The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet Read Online Free PDF

like sardines, it’s tough to keep still, tough to fight the worry down. His grandpa’s got power, N’Doch is sure of it, but is his magic strong enough to stand against the malign wizardry of Fire?
    Papa Dja, Papa Dja, keep your head low, old man
, he intones silently.
    The boy Mattias jumps up from the console as Gerrasch approaches. N’Doch thinks the kid looks a whole lot tighter around the eyes than when they’d left him here before. No surprise, given what he’s just seen, courtesy of the video feed. But he’s trying to play it cool. N’Doch would’ve done the same at his age. Hell, he’s doing it now.
    “Weah’s da dragins?” Mattias demands immediately.
    Gerrasch elbows him gently aside and rolls into his padded chair, his soft pink hands working the keys before he’s even settled his bulk.
    N’Doch jerks his thumb. “Upstairs.”
    Mattias looks to Gerrasch, who’s already hunched down and oblivious, then to Leif Cauldwell. His entire gawky-teen body pleads. “Kin I go, Leif, huh, huh?”
    Cauldwell nods. A bit grudgingly, N’Doch thinks, but he’s willing to cut the rebel leader some slack. A day ago, before all these mouthy strangers showed up out of nowhere, the dude was running his own show, the whole show, no matter what he says about chiefs or no chiefs. But his rebellion was doomed—ill-equipped and undermanned—and the man has the grace to see it, even if he won’t say it out loud. Two dragons suddenly on his side gives him and his people a serious fighting chance.
    The kid practically lays rubber scooting on out of there. N’Doch shoulders his way out of the press to wander restlessly among the rows of darkened workstations while late arrivals trot in from upstairs and the Librarian fiddles with his keypad. The walls to either side of the screen are gridded with smooth-faced, rectangular units adorned with svelte pull handles and tiny green idiot lights. Probably some sort of data storage. N’Doch wonders about the people who used to live and work here, sunk so deep into the mountain bedrock. What happened to them? What did they do while the world outside fell apart around them? He slides a palm along the slick surface. What is it? Metal? Plastic? He can’t tell. For him, it’s . . . well, the
future
. He can’t repress a little private speculation about what all this super high-tech equipment could do if retrofitted and put to work mixing one of his songs. He doubts he’ll get the chance to find out. Too much serious shit going down.
    The yellow glow bathing the racks of alien equipment flicks over to blue. N’Doch pivots and moves toward the screen. The big world map is back, with its too-great expanse of hot, empty ocean and its overlay of satellite orbits. He scans for the blinking indicators.
    “Uh-oh,” he murmurs, and scans again.
    There’s the one for Air, parked off the map in the lower corner, signifying her imprisonment who-knows-where, and there’s the two active signals poised over a position that looks to be right about where he’s standing, only several levels up in the big cavern. “Where is he? Where’s the fourth signal?”
    He hears a weird chittering noise. It’s Gerrasch, somethinghe’s doing with his teeth. “Gone,” he says. “Already.”
    “Gone?” moans Erde. “Oh, I knew it! We shouldn’t have waited!”
    “Hold on, hold on.” But N’Doch is offering comfort he doesn’t feel.
    Stoksie peers at the screen. “Gone weah?”
    “To another time,” says Cauldwell grimly, “If I understand this right.”
    N’Doch nods. “Question is, which one? Who do we warn first?”
    Again, they’re all talking at once, filling the room with more noise than there are people. Luther explains to Ysa what the blinking lights mean. Constanze asks if the indicator would change if the Beast assumed man-form. N’Doch thinks about his mama, alone in front of her vid set. Grandpapa Djawara can’t be much help to her. He’s an old man, living by