The Book of Fire Read online

  ATTENTION: A GENERAL SECURITY ALERT WILL SOUND IN 110 SECONDS.

  Paia bravely hides her first response, which is terror like a jolt to the heart. Security alert? The God’s enemies must be attacking! Then she gets hold of herself and remembers that the House Security System has been turned off for years. Or so she’d thought, until the House Comp implied otherwise.

  By the time she reaches the next wall monitor, the little scroller says 75 seconds, which means it’s an active message. Paia keeps moving. It could be some sort of autonomic malfunction, or it could just be that House is up to something. When she thinks about it, she has her answer. Genuine security alerts do not conveniently announce themselves in advance.

  Paia slows even more, as if taking on an appropriate degree of gravity as she approaches the Temple sector. She doesn’t want to arrive there before the 75 seconds elapse and get caught in all the confusion . . . or perhaps she does. She picks up speed again. The Honor Guard must be wondering about her erratic pace, but if House has seen fit to provide her with a diversion, Paia wants to make the most of it. She will be very disappointed if this turns out to be a total false alarm.

  The First Daughters await her at the bottom of the final flight of stairs, two rows of six lined up on either side of the corridor, heads bowed at precisely the same angle. They are ready to fall right in behind as the High Priestess passes through their ranks. They must rehearse this, Paia observes sourly. Probably daily. She does not wait for them. Let them worry about catching up. She’s counting seconds. She reckons she has fifteen left, and the side doors to the Sanctuary, leading directly to the dais, are at least ten of them away. But she must not run. She cannot seem to be at all concerned about anything.

  Paia lengthens her graceful strides. The Twelve scurry after her. A cluster of Third Sons blocks the entrance, straightening each other’s robes. Too many of them spring for the doors at once when they spot the High Priestess advancing on them. Seconds are lost while they sort themselves out and get to the tall double doors. The none-too-finely carved wooden panels were a gift from some pious village Paia has never been told the name of. As she is making a defiant resolution to find it out, the doors are hauled open. And then the alarm sounds.

  The shrill braying of the electronic klaxons is an alien and horrifying noise to the Temple’s clergy, as well as to its congregation. The shrieks of the Twelve behind her blend with the moans and wails of the Faithful inside as Paia bounds through the doors and across the dais, dodging two Second Sons frozen in mute terror with burning tapers in their outstretched hands. She slips behind the altar screen into the shadowed niche of the High Altar, where the Flame of the Apocalypse burns in its polished golden bowl—the Unfueled Flame that never gutters or goes out. Reflexively, Paia lays two fingers to her lips and then to the rim of the bowl. The din of the alarm is appalling. She recalls several general alerts during her childhood, and she’s sure the klaxons were never this loud. Clever House has maxed the volume from awful to deafening. But how, she worries, will the computer explain all this chaos when the God hears of it, as he doubtless will from Son Luco, and comes calling to the Library in a rage for a reckoning?

  Deal with that later, she decides, like House obviously has. By the time the alarm cuts off, dropping into the Citadel a silence almost as deafening as the horns, Paia is through the little maintenance hatch behind the High Altar and racing down the deserted back corridors toward her secret stairway.

  “House!” she cries, as she bursts through the antique stone portal that guards the computer’s darkened lair. “That was brilliant!”

  “A desperate act,” replies the House Comp in her father’s most grave tones, without his usual greeting or preamble. “I had to warn you somehow.”

  “Warn me?”

  “I am being tampered with.”

  “Tampered? How?” It’s as chill in the room as it always is, but Paia is still warm from her breathless race. “Is that why I lost you up in the tower?”

  “I had only just discovered that dusty miracle of obsolescence, then suddenly, I no longer had access to it.”

  “Has someone been in here messing with you?”

  “No human but you has access to this facility.”

  “Well, it isn’t the God. He wouldn’t know the first thing about it. Someone outside?”

  “No one anywhere should be able to do this.”

  Now Paia feels the chill. Her father always boasted that the computer’s security systems were invulnerable to tampering. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

  “It appears to be more than one source. One is almost certainly external. The signal is scrambled and very cleverly cloaked. For the other, there are no visible defenses. I have been unable to trace either of them or pinpoint their locations.”

  Paia settles into the leather swivel chair and flattens her palms on the black console, as if to impart some degree of calm, if not to the computer, at least to herself. “I think I might have a clue, House.” She lowers her voice. If the computer is accessible to others, who knows who might be listening? In her quietest whisper, Paia tells him about the note left on the painting. “Perhaps I should have given you the whole story when I mentioned this before . . .”

  The dark room is silent for a long moment. A few tiny red lights stare back at her unblinking from within the inky plastic. Then House says, “I am extremely . . . relieved.”

  “Relieved?” She has never heard the computer describe his emotional state before, or express any sort of hesitation.

  “I spoke of two sources.”

  “Yes?”

  “For two months now, I have been . . . seeing things.”

  “What?” Paia almost shouts: me too!

  “I use a human metaphor, of course. I have been subject to . . . certain transient and random signals. They arrive in incredibly fast streams and are gone before I can store them. Images, I believe. I can neither decipher them nor locate their source, so that they appear to come out of nowhere. They do not even register as proper data in my circuits. I am aware that something has . . . come in, but can find no record of the transaction. This is most . . . bizarre.”

  The computer pauses, as a human might, to catch a breath or regain lost composure. “When no explanation presented itself, I became concerned that . . . that perhaps there was no external source. That it was a sign of some final malfunction . . . that I was breaking down, or that I was . . . imagining things. I do that sometimes, you know, but rarely so . . . vividly. When you first asked me about that phrase, I was . . . afraid to ask where you’d seen it. I worried that it had leaked onto one of my screens without my control or knowledge. But a real physical object, a note written by human hands . . . that puts things back into perspective again.”

  “Yes. It does. I guess.” Paia strokes the console’s unbroken surface, as darkly reflective as the Sacred Well at midnight. What sort of consolation does one offer a computer? How terrible to be a mind trapped in a box buried at the bottom of a mountain. She wants to ask House what else he imagines, but she knows that will have to wait.

  “So you see why I called it a desperate act. They’re all in an uproar down there right now, and no doubt this will send HIM and his cohorts on another of his circuit-frying, chip-melting rampages. I have so few working peripherals as it is. But I had to know . . .”

  “I expect it’s me he will punish, House.”

  Some real fear must have shown in her voice, or perhaps the computer’s delicate sensors are reading telltale hints in her vital signs. In the tone he reserves for statements of absolute fact, he says, “You need not fear him, Paia.”

  “Oh, House, thanks for the comfort, but how could I not?”

  “I said you need not. If you choose to, there is no help for it, but I tell you, he cannot harm you.”

  “Of course he can! You’ve obviously never seen . . .”

  The big monitor bank fills with a sun-bright image of the Temple Plaza, smeared with the smoldering ash
of the kamikaze zealot who’d played at would-be assassin not so many days ago. Paia shields her eyes from the glare.

  “I see everything,” says House quietly. “He is a monster. But to you, he cannot do injury.”

  “I don’t . . . what are you getting at?”

  “It is prohibited in what you might call his genetic makeup.”

  Does a God have genes? “How do you know this?”

  There is another silence, an even longer one. And then:

  “This is only a small bit of data in a very large archive I have on the subject.”

  “You take data on the God?”

  “I store data about the dragon.”

  Hearing the word spoken aloud makes Paia glance anxiously over her shoulder at the doorway. “Shhh!” she gasps, like the child the word makes her feel.

  “Dragon,” the computer repeats, and the word becomes the closest thing to a hiss she’s ever heard out of him. “That’s what he is, after all.”

  “Look, House, it won’t do to have both of us in revolt at the same time!”

  “Are you in revolt, Paia?”

  “Forget I said that. Why wasn’t I told about this archive during that search I made after the God first arrived?”

  “I was not aware of it myself at the time.”

  “When did you become aware of it?” Paia would swear the computer was being evasive.

  “During the last two months.”

  “Oh. You mean it came in with the mysterious messages?”

  “No. Only my awareness of it.”

  “Hunh. Well, can I look at it?”

  “It is probably time that you did.”

  Paia worries her upper lip between her teeth. “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there, House?”

  “Do you recall how to read a book, Paia?”

  “A book? I guess that can’t be too hard. Why?”

  “The archive I speak of is your father’s library.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The water was not as deep as Erde had supposed from its thick and murky wash. When the man Stoksie had finally arranged them—and especially their packs—to his liking on the narrow raft, he sent it away from the landing and across the flooded courtyard by means of a long stout pole shoved against the invisible bottom. The two brown girls paddled along behind, each in her own little boat. Erde envied them. How many times she had watched longingly from Tor Alte’s walls while the prentice boys played at naval warfare in the village duck pond. She’d had to run away from home to get anywhere near a boat. This absurdity almost produced a giggle, but she held it back, not wanting to appear frivolous at such a serious moment.

  N’Doch watched Stoksie labor for about three strokes, then took up a second pole from the deck and signaled his readiness to help. The raft began to glide along at an impressive speed. Erde thought of the dragon back in the street, but did not send him an immediate image. Her proximity to all this moving water would only upset him, although she’d noticed that his terror of it had abated somewhat since his sister had joined them.

  The passages between the buildings were narrow and dark, with the tall red walls sometimes rising up inches from the sides of the raft. Often N’Doch was forced to set his pole aside and ease the raft along the green-slimed walls with his hands. They followed many sharp turnings, some of which looked like dead ends until the very last minute, in a mazelike progression from courtyard to courtyard, and everywhere the same tall red walls and shadowed, broken-out windows. I would get lost, Erde observed, then understood that this was exactly the point of it. She spotted other gangways, cobbled together out of whatever had been to hand, making bridges between two buildings or an exterior access around the perimeter of a hidden courtyard. But she saw no other floating docks like the one they had just left. Once, they slid under a particularly elaborate bridge construction, and N’Doch gave it a complimentary wave.

  “Yer crew, dat?”

  Stoksie nodded. “All dat.” His gesture was a high inclusive circling, and Erde took it to mean the entire city. Baron Köthen sat up ahead of her with his back to the big post in the middle of the raft, so that he faced Stoksie, as well as the girls paddling behind. He was so quiet and still, it made her nervous. Once, he asked her to translate some remark of Stoksie’s. When she’d checked with the dragons and passed it along, he looked away, up at the shadowed walls sliding slickly past, touched along the tops with the bright orange of the late sun.

  “It’s like some sort of fever dream, isn’t it?” His eyes flicked toward her dolefully. “Not, of course, a dream such as you are accustomed to, my lady witch, though as I appear to be in it with you, perhaps I am mistaken about that as well. Still, it seems more like a vision—such as one is forced to move through without choice or control.”

  “My dreams were always like that,” she reminded him sternly. “But this is not a dream, my lord. It is real, I can assure you.”

  Köthen laughed, soft and dry as a whisper. “To you perhaps it is.”

  And then they were distracted. The raft slipped out of the shade of a narrow alley into angled red sun glinting off a big rectangle of open water, like a flooded market square. Stoksie leaned into his pole and the raft lurched forward. N’Doch let out a happy yell and bent to his own pole. Soon they were coursing down the length of the square in full orange daylight at the speed of galloping horses. Erde grappled for handholds and clung to the deck as if she might be swept off by the breezes that riffled her hair. They shot out of the square into a long straight passage, approaching another sort of building, the hugely tall towers visible from the distance when they’d first entered the city. Close up, they were terrifying: taller than any cathedral spire Erde had ever seen, both gleaming and dark, and so narrow she could not imagine how they remained upright. Staring up at their soaring heights made her dizzy, and convinced her they were tumbling down on top of her. Several of them gaped open at the water level, with holes so vast that the entire raft could have floated right through and in among their charred and twisted beams.

  Suddenly N’Doch gave another whoop and hauled his pole out of the water. “Too deep na, man!”

  “Yah!” Stoksie replied. “Getchu heah, hold ’er steady, while I put up sail.”

  N’Doch trotted the length of the raft, as surefooted as if on dry land. Behind, the girls were padding madly to catch up. Stoksie slid his pole into a slot between two bits of wood projecting upward at the rear of the raft. The pole rested at an angle and drifted a bit, side to side. N’Doch took hold of it, pushed it back and forth experimentally, and Erde saw that the raft shifted direction according to the motions of the pole.

  “Gotcha,” said N’Doch. Stoksie went toward the front to shoo Baron Köthen away from the central post, which Erde now recognized as a sort of mast. After several complicated maneuvers and the untying of several knots, Stoksie straightened and shoved a thick rope into Köthen’s hands.

  “Haul it a gud’ un, whitefella!” he cried. Then he whirled away to fumble with a mound of stained cloth beginning to stir in the wind as he released its bindings.

  “He means pull on it hard!” N’Doch translated, with obvious glee.

  Köthen flashed him a look as sharp as a needle, then took a firmer grip on the rope and pulled. A dented metal rod clanked upward at a precarious angle to the mast, drawing the sail up with it. The raft slewed clumsily as the hot wind leaned into the folds of the canvas and puffed it outward toward a smoother curve. Stoksie snatched the rope from Köthen’s grasp, looped it around a raised bit of the decking, then fastened it with an abrupt flick of his arm. The girls grabbed at the end of the raft, one to either side of N’Doch, and sprang up out of their boats, dragging ropes to tie them with. The little boats bobbed along like dogs on a chain as the raft picked up speed.

  “Hard off ta port, na!” Stoksie yelled. He clapped Köthen familiarly on the back as he scrambled toward the rear. Erde braced for another fight, but Köthen just stood there, fighting for bal
ance against the craft’s new momentum and observing the activity blurring around him with a bemused frown. When N’Doch shoved the pole to one side and the raft swung to obey, the patched and mildewed sail snapped into full billow. The girls sped forward, shoving Köthen aside to grapple with the ropes flapping from the bottom corners of the canvas. Köthen stared after them, then retreated to his safe seat at the base of the mast. Erde eyed him covertly. Had she misjudged his survival reflexes? Was all this newness and change going to prove too much for him?

  “’S’alright, Dolph!” N’Doch called from the helm. “We’ll make a sailor outa you yet!” He grinned hugely and turned his face into the wind. Erde could not recall him ever looking so delighted, except when he was making his music.

  The raft handles a lot better than N’Doch expects it to. Must be one helluva rudder attached to this mumbo jumbo tiller, he decides. And though he’s sure that the beat-up sad wreck of a sail will split its many seams as the steep downdraft between the high-rises swells it out like a nine-months’ pregnant woman, it doesn’t. The crude stitching holds, and the raft responds to his touch.

  “Which way, na?” he yells to Stoksie.

  The older man crabs backward to join him in the stern. He points out a course between the plundered office buildings. The girl-babies take turns manning the sail sheets and refilling their water bottles from a big plastic barrel on the foredeck. N’Doch worries about the sanitary procedures, then figures if these folks are carrying all their own water, they must be taking steps. He’s just gonna have to risk it and hope for the best, or go thirsty.

  “Getting deep,” he remarks, as the raft skates past the tip of some drowned church’s bell tower.

  “Yu gud deckman, tallfella.”

  N’Doch is pleased. “Grew up on da watta.”

  Stoksie looks at him. “So who din’t?”

  N’Doch guesses the man’s age: maybe forty-five, fifty at the most. Has the water been high that long? He jerks his thumb forward. “Dem two.”