Exiles of tabat, p.29
Exiles of Tabat, page 29
Teo followed her at a distance, which she thought was touching, that he already trusted her to take care of him in the face of a Dragon. She stopped about twenty paces away from the Dragon and said, politely, “My name is Lucy.”
The Dragon gave off its long sinuous wriggle and slithered around so its huge face confronted hers. It was so much larger than she was that it could have simply opened its mouth and swallowed her whole.
She found herself rehearsing mentally what she would do in such a case. The teeth would be locked, the skull a prison of bone, but down the throat and then out …
“There’s no need to consider such incivilities.” The Dragon’s voice was honey and fire, its eyes great golden pinwheels, translucent wrinkles of light aligned with the pupils to create mesmerizing starbursts, full of wisdom and beauty …
She caught herself leaning towards one of those eyes and pulled herself backward, shoving a barrier of magic between herself and the Dragon’s lure.
“Huh. Well, you can’t blame someone for trying.” The Dragon’s voice held a sulky note despite the overwhelming sweetness. “Where are you bound next?”
“Tabat,” she said.
“Mmm, Tabat. To do what?”
“To destroy it,” she said steadily. The great eyes whirled, but she found herself able to resist their pull this time. As though sensing her immunity, the Dragon left off trying to hypnotize her.
“Mmm,” it repeated. “To destroy Tabat. That is a tall order, my mouseling.”
“Still, one I intend to undertake.” She found herself considering the Dragon’s strength. She thought she had the advantage, overall, but Dragons were long-lived and cunning and there was always the possibility that a Dragon had run into a thing like her before, encountered a creature that was, she had been thinking with increasing complacency, something quite like a god, as powerful as the pretend moons or Trade Gods of Tabat, blind little porcelain faces that people thought should dictate when and where and what they did in life.
“You have enough power to destroy it, to be sure,” the Dragon said. “But I do not wish you to destroy it all. I want you to leave the Beasts alive. In fact, to encourage them, to help them make the city something of their very own.”
“A Beast city?” she said, incredulous. “Something like that will never fly.”
“And if I told you that it would, that I knew it?”
But she shook her head again. “At best I would find it unbelievable, at worst I would think it overly gullible on your part, to have fallen for some trick tailor-made to your wants. This city will never accept Beasts as equals—intolerance is baked into its tiles, has been since day one.”
“That doesn’t mean that it has to continue.”
Lucy said, “You can believe what you like, but if you went to Tabat right now, even if you proclaimed yourself uninvolved in politics, interested only in the city and its meager ways, you would still be struck down before you could do more than overfly the city once.”
“And you will overfly it and destroy it. Will you let my fellow Beasts be?”
“I will take my foes as they come at me,” Lucy said. “And I will spare no one that does so.”
And with that, the Dragon raised its head, taking a deep breath.
Then it paused, and said, “Little godling—are you sure you will not listen to what I say? I ask you once.”
“I have been waiting for you,” Lucy said, for she had. “And I say no.”
“I ask you twice.”
“And I say no.”
“Because you fear me,” the Dragon said with complacency.
“Because I was curious about this,” she said, and silver fire came directly from her left hand, blinding fire that made Teo shelter his face, that blasted directly at the Dragon’s head.
For a few seconds, it quailed back, and then it opened its great jaws and breathed out black fire that fought her starlight clarity, clung to it like sticky smoke or black tar, overpowering it, forcing it back at her.
It quivered in the air. She swung her right arm up and forward, and with it a curtain of silvery blue lightning, crackling and sizzling like a newly birthed thunderstorm.
It slashed, leaving holes in the air where it struck, swathes of terrifying nothingness, and then it slashed again across the Dragon’s throat and opened it up.
The scales parted as though an unparryable blade had leapt forward to do its work, and flaming blood poured out, vast gouts of it that steamed in the air.
Teo cried out and flung himself backward before the puddle could envelop his feet. Lucy simply levitated herself upward above it, so none of it could touch her. She could smell it, though, the raw bloody smell of it tinged with sulfur, so thick that it burned at the inside of her nostrils.
Teo was quiet, staring at the enormous corpse in the slowly spreading crimson pool. Two gulls swooped down. They stood in the sand as though considering, then one hopped away from the puddle’s swelling edge and onto the Dragon’s form. It flapped its wings awkwardly, balancing itself, as though ready for the Dragon to rebuke it, to snap or snarl in a deadly motion that never came.
Little crabs began to assemble and test one drying edge of the gore. Flies followed.
Lucy decided the beach was not so pleasant. She did not speak to Teo, but he was prepared this time and did not fall as she swept him upward.
No one would ever push her around again. No one would ever slap her. Or piss on her. Or make decisions about her life without consulting her. She found herself grinning. Or if they did, they’d be sorry—very, very sorry.
Her senses spread all out around her as though she was part of the landscape regarding herself. She didn’t look like Lucy or Obedience any more at all. She looked like a creature made out of fire and light, not something of flesh and blood.
She couldn’t actually remember what it had felt like, being flesh and blood. She thought it had probably been rather unpleasant or she would have remembered it better.
She cast it from her mind. There was no point in thinking about such things.
Behind them the Dragon’s body cooled.
Teo
It was very odd not to be a dog anymore. His mind kept trying to insist that he was a dog, so he found himself doing doggish things, like trying to use a foot to scratch his ribs or licking his nose.
He knew what being in another form was like. He’d run as a cougar once.
But he’d awakened from that the next day, himself again. Being a dog—unable to change back into a boy—had been a prison at first and then faded, becoming more a way of existence. Murga had done this to him, had turned him into a dog back in Tabat, the same night he’d seen the Sorcerer turn the Dryad into a monstrous wooden golem. He had been able to remember himself better when he was a cougar—being a dog had been overwhelming, something that had wracked him down to his innermost core.
Lucy was sleeping now, and he was lying awake and staring up at what he could see of the stars through the branches. They hung bright and low and sweet, and the red moon hovered high in one spot, while the white moon winked at him from between two branches as they shifted in the wind.
The susurration of the water, the waves rolling in over and over again, filled him with a drowsy lassitude. He wondered what Bella and Scylla were doing. He thought Bella might be pursuing them, or have some sort of plan, at least. That was the sort of person that Bella was, the sort of person who did things rather than spending more time talking about them than doing them.
Something soared through the sky far above and he froze for a moment, not sure if it was a bird close at hand, or a Dragon much further off, moving silently. How many Dragons were there in the world? Would they know that Lucy had slain one of their number and come chasing her for vengeance? In all the stories of Dragons, that was the sort of thing they were prone to doing.
Then he heard the wings flap and relaxed. Just a bird.
Lucy was taking him back to Tabat. He thought the journey would be faster than the trip down, but those days on the boat all blurred together in doggy memory to the point where they could as easily have been three days as three weeks.
Tabat—what would the city be like now? What had Murga and his golem and all his circus done to the city, and what was his connection to the Duke? Now that he was no longer a dog, his mind was starting to whirl a bit, to make connections. How much of the riots, the restless Beasts, was something Murga had engineered?
How much power did Lucy have? Did she have something that helped her, or was the thing inside her? She’d told him the night before that it had come from going down to the center of the earth and taking it, but she had been vague about the process, saying only that it had been difficult.
He thought that maybe there had been more people with her when she went down, and that they had all died when she was on her way back up. He wasn’t sure whether or not she had killed them, but he suspected she had.
So—a lot of power. Enough to defeat Murga, surely. But Murga and the Duke, and whatever else the Duke could bring to bear? He was less sure of that.
And what would she do with it if she won?
Tomorrow she had said they would go to Margolees before they set off for Tabat. He had asked why, and she said, “I’m curious about it. Aren’t you? How often do you get a chance to travel?”
“Never,” he’d said. It was true, it was like living an adventure from a penny-wide and Lucy was surely worthy of such a story. She was magic, after all, and had righted wrongs and rescued herself from pirates. He wasn’t entirely sure what she intended to do when they got back to Tabat but surely she must want to right other wrongs.
There was certainly one wrong in Tabat, which was the way that they treated Beasts, just as the Dragon had said. Lucy could change that, and he would talk to her, so she wanted to do it, wanted to right that particular wrong.
And then maybe he could persuade her that not all Shifters meant harm, not all were treacherous or evil and bent on replacing people. That they should be allowed to walk freely in Tabat. Maybe even own a house or run some business. He wasn’t sure exactly what sort of business he could run, but surely Lucy would need someone to handle things, a job more important than the sort of errands he’d run for Bella Kanto.
Dawn was starting to edge the sky and crowd out the stars on the eastern horizon. He rolled out of his hammock and moved quietly to gather fruit. Lucy should see that he didn’t intend to take her for granted, that he would work for her and her aims. That was the safest thing, and possibly the one with the brightest future.
It was also one that let him wait and see what Bella Kanto did and whether or not she would come for him.
Chapter 43
(Lucy)
In the morning when she woke, she found that Teo had gathered fruit already, a big heap of it.
“You didn’t need to bother,” she said grumpily. She felt frowsy and fuzzled by sleep, and the sun was too bright, the air too hot and sticky already. One thing you could say about Tabat, it was only in the summer’s very hottest days that it got anywhere even close to this southern misery.
His face fell, but he didn’t say anything to reproach her, which only made her feel more grumpy, as though she were accommodating a sulky child. She announced, “After we eat, we are going to Margolees. I want new clothes and to see the sights and eat some delicious things.”
“Do we have money for that?” Teo asked.
“We don’t need money,” she said. She smiled. “I can take what I want now, and no one can stop me. You saw what I did to the Dragon.”
He looked uneasy, but nodded. He sat down beside the pile of fruit and started peeling one. She waited until he was done, then reached out and plucked it from his grasp. She put it to her mouth and took a juicy bite, watching him, waiting to see what he would say, if he would bristle out some challenge or roll over.
He picked up another and began to peel it. “Would you like another?” he asked.
After they had eaten, Lucy made them new clothes out of air, splendid clothes of the kind she’d seen back in Tabat, bright velvets and diamonds dripping from the hems. She looked like a play-acting child, Teo thought with dismay, looking at her bright eyes as she peered at herself in the mirror that she had summoned, but he said nothing.
“We don’t need to go to the city. You could just as easily make us something,” he said.
Her eyes gleamed brighter. “I can only make things that I’ve tasted before. I want to try new things so I can make them. I want to try everything.” Her voice took on a resonance that made him flinch away, made his stomach twitch.
His face hurt from smiling, hurt from looking pleasant and unafraid. He wished that Bella was here to tell him what to do. He felt grateful to Lucy—the person who had, finally, rescued him from his dog state, had made sure he didn’t keep being a dog all his life, falling farther and farther into its mind until he was entirely lost. She’d saved him from that fate, and it was terrifying to think that she might put him back.
She seemed fond of him in a way that she had not been of Bella. He thought that maybe she was a little lonely, that she regretted killing all of her pirate companions, of whom she never spoke.
“Let’s go,” she said, and they rose into the sky.
They came at Margolees from the east side, flying over the citrus groves. Teo smelled the waft of orange and lemon from below and thought it one of the pleasantest things he’d ever smelled. Fruit like that usually did not come to Tabat except weeks old, when it had already started to dry out, and this was lush and fresh in a way he had never experienced, almost as though the joys of his canine nose, which had smelled so many wonderful things during the time he was a dog, had been briefly restored.
But all too soon, it was interrupted by the odors of a poor quarter on the outskirts of town, where the fruit pickers lived. Sour food and sewage mingled with the stink of too many people living too close together. Lucy made a face.
“It smells like home, but not in a good way,” she said.
He agreed. In Tabat, there would be the chemical tang of the smoke from the Slumpers, and the ozone and mist of the etheric lights that lined the main streets. He thought wistfully of Tabat—while he missed the village he had come from, it was mostly the people there, like his parents. Tabat had been his first taste of a city, and he loved it for that introduction, loved it down to his bones.
They landed in a courtyard filled with little apple trees growing in white ceramic pots. Someone came at them, shouting about trespassing.
Lucy waved a hand before Teo could even see the person who was shouting. They disappeared into a fine red mist that coated the surface of the fruit dangling around them, giving them an unappetizing, sticky gleam that made his stomach churn.
Lucy looked around complacently. She said, “This place is pretty enough, and I like all the birds and flowers. Perhaps I will make some of them appear, back in Tabat.” She turned to him. “What do you think?”
He started to speak, and instead was heartily, noisily, wretchedly sick in the corner.
Her lip curled. “Poor boy. You’re still suffering the aftereffects of all that enchantment. You said the man who did it owned a circus? That will be fun to visit.”
He doubted from her tone, as well as what he had experienced by now, that Murga would enjoy the experience.
She strolled through the archway and onto the street. No one noticed her until they began exploding, one by one, as her gaze fell on them. She cleared the street and walked down it, looking at the houses. Teo followed in her wake when she beckoned to him. What else could he do?
“The houses are nicer in Tabat, but these colors are pretty. Perhaps we will make the houses in Tabat look like this.” She smiled at him as they stepped over the sticky red street. He tried to ignore what lay beneath their feet. Unable to summon a smile, he simply nodded.
“Pretty place,” she mused again as people continued to fall. “Such a pretty place.”
By nightfall, the city was gutted. Teo was sick of the smell of blood and smoke, and Lucy’s smile was so bright it could have lit the night.
“I think I am entirely ready for Tabat now,” she said when the last of the screaming died down. And she did not pause, simply scooped him up into the air and began to fly north.
Chapter 44
En Route to Margolees (Bella)
We see the smoke from Margolees long before we reach it.
The smoke turns out to have been from unattended fires taking hold in the city, caused by the fact that whoever would have tended them was dead.
At first, I think that she has made people vanish and that is why so few crowd this devastated place, making it feel eerie and uninhabited. But then I look closer at what lies to hand, and why it is that fat carrion flies circle everywhere, so big and buzzing that you cannot ignore, and sometimes landing on one’s flesh for an exploratory bite.
We find some neighborhoods harder hit than others. In a space near the docks, we’re able to purchase food. I decide that a skin of wine will not go amiss, despite the fact that Scylla argues with me over it.
I have a handful of coins left, and we are about to travel in a way no Human ever has before. We shall have wine to accompany us. The little shop is still grieving one of its clerks, who was unfortunate enough to run into Lucy in the marketplace, and so they give me a good price on the two skins I tuck into my belt. The bell of the shop tinkles as I step out onto the street and find Ruhua standing there.
Chapter 45
(Lucy)
The flight was nightmarishly cold. Lucy didn’t pay him any attention, and the rush of the wind was too loud for her to hear him, even when he tried shouting. At length he gave up and simply watched the rush of water underneath him. Once or twice, he thought he saw great ocean fish, but they always passed far too quickly for him to decide what he was really seeing.
