The Book of Water (22 page)

But power to the Wedge was turned off long ago, like with most of the outlying sectors. Not enough of it to go around anymore. N’Doch is used to moving around his own town on the blackest nights, but even he is hesitant about charging off into the unlit streets of the City.

“Man, it’s dark out here,” he mutters.

—
I can help, you know.

“Yeah? What d’ya have in mind?”

Water’s tone is faintly superior, but N’Doch backs off his irritation, since he’s found she can usually deliver on what she promises, and at the moment, he needs all the help he can get. She doesn’t answer him right off. Instead, he feels this strange sensation, like she’s caught hold of him from behind his eyeballs.

“Yow.” It doesn’t hurt exactly, but for a moment, he’s got double vision. He must have staggered, ’cause he’s stumbling into the girl, and she’s grabbing his arm for support.

“Yow,” he says again, then he and the dragon are in sync and he can see with a clarity that takes his breath away, like in broad daylight except it’s all black and white, and all the surfaces of things seem to be alive with tiny wormlike movements. N’Doch knows he hasn’t chewed or smoked anything lately, and the moon didn’t just come out all of a sudden. Besides, he’s pretty sure it has nothing to do with his eyes. It’s like he’s
hearing
the shapes and spaces around him: the dragons, the girl, the nearby hulk of the rubber factory with every broken window and cracked cinder block picked out in awesome detail. He makes himself start breathing again.

“Wow. Radical. It’s like . . . 
sonarvision!
”

“N’Doch, are you well?” asks the girl.

“Yeah, fine. Just had my eyeballs turned inside out, that’s all.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The dragon . . . Water . . . she . . . Hey, can your guy, like, you know, make you hear like your own ears never could?”

“No.” She thinks for a moment. “But he teaches me the scents of things that I never even knew had smells.”

“Huh. Like Papa Dja used to say about his dogs: They read the air and the ground like he reads his books. But you can’t, like, see in the dark?”

“Oh, no—right now I’m as blind as you are.”

“But I’m not, you see. This critter has ears like Baraga’s spy-eyes.”

“You mean, Water?”

“She can turn sounds into images, and transmit ’em right to my eyes. So I
can
see in the dark. Cool, huh?”

“That could be very useful.”

N’Doch laughs, looks at her, then laughs again. She’s serious. He can’t believe this girl’s total lack of irony. “Well, yeah, it could. Okay, first thing is, find us a proper hidey-hole.”

“Shouldn’t we go in search of the Mage’s friend while it’s still dark?”

“Safe digs first, girl. Wandering around the City at night is asking for it unless there’re a lot more of you or you’re a whole lot better armed than we are.”

“But in the light, we will be seen.”

“In the light, we’ll blend into the crowds, or at least, that’s the idea. Besides, Mme. Lealé wouldn’t take well to us banging on her door in the middle of the night. In the City, no one goes out after dark, girl, unless they’ve got trouble in mind.”

With his new sonarvision, N’Doch cases the outside of the rubber plant, looking for squatter-sign: newly boarded-up doorways or broken windows conveniently shaded with tarps. The really dumb ones, or sometimes a family that’s newly homeless, make the mistake of letting some lantern-light show or leaving a telltale bit of clothing hanging out of a window to dry. N’Doch doesn’t detect any of that, but he does spot a heap of recently dumped rubble just below an open shaftway a few stories up. He snorts softly and shakes his head. Whoever’s got the factory is careful, but not careful enough.

“Let’s move on,” he whispers. They haven’t been absolutely silent. They may have been spotted already, and they’re carrying valuable food and water that he doesn’t want to lose this early in the game. “This way.”

He leads them away from the factory, through the dry weeds and shattered asphalt. He’s thinking of a place he crashed at once, with a guy he knows won’t be there unless he’s come back from the dead. It took some getting into then, but once you did, it was big inside and pretty secure. It’s not far, so he heads that way. The girl is stumbling on the asphalt chunks, rattling the scattered litter of metal shards. She slows, knowing she’s making too much noise, but she doesn’t have his magic new Sonarvision—he thinks of it with a capital “S” now, like some new product he’s invented—so he takes her hand and guides her through the worst of it. The dragons, he notices, move along in utter silence. He doesn’t even bother to ask how they manage that one. He’s beginning to take dragon miracles pretty much for granted.

They pass a cluster of collapsed warehouses, no sign of habitation. He recalls just in time that there’s a particularly nasty toxics dump up ahead. One drawback of his new vision: it doesn’t help him read caution signs in the dark, unless the print has dimension off the surface. Besides, he’s willing to bet there aren’t any signs. The government-of-the-moment is too busy staying in control to worry about the public welfare. He takes a detour around the site, then continues onward.

Now and then, one of the snooping copters swings a little too close by for comfort, and N’Doch makes everyone duck and hide, just in case. But since he’s got them moving so slow and careful, in the interest of silence, he also takes the opportunity to use his Sonarvision to scout for salvage. He sees everything’s been pretty much picked over already, and the sigh comes up from somewhere deep without his even knowing. He can never quite let go of that old scavenger’s dream—even though he knows it’s unrealistic—that someday he’ll light upon a huge and entirely unspoiled cache of prime bartering goods. Then his fortune’ll be made, and he can buy those big amps and that new keyboard that’ll make him a star.

Farther along, he catches a big whiff of the dead smell,
over to the left, and leads his gang away from it. If it was light and he was alone, he might investigate, just see if anyone’s been along yet to shake down the stiff. He hates doing it, but what’s dead is dead, he figures, and he’s turned up some valuable stuff that way. Tonight, however, he’ll move on.

The girl’s caught the scent, too. Her grip on his hand, light and impersonal, tightens. “Is it . . . Plague?”

“Which plague’s that? AIDS? Cholera? Typhus? Bubonic?”

“Are there so many? What have the people done to make God so angry with them?”

N’Doch snorts. “God hasn’t anything to do with it.”

“But the Plague is God’s punishment, N’Doch.”

He stops short. Even before he opens his mouth, he knows his response is over the top, and some part of him wonders why. He grips the girl’s shoulders, not kindly this time, and it’s all he can do to keep from shouting. “Girl, let’s get this straight: Diseases come from germs, not some god idea. This ain’t 913 and even if there was a god then, he sure ain’t here now unless he’s a world-class sadist!” He can see, with his hearing eyes, that she’s gazing at him astonished, a little frightened. Is it him she’s scared of, or what he’s saying? He gets hold of himself, lets her go, then dusts her shoulders off in comic apology. But he doubts she’ll buy it as only a joke. “You believe in God, huh?”

She nods mutely, as if she can’t imagine an alternative.

“Well, sorry,” he murmurs. “I just hate listening to that god stuff. I grew up with the imams and the mullahs and the ayatollahs throwing their weight around, and it didn’t do nobody any good but them, far as I could see. Lining their pockets, just like everyone else, ’cept they expect to be treated special.”

Soberly, she nods, like she understands him now. “God is not always well represented by his representatives on Earth.” She takes his hand conciliatorily. “But we don’t ever have to talk about God if you don’t want to.”

N’Doch sees this is as far as he’s going to get with this issue for now unless he wants a raging argument on his hands, which would likely attract all sorts of unwanted attention
from the shadows around them. “Fine,” he says. “This way.”

The place they finally come to is an old peanut processing plant that fell in on itself after being gutted by fire. N’Doch suspects it wasn’t very well built to begin with, but apparently the basement was, because it’s still intact, beneath a protective and concealing layer of charred steel and construction debris. He locates the entrance, a narrow fire stair covered up with the same battered sheet of corrugated metal he recalls from before, lying there as if thoughtlessly tossed aside.
Man
, he thinks,
hide in plain sight. It sure seems to work. Course there could still be somebody down there, as clever as me.
 . . .

He crouches a distance from the concealed stair, pondering his next move.

—
There is nobody down there.

He starts, remembers he’s not alone in his mind anymore. “How do you know?”

—
Easy. If there were, I could hear their breathing and the beating of their heart. Oh, and my brother wishes me to add: he could smell them.

“You’re sure of this, now. . . .”

—
Of course I am! Why say so otherwise?

Hasn’t she ever heard of bravado? Maybe dragons don’t need any ego boosting. Anyway, he decides he’ll trust her, on the basis of what her awesome hearing has managed already. He grasps the metal sheet and slides it to one side as quietly as possible. A receding darkness yawns beneath, but the air flowing up out of the hole doesn’t smell any worse than might be expected.

“Doesn’t seem like anything’s died down there recently,” he mutters. “I’ll give it a try.”

—
You will lose your night sight down there.

“Yeah? How come?”

—
What I can’t see, you can’t see.

He’d swear the blue dragon is smirking at him. “Fine. I’ll do it blind.”

“Wait,” says the girl. She fishes in her pack and unwraps a squat stub of candle. She offers it to him as if it was edible.

“Way to go, girl,” N’Doch crows softly, reaching into his
own pack. He’s got plenty of matches but nothing to light. “What a team.”

Clutching the candle stub, he eases himself into the hole. The girl makes a sign to follow, but he waves her back. It’s tricky going. The steps are crumbly with broken concrete gravel. He doesn’t shift his weight onto his leading leg until he’s very sure of his footing. He stops at the end of the first flight, where the stair takes a turn and the dragon will lose the line of sight. His head is below ground level, so he risks the brief flare of the match through his cupped hands and lights the candle. The stained cinder block walls close in around him. The stair feels suddenly airless, narrower in light than it did with his sonarvision. He sniffs carefully but smells only the usual metallic tang. With his free hand, he reaches for his switchblade.

It gets cooler as he descends the long stair. At the bottom, the smashed-in fire door has been yanked half off its hinges. N’Doch slips through the opening and his footsteps start to throw back echoes. His rat phobia is sending warning tingles up his spine, but he reminds himself how the blue dragon has already cured him of one major killer bug, so she can probably handle a rat bite, even a sick one. Still, he listens real hard, sure he’s heard a quick scuttle and rush off in the corners of the basement. He holds the candle high and moves into the cavernous interior, testing the musty, still air as he goes. The dusty hulks of boilers and air-conditioning units crowd along the walls like parked cars. A maze of pipes and ducting, bristly with char, hangs in the darkness above his head. Despite being twenty feet underground, he feels vulnerable here. But he recalls a smaller storage room, dry and empty, across the basement somewhere to the right. If he recalls it right, it has some kind of grating that lets in air.

Again he hears a rustling sound. He whirls, candle out-stretched in one hand, switchblade in the other. The flame catches in something bright, reflective, quickly moving, like a weapon or someone’s eyes. Then it’s gone. Too tall for a rat, too short for a man. Now he hears nothing but the rush of blood and adrenaline in his own ears. He’s getting the real creeps now. He’s got to find that room and call the dragons down. He steels himself and turns away, though he
feels the itch at his back like he’s being watched. He locates the room, pretty much where he remembered. At the open doorway, he sniffs again, real cautiously: ash, stale machine oil, a faint sour tinge, nothing rotting. He’s worried that his fantasies will have enlarged and improved this hidey-hole unreasonably, but it is as he’d hoped—a big cement rectangle with one lockable door, a high ceiling, a dry coolish floor, and a faint drift of air past him at the door toward the invisible outlet above. The place has been cleaned out and appreciated by at least one man he knows. He wonders if anyone found it since Habbim died. He studies it carefully, then lets the dragon into his mind so she can transmit the image to the big guy. With her there, he feels a little bit steadier.

—
I could have shifted and come with you, if you’d asked me. You were never in danger.

“Yeah?” His voice startles him, erupting into the silence. “I don’t know. I’m sure there’s something down here.”

—
Impossible.

“I dunno. . . .”

The two dragons and the girl wink into existence around him. N’Doch lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“What do you think is down here?” asks the girl.

Now his fear embarrasses him. “Oh, nothing. Y’know, an animal or something.”

This doesn’t seem to bother her too much. She shudders and shrugs like she’s used to having that sort of trouble around. But N’Doch knows there’s hardly any animals left in the City except rats and men. Fact is, he’s not sure what it could have been, but he’s pretty sure he didn’t imagine it.

—
Yes. You are right. Something was here.

“You mean, it was here just now and it left? How’d it get out? There used to be only one way into here.”