Dragon Soul (35 page)

“It is merely an assumption,” Badger admitted stiffly. “I don’t pretend to know the innermost workings of a man like that. I’ve just been thinking. About our situation, as it stands. And you.”

“You sure know how to comfort a girl,” I told him, suddenly feeling the night chill a lot more than I had a minute ago. Another little desert breeze kicked up, and I wrapped my arms around my body, trying not to shiver too bad.

“My apologies,” Badger said. “I didn’t intend to be so blunt. I only thought to tell you,
should
that be the case, then your best chance might very well be this…Malahide.”

We looked after her together: There she was, on the top of the hill, her skinny little body like a wraith in the wind. She had her skirts pinned up with one hand, arms akimbo, and she was stretching forward, scenting the air. Pretty fucking outlandish if you asked me, and totally insane that she had to be what I now considered my last real hope.

“I don’t trust her either,” I told him. But I was pretty sure I understood what he’d been trying to say. Couldn’t help being a soldier. And kind of an ox, on top of that. “Hey, Badger—”

“Well, don’t
you
two paint a lovely little picture,” Malahide trilled, tramping back toward us over the dune’s face and kicking up sand behind her with her sharp little boots.

Badger scowled, and I was pretty sure my own expression wasn’t that far off. I handed him back his waterskin and he sat down in the sand, returning it to its rightful place.

“You’re in a chipper mood,” I noted. “I was beginning to think you’d fallen asleep out there.”

“Hardly, my dear,” Malahide said, tapping the side of her strong nose. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’ve detected something in the midst of all this sand at last—a change in the geography, if you will—and I’d be willing to stake my life that it’s where our quarry will stop for the daylight hours.”

“An oasis?” Badger asked.

“Precisely,” Malahide said, with a frightening glimmer in her eyes.

“So we’re catching up?” I asked. Didn’t make sense. They had to be
traveling too slowly, because they had a head start on us if you
didn’t
count the fact that they were riding and we were on foot.

“Somehow,” Malahide said, “they don’t sense us as well as we sense them. Something is not right.”

We all stayed still for a while, trying to think about it, and I would’ve been the first to admit that, just the same as my body was lagging behind theirs, so was my mind. Being sick all the time, not being in control of your own body—it’d do that to you, faster than you’d like, and then you were worse’n some dumb pack animal, because you couldn’t even carry your
own
weight, much less someone else’s. I was beginning to hate myself, and the only thing keeping me from getting too mired in it was knowing I had other people to blame for my current situation. Whenever things got so bad I couldn’t stand it anymore, I just pictured that magician’s lean, ratty little face, and I was good to go again, if only for a little while.

“They’re not expecting to be tracked,” Badger offered sensibly, breaking me out of all my slow-paced thinking. Easy to get distracted too, my thoughts running every which way like wind furrowing the sand.

“Still, they aren’t headed toward the seaside at all,” Malahide said. She folded her legs gracefully to inspect a bit of a tear in the hem of her skirt. I envied the knowledge that, no matter how cracked up she was, she was still in a better state than I was—mentally
and
physically.

“Maybe they’ve gotta meet up with somebody first,” I said. “How the hell should I know?”

“There’s more to this,” Malahide began, then trailed off, huffing as the wind picked up, this time from a new direction. “Press on,” she said sharply.

She stood at once, and Badger followed her; he offered a hand down to me and I took it with my left one, letting him haul my ass up. Pride was one thing; being practical was another.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I grumbled, when he looked too closely at me. “Let’s keep moving. Can’t let the scent go dry or whatever it does.”

“Don’t push yourself too hard,” Badger warned.

“Don’t have a choice,” I told him, and I guessed he knew I was right, ’cause he didn’t say anything else after that.

The days were all starting to blend together, and even worse than that were my dreams. Flashes of light, the sound of water, voices I
didn’t remember. Everything smelling like metal, the hot sun beating down on me, only a few of my silks left to shield me from the sky. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing anymore or why I was doing it; I could remember the faces from my dreams better than I could remember my own mother’s. And when I woke up it’d be dark out, dunes rising and falling around me, like a sea of sand I was drowning in.

“Madoka,” a female voice said.

I snapped awake to find Malahide kneeling beside me. She even managed to make that look delicate; if there was sand getting everywhere on
her
, she sure as shit didn’t look too bothered by it. Her hair was perfect, her skin still the same milky white court ladies kill for, and I had no idea how she did it.

“It isn’t your fault, my dear,” she said gently, and wrapped her arms around me, pulling me against her chest. I could hear her heart beating and I wanted to throw up, but eventually the rhythm soothed me enough so I could pull away and breathe easier. “We’re close now,” Malahide went on, gently taking my arm once more. I felt her roll back the sleeve and I winced. “I wager an hour is all we need. They slept there all day, and I do not believe they are getting an early start, like we are. Think of the water, and the trees; the
shade
at last. But most important, think of our prize.”

Since when is it “our” prize
, I thought, but there was something about her voice that was soothing.

Malahide held up my hand in front of my own face without any warning, and I was forced to look at it. The places that’d been red before were laced with green; the skin directly in contact with the metal had turned a sickly shade of black.

“Concentrate on this,” she said. “Do not avoid it. There is someone in this world who turned your own body against you. I know it is difficult, but you must continue to fight in the hopes that one day you will be able to turn his own body against him.”

Sounded pretty good, I thought. With new strength in my legs and arms, I hauled my own self to my feet this time.

“An hour away, huh?” I asked. Badger was already raring to go, and I was getting used to walking on empty promises and feet that felt like deadweights.

Malahide nodded.

“Well, that’s not so bad,” I said, and started on my way, not looking to see if my two new friends had my back.

Of all the things I’d been expecting, milking a little practical understanding out of Professor Mollyrat Thom wasn’t one of them.

But I didn’t want to think about all that. I’d wasted enough of our precious fucking time already nancing around the desert and crying about my horseshit feelings, and now it was time to wake up and get a little practical. Because the last thing I wanted to do was show the mastermind behind my girl that I was some wishy-washy weepy-whiny shitbag who couldn’t handle the truth when he saw it with his own two eyes.

“Just needed some fresh air,” I said, stepping back inside.

“That’s my excuse for coming out here too,” Sarah Fleet replied. “Have some pudding and let’s talk.”

So there we were, eating bowls of pudding that had rice in it, trying to get around the weird feeling that part of it might’ve been burned, or maybe we just didn’t understand the delicacy, being Mollyrats and all. I looked over at Thom and saw him wolfing it down, and I slid him my own portion. Whether he took it or not didn’t matter. I was too fucking excited to be hungry.

“So,” I said. “What’s the plan?”

“You don’t like it?” Sarah Fleet asked.

“It’s delicious,” Thom reassured her, snagging my bowl after setting his down.

“Grows on you, this one,” Sarah Fleet said. “All right, you’re anxious to get started. I’m assuming you’ve brought me something I can work with? All I need’s a memory to start with; you leave the rest to me.”

More magician mumbo jumbo, I thought. Even Sarah Fleet, who was different from the rest, couldn’t help it. I shook my head.

“Don’t speak in riddles,” I told her. It was more polite than I usually had reason to be, but this woman was special. She licked her spoon and shook her head, like for whatever reason she was disappointed in me. I didn’t like the feeling.

“And here I thought I was being straight as an arrow with you boys,” she said. “Guess that doesn’t help us any if you’re slow as mud.”

“We don’t have that much experience with magicians,” Thom clarified, his mouth full of rice pudding. Just like a real diplomat.

“Well I don’t mean a real memory,” Sarah Fleet elaborated. “I’m not one of those creepers with a quiet Talent who’ll go mucking around in your head quicker than you can say boo! No offense, boys, I’m sure you’ve got a lot of those hanging around, but what good’s a memory for helping you to find something, anyway? Memories are in the past, and what
you
want is decidedly from the now.” She shook her head slowly, punching the air with her spoon. “Now, what I meant is a physical memory—like a remembrance token. If my little girl was your lover, you’d have kept a lock of her hair in a ribbon, wear it next to your heart, that kind of bullcrap. You get me? Or is that still too much of a riddle for you?”

“Oh,” said Thom, blinking. “You mean…” He trailed off and turned to me, clearly not wanting to say anything without my rogering it first, which I guess was loyal, if misguided, of him. Wasn’t anything like working with Havemercy—doing first, asking later—but what was like working with Havemercy?

Answer to that was: Nothing.

“Yeah,” I said. Only problem was we didn’t have anything like that on us. I had a scale from Chastity and a claw from Compassus, and nothing at all from my own girl. Just more proof that the world wouldn’t pass up a chance to shit on a Mollyrat. I had a feeling Sarah Fleet knew it too, or at least she could tell by the look on my face.

I didn’t go in for wearing my heart on my sleeve like
some
idiots, but people always knew when I was upset.

“What’s the matter, boys?” Sarah Fleet asked, looking from side to side, even though she didn’t really need to, her eyes being the way they were. “You look like I caught you with your pants down.”

“Nothing like that,” Thom said, sounding horrified at the very idea. “I’m merely afraid that we don’t have what you’re looking for. Of the parts we
have
been able to locate, neither of them has come from Havemercy herself.”

Sarah Fleet sat back in her chair and grunted. There was a glimmer of something in her eye—the lazy one—that I was pretty damned sure I recognized. “Lucky for all three of us that I wasn’t asking, then, isn’t
it?” she said, before getting up from the chair and disappearing into one of the rooms farther back in her house.

Something inside of me did a flip, just like Niall messing around on Erdeni before we flew out. Luckily I had better control over my outsides than my insides, and Thom had no clue.

She hustled back pretty quick for someone with her build, which was just as well, since if she’d taken any longer, I’d’ve probably lost my cool and gone back there to haul her in. There was something in her hands, largish, with a bit of a curve to it.

Sarah Fleet put the scale down on the table, and it was almost like she’d torn a hunk out of
me
and plonked it down in the dining room.

I’d have known one of my girl’s scales anywhere, even if this one was in way better condition than all the rest of ’em put together. It was what she’d looked like brand-new, and I had to swallow quick because otherwise I was gonna hurl all over the place. She was just sitting there, resting smack-dab in the middle of the dining-room table like no more than a potholder or one of those round things you put under mugs of coffee to keep the table from staining. Somehow it looked right at home among the bowls of rice pudding. I snorted, because there wasn’t much I could say.

“Don’t start blubbering,” Sarah Fleet warned. “And I don’t want to hear any lectures about stealing, either, because you can’t steal something that came from you in the first place.”
She
didn’t seem that impressed by the scale, but then I wasn’t really surprised. That was my girl all over. She
did
reach out and touch the metal, her finger against the arc of white steel, and she sighed, like coming home. “All right,” she said. “I only have one rule, and that’s never mix food with magic. You get all kinds of unwanted mess that way, and it
always
spoils the taste.”

Thom slowly lowered his spoon. There was rice in the corner of his mouth, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. At least he’d had time to finish, though he’d eaten two portions in the time it’d taken Sarah Fleet to eat one. If we’d been alone, I’d have told him to take a good look at the magician, because that was where he was heading with an appetite like that; but the magician in question had sharp fucking ears and might’ve been able to use a spoon as a weapon.

We weren’t alone, and I needed Sarah Fleet’s help, and even someone like
me
knew when to keep my mouth shut about a woman’s weight—when it worked to my benefit, of course.

“I’ll clear the table,” Thom said, with an eye between Sarah Fleet and me like he knew his place among the three of us.
Someone
had taught him real manners somewhere along the line, on top of all that horseshit he’d picked up at the ’Versity. Before Sarah Fleet could say otherwise, he’d scooped up the bowls carefully and scuttled out to the kitchen like an unwanted roach.

“Not bad, that one,” Sarah Fleet said, with an approving eye that made me jealous for no good reason. “He’s got
lovely
manners, for example. Unlike some no-account brawlers I could name.”

“You want me to clear the table, or you want to get this done quick?” I replied.