He had shared this with Tamami as well, and as usual, she completely understood what he was feeling and his predicament. She had promised to get the information about the cube’s whereabouts and to lead him to it tonight. Once he knew where it was kept, the two of them would figure out a plan to retrieve the cube and to get him and his team out of the city. He had told some of this to Mona, Jonathan, and Master Banzo, and asked that they be prepared later in the morning for his signal even though he could not tell them for sure whether it would come or not.
As he tried to focus on potential plans in his head, Tamami appeared outside his window, and his mind went blank. She was dressed still in her monastic garb, but with her straw hat pulled back so that he could see her face. She spoke a few words from Araki’s tongue to defuse the wards Merrick had inadvertently tripped on his first night out of his room. Then she smiled and gestured for him to join her.
Without hesitation, Merrick leapt out of the window and joined her as they floated high above the city.
“Hello, Merrick,” she said, her face close to his, as had become their custom.
“Hi,” he said, still with a smile on his face.
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then, with her arm around his waist, she turned and flew them toward the heart of the city.
Unlike the quiet nights at the Earth Clan, the Cloud City was alive and teeming with all sorts of characters and ways to both enjoy oneself and to get in trouble if one wasn’t careful.
Luckily, he had the best guide in the city.
Within a minute, she set them both down on a small street that led into a crowded part of the city he had not yet seen. Ahead, he could hear the sounds of vendors still hawking merchandise even this late at night, and he knew he would find older Drayoom sitting around playing board games with each other while laughing and telling tales of their youth.
“Tonight, I want to show you something very special to me,” Tamami said.
“Is this about the cube?” he said.
“I have found that which you seek, my lovely Merrick,” she said, “but we must wait to discuss that when there are fewer prying ears nearby.”
Merrick looked around and noticed that he and Tamami were constantly being recognized. When someone said something to Tamami, she simply smiled and nodded her head regardless of what was said. Even though she was not recognized as a member of the royal family, Merrick could tell that the people revered her.
As they continued walking, and the crowds began to thin, they slowed their walk to a stroll to better enjoy the evening. Without even realizing it, Merrick reached over and held her hand.
She turned toward him briefly and smiled.
“Is this allowed?” Merrick said. “With you being a monk?”
She laughed delicately.
“Yes,” she said, “unlike human devotees to their religious orders, I am allowed to marry and can also be courted, although none ever have. My heart belongs to Araki, but it can also be shared with another.”
She looked up at Merrick with soft, almond eyes.
“As can the rest of me,” she said.
Merrick felt a lump in his throat and could not swallow. How things had changed since he first met Tamami. With each passing minute they were together, her scars disappeared a little more and he found himself looking deeply into her eyes more and more often—his only concern being to solve the riddle to her soul.
“I am taking you to a small house” she said, as Merrick labored over how to respond to her last statement. “The place I was born is only a couple of miles from here. Once there, I will tell you about your cube.”
Merrick didn’t mind walking with Tamami, and the two of them strolled through the downtown streets of the Cloud City, heading for the place of Tamami’s birth.
Merrick walked with confidence, having grown accustomed to the soft clouds underfoot. A crisp breeze flowed through the chill evening air as the two walked along next to each other—their shoulders touching accidentally, but not regrettably, every few steps.
“Tell me about your home,” Tamami said softly. “Do you do much walking where you live?”
“We mainly use our vehicles to move around,” Merrick said. “There are fewer and fewer places to walk where I live.”
“How do the humans survive without walking?” she said.
“They…we go to special places called gyms, where we walk and run on machines that simulate walking outdoors. Hearing myself actually say that, the whole thing sounds kind of senseless. I know you’re going to ask why we don’t just walk and run outside, but if you walk in Tysons Corner, you take your life into your own hands. The drivers there are some of the worst in the nation.”
They walked in silence for another minute.
“My sisterhood,” Tamami said, “my fellow monks. Each must walk or run every day for years before being allowed to join the order officially. They rise before the sun, each picking a separate direction, and they run, hopping from cloud to cloud or flying until the sun goes down. They start in the city, but they move among the clouds all over the world in order to fulfill their sacred vows. They are trying to touch every piece of Araki, to prove their devotion to him.”
“Did you do this as well?” Merrick said.
Tamami smiled as if remembering a time in her distant past.
“When I was a young girl,” Tamami said, “I was the best runner our order had ever seen. I had no desire to be among others, and I craved the time alone each day. Just the clouds, the wind, and me. Sometimes I still go out with one of the runners. It helps me to find my center whenever I feel it slipping away.”
Although Merrick wanted to ask what could make her feel so unbalanced, he knew the answer. He had asked her already about her scars, and she had told him of her abduction by members of the Fire Tribe and of her subsequent return to a less-than-accepting royal family. The Emperor claimed that by mixing with those from the Fire Tribe, she had dishonored their family, but the real reason she had been shunned was because of her mixed blood.
Just the memory alone of a childhood like hers would be enough to unbalance anyone.
When she talked about her past, she looked older than her years. Out of respect, he did not bring it up again.
After walking in silence to the edge of the city, Tamami squeezed Merrick’s hand and led him down a narrow road that branched away to the left.
“Even though this is a city,” Tamami said, “many of us live farther out in what you would call a rural setting. I was born out here, away from the palace, because my father had wanted to keep my existence a secret at first.”
“It’s beautiful out here, even at night,” Merrick said. Being this far up in the sky presented him with an almost other worldly view of the celestial heavens. He felt happy yet insignificant walking beneath them.
“Tell me more about your cubes,” she said. “We have always used divinium, but never have I heard of the sacred stone being used as you and your people do.”
“Like you said before, Ohman was a genius,” Merrick said. “Now that he’s gone, I’m starting to realize this more and more with each passing day. He took the very human concept of computer programming and user interfaces and merged those together with the divinium’s natural ability to store information and to help anyone who touches it tap into their internal stores of magical energy. He turned divinium into a usable version of a living computer.”
“And you turned his cubes into weapons?” she said.
“The cubes were never meant to be weapons, but we had to defend ourselves and the Earth Clan against my brother, Eudroch, and the Fire Tribe,” Merrick said. “We had no choice.”
“And the humans...” Tamami said.
“Ohman and I were the only full-blooded Drayoom at Rune Corp,” Merrick said. “Even Cara’s only half Drayoom. We had no other choice but to empower and mobilize some of the Rune Corp employees. The humans fought bravely and brilliantly, but they all died.”
Merrick was quie
t for several steps before continuing.
“They were programmers, not warriors,” he said. “That’s why I started the Alphas, the team that gave the demonstration for you back at Rune Corp. If ever the time comes again for us to go to war, our humans will be trained properly and ready for anything.”
“All very noble,” Tamami said, her face now serious. “But do you think it wise to give the power of magic to humans? They have proven themselves time and again to be irresponsible with great power.”
“As have the Drayoom,” Merrick said.
Tamami was silent.
“The thought of humans using divinium had occurred to us once before as well,” she said, “but our best engineers were unable to figure a way for humans to harness its power. I’m not sure why the Emperor’s team was unsuccessful, when you have quite obviously solved the problem.”
“Some of our success is because we applied human concepts to the divinium, but also, I think it’s because of our divinium itself and its special ability to hold words from all of the dragons.”
“Did Ohman make the divinium the way it is?” she said.
“Knowing how Ohman was, it could be that he made it or that he found it—but I’ve been through all of his notes, and if he figured out a way to alter regular divinium, I can’t find his formula. My best guess is that the divinium is found naturally somewhere,” Merrick said.
“You have guessed, I am sure,” Tamami said, “that the Emperor desperately craves the power of your vaunted divinium. He will do whatever it takes to either find more of it himself or to take yours by force.”
Merrick knew that he needed to be careful about what he divulged to Tamami, even though his heart told him to trust her completely. And yet, his heart made him slack and relaxed as he turned to look into her eyes.
“The Emperor is not the only one who seeks the source of the divinium,” he said.
Tamami stopped walking and turned to Merrick.
“Are you trying to tell me that you don’t know where your own divinium comes from?”
Her eyes turned slightly moist.
“If you don’t trust me enough to tell me, I understand, Merrick, but...”
Merrick gently took her shoulders in his hands and looked directly into her eyes.
“I would tell you if it were otherwise,” he said, “but trust me, no one at Rune Corp knows where Ohman got our divinium from. After I retrieve our cube, that will be my next task. But until then, your guess is as good, and maybe even better, than mine.”
As he heard himself speak about the cube, a dim light flickered in Merrick’s mind, and he shook his head as if to clear it of some unseen cobweb. For a brief second, he remembered his mission.
“As much as I could spend forever walking and talking with you, I need to find our cube and return to the Earth Clan to start my search. For all I know, the Emperor or some other Drayoom is already ahead of me looking for it.”
They started walking again, and soon they turned down another narrow road with a small house off to the left.
“This is where I entered the world for this incarnation,” Tamami said with a slight smile. “This is where my father tried to hide me from his people. This is where I learned to fight and to love, and it is ultimately the place that gave me the strength to later overcome my capture by the Fire Tribe. This is my real home. Come with me inside, and I will tell you of your cube, and we shall make plans for how you can retrieve it.”
For hours, Merrick sat with Tamami in her old house, long since abandoned by the passing of her adoptive parents. Merrick shared how he had been raised by his human father, only to discover that he was adopted. Then he told her of his long journey to find himself and of the revelation that the Earth Queen was his true mother. In the end, he told Tamami that he had discovered a truth—that family had less to do with common DNA than it had to do with the love shared between people on a daily basis. He ended his story by telling Tamami that he still missed his human father on a daily basis.
They spoke of many things, including the location of the cube and how to best recapture it.
Merrick knew he had a duty to his people and to Drayoom everywhere to retrieve the cube, but he was also learning a lot about himself with Tamami, and that was important as well. He was beginning to understand that it was acceptable and perhaps even beneficial to take time to enjoy life. And for some reason, he felt comfortable doing just that with Tamami.
With only hours left before the dawn, they made their way back to the palace.
“I have one last favor, Tamami,” he said as he pulled out of his pocket the small stone he had taken earlier in the week from the Earth Room. “Can we stop by the edge of the city on the way back? Or someplace where I can drop this to the ground below. I have to get word to Cara that I will be late for our rendezvous.”
“We could drop something through even here,” she said, “but there would be less notice if we did it from the edge of the city as you suggest. Follow me.”
In fifteen minutes they stood near the edge of the cloud on which the city was built. He turned around and saw what he considered to be the perfect view of the entire city as he stood on an island of clouds, surrounded by a sea of sky.
Tamami stepped in front of Merrick and held out one of her hands as she spoke a long series of words from the Wind Dragon.
“Throw your stone over the side, now,” she said.
Merrick tossed the tiny stone out into the atmosphere, watching as it faded into nothingness on its way to collide with the Earth so many miles below.
Now Cara would know that they were all safe for the time being and that he was planning on meeting her at the Earth City soon. If the information Tamami had just given him about the location of the cube was accurate, they could be leaving as soon as tomorrow evening.
Merrick thanked Tamami, who smiled silently and turned to take him back to his room, just as she had done the previous three nights.
Just as they had done the night before, the two of them floated in each other’s arms as they rose from the ground outside of the palace, all the way up to Merrick’s room.
But this time, there were two things that were different about the way the night ended.
The first difference was that this was the first night Merrick had not felt even a tinge of guilt about spending so long a time with Tamami rather than with Mona.
The second difference was that when Tamami helped him get back to his room, she did not leave.
CHAPTER 49
MONA HAD WAITED all night for a signal from Merrick—a signal that never came.
As the dawn approached, she couldn’t stay awake any longer, and lay down on her bed, finally giving way to the heaviness of her eyelids.
As she touched her stomach, she reminded herself to give Merrick the benefit of the doubt. She was relatively certain that nothing had happened to him, since no alarms had gone off in the palace. Her best guess was that something unforeseen had come up, and Merrick had been unable to contact her.
After a few hours of sleep, she’d meet Merrick for breakfast in the courtyard on the ground floor and give him a chance to explain. She hoped that Jonathan and Master Banzo weren’t still awake, too. At least they had been allowed to stay in the same room, so they would have been able to entertain each other and to fend off the boredom of waiting around all night.
If she knew Master Banzo at all, he was probably having Jonathan go through his latest kata while they were waiting. Or maybe they were taking shifts sleeping. Either way, she only hoped that they had gotten some rest. If Merrick really was this close to finding the cube, they needed to be well rested and ready to go at a moment’s notice.
They certainly needed to get more rest than Merrick had been getting for the last few days.
Merrick had plenty of life in his eyes and energy in his step, but she could tell that he was tired. She knew he had been going out at night, searching for the cube, and the effort was clearly taking its toll on him.
She placed her hand flat on her stomach again. She was hardly showing, but soon she would, and then she’d have to tell Merrick about his child. Instead of waiting that long, she decided to let him know once they made it to the Earth Clan, since the last thing she wanted was to distract him from his mission in the Cloud City.
After all, waiting another day or two to tell him wouldn’t really make that much of a difference anyway.
CHAPTER 50
AT TIMES, TAMAMI wasn’t sure if the Prince wanted to be accepted by the Emperor or if he wanted to actually be the Emperor himself. Either way, Tamami believed the Prince was too obvious about his desire to rule the Wind Family. He had not said as much out loud, but the tone in his voice when he addressed their brother spoke volumes. She had overheard the two discussing Merrick’s fate, which is how she knew to save Merrick from their trap. She had been surprised that the Emperor had tolerated their older brother’s arrogance.
She herself had been on the other end of the Prince’s haughty disposition countless times, but that was to be expected since the Prince, along with most everyone else, believed that Tamami was stuck in her current station—that she had no ambition for the future nor way to rise above the level of a common monk.
At best, the people of the Wind Family believed she might one day advance to the position of Abbess once the current one passed on to her next incarnation.
Everyone, of course, was wrong.
Not only did she dream of taking back her role as the rightful Empress and of ruling the Wind Family, but she also had dreams that far outreached those of her brothers. Tamami believed in the vision of unifying all of the families, as did the Emperor, but unlike her brother, she knew that she would not be the one to achieve this feat.
The Equilibrium of Magic Page 25
