I fought off a wave of giddiness; Laura screamed and dropped the flaming card on the rag rug. I hadn’t thought through this very well, had I? I picked up a bedroom slipper, knelt to suffocate the tiny flame, and looked at the damage. In the soft light of the bedside lamp it didn’t look that bad. I looked up at Laura.
She was dead white, all but her black hair and dark eyes.
“Sienna? That was real fire! It would have burned me! If th-that’s a trick…”
“It isn’t,” I said, getting up slowly. “But I’m not going to do any more demos right now, if you don’t mind.” Lighting that card had brought back the ugly memories of this afternoon, now all too clear in my head. I kind of missed the white fuzz that had blurred them out for a while.
“I – I – That’s okay. Yes.” She took a deep breath and blew it out hard. “If this is for real, I don’t need to see any more j-just now. And if it’s a trick… Sienna, if you’re teasing me, stop now, okay?”
“I’m not,” I said. “It is real. This is why Dr. Edward Osborne was so desperate to get that notebook – and why he mustn’t have it.”
“What are we going to do?” Laura asked. “Burn it in front of him?”
“That would be a good idea. The trouble is, I don’t exactly know where he is right now. He… kind of… went away this afternoon. Maybe he won’t be back.” I told Laura about the nasty scene at the Rivers open house. She listened without interrupting, still white-faced, twisting her hands together.
“Couldn’t you make him go away? Permanently?”
I thought she hadn’t fully grasped the situation. “Horrible things happen to people who overuse the language.”
“Nothing horrible has happened to you. Yet. Well, except for what Dr. Osborne tried to do this afternoon, and you can’t blame that on magic.”
“That’s because I haven’t done very much. Only a couple of little nudges to the world. The worst thing was burning Dr. Osborne this afternoon.”
“But you had to do that to save yourself!”
“I don’t think the language cares about the purity of your motives,” I said, thinking it out as I went. “I think it’s more like gravity: if you jump off a cliff, you’re going to fall, and gravity doesn’t care that you had perfectly good reasons for jumping.”
“Like to get away from the ax murderer who’s chasing you.”
“Exactly. And the higher the cliff, the worse the fall. You can still wind up dead at the bottom of the cliff, only from a broken neck instead of an ax in your head. I think it’s like that. The bigger the change you make in the universe, the bigger the damage to your brain. If anybody did try to conquer the world, I think they’d become incurably mad before they got very far. Even if I did just a little more…”
“Like what?”
“If I could find the right words to use,” I said slowly, “maybe I could make Michael tell me the truth.”
“I thought you’d already decided that he was a liar and you hate him.”
“I do!”
“But maybe you’re hoping that there’s a truth that exonerates him?”
“He did say that he’s not working for Osborne.” I thought it over. “And he didn’t help Osborne.”
“No. He got cut up and bruised coming in through a window to help you.”
“He was hurt?”
“What, you didn’t notice?”
“Everything was kind of fuzzy by then.”
“Well, he stayed here – right by your side – until I got home. And he had blood on his shirt, not to mention a blood-stained handkerchief wrapped around one hand. Are you sure you hate him?”
I sighed. “I don’t want to. But you didn’t hear him last night… He’s definitely been lying to me. He admitted as much today. Laura, I’m not terribly fond of guys who lie and trick their way into this house. And you have to admit I have a good reason for that.”
“Maybe you should use the language to make him fall in love with you. Then he’d tell you the truth because he wants to.”
“Or he’d come up with some other twisty reason that made it all right to lie… Anyway, I don’t have the vocabulary for that either. The notebook is full of how to clean wool and dry yak dung patties. Not so much about feelings.”
“Ah, so you have been thinking about it.”
“No!”
“Well, you don’t need to worry about the consequences of saying it, if you don’t know what words to say. Maybe you should just try talking to him. You know. In English.”
“I have nothing to say to that lying rat bastard.”
“Well, maybe he has something to say to you.”
It seemed to me that all Michael and I had to say to each other was ‘Goodbye,’ and that thought did not cheer me up. Wait, maybe I could make it stronger. “Come to think of it, I do want to say something to him.”
“I knew it! What?”
“Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.”
16. Summer storm
Laura was inclined to drag out this useless conversation even farther, holding forth on the topic of stubborn grudge-holding women. After I refused to discuss Michael and convinced her that I really was okay, I managed to chase her out of the house to take up her interrupted not-really-a-date with Duke. The fact that she’d deployed that slinky red dress made me doubt her protestations that the “date” hadn’t mattered to her, although I had better manners than to call her a liar to her face.
Once she was gone, I washed my face, made a cup of coffee and sat down to consider my problems. I needed to find Dr. Osborne and convince him the notebook was gone forever; burning it in front of him sounded like a great idea, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to arrange it. Or where he was – I needed to find that word he’d used, udjy. Maybe it meant something like “in an alternate dimension inconsistent with human life,” and that problem would be solved, yay.
Second, I needed to make sure Michael had moved out. I tiptoed through the bathroom and cracked the door into his bedroom. It wasn’t bolted… but the bedroom was still full of his stuff. We would have to have another talk about that. If he thought saving my life made up for the previous lies… Huh. Should it? Well, I didn’t need to think about that now; wherever the man might be, at least he wasn’t here.
And third, I needed to confess to Aunt Georgia that the agency was on the hook for repairs to Sophie Rivers’ front window. That, at least, I could tackle here and now. Bracing my shoulders, I reached for the phone.
“I know all about it,” she interrupted before I got through my first sentence. “That nice young man you rented your front room to…”
I mentally substituted That lying rat bastard I rented your front room to, and missed the next few words. Police report. Insurance. Apologies to Rivers family. Everything was under control, my aunt said briskly, and all I needed to do was rest and feel better.
I guessed she hadn’t missed her Art Deco clock yet. Or… had it magically popped back into existence? It wasn’t like I’d done a lot of controlled research on what happened when you sent something into Nowhere. I decided not to raise the question; right now she wasn’t mad at me, and it would be nice to have that last for a little while.
My head was better now, so after I got off the phone I skimmed through my images of the notebook, looking for the word Osborne had used. Ah, here it was: udjy, ‘home.’ Useful word. So he’d taken himself home, had he? I hoped doing so had given him a major headache on top of the pain from the burns. Now, would those have been real burns, or would he have been perfectly all right as soon as the magical flames were put out? I didn’t feel like risking brain damage to research the question. On Monday I could call Sammy’s big sister and find out if Osborne was in his office or in the hospital.
***
“Son,” Hank Henderson said, “there’s only one thing to do when a woman is this mad at you.”
Michael had called Henderson to quit. When Hank asked why, he’d spilled out all the disasters of the last twent
y-four hours. He had not asked for advice to the lovelorn.
“I have to be able to tell her that I’m not trying to steal her precious notebook. Not any longer.”
“But you were,” Hank pointed out, “and she’s already plenty steamed about that.” He paused. “Of course, since you’re paying the price for that already, she probably wouldn’t get much madder if you succeeded, so…”
“No.”
“You want to walk away and leave her at the mercy of Ed Osborne? You think he’s going to quit trying to get that notebook from whoever has it? Only way she’ll be safe is when he knows for sure that somebody else has it. You’d be doing her a favor to steal it.”
“No.” After a wrenching evening of trying to persuade himself he hadn’t seen anything unusual at that suburban open house, Michael had worked out his own solution. “The only way she – and the rest of the world – will be safe is if the notebook no longer exists, and Osborne knows that for sure.”
A long silence. Finally Hank sighed. “You’re probably right. Damn, I’d have liked to have that notebook. And I wouldn’t have used it, you know. Heck, I can’t even read that script. But it would be the only field notebook of Old Shaimaki in the world.”
“A curio that’s too expensive even for the Henderson fortune,” Michael said. “Do you think any amount of money would stop Osborne from coming after it? And what if other people found out what the language can do?”
Hank sighed again. “Damn, I hate it when you’re right. Okay… I’ll pay you the same fee we agreed upon, if you can destroy the thing, document its destruction, and make sure Eddie Osborne understands that it’s no longer available. And don’t you dare tell anybody I’m going soft-headed in my old age, hear?”
Michael grinned. “I knew you’d do the right thing. Sir.”
“Don’t get too happy,” Henderson warned him. “You’ve still got to persuade her to go along with you.”
It was Michael’s turn to sigh. “She hates me.”
“Well, that gets us back to what I said: there’s only one thing to do when a woman is this mad at you.”
“Explain the situation?”
“Hell, no! Apologize! Grovel!”
“Apologize for what? I haven’t done anything to her!”
“Except lie to her, search her room, photograph her notebook…”
“It’s not really hers, and besides, she doesn’t know about that part.”
“Grovel,” Hank repeated. “Then persuade her that it’s got to be destroyed.”
“What if I can’t?”
“Then you’ll have to do it in spite of her.”
***
Going to sleep after all that wasn’t really an option.
I stared up at the ceiling and counted the verb forms of Homeric Greek – there are around eight hundred of them, that alone usually put me to sleep before I got past the aorist subjunctive. Mentally reviewed my growing Old Shaimaki vocabulary. Recited the copious chunks of Faust that I had memorized in Frau Heilemann’s high school German classes.
Nothing worked.
I decided that my fundamental mistake had been concentrating on Part I of Faust, which actually tells a story. Part II, which is full of arcane jibes at Goethe’s literary contemporaries, would put anybody to sleep. But naturally, I hadn’t memorized that part. At one time I would have said that was because learning Part II by heart could cause irreversible brain damage. Now that I had some experience of actual brain damage, that wasn’t so funny. I just hoped it was reversible.
It was almost a relief when the downpour started. Rain drummed on the roof and thunder cracked overhead. For some time I tried to convince myself that all I heard was a late-summer storm rolling through town. But it didn’t work; I kept hearing noises from the far side of the bathroom. Loud clunks and thuds sounded like somebody throwing the contents of the other bedroom against the wall. Either Michael was angry and packing up his possessions with maximum sound effects, or my wanna-be burglar had returned and was remarkably unconcerned about making enough noise to waken the residents – perhaps this time he was armed. In either case, I decided that I could use some extra security before checking out the noises.
“You don’t need that,” Michael said when I cracked the door from the bathroom into his bedroom. He nodded at my pistol. “I’m moving out. As you requested.”
My knees were shaking for some reason. Had I really expected more of Osborne’s thugs?
Well, why not?
I leaned against the doorjamb and slid down to sit on the floor, setting the Smith and Wesson down beside me. “I’m surprised.”
“Why? You asked me to leave. I’m leaving.”
I felt that as a conclusion, this left too much unsaid, but I didn’t know where to start. “Do you customarily move after midnight?”
“I’ve been busy.” He threw some clothes into a duffel bag and slammed the drawer he’d opened.
“Do you even have someplace to go?”
“Does it matter?”
It shouldn’t. I reminded myself that I hated him. That he’d been lying to me from the beginning. That he’d inserted himself into my house with lies and secret motives.
“I… didn’t mean to kick you out into the snow.”
He laughed shortly. “In Austin? You’d have to wait a while and choose your time carefully. Don’t worry. Kicking me out into the thunderstorm will have to do.”
“You can stay until the rain stops.”
“As long as you understand that I am effectively out of here.”
“Why do you care?”
He slid down against the dresser to sit on the floor facing me. “Because I know how you feel about having your space invaded. Because I don’t want you to associate me in any way with the jerk who assaulted you when you were nineteen. Because… I want you to listen when…” He exhaled a sharp breath and started over. “I want you to listen when I apologize.”
“What exactly are you apologizing for?”
“Pretending I wasn’t interested in the notebook, lying to you, taking money to spy on you. For starters. I need to explain…”
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that some idiotic part of me still hoped there was an explanation that would mean he hadn’t been lying all along. I ran one finger along the barrel of the pistol. “I’m not sure the reasons make any difference.”
“They have to!” he insisted. “You have to let me explain… Sure, I lied, but that’s what – I mean, I didn’t know it was you I was lying to.”
I raised my brows. “Oh? Who did you think you were spying on?”
“Some woman. Koshan Idrisov’s landlady. Could have been anybody. You see, I was in California when Hank contacted me. He told me there was a notebook he wanted… He’s a collector. Exotic curios. He’d tried to negotiate with Idrisov to buy it but hadn’t been able to get an answer. Initially he just wanted me to get in touch with Idrisov. Then I got out here and found out the guy had disappeared without packing up his stuff and nobody knew where he’d gone. I wanted to get a look at whatever he’d left…”
“Oh. Now we get to the part where you got paid to spy on me?”
“I didn’t,” Michael repeated, sounding strained, “know it was you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look,” he said, “if we’d met normally, I would’ve, I don’t know, asked you out for coffee. Dinner. Gotten to know you the way people do. Instead, here I was living in your house, hired to look for something you didn’t know you had.”
“Only it turned out, unfortunately for you, that I did know. Bad luck, that.”
“Indeed. What are the chances that Idrisov would leave that notebook with somebody who could, first, read it, and second, figure out why it was so important? I didn’t know why Hank wanted it so badly, or why some linguistics professor was chasing after you for it.”
“Yes, well, I guess you know now.”
“Yes. And I’ve talked to Hank.” He took a deep breath.
“Sienna, that notebook has to be destroyed…” His eyes slid sideways. “Must you play with that damned pistol while we’re talking?”
“Oh. Sorry. What do you mean, it has to be destroyed?”
“For one thing, it’s the only thing that’ll get Osborne off your back. The man’s crazy, and he’s dangerous, and he won’t give up otherwise. I don’t want you to get hurt. And I really don’t want somebody like that to have the kind of power he could get from studying those notes.”
“What are you planning to do?” I wanted to trust him. I dared not trust him. “Some kind of substitution game? I hand over the notebook, you make a show of destroying it in front of Osborne, but somehow you slip it to your boss instead?”
“No. Hank agrees with me. It’s too explosive; he’d rather lose it than know the information is out there for someone like Osborne to take advantage of.”
I thought that over for a full count of five in Modern Greek: ena, dhio, tria, tessera, pente.
“Fine. Go away. Come Monday, I’ll get in touch with Osborne and set the notebook on fire in front of him.”
“I can’t let you take that risk,” Michael said. “You have to let me help you.”
I felt the cool, hard shape of the pistol under my hand. “Wrong.”
His eyes went to my right hand. “Damn it, Sienna, why do I always wind up in your sights instead of that bastard Osborne?”
“Good question! Maybe you should ask yourself that!”
“No, maybe you should—” He stopped, blew out his breath in a hard huff, and started over. “Let me help you. Please let me help you, Sienna. That man has no scruples. How are you going to get close enough to convince him you’re destroying the notebook, without giving him another chance to attack you?”
I hadn’t actually figured that out yet, but that didn’t mean I could trust Michael, did it? “That’s my problem. You are not involved.”
“I can’t not be involved, now that I know you, now that I know what’s going on. Sienna, please—”
“Just. Go. Away.”
He stood up and hefted the duffel. “All right.” He reached in his pocket, dug out the key and dropped it on the floor beside me.
The Language of the Dragon Page 14