A Dream of Ice (19 page)

Pao and Rensat returned, standing still and silent like clothes stored for the winter. Is this how they had spent part of their endless time as earthbound spirits? In some kind of contemplative stasis? Did time even have any meaning for them? Without periods of sleep to measure the hours, did the destruction of Galderkhaan seem no more than a few decades distant?

Mikel began to search through the images again, posing himself a scientific question: here on this side of Antarctica there were no volcanoes. The bedrock had long since been mapped. Yet if he was here watching history, there
had
been a volcano, at the very least the remnants of a caldera somewhere. Unless—

Absolute devastation
, he answered himself. The mountain must have been leveled, then swallowed by the sea, then ice.

Rensat and Pao began to move again. They were still very silent. Suddenly, Mikel felt a very low, slow vibration pass through the room. The walls themselves were vibrating. The tiles were becoming almost blindingly luminous. The sound was deeper, much more inter
nally loud than the erupting volcano had been. Amazingly, as Mikel's body wavered under its force, he watched Pao and Rensat tremble in exactly the same manner and motion. Mikel felt terror return, stronger than before.

“What was
that
?” he said to himself.

Rensat asked the same thing, a moment behind him.

“I don't know,” Pao admitted.

Behind Mikel, the tunnel began to glow with a dull orange. He heard a distant cry from the direction in which he'd encountered Jina.

Something was coming. Something—tracking him or the other two? Was that what Rensat and Pao had felt, what she went in the other room to find?

Rensat looked in Mikel's direction. “There is another . . . no, several others,” she said.

Pao studied his companion. “Rensat, is it possible that it is Enzo?”

“How?” Rensat asked. “She was lost, her mission unfinished. And the ascended cannot communicate with anyone, not in her plane, not in ours.”

“What if she has found another voice?” Pao asked with rising enthusiasm. “What if she has found a body?”

“But how? I don't understand.”

“You remember Sogera, his experiments with braziers,” Pao said. “Enzo was there, I remember her clearly. She saw how the flaming sunbird continued to hiss as her flesh was consumed.”

“But not her soul,” the woman said. “Blessed Enzo, if it is so!”

Rensat began to share Pao's renewed—
fervor
was the word that came to Mikel's mind. It was as if they were born again, their eyes and expressions almost manic.

The rumbling remained constant, the glow grew brighter, and now the heat began to rise. Mikel began to feel like he imagined the poor figures in the vision had felt . . . only in slow motion. Helpless as the fire neared, with nowhere to turn, except to each other. He won
dered if the tiles had somehow anticipated his future, showed him something he needed to know, to experience by proxy—death throes by fire—in order to escape his own possible fate.

Dear god
, he thought.
To die without sharing what I've discovered—

That mustn't be, it
would
not be. If it were true that the stones had some kind of access to his mind, they might also save him. He looked at the ghostly couple and placed his hands in the widely splayed position he had in the previous chamber.

Do something!
he yelled in his mind.

But he wasn't sure what he wanted to do, except escape, and, obviously, the tiles could not teleport him free.

Looking into the room Mikel realized, suddenly, that the material Pao and Rensat had been studying was an instruction manual for the tiles. His eyes scanned them desperately for guidance. He saw one figure walking—and a wall opening.

Right
, he thought.
The tiles can be removed.
He looked them over from bottom to top, side to side.
Which one is the key?

Now a tile just to the right of his face began to glow brighter. Without hesitation he placed both hands on it, just as the figure in the drawing did. One hand above, one below, fingers spread. Nothing happened. He moved his fingers slightly. Then again. Then again.

Come on, Mikel!

All the while the heat grew against his back with a predatory ferocity: this wasn't a fireball spit up by the earth. Something was coming toward him and bringing with it a shrieking victim. Perhaps, as Rensat had said, it was Enzo—with her newfound and unwilling voice, Jina Park.

Another minute shift of his fingers and, almost at once, the tiles opened like the door to the cave of the forty thieves. He surged through like a bull, the tiles snapping shut behind him, locking him in and blocking the fury on the other side. The heat was gone.

Mikel came to a skidding halt, standing upright in a moldering room with dry powdered bones beneath his feet and the living tiles
bright before him. The smell of something akin to gunpowder hung in the air like incense, tart and inexplicable.

And there was something else: he was not alone. Before him stood the two spirits of the dead Galderkhaani.

Spirits who were
seeing
him.

I
t was dark in Caitlin's apartment but even darker inside her head. She refused to allow her fears to drag her into despair, which meant doing what she always did: fighting back. As much as she wanted to be alone, watching over her son, she knew she shouldn't be. Which was why she let Ben stay.

Caitlin kept Jacob home from school, something she didn't like to do, but after his experience the day before, she thought it prudent. The vice principal concurred. Ben called in sick.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor while Jacob read in his room, they had spent the morning and early afternoon reviewing everything they knew of Galderkhaan, trying to figure out the meaning of what Jacob had said: “
en dovi
.”

“Those letter combinations don't appear in any of the language we've encountered so far,” Ben said conclusively. “Which leaves us two possibilities. First: they aren't Galderkhaani. Jacob might have been speaking English. Or maybe phonetic French. That novel he's reading, by Jules Verne, is in both languages.”

“What's the second possibility?” Caitlin asked.

“The second possibility,” Ben said, “is that they are proper nouns. The names of places or people.”

Caitlin considered that. “I wish I'd paid more attention to names when I was back there,” she said. “Then I could be of some freaking
use
here.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Ben cautioned. “Beating yourself up: not gonna help.”

Caitlin nodded. “Maybe I should go back and steal a goddamn telephone directory and a dictionary.”

“Not the worst idea I've heard,” Ben told her. “I wonder if they had something other than scrolls and tablets to write on. Just because they were pre-everything, doesn't mean they were as relatively primitive as the ancient civilizations we know.”

While they spoke, Ben had been passing a large, green glass orb back and forth between his hands nonstop. The piece was beautiful, with an almost spectral aura created by the way the lines caught the light and shone white within the green. An artisan acquaintance of Caitlin's had crafted it years before, using a kiln to bake the glass sphere and then submerging the orb in ice water.

Caitlin finally stopped him with a gentle hand.

“Sorry—making you nervous?” he asked.

“No, nothing like that,” she said. “But you keep doing it, you may induce a trance.”

He stopped at once but he didn't put the orb aside. They just stared at each other.

“Well, hell,” Ben said after a moment.

“I know,” Caitlin agreed. “When all else fails, do what's left.”

Ben couldn't know how real Caitlin's experiences were but they both knew, in that moment, they weren't going to make any further progress unless he erred on the side of taking it very seriously. Though Ben couldn't deny that he'd walked the rim of some of those experiences, he had said repeatedly through the afternoon that he preferred to seek a more logical, analytical approach to the questions they had to answer.

“I don't know, Cai,” he said.

“I do,” she said. “When it's the only proactive option on the table, you take it.”

Ben agreed that he would help to re-create an environment similar to what Caitlin had experienced before at the UN and see where it took her as long as she didn't use the
cazh
.

“But you keep your hands away from me,” he said. “You can try any of the other techniques you know—hypnosis, energy direction, astrally projecting above the city—anything, but not that.”

“Why? You afraid it might work and you'll be stuck with me for eternity?”

“You know I'd sign on for that,” he said, correcting her. “But right now we're exploring, trying to help you and Jacob. That doesn't include buying a one-way ticket to Neverland. Isn't that exclusively what the
cazh
was designed for? Knock-knock-knocking on heaven's door?”

“We don't exactly know, do we?” she asked. “That's one of the things we're trying to find out.”

“No, it isn't,” he said. “We're trying to find out who may—
may
—have their hooks in Jacob and why. That's it for now. Are we on the same page?”

“Don't be dumb,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Of course this is primarily about Jacob but if I see something interesting, I'm going to check it out!”

“No! Caitlin, I am not going to try to explain to a 911 dispatcher that my friend has fallen into the past and can't get up. If you can't agree to that, then get yourself another playmate.”

Caitlin sighed hard. She could not help thinking that all the information about Galderkhaan was holistic: if she unraveled the riddle of their belief system she could understand everything about them and help Jacob at the same time.

But Caitlin put a hand on top of his. “All right. I mean it. You're absolutely right. The chant isn't appropriate for this situation. I
have to get back to Galderkhaan and have a look around, that's all.”

“Okay, then,” Ben said, smiling.

Following her instructions, Ben held the orb before her. He moved it slowly, the light shifting in her eyes, in the back of her eyes, in her brain. Nearby sounds were magnified: his breath, her breath, the cat moving away.

And then she was back.

“Shit and shit,” she said.

“What's happening? Or not?”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Something's holding me back.”

He pushed his face toward her. “Don't let it. I'm here. You won't get lost there, I promise. Hey, remember? I've been down that road with you, Cai. I haven't lost a trance walker yet.”

Caitlin smiled and nodded sweetly. Ben smiled back.

“Ready for takeoff?” he asked.

In response, she relaxed and stared into the orb. He began to move it again.

Almost at once, the tendrils of the glass turned from green to red. The red—

“Contrails,” she said softly. “I see . . . fingers of color, like smoke.”

Without stopping, Ben stretched his fingers to the dining room table and grabbed his phone. He began to record. He felt like the Infant of Prague, the orb resting in his cupped left hand, the phone upright in his right. He couldn't help but wonder if every archetype in the history of humankind repeated itself and was perhaps traceable to Galderkhaan.

And then a sudden iciness fell on the room, as though someone had turned an air conditioner on low. Ben felt the shift instantly and then watched Caitlin's hair begin to rise, as if reacting to static electricity. In the distance, Arfa bolted into the bathroom, to his litter box.

“There is ice . . . below,” Caitlin said. “Acres . . . more acres . . . miles . . . peaceful.”

She forced herself to look back up, back at the contrails.

“Red . . . above and . . . and behind,” Caitlin went on. “Fire!” she said more urgently. “Flames . . . Enzo! No!”

Caitlin's eyes were still open, staring. They grew wider. Her breath came faster, harder. Her hands were reaching for something, holding something, pulling—ropes? She looked like a fisherman pulling his boat to its moorings.

“You've killed us!
Why!?
”

Caitlin began swatting at her face, as though she were surrounded by gnats. She winced with pain.

“The name!” she said. “I will tell you . . . tell you . . .”

And then Caitlin screamed in her mouth. It rose up her throat and stuck at the top, as though she were vomiting.

Ben discarded the orb and phone down and took her hands in his, holding them tight. Almost at once he released one hand as if it were electrified: Ben had forgotten his own admonition. He did not want to give any Galderkhaani access to the
cazh
.

Even holding one of her hands, anchoring Caitlin in the present, caused the cold to begin to dissipate.

“No, Dovit! Let me go!” the woman wept.

“Cai, it's Ben!” he said softly but insistently. “Cai, where are you?”

“Falling from the sky!” she said, gasping. “I told Enzo . . . why did she do it?
It will never work!
”

And then Caitlin was back, panting, leaning forward, collapsing into Ben's arms.

“I've got you,” he said.

“I . . . thought I died!”

“It wasn't you,” he told her.

“I know, but I felt it. I
felt
it!”

“Who was it?”

Caitlin shook her head firmly. “Her name was Azha. We were in the air, in an airship of some kind, and it was on fire.”