“Accident?” Rook growled.
“A trifling matter,” Geoffrey assured him, waving a hand airily. “Some natives lost, but nothing important. We got what we’d come for—achieving one’s goals is the most fulfilling feeling in the world, don’t you agree?”
When neither of us replied—I was too astonished to speak, and I judged Rook to be too angry—he gave a little shrug.
“You’ll see how it is soon enough, I’m sure. We’ve got some fresh dates and the most incredible cheese. Do step in; there’s no use waiting outside. We can’t leave until dusk, anyway.”
“Whyssat?” Rook ground out.
“Too hot,” Geoffrey replied. “We travel by night. Come on in, fellows.”
Rook wasn’t one to make the first gesture of peace, so I did the honors, stepping past my brother and into Geoffrey’s house once more. It smelled of incense and flat bread, but suddenly I was no longer hungry for breakfast.
CHAPTER SIX
MADOKA
I was having a dream, and in it, I was free from all this madness. My hand was good again, and my life simple, so I was pretty pissed when I found myself shaken out of it.
I squinted up at Badger.
“Well?” I asked. “Better be something good.”
“Let’s hope,” Badger said. “Your hand’s making noises.”
I paused to listen, then I heard it, this faint whirring sound like the hands of a broken clock suddenly starting to move. I pulled my glove off and looked down at my palm. It’d been three days of walking around like lost souls with Badger by my side—three days of making awkward conversation and getting nowhere. Three days of sleeping in the shadow of the Cobalts without any compass to serve as my guide. Three days—two of which were storming pretty bad—and I was ready for something to start going right for us, or for that compass to start working again.
It had.
Not that I could make any sense of it; it was just the hands starting to whirl, round and round, without resting. They reminded me of myself—of us—wandering in circles with nothing to go on, and I didn’t like looking at it.
“Can you figure it out?” I asked Badger. It was a long shot.
He shook his head slowly, rubbing at the bottom left corner of the scar. “Can’t say that I can,” he replied.
“Shit,” I muttered. I suppose it’d been too much to wish that our mutual friend the madman had sent Badger down here with a manual for my new parts. “Well that’s about as helpful as—”
“Please,” said Badger. “Spare me the image.”
“Well, fine,” I said, disgruntled now that I had to watch my language on top of everything else. I was also still damp from the rain, since nothing took longer to dry than seven separate outfits all layered on top of one another. I was going to have to ditch some extra layers real soon, but I told myself to suck it up in the meantime. Most people who lived this far south were probably grateful for an hour of rain, let alone two whole days. Knowing that didn’t make me any less sour about trying to fall asleep all clammy, but I was doing my best to find the sunshine behind the clouds—or whatever that saying was.
“I believe there’s a village around here,” Badger said, adjusting his sleeves where he’d folded them above the elbow. “We could stop there to get our bearings.”
I looked at our surroundings: rock, sand, and more rocks. There were some sad, brown little bushes that looked like an old woman’s scrub brush—the kind the old lady’d used to clean me off when I got too dirty—and a clump of those aloe plants I’d raided to soothe the itching in my hand last night. Other than that, it was just me and Badger, so I didn’t see how he could possibly know there were people around here, let alone a whole village.
“You been here before, or are you just some kind of desert expert?” I asked. “Because I’ll be honest, that’d be a real useful skill to whip out all of a sudden.”
“I am not whipping anything out,” Badger informed me. “Do you see that path through the rock? It isn’t natural; there are tool marks on the stone, which means someone cut a path through the rock. Out here, there’s very little natural protection from the elements, and I’d imagine building a village into or against the cliffs would be the wisest choice.”
“So you want to go that way?” I asked, while privately wondering how in the hell he’d noticed a thing like tool marks. He was a strange one, for a soldier.
“Until your, ah, hand stops spinning,” he said, looking slightly uncomfortable about having to address it at all. I understood exactly where he was coming from. We might have been nearly polar opposites in a lot of things, but where magic was concerned, we were in complete agreement. It made us both itchy. “If nothing else, I imagine the natives here will possess a greater understanding of the area than we currently have.”
It was starting to dawn on me why poor Badger’d been sent after me in the first place. He didn’t know the first thing about my little hand problem, but what he did know a lot about was terrain, and geography, and all this other stuff being a soldier’d taught him that I didn’t know. He was life insurance.
“You mean, you think we could snag a map off of one of them?” I said, brightening just a little. I always felt better with a destination in mind. Part of what had me so bent out of shape before was all that wandering without knowing where in the seven hells I was heading. Having a plan, even a short-term one, was mighty fine by me.
“Something like that,” Badger said, with another glance at my hand.
I tugged the glove back on over it. He didn’t need to tell me that.
“Let’s go, then,” I said, kicking sand over our fire pit from last night. “I wouldn’t mind a change of scenery—no offense meant for your face, either, Badger.”
“I only hope these aren’t the desert-dwellers who believe in eating the flesh of foreign travelers who blunder into their villages,” Badger said, looking thoughtful.
All the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
“What?” I asked, good and freaked-out now. Then I caught the look on his face. I’d never seen it before on that mug of his, so I couldn’t be sure, but on any other person it would’ve been almost…amused. “Hang on a second. Was that supposed to be some kind of joke?”
“Your pardon,” said Badger, a faint smile just visible over his hand. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Some kind of traveling madness, more like,” I said, crossly. “They say it happens when you’re on the road too long. I expected better from a soldier, but evidently I shouldn’t’ve.”
“It won’t happen again,” Badger promised, shouldering my bag alongside his own. I hated it when he did that, but nothing could dissuade him—short of jumping on him like a monkey and wrestling the pack away, which, admittedly, I had yet to try. Soldiers were a whole other class when it came to dumb stubbornness, and if he wanted to make his shoulders sore, then that was fine by me. The hot desert air was making me sluggish, and I had other things to worry about.
Like how, now that I’d listened to it, I couldn’t quite stop hearing the whirring sound of my hand. It made me feel self-conscious, and like it was probably the worst idea in the world to be heading into a village with other people when my own hand was ticking like a clock, but Badger’s reasons for wanting to go had all made too much sense for me to ignore. I folded my fingers around the compass set into my palm, hoping to keep it quiet and not break it, and followed after him, kicking up a trail of dust in my wake.
When we got to the cliffs he’d mentioned, I paused, staring real hard to see if I could tell that these were tool marks and not just scratches on the rock. I couldn’t. Hell, if I hadn’t been traveling with Badger, I probably would’ve bypassed the village altogether and never’ve known it was there in the first place. I wasn’t sure if I liked that or not. I was glad I had the help, I guessed, but it made me feel dependent in a way I wasn’t used to. He squeezed through the path ahead of me, bags knocking into either side of the rocks. So long
as he didn’t bring anything down on us, I was glad to let him lead the way.
I followed after him at a distance, trying not to get hit by the showers of dust and stone the packs triggered. At one point I tripped and caught myself with my compass hand, which throbbed painfully for my efforts. It was starting to get worse. At least, it was starting to hurt more than it itched, which I didn’t like.
I hadn’t mentioned this to Badger for a couple of reasons. One, it was none of his business, and two, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Aloe’d helped for a while but the problem’d already changed. I’d just have to hope we made it back to our friend the magician before my whole hand rotted and fell off, or something equally pleasant.
“Watch your step,” Badger called back to me, dropping about a foot in height as he did so. There was a steep slope down on the other side of the cliff wall, and I hopped down, ignoring the hand he was holding out.
There were some things a woman just had to do for herself, and risking a twisted ankle was one of them.
When I straightened up, I saw that Badger had been right about the village. At least, there’d been one here at some point. Little white tents huddled together, interspersed with the bigger, more solid huts, and what looked like a large well just outside the center of town. There was a rank smell on the air, though, and I noticed something else: There were no people walking around.
“Something’s wrong,” Badger said. His face was tight and closed off, the way it had been when I’d first met him. It was his soldier face, I guessed, and I hadn’t realized it was any different from his normal face until now.
By one of the tents, something stumbled out of the shadows and fell. I was running before I knew it, pounding across the sand and toward the village like some kind of idiot.
Not my best move, but it reminded me a little too much of home, so there had to be something I could do before it was all too late for these poor bastards. That is, if it wasn’t all too late already.
The smell on the air was smoke and burning things—all the little things people built up over the years, the possessions that made them people in the first place. Sure, it was stupid to get worked up over objects, but when you didn’t have much, you had to think about life in those terms. The difference between a kid who had a doll and a kid who didn’t was a whole world.
I should know. I’d been the kid without a doll for the longest time until I stole one for myself.
By the time I got to him, the boy had already collapsed. It was hard to tell what he was at first, because his face was covered in ash, but his hair was cut in a style I recognized—the same cut every boy got when he passed the age of eight and started toward manhood. I grabbed him in my arms, not even thinking about making him worse. His arm and chest were sticky.
“Get out of there!” Badger was yelling at me, but his voice got louder while he was shouting; he was following after me. “Whoever did this could still be close by. They could even still be here. We can’t…”
And yet there he was, kneeling next to me, taking the boy out of my arms and checking his throat for a pulse. Typical firstborn behavior. Shout at someone for doing something dumb, then wade right in to take their place.
“He still alive?” I asked. I hated the sound of my own voice right then, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
“Yes,” Badger said.
There was a sharp pain coursing through my hand—like it was going to burst into flames if I didn’t do something. Now wasn’t the time to worry about my own problems, I thought, but it got to the point where it was so unbearable I had to tear my glove off or faint right there. The whole compass was pulsing hot, sending bolts of heat through my blood. And the hands were going crazy.
“I’ll take care of the boy,” Badger told me. His voice was calm—he was used to giving out orders, I guessed—but it was nice to hear someone who sounded like they were in control, not just the ragged breaths the boy was sucking in through his open mouth and the sound of my own heart pounding too loud with the pain I was in. “You—be careful.”
I stumbled to my feet. “I don’t know,” I said, trying to laugh. “I’ve gotta do what it’s telling me.”
That sounded crazy. More than anything, I wanted to help the boy Badger was holding in his arms; I wanted to put my hand on his forehead and tell him it was gonna be all right, while Badger put his army training to some real use and patched him up. But I couldn’t. I had this thing I had to listen to, a voice that was calling me. What I wanted to do and what I had to do had never been more at odds.
I clenched my teeth and started off through the wreckage of this poor, two-ways-fucked village. Smoke was still belching out of a couple of the huts, and now that I was down in the thick of it I could see the extent of the destruction: broken bits of wood, torn cloth, the well smashed on one side, a few of the houses’ roofs caved in. And there I was, picking up speed as I moved through it and past it, not even looking for survivors or people I could help—just answering to the call of the compass in my hand.
But the movements of its hands were starting to gain focus. Sure, two out of the four hands were still going crazy, but the other two were actually pointed in the same direction.
I stumbled past a broken-down tent with a pile of ash and cinder and a streak of blood smeared over it. The third hand, the second longest, snapped into the same direction. For the first time, I was headed the right way.
I was also almost at the edge of the village.
It was tucked into a flat place but still on the side of the mountain, for safety’s sake—fat lot of good that’d done any of them. I rounded past a grouping of tents and the ground almost fell away from me; I was looking out over the true desert now, from a pretty good vantage point, breathing as raggedly as that kid had been and feeling pretty crazy.
The fourth compass hand locked into place, pointing out over the sand.
There, in the distance, I saw them—nomads, maybe even desert raiders, all on horseback in a cloud of desert dust, riding away. My own village was too close to Ke-Han territory to worry about that kind of thing, but it was the stuff all my childhood nightmares were about. One day, if they got cocky enough, the nomad princes would come for us, take our supplies, and be gone by morning, leaving nothing in their wake. Just like they’d done for this village.
But on top of that, they had something I needed, and they were riding farther and farther away with every second I stood there gaping after them.
My head ached; my temples were pounding. I dropped to my knees. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t have a horse—certainly not one trained to outrace nomads in the desert—and I didn’t have an army, so I couldn’t’ve done anything even if I were able to ride out after them. I just had to sit down for a little while, that was all; give in to the pain in my head and my hand, and let everything take over.
I was tired. I hurt. And I was fainting.
“Shh,” someone said, and a cool, feminine hand touched my brow; I was so hot that it felt like ice. I saw her for a moment; she had a funny nose and didn’t look anything at all like the women I was used to. Shit, she didn’t even look Ke-Han.
Then I passed the fuck out.
ROOK
Maybe, if I’d been in a better mood, I might’ve liked the desert. There was sand everywhere, which was far better than large groups of stupid people. And camels were bigger than horses, and the one I was riding hadn’t spat on me yet. All in all, I was doing pretty good with the desert, though some people were struggling.
It was just that even watching a camel spit in Thom’s face wasn’t cheering me up any.
“They really do know when someone doesn’t like them,” Geoffrey Fucking Bless had explained, back at the beginning of our little expedition when the event in question had taken place. “That explains the spitting, do you see?”
Logical sense, I thought—something Thom’d usually eat up with a spoon—but Thom wasn’t in a better mood, either, and getting spit on by t
he animal he was gonna be riding for the next few days didn’t seem to help. Bastion, I’d even offered to trade, but he’d been stubborn as an ox, as always, and he’d stick by that camel until the day it or he died, whichever came first.
But it was nice and dark out over the dunes now, with night coming on. There weren’t any sights to see, just sand and more sand, and occasionally I’d look over at Thom, nodding off over the neck of his camel, just to make sure he hadn’t fallen off somewhere on the trail behind us. Him and his mount were getting along fine now. Thom just took some getting used to with everyone.
As Bless explained it, we had to do the bulk of our riding at night and sleep in tents under the sun during midday. That way, you kept from getting heatstroke. And the last thing this trip needed, on top of everything else, was Thom fainting like a lady having the vapors because of a little sunlight.
If anyone was gonna be prone to some kind of affliction I hadn’t heard of, it was Thom.
For the first few days, Bless’d done his best to keep up a travel dialogue, showing off every damned fact he’d crammed into his overlarge head, but after a while it became pretty hard to ignore the fact that he was talking to himself, so I guess he gave up out of embarrassment—finally. I wasn’t interested, and Thom’s attention was all squared away in staying on his camel, though he did throw in the occasional “ah” and “is that so?” for Bless’s benefit. I did have to give the guy credit for not ending up dead and still somehow managing to be the biggest idiot I’d ever clapped eyes on. They said the desert was pretty merciless with idiots, and yet here was Geoffrey Fucking Bless to prove the theory wrong, riding his camel like it was a fucking carousel horse.
We crested one of the big dunes, my camel grunting like she didn’t think much about all this hill-climbing all of a sudden, but camels didn’t talk, so it was harder to tell what they were thinking. Not that it mattered; it was just different. If I’d told that to Thom, he would’ve wanted to open a dialogue or some shit and I’d have had to spit on him, camel or no.
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