The Book of Fire (69 page)

“You see, Luco! You do love him, just as I must!”

“NO!” But even he knows his denial has been too quick and too hot. “Once, I might have. And I risked my life for his sake, for the miracle of his . . . magic. But what has he done with his supernatural gifts? Turned them to the perpetuation of his own pleasures. It’s an unconscionable waste! A crime! Of the worst order!”

Paia wants this all to be over, wants to wake up, to be back in her uncomplicated bed at the Citadel, with only the safe dullness of her Temple duties to trouble her. She tries to imagine what the God would say to his rebel priest. How would he explain himself? She knows the answer. He wouldn’t.

“We had to do something,” Luco continues. “The dry up gets worse and worse. The scant resources of a hundred suffering villages are being squandered on needless luxury to feather the tyrant’s nest!”

Paia cannot deny it. She’s seen it now for herself, trekking across desiccated fields, through dust-blown farmsteads and villages. She’s seen the desperation in the
townspeople’s eyes. No wonder Luco agreed so easily to back her plan for the Visitation. A further chance to open her eyes to the realities. Perhaps he even planted the notion himself.

Paia feels the chasm yawning.

The tyrant. Erde thought of the hell-priest, and the war at home, being fought for such similar reasons. But there were many kinds of tyranny. She understood Leif Cauldwell’s righteous outrage, and that he must explain to the priestess why he’d brought her here. But she didn’t think his full frontal assault was helping matters. Couldn’t he see he was asking Paia to deny her dragon? It was like watching a wall crumble beneath the blows of a battering ram. The priestess was collapsing slowly into herself, her eyes gone listless, her vital glow dimmed.

Baron Köthen scowled, held back from open protest, she thought, only by N’Doch’s hand and simultaneous translation. Erde almost thought to protest herself. If Paia, as Lord Fire’s guide, was to regain any influence over him, she would need to have things explained to her in the proper terms by people who understood the true nature of the connection.

“He’s a one-sided god,” Cauldwell continued relentlessly. “He only takes. I tried persuasion, early on. Nearly got myself incinerated. And he thwarts all my covert attempts to steer the Temple toward a more civic-minded policy. But we can’t fight him. We don’t have the weapons that would bring him down. The only solution is to convince him that it’s in his best interests to show responsibility to the people who’ve served him so loyally!”

The priestess sniffed, wiped her eyes. “How are you going to do that?”

“I’m not. You are.”

She stared at him. “What?”

“You are. Paia, you have the power. He will not hurt you. You know that.”

“No.”

For a dizzying moment, Erde thought the priestess had spoken in her mind, but perhaps it was because the pain was so eloquent in Paia’s eyes. Entire volumes of terror and confusion and frustrated love. Erde guessed that she’d actually tried to do her duty to her dragon lord, but he’d rejected her service.

Luther and Stoksie moved off to a darker corner of the room to mutter among themselves, but Erde almost stepped forward again. Couldn’t the rebel priest see that his priestess was on the verge of hysteria? She wasn’t strong enough for this. She wasn’t yet aware of her Duty. She needed comforting, not more things to think about.

Cauldwell’s wife also saw the crisis coming. She went to sit at the priestess’ side, patting her, whispering soothing nonsense. But Paia batted the woman’s hands away, both arms pinwheeling, her sobs rising uncontrollably until it seemed that she might choke, unable to catch her breath. Then an amazing thing happened.

Baron Köthen, who’d been standing behind her protectively, leaned over the back of the big, soft seat and laid his hand on her shoulder. Quietly, firmly, he hushed her, as if she was a child.

Paia froze, shuddered, hiccuped a few times, and stopped crying.

“Good.” Köthen settled himself on the arm beside her. “Now, speak to the man,
Liebchen
. Your life is in his hands.”

Of course, he spoke in his own German, so the priestess couldn’t understand him. But his tone of voice served well enough. She wiped her eyes without even looking at him and sat up straighter, while the whole room stared in astonishment.

Cauldwell sat back, bemused. “Well, that’s better.”

“Um . . .” N’Doch began, “He said . . .”

“I know what he said. Haven’t had much use for my diplomatic German in a while but . . .”

“You really oughta back off a bit.”

Cauldwell blinked at him.

N’Doch shrugged. “Just an idea.”

“I . . . all right.” Cauldwell rose, stood uneasily for a moment, his arms crossed. “But you see, the point is, he’s
got it wrong. Our lives are in
her
hands. That’s what’s at stake here.”

“Well, that ain’t all of it.”

Cauldwell looked around, taking in Köthen’s calm stare, the Tinkers’ silence, Erde’s own disapproving frown. “Luther? What am I missing here?”

“Just that you oughta back off,” N’Doch repeated. “Give her a chance to get her bearings, y’know?”

“We don’t have time to wait ourselves through one of her tantrums!”

“It isn’t a tantrum.” Erde was shocked by the hoarse sound of her own voice.

“Luther . . .?”

“Yu ought lissen to ’em, Leif. Dere’s t’ings dey know.”

Cauldwell rubbed his brow in disbelief, then appealed directly to the priestess, his big hands spread. “Look. Paia. I wish we had time to get you up to speed on all this gradually, but we don’t. We’ve committed ourselves to a rather desperate course of action. We need your help and we need it now!”

Constanze stroked the priestess’ hand as if she were a frightened kitten. “We need to be able to tell the others you’re willing, or it’ll be hard to keep you safe from Sel Minor’s faction. Their view right now is a short one, focused entirely on revenge.”

It looked for a moment like Paia might break down again. A half-glance up at Köthen stopped her. She seemed surprised to find him still there. She gathered herself, sniffing. “What kind of help? What could I possibly do?”

“Convince him to change his ways. You’re the only one he’ll listen to. The only one he must listen to.”

“He’ll come after you! All of you!”

“He’ll try.”

“He’ll find you!”

“He hasn’t so far.”

“And of course, we’ll have you as a hostage,” said Constanze.

“What?” The priestess looked at Cauldwell. “Hostage?”

He nodded, somewhat apologetically.

“Luco! How could you?”

Constanze ticked items off on her fingers entirely without
apology. “And we’ve cut off food and goods shipments to the Citadel, and evacuated our people from the towns and farms as best we can.”

“Life’s going to get real hard at the Citadel, Paia. You’re better off here with us.”

The priestess lidded her eyes, folded her hands in her lap, and took a deep, shuddering, and hopeless breath. “I always knew you feared the God, Luco, but I thought you loved him, too. Or, at least, believed in him.”

“What’s to believe in?” Constanze demanded. “What does he offer but the end of the world? There’s a better way, Paia.”

“Amen!” breathed Luther, from out of the shadows.

“There’s One who offers hope instead of despair.”

“She walks in light,” someone murmured.

“Ah.” The priestess glanced up. “You talk of helping the people, but I see what this really is. Just another heresy. I’m surprised at you, Luco, having put down so many of them yourself.”

Heresy. The word alone gave Erde a chill, but Cauldwell only sighed. “Not just another, Paia. The Beast is not the only force of nature abroad in the End of Days.” He settled himself again in front of her and held out his hand. “By the way, may I introduce myself properly? My name is Leif Cauldwell. Your father was my uncle, Paia. We’re cousins.”

She looked at him dumbfounded. “Cousins?”

There was a sudden commotion in the corridor.

Cauldwell paused, listening toward the door, as the guards moved swiftly out into the hall. “Mick? What’s up?”

“Visitors,” said one of them.

Erde feared the angry damaged woman from upstairs had armed herself and her cohorts. But it sounded more like children, a lot of them. And it was! A wild pack of children, spilling, bursting into the room, squealing and laughing, racing around the adults as if in the middle of a mad game of tag, most of them younger than Mari and Senda. Erde’s hands were grabbed, her arms pulled. She felt like an ancient grown-up among them. Where did they all come from?

“Gotta come! Gotta come!” they chanted. “He wants yu come now!”

A blonde little girl threw herself at Cauldwell’s knees. His impatient frown vanished. He bent, scooped her up, and swung her in the air. “Young one! Hello! What is it?”

“Gotta come now, Da! Gotta come now!”

“He wants to see me?”

She shook her head. “He wanna see dem!”

“Who, them?” Cauldwell pouted comically. “What about me?”

The resemblance between them was unmistakable. Erde saw the priestess watching, her wonder entirely transparent. Not only was her supposed priest married, he had children as well. Or one child, at least. A perfect, healthy one. And Erde was beginning to understand how rare that was in this devastated future.

The child giggled and laid her small hand on Cauldwell’s cheek. “Das okay, Da. Yu kin come, too.”

“Who does he want to see?”

Immediately, a child fastened itself to Erde’s arm. N’Doch and Baron Köthen were similarly claimed, and the two Tinkers. A young boy, perhaps the oldest, presented himself bashfully before the priestess. His thin, dark limbs seemed to move each in a different direction. He stuck out his hand like he’d just gotten it and wasn’t sure how it worked. “He say, yu gotta come special.”

Cauldwell seemed surprised at last. “How could he have known . . .?”

“Ain’ a lot he doan know,” remarked Luther.

Cauldwell nodded, then snugged the little girl high on one hip. “Well, off with us, then, young one. We’ve been summoned.”

The priestess let the young boy pull her to her feet, but it was Baron Köthen’s arm she sought blindly, for support. The other children had regrouped by the doorway, waiting none too quietly. “Hurry hurry hurry! He wants yu to come now!”

Summoned.
This word was a final key, fitting into a lock in Erde’s ears. They had indeed been summoned, and now she could hear it, inside, in the dragon’s place. But it wasn’t the dragon. It wasn’t words, or even images. More like an articulate breeze. It distracted her from the sight of another woman on Baron Köthen’s arm.

N’Doch! Do you hear it?

He shook his head like a dog.
I hear it. Comin’ in loud ’n clear.

So he’s back in the crowded corridors again, with kids hauling on his arms, and a big dragon buzz in his head, only there’s no dragon, or at least, if there is, she’s not talking to him. And he’s not sure what got into him, making him stand up like that for the priestess. N’Doch thinks things are starting to get weird, even by his definition.

Soon the clutter’s so thick in the passage that just walking has to be skillfully negotiated. Then there’s a door ahead of them, circular and armored like a vault but standing wide open. N’Doch guesses it would take several hours and some good strong men to shift away all the piles and nondescript electronics shoved against it. He hopes it doesn’t ever have to be closed in an emergency. The joint looks a little derelict, but through the opening he sees console lights and screen glow. Someone’s up and working.

The kids get real quiet at the door, like they’ve turned off the noise faucet. Even the Tinkers hesitate, Luther especially. Though he goes in ahead of Stoksie, he moves with the same faintly awed respect that Sedou brought out in him. Is it for all the high tech inside, or for the person running it?

Whadda ya think girl?

There is great power in here.

N’Doch cracks a nervous grin. He can feel it in his bone marrow.
And it ain’t just electrical!

The big room is even dimmer and colder than the corridors. Part of it is divided into low-walled cubicles, empty workstations with desks and small banks of monitors. But the far wall is curved, one huge wraparound screen or series of screens, with a big curved console at the center point of the arc. Someone is working there, and the kids halt a short distance away and wait silently to be noticed. Köthen lets the priestess move ahead of him. She kind of floats into the room with her kid escort beside her. Cauldwell’s girl-baby
squirms in his arms. He sets her down, and she races off to rejoin the pack.