STILL WHAT?
Is there something you haven’t told us?
“You humans,” Fire sneers. “Wave a few big words around, like Duty or Destiny, and you come running like sheep. You lose all common sense.”
“What’s sensible by your definition?” N’Doch retorts. “Murder and intimidation? Despotism?”
“Survival is sensible.” Fire stops by the window, gazing outward again. “It’s the only thing that does make sense.”
Erde would have a heroic comeback for that remark, but N’Doch can’t make his mouth say the words.
“But you’re tired of mere survival, aren’t you?” Paia asks suddenly. “And of the price you have to pay for it.”
Fire laughs. “Price? What price? I’ve had everything I want.”
“Except me.”
A warning rises in N’Doch’s throat, hovering stillborn. What is she up to? She moves toward the Fire-breather, her gait slow and sensual. She’s become the seductress. Is it to lure him into divulging information, or because she can’t help herself? N’Doch thinks this is a very dangerous game to be playing here and now. He considers whether to intervene. Fire is still turned away at the window, but he senses Paia’s approach and turns to meet her just as she stops in front of him. They stare at each other, and Paia crosses her arms beneath her breasts so that they are presented to him roundly, a sweet and teasing gift.
“Isn’t that so, my lord?”
“Yes, beloved. Except you.” Fire looks down at her. With a faint but knowing smile, he lifts one gilt-scaled hand and places it gently against her cheek. “Until now.”
Paia gasps and recoils, her own hand flying to her face. “How did you . . .!”
Fire says nothing. He holds himself utterly still, his hand poised in the air where her cheek has been. By the bar, the others start up on instant alert.
“What’d he do?” demands N’Doch.
“He . . . touched me.”
It takes him a moment, then he gets it. “You mean, actually touched?”
The bartender calmly lays aside his towel.
Paia stares at Fire. “How did you do that?”
“Because you wanted me to.” Fire lets his hand drop slowly. “You did want it, do want it, don’t you, beloved? You always have before.”
“No!” Paia steps back, but wavers in mid-stride and stalls in confusion.
“Why are you frightened? You wish to speak of Destiny? Then admit we are bound by it. You and I. I only want what’s best for us. All I’ve done has been for your sake.” Fire holds out both hands to her, like a father to a child. “See? Let me show you.”
Paia’s body sways toward him, though her feet do not move.
“Come, a joining of hands at least. You owe me that much, after all these years.”
Paia shakes her head, but her hand floats toward his.
“Don’t do it, girl!” N’Doch is only guessing that touching will give the dragon power over her. But he can’t bear the longing in her eyes, and in Fire’s. They are a matched set of long-frustrated passion. Köthen should never have let this woman out of his sight. But, then, he didn’t. He wouldn’t have.
It’s all my fault, even if it was by accident.
THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS.
As Paia’s hand lifts to meet Fire’s, the bartender vaults up and over the bar. Chairs and tables whirl aside. In a dizzying blur and sprint, Sedou is a large black mountain between the Fire-breather and his guide.
“No!” He shoves Paia behind him. “You shall not take her from here!”
“You!” Fire’s yearning gaze cracks into a mask of fury and hatred. His outstretched hand lashes back, then forward, his gilt nails lengthening into claws. Sedou grabs that wrist, and then the other, as it swings up to join the attack. Fire snarls, held by both arms. He doesn’t struggle, but the tang of hot metal invades the rich coffee aroma of the café.
“Not too practiced at the hand-to-hand stuff yet, brother?” Sedou grins. “It’s a man-thing, you know? Yet I congratulate you. This new manifesting must be exhausting. Careful, or you’ll wear yourself out utterly.”
“You cannot prevent her if she wishes to go!”
“If she wishes, and only if. Or else . . .”
Fire’s snarl deepens. “I am as safe here from you as you are from me.”
“True enough.” Sedou releases him abruptly and steps back. “So, brother. Let’s talk instead of fight.”
“There is nothing to talk about.”
“Oh, but there is.” Sedou reaches behind him to draw two chairs out from the nearest table. “Shall we sit down? You can sit, right? A chair is a marvelous mechanism. You should try it.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
N’Doch slides over to urge Paia away to the rear of the café. She shakes him off silently.
Sedou sits, kicking the second chair closer to Fire. “For instance, let’s discuss these lies you accuse me of, or the information you claim your brother Earth and I are withholding.”
Fire folds his arms across his broad red chest. “So confident of human loyalty? Very rash. It’s not too late, you know, for them to see the wisdom of my way.”
“Then tell us what your way is, as you see it.”
“You know what it is.”
“No. Truly. Tell me. It’s what I came to hear.”
Fire frowns, furious to have been trapped into any sort of discussion at all. “I have said it plainly enough: survival.”
Sedou nods, easing back in his chair. “All right. None of us would take issue with that.”
“Oh, come now.”
“What? Why would we?”
Fire looks away contemptuously.
“Well, then I will amend that slightly. Given that anything worth doing inevitably bears some risk, I’ll say we seek survival as well as the accomplishment of our Purpose. Which is yours also, since you are one of us. So, explain it to me again. Why have you set yourself against us?”
“Such endearing earnestness!” Fire bends a satirically pleading gaze toward Paia. “Release me, my priestess, I beg you. Don’t ask me to sit still for this mawkish spectacle!”
“You are free to go any time, my lord, but without me.”
“Why so impatient?” Sedou asks.
Fire flings both fists into the air. “Because this is so boring!” He paces away from the window, then stops, arms and fingers spread. “Do you really suppose that because Paia is here, I’ll be a party to your lies and deceptions simply to spare her? Well, you suppose wrong! If I’m tired of anything, I’m tired of the hypocrisy that lurks at the heart of your so-called Quest! It’s time she knew the truth. It’s time they all knew!”
“Lies, brother? Deceptions? A dragon cannot lie.”
“Ah, granted, a dragon cannot lie. But we can manipulate the truth to the same effect.”
“I assume you are speaking from personal experience,” retorts Sedou sharply.
“What truth?” asks Paia, and N’Doch is grateful. He senses a drawn-out dragon debate in the offing, and he’d rather they just got on with business. “What truth?” she asks again. “If I should know it, tell me.”
Fire gives her a long, tragic look over his shoulder. N’Doch can’t decide if it reflects the Fire-breather’s true mood or the aura of high drama he prefers to surround himself with. “If I’d thought you should know it, beloved, I’d have told you long ago.”
Whatever its intent, this performance brings Sedou angrily to his feet. “Oh, please! Has all this sabotage and destruction been merely for your own amusement, brother? You have a big secret, but you can’t tell anyone what it is? It’s a childish game, and a waste of your talents! I believe there is no secret at all!”
Fire smirks. “If it were our poor innocent brother Earth saying this to me, I could almost believe he doesn’t know. But you? The clever, meddling one? No wonder you’re so at ease in man-form. You should have been created human to begin with.”
“Enough!” bellows Sed
ou. “What is it you have to tell us?”
“Whoa. Easy, bro,” chides N’Doch. He sees his dragon/brother’s shape wavering in the heat of rage. If both dragons take their own form in this confined space, the humans will be done for. “He’s the one supposed to be the hothead, not you.”
Sedou’s eyes show green and golden against his ebony skin. He collects himself and subsides, but not before kicking one of the café chairs the full width of the room, sending it smashing against the wall. As the shattered pieces rattle across the tiles, N’Doch laughs softly, his heart aching. So much, so very much like his real brother.
In the impasse that follows, Djawara breaks his long silence and steps forward, hands clasped peaceably at his waist. “May I make a suggestion?”
Fire rolls his eyes. Sedou grunts and throws himself into the nearest chair.
“Go for it, Papa,” says N’Doch, fed up with both dragons now.
“I propose that there is no deception. I propose that you both believe the truth of what you’re saying.”
“Huh,” says Sedou sulkily.
Fire sighs theatrically, but his gaze drifts back to the big man slouched in a chair much too small for him. His stillness expresses his doubt better than any words could, or his constant avid reckoning of whether what he has to say will win him new friends or further enemies. “Proof, old man?”
“A dragon cannot lie.”
“I told you what . . .”
“Listen to him, my lord,” puts in Paia. “I beg you.”
Fire laughs soundlessly. “Ah, beloved. You hope for me to redeem myself with reasonableness? Me?”
“In my eyes, if in no one else’s.”
“Then what choice have I?” He flashes her a sultry, resentful grin. “Let me then entertain the possibility that I silenced my sister Air before she was able to pass her knowledge on to my other siblings.” He stalks to Sedou’s table, pulls up a chair, and seats himself with elaborate formality. He rests his chin on steepled fingers, arch and condescending, and faces his fellow dragon. “Look into my eyes and swear you do not know.”
“Know what?” Sedou growls.
“If you and our brother are truly ignorant of the final Destiny laid out for us, then your mindless pursuit of it is all the more tragic. But I suppose I must actually consider this possibility.”
Sedou meets Fire’s calculating regard. “Consider it well and quickly! Tell me what you know!”
Again, Fire glances back at Paia. Her return gaze is fervent and hopeful, so bright that even the Fire-breather seems to shrink from its glare. Guilt, ventures N’Doch. Maybe even a trace of remorse?
Nah, can’t be. Remember who we’re dealing with here.
Fire sits back and rakes his gilded nails through his hair, which does nothing to tame its mobile energy. “Then I will tell you, because I must. Because my priestess requires me to.” He looks nervous and intent, like a performer about to go on stage. His big moment, N’Doch realizes. The unloading of his secret weapon, his last hope to win Paia back to him, and perhaps even a sibling to his cause. “But don’t hold me responsible for the results. Because I warn you, you with such faith in the rightness of Destiny . . . my news will destroy that faith, as it did mine.”
In the waiting silence, N’Doch finally understands why the Fire dude has been so civilized, so tractable. Not just to please Paia, his priestess, though obviously that’s what he’d like her to think. No, the guy thinks he’s won, and he’s just having fun jerking our chains.
Must be one hell of a piece of news he’s about to lay on us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Hard thinking has always made him ravenous.
The Librarian piles rye bread and cheese, cold chicken and tomatoes and lettuce beside his keypad, and uses an obsolete mouse pad as a cutting board. Rye bread with caraway. And mustard. What a luxury! He lets himself concentrate entirely on the elaborate architecture of the sandwich, offering his brain a brief rest. But only the conscious part accepts the holiday. While he’s slicing his precarious tower neatly in half, then in quarters, his mental subroutines are clipping away a meter per millisecond. Per nanosecond, he amends, filling his mouth with sensual distraction.
Nanotech. He still can’t quite believe it. A whole city of it. Mind-boggling. But he figures it could work.
For instance: he’s connected to the dragon in the way of dragon guides, even if the lines of communication are interrupted, and function randomly at best. So, sporadically, his memories are open to her. Assuming she has control of the city’s infinite population of submicroscopic mechanisms—a big assumption, but it makes sense—and she’s instructing them to re-create selected portions of his past in dimensional replicas.
How she does it is interesting enough, but the real question is, why? Why not just speak to him directly? The Librarian takes another huge bite of his sandwich. He’s gone over this territory a million times. She doesn’t because she can’t. He has to be satisfied with a half-baked answer. But building memories around him is apparently something she can do. So maybe she’s doing it in order to attract his attention. She’s trying to communicate, and he should see each of these apparitions from the past as a sort of coded message. The dragon is telling him something general about the past, or about a specific aspect of his past . . . or maybe it’s something about the nanomechs that can so easily re-create it.
The Librarian lets himself focus for a moment on the pure pleasure of Swiss cheese. Like the beer, it’s something he hasn’t tasted in a very long time. A thing of the past in 2213. And the dragon has created it for him. So maybe it is the past she wants to talk about. But what about it? The nanomechs seem like a better bet. And at least he has an idea of how to proceed with them. He can look at their programming.
He sets the last quarter of his sandwich aside. Brushing crumbs from the desk and then his chin, he centers the keypad in front of him. Before he sets to work, he glances over at the old TV sitting at the edge of the darkness. The Grand Stair to the Citadel is as hard and bright on the screen as the Sahara at noon, and still just as empty, except for the two Temple guardsmen, who appear to be sleeping. Or perhaps they are just too heat dazed to move. The Librarian offers them his sympathy, then turns back to his search and forgets about them entirely.
It doesn’t take him long to discover anomalies in the nanomech programming, the same sort he’d seen with the larger devices like the street-cleaning machines. Are they accidental corruptions, or intentional interpolations? The Librarian reverse engineers several of the modified nanomechs, and decides that their functions have been purposely altered, and then linked, so that they form a sort of broadband signaling device. Very broadband. He can’t get the signal to play over his human-ear-specific speakers. But as soon as he activates the device, the signal is there, shouting in his head. And not just noise this time, but articulate with meaning.
AWAKE! COME! YOU ARE NEEDED!
The voice of the Summoner. The Librarian has been hearing this call all his lives, ever since . . . well, it began by the lake, didn’t it, when the elder knight arrived with his squire in tow. Only the squire was a girl, disguised and on the run. And if that wasn’t interesting enough, she traveled with a dragon. The knight, an old lore-hound, announced it proudly: a dragon! As if he was responsible.
The Librarian chuckles. Good old Hal, doing his preordained duty by jump-starting the Quest, considering it a minor part to play and consequently feeling sidelined, never realizing how crucial he’d been. For on that very day, the Librarian—or the creature he’d been then—took the young girl’s hands in his own and saw Destiny written across her palms. Hers, yes, but his own as well.
The girl’s dragon was following a mysterious inner “summons.” The Librarian—not a librarian then, just Gerrasch, half man, half beast—stared into her eyes and heard the Call himself for the first time, though it was several lives before he understood that it summoned him as well.
The Librarian blinks. He’s been dragged i
nto memory again, as irresistibly as if with a block and tackle. Some important message waits, abandoned in the past. Some understanding he should have recognized then and carried with him. What? What?
There were questions asked that day. He recalls that much. What were they? Hal paid him good king’s silver for the answers. The Librarian retrieves the abandoned quarter of his sandwich and munches it pensively, searching for the mnemonic hook that will haul that memory out of the shadow of a millennium.
Bread and cheese. Hal had brought some of that as well.
The answers come to him stripped of their questions. They flare into his brain like bright meteors, inexplicable but sure.
The first answer: The Purpose is to fix what’s broken.
Well, that’s clear enough. The question was: What is the purpose of the Quest? And what’s broken is obviously the Earth. The whole ecosystem is on the verge of collapse. But was it then? Who in 913 had any inkling of the horrors to come? The Summoner must have known, and therefore, the purpose of the urgent Call that woke the dragons.
The second answer: The Summoner is not here.
No, not there in 913. Because the Summoner was here, in . . . wherever here is. The Librarian has long assumed that the Summoner is Air, his dragon, but he’d never guessed the mechanism. A million nanotech voices calling down the centuries.
The third answer, for three was all he’d had time for, with the girl’s pursuers fast approaching: Ask them about the City.
He knows he meant the women of Deep Moor, but what was the question? Does it even matter?
For here we are in it, millennia later. The long-ago Gerrasch saw the City that day, this city, in the girl’s frightened eyes. Which explains the déjà-vu he was assailed with the moment he stepped through the portal. The Librarian rubs his forehead vigorously. He needs his brain to work faster, deeper.
The Purpose is to fix what’s broken.
The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet Page 24
