The Book of Water (43 page)

“Jeez . . .” breathes the apparition.

N’Doch’s impulse is to grab the nearest responsible person and shake them until their bones rattle. He wants to scream, “Why didn’t you tell us?” But there’s no one in this room worth grabbing. The responsibility lies much higher up than skinny head flapper Jean-Pierre, and what’s worse, it lies within himself as well. N’Doch sees he’s been wrong all this time to think of himself as one of the Watched, or even Watched-in-Waiting. He’s a Watcher, just like everyone else, taking what he’s given as information and image, and buying right into it, same as his mama does. His particular fantasy is different from hers, is all. It’s still a fantasy.

He leans his forehead against the terminal and lets out an explosion of breath. It seems to come from the bottom of his feet, an exhalation of pure rage and frustration.

“I used to razz Sedou,” he tells the apparition. “Say he was living in a fantasy world if he thought he could change things by messing in politics.” N’Doch saw himself as the pragmatic realist, the artist and independent loner, out for what he could get from the world. But what’s coming clear is how he’s been taught to want only what the world thinks is good business to sell him, assuming he ever gets rich enough to be able to afford it. The world, and by “the world” he’s beginning to mean Baraga and those like him, the real power brokers—they don’t want him to want freedom, they want him to want things, comfort, fame. They’d rather he didn’t have a true awareness of how fucked up things really are, so they trained him not to want it.

But knowledge is power, or so it seems to N’Doch as he stands with just that sort of information held slack in his hand. What burns him the most is that this realization has probably come too late. He’s never sidestepped the current
of life like he thought he had, not even for a moment. He’s right there in the torrent, caught up in the tide of events, tumbling head over heels along with everyone else.

“Hey, bro?” murmurs the apparition. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he replies curtly, but he isn’t. His mind is a seething mess. He’s blind with rage and panic and humiliation.

“I think you’re not . . .”

N’Doch thrusts the paper in the kid’s face. “Well, look at this!”

“I know. I did.”

“Doesn’t it make all your ‘quest’ shit look pretty silly when laid up beside the end of the world as we know it?”

The apparition blinks at him with the dragon’s bottomless dark eyes. “Not if preventing the end of the world is the object of that Quest.”

N’Doch thinks,
Man, haven’t we been through this already
? “‘Saving the world’ is just a phrase, kid. It means you’re a do-gooder, which I know you are, and that’s fine. But you can’t take it literally.”

“I can. I do.”

“I mean, it doesn’t mean you gotta try to do it single-handedly.”

“It might.”

“What?” N’Doch really has to laugh. “You?”

“Us. Not as we are but as we will be.”

N’Doch feels the conversation spinning off from the crisis at hand back toward the realm of the unreal, where as far as he sees it, no solution lies.
These dragons are as bad as Baraga.
“And what will we be?”

“Eight, eventually. Four dragons, four companions. A synergy of power.”

“Great. One dragon you can’t find and the other one’s trying to kill you.”

The kid’s brow furrows like he’s having a complicated thought. “That must be part of the Work.”

“What is?”

“Overcoming the obstacles. Solving the mysteries. All leading toward the awakening to power.”

“We don’t have time for all that!” N’Doch grabs up another sheet of PrintNews and shakes it like a club. “What’s it got to do with today and tomorrow and how we’re gonna get ourselves out of this mess?”

“Everything! Have you been listening to me at all?”

In his head, N’Doch hears/feels a blast of music, a gale that almost knocks him flat. He sags against the PrintNews terminal. He’s breathless and shaking. He understands that the dragon has just lost her patience with him. “Okay, okay. Okay. We’ll do whatever you want.”

The apparition sighs. “I want to do what you said, before you let revelation sidetrack you.”

N’Doch is exhausted. He glances at the girl, still guarding the door. She watching him, and her eyes are soft with sympathy. “And what was that? Remind me.”

“Lealé.”

“Oh, right. Lealé.” His brain feels pummeled, but another piece of his new analysis has just clicked into place, and he sees a direction, at least, in which a solution might lie.

They collect the girl and shove their way back along the long hallway, more crowded even than it was before, and into the dining rom. A group of flappers, plus an older woman N’Doch hasn’t seen before, are gathered around a long table at one end, working on the gunshot wound. He sees another “guest” lying on the floor, wrapped in a tablecloth. He can’t tell if the guy’s dead or alive, but he figures no one would’ve risked life and limb to drag him in if he was gone already.

Lealé’s pacing in small circles at the other end, talking rapidly into a phone like the one Baraga’d had with him. N’Doch is glad she’s smart enough to stay clear of the windows. Above the drawn draperies, the windows arch in a clear half-moon of divided glass. He sees thick sunset colors in the light, and gathering darkness in the sky above. He has a momentary inspiration for a song he could write about darkness gathering all around the world.

Lealé finishes her call when she sees them coming. Her eyes land on the apparition and stay there, so N’Doch lets him take the lead. It’s his party, anyway.

The kid doesn’t beat around the bush. “Mother Lealé, your help is needed. We must return immediately to your ‘Dream Haven.’”

She waves her arms as if warding him off. “There’s no time for dreams now. Don’t you see what’s happening?”

“I do. All the more reason.”

“No! He’ll find out! You’ll ruin me!”

“Events outside seem to be conspiring to do that already.”

Lealé turns away, a Glory turn, and shakes her mane of beaded hair. “Nonsense. This goes on all the time. Once the new leaders have settled in, everything will be business as usual.”

“Mother Lealé.” The kid’s tone is low, almost conspiratorial. “Do you really believe that?”

Panic flares into Lealé’s eyes. N’Doch can see her trying to dampen it, but it still makes her hands flutter around too much and her voice unsteady. “Of course I do.”

The kid takes her arm. “We need to talk.”

Probably because he’s so small and childlike, Lealé doesn’t resist as he leads her toward the alcove. N’Doch beckons to the girl, and follows. As he draws the curtains behind them, he sees another shooting victim being carried in. This time, it’s a head wound, and it looks like a bad one. The snipers’ aim is improving.

The kid sits Lealé down on a couch, then sits beside her, holding her hand. “Now listen. You had a dream, Mother Lealé, that caused you to write to an old friend you hadn’t seen in years. That dream told you to expect travelers. Was it a good dream?”

Both his formality and his question seemed to puzzle her. Lealé considered. “Yes . . . I recall being very excited. I felt something wonderful was going to happen.”

“But later, you had visits from your spirit guide directing you to . . . well, disable the travelers . . . permanently.”

Nervous, she answers, “Yes.”

The apparition nods, and N’Doch sees the nod of an old wise woman, slow and serene. “And you also dreamed of a particular place, a house that the dream led you to acquire. What was that dream like?”

Lealé looks around her like she’s costing out the furniture. “I didn’t dream of the house, actually. I dreamed of that grove of trees out back and felt I had to have them. When I inquired, I found the house came with them.”

“A dream of trees.” The apparition has a triumphant gleam in his eyes. “And then the idea to make a business there was . . .”

“Suggested by my . . . my investor, who I had helped so much by bringing him dreams in the past.” She frowns,
remembering. “He told me I should cut the trees down, build a new wing on the house to quarter my staff. It was our first argument ever.”

“Why would he want you to destroy something so lovely? Surely it adds to the value of the property?”

“It is peculiar. He spends huge sums planting trees around his own house and grounds.”

“So it must be something about this
particular
grove of trees. That he doesn’t like.”

“I don’t know. Why does it matter?”

“Because I think I do know.” He urges N’Doch and the girl in closer with his eyes. “You are a gifted receptor, Mother Lealé. There are not many such available. So, more than one entity wishing to communicate might be led to take advantage of your gifts. I believe that not all your dreams come from your spirit guide. The two we mentioned, for example: They came from somewhere else, and later your dream guide saw to it that you reinterpreted their instructions.”

N’Doch is sure Lealé wouldn’t appreciate the image he has of her now, as some sort of psychic ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Dreams from someone else?” she asks, right on cue.

“Someone I have seen and Erde has seen, and you have seen as well, and been told to deny. The presence in the wood.”

Lealé gazes at the apparition unhappily, then stands up and begins to pace.

“We must try to contact it,” he continues, letting his voice follow her around the alcove. “It has been your true Work, which your spirit guide has tried to disrupt, to bring us here for that Purpose. And we must accomplish it quickly, before he succeeds in stopping us. Even this fighting now, I believe, is part of his plan.”

N’Doch moves into the archway, so he can stop Lealé in case she decides to pace herself right out of the room. He wants to get this act over with and be on to finding a place for them all to lay low that isn’t ground zero. He sees her eyes flick up to the top of the arch, just a flick and back, he almost didn’t catch it. But now he knows he’s missed a camera port in his initial survey of the alcove. He checks it
out. Sure enough. Damn! But he doubts, with all this chaos going on, that anyone’s bothering to keep an eye on the monitors.

*   *   *

Watching Lealé pace and wring her hands, Erde felt sorry for her. Unlike herself and N’Doch, Lealé had a perfectly good life that she was putting at risk. Or at least she did until the fighting broke out.

Erde considered that coincidence. War here, war at home. Could the fighting at home also be part of someone’s dire plan, a someone that Water insisted must be the dragon Fire? Why would Fire wish to disrupt the Work, whatever it was, that all the dragons were being called to perform?

“Think of Djawara,” little Wasser was saying, “who sent us to you in trust and full faith that you would do what was needed. . . .”

“But I don’t know what that is!”

“Yes, you do.”

“All right! But I won’t go in there with you this time. I won’t face him if he comes to punish me!”

“I don’t think,” replied Wasser, “that he will dare show his face while I’m around.”

N’Doch bent his head to Erde’s ear as Lealé palmed the wall and the paneling hissed open. “Don’t forget to tell the big guy we’re going off the radar.”

Wasser led the way this time, down the unlighted passageway. Because he could move so surely in the dark, they were there before Erde had time to admit to herself how scared she was. What if it was Fire, and he did dare to show himself?

The dim little room was the same as it had been before, only warmer. The air was thick and close, and tinged with smoke. Wasser sniffed thoughtfully. “My brother leaves his calling card.”

N’Doch grinned. “Trying to scare us off?”

Wasser approached the wide, empty doorway leading out to the wood. “More like he can’t resist the chance to show how clever he is. Wherever he is physically, this room is the connection between his reality and ours. He wants us to know he’s in control of it.” He moved carefully into the
doorway, then out onto the first wide, white marble step. He’d eased down onto the second when Erde darted forward and grabbed his arm.

“Don’t go down there without some kind of lifeline, a rope or something! The door will vanish, I know it will, and you’ll not find your way back again!”

Wasser retreated to the top step and stood staring out into the wood. The same trees, the same grass. Erde shivered and sat down on the edge of the step. She remembered it all too well.

N’Doch leaned against the doorway, waiting. “What d’you think, bro?”

Wasser turned. “I think . . . that’s exactly what he wants. The object of this entire exercise: Lealé’s dreams, the wood, everything. If I am trapped here, as perhaps my sister Air is, I cannot carry out my Purpose, the Work that is our collective Purpose.”

Erde spotted movement then, among the trees. Her head jerked to follow it, but it was gone.

“You saw . . . ?” Wasser asked.

She nodded.

“Me, too.” N’Doch came forward and pointed.

“No,” said Erde. “It was over there.”

“It’s everywhere,” Wasser concluded. “It’s trying to attract our attention.”

“To speak to us,” added Erde.

“Or just trying to lure you out there where it can take control . . .” worried N’Doch.

“Here.” Wasser extended a small hand to Erde. “We’ll make a chain. Brother N’Doch, you be the anchor.”

Erde took his hand and then N’Doch’s, and stepped down onto the bottom stair with Wasser. N’Doch wrapped his free hand around one of the columns flanking the doorway. When they signaled that they were ready, Wasser let himself down onto the velvet grass and . . .

. . . disappeared. All but his hand, which remained tightly clasped in Erde’s. The pull on her was light and irregular, like a fishing line bobbing in a slow moving stream. It was easy to maintain her grasp. She smiled over her shoulder at N’Doch, who said, “You know what? It’s getting real hot inside this little room.”

And, yes, she saw that he was wreathed in smoke. There
was even a faint ruddy flicker down the passageway behind him. “Oh, dear. What if the house is burning?”

N’Doch raised an eyebrow. “Don’t even think about it.”