Demons (25 page)

The cold wind rolled across the plains like a breaker, gusting imperiously out of Russia, slapping them with dust from the Kara Kum desert. She glanced toward their guides’ truck. One corner of the truck’s dark side window pulsed red with a cigarette’s ember as one of the Turkmen sucked at the harsh Russian tobacco. What were these guides good for if they didn’t even know the way to the Fallen Shrine? She coughed, and had just decided to take Marcus inside, when firelight sketched the edge of the building’s opening door, and she saw Nyerza stooping to step through. He turned back and waved to someone inside. She glimpsed a stocky bearded man wearing a
telpek
, the shaggy brimless hat of the desert Turkmen. Nyerza made a farewell gesture she’d seen Muslims give—he could seem utterly Muslim when he chose—and strode out toward the Jeep, fighting the wind, picking his way over the rough ground, an absurdly elongated, wavering figure in the streamers of dust flickering in the dawn light.

She found herself thinking of someone else entirely as she watched Nyerza approach: Ira, back home in a more familiar world, giving his art lessons, studying with Yanan, drawing, worrying. She felt a surge of warmth when she remembered the struggle in him—she’d felt it so palpably, when he’d agreed to let her come without him, to bring Marcus, to go with Nyerza. Knowing his jealousy of Nyerza but letting her go.

She asked herself for the hundredth time why she’d come. She asked something within her, but her connection to the Urn had gone silent some time ago. They were preoccupied or chose to be unresponsive. They gave no answer. Perhaps they’d withdrawn from her entirely.

Perhaps she was unworthy.

Drawing his robes closer around him, the tall African ducked down behind the windshield, settled back in his seat. He bent and spoke behind a cupped hand into her ear, to be heard over the wind. “They gave me a map. Perhaps it’s good. The wind will ease as the daylight comes. We’ll go to the foot of Mount Rize before we rest.”

She would have liked to put up their tents somewhere sheltered. She was grittily tired; her eyes ached; she was hungry. But Nyerza had said they were to move as quickly as they could.

He glanced at her, seemed to cast about for a subject to take her mind off her fatigue. He bent near again. “Do you know how many of them are in that building?”

“Couldn’t be room for more than twenty at the most.”

“I counted sixty-three, mostly men, a couple of crones, one young wife, a handful of children.”

“Sixty-three! In that little building!”

“Not only that but two horses! The less valuable horses are out back, in improvised shelters. It’s crowded, but more protection than a yurt. They travel in extended families—and no one is to be left without shelter. But that is how I left you! I’m sorry to leave you out here. Those oafs in the truck should have traded places with you while we waited.”

“It’s all right. I think Marcus has gone to sleep anyway.”

As he put the Jeep in gear, the window of the truck rolled down, shedding dust, and a bearded face peered out through a wreath of smoke. Nyerza gave a thumbs-up and said something in Russian. The Turkmen spoke a combination of Turkish, Russian, and Azeri; they understood Russian well enough. They nodded, and the truck roared to life. The Jeep led the way, jouncing along the rutted gravel road.

The road cut straight across the plain for eight miles more, then advanced windingly up the spine of a ridge. The great sea of dust parted before them like the Red Sea before Moses, settling as the wind dropped. Now and then, following the road—or did the road follow them?—there were standing stones. They might once have been sculpted, but windblown sand had removed any traces of man, except for their stubborn, precariously balanced uprightness.

The two vehicles bounced up the ridge’s spine toward the foothills of Mount Rize. In the distance, where the first sunlight shifted indigo plains to reaches of lifeless blue and outcroppings of stony dun, there were points of unsteady flickering. “What is that—city lights?” she asked.

“No—you see how it wavers? It’s flame. Those are the new natural gas fields—they’re doing some burn-off. When the gas reserves were discovered, the Russians were sorry they’d let Turkmenistan go. And there are new oil wells, too, south of here.”

“Oil! When will it be enough? We have hydrogen cars now, and electric cars.”

“Those are only prevalent in America and Europe, somewhat in Japan. Most of the world still burns gasoline and slowly melts the ice caps. Is there any bottled water left?”

“Yes, I think Marcus has it. How far to the shrine?”

“About a hundred and fifty miles, but some of it we will have to go on horseback.”

She reached under the blanket for the plastic water bottle Marcus held in his arms as he slept and felt a dreadful clamminess on the boy’s wrist, a throbbing heat from his forehead. “Oh, no. Marcus? Are you all right? How do you feel? Marcus!”

The boy didn’t reply.

“Marcus?”
He remained limp, unresponsive. With trembling hands she fumbled the Mediscan kit from the satchel on the floor, found the general indications scanner, and pressed it to his temple. “Stop the Jeep—I can’t read this with all the bouncing!”

Nyerza signaled the truck, and the two vehicles lurched to a stop in a plume of dust. She pressed the scanner to the boy’s sweat-beaded forehead, and squinted at its miniature, green-glowing screen.

“What is it?” Nyerza asked.

She let out a long, ragged breath. “I can’t wake Marcus. His blood pressure is mortally low. And he has a temperature of a hundred and five.”

3

Bald Peak, Northern California

Stephen was poised on the edge of paradise, or so it seemedto him.

He stood on a cliff’s edge, on the grassy grounds of the old Bald Peak Observatory, gazing down over Ash Valley. He stood there in the gentle breeze, his hands in the pockets of a heavy black overcoat, ducking his head so that the thin, drizzling rain didn’t slant past his plastic-coated hat brim.

Three parallel slanting shafts of light transfixed the great green and golden bowl of Ash Valley, sunlight breaking through gaps in the uneasy roof of blue-gray clouds. The beams of light shifted like spotlights over the rolling, piney hills, the winding olive-dun river, clusters of tree-hugged houses, and stubbly cornfields cupped by the Northern California highlands. At the northern end of the valley, the ground dipped to the silvery snail tracks of rice field canals.

“It’s an experiment,” said a feminine voice just behind him. He turned and saw a short, slightly plump woman in a rust-colored windbreaker, the hood up. Stephen found he was startled by her lively golden-brown eyes, the lustrous brown hair trapped by the hood, churning in curls and framing her face. She smiled, dimpling cheeks red from the wind. He thought about Winderson’s niece, Jonquil, so different from this woman, but it was a bracing difference.

“Which experiment is that?” Stephen asked. He didn’t yet want to ask her name; he wanted to remain suspended in the delicious uncertainty of the moment there on the edge of a rain-softened abyss.

“The rice fields. I thought you were looking at them with a kind of what-the-devil-are-those look. That’s wetlands there, at the north end of the valley. It’s stocked with wetlands birds who eat insects and grubs but not rice. The birds are supposed to take care of the rice, while the rice fields provide wetlands for them. And wetlands, of course, protect the rest of the valley from flooding. But since West Wind has bought most of the valley, I’m not sure what they’ll do with that land.”

He could tell she was trying to keep regret from her voice.

“You live down there?” he asked.

“Me? No! I live at the observatory now—of course, it’s not used as an observatory much anymore. I work for West Wind, like you. I’m Glyneth Solomon. You
are
Stephen Isquerat, aren’t you?”

“Thank you for pronouncing my name right. It’s refreshing. I hear Isk-rat a lot. I haven’t checked in yet. West Wind already knows I’m here?”

“Seems so. They sent me out to ask if you needed to know how to get into the building. I guess—” her smile flashed and hid itself again “—they couldn’t figure out why you’d be standing out here looking at the valley.”

He turned and looked back at Ash Valley. “I just thought it was . . . beautiful. Even in the rain. Even more in the rain, maybe. I don’t know. My mood today—” He broke off, wondering why he was telling her this.

He looked at her but couldn’t read her expression. It might have been sympathy and it might have been puzzlement. She said, “Did they tell you I was to be your new assistant?”

He shook his head. “No, but . . . that’s great. I mean, they said I was to have an assistant. Good to meet you.” He cleared his throat. “Well, I’m just getting soaked out here. Can you take me to the coffee?”

“I sure can. I know right where it is. Then we’ll locate Dickinham—he’ll want to show you around.”

Portland, Oregon

Ira had a cat in his lap and a laptop on the worktable in front of him. He was waiting for Melissa to call.

He was searching online for the name Iskeriat or Isqueriat and all the variations he could come up with, working in the cone of light from a gooseneck lamp, now and then elbowing art supplies out of the way. And he was waiting for Melissa to call.

Why did she have to take Marcus?
he asked himself for the hundredth time. The boy should be in school. He should be here, where he could be safe and live a normal child’s life. He should be here
playing
, for God’s sake. He thought about Marcus playing with Paymenz’s cats. Getting down on the floor, on his hands and knees, butting heads with a cat, laughing when it flopped on its back, a sign it wanted to play. “How’m I supposed to play that without any claws like you got?” the boy had asked. “You give me some claws, then I’ll play that . . .”

“Very wise, Marcus,” Paymenz had said. Right then, Marcus was showing off a tumbling move he’d learned, somersaulting into the side of Paymenz’s overloaded desk, jarring it so that papers showered down on him. “It’s rainin’ paper!”

“Hey, Marcus,” Ira had said, “you could’ve knocked off his expensive laptop.” He had tried to scowl disapproval at the boy, but it was hard. Marcus’s eyes were his mother’s; the boy’s smile was at once a paragon of innocence and sly humor.

A week later Marcus had gotten into some trouble in school. A parent-teacher conference was called. Marcus had apparently been singing a song he’d heard on the video channel. “ ‘I’m a sex god from the thirteenth hell, love in my touch but sulfur in my smell—oh, yeah, oh darlin’ yeah.’ ” Singing it, moreover, while dancing around a little girl, Ira was told.

At the school, Marcus’s pleasant, pretty Vietnamese-American teacher, Nhe, told him earnestly that the boy was guilty of sexual harassment.

“What’s that?” Marcus had asked.

Ira shrugged. “They claim you were getting all sexy with the girl or something inappropriate like that.”

“What girl?”

“Diane,” Nhe said.

“When?”

“When you were dancing and singing that song about sex gods.” Ira sighed—trying not to laugh.

“I only sang it once. I just like the sound of it. I didn’t notice Diane. Is she that red-haired girl?” No, he was told; she was the girl with long black hair. “Well,” Marcus said, “if I notice her, I won’t sing it around her anymore. But if I don’t notice her, I might sing it on accident.”

“
By
accident,” Ira had said automatically.

Ira told them he would see to it that the boy sang no more inappropriate songs at school.

They said fine, but Marcus would have to do some detention.

Marcus had taken it in stride, Ira thought tenderly, never sulking about the extra school time, though he had no enthusiasm for hanging around school unnecessarily. He had only smiled and said, “Okay.”

In the car with Ira, on the way home, the boy had said, “I wasn’t sexing at anybody.”

“I know you weren’t.”

“But they thought I was. They were protecting her.” More to himself, than to Ira.

Ira looked at the boy in admiration. He understood completely.

Marcus asked, “What is a sex god anyway?”

“Hell if I know, son.”

They’d both laughed at that, the laughter between them like two colors in a painting, Ira thought, blending into one shade, making a single statement of affinity.