The Tinkers will not be rushed. After two idle days of waiting through their prep for the big trade expedition, N’Doch and the baron are getting restless. For different reasons, of course. N’Doch, because he’s picking it up from the dragons, no matter how hard he tries to resist. The baron, because restlessness is his natural state, as far as N’Doch can tell.
Mostly to bug him, N’Doch pretends to relish the long hot days spent mostly within hands’ reach of Blind Rachel’s chill pool.
“You just gotta lighten up some, Dolph. A little r ’n r is good for a man of war like yerself.” He trails his hand in the cooling water, then drips it luxuriously across his bare chest.
Köthen merely grunts, then spits on the honing stone he’s cadged off Luther and sets the blade of his dagger to the dampened surface. “I’ve many times wished for Hal Engle at my side,” he muses, rotating the already lethal steel in small, precise circles, “but now more than ever.”
“What? I’m not good enough for you?”
Without ceasing his honing, Köthen gazes out into the amber darkness of the dusk-shadowed woods. “Hal Engle knows everything there is to know about dragons. He would know how best to kill one, I imagine.”
N’Doch sits up straighter. “Whoa. No one’s said anything about killing. If this ‘monsta’ of theirs is Fire, and he has got Air stashed away someplace, killing him ain’t gonna help us one bit.”
“But it might help the local populace.”
“Hey, man, you didn’t even want to be here. What the hell d’you care about the local populace?”
Köthen shrugs, not a thing N’Doch sees him do all that often, since the baron’s not much into either indecision or ambivalence. “They appear to be in need, and they have requested our help.”
“Oh. I get it.” N’Doch nods sagely, wondering how he got so brave, to be talking like this to a man with both a temper and a very sharp blade. “Now I know the kinda guy you are. You think you can fix everything, right? Whatever’s wrong, you’re gonna be the man for it.”
Köthen doesn’t leave off making his neat little circles on the stone. “There’s no success without effort.”
The man’s self-restraint is admirable, N’Doch decides, now that he’s got it back in hand. He’s settling in to his exile with the scary kind of patience that usually portends an explosion of action when the time comes. N’Doch’s never known a man who could make his silences so loud. The Tinkers walk softly around Köthen, but never fail to let him know they’re glad to have him as an ally. “You’re just bored, is what you are. But listen up, Dolph. Don’t you let the girl hear you talk about killing dragons.”
Now Köthen looks up. “Perhaps if I did, it would finally affect the disillusionment I’ve been unable thus far to achieve.”
“Mebbe. I wouldn’t count on it, though.”
An odd crackling off among the trees alerts them both.
“Horses,” says Köthen, with mild wonder.
“Nah, c’mon. Here?” N’Doch gets to his feet, squinting into the dim spaces between the trunks and branches.
Köthen spits on his stone again, listening. “Horses, unshod. No riders. No, they’re . . .” He looks up, frowning, as a crowd of large animals noses its way through the woods to the edge of the pool, followed by several of the Tinker children. “Ah, that’s it. They’re mules.”
“Damn.” N’Doch is impressed, both by Köthen’s ear and the animals’ size. They look strong and tough, if a bit on the thin side.
Köthen sheathes his dagger and stands to make room as the herd lowers their long heads to drink. His hands move over them eagerly, smoothing flanks, assessing leg muscles.
“There’s some skill to breeding a good mule.”
N’Doch stands back. He’s not so easy being surrounded by large hoofed animals. “Wonder where they’ve been keeping them.”
“Yo! Dockman!” Luther calls from behind. He slaps a lagging mule toward the water and ambles over to join them, gesturing at the stone in Köthen’s belt. “Yu dun wit’ dat?”
Köthen nods, offering it back. “Ja, danka.”
“Time ta pack up, nah. Yu ready?”
“Betcha!” N’Doch waves a hand at the mule herd. “Where’d all this come from?”
“Up da hill sum. Dey’s grass deah, sumat.” Luther laughs, a mournful hollow sound. “Didna tink we was gonna haul dem waggins by oursels, didju? Das fer townfolk!”
When suddenly the next dawn proved to be departure day, Erde watched the hitchup with eager interest. The sturdy mules reminded her of Sir Hal’s uncanny beast, and that set her worrying about how matters were in Deep Moor, and with the war. She wished Linden was here, for the youngest Tinker baby was ill with a mysterious ailment that their own herbalist could not seem to cure. Erde considered stealing the child and whisking it off to the dragon in the woods. He thought perhaps he could help. But the mother never left it alone for a minute, and it was still not time to let the Tinkers in on the true nature of their new allies.
It was good to be on the move again, even better that her heavy pack would travel in the wagons instead of on her back. Erde had been able to learn a lot in her two days at Blind Rachel, about the villagers and their dragon worship. The information had only upset her own dragons further, but it had decided them that confrontation was the best course, and that there was no time to lose. The search for Air would take a back seat to the search for Fire. Now both dragons were sure that one would lead to the other.
AND MEANWHILE, YOU WILL REST HERE AND BE COMFORTABLE?
I DO NOT NOTICE SUCH THINGS.
YOU NOTICE WHEN YOU’RE HUNGRY.
INDEED I DO, AND WE SHALL NEED TO BE THINKING ABOUT THAT SOON.
The woods around the Tinker camp were nearly barren of wildlife. Certainly there was nothing big enough to keep a dragon fed. Erde found herself gazing at the mules and averted her eyes guiltily.
I WILL BUY YOU SOMETHING FAT AND SWEET WHEN WE REACH THE VILLAGES.
If there is such a thing in the villages. And what will you buy it with, girl?
Leave it to Lady Water to come up with a fuller understanding of commerce. But for her dagger and the dragon brooch pinned inside her shirt, Erde had nothing of value.
I’LL TRADE FOR IT. I’LL THINK OF SOMETHING.
“Of course you will, little sister.” The dragon-as-Sedou joined her, laughter in his eyes. “Don’t mind me. All set to leave? The signal’s been given. Come walk along with me. The day’s just begun, yet I sense we are nearing our journey’s end.”
Earth felt it, too. He said it was like hearing a rumbling in the distance for ever so long, and then finally spotting the thunderhead. And the summons had strengthened again, he said, that silent call that only the dragons heard. Erde was sad to leave him behind again. She welcomed Sedou’s company, since N’Doch had decided to walk with Baron Köthen in the rear. More than half the crew was going along, leaving only a handful of elderly to care for the rabbits and goats and to water the little kitchen gardens, plus a small warrior contingent assigned to the camp’s defense.
But Erde understood why. Listening carefully over the past few days, especially to Luther who did not mince words, had made it clear that this trip was more than the usual “biz.” Despite the beauty of their stronghold and Stoksie’s irrepressible cheer, Blind Rachel Crew’s situation was deteriorating. Their trade stocks were precariously low, their stores of staple foods even lower. Their survival as a community depended on the success of this expedition. At least the continuation of their water supply was now assured, though none of them knew it. Erde wished she could tell them, to relieve at least one source of their constant anxiety.
She and Sedou joined the line of wagons midway as it rolled out of camp. The road outward did not appear to be a road at all. The first several hours were a trek across crumbling stone ledges and dry, scrub-choked meadows. Erde pointed out to Sedou how both wagons and walkers spread out in a wide fan formation wherever space permitted.
“I believe they hope to leave as faint a trace of our passage as possible.” He circled a hand in the air. “Not even much of a dust cloud raised.”
She nodded, intrigued by the Tinkers’ quiet methods of defense. Her father, Baron Josef, would have built a big stone wall around such a stronghold, then loudly challenged all comers to vanquish it.
Before the sun was high, the expedition was several leagues from the camp by Erde’s estimation, stretched out in a long, lazy line. The pace had slowed to an odd kind of waiting. But then, at a call from up front, each walker and wagon turned abruptly left from where they were, and moved downslope into a broad stand of sharp-needled evergreens. These young trees looked so thick and healthy that Erde wondered if someone had been watering them, like they did back in camp. Passage between the trunks was so narrow that the rough branches scraped the sides of the bigger wagons. The mules groaned and protested, but on the other side of the grove, Erde saw they had come out onto what N’Doch would call a “real” road, paved like a castle courtyard with that pale seamless stone he called concrete. The low, heavy greenery screened their sideways approach to the road as effectively as any big stone wall, or perhaps more so, for the fact of not announcing itself.
Once on the road, though it was cracked and pitted and dotted with tall tufts of weeds, the expedition moved faster. They descended through dusty pine scrub onto more open slopes of thorn brush and brittle yellow grasses that rustled like a woman’s skirts in the hot breezes. Here and there, a few stunted hardwoods clung to the hillsides, bent over with drought and wind. Along one such dry meadow, the Tinkers stopped to rest, by habit or common consent, Erde could never tell. Their decision-making process was often too diffuse for her even to detect. Two or three walkers left the road and plunged into the scrub, to answer a call of Nature, she assumed. But a wave from one brought another dozen leaping down from the carts and caravans, armed with buckets and long-handled baskets of metallic mesh. Others followed more slowly.
“Bluburry,” announced Stoksie as he limped past, a bucket in each hand. “Real gud trade, bluburry. Be heah a while, den. Yu doin’ okay, nah?”
Erde nodded gratefully, looking to Sedou for help with the English, which she could understand now but still had trouble pronouncing.
“Can we help?” Sedou asked, for them both.
Stoksie handed over one of his buckets with a gap-toothed grin. “Betcha!”
The berries were tiny but sweet. Erde couldn’t resist nibbling a few, but all the Tinkers were doing the same. The picking went quickly with so many pickers, and consolidation produced an impressive crop. Several large buckets were capped and stowed. Watching Stoksie rub his hands in satisfaction, Erde thought, every little bit helps.
A small noon meal was shared out, with water from the big wooden casks lashed to each wagon. When the expedition moved on, a steady pace brought them down off the higher reaches and into the foothills by midafternoon. It was hotter there, and traces of civilization appeared. Very soon Erde understood Baron Köthen’s dry bemusement at what he called N’Doch’s “ridiculous luck,” for stumbling upon the Tinkers and not someone more dangerous.
Her first hint was the ruins along the road, the crumbling stone foundations of farmsteads long ago deserted. These looked sad and lonely, but with a peaceful aura of having eased gradually back to Nature. After that came less comforting signs: structures more recently inhabited, not fallen back to the barren earth quickly enough to eradicate the high metal fences that had once surrounded them, now smashed and broken, or the wide dark scars of explosion and conflagration.
“Surely there was a war!” exclaimed Erde, after the seventh or eighth burned-out ruin.
The dragon-as-Sedou shook his head. “Mankind is a rabid animal destroying itself from within.”
“No animal would so foul its nest. God set Man apart from the animals, to do His bidding, but Man will not follow His will.”
“It’s humanity’s belief that they’re different from animals that leads to all this.” He gestured across the devastated landscape, his face stony with ancient despair. “Would any true god allow it?”
Erde’s lips pursed. She regretted starting this conversation, for the dragon could talk circles around her. But there were certain perversions of dogma that she should not let pass unchallenged. “As if there could be more than one! My lady Water, you learn this pagan talk from your godless guide!”
“More from his brother, the martyr and idealist whose shape I walk in.”
“A man you’ve never met.”
“Yet who lives richly in the mind of the brother who loved him.”
“Oh, how do you know what’s really Sedou and what’s merely N’Doch’s memory of him?”
“I do not. Does it matter? Why do you say merely? Is it not mankind’s dearest hope to be lovingly remembered when one no longer lives?”
“Mankind’s dearest hope is salvation,” Erde reminded him primly.
“Ah. Salvation.”
She sensed mockery and frowned up at him.
The dragon-as-Sedou grinned. “Well, little sister? Did it never occur to you that some dragons—and their guides—might not be Christian?”
A shout from ahead saved her the cost of a foolish reply. The wagons halted and every Tinker without reins in their hands reached for a weapon.
“Uh-oh,” murmured Sedou, sounding very much like N’Doch.
N’Doch and Baron Köthen came loping up from behind. Köthen had armed himself with a stout sharpened pole.
“Dochmann! Stay with milady!” he ordered, still moving forward. “Dragon man, come with me.”
Sedou fell in beside him. “Dragon woman, you mean.”
Köthen shook his head. “Woman dragon. Dragon man.”
Sedou laughed, and the two of them trotted ahead, along the line of wagons. Next, Luther hurried by, with several others behind him.
“Should we go, too?” Erde asked N’Doch.
“We’re safer here.”
“No, I mean, don’t you want to know what’s happening?”
N’Doch stares at her. She’s craning forward, this way and that, like an anxious bird. Either she’s the bravest fool he’s ever met, or she really has no idea. “Hey, we’ll know soon enough. If it blows up into something serious, we’ll go in as backup.”
“Well, I’m going now.”
N’Doch grabs her arm. “No, you don’t. The boss says stay here, that’s what we’ll do.”
“The boss?”
N’Doch fidgets. “Y’know. His high-mucky-muck lordship.”
The girl looks interested. “Have you sworn service to Baron Köthen?”
“Gedoudaheah! No way!”
She cocks her head at him, puzzled.
“Just never mind, okay? What do the dragons say is going on up there?”
She makes a little pout at him, then goes inward to that place where, as N’Doch thinks of it, the channel is always open. “That there are some people up ahead who claim the right of payment for our safe passage through their lands. Stoksie, Luther, and Brenda do not agree with them.”
N’Doch smirks. “The old toll gambit. Getting back what they gave.”
“But Ysabel seems to think it might be wiser to negotiate a reasonable price.”
“What for?” Actually, N’Doch is sorry to miss this bit of entertainment. His regret must be reading on his face, ’cause the girl grabs his hand and starts yanking him forward.
“You do want to know! Come, N’Doch! You needn’t do everything Baron Köthen tells you to!”
Ouch, he thinks. She’s really learned how to get to him. But by the time he’s made up his mind to go along with her, the Tinkers are relaxing off the alert, remounting their wagons and taking up the reins again, though their weapons are set closer to hand. Soon Köthen and Sedou come strolling back from the front, both of them looking just a bit smug.
“So what happened?” N’Doch demands.
Köthen flicks a hand dismissively.
“A few hungry people trying to fill their bellies the easy way,” Sedou says.
“Yeah? What’d you do?”
Sedou shrugs. “Just showed up.”
“Well, that’s kinda too easy, ain’t it?”
“A scrawny, measly lot of brigands,” Köthen mutters.
“Not brigands, Dolph. People starving.”
Köthen bows to the dragon man satirically. “I stand corrected.”
“Stoksie’s seeing what they have left to trade for food.”
“Oh,” exclaims the girl. “We ought to just give them what they need!”
N’Doch is glad he’s not the only one staring at her like she’s a lunatic. “And what do you plan to eat after you’ve given it all away?”
“Well . . . if they had items to trade, would they not have traded it for food already, in the villages?”
Sedou gropes for a middle ground between honorable charity and reckless waste. “Luther says these people can’t go to the villages. They’re exiles. They don’t approve of the villagers’ religion.”
“Good on them,” N’Doch remarks.
Sedou nods. “So Stoksie’s trying to work out a way to give them some food, without giving it outright.”
“Which is against his principles,” Köthen adds.
“Like to see what he gets for it,” says N’Doch.
“I think he did not wish to make them beg for their food,” Sedou concludes.
Köthen sucks his teeth. “I think they were not strangers.”
They all look at him, waiting for more.
“Really?” N’Doch prompts.
“Yes, though they wished to pretend otherwise.”
“Well, that doesn’t make sense.”
Köthen offers one of his hard looks.
“Okay, lemme put it this way: why would they do that?”
“Friend N’Doch, I have not yet given the structure of alliances in this region a thorough enough study.”
N’Doch’s getting irritated. “Well, lemme know when you do.”
It’s only after the wagons move forward again and Köthen drops back to his habitual spot in the rear, that N’Doch realizes the baron’s learned how to bait him, too, in return for the abuse he’s been dishing out. This makes him laugh out loud.
The girl stares at him. “What’s funny?”
“Your man Dolph.”
“Don’t call him that,” she murmurs.
And her regret is too real for him to make light of. “Okay. I won’t.”
When they pass the spot where the front wagons had halted, he sees a group of eight or ten ragged folk squatting down in the dust with a small pile of food between them. They’re arguing over it already.
The toll gambit is pulled on them twice more before the wagons reach the first village, with much the same results. By then, N’Doch suspects that Köthen is right, or the Tinkers are more softhearted than they’d like to admit. Either way, he hopes they pack extra rations on these trips, so they can afford their own generosity. No wonder they’re in trouble.
The first village is a small one, no more than twenty houses set beneath a scattering of battered, broad-trunked trees. Must be water underground, N’Doch decides, to keep these oldsters alive. The houses are low and square and made of stone. If they were cement block, they’d look a lot like his mama’s house. A roof over one’s head but otherwise full of holes. At dusk, the place looks deserted, not much of a threat. Not even a junkyard dog to greet them, just a few old people peering cautiously out of their doorways. The Tinkers pass through the village unchallenged and pull the wagons into a tight ring in a dusty field on the other side. While dinner preparations are underway, a small but well-armed delegation walks back into town to announce the start of trade at dawn the next morning and to negotiate water and grazing for the mules. N’Doch wonders who they’re gonna find to talk to.
He’s scavenging bits of twig for Luther’s cook fire when a murmur runs around the circle of wagons. Folks straighten up from their chopping and stirring to point at the horizon. N’Doch dumps his meager handful beside Sedou and the girl. She’s teaching the dragon man how to peel potatoes.
“Take a look out there,” he tells them.
An odd formation of cloud has appeared to either side of the blood red setting sun. Not rain clouds, but puffy and pink. More what N’Doch would call fair-weather clouds, unlikely at dusk in any location, and certainly weird in this place. He hasn’t seen a hint of a cloud since he arrived, only the ever-present sooty murk that turns the empty sky yellow and green.
Sedou stares at the horizon, the potato forgotten in his hand. “Interesting. Not one of mine.”
N’Doch laughs. “Oh, yeah?”
“Mine have more water in them.”
“Cool, bro. Bring ’em on! I could do with a shower.”
“Such energies are not to be squandered lightly.”
N’Doch sees he’s serious. “Wait . . . you can do that? Really?”
The girl gets that haunted look. “Have you forgotten how Lady Water saved us at Lealé’s?”
“I can do it, sure, I can. A shower is a mere parlor trick.” Sedou turns his dragon stare on N’Doch, only there’s a lot of Sedou in it, too, Sedou flaring in righteous wrath. He shakes the potato in his dark fist as if it stood in for all of Nature. “But do you mean, can I fix this dust, this parched field, this . . . wasted earth? I can turn it to mud, if you like . . .”
“No, I . . .”
“For an hour perhaps, and then the life-water would be gone, sucked away as if it had never been! The roots would still dry and the stems still wither! It takes more than just water, even if I could offer an endless supply. Too much water, after all, is a flood, and a flood is as destructive as a drought! Alone, I can do little. But with proper help . . .”
“Whoa. Easy.” N’Doch hates this. Just when he’s let himself forget, the millennia creep back into the voice of this man-thing who isn’t really his brother.
Sedou stares at the horizon, and then his rage is gone as quickly as it came. “But with help . . .”
“With help you could what? Make a monsoon?”
The girl clucks her tongue, disapproving his attempt to lighten up a moment just because its gravity makes him nervous.
“No. No. But surely this is part of it.”
“Part of what?”
“Part of all of it. Of what we are to do, to accomplish. Together.” Sedou’s chin lifts and his shoulders drop back as his gaze drifts to some inner dragon space that N’Doch doesn’t even want to contemplate. “Sometimes I see . . .” He falters, his inhuman eyes suddenly dark with foreboding.
“What, bro?” N’Doch asks again, uneasy. “What do you see?”
And then it comes to him what’s been bothering him since they arrived at Blind Rachel. He just knows this gig’s been much too easy so far. Any minute now, the shit is gonna hit the fan. The girl is staring at Sedou reverently, like he might lay out some final truth any moment. She prefers him like this, damn her, more dragon than Sedou.
But the dragon/man sighs, shakes his head. “It’s never clear enough to really say. What my brother Earth calls a Purpose only partly understood . . . for me, it’s more like a vision, only partly glimpsed.” He shakes himself out of his sober reverie. “But those clouds . . . those are interesting. A sign . . . of some sort.”
The Tinker delegation returning from the village descends upon them with jovial enthusiasm.
“C’monta my fire, nah,” invites Ysabel. “Feedju up gud!”
N’Doch soaks up the crinkle in her hair and the faint Latin music in her speech like it was cool, sweet water.
Sedou lifts the pot of potatoes he and the girl have not quite worked their way through. “Thank you, but Luther was kind enough to ask . . .”
“Luta come, too, den. Dat ri’, Luta? Allyu come wit me! Heah da news frum town.”
Stoksie grins up at N’Doch. “Yu bring gud luck, tallfella.”
Stoksie runs a hand across his shiny bald head, then points at the clouds, grown into two thin spires that flank the ruby oval of the sun like the minarets on a mosque. “Dese townies call dat a sign. Say da god smile onda trade day.”
“Which god is that?” Sedou asks lightly.
Stoksie and Ysa flick glances at Luther, as if waiting for a cue.
“Dere’s only one fer dem,” Luther says grimly. “Da monsta.”
The girl frowns. “They think the monster is God? You did not mention that.”
N’Doch laughs. “And he cares about trade?”
Stoksie’s grin returns. “Shur, shur. Lotsa time, dem townies trade der food ’n der craftwerk for stoopid glittajunk to give ’im prezents.”
“Glitter junk?”
“Shur. Like dem jools what wimen usda weah. Ornyment.” Stoksie sees he has the three visitors’ total attention. “Fake stuff, y’know. Salvage.” He mimes digging. “We find it ’roun.”
Sedou nods. “But why are the clouds a good omen?”
Stoksie blinks at him. “Clouds is alwiz a gud sign, tallfella. Whachu tink? Mebba it rain, nah?”
“When did you see clouds last, can you remember?”
“Can’ say wen it wuz. Wachu tink, Ysa?”
“I’d say tree mont’, mebbe fowah. Dat weerd time. Yu memba dat, Luta?”
Luther, absorbed in cloud study, responds to his name with a start. “Betcha! Come up suddin like, afta nuttin fer neah a yeah. Den a few, den moah ’n moah fer a week, like. Den alla suddin, nuttin agin. Till now.”
“Three months ago?” asks Sedou thoughtfully. “Clouds like these?”
“Sumpin’ like.”
“Interesting.”
“Okay, c’mon nah.” Ysabel hooks an arm around Stoksie’s elbow. “Talk whilyu eatin!”
Night settles in during the meal prep. There are fewer cook fires inside the ring of wagons than at the camp. Not enough firewood. N’Doch feels the darkness wrapping him close. He’s used to not much light at home, out in the bush, but this night is the very definition of lightless. It looms like a wall, a tsunami of darkness. And his conviction that the party’s over is still giving him the creeps. Maybe the others sense it, too. N’Doch sees how, despite the heat, everyone finds a spot to huddle in tight around the few dim pools of glow. But it’s not a night attack that worries them. Instead of keeping it quiet, they talk louder than usual, act raucous, as if to shout down suffocation by the void.
At Ysabel’s fire, Luis joins them and a few couples N’Doch knows by face but not by name, plus Mari and Senda, who hang around Sedou whenever they can get away with the idleness that hanging around requires. Brenda and Charlie sit down long enough to eat, then go off on perimeter watch. N’Doch wishes Marley was by, with his guitar, but the old man has stayed at camp to look after his prize tomatoes.
The conversation is about the townies. Those who went into the village share out the local gossip—who’s dead, who’s married who, who’s promised what for trade. Then comes the news that’s got the village in an uproar: some big religious figure making a town-by-town tour will not be stopping by their village because it’s too small.
“Too small fer da monsta ta bodda wit’,” notes Luther. “An’ das a gud ting!”
“Das why we come heah,” Stoksie agrees.
“But dey hate dat, doncha know? Makes ’em feel bad. Like dey not gud enuff.”
“Gud enuff fer us, nah.”
General agreement runs around the fire, then talk turns to the monster god himself. War stories, N’Doch thinks of them. Disputes about the span of his wings, the size of his claws, the direness of his wrath. It takes a lot, he notes, for these folks to air their grievances. They’d rather be laughing and yarn-spinning. Old tales are trotted out to shock the visitors’ virgin ears, and everyone dutifully claims not to believe any of them, so Luther can attest loudly to the accuracy of every single one. N’Doch thinks of evenings in the bush village where he grew up, though the gossip there was mostly the bad news from the city and the stories were the familiar ancestral myths, recounted each time as if for the first time.
“But why do they call him God?” protests the girl in her polite but pained way, after Mari and Senda have shuddered their way through a fourth graphic tale of bestial cruelty, “Where is the religion in such a practice? Is there doctrine? Does he work miracles? If he’s there in the flesh and there’s no denying his presence, what are the issues of Faith?”
Köthen, leaning in to N’Doch’s quiet running translation, agrees. “More a plain tyrant than a god, it would seem.”
Luther clears his throat, and though no one actually moves, somehow the others make a respectful space for him, as they have done for Sedou since he appeared among them. “Well, der is doktrin. Summa dem belief it. But I tink mosta dem jes say so cuz dey skeerda da monsta.”
“What do they believe?” Sedou asks.
“Ina enda da wold. Any day nah. Say der’s no pint doin’ nuttin fer da future, cuz der won’ be any. Or so dey tink.”
“I take it you do not share this belief.”
“Nah.” Luther offers a wan grin. “Das too dak fer me, y’know?”
Sedou asks, “So what do you believe?”
For a moment, silence reigns around Ysabel’s fire. Again, it seems that the others, even Stoksie and Ysabel, defer in such matters to Luther. He begins slowly. “Well, summa us see it diffrint. We say it mebbe look like da enda da wold, bud it ain’t.” He pauses as if he would welcome a change of subject, but Sedou waits him out. Finally Luther shrugs and hikes his stooped body and big nose forward, his scarred hands lifting from his sides to talk along with him. “No, it ain’t. Why? Cuz der’s One comin’ ta make it right.”
“She walks in light,” Ysabel murmurs.
“Fixit all, y’know?” Luther’s arms pinwheel around him. “Alla it. Den mebbe we liff like umins again.”
“The One?” the girl breathes. “You mean, Our Savior?”
“Probably not the one you’re thinking of,” says Sedou gently.
“You think this fix up’s gonna happen soon?” N’Doch asks, for it sounds like he does. Maybe even tomorrow.
Luther rocks his head back and forth like a tired bear. “We don’ know dat, nah, cuz y’see, da One gotta big problum. She shuddup inna dark by da Handa Chaos, waitin’ till we figure a way ta ged her out.”
“She? In the dark?” The words escape Sedou as a sigh. N’Doch is too astounded to speak, and the girl looks thunderstruck.
“She walks in light,” murmurs Ysabel again, echoed this time by Luis and one of the nameless couples. Stoksie, N’Doch notices, remains silent. The others shift uneasily.
“Like I sez,” Luther concludes, “Only summa us belief dis.”
N’Doch feels the deep thrum of dragon energies in the air, in the very ground beneath his feet. He wishes he was like the Tinkers, sitting there unawares. He remembers how, at Lealé’s, when the dragons decided to make their move, things started to pinball with sickening speed. The girl’s still looking stunned, but he knows she’s in furious converse with the big guy back in the woods. Despite the high voltage that Sedou’s generating for those who are plugged in to it, his surface remains calm and merely . . . interested.
“An imprisoned messiah. It’s a beautiful notion, Luther. Is it yours?”
Luther looks shocked, then embarrassed. “Na, na. I heerd it frum . . . a frien’. A greyt preecher-man, y’know? I lissen, I jus’ know he got da wold on right.”
“I’d like to meet this preacher. Does he say where the Hand of Chaos is keeping your awaited One?”
“We all lookin’ on dat. Ev’ry day, we closer to da ansa.”
“And what will it take to free her?”
Luther lowers his elbows to rest on his knees. “We ain’t figurd dat yet neider.”
“Der’s sum say da One’ll be free whenda monsta is ovahtrone.”
This is a new voice, one N’Doch doesn’t recognize, and he’s sure he knows all of Blind Rachel’s sounds, if not the names. The speaker is a young woman crouched on the other side of the fire, partly obscured by the flames.
“Sum say dat,” Luther agrees dubiously.
She’s got two other strangers with her, one on either side, two guys, youngish and serious-looking. N’Doch is ashamed how they just snuck up out of the night without him noticing. Köthen is already watching them, probably has been for a while. But the Tinkers act like it’s nothing unusual.
He nudges Stoksie. “Who’s that?”
“Frum town.”
“You don’t mind?”
Stoksie shrugs. “Wild young’uns. Y’know?”
Luther shoves his hair back, speaking across the fire, “But dem as tink dat got no ideah how dey gonna make it happin.”
“Sum do,” says the young woman.
“Sum oughta git bettah ideahs befur dey go preechin’ ’em.”
And then it looks like that’s all anyone’s willing to say, until Sedou draws a deep and quiet breath. The hot wind that’s been fanning the embers dies back. N’Doch feels his own breath coming shorter now, and he knows for sure that his vacation’s over. Some conjunction of circumstance and subject matter has occurred. The ball is in the slot and the blue dragon’s hand is on the lever. He glances down the line of listeners, sees all the apprehension in her and catches his fellow dragon guide’s eye. He that he’s trying to keep off his own.
“Here we go,” he mutters to Köthen.
“Now, Luther, I won’t claim that my ideas are any better, but there’s one I’d like to try out on you anyway.” Sedou looks to Luther for permission.
“Yer ideahs is always welcum, tallfella.”
“My thanks. What if I say, then . . .” Sedou gazes around until he holds their attention, even the newcomers across the fire. “What if I point out an amazing coincidence. The friend my companions and I came looking for is also imprisoned in an unknown place. We believe her imprisonment is keeping her—and us—from accomplishing a glorious good. And we believe that he who imprisoned her does not want this great good accomplished.” Sedou glances down, the very image of humble self-doubt. “Do you think, my friends, that it is too much to conclude that this jailer is the same monster god you speak of?”
Murmurs build around the fire.
“A moment longer, friends.” Sedou puts out a hand as if smoothing ripples. The murmurs die into edgy silence, and N’Doch senses the lever’s twang. The ball is in motion.
“What if I say something further, something . . . oh, you who have asked our help, listen well! What if I tell you the help that I bring is far greater than you’ve supposed, and of a . . . different sort. It will shake your faith, but then surely renew it!”
The Tinkers eye him, some wearily, others with caution, like they expect him to start raving any minute. Maybe he already has. N’Doch guesses it’s like opening a box you had great plans for and finding it empty, or full of the same old garbage.
But Luther says, “Go on, tallfella.”
Sedou nods. “It cannot be mere chance that has brought us together. It cannot be! There is a great mystery here that I have not yet been able to penetrate. But I believe our shared knowledge of it will fit together like a key in a lock, that together, we can discover this prison and free my friend . . . and your awaited One.” The dragon/man drops his hand and his voice. The wind dies entirely, as if someone’s switched off the fan, and Sedou’s whisper insinuates itself into every ear. “For, you see, my friends: I believe them to be one and the same being, that is, my sister Air.”
Luther coughs gently, just once. “Tallfella, we weren’t expectin’ da One to be umin . . . y’know?”
“Nor is my sister Air.”
Luther nods, like he’s been waiting for this.
N’Doch shivers, despite the heat. Well, that certainly lays a lot of our cards on the table. He’s not sure the other Tinkers are ready for it. But maybe they are. He looks around at the stubborn faces still protecting themselves against the rising of hope, eyes narrowing at Sedou, trying to decide exactly how crazy he is . . . or isn’t.
Because there’s a difference here: these people don’t need to be convinced of the reality of magical creatures. There’s one ravaging their countryside already. What they need is renewed faith and a weapon.
Well, one has just arrived. No, make that two.
N’Doch fills Köthen in on what’s gone down, and is unsurprised by the baron’s sudden grin of anticipation. As for himself, he’s got nothing against a good fight, but he feels a darkness creeping up on him that he cannot explain.
Sedou smiles into the uneasy silence, a glow like the full moon rising. There is power in his very calm, as if he knows they will come to believe him and he needs offer nothing but patience while they find this out for themselves.
Damn dragon arrogance, N’Doch swears, watching the dragon/man morph into something subtly less earthly, without needing a note of his music. He’d be surprised to find a steady hand or slow heart in the house. Finally the townie woman stands. She moves stiffly around the fire until she’s face-to-face with the sitting giant. She has round Asian features and tawny pox-marked skin. N’Doch is sad for her disfigurement. Otherwise, she would be beautiful.
“Give us a sign.” Her back is rigid and her Tinker accent suddenly flushed from her voice. She’s brave but terrified.
Sedou laughs. “A sign?”
“Of this power you speak of. We’ve had our fill of messianic lunatics!”
“Of course you have.”
She glances defiantly at Luther. “Some people will believe anything if they want it bad enough.”
Agreement whispers through the gathering.
“Who are you?” she demands. “Or . . . what.”
“My name is Sedou. I am what I am. Who or what are you?”
“I am Miriam, and I . . .” She bites her lip, glances back at her two young accomplices. Their mouths hang open. Wide-eyed, they nod. “And I . . . stand in opposition to the Winged God of the Apocalypse!” She plants her hands on her hips, glaring at Sedou in challenge.
“Well, Miriam. Well spoken. So do I. So does everyone here.”
“I know that.” His gentleness has caught her off guard. “But these Tinkers do nothing about it! They oppose but do not act! Why do you come to them with your magical appearance and your gift of fish?”
“Word gets around, I see.”
Young Miriam scoffs. “Easily accomplished! Why should we listen? Why should we believe? Show us a sign that cannot be explained away!”
Just call in the big guy, thinks N’Doch. That’ll convince ’em. Or it might just send them screaming in the opposite direction, given their current expectations of dragons.
“A sign.” The dragon/man laughs again, a great booming laugh that tickles a smile or a sheepish grin onto the soberest of disbelieving faces around the fire. He stands, towering over the young woman, but she stands her ground as he spreads his arms wide and throws his head back as if welcoming the surrounding darkness. “So be it, doubting Miriam!”
And a soft rain begins to fall, a precise zone of cooling relief that stops a step outside the circle around the fire. Miriam catches tiny drops on her outstretched palms until they run with moisture, then presses them to her eyes with a sob.
“Parlor tricks,” says Sedou sadly.
But Luther lowers himself onto his bony knees, his rough hands clasped in gratitude. “Welcome, pilgrim! Your search has ended.”