“Are you stealing?” Thom demanded.
“Can’t steal something that didn’t belong to a man in the first place,” I snarled. Everyone was shrinking away from me now, but I didn’t care what they were thinking. “Someone’s selling our girls. Piece by fucking piece.”
MALAHIDE
It was twelve o’clock, of the midnight variety, when the Esar called me in to speak with him. I had not been at the same party as the others—not rubbing shoulders with those of high standing and high society, that is—but rather waiting for when I would become necessary.
I bowed my head before anything else. Protocol had to be observed, even in these more peaceful times. My liege was troubled; I could see it in his eyes, in the deep lines around his mouth, obscured for the most part by his reddish beard but recognizable to those who knew him best. I had a good sense about these things. When one could not speak, one listened very carefully to what everyone else had to say.
“Malahide,” the Esar said, after the formalities were over, “I have a favor I must ask of you.” His tone was weighty and somber, and the seriousness of the situation delighted me. There was something of great importance for which I was needed. Such occurrences were as rare as disasters were commonplace these days. I knew how it disturbed him, yet I could not help it when my nostrils flared.
It was always difficult—even for a ruler—to speak with someone who could not hold up her end of the conversation. It put most men and women at a distinct disadvantage, and those who were not accustomed to the discomfort tended to ramble.
But the Esar was not someone who minced or wasted words. His time was precious, and I could already see how moved he was by tonight’s business.
I sat down at the opposite end of the table from him. Despite how careful he was to hide his uneasiness around someone as queer as I, I could nonetheless sense it, a hunting dog smelling a fox’s fear.
“There is a box before you,” the Esar said. “Open it.”
There was indeed. It was a simple, wooden affair, with a catch. Half expecting to need a key, I found it already unlocked, and caught the top as it swung open. Within the box was a twisted piece of metal.
I looked up at the Esar. How fascinating. I could tell from the scent of the metal that it had been through many fires. If I had been a superstitious sort, I would have been afraid to touch it, for fear it was still hot.
“You may touch it,” the Esar said.
I shook my head. I would never have marred its pristine condition with my own fragrance. During my work, I always wore gloves, but I hadn’t been working when I’d arrived. There had only been the hint of duty, a promise of my coming necessity on the dry palace air, and so I’d waited to be called, hands bare and fingertips pressed together.
I had to press them tightly together just now to keep from touching the prize. It was very tempting. To be told what it was would almost spoil the surprise, but I knew that very question was what the Esar awaited from me. A lesser agent might tire of the little games we played with one another, but I never had.
I looked up, features arranged into polite confusion—the expression he expected from me.
The Esar glanced from right to left, as though expecting to see listeners at either corner. He was a sensible man for the most part, but living so long with no viable heir had made him more paranoid than the average gentleman.
“Do you have any idea what this is?” he asked me.
I had my guesses, though they were nothing more than that. Small, vague theories had formed in the few seconds since I’d opened the box. I was trained to think quickly, but I also knew not to volunteer guesses when my liege was leading the show. I would not offer anything but certainty to the Esar—something he knew as well as I did. I shook my head.
“It’s a relic from another time,” he said, voice worn around the edges in a way I’d rarely heard from him. Under normal circumstances, he possessed too much self-control.
My instinctive deduction was correct, then: It must be an artifact from the war.
I tilted the box toward me, letting the metal fragment within catch the dim, private light. No one on this side of the mountains had lost so much as the Esar in that war—not when it came to political advantage and technological development. There was only one sort of metal that the Esar would keep, twisted and ruined as this was, for he was not a sentimental man. All at once I felt a tight clutching in my belly, of excitement and anticipation. To what end was I gazing at a piece of one of Volstov’s destroyed dragons?
Only the man before me would be able to answer that, and he’d been watching my face carefully to gauge my reaction—a task I knew was particularly difficult. I made it that way on purpose though my deception was not intended specifically for my liege.
Once, during wartime, I’d worked with a partner—a man to speak for me so that all this interplay might be avoided—but the war had claimed him just as surely as it had claimed the Esar’s dragons. And for both of us, a replacement seemed impossible.
“Malahide,” the Esar said, and I took my eyes away from the scrap of metal. “We have reason to believe that key elements of those dragons we lost during the war did not ‘disappear’ as claimed.”
I nodded, and bade him to please continue with a gesture of my hand.
“Parts, it seems, are popping up everywhere you look. Some are counterfeit, and some—like this piece—are not. There’s a black market for everything these days, and our royal guess is that they were simply waiting for the terms of the provisional treaty to get laid down before they began to—what is the phrase? Ah yes.” His tone was grim. “Hawk their wares.”
I had never heard the Esar sound so angry. I knew somehow that he never would have spoken so in an audience chamber, with servants and officials present, but my meetings with the Esar were always unofficial and therefore we were always alone. If I hadn’t been such a queer thing, I’m sure such clandestine trysts would have made the Esarina suspect us—though as one palace guard had put it, You can’t be much for kissing with no tongue in that head.
I smoothed my skirts, straightening them over my knees while I thought about how to put my question. My now-deceased partner had made things travel at a much quicker pace. All the more regrettable that he’d died, I thought.
It was evident why the Esar had called me here. His intent was always straightforward: I was to track down those responsible for selling the charred remains of his dragons to the public. Not for sentimentality, as I already knew he was not a sentimental man, but for safety and security. Pride, too, was a factor, but the Esar was not what moralists would call a bad man, nor one foolishly governed by his own feelings.
If Volstov’s enemies happened to get their hands on what had once been our prize, the consequences would not bear thinking about.
The provisions of wartime that had allowed the Esar to commission the dragons in the first place presumably no longer existed. And while the members of the bastion argued with the members of the Basquiat, our neighboring enemies all would scramble to re-create what had once been our most efficient weapons. How unfortunate that would be. It was now in my hands, this ability to avoid more unnecessary conflict; the tragedy of needless, violent deaths; the escalation of tensions between border-sharing countries. Even above my duty to the Esar, I was a patriot down to my bones. This task suited me well.
I had a special skill in tracking. I did not tire with the same frequency as men sent to do the same tasks, and I had given up my speech for skills immeasurably more useful than simply talking.
“We want you to find them,” the Esar went on. “If you are helped by smaller, trifling pieces such as this, then you are to collect those as well, but know this: It is not for simple scraps that we send you. After the destruction of our dragons, certain key parts remain missing. Chief among these was a piece entirely unique: the soul of a dragon.”
If I’d had a tongue, I’d have found difficulty in holding it here, suggesting that instead my lord might see
k a Brother of Regina to accomplish this task, if taking hold of a soul was involved. If I had no confirmation of my own, how would I know a dragon’s when I saw one?
He seemed to know what I was thinking, as he often did. It was part of why we worked so well together.
“We are looking for one in particular. In light of this, we have ordered blueprints up from the bastion, that you might study them and know what it is you’re looking for. Return to us what is rightfully ours. We cannot make ourselves any clearer.”
I’d done far more difficult things in the past. Indeed, despite the gravity of his words, and the current imperiousness of his affectations, the Esar had almost made this task too easy for me. He had given me something to go on—a piece of one of the dragons themselves.
The stench of the burned, warped metal filled my nose, but there were countless other scents at play as well: the cold of the Cobalt Mountain Range, their deep blue rocks laced with dolerite, and the countless excited hands passing over its twisted features. The land of the Ke-Han Empire…and places yet farther south, spiced with the flavors of the desert.
That was where I would begin my search.
There was only one problem, one I had nearly forgotten in the giddy rush of smells emanating from my task. With no partner, it would be next to impossible to gather information of the sort I needed. Tracking the culprits depended strongly on word of mouth, and I could not trust enough in luck to hope I would always be at the right place at the right time to overhear all the information vital to my mission.
I would need a voice, but I had no partner to give me one.
Besides that, I had a difficult nature and wouldn’t work easily with just anyone.
I passed my hand over my throat, bare of the jewelry that was so in fashion these days, since the scent of metals and stones interfered with my thinking.
The Esar, not the most observant man I’d ever known but nonetheless one of the shrewdest, seemed to understand at once.
“We have not yet located a replacement for your partner. As time is short, we had the magicians at the Basquiat cook a little something up for you that should give you the assistance you require without the troubles of partnership.”
He reached for something hidden in shadows at his end of the table. I’d noted it upon entering, then allowed it to slide from my mind as the conversation proceeded and the Esar made no reference to it. Every man should be allowed to keep his own secrets, and men such as the Esar demanded that respect. I was only a silent observer; I wooed not through flattering speech but through the conscientiousness of my efforts—a silent flattery that required more observation than most could muster.
The Esar gestured, peremptorily, that I was to stand. It was the closest we had ever been, and I made note of the fact that his precious Antoinette was not currently with him. Had she been, she would have brought the box to me rather than allowing me to get so close.
He was uncomfortable with me beside him. I was not the sort of woman who put him at ease, despite all my attempts to reassure him. Still, he needed me, and that went a long way toward making him accept my presence.
It was humorous, I thought, that a man such as he would smell of country dishes beneath his cologne. Even though he wore the most expensive silk—imported, I could tell at once, from Seon—he nonetheless smelled of stew, the main ingredients of which were tomatoes and eggplants, which at once felt homely and relaxed. Whatever he had dined on, it was not the same dishes that were currently in fashion and which the members of the bastion—and those pretentious socialites in the Basquiat—currently swooned over.
I bowed my head to hide my smile.
“I’d never have imagined I’d be giving such an item to you,” the Esar said, with the same ruefulness as an innkeeper offering his wife a token of the many years of their marriage. The item in question was a second box—one with equally little ornament, but its contents were far more complicated. I knelt beside my liege and observed him as he took from the box a sweet little necklace.
The Esar knew I did not wear jewelry, but only the faint scent of deep water came forth from this trinket.
He fastened it around my neck and it settled, all at once, in the hollow where my two collarbones met. I could feel it sinking against the skin—an uncomfortable sensation, not unlike being choked.
“Speak, Malahide,” the Esar said.
That was impossible, or so I had always assumed. A brief blossom of fear awoke inside of me—I had bartered my voice for my powers, and this would be akin to cheating whatever gods had made such bargains possible in the first place. I had been a quiet child, weedy and recalcitrant, even for an inhabitant of the orphanage in which I’d been brought up. When my own seedling of Talent was discovered, after I’d taken great pains to make sure it blossomed in the first place, I was brought in front of the Esar. He’d been searching in his own quiet ways for children of a certain caliber who might be trained to work for him outside the influence of the Basquiat. With no friends to speak of, and little to occupy my time, I’d jumped at the chance to have something to apply myself toward. To have a purpose in life was a wealth that could never be measured. It was one for which I had been willing to make any sacrifice in order to hold on to. It was something that other people found difficult to understand, but for me the decision had always been easy.
I swallowed and was reminded of the heavy bead digging into my flesh. A strange warmth overcame my throat.
“My liege,” I said, speaking for the first time in ten years.
The sound of my own voice did not come out with rusty hesitance, nor did it startle me. In point of fact, it seemed so distant and so foreign from my own conception of myself that I was not bothered by it at all, though I would have to learn to use my mouth to pretend I was forming the words. The voice itself echoed up through the depths of my throat, like some distant puppeteer casting his voice to his puppet, and it seemed fitting that the Esar would be behind this sleight of hand. His magicians were capable of truly commendable work.
The Esar observed me with his head tilted and his eyes bright—a handsome man, though far from my type. It was a stroke of luck that I was far from his.
“A pretty voice,” he said. “It hardly suits you.”
“I will have to make it suit me,” I said, and was dismissed.
MADOKA
On the border between Seon and Xi’An territory, nestled between marshland and the desert, was the village where I was born. It was shit and everyone knew it, but we had some kind of deep-down Ke-Han pride that always kept us thinking of it. Even those of us who were lucky enough to get away from it and find ourselves in what city folk would have called a real city couldn’t wash it off our skin.
After all I’d seen, though, I didn’t much care for real cities one bit.
I’d been in the capital when the dragons came, and I’d seen every weakness that a city had to offer. Buildings that fell because the ones beside them had already fallen; the earth shaking the towers above it, turning years of hard labor into fine dust; men and women trampling their neighbors to protect themselves; walls, designed to protect, keeping their charges from escaping to safety. And, most deadly of all, fires that spread faster than a man could run, from one district to the next, leaving char and ash in their wake, bones and wood alike burned into blackness.
It wasn’t a pretty sight.
You could sum it up with poetry or you could put it out of your mind, and the longer I dwelled on it, the less time I slept. So I tried not to think about where I’d been or what I’d seen. If I gave it enough time, everything would be rebuilt—like nothing had ever happened at all, and I hadn’t been burning my hands picking debris from debris days after the fires had finally died down.
I was asleep, dreaming of sunlight glinting off sand, when the old woman woke me. We’d left the capital at around the same time heading south, and ended up traveling together when I’d caught her going through my bags for food.
“Madoka,” she said.
“They’re rounding up the scavengers.”
“Shit,” I said, still half-asleep, and the old woman smacked me in back of my head hard enough to take care of that.
“Watch that mouth,” she told me, tugging at my arm and all but pulling me out of the pile of rags and discarded garments I’d turned into a bed. It wasn’t as comfortable as it could have been, but it sure as shit beat sleeping on the ground.
The old lady was as shriveled up as a dried leaf, but not nearly so fragile, and when she had a mind toward doing something it was best just to go along with it.
I shook her off and started scooping clothes off the ground, pulling them on one by one—layers of cotton and silks discarded for the scorch marks on them. The old woman said it made me look like a madwoman or a minstrel—neither of them being a desirable identity—but I liked to travel with everything I’d need all at once in case I ran into any difficulties—difficulties like this one. I tied my sash at my waist, cinching everything together, then hoisted my pack up over my shoulders.
One day, when people had money to buy things again, all this would be worth something.
“Any point in trying to get a head start?” I asked, already knowing what the answer’d be. There was no point in trying to run from the emperor’s soldiers since they’d take your own family just as gladly as they’d take you.
I’d left most of my family behind a long time ago, but that didn’t mean I was looking to get an unpleasant reminder. Important men didn’t like it when someone made them feel unimportant, and they’d do all they could to remind you just how important they were.
“Even you aren’t as foolish as all that,” the old woman said, fixing my hair like I was the hopeless case she’d always called me. What good would fixing my hair do when I looked like this? I was a big girl—taller than all my brothers and broader than some of them too. I wasn’t, as the old woman was fond of saying, the marrying kind, but I guess I was all right with that. If I’d been born some flittering little moon princess, I’d hardly have managed half so well on my own in the Ke-Han countryside. “Go on. Maybe one of those handsome soldiers’ll take a liking to you and you can move out of this hole in the ground.”
Dragon Soul Page 3