Free The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet by Marjorie B. Kellogg

Like the dust off the plateau behind the Citadel. For the first time since falling through the portal, Paia feels uncomfortably right at home. This dry landscape is one she would know exactly how to paint, but the familiarity is unwelcome. Ahead, the palm trunks thin out onto a flat orange plain, the hard blue sky like a painted ceiling. The red road disappears into heat shimmer, where low rectangles dance in and out of visibility and a wide, dark smudge rises above the bright horizon.
    N’Doch shades his eyes from the glare, squinting into the mirage. A strangled moan escapes him. Without warning, he takes off at a dead run.
    “N’Doch!” Paia bolts after him. A vision of wandering alone in a strange time, strange place lends her speed, but she cannot catch up. She’s forced to halt in the middle of the road and holler like a lost child. N’Doch turns, his arms beating a mad rhythm of frustration. He’d like to lose her. It’s as plain as if he’s said it out loud. But the image of the murderous soldier must linger in his mind, for he races back, grabs her hand without a word, and drags her stumbling behind him.
    The mirage steadies as they approach, into the shapes and structures of a town. The red road passes through a formal opening in the stout stucco walls, but the tall metal gates hang twisted away to either side and the walls have been breached in several places by something large enough to crush stone. Columns of smoke rise from the taller buildings. People are climbing through the ragged gaps and streaming out between the gates, limping, coughing, weeping, with their possessions stuffed into whatever was handy, or strapped to their backs. The broken walls echo with shouts and sporadic gunfire. The town is in ruins.
    Before the bent gates, the road is choked with refugees and rubble. N’Doch grips Paia’s elbow and uses his body as a ram to shove them both upstream through the milling and confusion. He breaks the tightest clots with a threatening gesture of his tire iron.
    Startled by a close-by burst of shooting, Paia shrinks against him. “Are we going in there?”
    “Have to. That’s where Fâtime is.”
    His cool determination is a surprise to her. He didn’t seem like the implacable type. Paia has a thousand questions but asks him none of them. Her memory is hard at work again, this time assailing her with an image House showed her just before she left the Citadel. It was a live feed from a local farmstead that had been unable to pay its monthly tithe to the Temple. She saw a woman with her fist raised at the sky, tears of grief and outrage streaking her sooty cheeks. Behind, a landscape of smoking wreckage.
    He’s burning villages
, House had said.
    It’s like a blow to the belly. Tears of a different sort of grief and outrage start in Paia’s own eyes. She fears that she recognizes her dragon’s signature.
    “I have to find a way . . .” she mutters.
    “What’s that?” N’Doch glances back, notes her dampened face. “What’s up? You crapping out on me?”
    Paia reaches for the more resilient pose that will make him feel comfortable. “No, I just love strolling through a war zone when I know my dragon’s responsible for all the mess.”
    “Don’t say that.”
    “But I think it’s true.”
    “Then that means he’s been here before us.”
    With renewed vigor, N’Doch shoulders them to the edge of the throng and turns off the main thoroughfare, into a rubble-strewn side street where the crowd is thinner and no one pays them much attention. They’re just one more empty-handed couple fleeing for their lives. “Of course, he’s only encouraging the bad shit that was going on already.”
    “Or maybe he began it in the first place.”
    “What? The whole damn cycle of human violence? C’mon!”
    “Why not?”
    N’Doch slows at an intersection to scan the narrow crossing alleys. Smoke obscures the distance in both directions. Two young men race by with their arms full. An old