Dragon Soul

by Danielle Bennett

  The compass was gone. In its place was a scar, pink and fresh and perfectly round. I wouldn’t be able to tell my future by reading the lines in my palm anymore—just my past—but I figured I could live with that.

  “Nice,” I said, looking up at Malahide. The world began to move around me and I was pretty happy that Badger was still there, because when I keeled over from all the stress, he’d catch me when I dropped.

  I was sure of it.

  I’d never had anybody like that before, someone to watch my back for me. I guess you could call it a friend and I guessed I would call it a friend. I had my hand back and I probably could’ve caught myself, but I’d done enough of that for one lifetime, landing on my own two feet in the middle of so much shit. Gutter pig, yeah, but even sows had sty mates. There wasn’t any reason for Malahide to stick around, and despite being grateful to her, I was glad she wasn’t going to. Life could get back to the way it was but a little bit different, at that. I looked back over my shoulder at Badger and he was smiling at me, his face all crooked with the scar.

  “Me too,” I said, meaning my hand.

  It was getting embarrassing, the number of times I’d passed out. But this was my last. I was finally done with it.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MALAHIDE

  We’d all assumed it was going to be impossible to find our way back to immediate medical help. After all, we had two almost deadweights on our hands—Madoka and the airman—the first of whom was out stone cold, and who could blame her after such a barbaric ritual, and the second of whom obviously could not walk, despite all his protestations to the contrary. No matter how hard or how loud some people protested, they were still no closer to convincing me of an untruth, and that was exactly how things were with Airman Rook. Some choice phrases were exchanged, with his traveling companion attempting to mediate the damage—needlessly; I certainly wasn’t going to be offended by empty words slung at me from a wounded animal—before Badger commanded all of us, with diction even those who did not speak the Ke-Han language could understand as a soldier’s order, to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. He held Madoka in his arms like she was a fallen comrade, and I was fond of them, but my attention really was directed elsewhere.

  The item in question rested before us, forever altered. It reminded me of myself in some ways: The outer vestiges of what it once had been had been blown clean away, and now it was as much a part of Madoka as it was a part of a dragon at all.

  No wonder she was all tired out.

  It had to have been the dragon’s core—its heart, or perhaps more accurately, its soul. Whatever magician had wrought this beauty would never know the spectacular display it had given at its last—more than even a simply fiery death in battle could have allowed. I was so proud, even though it had never involved me directly. As a spectator, I had participated in such a beautiful exhibition that it would leave me changed for life. Even if parts of it turned out to be things Madoka might prefer to forget. That was something we all could appreciate.

  It might take years; it might take an entire lifetime; it might exceed my capacity for understanding at all. I had been through certain magical experiments myself, when I was young but not too young to remember all the details, and this surpassed them all. The sun was slowly beginning to set, and yet it had been brighter than the sun itself at full burning capacity, above us and unbearable in the desert sky. How had anyone managed to create such a wondrous thing, with full knowledge that it was to be used for destruction?

  Bastion bless the Volstov, I’d thought to myself, and even had the capacity to laugh at my own precious little joke.

  But that hadn’t left us in any better straits—they were, in fact, rather dire. Alone in the desert, no transportation, no water left, no knowledge of where we were: It all pointed to trouble. Yet more trouble. It was no sandstorm I could outlast nor desert tribe I could outwit. I’d never been the praying sort, but I was almost embarrassingly close to it. I could even see Badger was participating in a few prayers—perhaps he assumed his gods could hear him all the way out here, so far from home. I would never understand the deeply religious. I had never been the sort of person to give up in any situation, no matter how grim—I considered myself something of an opportunist, and a lucky one at that—but even I couldn’t see my way toward strolling free of this one. No amount of gumption or wit could charm the desert itself. We’d ridden this far from the oasis by following my nose, and not any natural landmarks, so that no one in our ragtag little gang even knew which direction to start in.

  We were, to put it shortly, quite doomed. But fate had a funny way of repaying me for services rendered—among other things I’d given up—and it seemed she’d decided not to allow the ink on my tale to dry, just yet.

  When we’d least expected it—indeed, I believed Badger himself had fallen into some sort of meditative trance—we were saved. Not by a stroke of luck from above, as I’d imagined, but by my favorite and least favorite man on earth. Well, currently, in any case. But nonetheless my intimate friend, Kalim.

  “You will ride!” he told me, meaning me and the others, after one of his men had dismounted to bring both Rook and Madoka some water. He’d had the good sense to ride out with a solid entourage, whether hoping to bring help or simply to show off the magnificent display of the desert magic, I would never know. In a moment of rare simplicity, especially for me, I found that I didn’t care one iota.

  They were efficient, very well trained, and I was unable to fully appreciate all that they had to offer, as I felt Kalim’s eyes on me the entire time. It put a decided cramp in my style, and I smoothed my skirts with fingers that were genuinely unsure. He didn’t think I was dangerous—he wasn’t trying to test me, to see if I would make the first move. In fact, there was an almost jovial camaraderie in his expression. I trusted it even less for that assumption. To him it might well have been nothing, but for me, it was the world.

  After drinking a few greedy gulps of the proffered water, Airman Rook finally did manage to draw himself to his feet, despite his companion’s adamant disapproval and insistence that he should absolutely not do so.

  “Can I ride with this?” Rook asked, limping proudly and foolishly over to the dragonsoul.

  “It appears cursed,” Kalim said. “It is changed. You should leave it here.”

  “There’s something I gotta do with it,” Rook said, leaning down and grunting. He looked like he was very near to coming apart at the seams, but it wasn’t my place to mention anything. I knew—call it womanly intuition—that my concern would not be appreciated. Somehow he managed to pick up the dragonsoul, then stood there swaying like a dead man. I admired his success, if not his motives. His companion ran over to him, as though to help, and after a moment I thought I saw the tension in his shoulders ease as he shifted—not half, but some of—his burden. “Get outta here, Thom,” he added, but there was no passion in it.

  “I will not,” Thom said.

  “Enough, enough!” Kalim said. “We will take you back to Karakhum. Are you sure you wish to bring that with you? You are hurt, and there are men there who would steal it.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Rook said.

  He was a ridiculous man. Impossibly stubborn and set on what he wanted. I couldn’t admire him, but I did envy his conviction. Just a little.

  Others could deal with him now; I would have to keep an eye on him and make sure he got rid of it, so that I could make my report back to the Esar without being contradicted by the evidence. I could at least tell that he did not intend to cling to it as some memento, as though it were really as simple and benign as a lover’s token. There was little left I had to worry about, save for incompetence. At least there were two of them; their separate brands of intelligences almost made them as clever as a single clever person.

  I turned to Kalim.

  “We shall ride,” I told him. “That man is wounded; the woman, weary.”

  “I saw a great deal of magic here,” K
alim told me, still looking cheerful, but also overawed.

  “Yes, well, I had very little to do with it,” I replied, feeling put out. “How far is Karakhum?”

  “We ride through the night,” Kalim replied, “and reach Karakhum in the morning.”

  And that is exactly what we did.

  I had never been to Karakhum, having passed through the Cobalt Mountain Range on my first trek out to the desert and bypassed the famous desert city quite entirely. It seemed a lonely and mean path when I thought about it now, though at the time it had been perfectly satisfactory. My mind had been solely on the chase, following a man who’d ended up buried beneath the dunes—I had never even gotten to meet him at all. Truth be told, I was a little disappointed that he’d been dispatched so easily. I would have to continue my search for my equal—someone who would not let me down when push came unequivocally to shove. This one, like all the others, had disappointed me.

  Such was the conclusion to this particular chapter.

  I rode the entire way to Karakhum on my own camel, thank you, keeping pace with Kalim’s out of choice and not because I was a witch under suspicion this time. A few of his men shot me curious looks, but looks had never bothered me before. I was a creature entirely unique. Not in the sense that every young woman with more powder on her cheeks than sense in her head thinks herself special, but truly different. If they wished to stare, they could; at least they did not consider me with the same comprehension as Kalim, for which I was grateful.

  As was often the case, I appeared different to them. They could not put a finger upon why, nor could they articulate the difference they observed. I was and was not the “typical” woman—or whatever facsimile they expected from their own comprehension of womanhood—for the simple reason that I was not born a woman at all. Nor, I suppose, did I have the requisite parts to receive their blessing as a woman even now. But that, as always, was beside the point.

  I’d made the decision when I was much younger, as contrary as ever to the current state of things. It was no secret among anyone in Volstov that a woman’s place in society was below a man’s, and though I was nothing but a forgotten orphan and therefore less than worthless to begin with, I somehow considered it my little joke: to be worth more than anyone else when I was at once a woman and an orphan. Contrary, indeed, but I knew the tales as well as anyone. There were ways to buy Talent with your own talents, to offer something to the earth and the sky and receive something from it in return. It was not so simple as drinking from the water and receiving the blessing—the strength, the power—but the one burr in my side was that I could not choose with what I would be gifted.

  I could, however, choose the form that would receive it.

  And besides which, it suited me better.

  I put myself in the hands of the Esar’s personal magicians—a blank slate, upon whom they could practice their designs without remorse; no one would notice I was missing. The experiments had been conducted while I was much younger, when I’d been deemed a suitable candidate for the process and had offered no protests to the contrary. I’d had very little in common with other children of a similar age and background—no parents or family at all to speak of, no one to protest or demand I be one way rather than another, and I’d imagined that perhaps I might find my way more easily through the world if I made this my purpose in life. Simply put, it was right for me. I was a little girl and, back then at least, my eyes were very innocent. Who would ever suspect me of any darker thoughts, any plans of my own or deeper designs?

  At that time, the Esar had been in need of an agent—a female agent—who could be trusted in Volstov and afar. It had to be a woman, for women were so often considered benign little jewels of the court, and for all their restrictions, the lack of consideration they were afforded allowed them, in some regards, greater mobility and greater access. I had nothing to say one way or the other about the injustice of this. It was the way Volstov was, and in my own way, I had subverted it. There were other women, magicians or widows, who managed to make a place for themselves among the men—whereas I had managed to make a place for myself among the women—and their strength and determination was that upon which I modeled myself, even at so young an age.

  The sacrifice of my freedom had seemed to me very small indeed, and I’d given it up much more easily than I had my tongue—a decision with which I’d made peace years ago. It hurt less, to begin with, and while losing my tongue made my body something less than what it once had been, this new change quite obviously did not. I’d hidden my true identity for as long as I could remember—there were some things the experiments had not done away with, and it took the utmost vigilance to keep them as intimate a secret as I wanted them kept. My clothing did a great deal of the work for me, and carefully trained body language did the rest. I had never allowed another man—or a woman, for that matter—to observe me in an undressed state, and I had never felt before that I was missing out on much. Riding beside Kalim now, however, made a strange memory rise to the surface, of another ride through the desert, when it had been cramped and hot with his arms around me and the wind kicking up ahead.

  It was the closest I’d ever been to another person. Even my old partner had never come so near. And yet I still felt as though it was too far, by some measureless standard that I’d never before anticipated using.

  How curious I was.

  The sun was rising again when we reached Karakhum. By then, I was more than ready to see the backside of my camel. I was a trained rider, but our travels of late had been quite intensive, and I was looking forward more than anything to a good soak in a private bath and perhaps the leisure of riding sidesaddle upon a sweet, properly trained horse.

  As always, though, I had some business to attend to before I could reward myself with even the simplest of pleasures. I couldn’t properly relax until I was sure that Airman Rook had destroyed the dragonsoul, and I could not be sure that Airman Rook had destroyed the dragonsoul until I saw it shattered with my own two eyes. As I watched his companion—Thom, he’d called him—ease him down off his camel, I had a feeling my presence wouldn’t be much welcomed by Rook’s bedside. There would be some recovery time required for both Rook and Madoka, and I might just be able to slip some personal time in during it. I could catch up on my correspondence, send the Esar a letter—carefully devoid of any more private details, of course, for despite what he thought, what the Esar did not know would not always harm him—telling him that I would be on my way to Thremedon very shortly, my foray into the desert successful. If my news was to his satisfaction, no doubt he would need the time to prepare for me a very warm welcome, and I wished to give him as much advance warning as possible.

  Then there was the matter of Dmitri, who always did fret so when I didn’t write him for months at a time. It put him in a frightful mood, pinned as he was to the city, and I didn’t think much of wishing that fate on his fellow wolves, not to mention the hapless criminals he caught, unlucky enough to run afoul of him during such a time.

  “This is where we part ways,” Kalim announced, sliding off his camel with an ease that I envied. “My men will not stay in the city.”

  “And what about you?” I asked. A desert breeze eddied around my boots, kicking up the dusty hems of my many-layered skirts. They would already be out of fashion in Thremedon, and I would have to buy new ones before I returned to the Esar’s court. For once, I found that I had nothing to do with my hands—no hair to twirl, no coy motions of the wrist. I was tired, I was hot, and I was—in all likelihood—sunburnt to within an inch of my life. I had never found myself so far removed from my element, and I had never been stripped so clean for all the gritty sand I felt everywhere.

  I ought to have known. Rumor had it the desert could separate a man’s flesh from his bones. It shouldn’t have surprised me at all that it had found no trouble in infiltrating the layers in which I’d cocooned myself.

  Kalim laughed, a hoarse, rough sound that was nonetheless pleasant to
hear. “I took my schooling in this city,” he said, “and I like its buildings and its windows. But I go where my men go. If I did not, I would find myself a very lonesome man, do you not think so?”

  “They should go where you lead them,” I said, stubborn and more peevish than I might have liked to seem—especially as an ambassador of my liege. The wind whipped a long, awkward piece of hair into my face, and before I could move, Kalim was there. He brushed it to one side, his fingers coarse as the sand itself. For once I looked him straight in the eye, even though all I wished to do was to drop my gaze. There was no artifice in the troublesome rhythm of my heart—simple adrenaline, I knew, but it had never reacted so over something as straightforward as this. I could smell him. Just as the sand was clean, so was his scent—the sweat and the sun and the camels a bare whisper over the skin beneath. “It doesn’t trouble everyone to be alone.”

  “Perhaps not,” Kalim said, shrugging his shoulders easily. He glanced over his shoulder as the Volstovics passed us by, the dragonsoul—and Rook, whether he’d admit it or not—in tow. We were lucky we had arrived early; there was no crowd to gawk at us. The dragonsoul might yet make it indoors without causing a commotion. “It seems to me that all creatures of warm blood desire some form of companionship or another. Even lizards and snakes seek mates. And, as you know, lizards and snakes are cold inside despite all this sunlight. But maybe that custom seems strange to one whose home is not the desert.”

  “I’m quite content with my walls,” I said, the words sounding hollow to my ears. My heart wasn’t pounding with excitement, but fear. I needed walls, just as Kalim needed the open space of the desert. We hardly knew one another. The safest, not to mention the simplest, thing to do would be part ways now. It would seem difficult at first, but in the end would prove much easier than whatever mad things were currently racing through my mind.