“There is a magician in the desert, you know,” I said, testing him. “She created this particular dragon. The part you intend to test is her creation. Wouldn’t it be better to go directly to the source? Rather than be here, working with a power you can’t possibly understand fully…To have that knowledge—”
“Unnecessary,” Fan said, clipped. “As I’ve said, it’s not her we need. It’s Rook. Mix his blood with this, return it to the soul, and the bond between dragon and rider will be broken. Terribly inconvenient, her having imprinted on him in the first place, since it introduced all sorts of complications into the initial plan. All we have to do now is mix your blood with the woman’s, to create a transference of that loyalty. You’ve no idea how delighted I was to encounter you on my travels. I’ve never had much reason to believe in fate before, but that was truly an indication of some higher power.”
“Fat fucking chance,” said Rook, but I could see him eyeing the vial with considerably more care than he’d first paid it.
I thought hard, harder than I ever had and more swiftly—I could practically hear the gears of my brain grinding in protest—but I couldn’t come up with anything. Silence and the wind. I didn’t dare to close my eyes, though they were burning with the heat and the sand. Somehow, because of the immediacy of direct sunlight from overhead, it was burningly hot in our little prison, and the sand crusted on my skin was not helping matters in the slightest. The wind at least cooled my body down somewhat, enough for me to think things through.
Fan was working with at least one companion. That much I knew. And it would have to be someone who knew a great deal of magic—perhaps even the cause of the Ke-Han windstorm we were currently experiencing. I cast my mind back to my initial assessment of him, back when we had only first met. Part Ke-Han, I had guessed then, and now I wondered if I wasn’t so far off. If he was part Ke-Han, and this magic had at its source a Ke-Han wind-magic element, then it stood to reason that Fan’s purposes—his interests—lay with the Ke-Han.
I had a motive. Perhaps.
“The Esar would be willing to bargain with you,” I offered tentatively. “For this piece, you know he would offer you a great many things.”
“Bargain?” Fan said, and laughed. “I don’t need to bargain.”
“You probably want him to beg,” Rook said.
Fan’s silence explained everything, and I realized with grim certainty that my guesswork had led me to the proper conclusion. QED, as it were. We were at a grave disadvantage, and Rook must have known it too; it was why he wasn’t acting yet, or even acting at all. He stood as still as an alley cat waiting for a mouse—all muscles coiled and primed, tense and ready to pounce. But no mouse had yet presented itself, and Fan was watching us with that same smug delight. Or perhaps the idea of a resurrected Havemercy was one that Rook didn’t find so disagreeable now that he was confronted with it. Face-to-face, so to speak, with one he’d loved and assumed gone forever.
I couldn’t allow myself to doubt his motives though. I had to trust my brother.
“What about us, then?” I asked, sliding farther away from Rook. I had to give him some kind of opportunity to act. At the very least, we might be able to use Fan as a hostage—that is, if we could locate his counterpart, the other agent in this dangerous masquerade. “Do you intend to kill us?”
“Perhaps,” Fan said. “You’ve been very troublesome, following me all this way.”
“We haven’t been following you,” Rook said. He wasn’t watching me, but I could tell he was painfully aware of my every movement. “Guess you’re getting a little paranoid there, huh?”
“No matter,” Fan said, shrugging lightly. “If the storm does not take care of all my enemies, it will certainly neutralize them. I am used to being pursued.”
“There certainly is a lot of sand, isn’t there,” I said, lifting my hand to wipe at some of the grit that was crusted around my mouth. “How do you tolerate it?”
That brought Fan up short. He stared at me as though I’d lost my mind. “Beg pardon?” he said.
“And the camels,” I added. “Have you been riding them? Beasts. In fact, I think I’m going to sit down. This is all tiring me out tremendously. I’m not at all the adventuresome type.”
“Don’t move—” Fan began, but I’d given Rook all the time he needed. He went after him with a howl and then—much to my horror—they both disappeared with the force of impact, falling straight through the wall of sand at Fan’s back.
“John!” I shouted, but only the wind answered me. I was alone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MADOKA
When the wind started up like a wounded wolf, our shit luck didn’t even surprise me anymore. At least I knew this kind of magic—and I knew it pretty damn well. Even growing up in a piece-of-shit village that was nowhere near the contested border—the one where all the action happened—I still knew what it was like to feel the sharp wind on your skin and know that it didn’t have anything to do with nature. The emperor’s magicians liked to fiddle with things most sensible people knew were better off left alone, and the weather just happened to be the most convenient trick they had up their sleeves for when the dragons came calling. No one cared that sometimes a storm got out of control and blew down a few shacks, tore up a few rice fields. The war effort was what was important, and the rest of us had to be good little patriots and suck it up.
The only difference between this and the storms I was used to was that the latter didn’t usually involve sand. But there was a first time for everything, wasn’t there? This whole trip just proved it.
The wind bit into my cheeks and the sand cut into every inch of exposed flesh, but this time I wasn’t about to let any Ke-Han magician get the better of me. That certainty gave me something to cling to, a fire to bolster my spirits. I’d never thought about killing someone before—leastways no one had ever made me mad enough to—but I had a feeling all that was going to change.
I didn’t care about what my ancestors would’ve thought. If I found that magician before any of the others did, he was going down with my hands around his throat.
“Madoka!” I heard Badger shout, and he grabbed for me while our mount bucked. We’d come a long way from him skulking along behind me in the shadows, that was for sure. I held firm to the reins, and even dug my fingers into the camel’s shaggy neck fuzz, but it was only a matter of time before we lost our hold. The beast was going crazy along with the weather. I couldn’t say I blamed it, but it was stronger than me.
I tried to answer Badger, but when I opened my mouth sand flew in, and I was too busy to say anything what with all the choking. I felt my fingers slipping—couldn’t concentrate on holding on and breathing at the same time—and I hit the ground hard. But I didn’t let the impact daze me for even an instant. I had new strength way down to my bones, and I hadn’t hauled my ass this far only to wipe out right at the finish line. I had a purpose now and it was right in front of my nose—just past all the sand, anyway—and I was so close to freedom I could almost taste it.
Except that was probably sand too.
I cleared my throat and spat—trying to improve my situation a little—then realized I was totally fucking alone in the middle of the desert, no mount or anything, the storm swirling all around me and threatening to swallow me up. Wind magic was a mean, shifty little trick to play at this point, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d seen us coming after all. They’d sure as hell chosen the most effective way of evening out the odds, and confusing the shit out of everyone, to boot. Where the hell had Badger gone? It wasn’t like I needed him around or anything, but he’d disappeared trying to get to me. I didn’t want to owe a soldier any more than I had to. And where the fuck was the rest of the party?
Maybe they were dead. Hell, it was more than possible.
I couldn’t even grope around in front of myself. My hand was throbbing worse than ever, and I didn’t want to know how much worse it could get if sand got into my veins, bu
t that pain was good. The pain meant I was near to that dragon piece, and if I was near to that, then I could follow the aching in my palm straight to the man I was looking for. Then I could end him. It was my only shot at this point, since I couldn’t hope to see the hands on the compass.
Against my better instincts, I closed my eyes—I was going to need them later, and it wouldn’t do me any good to go sand-blind before the real shit went down. Besides, in this situation I was probably better off than the others since I didn’t need to see in order to reach my goal. All I had to do was follow the throbbing in my hand, and even though it was hurting bad enough to make me want to scream, I could tell myself this time it’d be worth it. With each ridiculous, shuffling step I took through the desert, I was drawing closer to the magician who’d done this to me. That knowledge was the only thing that made it bearable. I was every woman wronged by a man who thought he could be clever enough to cheat the fates. Every lonely ghost conscripted to wander the loneliest corners of the land until she closed in on the one who’d mistreated her. Every cautionary tale whispered in a young child’s ear at night to make ’em shut up and go to sleep.
Those stories’d scared the shit out of me as a little tot. Now they seemed about the same as all those heroic legends I’d gobbled up—everyone got what was coming to them, and justice was served.
Justice with a side of sand.
All of a sudden my hand pulsed something fierce and I straightened up quick as shit, eyes squeezed shut, shirt pulled up over my nose and mouth to keep all the sand out of my lungs. All I could hear was the wind howling, but the pain in my hand was telling me that wind wasn’t the only thing close by. The sand whipped sharply at my face, like I’d fallen into a nettle patch, but I held myself still, breathing shallow and close against the fabric of my collar.
As I stood there, the wind started to sound more like voices—loud angry voices and thin, shivery voices all rolled up together. On top of the fever, I was probably just losing my mind in the heat, the way people said happened once the sun came up over the desert. Not that I could see the sun behind all this sand, but I knew it was there.
Where are you going? the wind sighed, hard against my face but soft on my ears. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to lie down and rest? Let the sand cover your tired bones?
I didn’t know whether the voice was real or imaginary, but to my mind it sounded an awful lot like that rat-faced magician from the capital. I couldn’t tell what direction the words were coming from though, so that didn’t help me. All I had to go by was the feeling in my hand, like someone’d stuck an arrow straight through it.
As a kid, my favorite stories had been the ones about the blind warrior—the one who won out against impossible odds every time, even when you thought his goose was cooked. I used to imagine what it was like to fight blind—to go into every battle knowing you were at a huge fucking disadvantage and not to let your guard down even after you’d thought you’d won. I’d go out back of the house, shut my eyes tight, and listen as hard as I could while one of my kid brothers tried to sneak up behind me. Sometimes I got him, and sometimes he got me. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, and eventually I decided I was sick of playing blind warrior.
What kind of idiot gave up an advantage she was lucky enough to have in the first place?
That magician bastard was somewhere close now. I knew it as sure as the throbbing in my hand, and I was stuck in the middle of the desert playing blind warrior again, only out here the stakes were a lot higher than bragging rights or who got first crack at our mama’s fried dumplings.
Breathing in slow, I forced myself to focus on the pain. It hurt enough to make me feel a little crazy for even trying it, but it was my only shot at getting the drop on this asshole. I took a step forward. Nothing happened. I shifted my weight to the right and got a blinding flash of pain all through my hand and up my arm for my troubles. That was the way, then, and he was a lot damned closer than I’d thought for me to be feeling this bad.
Screwing up my courage, not to mention my eyes, I took another step in what I already knew was the right direction. The voices started up again, louder than before, though they echoed strangely, sounding faint as they whisked past my ears.
What can you possibly be thinking? Even an animal knows to lie down when it’s been beaten. Surely you have more sense than something that goes about walking on four legs?
If that was the best they could do, I thought, gaining momentum against the shallow incline of the dune I’d come up against, then I was going to get through this, no problem. Every girl with a couple of brothers learns to build up a tough skin against being called animal names, and those desert voices had made a pretty big mistake in piping up again since I was almost positive at this point where they originated. Cheap insults had nothing on the shit I was living right now.
My palm flashed white-hot pain as I crested the dune, and with the last of my strength I threw myself forward, hollering like any blind warrior worth his salt. Maybe I should’ve kept the element of surprise on my side, but there was only so much I had planned out before my future became crazy with revenge.
I connected hard with something good and solid, and for a minute my head swam like I was maybe going to pass out right there. But then me and whatever went over together and hit the ground with a thump that knocked all the wind out of my lungs—and there hadn’t been much in there to start with, what with me breathing hot, thick air in gulps through my shirt. I opened my eyes just long enough to see something bright and silver go flying in an arc through the air before it disappeared behind more sand, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut again or risk going blind.
The thing I’d hit shrieked like an animal caught under a cart wheel, and after that it started to struggle real good. I struck out at it blindly—at him, I hoped—hitting soft sand, then something hard and bony. My hand was hurting bad enough that I half expected it to start screaming, but I was caught up in some kind of madness, and nothing could tear me away from my purpose. He threw me off, but I was bigger than he was, and I definitely didn’t land as far away as he’d hoped. I sucked in a gasp when I landed, then realized that I hadn’t gotten any sand in with my air.
Tentatively, I opened my eyes, just in time to see a flash of blue clothing, and a pale, spindly arm heading straight for me.
“Idiot girl!” the owner of the arm shrieked, and if I hadn’t been sure before, that voice cinched it. I rolled away just in time to dodge the magician’s blow, and was on my feet—with my eyes open this time—before he could rally to get the better of me. “What if you’d broken it?”
“Well, considering it’s been doing its best to break me ever since you put the damned thing in my hand, I figured I’d give it some payback,” I told him, a little bit of my own madness in my voice now, from the heat and the anger and the fever pulsing in my blood. “I’m a pretty simple person. Don’t know anything about magic in the first place, so I couldn’t tell you one way or another what you’re doing either. Just that I don’t like it and I want my hand back.”
He stamped his foot like a child, and I swallowed the urge to laugh in his face. This was the man who’d caused me so much pain and suffering? He was about as angry as a little boy who’d lost his favorite toy—and then I realized my hand wasn’t hurt as bad as it could’ve been, or should’ve been, if I was face-to-face with not my tormentor but the object causing all my torment.
“Shit,” I said.
“Exactly!” the magician cried. “That contraption in your hand is the final piece. Without it, everything else will fall to pieces. You can’t possibly understand its importance. The planning that went into this.”
“Guess you shouldn’t’ve let me wander off on my own, then,” I said. We were in a pocket of air maybe, but the wind was coming in strong, if not the sand. What’d just moments ago been a shelter from the storm felt like it was closing in on us—it was possible I was hallucinating, but just then, I wasn’t really sure. I had to as
sume everything and everyone was hostile to get the job done. Safer that way—if anything could be safe, at the moment.
“But you’re an incompetent,” the magician said.
Sure as shit, it baffled me too.
“So then why the hell’d you ask me to go after the piece in the first place?” I demanded. “Did you already know where it was?”
“Only the general area,” the magician said. “I had more important things to do than drag an ill-mannered pack mule down to the desert and use her as a divining rod. Easier to follow you once you’d homed in on the soul, so I could take care of other pressing matters. I hope it doesn’t offend your womanly pride to hear that you were not the only thing required for my plans.”
“So are you gonna take this gods-cursed thing out of my hand or not?” I asked. I figured I was going to kill him either way, but there was no harm in asking.
“In a sense,” said the magician, scratching his cheek as he stared at me with those ghostly eyes. “When we join you with the soul.” He sounded irritable. I was gonna have to wring his neck. I pressed my fingers against the inside of my elbow, trying to soothe the pulse.
“I’m supposed to pretend like I know what that means?” I asked, like it didn’t scare me one bit to have some creep deciding things about my body.
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” the magician sniffed. “You’re an uneducated fool from a backwater outpost. Only someone who’d dedicated themselves to the study of dragons could possibly hope to comprehend my plans.”
“Great,” I said, fighting the urge to go for his throat then and there. If I could keep him talking, I might be able to figure out what the hell I was going to do with this hand of mine. Lucky for me, he was an arrogant prick, and there was nothing arrogant pricks liked more than explaining their plans to stupid women. “What’s that mean?”
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