The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet Page 7

They hurry past rows of small houses, squatter and more widely spaced than the buildings in the center of town. Tiny plots of tilled ground shelter the desiccated remains of kitchen gardens. There is less destruction here, and N’Doch is walking faster, muttering in hopeful distraction. On the other side of a building with its roof caved in, a row of cinder-block structures fronts an unpaved road. Windowless boxes with open doorways, hardly houses at all. A few look burned out, but all are still standing. At the far end of the row, a man slumps on a stoop with his head in his hands.

  N’Doch makes eagerly for the fourth house down the line. Instinct holds Paia back as they reach the door. It’s pitch-black inside, despite the white glare of the sun.

  “Fâtime?” N’Doch eases into the darkness. “Ma? You there?”

  Alone on the dirt street with the pop of distant gunfire, Paia’s terror suddenly blossoms. Only the need to keep moving has kept it at bay. She’s sure she hears a jeep approaching, or the tramp of running feet, or the swoop of giant wings. A dull metallic clatter echoes inside the house.

  “N’Doch?” Paia backs into the doorway, tripping over the tire iron, which lies just inside the door. It’s not as dark in the house as she’s expected. A shaft of light from a high side window cuts across the interior. N’Doch stands in the middle of the room, backlit by the narrow dusty beam. He’s gazing at a woman sitting in a chair against the opposite wall. His shadow obscures the woman’s face but for a glimmer in her eyes. Paia wonders if the woman is weeping. She sees no damage anywhere in the room. A few battered pots and pans sit in logical places. An ancient television rests on a rickety metal table. So, it must be relief that sags N’Doch’s shoulders, his whole slim straight back letting go into a slump.

  But the only sound is the buzzing of insects and N’Doch’s soft keening, not a sound of relief at all.

  “N’Doch?” Paia goes to him quickly and takes his arm.

  He turns his head away, out of the light, and the woman’s face is lit instead. She’s an older woman, with dark skin and graying hair, thin with starvation and fatigue. Her eyes are open, but Paia sees no tears, only a neat, dark hole in the center of her forehead. The wall behind her is crawling with flies.

  “Ohhh.” Paia leans into N’Doch’s side. “Is it . . .?”

  “Yes.”

  After a moment, she says, “He did this, somehow. I’m sure of it.”

  “Yeah, probably. It sure was no accident.” He eases out of Paia’s grip. As deliberately as a sleepwalker, he crosses the room to close his mother’s eyes. His fingers linger on her thin shoulder. “My fault, Ma. My fault.”

  “No,” insists Paia. “No. How can you say that?”

  “Because I was never there when she needed me before, and I wasn’t there now.”

  She understands his muddled syntax. But must the child take care of the parent? This is a new concept for Paia. Were there things she could have been or done for her father that would have kept him from descending into drink and despair?

  “What should we do?”

  His sigh is more like a shudder. “Go find Papa Dja, ASAP.”

  “I mean, with the . . . with her?”

  “Nothing much we can do. She’s gone. No place nearby to bury her.”

  Paia imagines digging a grave as the bullets sing above their heads. If Fire keeps doing things like this, it will be easy to hate him.

  “I mean, Papa Dja might still be okay. We gotta warn him if we can.”

  “So we just . . . leave her?”

  “She’s in her house. That’s where she liked to be.” N’Doch lifts his hands to his face and scrubs his forehead, then drags his palms hard along his cheeks. He paces away from his mother’s body, then back to touch her shoulder again. “Hey, Ma. This is me leaving. Like always, hunh? Might not be smart to stick around here right now.”

  “I will know if he’s approaching,” Paia says quietly.

  “Yeah, but will you know the hand that actually pulled the trigger?”

  “Ah. Right.” In dragon-form, Fire could neither have managed a gun nor fit inside this tiny house. And his man-form is an illusion born of manipulated energies. It can be whatever size or shape he wants, but an illusion cannot hold an actual gun or press an actual trigger. “Someone else was here with him.”

  “To do the deed. Yes. Had to be.” N’Doch moves away from the body and around the room, picking things up and putting them down, as if taking inventory of his mother’s scant possessions. He stares for a moment into a small, blackened pot. When he sets it aside, his eyes are full and moist.

  “Someone from the Temple?” Paia can’t really believe it. She says it mainly to distract him.

  It works. “Can he do that? Haul people around, like Earth can?”

  “I’m not sure. He’d always threaten that if I didn’t behave, he’d fly me off to a foreign land and abandon me. But he never took me anywhere.”

  N’Doch stops short. He bends over abruptly. When he straightens again, each fist is grasping one end of the tire iron. “Baraga!”

  “Who?” Paia whirls, certain that someone is in the doorway.

  “That’s it! Sonofabitch!” N’Doch slashes the air, right, left, right, left. “Fire doesn’t need to bring anyone from anywhere. He’s got his own big toady right here!” He takes another swipe at nothing, and another. “Just the sorta guy who can get his thug into a burning town to do the job, and get him out again. Damn! Sonofabitch!”

  It would be easy and obvious for N’Doch to spend his grief trashing his mother’s home. Paia is glad when he lowers the tire iron, and chooses not to.

  Within the next heartbeat, the room fills with a rich blue radiance. The old-fashioned video set has flicked on of its own accord. N’Doch’s fighting stance collapses. They both turn to stare into the sudden glow.

  Paia shivers. It’s like the aged monitor that appeared so suddenly in her studio, dust-caked and battered as if it had been there forever. It showed this same empty blue screen. Foolishly, she ventures, “House? Is that you?”

  But there’s no answering crawl of white letters across the bottom of the screen. Just blank blue, and then, abruptly, an image.

  “Hunh,” says N’Doch.

  “What is that?”

  “Looks like a city of some kind.”

  Paia nods. She’s never actually been in a city, but she’s seen them on the vid and in her history books. This city looks brand new, as white and clean as if it had been finished yesterday. As if it has no history. Broad, smooth, empty boulevards. Terraced buildings topped with pale, shining towers that rise against a sky of the same blank blue that had filled the screen a moment ago.

  N’Doch leans forward. “Where’s all the people?”

  As suddenly as it came, the white city vanishes, and is replaced with blue, as if the sky behind has swallowed every trace of street or tower. And now a message does appear, in big unadorned white lettering.

  It says: HURRY.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Silence in the crowded com room, awed and uneasy. The girl and Luther have vanished right in front of their eyes, without even the illusion of a place to have fallen into.

  Next, a burst of querulous chatter. The Librarian glances up from his console, beginning to comprehend impatience. He has no time for wonder. Humans ask for miracles, then are upset and disbelieving when they get one. He could offer them a rational explanation, as rational as it gets with dragons, but it would take him too long to articulate it. Time he can’t afford right now. He clicks his teeth irritably and bends back to his work.

  Hurry, hurry, insists the imperative in his brain.

  Hurry how? Hurry at what? He’s doing all he knows how to do, what he’s always done: search for the source. Where is this farther future, where his dragon is waiting, as desperate as he is to make contact? Desperate. He longs for it with every molecule of his being.

  If only she’d send him an image of the place, or a signal coherent enough for him to pinpoint its source location,
temporal as well as geographical. But she does not send coherent signals, and he is besieged at his console. Too much noise. Too many people. Too many demands. Constanze wants to know what’s going on inside the Citadel. Leif and the soldier require updated military data. House is in a fit of anxiety about Paia’s disappearance and will not stop distracting him with suggestions and queries. The rebellion is crucial. The Librarian has aided and abetted it, but it is not his True Work. He’d like them all to get on with it, and leave him to his task: locating his dragon. If Air is not found, the rebellion—won or lost—will matter little.

  But because he’s so ruled by compassion and temperance, because so many of his lives have been given over to the service of causes—whatever cause . . . in the end, they were all the same: the survival of the planet—because he doesn’t know how to make the demands go away, the Librarian grants them his attention for a while longer.

  He transfers House to the private channel plugged into his ear, and convinces him to try a power-up of the deactivated surveillance cameras trained on the Citadel’s front entrance. After a few false starts and some creative rerouting, two front-on views of the imposing Temple facade appear on the screen. A cheer goes up among the watchers. The Librarian takes a look himself. He’s not seen the Citadel’s exterior since the Fire-breather took over. The elaborate, overscaled columns and friezes, so sharply delineated by the harsh sunlight, are the dragon’s addition. The Librarian notes an echo of styles affected by other, human, dictators in times gone by. Human, but not humane. What a difference a single letter can make. The Librarian smiles, drifting again, content in a celebration of the power of language.

  But soon Leif Cauldwell is back at his elbow. “See what he’s got on the Grand Stair. There’s a camera still working there, I’m sure of it.”

  The Librarian keys in the request. To accede is much easier. Refusal would require a considered explanation. The Citadel’s Grand Stair flashes up on the wall. Meanwhile, House is murmuring anxiously in his right ear.

  “But how did this happen, Gerrasch? How could it? Why didn’t anyone stop her?”

  “Accident.”

  “No such thing!”

  Taking the very long view, the Librarian is inclined to agree. There are no random events. In the short term, however, humans are definitely subject to them, mostly due to the thoughtlessness of their own actions. “Accident.”

  “Will she be safe?”

  “Will any?” counters the Librarian, as Leif looms over him again.

  “House, can you give us floor plans, level by level?”

  “Original or revised?” House is more terse on the public channel. “Leif, how could you let this happen? You promised to keep an eye on her!”

  “Revised. Don’t fret, House. We’ll have her back in no time.”

  The Librarian is not so sure. He has an uneasy feeling about how quickly their united force has been divided. If he was the Fire-breather, that’s exactly how he would begin his final conquest.

  A row of neatly drawn plans marches across the wall just at eye level.

  “Thanks, House. That’s perfect!” Leif beckons the soldier to the screen, and Stoksie wanders over for a closer look. “Here’s what makes the place so hard to break into. You’ve never been in the Citadel, have you, Stokes?”

  “Nevah bin close, even,” the little Tinker replies gravely. “Das Scroon Crew’s territory, y’know? But dey ain’ bin too close, lately, cuza da Monsta.”

  Köthen traces out potential patterns of access to the Citadel from the surrounding countryside. Each route leads his finger to the same spot: the stone staircase leading up to the Temple’s high outer courtyard.

  “Five hundred very tall steps,” Leif tells him.

  “The only entrance?” Köthen asks.

  “The only. In my family’s day, there was an elevator, but the Beast is technophobic. He replaced it with something he could understand, something that looks more intimidating.”

  “Elevator. The room that moves?”

  Leif nods approvingly, then taps the image of the Stair. “A perfect bottleneck. If we take it, they lose the advantage. This big gateway here leads to the Inner Court, and then directly into the Temple. And from there, into the complex.”

  Köthen studies the long view of the Temple facade. The Librarian marvels at how quickly this tenth-century man has mastered the concept of a live video feed. “For how long did your family rule this stronghold?”

  “Rule it?” Leif chuckles. “Not rulers in name, not by your definition, but I guess it was sort of the Cauldwells’ little kingdom. Our great grandfather saw the handwriting on the wall while most people were still in total denial. Entire governments, in fact. He sold off the other family holdings and added to his land in the Adirondacks. Bought up a big chunk when the country went bankrupt. Moved his wife and kids up. Other relatives followed. The Citadel began as an out-of-the-way vacation compound, then a family retreat. My father’s generation was forced to turn it into a fortress.”

  “It was a bad time, then,” Köthen remarks.

  Leif’s laugh is a bitter retort. “You could say that, yeah.” But there is recognition and empathy in Köthen’s tone, not a lack of understanding. “You’ve had some hard times of your own, I gather.”

  “So I imagined, until I came here.” Köthen turns back to the screen. He lays his palm on the long view of the cliff face as if to measure it in handspans. “This is . . . high. Is the courtyard within range from the top?”

  “Not with the weapons we have.”

  “What do you have?”

  Cauldwell makes a sour face.

  “Wait, nah, Leif,” Stoksie says. “Betcha we cud come up wit sumpin.”

  “What sort of something?”

  “Doan look so doubty, nah. Yu bin buried up in da palace a long time. Der’s stuff bin goin’ on yu don’ know ’bout. Stuff comin’ up frum da Sout’.”

  “Stokes, we need serious, working ammo.”

  “Yu kin git it, if yu got trade enuff.”

  “Huh.” Leif runs a hand through his long auburn hair. “Well, that’s news.” To Köthen, he says, “We have a big cave full of long-range weapons, you see, and nothing to put in them, not for years.”

  “Long-range. How long?”

  “Plenny long, Doff,” says Stoksie.

  The Librarian sighs as the past rears up and ricochets around his head. So many years, so many pasts, so many of them dominated by guns, large and small. He knew when he set this rebellion in motion, that there’d be fighting, there’d be deaths. So why is the idea suddenly so exhausting? His other revolution, the reshaping of the people’s hearts and minds with a new idea of how to live . . . it’s taking so long, oh, so long. Longer, he fears, than the world has time left. The data and the computer models have been in sync for a century, since the climate change became irreversible. Worse still, recent sensor readings indicate that the final decline is accelerating. His new idea came too late. Only the One can save them now. His dragon. Air. He must hurry. Hurry.

  “Gerrasch? You all right?”

  Leif bends over him solicitously. The Librarian blinks, lifts his head from the keypad, where it seems to have fallen. In his earphone, House is complaining about incomprehensible commands. The Librarian rubs his eyes and murmurs an apology.

  “Time you took a break, G.”

  “Later.” Mere sleep will not cure this particular exhaustion.

  “You know best.” Briefly, Leif massages his shoulders. “Can you get me a print-out of the floor plans, small enough for Dolph to keep on him until he’s got it memorized? And print out the area map, too.”

  The Librarian nods. Leif strides away, head high, back straight. The group at the wall screen watches him approach, moves aside to make room. It makes the Librarian smile. Leif Cauldwell has waited for this moment for over a decade. He is thrumming with strategy and resolve, and his ardor translates into those who look to him for guidance. The Librarian can smell their anticipation
. Even Köthen, the outsider, has caught a whiff of it. He sets himself apart from the group, but is not in contention with it or with Cauldwell, its obvious leader. Separate but equal, and ready to fight.

  The Librarian sighs. Perhaps now they will leave him alone for a while. And he’ll give House a really challenging task to perform, so the computer will stop its whining. He requests a trace on the source of the portal image of N’Doch’s Africa. It came up on his screens, so it must start as a signal somewhere. Just as his visions are signals, his dragon’s mad sendings propagated through time and space. He can feel their minute physicality as they enter his brain, lapping like waves on a lake shore. No magic, and not just his imagination. Rather, some unknown physics. The Librarian sets his electronic trackers to work.

  Hurry, hurry. But he needs time. Time to think. To analyze. Where is this new future? What’s the exact nature of the change in him? His dragon touched him and left him altered, but how?

  He imagines the Fire-breather, racing up and down the centuries, covering all his bases, making good on all his threats. Even for a power like Fire, this will be a strain on his resources. Good. He’ll be distracted. The perfect time to move on the Citadel, but also the perfect time to find and rescue Air. Is this what he’s meant to understand? That he must reassemble the four dragon guides, as soon as possible. Strength in unity. Only together will they find Air.

  He sees Stoksie beside him, watching blunt fingers play the keypad like a piano. How long has he been there? The Librarian cannot remember seeing him approach. The little man looks pensive, uncomfortable, like he’s been standing too long on his bad hip.

  The Librarian gestures. “Chair?”

  “Nah.” Stoksie props his elbow against the side of the console and leans his chin into his cupped palm. “Kin I ask yu sumpin?”

  “Ask.”

  “Dat place dey wen’, das like sumkinda time masheen?”

  “Sumkinda.” The Librarian slips unconsciously into the Tinker dialect.

  “Luta, he be okay, nah?”

  “Hope he will.” Does even Stoksie believe he has some mystic power over life and death? To his right, the plotter spits out the printed plan and map. The Librarian passes the stiff rolls to an outstretched hand, without noticing whose, and hears the crinkle of paper being spread across a nearby table. He worries that the stockpiled reams will be too dry to use long before his supply is exhausted.