Seraphina(20)

“As you wish,” he said. “Give me at least an hour, though. This student is particularly incapable.”


As I was bundling up, I realized I had done nothing about Basind’s blood on my cloak. The dragon’s blood had long since dried but was still shiny as ever. I slapped at it, causing a blizzard of little silver flakes. I beat as much of the stain out as I could and swept the gleaming detritus into the fireplace.

I took the Royal Road, which descended in wide, graceful curves. The streets were dark and silent, lit only by a quarter moon, lighted windows, and occasional Speculus lanterns that had been set out early. Down near the river, the air was sweet with woodsmoke and rich with someone’s garlicky dinner, then dense with the reek of a backyard cesspit. Or maybe offal—was I near a butcher’s?

A figure stepped out of the shadows and into the open street ahead of me. I froze, my heart pounding. It shambled toward me, and the choking odor grew stronger. I coughed at the stench and reached for the little knife I kept sheathed in the hem of my cloak.

The dark figure raised its left hand toward me, palm up as if to beg. It raised a second left hand and said, “Thlu-thlu-thluuu?” A wisp of blue flame played about its beaky mouth as it spoke, illuminating its features for a moment: slick scaly skin, spiky crest like a Zibou iguana, bulging conical eyeholes that swiveled independently of each other.

I exhaled. It was nothing but a panhandling quigutl.

The quigutl were a second species of dragon, much smaller than the saar. This one was about my height, tall for a quig. The quigutl could not change shape. They lived alongside saar in the mountains, squeezing into the cracks and crevasses of the larger dragons’ dens, living on garbage and using their four hands to build intricate, minuscule devices, such as the earrings the saarantrai all wore. Quigs had been included in Comonot’s Treaty out of politeness; no one had anticipated that so many would come south, or that they’d find the nooks and crannies—and garbage—of the city so much to their liking.

Quigs couldn’t speak Goreddi, having no lips and a tongue like a hollow reed, but most of them understood it. For my part, I understood Quigutl; it was just Mootya with a bad lisp. The creature had said, “Do I thmell cointh, maidy?”

“You should not be begging after dark,” I scolded it. “What are you doing out of Quighole? You’re not safe on the streets. One of your brother saar was attacked yesterday, in broad daylight.”

“Yeth, I thaw the whole thing from the eaveth of a ware-houthe,” it said, its tubelike tongue flicking out between its teeth and raining sparks down its speckled belly. “You have a friendly thmell, but you’re no thaar. I am thurprithed you underthtand me.”

“I have a knack for languages,” I said. Orma had told me my scales smelled of saar, though not strongly. He’d said a saarantras would have to put his nose right up to me to smell it. Did the quigutl have more sensitive noses?

It sidled closer and sniffed the dried bloodstain on my shoulder.

The quig’s breath was so gut-seizingly foul that I didn’t see how it could smell anything subtler. I’d never been able to smell saar, even on Orma. When the quig backed away, I sniffed at the stain myself. I could feel an odor’s presence in my nostrils—a sensation more tactile than olfactory—but I could discern nothing else about it.

A sharp pain shot through my head, as if I’d driven spikes up into my sinuses.

“You have two thaar thmells,” the creature said. “Altho, a thmall purth containing five thilver and eight copper cointh, and a knife—cheap thteel, rather dull.” Even these small dragons were pedantically precise.

“You can smell how sharp my knife is?” I said, pressing the heels of my hands against my temples, as if I might crush the pain. It didn’t help.

“I could thmell how many hairs were on your head, if I wished to, which I do not.”

“Lovely. Well, I can’t just give you coin. I only trade metal for metal,” I said, as I’d heard Orma respond to quigutl panhandling. It was not the usual Goreddi response, and nothing I would have attempted with other people watching, but Orma had acquired several odd trinkets for me this way. I kept the eccentric collection out of sight in the little basket. They weren’t illegal—they were nothing but toys—but such “demonic devices” might scare the maids.

The quigutl blinked its eyes and licked its lips. The creatures didn’t care about money, as such; they wanted metal to work with, and we were all carrying it in convenient, premeasured quantities.

Behind the quigutl, half a block up the street, stable doors clattered open. A boy emerged with two lanterns and hung them up on either side in anticipation of riders arriving home. The quig glanced over its shoulder, but the boy was looking the other way.

The quigutl’s spiky silhouette stood out against the light, its eye cones extending and retracting as it considered what to trade. It reached into its gullet, down into its extendable throat pouch, and withdrew two objects. “I have only thmall thingth with me: a copper and thilver filigree fish”—the fish dangled between the two thumbs of one right hand—“and thith, which ith mothtly tin, a lizard with a human head.”

I squinted in the feeble light from the stable. The man-faced lizard was rather horrible. Suddenly I wanted the thing, as if it were an abandoned grotesque who needed a place to live.