The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Those few words could be said to describe the entire arc of his life, of all his lives. It’s always been his purpose, and there’s always something broken: a bird’s wing, a man’s spirit, an entire ecosystem. Or this city, for instance. He thinks of the crippled street-cleaning machines, and the mangled lines of code he’d repaired to let N’Doch’s song take flight. So much of everything now is broken.

  But why is the dragon directing his thoughts backward? What was there to fix in 913, except the hell-priest’s wagon? Now, at least, there is no shortage of candidates.

  The Librarian’s strong thumbs are wearing bruises into the soft skin of his temples. He shifts to massaging his head, his fingers twisting in the salt-and-pepper thatch, as thick as an animal pelt. There’s some connection he’s not making, he’s sure of it. Something so obvious that any child could see it, but not a full grown, super-educated, overcomplicated man. It’s the reason the dragon has brought him here. Something he’s meant to fix, might actually be able to fix, unlike the sad old broken planet. That’s beyond his abilities. She’s the one who’s supposed to make that happen, but she’s . . .

  The Librarian goes still.

  That’s it. Of course. It’s the dragon herself that’s broken.

  He has, since he was aware of her, conceived of Air as a storybook sort of prisoner: shut away, gagged and bound in some dank dungeon, perhaps physically, perhaps by magic. Whatever the mechanism, she’s been denied the normal means of communication, has only occasionally been able to slip a message past the barricades. But her messages, when they arrive, are never whole and coherent. And besides, what are the normal means to a dragon? Now that the Librarian has met a few more of them, he realizes what an imperfect scenario he’d constructed. Just the sort of notion born of living with your nose stuck to a computer screen. Even if forcibly restrained, a dragon should be able to speak to her guide through barriers of any sort. The breakdown must be within.

  What sort of breakdown? Is she mute, as Erde was when he first met her? That would make little difference to a supposedly telepathic dragon. Besides, dragons are not equipped for human speech, unless they’re in man-form.

  The Librarian releases his aching scalp. He swings up and out of his chair to pace, and sees that the confining details of his office in the Refuge have vanished. Only his console remains, an island in the void, its brushed chrome gleaming, its idiot lights shining like the eyes of forest creatures in the night.

  He has to fix his dragon? Not just locate, free her, and do her bidding, but fix her?

  How? How? How? His hands stray to his hair again. He has to repair her like some sort of machine? He’s never felt more helpless.

  Machine? Nanomech?

  He has an unwelcome vision of the dragon as a benign version of the machina rex that chased him into this memory-haunted darkness. He sees her as a collection of parts spread out on the machinist’s workbench, or as countless invisible specks of nanomech. A hateful notion. It makes the Librarian abruptly nauseous, which he recognizes as panic. Because if any of this is true, there’ll be no eureka, no golden breakthrough of mutual recognition as he bursts through the walls of her prison to find her whole, waiting and material, ready to save the world. The Librarian swallows convulsively, banishing his panic to gnaw invisibly at his gut. Well, it was a silly romantic notion anyway.

  Sudden peripheral motion distracts him. The old TV still lurks at the edge of the circle of light, its bright screen hovering like a window in the darkness. The somnolent view of the Grand Stair has erupted with frenzied preparations. Soldiers are racing to the parapet, taking up battle stations.

  “Not now! Not now!” the Librarian pleads. He can’t lose the many threads of his elusive and still-developing epiphany. But he throws a quick glance at the screen anyway. He has to. Leif Cauldwell’s army has reached the Citadel. The security camera shows the view down the long final flight of steps from the midway landing to the ramshackle buildings clustered at the bottom. The long dry road is a pale scar down the middle of the village and out across the valley. But past the edge of the village, details blur with distance and heat shimmer. If he had House on-line, the Librarian could ask for a satellite close-up, maybe even sound. He gets up and shuffles nearer to the screen, but he can only squint and guess at how much of that broad dust cloud inching across the arid plain is actual and how much is mirage. Running a few numbers in his head, the Librarian estimates that even if Leif took with him every adult in the Refuge, he must have doubled that number in order to throw up a cloud that size. The Librarian is not surprised that the Temple-ruled towns and hamlets along the army’s route have proved less loyal to the Fire-breather than they’re sworn to be.

  And where is Fire, while all this is going on? The Librarian sees no vast winged shadow gliding across the barren flatlands or sliding down along the parched swell of the hills. No sign of burning wagons, or men. At least not yet.

  It’ll be an hour or more before the rebel army reaches the foot of the Stair. He has to get back to work. Grunting with the effort, the Librarian manhandles the big television closer to his console. He’s amused by its lack of a power cable. How convenient if we could edit reality as readily as we do our memories. He throws himself back into his chair. No more casual sorting. He’ll have to scrutinize every signal, every line of code for hints of the dragon’s presence, guessing at the outline of the whole by the shape of the parts.

  Hands poised above the keypad, he hesitates. Should he try to contact Mattias again to let him know that Leif is at the Citadel? Maybe the boy has managed to raise House in the interim. As he ponders the wisdom of this further delay, the Librarian hears the oddest sound. It’s so anomalous that he turns in his chair, expecting to find himself in some new memory place, a much older one this time, judging by the sound. But past his circle of light, there’s only darkness.

  And the baying of hounds.

  Perhaps all hounds bay alike, but the Librarian is certain he knows those dog voices. The memory that goes with them includes a rough stick dwelling by a pond in a grove of ancient oaks, where the verges were always green and the water never froze, even in the deepest winter. The void ahead is thinning now, but it’s not tree trunks the Librarian sees. It’s a paneled door and a row of tall windows with sills as high as his chest. The walls have reappeared, and through the windows, the paved city square is visible past the looming shadow of the machina rex.

  Damn! It’s still there.

  How much time has actually gone by while he was indulging himself along memory lane? No, not indulgence. Important information was gathered, passed on by the dragon, in the only way she can.

  And the baying is not a memory. It’s outside, filling the square.

  He goes to the window farthest from where the machina is mindlessly raking the facade around the door with its claws. The jointed, meter-long spikes don’t seem much the worse for wear, and neither does the building. But suddenly the squeal of metal on stone is deafening, perhaps because the dogs have fallen silent.

  Certainly some time has passed, because Stoksie has managed to escape and return, somehow, with reinforcements. The Librarian spots the little Tinker at the entrance to the square, pointing at the Rex. Inexplicably, he’s got Luther with him, two women and a pack of dogs. This is disorienting, and for a moment, the Librarian is forced to question what he sees. He doesn’t recognize the women at first, but the dogs help jog his memory. It’s the two scouts from Deep Moor, he’s sure of it, though he can’t retrieve their names. What are they doing here?

  Looking for him. He can tell that much from Stoksie’s wild gesticulating. And not finding him anywhere, they will assume that the Rex has eaten him, or pounded him into a red smear on the otherwise spotless black-and-white pavement.

  The Librarian doesn’t want the distraction of company just now. He needs to get on with the work. If they find nothing, will they go away? Or, not knowing he’s alive and well, will they tangle with the machina to recover what’s left
of him?

  Lily and Margit. That’s what they’re called. How did they get here, they and their dogs, so out of place in this high-tech city? And Luther here also, who’d left with Erde and the other dragons to warn . . .

  Ah. The Librarian remembers N’Doch’s song, and how the signal locator had placed him a few city blocks away. If N’Doch is in the city, very likely Paia is, too. If Luther’s here, probably Erde and the other dragons aren’t far away. All the players are here. Lily and Margit he’ll figure out soon enough. The Librarian sees it now. The forces are gathering. He’s always assumed that the Citadel would be the final battleground, but the campaign heating up there might be only the misdirection. Then who’s the magician, Air or Fire?

  Ask them about the City.

  Perhaps he did know, even then in 913. Because the dragon told him. He just didn’t take in the full meaning of her only partially coherent message.

  Across the square, Lily and Margit assess the situation with the hard-eyed squints of seasoned warriors. Margit shakes her head while Stoksie argues and Luther attempts to run interference. The dog pack is gathered in tight formation, ears erect, all eyes fastened on the stupid clanking hunk of metal that’s trying to tear down a building. It occurs to the Librarian that as fast as the Rex rips away layers of brick and stone, the dutiful little nanomechs are building it right back again, like the two machines that were unpaving and repaving the nearby square. Perhaps it’s the best a machine consciousness can do by way of a metaphor for human birth and death. If any of these machines have a consciousness. The city as a whole has a kind of consciousness, perhaps. But certainly not the Rex. It clearly hasn’t a thought in its titanium alloy head. It seems to be working on a single instruction: get Gerrasch.

  This is brought home more forcefully when the Librarian, watching the increasingly heated debate across the square, steps sideways for a better view. He drifts into the Rex’s line of sight through the window nearest the door. It spots him, and immediately shifts and redoubles its abuse in his direction. To the Librarian’s horror, cracks appear in the featureless gray wall. Long snaking fissures etch the smoky glass with patterns of dead tree branches. But the cracks are knit up as soon as they’re made, over and over, birth and death. He decides that the Rex will not get in. But neither will he be able to get out, definitely not through the door, and he sees no way to open any of the oversized window sashes, even if he could do it without drawing the Rex down on top of him. He’s safe, but trapped. He tries jumping up and down at the farthest window, waving his arms to attract Stoksie’s or the women’s attention. The Rex is there instantly, battering away and blocking the Librarian’s view of the preparations across the square.

  Now he’s worried. Because he’s no longer sure who the Rex is answering to. Fire is the obvious answer, but the Librarian hasn’t lived this long by assuming the obvious. What if Air has sent the Rex to keep him confined to the building and his console until he figures out a way to rescue her? Could she be that impatient, after all these years? The good news is that this could mean he’s actually close to a solution. The bad news is that, though he wouldn’t willingly sacrifice his friends’ safety to the interests of the Quest, the dragon might not be so choosy. The Librarian has few illusions about the altruism of dragons where their Duty is concerned.

  A handful of other women appear around Lily and Margit. Not Deep Moor women, at least none of the ones he knows. Margit issues instructions, her hands indicating positions to right and left around the square. Lily huddles with the dogs, as if coaching a football team. The machina rex has noticed none of this. The Librarian recalls that he walked within four meters of it before tripping its proximity alarm. Maybe its range really is that small. He offers it another moment of sympathy. It reminds him of athletes he’s known, or career soldiers. It’s a handsome, scary machine with no brain and one skill—intimidation—at which it excels. Sneaking up on it will not be difficult, but sooner or later, the women’s activity will snag its dim awareness, and what they’ll do then, the Librarian cannot imagine. He wishes he saw more weaponry spread among the eight women and two men sidling along the bright building facades. The sketched-in doors and windows offer scant refuge. Only speed will save them if the Rex attacks, and the Librarian can neither warn them nor help them. He’s always refused to carry a weapon, except his brain and his two clever hands.

  He’s gazing guiltily at his hands, pink-palmed and soft as a baby’s bottom, when he gets his idea. It sends him stumbling back to his console. If only he can do it in time! Fingers pounding the keypad, he sets up a series of searches aimed at picking up signals from machines operating within the immediate vicinity. He asks for red locators on a map of the surrounding blocks. Outside in the square, the hounds are baying again. The Librarian glances toward the windows just as the Rex pulls away from its destruction of the facade and turns to face the new intruders. His fingers thrum against the console. The search is taking longer than he’d hoped. When he looks up at his map, the entire screen is hazed in red.

  He whacks his forehead. He’s forgotten to exempt the gazillion building and maintenance nanos from the search. Or maybe there are two gazillion. Whatever. He taps in new instructions, and the map clears. A dozen possibilities remain, six of them on his side of the square. What could they be, smart street lights and sewage drains? He’d seen nothing in the square but the Rex.

  A crash outside nearly catapults him from his chair. The dogs are barking now, their high-pitched, got’im-cornered bark. The Librarian hears a yelp, and a soft, wet thud against the window glass. He groans, and lines the six signals up, one below the other, looking for hints.

  He picks it out right away, so quickly that he double-checks himself. It shouldn’t be so easy. But it’s the only constant signal. The others are intermittent: loops of regularly scheduled basic instructions. The Rex, or what he hopes is the Rex, has to go back to base every time it changes its direction or its target. The Librarian needs to follow the signal back to the Rex and capture enough of its code to be able to create a new instruction to send along to the machine. What he wants to do is turn the damn thing off. Fast. Soon. Quickly.

  He thinks he hears Lily whistling off the dog pack, but maybe she’s actually urging them forward. He can’t worry about the skirmish outside. He closes his ears, and bends his fingers to the chase. Once he locks onto his target, he’s inside the Rex soon enough. It’s like breaking into a big, empty, and echoing warehouse, with a few crucial items left prominently in the middle of the floor. The Librarian is delighted to find its programming so simple. It’ll make it much easier to mess with.

  Now that he’s doing a block by block analysis, the Librarian is struck by how similar the big machine’s code is to the tiny nanomechs. As if the Rex is the giant sibling to the nanos, somehow grown up way out of proportion and scale. He shoves this insight aside for future analysis. No time for it now. He’s on a mission of life and death. Still, in his frantic search for an on/off button, he can’t help noticing that the places in the Rex where its code differs the most radically look like the same sort of later interpolations that converted a big batch of nanomechs into the voice of the Summoner. He slows the rapid scrolling of ones and zeros. No, in this case, it looks like repair work. Rather artless repair work, at that, like a tapestry that’s been worn, then rewoven. The transition from original to restored is not entirely smooth. The reweaving looks to have been done by an unimaginative student, one who only knows how to go by the book.

  Like it’s been done by another machine.

  The instant the notion comes to him, the Librarian knows it’s right. Machines repairing machines, just like they constantly make and unmake the city. Because there’s nothing else for them to do, and no one else to do it? There’ll be no human population to look for, then, except those the dragon has managed to import. Was there ever, or was the city made for as well as by machines? The dragon will be able to tell him, when he finds her.

  He studies the repair
ed sectors again. The damage was extremely random. This may have confounded the logic-driven nanomechs, and made their reweaving awkward. Which introduced anomalies, which affected the broken device’s development, as if a fungus had invaded its originally clean and functional structure. Essentially, the repair nanos created a mutant, a machine mutant that grew into the machina rex.

  So the Rex isn’t his dragon’s creature, at least not intentionally. He’d like to know what caused this odd kind of damage. It’s not what he’d find if someone had gone into the programming and purposefully taken stuff out. The breaks aren’t that clean. It’s more like the result of physical damage, to the actual hardware. Like smashing the processor, or cooking a memory unit.

  Cooking. Fire damage? The fire dragon’s damage, that is? Could be. It’s widespread enough throughout the code he’s been looking at to be due to one major incident.

  The Librarian chews his lip. How would Fire, a proven technophobe, go after a sibling who’s so at home in the ether? Would he smash her electronic toys? Burn everything in sight? He’s dealt with all his other problems with flame and violence. It would explain why Air can’t communicate using normal electronic means. But not why her dragon means aren’t functioning. Unless . . .

  Circular thinking brings the Librarian back to his vision of the dragon as a machine. He doesn’t, he won’t, believe it. It’s too . . . inelegant. But it’s certainly possible that the Fire-breather went on a rampage at some point, among the city’s machinery. One reason he might do it is to contain or disable Air.

  A shout, a scream, and another crash from outside penetrate the Librarian’s haze. The Rex! He’s forgotten it entirely, with its code still staring balefully at him from the screen. He’d prefer to shut down the machine rather than wreck it, that is, write the instruction that will tell the Rex to turn itself off. But he hasn’t time now for the clean solution. His friends are out there being murdered. He flexes his fingers and starts deleting entire blocks of code, whole hog, grimacing as he does so. When he’s done what he hopes is enough, he sends it along and waits, hands lifted scant millimeters above the keypad. He doesn’t race to the window. He just listens. Soon there is a horrid grinding as the Rex tries to execute two conflicting motions at once. Joints squeal. Pistons bind. The Rex shudders to a halt. The Librarian hears a wan cheer from the forces in the square. He relaxes. Probably they think it’s something they’ve done that stopped the monster. So what. At least they’re safe.