The Book of Fire (75 page)

But as the elevator rises, the throbbing in her head worsens. It feels less like pain now than noise, like a great bass yowl that her ears can’t hear. Perhaps it’s the lift mechanism in need of oil. But Paia cannot make sense of it as machine noise. It sounds somehow more . . . organic. She is about to ask N’Doch if he hears it when the elevator hisses to a stop and the doors yawn open.

For a moment, no one moves. They are at the end of a short, sheltering tunnel that leads out into a blast of heat.
Past the opening, just visible in the gray dawn, is a broad, exposed shelf of wind-scoured rock. An old heliport, from the looks of it, which, when it was functional, was intended to blend in to the mountaintop. To the east, the sky is brightening. The full heat of day will rise with the sun and pour down on them like molten lead. Paia is sorry to leave the cool of the elevator cab. She’s sorry to be here at all, to be in such danger and causing such pain, and yet there seems a certain rightness about it. As if it really is, all of it, even the miracle of Baron Köthen, part of some Great Inevitability, this Duty Erde speaks of with such conviction. If it is, then Paia can tear herself apart about betraying the God, and still there’ll be no stopping Destiny’s forward momentum.

She finds this soothing. She wonders if Leif’s drug really has flushed itself from her system, or if gentle traces of it linger to soothe her toward this oddly tranquil state of mind. Or is it the sturdy blond man in the black T-shirt, who calms her with a nod? His acceptance of danger as an expected part of life shows in the set of his jaw, and shames her into searching out her own bravery. Her headache eases faintly. Paia returns the baron’s nod. She is ready.

N’Doch and the girl move ahead down the tunnel, with the local man they call Luther. Köthen follows. Paia falls in behind. But the Librarian is reluctant to venture out into the open at all. He lingers in the doorway, then takes a few halting steps into the dim gray light of the tunnel and stalls, shifting his ponderous weight from one foot to the other, uttering his slow monosyllables, like the moans of an anxious bear.

Erde looks back.
Oh, Gerrasch, I forgot! You haven’t been outside for ever so long, have you!

Paia waves her onward.
Please. Let me try
.

She recalls her own panic of not yet a week ago, when she left the Temple grounds. She turns back, though she is tingling with her own sort of dread, and hooks her hand around the Librarian’s soft elbow.

“Come now, don’t be frightened! A big thing like you . . .”

“Noise,” says the Librarian.

Paia starts. “Yes! Can you hear it, too?”

“The Intemperate One. He searches but cannot find.” Another complete sentence. He touches one pink finger to Paia’s temple, and the noise recedes until it is no longer painful. Then he lets her urge him down the tunnel to where Köthen waits, his mouth quirked with approval. Together, they venture out from under the rock overhang and across the shattered tarmac.

The old landing pad is a circular area still oddly smooth and clear of the brittle weeds and scrub that have taken over everywhere else. Paia guides the Librarian to the edge of the circle, where the others have stopped. She feels Köthen’s palm, gentle against the small of her back. She wants to lean into it, and into him, but he murmurs something about having a look around. N’Doch rubs one foot along the unscarred surface of the pad.

“You still got copters landing here?”

“Not fera long time,” says Luther.

“It’s just . . . it looks so clean an’ all . . .”

“Yes. It does.” The girl Erde lifts her pale face toward the light swelling in the east. Paia detects a glint of tears tracking her cheeks. But her back is straight and purposeful as she turns aside to walk the perimeter of the landing pad with slow and measured step. “A magic circle.”

N’Doch laughs, but nervously. He looks around. “You’d think there’d be, like, maintenance equipment around, or something . . .”

To Paia, schooled so long in the God’s calendar of ritual, the circle is a heavy omen. She hopes it’s a good one. Magic or not, its formal geometry lends credence and dignity to what they are about to attempt. Baron Köthen, she notes, instinctively respects the aura of ceremony that clings to this open ledge. In his alert, restless pacing about, he does not set foot past the circle’s curve. And Luther steps out of it as soon as the Four are assembled inside.

N’Doch dusts his hands together. “Well, let’s get on with it.”

Paia admires his bravado. “You’re very no-nonsense.”

“That so?” He ruffles Erde’s curly dark hair. “This one thinks I’m all fulla nonsense. Doncha, girl?”

Erde has a brave little smile that lights up her face as she flashes it, briefly, gratefully. Paia wishes she had bravado
enough of her own to put a sisterly arm around the girl and dry those tears, but it’s too hard, knowing she is the almost certain cause of them.

“Yup,” says N’Doch, filling the void. “Once you’re into something with these dragons, there ain’t no getting out of it. I’ve learned that much. Best to just get it over with, whatever it is.”

The Librarian is also walking the perimeter, hands shoved in the pockets of his blue jumpsuit, humming pensively to himself. He finishes up in the center and stands there flat-footed, his nose in the air like an animal, searching the hot dawn breeze.

The mountain shivers, as it had in the Library, the echo of some distant and continuing catastrophe. The swell of light on the eastern horizon reveals a tortured profile of roiling cloud.

“Time,” the Librarian intones. He beckons the others to him. His soft pawlike palms cradle a tiny remote keypad.

N’Doch glances behind him. “Luther? Dolph? Be cool, eh?” He repeats it in German, and Paia wonders if he really thinks Baron Köthen could be any more alert than he already is.

“Sorge dich nicht, Dochmann.”
He’s drawn the antique weapon he wears slung across his back. It glimmers icily in the dawn glow.
“Ich gebe dir Rückendeckung.”
His eyes meet Paia’s, serious and reassuring.

N’Doch grips Erde’s thin shoulder with one hand and Paia’s with the other. “Go for it.”

The Librarian taps out a sequence on the keypad, then shoves it in a pocket. As the mountain shudders again beneath them, he reaches for the two women’s hands.

. . . H
e can tell the difference right off, like he was in a soundproof room before and now someone’s blasted down the walls. Like maybe if he concentrated, he could hear every sound being made at this very moment all over the world. He could hear them all simultaneously and still know each one for what it is. What a symphony they would make!

. . . then he sees, as if standing right in front of him, his grandfather Djawara’s knowing face. So wise, so steady, so unperturbed by knowledge. No wonder the girl first thought he was her “mage.” He’s smiling, but there’s a warning in his eyes.

. . . 
What do you know, Papa Dja? Papa? Tell me . . .!

. . . She senses the dragon as an accelerating vastness but cannot truly connect with him. She sees flashes of light, blurs of motion. An ivory claw. He is not, she decides, quite in this world. He is not thinking in her direction, in her time, or even in her scale. The battle still rages, somewhere far away . . .

. . . yet an image reaches her, from . . . where? A well-loved face, every wrinkle familiar, floating in a swirl of mist. Alla, her old nursemaid and tutor, dead these three months . . .

. . . 
Alla? Alla!

. . . Alla smiles, and is gone . . .

. . . He is after the blue one, the rage howling in his blood. The smaller dragon sets the pace, but she is like sound through water, deflected, diffuse, omnipresent. The other, appearing out of nowhere, slams him off-balance each time he tries to rest. Paia tastes his fury and frustration like bile in her own throat. They dance and feint. They will not confront him. He trumpets that his strength is greater. Like two crows harrying an eagle, their only hope is to exhaust him. They lead him ever farther from the inhabited lands, to keep their battle from damaging the humans. He does not care about the humans. Soon he begins to suspect some other strategy, and decides he must have one of his own . . .

. . . but this is odd. As she watches, or seems in her mind to watch, the vision shrinks until it is a moving image framed by darkness, as on a screen. Words scroll rapidly across the bottom. She has missed the start of them . . .

. . . 
and who will be the guide’s guide in this ruined world, if not me?
 . . .

. . . 
House? Is that you? House?
 . . .

Yes! Something new in the meld. Not a voice, no, not at all, but each of them has heard it before, in what they thought were their dreams. Or in waking moments of drifting inattention, daydreams, a stirring of the subconscious. Or so they thought.

That articulate breath of wind, that sighing gust so rich with meaning. That motion of atmosphere that is more formed than wind, yet less than a voice, a word. That presence at the corner of an eye, just out of view.

N’Doch N’Djai hears it as the universal harmony.

Erde von Alte sees it as the colors of the spectrum.

Paia Alexii Cauldwell feels it as the entire range of emotion, human and beyond.

The Librarian absorbs it, collates it, interprets it. He offers what he can of the nature of the new presence: huge, discorporate, a being of vast intellect as yet unfocused, of shape as yet undetermined. More potential than actual. But the potential takes their breath away.

Ah! The magnificence! A power beyond imagining!

Toobigtooloudtoovasttoomuch! The specter of overload. The Four draw back as if burned. In that instant, a debriefing:

Clever dude, Fire. He trapped her, like a genie in a bottle, before she’d come into her powers.

But where? Where?

Nowhere.

So we gotta go nowhere to find her?

No place that we know of, he means.