Dragons & Dwarves by S. Andrew Swann

seventies, early eighties. The first major skyscraper built here after the city came out of default. First it was the Sohio corporate headquarters, then BP Oil bought them out and stayed long enough to rename the building. It was a high-profile address, right on Public Square, and the top floors were about as exclusive as you got as far as downtown office space went.
    I had never been here before, but I could tell that the current tenant had ordered extensive remodling.
    The fortieth floor no longer existed except as empty space three stories above me. In front of me was an atrium that enclosed almost as much space as the grand lobby downstairs. To my left and right were three stories of windows that looked down on the city from a dizzying height. Except for the heavy stillness in the air, the feeling was as if I stood on an urban mountain peak. The air smelled of roses and sulfur.
    What affected me most wasn’t the grand space, but the single occupant of that space.
    She—I wouldn’t have known gender if Baldassare hadn’t told me—was easily half again the size of Aloeus, though I was probably too close to her for an accurate measure of size. All I saw was a wall of muscular blue-black flesh that rose above my head and slid, slowly, from left to right. In the direction of motion, the wall narrowed to a serpentine neck that arched above her, ending in a head longer than I was tall. She lowered her head, pulling her body in an undulating motion behind it, so I glimpsed an arm stretching lazily toward the ceiling. Baldassare was right about feline body language, though the clawed hand I saw could easily break an eight-hundred pound Siberian tiger in half.
    I realized the wall of flesh in front of me was her back when she completed the feline stretch by rolling over—in my direction. If the intention was to impress me, Theophane succeeded. I flattened myself against the elevator doors, as her enormous form rolled to face me. She came to rest about ten feet from the column that held the elevator shaft, but my hypothalamus was screaming to the rest of my body that I was about to be crushed.
    Her head came down between me and the rest of her body. She looked at me with a heavy golden eye the size of my skull. She opened her mouth, and her voice filled the humid air around me.
    “Fuzzy gnome stories?”

CHAPTER TEN
     
    “ T HEOPHANE?” I asked unnecessarily.
     
    She blinked at me slowly.
    I realized she had asked a question, and was waiting for an answer. “It’s slang,” I told her, hoping to God I wasn’t being insulting. “News stories that are predominantly about the paranormal.”
    “ So I am a ‘fuzzy gnome?’ ”
    I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see her reaction. “Strictly speaking, yes.”
    I felt wet sulfur breath on my face and heard an ominous rumble. It shook the floor and I tensed, expecting to feel the dragon’s wrath at any moment. The rumble became louder, and when I wasn’t immediately torn limb from limb, I risked a peek.
    Theophane was laughing.
    She shook her head as she finished rolling to her feet. It took her body even closer, but she had enough control to avoid squashing me. She took a few steps away from me. With her stride that meant that there was suddenly about forty feet between us. I could now see most of her—a whiplike saurian body that seemed to cross a python with a T-rex. Her body shaded from black-blue on top, to a blue-white underneath. Her wings folded against her back like a cape, and her tail slid back past me and the pillar that held the elevator shaft. Her head sat on a serpentine neck that turned it to keep her gaze on me as she moved. Brimstone-scented steam rose from her nostrils as she laughed.
    After a moment, she regarded me with her head cocked inquisitively, “You do not find that amusing?”
    “I see the incongruity of the statement.” Sorry, but I’m a little too shit-scared to laugh right now. “Where did you hear that phrase? I thought it