The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (9 page)

She sees mostly women and children. And old people. As they move into the settlement, makeshift tents appear, and lean-tos cobbled together out of scrap wood, rusted sheet metal, and corrugated plastic. There’s sickness everywhere, and lassitude and injury. Moaning bodies sprawl in the shade with no one to tend to them. The children are dull-eyed and malnourished. An old man with no legs is propped up against a nearby palm trunk. He spies Paia, and stretches out a stick-thin hand. His scabbed lips mouth unintelligible beseechings.

When N’Doch elbows her along, Paia realizes she’s been caught by the old man’s desperate gaze. Her memory, stirred by horror and disgust, again offers up a reference. During the collapse that isolated her family fortress, the Citadel’s communications links provided news, more news than anyone could want, except her father, who watched the global video feed compulsively, obsessively, in those final days. In addition to storm devastation and killing grounds, there were all those awful refugee camps, crowded with starved, exhausted populations forced to flee the rising oceans, the waves of plague, the tides of war.

Is this the beginning, or is the collapse already at full throttle?

Paia notes the change in N’Doch’s body language. Wary but confident before, he has lost his bravado. His eyes flick about restlessly as he walks. She wonders if he’s taken a wrong turn.

“I don’t get it,” he mutters.

“What? Tell me.” His unease is contagious.

“It wasn’t like this . . . before. It wasn’t this bad.”

“This is the same . . . the right place?”

“Oh, yeah, I know exactly where I am. I grew up here.” He veers slightly left, avoiding a cluster of children fighting over the unidentifiable contents of a bloodied sack. One of them looks up, and Paia recoils at the feral greed in its stare. N’Doch adjust his grip on the tire iron. “See? Here’s the road into town.”

The road is a potholed swath of dry red dirt that swirls up with the hot gusts off the beach and sticks at the back of the throat like a thousand tiny pinpricks. Like the dust off the plateau behind the Citadel. For the first time since falling through the portal, Paia feels uncomfortably right at home. This dry landscape is one she would know exactly how to paint, but the familiarity is unwelcome. Ahead, the palm trunks thin out onto a flat orange plain, the hard blue sky like a painted ceiling. The red road disappears into heat shimmer, where low rectangles dance in and out of visibility and a wide, dark smudge rises above the bright horizon.

N’Doch shades his eyes from the glare, squinting into the mirage. A strangled moan escapes him. Without warning, he takes off at a dead run.

“N’Doch!” Paia bolts after him. A vision of wandering alone in a strange time, strange place lends her speed, but she cannot catch up. She’s forced to halt in the middle of the road and holler like a lost child. N’Doch turns, his arms beating a mad rhythm of frustration. He’d like to lose her. It’s as plain as if he’s said it out loud. But the image of the murderous soldier must linger in his mind, for he races back, grabs her hand without a word, and drags her stumbling behind him.

The mirage steadies as they approach, into the shapes and structures of a town. The red road passes through a formal opening in the stout stucco walls, but the tall metal gates hang twisted away to either side and the walls have been breached in several places by something large enough to crush stone. Columns of smoke rise from the taller buildings. People are climbing through the ragged gaps and streaming out between the gates, limping, coughing, weeping, with their possessions stuffed into whatever was handy, or strapped to their backs. The broken walls echo with shouts and sporadic gunfire. The town is in ruins.

Before the bent gates, the road is choked with refugees and rubble. N’Doch grips Paia’s elbow and uses his body as a ram to shove them both upstream through the milling and confusion. He breaks the tightest clots with a threatening gesture of his tire iron.

Startled by a close-by burst of shooting, Paia shrinks against him. “Are we going in there?”

“Have to. That’s where Fâtime is.”

His cool determination is a surprise to her. He didn’t seem like the implacable type. Paia has a thousand questions but asks him none of them. Her memory is hard at work again, this time assailing her with an image House showed her just before she left the Citadel. It was a live feed from a local farmstead that had been unable to pay its monthly tithe to the Temple. She saw a woman with her fist raised at the sky, tears of grief and outrage streaking her sooty cheeks. Behind, a landscape of smoking wreckage.

He’s burning villages
, House had said.

It’s like a blow to the belly. Tears of a different sort of grief and outrage start in Paia’s own eyes. She fears that she recognizes her dragon’s signature.

“I have to find a way . . .” she mutters.

“What’s that?” N’Doch glances back, notes her dampened face. “What’s up? You crapping out on me?”

Paia reaches for the more resilient pose that will make him feel comfortable. “No, I just love strolling through a war zone when I know my dragon’s responsible for all the mess.”

“Don’t say that.”

“But I think it’s true.”

“Then that means he’s been here before us.”

With renewed vigor, N’Doch shoulders them to the edge of the throng and turns off the main thoroughfare, into a rubble-strewn side street where the crowd is thinner and no one pays them much attention. They’re just one more empty-handed couple fleeing for their lives. “Of course, he’s only encouraging the bad shit that was going on already.”

“Or maybe he began it in the first place.”

“What? The whole damn cycle of human violence? C’mon!”

“Why not?”

N’Doch slows at an intersection to scan the narrow crossing alleys. Smoke obscures the distance in both directions. Two young men race by with their arms full. An old woman shrieks curses from an archway. Three sweating men struggle to topple some kind of machinery onto a half-burned cart, blocking most of the street. N’Doch edges Paia past them.

“Looters,” he snarls. “As if all this wasn’t bad enough already.”

“Why not?” asks Paia again, but so softly that only she hears the question. Why should N’Doch believe her? He doesn’t know Fire like she does.

Several blocks farther, a wrecked van burns in the street. The driver is dead at the wheel. Another body lies half in, half out of an open door. Paia veers toward them in sympathy.

“No! There’s nothing you can do!” N’Doch grabs her arm. Just past the van, two green jeeps are parked cross-ways in the road. Half a dozen armed men are stopping all passersby. Before N’Doch swerves aside, dragging her into the nearest alley, Paia sees a tall youth spread-eagled against a wall. The men are jabbing at him with the butts of their rifles. The youth looks a lot like N’Doch.

In the alley, shade brings some relief from the heat. Screams follow them as the buildings close in, and a racket of gunfire, ricocheting along bare, pockmarked walls of faded pink and orange. The barred windows are set high, out of reach. A rectangle of smoky bright light yawns ahead, an obstacle rather than a goal. At the edge of the narrow concealing darkness, N’Doch peers cautiously around the corner, then ducks back, pressing himself and Paia against the wall. A huge six-wheeled armored truck thunders past, grinding up clouds of dust and grit. Already breathless, Paia inhales enough to set her coughing convulsively. N’Doch is panting, too, but will not let her rest. When the vehicle roar fades, he leads her into the searing light.

A big square spreads to their right, lined with shuttered, ruined shops. All across the open space, wood and canvas canopies are collapsed and burning, stalls shattered or overthrown.

“This was the market.”

It’s the first local information N’Doch has offered. Paia guesses they are nearing his home territory. The devastation has become more personal to him. Bodies lie among the flames and ruins. It looks as if a fiery hurricane has descended without warning into a busy, crowded square. Just how it would look, Paia muses, if that hurricane was
a fire-breathing dragon. Furtive shapes dart through the smoke, snatching up whatever’s left to be scavenged.

N’Doch’s luxurious mouth thins to a grim line. He scans the burned-out square but does not linger. “This way,” he orders.

A soot-faced girl with an armload of charred electronics pushes off from the wall she’s been lounging against, into their path. She suggests several things in seductive tones in a language Paia does not recognize.

N’Doch brandishes his tire iron. “Scram.”

They see no one else but the dead for several blocks and several connecting shadowed alleyways. Just when this sector of town appears to be empty and N’Doch is moving ahead less cautiously, they nearly run into a second, sudden roadblock. More green jeeps, more men with assault rifles. N’Doch turns aside in the nick of time, sprints down a long passage barely wide enough to be called an alley, and they are out in the light again, carrying the reek of garbage on their clothing.

“Those bastards are sure looking for someone,” N’Doch observes angrily.

“Maybe it’s us.”

He scowls at her over his shoulder. “Girl, you are paranoid. I did a lot of stuff I’m not so proud of a while back, but I was never Public Enemy Number One. Besides, how would anyone know we’re . . . Oh. I see. The Fire dude.”

Paia nods.

“But how would he get men mobilized so fast?”

“If he knew, somehow, that we’d be coming . . .”

“Phew,” breathes N’Doch. “Now you’re really scaring me.”

They hurry past rows of small houses, squatter and more widely spaced than the buildings in the center of town. Tiny plots of tilled ground shelter the desiccated remains of kitchen gardens. There is less destruction here, and N’Doch is walking faster, muttering in hopeful distraction. On the other side of a building with its roof caved in, a row of cinder-block structures fronts an unpaved road. Windowless boxes with open doorways, hardly houses at all. A few look burned out, but all are still standing. At the far end of the row, a man slumps on a stoop with his head in his hands.

N’Doch makes eagerly for the fourth house down the line. Instinct holds Paia back as they reach the door. It’s pitch-black inside, despite the white glare of the sun.

“Fâtime?” N’Doch eases into the darkness. “Ma? You there?”

Alone on the dirt street with the pop of distant gunfire, Paia’s terror suddenly blossoms. Only the need to keep moving has kept it at bay. She’s sure she hears a jeep approaching, or the tramp of running feet, or the swoop of giant wings. A dull metallic clatter echoes inside the house.

“N’Doch?” Paia backs into the doorway, tripping over the tire iron, which lies just inside the door. It’s not as dark in the house as she’s expected. A shaft of light from a high side window cuts across the interior. N’Doch stands in the middle of the room, backlit by the narrow dusty beam. He’s gazing at a woman sitting in a chair against the opposite wall. His shadow obscures the woman’s face but for a glimmer in her eyes. Paia wonders if the woman is weeping. She sees no damage anywhere in the room. A few battered pots and pans sit in logical places. An ancient television rests on a rickety metal table. So, it must be relief that sags N’Doch’s shoulders, his whole slim straight back letting go into a slump.

But the only sound is the buzzing of insects and N’Doch’s soft keening, not a sound of relief at all.

“N’Doch?” Paia goes to him quickly and takes his arm.

He turns his head away, out of the light, and the woman’s face is lit instead. She’s an older woman, with dark skin and graying hair, thin with starvation and fatigue. Her eyes are open, but Paia sees no tears, only a neat, dark hole in the center of her forehead. The wall behind her is crawling with flies.

“Ohhh.” Paia leans into N’Doch’s side. “Is it . . .?”

“Yes.”

After a moment, she says, “He did this, somehow. I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah, probably. It sure was no accident.” He eases out of Paia’s grip. As deliberately as a sleepwalker, he crosses the room to close his mother’s eyes. His fingers linger on her thin shoulder. “My fault, Ma. My fault.”

“No,” insists Paia. “No. How can you say that?”

“Because I was never there when she needed me before, and I wasn’t there now.”

She understands his muddled syntax. But must the child take care of the parent? This is a new concept for Paia. Were there things she could have been or done for her father that would have kept him from descending into drink and despair?

“What should we do?”

His sigh is more like a shudder. “Go find Papa Dja, ASAP.”

“I mean, with the . . . with her?”

“Nothing much we can do. She’s gone. No place nearby to bury her.”

Paia imagines digging a grave as the bullets sing above their heads. If Fire keeps doing things like this, it will be easy to hate him.

“I mean, Papa Dja might still be okay. We gotta warn him if we can.”

“So we just . . . leave her?”

“She’s in her house. That’s where she liked to be.” N’Doch lifts his hands to his face and scrubs his forehead, then drags his palms hard along his cheeks. He paces away from his mother’s body, then back to touch her shoulder again. “Hey, Ma. This is me leaving. Like always, hunh? Might not be smart to stick around here right now.”

“I will know if he’s approaching,” Paia says quietly.

“Yeah, but will you know the hand that actually pulled the trigger?”

“Ah. Right.” In dragon-form, Fire could neither have managed a gun nor fit inside this tiny house. And his man-form is an illusion born of manipulated energies. It can be whatever size or shape he wants, but an illusion cannot hold an actual gun or press an actual trigger. “Someone else was here with him.”

“To do the deed. Yes. Had to be.” N’Doch moves away from the body and around the room, picking things up and putting them down, as if taking inventory of his mother’s scant possessions. He stares for a moment into a small, blackened pot. When he sets it aside, his eyes are full and moist.

“Someone from the Temple?” Paia can’t really believe it. She says it mainly to distract him.