The Dragons of Babel (11 page)

Sergeant Lucasta shrugged. “Your decision. Now we come to the second part of our little conversation. You noticed that I sent my girls away. That's because they like you. They don't have my objectivity. The small abomination here is not the only one with secrets, I think.” All the while she spoke, she was filling her pipe with tobacco and tamping it down. “There's a darkness in you that the rookies can't see. Tell me how you came to be traveling by yourself, without family or companions.”

“My village cast me out.”

The sergeant stuck a pipe into the corner of her mouth, lit it, and sucked on it meditatively. “You were a collaborator.”

“That oversimplifies the matter, and makes it out to be something that was in my power to say yea or nay to. But, yes, I was.”

“Go on.”

“A… a dragon crawled into our village and declared himself king. It was wounded. Its electrical system was all shot to hell, and it could barely make itself heard. It needed a lieutenant, a mediator between itself and the village. To… give orders. It chose me.”

“You did bad things, I suppose. You didn't mean to, at first, but one thing led to another. People disobeyed you, so they had to be punished.”

“They hated me! They blamed me for their own weakness!”

“Oh?”

“They wouldn't obey! I had no choice. If they'd obeyed, they wouldn't have been punished!”

“Go on.”

“Yes, okay, I did things! But if I hadn't, the dragon would have found out. I would've been punished. They would've been punished even worse than they were. I was just trying to protect them.” Will was crying now.

For a long moment the sergeant was silent. Then she sighed and said, “Killed anyone?”

“One. He was my best friend.”

“Well, that's war for you. You're not as bad a sort as you think you are, I suspect. In any case, you're neither a spy nor an agent provocateur, and that's all that really concerns me. So I can leave you behind with a clean conscience.”

“You can what?”

“You're far enough from the epicenter now that you should be safe. And we'll never rendezvous with our platoon unless we ditch the luck-eater.” She unholstered her gun and pointed it at the sleeping child. “Shall we try the monster's luck one last time? Or should I shoot it up in the air?”

“In the air,” Will said tightly. “Please.”

She lifted the gun and fired. The report shattered the night's silence, but did not awaken Esme.

“Lucky again,” Sergeant Lucasta said.

S
ummoned by the gunshot, Campaspe and Antiope trotted back to the spinney's edge. They received the news that the civilians were to be left behind without any visible emotion. But when Will bade them farewell, Campaspe bent as if to give him a swift peck on the cheek, and then stuck her tongue down his throat and gave his stones a squeeze. Antiope dumped his gear at his feet and playfully swatted him on his aching bum.

The sergeant, too, leaned down as if to kiss him. Will stiffened involuntarily. But instead, she said, “Listen to an old campaigner: Trouble will follow you so long as the child is in your care.” She straightened. “Keep the lodestar to your left shoulder, and then at dawn walk toward the
sun. That will take you east—there are refugee camps just across the Great River. Best not dawdle.”

“Thank you.”

“Let's go, ladies—this war isn't going to fucking well fight itself!”

The cavaliers cantered off without so much as a backward glance.

W
ill gently shook Esme awake, shouldered his pack, and took her hand. They walked to the dawn and beyond, ever eastward. When Esme tired, he picked her up and carried her. The sun was still low in the sky when he could carry her no longer. Ranging away from the road, then, he found a junk car in a thicket of sumac and made beds for them on the front and back seats.

For a time, he slept.

In the village, before driving him out, the lady-elders had made Will a bundle of sandwiches and placed a cantrip on his knapsack to alert and alarm him should anybody meddle with it in his sleep.

So now Will found himself sitting bolt upright, fully awake and staring at his knapsack. Saligos de Gralloch had opened the driver's side front door and had both hands buried to the hilt in it. He grinned like a hound. “Ye're up, young master. That's good. There don't seem to be any gold in here.”

“What happened to your stickfellas?”

“We had a falling out. I had to kill them. Lucky I chanced on you—otherwise I'd be all by myself.”

“Not luck,” Will said. “You broke a pin or button in two when you first found the child and hid half among her clothes, against the chance of her slipping away from you. Then, today, you followed the other half here.”

“That's very sharp for one who's just woke up,” Saligos said appreciatively. “I note, however, that you didn't say ‘my daughter,' but ‘the child.' So you're not her father after
all. I know my peasants. There's got to be some gold on you somewhere, even if it's no more than a single coin to lead you back someday to the crock you buried out behind your croft.”

“Nope. Sorry.”

“That's too bad.” Casually, Saligos removed his belt. “You interrupted something yesterday. So, before I make sure as you haven't hid the stuff somewhere about your person, I'm going to tie your wrists to the steering wheel. You can watch while I do
her”
—he nodded toward Esme, still asleep in the back seat—“good and hard.”

Will felt the dragon-darkness rising up in him, and this time, rather than fighting it down, he embraced it, letting it fill his brain, letting its negative radiance shine from his eyes like black flame.

The lubin's lips curled back in a snarl. Then he gasped as Will lunged forward and seized him.

Will squeezed the creature's forearms. Bones cracked and splintered under his fingers. “Do you like it now?” he asked. “Do you like it now that it's happening to you?”

Saligos de Gralloch squirmed helplessly in his implacable grip. The lubin's lips were moving, though Will could not hear him through the rush of blood pounding in his ears. Doubtless he was pleading for mercy. Doubtless he whimpered. Doubtless he whined. That was what he
would
do. Will knew the type only too well.

First the dragon-lust turned the world red, as if he were peering out through a scrim of pure rage, and then it turned his vision black. When he could see again, Saligos de Gralloch's mangled body lay steaming and lifeless on the ground beside the car. Will's fingers ached horribly, and his hands were tarred with blood up to his wrists. The lubin stared blindly upward, teeth exposed in a final, hideous grin. Something that might be his heart lay on the ground beside his ruptured chest.

“Papa?” Esme, awakened surely by the sound of what he
had done, cranked down the back seat window, and poked out her head. “Are you all right?”

Sick with revulsion, Will turned away and shook his head heavily from side to side. “You should leave,” he said. “Flee me—run!”

“Why?”

“There is something… very bad in me.”

“That's okay.”

Will stared down at his hands. Murderer's hands. His head was heavy and his heart was pounding so hard his chest ached. He was surprised he could still stand. “You don't understand. The dragon left a bit of himself in me. I can't get rid of it!”

“I don't mind.” Esme got out of the car, careful not to step on the corpse. “Bad things don't bother me. That's why I sold myself to the Year Eater.”

He turned back and stared long and hard at the child. She looked so innocent: golden-haired, large-headed, toothpick-legged, skin as brown as a berry. “You don't have any memory,” he said. “How do you know about the Year Eater?”

“The horse-lady thinks I have no memory. That's wrong. I only forget people and things that happen. I remember what's important. You taught me to tickle trout. I remember that. Somebody else taught me how to undo a sleep spell.” She turned her back on what remained of Saligos. “But by this afternoon, I'll have forgotten him and what you had to do to
him
as well.”

Then she led Will to a nearby sump to wash his hands. While he did so, she laundered his shirt, whacking it on a rock until every last trace of gore was gone from it. Wordlessly, she began to sing the tune he had been singing when first he saw her. Despite all that had happened, she was perfectly happy. She was, Will realized then, as damned and twisted a thing as he himself. Nobody could blame him were he to leave her behind.

Then again, perhaps they belonged together, so freakish were they both.

He honestly did not know what was the right thing to do.

At
noon, the land behind them turned to smoke. Not long after, an enormous blast reverberated across the land, so loud that refugees crouched in the road with their hands over their ears, and no one could hear properly for an hour afterward. All of the western shire was swallowed up in a deep and profound darkness punctuated by transient gouts of flame as farm houses and silos were engulfed in molten rock and exploded. Those who had lived within eyeshot raised their voices in an guished shrieks. In an instant, all the generations of lives beyond counting that had been written onto the land were erased from it. It was as if they all, the cherished and the forgotten alike, had ceased ever to have been.

The giants that rose up out of the smoke burned bright as the Holy City itself, hotter than the forges of the sunset. By gradual degrees they darkened and cooled, first to a magma glow, then to a gray barely distinguishable from the clouds. There were two of them, and they carried cudgels. They still shone a ruddy red when they began to wheel and turn upon each other. They were great shadowy bulks, lost in the sky, when their cudgels were hauled as far back and high as they would go.

The giants' motions were slow beyond the eye's ability to discern. But if Will looked away for a few minutes and then back, their positions would be subtly altered. Over the long course of the morning, their cudgels swung toward each other. At noon, they connected. For as long as it would take to count to thirty, the silence was absolute. Then the blast rolled across the land. Will saw it coming, like a great wind making the trees bow down before it. He grabbed Esme and flung them both into a ditch, and so evaded the worst of it.

They walked many miles that day, though the Great
River held itself ever distant and remote. Sometimes they rested, but only briefly. More, Will did not dare. At last, around sundown, Esme began to cry for weariness. Will stooped and, with a grunt, picked her up. His legs did not quite buckle.

“Hush,”
he sang to her,
“hush, ah, hush.”
It was the song of the scythe on a hot summer's day. “Hush.” She was just a child, after all, whatever else she might be.

Eventually, Esme fell asleep on Will's shoulder. He plodded along for a while, and then a truck driver slowed down and offered to let him sit on the tailgate along with four others, just because Esme looked particularly small and weary. The driver said he was going all the way to the camps, and that with luck they would be there by morning.

So, really, she paid for herself.

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