A Dream of Ice (26 page)

“Communicate what?” Caitlin asked.

“I do not know,” the woman admitted. “But we must find out.”

“Then I repeat: what now?” Caitlin asked.

“I have established a connection with your son on my own,” she said. “What he sees and hears, I will see and hear.”

“Goddamn it!” Caitlin yelled suddenly. “You could at least have asked!”

The smaller woman looked up. “To help you protect this world? Would you have refused? Should we waste
more
time with debate?”

Caitlin moved away in disgust. She didn't like being outmaneuvered and out-thought.

“You must not interfere,” Yokane said.

“You can't ask that.”

“I don't ask it, I insist,” Yokane replied. “Are you really prepared to feel around and across the planes of existence
blindly
, with your son?” she asked. “There are more powerful, elemental forces and greater minds at work than yours
or
mine. There is no room for trial and error like you had with your two clients.”

Caitlin could not find a reply.

Yokane settled into a more relaxed tone of voice. “Now that I know there is another presence near Jacob, I will make sure they are never alone.” Yokane's dark eyes bore into Caitlin's and once again, Caitlin believed her.

“So you'll be a guardian,” Caitlin said. “You won't ‘inhabit' Jacob.”

Yokane nodded once. “I am not a vandal.”

There was no irritation or condescension in her tone. Caitlin relaxed a little more. Yokane turned and Caitlin followed her back toward the living room. There, showing the same reverence as before, the woman wrapped and pocketed her stone.

“In return for my help,” Yokane said, “you will do something for me, since we have limited time and I cannot pursue two goals at once.”

“There is another stone,” Caitlin said.

For the first time, Yokane seemed surprised.

“You've had that one for a while, and the animals have only been acting up for a couple of weeks,” Caitlin said. “Something else had to be the cause.”

“The stone has a companion,” Yokane acknowledged. “It is located in a mansion on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, home of the Global Explorers' Club. It is comprised of people who know about Galderkhaan.”

“Know . . . what?” Caitlin asked.

“That is what you must find out,” Yokane told her. “Specifically, why have these artifacts suddenly become more active? Why is an ascended soul trying to contact Jacob?”

“Why can't you go?”

“I have been too long around this stone,” she replied, patting her coat. “I vibrate with it; it
knows
me. If I were to get close to the other stone it would cause more havoc. Already, the two are forming lines of connection with their companions in the South Pole. Together, their impact would be exponential.”

Caitlin understood, then, just how powerful the Galderkhaani mosaics had to be. Yokane wasn't subtle, but it was possible she wasn't exaggerating, either. “What do I have to do?” Caitlin asked.

“Speak to the people in the mansion, determine if
they
are somehow using the other stones . . . or the Source. They will not want to
talk to you,” she muttered as she walked to the front door. “You must make them.”

Realizing that Caitlin hadn't followed her, she motioned urgently.

“I mean now,” Yokane said. “You must go now.”

“I'm not waking Jacob and bringing him to that place,” Caitlin said. “And no, you cannot babysit.”

Yokane brushed the air with her hand. “The Galderkhaani woman will not allow Jacob to be harmed.” She smiled a little for the first time. “Not physically.”

“Where was she when Jacob had a freakin' seizure?”

“No doubt she caused that establishing contact,” Yokane said. “As you know, it is not a pleasant process nor a predictable science. If it helps, I am sure she watched over him when you went to the roof.”

“That was the roof; but you're talking about sending me miles downtown,” Caitlin said. “The only way I'll leave is to have someone stay with him. Sit there while I make a call.”

Yokane sat. So she
could
be reasonable.

But when Caitlin picked up her phone, she wasn't sure who to ask. She was afraid to try to explain this to her parents, and besides, they lived too far away for “right now.” Ben? She was afraid of explaining it to him too, especially with his recent commendable but inconvenient protectiveness. What about Barbara or Anita? It would certainly open their eyes to see a descendant of the civilization they didn't really believe had existed.

Christ.
She didn't want to call anyone.

But she remembered with horror her vision, Jacob's terror, and called Ben with one hand while using the other to search through the kitchen for jasmine tea.

A
quarter hour later, assured that Benjamin Moss was on his way, Yokane departed. Then she walked to the nearest intersection and vomited into a trash can. She held the edge of the bin for a moment, her eyes closed, waiting to see if anything else was going to come up.

“Are you all right?” a man asked as he stepped from a taxi.

“Thank you, yes.” Yokane smiled. “Bad seafood, I think.”

“Would you like my cab?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “The air will help.”

The man turned and hurried on his way. Yokane pushed herself from the bin and stood more steadily than she had a right to.

This had happened frequently over the past few days—both food and images coming up. It began when her
kavar
suddenly and surprisingly linked to another power source, another stone, crafting something more potent. It had happened about two weeks ago on a street north of Washington Square Park, when she was walking home from one of her frequent late-night strolls. She had regained consciousness in the stairwell of the Group's mansion. It was the claws that had woken her up, and the writhing, and the piercing squeaks of hundreds of rats on top of her, claws and tails scraping
across her face, catching in her hair, burying her from sight. She'd frozen in a fetal position, in abject horror as the rats scrabbled in their mad panic.

It was over an hour before the rodents finally relaxed and wandered off, the ones that were still alive. Yokane, shaking, had stood among the lumpen piles of death and staggered away. No matter how many showers she took, eye rinses, teeth brushings, she didn't feel clean for days afterward.

Now, having involuntarily relived the experience again in her open state, her stomach had rebuked her. She walked west toward the Hudson River, then south. She hoped that the view of the water, the river emptying into the bay, would steady her. It did, somewhat. But not nearly enough.

The situation was dangerous, more dangerous than she had let on to the psychiatrist. Someone was trying very hard to get through—someone who had
cazhed
with another. A woman and a man, both of them pushing toward any soul that could hear them.

They had found Caitlin O'Hara but Caitlin O'Hara refused to listen. So they sought her son.

Why?
Yokane wondered. It had to have something to do with the two
kavars
being active. The timing was too proximate.

Yokane continued to walk. Whatever the cost, she could not give up. She wished she could go in Caitlin's stead but that was not possible. She had gone back to the mansion one more time, only to feel the young scientist die. She was too afraid to go back again, so there was only the other path available to her.

Is she
varrem
?
Yokane asked again and again as she walked. That was a crucial question.
Is she ours?
She seemed to be a person of strong spirit, but that did not mean she was descended from the Priests. Though the lineage had been carefully tracked, the chaos of the last day left potential loopholes. Galderkhaani may have slipped through, those who had put flight ahead of
cazh
.

Yokane had nursed a hope that Caitlin was
varrem
. But even there,
she was torn. The doctor had fought to prevent Maanik from bonding with a desperate soul from Galderkhaan. And then there was the rainy, genocidal night when Caitlin had rent the sky with her force, and suddenly Yokane had felt soul after soul, her entire Priestly family, simply wink out of existence.

That sudden, overwhelming loneliness had paralyzed her for days. The Han woman renting a room in Chinatown to her had thought she was ill and kept trying to ply her with herbal teas. Yokane had only starved and wept and hated Caitlin.

When she regained rational thought Yokane knew that hatred was pointless and irrelevant. She knew she had to watch this woman, learn as much as she could about her. See what light and perspective the woman could provide on the hazy vision she herself had been experiencing.

Now she knew.

Yokane walked on through the lamp-lit night, her hands held at the center of her torso. She pointed the first two fingers of her left hand down, the first two of her right hand up.

Awareness flooded her inner and outer senses. The very spaces between the buildings of the city became as tangible as the buildings themselves. The millions of breathing bodies were knots of density across her field of sensation. Her emptied spirit filled with energy—

She stopped on a corner and leaned against a lamppost. But the energy was being drained.

“No . . . not
again
!”

Yokane was suddenly wrenched away, pulled back across fathoms of time and space, to a huge chamber with a domed ceiling, open to the sky. She had been here several times over the last few months but returned now with greater force and sharper awareness. She could not inform Caitlin O'Hara but it was the two souls central to the vision that filled her with dread.

In the heart of the chamber amid water and fire, a dozen people in
robes had gathered. A woman at the very center was performing movements and gestures that Yokane recognized from her training. As the woman moved, the others followed her exactly, and Yokane could feel immense pulses of energy rushing in torrents from their hands, through the air, through the walls, and away. The movements were slow but the intention behind them was pure fire, controlled ferocity and rage and conviction. Yokane felt a strange blend of horror and elation, a flood of anger and triumph rising within her, until the door to the chamber slammed open and a voice shouted in Galderkhaani, “Rensat! Gather everyone, quickly!”

It came from a short, elderly man with wildly curling white hair, hurrying as fast as he could across the chamber. The woman at the center never faltered in her movements but spoke simultaneously.

“What is wrong?” the woman asked.

“Out there”—he pointed in the direction from which he'd come—“there are rumors that the Source is active!”

The woman stiffened. “It must be stopped,” she said.

“We cannot access it!” the man said.

“Then we must find those who
operate
it and stop them!”

“You will kill them?”

“If necessary, as Enzo's sister tried to do.”

The man stood there, uncertain how to proceed. Suddenly his nose crinkled.

“The air!” the woman said, insisting. “Smell the air!”

The man inhaled as if he were already dismissing the notion, but the result caused confusion. “Sulfur,” he replied. “It's true—”

The ground-shattering sound of an explosion rocked through the room. It came from outside. The Priests lost their sequence in the movements. Rensat looked up in panic. Visible through the latticed ceiling was smoke, huge, throttling clouds of smoke. The man rushed to the stairs by the wall and lurched up them. He approached the nearest window and looked out, looked east.

“Oh gods,” he breathed. “The
khaan
 . . .”

The woman beseeched everyone to join hands with another, as many others as they could, and recite the
cazh
.

“Come to me, Pao!” Rensat cried. “Quickly, while there is time for us!”

“Oh gods!” Pao screamed as he grasped her outstretched fingers.

Then there was fire and torrent and Yokane's body fell sideways, sliding down the lamppost. She breathed heavily, losing the little energy she had gathered.

“Oh gods,” she murmured, repeating Pao's last words.

She pushed herself from the streetlight and began to walk. Walking had helped before and it worked now. Soon her head was clear again and the vision of Galderkhaan held only the weight of a memory and the message that had demanded tonight's action.

She had not wanted to open herself to Caitlin, but she knew she needed help immediately. She knew that working through the boy would force Caitlin's hand.

Yokane continued to walk but she remained closed to the city and the past. She wanted to avoid Fifth Avenue and Washington Square, continuing over to the East Side and down toward her closet-sized room.

She had told Caitlin to contact her—by phone—after her visit to the Group's headquarters. When that was done, when Yokane had rested, she would know better what had to be done in the past to protect the future.

Mustering her strength, the woman continued to walk. The night had been more exhausting than she had anticipated, and after a few minutes more she decided she had walked enough. It was time to rest. She hadn't seen many cabs pass by so she hurried for the subway and took the D train to the West Village.

The respite was what she needed—though the buzzing in her pocket as the train passed below the Group's mansion was noticeable not just to herself but to those nearest her. Most of the passengers probably assumed it was her cell phone, but their annoyed looks put
Yokane on guard: she couldn't afford a confrontation, especially if there was a police officer on board. She wished it were a pet
thyodularasi
whose smooth flesh she could stroke and calm, and it would calm her . . . at least, that was the legend. She had only seen the animal's bones, held in secret and treasured by the generations who had come before her. She left the subway at Lafayette Street—well below the Group's mansion.