Soul of Fire (30 page)

Grasping the tiger, he flew over forest and two small villages, away from Benares. He crossed the Ganges, and another couple of bodies of water, before he came across a clearing he thought perfect for his purpose.

It was desolate, the terrain raised a little above its normal incline. It would give him a look at the area near them. Enough, he thought, that if he saw or heard the tigers approach, he could reach for Sofie and take her to safety.

Landing, he kept his paw on top of the tiger, who was writhing and now coughing and spasming in the violent convulsions that Peter knew all too well. And Peter realized that in all his planning, he’d forgotten something. Turning his head so it faced the girl on his back, he concentrated on forming words with the dragon’s mouth.

It was always hard. Almost impossible, in fact. The voice that came out was either a hiss or a roar, and the roar was totally unsuited to communicating. But the hiss could hardly be modulated with unwieldy lips and a forked, thin tongue that could not form syllables. Something like words could emerge, though, and, struggling, Peter forced them to do so now. “Give me your belt,” he told Sofie. “Your belt.”

For a moment, she looked startled. Then, with nimble fingers, she untied the blue sash from her middle and handed it to him. Holding what was now a young, lank native under one paw, Peter picked up the belt with the other.

Tying knots while a dragon was even harder, but he had experience with it. He’d once tied up—and interrogated—Her Majesty’s minister of magic. It involved holding the creature with his mouth, making sure his teeth didn’t break skin, or not too much, while with his claws he tied the belt around the boy’s middle and then, breaking off part of it, around his ankles.

When he stepped back, the native was writhing on the ground in front of him. He wondered if the young man understood English. If he didn’t, this would all have been for naught. He couldn’t, after all, get an answer if he couldn’t interrogate the man. If he didn’t speak English, Peter would have to go back and pick another tiger.

Hissing, he turned to the boy and forced the words to form within the dragon’s mouth. “What’s your name?” he said.

The boy—with lanky hair falling in front of his face—opened his mouth, but all that came out was a sort of growl.

For a moment, Peter was puzzled, then he realized that the young man was trying to roar—that he didn’t even realize he had turned back from a tiger. Clearly the transformation had happened under the impact of panic and horror at finding himself captured by this immense and far more powerful creature.

Peter—who turned into a dragon and not a human when in panic—couldn’t understand the reaction, but he supposed there was nothing to understand. It would be instinctive, taking place at a level of the self where the self didn’t think, only feel. For some reason, the young man felt more comfortable as a human. Peter wondered why, since he looked horrified and terrified enough. One would think the tiger would be better defended.

“You can’t roar,” Peter said, his voice a loud, modulated hiss. “You must talk. What is your name?”

And then words came, a torrent, emerging from lips gone pale with fear, in a voice high-pitched and crazed by the last vestige of hope. “I am Prince Yatin. I am a son of the raj of the tigers. You cannot hold me. My father will avenge me dreadfully.”

Peter settled back on the dragon’s haunches, a comfortable position, and showed his teeth in the dragon version of a smile—which he knew all too well was not reassuring to watch. “A prince, are you? Good. That means you will be well informed. Now, tell me, for what reason does your father want to marry the girl Sofie Warington? What does he want with her?”

The boy, though he looked very young—to Peter’s eyes he couldn’t be more than maybe twenty—didn’t appear to be stupid. He looked at the dragon’s back, at Sofie. Peter wondered what Sofie felt, and prayed—internally and desperately prayed—that this boy was young enough to spill everything. Spill everything now, and Peter would cut his bonds and take to the air and let him go.

He didn’t want to kill him, he didn’t want to hurt him at all in front of Sofie. He would protect her even from the disillusionment of seeing the dragon in his true colors.

“Come, boy,” he hissed impatiently. “Answer me now, and I will let you go.”

But the prince shook his head, revealing a small, sharp face, full of determination. He again looked at Sofie on Peter’s back, and then at Peter’s single eye, and pressed his lips closed, as though steeling himself. The Adam’s apple on his neck bobbed as he swallowed. But his voice was creditably steady and strong as he said, “I will not talk. I have done only what my father told me to do. I will not talk.”

All right. There were ways to do this—ways to force words from reluctant lips—and Peter was not unacquainted with them. The boy looked stubborn—or at least the boy was willing himself to be stubborn—but he was young. The easiest method was to threaten him, to get him to see that his best interest lay with speaking—and that, indeed, he could not avoid doing so.

“If you don’t speak,” Peter said, as he might have spoken to a child in the nursery who was too young or too stupid to understand the alphabet—supposing, of course, a nursery child understood a dragon’s hissing—“I shall have to hurt you. Hurt you hard and long enough to make you talk.”

“I don’t care,” the boy returned, shrilly. “You can hurt me as much as you wish. You can bring the might of China against me, but I will not break. I will not talk. I will never tell you anything. I am Prince Yatin, whose father rules the fearsome tiger kingdom of Jaipur, whose ancestors held the crown and the claw, and fought every enemy valiantly. I will not give in to you.”

“Oh, are you sure? Well, that’s too bad. Because I hate to hurt someone so young and brave,” Peter said, making his hiss as threatening as he could. What did the boy mean, the might of China? Was he under the impression, then, that Peter was Chinese?

Peter shook his head. He wanted to pursue those thoughts. He wanted to pursue all possible thoughts, rather than continue to follow the logical course of this. Less than a year ago, in the English countryside, using the techniques and knowledge acquired all over Europe, in missions that had then—he thought—been destined to usher in anarchy, he’d tortured Lord Widefield, the queen’s minister of magic.

How long ago that seemed, and how strange that, looking back, he felt nothing but regret. Widefield had been an old man, and an old courtier, accustomed to navigating the maze of power in Europe, and he was certainly no innocent. But this boy before him, tiger or no, of what was he guilty, exactly, but of following the narrow confines of his culture, and obeying his father as a living god?

The boy shook his head and compressed his lips and opened them only to say, in an English marred with a strong accent, “I will not talk.”

And Peter, who would much rather not do this at all, cast about erratically for something that would cause the boy to break, and to break quickly. He’d start slowly, he thought. He’d start . . . almost gently. He’d inflict physical hurt, but no real physical wound—something that would heal well and quickly in a were.

The boy’s even skin, his uncalloused hands and feet, gave away his privileged status. A soft prince—possibly his father’s heir—raised in comfort and luxury. He’d break at the first touch of pain. At least, Peter hoped so. He truly hoped so.

Carefully, using his incisors, which were sharp and fine like Toledo blades, he leaned over the boy and carefully, precisely, cut two long incisions on the boy’s thighs. Blood poured. The boy’s face went white. He screamed.

And Peter felt a little of his humanity melt away.

MONKEYS ON A FLYING RUG; DRAGONS AND TIGERS AND ENGLISH MISSES

“There, ahead.” Maidan, Lalita’s cousin, had joined
them on their quest. Now he pointed an eager finger ahead, where some movement at the low level of the canopy seemed to indicate a flutter of dragon wings.

They were all on the small flying rug that Hanuman had purchased. Maidan was in front, and Hanuman, using his magic to steer the rug, was immediately behind. Lalita was behind the two of them, thinking that, very soon, the rug might not be safe, and wishing for the first time in her life that she had wings to fly on her own.

Maidan had followed them as they ran to the place where they’d hidden the rug, and had changed shapes when they had and jumped aboard. Maidan was as good-looking as Hanuman, though younger. Broad of shoulder and long of leg, with even cinnamon-colored skin and black hair that had the texture and sheen of fine silk, he was as princely as Hanuman was, but underneath it all, shoddy-plebeian. He didn’t wear those bright-shiny gold earrings, and he did not call her Princess. In fact, he hadn’t yet called her much of anything. They had played together as children, and she remembered that, for a monkey, he’d always been unnaturally quiet and reserved.

Hanuman had looked thunderous at being forced to start the rug with the interloper aboard, and now looked equally upset at having to steer in the direction in which Maidan’s finger pointed. Lalita was amused. You could almost hear Hanuman gritting his teeth, even though he tried to keep his face impassive.

As they neared the place, what had seemed like a flutter of captive fire wings resolved itself into a flicker of a bonfire, in which some shepherds were burning rubbish. Perhaps a dangerous pastime in this most perilous of seasons, but hardly a dragon.

“Why did you say you decided to join us?” Hanuman asked, his voice as deep and cool as the snows on the Himalayan peaks. He spoke without deference at all toward the prince, but Maidan didn’t seem to take offense, which, in itself, was instructive.

Hanuman was, of course, baiting a hook, in a manner of speaking, because Maidan had never told them who had sent him, or why he’d decided to come. Maidan looked back over his shoulder now and graced Hanuman with a blinding smile. “Oh, most wise Hanuman, you know well I’ve told you nothing.”

“I think perhaps you should,” Hanuman said, straightening the flight of the rug and looking below as they flew. Lalita looked, too, but saw nothing but dun countryside and the occasional hovel.

Where could Sofie be? And who could she be with? If there was an Englishman with her, why was she on a dragon’s back? And if she was on a dragon’s back, why was the dragon carrying a were-tiger? Lalita, always used to considering her former mistress and friend too impetuous for her own good, now wondered if Sofie had got in so far that she could no longer see the shore and kept sinking further and further into whatever trouble enveloped her.

“Lalita,” Maidan called, “do you also wish to know where I came from and why?”

“Yes,” Lalita said. “With what is at stake, I feel . . .”

“That you must know who is friend and who is foe. Very well. My father, King Budhev, sent word to me to help you. Years ago, I decided it was not worth my while to reside in the court, and came here, to the temple of Durga, to seek enlightenment in the true ways of simian life.” He released a sigh that she suspected was half theatrical and half heartfelt. “Into my retirement, yesterday, there poured a communication that has been passed from monkey to monkey very fast, since shortly after you left the capital. I am to render you assistance in anything you need. And they said you would be tracing a girl riding a dragon. Therefore, as you see . . .” He grinned over his shoulder. “I hastened to obey the orders of my father and king.”

Lalita wondered how much of this—if any—was true. Maidan had always been less mischievous than other monkeys, but that did not mean he couldn’t lie.