The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet Page 8

  “Yu cud go anyweah, den?” Stoksie pursues.

  “Theoretically.” The Librarian takes a breath. So many syllables all at once. “With control.”

  Stoksie grunts. “But we doan have dat. How cud we git dat, dya t’ink?”

  “Working on it,” the Librarian mutters. Wait. What is that? There’s a new humming in his earpiece, something that isn’t coming from House. What is it? Too much noise in the room to be sure. Too much noise and too much busyness. He can’t focus. He can’t hear himself think. He waves his arms distractedly. “Quiet! QUIET!”

  No one hears him except Stoksie. “Yu gotta raise yer volume sum, G.”

  The Librarian frowns. Wasn’t he yelling at the top of his lungs?

  “Heah. Lemme do it.”

  Stoksie limps away, moving from caucus to caucus, debate to debate. The Librarian doesn’t pick up what he says, but the hubbub dies back a bit, and groups begin to drift toward the door. Soon the room is empty, but for the cluster of warriors around the printout.

  “. . . four days’ direct march, if the dragons can’t take us.” Leif delineates a route across the area map, between spidery contour lines and the broken traces of old roadways.

  “With how many men?” asks Köthen.

  “People,” says Constanze.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the force won’t be all men. The women will fight, too.”

  “Ah.” Köthen’s shrug suggests that if all the women are as staunch as Constanze, he has no objection. He straightens away from the map and turns to study the screen again. “Herr Stokes,” he calls out, waiting for the translator to catch up. “Are those mules of yours saddle-broken?”

  “Mebbe. Why yu askin’?”

  Köthen seems to take this ambiguity for an assent. He nods. “Give me ten men of my choosing, Leif Cauldwell, armed with these wondrous weapons you speak of. I will take the heights, and clear the courtyards.”

  “Hmm, it’s a good idea, but you’ll be totally exposed up there when the Beast returns. And he will return, no doubt of it.”

  “The risk is no worse than that of an ambush in the lightless bowels of these unfamiliar warrens.”

  “Not entirely lightless.”

  “But well-known to you. In there, I would be a hazard to my men.”

  “I see your point.” Leif nods. “Okay, you’re on. The heights are your job.”

  So the soldier prefers to fight his battles in the open air, the Librarian muses. Better him than me. Hours later, his cave-adapted lungs still feel the dry sear of the mountaintop.

  “When can we expect our dragons back, Gerrasch?” Leif asks.

  “Unsure.” The Librarian is not well-versed in the issues of real-time relative to dragon travel. It’s not the sort of information you can easily find in books or data banks. He suspects that elapsed time in the past is not exactly equivalent to elapsed time in the present. Besides, time, as in a specific chronological goal, is not Earth’s main parameter. It’s place that draws him. The fact that places have their associated times is apparently coincidental. But standard time paradox should dictate that the physical dragon can’t be in two places at once. So his return can be expected at any time after the moment he left. Could be seconds, could be days or weeks.

  “Well, say, an hour or two, maybe?”

  “Maybe. Yes.” What will be, will be. The Librarian doesn’t want to burden Leif Cauldwell with worries he can do nothing about.

  “Let’s say an hour, then. Time enough to talk to the folks upstairs.”

  “We do need a head count,” notes Constanze.

  “Let’s get on it, then.” Leif rolls up the printout and hands it to his wife for safekeeping. “Stoksie, can you stick around down here and keep G company? Anything important comes through from the Citadel, you can let us know.”

  “Betcha,” the Tinker agrees.

  And at last the room is truly empty. Silence settles in like a gentle rain. The Librarian remembers rain. He allows himself a moment to savor the precious memory, not wanting to waste it. Stoksie noses about for a comfortable seat, then drags a battered swivel chair up to the desk nearest the console. He props his feet on an open drawer and leans back into the cracked plastic with a sigh.

  “Ain’ slept sinze yestiddy.”

  The Librarian nods sympathetically. He feels like he hasn’t slept in years. Centuries, maybe. How will any of them get rest enough to fight this war? He peers at the readouts stacked to the left of his keypad. The tracking routines are in their third loop, still without a result. He plants his elbows on the cushioned wrist pad and rests his head in his palms. Just for a moment, he tells himself. Just long enough to clear his head of the residue from the morning’s noise and crisis . . . but that humming is back again. He can hear it clearly now, in his ears, in his mind. He can feel it in his gut. Is it . . . physical? Is something going on out on the mountainside?

  The Librarian stirs, lifts his head. His neck muscles are cramped. His eyelids seem fastened together. He has no feeling at all in his hands. He’s been asleep, and the humming has woken him. There’s something different about the light. For a moment, before he is fully awake, he imagines that the sun has risen. But the sun does not rise when you’re a mile underground.

  The Librarian shakes himself upright.

  The room is bathed in a pure white radiance. Every corner, every detail is softly delineated. In memory of his former animal self, every hair on the Librarian’s body rises to attention. He lifts his dazzled eyes to the wall screen. Instantly he understands. The portal has opened again.

  The darker walls and ceiling frame the bright vista beyond. Light spills in a long rectangle onto the scuffed flooring of the com room. A glowing path, leading right to his console. He is inside, looking out onto a shaded terrace, bounded by delicate columns and a railing of translucent stone. Like alabaster, the Librarian decides, but without alabaster’s depth. This stone is as smooth and white as the paper from the plotter. Past the railing is a blue void, neither sea nor sky, but a seamless both. The white terrace continues out of sight to left and right, its hidden spaces beckoning.

  What does it mean? It’s not a place he knows or has ever been, or has ever seen. Yet it seems . . . familiar. How can this be? He’s a librarian, after all. His memory is encyclopedic. If this was a place from any of his many pasts, he’d remember it. And he doubts it could be an unknown from his current present, unless there still exists some impossibly sheltered corner of the world, where such a terrace could show no sign of destruction or wear.

  But he knows . . . he knows that a city lies concealed below the white horizon of the terrace railing. Images flood the space behind his eyes: tall glass towers reflecting the unchanging white light. Wide boulevards and open plazas. An empty city that calls to him. Is this to be the next phase of his search?

  He has only to walk the width of the terrace to find out. It isn’t far. Not far at all.

  The Librarian lurches to his feet. Refusing to let the image out of his sight, he fumbles over to Stoksie’s chair and wakes him with a clumsy, flailing arm.

  “Easy, nah! Easy!”

  “Stokes! Look!”

  Stoksie’s eyes flick open. “Whatsit?”

  “What do . . . wachu see deah, Stokes?”

  “Weah?”

  “On da screen.”

  The Tinker sets both feet carefully on the floor and squints into the light. “Dunno, G. Wachu t’ink it iz?”

  The Librarian is wary of admitting what he thinks. It’s too impossible, too crazy, that after so long, the moment could have actually arrived, so suddenly and without fanfare. He hopes Stoksie’s determined skepticism will help him think past the exultant hammering of his heart. “I t’ink . . . think it’s her place. Why else would it come to me? She’s in there somewhere.”

  But Stoksie seems less inclined to doubt him since the other dragons appeared. He levers himself out of his chair and takes a few stiff steps forward. “Her? Yu mean, da One?
”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s da portal opin agin, den?”

  “Think so. Yes. Sure of it.”

  Stoksie rubs his stubbled chin, runs a hand over his bald head, then limps into the shaft of surreal light, right up to the edge of the opening. The Librarian follows, a long step behind. There is a faint line across the floor, a subtle change of tonality, like a borderline between here and there. Slowly, Stoksie extends his arm, up to and past where the screen should be. He waves his hand up and down, meeting no resistance. “It’s da portal, all ri’. Wachu wanna do, G?”

  The Librarian swallows. Physical courage has not been much required of him during his eternal waiting period. Endurance, persistence, patience, resourcefulness, and intelligence, yes. Those are his major qualities. But his body is thick and slow, his hands agile but not particularly strong. “Gotta go deah, Stokes,” he whispers hoarsely.

  “Nah. Bad ideah. Stoopid.”

  “Got to.” What if the portal closes, and she can’t open it again? What if it’s only Fire’s current distraction that’s allowed her to do it? “Got to, Stokes. Can’t miss the chance.”

  “Now? Ri’ now, yu got to?”

  The Librarian nods.

  “Den lemme run tell Leif an’ da othas.”

  “No. Please. They’ll try to stop me.”

  “Shur dey will, an’ gud fer dem!”

  “No. Not good. Got to do this.” The Librarian shakes his head. He takes a half step forward, until the change in the light falls across the middle of his toes. Is this the difference, then? That he can actually walk off into the unknown without quailing in panic?

  Stoksie moves up beside him. “Den I gotta go wichu.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yeah. Betcha.”

  The Librarian shudders. His last chance to refuse the summons has just crumbled. Now he has to go. But he doesn’t have to go alone. Often he’s convinced that the Tinker crews are the treasure-house of all that was once admirable in humanity. “Thank you,” he gasps.

  Stoksie laughs, a reckless sort of cackle. “Da lame an’ da halt, nah? Fine peah we make ta go aventurin’!”

  No random events, the Librarian reminds himself, a litany to bolster his courage. “Let’s go, then.”

  He rests his hand on the Tinker’s shoulder and, together, they step into the light.

  PART TWO

  The Journey into Peril

  CHAPTER SIX

  After only an instant in the snowy yard at Deep Moor, Erde knows that her Seeing has been a true one.

  The white ground is churned up and stained with frozen mud. Acrid odors pinch her throat and nostrils, not the warm scent of cozy fireplaces, but the stench of burning. Black smoke billows beyond the surrounding pines, toward the barns, toward the house.

  “Oh, no! Oh, no!” Erde flings the sack of woolens into Luther’s arms and races across the ragged snow in her sandals and leggings. The path through the trees to the house is ashy and trampled. At the base of the stone steps, she collapses with an anguished wail.

  The house is a ruin. Scorched stone. Charred timbers. No sign of life.

  She can hardly catch breath enough to cry out her grief and horror. The dragons, appalled as always by humankind’s potential for disaster, offer what little comfort they can.

  Luther rushes up, shrugging into the last of his winter layers. “Watsit, gal? Watsda matta?” He stops short at the sight of the ravaged house. Gently, he hauls Erde to her feet and presses her boots and sheepskin cloak into her arms. She throws them down, wailing.

  “We’re too late! How can we be too late?”

  Patiently, Luther retrieves the clothing from the dirty snow. “Put dese on, nah. Yu’ll freeze ta deat’.”

  “I don’t care! How could we let this happen!”

  The dragons are exploring the rest of the farmstead. Lady Water’s tone is tight and furious.

  THE BARNS ARE BURNED OUT AS WELL. THE ASHES ARE STILL HOT.

  Earth’s outrage is quieter. HE HAS BEEN HERE, OUR BROTHER.

  HE, OR HIS AGENTS.

  The hell-priest’s armies! It must have been!

  Away from the aura of the dragon’s heat, Erde is soon shivering as much from cold as from horror and outrage. Guillemo’s men in Deep Moor! It’s sacrilege! A desecration! She lets Luther help her into her boots and heavy cloak. She notes his wary sidelong glances, at the mounded snow, the tall and blistered pines, the grim lowering sky—the habit of a man used to hidden dangers.

  “Git yer stuff on,” he urges. “Den we’ll take a look ’roun’.”

  Erde forces her numbed fingers to tie up icy bootlaces. She must get hold of herself. She owes it to Luther and the dragons. “Is anyone here? Do you see any . . .” She can’t bring herself to say it, so Lady Water does instead.

  NO BODIES. SOME DEAD LIVESTOCK, BUT FEWER THAN MIGHT BE EXPECTED, GIVEN HOW TOTAL THE DESTRUCTION IS.

  Luther climbs the terrace steps to peer into the smoking ruin. “Doan see anyone . . . yu know . . . leas’ not heah.”

  “Then where is everyone?”

  Water offers an answer almost worse than death. NO DOUBT HE HAS TAKEN THEM.

  “No! Maybe they escaped. We’ll search till we find out what’s happened!” Erde’s tears are freezing on her cheeks. She fights back a hiccuping sob and musters a more determined expression. “Look at me, weeping over an old house, when Raven and Rose and the others need our help!”

  But, oh, how she did love that old house! Nestled in the leaves like a bird’s nest, low and cozy and so full of life! Now her little bedroom among the eaves is gone and the massive stone chimney stands alone amidst the smoking embers of the roof. Rose’s beautiful garden courtyard is a tumble of blackened sticks. The kitchen’s long, sturdy, well-used table, the center of the women’s lives and fellowship, is reduced to a heap of cinders clogging the charred stone sink.

  Erde had come to think of this house as home, as if it had been her true home all along, and her earlier life in her father’s castle was only a waiting time until she found Deep Moor. To keep herself from bursting into sobs again, she turns her back on the wreckage and her face into the frigid wind.

  “Howya doin?” Luther asks.

  “I’m all right now. Let’s go see what we can find out.”

  She leads him back to the churned yard and across it, following Earth’s wide, slushy trail through the pines and past the burned-out barns.

  “These were big and warm and beautiful once, Luther.”

  The Tinker nods. “Yu kin always builda house back, y’know, gal.”

  “Yes, I know. Yes, of course you can.” But it will never be the way it was, Erde mourns. It will never seem so perfect and protected, so . . . invulnerable. Perhaps that is the most devastating thing of all, that destruction came so quickly and so easily.

  They find the dragons in the big farmyard, where it opens out into the flat meadows of the valley. Both are nosing among the smaller outbuildings that have escaped the flames. The yard is a chaos of mud and ice, trampled and refrozen, with a confusion of tracks leading off in all directions. Earth crouches at the center, the snow melting around him. He’s reluctant to move his great horned bulk about and disturb the scents and signs he is taking such careful inventory of. Water has assumed a smoothly furred pragmatic shape. The dull late light glimmers in the velvet of her coat. Erde sees this particular shape has hands of a sort, for the dragon is clearing aside the remains of the henhouse. Luther hurries over to help.

  Erde takes stock hastily. The duck pen is more or less intact. The hog sty sags and a burned tree has fallen on the goat hut. All the doors have apparently been flung wide. She’s relieved to discover no dead animals inside. The rabbit hutch lies turned over. Luther nudges it with his foot.

  Erde moans. “Did they steal everything?”

  Earth’s gaze is steady and sad. THERE IS FAMINE IN THE LAND, REMEMBER.

  “I know.” She relays the dragon’s words to Luther, and for his sake, speak
s her reply out loud. “But I hate to think of Fra Guill’s men eating up all of Deep Moor!”

  “Dey’s all sortsa tracks heah,” Luther’s dark face is intent. “Like heah—dat’s da rabbits runnin’ away.” He points across the snowy field, then straightens out of his habitual stoop to take in the long valley and the tall, pine-shrouded hills.

  “You think so?” Erde squints to follow the trace until it vanishes behind a distant pile of brambles. She finds this small mercy enormously comforting.

  “Betcha. We raiz’em at Blin’ Rachel. Still had ’em wild, wen I wuza boy.” Luther studies the ground again. “An’ dis heah, das a mule.”

  “A mule!” Hope against hope! “Dragons, did you hear? Maybe it’s Sir Hal’s mule!”

  OR IT COULD BE A HORSE. Lady Water noses at the tracks.

  I don’t recall any horses at Deep Moor.

  SOMEONE ELSE’S HORSES, THEN.

  Erde shudders, recalling the thick-limbed white chargers favored by the hell-priest’s monkish bodyguards, trained to maul and trample. “She says it could be a horse.”

  “Mebbe so. Ain’ nevah seen a horse. Yu gottim heah?”

  “Oh, yes. The knights ride horses to battle.”

  Luther frowns, turning back to stare into the distant surrounding hills. “Yeah? Wonda if dey’s gone yit.”

  What if it was not just his men, but the hell-priest himself? That might account for the rampant and needless destruction. Fear and horror rise like gall, so physical a sensation that she clamps both hands to her mouth to keep the material glob of terror from spewing out of her gut.

  IF HE WAS HERE, YOU WOULD KNOW IT.

  She takes a breath, swallows, and lowers her hands. “Yes, dragon. I would. I always do.” But it’s hard to have faith in the face of such catastrophe.