Dragon Soul (28 page)

If Malahide noticed what I was doing, she pretended not to see. Instead, she busied herself with something just out of my line of sight.

“Hey,” I said, rasping just like the old woman.

“Water?” she asked, holding a canteen up to my lips.

Without any kind of modesty whatsoever, I took it right out of her hands, and she helped me to sit up while I did my best impression of a dying woman. Maybe I had been dying. I had to slow down when the water started dribbling out of my mouth and running across my cheeks, though, since I didn’t want to waste it. Especially not in a place like the desert; it was disrespectful to the gods. When I’d finished, I handed the canteen back to Malahide, who looked a little surprised, but she didn’t call me a desert pig the way Badger might have, so at least there was that. Maybe her kind was too dainty for it, but something about her face made me doubt that.

“I’ll refill it at the well,” Malahide said thoughtfully, screwing the top back on.

My hand pulsed again, hot and sharp, and I traced the lines of the compass’s hands with one finger, keeping the whole spectacle out of Malahide’s sight. The hands were still in alignment, pointed straight out over the desert on whatever path those nomads had taken. I knew I had to follow them, but right now my bones felt about as sturdy as mud in a rice paddy, and it was doing a wood-heeled clog dance on my morale.

“Were you here when the village was attacked?” Malahide asked, her queer voice trembling like a bowstring. The nervous show didn’t quite reach her eyes, though. She was a lot tougher than she was letting on, for whatever reason. But if she was as noble as she looked, then toughness was considered right up there with the big sins, so it was probably a lot less trouble to go around fainting at spiders and whatnot than to let people see what she was really made of. I didn’t envy her
that
kind of playacting one bit.

“No,” I said, starting to sound halfway back to human after drinking all that water. “Just caught the aftermath.”

In a flash, I remembered the boy I’d tried to help, before Badger had taken over. Was he all right? Maybe it was stupid for me to get so attached to someone I hardly knew, but the kid’s situation and mine’d been more similar than I liked to think about. In fact, his whole village was making me itchy, like I’d somehow made a wrong turn and ended up back home again.
Snap out of it, Madoka
, I told myself, sternly. The old woman would never’ve allowed wallowing like this, and for a
minute I imagined I could feel her stick across my knuckles. The memory of the sting was still fresh in my mind, and it did pull me out of it. For the moment, anyway.

Malahide turned around, and I snuck a look at my hand, peering close because of how dark it’d gotten. I didn’t particularly like what I was seeing. My skin definitely wasn’t any less red than it’d been at the height of the burning stage, and slowly but surely there were little red lines filtering their way out from the center, like little green sprouts growing up in the ground. If my compass was a big, fat spider in the center of my palm, then it’d started growing legs. I was gonna
kill
the magician when I saw him next.

I was too busy seething to hear Malahide when she came up behind me, which was probably why I nearly jumped straight up to the moon when she took hold of my bad hand.

“Yow,” I said, startled as I’d ever been. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“My apologies,” Malahide said, but she was staring intently at my hand with something pretty close to reverence. She glanced up at me, and this time her eyes betrayed nothing. “Your hand is troubled.”

No shit
, I thought, but didn’t say. “Yeah, that’s one way of putting it, I guess.”

Before I could stop her, she was touching the hands of the compass, little white gloves tracing the direction they indicated. The added pressure was small, but it was enough to send a dull pain through my palm and all the way down my wrist. I gritted my teeth, more frustrated than actually upset. I was sick of this whole stupid thing. I wanted the compass out of my hand, I wanted someone else to do the job—Badger, maybe, ’cause he seemed like a responsible kind of guy—or maybe I could give it to this woman, if she wanted it. I didn’t care. All I knew was that I hadn’t signed up for this of my own free will, and now more than ever, I wanted out.

But all I had to do was conjure up my family’s faces to know that getting out was impossible.

“It doesn’t agree with you,” Malahide said at last.

Well, even I could’ve told her that.

I was feeling better now, at least. Less light-headed, and more like my bones were real bones again, which was always a comfort. Maybe
I’d been going too many days on too little water, but it wasn’t like I’d known I’d be ending up in desert country, of all places. Just one more thing I’d have to thank the magician for when we met again.

“Not much I can do about it,” I told her, wanting my hand back. It was making me uncomfortable the way she looked at it, but I didn’t quite know how to tell her to stop without being rude. For all I knew, she’d saved my life. It wasn’t something you just spat on—that, too, would piss the gods right off.

“It’s broken,” she said, sounding concerned. “The direction it’s pointing isn’t north at all.” A weird thing to focus on, I thought; it didn’t faze her one bit that I had a compass in my actual fucking hand, but it did freak her out that the direction wasn’t right. They came in all shapes and sizes, crazy people.

“It’s not supposed to,” I told her, to cover up for my one second of panic when she’d called it broken.

“No?” Malahide asked, her voice drenched in curiosity. “What do you follow, then, if not true north?”

“Just…something I’m looking to get my hands on,” I said, being evasive. I’d never been trained in espionage, so I wasn’t the best liar or anything; I just didn’t feel like getting into what’d happened in that storage cellar, with that madman of a magician. Even to me, it sounded a little nuts. There was the added matter of Malahide being a foreigner, for all I knew even from Volstov, and the last thing I wanted was to bring up the fire-breathers to a Volstovic. “For now, it’s those shit-eating cowards that hit this village,” I added, which was the truth, if only a part of it.

Malahide nodded as if she understood. “You’ll have to make preparations before attempting to cross the desert,” she said then, like she was some experienced traveler herself. I guessed it was possible; she just really didn’t have the complexion for it, not even so much as a single freckle.

“I know,” I told her. I’d already resigned myself to scrabbling through whatever these poor people had to see if there was something I could use in getting across all that sand. It made my heart hurt worse than the throbbing in my hand, to steal from dead people who couldn’t defend themselves, but I wasn’t about to go killing myself in the desert out of sentimentality. When you were dead, you had no use for the stuff left over from living.

“Are you feeling better?” she asked me. I nodded. “Then I’ll go and wake your soldier friend.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s dark out. Should probably let him sleep.”

“You might prefer to have this conversation with all three of us,” Malahide said. “Unless, of course, he doesn’t know about your hand.”

I snorted. The compass in my palm was as plain as the eyes in my face. I couldn’t keep it covered up with a glove anymore; it hurt too bad for that. And now I’d just gone and shown it to a total stranger—someone who by all rights had been an enemy up until a few months ago. I wasn’t ready for this mission; the magician’d made a real big mistake. He could’ve chosen anyone, a soldier, a seasoned tracker, somebody who knew what he was doing. But he’d chosen me, I guess to absolve him and the emperor of having anything to do with it if I was caught. They trusted me not to turn myself in to the emperor’s men, to remain beholden to the people who’d put this foreign object inside of me because I needed them to take it out. And if I died, I was expendable. Badger’d just chop my hand off and it’d be given to someone else, maybe better’n I was.

“What about it?” I said lightly. “Common practice here in the Ke-Han. It’s in fashion; women wander around with compass hands all the time.”

“That,” Malahide said, pointing gracefully at the item in question, “is no simple compass. You said so yourself.” Her nostrils flared; it wasn’t a dainty expression at all, maybe the first true face I’d seen her make. Suddenly, I felt afraid, and would’ve scrambled away from her if she hadn’t reached out to clasp me by the wrist.

“You looking to fight?” I asked.

“Who sent you on this mission?” she asked. Her voice had gentled, and she wasn’t hurting me, either; the way she held my wrist was tender, and her thumb rested on a pressure point that eased the pounding fire in my blood. She was trying to help me—even if I couldn’t trust her motives, I could trust the result. I was so pain-crazy by that point I was willing to accept help, even if I didn’t have much faith in the source.

“Don’t know…” I said.
What you’re talking about
, I meant, but the lie was flimsy and she leveled a look at me.

“Let me be honest with you, little woman,” she said. I resented the nickname, but her voice was commanding; and there was that strange, tinny quality, like it was coming to me across the blade of a sword. She
expected me to listen, and I
did
, if only because I couldn’t resist the strength of her grasp and the color of her eyes. “I am here because I seek the same prize you do. My methods are different—I was not so lucky to lay my hands on a compass like this one, though ‘luck’ in this matter is a purely relative state of being. You do not consider yourself lucky to have it, and I do not blame you. Yet I consider myself
very
lucky to have found you here.”

So she knew, I realized. Somehow, she knew about everything. She knew why I was here, and she wanted the same thing I did.

“You gonna chop it off?” I asked, breathless. “I’ll fight you. Might be little, but I’m strong, and you don’t look so good at one-on-one yourself. I’ll scream for him too; he’ll take you out—”

“Stop babbling,” Malahide said. She eased her grip slightly, letting her soft hair fall over her brow as she looked away from me. It was seductive. I didn’t trust it for a second, didn’t understand what the hell she was trying to do to me. “I did contemplate removing your hand from your body while you and the soldier slept, but it would have been messy. All that blood would have obscured the scent of my quarry—
our
quarry—and I prefer not to leave such…blatant statements behind me when I work. Surely, I thought to myself, whoever charged you with this task would be as ruthless as the man who charged me with mine. I would not want to complicate matters more than necessary.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s great.” I’d never known someone who could be so rational about whether or not to slice off a complete stranger’s hand, and now that I did, I was pretty sure I wished I didn’t.

“I suppose, since you are the possessor of this new clue,” Malahide continued, “we can talk without your companion present. Woman to woman.”

“Okay,” I managed to choke out. I wished Badger was around, if only because I needed someone else to confirm for me: This lady was crazy. But she was the kind of rational-thinking crazy that was more dangerous than all the bell-cracked loonies wandering around blathering gibberish.

“This piece,” Malahide explained, “this compass. Does it point to dragonmetal?”

“As far as I figure it, yeah,” I said. I was too tired to argue, too tired to lie, too tired even to start shouting my head off for the Badger. I
didn’t owe that fucking magician any loyalty, and if he’d clapped this thing into my hand and figured sending Badger after me would be enough to keep me in line, then he was dead wrong. “You can take it,” I said suddenly. “I don’t even fucking want it anymore. It’s brought me nothing but trouble; this whole thing’s crazy. Just rip it the hell out, right now, you can have it. I hope you find what you’re looking for, ’cause I sure as hell don’t want it.”

“Come now,” Malahide said. “You must know you’re lying.”

I thought about it, just like she said. And maybe I was lying—but only halfway. I did want to be free of it; I just didn’t want to suffer the consequences.

“I’m not offering you nothing,” Malahide said, coming close to whisper the terrible words in my ear. “There are ways I could help you, should you choose to work with me. I know of magicians in the city of Thremedon who could remove that with less pain, I think, than it was given to you. You are a woman; this is your body. You are beholden to no one, Ke-Han or Volstovic. Right now you are working for someone whose motives you do not trust, whose methods you despise.”

“So you’re on this quest for yourself, then?” I asked. It was a pretty speech. I just didn’t know if I could really believe it.

Malahide’s pretty mouth quirked into a wry smile. “Very astute,” she said. “In a manner of speaking, I am on ‘this quest’ for my commissioner. In another manner of speaking, I do what I do for myself and myself alone. We are in the same position, and because of that, I believe we should work together. You assisting me, and I assisting you.”

“And if I say no?” I asked, more than a little afraid to hear what she’d answer.

“Then I will hunt you down and kill you,” she said simply. “Both you and your friend. I will dispose of your bodies so that no one, not even this employer whom you fear so greatly, will ever have any hope of finding you. I will take the compass for myself and I will be the sole proprietor of the bounty. Despite how unpleasant it will be to traverse the desert on my own, to come up against whatever raiders and whatever sandstorms the desert tosses my way, I will nonetheless use the advantage now buried in you to win this hunt.”

“Oh,” I said again. My voice croaked, but not because I was thirsty.

“If we follow my proposal,” Malahide promised, “we will find the
bounty more quickly than if we were working alone, and at cross-purposes. Once we have our hands upon the prize, we can settle our disputes properly.”

“You mean, decide who gets to take what back to her master?” I said, feeling bile rise in my throat.