The Book of Dragons

It would have been so easy to lie. Just a nod and the conversation could be over, but then again, why should she lie? It wasn’t as if she wouldn’t be attending the university. The two were on the same grounds. “Institute,” she said. “Technical branch. Keep an eye on him for me, will you?”

The gargoyle’s eyes twinkled. “Good on you, love. The world could always use more magitechs. Sure I’ll watch your ride. Just don’t be long, and, please, if at all possible, be human when you get back. It’s awful disorienting when they’re not.”

“Don’t worry, I will be.”

“I assume you know who you’re dealing with down there?”

“Carl’s an old friend,” she said.

The gargoyle gave a gravelly chuckle. “Well, well, if you say so. You take care of yourself, all right? We’ll both be here when you get back.”

She thanked him again and turned to the dragon. It sat motionless on its haunches, surveying the street below with what she liked to imagine was a protective gaze. “I’ll be right back, buddy,” she whispered, and whistled the locking sequence her father had taught her: a few notes, carefully arranged, changed every month or so, and nonsensical to the casual listener. To a keener ear, or to anyone who’d been close to Melee for longer than six months, the random sequences might begin to form a pattern, just discernible as the beginning of a song. A more patient listener would find the entire tune laid out within a year, and they might wonder why such a pretty lullaby had earned this practical vivisection. Fortunately, no one ever managed to stick around for more than a few months. Melee made sure of it.

The golden light faded from the dragon’s eyes as it settled into standby.

“Back in a bit,” she told the gargoyle, and headed for the rusty fire escape on the side of the building.

The bell chimed softly as she opened the door. It was dim inside and crowded in a way that made Melee feel right at home. The dark wood of the floor and ceiling glowed in the light of the false electric candles on the walls, the sight of which very nearly made her smile again. Carl had renovated since her last visit. Shelves filled the shop from floor to ceiling, stuffed with the leftovers and hand-me-downs of centuries of university students. She passed piles of mended rucksacks, a bin of shoes made for non-human feet, old microwaves, taxidermy homunculi, heaps of mismatched dishes, and brass alchemical sets on her way to the back where the true treasures lived.

Melee slowed as she approached the last row of shelves. Just beyond shone the long glass counter, sparkling clean. There was the magnificent mahogany cabinet behind it, locking away the tools of Carl’s true trade. And there, laying around it in piles as tall as she was, were the textbooks.

Carl, however, was nowhere in sight. She picked her way over a liger-skin rug and began searching the nearest stack, eyes keyed for the distinctive orange cover of Dragons, Dynamos, and Dirty Jobs: A Primer in Magitech . It was only after combing through three stacks and nine copies of Necromancy for the Absolute Beginner that she thought to glance at the counter itself.

There, spread out on the glittering glass surface, was the primer.

Please, please, be readable , she thought, and eased a finger beneath the battered cover. Gingerly, she lifted it a few inches, waiting for the telltale movement. When no words scurried across the page and out of sight, she breathed a sigh of relief. The magical silverfish she’d found graffitied in the last pawnshop’s primer had herded the words into the spine each time it was opened. Probably the parting gift of a senior lexomancer to all those undergraduates who had to stoop to buying their books on Pawn Row. Imagining all sorts of miserable postgraduate fates on the fictional lexomancer, Melee hadn’t been able to resist adding a few lines of her own in the margins of that one before shoving it back on the shelf.

The text on the pages of this primer, however, stayed firmly in place, obscured here and there by patterns of oily thumbprints in various degrees of translucence. They testified to at least one previous owner with a love of pizza, and no hope of resale profit. She thumbed through the first chapter, wrinkling her nose at the faint smell of mildew and ensorcelled embalming fluid that wafted out. The pizza-loving owner must’ve been a necromancy major exploring their backup career options. Wonderful. She’d heard of senior students binding unpleasant little creatures within the textbooks they didn’t like as practice for their finals, and the last thing she wanted was a pseudo-djinn bursting from the pages and interrupting her studies.

The trouble was, she needed this textbook. Term started on Monday, and she was running out of pawnshops where she was still welcome.

“Interested, darling?”

Melee slammed the book shut and let out a stream of expletives her father would be shocked to hear she knew. The man standing behind the counter merely smiled and raised one perfectly manicured eyebrow.

“Good to see you again too, Melee,” he said when she stopped for breath.

“ Carl ,” she growled, “you can’t sneak up on people like that.”

“Says who?”

“Says me!”

He sighed. “Next time I’ll wear a cowbell. Now: Are you interested?”

She looked down at the fraying cover, the pizza stains, the torn pages. “Yes,” she said carefully, “but I think I should get a discount.”

“ What? ” At least, that’s what she assumed he meant. It came out more like, “ Hwhaaaaaaa? ”

“Look at it,” she said. “The professor’ll quarantine it as a biohazard.”

Carl sucked in his cheeks until she could see the outlines of his elongated eyeteeth, making him look more like a corpse. An impressive feat, given that Carl de Rosia had been legally dead for at least a hundred years.

“Melee. Darling ,” the vampire tried. “Be reasonable. You’re going for magitech, aren’t you?” He waved a hand before she could answer. “What am I saying? Of course you are. I’ve known Instructor Groźny for … well, for a long time. She’s been teaching those technical courses since before I got my fangs. As long as you have it, she couldn’t care less about the state of your textbook. Besides, a little battering gives it character, don’t you think?”

“A little battering?”

He looked again at the weary cover. “I believe the proprietary term is ‘well loved.’”

Melee bit her tongue. He was probably right: about the book, about Groźny, about everything. No matter where one fell on the vital spectrum, no one earned a position at the University of Uncommon Arts and Sciences without enough life experience to fill a textbook of their own. Or a position at the institute technical branch , she reminded herself. Those who made it that far had learned to pick their battles.

“I’ll give you one hundred and twenty,” she said.

“One hundred and twenty? One hundred and twenty? ” The words escaped with more than a hint of a whine, and Melee saw his lips twitch back from his fangs. She guessed he’d added a few more words out of the range of human hearing. “Do you want me to starve, heartless girl?”

“You’re being dramatic again, Carl. You’re not going to starve.”

“I might!” he cried. “I haven’t had customers in days .”

“Liar.”

“All right, hours . But I have a high metabolism and … and you don’t understand …”

Melee wondered if the University Theater knew what talent they had missed when Carl de Rosia decided to pursue the unlife of a pawnbroker. Really, all that was missing were tears and a lacy handkerchief.