. . . He can tell the difference right off, like he was in a soundproof room before and now someone’s blasted down the walls. Like maybe if he concentrated, he could hear every sound being made at this very moment all over the world. He could hear them all simultaneously and still know each one for what it is. What a symphony they would make!
. . . then he sees, as if standing right in front of him, his grandfather Djawara’s knowing face. So wise, so steady, so unperturbed by knowledge. No wonder the girl first thought he was her “mage.” He’s smiling, but there’s a warning in his eyes.
. . . What do you know, Papa Dja? Papa? Tell me . . .!
. . . She senses the dragon as an accelerating vastness but cannot truly connect with him. She sees flashes of light, blurs of motion. An ivory claw. He is not, she decides, quite in this world. He is not thinking in her direction, in her time, or even in her scale. The battle still rages, somewhere far away . . .
. . . yet an image reaches her, from . . . where? A well-loved face, every wrinkle familiar, floating in a swirl of mist. Alla, her old nursemaid and tutor, dead these three months . . .
. . . Alla? Alla!
. . . Alla smiles, and is gone . . .
. . . He is after the blue one, the rage howling in his blood. The smaller dragon sets the pace, but she is like sound through water, deflected, diffuse, omnipresent. The other, appearing out of nowhere, slams him off-balance each time he tries to rest. Paia tastes his fury and frustration like bile in her own throat. They dance and feint. They will not confront him. He trumpets that his strength is greater. Like two crows harrying an eagle, their only hope is to exhaust him. They lead him ever farther from the inhabited lands, to keep their battle from damaging the humans. He does not care about the humans. Soon he begins to suspect some other strategy, and decides he must have one of his own . . .
. . . but this is odd. As she watches, or seems in her mind to watch, the vision shrinks until it is a moving image framed by darkness, as on a screen. Words scroll rapidly across the bottom. She has missed the start of them . . .
. . . and who will be the guide’s guide in this ruined world, if not me? . . .
. . . House? Is that you? House? . . .
. . . LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! . . .
Yes! Something new in the meld. Not a voice, no, not at all, but each of them has heard it before, in what they thought were their dreams. Or in waking moments of drifting inattention, daydreams, a stirring of the subconscious. Or so they thought.
That articulate breath of wind, that sighing gust so rich with meaning. That motion of atmosphere that is more formed than wind, yet less than a voice, a word. That presence at the corner of an eye, just out of view.
N’Doch N’Djai hears it as the universal harmony.
Erde von Alte sees it as the colors of the spectrum.
Paia Alexii Cauldwell feels it as the entire range of emotion, human and beyond.
The Librarian absorbs it, collates it, interprets it. He offers what he can of the nature of the new presence: huge, discorporate, a being of vast intellect as yet unfocused, of shape as yet undetermined. More potential than actual. But the potential takes their breath away.
Ah! The magnificence! A power beyond imagining!
AIR! AIR! AIR!
Toobigtooloudtoovasttoomuch! The specter of overload. The Four draw back as if burned. In that instant, a debriefing:
Clever dude, Fire. He trapped her, like a genie in a bottle, before she’d come into her powers.
But where? Where?
Nowhere.
So we gotta go nowhere to find her?
No place that we know of, he means.
No where.
Can she be a bit more specific?
Listen! Listen! Listen!
She is there. Air. His dragon. He is made whole for the briefest of instants. A taste of totality. His centuries of waiting are . . . and then she is gone.
Ah, the ache! Ah, the loss! And yet, the gain . . .
SEE: nothing.
HEAR: nothing.
SMELL: nothing.
FEEL: the outward expansion of consciousness toward infinity.
What he would say for her if he could but find the words, the all-too-human words? He wouldn’t say, he would show. Image, sound, scent, touch, taste: a tidal surge of sensation and dream and memory, washing over, around. She has seen all. She has seen what you see. She remembers it for you. A green valley bathed in the golden mist of a summer evening, resonant with bee hum. The crisp sparkle of snow on a sunlit windowsill at Tor Alte. A symphony of birds and salt water cascading along an African shore. The sweet cacophony of Blind Rachel plunging cool and crystalline from a pine-scented height.
Treasure it! Hold it in the now! Do not let it pass into memory! Is it not all that is right and good? Is it not the truest miracle? Can it be that, instead, we choose nothingness and death?
Ah, the ache! The loss! There is no gain . . .
Paia feels the message as remembered grief, her mother’s death, her father’s decline and fall. Yet she understands how the mutable painting has prepared her to receive this message in a larger sense. Inside her now, no lazy, clichéd notion, no old denial like she heard so often as a child: hey, it wasn’t me who wrecked the planet!
Instead, a profound, abiding rage that her birthright has been taken from her, and from all the other dwellers on the Earth. Only through another’s memories will she hear the salt roar of the African surf, or taste the pure snowmelt of a German mountain stream. All she can know firsthand is heat and barren rock and devastation.
What can be done? What must I do?
The blue screen swims again behind her eyelids.
White letters read: DENY HIM.
No word, no voice. A sudden avalanche of emotion. A shock wave of rage and negation shakes the Four until their bones rattle. They see shredded wings, a flash of scales and smoke and blood. The contact is shattered. They are flung apart, flying, gasping, falling, slammed down hard on the weathered tarmac, overwhelmed, tumbled, scattered like rag dolls around the perimeter of the circle.
Without the multiple voices of the meld to fill her mind and her attention, Paia knows the exact moment when he arrives.