Dragon Soul (5 page)

I was asleep, dreaming of sunlight glinting off sand, when the old woman woke me. We’d left the capital at around the same time heading south, and ended up traveling together when I’d caught her going through my bags for food.

“Madoka,” she said. “They’re rounding up the scavengers.”

“Shit,” I said, still half-asleep, and the old woman smacked me in back of my head hard enough to take care of that.

“Watch that mouth,” she told me, tugging at my arm and all but pulling me out of the pile of rags and discarded garments I’d turned into a bed. It wasn’t as comfortable as it could have been, but it sure as shit beat sleeping on the ground.

The old lady was as shriveled up as a dried leaf, but not nearly so fragile, and when she had a mind toward doing something it was best just to go along with it.

I shook her off and started scooping clothes off the ground, pulling them on one by one—layers of cotton and silks discarded for the scorch marks on them. The old woman said it made me look like a madwoman or a minstrel—neither of them being a desirable identity—but I liked to travel with everything I’d need all at once in case I ran into any difficulties—difficulties like this one. I tied my sash at my waist, cinching everything together, then hoisted my pack up over my shoulders.

One day, when people had money to buy things again, all this would be worth something.

“Any point in trying to get a head start?” I asked, already knowing what the answer’d be. There was no point in trying to run from the emperor’s soldiers since they’d take your own family just as gladly as they’d take you.

I’d left most of my family behind a long time ago, but that didn’t mean I was looking to get an unpleasant reminder. Important men didn’t like it when someone made them feel unimportant, and they’d do all they could to remind you just how important they were.

“Even
you
aren’t as foolish as all that,” the old woman said, fixing my hair like I was the hopeless case she’d always called me. What good would fixing my hair do when I looked like this? I was a big girl—taller than all my brothers and broader than some of them too. I wasn’t, as the old woman was fond of saying, the marrying kind, but I guess I was all right with that. If I’d been born some flittering little moon princess, I’d hardly have managed half so well on my own in the Ke-Han countryside. “Go on. Maybe one of those handsome soldiers’ll take a liking to you and you can move out of this hole in the ground.”

“Just what I’ve always wanted,” I said, pulling a face and dropping low to avoid the swipe of her hand. It was a harder feat to accomplish with the pack on my shoulders and so many layers making me slow, but I managed it somehow.

The old woman pushed the tent flap aside and bright light flooded in. Outside, hard-faced men in disciplined lines were organizing us into groups, digging through bags and storming into the half-ruined houses without even knocking. They weren’t shouting—they’d probably gotten enough of that during the war—but they managed to have the same effect. We’d long since been warped by years of tradition and wartime duty to do whatever an official told us.

A convenient system for our emperor, no doubt, but one that spoke very little of the will of the people under him.

It made me sick, but I was a part of it too, and like my village I could hardly cut it out of my being. Even if it
was
shit.

I shouldered my bag and strode out into the sunlight, sand crunching beneath my sandals and last night’s grit caught between my toes. I could see now that there were caravans, big ones, meant for transporting people as well as cargo. I didn’t like the looks of them, or what it
meant that they were there in the first place, but I had enough brains in my head not to run at the first sight of something that spooked me.

“You there,” said one of the soldiers.

“Me here?” I asked, pointing, but he just took me by the elbow and pushed me into one of the scattered lines slowly being formed.

Soldiers never listened to what the common folk had to say, but that had never stopped me from trying to say it. It was an attitude that would one day land me in more trouble than I was looking for, according to the old woman, but I’d gotten lucky so far. I planned on staying that way.

Plus, I was pissed at being interrupted right in the middle of a good dream for some last-minute examination. All we had was trash anyway—nothing the higher-ups would ever want to use. It was funny how the emperor hadn’t given a shit what we took from the capital back when it’d still been burning and he didn’t want to dig through anything himself. But now that other people had gone and done the dirty work for him, he could just follow after them and collect what he liked, simpler than sifting through a whole pile of dirt.

In short, the whole deal pissed me off, but there wasn’t much I could do about it now. I spat on the ground and adjusted one strap on my pack. Maybe if I looked angry enough—and stupid enough, on top of that—they’d think I was a waste of time and go right by me. It was a long shot, but I was willing to take whatever I could.

I wasn’t about to let them get ahold of what
I’d
found.

Besides that, I wasn’t too keen on giving up the little things either.

We could use this crap—make clothes, wrap our babies in it, see to it that kids had proper shoes. Up at the top of the heap, all it would do was gather dust at best; at worst, it’d burn. But wasn’t that just like power? Someone had to make sure things stayed the way they were—poor people having nothing and rich people having even the things they didn’t want or need.

At the end of my line was another soldier sitting at a long table; he was wearing a hat, which meant he was more important than the others even though he looked a hell of a lot younger from where I was standing. I could tell what kind of man
he
was without him having to say a word—shirt neatly pressed, cuffs stiff and clean, medals gleaming like he polished them every morning alongside his shoes. Only the young ones had the energy to be that spic-and-span about every little
detail. What someone like
him
was doing in charge of this operation was beyond me, but there was no money to be made in speculating so I didn’t waste my time doing it.

When he lifted his head I could see the poor bastard had a long, ugly scar running up through the center of his cheek and—mercifully—just to the left of one eye. It was the kind of thing you got when something tried to rip half your face off and didn’t quite succeed, which I guess was why he was so young and so important in his hat and all. If he noticed me staring, he didn’t say a thing, only folded his hands together on the table and lifted his chin like he was real sure of himself and used to it.

“Open the bag,” he barked.

Being an obedient little lady of the realm, I swung it off my shoulders and onto the table with a thump. The soldier looked angry, which meant that I’d taken him by surprise and I felt pretty satisfied about that. Less satisfied came afterward, when he snapped his fingers and two soldiers set to undoing the buckles and tabs that kept my pack together, not to mention keeping everything inside it.

I bit down on the inside of my cheek. It wasn’t my stuff anyway, not to begin with. Besides, I was a woman and a peasant, and I had no rights even to things I’d been born with, like hope and dignity and pride. The old woman was always saying my tongue’d be the death of me if I survived the war. Thinking about the smug way she’d laugh if she turned out to be right was all that kept me silent while the soldiers tore through my findings—like patterned cloth too big or still too torn to wear, and things I’d thought to send to my mother once I got the time and the money. There were other things too, smaller and more fragile, bundled in the fabric to keep them safe from the kind of treatment they were getting now.

One soldier pulled loose a smaller bundle I’d made, strips of deep, heart’s blood purple wrapped around my prize. I stiffened, hands clenched behind my back, and if they’d thought to have soldiers holding me they’d have noticed straightaway, only they hadn’t planned for that. Because I was only a woman, probably, or maybe because they just didn’t have the manpower for that anymore. Whatever the reason, I was seconds away from leaping across the table and snatching what was mine back from that soldier’s hands. The only thing stopping me was thinking up the best way to do it.

What they unwrapped was a hunk of metal, scorched black along the back and twisted from the heat of the fires I’d found it in. There was a clock face set into the front—I’d grabbed it at first because I’d thought it was a watch and maybe if I got it working again I could use it to tell the time—but instead of numbers there were only symbols, strange and foreign. I’d been about to throw it back when the pieces had started moving. What I’d assumed to be the hands for telling time, a sculpted arrow and a broken spring, suddenly aligned like the hands of the weirdest damned compass I’d ever seen—the other two were still—and both pointed toward the wreck of the magician’s dome, where the fires had burned the hottest and most scavengers still feared to go.

That was where I’d discovered my real treasure: the shiny, smooth scales of a Volstovic fire-breather, those monsters that had decided the war for good. I’d turned up three scales and one mean-looking claw; I’d sold the claw first and the others pretty quick after that, once word started to spread.

Even if there wasn’t money for food, there was still money enough for
that
.

I wasn’t some kind of sentimental fool out to keep a memento of the monsters that’d ruined us, and if some idiot wanted to feed me and my family for the privilege of sentiment? Well, that was fine by me.

The hands on my find hadn’t so much as twitched since I’d left the capital, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t still checking it regular, every night before I went to bed and every morning when I woke up, and periods in between when no one was looking too.

“What is this?” The soldier with the scar snapped to, all of a sudden, taking my prize in his hands and holding it up to the light, blunt fingers twisting the hands around like he was trying to set it to the right time.

The clumsy oaf was going to break it.

A fool would’ve hit him, but I had better control over myself than that. I shrugged, trying not to look like I cared one way or another. “I found it,” I said. “I don’t know what it does.”

“Perhaps you haven’t heard, but there’s a rumor going around about scavengers selling government-owned property on the black market,” he said, like we were on speaking terms all of a sudden when he hadn’t so much as said “boo” to me this whole time we’d been standing across the table from one another.
Soldiers
. Arrogant as peacocks,
the lot of them, and none so handsome. He’d probably been waiting for just the right time to impress upon me who was in charge and who wasn’t. “Things that
should have
fallen under the terms of the provisional treaty. That sort of action is treasonous.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” I sniffed. Maybe once things’d been settled in the capital it’d start spreading outward, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

“It would be convenient for you if I believed that,” he said. “I think we’ll take you along with us.”

“To the capital?” I asked, before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to speak. The old woman would’ve got me good with her stick for that one, and I would’ve deserved it.

The soldiers exchanged a look. They’d started shoving things this way and that back into my bag, but I noticed they were still holding on to my prize—like they didn’t plan on giving it back to me ever. I didn’t like to admit it, but I was getting anxious. And anytime I was anxious, I got pissed off.

“Somewhere much closer than that,” my friend in the hat answered me, finally. He pulled me close by one of my seven sleeves, all of them layered like I was some kind of princess straight out of a fairy tale. At least I was tall enough that he didn’t tower over me, and I did my best not to stare right at that giant scar. “Tell me, country girl: Have you heard of the magicians’ city?”

I wanted to tell him all that was a bedtime story. Shit like that wasn’t real anymore, and maybe it’d never been real to begin with, either. But I bit back on my anti-national way of thinking and looked away, off toward the cracked dome of the magician’s tower, lying overturned in a heap of its own rubble. Hatty’d take my drift.

“Commoners,” he said, and shook his head as he pocketed the one piece of treasure I’d ever held in my hands. “You’re coming with us.”

I had no choice, so I went.

This was not the first time I’d ever been a part of a barroom brawl. However, it was the first time I had ever participated actively in one.

It was difficult to deny Rook when he issued a command—something he’d learned, no doubt, from Chief Sergeant Adamo and saved only for special occasions. There was more power behind an order when it was bellowed in unfamiliar tones, making a man who’d otherwise remain neutral fall into a sudden alliance from which he could not withdraw. It was, in some ways, the most basic strategic lesson I had been given, inside the ’Versity or out.