The Book of Fire (28 page)

N’Doch pulls up short. The insulation on the cable is badly worn all along the swag just behind Köthen’s head. In some spots, the wires are completely bare. N’Doch can smell the scorch of raw power in the air. He spreads his hands, palms out, away from his own weapon.

“Just don’t move, man,” he says quietly. “Just don’t fucking move.”

Köthen’s at ready, knees flexed, his knife arm extended to one side, too close to the cable. One more step back or even an unlucky arcing, and the man’s a goner. N’Doch hears the girl pounding down the road behind him, but she’ll
never be there in time. He needs the language, the right words, and there’s only one place he can get them. No reason he should be busting his butt for this guy who keeps wanting to kill him, but he’d really hate to watch him burn to a crisp, especially in front of the girl. So he does the thing he hates most of all, the thing that erases him, makes him feel like he’s falling into a bottomless pit. He gives himself over and calls to the dragon, the way he knows he can and never does, and she puts the words into his head and guides his tongue.

N’Doch points at the cable.
“Fassen Sie das nicht an!”

Köthen’s not sure he’s heard right, but his eyes flick to where N’Doch’s pointing, then back again, narrowing. He thinks it’s a ruse.

And then it’s all there, the language N’Doch needs, an awkward tumble of German syllables, but enough to bring the dude at least halfway off battle alert, enough to talk him a few steps forward, away from the waiting cable, away from sure and instant death. N’Doch drops to a crouch, heart pounding, and rubs his forehead, trying to clear his brain of the adrenaline rush. Because now there’s this dragon inside there that he’s got to make a lot more room for.

Köthen does not sheathe his dagger, but he turns around warily to stare at the thick swag of cable. N’Doch can see he hasn’t a clue what the danger is, but he’s read and believed the urgency in N’Doch’s voice and body and words. He takes a few extra steps away.

The girl catches up finally. “What is it, N’Doch?”

“Your boy here nearly fried himself, is all.”

She stares at him, horrified. N’Doch thinks about what he’s said, and recalls how the big dragon tends to translate to her in visual images. Probably they’ll both get him wrong this time, but he can’t help himself. He puts his head down and starts to laugh.

Erde’s scowl was reflexive. She shouldn’t be angry with him. She knew by now that laughter was N’Doch’s usual
release after a crisis. But the image of Köthen burning had left her shuddering and nauseous, so she had to frown at him anyway, like she always did. “It’s not funny, N’Doch!”

“No,” he agreed, laughing. “I guess it ain’t.”

Baron Köthen put up his dagger finally and crossed his arms. “Well, does he speak German or not?”

“When he feels like it,” Erde was forced to admit.

“It’s not like that,” N’Doch protested, in French.

Köthen nodded. “I begin to suspect . . . no, never mind. Was I actually in danger?”

N’Doch glanced up from his crouch. “You bet your ass you were.” But he said it in French, and Erde refused to translate. Caught, he stared at the ground, almost bashfully, as if listening very hard. Then he repeated it, in substantially more proper German. Erde privately thanked Lady Water for her refined sensibilities, but still, she wanted to cheer out loud. All her previous efforts to get N’Doch speaking her language had failed. Köthen had succeeded without even trying. And of course he had no idea what he’d accomplished. One quick glance, a curiously arched brow, and he’d accepted N’Doch’s sudden acquisition of fractured but comprehensible German as if it was just one more in the series of bizarre events he’d been swept up in.

“You watch, now,” said N’Doch. He rose from his crouch and walked over to the huge structure that towered over them like the tallest siege engine Erde could imagine. He searched around beneath it, picked something up and knocked it against one of the tower’s pilings. It rang like metal, and the sound vibrated up the length of the piling. He brought the thing back to them, a length of hollow metal.

“Stand back,” he said. “Way back.”

Baron Köthen eyed the metal thing, seemed to decide that it was both too short and too rusted to be much of a weapon. He joined Erde where N’Doch directed them, into the shade of the pine trees. N’Doch moved back also, then he faced the dark, dangling ropes and lobbed the metal thing with a big underhand toss, right into the most frayed part of the loop.

Light exploded around it, white and blue and sizzling. There was a crack like lightning, sparks flew in all directions and the ropes danced and snapped like battle pennants
in a gale. Erde felt the surge to the roots of her hair, and beside her, Köthen muttered. Then it was over, and the ropes were quiet again, and the metal thing lay on the ground, singed as if from the forge.

N’Doch offered them a death’s-head grin, then let the dragon speak for him. “So whaddya think? That could’ve been you, Baron K.”

Köthen wet his lips. “I don’t think I’d have liked that.”

N’Doch laughed softly. “Damn straight you wouldn’t.”

Köthen looked up at the tower. “What is this thing for?”

“You really want to know? How much time have you got?”

Köthen heard the challenge. Erde felt, rather than saw, him tense. He seemed to be considering his options, none of which he was very happy about. But he understood that his life had just been saved. Perhaps he felt he owed N’Doch a hearing, for he returned the same, soft laugh and said, “I seem to have all the time in the world.”

So for the next several miles, N’Doch and Baron Köthen walked side by side, one long, safe pace apart, while N’Doch discoursed on the magical force called
electricity.
Erde trudged along behind, only half listening. Master Djawara had already explained this to her, when they’d visited his compound in the bush. Mostly she listened to hear Köthen’s response, to hear if he believed N’Doch’s insistence that
electricity
was not magic or if he, like her, was reserving judgment. But Köthen’s response was so reserved, she couldn’t even tell what it was. He just listened, nodded, asked a quiet question or two, and nodded some more, walking along with his hands tucked behind his back like he was out for a stroll in his castle yard. Perhaps, she decided, he doesn’t believe any of it at all.

She was beginning to look forward to another rest in the shade when, ahead of her, the men pulled up short at the top of another big rise. Something in the angle of Köthen’s shoulders made Erde quicken her step. What she saw when she drew up beside him left her speechless.

A city lay spread out in the lowland. A city half submerged in ragged foliage and the same green water she’d seen back at the broken bridge. She knew it was a city by its straight lines and squared angles, its so obviously human geometry. But it was like no city she’d ever seen.
Except . . .

Without thinking, she put an urgent call out to Earth. He must see this with his own eyes. Sure that she was under some sort of attack, both dragons flashed into existence in the road right behind them. The hot air churned. The dust boiled up in small cyclones. Köthen whirled and swore, but when he’d got hold of himself and slid his dagger back into its sheath, there was a spark of admiration in his eyes.

“That’s how we . . . arrived?”

Erde nodded.

He let out a breath. “With a whole army like that, you’d be invincible.” Then he returned his attention to the city, which seemed to amaze him even more than the traveling methods of dragons.

He gave it a long, slow study, as they all did. The tall, rigid, boxlike structures rose in clusters out of the parched foliage, or in places, right out of the long green bay that coiled up from the south to partly encircle the city. The boxes were all different sizes, and reflected the sun in bright, blinding shafts. One towering rectangle seemed to be made entirely of burnished gold. But some were stunted, collapsed or broken off partway. Their gleaming skins were scorched and peeled back, exposing their understructure like the blackened bones of a decaying corpse.

“My God,” Köthen whispered finally. “It really is the future, isn’t it.”

N’Doch grinned. “You got it, man.”

But Erde shivered.
OH, DRAGON! IS IT THE MAGE CITY?

They had dreamed a city like this, together: a tall-towered, fantastical city. But their city was perfect and whole and shining, not with the reflected light of a grim red sun but with an inner glow of purity and wisdom. And they knew a mage dwelt there who would help the dragon fulfill his quest.

THE CALL IS STRONG, BUT
 . . . 
NOT FROM THAT DIRECTION
.

IT IS THE MAGE CITY, I KNOW IT IS! BUT IT’S IN RUINS! DRAGON, WHAT DOES IT MEAN? ARE WE TOO LATE?

WE CANNOT BE TOO LATE. I WILL NOT ACCEPT SUCH A POSSIBILITY
.

Erde trusted the dragon’s superior instincts and loved him for his stubbornness. But she was uneasy about the hopelessness that had settled over her in this desolate place, as heavy as a winding shroud. What if he was wrong?

Köthen beckoned N’Doch closer. Erde shook herself out of her gloom and prepared herself to keep the peace. But N’Doch’s snatching Köthen from an unexpected peril seemed to have proved his usefulness. And now that the baron had established the chain of command to his satisfaction, he could treat the man he’d so recently drawn on and thrown to the ground as his new lieutenant. Even more astonishing, N’Doch did not seem to object. He’d given up all pretense of being unable to communicate. He stepped up beside Köthen, and they studied the city together.

“Do you know this place?”

N’Doch shook his head. “But there are cities like this where I come from. That is, the buildings look sort of the same. The landscape’s real different.”

“How many years since . . .” The baron stopped, cleared his throat awkwardly.

“Since your time?”

Köthen’s mouth pressed back against the flood of questions he obviously longed to ask. He shrugged, nodded.

“Well, we know it’s at least eleven hundred years, ’cause that brings us to my time and everything looks pretty familiar to me so far. Closer than that, it’s hard to say. We’re sure to find some bit of something that’ll tell us.”

Again, Erde watched the baron closely. Would he share her nightmares about the weight of all those intervening years? But he only nodded again and murmured, “Eleven hundred years.”

“I could be wrong, y’know? I guess it could be less, but it’s probably more.”

Köthen waved a hand as if to say, how can a few years more or less even matter? “And what would such a city signify . . . in your time?”

“Signify?”

The baron pointed, measuring the city’s breadth between the span of his outstretched hands. “Is it likely some king’s capital?”

“Well, it might be a capital, but there probably isn’t any king.”

“Why is that?”

“Not a lot of kings left in the world, ’least not in my day. ’Course,
now
, you never know. But, seemed to me, kings were pretty much done for in the history of the
world.” N’Doch regarded Köthen sideways, as if gauging the distance between them, just in case the offense he implied was actually taken. Erde thought it another sign of his madness that he should needle Baron Köthen so rashly, over and over again. But didn’t they make an interesting contrast side by side? The shorter, solid blond who carried himself like a much larger man against N’Doch’s slim, towering darkness. N’Doch bending his head slightly to catch Köthen’s terse and quiet questioning, Köthen not looking at him, as that would require him to look up.

“No kings. Is it a city of merchants, then?”

N’Doch laughed. “Oh, there’s probably plenty of them, all right, if there’s anybody.” The German was coming easier to him, she could see, as he relaxed into it and let Lady Water guide his tongue. No doubt, Erde reflected sourly, he would soon be able to abuse her language as outrageously as he abused his own.

“If?”

N’Doch gave his little shrug. “Don’t know. Just a feeling I have.”

Köthen frowned. “Still, perhaps we’ll find shelter there.”

“Yeah. Just hope we don’t find a lot else besides.”