The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet Read online

  She calls up the soldier’s face to banish the God’s forbidden image. She studies the slender, swaying trees that raise a tall gray wall across the top of the beach. Palm trees, a memory suggests. Paia would have expected them to be greener. She imagines touching their stiff fronds into the landscape with the edge of her palette knife.

  Beside her, N’Doch straightens, listening. “Quick! This way!”

  She looks up, instinctively searching for dragon shadow. But the sky is still empty and blue. Then she hears a low growling from behind the palms. “What’s that?”

  He grabs her arm. “Cover first, questions later!” He pulls her across the superheated sand toward the beached flotilla. The boats looked like painted toys from a distance, but as N’Doch hauls her into the shadow of the nearest one, its bright prow towers over them in a rising curve, its mast at a crazy tilt.

  “Hunh. That’s strange.” N’Doch runs a palm along the planking. Paint falls away like peeling bark. “Doesn’t look like she’s been out in a while.” His hand snags in a rough spot, then another and another. The tip of his finger disappears into the scarred wood. “Aw, no wonder! Bullet holes.”

  Paia’s nose wrinkles. “What’s that awful smell?”

  “Fish. That’s fish, girl. You never smelled dead fish in your life?”

  “Where would I find a fish in the Citadel?”

  “Damn, woman, you need to get out more!”

  The growling sound is louder. Nearing, Paia realizes, and rapidly. N’Doch draws her around the pointed end of the boat, putting a stinking pile of crates between them and the noise. Paia needs no urging to hunker down behind the smelly barricade. She knows what that sound is. Engines. She hasn’t heard engines since she was a child. They were a rare event, and usually they brought bad news.

  “Jeeps,” N’Doch mutters.

  “Who is it?”

  “No one we’ll want to know, you can bet on that.”

  He ducks behind the curve of the boat as four dusty green vehicles roar through a gap between the palm trunks and out onto the beach. They fling up long arcs of sand as they turn and speed down the beach, swerving left and right, horns blaring. Paia hears a popping sound, like gunfire. The children scatter, screaming. Raucous male laughter echoes up the beach, over the boom and whine of the motors.

  “Muthafuckahs.” N’Doch slides a hand down the long knife sheath on his belt. “Let’s get out of here. Now’s when we’ll wish we had the dragons with us. Step where I step, and don’t you linger! Watch out for the shit in the sand.”

  Paia wonders if the danger in the sand is living or dead. She scoots after him along the line of boats, from hull shadow to hull shadow, away from the mayhem down the beach. Using the crates and the few ragged shacks as cover, N’Doch heads for the tree line. Shards of rusting metal and sun-bleached plastic are scattered everywhere. The beach might as well be mined with knife blades.

  “Where did all this come from?” Paia asks.

  “Folks just leave things where they fall. The Tinker crews could live for a year off this beach!” Hardly slowing, he stoops to snatch a rusted metal rod out of the sand.

  “What’s that?”

  “A perfectly good tire iron.”

  “Is it a weapon?” She sees how neatly it fits into his fist.

  “It is now.” He glances up as they near the line of palms. “Man, these trees have seen better days. Guess I wasn’t looking, last time I was out here.”

  Most of the palm leaves are stiff and brown, the source of the dry rattling that Paia has heard under the roar of the engines and the roll of the surf. Dead fronds lie in spiky heaps at the base of the trees.

  Another burst of gunfire erupts down the beach.

  “C’mon, keep moving! We’re almost there.” N’Doch hurries her forward, shoving her into the speckled shade between the slim, curved trunks just as the jeeps wheel around and head back toward the boats. Three of them race side by side, jostling each other with a great revving of engines and the squeal of bruised metal. “Don’t let ’em see you!”

  Pressed behind a palm trunk, Paia asks, “Why are they doing that?”

  “Because they can.” He’s gripping the tire iron like a club.

  His bitter tone makes Paia stare curiously after the careening vehicles as they smash heedlessly through a stack of crates. “They must be very rich. I mean, to be able to waste fuel and vehicles so recklessly.”

  “And it’s your kids and mine who’ll pay for it, girl!” N’Doch’s dark face relaxes into momentary confusion. “Well, I mean, mine already have. If I even had any. If I ever had the time.” He waves the tire iron irritably. “Never mind. Let’s go find Fâtime.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  He strides off through the palm trunks, heading inland. Within five minutes of struggling to keep up, Paia is winded. She feels awkward, running full tilt. Arms and legs all over the place. The hot grit in her sandals rasps painfully against her soft indoor soles.

  “N’Doch! Please! I can’t . . .!”

  Startled, he glances back, then stops to wait. In his haste, he’s almost forgotten her. “Sorry. If there was any place safe, I’d leave you there.”

  “No!”

  “I mean, to rest, while I find Fâtime.”

  “I’ll be okay,” she gasps. “Just please don’t leave me.”

  He grins sourly. “You’re in luck. I can’t.”

  Paia slumps against a palm trunk. She doesn’t want to be a burden to him. But being High Priestess of the Temple of the Apocalypse did not involve a lot of physical labor. She’s had a life of being merely decorative, at least since the God . . . no, she must, must call him Fire . . . since Fire arrived at the Citadel. Before that, she was her father’s protected little girl.

  She tries a rueful sort of smile. “I’m out of shape, I’m afraid. But if Fire is here, I’m your best chance of dealing with him.”

  “Your shape looks just fine to me.” N’Doch grins down at her, then looks away sheepishly. “Sorry again. It’s habit. Don’t mean anything by it, y’know. He’d have my head if he heard me.”

  He. The soldier. For a moment, she was sure he meant Fire. “Does it matter so much to you what he thinks?”

  “Well, yeah. I guess it does. He’s the dude, y’know?” He chews his lip, considering, then suddenly he’s off again through the trees.

  Paia pushes herself harder, breathing more deeply, imitating N’Doch’s steady stride. It’s easier now that they’re not slogging through deep sand. She studies his lean, muscular frame moving ahead of her. What would it take to acquire his strength and endurance? Paia envisions her soft curves bulked up with muscle. She rather likes the idea. Certainly, being so very decorative gives her a kind of power. But it’s mostly the power to manipulate others—men, of course, but not only—into doing things for you. Paia would like to be able to do things for herself. Like the girl Erde—still a young teenager, yet so confident in her role as dragon guide, so totally in tune with her dragon. Paia wishes she had so clear a view of life. She wishes for a truer dragon.

  Musing distractedly with her body on autopilot, Paia slams smack into N’Doch’s back. He’s halted, with the tire iron at the ready. They’ve jogged into the middle of a village without even noticing. Or perhaps it’s more of an encampment. People are milling about, aimless and slow, as if exhausted. Smoke rises among them in pale columns like ephemeral palm trunks. Ragged blankets are spread on the ground and tied between trees. Small piles of possessions are strewn here and there, but Paia sees little in the way of shelter. The people are ebony-skinned, like N’Doch. Her own café-au-lait looks pale by comparison. She hears babies crying, and a murmur of argument and desperation and other kinds of prayer. Somewhere among the palms and hanging blankets, a woman is wailing. Long thin exhalations of grief.

  Paia shivers. “What’s happened here?”

  N’Doch shakes his head. “Things are . . .”

  “Are what?”

>   “Don’t know . . . I mean, this is the bidonville. It’s always been here, but it’s . . . different than it was. Stick close. I mean it, okay?”

  He waits until she nods her agreement. When he starts forward, she hooks a finger through one of his belt loops, so that she can peer around without losing him.

  She sees mostly women and children. And old people. As they move into the settlement, makeshift tents appear, and lean-tos cobbled together out of scrap wood, rusted sheet metal, and corrugated plastic. There’s sickness everywhere, and lassitude and injury. Moaning bodies sprawl in the shade with no one to tend to them. The children are dull-eyed and malnourished. An old man with no legs is propped up against a nearby palm trunk. He spies Paia, and stretches out a stick-thin hand. His scabbed lips mouth unintelligible beseechings.

  When N’Doch elbows her along, Paia realizes she’s been caught by the old man’s desperate gaze. Her memory, stirred by horror and disgust, again offers up a reference. During the collapse that isolated her family fortress, the Citadel’s communications links provided news, more news than anyone could want, except her father, who watched the global video feed compulsively, obsessively, in those final days. In addition to storm devastation and killing grounds, there were all those awful refugee camps, crowded with starved, exhausted populations forced to flee the rising oceans, the waves of plague, the tides of war.

  Is this the beginning, or is the collapse already at full throttle?

  Paia notes the change in N’Doch’s body language. Wary but confident before, he has lost his bravado. His eyes flick about restlessly as he walks. She wonders if he’s taken a wrong turn.

  “I don’t get it,” he mutters.

  “What? Tell me.” His unease is contagious.

  “It wasn’t like this . . . before. It wasn’t this bad.”

  “This is the same . . . the right place?”

  “Oh, yeah, I know exactly where I am. I grew up here.” He veers slightly left, avoiding a cluster of children fighting over the unidentifiable contents of a bloodied sack. One of them looks up, and Paia recoils at the feral greed in its stare. N’Doch adjust his grip on the tire iron. “See? Here’s the road into town.”

  The road is a potholed swath of dry red dirt that swirls up with the hot gusts off the beach and sticks at the back of the throat like a thousand tiny pinpricks. Like the dust off the plateau behind the Citadel. For the first time since falling through the portal, Paia feels uncomfortably right at home. This dry landscape is one she would know exactly how to paint, but the familiarity is unwelcome. Ahead, the palm trunks thin out onto a flat orange plain, the hard blue sky like a painted ceiling. The red road disappears into heat shimmer, where low rectangles dance in and out of visibility and a wide, dark smudge rises above the bright horizon.

  N’Doch shades his eyes from the glare, squinting into the mirage. A strangled moan escapes him. Without warning, he takes off at a dead run.

  “N’Doch!” Paia bolts after him. A vision of wandering alone in a strange time, strange place lends her speed, but she cannot catch up. She’s forced to halt in the middle of the road and holler like a lost child. N’Doch turns, his arms beating a mad rhythm of frustration. He’d like to lose her. It’s as plain as if he’s said it out loud. But the image of the murderous soldier must linger in his mind, for he races back, grabs her hand without a word, and drags her stumbling behind him.

  The mirage steadies as they approach, into the shapes and structures of a town. The red road passes through a formal opening in the stout stucco walls, but the tall metal gates hang twisted away to either side and the walls have been breached in several places by something large enough to crush stone. Columns of smoke rise from the taller buildings. People are climbing through the ragged gaps and streaming out between the gates, limping, coughing, weeping, with their possessions stuffed into whatever was handy, or strapped to their backs. The broken walls echo with shouts and sporadic gunfire. The town is in ruins.

  Before the bent gates, the road is choked with refugees and rubble. N’Doch grips Paia’s elbow and uses his body as a ram to shove them both upstream through the milling and confusion. He breaks the tightest clots with a threatening gesture of his tire iron.

  Startled by a close-by burst of shooting, Paia shrinks against him. “Are we going in there?”

  “Have to. That’s where Fâtime is.”

  His cool determination is a surprise to her. He didn’t seem like the implacable type. Paia has a thousand questions but asks him none of them. Her memory is hard at work again, this time assailing her with an image House showed her just before she left the Citadel. It was a live feed from a local farmstead that had been unable to pay its monthly tithe to the Temple. She saw a woman with her fist raised at the sky, tears of grief and outrage streaking her sooty cheeks. Behind, a landscape of smoking wreckage.

  He’s burning villages, House had said.

  It’s like a blow to the belly. Tears of a different sort of grief and outrage start in Paia’s own eyes. She fears that she recognizes her dragon’s signature.

  “I have to find a way . . .” she mutters.

  “What’s that?” N’Doch glances back, notes her dampened face. “What’s up? You crapping out on me?”

  Paia reaches for the more resilient pose that will make him feel comfortable. “No, I just love strolling through a war zone when I know my dragon’s responsible for all the mess.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But I think it’s true.”

  “Then that means he’s been here before us.”

  With renewed vigor, N’Doch shoulders them to the edge of the throng and turns off the main thoroughfare, into a rubble-strewn side street where the crowd is thinner and no one pays them much attention. They’re just one more empty-handed couple fleeing for their lives. “Of course, he’s only encouraging the bad shit that was going on already.”

  “Or maybe he began it in the first place.”

  “What? The whole damn cycle of human violence? C’mon!”

  “Why not?”

  N’Doch slows at an intersection to scan the narrow crossing alleys. Smoke obscures the distance in both directions. Two young men race by with their arms full. An old woman shrieks curses from an archway. Three sweating men struggle to topple some kind of machinery onto a half-burned cart, blocking most of the street. N’Doch edges Paia past them.

  “Looters,” he snarls. “As if all this wasn’t bad enough already.”

  “Why not?” asks Paia again, but so softly that only she hears the question. Why should N’Doch believe her? He doesn’t know Fire like she does.

  Several blocks farther, a wrecked van burns in the street. The driver is dead at the wheel. Another body lies half in, half out of an open door. Paia veers toward them in sympathy.

  “No! There’s nothing you can do!” N’Doch grabs her arm. Just past the van, two green jeeps are parked cross-ways in the road. Half a dozen armed men are stopping all passersby. Before N’Doch swerves aside, dragging her into the nearest alley, Paia sees a tall youth spread-eagled against a wall. The men are jabbing at him with the butts of their rifles. The youth looks a lot like N’Doch.

  In the alley, shade brings some relief from the heat. Screams follow them as the buildings close in, and a racket of gunfire, ricocheting along bare, pockmarked walls of faded pink and orange. The barred windows are set high, out of reach. A rectangle of smoky bright light yawns ahead, an obstacle rather than a goal. At the edge of the narrow concealing darkness, N’Doch peers cautiously around the corner, then ducks back, pressing himself and Paia against the wall. A huge six-wheeled armored truck thunders past, grinding up clouds of dust and grit. Already breathless, Paia inhales enough to set her coughing convulsively. N’Doch is panting, too, but will not let her rest. When the vehicle roar fades, he leads her into the searing light.

  A big square spreads to their right, lined with shuttered, ruined shops. All across the open space, wood and canvas canopies are collapsed an
d burning, stalls shattered or overthrown.

  “This was the market.”

  It’s the first local information N’Doch has offered. Paia guesses they are nearing his home territory. The devastation has become more personal to him. Bodies lie among the flames and ruins. It looks as if a fiery hurricane has descended without warning into a busy, crowded square. Just how it would look, Paia muses, if that hurricane was a fire-breathing dragon. Furtive shapes dart through the smoke, snatching up whatever’s left to be scavenged.

  N’Doch’s luxurious mouth thins to a grim line. He scans the burned-out square but does not linger. “This way,” he orders.

  A soot-faced girl with an armload of charred electronics pushes off from the wall she’s been lounging against, into their path. She suggests several things in seductive tones in a language Paia does not recognize.

  N’Doch brandishes his tire iron. “Scram.”

  They see no one else but the dead for several blocks and several connecting shadowed alleyways. Just when this sector of town appears to be empty and N’Doch is moving ahead less cautiously, they nearly run into a second, sudden roadblock. More green jeeps, more men with assault rifles. N’Doch turns aside in the nick of time, sprints down a long passage barely wide enough to be called an alley, and they are out in the light again, carrying the reek of garbage on their clothing.

  “Those bastards are sure looking for someone,” N’Doch observes angrily.

  “Maybe it’s us.”

  He scowls at her over his shoulder. “Girl, you are paranoid. I did a lot of stuff I’m not so proud of a while back, but I was never Public Enemy Number One. Besides, how would anyone know we’re . . . Oh. I see. The Fire dude.”

  Paia nods.

  “But how would he get men mobilized so fast?”

  “If he knew, somehow, that we’d be coming . . .”

  “Phew,” breathes N’Doch. “Now you’re really scaring me.”