The Book of Fire (32 page)

What about my needs? But Erde kept this thought in the private part of her mind. She was outnumbered on the issue of N’Doch, and always in such cases, she trusted the dragons’ wisdom. Again, she resolved to try to better understand her fellow dragon guide.

They were about to start off, arranged in that stringlike formation that both Köthen and N’Doch favored, with herself in the middle and N’Doch up ahead. N’Doch came over and touched her elbow. “Did you warn him about guns yet?”

Guns. Oh, no.

“Will they be here, too?”

“Hell, girl, more’n likely. Once you get a good idea like that into folks’ heads, they ain’t gonna give it up easy.”

“A good idea, N’Doch?”

He, of all people, who but for the dragons would be dead from the destruction that these “good ideas” could wreak on human flesh.

“Well, you know what I mean. They work.”

“How should I warn him about guns?”

“How did you learn? I told you, right?”

“No. Someone just began shooting, and you told me to duck.”

“Oh, right. I remember now. Well, maybe that’s how he’ll have to learn, too.”

“No.”

The moment was always in her mind, though most of the time she could ignore it, that preternaturally clear, slow-motion image that would never fade or be forgotten:
N’Doch is yelling. He is racing toward her over the bright velvet grass, dodging not out of but into the path of the guns
firing behind him. And then his long, slim body is jerking, arcing into the air, his mouth flung open, his dark head hauled back, blood and bone and flesh, pieces of him spattering her chest and cheeks as the dragons’ aura embraces them in a rush of silence and merciful oblivion.

Erde buried her face in her hands.

“Hey, girl . . .” He touched her elbow again, uneasily. “You worry too much.”

“No.” She shuddered once, then dropped her hands and looked up at him, amazed. She had just understood something. While reliving that awful moment yet again, a detail had made itself clear to her, something she had not known, or had denied.

. . . dodging not out of but
into
the path of the guns . . .

He had put himself
between
them, between her and the guns.

He’d said he remembered nothing about that moment, the moment of his dying and just before. But Erde thought he should. She reached out to the dragons and asked them to put the image into his head. She saw its arrival in his eyes and in his sharp intake of breath.

“Why did you do that, N’Doch?”

He was wrung silent by the pictures in his mind. Only a strangled gasp escaped him, then a shudder very much like her own.

“Why, N’Doch?”

“I don’t . . .” he murmured, then stopped and licked his lips. “No, I do . . . what I remember is, I was . . . so angry. Just so fucking angry! Shooting down innocent women because they’re, like, an inconvenience!” His chest rose and fell as if he’d been running. “Baraga thought I controlled the dragons. I couldn’t . . .”

“I know.” Right there in the broken alien street, Erde put her arms around N’Doch, not even worrying about what Baron Köthen might think, and held him until he stopped shuddering. He did not return the embrace. He was too stunned, she could see, by what she had shown him, by what it told him about himself. And so was she.

She backed away from him a step, patting his arms several times as they hung long and limp by his sides.

“I will tell him about guns,” she said.

N’Doch knows he can’t let himself be distracted by this just now. He needs to be about four hundred percent alert. But he decides it’s also not the best idea to let the girl fill the baron in on something crucial like guns which she knows shit-all about. Like, what if he says to her, how does it work? This guy could ask that kind of question. What will she say, by magic?

Plus he sees Köthen is leaning back against the brick wall of the building while she talks to him, with his arms folded across his chest at a majorly skeptical angle. It won’t do for the baron not to believe her at all. He’ll get his head blown off first thing. N’Doch slouches over to join them.

“So what’d you tell him?”

When she repeats it for him, N’Doch laughs. “I wouldn’ta believed you either.” He offers a more mechanical explanation involving trajectories and lightning and simple ballistics, and Köthen’s eyes surrender their resistant glaze. He has never heard of artillery or gunpowder, but he knows all about catapults, and once again, he impresses N’Doch with the agility of his thinking and his willingness to go after an idea as long as he can get the smallest toehold on it.

“Gun.” Köthen rolls the word around as if tasting it. The military potential of such a notion is not lost on him, though N’Doch’s description of gunpowder clearly smacks to him of alchemy. He uses the French word, somewhat awkwardly, since N’Doch hasn’t been able to give him the word for gun in German. It doesn’t exist yet for the girl and the baron, anyhow. N’Doch finds his own brain bending around that idea. Like, if he did know the German for gun, and he taught it to the baron and it got into the language that way, where would the word have come from in the first place? He reminds himself, when he has time, to ask the dragons. Just the sort of thing they ought to know.

“Main thing,” he says, “is to stick close to cover. Just ’cause they’re a ways away don’t mean they can’t get at you.” He sees Köthen’s glance flick down the length of the
street and up the sides of the buildings, scanning the dark rows of empty window holes.
You got it, dude
, he agrees gloomily.
This here’s sniper heaven.
He thinks he detects the slightest wavering in the man’s ramrod confidence. It’s there in his eyes—the shadow of a shark cruising the shallows—and as quickly gone, as the baron rejects the thought and shoves himself away from the wall.

“I am not the kingdom’s best archer,” he remarks, “but a stout bow would be comforting right now.” He nods N’Doch forward and signals them to move on.

Feeling as much of a sitting duck as he can ever recall, N’Doch leads the way down the littered sidewalk, choosing now to hug the building walls for the sake of available cover. He checks every burned-out doorway or busted window and it’s slow going, but the smell of smoke is still hanging in the air and the baron doesn’t seem impatient.

The street runs straight for several more blocks, then snakes off to the left. At the crook of the turn, N’Doch spots a little huddle of what must have been shops, shorter buildings with gaping holes in the bottom story that used to be display windows. He peers inside each one. He sees old glass, mostly ground into glittery powder, and along the walls, wrecked and empty shelving, the charred remains of counters and freezer cases, heaps of twisted wire from storage racks. All junk. Anything useful has been salvaged already, probably over a considerable length of time. These places have a picked-over quality that N’Doch recognizes. He shrugs and moves on. Here and there, a bit of blistered metal offers a fragment of a word or image to confirm his guess: the northeastern US of A, some time after his. He can’t decide now which is more surreal: walking around knowing you’re in 913, or sifting through the wreckage of your own future.

Around the elbow, the street dips sharply and within a block, lowers itself into the muddy green water. There are no alleys or cross streets to lead them aside, along dry land. N’Doch glares about at the looming brick facades.
Cul de sac.
Perfect place for an ambush. But he’s always had a major objection to retracing his steps. Then he sees something that makes him smile. Köthen and the girl come up beside him.

“Oh,” says the girl. “We’ll have to find another way.”

“Unh-unh.” N’Doch points.

Down the slope of the street and on the far side, where the bay has already swallowed the bottom story, a crude gangway has been lashed together out of salvaged pipes and window grating and battered metal doors. It leads from the raised stone stoop of the building at the water’s edge, across that facade, and into a second-floor window of the building next door. It looks well-used and pretty sturdy, N’Doch thinks. It even has a jerry-built sort of railing. What he finds most interesting, though, is that there’s been no attempt made to conceal it. It’s like, well, yeah, this is where the road goes, now that the old one’s underwater. He looks to the baron. “I’ll check it out.”

Köthen shrugs, like it’s the best of a poor choice, and nods him forward. They head downhill and cross the street. Köthen and the girl wait on the stoop while N’Doch climbs the gangway. The windows of the facade are blocked with dented sheet metal until he gets up to the end of the ramp. The final window has been enlarged by knocking away the brick sill. It’s now door height, if you’re someone a bit shorter than N’Doch. He leans against the facade and pokes his head into the opening. The dark room inside has long ago been trashed. The wooden floor gapes in several places. N’Doch can hear the slosh of water in the space below. There’s a salty dampness in the air, a coolish draft rising that he inhales with relief as he ducks through the doorway.

Inside, the gangway continues, cutting the room diagonally, across charred wood and naked joists, safety railing and all. It disappears through a wide archway into an even darker room beyond. N’Doch squints into the ungiving shadow. He listens. It looks and sounds like the building is empty, but he
feels
that it isn’t. Old instinct tells him that in a place like this, it’s likely he’s being watched. He’s been trying hard to ignore the chill in his gut from the girl’s little dragon-video, but the image is on flash replay in his head and he can’t find the off button. He needs a leg up here, so he does something he almost never does. He calls up the dragon voluntarily.

Hey, girl—you there?

Where else? What’s up?

Nothin’. Only, y’know that eye thing you do? I’m out
scouting this old building and it’s dark as a powerdown in here, so like . . . I was wondering if maybe you could help me out a little.

Sure thing, bro.

He’s got to grant her this, she doesn’t rag him when she knows he’s in a tight spot. As he’d given over his tongue, N’Doch now gives up his eyes to dragon control, and the spectrum of light available to him increases vastly into the infrared. Details of the room snap into focus in seething black and white.

“Mega,” N’Doch murmurs.

You want to ride this road with me a while, or are you guys too busy?

I’m with you.

WE BOTH ARE
.

N’Doch’s gotten almost used to Water hanging around in his head. She sounds pretty much like he does, so even with their frequent disagreements, it’s kind of like having a conversation with himself. But when the Big Guy talks to him, it’s a shock to his system. Earth’s voice is as slow and vast as the dragon himself, and there’s no denying the weird and external source of it.

“Great,” mutters N’Doch to himself and the dark space beyond. “Hope you won’t be sewing me up again too soon.”

He checks for the knife that Margit loaned him, then leaves it in its sheath and starts off across the gangway. Even in infrared, he sees nothing unusual, but his own personal sonar is about screaming by the time he makes it to the other side of the room. He halts at the archway and peers around one side. Another dark, empty room, longer, much narrower. A hallway, maybe, its one window to the left again boarded, its floor again in tatters. But it occurs to N’Doch that here, the floor has been pulled up on purpose, so that an intruder will be forced to the gangway.

It’s a few long steps to the next doorway. He takes them swiftly and quietly. He sees that the door has been taken off its hinges and used as part of the gangway. He sticks his nose into the absolute darkness of the third room, barely able to hear for the alarms going off inside his head. Surveying the walls with his dragon night sight, he spots an interesting arrangement of old rope and broken planks that
just might lead along one wall to a corner, where a mess of pipe and plaster-dusted studs lean upright to suspiciously resemble a ladder. Sure enough, halfway to the crumbling ceiling, among the mildewing remnants of a plaster cornice, N’Doch makes out a shallow platform and two small bright spots of human heat. One of them has a stubby arrow nocked into a mean-looking crossbow, aimed straight at N’Doch’s heart.