Read Online Dragon Coast by Greg van Eekhout - Free Book Online Page B

to find Daniel Blackland enjoying the view from his living room couch.
    Gabriel set down his briefcase and hung his coat. “Can I get you something to drink?”
    Daniel lifted a bottle of wine to him. “No need.”
    â€œIs that the ninety-three Wolfskill cabernet?”
    â€œI didn’t read the label. It tastes like smog.”
    â€œThe ninety-seven, then. You look beat.” Daniel always looked a little beat: thin, unshaven, hair cropped by a box cutter. One of his hands was bundled with a comically large bandage. “What happened to you?”
    â€œWhere’s your hound?” Daniel said, ignoring the question because he always seemed to get a kick from evading questions put to him by authority figures, and despite the frightening power that resided in his bones, he considered Gabriel an authority figure.
    â€œBy ‘hound’ I think you’re referring to the assistant director of the Department of Water and Power?”
    â€œWow, you’re starchy today. Isn’t that what I said?”
    â€œNot even close. To what do I owe this visit, Daniel?”
    Daniel took a swig of Gabriel’s wine. “I suppose you know where I’ve just come back from.”
    â€œWell, I know you hired Isaac Slough to grow a new body for Sam. But I’m not actually spying on you. However, your face is pretty chapped, even though we’ve had wet weather the last two weeks. Out to sea? Mountaintop?”
    Daniel raised the bottle at “mountaintop.”
    â€œMount Whitney. I found Sam there. Then lost him.”
    â€œLost him to whom?”
    â€œThe Northern realm.” Daniel took a swig.
    Gabriel lowered himself into the opposite chair. He relieved Daniel of the bottle and took a long pull. “Tell me what happened on the mountain.”
    Daniel told him about the airships and the Northern soldiers, and how he watched them carry the dragon away. He told him about his visit to Hollywood Cemetery, and how he obtained a small piece of the axis mundi dragon. Gabriel pretended he didn’t know what that was.
    â€œBasically,” Daniel said, “it’s like a soul magnet. I hoped to use it to draw Sam’s consciousness from the firedrake, store it in the bone, and then put his consciousness inside Slough’s golem.” Daniel let out a small, bitter laugh. “It sounds so straightforward when I say it like that.”
    â€œMaybe not straightforward in execution, but certainly in concept.” Gabriel liked it. It was neat, with clear objectives and mileposts. “So, the only thing that’s changed is now instead of drawing the firedrake to a mountaintop, you have to find it in the Northern realm.”
    â€œRight, that’s all there is to it. Oh, except for I lost the axis mundi bone in all the high-altitude fisticuffs, and the only other known fragments are in China and the Northern realm. You have any friends in China?”
    â€œWhere in the Northern realm, exactly?”
    â€œIn the stronghold of one of their most powerful osteomancers. He’s very close to the Northern Hierarch. Or at least he was.”
    Gabriel realized Daniel was setting him up for some bad news. “What happened to him?” Gabriel asked, playing the straight man.
    â€œI killed him.”
    Daniel reached for the bottle. Gabriel took an extra-long swig before handing it back.
    â€œPaul Sigilo had the bone. Your golem-brother.”
    â€œMy golem-brother, the osteomancer who built the Pacific firedrake. Who I killed on Catalina.”
    â€œYou don’t make things easy, do you, Blackland?”
    â€œNothing’s easy. That’s why I’ve come to you. I can’t do this by myself. Too many moving parts, and none of them close to hand. By myself, I could maybe find the firedrake in the North. By myself, I could maybe find a way to get the axis mundi bone from Paul’s house.”
    These were big, ambitious, conspicuous capers