From below, someone shouted, and I could see dimmer lights turning on, torches and oil lamps, doors opening and people staring out of their windows.
I drew back from the edge of the roof, pulling Thom with me.
“Come on,” I said, and before my brother could say anything stupid to ruin the moment, I grabbed on to his arm, wheeling him around the way we’d come.
Sometimes I didn’t give him enough credit, though, ’cause he didn’t seem to be all that surprised. Instead, he just had that resigned look on his face, like he thought that’d fool anyone into thinking he wasn’t anything but happy at being dragged off to our next destination. Wherever it was.
“Are you well enough to ride?” he asked, like he wasn’t the one stumbling after me.
“I’m fine,” I told him, and if he wanted to take that in both directions at once, he could. I knew he wasn’t just asking about my injuries, anyway. I was either too smart for him, or he wasn’t that subtle to begin with. Or we just knew each other a little bit by this point. “Job’s done, anyway. Hate getting sidetracked.”
Thom craned his head around to see if he could make heads or tails of the commotion taking place below us. Everyone’s lights were on now, and I could hear angry shouts mixed with more excited ones—probably the opportunists who’d noticed the precious metals laid into the shards of glasswork. Those would’ve survived the fall, I imagined, but that wasn’t my concern. My stake in it was over, my work was done, and I wasn’t interested in looking back. Neither of us could protect each other anymore.
There were all sorts of horses stabled outside the place we’d been staying. It made me feel a little low-down to be stealing from sick people, but then we’d be leaving our camels behind, so as far as I was concerned, it was a fair trade. Thom didn’t even pipe up once to complain about it, either, which gave me some idea of just how bad an influence I was turning out to be. He did a neat job of prepping the horses, checking the bridles and making sure the saddles weren’t too loose. I didn’t know where this sudden burst of competence had come from, but if I had to guess, I’d have said it was pure fucking gratitude at getting the hell away from his camel and back onto an animal that made more sense to him.
“Did you have a destination in mind?” he asked, leading my horse up to me, neat as punch, like all of a sudden he was some kind of cindy mind-reading animal savant.
“Still have to get to Eklesias, don’t we?” I asked. I eyed the horse for a minute, trying to decide on the best approach, only while I was doing it, Thom was suddenly at my side, pulling my arm over his shoulder and hefting me up onto the horse, like I was a sack of vegetables or something equally useless. I sure as bastion shit didn’t like that feeling very much. Oh how the tables had fucking turned. I’d’ve hit him in the head if it’d even looked like he was thinking about laughing, but he didn’t.
We’d have to pretend that never fucking happened.
“There’s nothing to remember,” I said, taking him off guard again and before he could start back to his own horse.
“Pardon?” he asked, fiddling with my reins before I yanked them out of his hands. He looked like he might’ve known what I was talking about, but he wanted me to say it first. Just so he could be sure.
You know what they say about assumptions, I thought, and figured it couldn’t hurt to do him one good turn. So long as he didn’t get too used to this.
“You and me,” I clarified, going along with his little game. “There wasn’t much, and what there was wasn’t any good to begin with, so you’re probably better off not knowing about it. Dear old Mom and Dad skipped out on us both pretty early so it’s not like I can tell you much about them. She looked like you; he wasn’t even around. As for the rest, you were a pain in the ass then, and you’re a pain in the ass now, so it’s not like much has changed. Just in case you were thinking it was any different.”
“I see,” Thom said, wearing a quiet smile on his face. “I suppose I’d rather expected as much; a starved toddler doesn’t exactly make for the fondest memories.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Anything you dig up from the past’s always gonna be just that. You can’t hold on to it, and you can’t go back to it, so it doesn’t seem to me like there’s much damn point. Better to focus that big brain on something that’ll make a real difference—at least that’s what I think. Can’t change anything from back then. Better just to keep your mind on what’s next so nothing gets you in the nuts, you know what I mean?”
Maybe it was some of the stuff I’d managed to sort out for myself so far, lying in my bed of pain, and maybe that made me a bit of a hypocrite, passing it off like a rule I’d always known to live by, but I didn’t care. If I couldn’t use what I’d learned to kick Thom out of doing something stupid, then what was the point of learning anything at all?
“Focus on the future,” Thom repeated, one hand stroking the sheen of my horse’s neck. Then he looked up at me with those big eyes of his and I knew I’d made some kind of fatal error. “Our future?”
“I meant in general,” I told him sharply, nudging his shoulder with the toe of my boot. “You want to have another long conversation in the middle of stealing horses? Don’t think I won’t ride off and leave you. You could write letters to me and Balfour from a desert prison, having just blown up a residential area, and wouldn’t that be just peaches and fucking cream?” My horse stamped her hoof in agitation, wondering why she suddenly had a rider who didn’t seem to have any intention of going anywhere. I agreed wholeheartedly.
“Well, sometimes,” Thom said, and took something out of his pocket, handing it up to me, “it’s not that terrible to remind yourself, occasionally, of what once was. I took it before we brought the soul up to the roof. I thought you might want to keep it.”
I would’ve recognized it anywhere. It looked like a pocket watch but it had four hands, and none of them were moving. Stopped in time forever, I guessed, without anything left to point at. She was all gone, and this was the only thing that was left behind. Not even in working order, but just enough to let me think: Hey, beautiful.
“Sentimental asswipe,” I told him, but I put the compass in my own pocket, right over my chest. “Don’t expect me to thank you. Someone’ll probably steal it, then you’ll be sorry.”
Thom shook his head quickly and scampered off to mount his own horse. At least he managed to look halfway respectable while doing it. No more camels; that was the only promise I could give him.
“Eklesias, then?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. Wait until my brother got a load of those fucking baths.
He squeezed his heels around the horse and she took off like a shot, leaving me to bring up the rear, which was an okay change from what things had been like in the desert. I was going to miss it, kind of, but it wasn’t like I was about to grow old and drop dead anytime soon. We could come back. It was all a matter of waiting just long enough for Thom to forget how much he’d hated it here. Might be a long time, but I was willing to be patient about some things. I might not’ve been looking forward to returning to the way things’d been before either, but Thom’d gone and lost his journals in that sandstorm—everything he’d been recording up until this point—and when I’d asked him about it, he’d admitted he wasn’t that keen on starting up again from scratch.
“You miss out on a lot when you’re writing things down instead of looking at them,” he’d said. “I think I’d rather have the experiences now and leave the memories to my head for a while. That doesn’t mean I won’t come to write about it later. And maybe I will take a few notes, so I don’t forget how things really were…”
I gave it a week, maybe two weeks tops, before he broke down and changed his mind, but it was a nice thought all the same. I’d take all the peace and quiet I could get.
We drew even with each other at the white gates of Karakhum, bright and imposing, even in the dark. I had no fucking idea which way Eklesias was from here, but I picked a direction
and took it. If it was the wrong way, we’d find out soon enough, and at that minute it didn’t really matter. I had my brother with me, and as far as I was concerned, we had all the time in the world to get things right.
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ADAMO
The way I saw it—and probably would ’til the day I died—was that both times the rug was pulled out from underneath my boots, it was somehow because of that whelp. Not even the whoreson who usually gave me all my trouble. It was the brother of the whoreson who usually gave me all my trouble.
I’d never asked to be anybody’s pen pal, since I’d never been much for writing letters in the first place and all the people I’d ever cared to know lived in the same city as I did. The end of the war had fractured some things though, sent little pieces skittering all over, and one of those pieces just happened to have a brother with a real sick sense of humor, at least by my understanding.
Dear Adamo, the letter began—no Chief Sergeant or nothing, which was technically correct, but seemed oddly personal to me.
It is my sincerest wish that this letter finds you well, that its contents are not despoiled before you’ve had a chance to read them, and most of all that this information doesn’t bring you trouble.
I will jump straight to the sticking point and hope that you can forgive me: While in the desert, Rook and I very nearly saw the resurrection of a dragon. Havemercy, specifically. A pair of magicians from Xi’an had pieced her together from old, found parts and somehow managed to get a hold on her soul as well. Please don’t mistake me for a philosopher; the soul is a device both magical and mechanical, with the essence of a powerful magician inside to give the creation life. These men had planned on using a woman to house the dragon’s soul—a decidedly unmechanical vessel, but one that perhaps seemed easier to control. I tell you all this because Rook and I were not alone when we made this discovery. There was an agent of the Esar present, and what she learned she has no doubt already passed on to her master.
I know that the Esar is a secretive man, one who guards his possessions jealously. In light of that, I considered the possibility that he might never share this story with you and thus felt duty-bound to impart it myself. The dragons belonged to more than just one man, however powerful that man might be.
I have no counsel for what you might do with this information, my own strengths lying largely in the theoretical and analytical fields. I merely felt that it was the right thing to pass it along and hope that you do not find yourself too at odds with my assumption.
That was it—the vital parts anyway. I’d squeezed out a lot of the hand-wringing that came afterward and there were three more long paragraphs all about how Rook had taken to the desert like a camel and nearly became prince of the nomads, but that wasn’t the shit that was going to get me arrested.
He’d wrapped up the whole thing with Best wishes. After crafting a letter that read like Thom was putting every ounce of that enormous brain into getting me arrested, he ended it with “best wishes.”
I’d met some cracked little teacups in my time, but he had to be the absolute worst.
“So the thrust of the matter,” I concluded, myself, “is he says you need a living, breathing human being to bind their soul to, and he thinks the ethical implications of something like that would be devastating. Not just for Volstov, but for everywhere else.” I reached for the letter to get the proper phrase, the one he’d used that’d made me laugh out my breakfast, although it wasn’t for pure humor. “Oh, yeah. ‘Just devastating.’ He feels compelled, because of our time together, y’see, and because of his brother being ‘one of us,’ to make sure I’m aware of a situation that, as far as I’m concerned, could probably take my head off my body a damned sight easier than flying.”
And that, as anybody knew, was dangerous enough. Commanding the members of the Dragon Corps from Proud-mouth’s back wasn’t exactly the job a sane soldier volunteered for, was it? Even if the truth was I’d never really volunteered for it in the first place—I was just a whole lot better than most people at holding back all the shit I wanted to say when somebody more important was doling out the steaming heaps.
Bitter, my good friend Royston might’ve called it, but it wasn’t really that. It was just practical thinking. My theory was, the less you got involved, the less chance there was of someone important taking exception to your head and the way it sat on your shoulders.
Which was why I didn’t appreciate getting this crazy letter from a man I already knew thought more of the ethical implications of something than he did of the personal ones. In other words, me holding this letter, getting it over breakfast and breaking the seal and reading it with my buttered rolls, would’ve had more implications in th’Esar’s eyes than just ethical ones.
Sometimes, a man just didn’t want to know.
And that was kind of the tactic I was taking right now. Because in that letter, the words that loudmouthed, proud-arsed, crazy-eyed ex-airman Rook’s damn strange little brother had used—such as “resurrection” and “soul”—sounded a lot to me like playing at things I wasn’t meant to play at. More often than not, I gave my hand away at cards.
“So, I burn it,” I said, with only a hint of uncertainty. I didn’t want to be the man who went to his friends asking for advice with his mind already made up. No man was ever more of a burr in the arse than that one, and I wasn’t going to be him. Not even in my old age.
Across from me, Royston took a neat little sip of his coffee. Then he reached up to smooth the two, maybe three, gray hairs growing at his left temple—the ones no one would notice if he wasn’t so damn self-conscious about them. After all, he was considerably less advanced into his forties than myself. In fact, I thought it was downright rude of him to remind me.
“Well, it is a conundrum,” he said finally.
He was doing it to needle me, I told myself, but years of getting used to the behavior never quite meant you became master at dealing with it. I snorted, just giving him the rise he wanted, not to mention buying him extra time to think up a more clever response, then handed it over.
“Well,” I said, filling up the air. I hated to watch people read things, and Roy knew it.
“Reading,” Roy replied quietly, with that distant air he only got when he was putting his mind to something complicated, or talking about his boy.
Now, that was a mess of worms, I told myself—a can of them that’d already been opened—and to avoid hurting certain feelings I had to throw myself into the task of teasing Roy every chance I got, just so he’d know how I felt about the matter. But it’d probably take a few years before I’d be comfortable sitting in the same room with the two of them. Pointing out that a man was still a baby was no fun when that man was in the room, if only because teasing babies just wasn’t right no matter who you were doing it for.
Those thoughts seemed to occupy enough time that Roy finally cleared his throat, tossing the letter down between our coffee cups. I eyed it unhappily, this simple-enough-looking thing that I knew wasn’t going to prove simple for me—at least not now that I knew about it.
I wasn’t the sort of man who could just sit on information. I’d been bred to act, and all this sitting around and hemming and hawing was starting to chafe at my very last nerve. Wouldn’t’ve expected it to be the quiet that got me in the end either, but the world was a strange place.
“I’ll look into it,” Roy said.
“Somehow, I knew that’d be your answer.” I sighed. “But with a nose that large, I supp
ose you can’t help poking it into things.”
“Dark-mooded as you are, it isn’t anything yet,” Roy continued, too distracted by his thoughts to let the teasing get to him. This wasn’t a normal coffee we were having, and for whatever reasons that made me even more clench-jawed. There was no way I wasn’t going to tear into some poor, hopeful tactician in my afternoon lecture that day, and be hearing about it from the wealthy parents a few days afterward. Couldn’t I please be easier on their precious offspring? The lecture room wasn’t part of the Airman, as far as they could tell.
And, the worst one: This isn’t wartime anymore, you know.
Not that I was against the war being over—not even when it was all I’d ever known, which meant I knew a whole lot more about it than the sap-eyed creatures who shuffled into the room and daydreamed about their ponies back in the country while I tried to impress upon them the importance of strategy, or coax some milk of inspiration out of them in return for all the milk they’d sucked from the world, probably right up until the moment they were sent away to ’Versity. Maybe they missed it now. Maybe if I bottled some and gave them all nap times and dollies, they’d be more inclined to think about what the differences would be between an airstrike and a land strike.
And Brothers and Sisters of Regina help them if one of them ever questioned the real importance of discussing airstrikes again, since wasn’t that a moot point these days anyway?
Nothing in war or the possibility of war—and definitely not during the preparation for war—was a moot point. I’d drum it into their skulls yet, and if not me, then some future generation of real war drums. Not exactly comforting, but it was a salary and I hadn’t been fired yet—no matter how much some parents objected to the shouting.
Dragon Soul Page 49
