The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Djawara turns back to the man with a courtly nod. “Three. Yes.” He gestures casually at the rain of stones, as if stones fell every day of his life. “Would you care to come inside while we gather ourselves for the journey?”

  “Oh, no, sir. Thank you, sir. I’ll just wait right here, sir. No rush. Take your time.”

  No rush. Yeah, right. N’Doch can hear the urgent imperative hidden in the man’s implacable courtesy. “She sent him, hunh? Hey, you didn’t tell me your sister had style! And we’re going?”

  “Oh, yes.” Sedou laughs. “I would say so.”

  N’Doch looks back at the sleek blue car. Its unblemished finish shines as if with its own light. It’s the perfect embodiment of all he’d ever thought he wanted out of life. But that was then.

  He sighs. Hey, I’ve died once. How bad could it be a second time?

  He wraps grateful arms around the foundling guitar, puts his ear to the box to hear it hum its quiet, consoling song. It appeared just when he needed it. Like magic. Now, he’s as ready as he’ll ever be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Paia cannot say clearly what makes her grasp the hand of the intemperate, murdering bully she had denied with such conviction not twelve hours ago. Or was it twelve days? It could have been weeks, for all she knows, she’s so entirely lost track in this place where time seems somehow irrelevant. What she does know is that she’s exhausted, dirty, hungry, and overwhelmed by a longing to be home again, no matter what the situation there might be.

  I can do nothing useful here, she tells herself, reaching to lay her hand in Fire’s palm. At the Citadel, perhaps I still can.

  Paia has had little experience of life outside the narrow sociology of the Temple and the Citadel, but she’s consumed enough of the House Computer’s large stock of classic novels to understand at least secondhand that a young woman’s first taste of freedom can result in a reckless plunge overboard. In the safety of Djawara’s quaint café, as her dragon defiantly justifies his bloody deeds and flagrant dereliction of duty, Paia suddenly sees his actions as mirrored by her own. At that moment, her connection to him has never seemed more real or poignant. For what was leaving the Citadel if not a dereliction of duty? Or a denial of her proper destiny? Fire is her dragon. She is his guide. Her responsibility, her life’s duty is to him, not to some stranger lord from a distant past. Nor even to the other dragons or their guides. If both she and Fire do owe allegiance to some larger Purpose, her best way to serve that Purpose is to fulfill her duty to her own dragon, in her own place in the continuum of time. Ironically, Fire would agree, the only difference being how that duty is defined. And it’s a major difference, she realizes, now that she’s clear about it, but not so much in its particulars of behavior as in its intended result.

  I had to come all this way to figure it out.

  Paia consoles herself that her little rebellion was not entirely pointless. Of course, she fears what might happen should she meet Adolphus of Köthen again, face-to-face. Or even see him from a distance. Perhaps she gave in to her attraction to him with girlish abandon, but the attraction was real enough and certainly mutual. This is probably on her dragon’s mind as well, which will make Köthen either a prime target, or someone to be avoided at all costs. It’s a shame, Paia muses, that they must be rivals. For wasn’t it Köthen’s dragonlike qualities that made him so desirable? The perfect stand-in for the dragon lover she dreamed of but couldn’t have. But now . . .

  Paia recalls the heat of Fire’s fingertips against her cheek. Now everything is different. Now she might actually have some power over him.

  She lays her hand in his outstretched palm.

  The sensation of falling goes on forever, falling not toward or into, but away from, falling until fall becomes flight, without up or down. The rush and lift of the wind beneath her wings is so thrilling that she soars deliriously for more endless moments, drifting in the thermals that rise off the dry, red cliffs. Then self-awareness stirs, and exhilaration gives way to fear.

  !!

  Her flight falters. Speed fading, altitude lost. A spinning plummet into a dive. Confusion and terror. Then amazement and gratitude as the great dragon body—hollow bones lighter than air, vast and glittering wingspread—turns back into the wind, catches a strong updraft and rises, exultant, laughing.

  I SEE YOU’LL NEED SOME FLYING LESSONS.

  It’s as if he’s right beside her. Not inside her head, but as if this scaled and gilded frame is a vehicle they both are driving. He’s just taken over the wheel to save them from disaster.

  !!

  Speechless still, even inside herself. Sorting out identities, separating the physical entities. Words are useless until she’s sure whose self they’ve come from. Is she the dragon, or merely resident inside the dragon’s body? Is this a temporary manifestation, Fire’s own mode of dragon transport, which he’s never invited her to experience before, except as a threat of deportation and abandonment? Or is it some more permanent arrangement that she’s unwittingly agreed to by placing herself, literally, in his hands?

  As she struggles to form the question, Fire distracts her with a breathtaking surge of speed, wings billowing and snapping like the sails of an ancient galleon. Her heart fills with air and sky and freedom. Joy gives her back the words.

  Could we have done this before?

  ALWAYS.

  Why not, then?

  I DIDN’T TRUST YOU.

  And now you do?

  NOW IT DOESN’T MATTER.

  Paia has had this thought also, without knowing where it came from, or exactly what it means. It wasn’t just the dragon’s touch. In the café, something changed, and now all things are different.

  Why doesn’t it matter? What happened?

  DON’T THINK ABOUT IT NOW. THINK OF ME. ONLY OF ME.

  The great wings pump. Higher, higher, past the soft mist of clouds into the darker blue of the sky, and then into a spiraling roll, as if tunneling through the air itself, or swimming, in water the temperature of blood. At once aware of wings and claws and scales and flight, and of two more human bodies within, rolling together, skin slick and hot, rolling entwined, pillowed by the wind, his forked tongue in her mouth, his gilded arms cradling her hips. Paia sighs and takes him inside her as they roll and soar and rock in ecstasy.

  “It’s all an illusion, of course,” says Fire later, as the dragon body rests on an isolated windblown crag.

  “My body doesn’t think so.”

  His murmur suggests a self-congratulatory smirk. “Your body is an illusion. As is all matter.”

  Paia recalls her physics lessons only vaguely. “Some more so than other, then.”

  The illusion now is of their human bodies lying in the softest of beds, limbs entangled, slack with release. No sight, only sensation. Damp skin and whispers. And desire, so intense. Already, she wants him again.

  “I mean our lovemaking is an illusion.”

  “I know.” It’s like receiving his thoughts, Paia notes, rather than sharing them. He still holds part of himself aloof.

  “And yet, it’s not. My energies have absorbed yours. Therefore, we are joined more fully than any normal lovers could be.”

  “Hush,” she whispers, stroking him. “Don’t talk.”

  “But I could as well have been describing this outer body. That, too, is an illusion, its design derived not from some magical genetics but from the darkest corner of human imaginings. Shaped to rule the souls of men.”

  The outer body lifts its reptilian head to arch and preen. Paia is the dragon again, showing off her sleek and sinuous neck, her magnificent form, proud of her powerful legs and tail. She stretches gilded wings and extends curved claws to whet their razor tips on a handy rock. Then the dragon settles down again and closes its eyes. Paia is released to a single consciousness. She doesn’t mention how she prefers the shape of the man-body beneath her hands, the one she feels but cannot see. “You’re trying to tell me something.”

  “My s
iblings and I are made of elemental energies. Our physical form is determined by the genetics and evolution of the human mind. We have no DNA of our own. So which came first, the dragon or its myth?”

  “Is it a riddle?”

  He pulls away slightly. “A basic truth.”

  “Does it matter? You are here.” Now she’s sure he’s working his way around some bit of information he doesn’t want to come right out and deliver. What now? She’d thought he’d told her the worst already.

  “It matters to some. But in the long run, well . . .”

  “Your siblings have different shapes.” She had been about to say “kinder.”

  “No accounting for taste,” he quips, but she senses an attempt to redirect her line of questioning.

  “Why take any shape at all? I mean, why does it matter what shape you take? You could be one shape today, another tomorrow, like some people change their clothing. Water does it.”

  “No.” He stirs brusquely, as if recalling some old grudge. “It’s not my gift. Water actually changes. Her power is over matter. Mine is over minds. I had a choice and I made it, and that was that. Because . . . no, never mind. We have better things to do with our time.”

  “Because? Because?” She pushes his hands and mouth away with mock severity. “You can’t leave me hanging!”

  “Better for you if I do.”

  “I am you now, or so it would appear.”

  “Beloved, you always were.”

  “Then I should know what you know.” She stretches against him like a cat. “You were saying, because . . .?”

  He rumbles his irritation, reminding Paia how very recently she feared doing anything that might displease him. Now what’s left to fear? He’s dissolved her already, and her consciousness appears intact and fully capable of sensation. Yes, fully indeed, she muses, as another tsunami of desire sweeps over her, rolling her against him. Astonishing, how desire can animate a body all of its own accord. Astonishing and wonderful. Still, she wishes she could see his eyes. They were always the surest gauge of his true mood. But his eyes are now her eyes, those great golden orbs lidded against the scouring winds of the heights. To test the extent of her control over the dragon body, she focuses her awareness of it and lifts one lid, thinking of it as a kind of giant window shade. The flood of light is blinding. The cold air sears. Fire growls in protest, and Paia closes the eye. Some control, then. But whose eye is it really? A perplexing dilemma.

  “Am I to have my own body back, my own . . . self?”

  “Is that what you wish?”

  Just like him to twist a question into a complaint. “Whose choice is it?”

  He shifts again. Another flare of silent irritation. Finally his voice comes muffled, as if from the depths of pillows. “Yours.”

  “Ah. You didn’t want me to know that, did you? Among other things.”

  Silence. Yet, in their old days together, she got nothing at all from him if he didn’t want to tell her. So even this little is progress. Wishing she knew more about the art of seduction, Paia puts her hands to work, and when it seems she has him pliant beneath her, she murmurs, “It’s a lovely shape. It fits just right. But explain to me: why take any shape at all?”

  He is a creature with a long habit of illusion, so bedsprings creak faintly as he twists away from her and up, to pace invisibly. Only the air moving across her cheek marks his passage. “Because,” he says in a voice she recognizes, his angry voice, the voice of the God. “Because men need to be controlled! Because men are Nature’s suicidal impulse! Because the history of the world would be so much shorter than it is to be already if terror and awe had never been given form and articulation!”

  “And you did that?” she asks meekly.

  “I am that!” His voice booms as if he’s grown to fit the scale of his rage. “I am the terrible image of Nature uncontrolled and uncontrollable! The hint of awesome Powers beyond their ken! The threat of the dire consequences of misbehavior! A deterrent against greed and selfishness, against mankind’s wanton thirst for power and taste for destruction! Terror and awe! Before there were gods, there were dragons!”

  Now Paia is glad for the unnatural darkness around them, for how could she possibly conceal her utter dismay and disbelief? He cannot be unaware that most others, human and dragon, would level at him exactly the same accusations he’s just thrown at mankind. Is this some new strategy of self-justification, an art she knows he’s already well-practiced in?

  “But what about the innocent humans? Not all can be blamed! All those innocent lives you’ve . . .”

  “There are no innocents! All humanity is complicit in the death of the Earth, by inaction as much as by intent!” His volume dims, as if he’s turned his back. “Besides, intimidation is not the same as murder. How often must I make this point? Count the dead, I tell you! You’ll find that either their lives were willingly offered here in my own time where I can physically manifest, or they died in other times at the hand of some human gone out of control! If human nature is weak and corruptible, am I to blame?”

  “But surely there are other myths you could have personified!” Part of her curses and accuses him, but another part accepts the tragic truth of all he says. “More . . . hopeful ones.”

  “That was my brother’s theory, and Water’s, too. And you see how successful they’ve been at keeping mankind in check. If it weren’t for me . . .!”

  Paia waits, for what seems an abnormal length of time. Perhaps there’s a part of him that’s lost faith in his pitiless rhetoric. “What?” she asks finally, and hears him sigh, long and dry, like a wind off a wasteland.

  “Well, no method is perfect, when you’re working with such fallible material as the hearts and minds of men. Sooner or later, some human or other wants his own piece of the terror and awe. And then there’s no controlling them. They lose all respect for the natural order of the world, and the long doomward spiral has begun.”

  Paia thinks of the girl Erde, able at the direst moments to find an optimistic angle of view, or an excuse for positive action. I am not that girl, she decides. I have seen too much of the destruction men have brought about. I have lost my family to it, and the life I once knew. What convincing arguments can I pull together to counter his, when the evidence in his favor lies all around the Citadel, in the greedy hearts of its merchants and in the scheming minds of the Temple’s priests and priestesses?

  “I always wondered, even as a little girl, when you first arrived . . . I always wondered why the God was so angry all the time.”

  “Not all the time.” His growl from the darkness is half-denial, half acknowledgment.

  “Yes, all. All the time. Even in your most generous or frivolous moods, it was always there, that underground simmer of rage. I thought you were just mean.”

  “I am mean. I am the . . .”

  “I know. The God.” An uncomfortable pressure is building in Paia’s chest. She reaches for a sheet to pull up around her shoulders, and finds it right there beneath her hand. Silk. “So you came to the Citadel to punish mankind for all they’d done?”

  Fire laughs bleakly. “The world they’ve made seems punishment enough. Let them suffer in it. I came to the Citadel to enjoy myself while the planet still lives. And because you were there, dragon guide. You might say I had no choice. Perhaps a bit of revenge seemed excusable, under the circumstances, and since there was nothing better to do with my time . . .”

  “But you became all and everything that you despise men for!” she cries out suddenly, and bursts into tears.

  “Don’t do that. Don’t do that!”

  “I can’t help it! It’s so . . . such a terrible waste!”

  “Maybe I became what humanity deserves!” he shouts. “It’s too late to change things now. Stop crying!”

  Does she detect some faint stirrings of regret? Or does he simply mean it’s too late for him to change? Paia hiccups and swallows a sob. “Earth and Water tell a different story.”

  �
�And I have told them, and you, the truth of that story. And a dragon cannot lie.” He sits down beside her and draws the sheet aside. “Come, beloved, why concern ourselves with the fate of undeserving men? My siblings are fools to do so. I refuse to join them. My clever ingenuity has made a way for us to be together, at least for a while. Shouldn’t we enjoy it while we can?”

  A new concern saps Paia’s resistance: wouldn’t a dragon guide inevitably share her dragon’s weaknesses as well as his strengths? “I suppose a little while longer can’t make any difference. But do you think, my Fire,” she adds only half playfully, “that you will be able to accept the responsibility of an actual relationship?”

  He kisses her in reply, then fills her again, and again, and somewhere in their endless excess of orgasm, Paia realizes that they’ve had the argument he was willing to have, but meanwhile strayed completely from the questions she most wants an answer to: Why now? What made me know to come to you so willingly? What’s happened? What has changed?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Librarian programs a tiny window through the blankness around him to watch the sky-blue limo glide away along the narrow, pitted street. He’s programmed a longer journey than necessary for its passengers, a guided tour of the White City while he takes the time to rescue Stoksie and the others from the machina rex, and discover what Luther knows about Earth’s whereabouts.

  Now that he has a method, he works quickly and efficiently. He’ll gather up the next ones in a group. He calls up the power grid diagram to trace out the Rex’s location. He hunts up the nearest paver machine, and sends it a long set of radical instructions. Just before leaving, he remembers his video feed to the Citadel. He turns to find the old TV waiting behind him, like a patient family retainer. The screen frames a bright view of the Grand Stair and a great deal of commotion. The Librarian reflexively reaches for the volume control, then recalls that this signal has no sound. In the dust and pitiless sun, armed men are pouring up the steps toward the Temple. The Librarian can’t even think of staying to watch, but he lingers long enough to observe that the vanguard of resistance has already crumbled. The soldiers guarding the stair have thrown down their weapons. Some seem to be greeting Leif Cauldwell’s army as if they were old friends. It’s possible, the Librarian muses. As if famine and epidemic weren’t enough, the Fire-breather’s tyranny split families, estranged neighbors, destroyed the fabric of entire communities. There is a sporadic hail of arrows from the walls of the upper plaza, but perhaps Leif will have less of a battle than he was prepared for. All for the best . . . and still no flash of gold from above, no vast dragon wing darkening the sky. What can be keeping Fire, the Librarian wonders?