“Let’s move on,” he whispers. They haven’t been absolutely silent. They may have been spotted already, and they’re carrying valuable food and water that he doesn’t want to lose this early in the game. “This way.”
He leads them away from the factory, through the dry weeds and shattered asphalt. He’s thinking of a place he crashed at once, with a guy he knows won’t be there unless he’s come back from the dead. It took some getting into then, but once you did, it was big inside and pretty secure. It’s not far, so he heads that way. The girl is stumbling on the asphalt chunks, rattling the scattered litter of metal shards. She slows, knowing she’s making too much noise, but she doesn’t have his magic new Sonarvision—he thinks of it with a capital “S” now, like some new product he’s invented—so he takes her hand and guides her through the worst of it. The dragons, he notices, move along in utter silence. He doesn’t even bother to ask how they manage that one. He’s beginning to take dragon miracles pretty much for granted.
They pass a cluster of collapsed warehouses, no sign of habitation. He recalls just in time that there’s a particularly nasty toxics dump up ahead. One drawback of his new vision: it doesn’t help him read caution signs in the dark, unless the print has dimension off the surface. Besides, he’s willing to bet there aren’t any signs. The government-of-the-moment is too busy staying in control to worry about the public welfare. He takes a detour around the site, then continues onward.
Now and then, one of the snooping copters swings a little too close by for comfort, and N’Doch makes everyone duck and hide, just in case. But since he’s got them moving so slow and careful, in the interest of silence, he also takes the opportunity to use his Sonarvision to scout for salvage. He sees everything’s been pretty much picked over already, and the sigh comes up from somewhere deep without his even knowing. He can never quite let go of that old scavenger’s dream—even though he knows it’s unrealistic—that someday he’ll light upon a huge and entirely unspoiled cache of prime bartering goods. Then his fortune’ll be made, and he can buy those big amps and that new keyboard that’ll make him a star.
Farther along, he catches a big whiff of the dead smell, over to the left, and leads his gang away from it. If it was light and he was alone, he might investigate, just see if anyone’s been along yet to shake down the stiff. He hates doing it, but what’s dead is dead, he figures, and he’s turned up some valuable stuff that way. Tonight, however, he’ll move on.
The girl’s caught the scent, too. Her grip on his hand, light and impersonal, tightens. “Is it . . . Plague?”
“Which plague’s that? AIDS? Cholera? Typhus? Bubonic?”
“Are there so many? What have the people done to make God so angry with them?”
N’Doch snorts. “God hasn’t anything to do with it.”
“But the Plague is God’s punishment, N’Doch.”
He stops short. Even before he opens his mouth, he knows his response is over the top, and some part of him wonders why. He grips the girl’s shoulders, not kindly this time, and it’s all he can do to keep from shouting. “Girl, let’s get this straight: Diseases come from germs, not some god idea. This ain’t 913 and even if there was a god then, he sure ain’t here now unless he’s a world-class sadist!” He can see, with his hearing eyes, that she’s gazing at him astonished, a little frightened. Is it him she’s scared of, or what he’s saying? He gets hold of himself, lets her go, then dusts her shoulders off in comic apology. But he doubts she’ll buy it as only a joke. “You believe in God, huh?”
She nods mutely, as if she can’t imagine an alternative.
“Well, sorry,” he murmurs. “I just hate listening to that god stuff. I grew up with the imams and the mullahs and the ayatollahs throwing their weight around, and it didn’t do nobody any good but them, far as I could see. Lining their pockets, just like everyone else, ’cept they expect to be treated special.”
Soberly, she nods, like she understands him now. “God is not always well represented by his representatives on Earth.” She takes his hand conciliatorily. “But we don’t ever have to talk about God if you don’t want to.”
N’Doch sees this is as far as he’s going to get with this issue for now unless he wants a raging argument on his hands, which would likely attract all sorts of unwanted attention from the shadows around them. “Fine,” he says. “This way.”
The place they finally come to is an old peanut processing plant that fell in on itself after being gutted by fire. N’Doch suspects it wasn’t very well built to begin with, but apparently the basement was, because it’s still intact, beneath a protective and concealing layer of charred steel and construction debris. He locates the entrance, a narrow fire stair covered up with the same battered sheet of corrugated metal he recalls from before, lying there as if thoughtlessly tossed aside. Man, he thinks, hide in plain sight. It sure seems to work. Course there could still be somebody down there, as clever as me. . . .
He crouches a distance from the concealed stair, pondering his next move.
—There is nobody down there.
He starts, remembers he’s not alone in his mind anymore. “How do you know?”
—Easy. If there were, I could hear their breathing and the beating of their heart. Oh, and my brother wishes me to add: he could smell them.
“You’re sure of this, now. . . .”
—Of course I am! Why say so otherwise?
Hasn’t she ever heard of bravado? Maybe dragons don’t need any ego boosting. Anyway, he decides he’ll trust her, on the basis of what her awesome hearing has managed already. He grasps the metal sheet and slides it to one side as quietly as possible. A receding darkness yawns beneath, but the air flowing up out of the hole doesn’t smell any worse than might be expected.
“Doesn’t seem like anything’s died down there recently,” he mutters. “I’ll give it a try.”
—You will lose your night sight down there.
“Yeah? How come?”
—What I can’t see, you can’t see.
He’d swear the blue dragon is smirking at him. “Fine. I’ll do it blind.”
“Wait,” says the girl. She fishes in her pack and unwraps a squat stub of candle. She offers it to him as if it was edible.
“Way to go, girl,” N’Doch crows softly, reaching into his own pack. He’s got plenty of matches but nothing to light. “What a team.”
Clutching the candle stub, he eases himself into the hole. The girl makes a sign to follow, but he waves her back. It’s tricky going. The steps are crumbly with broken concrete gravel. He doesn’t shift his weight onto his leading leg until he’s very sure of his footing. He stops at the end of the first flight, where the stair takes a turn and the dragon will lose the line of sight. His head is below ground level, so he risks the brief flare of the match through his cupped hands and lights the candle. The stained cinder block walls close in around him. The stair feels suddenly airless, narrower in light than it did with his sonarvision. He sniffs carefully but smells only the usual metallic tang. With his free hand, he reaches for his switchblade.
It gets cooler as he descends the long stair. At the bottom, the smashed-in fire door has been yanked half off its hinges. N’Doch slips through the opening and his footsteps start to throw back echoes. His rat phobia is sending warning tingles up his spine, but he reminds himself how the blue dragon has already cured him of one major killer bug, so she can probably handle a rat bite, even a sick one. Still, he listens real hard, sure he’s heard a quick scuttle and rush off in the corners of the basement. He holds the candle high and moves into the cavernous interior, testing the musty, still air as he goes. The dusty hulks of boilers and air-conditioning units crowd along the walls like parked cars. A maze of pipes and ducting, bristly with char, hangs in the darkness above his head. Despite being twenty feet underground, he feels vulnerable here. But he recalls a smaller storage room, dry and empty, across the basement somewhere to the right. If he recalls it right, it has some kin
d of grating that lets in air.
Again he hears a rustling sound. He whirls, candle out-stretched in one hand, switchblade in the other. The flame catches in something bright, reflective, quickly moving, like a weapon or someone’s eyes. Then it’s gone. Too tall for a rat, too short for a man. Now he hears nothing but the rush of blood and adrenaline in his own ears. He’s getting the real creeps now. He’s got to find that room and call the dragons down. He steels himself and turns away, though he feels the itch at his back like he’s being watched. He locates the room, pretty much where he remembered. At the open doorway, he sniffs again, real cautiously: ash, stale machine oil, a faint sour tinge, nothing rotting. He’s worried that his fantasies will have enlarged and improved this hidey-hole unreasonably, but it is as he’d hoped—a big cement rectangle with one lockable door, a high ceiling, a dry coolish floor, and a faint drift of air past him at the door toward the invisible outlet above. The place has been cleaned out and appreciated by at least one man he knows. He wonders if anyone found it since Habbim died. He studies it carefully, then lets the dragon into his mind so she can transmit the image to the big guy. With her there, he feels a little bit steadier.
—I could have shifted and come with you, if you’d asked me. You were never in danger.
“Yeah?” His voice startles him, erupting into the silence. “I don’t know. I’m sure there’s something down here.”
—Impossible.
“I dunno. . . .”
The two dragons and the girl wink into existence around him. N’Doch lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.
“What do you think is down here?” asks the girl.
Now his fear embarrasses him. “Oh, nothing. Y’know, an animal or something.”
This doesn’t seem to bother her too much. She shudders and shrugs like she’s used to having that sort of trouble around. But N’Doch knows there’s hardly any animals left in the City except rats and men. Fact is, he’s not sure what it could have been, but he’s pretty sure he didn’t imagine it.
—Yes. You are right. Something was here.
“You mean, it was here just now and it left? How’d it get out? There used to be only one way into here.”
—Well, it’s gone now, whatever it was.
The dragon seems to think that should be the end of it, but N’Doch is glad this hidey-hole has a lockable door. Meanwhile, they might as well get bedded down. He sees the girl already looking around for her spot.
“You take the far corner,” he says, gearing up for an argument. But she’s cool with that, and he relaxes. He stopped running with gangs once he became a teenager, so he’s not much used to moving about in groups. He’ll feel better if he can control the layout. But he does let the dragons scope out their own territory. “I’ll hang here by the door.” He closes it and locks it, though it makes him feel more trapped than safe. Then, to the right of it, where the door can’t swing against him if somebody bashes it in, he tosses down his pack. “Okay, rest up. Come morning, we’ll go looking for Lealé.”
He settles himself on the concrete with his pack for a pillow, and blows out the candle. Darkness encloses him like a shroud. The dragon must be asleep already. He knows she’s there, not ten feet from him, but he still loses faith in her existence if he can’t actually see her. He’d hate to sound like some little kid whining in the night, so he figures it’s time he tried the mind-calling thing the girl talks about. She says you just shape your thought like an arrow and send it. N’Doch wonders if she’s seen a real arrow. Maybe she has. Maybe they still use such things back in 913. He feels himself drifting and pulls himself back.
—Dragon? Hey, Dragon! You there?
—Of course I’m here. Where did you think I was?
—No, I knew you were here, but I, like, called you, y’know?
—Yes . . . ?
—Well, y’know, I never did that before, so I . . .
—You woke me up.
N’Doch is miffed. She didn’t congratulate him or anything. It was pretty easy, he has to admit, but she could have at least noticed.
—Okay. Got that. Now, since you’re awake, you sure you’d know if there was something alive down here?
—Absolutely.
—You’d, like, smell it or something?
—Or hear it.
—What if it wasn’t making any noise?
—I’d hear it living. Go to sleep.
He tries to, but just before he does, he hears the rustle again, muffled this time, like there’s something moving about out in the main basement. He gets up and checks the door, which is latched and sturdy. But then, because he’s come to trust the dragon’s word on things, no matter if he questions her as if he doesn’t, he finds himself thinking, well, then, maybe whatever’s out there isn’t technically alive. . . .
And that keeps him awake for way longer than he likes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Erde lay awake for a while, tucked against Earth’s foreleg, listening to the deep bellows-rush of his breathing, always more like a movement of air than an actual sound. Usually it lulled her, but tonight it seemed less soothing. She decided he was not asleep after all, only pretending to be, and not doing a very good job. In fact, she thought, none of us is asleep. That’s why the room feels so . . . full. Probably they were all thinking about the next day and what it would bring. She had heard her father’s knights use the same tone the night before a battle that N’Doch used when he talked about going into the City.
—Dragon? Are you sleep?
—No.
—I didn’t think so. Me neither.
—Good. That means you’re not talking in your sleep.
—Do I?
—You used to, when you thought you’d lost your voice.
—But I did lose my voice.
—You didn’t lose it. You just couldn’t find it.
—Oh, really? And tell me, Dragon, do you know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
—What’s an angel?
—What’s an . . . well, angels are . . . never mind. It’s an expression. Alla used to say that to me when I continued an argument to too fine a point.
—It’s not too fine a point if you think about it. You actually did have your voice all along. You just couldn’t use it, except when you were asleep and didn’t know any better.
—Now, Dragon, I did not lose my voice on purpose.
—Purpose is a complex thing to define, is it not?
—You sound like Master Djawara. He said . . . Wait. Did you hear that?
Erde stiffened against him, listening.
—What?
—Do you smell anything out there?
—Out where?
—Out there, in the bigger part of the cave.
Earth’s body stilled. His breathing quickened. Erde waited while he did his search.
—No. I smell nothing but unliving smells. Fire smells and the smell of the forge. And the smell of those things the boy calls machines.
N’Doch and Master Djawara had explained about “machines,” but Erde thought it sounded like alchemy all the same: burning certain precious substances in order to make the inanimate move. Just as the thing they named “electricity” was clearly strong air magic: calling down invisible power from the sky.
—I’m sure I heard something. Remember, your sister said . . .
—She said something had been there and was not now. I think you are tired and should go to sleep.
—Well, I’ll try.
And she did, for a while, but she failed.
—Dragon?
—Mmmm?
—Have you heard the Summoner at all since we left Deep Moor?
This time, she detected anxiety in his reply and instantly regretted the question.
—I have heard nothing. I have waited and listened. Perhaps I am listening too hard.
—Don’t worry. I’m sure we’re on the right path. Don’t you agree?
—I am eager to find Mistr
ess Lealé.
—So am I.
—Good night.
—Good night, Dragon.
Finally, having shared her doubts, Erde fell asleep.
Almost immediately, she was dreaming.
She was home again, not home at Tor Alte but in her home time, in the chill mud and sleeting rain of a battlefield. It was early evening. From her vantage on a low hill, she could see the men and the carts moving about, hurrying to pick up the dead and the wounded before dark, butchering the dead horses to feed what was left of the armies.
In her waking life, Erde had never been to a battlefield, had certainly never seen so many dead in one place or had to listen to the moans of the dying. Their agonies filled her ears. The rutted mud was black with their blood. She wanted to turn away, but the dream would not let her.
Now a man stood in front of her on the hill. The same blood and mud stained his silken tunic and spattered his fine mail. A boy in blue-and-yellow livery raced up with linens and a steaming pitcher, and the man bent to scrub the mud and blood from his face and beard. This time, Erde was unsurprised to recognize Adolphus of Köthen, but she was sorry to see, when he turned toward her, how haggard he looked, how sad and bitter. She had assumed a warrior enjoyed fighting. Again, she thought he would speak to her, as his angry glance was so direct, but again, he looked past her and called out to someone farther along the hill. She turned and saw her father, equally battle-worn, standing beside two of his vassal barons, with a tattered parchment map stretched out between them.
In the dream, she understood she was seeing her father as Köthen saw him: florid, a bit too pudgy for a true fighting man, overly proud of his mane of prematurely silver hair, brave enough but not very bright. She understood also now that Köthen was using her father to further his own ends, but that he was no longer sure that he was getting the best of the exchange.
An early darkness was falling, thick with cold mist and cloud. Köthen signaled the boy to pour more heated water into his cupped hands. He drenched his face and beard, scrubbed hard, rinsed again, and toweled off. Out on the plain, the laden carts drew together, conferred, then split off in two directions, one group across the hill where Erde stood, the other up the longer slope on the far side of the field. Following Köthen’s pensive glance, she picked out a scattering of men and horses, one flying the royal standard, another the deep red of the King’s Knights.
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