Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(118)

“And erase anything else?” cried Eskar. “I don’t think so.”

“Routine maintenance,” screeched the old archivist, whining like a broken bagpipe. “Everything I erase is stored in my mind. I never forget.”

Eskar had called up the correct file on the reader and was skimming it rapidly, emitting impatient puffs of smoke from her flared nostrils. “Yes, this is it!” she cried at last. “General Palonn’s niece, born of his sister Abind, who died. The creature was locked up for twenty-seven years and used as a research subject.”

Comonot stood very still now, with his arms folded. “And for this action, which I agree is questionable, you think we should disband the Censors entirely?”

“She was intelligent, and intelligence has value,” said Eskar. “It’s the same principle you applied to humanity. A sound principle, Ardmagar, but it needs to be expanded, not contracted.”

“A ludicrous principle,” screeched an unfamiliar voice, and we all turned to look at the hatchling supporting the old archivist. He bared his teeth. “Other creatures may be intelligent, but only dragons are truly logical. Logic is pure and incorruptible. By engaging with non-dragon intelligences, dragons may be corrupted until they are no longer dragons. Consorting with humans degrades us; we must burn the corruption out of our own.”

His words made me shudder. I glanced at Comonot, as if he might have shared my sentiment, but he was staring intently at the youngster, clearly interested. “That’s it,” he said, nodding firmly. “That’s the new logic: I’m not a dragon in your estimation, and it’s worth your life to put an end to mine. Now I’ve heard it stated plainly. But where did it come from?”

“From that thing,” grunted the elder archivist, dribbling from a corner of his mouth. “Experiment 723a. You considered it intelligent, Eskar? It was too intelligent by half.”

I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Her name is Jannoula. She’s been helping them strategize. Remember telling me about General Laedi, Comonot? That’s her.”

“They’re taking advice from a half-dragon when there are perfectly whole dragons they don’t consider dragons at all?” said the Ardmagar, raising his bushy brows.

“Laedi is useful—for now,” screeched the archivist’s young assistant. “Don’t imagine we’ll let her live once the civil strife is over.”

“She has a talent for persuasion,” I said to Comonot. “She’s in the Southlands now, pursuing the Old Ard’s ends. She had Orma sent back to Goredd.”

“The Censors tortured her!” cried Eskar, pulling the control cups off her claws. “They made a monster.”

“A monster who does our bidding,” sneered the younger dragon.

Eskar gave him a withering look down her snout. “You hope.”

Eskar may have been baiting him, but she’d raised a crucial point. It wasn’t obvious that the Old Ard could rely on Jannoula. She hated dragons; I remembered how contemptuously she had spoken of them, how upset she’d been about Orma and me being friendly. She had talked her way out of prison at last, I suspected; the Old Ard believed they were using her, and she let them believe that.

Eskar had succeeded in provoking the youngster. Wisps of smoke leaked from his nostrils and he quivered all over, itching to fight her but unable to lunge because he was propping up the aged archivist. “You are a blot on draconic purity, Eskar. We know all about you, how you lived with a deviant in Porphyry and loved him, how you are afflicted with a creeping sympathy for quigs. We will burn out this cancer, to our last breath. It doesn’t matter how many of us die: two pure dragons are all we need to renew the race to its former—”

He cut off with a squawk. The elderly archivist, sudden as a snake, had clamped his crusty jaws upon the back of the youngster’s neck, just below his head. The hatchling’s jaws opened and shut reflexively, and his eyes rolled. The archivist held on until the younger dragon lost consciousness; when he let go, the hatchling’s head flopped to the floor, bounced once, and lolled grotesquely.

“I’d have bitten him sooner,” creaked the old dragon, “but I have trouble with my eyes. I had only one chance to hit that nerve, and I had to get it right.” The archivist limped closer to the unconscious hatchling and leaned against him; he sagged distressingly without support.

The Ardmagar saluted the sky. “All in ard. I take it you don’t subscribe to this new philosophy?”

“I am too old for philosophy,” squawked the archivist. “And the half-human didn’t have to work as hard as all that. All it did was hold a mirror to our biases and say, ‘Look how right you already are!’


“Those disgruntled generals had been plotting against you for decades, Ardmagar. Things might never have gone beyond scheming and spying if the half-human hadn’t goaded them into action. Its uncle, General Palonn, visited once a year, but Experiment 723a didn’t require much time. ‘Comonot is impure, Uncle. You could set things right. If you had a spy in Goredd, he could put an end to this foolish treaty in one blow.’ ”

“She knew about Imlann?” I blurted, appalled by the idea that my grandfather’s attack on Comonot and the Queen last midwinter had been due to Jannoula’s influence.

The ancient dragon bared his broken fangs disdainfully. “Not by name, but the half-human was an uncanny guesser. It inferred that the generals must have a spy. Only I considered its intuitions dangerous; no one else took the creature seriously.”