The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (26 page)

P
aia listens to N’Doch’s song, glad for the excuse to put off her summoning a bit longer. His voice is strong and pure, and the melody murmurs of loss and longing. By the second verse, in a happier vein, he’s left off his guitar accompaniment, so that the song drifts entirely on its own through the thickening dusk. Paia imagines it like water, flowing into the darkened corners of the room. Where it’s been, it leaves a new glimmer behind. Chandeliers flare softly overhead. Etched glass sconces glow to life. The darkness retreats a little.

N’Doch is still singing when the front door opens and shuts with the throaty rattle of thin glass in an aging wooden frame. N’Doch falls silent in the middle of a word. Paia fears to look. She’s sure the God has somehow preempted her summons. But how has he managed the doorknob?

Djawara’s back is to the door. He turns, then rises with a quick, stiff jolt and a gasp. His chair clatters to one side.

“Easy, Papa,” says N’Doch quickly. “It’s not who you think.”

A tall black man stands in front of the closed door, reconnoitering. As tall as N’Doch, maybe taller, and more broad-shouldered. A big man. But Paia immediately sees the resemblance. It’s in the smile, the great transformation from a glower to a grin.

N’Doch wrenches himself out of the overstuffed armchair. One fist shoots into the air angrily. The other clutches the neck of the miraculous guitar. “Whacha trying to do?” he yells at the man, “Give Papa Dja a heart attack?”

“Nice welcome.” The newcomer frowns, and the heated air in the café chills noticeably. “Papa,” he says gently. His voice is deep, like the roll of distant thunder. “I didn’t know you were here.”

Djawara finds his own voice, but barely. He looks so frail and overcome that Paia worries for him. She puts her hand out, and he grasps it gratefully. “Sedou? Sedou, my boy?”

N’Doch hugs the guitar against his chest. “Nah, Papa, it’s her. It’s the dragon. Will you please just sit down and take a breath?” To the big man, who hasn’t moved from the door: “You oughta be ashamed of yourself!”

“Be cool, bro. I didn’t know. You should have warned him before you sang me.”

“I didn’t . . .” N’Doch notices the guitar in his arms. “Did I? Shit, guess I did. What was I thinking?”

“I guess you weren’t. Nothing new there.”

“Glad to see you, too.”

“The dragon?” murmurs Djawara.

Paia is amazed. Water in human form has none of Fire’s charged, holographic glitter. The dragon has simply become the man, the older brother that N’Doch was singing about. The
dead
older brother, she now recalls. No wonder Djawara is so distressed.

“The dragon?” the old man asks again.

N’Doch is busy squabbling with his pseudo-sibling. “How did you find me here?”

Paia sets Djawara’s chair upright and urges him to sit. “His dragon. Water. She’s a shape-shifter.”

He knows this, but had for the moment forgotten. She sees comprehension return as if a mist has cleared from his eyes. “Ah, yes. Shape-shifter.” He looks away from the apparition of his dead grandson, then back again. “Remarkable likeness, really.” He smiles at Paia and pats her hand. “Remarkable. Though now that I look more closely, not exactly as I remember him. Sedou was not so . . .” Djawara’s hands sketch out height and breadth. “Not such a giant.”

“He’s the Sedou that N’Doch remembers,” Paia offers quietly.

“I am what he sings me.” The big man moves gracefully among the empty tables, snatching up a chair as he passes. He sets it down in front of Djawara and sits, his eyes level with the old man’s. They regard each other for a long moment, while N’Doch hovers uneasily in the background.

“Ever since she showed up,” he mutters to Paia, “I always thought it should be Papa Dja she came for. He’s been expecting dragons for years.”

“I am very sorry for the loss of your daughter, good sage,” says the dragon. “But happy that you are alive and well.”

Djawara’s round face crinkles, caught between joy and sorrow. “Had I never met a dragon before now, I’d never have thought to look for salvation in a grove of trees.” He pauses. “What shall I call you?”

“Whatever makes you easy, Papa.”

“Sedou, then. In honor of.”

Paia tries to imagine Fire ever putting someone else’s comfort before his own. She offers her hand, mostly for the chance of convincing herself of the dragon’s material presence. “Sedou. I feel I should introduce myself.”

N’Doch’s fist descends on the big man’s shoulder, beating out a soft repeating rhythm. “So, you’re here. Did you leave the Big Guy outside?”

“Not here.”

When the dragon has explained about Rose and the destruction of Deep Moor, N’Doch begins to pace. “We’re all here, then, here in the city. Even Gerrasch. Damn, that’s got to mean something.”

“Still missing one,” Paia reminds him.

N’Doch levels a knowing glance. “Not entirely missing, though.”

Sedou sits back, swinging his arm over the curve of his chair. “Yeah, what about that? I’m picking up vibes about this little project you all have in mind. Seems like I got here just in time.”

N’Doch frowns. “You mean, time to tell us to forget it, huh?”

“No. No.” Sedou looks thoughtful. “Brother Earth certainly would. But I’d kinda like to hear what Fire has to
say for himself when he’s not trying to incinerate me.” The man/dragon lets his eyes roam the shadowed length of the café. “Perhaps this civilized and casual setting will be more conducive to rational discourse than a barren mountaintop.”

“He’s often most deadly when he’s rational,” Paia warns.

“But in this zone of safety, his only available weapon will be his tongue,” Djawara points out. “The only real power in words is what we give them ourselves.”

Paia is surprised that this old man should be so willing to meet the dragon who has just murdered his only daughter. She’s also surprised that Water is willing to go along with N’Doch’s mad scheme. But she nods, accepting the inevitable. The idea seems less crazy with another dragon in the room.

“That’s it, then?” N’Doch tightens his hold on the guitar. “We’re still good to go?”

Sedou stands. “The sooner, the better. Before our less devious colleagues get wind of this.”

“Come now.” Djawara puts on a fey grin. “What’s devious about a little negotiation?”

T
he Librarian flicks the switch, and nothing happens. Despair surges through him, like the rush of a bad, cheap drug. His heart pounds. His fingers rattle against the noisy, antique keyboard.
Shame, Gerrasch!
He’s too smart, too experienced to rest his entire future on the outcome of a single action. And yet, he did, he has. He’s secretly hoped she’d just . . . be there.

Then the rising whine of the drives drowns out the blood roar in his ears. The flood of returning joy nearly knocks him flat.

What doesn’t kill you makes you strong
, the Librarian intones silently. He vows to settle down. Get a grip. He is unused to being tideswept by the force of his own emotions.

Okay. Where am I?

His tiny crash pad in Frankfort. His desk and chair. A few books. His battered ham radio. Other than that, there was just a mattress on the floor and a crate for his clothing. Is the mattress out there also, lumpy and dank, in the darkness that, now as then, surrounds his desk? He’s sure that’s its sour smell he detects, mixing with odors of boiled cabbage and crumbling plaster. The old-fashioned mechanical keys feel both strange and familiar. He cocks an ear for the sounds of traffic and footfalls outside the cracked basement window. A single monitor shivers to gray life at eye level, and coughs up the DOS prompt. The cursor flashes at him balefully. The Librarian never liked cursors. He knows already that this system will be inadequate to his uses. Can it even do as much as he’s already doing (miraculously) on his own, without the aid of machinery? Unlikely. Meanwhile, it’s here, so there must be a reason. The dragon’s
reason, he hopes. He’ll have to scour his memory for all the tricks he used back then to tease power, speed, and flexibility out of third-hand equipment. In those days, his ingenuity was fueled by necessity as well as obsession. He’s tickled by the image of his burly neck and shoulders as solidly built shelves of a library, the required architectural support for all the information he carries inside his head. He stares at the cursor, pondering his course of action.

He considers what he knows, what he’s sure about: the dragon Air is somewhere about. Instinct tells him this, not hard evidence. But trusting instinct has won him through many situations where rationality proved dangerously misleading. Assume, then, that she’s close by, but either cannot or will not speak to him directly. The Librarian opts for
cannot
, since he feels still and always the pull of the dragon’s desire to communicate. It’s the bright star by which he’s navigated through his many lives. He can’t believe, he
won’t
believe, that it would fail him now, when he’s so close to his goal.

So she’s here, she can’t speak to him, for whatever reason, but there’s all this signal in the air, which his peculiar ear perceives as sound, and his particular brain as code.
There are no accidents
. He now recalls that, back when, he’d rigged this system to do primitive cryptography, once he’d given up asking his geek acquaintances about the mysterious binary sequences that kept showing up in his system. There’d been equivalent incursions during his ham radio years, even on his CB, but he rarely mentioned these, lacking the material evidence to back up his claim. It became a very private matter. Either his friends began to suspect his sanity, or they got much too interested and insisted on burdening him with reports of their own communications with space aliens. He had no desire to admit to being one of them, and yet, there were these “messages.” Not sentences. Not even words. Only their elegant patterning indicated intent on the part of the sender. But the intent was mysterious, and the sender never identified. Looking back, the Librarian is proud that he kept the faith for so long, his faith in his preternatural senses, and never let himself be convinced that he was imagining things. Eventually, in desperation, he’d developed his own private array of listening devices, but none of them was ever a
channel for the mystery signal. It didn’t use his devices. It just . . . arrived. And, doggedly, the Librarian would attempt to decode it.

So now, reverting to the habit of the location he finds himself in, he calls up a menu of active frequencies and chooses one at random. He squints into the monitor as the numbers scroll past.

The keyboard feels different when he sets his hands back on it: sleeker, more compact. He glances down and recognizes yet another old friend, from a slightly later time when he began to wear out his keyboard every six months. More books, piled at his elbow, his single shelf having overflowed. The familiar bibles are there:
Silent Spring, Limits to Growth
, the report from Rio, mixed in with his deep ecology journals and action alerts from Greenpeace and Earth First. For a moment, he’s distracted by the hopefulness of all these pages of horrifying statistics and earnest prose.
If only we can get the word out, the people will listen!
The Librarian sighs and rubs his eyes. He believed that, then. He looks up again to find a bank of three monitors, each showing the processing of a different line of code. On the right-hand screen, a familiarity in the sequencing catches his eye. It’s the signal he’d monkeyed with in order to free up its logjam. He types briefly, then waits for what seems like a lifetime.
Too slow, too slow
, he fumes. At this rate, the world will be burned to a cinder before he gets through to his dragon. At last, the screen offers him several options. When he lowers his fingers, the keyboard has become a chunky but functional laptop. The Librarian taps in his choice, and music enters the void like a friend walking into the room. A single plaintive guitar, and a voice he’s sure he recognizes, even though he’s never heard it singing before. He doesn’t ask why he’s hearing N’Doch sing. It’s a pleasant and appropriate accompaniment to his work. And when he finds
her
, she will explain it all.