Dragon Soul

by Danielle Bennett

  Quickly I pulled myself to my feet once more, stretching my hands out to help Badger do the same.

  “What was that?” he yelled against my ear once I’d tugged him up.

  “I don’t know,” I told him, not for the first time wishing I’d had something more to give up for the as-yet-undiscovered Talent of omnipotence. The smell was more my concern than the earth’s rumbling, but I couldn’t tell him that either. “We aren’t heading in that direction.”

  “If Madoka—” Badger began, squinting off into the distance.

  “She’s not over there either,” I said, raising my voice. The curious quality it held—tinny, Madoka called it—became more obvious when I shouted. I sounded a little like the wind itself, sharp and strange. Lucky for me, the wind was devouring all it came across now, and the tone of my voice was the least of Badger’s concerns. “Trust me—I would know!”

  In truth, I had no idea where Madoka was, since I’d lost the scent of even her hand in the wake of all this other magic. It drowned everything else out, to the point where I felt rather blinded by it. The explosion had made things worse, and not just because of the wild roiling of the sand. At present, I needed Badger to stay on course, and if he needed to hear that Madoka had not been caught up in whatever minor earthquake had just occurred in the middle of the desert, then I was doing us both a favor. In the past, I had done far worse in order to get what I wanted. The only difference was, it had never bothered me before.

  Badger squeezed my hands, though, and straightened his back once again. The walls of sand had shifted, collapsing in on themselves with the force of whatever had erupted in the distance, but they still held strong. I drew in as deep a breath as I could dare, one hand pressed over my nose and mouth. Sand found its way in, but at least there was still some air left for breathing.

  We were so close now that the stench was burning my nostrils—a sharp pain that made my eyes water. The wind whipped my tears away as quickly as they formed. In fact, our sheer proximity was what made it difficult for me to choose our next move since the magic on the air was overwhelming no matter which direction I turned in. Much like Madoka’s compass, I could not operate when I was too close to the source.

  I could be sure, at least, that we did not need to head toward the direction of the explosion. That much was certain. Its cause was beyond our present concerns. And if we stood here for very long, we were all too likely to become too tired to fight any longer against the fierce winds and sands. I would simply have to trust my instincts—those, at least, were always good—and follow them for the time being, instead of my nose. I knew what direction I had been heading in; in this storm, it seemed impossible that even the man controlling the winds could navigate all that quickly through them. It was a safe assumption to make: that he had not gone far from when last I’d been certain of his whereabouts.

  I tugged at Badger’s shirt and gave him a little nudge in the direction I’d chosen, hoping he wouldn’t decide that now of all moments it was time to do something foolish. I’d underestimated his soldierly training, however, and he did nothing of the kind, simply starting off through the sand the way I’d indicated and leaving me to scurry along quickly in his wake. He didn’t like me, but he was willing to work with me for Madoka’s sake. People could be so funny when they were trying to be decent.

  I clutched Badger’s shoulder as we walked, and the scuffling sound of the sand beneath our feet coupled with the shrieking of the wind—much more intense than it had been moments ago—covered up any further conversation we might’ve indulged in, about Madoka or otherwise. Of all of us, including the men from Volstov as well as Kalim, I understood Badger’s stake in this quest the least. I would have liked to ask him more about it, had there been ample time and opportunity. It had been my experience, of most of the soldiers I’d known, that their loyalty to country far outweighed their loyalty to themselves, but his behavior wasn’t that of a man acting out of duty. I’d suspected he’d had feelings for Madoka, but to see it in action now had startled me. I had never allowed my own personal feelings to take precedence over my missions.

  I’d never had personal feelings strong enough to warrant it.

  Unfortunately, fate seemed to be rather short on both time and opportunity these days. I could trust his motives. They were not fickle. That was all I needed.

  I’d only just adjusted to the inundation of magic flooding my nostrils, a heady brew that made my brain feel lazy as I followed along tightly behind Badger—when the quality of the air around us changed once more. I tensed, unsure of what to expect, when another boom shuddered through the sands—this one much stronger than the first and stinking to the heavens of a new brand of magic. Sand sprayed everywhere, like someone had overturned a giant hourglass, and ahead of me, Badger pulled up short. For the first time, I felt the sand falling as a weight against my shoulders instead of pulling at me right and left. Realizing what it meant, I had time only to give my companion a firm push as I threw what remained of my energy into a speedier pace.

  “Run!” I shouted, the sound of my voice nearly swallowed by the sand now hailing down around us. A blizzard of sand, one might call it; but whatever the name, it was a terrifying and unnatural expression, perhaps the landscape’s reaction to so much torturous manipulation.

  We had no choice but to escape it.

  Badger broke into a sprint behind me, though I couldn’t exactly promise I was the best person to be following at the moment. Like everyone with a bit of sense still left in them—and I did have that, despite what everyone had always told me—I had an inordinate fear of being buried alive, and the way the sandstorm had turned on us, I was beginning to fear that might be the result. I was running toward the direction I’d chosen, but I no longer had any guarantee of what we would discover once we arrived there.

  I stumbled through the soft dune sands, and at one point Badger even hauled me back up to my feet, the pair of us running blind through the sudden downpour. My heart was pounding, and my lungs ached from the lack of air they were receiving. I could only hope that somehow—despite all the odds, which seemed to have turned against me as of late—we would break clear of the sand before it covered us. Already, every step I took was sinking a little lower into the ground. The sand sucked at my ankles, pooling around my shins and threatening to tear my boots off the more I struggled. And behind me I could hear it, roaring like a wave. We had to outrun it as it chased us from the center of the storm. As for our comrades, it was more than possible they would be buried beneath all this madness. The very desert had turned against these insults and was reclaiming itself from us. So much for Kalim’s theory that his gods were behind the appearance of dragonmetal in these parts. A more suspicious person would have suggested this was the gods’ revenge against the very piece in question.

  At least this would make an excellent story for Dmitri, if I ever saw him again.

  Then, just as I was all but ready to accept the almost certainty of my final resting place, unmarked and unremarkable in the midst of the desert sands, the air pressure lifted from my shoulders. I stumbled forward with the sudden lightness in my feet, falling onto all fours on the ground, the sand scorching hot beneath my palms. I could feel the sun, and hear Badger’s boots on the sand behind me, and—feeling acutely foolish—I risked opening my eyes.

  The deluge had stopped completely.

  Good girl, I thought privately. Even among Ke-Han magicians, the quickest solution to stopping a spell was killing it at the source.

  All I saw was sand, sand for miles, the shapes of the dunes shifted but unmistakable. Blank and impenetrable, as well. My eyes stung with the ferocity of the sunlight. It must have been about midday.

  I drew in a deep breath, daintily picking myself up off the ground and dusting off my skirts, trying to regain some semblance of self-respect. The smell of magic was still potent in the air, but it hung about my body like an aftereffect—nowhere near as strong as it had been before. There was still that other
scent I’d detected, tickling in my nostrils like strong pepper, and I followed its direction with my eyes. A great dune in the desert was shifting. At least, that was what it looked like from here.

  “What’s that?” Badger asked abruptly. I assumed he was talking about the same thing I’d seen, but when I turned to look at him, he was facing in the exact opposite direction.

  Some few feet away was a funny little mound, not at all natural to the area, with something glinting off the side of it. I couldn’t be sure from this distance—all that peering through the sand had done some damage to my eyes—but it very nearly looked like a compass. At least, it was metal, polished to exquisite brightness by the force of wind and sand.

  “Madoka?” I asked, a little wonderingly, and Badger was across the distance in a flash, using his hands as blunt shovels to clear the sand off her.

  Somehow, her body had made it through.

  I let Badger go for her. It seemed to please him that he could. I had been under the assumption earlier that they had not known each other for very long, but soldiers often grew attached to their companions. I was a little jealous, but I could hardly begrudge them their closeness. It was almost sweet.

  He grabbed her under her armpits and hauled her up out of the sand, shading her with his own body—again, a small thing that was, to me, quite touching. In the meantime I undid the laces of my boots and dumped the sand out of them, and as I redid the laces I scented the air. The magic was still there, simply muted, as though all the sand had deafened me—or it. But it was fading fast.

  At least now my boots were much less painful to wear, though my stockings were torn and my heels and toes made rough with little pinpricks, each grain of sand nothing on its own but quite painful when working in tandem.

  I glanced at Madoka again. She was moving, as were the hands upon her compass. She was still alive, then, and Badger was attempting to coax the sand from out of her lungs, two hands pressed flat against her chest as he heaved his considerable strength against her. But it was not Badger’s sweet, futile emotions that caught my attention most. It was the compass in Madoka’s palm.

  All at once, the hands went still—they hadn’t been moving as wildly to begin with, I realized, the meaning of which I could not entirely comprehend. Was the dragonsoul buried? I would certainly be compelled to dig for that.

  “She’s alive!” Badger called out to me. Perhaps he expected something of me. I should have gone to him and taught him the proper ways to coax breath back into aching lungs, but instead I drew up my skirts and turned my head back over my shoulder, in the direction toward which the compass hands—all three of them at once—were pointing.

  Something, very far in the distance, moved.

  “Can she walk?” I asked.

  Badger opened his mouth—no doubt to tell me she could not.

  “I can,” Madoka croaked. “Where’s the fucking magician?” I paused to sniff the air. “Dead,” I said, and I was certain of it. “I know,” Madoka said grimly, then, “Shit. How’m I supposed to get this out of me?”

  “I promised you that Volstovic magicians would take a gander at your predicament,” I reassured her, all the while not taking my eyes off the compass. It was still pointing straight in the same direction. I sniffed again, but the air was so still I could smell nothing at all beyond the stench of blood and rot and metal in Madoka’s hand.

  “You’re dreaming if you think I can make it that far,” Madoka said, and privately I rather agreed with her.

  “Well,” I said slyly, “there is one more option.”

  All three of us looked at her hand at the same time.

  “Help me up,” Madoka said.

  Badger was going to protest again, then thought the better of it. He stood, bringing Madoka with him, and she was sure on her feet. The sleeve of her dress was torn and I could see red lines traced with green tangled all up the length of her forearm—I could not imagine how it would be to have your body turned against you so thoroughly, and the man behind the magic dead and buried beneath the dunes. Yet there was one option left to us, and the compass made the direction all too clear.

  “Don’t care what you do with it now,” Madoka told me. “I just want this thing gone.”

  “We can only hope it’s three against two,” I replied. This time, I would be the one to lead the way, not Badger.

  And, I added privately to myself, I hoped the odds were even more in our favor.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THOM

  The wind had stopped. It was painfully quiet. Whatever Fan had done to animate the body of the dragon, she had wound down, or perhaps all the sand had fouled up her workings. In any case, she was silent, the air was still, and I was alone. My chest was aching, but it wasn’t because of the sand.

  Rather, it was what the wind and sand had given me—thrown against me in one last dying blast. I’d tried to get it to Rook. I remembered that much. It’d hit me so hard that I felt my heart stop, and I wondered if this was yet another earthquake—if this one would finish me off—before I lost consciousness. It was brief, however, and my heart soon regained its usual rhythm.

  And so I awoke with my arms wrapped around the dragonsoul, as though it were a baby cradled in my lap.

  It was beautiful. Despite the heat, the glass and metal were both cool, save for a tender warmth that pulsed at the very core of the glass tube. The metalwork was intricate, and even the cogs here and there had been bent into such shapes as to look like crown jewels. There were nubs of metal that reminded me of the mechanisms inside music boxes, and the liquid magic itself glittered like fireflies were caught inside. All the rest was made up of gears and workings I had no way of comprehending. There was even some ancient, polished wood mixed in with the metal, and despite the ordeals it must have been through, the polish remained glossy—not even a single edge was blistered or burned. Only one part of the whole looked incomplete, or imperfect. There was a spot on the side where a circle of metal had been sheared off, the glass beneath cracked but not shattered, and I ran my fingers against it wonderingly. A shiver ran down my spine.

  This was what we had been looking for, all this time.

  It truly was as glorious as our mad search warranted.

  If I give this to John, I thought, he really will be happy.

  But he was somewhere underneath all the sand. I’d seen him buried underneath it, and here I was, clinging to some inanimate object—one he’d been looking for, not me. If I let go of it he’d be angry, but he wasn’t here to rebuke me.

  It hadn’t even been long since the wind had stopped howling and all had fallen still. There was a chance Rook was still alive under the sand mounded up before me, but I was afraid—afraid that if I began to dig I might discover that he wasn’t. As long as I did nothing, I still had hope.

  And what kind of pussyfoot thinking is that horseshit? Rook would have demanded. I would have stiffened, scoffed, frowned, fought off the insult, then kept it privately within my heart as a secret wound for the rest of my life. If I didn’t change now, then I would never be able to.

  Still, I couldn’t drop the dragonsoul. We’d worked this hard, come all this way, fought with one another and beside one another—in a manner of speaking, if whatever I had done could even be called fighting—just to get our hands on it. I held it tighter, then loosened my grip, afraid of its power as well as the fissure in the glass. If I broke it open, what horrible power would I unleash?

  More important than all that was this: The last time I’d seen my brother, before the sand came down around us all, there’d been a knife sticking straight out of his rib cage. I knew anatomy very well, and I knew that such wounds could look worse than they really were. It all depended on where he’d been hit, but that injury on top of the sandstorm…

  I felt sick.

  “Shut up, Thom,” I said out loud. It sounded like Rook, and it jolted me out of my idiocy more quickly than sitting on my ass mourning my assumed losses had done. I stood, hauling the
dragonsoul with me, and stumbled in Rook’s direction.

  I couldn’t be certain that this was where he’d ended up, but it was the last place I’d seen him before the sand had come crashing down around him, and it was the best choice out of my limited options. The desert landscape had gone back to its natural state of eerie barrenness after the eruption of the storm, and, frankly, the sight terrified me. There was no trace of my brother, nor was there any of Fan, though the latter was hardly my concern at the moment. With shaking fingers, I set the dragonsoul down in the sand, where it wouldn’t be in the way but where I could also keep an eye on it. I’d remain mindful of it. I owed that much to my brother—a final vigilance, if all was as hopeless as I feared—but, perhaps not surprisingly, it was not my foremost concern, either. It seemed strange to have sought so long for something only to have it matter so little now. The soul was a beautiful piece of work, both powerful and strange, but all its magic amounted to nothing if I had to bear it alone.

  On my knees, in the middle of the desert and sweating under the blaze of the noon-high sun, I began to dig.

  For once I didn’t allow myself to think about anything except the task at hand, how best to clear the sand away from the site of my excavation. It was horribly disheartening work, the sand so dry that it seeped in where I’d been digging only moments before, making my efforts seem almost worse than futile. The only way to beat it was to stay on top of the flow, digging a wider radius as I went deeper, so that the very center was never covered by any of the sand as it spilled in around the edges. It was troublesome enough a task that it kept my mind occupied, giving me no time to think about my brother’s capacity for air while trapped under the ground, or the knife that had been stuck into him. I should have trusted Rook’s initial assessment of Fan and allowed Rook to do away with him as he pleased. My brother was paranoid and violent but, as much as I hated to admit it, he was so often right.