A Dream of Ice (21 page)

Break the connection
, she told herself.

With a physical jerk that nearly sent her sprawling from the sofa, she found herself back in the living room. She was disoriented, frightened, and even more so when she realized she was looking at a woman—a woman with short black hair, the woman who had shoved her backpack in the door of Caitlin's subway train and then had wiped the air, flooding Caitlin's mind.

And here she was in Caitlin's apartment, down the hall from where Jacob lay sleeping. Caitlin pushed herself up from the couch. As she came to standing, the woman wiped the air before her, propelling Caitlin backward as if she'd been punched in the gut.

And then she was gone.

M
ikel's brain was a suddenly empty vessel.

The two souls from Galderkhaan gazed into the eyes of the living man who had invaded the ruins of their city.

Rensat spoke first with some disbelief. “You are alive.”

“Yes,” Mikel said. “So far.” He added, “I think. How—how are we communicating?”

“The stones in the corridor,” she said with pleasure. “You physically activated them. They have connected us.”

Pao circled the intruder as if he were a specimen in a jar. Perhaps he was. “You have a stone of your own?”

Mikel followed where he was pointing. “That—that's a radio,” he said. “I use it to communicate with fellow men but only on the surface.”

“Why did you enter this room?” the Galderkhaani man asked.

“Something was out there,” Mikel said. “A presence of some kind.” He shook his head. “Forgive me, but—how am I understanding you? I do not speak Galderkhaani.”

“The stones in this library have the wisdom of language,” Pao said.

“But my language did not exist when you did, when they were . . . made,” Mikel said.

“Then someone who spoke your tongue has ascended near this place,” Pao told him. “What the living knew, the stones now know.”

“How? By what mechanism?” Mikel asked.

Pao started to answer but a touch from Rensat stopped him.

“Your attire, the materials are—unfamiliar to us,” Rensat said. “Where are you from?”

“The north,” he answered. “Far from here, both in time and place.”

“By your reckoning, how old are we?” she asked.

“Judging from the map I saw out there, the contours of your coastline are familiar yet they had not been defined by the end of the Ice Age. That would make it about thirty thousand years ago.”

“An ‘ice age,' ” Pao said, shaking his head. “The Technologists were right about that, at least.”

“Yes, and they should have stopped where they did,” Rensat said.

“Please explain,” Mikel implored. “There is so much I do not know. These Technologists—what were they trying to do?”

“In the beginning of their rise to power, they sought to tap heat from inside the earth, to melt the ice and protect our city,” Rensat said. “That project was accomplished and it led to the development of a larger idea. To burn their way to Candescence.”

“What you were discussing with the other man, Vol, at the ritual,” Mikel said.

Pao's eyes showed surprise. “You saw that too?”

Mikel nodded.

“Have you seen Vol elsewhere?” Pao said, pressing him.

Mikel shook his head.

Pao and Rensat exchanged glances. A flicker of hope had risen and quickly perished.

“You've mentioned the Candescents several times,” Mikel said. “Who were they?”

“Who
are
they,” Rensat said, gently correcting him.

“I'm sorry,” Mikel said sincerely. That was clumsy. He had to be careful.

“They are unimaginably ancient beings who inhabit the cosmic plane,” Rensat explained.

“So you
believe
,” Pao added. “We do not know.”

“The tiles,” she said confidently.

“That is
one
explanation for the power of the stones,” Pao said. “Some of us agree with the Technologists that the tiles are simply minerals that vibrate in alignment with the planetary poles, that by some unknown mechanism they store and release everything they encounter along those lines: the energy of human thought, of animal memory, of all that has ever been witnessed or conceived.”

Mikel thought of Flora's vectors. He was with the Technologists on this one.

“Some of us do not believe in miraculous physical ‘mechanisms' that have defied understanding,” Rensat said. “The stones could not exist without intelligent creation.”

Mikel had heard this very same argument many times in many contexts; it would not be resolved here and now.

He had the sudden urge to drop it on the conference table before the Group, let them finger through it like an unassembled jigsaw puzzle.

Pao interrupted his thought process. “You said something was out there.”

Mikel nodded. “Fire. The . . . the ghost of a woman who died recently, on the ice. Burned to death.”

“You saw this—this ‘ghost,' the ascended one?” Pao asked.

“No, she said her name,” Mikel answered. “I knew of her.”

“Did she say anything else?” Rensat asked.

“Yes,” Mikel told her. “She said, ‘Release me, please.' ” He studied the two. “What was holding her?”

The spirits did not answer. But he remembered something they had been discussing earlier.

“Is it your ‘blessed Enzo'?” Mikel asked. “Is Enzo in the flame?”

“It is to be hoped,” Rensat said.

Pao regarded her sternly. “Enough!”

They stood mutely, stubbornly. That line of questioning was closed but Mikel had a great many other things he wanted to ask.

“Tell me about the Source,” he said.

“The Source is everywhere in Galderkhaan,” Pao told him. “Tunnels of magma connecting pool to pool.”

The orange spots on the map
, Mikel realized. “The winds I rode to get here,” he said. “Those tunnels were conduits for lava?”

“Yes,” Pao said. “The entrances to the tunnels were placed where the winds were fierce and could be channeled underground, used to drive the sails of the digging apparatus.”

“They were expanded in secret, like so much of what the Technologists did,” Rensat added. “It is why the Source was so much stronger than any of us knew. No one realized the pools were already linked.”

Pao approached Mikel. “It is one of the reasons we have remained here,” he said. “We seek the identity of the one who turned the Source on. Do you know anything of that?”

“No,” Mikel said. “And—why should that matter now?”

The two souls fell silent. Their selective cooperation was starting to frustrate him. They were like Flora, always holding secret cards.

“Pao, Rensat—I don't know much, but I've learned enough to know that there are inordinately dangerous forces here. I need to understand much more in order to protect my people.”

“How are they in jeopardy?” Pao asked, suddenly.

“I found a stone,” Mikel said. “It was drawn from the sea near here. It had the same olivine insets as these many others, and like them, it would vibrate, unpredictably. It gave me . . . visions. One of my associates was studying it. We think it killed him. It melted his brain.”

“Describe this stone in detail, please,” Rensat said.

“I just told you it melted a man's brain,” Mikel said with rising irritation. “Does that even matter?”

“I am sorry he died,” Rensat said. “So many have, you know.”

Mikel did not appreciate the mild rebuke.

“The stone,” Pao said. “Tell me about it.”

Mikel did not have the patience to argue. He closed his eyes, visualized the design, and described it in detail.

Pao nodded, nodded again. “You found a stone from the
motu-varkas
—the tallest and most powerful tower, farthest out at sea. One point of the grand triangle.”

“That ring of tiles was the oldest and strongest in all of Galderkhaan,” Rensat said. “It contained a great concentration of energy.” Her tone grew somber. “That ring was crafted by Aargan, the chief Technologist, the one who made the whole construct come together.”

Pao added, “I have long suspected that she was the one who activated the Source, just to prove she could control it with the ring of
motu-varkas
.”

Rensat took a moment to consider her next words. “The Technologists used to call us, the Priests, a ‘cult of suicide,' yet they were the ones who ravaged Galderkhaan. The Priests believed—we
proved
—that bodies are simply a vehicle to the ultimate goal of soul bonding to reach the higher planes.”

“You proved the existence of these other planes—how?” Mikel asked dubiously.

“In the
cazh
rituals we performed, stopping short of physical death, we had visions of the transpersonal plane, even the cosmic plane,” she said.

Pao approached Mikel. There was something new in his expression: impatience.

“There is another one we seek,” he said. “We have been searching for her as long as we have been down here.”

“Who is she?” Mikel asked.

In response, Pao plunged his hands at the tiles. The tiles hummed, formed an image of a woman's face. It was indistinct, distant, but ob
viously in pain or stress. Given the flames that glowed below it, it appeared to be part of the same recording Mikel had seen earlier, of the destruction of Galderkhaan.

“You must tell me,” Pao said. “In your searches, you have encountered no one like this woman?”

Mikel looked at the face. Nothing registered. “Why is she so important?”

“Concentrate,” Pao said with obvious frustration.

Curious himself, and becoming inured to the spirits' occasionally brusque manner, Mikel ran through the catalog of faces from his decade with the Group. He wished he had a laptop or tablet with the Group's facial recognition software. He really wanted to help these two, who were truly lost souls.

Suddenly, he recalled that just over a week ago, when he'd been on board the ship on the Scotia Sea, right before seeing the airship burst from the iceberg, Flora had been sending notifications about the stone melting her deep freezers. She'd also mentioned a woman in a video in Haiti. Mikel had been too busy to chase will-o'-the-wisps. He remembered streaming the video at some point, with a lousy Internet connection. Though it had been a pinpoint of thought, now it was bright and clear—and important.

“That's her,” Pao said, and turned from Mikel.

Oddly, horribly, Mikel felt like a drained glass. Had Pao been inside his mind? Or had the tiles done that? Without realizing it, during this brief interlude, Mikel had leaned against the wall. He could feel the power of the stones vibrating through his shoulder.

Mikel broke the connection by pushing off with his back. He looked at the two spirits, their expressions suddenly triumphant.

“You have seen her! She is of your time!” Pao said. He turned briefly to Rensat. “We cannot leave. We cannot give up now.”

She nodded in firm agreement.

“You must find her,” Pao said to Mikel. “You must bring her to us.”

“Why?” Mikel asked, surprised by the timidity of his own voice.
“What good can that possibly do you? You can't change the past.” Then, with a shudder that started in his knees, he added, “Can you?”

“You saw!” Rensat said with a cruel twist to her mouth, as if he had been complicit in something. “It has already been done.”

“When?”

“At the end,” Pao said. “Someone was present who did not belong.”

“You mean, this woman? From my own time?”

“So it appears,” Pao said. “A few of us managed to bond before she appeared in the sky and prevented the great final
cazh
.”

Mikel did not share the jubilation of the two Galderkhaani. He felt very, very sick. “You want me to bring her here to change the past,” Mikel said with awful clarity.

“To stop an annihilation!” Pao yelled.

Mikel cried out with shock as his eyesight was ripped away from him and turned toward the previous vision. He was back in the courtyard with the screaming, dying horrors rising above their burning bodies. It was like a Doré etching of hell from Dante's
Inferno
come to ghastly life, with shrieks and flames mingled and rising through a canopy of black, cloudy death. He heard the souls of the dead shrieking with agony as they blindly passed other ascended souls in the sky—all of them lost, untranscended, alone, drifting aimlessly above the churning smoke.

Mikel regained his equilibrium somewhat and continued to watch the image. Then he saw the ultimate, final destruction of Galderkhaan. He saw a momentous pulse of fiery energy fueled by pool after pool of magma shooting from the direction of the sea. It rushed into the pavement below their feet and above, immolating the survivors, driving the mass of souls apart.

Above the dying city, he saw the image of the woman hovering and then the image vanished so swiftly that Mikel felt psychological whiplash that left him spinning. Pao was standing very still, his hands hanging at his sides, his eyes on the bones on the floor. Mikel didn't
think he'd ever seen anyone look so sad. Rensat took a step closer to him but could only hover, could not touch him.

“The
cazh
was working, damn her blood!” Rensat said. “We might have taken thousands of souls to the transpersonal plane instead of leaving them stranded, strewn about in horrible isolation, unable ever to rise.”

“Why?” Mikel asked. “Why would someone from
my
time do that?”

“I don't know,” Pao admitted.

“And I ask again: finding her now,” Mikel said, “what good will that do?”

It was Rensat who answered. “We seek two,” she reminded him. “This woman . . . and whoever activated the Source. Finding
that
genocidal maniac, we will use her to stop him.”