Dragon Soul (39 page)

“This is what matters,” Rook said to me suddenly.

“I know,” I told him. “We’ll find it.”

“Damn right we will,” Rook replied, “even if I have to fight every last one of these bastards single-handed.”

“Well,” I said, “not quite…single-handed.”

“You’d just get in the way,” Rook said, but I thought I could hear him grinning, and he didn’t even laugh when I dragged myself up bodily onto Bessie, which was an olive branch if ever I’d seen one. Heartened by his good mood and the promise of some conclusion ahead of us, I hushed Bessie as she snorted at my weight atop her. If I could last this one out, then so could she, the cruel, spiteful animal.

“You coming, Thom?” Rook asked. Like I was a person, a friend, someone to counsel.

I wiped the fresh sand from out of my nose. “I am,” I said.

“Excellent,” Kalim told us. “Now we ride hard.”

People had this saying: Don’t ask
how can things get worse
when you don’t want to find out the answer. It was a wise saying. I hadn’t stuck to it, and now here I was, being talked at by people in a language I didn’t understand, with everyone shouting at once and my hand hurting so bad I thought my arm was going to fall off.

I’d stopped trying to explain myself or even plead innocent when the sound of my voice’d earned me a boot to the face. They didn’t appreciate my words. I didn’t appreciate theirs, either, but the thing was, I wasn’t the one holding all the dice so I wasn’t the one who got to call the shots, and it was shut up fast or get kicked to the sand again, so I chose the first option, thanks very much, and hoped that’d earn me a short reprieve.

Wherever Badger and Malahide were now, it certainly wasn’t helping me. I hoped they hadn’t gotten their asses snagged up too—if I was lucky, they wouldn’t abandon me completely, but I had a dark feeling about my luck lately.

Leave it to me to get snagged by a scout while I wasn’t paying attention. So here I was, held back by my hair, while some desert rider shouted in my face. He was probably asking me something, but I didn’t know what the hell he wanted from me; maybe he’d wise up and see
nothing was getting through. Limply, I held up my hand, the universal symbol for
wait just a fucking second
.

Wrong hand, I thought a moment later.

Everyone gasped and pulled back.

“That good, huh?” I asked, not actually thinking for long enough to stop myself from being stupid.

The man in charge’s eyes narrowed, and he pointed at my hand.

“Oh,
this
bad boy,” I said, holding it up; the guy yanking on my hair dropped me like I was on fire, which sometimes I felt like I was, and scurried quickly away from me. Suddenly, I realized something pretty sweet.

I wasn’t the only one who was afraid of this thing.

I looked at it like I was thinking about something real hard, and then I held it up again, just to see what would happen. The men all shrank back like I was a witch or something. And hey, if that was what I needed to be to get the hell out of here, then so be it.

It explained why they hadn’t nabbed Malahide yet, anyway. If
anyone
ever looked like a witch who’d cut out your eyes and use ’em for marbles, it was her.

“What can I say?” I asked, getting to my feet, brushing the sand off of me with my good hand while still brandishing the bad one like it was a weapon. “Sometimes a girl just gets a little bored, likes to conduct a few experiments on herself. Nothing you guys’d understand, of course. Really powerful magic. That kind of thing. Not the sort of mess you’d want to get caught up in, if you catch my drift,” I added, punctuating my warning with a hand gesture I’d made up on the spot.

The man who’d been holding me by the hair crossed over to talk to the one who’d been shouting at me, giving me a wide berth while he did so. They murmured to one another in desert-speak, taking the time to glance over at me every so often just so I could be sure to understand their topic. Remarkable what you could still overcome with a language barrier between you. Well, at this rate, they’d be giving me a real big head.

Just like that, Shouty started shouting again, gesturing wildly all around like a playactor miming a part, then jabbing his finger in my direction. The hair-yanker shook his head, holding firm to whatever line he’d drawn, and I took a curious step forward. I didn’t want to get
too
cocky, of course, but my hand was throbbing like fire. If they were planning
on letting me go because they thought I was going to curse them with my evil-witch presence, I wanted to know sooner rather than later. And if they weren’t about to let me go, then I figured it couldn’t hurt me at all to stall a little, give Malahide and the Badger time to come to my rescue while my new desert-rider friends argued among themselves about what the hell to do with me, if anything.

Shouty and Hair-Yanker both looked at me like scared rabbits, and I was the slavering hunting dog coming to bring them home.

“It’s rude to talk about someone when she’s sitting here right in front of you,” I told them, not that it mattered, since they couldn’t understand whatever was coming out of my mouth anyway. “I assume that’s what you’re talking about, anyway. Guess it could be all about how I’ve ruined your dinner plans because I’m spoiled meat now.”

“Meat,”
Shouty repeated slowly, though the word sounded all wrong in his mouth, like he had something stuck in his teeth. Next to him, Hair-Yanker had his eyes on me like a hawk—or more specifically, he had his eyes on my hand.

“Hey, that’s not half-bad,” I told him, and took a chance on getting a little closer.

You’d have thought I’d dropped a bomb into the middle of camp, the way everyone jumped up, frantically scurrying every which way like mice caught in the granary.

Shouty yelled something—I was getting
really
sick of not understanding anything that was going on around me—and the desert riders all froze in place like he’d turned them to stone. Then he turned back to me, and I could still see the fear in his eyes, but there was something below it, like pure, hard determination, which scared me just a little.

Luckily, I was still carrying that trump card of mine. Not like I could let it go.

“Look,” I said, holding out both hands this time. Everybody flinched back—it reminded me of the old woman, when she said I hadn’t bathed in a while and that I’d be driving off any prospective husband who could get over my looks—but I tried not to let it get to me too much. Hell, after spending so long as someone else’s helpless lapdog, it felt nice to have some power for a change.

“Look,”
Shouty repeated carefully, but he got his tongue hooked around the beginning of the word and it came out sounding garbled and wrong. He took a step toward me, and I didn’t bolt.
I
wasn’t some
scaredy-cat desert rider. I was a bona fide Ke-Han witch. He looked like he was afraid I’d rip his tongue out, which I guess was a fair enough assessment. It’d be a fair exchange, since his man had made my scalp pretty sore, and probably had a handful of hair for his pains.

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said, just to be encouraging. It made me a little sick to be this close to them—voluntarily, since I wasn’t exactly being held captive any longer. Shouty had sand stuck in the grizzle on his cheeks, and his cloak was streaked with dried blood. I tried my best not to think about where it might’ve come from, like that poor fucking boy Badger’d bandaged up before we left. “You think you boys could find your way toward letting me go, seeing as I’m a menace and all?”

Shouty tilted his head to one side and shook it, the international symbol for
do-not-understand
.

I hated motherfucking bandits. I’d seen what they’d done to the desert village, and probably dozens of other villages before that. And for what? Probably just because they’d been bored. Just knowing I couldn’t reach up and choke the life out of them was killing me a little. I wasn’t exactly the most self-righteous person when it came to fancy morals, and I
definitely
didn’t count myself among those idiots who followed all the rules of society without really understanding why, but what these men did for profit was downright unforgivable. No judgment from the emperor, no jail sentence, nothing. In the court of Madoka, people who preyed on and stole from the poor and helpless deserved to be buried from the neck down and left to die in the desert while the birds pecked out their eyes.

Just like that, Shouty turned away from me and hollered something for the rest of his tribe to hear. The gang looked between me and him, like even
they
didn’t quite understand, then—like they’d come to some kind of mutual agreement all of a sudden—they let out a real hoot-and-holler of a cheer.

It was the kind of sound that sent shivers down my spine since it was pretty obvious that if something made the nomads cheer, it spelled bad news for me.

Shouty fixed his gaze on me, and this time there was no fear at all, just the set jaw and hard look of a man about to do something in spite of the fact that deep down it still scared him shitless.

He started toward me, and I threw up my hand like a warning. This made him hesitate, but not for very long. He was evidently the leader of
the tribe—the one man who
didn’t
have a free pass to cower back from the girl with the compass rotting in her hand. Bad news for me again, because it looked like he was calling my bluff. And before I could do anything he’d seized me tight around the wrist, throwing me off-balance.

The damned fever’d really messed with my reflexes. If I’d been at the top of my game, I’d never have let a throat-cutter like him put his hands on me,
and
he’d have had a nice pain between his legs for trying it too.

“Get off me!” I grunted, tugging hard and feeling only a dull throb in my hand for the effort. He was a strong guy, though, and he had a pretty good grip on me. I stamped hard on his foot—not caring that I was pretty much surrounded—and we went over and into the sand, with me falling hard on my back. Shouty landed next to me, and I realized we’d tripped over something, half-covered by someone’s stinking shirt. It rolled free into the sand and I stared, unable to do anything but gawp like an addlepated brat. It glittered on the sand like fish scales but smooth, about the size of a fat marmot, if marmots were silver instead of furry. It rolled a short distance along the ground, away from us both, then stopped. I’d never seen anything like it—I couldn’t even
start
to guess at what it was—but I still couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Without thinking, I reached for it and all of a sudden my hand pulsed hard like something’d slammed straight into it. All I could do was curl up in a ball, gasping from the sudden pain.

Shouty made a grab for the thing, kicking up the sand around us as he scrambled after it. It was only after he managed to get hold of it that he noticed me, writhing on the ground and shaking my hand like that’d set me free once and for all. He stared down at me like he’d just seen a dog get run over by a merchant’s cart—that same mixture of horror and disgust. Then he grabbed me by the arm once more, prying my fingers back to stare at the compass.

The hands were on the move again, spinning around and around like a clock gone out of its mind, which must have been what’d set the flesh to burning. Not that I was exactly in a rational frame of mind to appreciate that kind of thing.

Shouty’s prize started to vibrate softly in his hand, like a broken piece of machinery that didn’t know quite how to function anymore, and I stared at it, completely transfixed. I was scared he was going to
drop it, but I guess he needed the other hand for holding me. For a few moments, I felt nothing. Just the sight of it washed over me, cool and calm, and there was nothing else in the world but it and me.

Then the pain in my hand started up again, so bad and so hot I couldn’t help but scream at it.

Seeing my reaction, Shouty held it up to the light of their campfire, and closer to me. He’d turned the tables on us right quick, and no mistake. Fire raced through my palm, shooting through my veins and down my wrist, throbbing all the way up into my chest, and I tugged like hell to get away from him and that
thing
. I was too crazy with the pain to worry about getting kicked anywhere now. Distantly, through the red fog in my brain, I heard something come crashing through the foliage, and someone yelled in Badger’s voice. It sounded like he was saying my name.

All at once, the nomads who’d shrunk back from my hand crowded forward again at the sudden invasion of their campsite, all of them on the alert and probably drawing out their weapons. I was about to open my mouth and tell Badger he was a real damn fool when all of a sudden Malahide sprang in front of him looking like a sprite from an old myth—the kind that stole babies away from their mothers and replaced them with lumps of coal or stone. She shouted something in the desert language the riders had been using—it figured she’d know that, on top of all the rest—and they all halted, staring at me fearfully.