Dragon Soul (7 page)

Footsteps signaled the arrival of some new asshole. I braced myself.

“You are being treated quite poorly,” an unfamiliar voice said. “I apologize for that.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds great.”

“You should not deny what small kindnesses we allow you,” the voice said, falsely sympathetic, and I bit the inside of my cheek. “You are in a disadvantageous position. Please, take off her blindfold.”

Aw, shit
, I thought,
don’t go doing that
, but it was too late and now I could see everything: dim light and shadows and rock, like we were in some kind of storage cellar. If this was the famous magicians’ city, then I was one disappointed commoner right now. Then again, maybe Hatty had been full of it when he’d told me that was where we were going.

I’d never seen a magician up close before, but if I had to guess, I’d say I was looking at one right now. The man standing in front of me was dressed simply but I knew by the way he held himself that he was somebody important, even with how young he was. He was holding my treasure—I guessed I should call it a compass, not having any other name for it—and I focused my eyes on that because it was something I recognized, at least.

“I suppose it is clear by now that we wish to know where you found this,” he said. His robes were blue, the color of a real Ke-Han patriot, and his head was shaved down to the bone. That look worked on some people, but his skull had too many knobbly bits.

“It’s garbage,” I told him. “Some people collect that.”

“You’re a profiteer,” he said. “You seek to benefit from the empire’s loss.”

“Somebody needs to, all due respect,” I replied.

His lip twitched at the corner. He wasn’t a soldier and he wasn’t nobility, because he had real facial expressions—the sort of thing you never saw in people who carried themselves like he did. “There is no respect in that,” he said, touching the curved body of the compass gently, in a way that made me uncomfortable. He could stop making love to it anytime now and I’d feel a whole lot better. “You’ve sold parts—parts like this one?”

“Not really,” I said, and gritted my jaw. “No use in selling the good stuff.”

“And why is that?”

“I think,” said my old friend, Hatty with the scar, “she hopes to make a greater profit when there is greater profit to be had.”

The stranger whirled on me without further warning—he was trying to intimidate me physically, and he had the element of surprise on his side, so damn me if it didn’t work. “Do you have, or have you had, in your possession, any pieces similar to this one?” he demanded.

“Nothing like that,” I said. “You want me to swear on something?”

The stranger smiled. “Your life will serve.”

Great. A fucking crazy person was in charge of me now. At least with Hatty I’d known where I stood since it was easy to know where you stood with a soldier: Keep quiet and they’ll usually do the same. Safest thing to do with a crazy person, I reasoned, was to go along with whatever craziness he was spouting and hope he didn’t change directions midthought just to trip me up.

I held out my hands, palms down like I was bowing, only I wasn’t about to get on my knees in a place like this. No telling
what
was on the ground in a storage cellar, even a storage cellar that attracted men as fancy as this one.

“On my life,” I said. “I
swear
I only found that one. But it seems to me like it’s the sort of thing you only find once, if you don’t mind my speculating.”

“Indeed,” my interrogator said thoughtfully, turning my prize this way and that, the way a squirrel might fiddle with a nut until he found the best place for sinking his teeth in. “So there is some humility in that head of yours, after all. Still, perhaps I ought to have phrased my question better.”

He raised his head. I hadn’t looked into his eyes before, but just as I did it seemed to me that something passed over the surface of them, flickering and pale as a ghost. I’d have jumped backward if Hatty hadn’t been standing beside me, that knife stashed away but not forgotten. I wasn’t giving him any excuses to use it. Still, there was no denying those eyes. Every kid in Xi’An knew how to pick out a Ke-Han magician. They bargained with the spirits to get their powers, and they ended up with ghosts in their eyes. I was glad the old woman hadn’t been taken along with me now, since she probably would’ve dropped
dead of shock right on the spot. Even I felt a little weird about it. I’d thought all the magicians had been killed in the dome.

“By your word, this piece is the only one of such rarity that you’ve discovered, is that correct?” He went on without waiting for an answer, just another man who liked to hear himself speak. “I will ask you, then, whether or not the reason you have
kept
this piece instead of selling it off is that you feel it will be of a greater profit in your hands.”

I wanted to ask why he thought he was the one who could be asking questions in the first place, some magician with goddamned ghosts in his eyes, but I was still playing stupid and that meant not drawing any attention to myself. It was probably just some trick to intimidate me, mixing it up so it wasn’t
just
his height and his creepy, sudden movements. He’d thought this out. Either that or he’d been at it a long time, and either way it didn’t bear much thinking about.

It was what it was. He was fucked up.

I didn’t want to let anyone in on my little secret, but I didn’t want to die down here in some forsaken storage cellar either, with no one to write home to the people waiting for me.

That was why they’d taken me in the first place, I figured. No one to come looking for me if things turned bad quick.

“I don’t know what it does,” I said, just so we were all clear on that up front. “I’m no genius like yourself or anything. I just picked it up because I thought it looked interesting. And that’s all it was, at first.”

“At first,” he repeated, seizing on that like an eel on some hapless fish. “Which means that your understanding of the object changed from the time of your first theorization. Oh, no; I’m not interrupting you. I wouldn’t dream of it. Please do continue.”

If Hatty hadn’t been such a slaphappy bitch to deal with himself, this was where he and I might have shared a look of camaraderie, because this guy we were
both
dealing with was clearly out of it. In a big way.

“Right,” I said, because my mother always told me it was safest to agree with a madman. “That’s what I said. Only when I picked it up, the little hands started flying all over the place. I thought it was broken for sure, but then they stopped…” It pissed me off, but right about now, I didn’t know how else to explain it.

“They aligned, didn’t they?” The stranger had started pacing again,
his back to me and my escort, hunkered down over my compass like it was the emperor’s feet and he just couldn’t wait to pay his respects. “Like the hands of a compass, only it wasn’t true north they guided you to. No; it was something far more elusive than that, wasn’t it?”

He startled me again by looking up; his gaze hit me like a strong wind, unexpected and chill.

“I…guess you could say it was like that,” I said. We were getting into information that I wasn’t all that comfortable sharing with other people, but I supposed between that and a quiet death underground, I’d take a little discomfort any day. Besides, rats survived so well because they
were
rats. They knew when to keep quiet and they knew when to squeal.

“What did you find when you followed it?” the madman asked, bringing his ghost eyes up close to my face this time. He smelled a little strange, sweet and bitter at the same time, the way madness might have smelled if it could’ve taken a physical form. Or maybe it was just whatever he’d eaten at lunch. Either way, the combination was making my stomach turn.

“Other pieces,” I said, wrinkling my nose and hoping it wouldn’t show in the dark. “Nothing like that, like I said before, but little things. Small prizes. That thing’s like a ready-made treasure detector, if there’s treasure to be found.”

“Ah,” said the madman. He was breathing on me, and I wanted to ask if he’d ever had a mother who’d taught him about manners and personal space and all those little niceties men seemed to plumb forget about when they were outside the capital. I held my tongue, but it was tough going. “It led you right to them, didn’t it? Like a helpful little bloodhound.”

“Never had a dog,” I said, “so I wouldn’t know about that. But as for the rest of it…yeah, you could say that. I don’t know anything about how it works, though, so if you’re looking for more answers, I’m all out.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. It’s incredibly precise.” The madman brushed me off with a gesture of his hand, retreating once again to fiddle with my compass. I took a grateful breath of stale cellar air while I could. Meanwhile, he was muttering to himself—things that I couldn’t quite catch and might not’ve understood if I had been able to, but his
fingers never stopped moving, roving over the metal’s surface and shaping the sharp point of the one unbroken hand like a blind man who thought he could memorize the thing.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked at last. “Do you know what you’ve brought us?
You
, of all people—a scavenger bird making your nest upon the corpse of his imperial reign? You’re no better than a filthy animal, no matter how many fine fabrics you swathe yourself in…and yet here you are, with the greatest treasure I could ever hope to see in my lifetime.”

“It’s no good for finding gold,” I said, to take the edge off how offended I was, which was:
plenty
. It took a lot of nerve for someone conducting meetings in a storage cellar to call someone
else
a filthy animal. At least I didn’t spend my time in a hole under the ground—and on top of all that,
he
was the one who didn’t have any common courtesy about him. “It doesn’t find jewels either, just hunks of dragon, and then you’ve got your work cut out for you trying to convince anyone that’s really what you’ve got and not a heap of twisted old scrap metal.”

The madman clutched at his head like I’d hit him somewhere soft and vulnerable.

“Your stupidity pains me,” he said. “Do I look like the sort of man who wishes to profit from selling spare parts to grasping fools?”

I could have told him
exactly
what sort of man he looked like, but I wasn’t playing that kind of stupid.

I was nice instead, if a liar, and said, “No.”

His fingers twitched as he held up the compass. Its hands were whirling in uncontrollable circles around its ash-clogged face, unable to find even a moment’s rest. If he kept this up, he was probably going to break it—unless he knew exactly what he was doing, which scared me even more. There were some people in this world who were too smart for their own good, and this guy was one of them.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said, eyes locked onto the compass like he couldn’t drag them away. “Doubtless its countless nuances will be too much for a mind like yours to grasp, but I find myself compelled nonetheless, and it doesn’t do to ignore one’s compulsions—no, not at all. The story begins this way: Once there was a cellar mouse, the lowest form of creation with a spine. His mother was favored by the emperor, and even though the mouse was illegitimate, good for nothing, and would doubtless have benefited more from being smothered at
birth, the emperor favored him too. They were even happy for a time, the mouse, his mother, and the emperor. But as everyone knows, happiness is a fleeting sensation, and those who aspire to owning it are met only with despair.” He paused with his fingers on the face of the watch, though he didn’t look up at me. “The rodent’s mother died, and with her some part of the emperor himself. No longer could he bear to look at his child, who so resembled the woman he’d lost. Thus the mouse lost both his parents in swift succession.” The hands on the compass face started spinning again, more rapidly than before. “One might
think
that to be the most crushing blow a man could suffer, but that was before the end of the war. Even though he’d been cast aside by the father he loved, the mouse felt his allegiance burning in him stronger than ever. The loss of the war was a mortal wound to the emperor, but the mouse vowed to restore his kingdom all the same.”

I was starting to get a bad feeling about this guy, and not for the first time. Behind me, I could feel Hatty tense up like a dried squid and I knew that whatever he was thinking, it was along the same lines as me. Which said a lot, because weren’t they supposed to be on the same side?

When you couldn’t trust your own allies, what was the world coming to?

I was getting a little too theoretical for my own liking. I was pretty sure this story wasn’t something he’d just made up out of the blue, either, and people who talked about themselves like they’d read a tale in a book were more than a little bat-shit crazed. I needed to get out of here, back to a world with dangers I could understand, like getting robbed in the night or losing a friend to disease. They weren’t small by any means, but at least they made sense. They were predictable. This guy wasn’t.

“What was Volstov’s great advantage in the war?” the magician asked, drawing something out from behind his back while my heart hammered in my chest.

It took me a minute to realize I’d seen this thing before, even though recognizing it threw me for a loop at first. I’d been the one to find it—and, after that, I’d been the one to sell it, for a pretty fucking price, at that. So I knew before he got to his grand finish what it was he was planning on showing us. The closer to the compass he brought the piece—at first glance it was a hunk of twisted metal, the surface dull and burned on one side and fiercely polished on the other, exactly the
way I’d found it—the wilder the motions of the hands became until, at last, they scissored to a stop. All four of them pointed to the piece of metal, curved and sharpened at one end like a lotus leaf.

I was pretty tempted to say something to the effect of
Yeah, I’ve seen that, and before you ever did too
, but I managed to restrain myself. I deserved a fucking medal.