Dragon Soul (53 page)

Fan tilted his head and arched an eyebrow. The light in his eyes did make him look rather mad, I realized, or perhaps it was something to do with his close-set features. If we were lucky, he would have no Talent.

If we were not…

“I didn’t expect you to listen,” Fan said with a deep sigh. “Men like you are always so stubborn, for better or for worse. Or perhaps you can’t bear the idea that your precious ‘girl’ would be turned against you—just like this.”

“Where is it?” I asked again, steadier this time. Fan talked about his plans with the same bluster and fastidious detail with which many of my professors had attacked their specialties. I knew how to talk to people like that, how to flatter their vanity and make it seem as though even in defeat I admired their cunning, understood the intricacies of their peculiar genius. I had no confidence that it would work under these circumstances, of course, but it was the only chance I had. The principles were essentially the same. “What
do
you plan to do with it? With…her? And how can you be sure it’ll work, to begin with? No one to date has ever dismantled and reconstructed a dragon—you can’t possibly know that the parts will function as you’ve planned.”

“Why
ever
do you think we’ve come out here in the first place?” Fan asked, spreading his arms wide as if to encompass the desert itself. “It’s the perfect testing ground. No inconvenient buildings in place, no tiresome patrolmen to keep an eye out for. In fact, you merry rovers are the only obstacles we’ve currently run up against, but that’s all right. Onto every parade, a little rain must fall. Unless of course one comes to the desert,” he added, giggling thinly at his own joke.

“You’re not alone?” I asked, just to make sure. There was always the chance that he was speaking as the Esar did—Fan seemed far removed enough from the real world to assume that air—and I didn’t want to rush into things. Especially when I’d come so far in keeping Rook from doing just that.

“Oh dear,” Fan said, shaking his head. “And here I called you clever. Well, no matter, perhaps I can
clear
things up for you.”

He raised both hands, and I tightened my hold on Rook instinctively. The shifting miasma of sand at Fan’s back howled and began to part like a golden mist. There was a shape behind him that I couldn’t discern, impossibly large, too delicate to be one of the stone columns that had surrounded Kalim’s camp and somehow…familiar. I glimpsed an elegant neck, the cruel hook of a talon, and the stark, metallic outline of a rib cage.

Rook snarled and dragged me a full foot forward before I recovered myself, hauling back at him with all my weight while praying to anyone that might’ve been listening that now would be an
excellent
time to grant me just a bit of added strength.

I’d known what it was before my brother moved, of course. It was difficult to forget a face that’d left such an impression on me.

“I imagine she looks a little different than when you last saw her,” Fan said, and the sound of his voice made me want to hit him right between the eyes. “It’s a shame really. We had to make do with what we had, and as you can imagine, after the war it was difficult to get our hands on
too
many parts without looking suspicious. You could call this a collaborative effort though. She’ll carry Havemercy’s soul, but I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if there wasn’t a piece of all the dragons in that body.”

“You’re a real son of a bitch,” I said, both because I was unable to help myself, and my brother seemed too shocked to move. “I hope you know that.”

“Let’s not bring my mother into this,” Fan said. “The mere sight of you has already ruined my day
quite
sufficiently.”

“But you led us right to Sarah Fleet,” I protested, as Rook shifted slowly, with less anger this time and more calculated intent. “What possible reason could you have had—unless you meant for us to come here all along?”

“Well, not all of you,” Fan drawled. “The only one we really need is your brother.”

“Sucks to be fucking you,” Rook replied. He hadn’t even taken his eyes off the dragon—I couldn’t call her Havemercy, not in her current state—and I hadn’t
really
been sure that he’d even been aware of the conversation. “I ain’t biting.”

I could feel the tension in him, and for the first time I truly appreciated how much it was taking for him to remain still. He was waiting,
no doubt measuring the distance between himself and Fan, weighing his options, planning his next move. If he hoped to stick a knife through Fan’s heart and exorcise him in that way, then he would of course wish to make sure his blade hit the mark. It was pressed between us currently, and I shifted, stepping away from Rook just enough that he would know he could remove it now without fear of somehow injuring me. Whether he noticed or appreciated my efforts was unclear, but Fan clicked his teeth together.

“Ah ah,” he tsked, holding up one hand. In it was a small vial of clear liquid; I had no idea whether it was something as simple as water or a substance far more potent. Rook’s jaw was hard. “No planning between you, please. No sudden movements, either.” He paused, licking his lips. The vial was important—perhaps that was his trump card. “Don’t recognize it, do you?” he added, after a brief moment. “Or, I suppose I should say, don’t recognize ‘her’?”

“Everybody changes,” Rook said harshly.

“Don’t do anything rash,” I cautioned—as though somehow my words could affect Fan’s decisions at all. I was still trying to talk him down from whatever madness he hoped to indulge in, here in the desert where no one from Volstov could see. If I could only manage to make him grandstand just a little longer—posturing enough to give me further clues as to his confederates, his desires, his
motives
—or at least distract him for long enough to give Rook a clumsy opening…As ridiculous as both plans were, they were all I had.

I squeezed Rook’s arm and his muscles tightened beneath the touch.

If only we might have worked together.

“It’s a good plan, actually,” Fan explained, gentling. He held the bottle up, but there was no light for it to catch, only solid walls of sand every which way, sunlight barely managing to filter in from far, far above. “We took this from the source itself, the guts of the soul, so to speak.” He shivered, but I wasn’t expert enough to tell whether it was feigned or genuine. “Opens you up to all sorts of theological philosophies, doesn’t it?”

“There is a magician in the desert, you know,” I said, testing him. “She created this particular dragon. The part you intend to test is her creation. Wouldn’t it be better to go directly to the source? Rather than
be here, working with a power you can’t possibly understand fully…To have that knowledge—”

“Unnecessary,” Fan said, clipped. “As I’ve said, it’s not her we need. It’s Rook. Mix his blood with this, return it to the soul, and the bond between dragon and rider will be broken. Terribly inconvenient, her having imprinted on him in the first place, since it introduced all
sorts
of complications into the initial plan. All we have to do now is mix your blood with the woman’s, to create a transference of that loyalty. You’ve no idea how delighted I was to encounter you on my travels. I’ve never had much reason to believe in fate before, but that was truly an indication of some higher power.”

“Fat fucking chance,” said Rook, but I could see him eyeing the vial with considerably more care than he’d first paid it.

I thought hard, harder than I ever had and more swiftly—I could practically hear the gears of my brain grinding in protest—but I couldn’t come up with anything. Silence and the wind. I didn’t dare to close my eyes, though they were burning with the heat and the sand. Somehow, because of the immediacy of direct sunlight from overhead, it was burningly hot in our little prison, and the sand crusted on my skin was not helping matters in the slightest. The wind at least cooled my body down somewhat, enough for me to think things through.

Fan was working with at least one companion. That much I knew. And it would have to be someone who knew a great deal of magic—perhaps even the cause of the Ke-Han windstorm we were currently experiencing. I cast my mind back to my initial assessment of him, back when we had only first met. Part Ke-Han, I had guessed then, and now I wondered if I wasn’t so far off. If he was part Ke-Han, and this magic had at its source a Ke-Han wind-magic element, then it stood to reason that Fan’s purposes—his interests—lay with the Ke-Han.

I had a motive. Perhaps.

“The Esar would be willing to bargain with you,” I offered tentatively. “For this piece, you
know
he would offer you a great many things.”

“Bargain?” Fan said, and laughed. “I don’t need to bargain.”

“You probably want him to beg,” Rook said.

Fan’s silence explained everything, and I realized with grim certainty that my guesswork had led me to the proper conclusion. QED, as
it were. We were at a grave disadvantage, and Rook must have known it too; it was why he wasn’t acting yet, or even acting at all. He stood as still as an alley cat waiting for a mouse—all muscles coiled and primed, tense and ready to pounce. But no mouse had yet presented itself, and Fan was watching us with that same smug delight. Or perhaps the idea of a resurrected Havemercy was one that Rook didn’t find so disagreeable now that he was confronted with it. Face-to-face, so to speak, with one he’d loved and assumed gone forever.

I couldn’t allow myself to doubt his motives though. I had to trust my brother.

“What about us, then?” I asked, sliding farther away from Rook. I had to give him
some
kind of opportunity to act. At the very least, we might be able to use Fan as a hostage—that is, if we could locate his counterpart, the other agent in this dangerous masquerade. “Do you intend to kill us?”

“Perhaps,” Fan said. “You’ve been very troublesome, following me all this way.”

“We haven’t been following you,” Rook said. He wasn’t watching me, but I could tell he was painfully aware of my every movement. “Guess you’re getting a little paranoid there, huh?”

“No matter,” Fan said, shrugging lightly. “If the storm does not take care of all my enemies, it will certainly neutralize them. I am used to being pursued.”

“There certainly is a lot of sand, isn’t there,” I said, lifting my hand to wipe at some of the grit that was crusted around my mouth. “How do you tolerate it?”

That brought Fan up short. He stared at me as though I’d lost my mind. “Beg pardon?” he said.

“And the camels,” I added. “Have you been riding them? Beasts. In fact, I think I’m going to sit down. This is all tiring me out tremendously. I’m not at all the adventuresome type.”

“Don’t move—” Fan began, but I’d given Rook all the time he needed. He went after him with a howl and then—much to my horror—they both disappeared with the force of impact, falling straight through the wall of sand at Fan’s back.

“John!” I shouted, but only the wind answered me. I was alone.

When the wind started up like a wounded wolf, our shit luck didn’t even surprise me anymore. At least I knew this kind of magic—and I knew it pretty damn well. Even growing up in a piece-of-shit village that was nowhere near the contested border—the one where all the action happened—I still knew what it was like to feel the sharp wind on your skin and know that it didn’t have anything to do with nature. The emperor’s magicians liked to fiddle with things most sensible people knew were better off left alone, and the weather just happened to be the most convenient trick they had up their sleeves for when the dragons came calling. No one cared that sometimes a storm got out of control and blew down a few shacks, tore up a few rice fields. The war effort was what was important, and the rest of us had to be good little patriots and suck it up.

The only difference between this and the storms I was used to was that the latter didn’t usually involve sand. But there was a first time for everything, wasn’t there? This whole trip just proved it.

The wind bit into my cheeks and the sand cut into every inch of exposed flesh, but this time I wasn’t about to let any Ke-Han magician get the better of me. That certainty gave me something to cling to, a fire to bolster my spirits. I’d never thought about killing someone before—
leastways no one had ever made me mad enough to—but I had a feeling all that was going to change.

I didn’t care about what my ancestors would’ve thought. If I found that magician before any of the others did, he was going down with my hands around his throat.

“Madoka!” I heard Badger shout, and he grabbed for me while our mount bucked. We’d come a long way from him skulking along behind me in the shadows, that was for sure. I held firm to the reins, and even dug my fingers into the camel’s shaggy neck fuzz, but it was only a matter of time before we lost our hold. The beast was going crazy along with the weather. I couldn’t say I blamed it, but it was stronger than me.

I tried to answer Badger, but when I opened my mouth sand flew in, and I was too busy to say anything what with all the choking. I felt my fingers slipping—couldn’t concentrate on holding on
and
breathing at the same time—and I hit the ground hard. But I didn’t let the impact daze me for even an instant. I had new strength way down to my bones, and I hadn’t hauled my ass this far only to wipe out right at the finish line. I had a purpose now and it was right in front of my nose—just past all the sand, anyway—and I was so close to freedom I could almost taste it.