The Book of Water (46 page)

An eternity of seconds later, Lealé was nearly at the door. Beside the towering columns that framed the ceremonial entrance, she turned back toward the crowd, a faceless, dreamlike figure outlined in brilliant white.

“Now, my brave children, my dearest brothers and sisters, you shall rest here in safety, while Glory goes out to put an end to this nonsense! For how can the Word of Light be heard with all that going on?”

Erde heard N’Doch’s brief exhalation of disgust. She laid her palm against his back to quiet him.

“Hey, girl,” he whispered.

“Hey, bro,” she answered, in his own Frankish syllables.

He laughed softly, put his arm around her and hugged her close. “This is where it’s gonna get rough. You ready?”

Erde shook her head.

*   *   *

N’Doch wishes he could give the girl comforting words, but he has none. At the door, big Nikko slips the lock and eases the door open just the slightest crack to give himself a view of the situation outside. N’Doch ducks around behind him to peer around his back. Before the door swings shut, he gets a glimpse of the twisted-iron wreckage of the front gate. The pseudo-colonial guardhouse is a pile of rubble. Jack-booted soldiers in camo uniforms are pouring single-file through the gap and fanning out across the front, rifles at ready. N’Doch recalls what Nikko said about the attackers being organized.
Who are these guys?
he wonders. Why spend so much effort on just another cult house? The city’s lousy with them. But none of this is a mystery to Nikko.

“Storm troopers, Mr. B. They know we’re here.”

The phone on Nikko’s hip beeps discreetly, like just another business call coming in to enlarge the Big Man’s empire. Nikko confers with it briefly.

“Fifteen seconds to the wall,” he reports. “Another twelve to the door.”

Baraga pats the air, palms down, a silencing gesture. His eyes flick toward Lealé, still soothing the petitioner crowd. Some of them are claiming her personal attention now, and by habit, she is trying to supply them with a calming answer. N’Doch watches the bodyguard balance his maglight on the rim of a tall vase of flowers. He does it without moving the beam, so that the light continues to embrace and magnify the Mahatma Glory even as he moves away from it with Baraga and Jean-Pierre, toward the door. Baraga looks back at N’Doch and jerks his head in a wordless summons. N’Doch feels the chill seep into his gut.

He’s gonna leave her behind.

N’Doch tells himself this bothers him because he’s soft-hearted where women are concerned. But it’s also scary confirmation of the dragon’s dead-weight theory of Baraga’s escape tactics.

Nikko cracks the door open again, letting in only the slightest wisp of light as he counts down silent seconds to
himself. At fifteen, N’Doch hears a grinding, tearing crunch, muffled by the heavy door. Nikko gives Baraga a slow nod.

Look behind you!
N’Doch begs Lealé. He’s only ten feet away from her. He’s got twelve seconds, less now. He could warn her with a whisper, but he can’t bring himself to do it. If he does, he could blow his Big Chance. He sees fame and fortune miraculously within his grasp, after a lifetime of dreaming, and the desire for them rages in him as hotly as sex.
Lealé can take care of herself
, he reasons, as the tanks roar up outside the house.

With his pistol held at arm’s length, Nikko yanks open the door. Jean-Pierre hugs his boxes and runs for it. Baraga wraps an iron arm around N’Doch’s waist and propels him forward.

“Keep your head low, kid.”

N’Doch bucks back. He has to at least try. “No! You’re leaving her! You can’t . . .”

“You want to live and be famous? Two four-man tanks. There’s no room.”

N’Doch doesn’t count heads, he struggles, not even sure why he’s doing it, if he feels the way he says he does. The Media King is stronger than he would ever have imagined. The iron arm around his waist is replaced by one around his throat. Baraga drags him through the doorway. N’Doch can’t see Sedou, but he guesses the heavy drag on Baraga’s other side is his brother hauling on him.

The tanks are firing rounds into the front yard, keeping the assault force down in cover. But bullets are pinging against the tanks’ armor and zinging past N’Doch’s ear. He’s still arguing with himself, telling himself to just relax, let the Media King toss both him and Sedou inside the goddamn tank where they’re safe. Nikko can get the girl.

“Nikko!” Baraga shouts. “Get him off me!”

The
girl
!

Off to the side, past Baraga’s stranglehold on his neck, N’Doch sees the girl dart out of the door. She’s got Lealé in tow, and she’s moving fast, using the tanks for cover like she should, except she’s not heading toward them, she’s . . . 
running for the grove
!

He tries to choke out a yell, but Baraga’s got him so tight, he can only gag for breath. Now he sees Sedou, grappling with the bodyguard, unable to shake him loose.

“Which one of you is it?” Baraga hisses. “Which one of you’s the dragon handler?”

N’Doch takes a wild guess. Maybe Baraga doesn’t know. Maybe he thinks
both
the dragons are stashed somewhere else.

“All of us!” he gasps.

“That’s not what he told me.”

“Then he didn’t tell you much!”

The girl’s out in the open now, and the rain of gunfire intensifies.

Nikko has Sedou pinned against one of the tanks. Sedou’s struggling to fight him off, struggling to hold on to his human-form, failing . . .

—
Sedou! The girl! Stop her!

The Sedou shape waves, resettles, wavers again. Nikko lets go and backs off from it in horror. He levels his pistol at its head.

“Nikko! No! Don’t hurt it! Take the other one!”

If he’d been thinking clearly, N’Doch realizes, he’d have seen the way it was going down. But then Baraga finally makes a mistake. He looses his hold on N’Doch’s throat to watch the man they’d called Sedou melt and dissolve before his very eyes and reform into a living creature out of myth. A dragon. N’Doch jerks himself free, off balance, and falls hard on his side. He rolls to his feet just as Nikko levels his pistol at the fleeing women.

“Nikko! Both of them! NOW!”

The bodyguard gets one shot off. Lealé stumbles and drops. A sudden wind has come up. Blinded by dust and outrage, N’Doch throws himself into the line of fire.

The lead ripping into him at close range blows him off his feet. Or maybe it’s the wind. He expects the agony of having his chest torn open, but there’s only a tingling and a vast roaring. He expects to land hard, in too many pieces.

But he never lands at all.

H
e comes to consciousness slowly, surreally aware that he is running, has been for a long time. His lungs ache and his ribs are cramped but his long legs keep pumping away, doing what is needed without his having to think about whether he can keep going or not. He just does.

Being on autopilot lets him check out his surroundings. The air is thick and hot, and the sun’s all wrong, too red and not quite round, like it might be at sunset near the horizon, except it’s straight overhead. The dusty hills around him are too red, too, and pocked with shell craters. He sees he must have imagined all that blood and tearing and having his chest blown open. By some wonderful mistake the bodyguard missed, even at such close range, and N’Doch’s old survival instincts took over: He finally got some sense and ran for it.

But the landscape isn’t the familiar flat, dry fields surrounding the City. And N’Doch doubts that even the most organized coup could have leveled all the outlying villages and housing projects as completely as the rubble around him indicates. Plus, it all looks like it’s been there a while. Layers of grit have softened the contours of the shattered walls and filled in the crevasses. He searches the hills and horizon for the smoke plumes of fire-bombing, and listens for the clatter of artillery or the wock-wock of the copters in the air.

Nothing. Just hot, dry landscape and a man running. A man who hasn’t a clue where he is, or even why he’s running. He just knows that he has to, something is after him, but it isn’t behind him, it’s all around him. . . .

N’Doch wakes abruptly, with a heaving gasp and a need
for air so desperate that it’s a long shuddering moment before he can think about anything but breathing. When he gets it under control, he opens his eyes. He still doesn’t know where he is.

He’s lying in a bed, not just on it but in it, between sheets and under blankets, as far as he can tell. He lets his eyes rove, sees a tall wooden footboard with turned posts at both ends. The blankets are a single thick, airy coverlet. Its soft, coarsely woven fabric makes him think of his mother Fâtime at her loom.

The bed sits in a shaft of light from a small window. The bright cold light leaves the rest of the room in shadow, so while N’Doch gets his breath and waits for his heart to stop trying to break through his ribs, he studies the window in detail, hoping it will help him understand what’s happening to him.

The window is square and set well into the wall, so a deep seat is formed by the sill. N’Doch sees a thin, brown cushion and a pile of what might be clothes. He wonders if they are his. The glass in the window is divided into many smaller panes, held together with thin strips of some dull-colored metal. At first N’Doch thinks there’s something wrong with his eyes, but then he sees it’s the glass. It’s all ripply and dotted with minute air bubbles, so that his view of the outside is subtly diffused and diffracted: bare branches, furry-pointed green ones and blue, blue sky. N’Doch has never seen a sky that blue, and he stares at it until he realizes he’s been drifting, probably for a long while, because when he becomes aware of himself again, the angle of the light has shifted and the sky is chased with big white and gray clouds. And now there’s a woman sitting in the window seat, a white woman, paler than the girl even, dressed in white and with white-blonde hair as fine as spider silk. She’s bent over some sort of handwork which she’s holding up to the window in order to see. With the bright, white light, her long white dress and her own shell-like pallor, the woman is almost translucent.

N’Doch thinks he’s kept still but he must be wrong, ’cause the woman looks up at him with a soft frown of interest and concern, then sets her work aside and comes toward him. Her hands on his cheeks and forehead are cool and professional. He figures he’ll lay low and see what she’s
up to. And then it comes to him like a shock that she’s a nurse, maybe a doctor. So he did get blown to bits, and somehow they’ve managed to stick him back together again. Only he’s not sure now of how much of himself he’s got left. He’s forgotten to check.

The pale woman reaches her arms around him and with the impossible strength of mothers and doctors, bundles him up into a sitting position, supported by pillows and bolsters. N’Doch takes inventory and finds himself complete. Not quite like himself, and as weak as a newborn, but entirely as whole as one, too. It just doesn’t make sense. The woman pats his shoulder, then reaches to a low wooden table beside the bed and fills a small clay cup with water from a stoneware jug. The crisp trickle of water inflames a vast thirst he wasn’t aware of a moment before, and he drinks without worrying if the water’s safe. It’s cold and clear and more delicious than he ever imagined water could be. She’s holding a third cupful to his lips when his next big revelation hits him, so hard he almost chokes. They did it once, they could do it again.
He’s been doctored by dragons.

Which means it really did happen. The shock of the impact and the ripping and tearing of his vital organs, it’s not all a sweat-drenched nightmare. The bullets took him, then the dragons came and took him back, and carried him off somewhere . . . here. . . .

Revelation clicks in once more, and N’Doch understands where he is.

The woman sets the cup down and moves away through the shaft of light toward a shadowy door. She leans out and calls softly down the hall, and N’Doch knows he’s figured right. She’s speaking the girl’s antique Kraut. For cryin’ out loud, he’s in 913!

He lets that explanation settle for a while to see how its logic suits him. He knows he’s not thinking real fast or straight quite yet, but mostly he’s just grateful to be thinking at all.

I died
, he tells himself.
Or almost. And they fixed me.

The miracle implied makes him shiver, and the woman comes back to the bed and pulls the covers up around his chest and shoulders. His entirely unmarked, unventilated chest.

“
Kalt?
” she murmurs. Her eyes look away from him, as if she lets her hands do her talking.

And he is cold, he realizes, not just from shock and revelation. It’s cold in the room, and it’s probably real cold outside. Now that he’s upright, he has a wider view through the window, and he sees why the light streaming in is so hard and white. There’s snow on the ground out there.

Snow. Real snow. He’s never seen it before, except on the vid. He shivers again, and the woman goes to the corner where a small fire is burning in a narrow stone fireplace. She prods it with a metal poke and throws more wood on. She looks up at the sound of footsteps coming down the hall, light and steady, accompanied by the creak of floorboards. A second white woman comes into the room, shorter and older than the first, and rich with autumnal color in her short, graying hair and layered clothing. She has a brisk, direct presence that makes N’Doch feel obscurely chastised even though as far as he knows he hasn’t done anything wrong except die and be resurrected.