The Book of Fire Read online

  N’Doch nods. Amazing how words slip in and out of meaning. When he was a kid, a favorite fantasy was being let loose in an American mall with a pocket full of someone else’s credit. He looks down, sees a pair of older women pouring water into a wide trough dug around one of the taller trees. All the shade trees have troughs like that. “So where do ya have fun?”

  “All ovah, na?”

  “Good. Think I’m gonna like it here.” And for some reason, he does. Maybe it’s the trees, or maybe it’s being back among folks closer to his own color. Or maybe it’s just the easy way Stoksie has about him—makes people relax, like he’s got nothing to prove, ’cept that he’s honest and likable. A useful manner for a salesman. N’Doch tries to imagine what the big space out there was once: big parking lot, probably, planted around with fancy greenery, a big neon sign somewhere and the awful kind of landscape lights that turn the shrubbery gross shades of pink and blue and orange. He glances around and above, admiring the undulating rise of the terraces. He’s backed off his imitation of the local accent. Stoksie understands him well enough. “So . . . when you figure this place was built?”

  “Oh, reel ole place, dis. Mebbe a cent, y’know? Mebbe more. Fore my daddy’s daddy, leas’. Dat’s ole granpa Ben Stokes, him I only heard tell of. Dis place wuz wuna da las’ ta go, roun’ heah. Das wha’ ma da alwuz say.”

  “Last to go?” N’Doch hopes the girl’s calmed down enough to be listening real close while he pumps their host for information.

  “Y’know, ta fall outa da loop.” Stoksie parks his elbows more comfortably on the railing and eases the weight off his hip. N’Doch can tell there’s a favorite old story coming, like the ones his own old people used to tell, over and over, never tiring of them, finding comfort in the familiarity. “Dis how ma da alwuz tell it. He wuz Reuben Stokes like me. I’ma junyer. Anyhow, he say peeble usda come heah up from Albin, or frum da sout’—Bigapple, mebbe—lon’ time sin’. Den dey stop. Or dey come ’n wanna stay. Cuz y’know, when it git bad, it git bad down deah fust, an’ it come on fas’. So dey come runnin up heah, lotsa fokes, only dey can’ pay no moah. Den mebbe dey do work heah, y’know?”

  “To pay their board?”

  Stoksie doesn’t seem to know that word. “Whadevah. But dey’s too minny a dem, and final’ deah ain’ no pay, noweah.”

  N’Doch pulls out a word culled from American vids. “No cash, you mean?”

  “Ri’. Leas’ not heah. Mebbe down Bluridge way.” Stoksie scratches his bald head, gazing up into the dusty pine boughs while he muses a bit on this idea. “Mebbe some still down deah, na.”

  “You trade down there?”

  “Nah, noway. Gotta have sumbig firepowah, ya wanna do biz down deah. Sum-big.”

  “Bigger crews down there, you mean?”

  “No crews deah, doncha know? All sorta sumbitch gubbermints, regulatin’ da shit outa ev’ryting. Ev’ry lil valley gotta gubbermint. Pain inna butt.”

  N’Doch settles into a more comfortable lean on the railing. The girl sticks close beside him. “So the governments are like the crews down there?”

  “No way! Whachu sayin? Da crews nevah pull dat sorta shit! No way!”

  “Right. Okay.” The little man’s pure outrage makes N’Doch grin. “So, you ever been down there, just to go?”

  “Almos’ got der. Got far as Deecee one time, wi’ ma da, dat’s Reuben Seenyer. Me jus’ a boy. Yu cud still go deah den.”

  “Not now?”

  “Not easy, ‘less yu gotta boat. A real kinda boat, wit alotta teet’, y’know?” Stoksie cackles, miming the clashing of giant jaws and the recoil of giant guns.

  N’Doch’s ears perk up. “There’s people around with boats like that?”

  “Down deah, dey’s sum still. Leas’ deah usta be. Mebbe dey’s all rusted up na, y’know?”

  “Old, you mean?”

  “Nah, c’mon.” Stoksie shakes his head impatiently. “Say it rain alla time down deah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How yu like dat, na? Down deah, alla time. Up heah, notta drop. ’Cep all dis salt. Ain’ needer place kin grow a gud feelda corn no moah.”

  “No rain at all, huh?” N’Doch finds himself watching the women below as they water the trees, all of them, one by one.

  Stoksie shrugs. “Na ’n den, inna winta. Yusda get moah, even sinz I wuz growin’. Less ’n less. Keep on dis way, doan know how we’ll git on. Why, yu got rain up nort?”

  “Where I’m from, no, not enough.”

  “Da story alla roun. ’Cep Bluridge. Dey got rain ’n dey got pay.” He waves his arm toward the tents and caravans. “Me, I’ma ole man heah. Mosta dese peeble nevah herda pay. Dey still got pay up nort’?”

  “Nah. All trade there.” N’Doch hasn’t a clue, if the truth be known. He so badly wants to ask the question right out: please please please, what year is it? But he’s sure he’d blow their cover, such as it is. “Like here, yeah?”

  “All trade. Betcha.”

  He tries to sneak up on the data issue. “So what was Albin like, before?”

  “Nise, I guess. Lotsa peebles. Lotta rain den, too, dey say. Snow, even. Nise place, y’know? Wasa capidal.”

  A capital. Of what? N’Doch pictures the ruined, flooded, deserted city, and is seized by a kind of panicky despair. He decides it doesn’t really matter when it happened. Point is, it did. Global warming. The planet is simultaneously drying up and drowning. What a friggin’ waste! The coincidence that he’s traveling with two dragons named Earth and Water who are sure they have serious business to take care of is not entirely lost on him, but the possibilities make his head hurt. Too much thinking’s gone on in there for one day. One very long day. N’Doch yawns and tries to hide it.

  Stoksie shoves back from the railing, dusting his hands together. “C’mon na. Time ta innerduce yu ta Blin’ Rachel.”

  He makes them lock the door. N’Doch pockets the key. They follow Stoksie along the balcony and descend a hidden staircase at the far end of the curve. N’Doch decides it’s either cleverness or some superior authority on their guide’s part that they don’t pick up Brenda the guard dog until they’re at least halfway ’round the so-called mall. Even then, she and her entourage hold at a respectful ten paces behind, pretending like they’re out for their own little evening stroll and just happen to be carrying all their guns. Stoksie’s rolling limp sets a stiff pace down a gravel path through pines and brushy undergrowth, heading toward the sound of the waterfall. N’Doch is excited. He’s never seen a real waterfall before. He imagines something like Victoria before it went dry, or old Niagara, from the travel vids. Who knows? Maybe it is Niagara. He’s in America, isn’t he? To be out of the sun is a major relief. But he wonders if Blind Rachel always greets her visitors out here in the woods.

  As they near the water, the air softens with moisture, and the bushes lining the path get taller and fuller, harder to see through. For the last hundred meters, they glide through a sort of green tunnel, leaf walls on both sides, dappled shade overhead, doused in mist and scented with pine.

  “Ohhh,” breathes the girl.

  “Like home for her,” N’Doch replies to Stoksie’s glance. “In Europe.”

  “Yu say?” Stoksie looks impressed. “Still?”

  N’Doch vamps. “Just homesick, y’know?”

  “Sure, sure. Long way to Urop.”

  Then suddenly, around a leafy bend, there is the waterfall.

  It is not Victoria Falls, or the Niagara of N’Doch’s fervid imagination. In fact, he’s amazed that such a sad thin trickle could make so much noise. Maybe because it falls from such a height—fifteen, twenty meters at least—or because it’s broken and deflected at so many points of its fall before it plunges into the narrow rock-lined pool at its base. Or it’s the towering rock face that gives birth to it, echoing and amplifying its sound. But N’Doch’s disappointment passes quickly. It doesn’t need to be Niagara. After the lifeless, swelling river and the parched lands below,
this cool leaf-scented air and the crystalline clarity of the water nearly bring him to his knees, as he sees Stoksie has been, groaning faintly as he lands.

  Oddly, it’s Köthen who reads the significance of this gesture. Quietly, he beckons them downward in respect at the water’s edge. He mimics also the little man’s dipping of one hand lightly into the pool, to touch his forehead and lips with dampened fingertips. The moment is over quickly, like the water ritual that welcomed them into camp. No heavy-duty ceremony. Stoksie groans again, rising, then spreads his arms as if to embrace the entire rock face, the silvered thread of falling water, the clear and turbulent pool. “Dis heah Blin’ Rachel!”

  All three of them are wily enough by now not to crane their heads around in search of . . . a person. But there is a moment of utter stillness, which Stoksie apparently takes for reverence, for he beams at them as if they have fulfilled his every expectation. Then he turns the sweetest of gazes on Pitbull Brenda, who has been observing from the head of the path.

  “Nise, ha?” he grins.

  “Sehr schön!” says the girl.

  “Nice,” N’Doch agrees.

  But Stoksie wants a bit more. “Whachu got up nort’? Water Dragon nise like dis?”

  One more piece of the puzzle falls into place. It’s like naming the desert tribes after the oases they claim. In a world reverting to desert, it makes a lot of sense. N’Doch looks up to where the slim cascade shoots forth from a shadowed fissure in the rock. There’s another thirty meters of sheer rock above that. He knows without asking that this water is drinkable and safe. “Nice, yeah. But . . . y’know, different.” He reaches for a memory, even a fantasy, of safe, flowing water, and comes up dry. “Later, you visit. I’ll introduce you.”

  “Mebbe, mebbe.” Stoksie’s already counting up his inventory. “Got good trade up nort’?”

  N’Doch lets his grin go sly. “Depend on whachu bringin’.”

  “Yu’ll seeit den, an’ not befoah!” The little man claps him on the back, hugely satisfied. “Hey! Yu wanna washup?” N’Doch notices how the main pool spills over into a series of smaller pools, partly hidden by the screening greenery. The first of these lower pools has a steady stream of people carting containers back and forth from camp to dip and fill in its clear, chill depths. The second, wider and shallower, is lively with naked bathers. N’Doch does a kind of double take, sure he’s mistaken. But no, the pool is full of men, women, and children, scrubbing away, rinsing each other diligently. Young folks and old folks, gasping, laughing with the cold, though it looks a bit more like work than fun. N’Doch suspects it’s the frigid water making them all so energetic. In the third pool down, continuing the organized use of this precious unpolluted source, laundry is being done. N’Doch knows this swirling race of liquid ice will cut him to the bone, but his opportunities for bathing were infrequent at Deep Moor and now he’s got another time’s layers of dust and grit and sweat smeared all over him. He nods to Stoksie. “I’m there!”

  “Alla yus, na!” the little man waves, turning toward the lower pools, already stripping off his worn and dusty layers. But the girl is blushing furiously and shaking her head to N’Doch in mute appeal.

  Köthen, who has knelt again briefly to douse his face with cold water, wipes his beard on his sleeves and offers her a brisk bow. “If my lady prefers, I will see her back to the chamber beforehand.”

  The girl blinks at him. She can’t help glancing at N’Doch in confusion. “My lord is most kind,” she murmurs.

  “Few who know me would agree, my lady.”

  N’Doch isn’t sure if this is better or worse. What’s better for sure is that he not get any more involved in the issues between them than he is already. “Good man, Dolph,” he says cheerfully. He digs the key out of his pocket and tosses it to Köthen. “Hurry back. I’ll save you a spot at poolside.”

  Baron Köthen walked her back along the woodland path and up the rickety stairs in silence. Unlocking the door of the cavelike room, he removed the lock and hung it on the inside of the door. Then he bowed again, as one would to a respected stranger, and handed her the silvery key-thing.

  “I would suggest, my lady, that you lock yourself in. We will return soon enough to escort you to dinner.”

  With the air of a man who is discharging his moral duties, he insisted that she try the key in the lock, and stood by until she had called her competence with it through the safely fastened door. Then she heard his steps recede along the balcony—rather quickly, she thought.

  Erde found this newly solicitous behavior bewildering. Though it was a relief not to have him growling and glowering and calling her “witch,” this chill and distant formality was only a slight improvement. But at least it was one she could live with.

  The moment she thought she could suppose him to be out of sight, she unlocked the door and slipped outside, locking it again behind her. Hopefully, his passage back to the waterfall would occupy the hostile and suspicious Brenda for long enough for one very quiet girl to sneak past into the woods. It was time to find a secret place for the dragons to come to roost.

  A bit of sheltering rock, an open space among the pines, some handy and concealing shrubbery. The hiding place had not been hard to find, and it only needed to be free of prying eyes while the dragon transported himself and Lady Water there safely. Once they were settled, Brenda herself could stroll right by without spotting anything unusual. Both dragons were becoming expert at hiding in plain sight.

  They were restless when they arrived, materializing like two giant shadows out of the gathering dusk. Erde had hoped for time to curl up next to the dragon for a while, soaking up comfort before she must return for the evening meal, and a long night in a dank and cheerless cell. But Earth would not settle. Like an old dog unable to find a comfortable spot, he nosed around and around the little clearing, sat down, shifted about, got up and lumbered around a bit more. Lady Water stood to one side, rubbing her velvet-blue hide against a tree trunk. Her swim in the river, she said, had left her itchy all over.

  IT’S YOUR MIND THAT’S ITCHY, SISTER.

  Perhaps. But even breathing the air here is like swimming in filth.

  Erde gave up chasing after the dragon and sat down on a convenient rock to listen in. She noticed that her throat did feel rather raw, like when there was green wood burning in the castle hearths.

  THE SUMMONER’S CALL IS FADING AS WE TRAVEL INLAND.

  Not fading, brother. Being interfered with.

  WE DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE . . .

  I think we do know. I think he is deliberately blocking the signal.

  Erde guessed it was Lord Fire they were squabbling about. In the way of dragons, they might go on exploring the fine points of this debate until halfway to dawn. Perhaps she could hurry it along.

  HE KNOWS WE ARE COMING, THEN?

  He knows we will come, sooner or later. Each step he takes to deflect our approach brings us closer by calling attention to his actions. I wonder if he has considered this inevitability.

  Earth rumbled disconsolately, got up, moved two paces, and lay down again.

  WE MUST CONFRONT HIM. THEN WE WILL KNOW THE TRUTH.

  YOU KNOW WHERE HE IS, THEN?

  THESE GOOD PEOPLE WILL LEAD US TO HIM.

  THEY WILL? HOW?

  LISTEN CAREFULLY IN THE CAMP. THE CLUES WILL APPEAR. HE DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO LIVE QUIETLY.

  Erde got up from her rock and went to lean against him.

  CAN’T N’DOCH LISTEN? I’D RATHER STAY HERE WITH YOU. WHAT IF THESE PEOPLE INTEND TO MURDER US IN OUR BEDS AND STEAL ALL OUR WORLDLY GOODS . . .?

  Such as they are.

  WELL, I KNOW IT’S NOT MUCH, BUT THEY DO SEEM VERY OCCUPIED WITH . . . THINGS.

  CHILD, THEY LIVE AS THEY MUST, AS SCAVENGERS OFF THE CORPSE OF THE LAND.

  Lady Water ceased rubbing against her tree and came to join them.

  There’s one more bit of bad news they have ahead of them.

  Both girl and dragon looked her way
.

  Their precious stream is dying, along with everything else.

  OH! HOW CAN THAT BE?

  The deep source that feeds the spring is drying up. There is another aquifer below, but it is blocked.

  YOU CAN FEEL THE WATER THROUGH THE GROUND?

  I always know where the water is. In three dimensions, downward through the earth, upward into the sky.

  YOUR PARDON, MY LADY. I DIDN’T KNOW.

  Did you ever ask?

  SISTER, YOU ARE IRRITABLE.

  No kidding.

  The blue dragon turned and pranced away, her tail lashing.

  IT’S HIS FAULT, YOU SEE. SHE’S TOO MUCH IN THE WORLD OF HER ANTAGONIST OPPOSITE.

  LORD FIRE, YOU MEAN? IS HE HER OPPOSITE?

  FIRE AND WATER? WOULD HE NOT BE? IS SHE FORGIVEN?

  OF COURSE SHE IS.

  Earth had finally settled, it seemed. He put his great horned head down and got very still and quiet. Erde snuggled against him happily, until suddenly he spoke up again.

  PERHAPS I COULD UNBLOCK IT.

  It was a while before Erde understood that he was talking about the underground water.

  OH, DRAGON, COULD YOU TRY?

  THE SLIGHT SHIFTING OF A FISSURE, PERHAPS. A DEGRADATION OF THE BLOCKAGE. THE APPROACH WILL HAVE TO BE CAREFULLY CONSIDERED. I WOULD NOT WISH TO CAUSE ITS FINAL DESTRUCTION INSTEAD.

  YOU ARE THE CLEVEREST OF DRAGONS! YOU WILL NOT FAIL!

  Though the dying stream was terribly unfortunate, Erde was delighted that the dragon would have a useful project to soothe his restless mind. Just pondering it now, he was calmer.

  The sun had nearly set. She must return to the camp, but now she did so with a lighter heart.

  DRAGONS! I’M OFF TO LISTEN—VERY CAREFULLY—AND I WILL REPORT TO YOU EVERYTHING I HEAR!

  NOT EVERYTHING, I HOPE. HOW WILL WE GET ANY WORK DONE HERE?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  When Son Luco knocks on her door two hours after dinner, so much later than the priest has ever come visiting before, Paia knows it isn’t a social call. Not that Luco is often given to such civilities, but it’s the lingering startlement in his blue eyes that puts her on alert, and his comfortable civilian clothes underneath the gold Temple robe tossed on so hastily, its complex fastenings only half done up. He leaves the big door open when she invites him in, as if to head off any possible suspicion—on the part of the righteous Honor Guard in the hall, she supposes—of improper behavior within the Temple’s highest authorities.