The Dragons of Babel (10 page)

T
here were armies on the move, and no sensible being lingered in a war zone. Nevertheless Will did. By the time the sun went down, they had acquired trout and mushrooms and wild tubers enough to make a good meal, and built a small camp at the verge of the forest. Like most feys, Will was a mongrel. But there was enough woods-elf in his blood that, if it weren't for the War, he could be perfectly comfortable here forever. He built a nest of pine boughs for Esme and once again wrapped her in his blanket. She demanded of him a song, and then a story, and then another story, and then a lullaby. By degrees she began to blink and yawn, and finally she slid away to the realm of sleep.

She baffled Will. The girl was as much at ease as if she had lived in this camp all her life. He had expected, after the day's events, that she would fight sleep and suffer nightmares. But here, where it took his utmost efforts to keep them warm and fed, she slept the sleep of the innocent and protected.

Feeling sorely used, Will wrapped his windbreaker about himself, and fell asleep as well.

Hours later—or possibly mere minutes—he was wakened from uneasy dreams by the thunder of jets. Will opened his eyes in time to see a flight of dragons pass overhead. Their afterburners scratched thin lines of fire across the sky, dwindling slowly before finally disappearing over the western horizon. He crammed his hand into his mouth and bit the flesh between thumb and forefinger until it bled. How he used to marvel at those fearsome machines! He had even, in the innocence of his young heart, loved them and imagined himself piloting one someday. Now the sight of them nauseated him.

He got up, sourly noting that Esme slept undisturbed, and threw an armload of wood on the fire. He would not be able to sleep again tonight. Best he were warm while he awaited the dawn.

So it was that he chanced to be awake when a troop of centaurs galloped across the distant moonlit fields, gray as ghosts and silent as so many deer. At the sight of his camp-fire, their leader gestured and three of them split away from the others. They sped toward him. Will stood at their approach.

The centaurs pulled up with a thunder of hooves and a spatter of kicked-up dirt. “It's a civilian, Sarge,” one said. They were all three female and wore red military jackets with gold piping and shakos to match. “Happy, clueless, and out on a fucking walking tour of the countryside, apparently.”

“It's not aware that there's a gods-be-damned war on, then?”

“Apparently not.” To Will, she said, “Don't you know that the Sons of Fire are on their way?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” Will said shakily. Then, gathering his courage, “Nor whose side you are on.”

One centaur snorted in disdain. A second struck the insignia on her chest and cried, “We are the Fifth Amazons—the brood mares of death! Are you a fool, not to have heard of us?”

But the third said, “It does not matter whose side we are on. The rock people come, the dwellers-in-the-depths from the Land of Fire. Even now they climb toward the surface, bringing with them both immense heat and a fearful kinetic energy. When they arrive, the ground will bubble and smoke. All of
this”
—she swept her arm to take in all the land about them—“will be blasted away. Then will the battle begin. And it will be such that all who stand within the circuit of combat, no matter what their allegiance, will die.”

“Come away, Antiope,” said the first, who was older than the other two and, by the tone of authority in her voice, the sergeant. “We were told to clear the land of any lingering noncombatants. Our orders do not require us to rescue idiots.”

“What's this?” said the second. She knelt. “A child—and a girl!”

Will started forward, to snatch Esme away from the centaur. But the other two cantered sideways into his path, blocking him. “Look at her, Sergeant Lucasta. The poor little bugger is as weary as a kitten. She doesn't awaken, even when I pick her up.” She handed Esme to her superior, who held the sleeping child against her shoulder.

“We've wasted enough time,” Sergeant Lucasta said. “Let's go.”

“Should we douse the fire?” Antiope asked.

“Let it burn. This time tomorrow, what fucking difference will it make?”

The second centaur packed up Will's gear with startling efficiency, stowed it in leathern hip-bags, and started after her commander. Then the youn gest of the three seized Will's arm and effortlessly lifted him onto her back. She
reared up and hastily he placed his arms around her waist. “My name is Campaspe.” She grinned over her shoulder. “Hang on tight, manling. I'm going to give you the ride of your life.”

So began their midnight gallop. Up hill and down they sped, past forests and farms. All the world flowed by like a billowing curtain, a thin veil over something vast, naked, and profound. Will tried to imagine what lay beneath and could not. “Will all this really be destroyed?” he asked. “Is it possible?”

“If you'd been through half the shit
I
have,” Campaspe replied, “you would not doubt it for an instant. Rest quiet now, it's a long ride.” Taking her at her word, Will lay his cheek against Campaspe's back. It was warm. Her muscles moved smoothly beneath him and between his legs. He became acutely aware of the clean stench of her sweat.

“Hey! Sarge! I think the civilian likes me—he's getting hard!”

“He'll need to mount a stump if he expects to stick it to you,” the sergeant replied.

“At least he won't need any petroleum jelly!” Antiope said.

“That was… I didn't…” Will said hastily, as they all laughed.

“Oh, really?” Campaspe's eyes and teeth flashed scornfully. She took his hands from around her waist and placed them firmly on her breasts. “Deny it now!”

Horrified, Will snatched his hands away, almost fell, and seized Campaspe's waist again. “I couldn't! The Nameless Ones forbid it!”

“It would be bestiality for me too, little ape-hips,” she laughed. “But what's a war for, if not to loosen a few rules here and there? Eh, Sarge?”

“Only fucking reason
I
know.”

“I knew a gal in the Seventh who liked to do it with dogs,” Antiope said. “Big ones, of course. Mastiffs. So one
day she…” And she went on to relate a story so crude that Will flushed red as her jacket. The others laughed like horses, first at the story and then at his embarrassment.

F
or hours they coursed over the countryside, straight as falcons and almost as fast. By slow degrees, Will grew accustomed to Campaspe's badinage. She didn't mean anything by it, he realized. But she was young and in a war, and flirted out of nervousness. Once again he lay his cheek against her back, and she reached behind her to scratch his head reassuringly. It was then that he noticed the brass badge on her shoulder, and twisted about so he could read it. An image had been worked into the badge, a thin line of moonsilver that glimmered clear and bright by the light of Selene, showing three sword-wielding arms radiant from a common point, like a three-limbed swastika. Will recognized the symbol as the triskelion of the Armies of the Mighty. And he was in their power! He shuddered in revulsion and fear.

Sergeant Lucasta, galloping near, saw this and shifted the slumbering Esme from one shoulder to the other. “So you've caught on at last,” she said. “We're the wicked baby-eating enemy. And yet, oddly enough, we're the ones clearing you away from an extremely dangerous situation, rather than your own fucking army. Kind of makes you think, don't it?”

“It's because he's a civilian, right, Sarge? Not much sport in killing civilians,” Campaspe said.

“They can't fight and they can't shoot,” Antiope threw in. “They're lucky if they know how to die.”

“Fortunately, they have us to do all those things for them.” Sergeant Lucasta held up a hand, and they slowed to a walk. “We should have joined up with the platoon a long time ago.”

“We haven't missed' em,” Antiope said. “I can still see their spoor.”

“And smell their droppings,” Campaspe added.

They had come to a spinney of aspens. “We'll stop here for a bit and rest,” the sergeant said, “while I work this thing through in my head.”

Campaspe came to a halt and Will slid gratefully from her back. She took a thermos of coffee from a harness-bag and offered him some.

“I… I have to take a leak,” he said.

“Piss away,” she said carelessly. “You don't need my permission.” And then, when he started into the woods, “Hey! Where the fuck do you think you're going?”

Again Will flushed, remembering how casually his companions had voided themselves during the night, dropping turds behind them even as they conversed. “My kind needs privacy,” he said, and plunged into the brush.

Behind him, he heard Campaspe say, “Well, la-de-da!” to the extreme amusement of her comrades.

Deep into the spinney he went, until he could no longer hear the centaurs talking. Then he unzipped and did his business against the side of a pale slim tree. Briefly, he considered slipping away. The woods were his element, even as open terrain favored the centaurs. He could pass swiftly and silently through underbrush that would slow them to a walk and bury himself so cunningly in the fallen leaves of the forest floor that they would never find him. But did he dare leave Esme with them? Centaurs had no bathroom manners to speak of because they were an early creation, like trolls and giants. They were less subtle of thought than most thinking creatures, more primal in emotion. Murder came to them more easily than spite, lust than love, rapture than pity. They were perfectly capable of killing a small child simply out of annoyance with him for evading their grasp.

Esme meant nothing to him. But still, he could not be responsible for her death.

Yet as he approached the spot where he had left their captors, he heard childish laughter. Esme was awake, and
apparently having the time of her life. Another few steps brought him out of the aspens, and he saw Sergeant Lucasta sitting in the grass, forelegs neatly tucked under her, playing with Esme as gently as a mother would her own foal. Will could not help but smile. Females were females, whatever their species, and whatever their allegiance, Esme was probably as safe with these lady cavaliers as anywhere.

“Again!” Esme shrieked. “Please, again?”

“Oh, very well,” Sergeant Lucasta said fondly. She lifted her revolver, gave the cylinder a spin, cocked the hammer, and placed it to the child's forehead.

“Stop!”
Will screamed. Running forward, he snatched up Esme into his arms. “What in the name of sanity do you think you're doing?”

The sergeant flipped open the cylinder, looked down into the chamber. “There's the bullet. She would have died if you hadn't stopped me. Lucky.”

“I
am,”
Esme said. “I
am
lucky!”

The centaur snapped the cylinder shut, gave it a spin, and all in one motion pointed it at Esme again and pulled the trigger.

Snap!
The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

Esme laughed with delight. “For the sake of the Seven!” Will cried. “She's only a child!” He noticed now, as he had not before, that Campaspe and Antiope were nowhere to be seen. This did not strike him as a good omen.

“She has the luck of innocence,” Sergeant Lucasta observed, holstering her revolver. “Twenty-three times I spun the cylinder and fired at her, and every time the hammer came down on an empty chamber. Do you know what the odds are against that?”

“I'm not very good at math.”

“Neither am I. Pretty fucking unlikely, though, I'm sure of that.”

“I
told
you I was lucky,” Esme said. She struggled out of Will's arms. “Nobody ever listens to me.”

“Let me ask you a question, then, and I promise to listen. Who is he”—she jerked a thumb at Will—“to you?”

“My papa,” Esme said confidently.

“And who am I?”

The little girl's brow furrowed in thought. “My… mama?”

“Sleep,” said the centaur. She placed a hand on the girl's forehead and drew it down over her eyes. When she removed it, Esme was asleep. Carefully, she laid the child down in the grass. “I've seen this before,” she said. “I've seen a lot of things most folks never suspect. She is old, this one, old and far from a child, though she thinks and acts as one. Almost certainly, she's older than the both of us combined.”

“How can that be?”

“She's sold her past and her future, her memories and adolescence and maturity, to the Year Eater in exchange for an undying present and the kind of luck it takes for a child to survive on her own in a world like ours.”

Will remembered the lie he had told the lubin and experienced a sudden coldness. The tale had come to him out of nowhere. This could not be mere coincidence. Nevertheless, he said, “I don't believe it.”

“How did you come to be traveling with her?”

“She was running from some men who wanted to rape her.”

“Lucky thing you chanced along.” The sergeant patted the pockets of her jacket and extracted a pipe. “There is only a limited amount of luck in this world—perhaps you've noticed this for yourself? There is only so much, and it cannot be increased or decreased by so much as a tittle. This one draws luck from those around her. We should have rejoined our companions hours ago. It was good luck for her to be carried so much farther than we intended. It was bad luck for us to do so.” She reached into her hip-bags and came out with a tobacco pouch. “The child is a
monster—she has no memory. If you walk away from her, she will have forgotten you by morning.”

“Are you telling me to abandon her?”

“In a word? Yes.”

Will looked down on the sleeping child, so peaceful and so trusting. “I… I cannot.”