Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
THE DRAGONS OF THE CUYAHOGA
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
EPILOGUE
THE DWARVES OF WHISKEY ISLAND
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
EPILOGUE
Praise for the novels of Dragons and Dwarves:
“A very well done contemporary fantasy.”—Publishers Weekly
“It’s a good energetic mystery, with a complicated plot and lots of chasing-down-leads action.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A very enjoyable contemporary fantasy.”—Science Fiction
“It’s a provocative world of deadly enchantment in which the dirty game of policics remains the biggest threat of all.”
—Locus
“Skillfully done light adventure, with more than a dash of humor.”—Science Fiction Chronicle
Other fine DAW science fiction and fantasy from S. ANDREW SWANN
Science Fiction:
The Moreau Novels:
MOREAU OMNIBUS: (#1-3)
FEARFUL SYMMETRIES (#4)
Prophets:
APOTHEOSIS
Hostile Takeover:
PROFITEER
PARTISAN
REVOLUTIONARY
Fantasy:
DRAGONS AND DWARVES
BROKEN CRESCENT
GOD’S DICE
Fiction:
ZIMMERMAN’S ALGORITHM
THE DRAGONS OF THE CUYAHOGA
Copyright © 1996 by Steven Swiniarski
THE DWARVES OF WHISKEY ISLAND
Copyright © 1998 by Steven Swiniarski
DRAGONS AND DWARVES: STORIES OF THE CLEVELAND PORTAL
Copyright © 2009 by Steven Swiniarski
All Right Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1484.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
eISBN : 978-1-101-13330-9
First Omnibus Printing, August 2009
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
S.A.
http://us.penguingroup.com
THE DRAGONS OF THE CUYAHOGA
This is dedicated to a
poor little guy named Henry.
I want to thank all the hamsters
in Cleveland who saw this MS
and tried to improve it.
PROLOGUE
I DIDN’T witness it, but I imagine it happening like this. . . .
The name he is given in English is Aloeus. He weighs over fifteen tons. A hundred feet from nose to tail and a wingspan half again that long. Muscles ripple under leathery black skin with every wing beat, as each sweep hauls his serpentine bulk into the sky.
Aloeus is unconcerned about the fact that his soaring is impossible by the rules of Earthly physics. His flight is as much through the forces that pour through the Portal as it is through the mundane air. More than any other creature, Aloeus is a creature of those forces. His mind is knit by strands of magic, and magic—as much as muscles and sinew—holds his wings against the biting wind tearing across the sky three thousand feet above the city of Cleveland.
He sees those forces as he soars above the city. Where a human being would only see sky and clouds, a brilliantly lit skyline, and the roiling clouds by the lakeshore—the constant vortex marking the Portal itself—Aloeus saw in a spectrum that humans could barely imagine, much less perceive. The Portal is a font of mystical power, visible to Aloeus’ eye, and to the mind behind that eye. Glowing, pulsing tendrils of power twist and whip out from the Portal, pouring through the streets like rivers of mana, flowing into the sky like an inverted waterfall.
Aloeus breathes the power like air, feels wisps of it glide through his mind, tugs against it with his wings.
The power has its limits, but Aloeus cannot see them this close to the heart of it all, the Portal. The irregular edges of the magical flood are far from here, just short of Canada to the north, just short of Pennsylvania to the east, halfway to Columbus to the south, Sandusky to the west, and perhaps about three miles up. If Aloeus could see the edges of the mana enveloping northeast Ohio, he would not be flying this fast. Here, though, practically on top of the Portal, Aloeus is immersed in the forces that keep him alive.
The forces that keep him practically immortal.
While it would be disastrous for him to leave the sea of magic that pools around the Portal, there’s no danger of that here. While the turbulent flood of magic ebbs and flows around him, like the air, or water beneath the surface of the ocean, it is always there. It may be more or less dense and spots might temporarily deaden, but unlike the fickle edges far from the Portal, the magic never fades this close to the source. He would have to fly three miles straight up for that to become a danger.
These facts are fundamental in Aloeus’ world. Very basic assumptions that he takes so much for granted that he isn’t aware—or, perhaps, does not want to be aware—that they are assumptions.
Of all the creatures in the world, magical or not, Aloeus should know better.
Unconcerned, Aloeus tears through the night sky, black as a thunderhead, and as powerful as a tsunami. The citizens who care to look up at the cloudless sky see him only as a tiny eclipse of a star or two. A few people, working very late nights or very early mornings in some of the skyscrapers around Public Square, look west in time to see Aloeus’ demonic silhouette against a swollen setting moon.
As to what his last thoughts are, no one can know and I don’t care to guess. He doesn’t see it coming; if he did, he might be able to do something, maneuver, avoid it. . . .
Around him, the impossible happens.
A dead spot in the mana sea. Aloeus doesn’t even have time to understand the enormity of what is happening. As the magic disappears, his mind dies. Aloeus’ brain, the meat circuitry that regulates his physical body, is not complex enough to house his mind. The thinking part of Aloeus, his identity, lived in the mana that, until moments ago, had lived in every cell of his body.
His conscious mind is dead.
However, he is not unconscious. The higher functions are gone, the eyes that saw as much by magic as by light are now half blind, but, like any brute animal, Aloeus can feel pain.
He wears a body impossible by what human beings would consider the normal rules of biology and physics. Now, suddenly, he exists in a world where aerodynamics, the square-cube law, and the tensile strength of muscle and sinew all mean something.
The wind becomes a wall, tearing wings back, ripping joints out of their sockets, splintering delicate bone, shredding skin. The long serpentine neck snaps back, vertebrae separate and fracture, as a head the size of a human body slams into his back above the base of his tail.
His body tumbles in a spinning downward dive as overtaxed lungs separate from the chest wall and his heart busts open with the pressure of his blood.
No longer a shadow gliding across the sky, he is a plummeting missile. More people see him now, they can hear the whistle of air sliding by his body. There is the slight, horrible, chance that—as his body falls out of the dead spot and back into the mana sea—the thinking part of his brain might awaken enough to understand.
Then he hits.
Aloeus, one of the most private of creatures, suffers the most public of deaths. Fifteen tons of dragon slam into a gravel mine on the western shore of the Cuyahoga River within sight of downtown Cleveland.
The body hits at such a velocity and such an angle that it keeps moving. Bones turn to jelly and flesh tears away as it skids across the ground. Gore marks gantries two hundred feet up and fifty yards away. The body tears into a docked cargo ship, twisting bulkheads and steel as it tumbles off the far side and plunges into the river, finally, to rest.
And, before the last postmortem tremor leaves Aloeus’ epic corpse, the dominoes have started to fall.
CHAPTER ONE
THE domino with my name on it happened to be Columbia Jennings, a whip-thin, middle-aged Hispanic woman who was the Metro editor of the Cleveland Press. Third in the chain of command and my immediate boss.
Don’t get me wrong about this, I like my job. Cleveland, for various reasons, is one of very few places where serious print journalism is still kicking. Seniority gave me the ability to concentrate on investigative reporting and op-ed pieces. There are few times I dislike coming into the office.
All those times have Columbia’s name written on them.
When I came in that morning, and sat down at my workstation, and saw a little messaging icon with her name on it hovering in the middle of the LCD flatscreen display, my first response was to look around the office to see if anyone had witnessed my arrival and could testify if I bolted for the fire exit.
When an unseen escape proved not to be an option, I gritted my teeth and clicked on the message. Meeting, her office, three minutes ago. I think my wince was barely visible.
The words, “You’re late,” greeted me as I opened her office door. I looked around the office. Just me and her. Bad sign. She waved at me to close the door, which was worse—if only because it confined the stale smell of cigarette smoke in the room. Columbia reeked of it, and the air around her made my eyes water.
I took a seat across from her and said, “I just got your message.”
I don’t know exactly how she did it, but she could radiate disapproval without changing her expression. “Have you heard any news broadcasts this morning?”
I shook my head. One of my few personal rules was not to take work home. When I was off duty, I was off duty. Between whatever point I got home to my condo, and coming into work the next morning, I avoided news broadcasts, newspapers, even C-SPAN. It only took my wife and daughter moving to California to learn me that lesson, though I doubt my ex gives me any credit for it.
The disapproval wave hit me again.
“They found a dragon floating in the Cuyahoga River this morning.”
“I didn’t know they could swim.”
“Dead.” She snapped the word.
I was taken aback. It must have shown, because she let a shadow of a smile leak from the corner of her mouth. Common knowledge was that dragons were supposedly immortal. The things were supposed to be able to take a bullet directly into the brain or heart and still keep flying—though I don’t know anyone personally who’d had the balls to put that theory to the test.
Christ, there were only a handful of dragons on this side of the Portal. This wasn’t just news, this was major news.
Which made things pretty damn obvious to your truly.
“You know I don’t do fuzzy gnome stories.”
“This isn’t a fuzzy gnome story,” she said, “and you know it.” She was giving me a very cold look. I had the impression of an Old Testament pagan idol, the kind they fed babies to.
“This isn’t my kind of—”
“Bullshit, Maxwell.” She stood up. “You may have a privileged position here because you’ve been covering City Hall since they played football in Browns Stadium, but you can only take that so far. You still work for this paper.”
I shook my head.
“You think you’re too good to cover Morgan’s beat?”
Morgan would have been the man to cover this story. If he’d still been at the paper, this probably would have been his crowning achievement, actual feature material.
I shook my head no.
“Good, because you are the only person on the staff who hasn’t had to cover for him.”
I gave a resigned nod. I know very few reporters at the Press who envied Morgan’s beat. All the paranormal crap was, supposedly, what made Cleveland interesting. Makes sense, right? The fact was, the guy on the magic beat, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is working the ubiquitous “fuzzy gnome” stories. All the stupid (in)human interest stuff that’s filler in the paper and gives the morning dee-jays something stupid to talk about. Unicorn sightings, gremlins in the sewer line, the occasional talking frog—which never has anything interesting to say. All the kind of stuff you would have found in a supermarket tabloid before the Portal opened and the crap started actually happening.
The difference is, of course, when the hacks in the tabloids were making the shit up, they made sure it was interesting.
Morgan was a transplanted Kentuckian who was one of the few people who actually enjoyed hearing mages pontificate on the different varieties of graveyard soil.
Unfortunately for everyone, Morgan’s interest in his subject had overcome a prudent professional detachment, and it wasn’t just his objectivity that suffered. The stories on how it happened varied; the cleaner versions had him ingesting some elixir he shouldn’t have, the more ribald versions had him intimate with something not quite human. Either way, everyone agreed that four weeks ago, Morgan broke out in a carpet of tumors all over his skin. That would be bad enough, but apparently all these warts grew tiny little eyes that started staring at him. They did an MRI scan and discovered the little buggers scattered everywhere in his body.
Even so, his prognosis was pretty good. They just had to life-flight him down to Columbus, away from the influence of the Portal.
Bad news, returning anywhere within a hundred miles of this town would probably wake up all the little bright-eyed tumors, with fatal results.
“Do we know who it is?”
“They haven’t released any information yet.”
I stood up. “Okay, Bea, where am I going?”
She scrawled directions on a Post-It note and handed it to me. And for a brief moment I saw something that I’ve rarely ever seen in Columbia’s eyes.
Relief.
I did spend some nominal time on the way t
here wondering how it was, when a hundred-foot-long, fifteen-ton corpse with a 150-foot wingspan clogged the Cuyahoga River in the shadow of the Hope Memorial Bridge, that the Cleveland Press’ senior City Hall reporter got the plum assignment.
Unfortunately, while I am pretty good at spotting real or imagined conspiracies in city government, I wasn’t that good at seeing them at my own newspaper. In retrospect it was probably the willful blindness of a middle-aged man comfortable in his job that made me avoid asking a few key questions until much later.
I got to the scene a little after nine a.m. About five blocks from the river I was solidly wedged in traffic backed up from the bridge. I could just catch sight of police and EMS flashers at the base of the northernmost art-deco tower.
I looked up and saw a few traffic ’copters hovering above the river. Above them, reptilian shadows circled in the blue August sky. Other dragons paying their respects.
I turned on the radio and scanned through the stations. Each one announced itself with a few brief seconds of Portal-generated babble before the digital circuitry managed to decipher the real broadcast from the extraneous magical signals that ate up fifty or sixty percent of the bandwidth. The interference resolved into the tail end of a traffic report. “—nasty tie-up on Carnegie near the river. Police have closed the Hope Memorial Bridge, but that hasn’t seemed to stem the tide of curiosity seekers, who’ve tied up traffic all the way back to the Convocation Center—”