Themselves scrupulous in the use of their own marks, the dragons are also rarely made victims of any unscrupulous person who might think to rob them by submitting falsified markers to the Ministry. Being as a rule violently jealous of their wealth, dragons will at once on arriving in any settled place go to inquire as to the state of their accounts and scrutinize all expenses, and so quickly notice any unwarranted charge upon their funds or missing payment; and by all reports the well-known reactions of dragons to being robbed has no less force when that theft occurs in this manner indirectly and out of their view. Chinese law expressly waives any penalty for a dragon who kills a man proven guilty of such a theft; the ordinary sentence is indeed the exposure of the perpetrator to the dragon. Such a sentence of sure and violent death may seem to us a barbaric punishment, and yet I have been assured several times over by both master and dragon that this is the only means of consoling a dragon so abused and restoring it to calm.

This same necessity of placating the dragons has also ensured the steady continuance of the system over the course of better than a thousand years; any conquering dynasty made it nearly their first concern to stabilize the flow of funds, as one can well imagine the effects of a riot of angry dragons…

The soil of China is not naturally more arable than that of Europe; the vast necessary herds are rather supported through an ancient and neatly contrived scheme of husbandry whereby the herdsmen, having driven some portion of their flocks into the towns and cities to sate the hungry dragons, returning carry away with them great loads of the richly fermented night-soil collected in the dragon-middens of the town, to exchange with the farmers in their rural home districts. This practice of using dragon night-soil as fertilizer in addition to the manure of cattle, almost unknown here in the West due to the relative scarcity of dragons and the remoteness of their habitations, seems especially efficacious in renewing the fertility of the soil; why this should be so is a question as yet unanswered by modern science, and yet well-evidenced by the productivity of the Chinese husbandmen, whose farms, I am reliably informed, regularly produce a yield nearly an order of magnitude greater than our own…

Acknowledgments

A SECOND NOVEL POSES a fresh set of challenges and alarms, and I am especially grateful to my editors, Betsy Mitchell of Del Rey, and Jane Johnson and Emma Coode of HarperCollins UK, for their insights and excellent advice. I also owe many thanks to my team of beta readers on this one for all their help and encouragement: Holly Benton, Francesca Coppa, Dana Dupont, Doris Egan, Diana Fox, Vanessa Len, Shelley Mitchell, Georgina Paterson, Sara Rosenbaum, L. Salom, Micole Sudberg, Rebecca Tushnet, and Cho We Zen.

Many thanks to my sterling agent, Cynthia Manson, for all her help and guidance; and to my family for all their continuing advice and support and enthusiasm. And I’m lucky beyond measure in my very best and in-house reader, my husband, Charles.

And I want to say a special thanks to Dominic Harman, who has been doing one brilliant cover after another for both the American and British editions; it’s a thrill beyond measure to see my dragons given life in his art.