Soul of Fire (4 page)

She felt unnatural even thinking it, but she had—while in England—read more than fiction. She had read enough of the histories and compendiums in the academy’s moldy library to know about dark magic and what it did to people and their morals.

But Lalita looked reluctant and pale. Sofie wasn’t sure if she was afraid for her, or simply afraid of the retribution Sofie’s parents would visit on Lalita herself, once Sofie’s escape became known.

“I’m not sure—” Lalita began.

“I am,” Sofie said, firmly.

“Sofie?” Mrs. Warington’s voice sounded from down the stairs. “Sofie?”

“I have to go, Lalita.” Sofie picked up the valise and ran across the room, then went through the open doors onto the veranda. Behind her, she could hear her room door open and her mother cry, “Where is she, Lalita? Where did she go?”

She couldn’t hear Lalita’s reply, but she could hear the sound of her mother’s hand hitting the maid’s face. And then her mother’s steps toward the veranda.

Sofie had run around the corner. The house had a veranda on each of the three upper levels—and all completely encircled the house. This one was on the topmost level. From the level below, she could hear her father and the creature talk.

Mentally, she was thinking she needed a sheet or a rope or a curtain. But the open doors she passed—the doors to her parents’ rooms—showed servants moving about inside. She ran madly, hearing her mother’s steps behind her.

She must climb over the veranda railing. Perhaps she could dangle from this level onto the next one. Perhaps she could . . .

Blindly, she climbed over the railing, hands scratching at the rough stone. Holding on with one hand, the other grasping her carpetbag, she tried to feel with her foot for the railing below. But the railing was too far away and she couldn’t manage it, and her mother was running and calling, “Sofie! Oh, you unlucky girl. Don’t—”

And then her hold on the stone parapet gave.

THE DRAGON

Seeing the girl fall, Peter let go of his final shred of
self-control. Urges and impulses he’d thought well under control ran through him. The urge to change. To become a dragon. And now . . .

He’d found out long ago, and through his own experience, how frail those railings were. They looked like solid stone, but the places where pieces joined often crumbled under the joint action of the climate and shoddy workmanship.

He coughed and contorted. Without knowing quite what he was doing, with long-practiced haste, he removed his clothes, blindly, by touch, even as his shape shifted. The foot with which he kicked them under the edge of the Holwell Monument to the Black Hole disaster was already changing to something taloned and much larger than a human foot ever was.

Before he could check himself or think of what he was doing, he was flying through the dark, scented night, toward the balcony and the falling girl. He was barely aware of a woman’s shrill scream splitting the night. He was aware of excitement and babble from the native houses, but none of it mattered.

There was the air, and his wings cutting through it, lifting him higher and higher.

He couldn’t think in dragon form as he did in human form. While his reason remained, submerged within the blind irrationality of the brute, thoughts came haltingly and slow—mostly sensations and the immediate results of those sensations.

And yet at the back of it, his the human self remained, conscious and aware, if rarely in control. He felt the girl fall, the weight on his back, felt the dragon fly away with only the thought of escape in its head, even as the girl straddling it screamed and pummeled its scaly back with what felt like a small, clenched fist.

This scared the dragon and confused him. It had been too long since Peter had allowed it sway. The dragon wanted to escape, both from the closed-in society of humans and from the human on its back. It started to turn its head, the half-formed idea of flaming the creature off its back taking over its befuddled brain—and beyond that there was the distant plan of flying away to some forest and hunting in peace. It had learned that Peter wouldn’t normally allow it to eat humans, and after the energy burned in the transformation, it longed for food in the quantities the human form couldn’t take.

But Peter, at the back of the dragon’s mind, knew better. He couldn’t just fly to some wilderness with this lost child on his back. He could feel her heels kicking at him as her panic mounted, and he wasn’t sure that he could fly much farther without her jumping from his back in a fit of sheer terror.

The dragon flew, madly, to the outskirts of Calcutta, and Peter got a sharply delineated black-and-white panorama of the town, lively even at this hour—with turbans and Red Coats, and servants in white, and carriages. To Peter, at the back of the creature’s mind, slices of what the dragon felt and saw were relayed in snatches and bits.

The Hooghly—the branch of the Ganges that ships took up to Calcutta—was crammed with vessels of many nationalities, from transport ships to pleasure cruisers. Farther out were the great sandbanks built by the muddy waters, which made navigation so difficult and made the pilots of Calcutta such a close-knit guild. And stretching ten miles down the river were the warehouses and other necessities of international trade. On the opposite side of the Hooghly was Howrah—the end point of three railway systems, and headquarters to countless factories. There was the carpetport, where flying carpets—with the necessary buildings upon them—flew in from destinations around the globe.

Enough of Peter’s sense remained in the dragon’s mind that he did not wish to be seen by landing carpetships.

If Her Majesty’s Were-Hunters should come after him, things would become ugly. Yet the rumor held—and Peter hoped it was true—that there were so many weres in India at every class of society that though Gold Coats had landed in all the great cities, they dared not hunt them.

Even an outsider had heard of the fearsome elephant soldiers of Jaipur. They’d sown fear and destruction in their wake during the rebellion of 1857, and had then vanished into nothing, melting back into the locals, with many, doubtless, returning to their posts in British regiments.

In fact, it was the Gold Coats’ attempts to destroy Indian weres that had led to the current rumors of new riots, a new revolt.

No, should the Gold Coats in India become active, they would have their work cut out for them. And meanwhile, Peter would be safe. Maybe safe long enough to find Soul of Fire, though he was starting to doubt the existence of the historic ruby—and certainly his ability to find it.

He reached into the dragon’s mind and managed—desperately and through long practice—to turn the creature around, lead it back to the balcony.

Every instinct in the beast—that, somehow, was also Peter—struggled against his dominion and control, demanded to escape the confines of Calcutta.

But Peter, feeling himself in command of paws and claws and powerful wings, was trying—desperately—to control as much as he could without forcing the creature’s reversal to human.

Balancing on that precarious edge, he bent back toward Calcutta and the foreign palaces that stood out very white in the dragon’s field of vision. Tilting, banking, but not so much that he would lose the burden on his back, he tried to get close to the balcony where two men and a woman were calling out confused demands that he bring
her
back.

One of the men had a powerstick. This did not worry the dragon, who knew it took especially bespelled powersticks to hurt his kind, and a veritable barrage of such fire to kill him. It worried Peter, a little, since he knew for certain sure that about half the powersticks in India were bespelled against weres. They had to be, considering how often one’s own servant was likely to turn into a fearsome beast. At least, those were the stories of Indian expatriates who were forever talking of the dangers of native servants—and were just as determined to not give them up. After all, Sahibs could not be expected to do the menial work themselves.

But all the same, Peter—still at that edge of control, where he could move the dragon without forcing it to become human, something that would be at best disastrous, midair and with a girl on his back—thought his best bet was to return his fair charge to her place.

“No, please. Anything but that. Don’t make me go back!” the girl screamed as they approached the balcony.

The dragon thrashed to remove the unwanted burden from its back, which only caused a fresh panic of shrill screaming. Peter reached for the dragon’s mind, and conveyed without words
easy, easy, easy.

What was left of his rational capacity—seeming very remote from the senses of the body the beast occupied—struggled to reason through. The girl did not want to go back. Why did the girl not want to go back?

And like a nettle piercing through skin, suddenly came the thought that of course she did not wish to go back. After all, she had been walking around outside the railing of the balcony. What creature did that who did not mean to leave home and family behind?

He did not know why, but this much he was sure of. The demoiselle now straddling the beast’s back, warming it with a heat that Peter could feel even through the beast’s scales, was a runaway. It was not his place to wonder why. And besides, the beast, in a panic, let Peter see the gentleman on the balcony leveling a powerstick at the dragon yet again.

Peter released some of his control and he could feel the great wings struggling to beat down the air, propelling the dragon away from the balcony at all speed.

Behind the dragon, the powerstick erupted, but all Peter felt—distantly—was a warmth on the dragon’s flank. Not hit.

He knew what hits felt like. This was merely the far-reaching warmth of the power explosion. He should land, Peter thought. Land and change back. And then Peter thought of his clothes, shoved behind the Black Hole Monument. Normally he would not have cared to go back and retrieve them. Normally he’d have directed the dragon to the vicinity of the house in which he was a houseguest. But he had a female on his back, and he couldn’t be walking around, naked, with a girl. Besides that, he didn’t know who the girl was or what she meant to do with her hard-won freedom. And he could hardly show up at his hosts’ home with her.

But the monument was not far. So he directed the beast’s flight at housetop level, then lower down. Its outspread wings grazed the edges of buildings on either side, and its senses—sharper than those of the human Peter—could taste cardamon and curry, while its ears were assaulted by a multitude of musical instruments and, from one home, a female voice raised in sweet song.

Confused, almost lost, since he could not see through his human eyes or orient himself with his human sense, Peter was relieved to glimpse the scant moonlight reflecting off a vast square of black marble paving—which exactly defined the dimensions of the Black Hole, in which 146 Britishers had been locked away, and from which the next morning only 26 had emerged alive, having survived the close confinement, the lack of air and the heat of a Calcutta summer.

It was almost certain that the deaths had resulted from nothing so much as miscalculation and the natives’ fear of waking their nawab, who had retired to bed after ordering the men confined. Still, it was counted in England as one of the many reasons the Indians should not be allowed to rule themselves.

This thought was in Peter’s mind—not so much in clear words, but in a certain feeling of frustration and despair—as the dragon’s paws touched the sun-warmed black marble. The dragon tucked its wings in and Peter—madly, with all his strength—tried for control of their joint mind before the dragon could flame his burden. He felt said burden slip down his back scales and step to the side. He heard the sound of her soles on the marble—but only as through a haze.