A Dream of Ice (28 page)

Flora turned and spent a moment she did not have. “What are you talking about?”

“You have a mosaic tile in this building,” Caitlin said through her teeth. “It's not very happy to be here.”

She saw triumph in Flora's eyes. Caitlin had cracked first. Flora believed this was her game now.

“Stay here,” Flora said.

“You don't know what you're doing,” Caitlin replied, letting go of the woman's ankle.

“On the contrary. We have control of it,” Flora said evenly.

Caitlin decided not to mention the other tile, the masses of them in the South Pole. That, and the details about Yokane, was information she would trade if necessary.

Shooing Adrienne ahead, Flora turned and strode toward the room the younger woman had exited. Caitlin tried to stand but wavered immediately and had to sit back down. The reverse flow of events had dimmed but not stopped. She tried making the “cut off” gesture she had used on the subway but it didn't work. She was weaker in this mansion than anywhere else. She huddled into herself, feeling enhanced and powerless at the same time.

Flora, on the other hand, was fueled by purpose. She entered the chamber as if it were a shrine and cautiously approached the Serpent. Its former resting place, the room with the ruined floor, was locked away from sight with a mat rolled up outside the base of its door to disguise the damage to the cement. Here, in the new chamber, Adrienne had restored the acoustic levitation and once more the symbols on the stone were faceup. As Adrienne had indicated, the symbols were indeed glowing an ivory white. The luminescence wasn't very strong and nearly disappeared by the time it hit the black soundboard looming above it. The light was leisurely flickering through the symbols in some kind of sequence and the stone was still vibrating faintly.

“Any indication that it's going to flip again, or alter its position in the node in any way?” Flora asked.

“None,” Adrienne said, “and no changes to the environment.”

They both involuntarily glanced at the floor: it was smooth and normal.

“Video?” Flora asked.

Adrienne pointed at a camera she'd set up on a tripod in a corner, behind a wall of bulletproof glass in case of an explosion.

“Get yourself a chair,” Flora said, gazing adoringly at the object. “I don't want you to take your eyes off this thing.”

“Not in here,” Adrienne started. “We can hook the camera into—”

“Sit in the doorway then, Adrienne.” Flora snapped as she walked away. “I won't have data slipping through the pixels.”

As she arrived at the stairs, without asking, Flora reached down, put a hand under Caitlin's elbow, and hauled her to her feet. She walked the psychiatrist down the hall to the room she still thought of as Arni's lab and plopped her on a stool.

Caitlin looked up. Her visual feed immediately reset itself to the present time. She was able to focus on Flora's eyes now.

Flora noticed her gaze. “I recognized you,” she said.

“From where?”

“I saw you in a video and I wondered if you were just a Vodou voyeur.” Flora smiled with a mean twist to her mouth. “Yet here you are with all sorts of knowledge. Tell me what you know.”

“About what?” Caitlin asked. She was not being coy.

“Start with Galderkhaan. What have you to do with it?”

It was still strange to hear someone other than Ben say that word. Beaten mentally, psychologically, and now physically, Caitlin opened up—selectively. First she explained her history with the Galderkhaani Priests who had failed in their
cazh
, taking care not to mention the names or locations of the teenagers who had been affected. Flora pressed for details but did not fight her when Caitlin resisted.

Caitlin talked about the dead souls' possession of the living, admitted it had happened but said she didn't understand how or to what extent. She skipped her travels back in time but mentioned that she'd had help translating some of the Galderkhaani language.

“Who helped?” Flora demanded. “And what did you find?”

“Not now,” Caitlin said, thinking the deciphered words could be an additional bargaining chip in the future.

Suddenly, Caitlin gasped. She felt something hit her, a connection, hard but fleeting. She saw Yokane's face, heard her cry out, felt the stone she had carried, saw a final glimpse of a skinny man moving her dead body—all of it directed into her brain with spearlike precision. Though the impression was fleeting, the damage was not. Caitlin's mind remained open and here, in this room, she saw the skinny man once again, bundling the corpse of a tall, blond man into a bag, then a Mediterranean man looking on while Flora probed the dead man's skull.

Flora arched her eyebrows. “What is it, Dr. O'Hara?”

“The dead man in this room. Others.”

“What others?”

Caitlin ignored her. She sat there, still, as though she'd seen Medusa. The hit from Yokane's stone had connected her to the tile that had been in this room. Caitlin felt terrified and out of control, yet at the same time she had never experienced such energy coursing through her. It was as if she had become Arfa, Jack London, all the unsettled animals in New York. But she
had
to keep it contained.

Flora saw her inward look. “Talk to me,” she ordered.

“It's radioactive, the stone you have, with the carvings of crescents in a triangle.”

Flora's body jerked as if she'd lost balance on the stool. “How do you know about the carvings?”

“I'm looking at the stone. No,
into
it. It . . . it's showing me the history of this room.”

For the first time, Flora seemed unnerved. Caitlin's eyes snapped back to her. “Your dead man studied it and it was radioactive.”

“Nonsense,” Flora sputtered. “We checked it for radioactivity.”

“That Geiger counter was ticking hard right before it killed him,” Caitlin said evenly. Finally she felt she was back on an equal level with Davies.

Flora grabbed Caitlin's forearm. “Before
what
killed him? The stone?”

“I don't know if it was intentional or just a consequence. But it did.”

Flora's phone went off and she cursed. She wrenched it out of her pocket as if she were going to throw it across the room but out of habit checked the screen.

“I must take this,” she said, then stood, turned her back on Caitlin, and walked into the hall.

P
ao and Rensat shrieked after Mikel as he raced away from them. He was surprised that they did not pursue him. Perhaps they were bound to the room by some mechanism he did not understand.

The wind in the tunnel will not be much help to spirits
, he thought.

Their echoing cries were a combination of pent-up rage and hopeless frustration.

Mikel tore through the huge room, but not blindly. It was lit with the fires of hell.

It was the opening to one of the pits that serviced the Source—a hot-tub-sized vent that had apparently been designed to release the steam pressure lest it rupture the pipes. There were small openings above that must have led through the tunnel to the surface to give the steam some way out; perhaps they had originally been used to melt the oncoming ice, to keep the glaciers at bay. There were also tiles along one wall: Mikel could only surmise that Rensat had been in here earlier looking for clues to the identity of whoever turned the damned thing on. Or trying to find Enzo or who knew what else.

The chamber was a well of unfathomable energy, power so com
pact and deep it seemed to have mass. That pressure was softened somewhat by the life-sustaining mask; even so, his body was vibrating, oscillating at a cellular level from the energies that surrounded him.

And that was just the beginning, he realized. The force traveling through the Source would be unimaginable. Not just the part that was manifest here, but throughout the world: for all he knew, the Galderkhaani had probed deep, sent their tiles or some other construct far into the crust, the mantle, perhaps beyond.

Mikel had only those few seconds of total awareness to himself. Then he saw, in his mind, Rensat touching the tiles on her side of the room—activating a sequence of some kind. And then Pao was there, with her, also in his mind.

There was no reason to pursue me
, Mikel realized.
The tiles are projecting their thoughts along an arc, to other tiles throughout the ruins.
It was the same way that pure energy had gotten into the minds of animals caught along lines between New York and Antarctica.

As Mikel feared, Pao was not about to let him leave without an agreement to help.

“I will not permit it!” he heard.

The immaterial Galderkhaani attacked the only way they could—by forcing Mikel's mind to open itself to images stored in the ancient library and to Pao's own warnings.

He cannot harm me
, Mikel thought . . .
hoped
. If it were possible, Pao would have done so already. But he had not reckoned on the ingenuity of the Galderkhaani. The safeguards were clearly designed to cause intruders to make their own mistakes, make them unable to distinguish between the real and the unreal.

The first visual assault were the fangs of a leopard seal. As the enormous head of the animal lunged at him. Mikel felt the horror though not the pain or disfigurement of the animal biting at his throat. His heart beat hard and fast despite the structure imposed by the mask's skin. Every instinct he had screamed at him to turn back, to seek Pao's room with a promise to submit, behave.

But he had never listened to his saner angels and refused to do so now. Mikel ground his teeth together.

It's not real!
he thought hard.

Mikel stepped uncertainly forward, head bowed against the pressure being released by the vent—a cyclonic wind that was dissipated, he now noticed, into a series of funnels above. There had to be a doorway of some kind to the tunnel and the airstream beyond, he thought, so he continued into the maelstrom. The leopard seal retreated; Mikel could see it swimming in a long-vanished well, a pool, a short distance away, staring at him. It did not attack again, not physically. It lurked. Mikel's will had rolled the vision back.

Better than having my brain melt
, he thought.

“
You will not get away!
” he heard Pao shriek after him.

I will . . .
Mikel thought.

“
Your efforts will fail!
”

They must not . . .

“
I will join with your soul and trap you among the bones of Galderkhaan for all time!
”

You are not real!
Mikel screamed inside.

“
Listen to your words
,” Pao sneered. “
They are uttered in a dead tongue that you have never learned. This is very real!
”

And then, through the stones, Pao's entire mind dissolved into Mikel's brain like salt in water. Pieces of living Galderkhaan poured in—towers and villas, airships with nets strung between them, the odors of the sea and jasmine, the laughter and tears and chatter of citizens.

Mikel wrenched his brain into focus.
The stones
, he thought,
I have to get away from them.

But then there was something else. Something whispering and beguiling under it all like the serpent in Eden or the Sirens.

“
Seek that which I seek
,” Pao commanded. “
Be what I am. The joys of all-knowing await.
”

But Pao misjudged his subject. Mikel was not so far enamored of
their eternal power as he was of the power to be gained of its knowledge in his real world. Fighting the temptation was seductive but easy. What would life or ascension or whatever awaited be like if he had to endure the guilt of its deadly course of action?

Galderkhaan is already gone
, he told himself.
You are fighting to save everything and everyone you know!

Mikel's desire to resist created a slight but tangible split that gave him a foothold in his own identity. In that moment he both felt and understood the spirit's driving obsession: to find the woman Mikel knew from the video taken in Haiti, the one person they believed could actually go back and prevent what Pao was calling the
ulvor
—traitor—from destroying Galderkhaan. That singular desire was lodged in his brain, in Galderkhaani, now that he was away from the stones in the library.

As Mikel continued to make his way into the tunnel, its walls lit with phosphors, he was forced to live through images and episodes of Pao's life, the life of his body. It felt as if Pao were trying to meld their lives somehow, draw Mikel's soul into the past through emotional and physical experiences, shove it aside and insert his own soul in the young man's body.

The images were disjointed and out of chronological sequence. He saw and felt Pao's joy at holding a newborn daughter. He felt the anguish and ecstasy of his flaming death clutching Rensat. He sang to Vol in jubilation just after he finished writing the first chant of the
cazh.
Pao made love with ferocity. There were glimpses of many lovers, many places, many emotions. As a small boy, he pressed his hands against the great
hortatur
skin of a grounded balloon and marveled at the technology of Galderkhaan.

Then he stood on the side of a mountain, Pao as a much older man, weeping at the loss of Vol when Pao decided to join the Technologists. Then he was with more women, many more, and saw other lives that were too dim to discern clearly. Mikel sensed profound energy slither through his body as the earliest Priests began to
decipher the gestures and movements derived from Candescent
grymat
—blood writing. He saw gory designs on the wall, bloodshed, violence . . .