The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (33 page)

“Know
what
?” Sedou growls.

“If you and our brother are truly ignorant of the final Destiny laid out for us, then your mindless pursuit of it is all the more tragic. But I suppose I must actually consider this possibility.”

Sedou meets Fire’s calculating regard. “Consider it well and quickly! Tell me what you know!”

Again, Fire glances back at Paia. Her return gaze is fervent and hopeful, so bright that even the Fire-breather seems to shrink from its glare.
Guilt
, ventures N’Doch. Maybe even a trace of remorse?

Nah, can’t be. Remember who we’re dealing with here
.

Fire sits back and rakes his gilded nails through his hair, which does nothing to tame its mobile energy. “Then I will tell you, because I must. Because my priestess requires me to.” He looks nervous and intent, like a performer about to go on stage. His big moment, N’Doch realizes. The unloading
of his secret weapon, his last hope to win Paia back to him, and perhaps even a sibling to his cause. “But don’t hold me responsible for the results. Because I warn you, you with such faith in the rightness of Destiny . . . my news will destroy that faith, as it did mine.”

In the waiting silence, N’Doch finally understands why the Fire dude has been so civilized, so tractable. Not just to please Paia, his priestess, though obviously that’s what he’d like her to think. No, the guy thinks he’s won, and he’s just having fun jerking our chains.

Must be one hell of a piece of news he’s about to lay on us
.

H
ard thinking has always made him ravenous.

The Librarian piles rye bread and cheese, cold chicken and tomatoes and lettuce beside his keypad, and uses an obsolete mouse pad as a cutting board. Rye bread with caraway. And mustard. What a luxury! He lets himself concentrate entirely on the elaborate architecture of the sandwich, offering his brain a brief rest. But only the conscious part accepts the holiday. While he’s slicing his precarious tower neatly in half, then in quarters, his mental subroutines are clipping away a meter per millisecond.
Per
nano
second
, he amends, filling his mouth with sensual distraction.

Nanotech
. He still can’t quite believe it. A whole city of it. Mind-boggling. But he figures it could work.

For instance: he’s connected to the dragon in the way of dragon guides, even if the lines of communication are interrupted, and function randomly at best. So, sporadically, his memories are open to her. Assuming she has control of the city’s infinite population of submicroscopic mechanisms—a big assumption, but it makes sense—and she’s instructing them to re-create selected portions of his past in dimensional replicas.

How she does it is interesting enough, but the real question is, why? Why not just speak to him directly? The Librarian takes another huge bite of his sandwich. He’s gone over this territory a million times. She doesn’t because she can’t. He has to be satisfied with a half-baked answer. But building memories around him is apparently something she
can
do. So maybe she’s doing it in order to attract his attention. She’s trying to communicate, and he should see
each of these apparitions from the past as a sort of coded message. The dragon is telling him something general about the past, or about a specific aspect of his past . . . or maybe it’s something about the nanomechs that can so easily re-create it.

The Librarian lets himself focus for a moment on the pure pleasure of Swiss cheese. Like the beer, it’s something he hasn’t tasted in a very long time. A thing of the past in 2213. And the dragon has created it for him. So maybe it is the past she wants to talk about. But what about it? The nanomechs seem like a better bet. And at least he has an idea of how to proceed with them. He can look at their programming.

He sets the last quarter of his sandwich aside. Brushing crumbs from the desk and then his chin, he centers the keypad in front of him. Before he sets to work, he glances over at the old TV sitting at the edge of the darkness. The Grand Stair to the Citadel is as hard and bright on the screen as the Sahara at noon, and still just as empty, except for the two Temple guardsmen, who appear to be sleeping. Or perhaps they are just too heat dazed to move. The Librarian offers them his sympathy, then turns back to his search and forgets about them entirely.

It doesn’t take him long to discover anomalies in the nanomech programming, the same sort he’d seen with the larger devices like the street-cleaning machines. Are they accidental corruptions, or intentional interpolations? The Librarian reverse engineers several of the modified nanomechs, and decides that their functions have been purposely altered, and then linked, so that they form a sort of broadband signaling device. Very broadband. He can’t get the signal to play over his human-ear-specific speakers. But as soon as he activates the device, the signal is there, shouting in his head. And not just noise this time, but articulate with meaning.

AWAKE! COME! YOU ARE NEEDED!

The voice of the Summoner. The Librarian has been hearing this call all his lives, ever since . . . well, it began by the lake, didn’t it, when the elder knight arrived with his squire in tow. Only the squire was a girl, disguised and on the run. And if that wasn’t interesting enough, she traveled
with a dragon. The knight, an old lore-hound, announced it proudly:
a dragon!
As if he was responsible.

The Librarian chuckles. Good old Hal, doing his preordained duty by jump-starting the Quest, considering it a minor part to play and consequently feeling sidelined, never realizing how crucial he’d been. For on that very day, the Librarian—or the creature he’d been then—took the young girl’s hands in his own and saw Destiny written across her palms. Hers, yes, but his own as well.

The girl’s dragon was following a mysterious inner “summons.” The Librarian—not a librarian then, just Gerrasch, half man, half beast—stared into her eyes and heard the Call himself for the first time, though it was several lives before he understood that it summoned him as well.

The Librarian blinks. He’s been dragged into memory again, as irresistibly as if with a block and tackle. Some important message waits, abandoned in the past. Some understanding he should have recognized then and carried with him. What?
What?

There were questions asked that day. He recalls that much. What were they? Hal paid him good king’s silver for the answers. The Librarian retrieves the abandoned quarter of his sandwich and munches it pensively, searching for the mnemonic hook that will haul that memory out of the shadow of a millennium.

Bread and cheese. Hal had brought some of that as well.

The answers come to him stripped of their questions. They flare into his brain like bright meteors, inexplicable but sure.

The first answer:
The Purpose is to fix what’s broken
.

Well, that’s clear enough. The question was: What is the purpose of the Quest? And what’s broken is obviously the Earth. The whole ecosystem is on the verge of collapse. But was it then? Who in 913 had any inkling of the horrors to come? The Summoner must have known, and therefore, the purpose of the urgent Call that woke the dragons.

The second answer:
The Summoner is not here
.

No, not there in 913. Because the Summoner was here, in . . . wherever here is. The Librarian has long assumed that the Summoner is Air, his dragon, but he’d never guessed the mechanism. A million nanotech voices calling down the centuries.

The third answer, for three was all he’d had time for, with the girl’s pursuers fast approaching:
Ask them about the City
.

He knows he meant the women of Deep Moor, but what was the question? Does it even matter?

For here we are in it, millennia later. The long-ago Gerrasch saw the City that day, this city, in the girl’s frightened eyes. Which explains the déjà-vu he was assailed with the moment he stepped through the portal. The Librarian rubs his forehead vigorously. He needs his brain to work faster, deeper.

The Purpose is to fix what’s broken
.

Those few words could be said to describe the entire arc of his life, of all his lives. It’s always been his purpose, and there’s always something broken: a bird’s wing, a man’s spirit, an entire ecosystem. Or this city, for instance. He thinks of the crippled street-cleaning machines, and the mangled lines of code he’d repaired to let N’Doch’s song take flight. So much of everything now is broken.

But why is the dragon directing his thoughts backward? What was there to fix in 913, except the hell-priest’s wagon? Now, at least, there is no shortage of candidates.

The Librarian’s strong thumbs are wearing bruises into the soft skin of his temples. He shifts to massaging his head, his fingers twisting in the salt-and-pepper thatch, as thick as an animal pelt. There’s some connection he’s not making, he’s sure of it. Something so obvious that any child could see it, but not a full grown, super-educated, overcomplicated man. It’s the reason the dragon has brought him here. Something he’s meant to fix, might actually be
able
to fix, unlike the sad old broken planet. That’s beyond his abilities.
She’s
the one who’s supposed to make that happen, but she’s . . .

The Librarian goes still.

That’s it. Of course. It’s the dragon herself that’s broken.

He has, since he was aware of her, conceived of Air as a storybook sort of prisoner: shut away, gagged and bound in some dank dungeon, perhaps physically, perhaps by magic. Whatever the mechanism, she’s been denied the normal means of communication, has only occasionally been able to slip a message past the barricades. But her messages, when they arrive, are never whole and coherent. And
besides, what are the
normal means
to a dragon? Now that the Librarian has met a few more of them, he realizes what an imperfect scenario he’d constructed. Just the sort of notion born of living with your nose stuck to a computer screen. Even if forcibly restrained, a dragon should be able to speak to her guide through barriers of any sort. The breakdown must be within.

What sort of breakdown? Is she mute, as Erde was when he first met her? That would make little difference to a supposedly telepathic dragon. Besides, dragons are not equipped for human speech, unless they’re in man-form.

The Librarian releases his aching scalp. He swings up and out of his chair to pace, and sees that the confining details of his office in the Refuge have vanished. Only his console remains, an island in the void, its brushed chrome gleaming, its idiot lights shining like the eyes of forest creatures in the night.

He has to fix his dragon? Not just locate, free her, and do her bidding, but
fix
her?

How? How? How?
His hands stray to his hair again. He has to repair her like some sort of machine? He’s never felt more helpless.

Machine? Nanomech?

He has an unwelcome vision of the dragon as a benign version of the
machina rex
that chased him into this memory-haunted darkness. He sees her as a collection of parts spread out on the machinist’s workbench, or as countless invisible specks of nanomech. A hateful notion. It makes the Librarian abruptly nauseous, which he recognizes as panic. Because if any of this is true, there’ll be no eureka, no golden breakthrough of mutual recognition as he bursts through the walls of her prison to find her whole, waiting and material, ready to save the world. The Librarian swallows convulsively, banishing his panic to gnaw invisibly at his gut. Well, it was a silly romantic notion anyway.

Sudden peripheral motion distracts him. The old TV still lurks at the edge of the circle of light, its bright screen hovering like a window in the darkness. The somnolent view of the Grand Stair has erupted with frenzied preparations. Soldiers are racing to the parapet, taking up battle stations.

“Not now! Not now!” the Librarian pleads. He can’t lose
the many threads of his elusive and still-developing epiphany. But he throws a quick glance at the screen anyway. He has to. Leif Cauldwell’s army has reached the Citadel. The security camera shows the view down the long final flight of steps from the midway landing to the ramshackle buildings clustered at the bottom. The long dry road is a pale scar down the middle of the village and out across the valley. But past the edge of the village, details blur with distance and heat shimmer. If he had House on-line, the Librarian could ask for a satellite close-up, maybe even sound. He gets up and shuffles nearer to the screen, but he can only squint and guess at how much of that broad dust cloud inching across the arid plain is actual and how much is mirage. Running a few numbers in his head, the Librarian estimates that even if Leif took with him every adult in the Refuge, he must have doubled that number in order to throw up a cloud that size. The Librarian is not surprised that the Temple-ruled towns and hamlets along the army’s route have proved less loyal to the Fire-breather than they’re sworn to be.

And where is Fire, while all this is going on? The Librarian sees no vast winged shadow gliding across the barren flatlands or sliding down along the parched swell of the hills. No sign of burning wagons, or men. At least not yet.