Dragon Soul (58 page)

At least now my boots were much less painful to wear, though my stockings were torn and my heels and toes made rough with little pinpricks, each grain of sand nothing on its own but quite painful when working in tandem.

I glanced at Madoka again. She was moving, as were the hands upon her compass. She was still alive, then, and Badger was attempting to coax the sand from out of her lungs, two hands pressed flat against her chest as he heaved his considerable strength against her. But it was not Badger’s sweet, futile emotions that caught my attention most. It was the compass in Madoka’s palm.

All at once, the hands went still—they hadn’t been moving as wildly to begin with, I realized, the meaning of which I could not entirely comprehend. Was the dragonsoul buried? I would certainly be compelled to dig for that.

“She’s alive!” Badger called out to me. Perhaps he expected something of me. I should have gone to him and taught him the proper ways to coax breath back into aching lungs, but instead I drew up my skirts
and turned my head back over my shoulder, in the direction toward which the compass hands—all three of them at once—were pointing.

Something, very far in the distance, moved.

“Can she walk?” I asked.

Badger opened his mouth—no doubt to tell me she could not.

“I can,” Madoka croaked. “Where’s the fucking magician?” I paused to sniff the air. “Dead,” I said, and I was certain of it. “I know,” Madoka said grimly, then, “Shit. How’m I supposed to get this out of me?”

“I promised you that Volstovic magicians would take a gander at your predicament,” I reassured her, all the while not taking my eyes off the compass. It was still pointing straight in the same direction. I sniffed again, but the air was so still I could smell nothing at all beyond the stench of blood and rot and metal in Madoka’s hand.

“You’re dreaming if you think I can make it that far,” Madoka said, and privately I rather agreed with her.

“Well,” I said slyly, “there is one more option.”

All three of us looked at her hand at the same time.

“Help me up,” Madoka said.

Badger was going to protest again, then thought the better of it. He stood, bringing Madoka with him, and she was sure on her feet. The sleeve of her dress was torn and I could see red lines traced with green tangled all up the length of her forearm—I could not imagine how it would be to have your body turned against you so thoroughly, and the man behind the magic dead and buried beneath the dunes. Yet there
was
one option left to us, and the compass made the direction all too clear.

“Don’t care what you do with it now,” Madoka told me. “I just want this thing gone.”

“We can only hope it’s three against two,” I replied. This time, I would be the one to lead the way, not Badger.

And, I added privately to myself, I hoped the odds were even more in our favor.

The wind had stopped. It was painfully quiet. Whatever Fan had done to animate the body of the dragon, she had wound down, or perhaps all the sand had fouled up her workings. In any case, she was silent, the air was still, and I was alone. My chest was aching, but it wasn’t because of the sand.

Rather, it was what the wind and sand had given me—thrown against me in one last dying blast. I’d tried to get it to Rook. I remembered that much. It’d hit me so hard that I felt my heart stop, and I wondered if this was yet another earthquake—if this one would finish me off—before I lost consciousness. It was brief, however, and my heart soon regained its usual rhythm.

And so I awoke with my arms wrapped around the dragonsoul, as though it were a baby cradled in my lap.

It was beautiful. Despite the heat, the glass and metal were both cool, save for a tender warmth that pulsed at the very core of the glass tube. The metalwork was intricate, and even the cogs here and there had been bent into such shapes as to look like crown jewels. There were nubs of metal that reminded me of the mechanisms inside music boxes, and the liquid magic itself glittered like fireflies were caught inside. All the rest was made up of gears and workings I had no way of
comprehending. There was even some ancient, polished wood mixed in with the metal, and despite the ordeals it must have been through, the polish remained glossy—not even a single edge was blistered or burned. Only one part of the whole looked incomplete, or imperfect. There was a spot on the side where a circle of metal had been sheared off, the glass beneath cracked but not shattered, and I ran my fingers against it wonderingly. A shiver ran down my spine.

This was what we had been looking for, all this time.

It truly was as glorious as our mad search warranted.

If I give this to John
, I thought,
he really will be happy
.

But he was somewhere underneath all the sand. I’d seen him buried underneath it, and here I was, clinging to some inanimate object—one he’d been looking for, not me. If I let go of it he’d be angry, but he wasn’t here to rebuke me.

It hadn’t even been long since the wind had stopped howling and all had fallen still. There was a chance Rook was still alive under the sand mounded up before me, but I was afraid—afraid that if I began to dig I might discover that he wasn’t. As long as I did nothing, I still had hope.

And what kind of pussyfoot thinking is that horseshit?
Rook would have demanded. I would have stiffened, scoffed, frowned, fought off the insult, then kept it privately within my heart as a secret wound for the rest of my life. If I didn’t change now, then I would never be able to.

Still, I couldn’t drop the dragonsoul. We’d worked this hard, come all this way, fought with one another and beside one another—in a manner of speaking, if whatever
I
had done could even be called fighting—just to get our hands on it. I held it tighter, then loosened my grip, afraid of its power as well as the fissure in the glass. If I broke it open, what horrible power would I unleash?

More important than all that was this: The last time I’d seen my brother, before the sand came down around us all, there’d been a knife sticking straight out of his rib cage. I knew anatomy very well, and I knew that such wounds could look worse than they really were. It all depended on where he’d been hit, but that injury on top of the sandstorm…

I felt sick.

“Shut up, Thom,” I said out loud. It sounded like Rook, and it jolted me out of my idiocy more quickly than sitting on my ass mourning my
assumed losses had done. I stood, hauling the dragonsoul with me, and stumbled in Rook’s direction.

I couldn’t be certain that this was where he’d ended up, but it was the last place I’d seen him before the sand had come crashing down around him, and it was the best choice out of my limited options. The desert landscape had gone back to its natural state of eerie barrenness after the eruption of the storm, and, frankly, the sight terrified me. There was no trace of my brother, nor was there any of Fan, though the latter was hardly my concern at the moment. With shaking fingers, I set the dragonsoul down in the sand, where it wouldn’t be in the way but where I could also keep an eye on it. I’d remain mindful of it. I owed that much to my brother—a final vigilance, if all was as hopeless as I feared—but, perhaps not surprisingly, it was not my foremost concern, either. It seemed strange to have sought so long for something only to have it matter so little now. The soul was a beautiful piece of work, both powerful and strange, but all its magic amounted to nothing if I had to bear it alone.

On my knees, in the middle of the desert and sweating under the blaze of the noon-high sun, I began to dig.

For once I didn’t allow myself to think about anything except the task at hand, how best to clear the sand away from the site of my excavation. It was horribly disheartening work, the sand so dry that it seeped in where I’d been digging only moments before, making my efforts seem almost worse than futile. The only way to beat it was to stay on top of the flow, digging a wider radius as I went deeper, so that the very center was never covered by any of the sand as it spilled in around the edges. It was troublesome enough a task that it kept my mind occupied, giving me no time to think about my brother’s capacity for air while trapped under the ground, or the knife that had been stuck into him. I should have trusted Rook’s initial assessment of Fan and allowed Rook to do away with him as he pleased. My brother was paranoid and violent but, as much as I hated to admit it, he was so often
right
.

But such thoughts would only bring me to ruin or despair, and I required all my energy for digging.

Rook was the most stubborn person I’d ever met, and I knew he would cling to life with the same tenacity he chose to exhibit for all the other activities and objects most important to him. Havemercy was the one thing about which he’d been most passionate, but over the course
of our journey I was beginning to understand some of the others as well. Rook liked his freedom—he’d taken to the desert like a native, comfortable in ways I could never hope to approximate even after years of trying to settle down—and he seemed to like traveling. Reason should have dictated that he was happiest with nothing and no one to answer to—he’d chafed considerably under the Esar’s command, after all, which had caused all our mutual grief in the first place—but something gave me the sense that this initial assessment wasn’t quite accurate. There was some valuable piece of the puzzle that I was still missing, and I scrambled to uncover it just as I was attempting to displace an entire desert in order to find my brother.

The sand was hot—it burned my fingers—and the sun was growing almost intolerable. I tore my shirt off, winding it around my head as a makeshift protection from the heat—my back and arms would be less lucky, but these were small losses against a more immeasurable one—and I kept on digging, mindless of what discomforts the desert might visit on me. I dug until my fingers grew numb, chapped and red from the heat, the skin under my nails beginning to bleed.

My brother hadn’t come all the way out here, chasing a phantom of the past, because he liked things best on his own. He’d come because what he
really
wanted was something—or someone—on which to constantly test his teeth. He wanted someone who could roll with the punches and give him as good as they got, in return. Someone who, bastion help them, could in all likelihood keep him in line, though the relative position of that line might have to be moved every so often in order to keep him from being garroted by it.

Rook no longer had Havemercy, but he still had me.

Without warning, my fingers brushed up against something smooth and hard in the midst of the little sinkhole I’d created. I froze, my heart picking up sudden speed like the unsteady thundering of my camel’s hooves. But I couldn’t afford to falter now, and I plowed back in with renewed vigor, trying to extract sand from around what I’d hit. Further digging revealed a shoulder, clothed in dusty blue—my brother for certain, then, and not Fan. A revolt started in my stomach, all the way down to the tips of my fingers, now cracked and messy with sand-dried blood.

Even as I continued to dig, clearing the sand away with feverish need, I was still afraid. I was afraid that I was about to haul my brother’s
lifeless body out of the dunes, afraid that then I would truly be alone. I was so terrified of this that it nearly froze my blood in my veins.

I stood quickly, bracing myself against the ground to pull at Rook’s shoulder, towing him up under the arm I’d managed to clear. It was horrifically difficult, the sand heavy and Rook even heavier, and when I’d managed to get him up some of the way I tucked my arm firmly around his rib cage for better leverage. I pulled him back against me and hauled with all my might.

When he finally did come free, the sand sucking and popping against and around his body, I stumbled over backward, dragging him with me. We collapsed back onto the surface of the dune, in the shadow of Havemercy’s frame, the impact knocking the breath from my lungs. I could see the dragonsoul out of the corner of my eye, winking merrily in the sun like the most beautiful of desert jewels—a true diamond in the rough. The sand beneath us burned my back and the sun overhead was so hot as to be nearly unbearable. I was being baked alive, but at least I
was
alive.

Rook, however, didn’t move, neither to lift his head nor to swat me with his hand, all in order to tell me what an idiot I’d been. He looked worse than I’d ever seen him, pale beneath the sand and the front of his shirt soaked in dark blood. The knife was missing, probably lost under the sand along with Fan, though the damage it’d done remained. There were things I had to do—measures I had to take to be
sure
—but my heart was already sinking. Part of me wanted nothing more than simply to lie here and wait for the end to come and finish us both off. I was so tired that I felt as though there couldn’t possibly be anything left within me. I couldn’t even lift my own hand to shield my eyes from the sun. And I was angry with Rook, because so many things in the past had failed to kill him. How dare he leave me now? How dare he let something so small become something so large? If I’d only put my foot down, I might have made it clear to him that he was only chasing a dream through the desert. Desert wind whistled through the metal bones at my back. There it was, the last remnants of a war he’d won, and—irony of all ironies—this was what had finished him off.