As I’d thought, it wasn’t close by. Not anymore.
“He’ll escape,” the Volstovic finally said, in desperation, speaking with words I could actually understand. It startled the hell out of me, since I’d just assumed he had no idea what I was saying, same as I had no idea what he was saying, and both of us were even. Apparently we weren’t.
“Well, fancy that,” said Malahide, looking at him with sudden interest. “A man with a brain in his head.” She added something in the Volstovic tongue. “Perhaps he knows something about our thief after all,” she translated, for our benefit.
“You know him?” I asked the Volstovic. They’d shown up at around the same time, after all. They might even be partners, for all I knew, and he’d just passed the dragon-thing off to his buddy before running straight into me.
It took him a minute to think about how to reply, biting his lip and squinting his eyes and looking about seven different kinds of constipated, before he finally gave up. Looking deeply frustrated, and more than a little bit sorry, he nodded.
Obviously, he understood more than he could speak. That was just swell as far as I was concerned since I didn’t plan on letting him do a lot of the talking anyway.
“That settles it, then,” said Malahide, continuing before I had time to ask what exactly was settled. “He can’t have gone far. Not without becoming caught up in the fighting itself, and I doubt that he would risk such a prize amidst all this chaos.”
“So you think he’s just hiding somewhere, waiting for it to die down?” I demanded, with a sharp look at the Volstovic, just to see what he thought about that.
“I think that’s a distinct possibility, but our chances of finding him grow slimmer the longer we stand around talking about it,” Malahide said, suddenly sharp. It wasn’t just me who needed that dragon-thing bad. “Split up,” she added. “Madoka and I will take the north, Badger can take the south. The size of the dragon piece in question should hamper the thief’s movements slightly, but we should still be on our guard.”
“Understood,” Badger said, and he touched my shoulder before striding off into the night. I hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid. There was no telling with soldiers.
“You, my dear little captive, will come with us,” Malahide said, and the Volstovic blanched. “Ah, you really do comprehend! How marvelous. You mustn’t think I begrudge you giving me the opportunity to relish my native tongue once more, but my companion here would feel extremely left out. Do you understand?”
“…Little,” the Volstovic said hesitantly. His accent wasn’t bad, but he looked like he was about to piss his pants. He eyed me nervously. “A little bit?”
“Let’s get a move on, yeah?” I said, not particularly interested in bridging the gap between our two distinct and beautiful cultures right now, or whatever the hell Malahide was trying to do.
“Of course, my dear,” said Malahide, springing forward and dragging our captive along behind her. “Now the hunt begins in earnest.”
I followed her swift footsteps as we cut through the main camp, passing the place where the tents for sleeping had been cloistered together. Here, farther from the center than the chief’s tent had been, the sounds of battle were much louder. The dull, dry thud of camel hooves beating the sand filled the air, and my ears rang with the clash of metal on metal. Someone howled like he’d been stabbed straight in the gut, and I caught the Volstovic flinching at the sound. Of course he’d shown up at around the same time as the raiders; it made sense that he’d have friends among their ranks. What didn’t make sense, as far as I was concerned, was what a Volstov was doing running around in the desert in the first place. It wasn’t exactly my first choice for a vacation spot, and he didn’t really seem to be the rugged adventurer type.
Then again, he was probably asking himself the exact same question about me.
I checked the compass hands, which were useless anyway, pointing all over. Then I headed in the direction of the tents. Good place to hide; made sense. Good place to start.
We tore into the first one like wild animals, knocking aside a makeshift hammock strung up between two of the oasis trees. Fortunately, the lifestyle of the bandits made it pretty easy to search their tents—they were small and necessarily left uncluttered, easy to pack up and pack out as quick as you liked. That left no room for a sneaky thief to hide himself, and if he’d ducked inside hoping to wait it out until the battle’d ended, he was about to get himself a real nasty surprise. I figured I’d pretty much lucked into the better team, since Malahide had that whole trick of following her nose to get to the prize, but in close quarters like this, I guessed it must’ve been harder to tell where the smell was coming from. And considering all the shit that was flying around us…We’d have to rely more on my hand than her nose, anyway.
After the fourth tent, though, she pulled up sharp, and the Volstovic went stiff like he thought he was about to get a knife in the back.
The compass hands were whirling now, like they didn’t know which direction to point.
I stared at Malahide, hoping she had some better clue.
“West. Toward the water?” she mused, in her strange little voice. Then she picked up the pace, and I threw myself after her, ignoring every signal in my body that begged me to just lie down and sleep for the next fourteen years or so. “He can’t possibly be thinking of swimming out, can he? He’d get it wet…though perhaps it doesn’t rust…?”
“He was crazy enough to steal the thing right from under my nose,” I pointed out, which only made her pick up the pace. Meanwhile, our hostage followed, tripping now and then over his own feet, his mouth set in an unhappy little line. I didn’t blame him one bit, except of course he’d gone and gotten himself involved in the first place, so maybe he’d think twice next time before he pushed himself into other people’s crazy business.
We came to a rockier area, where little scrubby bushes were sprouting up between the cracks, and the path narrowed, like the one Badger and I’d followed to find the desert village. Now we’d come to the end of the road as far as the oasis was concerned, and my hand was starting to pulse. I didn’t even have to check the compass to know we were getting closer.
“You first,” Malahide said to the Volstovic, adding something in his language. I could only assume it was just in case they were in league together; she must’ve wanted the thief to see a friendly face and let his guard drop before we all came swooping down on him.
Reluctantly, with the hunched shoulders of someone well used to being bossed within an inch of his life, our captive took the lead. Not exactly a vision of bravery, I thought. Malahide plowed right in after him, ducking and weaving around the shaggy palms like some kind of expert, while I followed clumsily behind. The Volstovic stumbled against the wet stone, and she yanked on his arm, pulling him back neatly to his feet.
He muttered something that might have been his thanks, then fell silent once again.
I scraped my leg against the rough bark of one of the trees, and privately cursed up a storm. I wasn’t normally such an ox when it came to navigating on my own two feet, but this pain in my hand was throwing me for a real loop. The fever hadn’t gotten any worse, but it wasn’t getting any better, either. I had to find the little rat-turd who’d stolen what I needed to get back to my old self. My brain was cooking inside my head—it had to be, with how hot I was all the time now—and there was still some chance I could save it. Getting that dragon stuff back was the only way I knew how to do it, and I was damned if I was going to let a common thief get in my way.
There was something different about the air over by the oasis pool—a strangeness I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it was how distant the sounds of the battle suddenly seemed—as though we’d moved far enough down the camp so as to be removed from the danger completely—but I knew in my gut that it wasn’t just that. The old woman had always told me that your gut sense was the only one worth paying even a smidge of attention to, since it only spoke up when
it had something important to say.
I had no idea what my gut was trying to tell me as I followed Malahide farther down the path toward the oasis pool; but whatever it was, I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like it very much.
Then the Volstovic let out a shout.
He broke into a run, and Malahide took off after him, leaving me—as always—to bring up the perpetual rear. There was something near the lip of the pool that I couldn’t quite make out—it was too dark for that—but it was definitely a big something. Too big to be the dragon-thing, too. The Volstovic was the first to reach it, and he pulled up short, like all of a sudden he wasn’t so sure he wanted to be this close to whatever it was. His back was rigid, and his hands shook at his sides. Malahide reached him a short few seconds later and she immediately dropped to her knees, turning the thing over with her delicate white hands.
I saw two eyes, glazed and fixed in a staring face, before I had to look away. It was a body, lying suspiciously far from the battle currently raging around the camp.
I wasn’t exactly new to a sight like this. Hell, it’d been home for a while there; the capital’d been full of death the days following the war.
This was a personal death, though; a man whose throat had been slit. I couldn’t tell whether he’d been our hostage’s friend or not, but they definitely knew each other, because as soon as the hostage took one look at the dead body he turned away and threw up. Malahide let him have his moment, checking the guy’s pulse, but I could’ve told her that wasn’t necessary. I knew a dead body when I saw one.
“Did you know him?” Malahide finally asked.
The hostage nodded. “Y-yes,” he managed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Who was he?” Malahide pressed.
The hostage struggled, obviously at a loss for words, then said something to Malahide in a language I didn’t understand, with an apologetic look at me.
“Spare it for someone who needs it,” I told him, a little too harsh. He winced and I felt bad, but not bad enough to do anything about it. Then I turned to Malahide. “What’s he saying?”
“He says that this man was once a friend of his,” Malahide replied. “He was a researcher in the desert.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. “If he doesn’t have the goods, who does?”
The pain in my hand was receding. Whoever had the dragon piece now was already moving farther away, far enough away that I could start thinking, in fits and bursts, for myself. Malahide’s mouth tightened.
“He had it once,” she explained. “I can smell it on him.”
“Not anymore,” I said grimly, and looked out into the darkness to see nothing but the sand. He was getting away from us, but we had two up on him: my hand, and Malahide’s nose.
We were gonna track him down, no two ways about it.
We were gonna find him.
ROOK
It’d been a hell of a long time since I’d been in the middle of a real fight. That shit back at the inn on the other side of the mountains didn’t count, barely even got my blood up, though it relieved the itch at the time. But it couldn’t get me going like a real fight could, and this was a real fight.
Some of the principles were the same, and some were totally different. Keep your legs tight so nothing and no one could come up and knock you off your mount—that one was basic. But I wasn’t used to having a mount that spooked in battle, and maybe Kalim’s camels were used to being caught right in the thick of it, but the one I’d got in Karakhum sure as shit wasn’t. That was fine, just meant I had to be a little more forceful with the reins, dig my heels in a little harder, that kind of action. If anything, I knew how to be persuasive no matter what—or who—I was riding.
’Course, it wasn’t the same as how things used to be. I guessed things’d never be that way again, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. No one to talk to while I fought, no one to tell me what I was doing wrong and—more likely—what I was doing right. A couple of times I found myself coming up next to Kalim, but he was in his own world and I was in mine; the two of us might as well’ve been completely alone for all we weren’t paying fuck-all attention to one another.
He was a good fighter, Kalim, serious and down to business, with no unnecessary flourishes. I’d had a good time fighting him one-on-one, so it stood to reason I’d have a good time fighting with him, both of us on the same side. There were some guys who just understood the rules: how to cover someone’s back and how to lead a real charge, and you didn’t have to worry about covering their asses because they knew what they were doing as well as you did. That was what I’d really missed. Working in a group that knew its head from its ass.
One of the bandits came shouting toward me and I pushed a sudden burst of speed onto my camel, getting up a good momentum to knock him over. I guess we’d really surprised them, since a lot of them had just run out screaming over the desert like ants, without even taking the time to mount up proper. Bad luck for them, but it made picking ’em off real easy. I caught his sword against my blade—all sorts of jokes you could make about bringing a knife to a sword fight, but I figured there were more jokes you could make about bringing the weapon you didn’t know shit about using to any fight at all. I’d never had to use a damn sword before, and I wasn’t about to test out learning one in the middle of the desert. Besides, I was quicker with a knife, and on my camel I could keep the advantage easy enough.
On my right side, I could see Kalim giving ground against two enemies. To anyone else, it might have looked like he was struggling, but I’d come to know a little something about the look on his face right before he pulled a tricky maneuver. Sure enough, he twisted his mount around in a neat, swift movement that I’d have to get him to teach me someday, dodging one enemy’s rush and skewering the other ferociously. One side of his face was covered in blood, and he was grinning like some little baby’s idea of a bogeyman in a nightmare. My own opponent came at me again and I caught him in the chest with my boot, sending him sprawling over backward into Bakr or Jabr or whichever brother it was who looked about one week away from the eternal dirt nap himself. Whoever he was, he finished the job for me, and gave me a funny little wave with his sword before he went plunging back into the heart of battle. He’d lost his camel and I hadn’t. I was doing real good.
Even though it hadn’t been long ago that we’d started, I could already smell the end of the fight coming up soon. But it’d been one of those scrapes from the beginning: over before it really started, and every man worth his blade knew it. They hadn’t been expecting us, and I was cutthroat. We’d come riding down on them like hellfire and worse, and we didn’t leave much in our wake.
I had half a mind to throw myself off the camel just to even up the odds a little bit, prolong the fight as much as I could, but I wasn’t that stupid. Getting cocky was one thing, but giving up your advantage because of it was just plain suicidal. Besides, I wasn’t the kind of guy to yield high ground to anyone.
The one rule we had to follow was to spare the leader—probably so Kalim could do the honors with his own hand—and I could respect that. Didn’t know how I was going to recognize the guy if or when I saw him, but I stuck to Kalim and I cut down anyone who got in my way, and yeah, it made me feel pretty good about myself. Probably lucky that Thom was somewhere else and didn’t see me get into the thick of it—not because he didn’t know what I was capable of already, since he did, but because he would’ve given me hell if he saw it with his own two eyes, and I didn’t need to be lectured.
I grabbed one of the ones who’d had time enough to mount up and cut his throat while I was dragging him off the camel. Sure, it probably did say something piss-poor about me as a person—that I could feel more alive while other people were dying—but there wasn’t much I could do about it, let alone anyone else. It was what it was. No arguments there, and no amount of talking about it would make anyone feel better. In fact, it’d probably make everyone feel worse, and i
t was my job to make sure we didn’t come to that. Contrary to popular bastion-damned belief, I thought about that kind of thing; you could do it and be particularly good at cutting up your fellow man, which was something some people had a real hard time understanding.
There was blood all the way up to my elbows and spattering the front of my shirt when we finally found him, Kalim’s enemy, the leader of the rival tribe. Kalim grabbed him by the hair and held him up and everybody started cheering, myself included, despite me not knowing what the fuck I was actually cheering for. Kalim might’ve had what he wanted, but I didn’t. And I wasn’t about to sit through a cross-examination in a language I didn’t even know. That wasn’t why I was here.
“Do not worry,” Kalim said to me; it clearly made his captive piss his pants that a stranger was here and that Kalim was talking to him in a strange language, so the kindness for me was probably a tactical maneuver. It was a good one. “Go find your brother. I will take care of this—I will get the information that I need.”
“That we need, you mean,” I said.
“Hm,” Kalim said, a little wickedly. We both had that same dead man’s humor—not when we were dying ourselves, mind, but when we were looking straight at somebody we’d have no problem killing—so I let him have his moment and I headed off to look for Thom.
First thing was first: He wasn’t where I left him.
This wasn’t a new feeling for me.
There were plenty of things that could happen to Thom in between me leaving him and me coming back to him; he’d started doing that a whole lot of years ago, probably kept on doing it to somebody else when I wasn’t there to be a part of it, and once we’d started traveling together he’d picked it right back up with me again. Wait right here by this bush would always mean you’d never come back to find him waiting by that bush; there was always an excuse for why he hadn’t waited—always a long speech about what’d made him wind up standing next to a tree in the next glade over or lying in a ditch a few feet away, or ass deep in some spring staring at all the little fishies wondering if they were flesh-eating or not. Yeah, flesh-eating fish, in a stream in Volstov. That made fucking sense. Made sense to get into the water too, if that’s what you thought they might be.
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