A Dream of Ice

by Gillian Anderson

  “Are you all right?” a man asked as he stepped from a taxi.

  “Thank you, yes.” Yokane smiled. “Bad seafood, I think.”

  “Would you like my cab?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. “The air will help.”

  The man turned and hurried on his way. Yokane pushed herself from the bin and stood more steadily than she had a right to.

  This had happened frequently over the past few days—both food and images coming up. It began when her kavar suddenly and surprisingly linked to another power source, another stone, crafting something more potent. It had happened about two weeks ago on a street north of Washington Square Park, when she was walking home from one of her frequent late-night strolls. She had regained consciousness in the stairwell of the Group’s mansion. It was the claws that had woken her up, and the writhing, and the piercing squeaks of hundreds of rats on top of her, claws and tails scraping across her face, catching in her hair, burying her from sight. She’d frozen in a fetal position, in abject horror as the rats scrabbled in their mad panic.

  It was over an hour before the rodents finally relaxed and wandered off, the ones that were still alive. Yokane, shaking, had stood among the lumpen piles of death and staggered away. No matter how many showers she took, eye rinses, teeth brushings, she didn’t feel clean for days afterward.

  Now, having involuntarily relived the experience again in her open state, her stomach had rebuked her. She walked west toward the Hudson River, then south. She hoped that the view of the water, the river emptying into the bay, would steady her. It did, somewhat. But not nearly enough.

  The situation was dangerous, more dangerous than she had let on to the psychiatrist. Someone was trying very hard to get through—someone who had cazhed with another. A woman and a man, both of them pushing toward any soul that could hear them.

  They had found Caitlin O’Hara but Caitlin O’Hara refused to listen. So they sought her son.

  Why? Yokane wondered. It had to have something to do with the two kavars being active. The timing was too proximate.

  Yokane continued to walk. Whatever the cost, she could not give up. She wished she could go in Caitlin’s stead but that was not possible. She had gone back to the mansion one more time, only to feel the young scientist die. She was too afraid to go back again, so there was only the other path available to her.

  Is she varrem? Yokane asked again and again as she walked. That was a crucial question. Is she ours? She seemed to be a person of strong spirit, but that did not mean she was descended from the Priests. Though the lineage had been carefully tracked, the chaos of the last day left potential loopholes. Galderkhaani may have slipped through, those who had put flight ahead of cazh.

  Yokane had nursed a hope that Caitlin was varrem. But even there, she was torn. The doctor had fought to prevent Maanik from bonding with a desperate soul from Galderkhaan. And then there was the rainy, genocidal night when Caitlin had rent the sky with her force, and suddenly Yokane had felt soul after soul, her entire Priestly family, simply wink out of existence.

  That sudden, overwhelming loneliness had paralyzed her for days. The Han woman renting a room in Chinatown to her had thought she was ill and kept trying to ply her with herbal teas. Yokane had only starved and wept and hated Caitlin.

  When she regained rational thought Yokane knew that hatred was pointless and irrelevant. She knew she had to watch this woman, learn as much as she could about her. See what light and perspective the woman could provide on the hazy vision she herself had been experiencing.

  Now she knew.

  Yokane walked on through the lamp-lit night, her hands held at the center of her torso. She pointed the first two fingers of her left hand down, the first two of her right hand up.

  Awareness flooded her inner and outer senses. The very spaces between the buildings of the city became as tangible as the buildings themselves. The millions of breathing bodies were knots of density across her field of sensation. Her emptied spirit filled with energy—

  She stopped on a corner and leaned against a lamppost. But the energy was being drained.

  “No . . . not again!”

  Yokane was suddenly wrenched away, pulled back across fathoms of time and space, to a huge chamber with a domed ceiling, open to the sky. She had been here several times over the last few months but returned now with greater force and sharper awareness. She could not inform Caitlin O’Hara but it was the two souls central to the vision that filled her with dread.

  In the heart of the chamber amid water and fire, a dozen people in robes had gathered. A woman at the very center was performing movements and gestures that Yokane recognized from her training. As the woman moved, the others followed her exactly, and Yokane could feel immense pulses of energy rushing in torrents from their hands, through the air, through the walls, and away. The movements were slow but the intention behind them was pure fire, controlled ferocity and rage and conviction. Yokane felt a strange blend of horror and elation, a flood of anger and triumph rising within her, until the door to the chamber slammed open and a voice shouted in Galderkhaani, “Rensat! Gather everyone, quickly!”

  It came from a short, elderly man with wildly curling white hair, hurrying as fast as he could across the chamber. The woman at the center never faltered in her movements but spoke simultaneously.

  “What is wrong?” the woman asked.

  “Out there”—he pointed in the direction from which he’d come—“there are rumors that the Source is active!”

  The woman stiffened. “It must be stopped,” she said.

  “We cannot access it!” the man said.

  “Then we must find those who operate it and stop them!”

  “You will kill them?”

  “If necessary, as Enzo’s sister tried to do.”

  The man stood there, uncertain how to proceed. Suddenly his nose crinkled.

  “The air!” the woman said, insisting. “Smell the air!”

  The man inhaled as if he were already dismissing the notion, but the result caused confusion. “Sulfur,” he replied. “It’s true—”

  The ground-shattering sound of an explosion rocked through the room. It came from outside. The Priests lost their sequence in the movements. Rensat looked up in panic. Visible through the latticed ceiling was smoke, huge, throttling clouds of smoke. The man rushed to the stairs by the wall and lurched up them. He approached the nearest window and looked out, looked east.

  “Oh gods,” he breathed. “The khaan . . .”

  The woman beseeched everyone to join hands with another, as many others as they could, and recite the cazh.

  “Come to me, Pao!” Rensat cried. “Quickly, while there is time for us!”

  “Oh gods!” Pao screamed as he grasped her outstretched fingers.

  Then there was fire and torrent and Yokane’s body fell sideways, sliding down the lamppost. She breathed heavily, losing the little energy she had gathered.

  “Oh gods,” she murmured, repeating Pao’s last words.

  She pushed herself from the streetlight and began to walk. Walking had helped before and it worked now. Soon her head was clear again and the vision of Galderkhaan held only the weight of a memory and the message that had demanded tonight’s action.

  She had not wanted to open herself to Caitlin, but she knew she needed help immediately. She knew that working through the boy would force Caitlin’s hand.

  Yokane continued to walk but she remained closed to the city and the past. She wanted to avoid Fifth Avenue and Washington Square, continuing over to the East Side and down toward her closet-sized room.

  She had told Caitlin to contact her—by phone—after her visit to the Group’s headquarters. When that was done, when Yokane had rested, she would know better what had to be done in the past to protect the future.

  Mustering her strength, the woman continued to walk. The night had been more exhausting than she had anticipated, and after a few minutes more she decided she had walked enough.
It was time to rest. She hadn’t seen many cabs pass by so she hurried for the subway and took the D train to the West Village.

  The respite was what she needed—though the buzzing in her pocket as the train passed below the Group’s mansion was noticeable not just to herself but to those nearest her. Most of the passengers probably assumed it was her cell phone, but their annoyed looks put Yokane on guard: she couldn’t afford a confrontation, especially if there was a police officer on board. She wished it were a pet thyodularasi whose smooth flesh she could stroke and calm, and it would calm her . . . at least, that was the legend. She had only seen the animal’s bones, held in secret and treasured by the generations who had come before her. She left the subway at Lafayette Street—well below the Group’s mansion.

  Between her worried thoughts; her increasingly sad, wistful reflections; and the stone buzzing in her pocket, Yokane had very little attention to spare for her surroundings. She walked through Little Italy, then continued east. She only half-turned when approaching footsteps seemed uncommonly close.

  Three fingers jabbed into the angle of her jaw and neck and Yokane’s body dropped. Her last thought was of Caitlin and the Group’s headquarters, and the silent scream her body was no longer able to make—

  Casey Skett caught her so quickly that to a young woman walking on the other side of the street, she seemed only to wobble. With one arm Casey lifted Yokane just enough so that her feet would not drag on the pavement and walked her to the open passenger door of his Department of Sanitation van. He checked and no pedestrians were looking to see what had happened. He lifted Yokane into the seat, taking care to make it look friendly and romantic in case anyone was gazing from a nearby window. With the female belted into the passenger seat, he shut the door and moved around to get behind the wheel. He drove into the Group’s underground parking spot, parked, unfastened Yokane, and dragged her into the back of the van. There, he pulled the object from her pocket but did not pause to inspect the still-vibrating artifact. He’d known since Arni died what this descendant of the bloody Priestly suicide cult had been carrying. He put the stone in his own pocket, removed a leash hanging from the wall of the van, and strangled Yokane with it until her feet stopped their spasms.

  Then he drove straight to the animal hospital to utilize their incinerator.

  He would decide later if and when he would tell Flora about any of it . . . including his ties to the people she sought.

  The Technologists of Galderkhaan.

  CHAPTER 20

  There was a sharp chill in the air and an intermittent wind coming from Washington Square Park. Fallen leaves crackled as they skidded along the dimly lit sidewalk and scratched the sides of parked cars.

  Caitlin was oblivious to all of it. Standing on the front steps of the Group’s mansion, she was prepared to try the word “Galderkhaan” as her admittance password. Since it was around ten o’clock at night she couldn’t pretend to be a tourist or a neighborhood outreach representative from the Church of the Ascension across the street—though the name was apt enough.

  But excuses weren’t needed. The young woman who opened the door wearing green sparkly eyeshadow seemed a bit surprised at the sight of her, then immediately asked Caitlin to come in without another word. Flora had hired Erika as an assistant for many reasons, but the fact that she verged on having an eidetic memory was especially helpful. Erika did not say aloud that she remembered the visitor from a video she’d seen of a gathering in Jacmel, Haiti.

  She showed Caitlin into Flora’s office. It was filled with a mishmash of antique furniture that showed a preference for Art Deco and long brown-and-blue velvet drapes that covered the windows.

  Erika found Flora coming up the stairs from the basement and warned her who had arrived.

  “She’s here?” Flora exclaimed. It was all the Group leader said in response. The words had the weight of continental drift, an acknowledgment that large things were in motion.

  Donning a smile, she entered her office.

  “I am Flora Davies.”

  “Caitlin O’Hara,” her guest replied. “A mutual friend sent me in your direction. Yokane?”

  “Oh, yes,” Flora said.

  “You know her?” Caitlin asked.

  “I know of her,” Flora replied. In fact she had never heard the name but she certainly wasn’t going to give the woman a reason to walk away. She didn’t say anything else, simply gazed at Caitlin.

  “I’m a psychiatrist,” Caitlin continued.

  The comment invited a response, but Flora offered none. The silence stretched out.

  After years of talking with teenagers, Catlin recognized the recalcitrance tango—similar to the slow dance she had done with Odilon across the Ping-Pong table. Flora Davies’s demeanor was notably polite and polished, and Caitlin had no idea how long she would maintain her silence. It was likely that she had been presenting this pleasant facade for decades. So Caitlin just stared around the room at the antiquities, maps, and books. If Yokane were right about Davies’s having a Galderkhaani artifact somewhere in this mansion, then hiding everything would be much more natural for her than confiding. Caitlin might have to say something inspirational, irresistible, to break through that wall.

  Yet Caitlin wasn’t sure what she could or should say. Mentioning Yokane had elicited little response and no flicker of familiarity, no smile of liking or flash of dislike. She was betting Davies had never heard of her. And an archaeology group that hadn’t publicized one of the greatest finds in the history of the field was probably not to be trusted. It went against academic tradition. You find something big, you announce it, then you go to radio silence while you study it and prepare to publish. That way, if someone else finds one, you still get bragging or naming rights.

  Besides, Caitlin didn’t want to share her knowledge of Galderkhaan without getting something in return. Flora might take the information, thank Caitlin with practiced politeness, and kick her out the door. Caitlin needed information and her silence was the only bait she had.

  There’s only one difference between us, Caitlin thought as her eyes scanned the heavy desk. Flora had obviously been here a while. She had time. Caitlin did not. Her experience with Galderkhaani told her that if there were one ancient soul attached to Jacob, there could be others not far off.

  She was suddenly, sorely tempted to surprise Flora by taking a shortcut through an energy exchange, but Yokane’s trepidation about “accessing” while in the proximity of a Galderkhaan artifact seemed wise to heed. Forming such a conduit was also one of Caitlin’s hidden assets that she would not reveal until she had some sense of common purpose with this woman.

  Or until you’ve got nothing else to work with.

  Flora made a careful opening move, a bland statement of the obvious:

  “What does a psychiatrist want with our Explorers’ Group?” Flora asked. “Yokane must have thought there was a good reason to send you.”

  “I’ve been doing some exploring of my own,” Caitlin said mildly.

  “Where?”

  Caitlin decided to take this to the next level. “Everywhere. Through patients. They’ve had visions.”

  “You used hypnosis?”

  “Something along those lines,” Caitlin said mildly. “May I ask—what do you explore?”

  “The rather more mundane physical world,” Flora replied apologetically. “Would you care to see?”

  “I would,” Caitlin replied, trying to hide her surprise that Flora had offered.

  Flora began the speech she reserved for senators and university presidents. The speech was accompanied by a tour through two floors of the mansion.

  “Definitely not a museum,” Caitlin observed as she stepped—vaulted, in fact—over a leaning pile of spears obscuring a doorway.

  Flora laughed politely and fluttered her hand at the jumble of objects in the room, which was actually slightly more organized than the others.

  “This is a storage area for our explorers,” Flora said.
“We offer categorization, authentication, and appraisal services. Many people like to donate old rocks and stones and such for tax benefits.”

  “An old-school approach to collecting?” Caitlin said.

  “Like medieval nobility,” Flora admitted. “Getting material is the thing, and discussing the rarities with each other over drinks.”

  “But not with anyone else.”

  “This is an old, very private sandbox, Dr. O’Hara,” Flora remarked. “Most of the donors and some of the archaeologists we fund have an inflated sense of the worth of their finds.”

  Or deflated, Caitlin thought.

  The mansion was a very convenient spot at which to purposely devalue and conceal goods. The eccentric non-filing system had a cultivated sloppiness to it that screamed “underfunding”—an excuse to raise donations or grants that went to other work. The real work, whatever that was. Caitlin had no doubt that Davies also functioned as a fence for unwanted items whenever the opportunity arose. The woman might even trade something of enormously high value to a collector or museum for something she particularly wanted.

  Caitlin noticed that there were more weapons among the artifacts than any other functional item, yet nothing of Galderkhaan . . . until in a cramped, claustrophobic hallway they passed a closed door that gave Caitlin the faintest sense of vertigo. She experienced it for no more than half a pace, thankfully, so she covered it just as Flora glanced back at her.

  “Mind your head,” Flora said, patting a low beam as they passed into another Crock-Pot of a room.

  “You know what this place needs?” Caitlin said lightly. “A dog. An Irish wolfhound, negotiating Polynesian oars and the like. To complete the picture.”

  Flora laughed. “I’ve thought about it,” she said. She hadn’t.

  “Crazy what happened with the animals today,” Caitlin tossed out.

  “Oh, I’m sure they’ll trace it back to some sort of emission,” Flora delivered smoothly. “Remember that maple syrup smell all over Manhattan in the mid-2000s? Turned out to be a fenugreek factory in Jersey. With all the communication waves that are floating around now”—she whirled her hand above her head—“who knows what kinds of bandwidth are affecting our brains.” She added as she returned them to her office, “Have you experienced anything like that? Disorientation?”