Drawing near the mouth, he removed a lantern from the pack and lit the wick with a trembling hand. The scales of the underjaw, no more than six feet distant, glinted among tall weeds. He raised the lantern, illuminating a section of jaw some thirty feet above; higher yet, a portion of gum, brown as tobacco juice, came to light, as did the base of a fang. The wind blew across Griaule’s face and a breath of dry, dusty coolness briefly dominated the vegetable odors. Rosacher hooked the lantern to his pack, buttressed his mind against panic, and climbed, using vines hanging from the lip like strings of leathery drool to haul himself along. Minutes later, he slung a leg over the lip. He scrambled to his feet in a panic, turning this way and that, holding up the lantern to reveal stunted, pale-leaved shrubs sprouting from soil that had accumulated over the centuries; the head-high thickness of the tongue, a mounded shape shrouded in ground moss, and the dim concavity of the dragon’s cheek. Night sounds closed in around him—bleeps, rustlings, and what might have been thin screams—but he could detect no movement. Calmer now, he pushed through a fringe of vegetation to the tongue and suspended the lantern off the end a branch. From the pack he removed a veterinary syringe, the same Myrie had used. Cautiously, he plucked at the moss until he had cleared a circular area. The tongue was dead black. He placed the tip of the needle against it, but over a minute passed before he mustered the courage to shove it home, applying all his weight in order to penetrate the surface. He waited for a chthonic reaction, a great shudder or grumble of complaint. None occurred, but his anxiety did not subside until he had withdrawn the needle and emptied its contents into a flask. He repeated the process twice more, coming to scoff at Myrie’s fright and his own. There was nothing to harm him here. Only bugs, bats, and lizards. He worked hastily, but not too hastily for the sake of efficiency, filling twenty flasks, nearly a gallon of blood, and nesting them in cotton padding. In the future, he thought, he would contract this work not to men such as Myrie, but to the citizens of Hangtown, the village surmounting the dragon’s back where lived an assortment of outcasts. Though eccentric to a fault, they were honest enough and their familiarity with Griaule would preclude any repetition of the scene he had enacted with Myrie. He would need more blood, of that he was certain. Synthesizing a drug from a fluid whose constituency was a complete mystery would likely remain beyond the scope of his capabilities. Perhaps he could resolve that mystery with time and work, but his initial task was to determine an effective dosage and to find a suitable medium that would allow the drug to be absorbed into the bloodstream (syringes being in short supply).
A thin silver crescent sailed clear above the hills, appearing to hover beside a fang partially cast in silhouette by its light. To Rosacher, shouldering his pack, the sight had the unreal vividness of an opium dream—it appeared to infect the rest of the landscape, lending an occult accent to the dark sky with its freckling of stars and the brush-covered field and the flickering orange lamps in the windows of outlying shanties on the hillside, like an illustration in a book of exotic fairy tales. Odd, he thought, that he could be reflective after having been terrified not long before. It was a transformation like that he had experienced in the narcotic grip of the blood, and he wondered if it were still in his system…or perhaps what he felt was not a relaxation from fear, but Griaule’s approval. The citizens of Morningshade would suggest that since Rosacher had been allowed to draw blood, he must be obeying Griaule’s will, and that his calmness was a sign the dragon had given its blessing to the act. Because they believed that through the exertion of his will Griaule controlled every facet of their lives, they might further suggest that the similarity of effect between this blessing of calm and that of the injected blood proved he had been Griaule’s pawn from the beginning. They might have told him that, if the dragon had been angry, the blood would have changed to acid in his flesh. He was not inclined to ridicule such notions as once he might, but the truth of the matter was irrelevant. Whether or not as a result of the dragon’s manipulation, he was embarked upon a course from which it would be difficult to turn aside.
