Aurora (34 page)

‘I want you to be my ocean master. I will have Oreon as my adviser on world affairs and you, Clay, will rule and organize Ilira’s fleets and trade. Strozzi will carry out your orders and captain the fleets at sea. And you will be my dreamswoman, Broom,’ Candle adds. ‘All your ideas of the power that lies in the sun and the weather and the waterfalls – we can make those dreams real now!’

Broom looks torn; Clay unimpressed.

‘An ocean master who never goes to sea?’ he scoffs.

‘I must go home, Candle,’ Broom decides.

‘This is your home.’ All Candle’s imperiousness vanishes and she rushes across the room to fling her arms around Broom. ‘You’re my slave,’ she murmurs to the woman who has been her mother. ‘You’ll do as I say or I’ll have you locked up under the palace again.’

Broom kisses her then sets her apart. ‘Now that is no way for a commander to behave. And don’t you be so cheeky.’

‘No more slaves, Candle,’ says Mara. She pulls up the sleeve of her jumper to reveal a faded symbol on her arm. ‘Your people branded me one once, before I escaped into the mountains. Ilira made Broom and Clay slaves and all their talents were lost. So much is lost when people are not free.’

‘But I’ll lose Broom if she goes with you,’ Candle cries. ‘Just when I need her most. And Clay too if – if he . . .’

She stutters to a stop and glares at Lily, her tears dried to flinty sparks.

‘Imagine if the way into the interior was opened up,’ says Mara. ‘There’s so much we could do! No one ever need lose anyone again. What about trains, communication links . . . radios., all kinds of things are possible . . .’

Her vision is only fragments. She must piece it together before she can see what the world might be. But now she has the globe back Mara has regained all the lost treasures of the Weave. The old virtual world is a cybermuseum littered with crucial knowledge of the drowned world and lost ages. That knowledge can surely help them learn from the mistakes of the past.

‘This great island was once called the Land of the People,’ Mara remembers. ‘Tuck opened up Ilira to the world but we could build on that and open up this whole land for all its people. If war is on its way,’ she adds, ‘won’t a free people fight for their land much harder than slaves?’

‘You’ve been enslaved all
your
life,’ Broom says softly to Candle. ‘Everyone should be free.’

‘Does that include me, Mother?’ says Clay with a sly grin.

Broom replies with a rueful smile, trapped by her own words.

Oreon picks up a beautiful relic, full of mended cracks, with a long neck and a curving body of iridescent blue.

‘Some kind of weapon?’ Oreon muses, puzzling over the wires on the axe-like neck.

‘I won’t hide away in the mountains or in a palace,’ Clay tells Candle. ‘Captain Strozzi should master our fleets through a war. He is already a master of the ocean – but I could learn from him.’

The burly sea captain has been sitting in grumpy dejection on a rock, having been insulted twice now by the young mistress he himself just lifted on to a pedestal of power. He gets to his feet, struggling with hurt pride.

‘No one is ever a master of the ocean but I am always at the service of Ilira,’ he says gruffly, appraising Clay from head to foot, with the expression of a cook asked to create a feast from unworthy scraps, but his eyes twinkle as he seems to spy some essential ingredient in Clay’s determined face. ‘Well’ he shrugs, ‘let’s see what the ocean makes of you.’

Lily touches the mysterious blue relic in Oreon’s arms. Its curving body is the vivid blue of a twilight sky above Lake Longhope. At her curious touch the taut wires strung from its neck vibrate. A wild thrum fills the air.

‘It doesn’t kill,’ Lily exclaims, grabbing it from the scholar and thrumming it again. ‘It makes music’

‘Ah, I saw a weapon but you found music,’ says Oreon, looking shamed. ‘War has invaded me and it hasn’t yet begun. What will it make of us all once it breaks on our world?’

WOLFSCAR

The wolfskin wraps around Lily, steeped in Wing’s scent.

‘My wolf will keep you safe till the Fox comes,’ says Wing.

Lily looks up from the harbour rock she is sitting on, watching the skies. The agony she sees in Wing’s burned face is not only from his wound.

‘You’re going back? But you’re hurt, you can’t go. You need to rest.’ Lily reads the unspoken words in his eyes. ‘You’re going back to
her
.’

Wing sits on the rock beside her.

‘I need my wolves, my mountain,’ he tells her.

He leans forward and Lily sees in his eyes all the pain he is bearing. She wants to touch his face but links her arm through his instead.

‘Wing is Mara’s island,’ he says, referring to the name Mara gave him when she found him abandoned in the netherworld: the name of her island home. ‘Now I found my own name.’ He points to his face. ‘I am Wolfscar. See?’ he says proudly as Lily stares at the burns that warp the sleek down of his face like the markings of a wolf. ‘Like a true wolf now.’

Wolfscar. Scarwell. Lily sees, and has no idea what she can do to keep him.

‘She doesn’t love you like I do,’ she says at last.

He is struggling to use words as he never has before. ‘No one love Scar. No one ever. In nederwuld me and Scar was sea rats together, and now we are wolfkin.’

‘You’re not a wolf. They’re not your kin. Only half of you,’ Lily gently turns the unscarred side of his face towards her, ‘belongs to her.’

‘Wolf Mountain is my home,’ he insists.

The way he says
home
forces Lily to accept what she knows, deep down. The mountain and the lake and the wolves are his element. Wing aches to be there with them. He doesn’t need words there, the human words he finds so clumsy, because he has the language of the Earth, the animal world. He would always be on the edges of the human world. On Wolf Mountain he has a language and a world that he can own.

And Scarwell belongs to that world.

‘You’ll miss me,’ she tells him.

Wing pulls the wolfskin tight around her like a hug.

‘I miss you like I miss the sea. I miss Lily all winter.’ He sighs. ‘But I am Wolfscar.’

It’s no good, Lily sees. All she can do is let him go.

‘Wing Wolfscar then.’ Lily laughs to hide eyes filled with tears. ‘One day I’ll bring a fox to your wolf cave,’ Lily vows. ‘He’ll find me, won’t he, Wing? He won’t die?’

‘A fox is clever,’ Wing assures her. ‘Nederwuld foxes never drown. They hunt rats and mudcats and chew off paw to get out of fox trap. Fox not die.’

Wing strokes the snout of the wolf head that lies on Lily’s shoulder and grunts a wolfish goodbye in its ear. Then he kisses her hard and is gone.

THE MAGNIFICENT GIFT

‘Fire!’comes the order.

Fox waits for the blast of obliteration to come.

The fingers of the guards tremble on their guns.

But people have crowded around Fox like a human wall. The young guards, he sees, can’t summon the will to fire on their own citizens, people they know, friends, loved ones.

‘Fire!’ The order comes again. ‘Refusal to fire is a crime against the empire.’

Fox hears the frantic blast of Pan’s bugle behind him, alongside echoing screams from an elevator shaft. Heads turn this way and that in fright. The police squad is confused.

Pan’s skateboard slams on the ground. He can’t see her, but Fox knows the rickety rattle of her skate wheels.

‘Pandora says go!’ she yells.

Now he sees her. She shoots him a searing glance as she whizzes past and throws something. He catches it and watches her go. There is nothing else he can do. Speeding and swerving, Pan scatters the crowd, distracting the police, luring their lasers, dodging the blasts with her pangolin armour, bewildering them with all the daredevil tricks she learned on the netherworld bridge.

With a gesture as careless as a wave goodbye, Pan lifts her gun and blasts the armed policewoman who is relentlessly seeking out Fox. Pan hits her target with a perfect, deadly fire.

Screams break out. But it’s not Pan’s kill that sends the crowd scrambling.

‘Monster!’

As the crowd parts, Fox sees the grunting creature. Its jaws creak and snap as it lunges across the rooftop at a speed that shouldn’t be possible for such a squat, ungainly beast. A small swamp dragon, sucked up by the spiregyres, has followed its snout and sniffed out this feast of flesh on the top of the tower. Fox remembers the screams in the tunnels and the elevator shaft.

A hundred times Pan has outwitted a swamp dragon and she outwits this one too, flipping up the skateboard at the last second to leap over the beast. But the smooth solar sheet of the open rooftop is not the rubbly surface of the bridge. Here, in the gusting wind, speed goes a much longer way.

She’s going far too fast!

Fox shouts her name so hard the cry seems to rip apart his wound.

Pan makes a wobbly landing on the skateboard and veers into a deep swerve. Fox holds his breath. Even now, at the lethal edge of a moment, she can regain control. He’s seen her do it a hundred times.

A blizzard swirls out of the elevator shaft. The blizzard dances above the heads of the crowd and gusts around Pan. It’s a great cloud of moths, drawn to the first flame of the sun, but it seems to Fox that the spirit of the nether-world has sent its creatures up through the spiregyres to the top of the tower to reclaim Pan, who keeps skidding, arms flailing, out of control . . .

Fox moves. He will catch her, somehow. He
must
.

The wind catches her instead. Pan hurtles through the moth cloud, still on her skateboard, free right to the last, right to the edge of the roof.

And beyond.

Fox turns his head away, eyes shut tight, as Pandora falls from the tower.

Her name tears through him again and again. His heart feels like a gaping wound. What he just saw could not have happened. It cannot be real. Fox wants to stop time, to replay the moment, to see Pan spin in the air and land safely back on the tower roof.

He opens his eyes. The moth cloud quivers like a ghost above the spot where Pan fell. For a stricken moment they tremble there then flock towards the dawn. Now, a tremendous energy ignites the crowd as people turn on the nervous and outnumbered guards.

Fox can’t fight his way through the wave of anger. He doesn’t want tins awful, magnificent gift Pan has hurled at him – his own life for hers – but the heaving crowd forces him backwards until he is under the hovering ship where the air chute seizes him like a force of fate.

Fox is sucked up on a cushion of air into the belly of the ship.

He lands in a scarlet spray of his own blood on the entry ramp inside.

‘He’s in!’ someone shouts, and hauls him to the side as people continue to burst into the airship.

‘Anyone else?’ yells a commanding voice when the flow of refugees stop. ‘Last chance to board!’

Fox looks down through the transparent window on the floor of the airship and sees ragged boat refugees still among the Nooworlders on the roof. Some refugees are choosing to stay behind. There will be a whole new blend of citizens, he realizes, to imagineer a new city from the ruins of the old. And here on board Fox sees, looking around, are excited young sky citizens with their clean skins and clothes, and red-jacketed guards, crammed side by side with the boat refugees.