Dragon Soul (31 page)

“Watch that mouth,” Sarah Fleet snapped. I could’ve kissed her, toad face and all, but something told me she’d’ve snapped my dick off for trying. In her eyes, I wasn’t anything special, just some rat from the worst part of Molly, but it was the exact same look I’d always gotten from Have, and it comforted me, like a babe at his mama’s breast.

“He can’t,” Thom said wearily, and I knew he really
had
given up on all his fancy etiquette rules, at least for the time being. “This is what he’s like. All the time.”

“Well no wonder your mother left you,” said Sarah Fleet, “since one of you’s a brute and the other one’s a damn Cindy. I’d’ve had you drowned at birth, myself, but then the only child I gave birth to got me bounced from the capital, so how’s that for gratitude?”

It was the weirdest fucking experience of my life. For the first time, I wanted to shut up just so I could hear someone else talk. Thom looked at me, then shook his head, clearly reading whatever he needed to off of whatever expression I was wearing. I didn’t know, and I couldn’t be bothered to guess. Without warning, Sarah Fleet stood up. She was just about as tall standing as she had been sitting, which was a feat in itself, and she moved like her bones ached, if there even were bones buried under all that jelly. I couldn’t exactly be sure.

Anyway, she was real slow moving, but I could wait.

“You’re the one who flew my girl, then?” she asked, looking me up and down. I wanted to correct her—
my
girl—but whatever magic she was working kept my tongue in my head.

“That’s me,” I said instead, tossing a loose braid over one shoulder. “She wouldn’t look twice at
no one
before me. Heard she even bit some poor fucker’s hand clean off.”

“Wouldn’t look twice at
anyone
before you,” Sarah Fleet said sharply. “That’s the correct way to say it. I can see you were raised in a gutter, but don’t let’s drag everyone else through the same muck.”

Yes ma’am
, I thought, but I kept that one all to myself.

“You must be wondering why we’ve bothered to come all this way,” Thom interjected, either because he felt left out or because it was killing him to go so long without talking.

“Boy,” said Sarah Fleet, “you
are
a clever one. ’Versity-educated, no doubt, with a stick like that up your ass. ’Course in the
’Versity
, you’ll
find more and willing things besides sticks, but I’m betting you know all about that.”

Thom turned red all over and started to sputter, face looking kind of like a squashed tomato, and that was all it took. I was laughing my damn fool head off again.

I felt better than I had in weeks, maybe even months. It was the kind of good feeling that settled in real deep down and got its hooks into you. If Thom hadn’t been here, I probably would’ve just sat there all night and let the old bag hurl insults at me. But as much as I wanted to do just that, I couldn’t. Outside of Sarah Fleet’s little pisshole-in-the-sand shack, there was a whole world that wouldn’t slow down for nothing—anything—and somewhere out there someone was still selling parts of my girl to strangers who didn’t know her and didn’t deserve her either. I couldn’t ignore that. Not even when I’d found the one who’d breathed the life into her in the first place.

That
thought sobered me up pretty quick, but at least the sour-bastard mood I’d been in this whole time didn’t come back.

Sarah Fleet sniffed and gave us another once-over, which made it a twice-over, all things considered.

“Havemercy,” she said then, and Thom put a hand on my shoulder just as my knees damn well turned to water. I needed to sit my ass down in a chair, all right. “I never thought she’d have such rotten taste, but there’s no accounting for what the magic does when it gets loose of you.”

“She was a bat-crazy piece of work,” I said, more sure than I felt. “Should’ve known there’d be a crazy bat behind her.”

“You watch your mouth,” Fleet said, brandishing a fist that looked like bird suet in a flesh-colored sack. Then she turned to my brother, who seemed to have recovered from his bout of embarrassment or whatever-the-fuck he’d been suffering from. “And I’ve got some idea why you’re here too. I’m old, boys, not deaf, dumb, and blind.”

“Really?” Thom asked, and the hope in his voice was pretty hard to listen to. I guess I’d been making his life all kinds of miserable these days, and what I hadn’t managed to crush out of him, the desert’d gone and finished for me.

Of course, I could probably blame that camel just as much as I could blame myself, but we were equally at fault. A sobering thought.

“Sure,” said Sarah. “You’re here because you can’t move past your
own damn stunted adolescence and you don’t wanna let go of any chance you have to recapture it.”

That wasn’t it at all, I thought. Fleet might’ve had Have’s eyes and her sense of humor, but only one thin slice of her insight.

“Someone’s
sellin’
her,” I broke in. I didn’t even want to think about what my voice sounded like just then, too earnest and fucking sincere. I didn’t know how in the hell someone who looked like cooked pudding was going to help us, but I knew that if anyone
could
help us, it was this bizarre old loony holding my heart in the middle of the desert. “Havemercy. We crashed in the Ke-Han capital, morning of the last battle we ever fought, and now there’s carrion birds breaking her up and selling her off piece by piece, like a fucking animal you buy for dinner. It ain’t right.”

Sarah Fleet stared at me, past my eyes and right down deep into my fucking soul, like Thom was always talking about when he got into a poetic mood, only this didn’t make me want to punch anyone’s lights out. Hell, I let her do it; I even stared back. I didn’t have a damn thing I was ashamed of anymore, and Have herself’d picked me when I was little better than one of the muck-boys cleaning out stalls. If that was what Sarah Fleet was looking for—some quality that made me stand out better’n the rest—then she’d probably be looking a long damn time. She was and wasn’t the same as my girl, I realized. She had the same attitude, the same whip-smart tongue, and I bet she knew all the dirty words to the drinking songs, but that was only
almost
enough. We hadn’t been through the wars together.

“All right,” she said finally, throwing up her big hands in surrender. “I’ll help you track her down. But only because you spat on my floor when I was talking about that motherfucker.”

“Esar’s looking for her too,” I pointed out, while next to me Thom tried not to have a stroke.

“Oh, honey,” said Sarah Fleet. “I know.”

Neither of my new companions trusted me.

I hardly blamed them for their paranoia. The big soldier—whose name, I’d since discovered, was the same as the Ke-Han word for
badger
—never once took his eyes off me, no matter where I was, or what I was doing. Even if I told him I needed to freshen up and would require some privacy for the task, he was always there, lurking in the shadows and making a true nuisance of himself. Luckily for him, he’d been given an excellent chance to recuperate before he’d learned a little something more about me from the Ke-Han girl Madoka.

Unfortunately for me, because of his prying eyes, I had yet to bathe the soot and mud from my body.

A lady needed to keep some parts of her body secret.

I was unclean, and that always irked me. I truly loathed the prospect of setting out with them into the desert unwashed, and I needed to be able to smell our quarry over the stench of my own body.

“Really, Badger,” I said, watching him from the corner of my eye, “I am in need of a bath.”

“Fine by me,” Badger replied, his face unmoving as the mountain rock rising up around us.

We were at a stalemate. I had no idea what Madoka had told him,
but surely I wasn’t as dangerous-looking as all that. My Volstovic charms worked no wonders at all on him; I’d already played the strongest part of my hand, which meant that I had no further tricks just yet up my sleeve. Those would require more finesse, some study of my friends. Once I knew them better, I would better be able to play upon their senses with a show of my own emotions—or rather, I hoped that I would be able to do this. The only trouble was that Madoka herself saw directly through me; even under Dmitri’s disapproving stare, I had never before felt so transparent.

“It’s not as though I’m going to run away,” I tried to reason. Badger crossed his arms over his chest and said nothing. “After all, as I’m sure Madoka has told you, I intend to set out with you.”

“You a magician?” Madoka asked. She’d been relatively quiet all day, after we’d come to our little agreement; she was recuperating, and it was understandable. The compass buried in her skin had been placed there with such miserable clumsiness that it was difficult to look at it for too long, and the stench of rotting flesh had been overwhelming me since I’d started tending to her. A friendly enough gesture, I thought, though it seemed to make Badger extra wary of me.

It taught me one thing, however: The girl was essentially expendable, at least to the mastermind behind all this.

The Esar had incredible instincts—he was paranoid himself, sometimes to a fault, but he always knew when someone was plotting against him. His plan had been to strike first, and there was his only error. He hadn’t struck first, just simultaneously, with the half-imagined, half-real enemy that rose constantly like a specter, reaching for him over the ridge of the Cobalt Mountains.

Honesty, I thought, would be the sweetest trick of all. Perhaps I could assuage their fear of me somewhat if I showed them I was harmless as a little fly.

“I am,” I told her.

Madoka spat. “Hate ’em,” she said.

“You must have had a bad experience,” I replied benignly. “I can tell that the man behind that blight on your palm was a careless individual, and selfish on top of that. If I were in his shoes, and capable of such power, I would be much more precise in my actions, so no one would suffer needlessly.”

“Yeah?” Madoka demanded. She was fiery; I appreciated that in a
conversationalist, and was happy to talk to her for as long as it took to get myself some time alone with a washcloth and a bucket of water. We’d decided to leave the following morning—whether or not Madoka still had her fever.

Foolish of her to agree to that, but commendable, in any case.

“Indeed,” I replied, trying to indicate to her how a proper lady would speak.

“What
is
in your power, then?” Madoka asked.

I let out a delicate sigh, adjusting my collar around my throat. “Scent,” I replied. “I’m a tracker.”

“Like a dog, you mean?” Madoka asked.

This time, when I smiled, I made sure she saw my beautiful, pearl-white teeth. “Like a wolf is the comparison I prefer,” I told her.

That might not have helped my attempts at innocence, but at least it gave her a lesson in thinking a bit before she spoke. Ironically, I had become quite fond of her—less so of her overly large, relatively brutish bodyguard, but he was a simple man, and simple men were not my point of interest. If he had a single perceivable complication beyond the physical presence of that unfortunate scar, I might have appreciated his sullenness more.

“I
do
need a bath,” I said. “And I intend to have one.”

One thing I knew of the Ke-Han was that they were far less prudish about nudity than Volstovics; it was physical intimacy that bothered them, whereas holding hands or even offering a public kiss in Thremedon would not cause any passersby to so much as bat an eye.

I lifted my hand to my collar, then gave up the pretense that I could bluff them in this matter.

“I am a private woman,” I said. “I do not enjoy bouts of exhibitionism like the one you both seem so intent on forcing me to display.”

“We’ll look away,” Madoka offered. “But if you bathe anywhere, you’re doing it right here.”

They had forced my hand. At least, in the little house we’d chosen to take up as our quarters for the time being, there was the remnant of a standing screen—once operating, I assumed, as a makeshift wall for the tiny hovel. I stepped behind it, where it was dark and shadowy, and there was no chance for my silhouette to be cast clear against the surface.

“Do keep your promise,” I murmured gently, and began to undo the buttons at my throat, lace tickling my chin.

“Can’t imagine anyone going to such great lengths to spy on a skinny thing like you anyway,” Madoka said, and the echo of her voice told me she had indeed turned to face the wall.

“Not everyone was blessed with such a full figure as you, dear,” I trilled in sharp retort. That particular topic had always been a sensitive issue with me, and it was the most common observation thrown at me by other women with the express intention of wounding the image I held of myself. I’d grown used to such jabs long ago, but as I’d said: Going so long without a bath was taking its toll on my normally equable nature. I stepped eagerly into the little basin—hardly a proper bath, but it would have to suit my needs for the time being—and crouched low to soak my washcloth.