And then, as if this spasm of violence was no more than a fever dream, he is there in man-form again, staring at the painting, in the light of his own golden glow. The rock is rock once more, but the worktables are in scattered ruins and the treacherous landscape lies revealed to him.
In a heap on the floor, Paia weeps in grief, but also with relief.
“Get up and get over here,” he orders. He sounds disappointed.
She struggles to her feet and goes to him, stopping several long paces away. She looks at the floor, at all the mess, anywhere but at him or at the perfidious painting.
He laughs harshly. “Not so eager to stand beside me now, are you, beloved?”
“You have no cause, my lord,” she murmurs. “No cause.”
“I have no need of cause, my priestess. I am your God. It would do well for you to remember that.” He waits, glowering. “Did I hear you say, ‘yes, I will’?”
“Yes,” Paia whispers. Are hatred and love like science and magic, in the long run, only one and the same? “Yes, my lord Fire, I will remember that.”
“And any further treasonous communications you will report to me.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“I will stake your loyalty on it.”
“I understand that, my lord.”
He moves away, kicking futilely at bits of wreckage, then paces back to throw an offhand gesture at the painting. “Your work, I presume?”
She’s been waiting for this. Paia steels herself to look at the painting, then has to steel herself all over again. The canvas on the easel is like any other in the room: a painting in reds and browns and grays, a painting of dry rock and barren hills. Paia feels her self-conviction weaken and slide away like a melting ice floe. She has imagined it, then, all of it: the velvet grass, the trees, the silver ribbon of river, even the changes, the grim storm gathering above the mountains. It must be her loneliness and isolation, at last eating away at her sanity. “Yes, my lord,” she replies dully. “My work.”
“Beautiful.”
Her eyes widen at him. Perhaps he’s the one who’s crazy. Or it’s both of them, now that she thinks about it. That makes the most sense. If they are so indelibly bonded by centuries of tradition and breeding, how could one be insane and the other not? “Thank you,” she murmurs.
“Any progress on the choice of a Suitor?”
“None.”
“Get on it, then.”
It’s folly, but Paia raises her eyes to his, finding in herself a chill deep enough to match his own. “You are a monster.”
There is a flicker in his reptilian eyes, and a slight move toward turning away, until he catches himself and lets a cold smile twist his beauty into a carved and gilded mask. “Perhaps. And you are my pawn. As you said, you have no choice.”
With that, and the last word, he is gone.
Paia sinks to the floor and lets the darkness surround her for the length of time it takes to stop weeping and get her bearings. Then she raises her head and crawls to where she’s left the lantern, miraculously undamaged by the God’s fit of rage. She stands unsteadily, brings it back to the easel to look at the painting one more time. She’s glad that her reflexes have been slowed by her ordeal, which is all that prevents her from dropping the lantern.
For the painting has changed again. The valley in the mountains has reappeared, but this time the tall dark pines, the ribbon of river, the green velvet grass, are buried under a heavy weight of ice and snow.
Whoever is doing this, Paia muses, perhaps they’re on my side.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The path up the steep slope was brush-choked and narrow, and there was no longer the relief of a breeze. As she toiled upward in the crushing heat, Erde prayed that the men were right about going off with the first strangers they ran into. Particularly strangers who had threatened and tried to rob them. But N’Doch would say it was the quickest way to acquire the sort of local information they needed to find their way about this new land. Baron Köthen apparently agreed. So, until she had a better suggestion, she must follow their lead.
Climbing just ahead of her, N’Doch gave no sign of worry. He seemed, just as she had accused him of back on the raft, to be enjoying himself. He whistled now and then, one of his homemade tunes, and his step was jaunty, even as laden down as he was, with his own pack and a few of Stoksie’s. Was it simply confidence born of knowing that dragons shadowed their every upward step? Erde rubbed grit and sweat and the dust of crumbled leaves from her eyes, readjusted her own load and fixed her gaze on N’Doch’s heels, as if they could winch her up the rugged trail behind him. And she kept up her running internal monologue, reporting to the dragon what she saw ahead, imaging it all for him in detail—the stunted brush and broken trees, each cluster of ruined homesteads, every dry ravine—so that he could keep up, transporting himself and his sister to each imaged place as soon as the climbers had left it behind. Meanwhile, she again put to him the question that kept plaguing her, one she’d asked several times already since arriving in this dreadful place.
HAVE YOU THOUGHT FURTHER ON IT, DRAGON? IF THIS LAND HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN SO RUINED, HAVE YOU AN IDEA YET WHAT SIN THESE PEOPLE COULD BE GUILTY OF, THAT GOD SHOULD PUNISH THEM SO TERRIBLY?
Again the dragon replied that he did not, that he had no understanding of such matters, but would continue to consider it deeply. It was curious, Erde thought, that Lady Water, so ready to voice her opinion on every other matter, refrained entirely from commenting on this crucial spiritual issue. Well, almost.
Maybe it’s a whole new sin. One you’ve never even thought of.
Erde could not imagine what she meant. After all, didn’t God decree what was a sin and what wasn’t?
Her pondering distracted her for a while as she plodded upward, dulled with heat. When she woke to her surroundings again, the ruined signs of habitation had given way to patches of scrub clinging to ever-steeper slopes of solid rock. The path, such as it was, switchbacked right and left several times, winding around thin-layered outcroppings that reminded Erde of tall stacks of parchment. Or it wound up among piles of dragon-sized boulders, narrowing further until Erde could barely squeeze herself and her burdens past the enclosing walls of stone. She’d been glad to leave the biting midges behind down by the landing, but now it would be reassuring to hear the song of one bird or the hum of any insect, not this unnatural stillness broken only by their own heavy breathing and the crunch of their labored steps.
They stopped for a brief rest and a drink where the terrain leveled out at the foot of another towering rock face. Erde had her pack halfway off when N’Doch stopped her.
“You put it down now, girl, it’ll be a whole lot harder to pick up again.”
She did as he advised, but reluctantly. The rock wall faced southwest, and there wasn’t an inch of shade to be had anywhere on the ledge.
“Nice view, huh?”
“Are they taking us to their town, do you think?”
“Nah, we’re way up past where the old towns were.”
“A mountain stronghold, then?”
N’Doch grinned like he did when she’d said something he called quaint. “Something like that.” He gestured with his water jug at the far-off glimmer of Big Albin’s towers, then to the left where the wide stretch of water was visible over the tops of the dusty scrub. “Lot of people living down there once.”
From this distance the water was a deceptively inviting lavender, drawing warmth from the long summer twilight. The far shore was a faint line of purplish hills. Erde thought they must be a very long way away. “What happened to them? Was there a war?”
“Haven’t gotten around to asking that right out, y’know? But it don’t sound like they all got up and went somewhere better.”
“You mean, they just died?”
“Probably. Sickness, starvation, massacre. Who knows what else.”
“Oh. Oh, dear.”
N’Doch looked her over dubiously. “You holding up okay
? Wherever we’re headed, they sure don’t want to make getting there easy, do they?”
“I’m fine.” Erde thought of Tor Alte, a thick-walled stone fortress perched high on a mountain pinnacle. At several points along that upward road, visitors must walk their horses single-file. And these points, of course, were heavily monitored, and vulnerable to a well-placed rain of arrows or a deluge of boiling oil from above. She was familiar with the advantages of building in a secure location. But if there were so few people left around, what were Stoksie and his “crew” protecting themselves against? He was obviously more uneasy here than he’d been on the river. Every step of the trail, he and the girls stayed on the alert. Perhaps he would prefer to move along faster, but she couldn’t imagine how, with all that he was carrying. “Am I holding anyone up?”
“No way.” N’Doch tipped his head sideways. “’Cept maybe his lordship.”
Baron Köthen stood with his back to the rock, impassively observing the view. He had again positioned himself at the rear, so that no one was ever behind him and the path of retreat was under his control. He did not look worried, or even particularly concerned. He merely looked . . . careful.
The girls Senda and Mari were up and ready to be off again long before Erde was. They scampered straight along the face of the rock wall just long enough to raise her hopes that the climbing was over. Then they turned sideways and vanished from view as the path hooked a sharp right and crawled nearly vertically up the side of the ledge. At the turn, N’Doch leaned back to give Erde a hand up the first seemingly impossible step. Ahead, the taller girl called out and threw an eager wave upward. Behind, Stoksie let out a sigh of relief, then a long warble, three descending notes, two ascending, like a birdcall. An answering whistle echoed down among the rocks. Erde craned her neck this way and that. Finally, on a sharp jut high over the path, a slim figure moved into view, silhouetted against the amber sky. It carried a slim, dark object, like a broomstick with a handle, which it now slung over its shoulder to free one hand up for a wave.
A gun. The long kind. Erde recognized it, from her recent and all-too-vivid acquaintance with such objects. N’Doch saw it, too, and dropped back suddenly under the pretense of a stone in his sandal to confer with Baron Köthen in the rear. A gun. Erde was again haunted by the images of N’Doch’s body being torn to pieces by the last guns she’d seen. Her hands were wet, and her boots not the best for climbing. Distracted, she slipped, nearly lost her grip, then slipped again. She froze in terror.
DRAGON! I CANNOT MOVE! WILL YOU CATCH ME WHEN I FALL?
YOU WILL NOT FALL. THERE’LL BE NO TALK OF FALLING.
He was right of course. It would surely panic their guides if the dragon was forced to reveal himself precipitously. She must control her weakness. She must forget about guns and falling, and blank her mind of everything but the effort of hauling herself safely upward. She imagined the rocks as the dragon’s plated back, hospitable to her grip, and was able to move forward. Gaining the top, she was breathless and weak, incapable of another forward step. Humiliated, she collapsed onto a nearby ledge, and was uncharitably gratified when Stoksie struggled up over the edge, as much the worse for wear as she was.
He resettled his load to ease the burden on his bad hip and mopped his dark brow. The little girls had run off ahead already, their cries and childish chattering growing fainter with distance. “’Ard un, dat las’.”
Erde nodded wanly, forcing a smile, then realized it wasn’t an effort at all. She quite liked the man. Their shared plight somehow transformed him in her mind from a dark and forbidding stranger to an odd little man with a cheerful look. She didn’t need to know his language to get the sense of his words. Without N’Doch to translate, she had no words to say back to him, but this didn’t bother Stoksie one bit. So they sat catching their breath in easy silence, waiting for the others. When she could breathe more freely, Erde became aware of a subtle difference in the air—it was cooler here, even in the sun, perhaps due to the added elevation, but lighter and sweeter as well, with a promised hint of moisture.
Stoksie grinned when he saw her sniffing like a pack hound. He said something incomprehensible, bobbing his head fervently as if nods alone could make his words intelligible. Then N’Doch levered his tall frame over the edge. He stood panting for a moment, responding to their silence with a listening readiness of his own. Suddenly, he broke into a smile. “Aww, listen to that! Music to my ears!”
Erde had noticed it, too, a soft background sighing, like high-country breezes. Listening more carefully, she wondered how she could have mistaken running water for mere wind. And not just running, from the sound of it, but falling, as if from a great height. Stoksie, watching them inhale with such relish, nodded and grinned like a proud parent.
Baron Köthen finally joined them, dripping and scowling. “Seems we’ve paid our toll after all,” he remarked when he had breath enough. “As the good merchant’s beasts of burden.”
“You know it,” agreed N’Doch.
“All heah?” Stoksie bent, eagerly loading himself up again. “Quick, na.”
Putting weight on her feet again was painful. Erde repressed a groan, thinking that she’d happily trade the nausea and disorientation of dragon transport for this physical torture. But the path here was better trimmed and wider, and the rise was gentler. She thought perhaps the foliage had a healthier tinge, and that the dwarfish trees might be gaining some height. Soon they broke out of the scrub entirely, where the path intersected a gravel-strewn cut through a grove of taller trees, some sort of pine. The heat was making the blood pound in her ears, and Erde was grateful when Stoksie turned right and led them into this sweeter-smelling shade.
“Used to be a road, this.” N’Doch kicked at shards of rubble poking through the mat of needles, raising dust. “Not a real big one, though.”
Erde hoped that if it had been a road, its end was nearby. Would it only lead to more ruin? She was eager to be somewhere, to arrive, rather than to be ceaselessly pushing on with no particular goal or direction. There seemed to be no real place left to go in this destroyed future. Simple movements, like walking, were becoming a struggle, but another dose of dragon encouragement and the music of flowing water drew her onward.
Deeper into the grove, they rounded a bend screened by a thicket of broad-leafed shrubs to discover a trio of armed men ahead in the road, watching their approach. No, Erde noted, two women and a young man, with scowls and threatening postures and the long sorts of gun slung easily into the crooks of their elbows, guns almost as tall as they were.
N’Doch pulled up sharply and eased Erde behind his back, but Stoksie greeted them cheerfully by name.
“Wha’s dis?” one of the women snarled, shoving out ahead of the rest with her gun leveled.
“Easy, na.” Stoksie put up his palms.
“Doan tell me easy! Whachu tinkin’, bringin’ straingeas up heah? Yu sumkinda fool?”
“Whoa,” murmured N’Doch. “Heavy language.”
But Stoksie rolled his eyes at his guests over his shoulder. “She mean, bring yu heah w’out askin’ huh. Y’know?”
“Betcha,” N’Doch replied with his usual bravado, which Erde was beginning to see the purpose of.
“Dis heah Brenda Chu,” Stoksie offered. “Call her Pitbull, ’cuz she chews hard!” He grinned, but thrust his narrow jaw forward just a bit. “Dees heah gud ole bizmen, Brenda. An’ dey’s fine ’n healt’y, lookit ’em. Back off, na.”
The woman had a shiny dark cap of short hair, a flattish face with eyes shaped like almonds. Her skin was the same color as the smaller of the little girls, and she wore a ragged scar like a fighting man’s from the tip of her right eyebrow to the corner of her mouth. Her tough stance reminded Erde of Lily and Margit, Deep Moor’s scouts. But the resemblance ended with this woman’s reflex hostility, as she shifted her gun to her shoulder and stood up taller, as if proud to be named after a vicious animal.
N’Doch stepped forward to offer his
hand. “N’Doch heah.” Brenda just stared at him. He shrugged. “Das cool.”
“Das Charlie ’n das Punk,” Stoksie continued, as if nothing had happened. “Dis heah all Water Dragon Crew, frum up nort’.”
Charlie was a bronze-skinned blonde woman with a patchy complexion and paler skin showing at her cuffs and neckline. Even in the heavy heat, she was as covered up with clothing as anyone could possibly bear to be. She looked like she might be willing to smile, if only Brenda’s scowl was not so discouraging. Punk was an alarmingly skinny, dark youth—about Erde’s own age, she guessed, surely no more than fifteen. All three wore the same sort of mismatched assortment of garments as Stoksie and the girls. Erde saw Punk measuring N’Doch’s height and ebony sheen with interest, maybe with envy. She had never known until today that human beings came in so many different colors, almost all of them darker than her own.
“Dees two is Lady ’n Doff,” Stoksie concluded, with a wave in her direction. “Frum Urop. Got good trade.”
“Urop?” Brenda was skeptical.
“Bad deah now, huh?” Charlie’s casual remark earned her a nasty look from Brenda, but the business end of her gun sank slowly toward the ground.
“Real bad,” N’Doch agreed, giving Charlie his “special” smile. Erde hoped he knew what he was talking about. She noticed he didn’t try the smile on Brenda. There was a bit more arguing and hand waving, and another brief gun-pointing, which brought Köthen lunging forward only to run into N’Doch’s swiftly outstretched arm. But finally Brenda was overruled by Stoksie’s bluff good nature and the obvious curiosity of the others.
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