dragon’s strength for this, the girl was so slender and light. She turned and started back toward the alley, moving slowly and carefully over the unsteady rubble. But she had only taken a few steps when she heard the rocks shifting and tumbling softly behind her, and she looked back.
A dusty hand emerged from the rubble pushing aside the broken stones and bits of wood one by one until the entire arm was free, and then the man was able to shove a large beam aside and pull his head out into the clear air. He coughed violently and rubbed his eyes, and Asha recognized him as the Aegyptian man who had led the girl up to the temple doors.
If he was taking her in there, then he’s no friend of hers.
Asha continued toward the alley where she could see Priya waiting with her staff in one hand and Asha’s medicine bag in the other. Out of the corner of her eye she saw people approaching the ruined temple from the far end of the street. They were men in red shirts and steel breastplates, and they carried strange spears in their hands.
Soldiers. Good. They can help the other injured people.
“Wait!” the man in the rubble called out. “Please! Is she all right?”
Asha paused and glanced over her shoulder. The man had both arms free now and he finished hauling his legs out from under a piece of the fortress wall.
His legs must have been shattered.
The man got to his feet and proceeded to sweep the dust from his long blue coat.
Or not.
He started toward her. “How is she? Is she all right?”
Asha noted the expression of genuine concern on his face.
But is he really worried about her for her own sake, or because he doesn’t want to lose his little servant?
“She’s alive,” Asha said. “I need to look at her. I’m an herbalist.”
“You’re from India,” the man said, with a curious look of surprise. He had thick, wavy black hair with a few faint streaks of gray, and a salt and pepper stubble along his jaw and thin cheeks.
“Yes.” She frowned.
“How wonderful. I myself studied with several Indian physicians when I was younger. You’re of the Ayurveda school, perhaps?”
“Yes.” She frowned a little less, and began walking again toward the alley with the man following beside her. “Where did you study?”
“Kolkata, mostly,” he said. He leaned over the pale girl’s face and gently swept her red hair back from her eyes and touched her cheek.
“Really?” Asha stepped into the alley beside the nun in red. “Priya, let’s move back from the road a little way.”
“Priya?” The man nodded earnestly. “A pleasure to meet you. Omar Bakhoum, at your service. I see you are of the Buddhist persuasion. Excellent. And I particularly like those lotuses in your hair. Very nice, very pretty.”
Priya smiled as she walked with them. “Thank you very much, Mister Bakhoum.”
“Omar, please.”
Asha laid the unconscious girl on the ground and took her bag of supplies from Priya. From inside it she produced a wooden tube of waking salts, which she waved under the girl’s nose. A moment later the girl winced and blinked her eyes open.
“Shh, everything’s all right, Wren,” Omar said, taking her hand. “You’re going to be fine. Does anything hurt?”
The girl called Wren groaned and tried to sit up.
“Please, lie still,” Asha said.
“She may not understand you. She’s still learning Eranian,” Omar said. “Her first language is Rus.”
“Yslander, not Rus,” the girl muttered. “And I speak Eranian good enough.”
“ Well enough, dear,” Omar corrected her.
Wren sat up and coughed. She looked at Asha, and her tall furry ears twitched and turned from side to side, just like a nervous fox.
Asha stared at the ears. “They’re real? I thought they might be some sort of… They’re real?”
“Yes,” Omar said as he gently lifted the girl’s black scarf over her head again. “They are.”
Wren leaned forward as though she was about to stand up and Asha put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Sit still a moment, please. I want to be certain that you aren’t injured.”
Asha swept her hair back from her right ear, the golden scaled ear, the place where the dragon had bitten her as a child, and now the one part of her body that was forever clothed in dragon skin. She leaned close to the girl, listening.
Asha heard a riot of sounds tinkling and booming and thrumming from the city all around her. The souls of men and women, the half-souls of beasts large and small, even the fragile soul-stuff that lived inside the distant trees and gardens all crowded into her golden ear, but she tuned them all out to focus on the girl. Asha listened to the healthy, vital rhythms of the girl’s body, her heart, her lungs, and bones. But then she heard something else.
No, two somethings.
The first noise was the stranger of the two, a wild and hungry growling deep inside the girl’s body.
A second soul. An animal soul, just like the one inside me. But it’s not complete, not nearly. It’s only a tiny shred of the fox’s soul, just as I once had only a tiny shred of the dragon’s soul.
Asha held her breath, trying to focus a bit more, trying to hear through the wholesome song of the girl’s soul and past the agitated noise of the fox soul. And she found a steady hum.
There. It’s… another soul? A third soul? I’ve never seen this before. But it’s just another shred, a shred of a what? Gods, it’s human. It’s the soul of…
Asha leaned back and looked at the man called Omar. “What did you do to her? Why can I hear your soul in her body?”
Priya gasped. “Remarkable!”
“You can hear it?” Wren asked.
Omar’s eyes widened. “You are a healer of extraordinary talents. But it’s really nothing to concern yourself with. If you can hear my soul in her, then you must be able to hear the fox as well.”
Asha nodded.
“Well,” Omar hesitated. “I gave her a bit of my soul to keep the fox under control. Without me in there, the fox would do more than just give her those curious ears.”
Wren cleared her throat. “While we’re talking about ears.” She pointed at Asha.
Asha touched her golden ear, feeling the hard scales, and she let her hair fall back over it again. “When I was young, I was bitten by a creature. It did this to me, and now I can hear soul-sounds.” A small part of her felt guilty for not explaining more, but these were still strangers who were about to enter the Temple of Osiris of their own free will.
He could be lying about how she ended up this way, but it didn’t sound like he was trying to deceive us. In fact, he sounds like…
She tilted her head as she stared at him.
“Two souls?” Asha grabbed Priya’s arm, uncertain if she should be pleased or preparing to run. “You have a golden pendant around your neck with your soul inside it, don’t you? You’re one of the immortals!”
Omar’s jaw dropped. By way of answer, he tugged the little chain around his neck out of his shirt and displayed the heart-shaped lump of golden sun-steel. Then he dropped it back inside his shirt, saying, “How? How could you possibly know that?”
“I’ve met people like you before,” Asha said. “In Persia.”
“You mean Eran,” he corrected her.
“I know what I mean.” Asha glanced at Priya.
“Tell me everything, please,” he said. “Who did you meet? What happened to them?”
The nun smiled and reached up to pet the sleeping mongoose on her shoulder. “It would seem we have much to talk about. But first, should our duty not be to see to those who were in the street when the temple fell?”
