The Book of Fire Read online

  N’Doch stares at him, speechless.

  Stoksie nods, returns a tight little smile, and the two of them shake like a knife at the throat is all in a day’s work.

  Köthen feels N’Doch’s stare. He shrugs, with his eyes still on Stoksie. “If Hal Engle can do this, so can I. I am not so great a fool as you think.”

  “My lord, I never . . .” N’Doch bites back the words so hard he nearly chokes. Where the fuck did that come from?

  Now Köthen looks up at him. “Ah,” he says, and tilts his head ever so slightly. Then he turns and walks away to the end of the dock to stare down into the water. N’Doch wants to race after him, quickly explain his awful lapse. But that would mean admitting to it in the first place.

  No way.

  He sees the girl watching him with sudden interest. Damn her. She doesn’t miss a thing. He turns his attention back to Stoksie, struggling to imagine what he can possibly say next. Stoksie, the better trader, helps him out.

  “Yu speak fer ’em, den?”

  N’Doch nods. He guesses he does, for now at least.

  “So whatsa news, out onna road?”

  “Da road’s hot and dry,” N’Doch replies truthfully. He hauls over his pack and fishes around for his water jug. The jug gets Stoksie’s immediate attention. N’Doch unstoppers and takes a swig, then much against his better judgment and for the sake of diplomacy, he offers the jug to Stoksie. Like, who knows what the man might be carrying? Except, he’s just small, not sickly-looking.

  Stoksie slides the jug past his nose for a quick sniff before he drinks. N’Doch can see he’s trying not to look too cautious. He swallows without comment, then falls to studying the jug. He runs a dusty, tar-stained hand over the grainy stoneware curves and turns the rich blue glaze into the light. “Good work, dis. Hand stuff.”

  N’Doch nods.

  “Trade it?”

  A commodity. N’Doch appears to think about this.

  “Givya gud value.”

  N’Doch counts. He’s got three others. Meanwhile he’s thanking the Deep Moor potters for this unintended favor. Good thing he didn’t insist on dumping the ceramic for the plastic. “Whachu offerin’?”

  “Da night air camp, ha? Food n’ shelta?”

  They must look worse off than he thought. Or maybe this is the standard offer around here. “All three, fer one?”

  Stoksie nods.

  “Done.” Now that it’s too late, he wonders if he’s made the deal too quickly. Still, seems like a fair enough deal to him.

  They shake on it. N’Doch shows him how to soften the beeswax stopper in his hands, not too much trouble in this climate, and how to remold it around the jug’s tapered neck. “You got good water at camp?”

  “Da bes’! Blind Rachel watta!” Now Stoksie grins, and his teeth are such wrecks that N’Doch can barely look at him. “Yu frum way long way, ri’?”

  “You got it, man. Way long.” N’Doch passes the jug to the girl. “Take all you want this time.” He looks over his shoulder at Köthen, standing so still by the edge of the dock, head bowed like he’s contemplating jumping. “Hey, Dolph!” N’Doch hits the name and the German as hard as he can. “We need you back here.”

  Köthen lifts his head slowly as if being stirred from the deepest sleep. He sways to the roll of the float as he comes toward them and hunkers down, completing the circle of crates. N’Doch sees how the girl watches his every step, and he knows he shouldn’t be doing it, too, but the man’s body language rivets him. He posted bail once for a gang buddy who’d spent two weeks in solitary, a tiny windowless cage. Köthen just moved across that dock like that same buddy walked out of jail. N’Doch doesn’t understand any of it.

  He nudges Köthen’s elbow with the water jug. Polite as always, the girl has left some. “Drink up. I just sold the bottle.”

  Obediently, Köthen drains the jug. N’Doch takes it back, ceremoniously shakes out the last drop and hands it to Stoksie. “’S all yers. So wha’s da schedule?”

  Stoksie glances upward. The sun is invisible behind the tall brick walls, but the sky is still bright and the building tops are hot with late afternoon glare. “Resta bit. Den we start.”

  N’Doch likes a man who travels by night. He translates. “Sound good to you, Dolph?”

  Köthen wets his lips. “Where are we going?”

  N’Doch realizes this man of the killer stare hasn’t met anyone’s gaze since he rejoined them. “I bought us food, water, and shelter. In their camp.”

  “With a water jug? A good exchange.”

  N’Doch laughs. “Let’s hope so.”

  Erde considered the tacit understandings of men, even between total strangers, and wondered if she would always be mystified by them. For instance, how could these three men who had been blade-wielding adversaries hardly a moment ago, now sit together in the shade, sharing nothing more than a companionable silence? At the very least, she would be asking every question she could think of. She’d already planned an information assault on the little girls, once they were done fidgeting with their tiny boats, unpacking and repacking the nameless objects stowed in every conceivable cranny.

  The dragon had no insight to provide her on this issue. Though he was certainly male, the ways of men were as mysterious to him as they were to Erde. But Lady Water, like N’Doch, was always ready with an opinion.

  It’s the magic of commerce, girl!

  Erde supposed this meant that because the man Stoksie had given up so easily and had so quickly fallen to bartering like a common tradesman, he was no warrior or person of real authority, and was therefore not to be feared. Yet Baron Köthen had been willing to shake his hand and sit down with him as an equal. This was very confusing. After her return to Deep Moor, Erde had realized that during her stay in N’Doch’s time, she had merely set aside the assumptions and habits of her own world, like a garment she fully intended to resume wearing without alteration as soon as her stay was ended. But what if the garment no longer fit as well as it once had? Erde had not reckoned on this possibility.

  And what of Baron Köthen, who had offered to a total stranger—one without title or noticeable breeding—his most intimate Christian name? Erde sensed turmoil beneath his collected surface. No, if she was truly honest, she didn’t sense it at all. She assumed it. Why else would he be so alert to his surroundings and to signs of danger, and yet so profoundly self-absorbed? He must be in turmoil.

  But when the rest was called, he stretched out flat on his back with his hands grasped behind his head like a boy on a summer riverbank. His stern square jaw was oddly relaxed as he gazed up at the yellowing sky. Erde thought she detected even the faintest ghost of a smile. Surely she had lost all understanding of what was going on in his mind. To make sense of it, she was forced to be strict with herself and ask how true her assumptions about him had been in the first place. She could set them up in a gleaming row, like the marble statues in the niches of Tor Alte’s chapel, all labeled Adolphus, Baron Köthen. First, the Golden Lord, standing tall and proud. Next down, the Man Who Would Be King, his bright charisma emanating like an aura. Then, further on, in bands of candlelight and shadow, the Hero in Adversity, and finally, the Warrior Chained. She’d had a dream or two, and thought she knew him.

  But there was no space in this pantheon, for instance, for the Drunken Lord or the Player of Silly Suicide Games, or even for this newest guise, the Pragmatic Democrat. Köthen in the flesh consistently eluded and defied her expectations. She said this to the dragon after she had imaged for him the empty street out in front. He transported in the middle of a thought, and his reply astonished her.

  QUITE POSSIBLY HE’S DEFIED HIS OWN EXPECTATIONS AS WELL.

  EXCUSE ME? Erde wondered if she had the dragon’s attention. Already he was studying the neat red stones of the building façade.

  WATCH WITH A CLEARER EYE. NOTE HIS OWN SURPRISE, HOWEVER HE TRIES TO CONCEAL IT.

  Which he will. Just like a man . . .

  As usual,
Lady Water chose the more cynical road. Nonetheless, though, with a precipitous sense of loss, Erde admitted to the need to lay her old set of assumptions aside. They were attractive, but obsolete. They no longer served to explain the baron’s behavior, probably because they were almost entirely of her own invention. If she was ever to truly understand him, it was time to make room for the person she really didn’t know: Dolph Hoffman, the just-plain man.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Alone in her window seat, with her escort camped outside the door, Paia has an epiphany. She knows it’s a dramatic word, but after considering it carefully, she decides that it is not overstated.

  She is gazing down on the Temple grounds, at the familiar geometry of the shadowed Inner Court and the outer, sun-baked Temple Plaza, at the square granite block of the Altar of the Winged God, its rusty bloodstain visible even from this height. She is watching the Temple staff come and go, on missions she knows nothing of, past the approaching lines of the Faithful, each with its own particular geometry, observed from this very spot for so many years. She is watching and thinking of something else, as she usually does, except that this time her attention is caught.

  Something is different.

  She redirects a bit more of her concentration, away from her worries about the House Comp’s sudden silence and how to get to him, away from the mystery of those white letters on a blue screen. She studies the antlike patterns below more carefully. They are changing, have already changed, like the painting in the tower, although the difference is much harder to define. Paia is sure of it, nonetheless, and she wonders what it means.

  The God teaches that change is the enemy of stability. Should she, as she knows the God would, take steps to avert it? This would require understanding what the change is. Should she, as she is sure the God would advise, trust in him to protect her from it? As she has always done, since the day he came?

  A picture forms in her mind: change personified as one of those terrible endless hurricanes from her childhood that flattened everything in its path. The gales would wreck the windmills on the ridge above the Citadel, they’d be on emergency power for weeks, and entire coastal cities would wash away into the rising oceans. One of Paia’s first memories is watching the destruction on the satellite news. She remembers her mother weeping about all the little bodies floating on the tide. She even recalls asking why those children’s daddies weren’t smart enough to take to the shelter of rock and high ground like her daddy did, and his daddy before him.

  But then the hurricanes became windstorms, and then dust storms, and those became fewer but longer in duration, and as the heat settled in over the Citadel, its inhabitants retreated farther and farther into the mountainside. First her mother, then her father died, and young Paia stopped thinking about the ocean or the bodies or about anything at all except the struggle to keep herself and the Citadel alive.

  Then the God arrived, and set everything back in order. Again, lives were lost, in the Wars of Conversion, but it seemed a small price to pay for the end of chaos. And the God advised his new converts not to think about the future, which is unpredictable, or the past, which is full of things you can do nothing about or ever have back again, like green hillsides, luxurious possessions . . . or parents. Survive the day, the God said. At the time, Paia knew exactly what he meant. Now she is no longer sure.

  The rows of screens in the House Comp’s lair had been that same blank blue as on the monitor upstairs, behind the white lettering. The blue of oceans.

  What price survival?

  Paia had always thought . . . had she been told this, or did she merely assume? . . . that when the hurricanes dried into dust storms, the oceans receded to their former levels. She understands now that this isn’t true. Who would have told her such a thing? The God? It hardly matters. What she wants to know is how much of the world is still underwater? A quarter? A third? Half? Will it be more? Is this what’s aroused the God’s “ancient foes”? The need for higher ground, a new place of safety from an ever rising tide?

  She’s guessed at least one answer to the mysterious question: the price of her own survival has been ignorance.

  How is it she can sit so still, when her mind is in such a frenzy? Paralyzed. As if all her capacity for motion has been given over to thought.

  I know nothing. Nothing!

  She could throw a huge tantrum about it, but she doesn’t even know who to blame. No wonder the phrase “spoiled brat” rolled so easily off Son Luco’s tongue. He’s probably always thought that about her, even though he must be party to the agreement that keeps her in ignorance, in the name of preserving her innocence. The God’s conspiracy, with Luco as his chief conspirator and who knows who else, all in on it, telling themselves it’s for her own good. Only the House Comp has offered her knowledge, and she’s been too stupid . . . or too naive . . . to take advantage of it.

  Ignorance.

  And what are they hiding? Something specific? Such as, why the southern hills were alight with fire last week, and again two nights ago? Or why there’s been no melon on her breakfast tray for two weeks running? Why does she not know the faces of her priestesses? Why was the woman on the House Comp’s screens weeping and shaking her fist at the sky? Who? What? Why?

  Paia has asked questions before, but only idly, always allowing herself to be satisfied with evasion and the flattery of worship. But the Citadel is her father’s legacy. It’s time his only daughter took better charge of it.

  In the courtyard below, a scuffle breaks out in the long line of the Faithful waiting in the hot and lethal sun for admission to the Sanctuary. Perhaps a third of them will be admitted, and the rest will continue their wait until tomorrow morning, or evening, or the next morning. When the scuffle clears, as it always does, there is a man laid flat on the paving stones, as there always is. There’s no change down there. Paia understands that now. The change is in herself.

  It’s time to prepare for Evensong. The chambermaid will be knocking momentarily. Still Paia doesn’t stir. Her arms and legs are lead.

  What about the chambermaid, nameless to her mistress and mute since birth? Or so Paia is told, though now she has begun to doubt everything. Is the chambermaid also kept in ignorance? What about the Honor Guard outside her door? Or the Faithful, slamming each other’s heads for a place in line? How far does this conspiracy of ignorance extend?

  She pictures white letters on a blue screen. White as clouds, blue as oceans. Blue as the sky above velvet-green grass, in a landscape already passed into memory but for a black-and-white muddle in the House Comp’s surveillance files.

  And who is it who has finally had enough of all this ignorance?

  Paia assumed they were the enemy because they asked a heretical question. But perhaps they mean to be her friends.

  Her leaden fingers curl into fists. Her lips tighten. Small motions, great resolve. She will be her own conspiracy. First, she will get back to the House Comp. She’ll sneak away in the middle of the night. She’ll bribe the Honor Guard with her father’s oldest brandy! Whatever she has to do, she will.

  Next, she must get out of the Citadel. Must! Brave the sun and open air, the bandits and the assassins! She’ll tell Son Loco that the High Priestess wishes to make a formal visitation to the villages of the Faithful. She’ll bend every ounce of her authority and persuasion on him until he agrees. She’s done with being an idle ornament for the God’s altar. Only in full understanding of the world can she serve the Temple as the God deserves.

  And she’ll choose a Suitor, as the God has decreed, but his knowledge will be more attractive to her than his appearance. He’ll be someone she can pry information out of while he’s weak from the pleasures of her bed.

  And somehow, she will convince the God to tell her about these awful, ancient enemies that threaten his peace of mind. For instinct warns her that they are the key to all of this.

  Wrapped in stillness, Paia plans.

  PART THREE

  The Call to the Q
uest

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The chambermaid has come and gone. The High Priestess is on her way to Evensong, escorted by six of her Honor Guard. She has made sure to be gracious to them. She has even smiled at the duty captain, even though the watch will have changed at least twice before her planned darktime foray.

  Paia strides ahead of them along the dim corridor. The carpet, once so soft and thick beneath her feet, is worn thin in the center from all this military traffic. It was meant for comfort, not to withstand soldiers’ boots. Even her sandals make a scratchy sound against it now. Paia tries to look as if she cannot wait to enter the Temple once more, as if she is so eager to be leading her flock in holy worship of the God. Meanwhile, she is wondering where he is. She cannot feel him anywhere in the Citadel. She hasn’t seen him for several days. There is a measure of relief in this, but also the ache of loss. She misses him. He used to visit her more often.

  She is gliding down the steps between the second and third levels. She is thinking about the God, but her brain registers a delayed response to the deactivated house monitor screen at the top of the staircase. Has she really seen words there, or is she now imagining cryptic messages everywhere she looks?

  She cannot glance back. If there is something there, a look will bring it to the attention of the Honor Guard who, from the steady clatter of their downward progress behind her, appear to have noticed nothing. But there is another wall monitor at the bottom of the stair.

  Paia slows a little, pretending to adjust the glittering folds of her red-and-gold Evensong robe. As she moves past the monitor, she gives it a fleeting but thorough study. A small tickertape is scrolling silently across the bottom of an otherwise dead gray screen.