The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (41 page)

And there they are. The Rex has rebuilt enough of its damaged circuits to begin a random, self-protective flailing of knife-edged limbs. The women have wisely drawn back, hauling their dead and wounded to the square’s perimeter. He counts two bodies at least. Stoksie and Luther turn at the approaching squeal of tires as if sure it’s a new attack from the rear, then stare dumbfounded as the Librarian screeches to a halt in front of them. He tumbles out of the cab, pointing madly without explanation. The Rex is waking, waking!

“Get in! Get in!” he shouts. Later, he’ll tell them all that’s happened, if he can find the words.

Stoksie is stunned to immobility. “Weah’d yu cum frum, G? I t’ought yu wuz . . .”

“No! Not dead! Quick! Hurry! Get the women!” He grabs Luther, who stands entranced by this altered vision of his beloved and familiar wagon, and hauls him around to the rear. “Open it! You know how!”

No strangers to wonder or emergency, the Tinkers spring into action. As the Rex rediscovers coordination by gnashing its jaws and retracting and extending its claws, Stoksie enlists Lily and Margit with nod and gesture to help him herd the others toward the big yellow vehicle. They’re willing to trust the dark little stranger, whom they’ve lately seen bashing the metal monster with a pike. The dogs are less willing, however, and Lily, burdened with one of their wounded, is forced to be stern with them before they’ll leap blindly into the dark cave of the rear cargo box. The Rex finishes testing its systems. Its sensor-laden head swivels toward the source of sound and motion.

“Hurry!” the Librarian calls. Or is it his dragon’s urgency he’s giving voice to? The borderlines are blurring.

Luther and Margit insist on delaying long enough to load the dead.

“Mebbe he’ll fix ’em,” Luther says. “He did sum al’reddy.”

He means Earth, the Librarian realizes. “Yes! Hurry!” The Rex is moving toward them, gaining speed fast. He leaves them to finish up, and stumbles for the cab. He’s just started the engine when he hears the rear doors slam. Luther vaults into the passenger seat, just ahead of the Rex’s vicious sidearm slash. He ducks, grabs for the door, and pulls it tight. Steel claws rake the window, screech across the armored side. The truck sways wildly.

“Go!” Luther yells.

The Librarian floors it.

The Rex pursues them for a while, swift on the straightaway, but tending to madly overshoot its turns. Taking evasive action, the Librarian gets lost several times, with the Tinkers hotly debating the route and Margit and Lily swearing up and down that the streets have changed since the trip out. The Librarian offers them the minor consolation that they’re probably right. No knowledge is permanent here, and nothing is to be trusted. Also, he’s noticed something else. The city’s machined perfection seems to be breaking down. Entire townhouses disintegrating. High-rises developing gaping holes in their upper reaches. And, here and there, as they’ve sped past, he’s seen places where the nano repair machines are not replicating the bland building facades as they were before. Instead, the new portions reflect a much more alien geometry, as if the nanos’ memory of buildings designed by and for humans has failed, or stranger still, been jettisoned intentionally. The Librarian wonders if he needs to start worrying about the city’s life-support systems.

“Yu gottit! Lost ’im, I t’ink.” Luther hangs out the side window, searching for signs of the Rex.

Stoksie pokes his head through the hatch between front and back. “Yu gotta turn back leff, nah.”

The Librarian accesses the grid map to locate a concentration of nano power lines in the general direction that all describe. Eventually this guides them to the dank courtyard and the stone archway that all agree leads to Deep Moor. Here, too, in the fabric of this nano re-creation, the Librarian sees anomalies: blank spots in the drystone masonry, or patches of circuitry mingling with mossy cobbles in the court.

He pulls up in front of the iron gate. Luther jumps down to open the cargo doors. Lily and Margit pile out and through the arch, calling for help. But Margit is back soon, too soon, and Raven is with her, her lovely face tense with worry that eases with surprise and delight when she sees who’s come.

“Gerrasch! Oh, it’s you! I mean, it’s you and yet it isn’t. Just look at you! What a marvel!” She smiles, holding out both hands. “Quite the figure of a man you’ve become!”

The Librarian presses her fingers between his soft palms, and blushes.

Margit says, “He’s not here!”

“He’s not?”

“Gone!” exclaims Margit desperately.

Raven grasps the scout’s sleeve. “Shhh! Don’t tell them. Don’t worry! Linden will do all she can.”

“She can’t bring back the dead!”

“Shhh! Shhh, dear!”

“You should have kept him here!” Margit jerks her arm free and stalks away to help unload.

“Had I known, I . . .”

“Where is he?” The Librarian has definitely planned on Earth being here.

Raven’s eyes follow the wounded being carried through the gateway. “Gone again. Both of them. Without a word to any of us.”

“Why? Why?” His demand is more to the dragon inside him than to poor, distraught Raven, who looks further stricken anyway.

“Why, indeed! I can’t fathom it! Especially when they knew the rescue party had been sent out after you!”

Should have acted sooner! Should have got here faster!
The Librarian knows his reaction time is down, way down. But it’s hard, after so many millennia of waiting, of living in slow motion. He vows to work on it.

“I’ll find them,” he promises, to whomever’s still listening.

“And odd things are happening here, too,” Raven continues. “I mean, the whole place is odd to begin with. At first, we were constantly finding more and more of Deep Moor. You’d go through a gate or a door and discover a
garden or a room that hadn’t been there moments before. But now, parts of it are disappearing. There’s less and less of it. What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” the Librarian lies. Then he climbs back into the yellow truck to concentrate on programming a new sort of search.

W
ith enormous misgivings, Erde pictures the Grove in her mind, paying proper attention to its most telling details. She has failed to talk the dragon out of answering this latest summons, though she tells herself she shouldn’t call it failure, since that would imply that she’d had some vague chance of succeeding. As gentle and diffident as Earth appears at most times, when decided on something, he’s as stubborn as a rock and cannot be dissuaded, however foolish she might consider his chosen course.

Erde’s final warning concerns the stretch of years from this far future to her far-away past, and the risk of arriving in the midst of a dangerous situation already half-felled by weakness and nausea from the long journey. The dragon promises he will protect her, and how can she insult him by questioning his ability to do so? It’s a shame that the law of dragon transport does not permit her to travel any farther back in her own time than she has already lived in it. She cannot, for instance, send the dragon to the Grove as it was when she first saw it. It must be to the Grove of snow and ice and cold, and the black ashes of Deep Moor. At least she has thought of a backup plan.

So, sensing doom in every nerve ending, Erde tells the dragon she’s ready, then offers up her image of the Grove: solemn, majestic and, even in the smothering snow, heartbreakingly lovely.

She has chosen a smaller side clearing as their specific destination, away from the central pond and the broad, open meadow where the portal to the city had opened. Given his ever expanding size, the dragon will just barely fit under the arch of the great spreading limbs, but there
they might manage to arrive undetected if Fra Guill and his forces are still about, at least for long enough that she might recover her balance. But when they arrive, though Erde’s travel illness is mild this time, the trees are much thinner than she’s remembered. She barely has a moment to catch her breath and stand steadily on both feet, when a cry goes up from the meadow.

Dragon! We are discovered!

Hastily, she tells him her backup plan.

NO. NOT YET. WE MUST WAIT FOR THE OTHERS.

But surely you can see! There’s no one here but white-robes and soldiers!

Brother Guillemo’s army is encamped across the meadow, and all around the sacred pond. Their equipment and personal kits are strewn across the snow like garbage. Their heavy-footed warhorses have trampled the once-flowering verge of the pond into mud. Their boots and tents and lumbering supply wagons have crushed the delicate forest grasses and flattened the meadow into a field of rutted ice. And now Erde sees why the thick lattice of branches did not conceal them. Raw stumps protrude through the dirty snow where several vast and ancient giants have fallen to the ax. Cook fires and campfires dot the clearings, blackening the tender earth and sending up dark billows of smoke to blur the air.

Oh, the trees! They’re killing the trees! Oh, dragon, what are we to do?

The dragon, too, is stunned.

How could such sacrilege have been allowed to happen? Could not the Grove protect itself? Is the hell-priest’s power so very great?

In her grief and horror, Erde for a moment forgets her own peril. The alert soldiers who’d spotted them spring up and reach for their weapons. They kick dozing neighbors awake and send word of intruders down the line. Messengers race toward the cluster of tents, blindingly white, taking up the center of the meadow. The nearest men brandish their pikes and glower, but they do not advance. They glance behind, awaiting reinforcements.

They fear you, dragon, but you’ll see. Once their numbers give them courage, they’ll be on us like a swarm!

OR THEY WILL WAIT FOR THEIR LEADER TO APPROACH.

Their leader. Erde can feel him there, sniffing her out. She could point directly to the tent he hides in, not the biggest—the decoy—but that scruffier one off to the side.

No! We can’t wait for him! We can do nothing here without the others. Let’s go! We must wait until they come!

The first reinforcements have come up. At a shouted signal, the soldiers lockstep toward them, pikes and lances leveled. The dragon is hemmed in by trees. There is no possibility of retreat. For once, Earth is sensible, and relents.

An instant later, they are on a wide stone ledge high above the valley, overlooking the old downward trail. Once this was a faint and secret track that kept Deep Moor hidden from the world of men. Now, it’s trampled raw and wide, obvious even to the unskilled eye. An icy wind scours the ledge, but Erde has her old woolen clothes and the dragon for warmth. She leans against him disconsolately and knuckles away tears she can’t control. From this ledge, she’d beheld Deep Moor for the very first time. She wonders if she can bear any more sadness, any further loss.

Ah, dragon, I feel as if nothing good will ever happen again!

Earth lifts his horned head from a perusal of the battered trail. THEN LOOK OUT THERE, AND BE GLAD!

Far out in the middle of the valley, where the snow-flecked trees nestle in a bend of a silver ribbon of river, a further army spreads in a closed circle around the Grove. A protective circle, Erde assumes, the overflow of Fra Guill’s numberless legions. She cannot imagine why the sight of more tents and men and wagons littering her beloved valley should make her anything but horrified, and tells the dragon so between her sobs.

THEN LOOK CLOSER.

She does so, if only to please him, then sags against his foreclaw with a gasp.
Do I see it right? Is that the king’s standard flying above that red and gold pavilion?

The dragon assents gravely, as if this joy might be too fleeting to admit to.

Oh! And do you see . . .?

A LITTLE TO THE LEFT. He helps direct her gaze, not so keen as his over distances.

“I see it!” she cries aloud, grasping Earth’s claw to keep from pitching wildly over the ledge. The red dragon crest of Baron Weisstrasse flutters bravely among a cluster of smaller tents. “Hal! Sir Hal! Oh, listen to me! As if he could hear me! You see? I told you he would come to rescue Deep Moor!” She says nothing of him arriving too late, after Deep Moor is already in ashes and its women fled. That he is here is enough to lift her spirits. “Let’s go to him immediately!”

THESE SOLDIERS WILL FEAR ME MUCH AS THE OTHERS DID.

Then take me partway, and I’ll walk in alone to find him. We’ll let Sir Hal introduce you to his men. Imagine how proud he’ll be!

PERHAPS.

Now it’s Earth’s turn to be dubious, but he sets her down along the icy road, a decent distance from the encampment, then instantly stills himself to invisibility. The wind cuts cruelly across the valley floor, but Erde gathers her woolen layers about her, and with as much grandeur as she can muster, marches toward camp.

The outermost pickets are too cold and battle-weary to offer more than a halfhearted challenge, plus a few perfunctory leers. Erde does not offer her name. When last she was here, her father was the king’s enemy. But when she asks, with the grace and dignity learned from her grandmother the baroness, to be directed to the compound of Baron Weisstrasse, the three guards are intimidated into silence and pointing.