But such thoughts would only bring me to ruin or despair, and I required all my energy for digging.
Rook was the most stubborn person I’d ever met, and I knew he would cling to life with the same tenacity he chose to exhibit for all the other activities and objects most important to him. Havemercy was the one thing about which he’d been most passionate, but over the course of our journey I was beginning to understand some of the others as well. Rook liked his freedom—he’d taken to the desert like a native, comfortable in ways I could never hope to approximate even after years of trying to settle down—and he seemed to like traveling. Reason should have dictated that he was happiest with nothing and no one to answer to—he’d chafed considerably under the Esar’s command, after all, which had caused all our mutual grief in the first place—but something gave me the sense that this initial assessment wasn’t quite accurate. There was some valuable piece of the puzzle that I was still missing, and I scrambled to uncover it just as I was attempting to displace an entire desert in order to find my brother.
The sand was hot—it burned my fingers—and the sun was growing almost intolerable. I tore my shirt off, winding it around my head as a makeshift protection from the heat—my back and arms would be less lucky, but these were small losses against a more immeasurable one—and I kept on digging, mindless of what discomforts the desert might visit on me. I dug until my fingers grew numb, chapped and red from the heat, the skin under my nails beginning to bleed.
My brother hadn’t come all the way out here, chasing a phantom of the past, because he liked things best on his own. He’d come because what he really wanted was something—or someone—on which to constantly test his teeth. He wanted someone who could roll with the punches and give him as good as they got, in return. Someone who, bastion help them, could in all likelihood keep him in line, though the relative position of that line might have to be moved every so often in order to keep him from being garroted by it.
Rook no longer had Havemercy, but he still had me.
Without warning, my fingers brushed up against something smooth and hard in the midst of the little sinkhole I’d created. I froze, my heart picking up sudden speed like the unsteady thundering of my camel’s hooves. But I couldn’t afford to falter now, and I plowed back in with renewed vigor, trying to extract sand from around what I’d hit. Further digging revealed a shoulder, clothed in dusty blue—my brother for certain, then, and not Fan. A revolt started in my stomach, all the way down to the tips of my fingers, now cracked and messy with sand-dried blood.
Even as I continued to dig, clearing the sand away with feverish need, I was still afraid. I was afraid that I was about to haul my brother’s lifeless body out of the dunes, afraid that then I would truly be alone. I was so terrified of this that it nearly froze my blood in my veins.
I stood quickly, bracing myself against the ground to pull at Rook’s shoulder, towing him up under the arm I’d managed to clear. It was horrifically difficult, the sand heavy and Rook even heavier, and when I’d managed to get him up some of the way I tucked my arm firmly around his rib cage for better leverage. I pulled him back against me and hauled with all my might.
When he finally did come free, the sand sucking and popping against and around his body, I stumbled over backward, dragging him with me. We collapsed back onto the surface of the dune, in the shadow of Havemercy’s frame, the impact knocking the breath from my lungs. I could see the dragonsoul out of the corner of my eye, winking merrily in the sun like the most beautiful of desert jewels—a true diamond in the rough. The sand beneath us burned my back and the sun overhead was so hot as to be nearly unbearable. I was being baked alive, but at least I was alive.
Rook, however, didn’t move, neither to lift his head nor to swat me with his hand, all in order to tell me what an idiot I’d been. He looked worse than I’d ever seen him, pale beneath the sand and the front of his shirt soaked in dark blood. The knife was missing, probably lost under the sand along with Fan, though the damage it’d done remained. There were things I had to do—measures I had to take to be sure—but my heart was already sinking. Part of me wanted nothing more than simply to lie here and wait for the end to come and finish us both off. I was so tired that I felt as though there couldn’t possibly be anything left within me. I couldn’t even lift my own hand to shield my eyes from the sun. And I was angry with Rook, because so many things in the past had failed to kill him. How dare he leave me now? How dare he let something so small become something so large? If I’d only put my foot down, I might have made it clear to him that he was only chasing a dream through the desert. Desert wind whistled through the metal bones at my back. There it was, the last remnants of a war he’d won, and—irony of all ironies—this was what had finished him off.
I hadn’t finished my task, though, and I knew that I’d never be able to look my brother in the eye if I admitted defeat now. If he was alive, of course.
Besides, it wasn’t in my nature to give up on a lost cause. We were Mollyrats, after all. Lost causes and refusal to give up even when thoroughly beaten were a part of our blood.
I fumbled for a moment, then grabbed Rook by the wrist. There was a pulse there, faint but real. I had no way of knowing how long it would continue to beat before it thumped its last.
With monumental effort, I pushed Rook off me, rolling into a sitting position myself. He looked more like a statue than ever, coated in sand and still as stone. I pressed his chest in hard compressions with both hands, leaning my head close to see if I could hear or detect even the faintest signs of breath.
“Ridiculous,” I found myself muttering, continuing the rhythm of pressure against his chest as best I knew how. “This isn’t the proper way of things at all, do you know that? I’m the one who gives up; I’m the one who makes everyone worry when there’s hardly any cause for it. Don’t tell me you mean to switch places, because that’s hardly fair at this juncture—I don’t think I’d be able to adjust at all. That’s your strength again, do you see? I’m not adaptable. You’ve gone and gotten us all mixed around so I can’t make heads or tails of it anymore, and you don’t even have the common decency to stick around and clean up after the mess you’ve made? I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything better.”
I’d really done it now. I’d held on to it as long as I could, but now I’d lost my mind at last, and there I was, babbling to myself like an asylum inmate in the middle of the desert.
My throat caught, then I no longer had the heart or the breath for words beyond my increasingly desperate mutterings as my ministrations grew in turn more frantic. I was furious with him. He was the one to engage in such dangerous activities, and yet he had the gall to reprimand me for attempting to partake in them?
Yet I was clearly fine. He was the one who needed looking after.
To one side, the dragonsoul was glowing, even in the bright light of midday. I didn’t want to look at it, but I found my eyes hopelessly pulled in its direction. It was like a siren call, too lovely to resist, and yet drawing everyone around into ruin. As far as I knew, it had killed us all. I was the only survivor, while the others had been dashed upon the rocks, lured in by her promise and charm, and destroyed by their own desires.
A mere object, like the soul before me then, didn’t have that kind of power—I knew this logically—and yet I was forced to draw my conclusions from the circumstances around us. Rook and I were the only ones left, and we were just two broken bodies in the middle of all this sand, sheltered by a relic from another time.
Then I heard a slight sound, almost like a cough, and I whipped around to face Rook so quickly that it made the muscles in my neck scream out in protest.
Rook looked exactly the same. Any movement I thought his chest was making had to be a hallucination, a trick of the heat. But, stubborn and hopeful, I leaned over him closely, my eyes scanning anxiously over his body for any sign that what I’d heard had been real and not some aural mirage of the desert.
“John?
” I whispered, my face inches from his own.
For a long moment, he had no answer for me. It was so painful to wait that I wished to find that knife and demand a response from him.
Then he let out an explosive cough and sand sprayed me directly in the eyes. Blinded, I grabbed him by the shoulder and rolled him onto his side, thumping him hard on the back as more coughing followed the first pathetic burst. I pushed the hair from his face as he choked, trying to brush him off as best I could before I attended to my own eyes. His entire body was tensed with the force of his expulsions—his body doing everything it could to take in the air now available—and I kept my arm around him tight, my hand against his back.
I wished I had some water to offer him, but I’d lost all our supplies along with the camels. Everything was gone.
Yet we were alive—though a few more hours of this heat would finish us both off.
“Do we have it?” Rook demanded, still choking.
No “Are you all right, Thom?” or “Am I all right, Thom?” It was the one question I should have expected, and the one question I was the least prepared to hear.
I thumped him again, a good hard one, on his back, and felt him wince.
“Bastion,” I said. Now I felt like a cruel bastard, and then some. “You’re hurt—”
“Something like that,” Rook muttered, waving me away, as though I wasn’t trying to help him. “I asked you a fucking question.”
“We have it,” I said. Resigned to my place, I turned to retrieve the dragonsoul.
Only it was gone.
In its place were a pair of boots. A shadow fell over me, and I told myself then that every insult Rook had flung my way—every phrase that began as a compliment and quickly turned sour, every exasperated “I’ll just fucking take care of it”—was probably justified. And yet I was justified, as well—more concerned about my brother’s life than the piece of magician’s work that, though it may have been called a soul, was no more than a capsule housing a splash of this and a dash of that, all of it as simple as a little bit of magic.
How had I missed this, though? Three backlit figures stood before me; all I could make out from the shadows was the sudden glint of sunlight upon the soul.
“You boys have been busy,” Malahide said, taking in the rebuilt form of the dragon behind me. “It hardly seems fair to take this from you when you’re in such a state.”
Rook grunted. I had no way of knowing if it was from pain or rage, though I settled on grasping his hand, just in case it was the former.
“Ain’t that nice,” Rook said. “We do all the fucking work, then you waltz in here after the storm’s cleared and take what we fought for. You and th’Esar…you’re all the same.” Something told me he had more to say, but there was too much sand in his throat for him to say it. A small blessing, perhaps; there might have been a chance that, by degrading myself and begging for assistance, our lives would be spared. Rook would of course never forgive me, nor would he ever speak to me again, but at least I would have the knowledge that he was alive and well—somewhere—which was more than I’d had once, and it would have to be enough for me. I tried to tell myself that it would be all right, that I could not live in the desert nor probably make it to Eklesias if these were always to be the terms of our travels, but that was a blatant lie, and I was too tired for lying.
“Assumptions, assumptions,” Malahide said, clicking her teeth. “I came to ask you if I could borrow this, not keep it.”
“And give it to your fucking master?” Rook snarled. There wasn’t even true vehemence in his voice. He sounded beaten. I wanted to beg him now—to stop talking, and save his breath—but it would have been selfish of me to ask that. My motives were less than pure. I just couldn’t bear hearing him like that.
“Things happen in the desert,” Malahide said easily. I envied her her composure and wished she would stop flaunting it. “It will be the first time I’ve failed to accomplish a task outright, but if I bring him proof of its destruction in place of the dragonsoul itself, that should cover things nicely. That is, of course, presuming you do still plan to destroy it.”
“Bitch,” Rook said.
“Rook,” I snapped.
“No need,” Malahide told me. “I’m well accustomed to gratitude phrased in similar ways.”
“But what about your…friends?” I asked. “They want it too. Are they relinquishing their claims?”
“It’s a complicated matter,” Malahide replied, in a way I didn’t quite appreciate. “There’s something they must do with it, and then, I suppose, it’s all yours—if you promise not to be idiots and to destroy it.” Rook squeezed my hand and I winced. His grip was quite tight. “I leave that last honor to you,” Malahide continued, nodding to Rook, “because, as you so eloquently pointed out, you did do all the fucking work.”
I looked at my brother. His eyes were squeezed shut almost all the way as he squinted up at Madoka; beneath all the sand, his skin was deathly pale. If we continued to discuss the terms of our agreement, he was going to bleed out all over the desert floor and I refused that end with every fiber of my being. I squeezed his hand back, and hard, and suddenly the corner of his mouth twitched up into some haggard semblance of a smile.
“Madoka needs it, huh?” Rook asked.
“Indeed,” Malahide replied.
“Fine by me,” Rook said. It might have seemed like nothing at all to anyone else, but I knew what it meant. It was the return of Rook’s mean-spirited, shit-slinging, offensive grin, and if he was able to joke about a woman where Havemercy was concerned, then he’d finally let go of her. I breathed out, very slowly, my lungs afraid to hope along with everything else in my chest.
“Are you sure?” I asked him.
“Anything for a real lady,” Rook replied, and I knew he’d spit more sand at me if I pressed the issue any longer.
“Then it’s settled,” Malahide replied, and began to turn to her companions.
“Well,” I said, “actually, my brother—”
“This’ll only take a moment,” Malahide said. “And then we’ll see about getting the wounded out of this sun pit.”
“Don’t ever let a woman talk to you like that,” Rook told me raspily. “I mean, if you can call that horse-face a woman.”
“I’m glad to see you back in such fine spirits, Rook,” I said, and meant it with all my heart.
MADOKA
At last, we were together. Me and the dragon-thing, and no magician standing between us. We weren’t alone, and for that I was kinda grateful, although if shit went down after all the rest—the sandstorm and the crazy magician and the almost being buried alive—or if I made a total ass of myself when it came down to getting my end of things done, then I might be feeling a little less gratitude. Only time and the shakedown could tell.
Malahide’d as good as admitted to me she didn’t know if this trick I’d agreed to pull was gonna work, but it was the only shot in hell I really had, and I knew as well as she did—even as well as Badger did—that I had to take it. I wasn’t going to make it back to Volstov, we all knew it, and this thing sitting in the middle of the sand was pretty much my only shot—no matter how much I really didn’t want anything to do with it.
And at least I could console myself by saying I wasn’t as bad off as the Volstov bastard was, the one lying in the sand and bleeding all over the place. Actually, I probably was as bad off as he was, maybe even worse, but at least I wasn’t sweating and puking and shaking and passing out like I had been the last time I’d been face-to-face with the thing my compass was pointing toward. And that was a good start for me. Boded well. Auspicious, the priests would say.
The main problem was, I was still afraid of it.
“Guess it’s kinda dumb to ask if this is gonna rip my hand off along with everything else, right?” I asked, glancing over at Malahide. She looked small, but she must’ve been pretty strong to carry that thing without breaking a sweat—and wearing those fucking impossible shoe
s, not to mention. She didn’t even stumble or waver, whereas just looking at those high-heeled Volstov boots made my legs cramp.
“I suppose it might be,” Malahide agreed. “Never a dumb question, really, but you already know I can’t possibly tell you the answer to that.”
“So it is a dumb question,” I said. “Let’s leave it at that.”
Not exactly comforting, that Malahide.
“I don’t like it,” Badger said, looking between me and the dragon like he was afraid he’d blink and we’d switch places.
“You think you’re the only one?” I snorted, which was easier than letting him know I was shook up. He was kinda sensitive for a soldier, and I didn’t wanna give him another reason to worry, on top of everything else.
Hell, I didn’t blame him for worrying, after what that magician had said about his true plan, or whatever. So I should probably have been even more afraid than I already was. But given the choice of fucking myself over worse while trying to take steps toward improving my situation, and not doing anything at all, I knew my answer was pretty clear. Like I’d said, there was no way I could make it back in one piece to Volstov. And besides, I wasn’t letting more magicians fuck around with me. Definitely not Volstov magicians who—like Malahide—hadn’t ever seen magic like this before.
Madoka wasn’t anyone’s experiment. Not anymore.
“Okay,” I said. “Everybody wanna stand back or something? Since we don’t know what it’s gonna do?”
The friend of the Volstovic guy bleeding all over moved between us and him and said something to Malahide I didn’t understand.
“He wishes to know what, exactly, we’re doing,” Malahide translated for me. She drew closer and added, in a quieter voice so only me and Badger could hear it, “And he knows what he’s talking about, so lying to him probably won’t do. Shall I tell him the truth? It’s possible he might not let us, with his wounded companion so close to all this. But we can’t take any risks; we certainly can’t bring this back to a more populated center of civilization. We’d risk countless more lives, not to mention having the dragon piece stolen right out from under our noses a second time.”
Dragon Soul Page 45
