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“I’m sure he smells like a big banquet, but Em’s waiting.”
    Daniel looked at Em and nodded.
    She fired. The gun launched the harpoon with a bang, and the harpoon hit true, dead center in the cruciform of the dragon’s body and outspread wings. The bulb at its tip crumbled to chalky powder.
    The dragon roared with a fury that rippled Daniel’s pant legs and punched his heart like a battering ram.
    He and Moth and Em raced for the granite shelter, hoping to escape a torrent of dragon flame if the alp didn’t work like Mother Cauldron had promised.
    Once they reached the shelter, Daniel pushed Em and Moth through the open door. Before heading in himself, he turned to look at the dragon.
    Despite beating its wings harder, it was losing altitude. Its eyes had lost some of their gleam.
    The alp was doing its job.
    â€œSleep,” Daniel whispered. “Just go to sleep, Sam. It’ll be better when you wake up. I promise you.”
    The dragon struggled to stay aloft. The claws of one of its hind legs touched earth and gouged deep runnels in the solid rock. It let out a strangled roar, both frightful and pitiful. Exhalations of searing heat warped its face behind the disturbed air.
    One wing scraped against the summit’s ledge, dislodging tons of stone and earth in an avalanche. The ground jolted with the crash of boulders tumbling, the world coming undone.
    Then, an eerie quiet, only the clatter of smaller rocks and gravel and sifting sand.
    Daniel rushed to the crumbling ledge and peered over. The dragon had slid to a stop about three hundred feet below, its body sprawled across a shallow part of the slope, head resting on an outcropping.
    Em ran over with climbing gear and helped Daniel get into his harness. She tugged on the straps, making sure they were secure.
    â€œHe fell a long way,” she said. “Is he okay?”
    â€œThat’s not a long way for a fully armored firedrake,” Daniel said, affecting his most reassuring tone.
    She wasn’t having it. “But what about Sam?”
    Daniel aimed his flashlight down the slope. The dragon’s scales changed color in the light, swirling with deep reds and blues and greens, as much a creature of the sea as it was of fire. Its body was a treasure horde of nearly unimaginable value, its bones and teeth and claws fairly crackling with magic. It seemed as durable as the mountain itself. But the essence of Sam, somewhere beneath the iridescent outer plating, was an ephemeral wisp.
    â€œWe’ll see,” Daniel said, reaching into his pocket to make sure the case containing the axis mundi bone was still there.
    Em anchored the free end of the rope in a nest of boulders, checked her knots three times, and gave everything several violent tugs before deeming it worthy of her thumbs-up.
    With Moth belaying, Daniel brought his heels to the ledge and crouched.
    He paused there.
    There was always a moment when a job went to shit. Daniel’s instinct and experience told him such a moment was at hand.
    Moth gave him a questioning look, and then they both heard it: a low drone.
    â€œThere,” Em said, pointing southward.
    Three airships approached.
    Daniel came away from the ledge and unclipped the rope. Em unzipped her duffel and removed the components of a rifle and began screwing them together. Moth cracked his knuckles.
    The bows of the ships rose above the south ledge like whale shadows, blotting out a good part of the sky. No longer muffled by the mountain, the propeller engines buzzed an insectile baritone.
    Who in Southern California had airships? There used to be a few freight companies that used them to get around Gabriel Argent’s canal tolls, but Argent put a stop to that.
    Daniel reached for the oldest, deepest magic in his bones, the first osteomantic substance he’d ever consumed, from a beach far away, when his father held his hand and began crafting him into a bone sorcerer. Electricity seared