Soul of Fire (24 page)

His concern was such that though he’d have been hard-put to say whom, since he had trusted no divinity since discovering the colossal joke played on himself, the thoughts rose like a prayer, overwhelming even the dragon’s mind and the beast’s brutish hunger.

Through the dragon’s eyes, Peter saw the city tilting and spinning, seemingly with each pass of the beast’s flight. And with each pass, he looked closer and closer—dipping into a courtyard where a knot of people assembled, only to see it was the temple of Kali and that even at this late an hour the priests were sacrificing a goat to their goddess. By the light of torches, the goat had been tied so that its neck rested on the crook of a forked post.

One fast stroke of a sword, and the goat’s head rolled, and blood spurted upon the priests and the statue of Kali—which, it seemed to Peter, appeared to smile. Scenting blood, the dragon rushed. Before Peter could stop it, it had snapped up the still-warm goat in its massive jaws. Lest the creature decide to return for the priests, Peter urged it upward, even as the dragon-mind was full of the sensations of appeasing its hunger, or at least making it controllable—of the taste of fresh meat, of the texture of crunching bone. Up, up and up. He must find Sofie.

He registered, in some surprise and as though from very far away, that the priests of Kali had not protested. In fact, they had made no sound at all at his unexpected theft.

And then at the edge of town, cowering against the crumbling wall of an uncharacteristically dilapidated temple in this pious town, he glimpsed something. Something white, something black, something human. He should not have recognized the form.

But something in that person clinging to the ruins of the temple called to him. Closer he drove the beast, flying in circles to approach—great wings spread to the sky and hurting with the force of his precipitate descent. He must see. He must know.

Closer, and he was now sure that the figure was a female. A female wearing a billowing white dress, with jet-black curls loose down her back. She was climbing the crumbling pile of rocks, tripping and restarting, and tripping again.

How did she get here? How did she get so far, walking in her sleep? Why would she come here to a crumbling ruin at the edge of town, where there are almost no people?

Peter, locked inside the beast’s body, flinched when the girl tripped and lost her footing again, then swooped closer to save her.

Which was when he saw that she was awake now—whatever her state might have been in getting to this location. She was awake, her face a mask of terror, her eyes wide, her mouth open and panting. Looking over her shoulder now and then, she led him to look—for the first time—away from her, at those pursuing her.

They were tigers, with powerful heads and large, dangerous paws. Well-fed tigers that did not fear the weapons of man. Were-tigers, Peter would bet on it.

Then he looked on the other side of the rocks that Sofie was climbing blindly, hoping to find safety beyond them. But on the other side, he saw, other tigers waited—a very large one holding center stage. One he would bet was the king of tigers himself. Out of his kingdom and looking for . . . Sofie?

He tried to flame, but no flame came. Perhaps the concentrated magic of the tigers prevented him from flaming. He didn’t know. There were places he’d gone in the past where the dragon couldn’t flame. Places protected by spells of power, somewhat like the shields used in battle. Was the tiger kingdom protected by such?

TIGERS; MAIDEN AND DRAGON; A STRANGE KNIGHT

Sofie had woken—or at least come to herself—by the
crumbling temple, surrounded by tigers. She couldn’t say at which point her consciousness returned, at which point she was aware of being she—herself, Sofie Warington—here, amid unknown buildings, and near some horrible ruin at the edge of town. She assumed it was still Benares, the same town she’d fallen asleep in, because she could not possibly have transversed the distance to the next town by herself and on foot. Though in London, sometimes her nocturnal excursions had taken her farther afield than she’d ever been on her pleasure walks.

To the total strangeness of her surroundings, there was added—by degrees—the knowledge that she was alone. Where was St. Maur? Had he not noticed her leaving?

The situation was so clearly a nightmare that she would have closed her eyes and wished herself back in bed. But no more had she started doing so than a soft growl made her look up, to see tigers closing in.

There were three of them, and though she couldn’t know for sure they were were-tigers, they were moving like no natural beast ever did. They were closing in on her by steps—small steps, at that, and languidly taken. It was, she thought, as though they were savoring her terror at their approach.

She backed up, step by step, till her heel hit the ruins behind her. And then she started climbing, madly, blindly. Oh, she knew tigers could climb. She knew tigers could leap. But what else could she do? How else could she escape them?

She climbed, and climbed—her feet balancing precariously now on this stone, now on the next. They hurt. She thought she must have skinned them on some stone, but it didn’t matter. She had to keep going. She had to keep pressing on. Up and up and up, while the softly rumbling tigers closed in behind her.

Only the cold on her cheeks made her aware she was crying. Perhaps she had been foolish to run away. Perhaps she had been foolish to escape her parents’ protection. Had they not nurtured her all her life? But they wanted to give her in marriage to a were-tiger. And yet, perhaps she had exaggerated the danger? Perhaps they would have listened to her fears?

Too late. She was going to die here, amid strangers, her body torn apart by savage weres. She thought of St. Maur—the dragon that St. Maur became—devouring the buffalo, and something like a scream escaped her.

A sudden sound, like a sheet being shaken vigorously, or like a sail creaking under the power of the wind, called her attention. She looked up, despite herself, in time to see the dragon plunge out of the sky, his claws extended. For just a moment, her body wanted to fling itself away to run back down the rocks, safe from the oncoming beast.

What stopped her, more than anything, was the sense that this was a dream. It had to be a dream. Because this one-eyed dragon was, unmistakably, St. Maur. And she’d never been threatened by St. Maur, nor did she have any cause to run from him.

In that moment of confusion, the claws surrounded her. She felt them, like gigantic calloused fingers around her middle, and closed her eyes. It was just a dream. She would wake. She would wake and find that there was nothing around her middle—it would happen at the exact moment the claws squeezed the life out of her.

Only the claws never squeezed. They held her with the gentleness of a young boy holding a wounded sparrow. She felt herself lifted, her legs flailing midair, and when she opened her eyes, she saw that she was being flown—carefully flown—over the city, toward the house where they’d lodged.

Her thoughts were such that they didn’t bear exploring. There was the sudden realization that she’d been rescued by a dragon—that a dragon had indeed fulfilled the role of the white knight so prevalent in all the novels she’d read in England. She clasped both hands around what in the man would have been a wrist. And started, as she realized that on that wrist there was a slight, protruding dark spot. She remembered St. Maur’s wrist, as he reached for something that displayed the skin normally hidden by his cuffs. He had a beauty mark in the same spot. The dragon was the man and the man was the dragon, she knew that, but to be brought to understand it this immediately was almost shocking.

She looked up as the dragon looked down. The eye had an expression of thinking and worry. Then he flew lower, and retraced his path to the boarding house, where he set her down on the alley.

Sofie averted her eyes, as he shifted to human. She could hear gasps and a quickly stifled groan, but she also could tell he was trying to keep down the noise associated with his shift. She wanted to run. Not from him, of course, but from this alley, where the tigers must have seen them landing—from this entire city, where the tigers now knew they were.

She disciplined herself to say nothing and to wait, clenching her fists to allay her impatience. And she waited, as she normally would wait, for someone to change clothes with back turned.

Only then St. Maur’s voice said, softly, “Wait here,” and he walked past her, affording her a glimpse of his naked body. For some reason, it didn’t seem very shocking. But to see him mid-shift—that, for some reason, had come to seem a violation of his privacy, as it hadn’t that first time. Perhaps because she knew now how much he resented the change.

It seemed an eternity until he returned, an eternity measured in pounding heartbeats and in blood rushing in her ears. She thought he must be dressing, while the deeper, more scared part of her thought he must have left. Left her behind and saved himself from the pursuit of the tigers. Or would the tigers not be interested in her if she weren’t with him?

She thought back on the raj on her father’s balcony, the peculiar shape of his face, his yellow eyes that had no white at all, and she shook her head. It was her they wanted. She was sure of it. And now St. Maur had left her here all alone, to face them as she could. Or couldn’t.

“Miss Warington.” St. Maur’s voice woke her from this particular nightmare. He was still naked, holding his clothes.

She almost yelled at him, asking him why he’d taken so long to return. But before she could speak, he said, “I came out immediately, so you’ll pardon me if I dress here.”

He’d returned at once. That meant her perceptions had exaggerated time. Annoyed at herself, at her fear, and at—though she hated to own it—being more touched by his rescuing her than she thought she should be, she turned away. She could hear the rustles of his clothing, but it was quite a while before he spoke, and when he did it was in a slow and considering tone, “I don’t suppose you know how you got there? To that perilous a position?”

“I . . . woke near that ruin, with the tigers.”

“Yes,” he said. He said it as though it meant far more than the single, monosyllabic word should mean. “But perhaps . . . It’s hard to conceive, you see.”

“What is hard to conceive?” she asked, turning to face him, and seeing that he was fully dressed.

“That the tigers were following you.” He frowned. “They should have been able to catch up with you in no time at all. I don’t have figures, but I have seen tigers leap and I’m quite aware of the speed at which a human can run. They could have overrun you, and . . . devoured you or captured you, or whatever they mean to do with you.”

She pulled back the hair that had fallen in front of her face. Really, the worst of this was that she had neither brush nor comb nor the leisure to tidy herself, as she did at home or at school, nightly before the mirror. Her hair had grown to be a tangled mass and quite unruly. While normally it didn’t matter, some part of her did not wish St. Maur to see her wild and unkempt. “I know,” she said. “And I confess I don’t understand what they were doing either, nor how they keep tracking us down.”

St. Maur nodded. “A witch-sniffer would be able to find me.” And, as she was sure her features reflected her confusion at this, he added, “So I can imagine that having seen you in Calcutta, escaping on dragon-back, they realized they could use a witch-sniffer to find you. But here, in Benares, it shouldn’t apply. You see, though I quite lack the witch-sniffing sense myself, I can imagine how it works. Here, all the sniffing should be too confused. There is the gods’ power, for one, and the worship of their devotees, all of which are magic of sorts. And then, at least if rumor has it true, there are any number of weres in the city proper—monkeys and, as we’ve seen, tigers.