Dragon Soul (61 page)

I didn’t want to open my eyes, but I did it anyway.

“Shit,” I said, which wouldn’t have been my top choice for some first important words, or whatever, but I couldn’t help it. “What the hell was that?”

The dragon-thing was sitting in the sand, neat as you please, only where before it’d been filled with soothing, silver-white liquid like a million pearls all melted down, its contents were now angry and red. The mixture swirled darkly against the metal-hammered glass, making the whole contraption look more sinister than beautiful—a giant container of somebody’s watered-down blood. Was she in there?

“I wouldn’t worry about that just now,” Malahide counseled, leaning forward on her knees to examine the dragon piece curiously. I probably wasn’t interesting anymore, considering I was no longer a part of it.

“Can you move your hand?” Badger asked, giving voice to the one thing I really didn’t want to find out about. It was cowardly of me, sure, but I really didn’t think I could take the disappointment if it’d worked but hadn’t worked, or if I was fucked for life now because of all this.

Malahide looked at me expectantly, her hands already on the dragon-thing to pull it away before I could tell her not to, and over her shoulder those two men from Volstov were watching too, their eyes glued to me like they’d just seen one hell of a show. I guess they had.

“Your eye,” Badger said, looking at me appraisingly.

“Wish you hadn’t said that,” I muttered. There was a part of me
that’d been hoping whatever’d just happened was a dream. “What’s it look like?”

“Gold,” he said, and he was smiling even though I couldn’t think of any reason he’d have to be doing something like that.

“Great,” I said. “Just what I need. One brown and one gold.”

He reached out and put his hand over mine—the one I’d been too scared to move up until now.

“I think it suits you,” he said, and I didn’t have a smart retort for that one.

Guess I really was some kind of desert witch after all. It was just too bad I didn’t have a bigger audience to see it anymore.

Gingerly, I lifted my hand from the cooling surface of the glass. My whole body was tensed, expecting the worst: That pain could return at any minute, or maybe the compass would rip out of my hand when I moved it, or maybe I’d be sucked inside to swirl with the bloody liquid. Badger was holding my hand, though, and I didn’t think he’d let anything like that happen to me. Not now, when we’d taken care of that piece-of-shit magician once and for all.

“Your arm!” Badger exclaimed, startling me.

“Shit,” I said again, “you’ll scare me out of my skin like that.” The joke was kind of ironic, all things considered, but it put me in good enough spirits at least to look down at myself.

So I did, and I wasn’t expecting what I ended up seeing there. All the angry red lines had vanished, and there was no sickly, pale green color to the skin, either. That little sliver of hope was all I needed, and I pulled my hand back with certainty now, flipping it over palm up so I could force myself to look at it before I chickened out.

The compass was gone. In its place was a scar, pink and fresh and perfectly round. I wouldn’t be able to tell my future by reading the lines in my palm anymore—just my past—but I figured I could live with that.

“Nice,” I said, looking up at Malahide. The world began to move around me and I was pretty happy that Badger was still there, because when I keeled over from all the stress, he’d catch me when I dropped.

I was sure of it.

I’d never had anybody like that before, someone to watch my back for me. I guess you could call it a friend and I guessed I
would
call it a
friend. I had my hand back and I probably could’ve caught myself, but I’d done enough of that for one lifetime, landing on my own two feet in the middle of so much shit. Gutter pig, yeah, but even sows had sty mates. There wasn’t any reason for Malahide to stick around, and despite being grateful to her, I was glad she wasn’t going to. Life could get back to the way it was but a little bit different, at that. I looked back over my shoulder at Badger and he was smiling at me, his face all crooked with the scar.

“Me too,” I said, meaning my hand.

It was getting embarrassing, the number of times I’d passed out. But this was my last. I was finally done with it.

We’d all assumed it was going to be impossible to find our way back to immediate medical help. After all, we had two almost deadweights on our hands—Madoka and the airman—the first of whom was out stone cold, and who could blame her after such a barbaric ritual, and the second of whom obviously could not walk, despite all his protestations to the contrary. No matter how hard or how loud some people protested, they were still no closer to convincing
me
of an untruth, and that was exactly how things were with Airman Rook. Some choice phrases were exchanged, with his traveling companion attempting to mediate the damage—needlessly; I certainly wasn’t going to be offended by empty words slung at me from a wounded animal—before Badger commanded all of us, with diction even those who did
not
speak the Ke-Han language could understand as a soldier’s order, to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. He held Madoka in his arms like she was a fallen comrade, and I was fond of them, but my attention really was directed elsewhere.

The item in question rested before us, forever altered. It reminded me of myself in some ways: The outer vestiges of what it once had been had been blown clean away, and now it was as much a part of Madoka as it was a part of a dragon at all.

No wonder she was all tired out.

It had to have been the dragon’s core—its heart, or perhaps more accurately, its soul. Whatever magician had wrought this beauty would never know the spectacular display it had given at its last—more than even a simply fiery death in battle could have allowed. I was so proud, even though it had never involved me directly. As a spectator, I had participated in such a beautiful exhibition that it would leave me changed for life. Even if parts of it turned out to be things Madoka might prefer to forget.
That
was something we all could appreciate.

It might take years; it might take an entire lifetime; it might exceed my capacity for understanding at all. I had been through certain magical experiments myself, when I was young but not too young to remember all the details, and this surpassed them all. The sun was slowly beginning to set, and yet it had been brighter than the sun itself at full burning capacity, above us and unbearable in the desert sky. How had anyone managed to create such a wondrous thing, with full knowledge that it was to be used for destruction?

Bastion bless the Volstov
, I’d thought to myself, and even had the capacity to laugh at my own precious little joke.

But that hadn’t left us in any better straits—they were, in fact, rather dire. Alone in the desert, no transportation, no water left, no knowledge of where we were: It all pointed to trouble. Yet
more
trouble. It was no sandstorm I could outlast nor desert tribe I could outwit. I’d never been the praying sort, but I was almost embarrassingly close to it. I could even see Badger was participating in a few prayers—perhaps he assumed his gods could hear him all the way out here, so far from home. I would never understand the deeply religious. I had never been the sort of person to give up in any situation, no matter how grim—I considered myself something of an opportunist, and a lucky one at that—but even I couldn’t see my way toward strolling free of this one. No amount of gumption or wit could charm the desert itself. We’d ridden this far from the oasis by following my nose, and not any natural landmarks, so that no one in our ragtag little gang even knew which direction to start in.

We were, to put it shortly, quite doomed. But fate had a funny way of repaying me for services rendered—among other things I’d given up—and it seemed she’d decided not to allow the ink on my tale to dry, just yet.

When we’d least expected it—indeed, I believed Badger himself had fallen into some sort of meditative trance—we were saved. Not by a stroke of luck from above, as I’d imagined, but by my favorite and least favorite man on earth. Well, currently, in any case. But nonetheless my
intimate
friend, Kalim.

“You will ride!” he told me, meaning me and the others, after one of his men had dismounted to bring both Rook and Madoka some water. He’d had the good sense to ride out with a solid entourage, whether hoping to bring help or simply to show off the magnificent display of the desert magic, I would never know. In a moment of rare simplicity, especially for me, I found that I didn’t care one iota.

They were efficient, very well trained, and I was unable to fully appreciate all that they had to offer, as I felt Kalim’s eyes on me the entire time. It put a decided cramp in my style, and I smoothed my skirts with fingers that were genuinely unsure. He didn’t think I was dangerous—he wasn’t trying to test me, to see if I would make the first move. In fact, there was an almost jovial camaraderie in his expression. I trusted it even less for that assumption. To him it might well have been nothing, but for me, it was the world.

After drinking a few greedy gulps of the proffered water, Airman Rook finally
did
manage to draw himself to his feet, despite his companion’s adamant disapproval and insistence that he should absolutely not do so.

“Can I ride with this?” Rook asked, limping proudly and foolishly over to the dragonsoul.

“It appears cursed,” Kalim said. “It is changed. You should leave it here.”

“There’s something I gotta do with it,” Rook said, leaning down and grunting. He looked like he was very near to coming apart at the seams, but it wasn’t my place to mention anything. I knew—call it womanly intuition—that my concern would not be appreciated. Somehow he managed to pick up the dragonsoul, then stood there swaying like a dead man. I admired his success, if not his motives. His companion ran over to him, as though to help, and after a moment I thought I saw the tension in his shoulders ease as he shifted—not half, but
some
of—his burden. “Get outta here, Thom,” he added, but there was no passion in it.

“I will not,” Thom said.

“Enough, enough!” Kalim said. “We will take you back to Karakhum. Are you sure you wish to bring that with you? You are hurt, and there are men there who would steal it.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Rook said.

He was a ridiculous man. Impossibly stubborn and set on what he wanted. I couldn’t admire him, but I did envy his conviction. Just a little.

Others could deal with him now; I would have to keep an eye on him and make sure he got rid of it, so that I could make my report back to the Esar without being contradicted by the evidence. I could at least tell that he did not intend to cling to it as some memento, as though it were really as simple and benign as a lover’s token. There was little left I had to worry about, save for incompetence. At least there were two of them; their separate brands of intelligences almost made them as clever as a single clever person.

I turned to Kalim.

“We shall ride,” I told him. “That man is wounded; the woman, weary.”

“I saw a great deal of magic here,” Kalim told me, still looking cheerful, but also overawed.

“Yes, well, I had very little to do with it,” I replied, feeling put out. “How far is Karakhum?”

“We ride through the night,” Kalim replied, “and reach Karakhum in the morning.”

And that is exactly what we did.

I had never been to Karakhum, having passed through the Cobalt Mountain Range on my first trek out to the desert and bypassed the famous desert city quite entirely. It seemed a lonely and mean path when I thought about it now, though at the time it had been perfectly satisfactory. My mind had been solely on the chase, following a man who’d ended up buried beneath the dunes—I had never even gotten to meet him at all. Truth be told, I was a little disappointed that he’d been dispatched so easily. I would have to continue my search for my equal—someone who would not let me down when push came unequivocally to shove. This one, like all the others, had disappointed me.

Such was the conclusion to this particular chapter.

I rode the entire way to Karakhum on my own camel, thank you, keeping pace with Kalim’s out of choice and not because I was a witch
under suspicion this time. A few of his men shot me curious looks, but looks had never bothered me before. I was a creature entirely unique. Not in the sense that every young woman with more powder on her cheeks than sense in her head thinks herself special, but
truly
different. If they wished to stare, they could; at least they did not consider me with the same comprehension as Kalim, for which I was grateful.

As was often the case, I appeared different to them. They could not put a finger upon why, nor could they articulate the difference they observed. I was and was not the “typical” woman—or whatever facsimile they expected from their own comprehension of womanhood—for the simple reason that I was not born a woman at all. Nor, I suppose, did I have the requisite parts to receive their blessing as a woman even now. But that, as always, was beside the point.