The Book of Fire (67 page)

A
s the floor of the bright square room fell gently out from under her, Erde suffered a flash of childhood memory, of falling once when she was five into the deep end of the mill pond. It wasn’t just the sensation of sinking slowly into the unknown. There was also this strange, increasing pressure on her eardrums, in her lungs, inside her head.

Not painful, only . . . disorienting. Erde glanced around to see if anyone else seemed to notice it.

N’Doch was looking her way. She searched his round ebony face for helpful clues. Perhaps her own face showed more distress than she felt, for he winked at her and smiled encouragingly.

Part of the oddness, she knew, was being apart from the dragons, inwardly as well as outwardly. She recognized the disappointing dulling of her senses—sight, smell, and especially sound—and the loneliness of being once again remanded to the confines of her own narrow skull.

And yet . . . being entirely within herself once again made her feel peculiarly
collected
. Strong, and clear-minded. Grown up.

She had listened closely to the confrontation in the cavern. The dragons had planted all the necessary language in her head, but the day’s sequence of events had left her reeling with smoke and violence and revelation. The mystic reunion with Sir Hal’s dragon-hilted sword. Lord Fire denying his destiny. Her own Earth, and Lady Water, coming into the fullness of their powers. And all the human events as well.

But it wasn’t necessary, Erde decided, to understand all
the complex ramifications of those events, of the relationship between the town and the Tinkers, or the Tinkers and Lord Fire’s Temple, or even the Temple and the general populace. Or of the arrival of the man Leif Cauldwell. Erde would await the dragons’ reading of him. She thought of him as a sort of beautiful giant. If she were a sculptor, she would use him to model an archangel. Not fierce Michael, with the sword. Gabriel, rather, the Messenger.

All that really mattered was knowing how any of this bore on the dragons and the furthering of their Quest.

They had found Lord Fire and confronted him. As Baron Köthen had said, the battle was joined. Erde knew she should be filled with foreboding. Instead, she was exultant with purpose. Oh, the strength of purpose that swelled within her as the white room sank into unknown depths! It had been ripening, like a secret child in her womb, all along, while she was distracted with concern for the dragon’s growth and welfare. She felt as if nothing could dismay her now, not a day of confusion and bloodshed, not the piercing eye of the hell-priest, not even the hopelessness of her love for the man standing next to her.

She wondered if N’Doch felt the same.

It was not a question to be asked out loud, not in present company. And it was complicated. She wasn’t quite sure how to put it to him. So she turned it over in her mind, forming and re-forming the question, then glanced up to find him still staring at her. Only he wasn’t smiling now. He looked both amazed and horrified.

Stop thinking so loud
, his voice growled in her mind.
The answer is yes!

Omigod!
She knew she must not gape at him, and draw the others’ notice. What . . .?

A rueful chuckle tickled a corner of her mind.
Guess it finally got quiet enough in our heads for us to hear what else is going on.

Do you . . . mind?

No. Not really.
She feels his surprise.
Seems sorta . . . right. Long as I know there’s places you can’t go and things you can’t know.

Erde turned away to hide her smile from the casual onlooker.
N’Doch! Your thoughts are even more musical than your speech!

Oh, yeah?

Won’t they be pleased!

The dragons? You mean, ’cause we finally learned something on our own?

But we didn’t! They taught us. We just weren’t aware of it at the time.

I suppose.

But it wasn’t quite like talking with the dragons. This entire communication had been instantaneous, contained in the few seconds it took Stoksie across from her to raise his hand and scratch his head. Erde had always assumed that the dragons slowed down their thoughts to suit the more sluggish pace of human minds. What if it was the other way around?

She considered how the tiny rapid heartbeat of a bird in hand made one’s own human pulse seem inexorable and slow. Was it so with tiny humans and their dragons?

Hey, girl . . . Erde . . . lemme ask you something. I got a thought here.

She looked his way. He was studying the limp bundle in the archangel’s arms.
The priestess? What about her?

Fire’s dragon guide, I’m betting. Whadda you think?

Oh. Oh, my. Well . . . perhaps so.

When she wakes up, maybe we should ask her.

Like . . . this?

N’Doch laughed, and Luther glanced over curiously. N’Doch shook his head. “Nothin’, man, nothin’. Just a thought.”

But in her head, he said,
Well, yeah! If she answers, we’ll know we’re right.

P
aia stirs. How curious. What has happened to her ability to tell dream from reality, or waking from sleep? Too much of that unaccustomed dreaming. She thought she’d waked cradled in Luco’s arms, not a terrible place to be. Now she feels a subtle floating sensation that calls up memories of the Citadel’s elevators. Either she’s still dreaming or . . . she drifts away, then back, suddenly awash with relief and an explanation. Luco has brought her home, through some miraculously secret back entrance!

But her head is clearing, and logic intervenes. The Citadel is four hard days’ travel away. Even at the speed of those mad cart animals, such a distance could not be accomplished . . . unless they’ve been traveling in one big circle since they left the Citadel. But Luco said his locator was out of range. She must be dreaming. Where else could there be a working elevator? Paia ponders this muzzily as the cab continues to drop.

Further proof of the dream: she can’t seem to move or talk. Still wrapped in this tenacious drowsiness. It smoothes out any impulse to exert brain or muscle. She’s paralyzed with lassitude. Well, no worry. The God will show up soon, as he does in all of her dreams. So what if he’ll be furious.

Over the background hum of the elevator comes a soft babble of voices. In her dream, even though the words sound unfamiliar, Paia seems to understand them. One man is trying to explain to another man what an elevator is. She summons the effort to open her eyes. The first face she sees tells her she’s dreaming for sure. It’s the man with the sword, the man from her dreams, who stood in the crowd and stared at her as if he owned her. Now she begins to
question that sighting. The rocking sedan chair, the soporific heat . . . had she dozed off, and dreamed in daylight? But here he is again. He’s still staring at her. She should be insulted by his boldness, then and now. Instead, Paia welcomes it. She’s never seen a more beautiful man.

There are others in this dream, as well: a tall skinny youth who looks like he’s of pure African blood. Paia recalls colleagues of her father’s who resembled him. Perhaps this dream figment is the embodiment of her survivor’s guilt. She has suffered it since childhood, since the floods and epidemics that wiped out most of the African continent.

The next figment is a younger boy, no, it’s a girl dressed as a boy. A pretty girl, but with little sense of herself. Perhaps she is the beautiful man’s child, though they look nothing alike except for the lightness of their complexions. For some reason, Paia thinks of the chambermaid, and what her inventive hands could do with this girl, with her dark curly hair and her impossibly pale skin. Then there are two older men as well, smaller, darker than herself but clearly of local stock, except for their strange accents and their very independent manner. Why would she be dreaming these people? No matter. This dream has a mind of its own.

She is about to sneak another look at the man with the sword when the elevator breathes to a stop and the door lifts. A current of blessedly cool air swirls in and around her as she rests in Luco’s strong arms. Paia hears the quiet sigh of climate control, and has another seizure of being sure she’s back at the Citadel. Even dreaming, she’s glad of the long sleeves and the long soft pants she’s wearing. It’s cold down here.

The light outside the door is dimmer than inside. The elevator seems to pour light like a liquid into the darkened corridor. When Paia’s dream characters step out, the door closes behind them and there is just enough light in the corridor to see the way, as if half the recessed ceiling fixtures are burned out and the rest set to low power. But it’s enough light to see all the books, piles and piles of them, real books as well as the electronic kind. Not carefully shelved and catalogued like her father’s, but scattered about, right out in the open. Where are the servants, to
clean the place up? There are stacks of papers and rows of storage cabinets lining the hallway left and right. They narrow it to a single lane or sometimes none, where a pile has been pushed aside into the path or simply tumbled down like a paper landslide.

The taller of the older men leads them through the mess. They pass intersections with other disordered, obstructed corridors, and many half-open doors that reveal dimly lit rooms stocked with more books, more shelving, and storage racks.

“It’s a library,” Paia says finally, and in the dream, everyone turns and looks at her. She has startled them. “It’s even bigger than my father’s.”

Luco stops, shifting her in his arms. “You’re awake.”

“I am?” Paia realizes he’s right. She’s not even sure when the transition happened between the dream and reality. “I’m not dreaming? I thought I was dreaming.”

Luco sets her down gently. “Can you walk?”

She gets her balance, but her eyes will not focus. “Where am I?”

He supports her elbow, urging her forward. “Wait.”

Some of the drowsiness returns and it’s all she can do to walk. “I didn’t know,” she mumbles, “how exhausted I was.”

“Of course not,” Luco murmurs. “We’re almost there, and then you can rest. Just like I promised.”

N
’Doch doesn’t mention how he sees the drug, whatever it was, working its way out of the priestess’ limbs. Either it was a real clever one or she’s completely drug innocent. She doesn’t seem to know she’s been doped. He wonders if the Tinkers are hip to it. They must be. This whole weird day has all the marks of a carefully planned event. He’s picked up a little of the why or what for, so he decides to let the rest of it ride for now. There’s a lot that’s gotta smell just as fishy about him and Köthen and the girl, but the Tinkers have gone with their instincts, kept the questions to a minimum. N’Doch figures he owes them the same.

But, damn, it’s a pisser not to be able to ask what the hell this place is, so high tech and still in working order. Is there a whole hidden infrastructure nobody’s told him about, or just this one functioning artifact? Whatever, it’s a major relief. The cooled air caresses him like a woman’s hands. Now if he can just find a shower, or even a bath. There’s got to be running water down here somewhere. The priestess probably has the library part right, but a library for what, buried so deep in the ground like this? A seriously hardened burrow for some big-deal government installation? It can’t be a multinat hideout. The bizmen would never let it get into this much of a mess.