Dragon Soul (11 page)

Another night camped out under the stars and I was going to lose my mind.

My hand had healed, as had some of my wounded morals, but my back was what troubled me now. The weather was turning hotter and drier as we headed south toward the deserts, and the inns in these parts were few and far between.

And I couldn’t trust Rook with people, given his present mood.

I didn’t count; I was his punching bag for the time being, and I could consider myself lucky that such abuse was merely verbal and emotional, and had not yet turned to fisticuffs. It was easy enough to assume I would lose should matters ever come to
that
, but I did wonder how deep the vein of Rook’s anger ran, that even the extreme amounts of physical exercise we endured was not enough to cool his temper.

My travel log was full of notations—not merely on my surroundings, which was to be expected, but I found I was falling back on old habits, making note of each grunt and scowl Rook tossed my way like a master tossed his hunting dog scraps. Matters had been worse before—even I could admit that, despite how depressing they were now—but now I had no one else to talk to. There was only the fire, the soil, the
open road, and Rook. The first three couldn’t speak, and the fourth refused to.

Days of traveling had taken their toll on me, and I wondered if this was an endeavor that could have been accomplished by carriage rides. How did normal people travel, I wondered to myself, and with what comforts and expenses?

Yet if I considered it all fieldwork—if I reminded myself that
Excursions with a Hero: A Travel Diary
might become a fascinating treatise on a sort of modern-day walkabout—it was almost bearable.

Luckily for my sanity, we had found ourselves a campsite.

There were such places along the best-traveled routes to and from the major cities in Volstov, and those outside of Volstov’s domain that nonetheless were both friendly and major sites of trade. It was the possibility of visiting such metropolises that truly thrilled me, and our next stop would be just outside the famed caravan oasis of Karakhum—where my ’Versity friend Geoffrey Bless was, I could only hope, expecting our arrival.

Poor Geoffrey. He had no idea the storm that was, at this very moment, gathering.

“Get something to eat,” Rook grunted at me—the most perfunctory of statements that implied I was slow and soft in the head and needed to be told to eat when I was hungry.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked, softly, in the hopes that he wouldn’t hear me. The less he heard, the less chance there was of his becoming angry.

His anger frightened me.

“To check out the location,” Rook replied.

I would have offered to go with him, but he had already left me behind.

The landscape was rocky and uneven here, and, as previously noted, the dirt was becoming sandier, the air drier—all these conditions pointing toward our close proximity with the desert. Here and there my fellow travelers were talking with each other, little fires glinting alongside the tents. It was a fascinating scene and I was determined to make the most of it, to receive news from like-minded, intrepid explorers…or something akin to that.

I was beginning to discover that fieldwork was
not
my specialty. But the man I had come here with—presumably under the conditions that
we were to better understand one another—was somewhere among all these strangers, just as much of a stranger to me as all the rest.

“You look troubled,” someone said at my side. “Bad news from home?”

It was startling to be addressed. At first, I assumed that the voice in question could not be referring to me, but a hand on my shoulder brought me up short.

“Oh, and it looks bad,” the man—suddenly at my side—said, upon seeing my face.

In the dim light I could barely make out his descent, but his accent and the sharpness of his features were foreign to me. If I had to wager a guess on what small evidence I did have, I would have said he was three-quarters Volstovic and one-quarter Ke-Han—but just as fieldwork was not my specialty, neither were matters of lineage.

“What a fascinating accent you have,” I said.

“Is that so?” he asked. “I could say the same for you. I must’ve picked mine up somewhere; I’ve been traveling most of my life. What’s your excuse?”

“I’m from Thremedon,” I said.

“My sincerest apologies,” he replied. “I hope you don’t take any offense, but I can’t stand big cities.”

“I do find it to be a polarizing topic among nonnatives,” I admitted, trying to hide how shaken I was by his appearance. Something told me that Rook would never have been taken by surprise in this way, but then his upbringing had provided him with all sorts of instincts that I’d missed out on.

Funny, as always, that we were from the same place.

“Ah, but see, here I have to beg your pardon once again,” my new companion said, “as I’ve gone and started up a conversation without introducing myself. The name’s Afanasiy. Can’t blame that one on traveling; I got it from my mother.”

“Very traditional,” I said. “Your mother must have been quite the Volstovic purist.”

“Call me Fan,” he countered, smiling, as though I’d said something particularly amusing. “Don’t see many from Thremedon around these parts, and taking these roads. Hope you don’t mind my coming up to say hello; just thought you looked like you could use some company. I know I could.”

“No,” I said, because even if I’d wanted to be alone with my thoughts, I couldn’t find much objectionable in his actions thus far. “I don’t mind at all.”

There followed a slightly awkward pause in the conversation, where he waited for me to give my name, then shrugged when I didn’t volunteer it. While I hadn’t grown up in the Airman, I’d still managed to cultivate a certain set of my own instincts, and any Mollyrat worth his teeth knew not to give his name to a complete stranger—even when he was polite enough to offer his first.

“So, you heading into desert country?” Fan asked, scratching his neck beneath his jaw. “I only ask because if you’re on this road, then that’s where you’re heading whether you meant to or not, and the desert isn’t particularly…
kind
to those of us who go in unprepared.”

I didn’t blame him for thinking I looked unprepared. I felt unprepared, and I
was
unprepared; my only shame was how obvious it was, even to complete strangers.

“I’m meeting a friend,” I said, fingering the edges of my travel journal.

“Never a better reason to go on a journey,” he said. I couldn’t quite make out his eyes, but his voice was filled with approval. “I’ll tell you something else, since you and I are in the same boat, so to speak—being men of the road and all—but it’s
my
opinion that it’s never been a better time to get out of Volstov. See the world a bit, come back when things are settled. You take my meaning?”

“That was the general idea,” I agreed, beginning to wonder just how long it could be taking Rook to scout the location and come back, and whether or not he was coming back at all.

To our left, a woman scurried into her tent and came out dragging a man I assumed must have been her husband. She seemed provincial, and I wondered what she was doing all the way out here. But then, it took all kinds. I was so absorbed in studying her particular style of dress that I caught—quite by accident—the tail end of her conversation.

“I’m
telling
you, it’s him!” she said anxiously. “And you wanted to sleep early tonight! Teach me to marry the likes of you. Come on!”

“But what’s an airman like
Rook
doing all the way out here?” her husband demanded, before they disappeared between two distant tents.

I followed them with my eyes, attention diverted from my sudden companion.

“Excuse me,” I said to Fan, and started after them.

“You don’t think they meant
the
Rook?” he asked, keeping step with me all of a sudden. I supposed it was another thing he’d picked up being on the road—a kind of friendliness that bordered on overbearing to people more used to the anonymity of city life. In Thremedon, his behavior would have been considered rather rude, but after some time on the road myself, I supposed I could understand the urge to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. Hell, any more time with Rook in this temper, and I would likely be the one accosting strangers at random for a little conversation.

None of that mattered now. Rook was the center of a commotion, and I knew how he hated the sort of mindless attention that he garnered by being famous. Attention he caused was the sort he thrived on, but he had to be in control of it. The other set him snarling like a wild animal, and most people expecting a hero wouldn’t be prepared for my brother’s behavior when he felt cornered or trapped.

“I’m almost positive they do,” I said, since if other people already knew, then there was no point in lying. “I’m traveling with him.”

“Aha,” Fan said.

We rounded a cluster of tents just in time to see the small crowd gathered at the outskirts of the campsite: ragtag travelers of all ages and sizes, all trying to look as though they were busy with something else but clearly surrounding Rook, as though they’d been caught up in his peculiar gravitational pull.

“I’ve seen your statue,” one girl was telling him. She had a rosy face like an apple. “It isn’t nearly so…so
breathtaking.”

“That’s great,” Rook said, in flat tones. I could see him eyeing potential means of escape. “Real nice.”

Fan whistled low, reaching his hands up to form a picture frame around the scene. “That’s him, all right. You didn’t tell me you were traveling with a real live airman, stranger—though I guess this might be why.”

“You can call me Thom,” I said, resigned. I didn’t like the way he was gawking, but there was nothing I could do about that. No matter what, Rook was a hero. People responded only as they knew how. If I hadn’t known him, I was sure I’d have done the same.

“There now, that wasn’t so hard at all, was it?” Fan smiled again, then clapped me on the shoulder. I thought that perhaps there was something in his voice that hadn’t been there before, but I chalked it up to excitement. No one much fancied talking to me when Rook was about; Fan was probably working up the courage to ask me for an introduction. “He doesn’t look too happy about all this attention, does he?”

I was already cringing inwardly at the expression on Rook’s face, for it was one that I’d come to recognize all too well in the time we’d known one another. In fact, I’d been the cause of it often enough.

This was certainly not going to improve his mood.

“What was it like?” asked a boy—just past puberty, I thought, and filled with wide-eyed wonderment. I had to stop him before he said it, the damning word, the ultimate offense. “Riding on a—”

I cleared my throat helplessly, trying to push my way to the forefront.

“You!” Rook said suddenly, weeding me out of the crowd as though he’d heard my thoughts. “Did you at least manage to get some dinner ready while I was gone, or’ve you just been wasting time writing in that damn book like always?”

“Ah,” I said. “I’ll go start on that now.”

“Good,” he snarled, and took advantage of everyone’s confusion to storm toward our camp, heedless of all those around him who evidently would have been just as happy to keep him there all night.

I was all but preparing to get out of his way myself and see if I could at least make it back to our site before him when Fan made a sudden movement at my side, and I realized too late that he was heading straight for Rook.

There was being overly friendly, and then there was just plain suicide.

I made a grab for Fan’s sleeve—too late again—and then could do nothing but stare in horror as events unfolded in front of me: the last remnants of the crowd scattering in Rook’s wake, my strange acquaintance stepping into his path, smile like the sliver of the moon, and Rook himself halting without warning as he sensed this approach, Fan nearly plowing into him with the momentum he’d built up. It was like watching a boar cornered at a hunt—right before the boar turned wild and eviscerated its hapless pursuers out of self-defense.

“Pardon me,” Fan said, offering a funny little bow. “I would never presume to delay any man’s dinner, let alone one so distinguished as you.”

“Then
get,”
Rook grunted. “Unless you’re volunteering to go into the stewpot?”

“Nothing so crude,” Fan said, rummaging for something in a pouch on his belt. “We’re not in the desert just yet, after all.” I was still struggling with the simple human urge to get another man out of the way of the hurricane bearing down on him, but I was ashamed to admit that my curiosity was winning me over. I held my place, half a part of the crowd and half not, until Fan retrieved whatever it was he’d been searching for. I caught a glimpse of metal in the firelight, nothing more, but that was enough to make my stomach turn over.

No
, I thought.
Anything but that
.

Rook’s eyes sharpened. “Where’d you get that?” he demanded.