Dragon Soul (2010)

by Jaida Jones

  Through the gates was more fucking sand, and the sound of about a hundred different people shouting in a language I didn’t understand. Merchants were holding up handfuls of cheap-looking wares like if they talked loud enough about it, it’d interest someone, and they had to talk louder than the guy in the stall next to them in order to snag that day’s sucker. There were people milling up and down the alleys between tables—women in veils and serious-looking men—but no one seemed to notice that they were all in danger of going fucking deaf at any minute. Maybe growing up in a place like this meant they had thicker ears or something. I didn’t know, and Thom probably did, but I wasn’t about to ask him for the useless answer to some question that had nothing to do with my life and would only fill my brain with clutter.

  Aside from all the shouting people, there were the ramshackle stands set up with all sorts of colorful silks blowing in the breeze, like someone’d taken Our Lady of a Thousand Fans and shook it upside down—keeping hold of the bitches’ legs, but letting the dresses fall loose—and big crates of weird-looking fruits just sitting out in the open. That all looked pretty stupid to a born Mollyrat, like these people were just begging to be robbed. Too bad I was a lot bigger than I used to be and not cut out for that kinda shit anymore.

  Little fingers, every Mollyrat remembered, were sticky. Big fingers’d get cut off.

  Of course, with all the hustle and bustle, people still had some time to stop and stare at us. Dark eyes everywhere focused on us, probably trying to decide if we could understand enough of what they were saying to buy what they were selling. I gave a few of them warning looks so they wouldn’t try anything. None of them dared to give me any warning looks back.

  I scanned a few of the stalls, caught each time by glints of metal—but it was all jewelry or belt buckles or other useless shit, none of it what I was looking for, and I nearly spat on the man next to me. Would’ve served him right. He was getting too damn close.

  “Oh,” Thom said, like he’d seen something I hadn’t. He tugged at my sleeve like a kid, and for some reason, instead of shrugging him off, I looked up at where he was pointing.

  There were buildings made of white stone off in the distance, built by someone who’d clearly had a vision for that kind of thing, all thick columns and pointed turrets. They looked like bleached bones sticking out of the desert, like some giant back in the day had died here, picked clean by the desert wind. And people—just being people—had thought it was good for building. I’d never seen anything like it before. You could’ve dropped th’Esar’s palace right into one of them and still managed to fit the Basquiat on top.

  “Shit,” I said, whistling. “You read about that in your book?”

  “Yes,” Thom murmured. He had a look on his face like he’d just seen his first dragon. Except I’d been there when he’d seen his first dragon, and he sure as hell hadn’t looked anything like that.

  “Well,” I said, “plenty of time to look while we find your friend the professor, right? I’d ask, but I’m pretty sure you said something about wanting to do all the blabbing since that’s what you’re supposed to be good at.”

  “What?” Thom said, still staring off into the distance. Right when I was about to wave my hand in front of his face—and maybe smack him one, for good measure—he snapped to. “Oh. Geoffrey! You’re right; I’m sorry. Yes, I’ll…Well I suppose I’ll just have to…Hm.”

  He tore his eyes away from the big white building, somehow, and started rummaging away in his bag like a squirrel looking for an acorn. What he came up with was his travel journal. I should’ve guessed it wouldn’t be anything useful.

  “You looking to get yourself sold to some desert traders?” I growled. “Don’t think I’ll help you out when it happens. I’ll lie and tell ’em you’re a cinch at heavy lifting and not as annoying as you really are, either.”

  Thom shot me a look, like somehow I was the fucking unreasonable one here. “It’s been a while since I’ve spoken the language. I want to be able to write things down in case I run into a difficult patch,” he explained.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just don’t let ’em sucker you into buying anything. I don’t like the look of all of ’em.”

  Thom was lost to the world, though, mouthing out something he was reading in his travel journal, his face red from the heat and maybe embarrassment. “Let’s see,” he said. “It’s just that—well, that can’t be right, the pronunciation is all off—”

  “Let me help you out,” I said, not exactly feeling like a saint but ready to get out of this place before I went crazy from the stench of incense and bought myself a copper tiara. I breathed in deep, making sure to take as much air as I could into my lungs, like they were a blacksmith’s bellows. There’d never been a chance for me to bust out my Adamo impression anywhere other than the Fans. Still, I thought it’d be pretty damn impressive. I couldn’t wait to see these merchants piss themselves like little boys.

  “Rook, what are you—” Thom started, and I had to cut him off before he broke my damn concentration.

  “Geoffrey Bless?” I hollered, loud enough to get past all the shouting going on around me; maybe loud enough for Adamo to hear it back where he was filing his nails in the ’Versity. “Geoffrey Fucking Bless?”

  Everything stopped—the talking, the yelling, the exchanging of money, the jangling of trinkets. It started from right where we were and spread out like a little domino line, and everyone who’d been trying to pretend like they weren’t gawkers finally owned up to their curiosity and stared at us.

  “That’ll probably do it,” I said.

  Thom was white around the lips. “You could have warned me you were doing that,” he said. “I thought you were—”

  “Thomas?” someone said beside us, in the sweet, ladylike tones of a ’Versity boy. “Is that you?”

  “Geoffrey!” Thom said.

  I looked away to avoid the reunion, whatever backslapping and hugging and reminiscing it involved. Thomas was the stupidest name I’d ever heard, and already I hated this asshole, who had as high an opinion of himself as anyone who did this kind of thing with their lives. I didn’t buy into it. He was just a kid who never grew up; everyone here probably hated his guts more than I did.

  “And this must be Rook,” Geoffrey said.

  I grunted. “My name’s Nellie,” I said, which was what I felt like at the moment.

  “Ah,” Thom said quickly. “We’ve been traveling for some time, and—”

  “Of course! How awful of me,” Geoffrey Fucking Bless said, “not inviting you in. I’m just back from a Khevir dig, you see, which means I’ve forgotten my manners completely. Won’t you follow me?”

  I brought myself up close to him, scowling down into his weaselley little face. It was sunburnt, but also freckled, so I could see right through his whole charade as easily as if he were a whore pretending this was his first time with a man. “Don’t interrupt people,” I said. “It’s rude.”

  “Rook,” Thom said. “This is my friend, Geoffrey.”

  I couldn’t help it, but put on my best shit-eating grin—the one that always made other people shit themselves for some reason, though I’m sure I had no fucking idea why. “So pleased to finally make your acquaintance, Geoffrey,” I said. “The pleasure is all mine. Sincerely.”

  “Don’t worry,” Geoffrey said, ignoring me, though he did take my hand and shake it briefly. “The desert does this to people. I was in the worst mood for years when I first came out here. It’s all the sun, you know.”

  He started us past a vendor, who shoved a meat skewer into my face so fast I barely had time to duck—and give his stall a good, accidental kick while I did so—and then led us off the main street and onto a narrow one, where a few scrawny kids wearing almost nothing at all were crouched, playing with a couple of stones. That, at least, was a familiar sight if ever I saw one.

  One of them looked up at me as I stared down at them; I couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy, that’s h
ow runty they were. Still, their eyes went wide when they saw me, and a grave hush fell over them and their friends, stones completely forgotten. I made a face and they winced but didn’t run.

  Good, I thought. They’d do okay.

  “My house is, understandably, past all the regular hubbub,” Geoffrey said, walking carelessly on. Thom was eating up every word he said like it was a foreign delicacy, and I supposed their friendship would last for as long as Geoffrey Fucking Bless had stupid shit to say, which might be forever, or until Thom ate him out of house and home, which might take half a day. Depended on how generous our benefactor was, and whether he’d already been shopping. “One wouldn’t be able to sleep, since the market begins early and ends late,” Geoffrey rambled on. “You’d wonder how they get all their wares, but this is a major trade route—just not inland, of course, since that would have put them at such a disadvantage during the war, considering their border with Xi’An.” Thom was itching to write all this down; I could practically see his fingers twitching. And none of this mattered at all, either—geography lessons and all that ’Versity rot. We were here about something that mattered, and all this bastard could talk about was when the market opened in Kara-whatever. Khum, a little voice that sounded an awful lot like Thom’s whispered in my head. It means desert.

  “And here we are!” Geoffrey said finally. “I know it’s not much—isn’t the architecture fascinating here? Such simplicity of style, and yet indoors…” He swung open a door in a narrow little building with depressing windows, then stepped back to let us look inside.

  I’d be the first to admit, it did look like something out of a picture book. It sure as hell didn’t look like the kind of thing any student should’ve been able to afford. Not that I had any idea what kinda luxury students lived in one way or another; but judging by the holes in my brother’s socks, ’Versity living didn’t exactly strike me as cushy. As far as I knew, it wasn’t like there were people in the higher-ups paying you to learn, but someone was sure as shit paying Geoffrey Bless to do whatever it was he was doing. There was a whole litter of useless-looking pillows scattered about, done up in every color of the rainbow. It was exactly the kind of ridiculous shit they had in a high-class whorehouse like Our Lady, stupid baubles scattered everywhere to distract you from where the paint on the walls might be peeling a little, or where the floorboards were cracking, or draped over the stains they didn’t want you to notice or think too hard about. There were filmy curtains hanging all over the place too—those at least I could get behind, since they kept the stinging flies out, which’d been eating Thom up at night like he was a desert pastry—and low, backless couches that I was sure looked better than they felt on your ass.

  Fucking students. They were real fond of a thing “in theory,” and never once thought about whether or not it’d be comfortable to sit on at the end of the day.

  Bless’s place was quieter’n the marketplace had been, though, and he wasn’t burning any of that foul-smelling incense, so at least there was that.

  “Oh, my,” Thom said, fingering the straps on his pack like he didn’t quite have the words all of a sudden. I’d’ve figured him for eating up a place like this like it was a desert pastry, but instead he just looked like he didn’t know quite what to make of it, which was fine by me. Even if it was kinda fucking eerie that we were on the same page there.

  “Not exactly the style one becomes accustomed to in Thremedon,” said Geoffrey Fucking Bless, proud as piss of himself for having no taste to speak of.

  “Something wrong with Thremedon?” I asked. I was beginning to wish we hadn’t run into this guy after all, ’cause he was starting to rival the stinging flies on a scale of things that annoyed the shit out of me.

  “Of course not,” Thom said shortly, eyes still flitting around the room in confusion. His gaze landed on a statue—a round, ugly little thing with a face like a monkey—and he all but sprang forward, picking it up in his hands. “This is—well, I’m certainly no expert, but if I’m not mistaken, this is from the Lut Period. However did you afford—Geoffrey, how can you afford all this?”

  Leave it to a Mollyrat to ask questions about money. You never learned to tiptoe around what you didn’t have, and I sure as hell wasn’t surprised, but I could tell that Thom was, a little.

  Geoffrey Bless scratched his fucking curly mop, and laughed like he was uncomfortable. Good. I was starting to get real ticked off about how he was pretending that I wasn’t here. I might not’ve been ’Versity educated like some, but I sure as hell knew when someone was making like he didn’t see me, and not because he was scared but because he thought he was too high up to notice all the people down below him.

  Him and Raphael would’ve gotten along like houses on fire.

  “Well, that’s an interesting story, really,” Bless began. “Oh! But I won’t get into it just yet; let me get you some water, and please do sit down. Unless you’d prefer pomegranate juice? But then, so few people enjoy the real thing—it’s not sweet enough for their unrefined palates…At any rate, take a seat and make yourselves at home; I’ll get something to cool your throats.” He said all this in a whirl, heading toward the kitchen and gesturing toward the furniture and all the while blabbering like a lunatic. I was half expecting him to drop in a dead faint at any minute.

  No such luck.

  “We’ll have water, thank you,” Thom said carefully, after a cursory glance in my direction.

  I shrugged at him. Not my friend we were dealing with, now was it?

  Geoffrey Bless bowed—fucking bowed—and disappeared into the kitchen. I was really gunning for sainthood. They’d be accepting me into the Brothers of Regina any day now and blessing me with holy water to match the goodness of my sweet, pure heart.

  “Water. Guess the juice tastes like shit, huh?” I muttered, looking for a couch that wasn’t about to collapse the moment I sat down on it.

  “Just sit,” Thom retorted, though for a minute there he’d looked like he’d been about to crack up. He replaced the statue carefully, then pushed aside a curtain so he could sit down. At least he had the sense to seem fucking uncomfortable while he did it, but that might’ve been because the couches were so low to the floor you had to crouch down way past comfort to actually sit on them.

  “Didn’t tell me your friend was a high-class whore,” I said, picking up one of the pillows and tossing it aside.

  Thom looked startled, then hissed like an angry goose. “For goodness’ sake. He’s in the next room. He’ll hear you.”

  “Don’t think my Thremedon opinions’ll matter too much to him one way or another,” I pointed out. “Just don’t forget the reason we’re here.”

  “I’m hardly liable to do that,” Thom huffed, crossing his arms. He was sweating, rubbing his sleeve over his forehead and looking about ready to take a nap any minute. Great. That made me feel real optimistic about our prospects in the desert.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Geoffrey Bless called out, stepping back in the room carrying a whole trayful of goodies. I didn’t feel like telling him that wouldn’t even begin to sate my brother, the fucking bottomless ravine. That could be something he found out on his own, friend to friend, with no interference from me.

  “Grapes!” Thom exclaimed, looking suddenly like he could manage to go on after all.

  “Indeed,” said Geoffrey Bless. “And goat cheese. I think you’ll find the combination simply divine.”

  “Is that the water?” I asked, reaching over to take one of the glasses before he could tell me it was actually from a nearby bastion-damned mountain spring and that it was just peachy fucking heaven and it went best with prunes. I drank the whole thing in one go, like a camel storing up during the dry months. At least that was good.

  Geoffrey Fucking Bless didn’t even blink. Whatever. He wanted to pretend like he didn’t see me, that was fine. Just meant he was gonna get a real nasty shock sooner or later.

  “Thank you,” Thom said, looking like a chipmun
k with his cheeks full of grapes and cheese and bastion only knew what else. Guess you couldn’t breed some things out, even with good education and a stubborn-ass will.

  “You’re quite welcome,” said Geoffrey Fucking Bless, like he’d been doing nothing but playing perfect host out in the desert and just waiting for someone to come by and compliment him on it. He sat on one of those impossible fucking couches without tripping over his own feet—well, he’d had all the time in the world to practice—and set the tray to one side.

  “Listen,” I said, patience stretched about as thin as it was gonna go, grapes or no grapes. It was pretty fucking evident—to me, if no one else—that this asshole wanted to talk to Thom and not to me, but my brother’d gone and crammed his windpipe with delectables so it was up to me to pick up the fucking slack. “We’re real grateful for the fruit platter and all, but we’re here on business.”

  “Ah, of course!” said Geoffrey Bless, taking a drink of something red and sticky in a tall glass. I didn’t know what pomegranate juice was, but I hoped it still tasted like shit even to his refined palate. He turned toward Thom. “Where are my manners? I suppose I owe you something of an explanation.”

  “Mmph,” said Thom, helpful as fucking always. He’d moved over to where the tray’d been set down, grapes in one hand and water in the other, eyeing the cheese like a naughty cat.

  “You do,” I translated, not like it was my place or nothing, but I wanted things to be moving on as quickly as possible and not like a ’Versity-paced lecture.

  “Well,” began Geoffrey Bless, scratching his enormous fucking head, “I suppose when I last spoke with you, Thomas, it was when I’d just begun to grasp the difficulty of the task I’d set myself to. Not to mention the relatively small stipend one receives from the ’Versity when researching abroad. As much as I hate to admit it, I was beginning to reach the end of my rope very early into my studies here.”

  I was pretty sure that a son-of-a like Geoffrey Bless had no fucking idea what the end of the rope looked like. I was just as sure that I’d be willing to show him, after he’d gone and helped us all polite-like.