The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (16 page)

“What? What?”

“Nothing. It was . . . I thought you might sit on the bird.” But she almost orders him up again, so she can see the spot where the little cup fit so neatly back into the benchtop. Pressed down by his weight? She’d like to know. But she doesn’t want him to think she’s telling him what to do.

“I don’t get it.” He fists one hand restlessly inside the other. “All the other portals went somewhere. How come there’s no there here?”

“It’s like a waiting room.” Like the benches in the halls outside her father’s offices at the Citadel, where people seemed to wait forever.

“Waiting for what?”

“For an idea. For a way out. For something to happen. Like we are.” Paia wishes he wouldn’t glare at her so accusingly, as if she’s said something unpardonably stupid. She’s not stupid. She’s just more accepting of their situation. In fact, she feels curiously numb, as if she’s repressed her anxiety all the way to affectlessness. How totally sheltered she was in her family fortress! As long as she remained inside, she had nothing and no one to fear—except, of course, the God. In the outside world, apparently everything is a threat. Just as her father—and the God—had always warned her.

“Except you, bird,” she murmurs. “Isn’t that right?”

The bird regards her expectantly, as if it, too, is bored with waiting.

“Sorry. Not much I can do.” Paia turns away to study the windows along the opposite wall. If only she could see through all that cut glass and heavy drapery! There might be a light behind. She’s not sure, but the beveled patterns in the glass seem to sparkle with a different sort of light than the cool, even glow of the room they’re sitting in.
They could knock on a window, perhaps, even open it, or . . .

“What’s over the railing?” she asks N’Doch.

“What railing?”

“The balcony railing.”

He gives her that same accusing glare.

“Well, look.” She points. “Down at the far end.”

He turns toward the void. The railing is a waist-high band of white stone, supported by cylindrical balusters. “That wasn’t there before.”

“Yes, it . . . wait, no. You’re right. It wasn’t. Why did I . . .?” Paia suffers a moment of vertigo. Because the bench wasn’t a bench either. Not at first. She can picture it clearly: a plain white block. It’s like waking up when you’re not even aware you’ve been asleep and dreaming. “What about those windows?” The detail of their casing and mullions seems richer than a moment ago. “Those weren’t there either, were they?”

“No. They weren’t.” N’Doch stands up. “Something’s happening.”

At least he didn’t say, “What windows?” “Are we asleep?”

The accusing glare is slightly milder this time.

“Well, we might be. How would we know?” There’s another possibility that Paia doesn’t even want to mention.

“’Cause I know, that’s how.”

The bird suddenly emits its musical cry and takes off in a dusty flurry. It soars once around the room, then flies straight out into the void, its call fading with distance.

“Hey, look at that!” N’Doch sprints after it. “If it got out, we can!”

Paia hurries to join him at the edge, and finds him gripping the balcony railing as if it might try to escape.

“Okay,” he says. “This is weird.”

To the left and right of the opening, long flights of stairs have materialized. The broad white railing leads downward like an arrow into darkness. But shapes are coalescing out of the void, a landscape rising from the fog. Or rather, a cityscape. As they watch, tall straight-sided towers appear, bathed in a cool, even light. Puffs of storybook cloud obscure their heights. Their feet are planted within an infinitely receding grid of wide, clean streets.

“Now where have we got ourselves to?” N’Doch murmurs.

“It’s beautiful,” Paia breathes, mourning the drowned and ruined cities of her own time. “It’s huge. Are we supposed to go down there?”

“Where else?” N’Doch slides his hand along the railing, testing its solidity.

From high above its pale streets, the city looks motionless and deserted.

“Which way should we go?”

“If I had a coin, I’d toss it.”

“The bird flew that way.” Paia points vaguely toward the left. The sky between the towers is now a clear, flat blue. The puffy clouds seem permanently moored to their tips.

“As good a guess as any. Ready?” With a hint of returning bravado, N’Doch squares his shoulders and starts down the left-hand staircase. She can tell he’s glad just to be moving again.

The first part of the descent is more like mountain climbing than walking. The steps are dangerously high and deep, and the stair goes straight down without a turn or landing, as if built for giants. Paia is reminded of the Grand Stair leading up to the Citadel, specifically designed to be difficult, in order to repel invading armies, but also to provide the worshiper approaching the Temple with an opportunity for penance. She doesn’t question the oddness of such a stair until, after several minutes of perilous stumbling and a lot of awkwardness, the going gets easier and the steps are not so tall or wide. The farther they descend, the easier it gets, until the steps are the perfect height and width for speeding downward. N’Doch slows his pace voluntarily, to keep them both from tumbling headlong to the city streets.

The staircase spills them out at the edge of a vast, paved square. Paia glances back up the long run of steps, climbing the side of a windowless building as sheer as the face of a cliff. Who would build such a precipitous stair on the structure’s exterior? The balcony is a vague smudge, a mere brushstroke in the upper distance, wreathed like the tower tops in clouds that to her painter’s eye look as if they’ve been laid on top of an existing canvas.

“Are you sure we’re not dreaming this?” she asks plaintively.

“Sure, I’m sure,” replies N’Doch, with the intensity of one trying hard to convince himself. “What’s your problem, anyway?”

“Look at this place!”

“What’s the last city you were ever in?”

“I’ve seen pictures. Lots of them. Cities have people, but this place is empty. There’s no one here!”

“We don’t know that yet.” He stands with his arms akimbo, gazing ahead down a wide street that vanishes into the distance without a crook or bend. His dark, mobile silhouette rests uneasily against the pale background of faceless buildings and streets, as if cut out with scissors and pasted on. “Wonder where the damn bird went.”

Rather than striking out across the open square, N’Doch chooses the long way, around its perimeter. The pavement is as smooth and white as polished tile. The facades of the buildings are peculiarly blank, with tall arched niches wrapping curls of thin shadow around opaque windows and doors. Rather as an Impressionist might paint them, Paia notes. No detail, just the effects of light. But a painter’s surfaces would never be so flat and lifeless. It’s like there’s an entire dimension missing from everything she sees.

“If there are people here,” she asks, “how do they get in and out of these buildings?”

“What d’you mean, if? Who ever heard of a city with no people?”

“There’s lots of them. Most of them, in my time.”

N’Doch shakes his head impatiently. “Concealed entrances, probably. For security reasons.”

As he says this, there’s a shivering in the ground. A buildup of static in the air raises the hair on Paia’s arms. N’Doch has moved off toward the nearest doorway for a closer look.

“You feel that?” she calls.

He steps up on a sidewalk she hadn’t noticed before and peers into the archway. “Feel what?”

The sensation passes. Paia hurries to catch up with him. “You didn’t feel that little . . . quivering?”

“Nope. Not a thing.” He runs his palm across the blank space where the door should be. “You’d think maybe there’d be a sign or something. You know, like: dragon guides, ring here.”

Paia is relieved to see his humor resurfacing. Her laugh echoes thinly, as if the buildings have absorbed most of its wavelengths. N’Doch moves on to the next entryway, which is flanked by a pair of white columns, but offers the same lack of access.

“I’d feel better if there was someone around,” Paia ventures.

“Ha. Be careful what you wish for. Who says that someone would want us around?”

“But wouldn’t you prefer an enemy we know about to one we can’t even see?”

“I’d prefer no enemies at all. Enemies do things like blow you to pieces and murder your ma.”

“Oh, N’Doch. . . .” Paia slips her hand around the crook of his elbow. His tensed muscles are more honest about his state of mind than his face is. She squeezes him gently. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

She’s glad he can finally admit it aloud. They walk arm in arm to the end of the block, where a side street enters the square. But N’Doch disengages himself uneasily when they reach the curb. He looks out across the broad expanse of open pavement. “Y’know, the folks who made this city didn’t have much of an imagination. Those buildings on that side are exactly the same as these here.”

Paia allows his escape to safer subject matter. “And the other two sides match each other, too. An advanced appreciation of symmetry, perhaps?”

“Symmetry is boring.”

“Always?” She glances up at him, risking a smile. “You’d look very odd without matching arms and legs. Or eyes.”

N’Doch snorts. “Maybe. But I knew a guy once with one brown eye and one blue one. Made a shitload of money on it, ’cause people thought he was a big magic man.” His grin is sour, but Paia is happy to see it. “Point is,” he continues, “I wouldn’t want to meet the people that live here. They’d be the people who gotta do things a certain way. I wouldn’t likely fit into their mold. Maybe if we got off the main drag a bit . . .”

He turns to peer hopefully down the little side street. The ground shivers again, a tremor like a tiny earthquake.
Paia’s vision blurs momentarily. Either that, or something odd is happening to the surfaces of the buildings. And then, it’s as if nothing had occurred.

“There! Did you feel that?”

“Was that it before? I thought it was me phasing out for a nanosec.”

“No, it . . . look! Ask, and ye shall receive!”

On the corner of the building across the side street, a little above head-height, is a sign—the first they’ve seen, the first detail of any sort. Paia’s eyes fall upon it hungrily. It’s a bright sky-blue rectangle with a neat white border and white block lettering. Familiar looking, but she can’t quite place it.

“’As the crow flies . . .’” N’Doch reads with a puckered brow. “Huh. I guess it could have been a crow.”

“What’s a crow?”

“A bird. Like the one that got us into this mess in the first place.”

“Ah.” Paia stares at the sign, trying to tease out further meaning. Of course! It reminds her of a monitor screen. Amazing, she muses, the significance letters can assume when they’re the only ones around. There are very few signs in the Citadel, and no books at all, save the antiques in her father’s library. There’s no one to publish them anymore. The God requires literacy for the Temple priesthood, but only to enable them to carry out the day-to-day administration and to keep track of the tithing and finances. She wonders how many of the children in the villages that pay duty to the Temple are being taught to read and write. Why bother, if there’s nothing for them to read? On the other hand, how will there ever be anything to read again, if no one is taught how to write?

Paia realizes that N’Doch is staring at her.

“You gonna read that sign right off the wall, girl?”

“I was thinking about books.”

“Books? I’ve read one or two.” He shakes his head. “You’re weird. C’mon. This way. This little street looks promising.”

At first, Paia is not sure she agrees, and she’s glad when he chooses a cautious pace and sticks to the middle of the pavement. The street is narrow, and shaded rather abruptly into dimness by the tall buildings on either side—all the
horizontal confinement of a cave without the vertical comfort of a roof. But, in the distance, several vague projecting shapes promise a change in the monotony of the facades. They gain specificity as the distance shortens, and are finally resolved into objects familiar to Paia only through pictures. In colors and stripes, they hang out over the sidewalk, which is less well-maintained on this back street than out in the main square. Long cracks spiderweb the concrete, and the curbstones are worn and broken.

N’Doch points. “See those awnings? Must be a little business district.”

Awnings
. That’s what they’re called. Paia thinks they look very cheerful, especially after a long trudge through a dull gray city. Urged along faster, she can soon see little tables under the nearest one, covered with red-checkered cloths. The black metal chairs have rounded, filigreed backs. Paia feels a sudden urge to sit down.

But N’Doch’s eager pace has slackened. Abruptly he stops, in the middle of the street. “Oh, boy.”

“What is it?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I might, if you give me a chance.”

“I know this place.”

“What do you mean?”

“I
know
it. I’ve been there. Bunch of times, when I was a boy.”

Paia has met many strange notions in her life, but for some reason, this one gives her a chill. “Oh, N’Doch, it just
looks
like some place you’ve been.”

“No. It is.” He jabs a finger at the scrawl of lettering on the green-and-white striped canopy. “See what it says?
La Rive Gauche
. That’s what the place was called. It was Papa Dja’s favorite hangout when he was still living in town. Okay. I’ll reconsider the possibility that I’m dreaming . . .!”

“
We’re
dreaming.”

“We can’t both be . . .”

There’s movement among the tables. A large brown animal rises from the shadows and stands at attention, looking their way. Paia encounters her second extinct creature in less than a day. It’s a dog, and the sight invokes a sharp
twinge of nostalgia. Her father had tried to breed dogs in the early days of the Collapse, but feeding them became too difficult when the humans around them were starving. The feudal system of tribute-in-kind that keeps the Temple denizens so healthy and well fed wasn’t put in place until the dragon arrived. This dog does not look well fed at all. Even at a distance, Paia can see that its raggedy coat is patched with the matted darkness of dried blood. But it looks alert and capable of being threatening. Paia doesn’t know if she should be afraid of it or not.