Dragon Soul

by Danielle Bennett

  “Shots?” Kalim blinked. I could’ve laughed, but it would’ve broken my concentration.

  “You get to make the rules,” I clarified, and he nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “The rules. I am learning a great deal of interesting language from you, Mollyrat Rook.”

  “You’ve got no idea,” I said, and just like that he lunged at me.

  I’d been waiting for it. Oldest trick in the book was to talk at someone until you got them to let their guard down, and what Kalim hadn’t been counting on was that my guard was always fucking up, even when I was talking. Maybe especially when I was talking. I stepped quick to the right and he snapped back around, pivoting so the miss wouldn’t leave him vulnerable. He was quicker than I’d have guessed from his size, but that didn’t matter much since I was quick for my size too. Only real advantage he had on me was that he was better used to fighting in the desert, moving his feet on the sand when I was used to harder surfaces, broken-up cobblestone and the like. It was a little difference, but it was there.

  Starting out, I went on the defensive, stepping back and dodging as he circled me. It was the easiest way to make out his moves, see how fast he was and which side he favored. Then, just so he didn’t start to catch on that that was what I was doing, I attacked him quick, going low when he went high and catching his hip against my shoulder. I flipped him flat on his back.

  “Yes!” Thom whooped loudly, probably jumping up and down like a fucking idiot. I’d’ve thrown my knife at him if I’d had a spare, but he caught ahold of himself real quick and piped down. Better that he didn’t draw any attention to himself, or give our new desert friends reason to hold him hostage. It was one thing they were doing it to Bless, but if it’d been Thom they were ransoming, my hands really would’ve been tied.

  Kalim twisted up quickly to his feet, checking his arms for a knife wound. There wasn’t any. Not yet. We were both respecting each other too much to end it so quick, and I’d done him some kind of honor by prolonging the fight. He grinned like the crescent moon and dove at me again, his hand a blur as I hopped back, doing my best to dodge the sudden flurry of knife strokes as they sliced the air in front of me. I lost my balance in the sand for a second and one came dangerously close to my eye.

  Dangerously close, but not close enough. Best kind of close there was.

  “Tell me,” said Kalim, sounding out of breath enough for me to feel satisfied about my performance. “What is it you are doing in the desert, if your business is not with the rakhman?”

  “Looking for something,” I grunted, knocking his arm back when it swept forward.

  “I hope it is something that—belongs to you,” Kalim said, rolling to one side to dodge a kick I’d thrown at him.

  “She is,” I snarled, taking a lunge at him again. “It’s other people tryna take her from me.”

  “Ah,” huffed Kalim. “Woman trouble.”

  “You could say that,” I told him. I’d been marking which side he dodged to more often—everybody had one, and there was no reasoning to it beyond simple human wiring—so I could make the next one count. The next time I dove at him, I kept my knife to the left, so that when he did that neat trick of his, darting to one side with only a sliver of space between us, he caught the edge of my knife on his shoulder.

  It wouldn’t have worked if he’d been wearing sleeves—the difference was that fucking tiny—but he wasn’t. For a minute neither of us was sure if we had to stop. I was holding my knife up to defend in case he threw himself at me, and he’d assumed a similar pose, both of us waiting to know, one way or another, whether the fight was done.

  Most people got nervous in that moment. I didn’t. It was exactly like being up in the air and I fucking loved it.

  Then a bead of bright red formed, on his shoulder, sliding dark and liquid down his arm. A murmur went up from the circle around us—not a peep from Thom this time—and Kalim held up his knife. The crowd shut up instantly.

  “What happened?” Geoffrey was asking. He was starting to sound real fucking unhinged. “Did we win?”

  “This is for you,” Kalim said, holding the knife to me, handle out. He looked almost pleased with himself, which was a real funny way to look at losing, no two ways about it.

  I held up my hands. “That’s not necessary,” I said. Trophies weren’t my style. “Really. All I want is for me and my brother to get going. That’s all.”

  “Tradition,” Kalim insisted.

  I was still coming down from the fight. It’d been a good one, the first good one in a while, and maybe this Kalim wasn’t half-bad to begin with, so at least I had a reason for what I did next. I took his knife, but then before he could retract his hand I slapped mine into his palm.

  “It’s a trade,” I said, tucking his away. It was about the same weight, and a little longer than mine’d been, but I’d manage. I still fucking hoped it wasn’t made out of somebody’s arm or leg bone, but that was personal preference.

  Kalim held on to my knife a little longer. He had to have known that it was a cheap fucking piece of work—it’d served me pretty good but it wasn’t anything fancy, not like his. The trade wasn’t fair, and it shouldn’t’ve been, either. I was the winner, so I deserved the real prize. But the way Kalim was looking at my knife, it was like I’d gone and made things even between us, and now he owed me one since I’d kicked his ass good and proper.

  “Something wrong with the knife?” I asked.

  “It is a good blade,” Kalim told me. “You use it often?”

  “Only when I need to,” I said, grinning again. The cold air from the desert at night was blowing over my skin and cooling me down; I’d broken a sweat while fighting Kalim, but my blood wasn’t up anymore and I was even a little chilly, which was nice. Perfect weather for fighting, nice and cold and dry.

  Two of Kalim’s people had broken the circle, coming forward to check out his arm no doubt, but he waved them away.

  And then, just like that, life suddenly got interesting.

  “This woman you are seeking,” Kalim said. “I think that I know where she is.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MALAHIDE

  It was lonely on the road, and I did prefer things that way. I had been traveling south for a week, and still I hadn’t tired of watching the Cobalt Mountains, which changed shades of blue depending on how they were lit.

  It seemed strange to me that I could count myself among the few men and women who were truly happy with their station in life. Most people seemed to find the idea of a life like mine ghastly, or even laughable. As a consequence I had very few acquaintances, aside from those I used for work, but that too suited me. Some were simply born with a restlessness in their blood, a calling that urged them to travel over oceans and mountains. I myself was incredibly fortunate in that I could earn my keep while doing so.

  It had been too long since my last job promised to take me out of Volstov. After nearly losing us—his own precious magicians—in the plague that had come over the Cobalts, the Esar had kept all his old guard close at hand, almost like a concerned father. It would have been sweet had I not already known exactly what kind of father the Esar could be. When I thought of Dmitri, I wrote him, though they were frivolous letters by necessity, speaking nothing of the task at hand. I had no return address to which he might reciprocate, and so I received none in return, though in strictest honesty the freedom that silence granted allowed me to be much more candid in my writing than usual.

  Lovely scenery, only my thoughts to occupy me, and the occasional illegal deal taking place right before my eyes. My idea of perfection—or at least, as close to it as something as imperfect as me was liable to get. No one ever knew that I was watching; that was the entire point. My duty was to be neither seen nor heard, and I fulfilled it well enough even now that I had a voice.

  Yet there was still no sign of my bounty.

  A hunter was only worth as much as his or her quarry, but if that quarry was no more than a theory, the h
unt was only in theory, as well. I would have readily admitted—were there anyone to whom I might have offered my admissions—that I was feeling much like a ghost as I made my way along the Black Steppe. That was what they called it, and I appreciated its tonal qualities, but there were points at which I found my self-definitions slipping away, now that they had nothing to operate against. A dangerous, tricky business indeed, this loneliness.

  It had been different when I’d worked with my partner. More difficult, in many ways, since it was harder to ignore two people than one, and you always needed a better excuse for why the both of you were hanging around. He’d been a strange fellow—a combination of his predilections and his quiet Talent had made him so—but good enough company in the mountains when the days grew long and the air grew still in my sails.

  I was not sad when I thought of him, but I did miss his presence.

  Fortunately, it was in the steppe that I encountered my first real piece of luck: the man I was now following, who moved with such speed and such purpose that I knew he was either carrying something of great value or racing toward it. I could also smell dragonmetal on him, so my hunch was not entirely unfounded. I did not know his name, nor did I know his face, but since I first caught wind of his scent and, subsequently, his trail, I was drawing ever closer to him.

  Now the chase was on.

  I first smelled the dragonmetal in a dream; I was still in Volstovic territory, on Thremedon’s side of the Cobalt Range, only five days into my travels. It woke me instantly and I covered all traces of my camp better than he was currently covering his. After that, I was on my feet and back on the road in no time at all, ready to begin my hunt in earnest. He was deviating from the steppe. In point of fact, he was leading me straight through the mountains.

  Neither of us slept for days, and the knowledge thrilled me to the core. It was the rare man who could lose more than one day of sleep without his brain turning funny on him. This man was not only holding to his pace, but he was keeping sharp while doing so. It was still impossible for him to hide his trail from me, but he was getting better at it, not worse. It was quite possible he sensed my presence; he had no evidence that I was there save for a shadow of paranoia in his own mind, but he was picking up speed, moving with preternatural grace and purpose along a very narrow pass through the mountains. But so long as there was wind and air, I had my advantage. He was not yet suspicious enough to cover the scent of his own skin, and I doubted anything would cover the odor of the dragonmetal. And so long as I had my scents, I had my prey. I kept well enough away from him so that he would never have cause to hear the echo of my footsteps across the rocks above and realize that this shadow of fear had taken shape and was coming for him wearing my features.

  I could not wait to meet him. Our skills were very nearly evenly matched, and though he was traveling somewhat carelessly in his haste, he was clearly quite the extraordinary gentleman.

  A woman could wait years, even a lifetime, before she met her match.

  I was very nearly face-to-face with mine; I was exceedingly lucky that he just so happened to be carrying something of use to me. I intended to have it in my possession before we left the mountains, but he was taking the most twisted route through them possible, and I had to be careful not to press my advantage too quickly and have him turn the element of surprise against me. Suppose he were to have superior strength, or a Talent I could not sniff out from such a distance?

  No; I would have to wait and see where he led me.

  I hadn’t been born with the skills necessary to follow a man as I now did. It was my Talent that made me preternaturally suited to it—a strength of mind and body that made it possible for me to subsist on very little sleep and food. If I’d been of a stronger build, I might have made an excellent soldier. As things stood, at the time of my birth, the Esar had been in greater need of spies. There were precious few magicians who did not count themselves among the members of the Basquiat. My hard-won Talent made it such that I quickly surpassed those others being trained for the same purposes. I simply had an edge—one that separated me from even the small, distinctive group that lived in the Esar’s employ. Even that hadn’t been enough for my satisfaction, however, and on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday I gave up my speech for an extraordinary sense of smell.

  There were those who argued I had given up a great deal more than that, but my stubbornness matched their own quite easily. It had taken the Esar weeks to set up the ceremony in secret and far longer than that to find someone willing to perform it. Trading one sense for the magnification of another was clumsy magic, from another time entirely, and strictly outlawed for the mischief it could cause. Of course, the Esar was a man given to circumventing his own laws for the greater good, and he’d never hesitated after I’d made my decision. Of my own volition—that was the phrase he himself employed.

  I’d never been given cause to regret my decision. Speech could be clumsy, it could delay or mislead, but my nose had never lied to me. I was an instrument well suited to my position, and that was all I needed to be satisfied with my life.

  Although I would most certainly have been cheered by some further prospect of my quarry, as well.

  After three days in the mountains—three hungry, weary days, drinking only enough water to keep my energy up, and sleeping in hourlong fits and bursts whenever he paused in his breakneck pace—I could tell by the sand and the grit and the heat on the air that we were coming close to the desert. How curious.

  This was not the Black Steppe any longer. He was traveling via his own peculiar route, and not one that had been forged by any travelers ahead of him. It made the going difficult, but my innermost self was elated at the challenge he presented. It had been ages since I was tested so. There had been none among the Esar’s ranks who could challenge me before I’d traded in my tongue. Afterward, none had dared.

  I was, admittedly, delighted to come to a change in scenery. The mountains all around me had made me feel somewhat claustrophobic, and I was ready to see some open air. I was also ready to see my quarry’s face at last. I could hardly wait to meet him, though I could not allow my eagerness to overtake my plans. Patience was the most difficult virtue to cultivate, since it went against my every instinct as a human being. I imagined myself instead as a spider, a veteran hunter, craftily spinning a web as I waited for my prey to fall into it.

  As I spun, I formulated my next move. There was no time to send letters anymore, and no post to send them by, either. From here on out, it was strictly business—between my quarry and me—and no other thoughts would invade my mind.

  The next time he rested, I would not allow myself to sleep. Instead, I would come upon him in the darkness and pin him down. Then we would discuss a great number of topics, such as how he had the dragon piece in his possession and where he was heading with it so excitedly. If he refused to tell me, then I would be forced to persuade him—which was often a time-consuming process, but one that always prevailed in the end.

  Unfortunately, I never got my chance.

  It was on the dawn of the fourth day in the mountains that I at last crested the trail at a plateau and found myself looking out over the desert. Sand stretched out before me like some foreign, amber ocean. Indeed, it was an impressive sight—so much sand for a Volstovic native was quite exotic, and I was breathless as an observer, as well as a great lover of natural beauty. It spanned as far as the human eye could see, the smell of sun on sand positively overwhelming, and its size even dwarfed the Cobalts—themselves an awesome sight.

  However, I could also see quite clearly that a raiding party of nomads stood between me and my man. As dark spots against the tan hide of the desert, they stood out quite easily. If I’d had a horse—or no, a camel—I might have stood a real chance in overtaking them. But then the proverbial game would be up, and I wasn’t yet willing to concede what few advantages I had on my side.

  Over such open ground, I would have to divine a new way of following my elusive
friend.

  The stench of burning and killing wormed its way into my senses, and as the wind changed course, I found myself doused in the stink. The scent of dragonmetal had disappeared completely; only the faintest hint remained, overwhelmed by the fiery air. That would be the nomads, and he couldn’t have chosen a better screen to cloak his tracks if he’d tried. Blood and fire were two of the likeliest things to confuse a nose like mine, and the nomads here had been responsible for both all too recently. For the moment, my man had the upper hand. Too much stood between me and my trail.

  He had, I realized, excited and furious, given me the proverbial slip.

  Whether he’d done it on purpose or not was immaterial. I had no doubts that I’d covered my presence completely, but there was always the possibility that he too was possessed of some extraordinary Talent that had alerted him to the chase. The other option to consider was that he was simply monstrously lucky, and that fate was not on my side in this endeavor. That at least I didn’t mind, since I’d found myself on the wrong side of fate many a time since I’d been born and had not let it hinder my proceedings as of yet.

  I began my descent down the path toward the desert, warm wind swirling angrily around my hair and face. It was as though the very air around me was as agitated as I. As I surveyed the horizon once more, I realized that fate hadn’t entirely consigned itself to my quarry. The sun would be setting soon, which meant that I could keep going without fear of how I’d hold up under the unforgiving heat of the desert. I had no idea whether my Talent extended to protect me from something like this—a climate of the severest nature—and in my current mood, I was in no hurry to find out.