Dragon Soul (44 page)

Then we waited.

I enjoyed my position, almost invisible—though every now and then I did feel the weight of some bandit’s eyes upon me, measuring my movements. It was a lucky fact indeed that they were far more caught up in the promise of some great spectacle, and for the time being, that spectacle had become—in their minds—manifest in Madoka herself. She could look after herself even in this state; I fully trusted her. And this distraction gave me ample time to pass all the stages of our plan over to Badger, who was currently enjoying life as a prisoner, tied efficiently to a palm tree.

At least he was in the shade. Besides that, I’d already slipped him one of my own knives, and he’d be out of bondage easy as a prostitute sleeping with a rich man, as they said back in Thremedon.

After that, I was left to my own devices. I pretended to be very interested in a local tree in order to avoid the advances of a lonely young bandit who was apparently desperate enough to try anything and less interested in more archaic forms of magic than the mundane sort two bodies could achieve when they rested together. I was flattered, I wished to tell him, as it had been a long time since I found myself on the receiving end of such attentions, but now was hardly the time. In any case, I gave him the slip, attended to the camels, assessed all possible cogs in the gears that might potentially arise, and prepared myself for everything I considered a viable threat to our well-being and, even more important, our success.

I was ready by nightfall.

All too quickly, it was evening, and I found to my surprise that my own pulse had quickened with the excitement of it all. Tonight we were going to make off with a prize more valuable than I had ever before brought back to the Esar. I would be rewarded, certainly, but it was not the prospect of riches or esteem that fueled my excitement. Rather, it was the promise of another job well accomplished, the most difficult mission my liege had ever sent me on, succeeded and surpassed. There was nothing so satisfying as meeting the Esar’s expectations. He gave me the tasks he would not or
could
not trust to anyone else, and I continually delivered. This mission would be no exception.

If I hadn’t been surrounded by bandits and murderers, I might well have kicked up my heels to express my delight.

Then again, I couldn’t afford to rest on my laurels just yet. No need to count the chickens when the eggs had only just been laid.

“Derga will bring your witch her ingredients,” said Abbud, slipping up to me like a shadow in the night. “I will bring her the magic.”

“Very good,” I said, trying to sound as though everything was going according to plan. For all intents and purposes, it seemed to be.

The rest relied upon Madoka. They were leading her inside already and I was now no more than the playwright who must be content to sit in the audience and wait until the curtain fell to learn just how it had been received by the masses. I drew closer to Abbud’s tent.

Good luck, I thought. And with all luck, she’d perform very well, and wouldn’t need it.

Needless to say, I had not been deemed fit by either my brother or Kalim to ride with the rest of the party into battle.

Admittedly, I did not believe that I was the best suited for such a job, nor did I particularly wish to learn the skills of such a trade so quickly before I would be called upon to use them. I was not, nor would I ever be, a desert rider. They were right not to trust me or encourage me, and I should have been grateful that—at the very least—Rook cared enough about my well-being to stop me from doing something quite hazardous. Sensibility and good common sense told me all these things, and there was no reason to ignore such principles now, when they’d aided me my whole life.

And yet I was incapable of feeling anything other than left out.

I spent the rest of the day sulking and attempting to enjoy the views; my ink had run out, but I still had my graphite pencils, and here and there I attempted a few notes upon the statues, the garb, the camp life itself. Everyone operated efficiently, like the gears in a well-made machine. Everyone clearly had a designated place, or duty, and they saw to it without any confusion among the ranks. No one seemed to be speaking, and yet they worked with a synchronization that I had only ever imagined coming from a great deal of communication. At any given point there was no one who was not seeing to some matter of business—but then, I was observing the tribe under extreme duress. This was an observation of how a foreign tribe prepared for battle, and hardly a slice of normal life. And yet it reminded me of something—another time I had sat to one side and diligently attempted to parse the working mechanism of fourteen men who appeared to have as little as possible to do with one another outside the sphere of their work.

Every man here had a purpose, except of course for
me
.

Come now, Thom
, I told myself,
it
is
important to record history as it happens
. And when were theories useless? I was a thinker, not a fighter, and the world was always in need of thoughts.

It was simply that those hadn’t exactly proven themselves useful, either. The basic “theory” at hand was that I needed to stay out from underfoot, and so there I was, perched upon the giant thumb of a forgotten civilization, their last memory in the entire world, watching things happen in the present without actually being a part of them.

That was the kind of man I was.

It was extremely disheartening.

Once again, I reminded myself, I did not want to be a man like Rook. There were a thousand flaws in that way of living, not the least of which a dark venom that hurt even those he presumably cared about. That had never once appealed to me. Nor did I wish to be the sort of man who, like Rook, could easily take another human life—and would, tonight, when all went well. That was what disturbed me most of all: I wasn’t even nervous, or afraid that my brother would be hurt by all this. I knew he wouldn’t. All that harmed him physically rolled off his back like water off a duck; he was naturally suited to violence, and violence was naturally suited to him. Again, it was not the sort of ideal I personally strove toward.

But there was that terrible feeling again—the one that told me I was exactly like Geoffrey, except with even less of a practical bent. To what had I actually managed to apply myself? I had survived this far, but never once had I stuck my neck out. I was always there, in the background, observing and recording, but all that was starting to wear thin. My thoughts were selfish, messy and tangled. I hated considering them. That which had once been my strong suit—or so I thought—was now like chains around my ankles. I kicked my feet sullenly against the wind, feeling and acting like I was a child again, hiding from Georgie Pluck, who spent far too much time around a brothel for a child of thirteen, and who enjoyed giving me at least one bloody nose per performance hour during the ladies’ shows.

“You look like you ate something that didn’t agree with you,” Rook said, leaning up against the wrist at my side.

“Mm,” I replied. Not my cleverest comeback, but I was hot and I was glum, I was sticky, I smelled of camel, and even the smallest of my triumphs was truly nothing in the face of all that greater men than I had managed to accomplish in a shorter amount of time, and with less self-doubt.

“You don’t honestly fucking think I’d let you fight, do you?” Rook added. “I mean…you’re not exactly Molly’s finest.”

“I am aware of my shortcomings, thank you.”

“Whatever,” Rook said. He folded his arms over his chest and didn’t pull away. At least I could tell myself that he hadn’t completely acclimatized to the desert just yet. There was some chance left for me that
he wouldn’t join with Kalim to rule the sand, leaving me to become his biographer or something else that required very little of my actual presence.

“Whatever,” I agreed.

“So stop sulking,” Rook snapped. “It just doesn’t make any sense. ’Sides, it’s up to me to fight on Have’s behalf. You don’t have to be a part of it.”

“But I would like to be,” I said, with more candor than I usually exhibited. “I
want
to be a part of it.”

Rook didn’t say anything at first, and I wondered briefly if I’d managed to surprise him. Little did he know I actually wished to be of some use to someone—to anyone, though to
him
at this point in time would have been preferable. Maybe, judging by my behavior and failure to perform even the most basic of duties, he
hadn’t
known, and this had come as a shock to him. But when I looked over at his face to try to read his reaction he was just staring out into the lowering sunlight, his mouth a tight line and the muscles in his jaw hard as twine.

“Never mind,” I said. “Just be careful, I suppose. Don’t get hurt.”

“Can’t promise that,” Rook said, because he never pulled any punches, nor did he ever lie—unless it was to suit him. “You know. Fighting’s dangerous.”

“I’m aware,” I told him.

“And you’re a jumped-up little ’Versity boy,” he added, looking at me sideways.

“Stop that,” I warned.

“Probably couldn’t punch your way out of a fight with a kitten,” Rook continued, looking thoughtful. “One little scratch and the fuzzball’d have you cornered.”

“That’s not fair,” I said, the blood starting to pound between my ears.

“In fact, I should probably tell Kalim I think we should leave you back with the pregnant women and children,” Rook concluded, a little
too
smug. “I mean, if something bad happened to the camp while we were all gone, they’d end up having to defend you from the enemy.”

“Enough!” I shouted and, in a moment of extreme insanity, I threw myself at him.

He’d been nothing but awful to me throughout our travels. I’d been
abused, mistreated, put down, insulted. He’d threatened to leave me behind, feed me to the camels, and it was all nothing in comparison to what I could expect from him in the future. We were supposed to be brothers; we were
supposed
to be good to one another.

This was not any definition of
good
that I could understand.

However, I honestly had no plan for how I’d beat him man-to-man, and he had me pinned in the sand after I got one pathetic little blow in, clipping his chin with my fist and hurting my hand, I suspected, more than I’d managed to hurt him.

“Feel better?” he asked me, while I tried to catch my breath.

“How could I possibly?” I demanded.

“Wanna have another swing at me?” he offered. “Makes you feel good though, doesn’t it—just punching someone.”

“Bastion damn it, Rook,” I said, but he was right. I was acting as I always blamed him for acting. It wasn’t very pretty. Also, there was sand in my mouth now, not just my nose, and I inhaled too quickly, choking on it.

Rook clapped me—a little too hard—on the back, finally letting up, and I used that moment of weakness to tackle him again. This time I did hit him, soundly and solidly, a full three times before he overpowered me. My hand was throbbing now, as if to ask why on earth I’d insisted on putting it through such abuses, but I supposed I could be grateful it wasn’t my head. This time, as I tried to regain my breath with my face pushed firmly into the sand beneath me, I heard Rook laughing.

“You dirty fucking bastard,” he said. “Guess I’ve got less to teach you than I thought.”

It was almost—
almost
—like being complimented.

“Peace,” I said, the word muffled, and he pulled back just slightly. Nonetheless, I knew that the same underhanded tactic wouldn’t work a second time; it was lucky I had no intentions of continuing the fight as it was.

“Nasty,” Rook said appreciatively, and I pretended the blush on my cheeks was the hot flush of battle rage inside of me.

It might seem plausible.

“At least tell me there’s something I can do,” I said.

“Yeah, actually there is,” Rook replied, taking me completely by surprise.

“Kalim doesn’t want to leave the, uh,
rakhman
with the women and kids, so he’s gotta take him with us. But he’d just be a liability, so you’re gonna look after Bless.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Think of it like this,” Rook offered. “He’s a low-down dirty prisoner and you’re the jail warden. It’s an important fucking job. If he says anything, we all give you full permission to rough him up a little. Just gotta follow through with your punches. Don’t be such a Cindy about ’em.”

It appeared that I was being given brawling advice by my brother. At last, a true moment of bonding, and it was over fisticuffs.

“Oh,” I said once more.

“Get real angry again, just like that,” Rook said. “Take it all out on Bless if you wanna; I sure as shit wouldn’t mind, and nobody
here
’d give a fuck, either. Probably cheer you up.” He paused to laugh, then sighed. “We’re riding out a little before sunset, so think about how much you hate me and that camel and sand and the sun and daytime and nighttime and sleeping outside and moving and everything that doesn’t involve sitting on your bony ass and reading about other people doing things, and Bless’ll shit himself with how scary you look, trust me. He won’t try a thing.”

“Is that official advice?” I asked wryly.

“Are you kidding?” Rook asked, pushing off the statue’s remnant and heading off through the sand. “Out here, I’m the fucking Esar.”

I supposed, for all intents and purposes, that he might as well have been. Since leaving Thremedon, I had never seen my brother so loquacious about anything. If I’d been making a study of it—as I suppose I was, in my own, unofficial way—I’d have said the desert was the cure for whatever melancholy he’d been experiencing. Of course he
would
take to such a beastly place, the landscape as wild and unforgiving as he himself was. I wanted to love it, however misguided my reasons, but there was altogether too much sun and
sand
for that ever to be a real possibility. Yet I still couldn’t begrudge the place, if only for what it’d done for my brother.

Experimentally, I made a fist. It looked all wrong for some reason—or at least rather knobbly and ineffectual as compared to when Rook did it. Then I imagined slamming my fist into Geoffrey Bless’s face, and though it was a terribly violent image, I found myself not particularly
averse to it. I was quite sure that I had never been as angry with
anyone
as I’d been with Geoffrey—not even that little Pluck rat—the night the nomads had come upon us and my brother had challenged their leader to a duel. I was not often given cause to worry after Rook’s safety, but the uncertainty of the circumstances coupled with the unfamiliar territory had created just enough room for the shadow of doubt in my mind. If I hadn’t been so concerned with not disrupting the fragile peace we’d made with these desert men, that night I
would
have struck Geoffrey. How
dare
he lead us into such trouble—and it didn’t seem to matter much now that inadvertently he’d also led us into Sarah Fleet’s lap. He was clearly not our ally. We were only lucky that Kalim had gotten to him before
he
was able to get to us.