The Book of Fire (76 page)

No
where.

Can she be a bit more specific?

Listen! Listen! Listen!

She is there. Air. His dragon. He is made whole for the briefest of instants. A taste of totality. His centuries of waiting are . . . and then she is gone.

Ah, the ache! Ah, the loss! And yet, the gain . . .

SEE: nothing.

HEAR: nothing.

SMELL: nothing.

FEEL: the outward expansion of consciousness toward infinity.

What he would say for her if he could but find the words, the all-too-human words? He wouldn’t say, he would show. Image, sound, scent, touch, taste: a tidal surge of sensation and dream and memory, washing over, around. She has seen all. She has seen what you see. She remembers it for you. A green valley bathed in the golden mist of a summer
evening, resonant with bee hum. The crisp sparkle of snow on a sunlit windowsill at Tor Alte. A symphony of birds and salt water cascading along an African shore. The sweet cacophony of Blind Rachel plunging cool and crystalline from a pine-scented height.

Treasure it! Hold it in the now! Do not let it pass into memory! Is it not all that is right and good? Is it not the truest miracle? Can it be that, instead, we choose nothingness and death?

Ah, the ache! The loss! There is no gain . . .

Paia feels the message as remembered grief, her mother’s death, her father’s decline and fall. Yet she understands how the mutable painting has prepared her to receive this message in a larger sense. Inside her now, no lazy, clichéd notion, no old denial like she heard so often as a child:
hey, it wasn’t me who wrecked the planet!

Instead, a profound, abiding rage that her birthright has been taken from her, and from all the other dwellers on the Earth. Only through another’s memories will she hear the salt roar of the African surf, or taste the pure snowmelt of a German mountain stream. All she can know firsthand is heat and barren rock and devastation.

What can be done? What must I do?

The blue screen swims again behind her eyelids.

White letters read:
DENY HIM
.

No word, no voice. A sudden avalanche of emotion. A shock wave of rage and negation shakes the Four until their bones rattle. They see shredded wings, a flash of scales and smoke and blood. The contact is shattered. They are flung apart, flying, gasping, falling, slammed down hard on the weathered tarmac, overwhelmed, tumbled, scattered like rag dolls around the perimeter of the circle.

Without the multiple voices of the meld to fill her mind and her attention, Paia knows the exact moment when he arrives.

S
uspended in air, he sees the ground coming up hard. He tucks and rolls, gets the wind knocked out of him but keeps his head. He comes up gasping and coughing but conscious.

And in a haze of fury. Thrashing to regain his stance. Fists nose level and clenched. Ready to strike out with nails and fangs.

His lips pulls back so tight it hurts. His jaw attempts a snarl too big for his human mouth. His hands spasm with the effort of unsheathing claws he doesn’t have.

N’Doch!

Her voice is a hand snatching him back from the edge of a cliff. N’Doch reels and steadies. The haze clears. Wait. Not his. This is some other’s senseless rage that swept over him like a wave and sucked him into its undertow before he knew what was what. He feels nauseous and violated. Raped.

“N’Doch! Help Luther!”

Audible words this time, even more centering. He can see again. A flash of motion draws his eye: the girl racing toward Köthen up in the surrounding rocks where he stands at the ready, staring up at the sky.

Another voice, gasping. “Dockman! Ovah heah! Now, man!”

A shadow passes over. N’Doch doesn’t need to ask. He hears the ear-splitting screech. He searches around wildly. Luther is half the circle’s arc away, tugging on the crumpled form of the Librarian and not getting anywhere.

“Into the circle, my lord! Quickly!” The girl’s yelling at
Köthen, but N’Doch gets the idea. He staggers toward Luther.

“Wrong way! Luther! Wrong way!” The Tinker is trying to drag the Librarian into the elevator tunnel. A trap, a disaster in the making. “Luther! Into the circle!” It seems like forever until he reaches them. He grabs one of the Librarian’s stocky legs and hauls for all he’s worth. The shadow slides past them again, lower this time. N’Doch doesn’t look up. He knows what he’ll see. Half the screeching is in his own dragon-racked brain. He fights Luther briefly for control over the body, but the Librarian is coming to now, starting up his own struggle to regain the protection of the circle. Man, but the guy is slow!

On its third pass, the circling shadow darkens the entire mountaintop. The scream is like a detonation. It rakes N’Doch’s nerve endings, leaving him trembling and weak. A line of flame erupts behind them, targeting them as directly as a lit fuse. Luther gives up his disagreement at last and together they hoist the Librarian by his armpits and drag him stumbling over the perimeter.

The bright heat splashes upward and sideways behind them as if it has hit a solid wall. N’Doch hears the girl’s alarm call winging out across the dragon com-net. There’s no reply. She’s grabbed Köthen by his sword arm and won’t let go. He’s running with her toward the circle, trying to free up his weapon and shield her with his body at the same time. A sear of heat explodes in front of them. The girl squeals and ducks away blindly. Köthen snatches her up and plunges straight through the flames and across the perimeter. N’Doch races to meet them, tearing off his T-shirt. Köthen’s hair is smoldering. He drops the girl at N’Doch’s feet. Her long linen shirt has caught. Little fiery tongues rise up her back. N’Doch leaves Köthen to deal with his own conflagration and blankets the girl with his shirt, rolling her around on the tarmac until he’s sure he’s put her out.

“Where are they?” she gasps, when he lets her up. “What has he done to them?”

“Easy, girl.” It’s all he can think of to say as the screeching overhead rises deafeningly, then morphs into inhuman laughter inside their heads.

Her back is tender. She knows she’s been burned but not badly enough to worry. The loose light layers of her linens took most of the damage. The dragon will soothe it as soon as he returns. When he returns . . .

She has pushed her panic aside for the immediate emergency. Now dread assails her anew. She grabs N’Doch’s arm. “Where are they? Isn’t the barrier down? Why don’t they answer? Why don’t they come!”

“Don’t know, but it looks like we’re gonna have to deal with this one on our own . . .”

Erde follows his horrified gaze, past the priestess woman who stands as still as marble in the middle of the circle, to the vast shining beast wheeling at eye level just past the outer ledges of the mountainside.

“. . . ’cause here he comes.”

The golden dragon rises, a swift muscular ascent. The first red light of the morning sun glints off his gilt scales. Reflected shards as hot as flame sear Erde’s cheeks and eyes. He hovers a moment, high overhead. His great wings cock back for his stoop. He screams again, and then he is plunging toward them, in a dead fall like a rock kicked off a precipice, dropping until Erde is sure he means to dash himself against the mountaintop just to be able to kill them all in the process.

But moments before the inevitable collision, the dragon begins to glow—red, orange, yellow, white, like molten iron in the forge. At the instant of impact, there is no sound, no concussion. The dragon is a white-hot halo too bright to look at. Then the brightness winks out and out of this crucible is born . . . a man.

Even as she stares in wonder, Erde’s first thought is for Hal, avid collector of dragon lore. She’s sure Lord Fire’s spectacular translation would astound even that good knight’s fertile and learned imagination. For, unlike Lady Water’s exact replications from N’Doch’s memory, very little is truly human about Fire’s man-form. He is huge, ten or twelve feet tall, and shining gold all over, from the
writhing mass of his long hair to the sharp-clawed toes of his unshod feet. Here, then, is the fierce angel of the sword, the Archangel Michael, from the chapel at Tor Alte: inhumanly beautiful, ruthless, and cold. But this face has the yellow, slitted eyes of a reptile and a surprisingly sensuous mouth. And the Beast is boldly naked, but for a billowing cloth-of-gold cloak. It swirls around him as if alive and makes him seem twice his already monstrous size, but conceals no part of his scaled and glittering anatomy. Erde expects to see horns and a tail, for surely he is the Devil incarnate. But he has left those behind in his transformation. She would look away if she dared,
should
look away in all maiden modesty, but in truth, she can’t take her eyes off him. Nor can anyone else. He is riveting, magnificent, terrifying. It’s what Leif Cauldwell meant about the Beast compelling men to follow him. Foolish men, who mistake beauty for truth, and believe all his lies and promises.

But where are they? Where are the others?

Fire towers above them, turning his perfect profile to catch the sunrise just so. He fixes his gaze like a snake on his prey, savoring their awe, then slowly advances in long graceful strides. The humans gather in a protective arc around the priestess. Köthen has his sword ready, but even he seems to realize how little use it will be against such a monster. The Librarian has his mysterious little device in hand again and is muttering over it like an alchemist.