The Book of Water (30 page)

And now she’s saying in her regular “Glory” voice, “Bring your food and drink, children. We’ll go in here where we can be comfortable.” A deep archway in the far wall divides the big room from a smaller alcove where there are soft couches, big enough for sleeping or making love, and low tables and some kind of music N’Doch can’t quite make out. He guesses this little area doesn’t have the hidden mikes and cameras she seems to be worried about. It looks comfy and all, but when they’re all there and setting down their plates and glasses, and N’Doch is getting ready to really tuck into his food, Lealé eases past, touching each one of them on the shoulder. When she has their attention, she mouths silently, “This way.”

She moves back to the archway, leaning one hand against the wall beside it, then makes an abrupt turn to the left and vanishes.

The girl and the kid follow right her after like it was nothing. N’Doch swallows, but knowing what he does about surveillance sensors, he understands he better not react visibly to what he’s seeing. And he hates the idea of leaving all this good food behind. So he palms an orange off his plate and assumes an easy slouching pace across the alcove until he’s under the arch and able to see the slim opening where the paneled thickness of the arch has swung noiselessly aside. A dark narrow passage yawns. A hand, Lealé’s, reaches out and snatches him inside.

W
aiting in the dark for N’Doch to join them, Erde squeezed Wasser’s hand. It was chill, she noted, and the palm slightly damp, but what else would one expect from a dragon named Water? She was delighted by this new turn of events: the sudden shifting of identities, the magical appearance of a secret passage. Wonderful omens, each of them. Signs that the Quest was finally on its way again.

“Is this what was ‘wrong’?” she whispered eagerly to Wasser. “Things not being what they seem to be?”

“No.” The boy/dragon shivered. “Nothing ever is.”

“True enough. But some things are even less what they seem . . . or more. Oh, I don’t know. Anyhow, have you any better idea what it is, what you’re afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid. Who said I was afraid? I’m . . . horrified.”

Erde silently considered this mysterious difference.

“Same body language, I guess, different emotion.”

“Oh. Horrified by what?”

Wasser gave an impatient snort. “By the wrongness, of course.” Erde could hear him scuffing his feet in the darkness. “Maybe the right word is ‘outraged,’” he concluded.

“Hurry now, children. It won’t be long before they notice. Up ahead is a place we can talk.”

With N’Doch in tow, Lealé propelled them forward. The passage was pitch-black and wide enough for only one body at a time. Erde was forced to lead the way with a hand braced against each enclosing wall. But now she noticed something ominous. Reaching behind her, she drew Wasser
close to murmur in his ear. “It’s gone awfully quiet in my head all of a sudden.”

“Yes. I felt it as we stepped through the door. Wherever this place is, it isn’t here.”

As little sense as that made, she knew exactly what he meant. “He’ll be worried,” she whispered.

“He’ll be frantic.”

“You’re doing very well translating on your own now.”

“Yes.” Erde could hear the boy/dragon grin. “I am, amn’t I.”

“Aren’t.”

“I knew that.”

“Did you really know we were coming?” asked N’Doch behind them.

“Wait,” Lealé replied. “Until we get there.”

“We’re between the walls, huh?” he marveled.

“Yes,” Lealé murmured, but Erde thought her tone a bit doubtful.

“Your surveillance rig isn’t high-tech enough to reach inside the walls?”

“Not this wall.”

“Cool. Lead shielding, eh?”

“Not exactly.”

Erde took in their conversation with half an ear, partly because she was worried about Earth, now totally isolated in his underground burrow, and partly because Wasser’s German had only recently been lifted from her own head. It did not include words for much of what they were discussing. More important, she was distracted by a peculiar but somehow familiar sensation. Feeling her way along this lightless passage was not exactly the same, but certainly reminded her of how it felt when Earth transported her someplace. The same feeling of “otherness.” A kind of deafness within an echo, a tingling kind of numbness. Only, instead of being instantaneous and then over, before you were really aware of it, the sensation went on and on like a dull ache, not rising or falling in intensity.

“Hsst!” Wasser jogged her arm.

A square of green light shone ahead—how could she not have seen it before?—an enlarging square rather like an open window. She seemed to be moving toward it, but at an oddly unpredictable rate. For a while, it would grow
steadily, then it would stay the same for what seemed like minutes, though Erde knew she had not slowed her pace. Occasionally she would glance behind her, unthinking, to check on the others even though it was too dark to see anything. When she looked ahead again, the square would have suddenly enlarged, and she would be sure she was almost on top of it, ready to burst through into whatever mystery lay beyond.

“You could at least tell us where you’re taking us,” N’Doch muttered.

“To the only safe place. Everywhere else, I am watched. It’s the price of fame. But this place no one knows about except . . .” Her voice faded, then as quickly recovered. “I call it my ‘Dream Haven.’”

“Say it again?”

“It’s where the Dreams come to me.”

“Hunh. Seems like everyone’s having dreams lately.”

Erde knew Lealé had stopped short when she heard N’Doch’s soft explosion of breath as he ran into her.

“You’re not the Dreamer, surely,” Lealé said.

“Sure, I have dreams, I guess. Doesn’t everybody?”

“I mean the dreams you remarked upon.”

N’Doch was silent a moment. Erde tried to will him to keep his silence, tried to nudge Wasser to still him before he said too much. “No,” he admitted finally, “that would be her, I guess. Mine are pretty ordinary. But she’s been having some real humdingers.”

“Yes,” Lealé replied slowly. Erde could almost feel the woman’s eyes boring into her through the darkness. “Yes, I know. And I am meant to warn her against them. I see that now.”

“So you did know we were coming.”

“I must tell her not to listen to them. Except . . .” She broke off, as if changing her mind or suddenly losing her train of thought.

“Don’t think that’s gonna be necessary,” N’Doch went on, oblivious. “She’s already . . .”

“Wasser,” Erde murmured, “Ask her if she saw us in her dreams.”

But N’Doch’s ears were keen. “Hey, girl, how ’bout me? I can do that now, remember, just as good as him.”

Erde doubted it, but she could see how much it meant
to him, so much that he’d forgotten (or conveniently ignored) the fact that it was thanks to Wasser that the translations entered his head in the first place. He didn’t even seem to have noticed that there was currently one less link in their communications chain.

“Then you must do it,” she said to him. “But don’t tell her about my dreams, ask her about hers. Did they tell her about us? What did they say? Why does she need to warn me? Ask her if . . .”

“Whoa, slow down, girl. I’ll get to it.”

His insistence on always appearing casual was, Erde thought, his most irritating characteristic. After all, some things were more important than others. Some things were worth getting excited about. But N’Doch had to behave as if nothing in the world mattered at all.

“So that’s how you knew we were coming, Sister Lealé, from your dreams?”

But Lealé did not answer, and just then the passage widened and they were in a tiny empty room, lit only by the watery light from a wide doorway directly in front of them. This was the elusive green square that had led Erde through the darkness. It looked out on a bright grove of slender, smooth-trunked trees. Three broad steps of translucent stone led down to a flawless lawn that looked but did not smell like it had been fresh-cut minutes ago with a very sharp scythe. And there was something odd about the trees. A prickle up her spine made Erde halt just inside the opening. The others gathered beside her.

N’Doch spoke first. “So, are we there?”

“Yes,” Lealé murmured. “This is my Dream Haven.”

“Pretty weird lookin’ trees out there.”

“They’re all the same,” Wasser supplied.

“Yes,” said Erde. “How remarkable. Every one of them, exactly alike.”

“Cloned, must be,” N’Doch remarked. “This is kinda like your little park out back, ’cept those trees are, y’know, normal.”

“I see you’ve been exploring already.” In a brief flash of humor, Lealé deftly parodied his answering shrug, then turned serious again. “I think it is sort of my little park out
back, but whenever I go in there, I never end up here. It’s very confusing.”

“What happens when you go out there from here?”

“I never do.”

“There’s someone out there,” Wasser said quietly.

“Oh, no, dear,” Lealé assured him.

“There is.”

N’Doch eased forward. “Let’s go find out.”

Lealé grabbed his arm. “No! You can’t!” When he looked back at her in surprise, she let go but her eyes begged him. “Really. I never go out there. He wouldn’t like it.”

“He?” N’Doch gave her a sly look. “Aahh. The guy down the hall.”

Lealé laughed. “Oh, no. Not him.” Then she sobered and fell silent. Her moods were so mercurial that Erde was unable to make sense of them. The pale green light from the grove flowed over her anxious face as if it had substance, like smoke or water.
This is how it would feel
, Erde mused,
if you could live at the bottom of a clear lake
. She noticed how oddly steady the light was, as if every branch and leaf in the entire grove was utterly motionless. As still as the grave, she found herself thinking, then made herself stop, because of the chill it gave her. She remembered certain spring mornings at Tor Alte when the castle on its barren crag was wrapped in fog, and the sunlight seemed to come not from above, but from all around, as if trees and rocks, everything, even the fog itself, were aglow.
This place
, she decided,
is not of this world
.

“Then who is it you’re so worried about?” N’Doch prodded.

“When I do my readings,” Lealé offered finally. “I call him my spirit guide. My clients prefer to be able to envision their contact with the Infinite. Actually, I don’t know what he is. I just know when he’s here.”

“Here? You meet him here?”

“He speaks to me here.”

“Only here?”

“Yes. He calls me and I come.”

Erde’s ears pricked up at her use of the word “call” but N’Doch only nodded.

“Seems obvious to me—it’s him out there, whoever he is.”

Lealé shook her head. “He doesn’t speak to me from out there. He’s . . . somewhere else.”

Watching the grove, Erde saw a flicker of movement. “Wait!”

Lealé started. “What? What is it, dear?”

Erde pointed, then let her hand fall. “No, it’s gone.”

N’Doch shifted his weight onto the first of the white stone steps. “You saw something?”

“It’s nothing. That’s how it always is,” Lealé said. “Especially lately. I’m sure I’m seeing something, but he always tells me to pay no attention, and there’s never anything out there really.”

But Erde knew she’d seen something. “Did you see it, Wasser?”

The boy/dragon shuddered. “I felt it. We’re very near now. . . .”

“Near to what?”

“Knowledge.”

“I tell you, it’s nothing,” Lealé insisted.

“How do you know,” countered N’Doch, “if you never go out there and look?”

“Please. Don’t.”

The fear that had been building in Lealé’s voice finally drew Erde’s attention away from the grove. Looking back into the darkness, she noticed that it was no longer so dark, and that the room was a little larger than she’d thought. She could see the walls now, paneled wood below and an intricately repeating pattern of some kind above, like a tapestry, only smoother and more abstract. It didn’t seem to have any particular color. It just reflected the watery green glow pouring in from the grove.

“He doesn’t want me to go there,” Lealé continued. “He’s been very clear on that score. And he’s . . . not very pleasant when he’s crossed.”

N’Doch made a broad show of looking around. “I don’t see any gate here, no bars or signs or nothing.”

“I know. It’s . . . like a test. He asks very little of me, but if I disobey him, he won’t send the Dreams to me.”

He folded his arms. Erde could see stubbornness rising in him like sap. “Okay, but he’s not sending me any gigabillion-dollar
dream scam, right? So you just stay put like you’re supposed to, and I’ll go have a look around.”

Lealé grabbed him again, and a flare of the Mahatma’s fire burned in her gaze. “Listen, it’s you who’ve shown up like beggars on my doorstep! I don’t even know who you are! Now, I’ve been generous because you invoked the name of my friend, but I’ll not have you calling my Dreams a scam! My Dreams are true ones!”