The Dragonbone Petticoat

Chapter Four

"In a manner of speaking, though there's a bit more art than that. My dear," he added condescendingly.

"I might strike you if you call me my dear one more time."

"Then I might have to call Cilicia to my rescue." Cilicia rode the front of the wheeled freight palette bearing Beast, along with four other ceramic-clad Ardemians, their coifs draped around their shoulders. The motorized palette glided noiselessly until it clattered over the tracks so ferociously that Elessa turned an anxious glance to the griffin, who clung stubbornly to unconsciousness.

"That's not a threat." Though Elessa scrutinized the thickset young woman for any hidden powers or potentialities, she found none, other than one eye a full quarter inch higher than the other.

"What are you gawking at, Vanoori? Haven't you seen a real city?" As the road tapered toward the travex boarding stage, the clamor of human bodies feeding their own motors echoed from a long concourse of food smells and vendors loudly advertising their wares. Elessa found Cilicia's open abrasiveness more refreshing than Roric's pretentions, and thought it would be equally relieving to return like for like.

"No, nor a real monster until this moment." Having held their breath while they shared the palette with a griffin, the Ardemians laughed nervously, no doubt seeing the likeness between their intimidating subcommander and the wild creature.

Having reached the end of the loading and boarding area, the extent of the crisscrossed tracks, and complete safety from clicking travexes and their impatient bells, they joined the crowd milling in a thoroughfare flanked with all manner of vendors: strange creatures called news agents, proferring thick folios of flimsy paper in inkstained hands; food stalls where waffles and other pastries were scarfed down no sooner than they were popped from greasy iron mechanisms; a vast open air bookstore with book carts serving as walls, all stuffed with secondhand tomes, many with pages uncut and new as the day they were first sold, making Elessa pity the criminally unread books; and, a cafe huddled with coffee and tea drinkers leaning on stools at hightopped tables as they shouted over the din, which, from the sound of it, was louder on the inside even than the thronging concourse.

"Chomkin." Roric produced a silver coin from his pouch. "I'm buying the book for my guest."

Like a sleepwalker awaking from a dream, Elessa looked down on the small stack of books under her chin. Her first thought was that she couldn't pick only one and leave the others behind, her next thought was that she shouldn't be beholden to a slick goon like Roric, and both thoughts were crushed the instant they creeped from her brain by the mighty weight of BOOKS.

"You'd make the young lady pick one?" Chomkin was a pleasant, clean-shaven old man with such dark brown hair that he looked half his age until he tottered over for the sale.

"It would be a waste," sniffed Roric "She doesn't even know her major."

"I'm not that impressed with the lieutenant, and I didn't come to join your army, anyway." Elessa was surprised at the titters this produced in the Ardemians.

Roric rolled his eyes. "Are you always this mean to someone buying you a book?"

"It lets you trot out your clockwork attitude."

"I see. How thoughtful." His fingers moved over the spines of the books. "This one, Chomkin."

"No," said Elessa. "This one." She knocked aside the volume Roric had chosen, though it pained her to do so, for it was not only the one she wanted, but she had never wanted a book more: Eriva Kamadne's A Little Book of Monsters, which restated the zoology of Vanoori Menagerie for children. It irked Elessa that Roric reduced her so well to one book that she could not let him know he succeeded. Instead, she allowed him to buy Ardem: Year One, a lackluster and obscure history which nonetheless promised relevant information.