dragonsworn were real. Teaching about them has been banned for—what, twenty years now? All the university teaches is sorcery. Geomancy. Magic of the weather, magic of the body, magic of fates. Magic that needs copious study, ritual and ingredients. Dragonsworn were different. A different magic, older and wilder. The government doesn’t like it: books and temples, they can control. But dragons? You’ll have to ask the ranger—those are Dragonsworn carvings on his gun.”
Something halted their conversation: a quiet sound in the background, only noticeable because of its increasing volume. It waded out of the mist, a huge white tiger. No, Feng’s eyes had deceived her. In the same way people saw faces in clouds or patterns in tiles, her mind had defaulted to shapes she knew. What she had thought were stripes were dangling ribbons of flesh, and where a face should have been, there was a squirming nest of tentacles. While Feng could discern no eyes, she felt the gaze of the thing. She gasped when the professor pulled at her hand, signalling for silence. This was the rule; they were not to interfere.
The tiger, if they could call it that, slunk toward one of the gaping wounds in the scaled wall that was the dragon’s body. It latched its faceful of tentacles onto raw flesh and began to feed. Near to the end as he was, the dragon groaned, the low sound of the last gasp of wind, and shuddered all the way down his length. There was another roar, this one from a human throat, and Da Kai barrelled down toward them, covering the ground in great loping strides. The professor knew faster than Feng what the man was going to do.
“You mustn’t!” she yelled.
Da Kai dropped to his knee and brought the rifle up in one smooth arc. The sound of the gunshot was loud in the stillness. The ranger’s hands moved in a blur, and two more shots rang out, hitting the tiger square in the head. The animal was dead before it even knew it had been shot. When Da Kai stood up to examine the corpse, Feng observed that his rifle didn’t have a magazine. She’d seen guns in the capital before, but the ranger had loaded and fired two rounds in a bolt-action gun faster than most people could fire a magazine-fed firearm.
For the first time, she saw the professor angry. The woman had gone very still, and she measured out her words like an official counting grains of rice.
“You should not have done that, ranger. The dragons are wise and old, but this is his time, and this is part of the order of things. We cannot interfere, no matter how we feel for them.”
The ranger spat on the corpse of the creature, its fronds of flesh still twitching. “The dragon deserves his dignity. Haven’t we betrayed them enough?”
“You would know how, wouldn’t you, Dragonsworn?”
“You would blame a soldier for the crime of the generals? You think we didn’t know?” Da Kai sat, leaning his broad back against the dragon. The professor gestured for Feng to join him.
He went on: “In the old days, people like me would have been priests, praying to the dragons for rain when it was dry or for mercy when it flooded, and the dragons would listen. Then came the war. The army figured out how to find us, how we could be bonded with the dragons—sworn to them and they to us. I could see through my dragon’s eyes; I had only to fire my rifle, and his power would flow wherever I aimed. Have you seen a dragon’s lightning hit the ground? It could kill a single person, or reduce a ring a hundred paces wide to ash. Ash.”
“But there was a cost?” asked Feng.
“In blood. Dragons and soldiers died alike. It was war. But we asked too much of them; too much power flowed through the Dragonsworn to strike down the enemy. Their power. Their life. We knew what we were doing. All the Dragonsworn did. The dragons, they knew, too, but they wouldn’t leave us. You remember the Siege of the Pearl City, the last major battle of the war? So many dragons. That was the last time he ever spoke to me. We survived the war, he and I. But I never again heard his voice. Some Dragonsworn made the government give the dragons the Tian Shan Reserve. The Mountains of Heaven. Some fell to mercenary work or worse. Some…”
“Became rangers,” finished the professor.
Story done, Da Kai got to his feet. The war had ended long before Feng’s birth, and the tale had taken all the bounce from the man’s step, as though each word of history were a handful of dirt on his grave. He pressed his head to the scales of the dying beast.
“They called him the Prince of the South, and he was my dragon.”
• • •
• • •