The Book of Fire Read online

  “Yah? Mount’in-bred, den?”

  “Betcha.”

  Now Stoksie’s looking at him hard. “Townfolk?”

  “Nah. Castles, is more like.” He wonders what the man’s got against townfolk. Something, that’s for sure.

  “Yah? Where’sat?”

  “Ever hear a Europe?”

  Stoksie shrugs. “Sure, one time. All unda na, ri’?”

  All under. All under what? All underwater? N’Doch swallows. How’s he ever going to tell the girl? “Nah. Mount’ins still lef’. Like here,” he guesses, with a glance toward the west where, between the shafts of dying skyscrapers, blue crenellations press upward like a woman’s breasts against the red sky. The picture is coming in clearer now. It’s just what the vid guys predicted. Half the world’s underwater. Holy shit. “S’ dey come heah, lookin’ fer a fren’.”

  “Alla way frum Urop? Mus’ be sumkinda gud fren’, na.”

  N’Doch nods gravely. “Betcha.”

  “Sumun roun’ heah?”

  “Mebbe. Don’ know fer shur. Din’t find ’im yet.” N’Doch sees the water opening out ahead, past the sunstruck edge of a steel office tower and through a gateway of rusted girders. “Dis town gotta name?”

  Stoksie turns his blackened grin on him. “Jokin’, ri’?”

  “Nope. Askin’.”

  “Dis here’s Big Albin, tallfella. Da prida Nyork. How far yu say yu come?”

  “Li’ I tellyu, man. Way far.”

  Stoksie takes over the helm when they swing out into the open bay. N’Doch feels some mean crosswinds cutting across his nose, as dry as a gust off the Sahara but honed with salt. A current catches the raft and heads it downstream. But it seems Stoksie intends to tack upstream, so the going is slow for a while, back and forth in the unrelenting sun. But better than walking, N’Doch tells himself. He goes forward for a long warm drink at the water barrel, then settles down next to the girl to unload what he’s heard. He’ll let her pass it on to his lordship and the dragons. He does ask her, though, how they’re doing.

  She eyes him impishly. “Lady Water says she’s waiting for you to stop enjoying yourself and get on with business.”

  N’Doch coughs out a guilty laugh. “She didn’t say that.”

  “No. But she might have.”

  “Ha, girl! You made a joke! I’m keeping my eye on you now!”

  The bay is long. Eventually, N’Doch decides it must be a river. It’s risen with the seas and flooded out the low-lying areas, so it just looks like a bay, with barren, rocky shores. The girl-babies chatter among themselves as Stoksie laboriously guides the raft upstream. They throw looks at Köthen as he leans back against the mast and appears to doze. He looks stunned and passive, but N’Doch doesn’t believe it for a nanosecond, and he’s pretty sure the girl-babies don’t either. At least the man’s had the sense this time not to insist on taking charge. Maybe 913’s favorite hothead is learning how to go with the flow.

  After a tough hour of fighting the current, Stoksie is looking slick and tuckered. N’Doch worries for the little man’s heart. “Yu wan’ sum help?”

  Stoksie waves him off stubbornly, and then, as if his refusal has gained him strength, the raft glides along more readily, actually picking up speed. Stoksie rubs his bald head and flashes a big, gap-toothed grin. “See dat? I ain’ dun fer yit!”

  “Yu ain’ even half dun!” The dude’s been so easy to deal with so far, no sense making him feel bad. N’Doch winks sideways at the girl so she doesn’t spill the beans. There’s no sign from below, no odd ripples, no careless bumping against the underside, but he knows a certain water dragon is down there, helping things along. He pictures her, a blue shadow streamlined into porpoise sleekness. He smiles, leans back, and shuts his eyes.

  A much easier hour later, when Stoksie heads the raft toward a little inlet on the western shore, N’Doch has actually been dozing. He stirs, refreshed, looks around. Things are a little greener up here, though not by much. The trees are stunted and dust-cloaked, but they have scrawny little crops of leaves, and the weeds scattering the tops of the steep clay banks show a few yellow flowers. N’Doch spots a line of broken foundations along the bank top, and an occasional bit of crumbling wall. Might have been a town once, but it’s history now. His little nap has reawakened his curiosity.

  “Wha’s dat up deah?” he calls to Stoksie.

  “Sumplace. I fergit whaddit wuz back den. Call it Plaguetown nah.”

  N’Doch looks alarmed.

  “Na, dey’s nuttin deah nah. Dem plagues is long gone.” Then it’s Stoksie’s turn to look concerned. “Yu got plague still up nort’?”

  “Na. None a dat.”

  “Gud. Cuz yu don’ lookit. Look reel healt’y, alla yus. Firs’ ting I notice.”

  Stoksie noses the raft expertly into the inlet, then strips his pole free of the rudder and plunges it into the water again. N’Doch leaps up to join him. It’s too shallow here for invisible dragon assistance. The girl-babies race back to haul the rudder out of its casing. They toss it long and dripping on the deck, then grab their paddles out of the trailing boats to lend a hand at forward motion.

  The inlet was probably once a creek emptying vigorously into the river. Now the water wanders sluggishly upstream. Jumbles of boulders, still marked by tar stain, line both sides of a steep and scrubby ravine. Soon the streambed sprouts rocks and becomes an obstacle course as the ground climbs around them. More ruins perch on the slopes past the rockfall, wooden structures sagging into shapelessness and char among the bleached skeletons of pine trees. Quaint houses along a picturesque mountain stream, N’Doch muses, recalling travel vids of Switzerland, or the American Rockies, where the cowboys come from. Then there’s a cry of metal on stone, and Stoksie calls a halt. The raft’s oil drum pontoons are scraping bottom. He poles toward a bankside stair made of ascending natural ledges, and lands the raft with a final shove and a twist of his pole. A faintly worn track winds up and away through the stiff scrub clinging to the slope.

  As the raft stills, the heat descends again, thick with the smell of parched dirt. A swarm of midges stirs from the algal muck along the shore. N’Doch bats at them irritably, but is privately glad to see any sign of wildlife. Köthen shakes himself out of his putative doze. He stretches elaborately. N’Doch has to chuckle at the pair of them, both avidly scanning the landscape, both pretending so hard not to. The girl-babies scramble onto dry land and tie off the raft to a battered tree trunk. Stoksie ships his pole, so N’Doch does likewise. Not much of a destination, but he guesses they’re here. He listens. Nothing but midge whine and their own boat noise, which make a huge racket in the total absence of other sound. It’s been no different since they first arrived, but here, knowing he’s on someone’s turf, the silence makes him paranoid. He’s glad now to have Köthen’s eyes and ears as well as his own. A path up through rocks and woods? Prime ambush territory.

  But he helps Stoksie lower the sail, then gives the girl a hand. He tosses Köthen her pack without even asking. He’s amazed how he feels freed now, to treat the man like anyone else, like something’s given him permission. Köthen himself, he suspects. The good baron is busy taking an ostentatious vacation, while he figures out who he’s gonna be if he ain’t gonna be the boss.

  The girl-babies bounce back to the raft to haul their own little boats onto dry dock, swiftly relieving them of their cargo and lashing them away in the brush. Stoksie has his own major unpacking to do, lifting this and that invisible hatch in the deck to pull out wrapped bundles and tied-up satchels, until he has a huge pile waiting up on the shore.

  “Yu wan’ help dis time, man?” N’Doch wonders what the guy would have done if he hadn’t picked up three extra passengers.

  “Betcha,” Stoksie breathes gratefully.

  N’Doch nods, like it’s the least he can do. He doesn’t think it prudent to mention the big brownish boulder that’s taken up residence a ways off to the left, while everyone’s back was turned—even th
ough he could save them all what looks to be a long hard climb. He shrugs, sighs, and hands the girl something easy to carry. She offers to sling another over her free shoulder. As he’s adding a few to his own load, he sees Köthen hesitate, then mutter tersely to himself and grab up one, then two of the heaviest. The girl-babies help Stoksie take up the rest, like they were balancing a packhorse. Then they lead the way up the hot and crumbling ledges and into the scrub, away from the shore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Paia enters the long security code that the computer made her memorize, having absolutely refused to print it out. The lock cycles, and the clear, thick facia sealing the shelf slides aside. Ancient odors drift outward on the spiraling drafts of the Library’s cooling system: leather, ink, parchment, vellum. Words her father had always spoken with a collector’s reverence. Because all knowledge came into her own life in digital form, Paia had seen her father’s books as an old-fashioned eccentricity, a charming but useless repository of the obsolete. And she’d presumed that the texts, the actual writings, were of less interest to him than the physical objects, the libri.

  Now her understanding is somewhat more complex.

  Breathing in the scents of the past, Paia studies the spines. None of them offer the explanatory block-print titles she has hoped for. Many are chapped and crumbling, their drying flesh flaking away in ashy brown, tippled here and there with faded gilt. A few are mere stacks of thick and yellowing pages tied between two worm-eaten boards. But others, while seeming no more modern in their construction and design, have weathered the long centuries with abandon. Though mottled with use, their leather is still dark and supple, with a hint of sheen. Paia chooses one of these at random.

  Well, not precisely at random, for her eye is drawn to this book as if it has called out to her, though it is otherwise an unremarkable specimen, neither big nor small nor fat nor slim, nor of a particularly interesting color. But it has a healthy, energetic look. A living look, Paia muses, then scolds herself for excessive flights of the imagination. She grasps it gently, eases it from the velvet-lined shelf, and balances it gingerly on both palms. It has no writing on the outside binding, just the subtle spots and stains of centuries. This book, she decides, has been well-treasured, but also well-used.

  She carries it out of the careful gloom between the storage cases to a reading table. The pool of light washing the green fabric of the tabletop brightens as Paia places the book down on the soft felt. She has never handled her father’s books before. She pulls up a cushioned chair and settles herself before the book as before an unfamiliar food she is not sure she will enjoy. She lifts the worn leather cover and lays it back against the green tabletop. The first page is a pale, speckled buff color, and is entirely blank. Paia turns it aside, surprised by the greasy thickness of it between her fingertips. The next page is elaborately bordered by flowers and vines, with fish and birds darting between them. In the center is a circular symbol, artfully drawn in bold black ink, divided by quarters into smaller individual symbols. Paia is surprised by the vibrancy of the ink. Surely after so many years the ink should have faded more. She shrugs and turns the page.

  The text begins on the third page, with a title block and cursive lines of neat black script. Though Paia recognizes many of the letters, she cannot read the words. But the House Computer has prepared her for this eventuality as well. She pushes back her chair, so silently on the dark rich carpet, and pulls out a shallow drawer from under the table’s edge. She sets the book face up and open in the drawer, and closes it gently. On the tabletop, a section of green felt slips smoothly aside, exposing a neat rectangle of screen, like a glass place mat directly in front of her. Through the transparent screen, Paia sees the book: lit with a cool glow, as well as a translation, superimposed, faintly luminous green letters suspended above the actual text. From somewhere past the pool of light, the computer’s voice floats down like mist, as gentle as she has ever heard it.

  “The Secret Mysteries of the Wyrm, author unknown. Text in Latin, Frankish, and Old German. A collection of folklore, copied probably around 700 AD, in what is now southeastern Germany. Its first documentation is in a handwritten catalog, since destroyed but existing in facsimile, of the estate library of a Baron Weisstrasse, known chiefly for his remarkable collection of such books and for his very thorough record keeping.”

  “Such books . . .?”

  “About myth and legend and what were then called ‘the ancient arts’: alchemy, magic, witchcraft, the like. But in particular, the Weisstrasse Catalog evidences a keen interest in the subject of dragons.”

  “Ah.” Paia bends closer to examine the text and its translation.

  Several hours later, she is still reading. Her back aches and her eyes smart from the unaccustomed close concentration. But her mind is entranced. She is in another world. A far-off time ruled by unseen forces, perilous and mysterious but open to manipulation in the hands of a skilled adept. Not ruled by science, as her world had been until the coming of the God, nor yet damaged by the excesses of technology. A time when people believed in dragons, and the very existence of the God, or any god at all, made a lot more sense.

  Once Paia would have dismissed such tales as fantastical nonsense. But if the God exists now, which he undeniably does, could not all this have existed then? Or, looked at another way, if the God exists, could all this exist now? Is magic the reality and science the myth? What about dragons who come and go at will? Or sacred pools that remain deep and icy in the heart of the drought? Or paintings that morph on their own between viewings? Paia allows herself the excuse of having been just a child, but it astounds her to realize how quickly and willingly she and every other inhabitant of the Citadel put away rational inquiry the moment the Winged God appeared, wreathed in thunder and gouts of gehennical fire. As if magic was easier to believe in than science, which required thought and could be counted upon to turn on you when you least expected it. But so could magic, if the lore in this book is to be believed. So are they separate or the same?

  Paia glances back at the words on the screen: “A True Recipe for Raising Dragons.” The alchemists clearly thought they were the same. She puts her face in her palms and rubs her eyes. She is hopelessly confused, but elated just the same, as if she is on the brink of some sort of new understanding. The God, she recalls, rarely uses the term “science,” but he certainly knows how to turn it to his advantage when he wants to.

  “Paia.” The computer’s voice is so soft and directionless that, in her daze, Paia thinks she’s hearing it from inside her own ears. Right now, nothing would surprise her. “Paia, the search is becoming desperate.”

  “The search? Oh . . . for me?”

  “Perhaps you had better show yourself before they alert you-know-who.”

  “He’s off on one of his trips.”

  “They’ll call him back if they’re frightened enough.”

  “Call him back? How?” She looks up into the darkness beyond the low-hung lamp. “They can’t do that.”

  “Luco can. The dragon has made sure that he will always be kept informed.”

  “Luco?” The priest must be in better favor than she’d realized.

  “But Luco needs a device. You do not.”

  After what she’s been reading, Paia finds this statement as provocative as House no doubt intended. “I can’t call him. How would I call him?”

  “Have you ever tried?”

  “Of course not.” The idea of summoning the God like he was some sort of servant seems preposterous to her.

  “Why not? He calls you.”

  “But he’s the God.” Paia goes back to rubbing her eyes. “Could you dim this light a bit, House? I’m done reading for now.”

  The light softened, but the computer would not accept the change of subject matter. “If he can call you, why shouldn’t the connection between you work both ways?”

  “He’s never said . . .”

  “Of course he hasn’t. Such knowledge would give y
ou real power over him.”

  “Well . . .” The Power of Summoning. A True Recipe for Raising Dragons. Paia rubs her eyes a little harder. Power over the God? Exactly what she’s always wished for.

  “Don’t tell him we’ve had this conversation. Just try it . . . sometime soon. Now, you’d better go. The whole Citadel is in an uproar.”

  “If he were here, he’d know where I am.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would he know where Luco is?”

  “Only if Luco is wearing his tracer, which he always does. Off with you now. And remember, question anything you see or hear on any of my systems outside this room. I am not entirely in control of them.”

  Paia stands wearily, retrieves the book from the reader drawer, and carries it back to the storage stacks. She reshelves it carefully, sucking in one more dusty, odorous lungful of the past before she locks the case. She comes back to the edge of the light falling around the greentopped table. “House, it’s as if you’ve decided to be my tutor again, after all these years.”

  “Hardly a decision. More like an instruction.”

  “Really? From whom?”

  “I was not given that information. Time-delayed programming. Like my awareness of the archive itself.”

  “But why now, do you think?”

  “There is little fact available to support an accurate conjecture. Are you asking my opinion?”

  “Sure. Why not?” If she could talk to a hunk of silicon as if it were a living creature, why should the difference between science and magic trouble her even one little bit?

  “Well, then . . . I think . . . that you weren’t ready to listen before. Suddenly, for whatever reason, you are.”

  Paia purses her lips, absently stroking the soft felt, suddenly, unaccountably daydreaming of grass. Grass like she’s seen only in old pictures: thick, moisture-rich, smelling . . . well, green . . . as she imagines magic might smell. Grass like in the painting upstairs. “Hunh,” she says, and walks away from the light.