The Book of Water (41 page)

Another red tide washing in, N’Doch thinks.
Must be a really bad one.
He’s worried now. His dragon has been wounded. What if the big guy hadn’t been around? Would she have died? Maybe Baraga’s right. Maybe the world
really is falling apart. He remembers now what Water had said, under the trees in Djawara’s courtyard. That she was here because
something terrible is happening.
N’Doch is beginning to believe it.

—
The girl’s been dreaming. I think she had another bad one.

—
Yes. She’s telling my brother about it now. She needs to be near him now. Can you bring her out to the Grove?

—
Sure, no problem.

Actually, it is a problem, since he sure ain’t walking her out the front way, past Baraga’s eagle eyes. But N’Doch is glad for a task. He’s feeling helpless among all these high-power shenanigans, outside the gates and in Lealé’s office. He gets the girl up and mobile, though she’s refusing to let go of him for more than a few seconds at a time. So he lets her take his hand and he leads her into the outer room. Passing the food table, he thinks twice and stops.

“We ought to stock up.”

The girl is ready and willing. In fact, she’s putting as much food in her mouth as she is into the big linen napkin he hands her to tie up as a carry-sack.

“Whatcha been doing in that dream,” he kids her, “to make yourself so hungry?”

Her eyes get round. She shudders and shakes her head, and he knows when she lets it out, it’s gonna be a hell of a story.

At the big double doors, he pauses to picture the plan of the house in his mind, lining up the rooms he knows inside with the entrances he’s seen outside. He guesses the ceremonial side entrance must lead into a room that’s right across the hall, but when he cracks open one of the sliding doors, he sees only a blank wall opposite. It makes him skip at least one little breath when he notices, under the newly brightened lighting, that the wallpaper is patterned with dragons.
How much
, he wonders,
does Lealé know that she’s not telling us about
? He sticks his head out farther.

At the very end of the hall is a small door, so small it looks like a closet. N’Doch points it out to the girl and raises an eyebrow. She shrugs and nods.

“Okay. Let’s go for it.”

He makes her walk slow and steady, so she looks like she
knows where she’s going. When they get to the little door, it’s locked. But it’s an old-fashioned key lock, as old as the house is and never updated. N’Doch thinks fast, scanning the list he carries in his mind of every object currently available to him and their relevant uses. He needs a shiv and doesn’t have one on him. His knife blade is too thick. He starts down the list of what he knows the girl’s got, and stops at the image of the big red jewel she’s got pinned inside her jeans. He’d wanted her to leave it at Papa Dja’s, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
Good thinking, girl.

“Quick!” he whispers. “Gimme the dragon thing, you know, the jewel . . . your grandmama’s pin!”

She blinks at him. He mimes fiddling with the door, and she gives him back a steady, searching look while she pulls her right-hand pocket inside out and unpins the red stone. He sees her overcoming heavy reluctance in order to hand it over to him. He smiles at her. “You’ll have it back in a minute.”

In less than that, he’s used the pin’s long-pointed fastener to pick the lock. They’re inside a narrow inner hallway, lined with doors. The blood red stone is warm in his palm. He remembers how he’d felt sure it was alive, when it was stolen and resting in his pocket. As jewelry goes, the thing’s unnatural, but he finds that comforting now, and lets his thumb trace the miniature dragon carved into its polished surface. He hands it back without a qualm. “That did the trick, huh?”

Now her eyes are full of admiration for his cleverness. N’Doch laughs. She’s an easy mark if she’s wowed by an easy piece of juggling like that. But it makes him feel good anyway. He starts checking behind doors down the hall. Most of them are closets, filled with the long white tunics that the flappers wear, and shelves full of linens and candles and boxes of incense. But the door at the end leads them into a small antechamber, hung with soft, sound-absorbing draperies, and from there through a curtained arch into darkness.

They both stop short at the archway. They are in a huge, domed room. It’s the deep blue of the zenith just after sun-down, and it sparkles with a thousand electric stars. In the center, a big golden throne waits in a lavender spotlight.

“Oooh,” marvels the girl, turning to stare all around her.

“Look later.” N’Doch has just noticed the ring of chairs set one next to the other all around the wall. There’s a “guest” seated in every one of them, sitting, dozing, staring in meditative poses, or chatting with neighbors. He grabs the girl’s hand and makes a beeline for the outer door. He’s almost there when a “guest” rises to stop him, a youngish woman who lays a pleading hand on his arm.

“Will the Mahatma return to us soon? Will I have my Reading today, do you think?”

“Er . . . she’s busy right now,” he replies helplessly.

She grips his arm harder. “Please, ask her to hurry. I do so need her to tell me what to do about Mama.”

“Do whatever you feel like,” N’Doch wants to say, and finds that he actually has. He doesn’t know why but he’s unreasonably pissed at this woman. “Go out into the streets. See what’s really happening. Go read a PrintNews.”

The woman stares at him. Cautiously, she draws her hand away. N’Doch moves on.

Outside, the light and heat are blinding, even though it’s getting on toward late afternoon. The sky is a lurid yellow, thick with dust. He hears sirens and gunfire from several directions now. Copters race and hover like birds of prey, and off to the south, twin plumes of oily black smoke curl up from the Palace district. Another coup, no doubt of it. Since none of the past coups have ever seemed to change anything, N’Doch can’t see why this one should get Baraga in such an uproar. Can’t he just lay low like everyone else until one side or the other runs out of ammunition?

N’Doch suspects now that the answer could be found in a detailed and daily reading of PrintNews. He has that sinking feeling he gets when he’s understood something big enough to make him realize how little he knew before he understood it.

On the terrace outside the door, groups of “guests” are gathered around the vid screens built into neat stucco pillars here and there. He takes the girl over to look, certain for one insane moment that the vid stations have seen the light at the same moment that he has, and are broadcasting actual news of the coup. But the “guests” are watching one or the other of the late afternoon series with total absorption, as if completely unaware of the chaos outside the gates. N’Doch finds himself angry at them, too, and he drags the
girl away quickly to avoid a scene he’s not sure he would even be able to explain to himself.

He leads her around toward the back, sticking close to the house, staying under trees and behind bushes where he can. He makes her trot briskly across the open lawn and gravel driveway between the house and the grove. A few shots ring out, but they are distant, random fire. N’Doch slows once they’ve reached the trees, but the girl runs on ahead of him, following the call of her dragon, eager to see him after so long. Of course, it hasn’t been so long, just since the morning, but even N’Doch will admit it feels like an eternity. By the time he’s made it to the clearing, she’s already got herself pressed up against the big guy between his paws, with his great horny snout bending over her protectively. But she looks up at N’Doch with a wondering gaze and exclaims, “He thinks I’ve heard the Summoner!”

Water shifts and stretches her neck.

—
I think she’s heard someone else entirely.

N’Doch senses the dragons’ restless, edgy mood.
Don’t want to rush this
, he thinks.
I gotta sell it to ’em right, or they’re not gonna buy it.

He smiles, he hopes ingratiatingly. “Well . . . when you’re done arguing about her story, I’ll tell you mine.”

“B
ut what temptation could it have meant?” the girl is asking.

N’Doch is stretched out on the soft thick grass. One part of his brain is wondering why it’s so much cooler in this clearing than it is outside. The other is watching the girl for a sign that she’s kidding, because he just can’t believe she doesn’t know the answer to her question. Of course, she can’t see what her face does when she talks about this dude back when. She thinks she’s telling out her dream story like it could’ve happened to anyone, like it’s just some coincidence she’s dreaming about this guy, but if he could hand her a mirror to look at, the glow in her eyes might just about blind her.

N’Doch considers her question answered, and wants to move on to the next one, which is,
what’s wrong with her being tempted
? This Köthen sounds like a courageous dude and he’s straight with his men and all, and him being a baron like the girl’s father should make him just about right for her, at least as far as N’Doch sees it.

So he says all this, and the girl shakes her head, then blushes furiously and clams up. Both of the dragons stare off into the trees that rise around in an oh-so-perfect circle, pretending like they’re not even involved in this conversation, so for a while, there’s a silence so big you could drive a couple of APCs right through it. Instead, N’Doch sits up, and drives through it himself. Might be a leftover from his irritation with the Glory-guests, but he’s suddenly tired of coddling the girl like she’s in nursery school. Time she grew up a little.

“So what’s the deal? You hot for this dude, or not?”

An instant later, he wishes he could be the girl hearing Water’s relayed translation. First, she looks blown-away astonished. Next she gets stony mad. Her whole body pulls itself up and gets taller.

“What’d you say to her?” N’Doch’s just sure the blue critter’s got a smirk hidden somewhere.

“In my father’s court,” the girl gets out finally, “such insulting remarks would not go unpunished.”

N’Doch spreads his hands. “Where’s the insult? You like a guy’s looks, what’s wrong with that?”

“To imply that I would have such base thoughts, such . . .” But she can’t even say it out in words.

“C’mon, girl, don’t get all huffy. It’s just sex. It’s no big deal.”

Water finally decides to lend him a hand.

—
It is a big deal if it’s what she’s supposed to be resisting.

N’Doch is dogged. The girl is still stonyfaced and looking away from him, but he won’t have one of his favorite pas-times being labeled base or insulting. “It’s not the sex that’s the big deal, y’know what I mean? The sex is just the bait. The question is, why is the trap being set?”

—
Point taken.

“Yeah, it’s pretty simple, don’t you think? Something wants her back there, so it puts this cool handsome dude in her path. She said herself it might be the loony priest calling her into these dreams.” N’Doch is surprised to hear himself discussing all this as if it’s a series of rational events with your normal type of cause and effect. Maybe he’s starting to take this “Quest” thing seriously.

The thought of the priest makes the girl set her high-toned anger aside. “Yes, it could be. He was there in my head and he said I would never wake . . . Oh. I can’t ever go to sleep again.”

—
I will watch while you sleep.

—
Watching may not be enough, brother. Whatever Power is doing this, it seems sure it has found a weakness worth exploiting.

—
But surely, sister, I can protect my companion. . . .

—
Can you? I wonder. I am inclined to suspect our brother Fire in this also, using the priest as he would
have used Lealé. He will know our secrets and our ways. Our companions will be vulnerable to him.

The big dragon rose up on his haunches and dipped his horned head. For some reason, N’Doch thought of a great tree tossed with wind.

—
You are too free with your accusations, sister! You offer no proof of Fire’s involvement but your own suspicions.

—
You will recall, brother, that I remember him and you do not.

Earth draws his head into his shoulders until his neck’s nearly disappeared. Making himself like a rock, N’Doch notes. Stubborn. But N’Doch likes him for wanting to believe the best about this other brother he has no memory of. So maybe he’s dead wrong, but you gotta hand it to the big guy for trying. N’Doch would never stand for someone dumping all over Sedou.

“If it is Fire, who saved me from him?” asks the girl. “And who is the prisoner in the wood?”

—
It’s the Summoner. It must be!

—
Whatever saved your companion’s life fought off a dragon. The only power capable of thwarting a dragon is another dragon.