I heard my camel run off, and counted myself lucky that it did not trample my head as a parting gift before it went. It did, however, kick up sand into my eyes, and my wrist hurt very badly from where it had been wrapped within the reins. I could hear nothing else, only the sound of the sand whistling and howling all around me. At one point I called out for my brother, but the words barely left my lips before they were thrown back into my throat, along with so much sand I nearly choked. After that I learned not to open my mouth and pulled my arms over my head to keep the sand from clogging my ears and nose. I squeezed my eyes shut. It was possible this would last forever—or at least for long enough to bury us all here in the darkness. I tried to calm myself, repeating a few passages of my favorite books over and over to distract my mind from the certainty of death. Maybe, in a thousand years, someone would find my notebooks, and my writings would live on: the undiscovered works of a long-lost scholar. Or something like that. As of now, it was the only legacy for which I could reasonably hope.
And then someone touched my elbow.
“You just gonna lie there like that forever, or are you gonna do something about this shit?” Rook demanded, right next to my ear. He must have been close, since I could actually hear him, and felt his breath more than the cut of the sand.
I was as relieved as a little child, but also ashamed. Had I really given up? Why was it so easy for me and yet so difficult for him?
“Don’t open your mouth,” Rook continued, still shouting against my ear. “Just follow me.”
I searched out his hand, groping blindly through the sand with my own, and when I found it, I squeezed it, just to show him I understood. He grabbed it tight and pulled me forward, and I crawled after him. At least he felt guilty that he’d taken me all this way, only to land us smack in the middle of magic we barely understood and a storm we barely had the means of surviving.
All of it was for Havemercy. I’d hardly even known her. I certainly hadn’t loved her. In fact, I’d never had anyone to love—which perhaps was why I was incapable of understanding my brother’s determination right now.
I was jealous as well as baffled. I wondered, in a mean and angry rathole of my heart, if he would ever have fought this hard for me. Not back in Molly—when we were still really brothers—but now.
“Stop thinking!” Rook shouted, right up next to my head, so loud that it might well have shattered my eardrum. I didn’t know how he could tell what I was doing amidst all this mess, and in my own head, not to mention, but he was right. This more than anything was his area of expertise, and I’d do well to listen to him. The sand and the wind were so strong I could barely move, but I was trying, dragging myself forward and after my brother. I felt him move more than I could see him, and then the howling of the wind died down somewhat. He’d placed himself between me and the direction it was blowing from, and I would never be able to thank him for it. He’d simply never allow it.
A monumental ass, I thought wonderingly, and tucked myself against his body, allowing him to rescue me in this small way.
“What about the others?” I asked, up against his jaw. Some sand made it into my mouth, but not much, now that he was between me and the source of it all.
I felt him shrug, and I knew well enough what his answer would have been, if he could speak. Fuck ’em.
He was probably right. There wasn’t much we could do in the middle of the storm to save ourselves, let alone four relative strangers. Kalim, I reasoned, could probably handle himself next best to Rook—he’d been born into this sort of climate, hadn’t he? And as to the others, I would have to harden my thoughts. Leaving them to fend for themselves didn’t sit well with me, but what else could I do? I was as useful as a eunuch in a whorehouse—I had my brother to thank for that comparison—clutching to Rook’s hand and following him as he followed only bastion knew what. His own innate sense of direction, or whatever extrasensory perception he had for the dragonsoul’s pulse, calling out to him even across the most deadly of manufactured storms. Or pure stubbornness, when all else failed him.
I held close, plugging my nose and mouth with my free hand. My eyes I kept slitted open—even that stung them, but Rook almost certainly had his eyes open, and I wouldn’t make myself any more of a burden than I absolutely had to.
Gradually, because I had nothing else to turn my attention toward, and because I couldn’t stop thinking, no matter what Rook had told me, I noticed the ground was beginning to slope downward beneath our feet. It was a small thing, perhaps completely insignificant, but this mildest of changes gave me hope. At least I knew we weren’t simply wandering around in circles, which had probably been precisely our enemy’s intent.
They hadn’t counted on dealing with someone like my brother. With his particular set of skills, not to mention the formidable will he always exhibited, he certainly wasn’t the sort of man I’d have liked to imagine coming after me. My brother was exactly the kind of stubborn bastard Molly was so proud of churning out. He was more tenacious than most species of vermin, more terrifying than a childhood nightmare.
A fierce wind kicked up and I ducked my head behind Rook’s shoulder, holding him steady as the sand whipped around at our clothes and faces. He leaned back against me, taking my support as he tried to decide whether to head straight into the sudden gust or around it. Ke-Han wind magic had been a big part of Xi’An’s defense against the Dragon Corps; I remembered that. If anyone knew the best tactics for bypassing it, it was Rook. I stood as still as I could manage, trying to cultivate solidity where there hadn’t been much before. We were in this together, and even if he never thanked me for my help—what little there was of it—I was here to give him exactly that.
It was only a brief respite. Shortly, he began to move again, cutting a path through the rush of sand and throwing an arm up in front of his face to protect himself from the worst of it. There were a dozen things I wanted to ask him, but I wasn’t about to choke myself on sand just to speak. There was no space even to part my lips—it felt almost as though sand had replaced the very air around us.
Then, just as abruptly, we were through the worst of it. Rook stumbled forward, his momentum overcompensating in the sudden vacuum, and I fell straight into him, my bones turned to sand themselves. We must’ve come to the center of the storm—the relative eye of the cyclone, if it could be called that—and I breathed in painful, gasping gulps, taking the chance to fill my lungs while I still could. Rook coughed, and I brushed the sand from my eyes, taking great care not to rub it in. We were entirely covered in the stuff, I realized, now that I could see, and my brother looked more like an ancient statue rising from the dunes than a man of flesh and blood. He shook the sand off like a dog, then he was Rook again, if a little dustier than usual, all the sand crusted in the corners of his mouth and eyes, clinging heavily to his hair.
“See?” he croaked, licking his lips and spitting out sand into more sand. “Nothing to it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t quite say that,” said a not-unfamiliar voice, causing me and Rook both to whirl around almost in tandem. “Selling yourself short is such a mistake, after all.”
There was a slender, dark-cut figure standing against the backdrop of the swirling maelstrom. His face was thin and clever, and I immediately knew that I’d seen it before. It seemed like ages now, but it had only been a few weeks, less even than a month, since we’d last exchanged unpleasantries. Afanasiy. Fan. But what in bastion’s name was he doing here, and now?
Rook snarled, starting forward immediately, and I only just managed to catch him by the arm before it was too late. With some atavistic strength I’d never exhibited before, I hauled him back, keeping him from attacking out of anger, without thinking and, worse than that, without planning things through. Fan seemed to be alone, but if he was responsible for conjuring up a sandstorm like this one, then there was no telling what other tricks he had up his sleeve. Also, and this was more to the point, I couldn’t see the dragonsoul anywhere. Either he had a
n accomplice, or he’d stashed it somewhere he thought safe for the time being. None of this made any sense with the information I currently had, and that made me wary. Neither of us could afford to throw ourselves senselessly into the center of action.
My brother, however, had evidently considered none of this, and the look he shot me when I held him back was akin to a blow.
“Get the fuck off me,” Rook said, trying to shake me off like deadweight, which, at that moment, I supposed I was.
“Easy there,” Fan said, his tone light and breezy, the same as it had been that night at the countryside camp. “I’d take your brother’s counsel if I were you. He seems like the smarter one. No offense, of course. Just an observation.”
“Yeah, well I’d start observing a little more about your own situation if I were you,” Rook said, fighting against me less than he had been before. Never one to listen to counsel, of course, but never one to let anyone outsmart him, either. “Two against one doesn’t exactly scream ‘you’re a winner,’ and even if you are a fast little motherfucker, I’m willing to bet I could put you down.”
“Please,” Fan said, almost entreating. The condescension in his tone offended me, but that was beside the point. He was wearing a heavy coat in direct contradiction of the early-morning sun that now beat down overhead, and there was a curious light in his eyes that gave me less offense and more fear. “You don’t truly believe me to be that stupid, do you? By now, your little party is scattered across the desert, and the odds are entirely in my favor. This sandstorm was a neat trick, you must admit. Appears entirely natural to the untrained eye.”
“What have you done with it?” I asked, feeling like an intruder on the conversation. My voice didn’t sound nearly so sure as Rook’s or Fan’s, but I would have to make do. “Where’s the dragonsoul?”
Fan smiled in reply, a sickly grimace that looked like it’d been carved by a sculptor with a crude knife. I recognized it on the statues in the desert: a smug certainty, that air of immortality portrait artists often captured, which later generations come to understand as deeply ironic. Fan, however, did not seem to be one such deep thinker. “Do you know, I almost feel sorry for you?” he said, putting his hands behind his back. His stare was intent and malicious, but I couldn’t allow myself to look away. “You want this thing, this dragonsoul, for sentimental purposes. Because you can’t let go of the glory days, or you long for a memento. Something to stick up on your mantelpiece so you can look at it and remember a time when you were actually of use to the world around you, when you were more than relevant—when you were necessary. But you’ve got no imagination, no idea of the power contained in something like that. You can only see what it was: a part of an antique, as useless and outdated as the broken statues you passed along your way. But we…we have true vision. We’re the ones who will take the potential nearly destroyed by the likes of you, nearly lost to the desert or even shattered by your own hand, and put it to a better use.”
“That’s real nice,” Rook said. I could practically feel his pulse racing, and I held tight to his arm. I didn’t have any illusions about my strength compared to his if he really lost his temper, but I certainly wasn’t about to let go without a struggle. “You sound just like old Jonas down by the Mollydocks, reading fortunes for a ha’penny and spewing all kinds of shit-nonsense to anyone dumb enough to listen. Don’t think you’ve got an audience here. I don’t care what your stars said when you were a fucking tyke; I don’t care what you think you’re going to do with her. She’s mine, and that’s the way of things. I’d give you a chance—fight it and die or some better option—but you lost that a long time ago. You’ve only got one fucking choice now and I don’t give a flying shit what ace you’ve got tucked up your sleeve.”
Fan tilted his head and arched an eyebrow. The light in his eyes did make him look rather mad, I realized, or perhaps it was something to do with his close-set features. If we were lucky, he would have no Talent.
If we were not…
“I didn’t expect you to listen,” Fan said with a deep sigh. “Men like you are always so stubborn, for better or for worse. Or perhaps you can’t bear the idea that your precious ‘girl’ would be turned against you—just like this.”
“Where is it?” I asked again, steadier this time. Fan talked about his plans with the same bluster and fastidious detail with which many of my professors had attacked their specialties. I knew how to talk to people like that, how to flatter their vanity and make it seem as though even in defeat I admired their cunning, understood the intricacies of their peculiar genius. I had no confidence that it would work under these circumstances, of course, but it was the only chance I had. The principles were essentially the same. “What do you plan to do with it? With…her? And how can you be sure it’ll work, to begin with? No one to date has ever dismantled and reconstructed a dragon—you can’t possibly know that the parts will function as you’ve planned.”
“Whyever do you think we’ve come out here in the first place?” Fan asked, spreading his arms wide as if to encompass the desert itself. “It’s the perfect testing ground. No inconvenient buildings in place, no tiresome patrolmen to keep an eye out for. In fact, you merry rovers are the only obstacles we’ve currently run up against, but that’s all right. Onto every parade, a little rain must fall. Unless of course one comes to the desert,” he added, giggling thinly at his own joke.
“You’re not alone?” I asked, just to make sure. There was always the chance that he was speaking as the Esar did—Fan seemed far removed enough from the real world to assume that air—and I didn’t want to rush into things. Especially when I’d come so far in keeping Rook from doing just that.
“Oh dear,” Fan said, shaking his head. “And here I called you clever. Well, no matter, perhaps I can clear things up for you.”
He raised both hands, and I tightened my hold on Rook instinctively. The shifting miasma of sand at Fan’s back howled and began to part like a golden mist. There was a shape behind him that I couldn’t discern, impossibly large, too delicate to be one of the stone columns that had surrounded Kalim’s camp and somehow…familiar. I glimpsed an elegant neck, the cruel hook of a talon, and the stark, metallic outline of a rib cage.
Rook snarled and dragged me a full foot forward before I recovered myself, hauling back at him with all my weight while praying to anyone that might’ve been listening that now would be an excellent time to grant me just a bit of added strength.
I’d known what it was before my brother moved, of course. It was difficult to forget a face that’d left such an impression on me.
“I imagine she looks a little different than when you last saw her,” Fan said, and the sound of his voice made me want to hit him right between the eyes. “It’s a shame really. We had to make do with what we had, and as you can imagine, after the war it was difficult to get our hands on too many parts without looking suspicious. You could call this a collaborative effort though. She’ll carry Havemercy’s soul, but I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if there wasn’t a piece of all the dragons in that body.”
“You’re a real son of a bitch,” I said, both because I was unable to help myself, and my brother seemed too shocked to move. “I hope you know that.”
“Let’s not bring my mother into this,” Fan said. “The mere sight of you has already ruined my day quite sufficiently.”
“But you led us right to Sarah Fleet,” I protested, as Rook shifted slowly, with less anger this time and more calculated intent. “What possible reason could you have had—unless you meant for us to come here all along?”
“Well, not all of you,” Fan drawled. “The only one we really need is your brother.”
“Sucks to be fucking you,” Rook replied. He hadn’t even taken his eyes off the dragon—I couldn’t call her Havemercy, not in her current state—and I hadn’t really been sure that he’d even been aware of the conversation. “I ain’t biting.”
I could feel the tension in him, and for the fi
rst time I truly appreciated how much it was taking for him to remain still. He was waiting, no doubt measuring the distance between himself and Fan, weighing his options, planning his next move. If he hoped to stick a knife through Fan’s heart and exorcise him in that way, then he would of course wish to make sure his blade hit the mark. It was pressed between us currently, and I shifted, stepping away from Rook just enough that he would know he could remove it now without fear of somehow injuring me. Whether he noticed or appreciated my efforts was unclear, but Fan clicked his teeth together.
“Ah ah,” he tsked, holding up one hand. In it was a small vial of clear liquid; I had no idea whether it was something as simple as water or a substance far more potent. Rook’s jaw was hard. “No planning between you, please. No sudden movements, either.” He paused, licking his lips. The vial was important—perhaps that was his trump card. “Don’t recognize it, do you?” he added, after a brief moment. “Or, I suppose I should say, don’t recognize ‘her’?”
“Everybody changes,” Rook said harshly.
“Don’t do anything rash,” I cautioned—as though somehow my words could affect Fan’s decisions at all. I was still trying to talk him down from whatever madness he hoped to indulge in, here in the desert where no one from Volstov could see. If I could only manage to make him grandstand just a little longer—posturing enough to give me further clues as to his confederates, his desires, his motives—or at least distract him for long enough to give Rook a clumsy opening…As ridiculous as both plans were, they were all I had.
I squeezed Rook’s arm and his muscles tightened beneath the touch.
If only we might have worked together.
“It’s a good plan, actually,” Fan explained, gentling. He held the bottle up, but there was no light for it to catch, only solid walls of sand every which way, sunlight barely managing to filter in from far, far above. “We took this from the source itself, the guts of the soul, so to speak.” He shivered, but I wasn’t expert enough to tell whether it was feigned or genuine. “Opens you up to all sorts of theological philosophies, doesn’t it?”
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