Soul of Fire (31 page)

She thought he was truly her cousin. It was even possible that he was telling the truth about being requested to assist. Doubtless, the king would have investigated what had happened after Lalita left the court and would do what he could to help them on their way.

“And besides,” Maidan answered, turning forward, looking like he was talking to the tops of the trees and the distant mountains, “I saw you at the temple yesterday. And I thought it was time I came out of seclusion and met my lovely cousin again.”

Lalita thought of the tiny monkey paws, everywhere, scrabbling at her clothing, and felt a hot blush suffuse her. It made her feel even more uncomfortable about having been briefly naked in the presence of this stranger. Then again, what he said clicked into an internal suspicion she had been entertaining, but refusing to admit to consciously.

Monkey-kind married as early as possible, because they had a very low fertility rate.

Of course, she was no more sure that she had any interest in spending the rest of her life—or indeed any part of it—attached to Maidan. “There,” Maidan shouted, this time with decision, pointing in the direction of a slight rise in terrain. And Lalita didn’t need field glasses to see the dragon upon the rise. Nor did she need the sharp hearing of the were to hear the hoarse scream coming from the clearing, followed by a high, outraged and shocked feminine cry.

Hanuman was steering the rug in a circle and very low—low enough, she noticed, that even if the dragon should give a cursory glance around, he would notice no more than a mere fleck of something at the top of the trees. Then he rounded again, and landed, behind the group.

“Why are you landing so far from the dragon?” Maidan asked.

“Shh,” Hanuman replied, holding his finger to his lips.

“I think,” Lalita said, whispering, “it will be better if we round on him from behind, and listen to what may be going on before we reveal ourselves.”

“Why?” Maidan asked, in his normal voice. “Are we to rescue your friend from the dragons while hiding?”

Hanuman rounded on the man, finger still on his lips. In a sort of angry whisper, his face stern, he said, “Listen, do you know what dragons can do? A single dragon could burn us all where we stand.”

“So what?” Maidan asked, insolently. “We are all weres, are we not? We’d heal very fast.”

“Not if he burns us to a cinder.” Hanuman’s whisper, impressively, managed to convey absolute fury.

“We can rescue my friend by stealth,” Lalita said, supressing a grin. “It will work. And it is my wish.” It wasn’t that she found the fight between the two men amusing. It was more that she’d just realized that if Maidan hadn’t been present, Hanuman would have been insisting on exactly the sort of rescue he was now decrying.

Instead, Hanuman—a serious, grave-faced Hanuman, looking as much as he could like an elder statesman of the monkey court—led them amid the trees, walking with the stealth that their kind was quite capable of.

Their approach would be no more than the occasional scrape of leaves touched by an inconsiderate foot, or the swish of a disturbed branch. Even on a quiet day, they made no more noise than a breeze, whispering through the trees. With the screams emanating from the rise above, there was nothing—and no one—that could have discerned the noise of their passage.

As they approached, Lalita could hear Sofie yell, “Stop, you’re hurting him.”

An unearthly hiss that modulated itself into words answered her. “Yes, Miss Warington. I am. That’s rather the idea.”

“But he’s only small and scared, and doing what he thinks is right. How can you hurt him so?”

“Because you’re worth more to me than all the tigers in the world.”

And before Sofie could respond, there came again the male scream, inhumane and hoarse and ending in a sort of gurgle.

The three monkeys rushed ahead, tripping one upon the other, to look. In the clearing just ahead of them, there was a dragon. In front of the dragon, tied hand and foot on the ground, was a young man whom Lalita assumed was the tiger they’d seen in flight with the dragon. There were fine cuts all over the boy’s body, and his blood ran freely. He had to be a were. Were he not, he’d already be dead, with all the blood he’d lost.

The dragon, leaning over the wounded boy, asked in a dreadfully intent hiss, “Are you going to tell me now? Are you going to tell me what your father wants with Miss Warington? Why is she so important that the ruler of the were-tigers is pursuing her across half the Indian continent?”

The boy on the ground rolled his head from side to side, in what might be a negative, but might also simply be a reaction to pain. And Sofie, standing to the side of both the dragon and the boy, splattered with blood, looking pale enough to faint, clasped her hands tight on her skirt while tears ran down her cheeks.

Lalita started toward her, but stopped short as the boy on the ground spoke.

“I will tell you,” he said, in a voice so faint it could barely be heard. “I will tell you and be damned for all the good it will do you. My father wants the girl and the ruby.”

“The ruby?” the dragon asked, with every indication of surprise in his hiss.

The wounded boy managed something that might have been a cackle. “You don’t know about the ruby? You stuck yourself in the middle of our affairs and you don’t know about the ruby? Is China so ill-informed, then?”

But the dragon reared back his head as if slapped, and let out in a hiss that seemed to contain the last of his strength. “The ruby!
Soul of Fire
?”

“Ah, you know about it, then. Yes, my father planned to marry the girl to get the ruby as her dowry payment. You see, she’s the last of her line, and her parents are anxious to marry her well . . . And there’s more. Her father used blood magics to make the ruby invisible, but my father found out about it, and got a hold on him through those magics.”

Lalita wondered if he meant a magical hold, or if he meant that the king of tigers would denounce Sofie’s father to the British authorities. She suspected it didn’t matter. Both of those courses would result in death.

“But why did he want Miss Warington as well as the ruby?” the dragon asked.

The boy made a grimace that might have been a smile. “Why, because as it is, the ruby doesn’t work. It is inert, and will not connect with anything. But once it is purified and made to work again . . . then it will show us the way to Heart of Light, the ruby that still has all the power in the world in it. And with Heart of Light my father will bind all the magic in the world to himself, and send the British scrambling from India. And then India shall be free, and her weres shall be safe.”

The dragon’s head reared back once more and he whisper-hissed something. It seemed to Lalita to be, “And destroy the world with it.” But more loudly, he said, “Why does he need Miss Warington to purify the ruby?”

“Her blood is the last in the line that received Soul of Fire from the hand of Charlemagne himself, and she is a virgin. If she is sacrificed to the ruby, her blood will purify it. And only her blood—unless, of course, she marries and has a daughter. Then her daughter’s blood, when she’s a virgin and nubile, will be able to do the same. That means—”

The dragon’s head moved through the air, very fast. Lalita knew, as it snapped forward, that the dragon would kill its prey. But the dragon stopped. Somehow, Sofie had surged forward as fast as the dragon had moved, and was holding on to a sort of frilly, glowing ruffle at the end of the dragon’s neck. “No,” she said. “Don’t kill him. Don’t you dare!”

The dragon turned to her, and Lalita surged out of hiding immediately. She couldn’t help it. Seeing the blood-spattered creature turn on her friend that way, with that much intensity, it was clear that he meant to kill her.

But neither Sofie nor the dragon looked at her. They remained, gazes locked, staring at each other. “He meant to kill you,” the dragon hissed.

“So he did. He is a beast, raised in a kingdom of beasts, and not knowing any better. You and I are different. We have been given the benefit of true moral instruction. We know what is due our humanity.”

The dragon coughed, then writhed and twisted, like a man caught in an epileptic seizure. “Miss Warington,” he said, in what started as a hiss and ended as a human words. Human words emerging from a tall, blood-splattered Englishman standing naked before Lalita’s friend. An Englishman! Well, he’d clearly not been the Chinese dragon. But did he work with the Chinese? Lalita looked at the sky for a trace of the blue dragon, and didn’t see him. If he was still guarding them, he was cunning and hid well.

“Miss Warington, I speak better in this form, and you must—you
must
—listen to me. This man is on a quest for ultimate power, a power that will doom all of the Earth if it should be obtained. Heart of Light, the ruby that they want to use Soul of Fire to find, will bring nothing but death and destruction. I . . . I was looking for Heart of Light, myself, a bare six months ago. And I entered that most ancient temple of mankind, and saw there the avatar of which the rubies were meant to be the eyes.

“What you don’t realize—and apparently neither does our tiger friend—” the dragon spared a glance at the boy on the ground, who was now, seemingly, listening to him with full attention “—is that when Charlemagne took the ruby, he created a fracture in the fabric of the universe. Older and wiser ancestors than Charlemagne—ancestors of all mankind at the dawn of civilization—had anchored all the magic in the world to the avatar, so that people who had the capacity to use it could spin it out and use it in manageable quantities. But when the ruby was fractured and the power released, only a small part went into Charlemagne and his descendants.”

“Right,” Sofie said. “Only the power of Europe.” She had on her stubborn expression, lower lip slightly advanced, upper lip trembling. In that way, she had faced out the dictates of matrons and the laws of Lady Lodkin herself when she considered them unjust.

The man who had been a dragon shook his head. “No, not even that. Granted, all the power in the continent of Europe was ripped from their rightful owners, but what Charlemagne captured—that seemingly immense power that made him the master of Europe and capable of turning trees into soldiers and back again—was in fact only a fraction of the power of Europe. It was no more than a little bit of it. The rest of it . . . The rest of it took reality and splintered it, creating many worlds from our world, all radiating from that point. Can you understand that?”

Sofie tilted her head sideways a little, but nodded. Lalita knew that Sofie’s books spoke of the variety of magic worlds, so this should not come as a surprise.

“Well, if Heart of Light is taken, then the rest of reality will splinter with it. It will all be fractured, destroyed. There will be nothing and no one to save us after that.”

Sofie looked considering. “And beyond all that,” the dragon added, “this creature planned to kill you to achieve this goal. How can you not want me to kill him?”

“Because he is still a man,” Sofie said, thrusting her head forward and striking with the certainty that she used when discussing points for which she cared passionately. Lalita thus had heard her insist they hire a healer for Sofie’s favorite mare in Lady Lodkin’s stables, instead of putting the animal to death when she broke a leg. She had stuck it, too, even though Lady Lodkin had lamented the necessity of paying the healer’s price, and even though the mare would, of course, never be as strong as before her injury. “Because, as a man, he shouldn’t be killed just because he planned to do something he didn’t know was wrong. His king and father told him to do this. How could he think it wrong? Don’t we teach everyone to be loyal to their kind and their family?”

“But he’s not a man,” the dragon answered, furiously. “He’s a were. A half beast.”

“So are you.”

“I know.”

“He’s lying to you,” the tiger-man yelled. “He’s lying to you, miss. He admits he was hunting for Heart of Light himself. And he knew about Soul of Fire. And he has been running across India with you, has he not? Why else would he be doing it, if his plans weren’t exactly the same as ours?”

KNOWING ONESELF; OLD CRIMES AND NEW; THE BEST OF CHOICES