Dragon Soul (6 page)

And so I had allowed myself to become a hooligan.

While it wounded my pride, the main source of hurt was in my knuckles, which were swollen beyond my capacity to move them.

I didn’t even remember the face of the man I’d struck—it might just as well have been a woman, save for the faint imprint of what seemed to be a beard spread across my stiffened fist. If we were arrested, which we might well be, I had no excuses or even any explanations. I had simply punched a man because Rook had told me to, and it was all over some item, now tightly secured in Rook’s hands, which I couldn’t even identify.

“Didn’t know you could fight like that,” Rook said moodily, the
sound of his voice cutting through my troubled thoughts and bringing me, somewhat miserably, back down to earth.

“You forget my upbringing,” I replied.

Rook snorted. “I wasn’t there for it,” he said. Then, perhaps because that was too much even for him, he fell silent again.

We were in our rooms now, after being mobbed by an entire innful of country folk incensed at being insulted. And why shouldn’t they have been, I asked myself, since Rook had called them all thieves, liars, and the women whores. No one would take very kindly to that treatment, and they had only reacted as they saw fit. Besides which, he had confiscated something of theirs.

I didn’t blame them, but still I had fought them tooth and nail. Even now, I felt it necessary to apologize, or at least to offer the innkeeper payment. At this very moment, he was no doubt calculating the extra cost to us for staying in his establishment and doing our level best to tear it down before we set out to our next target.

“Rook,” I said, drawing in a steadying breath. “Since I have now been involved in actions I…am not entirely proud of…” Rook snorted again, and I tried to ignore it. “I’m waiting for an explanation,” I concluded at length. “Any reason at all for why we…Anything, really, would suffice.”

Rook’s face was twisted into an expression of such deep unhappiness that, at first, it might have passed for anger. In point of fact, even I drew back, before the sum total of his features—his hard jaw, his tight lips, the redness around his eyes and the whiteness around his mouth—brought me up short.

I had misread the situation—somehow—and on top of that, I was not the sort of partner he’d wanted.

Of course not. I wasn’t one of the boys. Brawling was
not
my specialty, and I did not enjoy the rush of simple pleasure brought on by physical fights.

But there was some other key element lacking—something that had to do with camaraderie—and when I thought too long or too well upon the subject, my heart began to hurt.

I tried to move my hand to distract myself. That pain was simple and immediate, and it was a momentary distraction. A dirty tactic, but for the time being it would serve its purpose.

“Like I said before things went to piss,” Rook muttered, “they had a fucking piece of Magoughin’s girl, all right?”

I glanced down at the box in Rook’s hand, trying to follow. His words had barely made sense—and then someone had made a grab for the box, and he’d thrown the first punch, and after that all was chaos. Hitting and kicking and clawing—all manner of action that drove real thought straight from a person’s head.

He’d said that before—
our girls
—but it hadn’t occurred to me at the time what he was actually talking about.

“Chastity?” I said.

“Yeah,” Rook agreed. His mouth twisted to the left, then resettled into its grim, hard line, like the slashed mouth of a ritual mask from the distant south. Those masks were meant to frighten away the curses placed upon a family by one’s ancestors. I would have explained the dark humor to Rook if I hadn’t already known the outcome:
Shut up, Professor. Shut the fuck up
. “You’ve still got all that memorized, huh?”

“You do, as well,” I pointed out.

“That’s different,” Rook snapped, and he was right.

I steadied myself to be brave enough for my next question. “May I see it?”

“It’s nothing special,” Rook said. “Just a fucking scale, nothing important. What good’s looking at it gonna do? Fuck me.” He lifted the box, though, as if he were about to slam it down on the table in front of us, then set it down gently, popping open the top. There it was, a scale indeed, though I personally would never have recognized it. I knew very little of the dragons themselves—I’d been given no real time to study them, and mechanics had never been my strong suit. In point of fact, what little I did know was of their riders. If this was Chastity, then it was as much a piece of Magoughin as it was a piece of metal.

I reached forward to touch it with my bad hand, and Rook whistled.

“Looks like that hurts,” he said.

I sniffed. “It does. Quite a bit, actually.”

“You bunched your fist too tight, that’s why,” Rook explained. “You made the muscles too tight. You gotta make your fist go loose—less bruising that way.”

The theory made anatomical sense. “I hope I never have to put that advice into practice, in any case,” I said.

“Well, don’t say I never taught you anything,” Rook muttered.

“I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

Rook got real close to me, his eyes crazy in a way I hadn’t seen them get for a long time. “That some kind of insult?”

“A compliment,” I managed, voice coming out distinctly strangled. “I believe I intended it to be a compliment.”

“We’re getting sidetracked anyway,” Rook said, wheeling away and stalking to the window. “What the fuck do you think about that thing?”

“About the dragonscale?” I asked, knowing already what the answer was. But I was buying time to think my answer over, foolishly convincing myself that if I put enough thought into it, I could divine the
right
answer, the one that would assure Rook he hadn’t been completely out of his mind to take me along.

I stretched my hand uneasily, trying to keep it from getting too stiff. I was treading on unsteady ground, and the hard lines of Rook’s back were as unforgiving as they’d ever been—even back in the days before we’d known what we were to one another. I stared at the dragonscale on the table, trying to mold my thoughts around the twisted shape of it.

The problem was, I’d never been as close to the dragons as I’d been to the men—one had to call them men, even if other words were preferable—who’d ridden them, and I’d been somewhat reluctant to raise the topic during my time spent traveling with Rook. How did one broach such a delicate subject? Thus far, we’d never addressed the dragons or what had happened to them at all, to say nothing of those members of the corps still living—or those now lost to us forever.

I’d written letters at first, and shared the responses willingly enough with Rook, until he’d pointed out that he didn’t give two shits whether Ghislain had bought a ship or not, or what classes Adamo was lecturing in. After that, it seemed best to keep both my letters and my theories to myself.

Rook had left Thremedon, and, it seemed, all thoughts of Thremedon as well.

All that, however, had been before I’d been foolish enough to get myself involved in Rook’s business as though it really were my own. The delicate throbbing in my hand told me it was too late to retract my support and, what was more, I’d spent enough time stalling.

I could hear his teeth grinding together in impatience from where I sat.

“Well,” I said, clearing my throat when my voice came out too dry for my liking. “During the last attack on the capital, there were only four dragons that made it back to Thremedon…And then
you
came back, of course, but not…” Rook grunted and I switched gears immediately. “What I mean to say is that, assuming things progressed as they’d initially been decided, the Esar would have had what remained of those four surviving dragons…destroyed, in keeping with the provisional treaty. And if that’s the case, that still leaves ten dragons that went down in or around Xi’An’s capital. I’m sure they would have done their best to recover and destroy the majority of the…ah, bodies. I hear from Balfour that most of those vital remains have been recovered. And it’s my understanding that after the destruction of the dome, the population of Ke-Han magicians was considerably depleted. I’d imagine that’s their chief concern right now, as opposed to gathering up the fallen pieces of dragons. However, it’s possible that pieces here and there went overlooked. In war and in recovery, there is always something left unaccounted for.”

“So,” Rook said, and I fell silent once again. “What you’re
sayin’
is that there’s a chance someone out there’s got pieces of our girls all carved up to auction off to the highest bidder.”

“Not exactly,” I said, fingering the scale while I thought. Its edges were sharp, whereas Magoughin had been all blunt corners. It was strange for me to have such vivid memories of men I’d never considered my friends—sometimes far too vivid for my liking, infiltrating my waking hours as well as my dreams. Thinking about them made me feel strange, like missing the bottom step upon a staircase or returning to a series of notes I’d made, only to find them all in disarray, the contents shuffled and some missing entirely.

I couldn’t imagine how Rook felt to think about it, but I hadn’t yet worked up the courage to ask.

“You gonna elaborate on that thought, or are you just waitin’ for me to come over there and
extract
it?” Rook turned around, features ablaze, lip curled in a snarl.

I put the scale down quickly. Fortunately, I was too frightened of the consequences to drop it.

“I think it’s likely that…certain smaller parts, such as this, may have escaped the initial cleanup,” I explained. “I’ve read from certain accounts that there are often scavengers who turn a profit on rare items like these, and that’s likely where our friend downstairs obtained his piece. It seems to me that such tasks would be best accompanied with a liberal side of secrecy, however, since if the emperor were to get word of such a business getting under way…But no doubt it has a great deal to do with rumor, authenticity, that sort of—”

“I don’t give a shit about any of that,” Rook snapped, looking as though he was regretting not throwing me out the window. He stalked back over to me, picked up the box that held the scale, and slammed his other hand down onto the table for emphasis. “What I want to know is if some rat bastard is out there with bits and pieces of
her
, showing ’em off for kicks in some backwater shit hole like this. That question plain enough for you, Professor?”

I should have known it would come to this—insults and nicknames recycled from a time we’d never quite escape.

I resisted the urge to draw away, since that would have been akin to retreat and Rook knew all too well how to scent blood in the water. Instead I forced myself to think the matter over as quickly and carefully as I could, knowing what the outcome would be no matter what I said.

He was angry; he was desperate for someone to blame. And I was the likeliest candidate since I was already there.

“There’s a chance,” I said at last, a faint band of regret forming tight around my heart. “There’s always a chance. To my knowledge, Havemercy was never recovered, and…” I trailed off, the name sounding like blasphemy on my lips.

More than anything, I did not want to send my brother on a wild-goose chase to try to recover something that had long since been lost. False hope, no matter its intentions, was never kind. But Rook was a grown man—perhaps slightly overgrown in some respects—and it was hardly my place to tell him what to do. He could decide for himself where he went and why, and would no doubt do exactly that no matter what I said to him.

“Fuck
the hanging gardens,” he said, shutting the box top and picking it up. “I’m gonna go have a little chat with the man that gave me this and see if we can’t learn a little more about
exactly
where it came from.”

I stood up, muscles aching in protest over what I’d already put them
through. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked. As always, it was only a formality. I had developed a new instinct when it came to my brother’s actions—a kind of self-preservation born of desperation. It was necessary, for our sanity—and, at times, for our survival—that I be prepared for the punches he threw my way.

He barely spared a glance in my direction.

“Get in my way and I’ll leave you here. I mean it this time.”

I didn’t doubt him. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked, sounding desperate even to myself. Despite all my protestations, I was his younger brother, and I wanted, more than anything, to be useful.

Silly Thom
, I thought.
You haven’t changed
.

“I’ll do the talking,” Rook said, pocketing the box with one hand and jerking his other toward my travel log. “You can write things down.”

Where was I?

That was a damn good question. It was also a question I didn’t have a proper answer for, seeing as how my friends the cleanup brigade had blindfolded me nice and gentle and kept a knife in my side as insurance. On the one hand, I hated being kept in the dark; but on the other, it might’ve meant I’d get out of this alive, now that I had absolutely no real information about where I was or how I’d gotten there. Hopefully, I could wiggle my way out of this one on the strength of being stupid, but it didn’t seem likely. It was the best defense I’d cultivated, and not even years of being poor and a woman had managed to strip that from me.

They sure had me good, though, taking me by wagon, then by foot, turning me this way and that so my head couldn’t focus on any one direction. All I really had to go by was the sound our feet made on the ground once we’d gotten down off the cart, and even that wasn’t giving me much. All I really knew for certain was that we weren’t outside anymore when we finally stopped for good, and the air itself was damp and kind of cold. The rest was silence. I tried to make like I was too dumb for paying attention, so maybe, in the end, I could go back to the rest of the world and laugh at everyone, telling them I could make it out of
anything alive. Just like a rat. The old woman’d probably clout me a good one with her stick, but I could even look forward to that if it meant getting out of here in one piece.