Dragon Soul (23 page)

That sounded crazy. More than anything, I wanted to help the boy Badger was holding in his arms; I wanted to put my hand on his forehead and tell him it was gonna be all right, while Badger put his army training to some real use and patched him up. But I couldn’t. I had this thing I had to listen to, a voice that was calling me. What I wanted to do and what I had to do had never been more at odds.

I clenched my teeth and started off through the wreckage of this poor, two-ways-fucked village. Smoke was still belching out of a couple of the huts, and now that I was down in the thick of it I could see the extent of the destruction: broken bits of wood, torn cloth, the well smashed on one side, a few of the houses’ roofs caved in. And there I was, picking up speed as I moved through it and past it, not even looking for survivors or people I could help—just answering to the call of the compass in my hand.

But the movements of
its
hands were starting to gain focus. Sure, two out of the four hands were still going crazy, but the other two were actually pointed in the same direction.

I stumbled past a broken-down tent with a pile of ash and cinder and a streak of blood smeared over it. The third hand, the second longest, snapped into the same direction. For the first time, I was headed the right way.

I was also almost at the edge of the village.

It was tucked into a flat place but still on the side of the mountain, for
safety’s
sake—fat lot of good that’d done any of them. I rounded past a grouping of tents and the ground almost fell away from me; I
was looking out over the true desert now, from a pretty good vantage point, breathing as raggedly as that kid had been and feeling pretty crazy.

The fourth compass hand locked into place, pointing out over the sand.

There, in the distance, I saw them—nomads, maybe even desert raiders, all on horseback in a cloud of desert dust, riding away. My own village was too close to Ke-Han territory to worry about that kind of thing, but it was the stuff all my childhood nightmares were about. One day, if they got cocky enough, the nomad princes would come for us, take our supplies, and be gone by morning, leaving nothing in their wake. Just like they’d done for this village.

But on top of that, they had something I needed, and they were riding farther and farther away with every second I stood there gaping after them.

My head ached; my temples were pounding. I dropped to my knees. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t have a horse—certainly not one trained to outrace nomads in the desert—and I didn’t have an army, so I couldn’t’ve done anything even if I were able to ride out after them. I just had to sit down for a little while, that was all; give in to the pain in my head and my hand, and let everything take over.

I was tired. I hurt. And I was fainting.

“Shh,” someone said, and a cool, feminine hand touched my brow; I was so hot that it felt like ice. I saw her for a moment; she had a funny nose and didn’t look anything at all like the women I was used to. Shit, she didn’t even look Ke-Han.

Then I passed the fuck out.

Maybe, if I’d been in a better mood, I might’ve liked the desert. There was sand everywhere, which was far better than large groups of stupid people. And camels were bigger than horses, and the one I was riding hadn’t spat on me yet. All in all, I was doing pretty good with the desert, though some people were struggling.

It was just that even watching a camel spit in Thom’s face wasn’t cheering me up any.

“They really do know when someone doesn’t like them,” Geoffrey Fucking Bless had explained, back at the beginning of our little expedition when the event in question had taken place. “That explains the spitting, do you see?”

Logical sense, I thought—something Thom’d usually eat up with a spoon—but Thom wasn’t in a better mood, either, and getting spit on by the animal he was gonna be riding for the next few days didn’t seem to help. Bastion, I’d even offered to trade, but he’d been stubborn as an ox, as always, and he’d stick by that camel until the day it or he died, whichever came first.

But it was nice and dark out over the dunes now, with night coming on. There weren’t any sights to see, just sand and more sand, and occasionally I’d look over at Thom, nodding off over the neck of his camel, just to make sure he hadn’t fallen off somewhere on the trail behind us. Him and his mount were getting along fine now. Thom just took some getting used to with everyone.

As Bless explained it, we had to do the bulk of our riding at night and sleep in tents under the sun during midday. That way, you kept from getting heatstroke. And the last thing this trip needed, on top of everything else, was Thom fainting like a lady having the vapors because of a little sunlight.

If anyone was gonna be prone to some kind of affliction I hadn’t heard of, it was Thom.

For the first few days, Bless’d done his best to keep up a travel dialogue, showing off every damned fact he’d crammed into his overlarge head, but after a while it became pretty hard to ignore the fact that he was talking to himself, so I guess he gave up out of embarrassment—finally. I wasn’t interested, and Thom’s attention was all squared away in staying on his camel, though he did throw in the occasional “ah” and “is that so?” for Bless’s benefit. I did have to give the guy credit for not ending up dead and
still
somehow managing to be the biggest idiot I’d ever clapped eyes on. They said the desert was pretty merciless with idiots, and yet here was Geoffrey Fucking Bless to prove the theory wrong, riding his camel like it was a fucking carousel horse.

We crested one of the big dunes, my camel grunting like she didn’t think much about all this hill-climbing all of a sudden, but camels didn’t talk, so it was harder to tell what they were thinking. Not that it
mattered; it was just different. If I’d told that to Thom, he would’ve wanted to
open a dialogue
or some shit and I’d have had to spit on him, camel or no.

Instead, I kept my thoughts to myself and my camel did the same. It was an okay system, all things considered.

Bless’d been riding somewhere in front of Thom and me for the better part of our travels—after it became pretty apparent that neither of us gave a shit whether the old kings of the desert were buried under all that shifting sand. Thom’s ass hurt too much—otherwise he’d’ve been eating Bless’s stories right up—but I just didn’t give a fuck.

On the third day, we’d passed some kind of enormous statue, buried half-underground, that Bless said was back from the days when the government had been a monarchy instead of a democracy. In the moonlight it looked like a giant being swallowed in quicksand—some king no one cared about or remembered anymore—and I got a good kick out of thinking about how th’Esar’d shit his pants if he ever saw something like that. Too close to home for comfort. Wish I could’ve commissioned a fucking portrait.

After we’d seen the first statue, we started to notice a lot more of them. Broken pillars, or half a head sticking out of the sand; sometimes no more than a piece of nose or a finger, but they weren’t regular old rocks, and we had the faculties to recognize ’em for what they were, now. It was like we’d somehow blundered into a forgotten city—and because we were only traveling at night, it felt all the more weird to be traveling through, riding our camels between dismembered body parts as large as the camels themselves.

“Amazing what a change time can bring, isn’t it?” Bless remarked, the third night, when we were setting up camp in the shadow of a wall that was mostly rubble by now, pitted and pocked like a poor bastard’s dirty face. In fact, I’d known somebody who looked like that wall down in Molly a long time ago. “Not to mention a change in the government, eh?”

There was something about his attitude that rubbed me the wrong way. I guessed it was mostly the way he seemed to think everything was better out in the desert, like leaving Thremedon had suddenly made him better than everyone else in it. There was no love lost between th’Esar and me, but even an idiot could tell he’d done well enough by
his country, and people who acted like they were better than everybody else while digging dead people up outta the ground and selling the pieces off to the highest bidders didn’t exactly inspire feelings of affection in me.

What surprised me—I mean really fucking knocked my boots off—was that Thom seemed to have picked up on it too. At least, he’d got some sand in his britches about something or other. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was having to sleep during the day and ride at night. Some men just weren’t made to be nocturnal; some of the boys back at the Airman’d had the same problem. I’d just have to keep an eye on my brother to make sure he didn’t turn into a knife-wielding maniac like Ivory on me, and everyone’d be okay.

I didn’t have a spare knife to lend him, for starters.

So it was shaping up to be one hell of a trip, each leg more tedious than the fucking last and no visible end in sight. To make my day fucking better, Bless’d slowed his camel that night to draw even with me. Sure, I’d done some bad things in my time, but nobody deserved to be saddled with this idiot.

“If we keep to this pace, we should arrive at a proper dig site tomorrow,” Bless confided in me. I didn’t know why he was talking to me all of a sudden and not pretending I didn’t exist, like we both knew he wanted to. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that his biggest fan had cooled his enthusiasm a little, worn down by so much traveling and so little to eat.

“Huh,” I said, which wasn’t an answer so much as a grunt. He knew I didn’t give two shits about a dig site.

“And,” Bless added quickly, “the Khevir dunes are only a matter of days away. Now, I know the rate at which we’re traveling has been very difficult for you, but doesn’t it soothe the sting somewhat to know that we’re very nearly at our goal? Of course, once we have reached the dunes, I imagine it will take us somewhat longer to comb them thoroughly for your magician, but the point remains that we are drawing very close to your destination.”

“Right,” I said, grinding my teeth. He didn’t need to sound so fucking pleased about it. I’d already signed up for however many days in the desert it took to find that fucking magician, and I didn’t need some reminder that it was gonna be difficult. “Like I said, it’s not like we’ve got anything better to do. And if you’re leading us around by the nose just
because you think you can get away with it, I’ll make it so you’re just another statue out here. You got that, Bless?”

We were passing by a huge stone forearm as I said it, set flat against the sand, with its palm turned up. The imagery didn’t escape Bless because ’Versity students were usually good with that kinda thing. He swallowed, then shook his head, still trying to pretend like I didn’t get to him. We both knew how true that was, too.

“My
dear
fellow,” he began, and I
would’ve
taken my knife out then, desert guide be damned, if Thom hadn’t shouted.

I whirled around, ready to fucking flay him alive if he’d gone and done something stupid like falling off his camel again, but he hadn’t. In fact, he looked pretty okay, save for the fact that he was staring at the arm like he thought it was real or something.

“Thomas?” Bless asked, in that snotty voice of his, like a mother whose child was misbehaving.

“I…” Thom blinked, then lifted a hand to rub at his eye. “I thought I saw someone. A man. Standing just above the wrist.”

I looked, but there hadn’t been anyone there a minute ago, and there sure as Molly-shit wasn’t anyone there now.

“Oh, Thomas,” Bless said, shaking his head. “I am
so
sorry. This change from diurnal to nocturnal’s been very difficult on you, hasn’t it? Perhaps you fell asleep for a moment, and dreamed it up? It’s happened to better men; don’t let it get you down.”

“I didn’t fall asleep,” Thom insisted, though he didn’t sound entirely sure of himself. “I wasn’t even feeling tired.”

“Well,” I said, sliding off my camel’s back, “only one way to be sure of that.”

I hated to stop. It only made me feel like we were wasting time, but Bless seemed ready to write off whatever Thom’d seen as a dream, and you could bet your boots that whatever Geoffrey Fucking Bless did, I’d do the opposite.

Besides, Thom was a Mollyrat. If he was going to shout because of anything, it wasn’t going to be some stupid dream. You learned quick enough not to shout in your sleep down in Molly, and even if Bless didn’t know better than to call my brother a liar,
I
sure as shit did.

I stalked up to the arm, sand crunching beneath my feet. Behind me, Thom hit the ground with a thump and came racing up to follow me like he was some kind of hunting dog and I was his master.

“Get back on the fucking camel,” I growled, hoisting myself up onto the broken stone thumb. “If there
is
anyone here, I don’t need you slowing me down.”

“I wasn’t dreaming,” Thom said stubbornly, scratching his arm. “These damn sand gnats…If I’d thought it was a mirage, I’d never have disturbed everyone like—bastion fucking
damn
it, Geoffrey!”

There was a flurry of action, and all of it happening in the fucking dark. I’d been good at seeing in the dark once, but I’d gone soft as fucking mud since then. Didn’t do me any good now to think about it. All I knew was that all of a sudden we weren’t alone in the desert, the night wind blowing in my face and the sand billowing up from someone
else’s
movements. Thom straightened up quick—his instincts weren’t bad when his thinking wasn’t getting in the way—and I swung down from the hand just in time to see three men dragging Bless from his camel.

If this was a dream, it was a pretty fucking vivid one.

Thom started toward them and I could’ve killed him on the spot, reaching out instead to haul him back by the collar. I shoved him behind me and pulled out my knife.

But that wouldn’t do any fucking good either, because we were already surrounded.

If Bless hadn’t’ve been there—if it’d just been the two of us—maybe I’d’ve been able to react a little faster; maybe I wouldn’t’ve let such a simple strategy pin us down so easy.