A Dream of Ice (25 page)

“I understand,” Caitlin said with a soft smile. “I'm kind of radioactive to you. Attacking will hurt you more than me.”

She returned to the living room, shut off the TV, and began to pace just as the intercom buzzed. Caitlin hurried to it. “Yes?”

“I am here,” said an unfamiliar voice. Her accent was odd enough that Caitlin couldn't place it.

“Come up,” she said.

“There is one condition,” the woman said before Caitlin could hit the buzzer to release the door.

“What is it?” Caitlin asked.

“Do not access Galderkhaan while I am there. For both our sakes.”

“Fine,” Caitlin said grimly. “You answer my questions, I won't push the boundaries.”

“And I won't cause you harm,” the woman answered coldly.

Caitlin hesitated, then buzzed the woman in. Standing outside the door of her apartment, Caitlin watched as the woman approached. In person, she was much smaller than she loomed in Caitlin's memory. And here, outside the rocking subway car, she moved with a grace that seemed utterly without effort. She did not meet Caitlin's gaze and seemed to flinch almost imperceptivly as she moved past Caitlin inside.

The woman remained with her back toward her host.

“I'm a damn good psychiatrist,” Caitlin announced as she shut the door. “If you lie to me, there is a very good chance I'll know it.”

“I trained with wild hawks and horses in Mongolia,” the woman said. “You don't intimidate me.”

“Nor you, me,” Caitlin assured her. For a moment she just stared at the woman's back, waiting for something to happen.

“It obviously took some kind of knowledge to show up in my living room like you did before.”

“Yes, some kind of knowledge,” the woman replied, looking around the apartment. “That is something we possess.”

“We?” Caitlin said. “Who?”

The woman turned and looked at her for the first time. “Descendants of the Priests of Galderkhaan.”

Caitlin wasn't surprised or alarmed, yet she still felt a profound chill. It's one thing to believe something in spirit, in theory. It's another to look upon the very embodiment of those ideas.

The woman turned away and stared especially hard at the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Caitlin moved between the woman and the hall.

“What did you do to my son?” Caitlin demanded.

“I did nothing,” she insisted.

“I don't believe you,” Caitlin spat.

“Dr. O'Hara, consider your words before you use them, or you will continue to grope.”

“Don't lecture me, please,” Caitlin retorted. “I asked you here to get answers.”

The woman regarded Caitlin before answering. “I didn't access his mind. Location is accomplished via the entire spirit. I read yours in the subway, easily. To me, you glow like a beacon.”

“If you didn't do anything to my son, who did?”

“An ascended soul, or souls,” the woman said. “Only the dead can do such a thing.”

Caitlin fought the sudden urge to drop into a chair.

“Does that mean—” she started, breathed, and then started again. “Does that mean Jacob is beginning to undergo the same process as the teenagers I've encountered?” Caitlin's mind did not go to the two young women she'd helped but to the one she'd failed to save, the Iranian boy, Atash.

“Think,” the woman said. “You will not always have a guide.”

“As if you're actually guiding me now?” Caitlin said.

“You must learn to see with different eyes, reason with a different mind,” the woman said. “That is as important as data.”

“No. It isn't,” Caitlin replied. She had done enough thinking, with Ben, on her own, on the run. She did not want to
think
, she wanted to be
told
. But clearly answers were going to come on this woman's terms.

Resigned, Caitlin exhaled and attempted to “think” aloud. “The . . . the ‘ascended,' the dead, can reach anyone alive.”

The woman's eyes opened slightly with encouragement.

Who had reached souls in the modern day?
Caitlin asked herself. “Not just the dead,” she said. “The
bonded
dead. The souls who performed the ritual.”

Caitlin paused and looked to the woman for confirmation, received none, but at least she wasn't told to “think.” So she was apparently on the right path.

“I freed Maanik and Gaelle,” Caitlin went on. “If that link could be broken, so can this.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” Caitlin cried.

The woman's look told her to think harder.

“Okay. All right.” She thought of the earlier cases. “I see. To free them, I had to go back. I had to break the
cazh
of those who were attacking them. You're saying this is a
cazh
?”

“I believe so, from some ancient moment of death,” the woman said, at least giving her that much.

“But we don't know
who
.” It wasn't a question Caitlin had uttered. It was a desperate statement of fact. She regarded the woman. “What's your name?”

“Yokane,” the woman replied.

“How long have you been watching me . . . Yokane?”

“Since you first visited Galderkhaan,” she said. “You and the young girl created quite a ripple.”

“You felt it—where? How?”

“I am not prepared to tell you that, yet,” Yokane said. “May I see your boy?”

Caitlin winced inside at the overfamiliarity. “To do what?”

“Observe,” she replied. “Only that. It may help answer your questions.”

Caitlin wasn't happy with the idea but she understood that it was probably necessary.

“Briefly,” Caitlin warned, making it clear that she would remain on the edge of active defense. “Lead the way,” she added. “I'm sure you know where he is.”

Yokane looked around. “I must leave something outside of his room,” she said.

The woman pulled a small package from inside her coat, wrapped in a beige material. Caitlin was instantly on alert, as any New Yorker would be, but realized that if the woman had wanted to harm her she'd have done so already.

Yokane walked to the dining room table but still, she hesitated to
put down the package. “I haven't parted with this in twenty years,” she said as she unwrapped a small, rectangular stone with embedded green crystals. Caitlin started.

“I saw that—in a vision!”

“When?”

“Today, earlier,” she said.

“This one in particular?” Yokane asked, holding it nearer.

Caitlin could sense that it was vibrating silently in the woman's hands. She didn't recognize the pattern but the general use of crescents she knew very well.

“No, not that one,” Caitlin replied. “The design was different. What is it?”

Yokane regarded her precious item. “It's from the Source of Galderkhaan,” she announced. “The
kavar
. A preferred design of the Technologists.”

“I thought you said you were with the Priests,” Caitlin said.

“I am,” Yokane replied. “This was entrusted to my family by the Obsidian Priest.”

Caitlin waited but the woman did not continue. Pressing would only meet with resistance but she suspected, as with her patients, that this woman wanted to say more.

“The stone,” Yokane went on, “has been passed down through my ancestors for millennia. The oral tradition has lost many details, but there is active danger in this object and others like it.”

“How many are there?”

“That I do not know,” she admitted. “But if it is active, others are active.”

“When you say ‘active,' what exactly do you mean?”

Yokane fixed her eyes on Caitlin. “It is screaming.”

“You don't mean that
literally
—?”

“I do,” Yokane said.

She had to mean it was vibrating, like a magnet trying to reach another magnet. Caitlin let the specific wording pass.

“Why? Why now?” Caitlin asked.

“For reasons that have forced me from concealment,” Yokane said. “Before they became obsessed with the transpersonal plane and beyond, the Technologists helped us achieve greatness. They linked a network of stones, a series of mosaics, to the Source. Powered by the planet itself—the magma layer that would one day become the Source—the stones were a record, if you will, access to the achievements and intellect of our race.”

“So . . . a living library?”

Yokane said with deep respect, “A means of unwinding time would be closer to it.”

Caitlin was barely hanging on to the concept. She tried to dumb it down for herself. “You're saying that through that stone you can see the past?”

“Not through
one
, no.” Yokane smiled sadly. “It is a lost
shavula
. Separated from the flock, all it can do is attempt to link to the others. It is not just the stone but the pattern of stones and access to the Source that give it vitality.”

“In and of itself, then, it has no intelligence.”

“No,” Yokane said. “But it has access to so much. So very much. Finding that access has been our goal for millennia.”

“A database of Galderkhaani minds,” Caitlin said, awed, as the idea took hold.

Yokane cradled the stone and then laid it gently upon the table with an almost ritualistic reverence. It reminded Caitlin of the respectful quiet of a Japanese tea ceremony. The woman then turned from the stone as though wrenching herself from her beloved and paced to the hall. Caitlin followed quickly, maternal instincts on guard. But when Yokane stopped outside Jacob's door and looked for Caitlin's permission before entering, her fears subsided somewhat. Given a nod, the woman collected herself with a deep breath and silently let herself into Jacob's room. The two women stood just within the doorway.

Once again, the eerie sound of a nonexistent wind was accompanying Jacob's deep sleep breathing. But Caitlin barely had time to register it before Yokane shocked her by laughing. The woman's face and hands were raised up to the ceiling—as Caitlin had done, instinctively, on the roof.

Yokane's smile was broad and bright, her fingers spread widely, trembling not with dread but with a kind of euphoria. After a moment, the woman turned to exit without even looking at Caitlin. She only said, “I thought they all perished.”

“Who?”

“Those at the final
cazh
,” Yokane replied.

Yokane brushed past Caitlin on her way to the hallway. When Caitlin caught up to her and stopped her, Yokane was restoring the wrapped stone to her inner pocket.

“What did you see?”

“What your son saw,” Yokane replied. “A Galderkhaani woman.”

Caitlin waited for more. It didn't come.

“See, this is the value of having a conversation,” Caitlin said. “I give
you
access to information, you give
me
your interpretation.”

“There is no more,” Yokane said, apologetic for the first time. “Not yet.”

Caitlin regarded her suspiciously. “But you
expect
more.”

“I do,” Yokane replied.

Caitlin was beginning to catch on.

“You didn't visit me on the subway, in my living room, then come back because you were worried about Jacob,” Caitlin said. “Hell, you were MIA during the whole thing with Maanik—even though you were aware of it.”

“That is true.”

Now Caitlin was angry. The only thing that stopped her from running into the living room and threatening to toss the mosaic tile out the window was that the woman could probably drop her with a twitch of her index finger.

Caitlin forced herself to calm. “Then why are you here, if not to help me and my son?”

“A serious situation has arisen elsewhere. I had to make sure you and Jacob were not the cause. He is just receiving, not generating or channeling. Neither are you.”

Caitlin stiffened. “And if he had been?”

The woman was silent.

“You
would
have hurt him,” Caitlin said.

“No,” Yokane said. “I would have interceded, as you did with your patients. But it wasn't necessary.”

“Necessary for
what
?”

“To save this city, for a start. And then the world.” Yokane pointed to the living room windows. “You are aware of the animals in peril out there? The stones, thousands of them just like mine, are coming to life.”

“How do you know this?”

“The stone,” she replied. “It has not stopped screaming since a few weeks ago.”

“You mean, it isn't like that all the time?”

Yokane shook her head.

“Why now?” Caitlin asked.

“Galderkhaan is being freed from the ice.”

“You're saying that climate change has found
another
way to destroy civilization?”

“You are perilously flip,” Yokane said, moving in on her. “I am not the only one who knows of the stones and their power. With Galderkhaan comes the Source. And there are those who would seek to use it.”

“How?”

“If I knew that, I could stop them,” Yokane said.

Caitlin backed off. She was silent, overwhelmed. She knew she could not fully trust this stranger, but she had always feared that the recent events had been larger, more encompassing, than the assault
of souls on the living. From the madness in Kashmir to the rats in Washington Square Park, global discordance, unease, panic were afoot.

“So what now?” Caitlin asked. “Are we done here?”

“Here, yes,” Yokane said and turned her eyes toward Jacob's room. “Whoever is in contact with your son has more to tell us.”

“And you know
that
how?”

“There are no self-inflicted wounds. This is not a forced
cazh
, a strong soul preying on the weak. I believe she is trying to communicate, not trying to ascend.”