The Book of Fire (41 page)

“It’s no exchange, my lord!” Paia would like to discuss his long view with him, to hear his response to the history she has just learned. But the word traitor wakes new thrills of terror. She clings to what the computer has promised: the God cannot harm her. She prays it is true. “Someone’s been leaving these notes up here. This is only the second. The first one said, ‘What price survival?’ and I didn’t understand what it meant.”

His head swivels toward her. His stillness is what’s most frightening. His eyes glow in his shadowed face. In man-form, he has never looked more dangerous, or more alluring. “And now you do?”

“I think I am beginning to.”

The God laughs softly. “And you asked me what had changed . . .”

She meets his golden gaze as boldly as she can. To her astonishment, he looks away to the window, turning his back on her. A silence hangs like a scent in the air, mysterious, inviting. And then, for no reason she can explain, Paia finds herself frightened for him, rather than of him. How could that be? “My lord Fire, is there something wrong? I mean, something else? I wish you would tell me.”

“It’s all wrong,” he growls. “All of it, all I’ve worked for. All my work through space and time.” He spreads his arms grandly, encompassing the barren moonlit hills on the other side of the thick glass. “All this. My art. The expression of my genius. It’ll all be gone if I cannot defeat them.”

Paia understands nothing of this, except that he’s finally been distracted by thoughts of his enemies, and that he’s in pain. The God is in pain. Like his rage, it pervades the room. Amazed, she sets aside the lantern and goes to him, as close as she has ever volunteered to approach him in man-form, close enough to feel the charged heat that his
manifestation generates. It prickles along her bare arms and up the middle of her back and, disturbingly, deep in her groin. She wishes she could touch him, to soothe the rage and restlessness out of him. She raises her hand as if to lay it on his chest.

His chin lifts. His elegant lip curls in a sneer. “Don’t. We’ll only both be terribly disappointed.”

Paia drops her hand but stands her ground. It’s he who chooses to move a step away from her. She studies him. The difference in him unsteadies her. “How did you come here this time without my knowing?”

His sneer sharpens to petulance. “I have a few tricks left you don’t know about. Entire lives you never even see.”

“You were . . . spying on me, my lord?”

“I must be certain of your loyalty.”

As if a keyed lock has just clicked, Paia becomes aware of an instinct she’s never noticed before: deeply buried, isolated, inaccessible until just now, like the House Comp’s time-lag programming. An instinct to read the truth in him and of him, and the truth of their bond. His wild threats against her may well be nothing but emotional manipulation. But equally, she would be unable to do anything to harm him. She can’t imagine what that could be—how could one harm a God? She only knows that she cannot do it.

Her lips are dry, and her throat even more so. She wonders how long they have stood there, side by side, unspeaking in the moonlight. When she looks up, he is looking down at her, and the distance between them is a zone of fire. She has never wanted any man as much as she wants him now. Except that he is not a man. This time it is she who backs away, one step, then two, brushing tears from her eyes.

“My lord Fire, my loyalty to you is undying. It cannot be otherwise.”

“Easier to promise than to prove.”

“A shallow response, my lord, when I am trying to tell you something serious, something I am only just beginning to understand.” Her hours in the Library have left her with half-knowledge, supposition, guesswork and conjecture, with understandings instinctive but still vague and uncertain. “I mean that I am born for this. To serve you.”

“Indeed. It pains me to hear that this is news to you.”

“I mean that it’s more than duty. It’s in my blood. I have no choice. Nor do you.”

“Be careful, my priestess . . .”

Again his stiffness frightens her, but she’s gone too far to stop now. “My lord, I mean that . . . it is decreed by history.”

“Decreed? History? How dare you!” He spins away from her, then whirls and seems to launch himself at her. Paia recoils as heat washes over her in a torrent. The hair on her outstretched arm is singed by his passage. “It’s their doing! They have put this into your head!”

“No! No! It’s not true!”

“How would you know? No matter! It’s all lies! Lies! I will not be ruled! By you or any other!”

Instantly he is before the easel, looming over a covering he cannot physically remove. The cavern shudders. The very bedrock shakes, glows hot and liquid. Magma. Paia crumples to the floor, the softening liquid rock. The computer was wrong. This is how he will destroy her. Not by his own hands but by . . . and there, he is Himself, a vast gilt-scaled monster coiled in the room with the easel at the center of his arc. His great barbed tail lashes at the wooden worktables and the piles of stacked canvases, sending brushes and palettes and mixing bowls flying, while a single ivory claw hooks the easel toward him to snag the plastic tarp and rip it free.

And then, as if this spasm of violence was no more than a fever dream, he is there in man-form again, staring at the painting, in the light of his own golden glow. The rock is rock once more, but the worktables are in scattered ruins and the treacherous landscape lies revealed to him.

In a heap on the floor, Paia weeps in grief, but also with relief.

“Get up and get over here,” he orders. He sounds disappointed.

She struggles to her feet and goes to him, stopping several long paces away. She looks at the floor, at all the mess, anywhere but at him or at the perfidious painting.

He laughs harshly. “Not so eager to stand beside me now, are you, beloved?”

“You have no cause, my lord,” she murmurs. “No cause.”

“I have no need of cause, my priestess. I am your God. It would do well for you to remember that.” He waits, glowering. “Did I hear you say, ‘yes, I will’?”

“Yes,” Paia whispers. Are hatred and love like science and magic, in the long run, only one and the same? “Yes, my lord Fire, I will remember that.”

“And any further treasonous communications you will report to me.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“I will stake your loyalty on it.”

“I understand that, my lord.”

He moves away, kicking futilely at bits of wreckage, then paces back to throw an offhand gesture at the painting. “Your work, I presume?”

She’s been waiting for this. Paia steels herself to look at the painting, then has to steel herself all over again. The canvas on the easel is like any other in the room: a painting in reds and browns and grays, a painting of dry rock and barren hills. Paia feels her self-conviction weaken and slide away like a melting ice floe. She has imagined it, then, all of it: the velvet grass, the trees, the silver ribbon of river, even the changes, the grim storm gathering above the mountains. It must be her loneliness and isolation, at last eating away at her sanity. “Yes, my lord,” she replies dully. “My work.”

“Beautiful.”

Her eyes widen at him. Perhaps he’s the one who’s crazy. Or it’s both of them, now that she thinks about it. That makes the most sense. If they are so indelibly bonded by centuries of tradition and breeding, how could one be insane and the other not? “Thank you,” she murmurs.

“Any progress on the choice of a Suitor?”

“None.”

“Get on it, then.”

It’s folly, but Paia raises her eyes to his, finding in herself a chill deep enough to match his own. “You are a monster.”

There is a flicker in his reptilian eyes, and a slight move toward turning away, until he catches himself and lets a cold smile twist his beauty into a carved and gilded mask. “Perhaps. And you are my pawn. As you said, you have no choice.”

With that, and the last word, he is gone.

Paia sinks to the floor and lets the darkness surround her for the length of time it takes to stop weeping and get her bearings. Then she raises her head and crawls to where she’s left the lantern, miraculously undamaged by the God’s fit of rage. She stands unsteadily, brings it back to the easel to look at the painting one more time. She’s glad that her reflexes have been slowed by her ordeal, which is all that prevents her from dropping the lantern.

For the painting has changed again. The valley in the mountains has reappeared, but this time the tall dark pines, the ribbon of river, the green velvet grass, are buried under a heavy weight of ice and snow.

Whoever is doing this
, Paia muses,
perhaps they’re on my side.

T
he path up the steep slope was brush-choked and narrow, and there was no longer the relief of a breeze. As she toiled upward in the crushing heat, Erde prayed that the men were right about going off with the first strangers they ran into. Particularly strangers who had threatened and tried to rob them. But N’Doch would say it was the quickest way to acquire the sort of local information they needed to find their way about this new land. Baron Köthen apparently agreed. So, until she had a better suggestion, she must follow their lead.

Climbing just ahead of her, N’Doch gave no sign of worry. He seemed, just as she had accused him of back on the raft, to be enjoying himself. He whistled now and then, one of his homemade tunes, and his step was jaunty, even as laden down as he was, with his own pack and a few of Stoksie’s. Was it simply confidence born of knowing that dragons shadowed their every upward step? Erde rubbed grit and sweat and the dust of crumbled leaves from her eyes, readjusted her own load and fixed her gaze on N’Doch’s heels, as if they could winch her up the rugged trail behind him. And she kept up her running internal monologue, reporting to the dragon what she saw ahead, imaging it all for him in detail—the stunted brush and broken trees, each cluster of ruined homesteads, every dry ravine—so that he could keep up, transporting himself and his sister to each imaged place as soon as the climbers had left it behind. Meanwhile, she again put to him the question that kept plaguing her, one she’d asked several times already since arriving in this dreadful place.

HAVE YOU THOUGHT FURTHER ON IT, DRAGON? IF THIS
LAND HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN SO RUINED, HAVE YOU AN IDEA YET WHAT SIN THESE PEOPLE COULD BE GUILTY OF, THAT GOD SHOULD PUNISH THEM SO TERRIBLY?

Again the dragon replied that he did not, that he had no understanding of such matters, but would continue to consider it deeply. It was curious, Erde thought, that Lady Water, so ready to voice her opinion on every other matter, refrained entirely from commenting on this crucial spiritual issue. Well, almost.

Maybe it’s a whole new sin. One you’ve never even thought of.

Erde could not imagine what she meant. After all, didn’t God decree what was a sin and what wasn’t?

Her pondering distracted her for a while as she plodded upward, dulled with heat. When she woke to her surroundings again, the ruined signs of habitation had given way to patches of scrub clinging to ever-steeper slopes of solid rock. The path, such as it was, switchbacked right and left several times, winding around thin-layered outcroppings that reminded Erde of tall stacks of parchment. Or it wound up among piles of dragon-sized boulders, narrowing further until Erde could barely squeeze herself and her burdens past the enclosing walls of stone. She’d been glad to leave the biting midges behind down by the landing, but now it would be reassuring to hear the song of one bird or the hum of any insect, not this unnatural stillness broken only by their own heavy breathing and the crunch of their labored steps.

They stopped for a brief rest and a drink where the terrain leveled out at the foot of another towering rock face. Erde had her pack halfway off when N’Doch stopped her.

“You put it down now, girl, it’ll be a whole lot harder to pick up again.”

She did as he advised, but reluctantly. The rock wall faced southwest, and there wasn’t an inch of shade to be had anywhere on the ledge.

“Nice view, huh?”

“Are they taking us to their town, do you think?”

“Nah, we’re way up past where the old towns were.”

“A mountain stronghold, then?”

N’Doch grinned like he did when she’d said something he called
quaint.
“Something like that.” He gestured with
his water jug at the far-off glimmer of Big Albin’s towers, then to the left where the wide stretch of water was visible over the tops of the dusty scrub. “Lot of people living down there once.”

From this distance the water was a deceptively inviting lavender, drawing warmth from the long summer twilight. The far shore was a faint line of purplish hills. Erde thought they must be a very long way away. “What happened to them? Was there a war?”

“Haven’t gotten around to asking that right out, y’know? But it don’t sound like they all got up and went somewhere better.”

“You mean, they just died?”

“Probably. Sickness, starvation, massacre. Who knows what else.”