“You looking to fight?” I asked.
“Who sent you on this mission?” she asked. Her voice had gentled, and she wasn’t hurting me, either; the way she held my wrist was tender, and her thumb rested on a pressure point that eased the pounding fire in my blood. She was trying to help me—even if I couldn’t trust her motives, I could trust the result. I was so pain-crazy by that point I was willing to accept help, even if I didn’t have much faith in the source.
“Don’t know…” I said. What you’re talking about, I meant, but the lie was flimsy and she leveled a look at me.
“Let me be honest with you, little woman,” she said. I resented the nickname, but her voice was commanding; and there was that strange, tinny quality, like it was coming to me across the blade of a sword. She expected me to listen, and I did, if only because I couldn’t resist the strength of her grasp and the color of her eyes. “I am here because I seek the same prize you do. My methods are different—I was not so lucky to lay my hands on a compass like this one, though ‘luck’ in this matter is a purely relative state of being. You do not consider yourself lucky to have it, and I do not blame you. Yet I consider myself very lucky to have found you here.”
So she knew, I realized. Somehow, she knew about everything. She knew why I was here, and she wanted the same thing I did.
“You gonna chop it off?” I asked, breathless. “I’ll fight you. Might be little, but I’m strong, and you don’t look so good at one-on-one yourself. I’ll scream for him too; he’ll take you out—”
“Stop babbling,” Malahide said. She eased her grip slightly, letting her soft hair fall over her brow as she looked away from me. It was seductive. I didn’t trust it for a second, didn’t understand what the hell she was trying to do to me. “I did contemplate removing your hand from your body while you and the soldier slept, but it would have been messy. All that blood would have obscured the scent of my quarry—our quarry—and I prefer not to leave such…blatant statements behind me when I work. Surely, I thought to myself, whoever charged you with this task would be as ruthless as the man who charged me with mine. I would not want to complicate matters more than necessary.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s great.” I’d never known someone who could be so rational about whether or not to slice off a complete stranger’s hand, and now that I did, I was pretty sure I wished I didn’t.
“I suppose, since you are the possessor of this new clue,” Malahide continued, “we can talk without your companion present. Woman to woman.”
“Okay,” I managed to choke out. I wished Badger was around, if only because I needed someone else to confirm for me: This lady was crazy. But she was the kind of rational-thinking crazy that was more dangerous than all the bell-cracked loonies wandering around blathering gibberish.
“This piece,” Malahide explained, “this compass. Does it point to dragonmetal?”
“As far as I figure it, yeah,” I said. I was too tired to argue, too tired to lie, too tired even to start shouting my head off for the Badger. I didn’t owe that fucking magician any loyalty, and if he’d clapped this thing into my hand and figured sending Badger after me would be enough to keep me in line, then he was dead wrong. “You can take it,” I said suddenly. “I don’t even fucking want it anymore. It’s brought me nothing but trouble; this whole thing’s crazy. Just rip it the hell out, right now, you can have it. I hope you find what you’re looking for, ’cause I sure as hell don’t want it.”
“Come now,” Malahide said. “You must know you’re lying.”
I thought about it, just like she said. And maybe I was lying—but only halfway. I did want to be free of it; I just didn’t want to suffer the consequences.
“I’m not offering you nothing,” Malahide said, coming close to whisper the terrible words in my ear. “There are ways I could help you, should you choose to work with me. I know of magicians in the city of Thremedon who could remove that with less pain, I think, than it was given to you. You are a woman; this is your body. You are beholden to no one, Ke-Han or Volstovic. Right now you are working for someone whose motives you do not trust, whose methods you despise.”
“So you’re on this quest for yourself, then?” I asked. It was a pretty speech. I just didn’t know if I could really believe it.
Malahide’s pretty mouth quirked into a wry smile. “Very astute,” she said. “In a manner of speaking, I am on ‘this quest’ for my commissioner. In another manner of speaking, I do what I do for myself and myself alone. We are in the same position, and because of that, I believe we should work together. You assisting me, and I assisting you.”
“And if I say no?” I asked, more than a little afraid to hear what she’d answer.
“Then I will hunt you down and kill you,” she said simply. “Both you and your friend. I will dispose of your bodies so that no one, not even this employer whom you fear so greatly, will ever have any hope of finding you. I will take the compass for myself and I will be the sole proprietor of the bounty. Despite how unpleasant it will be to traverse the desert on my own, to come up against whatever raiders and whatever sandstorms the desert tosses my way, I will nonetheless use the advantage now buried in you to win this hunt.”
“Oh,” I said again. My voice croaked, but not because I was thirsty.
“If we follow my proposal,” Malahide promised, “we will find the bounty more quickly than if we were working alone, and at cross-purposes. Once we have our hands upon the prize, we can settle our disputes properly.”
“You mean, decide who gets to take what back to her master?” I said, feeling bile rise in my throat.
Malahide’s soft smile turned into a sharp grin. “Why yes,” she said. “That is what I mean exactly.”
I wondered if I’d be able to face this woman and take her down when we came to the end of the trail—that is, if she didn’t stab me in the night.
But I had Badger, I told myself, and we could take turns keeping an eye on her. As much as we didn’t exactly get along, I knew he’d take my side over hers. We were countrymen, if nothing else. We had the advantage of numbers; we had teamwork. She was all on her own.
It was cold comfort, but I’d take it any day over knowing she was creeping up on me in the night.
“I promise I will contribute equally to the cause,” she said, holding out her dainty little hand.
“I’d shake on it,” I said, “but I’m missing the hand to do it with.”
“Never mind all that,” Malahide said. “We shall just pretend it happened.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
ROOK
As we rode across the desert, it became pretty obvious that my new friend the desert prince was a talented guy, who was used to things going his own way. Sand gnats never bit him, his mount never stumbled, and I never caught him rubbing at his eyes on account of a sudden strong wind blowing half the desert up into our faces.
But when it came time for him to try to teach my brother how to ride a damn camel, all his luck seemed to dry up like a spot of piss in the sand.
Suited me just fine, since I could’ve told him that trying to get Thom to do anything coordinated was pretty much a waste of time. He was all right once he got on, so long as he remembered not to think too much, but the in-between stuff was pretty fucking hilarious to watch.
“It must be one swift motion,” Kalim explained, demonstrating on his own camel, which was clearly some kind of hybrid camel-horse beast and not a camel at all from how fast and delicate she was. I wanted one for myself, and Kalim was clearly the guy to get one for me, but there’d be time to discuss that later.
“I am trying,” Thom insisted, and even I couldn’t argue with that. But for him, one swift motion became about seven awkward, scrabbling motions instead. I had to hand it to him—he didn’t give up, no matter how high the odds were stacked against him, but that was a Mollyrat for you. You grew up stubborn or not at all.
There must’ve been some kind of rat-crazy stubbornness in our desert pri
nce too, because he kept at it, late at night and early in the morning before Thom could start struggling with his damn tent. After a while, though, the whole thing started to make me sick to watch, all balled up and impatient inside, even though it’d never really slowed us up any—he probably knew I’d leave him behind if it came to that. It’d be better once we finally got to wherever we were going and I could stop feeling like there were bugs crawling in my skin. I knew I was acting like a real prick, but I also knew that once I reached the Khevir dunes, things’d ease up a little bit.
The way Kalim rode made me think we probably could’ve gone on through the day, and that he was just stopping out of pity on us “Volstovs,” but I couldn’t ask him without Thom hearing too, and he was already looking about as miserable as that camel he rode. Just about as mulish too. So I clammed up good, and the time passed like fucking grains of sand, one minute after another until they all blurred into the same mess in my head. At least we were traveling faster now that we’d left that Nellie Bless behind, and Kalim didn’t seem to feel the same urge to stop and talk about the historical significance of this and that as we passed it by. A statue in the sand was a statue in the sand, and I could appreciate it just fine without having to hear about who it was and why it’d ended up buried.
In the morning, Kalim told us we’d reach the magician’s house sometime during the next night.
“First bit of good news I’ve had all day,” Thom muttered, throwing his tent around like a laundrywoman. It curled up and tangled around his arm like a snake and he stumbled backward into his camel, who gave him a look of such piss-poor disdain that I wondered how both the rider and the mount managed to sleep at night.
I couldn’t look anymore. It was like watching a dog tart itself up for th’Esar’s next ball, all wrong and fucking awkward, and I didn’t know where to start making sense of it. It was a lot easier just to set up my tent and disappear into it; both Kalim and I knew, no matter what we did, we’d still wake up the next morning to find the damned thing wrapped around Thom like a body bag. How he’d managed to survive long enough to get to the ’Versity was beyond me.
The next night, I woke up early. It was still pretty light out, the sun going down and staining everything an eerie red color. It was my time, or had been, once, back before shit had stopped making sense and I’d gotten my brother back. Part of why I was having less trouble than Thom adjusting to desert living was probably because I’d spent half my damn life sleeping through the day and doing my real work at night. Your body just adjusted to it, after a while, and your mind could catch up after that pretty damn quick.
I squinted into the horizon, like I’d done about a hundred times before, and thought about things I sure as hell didn’t need to be thinking about right now.
Things looked different on the ground, that was all. It took some fine-tuning, just like sleeping all day and riding all night did. One thing I had in common with my bell-cracked brother: getting used to anything we weren’t already used to made us crankier’n th’Esar during th’Esarina’s time of the month.
Something made a sound to my left, pained and half-asleep like a pissed-off camel. I thought it was a bastion-damned camel until the canvas mess that’d buried my brother last night started to stir, and his head popped out like a jack-in-the-box.
“Is it time to go?” he asked, looking like he’d spent the night in some animal’s mouth instead of inside his own tent. Good, I thought. Served him right for being so damned cheerful in the mornings all the time back when we used to have beds. Let him see what it was like to have the boot on the other foot; he’d come around.
“Go back to sleep,” I told him, looking away. “Kalim’s not up yet, either.”
He made a snuffling, sleepy sorta noise and rubbed his nose. He’d been complaining about getting sand up there lately, but I wasn’t having any trouble. “I don’t think I’ll have time to make it back to sleep,” he said, sitting up like a grub in a cocoon. “Best to put my energies toward waking up fully; I’ll have a better chance at foiling that beast.”
“You mean Bessie?” I asked, tearing my eyes away from the sun when they started to burn.
Thom paused, halfway to wrestling himself out of his tent, and stared at me like I’d just told him I was gonna marry his camel.
“You named it?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with that? Can’t curse her if she doesn’t have a name,” I told him. It was a reasonable enough argument. Especially for me.
“I’m fairly certain it’s a him, for starters,” Thom said. “Although if there was ever a male I wished to embarrass by calling him a female name…Not that I condone such practices, you know I don’t, but it’s a camel, and…”
“Sure you don’t,” I said, grinning. The desert was making my brother into a real cindy shitkicker, just like the boys back home, and if I’d been in the sort of mood to appreciate it, I’d have been loving every second.
Thom cursed at me, which just proved my theory, and set to balling up his tent. It was never going to come out right if that was the way he folded it up, and after trying not to crack a rib laughing, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went over there and took the stupid thing out of his stupid hands, folding it up neat and proper in a matter of minutes. They weren’t meant to be complicated. It was just cloth and a riding stick; how hard could it be?
“Real fine education you paid for,” I needled him, handing it back.
“Technically,” he said, looking decently ashamed of himself, “I didn’t pay for it at all. I was a scholarship student.”
“Guess it’s all right to waste other people’s money, then,” I said, and I meant it. “Taxpayers’ money, come to think of it. The whole of Volstov, paying for this.” Thom flinched.
“There wasn’t a class on pitching a tent,” Thom said, then quickly added, “I don’t want to hear it.”
“Only ’Versity boys’d need a class in pitching tents,” I said, just to show him I didn’t care what he thought. “Hell, they could have a guest speaker in from Our Lady just to drive the point home.”
“You’re disgusting,” Thom said, but he didn’t even look like he believed that anymore. He was just saying it because it was easy, because he was too tired to come up with anything new. And also, more than probably, because he had sand up his nose.
Well, it was his own bastion-damned stubborn-ox fault, wasn’t it? I’d told him not to come, but he’d insisted, and here we were, Thom wiping sand from his upper lip and wishing he’d taken a few classes in how to be useful rather than how to name every speck of sand from here until they reached the ocean.
The sun disappeared below the horizon like a candle winking out, and just like that, the sky was gray. Pretty soon the winds’d be kicking up, and the air would get real cold, so it was important to start moving soon. I broke down my tent like a fever, almost slipping up a hundred times because my mind wasn’t on the job. Tonight, said a little voice in my head—the only woman whose tones I’d bothered to memorize, the only girl that’d ever mattered one shit to me. Tonight I was going to meet the magician. I didn’t know what came after that, and I didn’t much care. I only knew that meeting her was gonna help me get back what was rightfully mine in the first place.
There was a flurry of motion from my side that meant Kalim was awake, collapsing his tent by touching it with his index finger and all those little things he did that made me think he wasn’t quite human, just a trick of the sand.
“Good evening, Mollyrats of the Volstov,” he said, no trace of sleep in his voice. “Tonight will be an auspicious night, but we must be on our guard. Do not let the nearness of our goal allow you to become overexcited.”
“No danger of that,” I assured him. Thom looked like one good shot of excitement’d probably kill him, and what I was feeling definitely didn’t fall under the banner of excitement.
Kalim gave me a look, like he wasn’t quite sure I was telling the truth, and I stared back at him until he looked away. Surv
eying his land, he might’ve said if I asked him, but every now and then I liked to win a contest of wills with somebody, and even a desert prince’d do in a pinch.
“I mean only to remind you of my previous warning,” he said. “The lady of Volstov is not the sort to welcome a visitor.”
“So long as we aren’t flying th’Esar’s flag, I think we’ll be more welcome than some,” I said, and he looked puzzled.
“Our Esar,” Thom piped up, looking at least like he might make it through the night now. “Our ruler; he banished her to the desert in order to keep her powers from being exploited.”
“Aha,” said Kalim, nodding like he understood. “I see. This Esar, too, had woman troubles.”
“Kalim, you’ve got no idea,” I said, and I swung up onto my camel’s back.
For a little while, I waited for Kalim as he tried once more with Thom—neither of them giving up, and neither of them getting anywhere, either. Kalim allowed about ten minutes to be wasted on his lessons in the morning when we made camp and at night before we set off. Then, exactly ten minutes into it, he let Thom climb onto the camel like a kid just out of his diapers while he mounted up like a bolt of lightning, and our night really began.
We rode over the uneven dune terrain at a swift enough pace that I could feel the wind in my hair, the sand tossed from Kalim’s camel in front of me swirling around my face. The Khevir dunes were dangerous country, Kalim had explained, because of the high winds and the complete fucking lack of anything to use as cover. Even he wouldn’t cross ’em during the day, he’d said, making a mark over his chest to protect against evil spirits getting the wrong idea, or whatever it was the desert people believed in. The high winds were what built up the dunes, and it could make the crossing painfully slow if you didn’t know the right paths to take. Somehow, we’d as good as stumbled onto a guide who knew the area like the fortune lines on his palm—and who wasn’t a grave-robbing shit-eating pussyfoot, to boot—and the dunes didn’t much get in our way. Another difference was that the sand here was looser, less packed in, so you had to be careful your camel didn’t up and turn an ankle in the softer stuff. This last part was more for Thom than either of us, but to my everlasting shock and fucking awe, he managed to keep himself and Bessie intact.
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