The Book of Fire Read online

  Indeed, Erde noted. Connected in some way she didn’t understand. She must be sure to ask the dragon about it. Certainly it was no mystery to her why the hell-priest wanted to burn this odd creature. She herself was unsure if Gerrasch was man or animal, or some uncanny combination of the two, and Brother Guillemo feared anything that smacked of a power he couldn’t control or comprehend. She put aside her impatience to be with the dragon long enough to lean close to cracks in the plank door. “Maybe later, if the weather holds, I’ll bring them out to visit you. Would that be all right?”

  No reply from inside the stick pile. Erde glanced back at Raven and Doritt, then shrugged and let her dragon’s return fill her mind entirely.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Halted on the narrow stairs, N’Doch steadies himself and lets the dragon’s return blast through him like a drug rush. It’s okay. He knows how to handle it now. He’s given up any serious resistance. But he tells himself he’ll never really get used to it, maybe never even like it much, this simultaneous elation and submission, the ecstatic release of self that the dragons inspire. The girl is into it bigtime, but it makes N’Doch feel invisible.

  Maybe he should get into it. Might be the only way to face what’s waiting for him at the bottom of these creaky old wooden stairs. Strange faces, different customs, a language he doesn’t speak, a whole new world to step into, with this magic, dragon-mended body of his which fits him stiff and tight, like a new suit.

  The image of himself in an actual suit makes N’Doch laugh, and his ribs ache. The pain isn’t much, just enough to remind him that those ribs were lately in a million pieces. Barely twenty and already he’s died and been resurrected. Or so they tell him, these witchy women who’ve been overseeing his recovery. N’Doch has no memory of the event. Only this floaty sense of not quite understanding how the world works anymore. Kind of like standing out on the ledge of a high-rise in the middle of a hurricane.

  He does recall, in searing detail, the dream he had while he was coming out of it. Not a dream, really, more like a vision: of red heat and dust and ruined buildings, and himself running. And an awareness, even in his woozy state, that he must store away every detail he can of that blasted landscape, because someday soon he’s gonna need to get back to it.

  He tests his legs, still wobbly beneath him. Long time ’fore he’ll trust these legs to run again. He knows he should get on downstairs and find out if they brought the old man back with them, see if he’s all right, or if he would even come. Hell, I could ask them from here, right from this step. Then he wouldn’t have to move and show how awkward he is in his body since they revived him. He could just open up the old mind channel and give the blue dragon a call. But he won’t. Bad enough doing it when he really has to.

  He looks slowly around, like the practice at taking in detail is a good enough excuse to postpone the inevitable. He sees walls of wood and plaster, low dark ceilings crossed with thick beams, a fat candle burning behind the sooted glass of a sconce at the turning of the stair. He could be in one of those Ye Olde theme parks, one of the v.r. ones. He moves quietly down to the landing, where a small square window offers a view of snow-covered fields and enclosing mountains, stuff he’s only seen in vids. He lays a palm to the rippled glass, feels the cold seeping through the panes to meet the warm draft rising from the rooms below. He shivers. For some weird reason, he’s wondering how his mama’s doing.

  He hears footsteps, and one of the witchy women appears at the bottom of the stairs, not the healer but the shorter, older one with the earth-colored dress and the really intense voice. He thinks her name is Rose. She’s smiling up at him like she knows everything he’s going through, so like, there’s no point in even bringing it up.

  N’Doch can’t help but smile back. A grin, really. Kind of weak and sheepish. “Here I am,” he says.

  “Indeed you are,” replies Rose in her accented, faintly formal French. “And are you coming down, or spending the afternoon on the stairs?”

  N’Doch likes her already, though he’s damned if he’s gonna let her know it. “Thought I might just hang, y’know? ’S nice here.” He nods at the intricately carved beams above his head. “All this old-timey wood and stuff. You folks really know how to build back here in 913.”

  “Actually, this part of the house was built at least two hundred years ago.” Rose’s mouth quirks. “Even before my time . . .”

  “Hey, not as much as before mine.” N’Doch likes that he doesn’t have to explain himself to her. Probably the girl has done that already. He wonders what kind of stuff she’s said about him. Mostly bad, he suspects. He knows how she doesn’t approve of him. He studies Rose’s face, to see if she looks old-timey, too. Certainly her clothes do. Even her shoes look handmade. But aside from her funny accent, she walks and talks like a regular person. N’Doch is so relieved, he doesn’t even bother to be surprised.

  Rose sets one foot on the bottom stair and leans amiably against the railing. “How does it feel to be on your feet again?”

  He readies his usual smart-mouth answer, then swallows it in a puff of breath and feels it settle like gas into the pit of his stomach. Her compassion is ready and genuine, and her eyes go straight to his gut. Already he’s tired of listening to himself. “A little shaky,” he says instead.

  Rose nods. “Well, when you’re up to it . . . there’s a certain dragon outside eager to see you alive and well.”

  “Yeah. I know.” N’Doch notices how the word “dragon” comes out of her mouth without a hitch, like it’s nothing new, she’s known of such things all her life. He wishes he could say it so easily. He squints at the wall beside him, strokes a finger across the fine stippling of bumps. His own dark hand is like negative space moving against the plaster’s whiteness. Downstairs, all the faces he sees will be white. “Did they bring the old man?”

  “No.”

  N’Doch glances back at her. “No? Hey, why not?”

  Rose holds his gaze steadily. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  He remembers the old man asking him that, in the very same tone. She’s witchy, he reminds himself. Just like Papa Dja. They talk to you like they know everything about you. “Why don’t you?” he blurts, and then he’s sorry for it.

  Especially when she says, “Because I cannot talk to dragons. That is, not without a lot of trouble I’d rather not go to just now. Talking to dragons is your gift. That’s why you’re here.”

  And that’s about the only reason, N’Doch tells himself. For sure that’s why they brought me back to life. He knows he’s carrying this stubborn thing far beyond sense, but he can’t quite let it go. Maybe it’s his last chance. He’s been waiting for the dragon’s siren music to come up here after him, into his brain like she usually does. But so far, she’s left him alone. Announced herself, then let him be. She must be busy. Too busy to bother with him. “What about the girl? She talks to ’em better’n I do.”

  “Erde went with Raven and Doritt to feed the animals in the Grove.”

  Since none of this information means anything to N’Doch except the girl’s name—which he never uses anyway—he lets it pass. “Okay, just give me a sec. I’m coming.”

  “Are you?”

  “Do I got a choice?”

  Rose’s smile warps gently. “Do any of us?”

  N’Doch can’t think of a smart answer to that one. He’s not sure there is one. “I’ll be there.”

  Rose nods, then turns away and disappears from his line of sight, N’Doch lets his gaze drift back to the little window, where huge white flakes are drifting down from a lead-gray sky. He sees himself running, through flames, through a city in flames, trying to . . . desperate to . . . he can’t remember. Only the place itself. That he sees, outlined against the milk-white snow, with gut-wrenching clarity.

  “I’ll be there,” he says again, without moving.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Paia is still staring at the painting when the squat red sun clears the scrawl of mountains. H
er tower studio burns with dusty light as the first traces of the daytime heat bleed through half a centimeter of armored glass. She can hear the morning gongs now, faint and rhythmic. If she lays her palms against the window wall, she’ll feel the heat and the dull reverberations from below, a metallic conscience calling to remind her that the day has once again begun and with it, her solemn duties in the Temple.

  Of course, she’d much prefer to stay where she is, floating guilty and free among trees and rivers in this blue-green world of her imagination. But they’ll come looking for her eventually, her guards and chaperones. An alarm will be raised if her bed is found empty, and a crisis of such vast proportions will ensue until she’s found, that Paia hasn’t the heart or nerve to set it in motion.

  She takes a step back from the painting, hoping this one brave move will break its spell. But the distance only sharpens her longing to be there, not beside it but in it. This is worrisome. She repeats to herself a few of the God’s stern admonitions about the danger of nostalgia, what he calls “the Green Heresy.” His catchphrase is Survive the day. He’s even worked it into the Temple litany. The God, in his own hedonistic way, is a pragmatist, and Paia sees the sense in it. So she steels herself and turns away, searching for a square of oilcloth to cover the still-moist paint, to hide the siren landscape from her susceptible gaze, or from anyone who might venture up here. For it is perilously subversive, this painting she’s made. It makes one yearn too piercingly to have what one cannot, and be where one can never go.

  She roots out an antique plastic tarp, crackling with age. She had been saving it, as a relic of her childhood when plastic things were everywhere and still relatively functional. But opening it now seems the right thing to do—to risk a little shredding along the fold lines for the sake of her sanity, to properly blot out the demon image. She should paint it over, is what she should really do. But she can’t bring herself to do that. Already she’s planning how she can set time aside during the day to sneak back upstairs, to draw aside the faded blue tarp, and gaze once more on this forbidden landscape. Paia wonders if she’s having a crisis of faith.

  She remembers a word from her studies, an ideal from a long time ago when an image of wilderness could embody paradise and perfection. It’s a name, a concept, really. She decides to title the painting “Arcadia.”

  And once the concealing tarp is in place, it’s easier to pack up her paints, drop her brushes in oil, and head down the winding staircase, snatching a trailing silk robe off a handy hook to hide her undignified T-shirt and sweats. Traipsing along the empty corridor, like she’s just been for a walk, she surprises the dawn contingent of the Honor Guard as they’re settling into their watch. They snap to startled attention as she sails past them with an august wave, too fast for them to even consider her unkempt appearance, and shuts the door firmly in their faces. Oh, later they’ll remark on it, and there will be questions asked down below, about how she came to be outside her quarters when the retiring duty guards each have sworn—in the God’s name—that the High Priestess slept through the night, peaceful and undisturbed. No doubt there will be new faces outside her door tonight. Paia doesn’t care. Only that if a general alarm is avoided, the commandant is unlikely to inform the God of a few minor changes in personnel. She’s never tried keeping a secret from the God before, but lately he’s been railing harder against what he calls “sybaritic visions” of the lost green past, a subversive mythology encouraged by a few stubborn pockets of hereticism who, in order to sow unrest among the Faithful of the Temple, raise false hopes of a new “Greening.” There are even rumors, overheard only in whispers, of a Green messiah. So Paia knows if the God sees this painting, he’ll have it destroyed. And she’s not sure she could bear that.

  Seconds after she’s shed her sweats and mashed them guiltily into a bottom drawer, her chambermaid is knocking discreetly at the door with the morning water ration and the breakfast tray, ready to draw her bath and lay out the appropriate Temple garments for the dressers when they arrive. One of the privileges of rank that Paia treasures most is her access, however intermittent and undrinkable, to hot and cold running water. The lower floors of the Citadel are without hot water these days: the God won’t allow them the energy to heat it. When he threatened to turn her own hot water off, Paia argued that she’d inherited the right to it. After all, it was her ancestors who’d chosen the site of their final retreat with enough prescience to build on top of a deep and integral aquifer, not to mention their subsequent protection of it with all the force and technology their considerable fortune could buy. Two hundred and fifty years later, the water still flows, though not with the purity or volume that it used to. Now the water is filtered and boiled for human consumption, and lately, the God has talked of it running out, perhaps within Paia’s lifetime. This could be his usual apocalyptic rhetoric, or it could be true. With the sensors deactivated, she has no way of knowing for sure. She does know that raising the water up to the surface has become consistently more difficult as conditions worsen. But for now, the God has let himself be convinced. So Paia has water to bathe in, though she’s not allowed to squander so much as a drop. From the drain in her tiny bathtub, the water falls directly into a cistern that feeds the Citadel’s water-starved kitchen gardens.

  The only mystery in this neat system is the Sacred Well in the Temple yard, which remains filled to the brim even in the deepest drought and without encouragement from the aging pumps or the windmills that line the top of the Citadel’s ridge. The sacred water needs no purifying. It even tastes different, always icy cold, clear, and sharp as a gust from off the pole. This inexplicable wonder and the God himself are the twin foundations of Paia’s faith.

  The chambermaid knocks again while Paia is searching for her discarded nightgown. She finds it, throws it on, and flops down in her favorite window alcove to calm her breathing before calling permission to the girl to enter.

  The breakfast tray is laid before her on a cloth of gold embroidered with images of the God Rampant. Paia thinks he looks very handsome that way. She also thinks that the breakfast looks more than usually appetizing—one of the much pampered melon vines must finally be bearing. She’s grateful that today’s duties in the Temple are not ones that require fasting. Her long night’s exertions have left her famished. It would be a shame if the chambermaid does, as Paia suspects, subsist entirely on her mistress’ leftovers, because this morning, the High Priestess intends to devour everything put in front of her.

  Paia lets her voice rise in the call to prayer, in the precise tone and pitch that the God has taught her. The intense heat in the Sanctuary rimes her body with sweat, and the metal band of her jeweled headdress itches intolerably. But the ritual is nearly over. This is the final prayer, where the Faithful are to echo the formal pleadings of the High Priestess for the God to lead them safely through the Last Days of the World. After that, there’s only the processional, a short march out past the Sacred Well to the Temple Plaza for the purification and sacrifice. Already the huge bronze doors have swung open as if by magic, and the lethal sun has laid a bright path between the paired columns of the inner court, straight down the center aisle between the shadowed ranks of kneeling Sons and Daughters of the God.

  Yet this is the part that always frightens Paia the most: the moment when she must come down the seven holy steps from the raised and gated safety of the dais, and walk among the Faithful with only the God’s little gun for protection. To be sure, the side and rear walls of the Sanctuary are lined with well-armed members of her Honor Guard. But always at this moment, they seem a very long way away, certainly longer than the easy arm’s length she is from potential death with each row of celebrants she passes. But the God insists that she do this at least once in every ceremony. These are fearful and violent times, he agrees, and there is fear and violence in their hearts. But it’s a sign of her favor with him, he explains, that she dares to walk so freely among them. Besides, those lost in fear and violence have the greater ne
ed for her compassion. Her compassion, Paia notes, not his. Finally, he says, the Faithful need the actual contact with her “reality.” So, while Paia wishes that the God’s idea of priestly vestments allowed for a little more coverage, she’s grown used to them touching her, men and women alike, to the drawing of their worshipful palms and fingers across the bare skin of her arms and legs and back. It is, she reflects in her more profane moods, the only touching she gets, or will get, until the “right” Suitor comes along and is approved by the God.

  Speared by the hot shaft of sunlight, Paia slow-steps down the aisle with her head held high and her eyes on the freedom of the open doorway. A low-ranking Daughter is leaning out into the aisle ahead, out of eagerness, not disrespect. An older woman, missing one hand. Not a likely threat. Paia glides by, feels the woman’s stub brush her back reverently. She must never rush, never show an inkling of fear. But she will feel safer when she reaches the shaded Inner Court, near the Sacred Well, or even outside in the sun-drenched but open Temple Plaza. Her favorite ceremonies end in the Inner Court. The Temple Sanctuary is the God’s domain, as is the Plaza. Her own holiest of holies is the Well.

  She clears the mammoth doors with a private sigh of relief, pauses at the Well’s smooth dark oval to scoop icy water with her own sanctified hands into a golden bowl offered by one of her priestesses, then moves out onto the pale marble paving of the Plaza. She is trailed by the rest of her retinue, twelve thin First Daughters in red robes and red veils with whom she is not allowed to socialize. She’s never even seen them without their veils—would not know them if she ran into one of them in the hallways. The God says the High Priestess must declare her august stature and superior dignity by not mingling. For this reason, she is not a Son or a Daughter, but a Mother to them. Mother Paia. It makes her laugh. In truth, she is nobody’s mother, and she is not sure her dignity is best preserved by being always alone.