CHAPTER FORTY
The elevator ride to the top of the mountain takes longer than Paia’s memory of the trip to the heights of the Citadel. Bathed in the flat white light, both alien and familiar, she wonders if her father knew of this facility, perhaps had dealings with its builders, perhaps even rode in this very car. After the collapse of order, the House Comp has told her, contact with the outside became dangerous, even between former friends and allies, especially if you had something they lacked, like power or good water.
Her father is very much on Paia’s mind, as if the memory of him might help her face the terrible choice that awaits her on the mountaintop. Her head has cleared of Leif’s soporific, though there’s a dull pounding between her temples, hangover from the drug, maybe, or simple exhaustion. She’s hoped that settling her brain might help settle her decision. She feels a lot more like the self she recognizes, but her head aches and her dilemma remains: how can I betray him?
She’d snatched a moment with Leif in the communications room, while the possible backlash from Erde’s plan was being hurriedly prepared for. He was in motion, distracted, giving orders. His people flowed around them, moving weaponry and children and supplies. Still, they talked, in snatches, as if both of them needed the exchange in order to move onward. They talked about the past, about her father, about his death. Paia realized that her father had broken his nephew’s heart.
“He lost hope. He . . . gave up! He’d never done that! Ever! I was . . . desperate, furious. Maybe I was getting back at him for dying when I joined up with the Beast. By the time I came to my senses, well . . .” Leif grabbed the arm of a man hurrying past. “Marcus! Send someone down the tunnels to check the seals!”
She should be angry with him for drugging her, for kidnapping her, for setting all this in motion. But how could she blame him for wanting to fix things? He still cared so much. Paia studied his handsome face, so familiar, trying to place it in her childhood. “You were one of his aides then? How could I not have known you?”
He grinned at her crookedly. “I was around sometimes. Mostly I was out in the field. Shuttling from meeting to meeting. We were the ones they sent out, the young ones who didn’t have families. They’d always invite him, but after a while, they knew the best they were going to get was me. Then it got hard to get from meeting to meeting. I never made it home in between. I was stuck in a bunker in South Africa when the word came that he was . . . that he’d passed away.”
Leif stared at the stack of books he’d picked up absently, then shrugged and put it down. He glanced at Constanze in mute appeal as she edged past with two children in tow. She paused, leaned her head against his arm for a fraction, then moved on. Leif cleared his throat. “The com-net was badly shredded by then. The news itself was a month old. It took me seven months to get back here. By then, it was too late . . . he had arrived.” He looked away, signaling to a woman across the room to hurry. “If I’d been there, Paia! If only I’d been there, I could’ve kept the Old Man alive, I know I could have! Could’ve kept him from sinking into despair. Together, we could’ve fought the Beast off somehow!”
“You don’t know that,” Paia soothed automatically.
The Beast. The God. The Dragon. But no longer the only dragon. One of four. The black sheep of the family.
As if she had spoken out loud, Leif waved Luther over. “You go on up there with them. I know you want to. But keep an eye on this one.” He shook Paia’s shoulder, not ungently. “If he shows, she’ll run back to him in an instant. She won’t have any choice.”
And then he’d marshaled his own aides, gathered up the rest of the children, and gone down to the big cavern to be with “his people” for whatever might occur. Unlike her father, Leif Cauldwell had not given up. Except on the God.
She won’t have any choice.
Paia wonders. It may be wrong, but she misses him, his edgy magnificence, his energy, even his sharp tongue and cruel wit. Will he come for her this time? A surge of ambivalence and guilt presses Paia back against the cool metal side of the elevator. She has her own darkness to make peace with. If all the tales are true, she has been abetting a monster.
Monster.
She has called him that herself, to his perfect, golden face. But wrapped in her cocoon of safety and privilege, she meant it in an entirely personal way. She never thought to extrapolate his endless capacity for emotional cruelty into a notion of how he might behave out in the world. She just didn’t think.
Now she can do nothing but think, as her head pounds and the elevator continues its silent ascent.
Paia lets her aching head loll back against the metal wall. Baron Köthen watches her from across the cab, keeping a cool public distance but fooling no one. He looks concerned, as if he senses she is not entirely recovered. Paia knows their sudden and inexplicable attachment is causing Erde a lot of anguish. Paia is sorry for it, but it’s like asking the sun not to shine. Did she not dream him even before he arrived? Nothing to be done, except adopt a certain decorum in the girl’s presence. Because Paia is so sure of him, she has no impatience, only deep, stirring tremors of anticipation. She smiles at him wanly, as if she has known him forever, this beautiful stranger from another millennium. A quiet light blooms in his eyes. Paia’s glad she’s given up asking the world to make sense.
But as the elevator rises, the throbbing in her head worsens. It feels less like pain now than noise, like a great bass yowl that her ears can’t hear. Perhaps it’s the lift mechanism in need of oil. But Paia cannot make sense of it as machine noise. It sounds somehow more . . . organic. She is about to ask N’Doch if he hears it when the elevator hisses to a stop and the doors yawn open.
For a moment, no one moves. They are at the end of a short, sheltering tunnel that leads out into a blast of heat. Past the opening, just visible in the gray dawn, is a broad, exposed shelf of wind-scoured rock. An old heliport, from the looks of it, which, when it was functional, was intended to blend in to the mountaintop. To the east, the sky is brightening. The full heat of day will rise with the sun and pour down on them like molten lead. Paia is sorry to leave the cool of the elevator cab. She’s sorry to be here at all, to be in such danger and causing such pain, and yet there seems a certain rightness about it. As if it really is, all of it, even the miracle of Baron Köthen, part of some Great Inevitability, this Duty Erde speaks of with such conviction. If it is, then Paia can tear herself apart about betraying the God, and still there’ll be no stopping Destiny’s forward momentum.
She finds this soothing. She wonders if Leif’s drug really has flushed itself from her system, or if gentle traces of it linger to soothe her toward this oddly tranquil state of mind. Or is it the sturdy blond man in the black T-shirt, who calms her with a nod? His acceptance of danger as an expected part of life shows in the set of his jaw, and shames her into searching out her own bravery. Her headache eases faintly. Paia returns the baron’s nod. She is ready.
N’Doch and the girl move ahead down the tunnel, with the local man they call Luther. Köthen follows. Paia falls in behind. But the Librarian is reluctant to venture out into the open at all. He lingers in the doorway, then takes a few halting steps into the dim gray light of the tunnel and stalls, shifting his ponderous weight from one foot to the other, uttering his slow monosyllables, like the moans of an anxious bear.
Erde looks back. Oh, Gerrasch, I forgot! You haven’t been outside for ever so long, have you!
Paia waves her onward. Please. Let me try.
She recalls her own panic of not yet a week ago, when she left the Temple grounds. She turns back, though she is tingling with her own sort of dread, and hooks her hand around the Librarian’s soft elbow.
“Come now, don’t be frightened! A big thing like you . . .”
“Noise,” says the Librarian.
Paia starts. “Yes! Can you hear it, too?”
“The Intemperate One. He searches but cannot find.” Another complete sentence. He touches one pink finger to Pa
ia’s temple, and the noise recedes until it is no longer painful. Then he lets her urge him down the tunnel to where Köthen waits, his mouth quirked with approval. Together, they venture out from under the rock overhang and across the shattered tarmac.
The old landing pad is a circular area still oddly smooth and clear of the brittle weeds and scrub that have taken over everywhere else. Paia guides the Librarian to the edge of the circle, where the others have stopped. She feels Köthen’s palm, gentle against the small of her back. She wants to lean into it, and into him, but he murmurs something about having a look around. N’Doch rubs one foot along the unscarred surface of the pad.
“You still got copters landing here?”
“Not fera long time,” says Luther.
“It’s just . . . it looks so clean an’ all . . .”
“Yes. It does.” The girl Erde lifts her pale face toward the light swelling in the east. Paia detects a glint of tears tracking her cheeks. But her back is straight and purposeful as she turns aside to walk the perimeter of the landing pad with slow and measured step. “A magic circle.”
N’Doch laughs, but nervously. He looks around. “You’d think there’d be, like, maintenance equipment around, or something . . .”
To Paia, schooled so long in the God’s calendar of ritual, the circle is a heavy omen. She hopes it’s a good one. Magic or not, its formal geometry lends credence and dignity to what they are about to attempt. Baron Köthen, she notes, instinctively respects the aura of ceremony that clings to this open ledge. In his alert, restless pacing about, he does not set foot past the circle’s curve. And Luther steps out of it as soon as the Four are assembled inside.
N’Doch dusts his hands together. “Well, let’s get on with it.”
Paia admires his bravado. “You’re very no-nonsense.”
“That so?” He ruffles Erde’s curly dark hair. “This one thinks I’m all fulla nonsense. Doncha, girl?”
Erde has a brave little smile that lights up her face as she flashes it, briefly, gratefully. Paia wishes she had bravado enough of her own to put a sisterly arm around the girl and dry those tears, but it’s too hard, knowing she is the almost certain cause of them.
“Yup,” says N’Doch, filling the void. “Once you’re into something with these dragons, there ain’t no getting out of it. I’ve learned that much. Best to just get it over with, whatever it is.”
The Librarian is also walking the perimeter, hands shoved in the pockets of his blue jumpsuit, humming pensively to himself. He finishes up in the center and stands there flat-footed, his nose in the air like an animal, searching the hot dawn breeze.
The mountain shivers, as it had in the Library, the echo of some distant and continuing catastrophe. The swell of light on the eastern horizon reveals a tortured profile of roiling cloud.
“Time,” the Librarian intones. He beckons the others to him. His soft pawlike palms cradle a tiny remote keypad.
N’Doch glances behind him. “Luther? Dolph? Be cool, eh?” He repeats it in German, and Paia wonders if he really thinks Baron Köthen could be any more alert than he already is.
“Sorge dich nicht, Dochmann.” He’s drawn the antique weapon he wears slung across his back. It glimmers icily in the dawn glow. “Ich gebe dir Rückendeckung.” His eyes meet Paia’s, serious and reassuring.
N’Doch grips Erde’s thin shoulder with one hand and Paia’s with the other. “Go for it.”
The Librarian taps out a sequence on the keypad, then shoves it in a pocket. As the mountain shudders again beneath them, he reaches for the two women’s hands.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
. . . He can tell the difference right off, like he was in a soundproof room before and now someone’s blasted down the walls. Like maybe if he concentrated, he could hear every sound being made at this very moment all over the world. He could hear them all simultaneously and still know each one for what it is. What a symphony they would make!
. . . then he sees, as if standing right in front of him, his grandfather Djawara’s knowing face. So wise, so steady, so unperturbed by knowledge. No wonder the girl first thought he was her “mage.” He’s smiling, but there’s a warning in his eyes.
. . . What do you know, Papa Dja? Papa? Tell me . . .!
. . . She senses the dragon as an accelerating vastness but cannot truly connect with him. She sees flashes of light, blurs of motion. An ivory claw. He is not, she decides, quite in this world. He is not thinking in her direction, in her time, or even in her scale. The battle still rages, somewhere far away . . .
. . . yet an image reaches her, from . . . where? A well-loved face, every wrinkle familiar, floating in a swirl of mist. Alla, her old nursemaid and tutor, dead these three months . . .
. . . Alla? Alla!
. . . Alla smiles, and is gone . . .
. . . He is after the blue one, the rage howling in his blood. The smaller dragon sets the pace, but she is like sound through water, deflected, diffuse, omnipresent. The other, appearing out of nowhere, slams him off-balance each time he tries to rest. Paia tastes his fury and frustration like bile in her own throat. They dance and feint. They will not confront him. He trumpets that his strength is greater. Like two crows harrying an eagle, their only hope is to exhaust him. They lead him ever farther from the inhabited lands, to keep their battle from damaging the humans. He does not care about the humans. Soon he begins to suspect some other strategy, and decides he must have one of his own . . .
. . . but this is odd. As she watches, or seems in her mind to watch, the vision shrinks until it is a moving image framed by darkness, as on a screen. Words scroll rapidly across the bottom. She has missed the start of them . . .
. . . and who will be the guide’s guide in this ruined world, if not me? . . .
. . . House? Is that you? House? . . .
. . . LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! . . .
Yes! Something new in the meld. Not a voice, no, not at all, but each of them has heard it before, in what they thought were their dreams. Or in waking moments of drifting inattention, daydreams, a stirring of the subconscious. Or so they thought.
That articulate breath of wind, that sighing gust so rich with meaning. That motion of atmosphere that is more formed than wind, yet less than a voice, a word. That presence at the corner of an eye, just out of view.
N’Doch N’Djai hears it as the universal harmony.
Erde von Alte sees it as the colors of the spectrum.
Paia Alexii Cauldwell feels it as the entire range of emotion, human and beyond.
The Librarian absorbs it, collates it, interprets it. He offers what he can of the nature of the new presence: huge, discorporate, a being of vast intellect as yet unfocused, of shape as yet undetermined. More potential than actual. But the potential takes their breath away.
Ah! The magnificence! A power beyond imagining!
AIR! AIR! AIR!
Toobigtooloudtoovasttoomuch! The specter of overload. The Four draw back as if burned. In that instant, a debriefing:
Clever dude, Fire. He trapped her, like a genie in a bottle, before she’d come into her powers.
But where? Where?
Nowhere.
So we gotta go nowhere to find her?
No place that we know of, he means.
No where.
Can she be a bit more specific?
Listen! Listen! Listen!
She is there. Air. His dragon. He is made whole for the briefest of instants. A taste of totality. His centuries of waiting are . . . and then she is gone.
Ah, the ache! Ah, the loss! And yet, the gain . . .
SEE: nothing.
HEAR: nothing.
SMELL: nothing.
FEEL: the outward expansion of consciousness toward infinity.
What he would say for her if he could but find the words, the all-too-human words? He wouldn’t say, he would show. Image, sound, scent, touch, taste: a tidal surge of sensation and dream and memory, washing over, around. She has seen al
l. She has seen what you see. She remembers it for you. A green valley bathed in the golden mist of a summer evening, resonant with bee hum. The crisp sparkle of snow on a sunlit windowsill at Tor Alte. A symphony of birds and salt water cascading along an African shore. The sweet cacophony of Blind Rachel plunging cool and crystalline from a pine-scented height.
Treasure it! Hold it in the now! Do not let it pass into memory! Is it not all that is right and good? Is it not the truest miracle? Can it be that, instead, we choose nothingness and death?
Ah, the ache! The loss! There is no gain . . .
Paia feels the message as remembered grief, her mother’s death, her father’s decline and fall. Yet she understands how the mutable painting has prepared her to receive this message in a larger sense. Inside her now, no lazy, clichéd notion, no old denial like she heard so often as a child: hey, it wasn’t me who wrecked the planet!
Instead, a profound, abiding rage that her birthright has been taken from her, and from all the other dwellers on the Earth. Only through another’s memories will she hear the salt roar of the African surf, or taste the pure snowmelt of a German mountain stream. All she can know firsthand is heat and barren rock and devastation.
What can be done? What must I do?
The blue screen swims again behind her eyelids.
White letters read: DENY HIM.
No word, no voice. A sudden avalanche of emotion. A shock wave of rage and negation shakes the Four until their bones rattle. They see shredded wings, a flash of scales and smoke and blood. The contact is shattered. They are flung apart, flying, gasping, falling, slammed down hard on the weathered tarmac, overwhelmed, tumbled, scattered like rag dolls around the perimeter of the circle.
Without the multiple voices of the meld to fill her mind and her attention, Paia knows the exact moment when he arrives.
The Book of Fire Page 52