Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) (4 page)

“Of course. But will you go to her when I find her?”

Tough question.

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On where she is. If she’s still in New York, sure. I’ll do my best.”

The thought of facing Kolabati … they had a history, but he’d locked it away. He didn’t want her thinking he was back looking for a key.

“And if she’s not nearby?”

“Well, then … I don’t know.”

Glaeken spread his hands. “With the stakes what they are, how can you refuse?”

“
Because
of the stakes—because I have no idea what Rasalom’s got planned. If Bati’s back in India, I’ll have to leave Gia and Vicky here. What if the Change kicks in full speed while I’m away and I can’t make it back?” The thought of those two facing the apocalypse without him … He shook his head. “Can’t risk it.”

“They can stay with me.”

“Oh, swell. You’re right in Rasalom’s crosshairs—
numero uno
on his extermination list. That would really put my mind at ease.” He noted Glaeken’s steely gaze. “Don’t take that personally. It’s just that I don’t consider camping out on a firing range the best way to keep from getting shot.”

Glaeken sighed. “Point taken. But you can’t believe you’re the
only
one who can protect them.”

“That’s not the point. When they need me, I want to be there.”

“Short term, that makes sense, but in the long term Kolabati’s necklace might be a greater help to them.”

“‘Might’ be.”

“Yes. Might be. I can offer a little hope, but sadly, no guarantee. You must—”

Jack raised a hand. “Let’s table this for some other time. If you find her and she’s living in Hoboken, then this is all wasted air: Of course I’ll go.”

“And if she’s in India?”

“Isn’t there another way? What about the
Compendium
?” Immediately Jack wished he hadn’t brought that up.

Glaeken lowered his gaze. “We lost our interpreter.”

The words were a gut punch, bringing back the aching sense of loss he’d managed to hide from … well, most of the time.

“I miss her, Glaeken.” His throat felt thick.

“So do I. The Lady too.”

“Yeah. The Lady too.”

He did miss the Lady, but nowhere near the way he missed Weezy. A hole in his life. Not the gaping chasm the loss of Gia and Vicky would leave, but a hole nonetheless.

“They made the ultimate sacrifice. So … if Kolabati’s back in India?”

Jack’s teeth clenched. “I told you—”

“Will you reconsider if Central Park shrinks?”

“Sure.” That seemed a safe bet. “If you find her in India or someplace else on the far side of the globe, I’ll go see her when Central Park shrinks.”

“Fine,” Glaeken said, nodding. “It’s a deal then.”

“Deal.”

“Wonderful.”

The old man finished off his Courage, rose, and dropped a Hamilton on the table.

“My treat. See you soon.”

As Jack watched Glaeken make his way to the door, he thought about Kolabati and wondered how she was. Where she was. And what she was up to these days.

Kolabati

Maui—upcountry

The wind stopped.

Kolabati put down her book and rose from her chair. Not sure at first what had happened, she took her coffee cup and stepped out on the lanai where she stood for a moment, listening. Something was wrong. Too quiet. In her time on Maui she could not remember a truly silent moment. She had no neighbors to speak of, at least none within shouting or even bullhorn distance, but even when the birds and insects were silent, the Maui breeze whispered. Child of the tireless trade winds rolling from the northeast, its constant sussurrant undertone varied in pitch but never ceased—perpetual, interminable, timeless, relentless.

But it paused now. The ceramic wind chimes hung silent on the corners of the unscreened lanai. The air lay perfectly still, as if resting. Or holding its breath.

What was happening? First the news of the late sunrise this morning, and now this.

Kolabati looked down the slope of Haleakala past the rooftops of Kula to the valley spread out below in the late afternoon sun. A gently curved, almost flat span between the two volcanic masses that defined the island of Maui, the valley’s narrow waist was checkered with the pale green squares of sugar cane, the darker green of pineapple plants, the rich red-brown of newly tilled earth, and the near black of a recently burned cane field. She spent part of each day out here staring across the valley at the cloud-capped West Maui Mountains, waiting for her daily rainbow, or watching the cloud-shadows run across the valley floor thousands of feet below. But no shadows ran now. The streaming trade winds that propelled them had stalled. The clouds and their shadows waited.

Kolabati waited too. The air should have grown warmer in the wind’s absence, yet she felt a chill of foreboding. Something was wrong. The Maui breeze occasionally changed its pattern when the kona winds came, but the air always moved.

Krishna, Vishnu, she said, silently praying to the ancient gods of her youth, please don’t let anything spoil this. Not now. Not when I’ve finally found peace.

Peace. Kolabati had searched for it all her life, and it had been a long life. She looked thirty, perhaps a youngish thirty-five, yet she had been born in 1848. She had ceased counting her birthdays after the one hundred fiftieth.

A long time to be searching for contentment. She thought she’d found a chance for it a few years ago with a man named Jack but he had spurned her and the gift of longevity she’d offered him. She’d left him sitting in a pool of his own blood, dying. He was probably dead, and the thought saddened her. Such a vital man …

But I’m different now.

The new Kolabati would have stayed and helped Jack, or at least called a doctor for him despite the cruel things he had said to her.

Maui had worked a change in her. Maui and Moki. A place and a man. Together they had given her what little peace could be found in this world.

Here on Maui, clinging to the breast of the world’s largest dormant volcano, she had all the world within reach. If she tired of watching the valley below, cloud-dappled on sunny days, lashed by rain and speared by lightning when storms marched through, she could travel to the mountain’s windward east coast and visit the jungles above Hana; farther around on the south slope she could pretend she was in the savannas of Africa or the plains of North America, grazing cattle and all; or she could travel across the valley and wander among the rich Japanese and American vacationers in the resorts at Ka’anapali and Kapalua, or travel into the Iao Valley and beyond to the rain forests of the second wettest spot in the world, or return to Haleakala itself and walk the floor of its desolate crater, wandering among its thousand-foot cinder cones and imagining she was exploring the surface of Mars.

Wonders were close at hand too. Directly below the lanai her silversword garden grew. She had transplanted the seedlings culled during her explorations of Haleakala’s slopes and was perhaps unduly proud of her collection of the rare spiky clusters. Each would grow for twenty years before producing its one magnificent flower. Kolabati could wait. She had time.

She glanced down at the cup in her hands. Oh, yes. And coffee from the big island’s Kona Coast—the richest coffee in the world. She sipped.

No, she could not see herself tiring of living here, even if she didn’t have Moki. But Moki
was
here, and Moki gave meaning to it all.

She could hear him in the back now, working in his shop. Moki—her
kane,
her man. He carved driftwood. Together they would scour the beaches and the banks of Haleakala’s countless streams and waterfalls, searching for branches and small trunks, the long-dead pieces, bleached and hardened by time and the elements. They’d bring these gnarled, weathered remains back to the house and set them up around Moki’s workshop. There he would get to know them, live with them. And gradually he would spy things in them—the wrinkles around the eyes of an old woman’s face, the curve of a panther’s back, a lizard’s claws. When he’d spied the form hiding within, he would bring his small ax and array of chisels into play, working
on
the wood and
with
the wood to expose the hidden form to the light of day.

Moki was modest about his art, never taking credit and refusing blame for the nature of the works he produced. His stock phrase: “It was already there in the wood; I simply cleared away the excess and set it free.”

But he deserved far more credit. For Moki wasn’t content to leave his work as simple sculptures. They were Hawaiian wood carved by an almost full-blooded Hawaiian, but that wasn’t quite Hawaiian enough for Moki. When each was finished he shipped it to the big island and carried it to the fiery mouth of Kilauea, the active crater on the southeastern slope of Mauna Loa. There he trapped some of the living lava, poured it into a shape that complemented his sculpture, allowed the lava to cool to a point where it wouldn’t damage the wood, then set his sculpture into the gooey stone.

Kolabati had first seen Moki’s work with its intricate cuts and swirls and unique lava-rock bases in a Honolulu gallery. Fascinated, she had asked to meet the artist. She commissioned a piece and visited Moki many times during its fashioning. She found herself as taken by the man as by his work. His intensity, his passion for living, his love of his native islands. He was complete. In that sense he reminded her a little of her dead brother, Kusum.

Moki wanted her, but he didn’t need her, and that made him all the more attractive. Theirs was a relationship of passionate equals. She didn’t want to own Moki, didn’t demand all his passion. She knew some of that had to be funneled into his art and she encouraged it. To dominate him, to possess him would risk destroying a wild and wonderful talent. By demanding all of him, she would wind up with less than she had begun with.

Moki needed his art, needed to be Moki, and very much needed to be Hawaiian. He would have loved to have lived and worked on Niihau, the forbidden island, oldest of the Hawaiian chain, but had not been able to wrangle an invitation from the last of the purebred Hawaiians living there in the old, primitive ways. Like most Hawaiians, Moki was not purebred—traces of Portuguese and Filipino slunk through his bloodline.

But he remained pure Hawaiian in his heart, dressing the part around their
hale
or house, speaking the old language and teaching it to Kolabati.

His pieces, the graceful and the grotesque, were scattered about the islands, in galleries, museums, corporate offices, and on every available surface in their house. Kolabati loved the clutter, which was unusual for her. As a rule she preferred an ordered existence. But not in this case. The clutter was Moki. It put his stamp on their home, made it truly theirs. No other place on earth was quite like it.

Kolabati did not want that to change. For the first time in her many years the nattering inner voice of dissatisfaction had fallen silent. For the first time she no longer hungered for new people, new sensations, new feelings, the Next New Thing.
Continuity
counted most now.

“Bati!
Hele mai!
”

Moki’s voice, calling from his workshop, telling her to come to him. He sounded excited. She started toward the rear of the house but he was already coming her way.

The old Kolabati used to tire of a man after two weeks. They were all the same; so few had anything new to offer. But even after more than a year with Moki, the sight of him still excited her. His long, wild, red-brown hair—he was considered an
ehu,
a red-haired Hawaiian—his lean, light brown, muscled body, and his eyes as dark as her own. An artist, a sensitive man, as attuned to the mysteries of the wood he worked as to the mysteries within her own psyche. And yet he still retained an untamed quality, as witness the brief, loincloth-like
malo
he wore now. No two days were alike with Moki.

Which was why Kolabati called him her
kane
and allowed him to wear the other necklace.

And she loved his lilting accent.

“Bati, look!”

He held out his left palm to her. A ragged red line ran across it.

“Oh, Moki! What happened?”

“I cut myself.”

“But you’re always cutting yourself.”

She looked at the cut. It was barely bleeding. He’d done worse to his hands before. What was so special about this?

“Yes, but this was a deep one. I slipped badly. I thought the chisel went halfway through my palm. Blood started spurting a foot into the air—and then it stopped. I squeezed it for a few minutes, and when I checked again, it was half healed. And in the time it took me to come in from the workshop, it’s healed even further. Look at it. You can almost see it closing before your eyes!”

He was right. Kolabati watched with uneasy fascination as the wound stopped oozing and became shallower.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

He touched the necklace around his throat—a heavy chain of sculpted iron, each crescent link embossed with pre-Vedic script; centered over the notch atop his breastbone lay a matched pair of bright yellow elliptical stones, like thumb-sized topazes, each with a black center. Moki’s necklace perfectly matched her own. They’d belonged to her family for generations … since before history.