The Book of Fire (37 page)

T
he chambermaid has come and gone. The High Priestess is on her way to Evensong, escorted by six of her Honor Guard. She has made sure to be gracious to them. She has even smiled at the duty captain, even though the watch will have changed at least twice before her planned darktime foray.

Paia strides ahead of them along the dim corridor. The carpet, once so soft and thick beneath her feet, is worn thin in the center from all this military traffic. It was meant for comfort, not to withstand soldiers’ boots. Even her sandals make a scratchy sound against it now. Paia tries to look as if she cannot wait to enter the Temple once more, as if she is so eager to be leading her flock in holy worship of the God. Meanwhile, she is wondering where he is. She cannot feel him anywhere in the Citadel. She hasn’t seen him for several days. There is a measure of relief in this, but also the ache of loss. She misses him. He used to visit her more often.

She is gliding down the steps between the second and third levels. She is thinking about the God, but her brain registers a delayed response to the deactivated house monitor screen at the top of the staircase. Has she really seen words there, or is she now imagining cryptic messages everywhere she looks?

She cannot glance back. If there is something there, a look will bring it to the attention of the Honor Guard who, from the steady clatter of their downward progress behind her, appear to have noticed nothing. But there is another wall monitor at the bottom of the stair.

Paia slows a little, pretending to adjust the glittering folds
of her red-and-gold Evensong robe. As she moves past the monitor, she gives it a fleeting but thorough study. A small tickertape is scrolling silently across the bottom of an otherwise dead gray screen.

ATTENTION: A GENERAL SECURITY ALERT WILL SOUND IN
110
SECONDS
.

Paia bravely hides her first response, which is terror like a jolt to the heart. Security alert? The God’s enemies must be attacking! Then she gets hold of herself and remembers that the House Security System has been turned off for years. Or so she’d thought, until the House Comp implied otherwise.

By the time she reaches the next wall monitor, the little scroller says 75 seconds, which means it’s an active message. Paia keeps moving. It could be some sort of autonomic malfunction, or it could just be that House is up to something. When she thinks about it, she has her answer. Genuine security alerts do not conveniently announce themselves in advance.

Paia slows even more, as if taking on an appropriate degree of gravity as she approaches the Temple sector. She doesn’t want to arrive there before the 75 seconds elapse and get caught in all the confusion . . . or perhaps she does. She picks up speed again. The Honor Guard must be wondering about her erratic pace, but if House has seen fit to provide her with a diversion, Paia wants to make the most of it. She will be very disappointed if this turns out to be a total false alarm.

The First Daughters await her at the bottom of the final flight of stairs, two rows of six lined up on either side of the corridor, heads bowed at precisely the same angle. They are ready to fall right in behind as the High Priestess passes through their ranks. They must rehearse this, Paia observes sourly. Probably daily. She does not wait for them. Let them worry about catching up. She’s counting seconds. She reckons she has fifteen left, and the side doors to the Sanctuary, leading directly to the dais, are at least ten of them away. But she must not run. She cannot seem to be at all concerned about anything.

Paia lengthens her graceful strides. The Twelve scurry after her. A cluster of Third Sons blocks the entrance,
straightening each other’s robes. Too many of them spring for the doors at once when they spot the High Priestess advancing on them. Seconds are lost while they sort themselves out and get to the tall double doors. The none-too-finely carved wooden panels were a gift from some pious village Paia has never been told the name of. As she is making a defiant resolution to find it out, the doors are hauled open. And then the alarm sounds.

The shrill braying of the electronic klaxons is an alien and horrifying noise to the Temple’s clergy, as well as to its congregation. The shrieks of the Twelve behind her blend with the moans and wails of the Faithful inside as Paia bounds through the doors and across the dais, dodging two Second Sons frozen in mute terror with burning tapers in their outstretched hands. She slips behind the altar screen into the shadowed niche of the High Altar, where the Flame of the Apocalypse burns in its polished golden bowl—the Unfueled Flame that never gutters or goes out. Reflexively, Paia lays two fingers to her lips and then to the rim of the bowl. The din of the alarm is appalling. She recalls several general alerts during her childhood, and she’s sure the klaxons were never this loud. Clever House has maxed the volume from awful to deafening. But how, she worries, will the computer explain all this chaos when the God hears of it, as he doubtless will from Son Luco, and comes calling to the Library in a rage for a reckoning?

Deal with that later, she decides, like House obviously has. By the time the alarm cuts off, dropping into the Citadel a silence almost as deafening as the horns, Paia is through the little maintenance hatch behind the High Altar and racing down the deserted back corridors toward her secret stairway.

“House!” she cries, as she bursts through the antique stone portal that guards the computer’s darkened lair. “That was brilliant!”

“A desperate act,” replies the House Comp in her father’s most grave tones, without his usual greeting or preamble. “I had to warn you somehow.”

“Warn me?”

“I am being tampered with.”

“Tampered? How?” It’s as chill in the room as it always is, but Paia is still warm from her breathless race. “Is that why I lost you up in the tower?”

“I had only just discovered that dusty miracle of obsolescence, then suddenly, I no longer had access to it.”

“Has someone been in here messing with you?”

“No human but you has access to this facility.”

“Well, it isn’t the God. He wouldn’t know the first thing about it. Someone outside?”

“No one anywhere should be able to do this.”

Now Paia feels the chill. Her father always boasted that the computer’s security systems were invulnerable to tampering. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

“It appears to be more than one source. One is almost certainly external. The signal is scrambled and very cleverly cloaked. For the other, there are no visible defenses. I have been unable to trace either of them or pinpoint their locations.”

Paia settles into the leather swivel chair and flattens her palms on the black console, as if to impart some degree of calm, if not to the computer, at least to herself. “I think I might have a clue, House.” She lowers her voice. If the computer is accessible to others, who knows who might be listening? In her quietest whisper, Paia tells him about the note left on the painting. “Perhaps I should have given you the whole story when I mentioned this before . . .”

The dark room is silent for a long moment. A few tiny red lights stare back at her unblinking from within the inky plastic. Then House says, “I am extremely . . . relieved.”

“Relieved?” She has never heard the computer describe his emotional state before, or express any sort of hesitation.

“I spoke of two sources.”

“Yes?”

“For two months now, I have been . . . seeing things.”

“What?” Paia almost shouts:
me too!

“I use a human metaphor, of course. I have been subject to . . . certain transient and random signals. They arrive in incredibly fast streams and are gone before I can store them. Images, I believe. I can neither decipher them nor locate their source, so that they appear to come out of nowhere. They do not even register as proper data in my
circuits. I am aware that something has . . . come in, but can find no record of the transaction. This is most . . . bizarre.”

The computer pauses, as a human might, to catch a breath or regain lost composure. “When no explanation presented itself, I became concerned that . . . that perhaps there was no external source. That it was a sign of some final malfunction . . . that I was breaking down, or that I was . . . imagining things. I do that sometimes, you know, but rarely so . . . vividly. When you first asked me about that phrase, I was . . . afraid to ask where you’d seen it. I worried that it had leaked onto one of my screens without my control or knowledge. But a real physical object, a note written by human hands . . . that puts things back into perspective again.”

“Yes. It does. I guess.” Paia strokes the console’s unbroken surface, as darkly reflective as the Sacred Well at midnight. What sort of consolation does one offer a computer? How terrible to be a mind trapped in a box buried at the bottom of a mountain. She wants to ask House what else he imagines, but she knows that will have to wait.

“So you see why I called it a desperate act. They’re all in an uproar down there right now, and no doubt this will send HIM and his cohorts on another of his circuit-frying, chip-melting rampages. I have so few working peripherals as it is. But I had to know . . .”

“I expect it’s me he will punish, House.”

Some real fear must have shown in her voice, or perhaps the computer’s delicate sensors are reading telltale hints in her vital signs. In the tone he reserves for statements of absolute fact, he says, “You need not fear him, Paia.”

“Oh, House, thanks for the comfort, but how could I not?”

“I said you
need
not. If you choose to, there is no help for it, but I tell you, he cannot harm you.”

“Of course he can! You’ve obviously never seen . . .”

The big monitor bank fills with a sun-bright image of the Temple Plaza, smeared with the smoldering ash of the kamikaze zealot who’d played at would-be assassin not so many days ago. Paia shields her eyes from the glare.

“I see everything,” says House quietly. “He is a monster. But to you, he cannot do injury.”

“I don’t . . . what are you getting at?”

“It is prohibited in what you might call his genetic makeup.”

Does a God have genes? “How do you know this?”

There is another silence, an even longer one. And then:

“This is only a small bit of data in a very large archive I have on the subject.”

“You take data on the God?”

“I store data about the
dragon.
”

Hearing the word spoken aloud makes Paia glance anxiously over her shoulder at the doorway. “Shhh!” she gasps, like the child the word makes her feel.

“Dragon,” the computer repeats, and the word becomes the closest thing to a hiss she’s ever heard out of him. “That’s what he is, after all.”

“Look, House, it won’t do to have both of us in revolt at the same time!”

“Are you in revolt, Paia?”

“Forget I said that. Why wasn’t I told about this archive during that search I made after the God first arrived?”

“I was not aware of it myself at the time.”

“When did you become aware of it?” Paia would swear the computer was being evasive.

“During the last two months.”

“Oh. You mean it came in with the mysterious messages?”

“No. Only my awareness of it.”

“Hunh. Well, can I look at it?”

“It is probably time that you did.”

Paia worries her upper lip between her teeth. “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there, House?”

“Do you recall how to read a book, Paia?”

“A book? I guess that can’t be too hard. Why?”

“The archive I speak of is your father’s library.”

T
he water was not as deep as Erde had supposed from its thick and murky wash. When the man Stoksie had finally arranged them—and especially their packs—to his liking on the narrow raft, he sent it away from the landing and across the flooded courtyard by means of a long stout pole shoved against the invisible bottom. The two brown girls paddled along behind, each in her own little boat. Erde envied them. How many times she had watched longingly from Tor Alte’s walls while the prentice boys played at naval warfare in the village duck pond. She’d had to run away from home to get anywhere near a boat. This absurdity almost produced a giggle, but she held it back, not wanting to appear frivolous at such a serious moment.