Dragon Coast Read Free

they’d shatter. There was a crackling like dry straw, and the control stick splintered and snapped off in his hands.
    The dragon raised its great wings, the tips smashing into the sides of houses and shattering roofs. It brought them down again, and the waves they generated almost capsized the woman’s skiff. But the dragon began to climb. It rose through smoke into clear air, where Sam could see flames still spreading to other houses and people crawling on front lawns and families holding hands and running away. He caught sight of the woman in her skiff. She was stuck now in a clog of traffic of other people trying to get away in their boats.
    Whatever he’d done differently this time seemed to have worked. Somehow, this time, he’d managed to exert some control over the dragon. Sam wasn’t steering the dragon, but at least it was flying away without immolating the woman and her children in the skiff.
    The dragon rumbled with a vocalization. To Sam, it sounded like laughter.

 
    TWO
    The water mage disliked water. At least he did now, when there was far too much of it, especially when it was water he didn’t control.
    He stood at the bow of the fifty-foot shrimp boat as it rode swells taller than three-story buildings. The deck rose and then dropped beneath his feet, and he gripped the rail and reminded himself that he could have delegated this work to someone else, if he didn’t mind it being done wrong. Right now, Gabriel Argent wished he had a higher tolerance for things being done wrong. But he was a control freak. Other people said that like it was a bad thing.
    Spray obscured the wheelhouse windows, but he could imagine the glares of contempt directed at him by the captain and radio operator. Sailors knew better than to be out in this weather. Only the privilege of Gabriel’s high office shielded him from complaint. They might think nasty things at him, but they wouldn’t say them out loud. There was only one person who told him to his face when he was being stupid.
    The bright orange life jacket the captain insisted Gabriel wear did little to make him look rugged, nor did his constant and futile attempts to wipe water off his glasses. He entertained no illusions about his appearance. He was a man thinned by late hours and skipped meals, with a physique well suited to the strenuous exercise of lifting pens and bending over engineering diagrams and grimoires. He pocketed his glasses and squinted into the wet gloom.
    Beneath the surface, the Pacific Ocean churned, 760 trillion pounds of water that made Gabriel Argent’s own network of aqueducts and canals and sewers and pipes seem like a dribble.
    And there were other powers lurking among shipwrecks and whale carcasses: the magically potent remains of kraken, and dragon turtle, and horse-serpents sleeping in the crushing depths.
    The only thing that made Gabriel even more uneasy than the sea was the sky.
    A voice crackled through the intercom speaker: “We have visual contact.” It belonged to the pilot of the spotter plane, three thousand feet up and six miles downrange. He was probably hating the weather even more than Gabriel was.
    Gabriel peered through the binoculars, but he could see nothing through the wadded low clouds.
    â€œMax?”
    Max leaned into the wind and lurched up the deck to stand beside him, water streaming from his oilskin hood and from the tip of his long, sharp nose. He gave Gabriel a deadpan glare of annoyance. Unlike Gabriel’s other subordinates, Max wasn’t afraid to call out Gabriel’s mistakes, shortcomings, and bad ideas. That was only one reason Max was more than a subordinate. He was more of an equal who did what Gabriel told him.
    â€œYou think I can smell anything with all this water flying in my face?” he said over the storm.
    â€œWhat’s the point in having a great nose if you’re not willing to use it?”
    Max’s grumbles were lost in the wind