The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (11 page)

He imagines the Fire-breather, racing up and down the centuries, covering all his bases, making good on all his threats. Even for a power like Fire, this will be a strain on his resources. Good. He’ll be distracted. The perfect time to move on the Citadel, but also the perfect time to find and rescue Air. Is this what he’s meant to understand? That he must reassemble the four dragon guides, as soon as possible. Strength in unity. Only together will they find Air.

He sees Stoksie beside him, watching blunt fingers play the keypad like a piano. How long has he been there? The Librarian cannot remember seeing him approach. The little man looks pensive, uncomfortable, like he’s been standing too long on his bad hip.

The Librarian gestures. “Chair?”

“Nah.” Stoksie props his elbow against the side of the console and leans his chin into his cupped palm. “Kin I ask yu sumpin?”

“Ask.”

“Dat place dey wen’, das like sumkinda time masheen?”

“Sumkinda.” The Librarian slips unconsciously into the Tinker dialect.

“Luta, he be okay, nah?”

“Hope he will.” Does even Stoksie believe he has some mystic power over life and death? To his right, the plotter spits out the printed plan and map. The Librarian passes the stiff rolls to an outstretched hand, without noticing whose, and hears the crinkle of paper being spread across a nearby table. He worries that the stockpiled reams will be too dry to use long before his supply is exhausted.

“Yu cud go anyweah, den?” Stoksie pursues.

“Theoretically.” The Librarian takes a breath. So many syllables all at once. “With control.”

Stoksie grunts. “But we doan have dat. How cud we git dat, dya t’ink?”

“Working on it,” the Librarian mutters. Wait. What is that? There’s a new humming in his earpiece, something that isn’t coming from House. What is it? Too much noise in the room to be sure. Too much noise and too much busyness. He can’t focus. He can’t hear himself think. He waves his arms distractedly. “Quiet! QUIET!”

No one hears him except Stoksie. “Yu gotta raise yer volume sum, G.”

The Librarian frowns. Wasn’t he yelling at the top of his lungs?

“Heah. Lemme do it.”

Stoksie limps away, moving from caucus to caucus, debate to debate. The Librarian doesn’t pick up what he says, but the hubbub dies back a bit, and groups begin to drift toward the door. Soon the room is empty, but for the cluster of warriors around the printout.

“. . . four days’ direct march, if the dragons can’t take us.” Leif delineates a route across the area map, between spidery contour lines and the broken traces of old roadways.

“With how many men?” asks Köthen.

“People,” says Constanze.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the force won’t be all men. The women will fight, too.”

“Ah.” Köthen’s shrug suggests that if all the women are as staunch as Constanze, he has no objection. He straightens away from the map and turns to study the screen again. “
Herr
Stokes,” he calls out, waiting for the translator to catch up. “Are those mules of yours saddle-broken?”

“Mebbe. Why yu askin’?”

Köthen seems to take this ambiguity for an assent. He nods. “Give me ten men of my choosing, Leif Cauldwell, armed with these wondrous weapons you speak of. I will take the heights, and clear the courtyards.”

“Hmm, it’s a good idea, but you’ll be totally exposed up there when the Beast returns. And he will return, no doubt of it.”

“The risk is no worse than that of an ambush in the lightless bowels of these unfamiliar warrens.”

“Not entirely lightless.”

“But well-known to you. In there, I would be a hazard to my men.”

“I see your point.” Leif nods. “Okay, you’re on. The heights are your job.”

So the soldier prefers to fight his battles in the open air, the Librarian muses. Better him than me. Hours later, his cave-adapted lungs still feel the dry sear of the mountaintop.

“When can we expect our dragons back, Gerrasch?” Leif asks.

“Unsure.” The Librarian is not well-versed in the issues of real-time relative to dragon travel. It’s not the sort of information you can easily find in books or data banks. He suspects that elapsed time in the past is not exactly equivalent to elapsed time in the present. Besides, time, as in a specific chronological goal, is not Earth’s main parameter. It’s
place
that draws him. The fact that places have their associated times is apparently coincidental. But standard time paradox should dictate that the physical dragon can’t be in two places at once. So his return can be expected at any time
after
the moment he left. Could be seconds, could be days or weeks.

“Well, say, an hour or two, maybe?”

“Maybe. Yes.” What will be, will be. The Librarian doesn’t want to burden Leif Cauldwell with worries he can do nothing about.

“Let’s say an hour, then. Time enough to talk to the folks upstairs.”

“We do need a head count,” notes Constanze.

“Let’s get on it, then.” Leif rolls up the printout and hands it to his wife for safekeeping. “Stoksie, can you stick around down here and keep G company? Anything important comes through from the Citadel, you can let us know.”

“Betcha,” the Tinker agrees.

And at last the room is truly empty. Silence settles in like a gentle rain. The Librarian remembers rain. He allows himself a moment to savor the precious memory, not wanting to waste it. Stoksie noses about for a comfortable seat, then drags a battered swivel chair up to the desk nearest the console. He props his feet on an open drawer and leans back into the cracked plastic with a sigh.

“Ain’ slept sinze yestiddy.”

The Librarian nods sympathetically. He feels like he hasn’t slept in years. Centuries, maybe. How will any of them get rest enough to fight this war? He peers at the readouts stacked to the left of his keypad. The tracking routines are in their third loop, still without a result. He plants his elbows on the cushioned wrist pad and rests his head in his palms. Just for a moment, he tells himself. Just long enough to clear his head of the residue from the morning’s noise and crisis . . . but that humming is back again. He can hear it clearly now, in his ears, in his mind. He can feel it in his gut. Is it . . . physical? Is something going on out on the mountainside?

The Librarian stirs, lifts his head. His neck muscles are cramped. His eyelids seem fastened together. He has no feeling at all in his hands. He’s been asleep, and the humming has woken him. There’s something different about the light. For a moment, before he is fully awake, he imagines that the sun has risen. But the sun does not rise when you’re a mile underground.

The Librarian shakes himself upright.

The room is bathed in a pure white radiance. Every corner, every detail is softly delineated. In memory of his former animal self, every hair on the Librarian’s body rises to attention. He lifts his dazzled eyes to the wall screen. Instantly he understands. The portal has opened again.

The darker walls and ceiling frame the bright vista beyond. Light spills in a long rectangle onto the scuffed flooring of the com room. A glowing path, leading right to his console. He is inside, looking out onto a shaded terrace, bounded by delicate columns and a railing of translucent stone. Like alabaster, the Librarian decides, but without alabaster’s depth. This stone is as smooth and white as the paper from the plotter. Past the railing is a blue void, neither sea nor sky, but a seamless both. The white terrace continues out of sight to left and right, its hidden spaces beckoning.

What does it mean? It’s not a place he knows or has ever been, or has ever seen. Yet it seems . . . familiar. How can this be? He’s a librarian, after all. His memory is encyclopedic. If this was a place from any of his many pasts, he’d remember it. And he doubts it could be an unknown
from his current present, unless there still exists some impossibly sheltered corner of the world, where such a terrace could show no sign of destruction or wear.

But he knows . . . he
knows
that a city lies concealed below the white horizon of the terrace railing. Images flood the space behind his eyes: tall glass towers reflecting the unchanging white light. Wide boulevards and open plazas. An empty city that calls to him. Is this to be the next phase of his search?

He has only to walk the width of the terrace to find out. It isn’t far. Not far at all.

The Librarian lurches to his feet. Refusing to let the image out of his sight, he fumbles over to Stoksie’s chair and wakes him with a clumsy, flailing arm.

“Easy, nah! Easy!”

“Stokes! Look!”

Stoksie’s eyes flick open. “Whatsit?”

“What do . . . wachu see deah, Stokes?”

“Weah?”

“On da screen.”

The Tinker sets both feet carefully on the floor and squints into the light. “Dunno, G. Wachu t’ink it iz?”

The Librarian is wary of admitting what he thinks. It’s too impossible, too crazy, that after so long, the moment could have actually arrived, so suddenly and without fanfare. He hopes Stoksie’s determined skepticism will help him think past the exultant hammering of his heart. “I t’ink . . . think it’s
her
place. Why else would it come to me? She’s in there somewhere.”

But Stoksie seems less inclined to doubt him since the other dragons appeared. He levers himself out of his chair and takes a few stiff steps forward. “Her? Yu mean, da One?”

“Yes.”

“It’s da portal opin agin, den?”

“Think so. Yes. Sure of it.”

Stoksie rubs his stubbled chin, runs a hand over his bald head, then limps into the shaft of surreal light, right up to the edge of the opening. The Librarian follows, a long step behind. There is a faint line across the floor, a subtle change of tonality, like a borderline between here and there. Slowly, Stoksie extends his arm, up to and past where
the screen should be. He waves his hand up and down, meeting no resistance. “It’s da portal, all ri’. Wachu wanna do, G?”

The Librarian swallows. Physical courage has not been much required of him during his eternal waiting period. Endurance, persistence, patience, resourcefulness, and intelligence, yes. Those are his major qualities. But his body is thick and slow, his hands agile but not particularly strong. “Gotta go deah, Stokes,” he whispers hoarsely.

“Nah. Bad ideah. Stoopid.”

“Got to.” What if the portal closes, and she can’t open it again? What if it’s only Fire’s current distraction that’s allowed her to do it? “Got to, Stokes. Can’t miss the chance.”

“Now? Ri’ now, yu got to?”

The Librarian nods.

“Den lemme run tell Leif an’ da othas.”

“No. Please. They’ll try to stop me.”

“Shur dey will, an’ gud fer dem!”

“No. Not good. Got to do this.” The Librarian shakes his head. He takes a half step forward, until the change in the light falls across the middle of his toes. Is this the difference, then? That he can actually walk off into the unknown without quailing in panic?

Stoksie moves up beside him. “Den I gotta go wichu.”

“No.”

“Oh, yeah. Betcha.”

The Librarian shudders. His last chance to refuse the summons has just crumbled. Now he has to go. But he doesn’t have to go alone. Often he’s convinced that the Tinker crews are the treasure-house of all that was once admirable in humanity. “Thank you,” he gasps.

Stoksie laughs, a reckless sort of cackle. “Da lame an’ da halt, nah? Fine peah we make ta go aventurin’!”

No random events
, the Librarian reminds himself, a litany to bolster his courage. “Let’s go, then.”

He rests his hand on the Tinker’s shoulder and, together, they step into the light.

A
fter only an instant in the snowy yard at Deep Moor, Erde knows that her Seeing has been a true one.

The white ground is churned up and stained with frozen mud. Acrid odors pinch her throat and nostrils, not the warm scent of cozy fireplaces, but the stench of burning. Black smoke billows beyond the surrounding pines, toward the barns, toward the house.

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” Erde flings the sack of woolens into Luther’s arms and races across the ragged snow in her sandals and leggings. The path through the trees to the house is ashy and trampled. At the base of the stone steps, she collapses with an anguished wail.