Dragon Scales, page 1
part #2 of Dragon Speech Series
Dragon Scales
Dragon Speech Book 2
Margaret Ball
Galway Publishing
Copyright 2019 Margaret Ball
Published by Galway Publishing
ISBN paperback: 978-1-947648-22-7
ISBN ebook: 978-1-947648-23-4
Printed in the United States of America
Cover art: Cedar Sanderson
Also by Margaret Ball:
The Applied Topology series
A Pocketful of Stars (Book 1)
An Opening in the Air (Book 2)
An Annoyance of Grackles (Book 3)
A Tapestry of Fire (Book 4)
A Creature of Smokeless Flame (Book 5)
A Revolution of Rubies (Book 6)
A Child of Magic (forthcoming 2019)
The Dragon Speech series
The Language of the Dragon
Dragon Scales
The Harmony series
Insurgents (Book 1)
Awakening (Book 2)
Survivors (Book 3)
Other books
Disappearing Act
Duchess of Aquitaine
Mathemagics
Lost in Translation
No Earthly Sunne
Changeweaver
Flameweaver
The Shadow Gate
Table of Contents
Also by Margaret Ball
1. Tectonic plates grinding
2. Imagine Dragons
3. Imperious and demanding
4. A shallow ditch
5. The favor of his presence
6. The only genuine one in the country
7. The god of lightning
8. The grackle woman
9. Eyes like jewels
10. The dragon in my back yard, part 1
11. Tourism for dragons
12. Playing dragon
13. Off with their heads
14. Something to believe in
15. Dragon bait
16. Now you see it, now you don’t
17. The best-laid plans
18. The dragon in my back yard, part 2
19. But Tolkien wrote fiction
20. Empty eyes
21. Rattlesnakes are natural
22. An amoral eavesdropper
23. Dragonesse oblige
24. A shower of sparks
25. Magic where you least expect it
Also by Margaret Ball
Dragon Scales
1. Tectonic plates grinding
The trouble started on a perfectly normal Austin day in early March.
The bright, crisp morning with a hint of spring warmth had inspired me to wear a lightweight silky jacket over a silk camisole that just peeked out over the one button on the jacket. The light jacket looked professional but was the perfect weight to wear for my walk to the new office space on the Drag.
Halfway there, the sky went black with dragon-shaped clouds chasing each other from east to west and I was pelted with freezing rain. A superstitious person might have taken that as an omen, a warning; I took it as Texas weather.
Being superstitious would, in retrospect, have been smarter.
At first it worked out all right, because in the aftermath of the rainstorm a warm wind swept up from the south. By the time I ducked inside the front door of ShareASpace, the jacket was clammy but underneath it I felt too warm. I slipped into the as-yet-unlabeled door to our suite and peeled off the jacket, which was clinging damply to my skin. And my hair, which I’d tamed enough to tie back, was frizzing and trying to escape its Scrunchie. For the next few hours I would just have to work in a lightweight silk camisole over a skirt not quite wet enough to cling to my legs. What the heck – my business, my office, my rules, right?
My friend and tenant Laura is much more practical than I am about daily life, even if her professional life as a singer for alternative rock bands is the least practical career imaginable. Her office-warming present to me had been a box of office supplies, or what she thought we might need in the way of supplies. The anti-coagulant powder, the packs of gauze bandaging and the mini-fire extinguishers spoke to her opinion of me, rather than of offices in general. Fortunately, she’d also included such mundane items as markers, paper, and tape. I grabbed a sheet of paper, printed “Sienna Language Services” in big black capital letters, and taped it to the door. By the time clients were knocking at the door I would have something a little more impressive, but for today all I needed was something to help the people I was interviewing to find us.
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to continue using a desk in the front room, but since we didn’t have a receptionist I needed to be sitting there today to greet applicants and reassure them that Sienna Language Services was a real, if fledgling, business.
I hadn’t exactly planned to interview prospective language tutors with nothing but thin straps covering my shoulders and nothing much covering the territory below that but some clinging apricot-colored silk, but it was a perfectly decent outfit. Technically speaking. I mean, my matching apricot lace bra was hardly visible, and anyway nobody could tell which bits were bra and which were camisole. As I sat down my business manager came out of the cubbyhole where he doubled as IT expert, and his eyes conveyed that the outfit was significantly better than “decent.” From his perspective, anyway.
“I like what that color does for your skin and hair,” Michael said. “Want to take an early lunch break back at the house?”
I had a feeling that what he really liked was the amount of skin exposed after I took my jacket off.
“It’s nine-thirty. I have five interviews scheduled between now and noon, paperwork to file with the city before two-thirty, and more interviews beginning at three. Lunch is going to be a sandwich at my desk – if I can talk you into going around the corner and buying us sandwiches?”
“Ask and you shall receive,” he said, “always providing I get the website debugged by then.”
What? Yesterday he’d told me the website was functioning perfectly. He said he’d poked, prodded and misused it with every action from hitting the escape key to leaning an elbow on the keyboard, and all the screens came up on request and the information he entered got saved to the right place. Of course, that had been yesterday, and he had already been poking at the computer again when I poured my drenched self through the door…
“What have you been doing to my beautiful website?”
“Overnight I thought of a few little improvements,” he admitted. “It’s all your fault really.”
“My fault?”
“I offered to bring pizza and beer over last night to celebrate our almost-opening. If you’d taken me up on that offer, I had some subsequent plans in mind that would have kept both of us much too busy to lie awake worrying about all the trivial details of starting a business. As it was, I can tell you didn’t sleep any better than I did. Although,” he added quickly, “those dark shadows around your eyes are very attractive.”
“Liar. What’s wrong with the website?”
“Nothing! I mean, nothing I did should have made the registration function crash.”
“The registration function crashed?”
Lacking the gift of prophecy, at that point I thought that was the worst problem I could face today. If we couldn’t sign people up for tutoring via the website, we would have no customers, hence no business. I could feel the blood draining from my face. I didn’t have to check in a mirror to know that each and every one of the freckles spattered across my cheekbones and the bridge of my nose was popping out, accentuated by my pallor. Together with the raccoon eyes that Michael had so tactfully alluded to, my appearance alone would probably deter any prospective tutors from signing on.
“Well, sort of.”
“Sort of crashed, or sort of didn’t crash?”
“There’s no reason for it to act up,” he said impatiently. “Come over here.” He popped back into the IT cubicle and I followed him. “Sit down, let me show you exactly what I did and maybe you can point out where I went wrong. See, I improved the font – picked a bigger, darker one – and that made the display window a little too small for the text, so I… Oh! That’s the problem! Thank you, Sienna, you put your finger right on it!” He started tapping away at the keyboard and I went back to my own desk, wondering exactly how I’d helped him to solve his problem.
Against my better judgement, I flipped open my compact and looked at the damage. The rain had washed away my makeup and, just as I’d feared, the freckles were out in full force. I applied powder generously. “If I scare away all the applicants, we won’t have tutors,” I intoned. “If we don’t have tutors, we can’t help clients. If we can’t help clients, we won’t have a business.”
It wasn’t exactly a calming mantra.
Michael stuck his head out of the cubicle. “What are you worried about? Until we build up our clientele, you can handle them all personally.”
“Only the ones who want tutoring in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Russian, and Farsi.”
“You left out Taklan.” We’d spent a rather fraught time last fall in the High Pamirs, the mountains earlier explorers called the Roof of the World: not really enough time for me to have learned Taklan had it been a completely new language, but the two weeks we were there had been plenty long enough for me to pick up the Farsi dialect larded with Russian loan-words that was the national language of Taklanistan.
“Nobody wants to learn Taklan,” I pointed out. “The university doesn’t even offer a course in it. I might as well offer tutoring in the Language of the Dragon.”
Michael shuddered. “Do you mind not calling it that? I’m trying to forget my encounter with the original native speaker. Anyway, you can’t tutor anybody in that; you don’t have the notes any more.”
“True.” In a sense. The original field notes to that dangerous language had been burned, rather spectacularly, by a gust of flame from that native speaker Michael was trying to expunge from his memory. He didn’t know that I had pictures of every page in the notebook, discreetly stored on a thumb drive, just in case we ever really needed to explore the powers of that language again. And given his aversion to the whole subject, I felt he didn’t really need to know this. I switched back to worrying about our ability to handle other clients. “Do you have that master list of all the language courses UT offers?”
“It’s in your Documents folder. Do I need to show you again how to open it?”
“No.” Meaning no, I didn’t really need to look at the list again right this minute. Not meaning no, I didn’t need help finding my way around the system Michael had assembled for filing, billing, scheduling, and the ten million records required by the City of Austin. I was just indulging in a bit of nervous fidgeting, wondering if we could possibly get everything covered before Monday’s official launch.
You may have gathered that I’m pretty good at picking up languages. I’m also good at helping other people understand a language and how it likes to work. I actually enjoy getting them past that typical American approach of looking up each word of an English sentence in their little dictionary and then pasting the translated words together and expecting the result to make sense.
That was where Sienna Language Services was born. Blossom and Floss, my perennial Spanish-language students with a combined IQ significantly lower than the temperature of an Austin summer, had commented that it was a pity I couldn’t bottle my tutoring approach and sell it to other tutors who didn’t have nearly such good results.
And then Michael, who has completely unrealistic ideas of my abilities, had said, “Why not?” and the idea of my teaching a class for language tutors was born.
Somehow, over the winter, while for a change I actually worked hard at my day job of showing houses for my Aunt Georgia’s real estate company, the initial one-class idea had expanded into the notion of a whole tutoring business, one where I would train tutors in my approach and oversee them as they did the bulk of the repetitious work involved in teaching a language to someone who was expecting to fail anyway. (People don’t usually commit to paying a tutor until they’re desperate, and by then they have a whole stack of bad habits to overcome.)
Somewhat to my surprise, putting actual effort into the real estate sideline had brought in enough commissions to start a small business on something slightly better than a shoestring. Aunt Georgia’s take on the winter’s results was that she always knew I had it in me to be a great realtor and that I must be crazy to want to drop the real estate business just when it was beginning to pay off for me. My take on it was that the winter’s commissions were my running-away-from-home money. I’d never really taken to real estate, and now I had an honest-to-goodness alternative.
I had a registered business name.
An office.
A website.
Something faintly resembling a business plan.
And a chance to get started before the students struggling through spring semester language classes went down for the third time due to lack of good tutoring.
The academic calendar was pushing this start faster than I was comfortable with. As Michael kept saying, it would be silly to open a tutoring business in the summer when most of the university’s students weren’t even in town. As I kept saying, the beginning of fall semester would be a much more logical time to start the business, and that would give me another six months to get everything perfectly organized.
I don’t know why Michael’s logic overrode my logic here, but I suspect it has something to do with his personality and training. He’s an ex-Special Forces type, loves challenges, and has total confidence in his ability to dominate any situation he’s dropped into. That attitude seems to bleed over into his having total confidence in my ability to do the same.
Wish I felt that way about it.
After four interviews, one no-show, and an hour of working on forms intended to impress the City of Austin with our diverse staff and our commitment to historically underserved communities, I had a raging hunger headache and I needed to get out of the office. Forget sandwiches at the desk. I persuaded Michael to come out with me for an actual meal.
By the time we strolled back to the doors of ShareASpace, we were both feeling more human. We were even holding hands.
The sense of peace vanished abruptly when we were, oh, about one and a half steps inside the complex of shared offices.
“Mzzz Brown!” Rozzy Aguire, the ShareASpace manager, who’d been unfindable ever since I forked over the deposit, was suddenly a larger-than-life presence. She filled the hall between us and the door to Sienna Language Services. “I really must insist that you remove that person immediately, before I call the police!”
Oh, hell. Was I late for the first afternoon interview? No, not yet. Had the interviewee shown up early and done something to spook Rozzy? Some of UT’s foreign students did come from extremely strange cultures. Still, calling the cops seemed a bit of an overreaction to culture shock.
“What did he do? Or she,” I tacked on, because I suddenly couldn’t remember whether Sayana Raj, from Sri Lanka, was male or female.
“It’s not what he did,” Rozzy said ominously, “it’s what he is.”
I blinked. “Isn’t that racist? What do you have against Sri Lankans?”
“Nothing,” she said, “as long as they keep their clothes on! What kind of position are you hiring for, Mzzzz Brown? And that girl with him is obviously the kind of slut you’d expect to find clinging to a naked man. We have a strict policy against allowing ShareASpace offices to be used for that kind of business, Mzzzz Brown, and it won’t take ten minutes to void your contract!”
I wished she wouldn’t keep preceding my name with that “Mzzzz.” The buzzing noise was beginning to vibrate unpleasantly in my head.
“Just a minute there,” Michael spoke up. “Ms. Brown is not liable for your failure to prevent maniacs from invading your offices. But she might very well have a case against ShareASpace for letting this nut case into the space she is renting from you. Does the company have no concern for the safety of its tenants?”
He loomed over Rozzy in an intimidating fashion that was all the more admirable when you considered that he was only the same height as me – three inches shorter than the solidly built, six-foot office manager.
She loomed back.
Words were exchanged.
Menacing growls were exchanged.
“Guys, could you just cool it for long enough to let me find out what happened? Both of you cool it,” I emphasized. Michael seemed to be reverting from his business manager persona to his previous life in Special Forces, and I didn’t think guns and grenades were going to solve this problem.
Whatever it was.
I got my first clue after Rozzy grudgingly made room for me to pass down the hall to my own (rented) front door. I opened the door and saw two people: a pretty young girl who was familiar to me from a rather different context, and a very well-built man whose face did not ring any bells. It was, however, possible to fully appreciate how hot he was, because as Rozzy had hinted, he was stark naked.
His eyes gave me a clue: bright as gems, like glowing topazes, they were not quite human. I had seen those eyes before.
The language in which he greeted me was another clue. I’d heard that before, too. It was full of sounds like rocks breaking and tectonic plates grinding against one another. Both the people with me turned white.
