Steelhands (2011) (36 page)

“Shut it,” I told him. I must’ve gotten some of my magic back, because this time, he listened right away and did as he was told without protest.

When you were dealing with someone whose natural inclination was to be quiet—like Balfour—it was necessary not to scare him away from talking. You had to make him feel comfortable, let him know it was his turn. Someone like Luvander abhorred a vacuum, and maybe he thought he was helping Balfour by filling up the silence so no one had to be uncomfortable, but in truth, he wasn’t doing the man any favors by taking control.

“I began to hear things, on the day of the meeting,” Balfour said slowly. I could almost imagine him pulling at his gloves as he worked up the courage to gain some momentum—just like the old days—
except that he wasn’t wearing any. “At first I thought it was simply my mind growing bored with the proceedings and finding something else with which to occupy itself. I shouldn’t say this—I have no real cause to complain—but being a diplomat really is
unbearable
some days. I consider myself a rather patient person, but no one there ever wants to listen to anything but the sound of their own voices and their own solutions. It can be very disheartening, at times. Especially when, day in and day out, the same matters are addressed over and over again, and we never really get anywhere.”

“On the bright side, you
do
get all the best gossip first,” Luvander said, and I realized he was doing his best to be comforting.

“Either that, or you end up a part of it yourself,” Balfour agreed somewhat reluctantly.

“So you started hearing things,” I said. It wasn’t the kind of thing any man wanted to hear repeated, so I figured I’d be the one to do it and get it out of the way real fast. And we had to be sure, when it came to stuff like this.

“The way you say it, I can’t tell if I was overreacting or not,” Balfour said, looking sheepish. “Sometimes I think it was just the product of an idle brain. It’s certainly never happened
before
, anyway. As far as I know, there’s no history of such things in my family—not that I could write home to Mother and ask, you understand. The question would worry her.”

“No accounts of relatives going screaming out of boring parties?” Luvander asked. When Balfour shook his head, he sighed. “What a pity.”

“Don’t remember Amery ever doing it,” I said, steering us back to topic as best I could. Bastion knew Luvander was trying to be caring in his own mad way, and it was probably helping Balfour to have something to laugh at every now and again, but someone had to keep us focused.

“Perhaps my brother died before it came to that,” Balfour pointed out. It was a moment of straightforward grimness I wasn’t used to seeing him display, and he quickly looked away.

“Go on,” Luvander said softly.

Balfour chewed on a particularly dry part of his lip, hesitating before he spoke again.

“I didn’t realize what it was at first,” he said at last, in a fearful way
that I could tell meant we were coming close to the heart of the matter. “It sounded like metal. Just metal working, machines going, gears grinding up against one another, that kind of thing. And it was quite loud. At first I thought they were doing some kind of repair labors in the street until I realized that no one else was reacting to the sudden noise. Then I assumed they were merely hiding their discomfort—being professional, as it were—but I asked one of my fellow diplomats and he indicated he didn’t hear anything.”

“You told someone else you were hearing things first?” I asked.

“Well, not exactly,” Balfour said, with a miserable little twist to his mouth. “I was as subtle as I could manage without betraying any of the specifics. I simply asked him if he happened to hear anything strange at all, and when he realized that meant
I
was, he attempted to call off the proceedings. He also bore witness to my subsequent exit, so I suppose there was no point in being coy about it, after all. And now that everyone knows
something’s
the matter …” Balfour shook his head again. The only color in his cheeks was a flush of embarrassment. I’d’ve been uncomfortable, too, if I knew the whole city was talking about me like that. “I didn’t tell my friend the details of what I’d heard, though—I didn’t really get the chance.”

“So it sounded like metal, then,” Luvander said, resting his arms against the table. “That’s not so bad, really, Balfour. I’m sure there are worse things it could be. If Rook were here, he’d begin naming them all in order: beginning and ending, I’m sure, with one of the illustrious workers over at the ’Fans claiming you’d knocked her up. Now
that’d
be something I’d run away from.”

Balfour huffed a quiet laugh and I sat back in my chair, hoping the damned little thing wouldn’t turn into a pile of kindling under my weight. I didn’t like it—not one bit—but I wasn’t a physician, either, and it wasn’t my place to make any diagnosis. Stress did funny things to people, and for all I knew, this was just another simple case. It didn’t make much sense to me that it’d turn up now of all times, considering the kind of stress Balfour’d managed to weather
before
the war ended, but that was luck for you.

“Yes, but there’s more,” Balfour said quietly, staring hard at a knot in the tabletop. Whatever it was, I knew we probably weren’t going to like it.

“Out with it,” Luvander said, reaching across the table to put his
hand where Balfour’s would’ve been if he hadn’t been hiding them under the table. “It’s only us, after all. At least half the men at the Airman could’ve outdone you with stories of the things their minds conjured up when they weren’t paying attention. You
know
that. What’s more, despite my penchant for gossip, I’ll have you know that I am extremely good at keeping secrets. Once you tell me something, it’s gone forever. Locked away like that story about the Margrave’s daughter in the tower, only somewhat less gruesome at the end, I hope. Also, you needn’t worry about Adamo saying anything because he hasn’t any friends to speak of. Just look at him.”

“If I did,” I said, “meaning if I did say something, it’d be because I want an expert’s opinion and not just my own to go on.”

I wasn’t going to tell a lie for anyone’s comfort, and I had a feeling Roy might’ve been helpful with this one. He wasn’t a
velikaia
, but he knew his fair share of them. Besides that, he was smart as a whip and spent so much time learning about everything I was certain he’d have an answer or two about all this.

Maybe Balfour would be able to listen to him since he didn’t seem able to trust
me
just yet.

“I realize what this is going to sound like,” Balfour said, looking up from the table at last. There was a look of resolve on his face I’d seen only a handful of times, and usually right before he was about to do something stupid, like marching into the belly of the beast to get his favorite pair of gloves back. “Just so you know—before you have me committed to an institution, I suppose. But after a while, I began to recognize the noise. I thought I must have been mistaken, or perhaps that I really had taken leave of my senses and this was the form it had chosen, but I refuse to accept that now. I am
not
mad. I
know
what I heard, and it sounded exactly like a dragon.”

Balfour paused, letting that sink in, but not so long that the silence would get too out of hand, forcing Luvander to start talking again.

“It’s simply unmistakable,” Balfour continued. “I’m sure either of you, or even Ghislain, would have recognized the sound straightaway. It’s only that I’ve spent so much time telling myself
not
to think about it that … well, I suppose I’d made myself resistant toward that particular conclusion. Yet I’ve heard it in my dreams enough times that I can’t pretend for the sake of avoidance. I knew that if I at least told
you
two, you’d have a better chance of understanding than anyone else. I’m beginning
to form a theory of my own, but considering the rumors on just how sound a state of mind I’m in at present, I’d at least like a second opinion.”

“You heard a dragon?” Luvander asked, his voice hushed.

“In your head?” I added, just to clarify.

“Well, I am reasonably certain it hadn’t landed in the square, if that’s what you’re asking,” Balfour said with the hint of a smile. “The funny thing is, I almost … I suppose if I have come this far, now I have to tell you the rest. It wasn’t just the scraping and the banging or the turning of gears; I also heard a voice, in the barest of whispers at first, and then more clearly just before I fell unconscious. Or fainted, if that’s what you wish to call it. It knew who I was; it said my name.”

Luvander drew in a sharp breath as quietly as he could manage, and I forced my mind to take stock of things one at a time, instead of shooting in a hundred directions all at once. There was a chance Balfour’d been having a real bad day. Of the survivors, he’d suffered harder than most, and that had to wear on him day in and day out. There was no reason to jump to conclusions or to be thinking about Thom’s letter, for example—the one that’d said all kinds of things about bringing a dead dragon back to life.

There was no reason to do it, and yet I was pretty damn sure Luvander and I already were.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Balfour said, before either of us could gather our wits fast enough to say something—desperate for it to be the right thing, yet without too much hope for that. “I know I
have
been in and out with fever ever since; I think that it’s likely what caused me to faint in the first place. But I didn’t feel at
all
strange when it first started happening. The voice came when I was at my most lucid—triggering the fever, perhaps. What I mean to say is, it wasn’t the product of delirium. It wasn’t a feverish hallucination. When I’m ill, I don’t hear it at all. And shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

A real unwelcome thought occurred to me, and I wrestled with it for a moment before letting it out into the open.

“Are you hearing things right now?” I asked. It made sense, and it’d explain that awful twitching, Balfour’s head jerking around from time to time like he thought someone was calling his name somewhere in the distance.

“It comes and goes,” Balfour admitted. “I haven’t been back to work
simply because I’m never certain when it’s going to start up again. I even tried making a kind of chart, writing down the times of day it returned, but there’s no real pattern. I would say it’s driving me mad, but I think that’s a rather unfortunate hyperbole given the circumstances, don’t you think? Unless it turns out to be true, in which case …”

“Fevers make everyone a little funny in the head,” Luvander said slowly, looking to me for support. “I had an uncle once who marched down to the lake and threw himself in because he thought my aunt had drawn him a very large bath. It took all us cousins to haul him out again, and all the time him screaming that we should give him his privacy in the lav. The whole town came out to watch, in the end. My second cousin Levent almost drowned, actually, and it’s why I have a very personal rule never to visit my relatives in the country ever again.”

“Now, let’s nobody leap to any conclusions just yet,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as either of them. “Fever’s going around the ’Versity like wildfire right now, or so I’ve heard. Stands to reason there’d be a bit of it in the bastion, too.
If
that’s what’s making you hear things, then it ought to pass as soon as the bug’s out of you.”

“That
is
what I was hoping,” Balfour admitted, twisting his hands in his lap. They looked like little dragon claws from this distance, overhung by the shadow of the table. If he was staring at them every day, I thought, didn’t it make sense he’d be hearing dragons not only in his sleep but during waking hours, too? I closed my eyes for a moment to listen—to see if
I
could hear anything, or if it was some of the whirring and clicking from those hands—but they were completely silent, and all I heard was the three of us breathing and a sudden gust of wind howling outside the building.

“Might be best to wait it out,” I said finally.

“And not tell anyone about it, either,” Luvander added, very practically.

“It doesn’t sound so foolish when you say it,” Balfour admitted. He almost looked relieved he’d told us, which I guessed meant we’d done our job all right.

“But you’re going to have to be very forthright about how you’re feeling,” Luvander added, tapping his fingers against the table. “No long-suffering silences from you, young man,
and
I’ll show up here with soup if I have to just to make sure you’re getting well again. If you prove stubborn, I’ll have to send another letter by pigeon to Ghislain
telling him to return at once, and
believe me
, the last thing you want is him showing up here with his old Ramanthine remedies, not to mention whatever he’s picked up on the open seas. He’ll have you drinking chicken’s blood out of a hollowed-out Ke-Han skull, and you’ll do it because, well … Because your alternative would be saying no to Ghislain.”

Balfour shuddered. “No need to make me worse with talk of things like that. I’ll do whatever I can. I’d prefer not to feel this way, myself.”

“We’ll check up on you,” I said. It wasn’t a suggestion, and fortunately, nobody spoke up with their idea of a better plan. “I can do mornings, and Luvander can come at nighttime. How’s that sound?”

“A little like I’m an outpatient,” Balfour replied.

“But you suppose you’ll accept it,” Luvander said for him.

“However did you know?” Balfour asked.

“Then it’s settled,” I said firmly. “And, if you don’t mind, I’m requesting permission to share your experiences with a friend of mine at the Basquiat who knows a sight more about everything than I do.”

“A friend of yours?” Luvander asked, with a look of pure shock. “No—I can’t believe it.”

Balfour, on the other hand, looked momentarily reluctant, then allowed his shoulders to fall in a shrug of acceptance. “I don’t suppose it matters much now one way or another who knows,” he admitted quietly. “As long as all this doesn’t make its way back to my mother. I wouldn’t want to worry her for no reason.”