“Too cool! Dragon vid.”
Luther is almost purring. “It wuz da One ledyu ta make yer move, Leif.”
But if the visions are random in their occurrence, their subject matter is not. Mostly they focus on the dire condition of the planet, which is, of course, what’s encouraged Luther, as well as Leif and his rebels, to believe that when the One who Comes arrives, she’ll know exactly what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. N’Doch can only hope they’re right. He’s run pretty short of ideas himself.
He decides it’s time to head the conversation where it needs to go. Time’s awasting. He can feel it in his gut. He waves Köthen closer so he can translate, then sets Erde up and gives her the floor. When she’s done explaining her plan, most everybody’s still nodding.
Except Leif Cauldwell. He’s dead against it.
“Drop the cordon? No. No way. I can’t allow it!”
The meld was exhausting, mentally and physically. Erde’s sense of time and place is entirely in flux, with the present more present than ever and her own past beginning to seem like a tale someone else has told her. But this is the least of her worries.
The discussion has hit a snag. Leif Cauldwell is backed up against a desk, declaiming like the ex-military man that he is. Her plan has vaulted him out of his wait-and-see calm. His big hands clench and unclench fitfully. She catches his anguished glance at the small girl asleep against a partition. He doesn’t understand. “How can you even ask it? You’d expose our stronghold? Risk the lives of six hundred people? Of all our children? Our only chance of success rests on there being some place the Beast cannot get to! Or even know about! If he flushes us now, we’ll take heavy casualties and be forced into a ground war we’re not equipped to fight!”
“But this might work. And it might work now. No drawn-out guerrilla struggle.” N’Doch is trying to sound rational and empathetic while he wolfs down pieces of apple.
They are all exhausted, Erde realizes, as exhausted as I am. We need rest and sustenance and there is no time for either. We must get out of this muffling cave and back in contact with the dragons!
“He’ll be down on top of us in a minute!” barks Cauldwell.
“Maybe not. We’ll never know ’less we try.”
“Easy for you! These aren’t your people!”
“It’s my world, least it was. You’re not exactly seeing the Big Picture.”
Luther hovers, a dark silhouette against the blue screen. “Leif, we bin talkin’ ’bout how we gonna free da One fer ten yeer nah. If dis bring us closa to da ansa . . .”
“We might as well open the doors and invite him in! Luther, we haven’t survived this long by being reckless!”
“Lotta dem down in camp wuld wanna try it, probby,” Stoksie offers. “It ain’t all yer call, na.”
A brave thing, Erde thinks, for a little man to say to a giant. But though Cauldwell’s jaw tightens, he listens. He is bigger and louder, but this is, she realizes with interest, a debate among equals.
“Okay, it’s not all my call. But I have to deal with the military consequences, and—damn it—someone’s got to be the voice of reason here! Paia says he always knows where she is. So no matter how briefly the Librarian’s jamming signal is down, the Beast could still hear her, and if he does . . .”
“He will hear our summons as well.” Erde savors the feel of this very “modern” language on her tongue. She can at last give voice to her impatience, but she doesn’t want this earnestly misled man thinking that time or space have anything to do with these matters, now that she’s been freed of them herself.
“But if he’s occupied with battling Earth and Water,” Paia points out, “how could he come right away?”
“Right.” N’Doch swallows his apple. “So we should have time to try to contact Air. Now there’s four of us, we might actually get results.”
“And we can let the other dragons know we’ve found Gerrasch.”
“And maybe just lend a hand, y’know? Right now, they’re fighting this war all by their lonesome!”
“And we must do it quickly!”
Cauldwell looks assaulted. He whirls on the Librarian, who is listening quietly. “You agree with all this? Should we take this insane risk? Is it worth it?”
“Big chance. Yes.”
Erde notes how this reply could easily be read two ways.
“Da only chance, mebbe,” says Luther.
“Your embargo’s a risk, too,” adds N’Doch. “Who knows how long his people can hold out?”
“I know! I know every ounce of grain in the Citadel!”
“He’s got wings! He can reprovision! You could end up starving yourselves in your precious hole in the ground!”
The rebel leader drops into a chair, his eyes wild. “If! If! This is madness!”
The Librarian gets up slowly, comes over to lay a wide soft palm on Cauldwell’s head. It seems to calm him a little. “Come. Each one. A lesson.”
He gathers them around his big console, then directs their eyes to the wall screen while he fiddles at his touch pad. Paia knows the blue of that screen so very well. Was it here the message on the monitor originated? It’s as good an explanation as any right now.
“Mattias!” the odd creature calls. “You tell!” His voice is rough. He’s unused to speaking aloud. And he moves like a man feeling his way through a fog. Paia cannot imagine how she could have thought him dangerous.
The oldest boy, the one who’d guided Paia into the room, lopes forward from the shadowed group of desks where the children have retreated. Paia chides herself to remind them of the God’s repopulation program, one vote in his favor, at least. She’s sorry there have been so few children around at the Citadel, but for the occasional festival. They’re so bizarre and funny, so sure they’re being grown-up, as she no doubt was when she was their age. Like this Mattias, who rests one skinny arm atop the console and clears his throat importantly, waiting to be taken seriously.
The Librarian taps at his pad. In the center of the screen, overlaying the blue tracking diagram, appears a map. It’s an old map, the hand-drawn sort with antique Latin lettering and little drawings of castles and cathedrals where the towns are. The contours are unrecognizable, except to Baron Köthen, whose name Paia has finally absorbed even if she has not quite come to grips with his point of origin. He has seen such documents in his lifetime, and says as much, while N’Doch translates.
However, the boy Mattias has been asked to “tell,” and he intends to do it himself. He puts on his best false-adult Standard English. “This is a map of Ancient Europe, centering on the German duchies of the tenth century.” He glances over his shoulder, kidlike again, and catches his audience’s eye. “He show us dis alla time, doan know why. He say, we gotta know dese tings.”
“Mattias!”
“Yessir.”
The map zooms outward. The German duchies are now a tiny glow in a larger landscape traced by fanciful coastlines and dotted with puffy-cheeked wind gods. A good deal of it is blank parchment, labeled Oceanus or Mare Exterius, or simply, Terra Incognita.
“A tenth century European map of the world. The second century mathematician and geographer Ptolemy did a whole lot better.”
Paia suffers a brief memory quake, an upsurging of ancient history studies. The House Computer liked this map, too. She’s sure it’s the very same. Somewhere on it is the legend: And here there be dragons.
Before she can look for it, the image cross-fades to a crisp and colorful, mechanically produced map dated 1900.
“Another oldie,” says Mattias. “Now, watch carefully. He’ll do the overlays in ten-year increments.”
Sure enough, the map begins to evolve. National boundaries appear and vanish, often to reappear two or three increments later. Names change. Empires dissolve and re-form in altered configurations.
But one element of the change is gradual and consistent. N’Doch spots it first. “Okay, everybody—check out the coastlines . . .”
>
The years click by in the label window in the lower right corner: 1990—2000—2010.
“There! That’s me! 2013. That’s my time. Can you freeze the frame? See? The water’s rising already.”
2020—2050—2080. The inexorable creep of blue, swallowing up the green and yellow and brown. The Netherlands. Belgium. Northern France. The Mediterranean flows unimpeded into the Persian Gulf. The Amazon and the Congo are inland seas. A whole lot of India, vanished. All gone to water.
2120—2150—2180. Entire island chains have disappeared. The contour of North America is blunted by the loss of the eastern and Gulf coasts. There is no sign of Florida.
Leif has his brow pressed tight against his fists. “I know, I know . . . but the risk! The risk!”
Luther says, “If da One can’t makit heah ta help us, it woan mattah if da kids grow up or not.”
2200—2210. The clock edges up to 2213 and freezes. There is so little green left, N’Doch has to search for it. 2213. No further.
“That’s it?” asks N’Doch. “That’s where we are now?”
There’s not much more yellow and brown than there is green. The entire world is being sucked back into the oceans.
“2213. I was sure it woulda been further. To get so bad, y’know?” He sits back, looks at Cauldwell. “That make any difference in your thinking?”
“Makes me think how precious our lives are. Not to be thrown away on grand gestures and guesswork!”
N’Doch leans forward again. “But what if that’s all we have?”
“Yu tellit yerself, Leif. How da One’ll show us da way.” Luther eyes the disconsolate rebel leader in quiet challenge. “Wheah’s ya fait’?”
Paia has thought she would resist them, that she must resist them, out of duty to Fire, her dragon. A clear and present duty, even when redefined by what she knows now about the nature of their connection.
Instead, she cedes the floor to Luco—or Leif Cauldwell, as she must now learn to call him, her cousin Leif—as he resists their plan for entirely different reasons. For the cause of sanity. For “his people,” who she used to think were her people, or the God’s. And for the lovely sleeping child he’s picked up to cradle in his arms.
But just as he’s bottoming out in an agony of guilt and indecision, they both get a kind of answer. The whole room shudders gently, and then again. Paia sways, reaches out to catch her balance, and finds Baron Köthen’s waiting arm. She sees he is relieved to have something to do. She smiles at him gratefully as he realigns the sword sheathed across his back so that the hilt does not point at her eyes. She’d almost forgotten he was there. She’s gratified that he hasn’t forgotten her.
“Quake?” mutters N’Doch. “You get those here?”
“No.” The Librarian taps at his console and the tracking map reappears on the wall screen. The moving colored blips have converged somewhere over what Paia now realizes to be the practically endless ocean. The room tilts again, even more faintly.
Leif hugs his daughter closer. “Has he found us already?”
“Sir, that is Lord Earth,” Erde insists primly. “Keeping him away.”
The Librarian points at the blips. “Long way battle. Echo just.”
N’Doch leans in. “Wow. The fight? Can you get any visual?”
The Librarian searches for a working sensor at the indicated location, a buoy, a satellite, anything. The screen splits into four, then sixteen images, a lot of them static, the rest showing open water and empty sky.
“Shud be deah somweah, ri’?” worries Stoksie.
“Look!” Mattias cries. “There!”
He points at a screen. The Librarian quickly enlarges it, but all that’s visible is a faint smoke trail.
N’Doch mutters, “Hope we ain’t looking at no crash n’ burn there.”
Erde grabs his arm. “We have to try to reach her! We have to do it now! Oh, what if they’re . . .”
Abruptly, the big imagine breaks up in static, plunging the room into near darkness. Only the pinpoint lights on the console offer any sense of direction. The children cry out, a chorus of awed expectation, as if this were planned solely for their entertainment. Sure enough, the screen flashes to life again.
Paia gasps, a half second before Erde does the same. “There it is!”
It’s the landscape, her landscape, the pristine first version. It fills the entire wall with soothing green and breathless blue and tinkling silver. It’s more like a wall blown away to the outside than a picture on a screen. Now she knows what the place is. She’s been there in the meld, and it looks as actual now as it did then. The meandering river makes soft music. The breeze in the branches ruffles her hair and tickles her nose with pine scent and flowers.
“Oh, Deep Moor!” the girl exclaims. “Oh, Gerrasch! Where did you find such a painting? It’s so . . .”
“A photo, girl,” N’Doch says. “But it’s . . . wow, it’s really . . . real!”
When they take a step forward, Paia moves with them. She recalls what the God said: the painting is a portal. Is it a portal here as well? It certainly looks like they could walk right into the tall grasses stirring gently where the wall meets the floor. There’s a path there, narrow and curving, just wide enough for single file. It leads down a soft slope toward the riverbank, and the luscious shade of broad-leafed trees.
Behind her, the children exude a collective sigh. Paia takes another step forward, but a firm hand holds her back.
“Warte! Das ist nur eine Täuschung!”
An illusion, he says, her lover to be, her new protector. His antique language is in her head since the meld. He eases her back against him without force or presumption. How remarkable that, having exchanged at most three words, they already have an understanding, that satisfaction postponed due to circumstances will be all the sweeter. N’Doch has reached to snatch Erde back as well, just as the image starts to break up. Paia fears it’s the quake returning, but it’s the image evolving, exactly as the painting did. Clouds move up along the verdant profile of the mountains, the sky darkens, the glowing vista dims. The river hardens to solid white. When snow starts to fall, Paia shivers, though she has never seen real snow before. She is thankful for the heat of the baron’s body. His breath is steady at her ear. She senses him taking possession, final and absolute, and in her head, she gives herself utterly. He will never desert her or do her harm. She is as sure of him as she is of anything since waking up to find that nothing in her world is what it seemed to be.
But the comfort he offers cannot dispel the very real chill that rises in her gut as the idyllic valley is smothered in ice and snow, then racked by howling gales that whirl the flakes into a blinding whiteness. The winds drive the drifts before them in a scourge of icy needles that scour the forests and fields until the frozen land is exposed and barren. Then comes the melt, and with it, rain, in sheets and torrents, shredding the last leaf, shearing off branches, tearing the bare trees up by the roots. The little river swells to an angry flood choked with mud and boulders. The valley sinks beneath it.
Paia hears weeping, feels the ache in her chest as if it were her own. But it’s Erde, huddled like the child she really is, against tall N’Doch’s side.
“Is it happening now?” she sobs. “Is it happening now?”
“Now’s a relative thing, girl,” soothes N’Doch.
“Then what does it mean?”
Poor girl. She’s had to grow up so fast. Paia understands how awful that can be. Impulsively, she moves up beside them, away from the security of the baron’s aura, compelled by the kinship of the meld to offer comfort as they watch the valley flood, melt, then dry up under the sudden, searing heat of a sun as relentless as the one outside. The trees shrink and wilt, or burst into spontaneous flame. The river thins, then vanishes. The grass shrivels. As the color bleaches away, from green to brown to beige, Erde buries her face in N’Doch’s arm, shuddering.
“No, please, Gerrasch, no more! Make it stop! Make it go away!�
��
“Cannot.” The Librarian’s hoarse voice startles them. He’s there behind them, his stooped shoulders tight with pain and knowledge. “Cannot. Not me. The One speaks.”
“She walks in light,” someone murmurs in the darkness behind. Paia hears a sound she knows well, the rustle of awed worshipers falling to their knees.
The girl lifts her eyes, stares again at the screen. “Oh . . .?”
Paia says, “I saw it, too . . . my painting . . .”
“Yes. You, too. Wake-up call.”
“But why does she show us Deep Moor?” Erde asks.
The Librarian’s stubby arms lift and sink back helplessly. He has only the vision to offer, not its explanation.
“Damn!” N’Doch mutters. “I hate to think of it looking just like it does around here.”
“It used to be green and fertile around here, too,” Cauldwell reminds him. “Once upon a time.”
Baron Köthen speaks up unexpectedly, a low-voiced question, almost a growl.
“Tough one, Dolph,” says N’Doch.
From his crouch on the floor, Leif Cauldwell chuckles. It’s as bitter a sound as Paia has ever heard from this man she thought she knew as well as any. “No, it’s not,” he says.
“Whatsit?” asks Luther.
N’Doch translates. “He wants to know . . . who has destroyed the earth, God or Man?”
“Das easy,” Stoksie mutters.
“Well, tell him,” says Cauldwell. “It’s no theological conundrum. It’s not like we don’t know.”
N’Doch shrugs. “We did it, Dolph. A long time after yours. God had nothing to do with it.”
The baron sucks his teeth pensively, as if someone’s just told him that half his army has deserted. A disaster, yes, but not, in his mind, a cause for despair. “Then we should do what is necessary to fix it. Is this not what you’ve been suggesting?”
N’Doch grins to hide the sudden grip of fear on his gut. “Put up or shut up, huh? I guess that makes it unanimous, but for . . . well, whadda you say now, preacher man?”
Leif Cauldwell moans softly. “May the One help me. Do it.”
The Book of Fire Page 51