Dragon Soul

by Danielle Bennett

“Well, as everyone with an interest in the subject knows,” he conceded, “the Esar of Volstov has kept these magicians locked away from the outside world. But as with everything of value—a king’s tomb or a pirate’s legacy—well, hidden treasures are inevitably dug up. Now that the war’s over, people have more time to pay attention to these things, see what I’m saying? People are starting to make a trade in a whole new industry called information, and it’s a hell of a way to earn a living if you’re clever enough to keep your head while doing it. A fact I almost forgot a moment ago; luckily you were there to remind me of it. Now—and don’t go losing that temper of yours—but it just so happens I know a little about you, yourself. Not a lot—not more than your average person would’ve learned about one of Volstov’s airmen—but enough to venture a guess as to which dragonmaker you’d be especially interested in finding.”

  I sucked in a breath, crouching low to the ground and wrapping my fingers around one of the ropes securing the tent to the ground. Rook, of course, would show no similar effects of having been moved by what Fan was saying. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and crossed his arms as though he were bored, even though I knew he was just as excited about this as I was. It was the best lead we’d had since we’d started out.

  It was almost too fortuitous, I thought, but anticipation got the better of me.

  “Oh yeah?” Rook asked. I saw him flick something away, probably a fingernail he’d just picked loose. But he never did allow someone else, much less a total stranger, to have the upper hand.

  Fan nodded. “It’s a funny story, though I doubt you’ll be laughing about it, hey? Anyway, it goes that the Esar—at first, mind—had the magician exiled because of her creation’s…shall we say fiery temperament. He was upset, see, having poured all this time and energy, not to mention money, into a dragon that wouldn’t take a rider. It’s said she took the hand clean off one man who tried to touch her, and the Esar’d had enough after that.” Rook snorted; it sounded like a laugh. No wonder the dragon in question had taken a liking to Rook; their “quirks” were all too similar. “In any case, being the sort of man he is who doesn’t like feeling a fool’s been made of him, he sent that poor magician off to live somewhere real out of the way. It helped, too, once he realized the knowledge these poor geniuses had was dangerous to the crown, and the Esar got the idea to start hiding these magicians all over the place, just to protect his own interests. Once old Havemercy started being a hero instead of an embarrassment, the Esar had no real pretext for having sent her magician away in the first place, so his only real excuse was to pretend like he’d meant to have them in hiding all along. But you can bet if there’s ever another war Volstov has to fight, he’ll be bringing them out of the woodwork right and left, recalling them from their places of retirement. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? But that’s the simple case.”

  I could tell, even though Rook had his back to me, that he was having a rough time of it holding on to his temper. Fan couldn’t have known that speaking so candidly of the other member in the only real relationship of Rook’s life thus far was a one-way ticket to ending up as fodder for the corpse-ticklers down in Molly. The only reason he was still talking was because he was proving useful. That much was as plain as if Rook had stated it outright.

  “So Have’s…” Rook began, then growled, covering up something that sounded remarkably like choking, and started again. “You’re gonna tell me you know where this poor son-of-a was exiled to or not?”

  “As it just so happens,” Fan replied, lighting up, “I do have that information in my possession. Normally it’d be a very valuable thing—I doubt you’d get its worth if you shook down everyone in this camp and pooled your earnings all together—but as a personal favor, seeing as how I was so rude to you and seeing as how you’re fingering that pigsticker of yours, I think I can let it pass just this once.”

  “That’s real charitable of you,” Rook said. “Glad to see you’ve come to your fucking senses. So spit. It. Out.”

  Fan cleared his throat and posed like an actor on the stage. Maybe he was the sort of man who got an illicit thrill from cheating death every chance he had. It certainly didn’t thrill me. Just watching him court disaster made an icy shiver run down my spine.

  “I am very pleased to tell you, firstly,” Fan said, “that the direction you’re headed in right now, assuming you take this road in the direction of Karakhum, just so happens to be the right one. Funny how that works, isn’t it? It’s almost like birds who know which way to fly south for the winter even if they were born up north. I’ve heard rumors—yeah, rumors, and I know you’re not inclined to believe them, but I’ve had them from more than one trustworthy source—that your filly’s illustrious creator lives just east of the Khevir dunes. Last I heard, leastways. Can’t make any guarantees, but that’s the information I’ve got, and I didn’t have to come here and offer it to you, either. Free of charge.”

  Fan smoothed his shirt in a gesture I recognized as slightly nervous, as though he’d realized now that he’d shared what he had to offer and was no longer of much use. It was dangerous territory to be in. He’d have to hope that Rook was mollified by the offering, or trust in his skills as a very fast runner.

  “So the bastard’s stuck off in the desert, huh?” Rook mused.

  I was not overly familiar with the geography of the desert myself, but the Khevir dunes did lie east of where my friend Geoffrey was living. I could ask him for a more detailed map than the one I was currently working with once we arrived, if I could still convince Rook it was important to stop there and not charge down into the desert this very night.

  It was technically impossible to make it before morning—in fact, it would have taken three days for any normal man to traverse, walking solidly without stopping to eat, sleep, or even rest his legs—but then, Rook was capable of conjuring a great number of miracles.

  “I have one more question,” Rook said.

  “I hope I have one more answer,” Fan replied.

  Rook fingered something at his side—and, from this angle, I could tell that was the pommel of his knife, as crude and awful an instrument as I’d ever seen, and impossibly useful as well. “Are you selling that claw?” he asked at length.

  “Are you looking to buy?” Fan asked, a little too jauntily.

  There was a terrible tension in the air. I held my breath.

  “I know your face,” Rook said. He drew each word out with painful, deliberate slowness, in a dark tone even I’d never heard him use before. “I know your name, even if it is a lie. And if you sell that to someone who isn’t worth the ground they shit on, I’ll find you. Doesn’t matter when, does it? Doesn’t even fucking matter how. Could be a few months, could be a few years, could be when you’re old and fat and enjoying the spoils of war you stole when the people who won that war weren’t looking. But when I’m done with you, there won’t be any pieces left for bastards like you to sell. You got that?”

  “Explicitly,” Fan said.

  I let out my breath, slowly, unsteadily. Fan cast a glance in my direction—had he heard me?—then did the bravest thing I’d ever seen in my life: He turned his back on Rook and disappeared into the night.

  “You can come outta there now that the stew’s cold,” Rook said. “Fuck me, I should’ve fucking sliced him.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” I said.

  “Don’t fucking know why I didn’t.” Rook looked at me, then the stew I was holding, with a face that said he’d lost his appetite. “Right in front of Compassus too,” he said, which I took to mean the scale.

  I didn’t blame him for losing his appetite. I wasn’t hungry myself, either, though I thought I could still manage a few bites, despite all that.

  “If he was lying,” I began, trying to be helpful, “then I always have a few more contacts, channels to exploit—”

  “Start writing,” Rook said, and strode off, leaving me alone in the tentative firelight.

  CHAPTER
FOUR

  MADOKA

  I was being followed. Whoever was doing it wasn’t being all that clever about it, either, like it wasn’t his specialty.

  Well, fine. Eventually he’d mess up big enough to make things come to a head, but I was gonna let him embarrass himself before I did anything. Besides which, he hadn’t tried to kill me yet, and I’d given him plenty of opportunities.

  This wasn’t exactly my specialty, either.

  I’d taken the south route out of the capital, with a paper that gave me permission to cross any border I came to. It might’ve been imperial permission, but I didn’t know how to read, and frankly, I didn’t even want to know who was sponsoring this. Once I got far enough south, I’d come to desert territory. And in the desert, there wasn’t much that could be done about checkpoints or walls. Oases were few and far between, supplies didn’t come through easy, and people wandered into the middle of a sandstorm and were never seen again. Sure, there were ways around that, but they were far from the territory the Ke-Han had sprung out of in the first place—like people made of sand, the legends said. It was a landscape that’d been our home before my great-grandmother’d been a twinkle in anybody’s eye, but our illustrious heritage of conquering by horse and sword had long since made it clear that we preferred sitting in pretty castles and counting our money than braving the wind and the sand, the hot desert days and cold desert nights. I agreed with that way of thinking. I was Ke-Han, through and through.

  But seeing as how it was gonna be only me and the desert soon enough, it was becoming more and more clear that whoever was following me wasn’t doing it to kill me.

  There were two choices. One: He was somebody sent to keep tabs on me by the people who’d sent me, which was the likeliest case. Or two: He was somebody acting on good information, out to make a lot of money and crazy enough to risk his life for it. I didn’t like the second possibility; it was too unpredictable. I could fight and hold my own, that wasn’t the problem.

  But eventually I was gonna have to sleep.

  Man, but this situation was fucked. I was fucked, and I knew it, but that preservation instinct I had—the one that outweighed my more natural instinct for laziness—had kept me going this far.

  If I could make it—if, somehow, I could pull all this crazy shit off—then I’d be rich, and the effort now would ensure me never having to lift a finger again. It was a weird bargain to strike with fate, but fate’d dropped it in my lap and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  Still, there was the whole problem of sleeping. At first I was spending my nights in small villages, with enough people around that I could pretend that company meant safety, even when it didn’t. I slept then, but as the landscape started thinning and company got smaller and farther between, I started to get a little paranoid, like there was a god or some deity of vengeance breathing right down my neck.

  I wouldn’t have let it bother me so much if that’d been my only problem. I was tough for a lady, as the charmers in my old village had been fond of pointing out, and I could take a few annoyances. Hey, under normal circumstances, I probably would’ve been flattered that someone thought I was interesting enough to keep an eye on. Problem was, there wasn’t anything even close to normal about my circumstances these days, and whatever that creep in the cellar had done to my hand was starting to tick me off. I’d found a pair of gloves in among all the other stuff I’d lifted from the capital—stuff the madman’d let me keep. The gloves helped in some ways; I didn’t have to look at the metal compass, hands twitching as it sat in the corner of my palm like I was some broken clock just waiting for repairs, except when I wanted to. But there was nothing that could stop me from feeling how weird it was: an alien addition to a body I’d been perfectly comfortable with all my life.

  Every night, when I wasn’t working out a plan to deal with whoever was tailing me, I thought up all kinds of angry tirades I’d throw at the madman who’d done this to me, once I was finally out of his service. What was wrong with just holding a compass, for starters, and hadn’t he ever heard of asking permission before he went and mucked around with other people’s bodies? I had a lot of good one-liners, but I always forgot the best of them by morning.

  The problem with men like that was, they got so used to mucking around in other people’s lives that using their bodies seemed like the next logical step.

  Bunch of shit-eaters.

  But, much as I hated to admit it, the madman wasn’t my problem right now. I’d been thinking long and careful on how to deal with my pursuer, which was new to me. Planning ahead could take all the spontaneity out of life if you weren’t careful, but I figured I could start making exceptions in light of the fact that everyone around me seemed to be making plans and including me in them without my permission.

  I had to do something. I couldn’t take it anymore.

  Finally, I figured the best thing for it was to stop early for the night, just outside one of the little tent villages set up by travelers on their way into the desert. Close enough for security’s sake, but maybe just vulnerable enough that I could lure him out of hiding. I’d never catch him if I was surrounded by people; but if he turned out to be some kind of uncommonly skilled fighter, then I wanted to have an escape plan at the ready. Or at least some witnesses, if he was planning on murdering me. I figured at least he’d get in trouble—not that I’d be around to enjoy the retribution, what with being dead.

  Maybe, if I was lucky and it was the compass and not me this tracker was after, they’d only take my hand.

  So, yeah, I wasn’t too keen on using myself as bait. It pissed me off that I was even in this cracked situation to begin with, tracking down scrap metal like a trained hound. I didn’t even want to know what a man like Crazy-Eyes could do with parts of ruined fire-breathers, especially when it’d been clear to me that his mind was coming unglued like a badly made box. Just thinking about him made my skin prickle, and I rubbed my arms to chase the gooseflesh away. The palm of my compass-hand scraped dully against my arm and I shook it off in annoyance.

  There was a scuttling sound from behind me, like an animal losing its balance on the rocks, and I whirled around.

  Of course there was no one there. Just me and the dim evening light—someone’s idea of a joke that they hadn’t quite seen fit to let me in on.

  Enough of waiting. I’d have the upper hand—barely—if I just called the sucker out. Which, worn down by impatience, annoyance, and being so damn tired, I was brave enough and crazy enough to do right there.

  “Can’t you find something better to do?” I called. I didn’t even care if anyone from the nearby camp heard me. Maybe it was better if they did. Nothing to look at here, folks, I thought, just an altered freak having a temper tantrum in the badlands. If I’d done it earlier, called the bastard out in woodsier climes, I might’ve heard a telltale rustle in the bushes or the snap of a too-dry twig as he tried to disappear. Out here there wasn’t much in the way of vegetation, just sandy red dirt and scrabbly rocks that meant if a man wanted to get away unnoticed, all he had to do was hold still.

  “Hey!” I shouted, picking up one of the stones lying around my feet and throwing it as hard as I could into the darkness. It wouldn’t hit its mark, but I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t messing around. “I’m talking to you, my unwanted shadow! Didn’t your mother ever tell you to speak when spoken to?”

  Silence met my cries, and for a minute I did feel as foolish as a child pitching a fit. Then I gritted my teeth and started picking up handfuls of stones, hurling them down the narrow path between rock formations—the same one I’d followed to get here. The scrabbling sound that I’d heard before started again, and I paused to get a handle on where it was coming from before I threw my next-to-last stone. It was a good one, heavy and round, and when it landed it made a thump instead of a crack.

  “Fuck!” someone howled, in a voice that mingled disbelief with pain.

  “Are you planning on coming out now?” I sh
outed, adrenaline making me a little cockier than I had any right to be. I sure as shit hoped no strangers were watching. This was top-notch crazy behavior. “I’ve got good aim, and in case you haven’t noticed, there’s an unlimited supply of rocks around these parts. Anyway, you’re pretty fucking bad at following someone without them knowing, so you might as well give up now.”

  I waited, turning the last stone over in my hand.

  Finally I heard footfalls on the rocky overpass above my head, hesitant at first, then growing more sure of themselves. Someone dropped to the ground next to where I’d set up camp and stood, clutching his forehead. It was hard to make him out in the shadows, but then he moved his hand and everything became clear.

  “Well blow me down,” I said, hand clenching around the compass stuck into one palm, the other still holding tight to my last good throwing rock.

  And here he was: my friend the soldier with the ugly scar. I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty, since it wasn’t like his face needed any more markings on it. For now, though, anger was still outweighing my guilt. Maybe this was how he’d gotten scratched up in the first place, skulking around in the shadows and creeping people out.

  “So what,” I said, “you’re following me now? I should’ve known it was you. Soldiers can’t sneak around worth a damn.” I didn’t put the rock down and I still had my good knife hidden at the small of my back, in case things went south fast. Not that I thought I was on a level with an army man—’cause as cocky as I was, I wasn’t stupid—but maybe I’d stunned him a little when I cast the first stone and could use his headache to my advantage. “It’s ’cause you all think you have a right to be anywhere you’re going, so you’ve never had to practice it. You’re getting a little purple up there, by the way.”

  “Shocking,” he said, reaching up with tentative fingers to poke at his forehead. He was going to have one hell of a goose’s egg in a couple hours.