Firespark (14 page)

“Slow down!” she yells at Rowan in the control cabin. “We're going to crash.”

There's a great pull and the ship heaves and shudders as Rowan cuts speed. Broomielaw grabs baby Clayslaps from his father's arms.

The lights of what must be a village blaze out of the dark. The thin moon makes it hard to see whether there is a harbor.

“There!” Ibrox the firekeeper has tracked the patterns of light and points to a line of blazing torches that reaches out into the sea and ends in a wide curve.

Mara races into the control cabin. “Keep slow but steer to the harbor lights,” she tells Rowan.

His forehead is damp with sweat and his hands grip the steering wheel. His eyes are fixed on a screen full of tumbling numbers. “Still way too fast,” he grunts.

“No, steer away!” Pollock bursts in. He stares at the ship's controls, looking frantic. “This is wrong. There's no harbor. The stone men, the lights—”

“Pollock, don't be a dolt—”

“We're in a trap. I'm a hunter, I set traps, I
know
—” Pollock yells.

The ship gives a huge jolt that sends them all crashing against the cabin wall. There's a metallic screech and groan, a horrible sound, and screaming from the deck.

Mara struggles to her feet and peers out the cabin window. The harbor lights are all gone.

What happened? Where are they
?

She rushes into the uproar on deck and stares out at black sea. A moment ago there was a clear line of lights. Now there is only dark.

A horrendous banging erupts, deep in the ship's bowels.

“Rocks!” Rowan yells. “We've hit rocks!”

The world lurches. Mara is flung off her feet and is sent rolling across the deck. She crashes into the ship's rail, tries to grab it, but it's gone. There's a long, dark moment of freezing wind, tumbling stars.
The stars are falling
, she thinks, bewildered, feeling them rush past her head as she plunges into blackness.

The moment stretches. She can't breathe, can't see, can't find her way out. Where are the stars, the ship, where's the sea? She's suffocating, alone, in freezing black space.

Sea
.

It's more instinct than thought, an instant knowing that electrifies her. This frozen blackness
is
sea. Mara thrashes around in terror.
Which way, which way
? The darkness is too deep; she can't see where the surface is. Her head and lungs ache with the weight of the sea. The impulse to breathe is overpowering. She can't resist, must,
can't
. Thoughts tumble, fragments of consciousness scatter like smashed stars.

Someone help me, I'm lost … Fox
…

Light, light … there
…

A light hangs in the darkness. Mara reaches for it, claws and kicks away the blackness that has begun to drag like a stone weight. The thin curve of light bobs out of reach, there are too many smashed stars inside her head, she's too weighed down.

Can't see, must breathe
…

Air hits her lungs. She breaks through the surface, raking in painful, barbed breaths. A wave fills her mouth with sea and she's choking. Saltwater stings her eyes. A sharp
shadow that must be the ship's hull juts into the froth of the stars. But there's something wrong. It's listing sideways, at a precarious angle. The ship is groaning like a dying iceberg.

Mara's stunned mind clicks into gear. The lights went out. The ship hit the rocks. It has capsized, it's sinking. And she is close to freezing in this icy sea.

Keep moving. Swim to the rocks, find a rock
.

Lights flash in front of her. Someone shouts. Mara looks up and sees a lantern on a long stick looming out of the dark.

A loop of rope dangles from the lantern stick. Mara lunges for it but her freezing fingers cannot grip. She forces her hand to make a claw, lunges again, feels the hot burn of rope in her hands, and is pulled into shore. Rocks rake her skin but pain is numbed by shock and cold. Mara lies where she's been dragged onto a slab of rock.

Unable to get up, she turns her head. The sickle moon hangs above the silhouette of an open-armed stone giant like a glinting fishhook, or a sly smile.

Fox rips up books and feeds them to the fire. The cold stone of the university tower has seeped into his bones and he can't sleep. Every time he shuts his eyes he sees Mara trapped in the arms of the wind, separated from him by a wall of sea.

She didn't make it to the bridge again tonight.
Is she safe
? Fox puts on his godgem once more and zips into the Weave, but the electronic boulevards zing with loneliness. The Bridge to Nowhere is empty, the ether undisturbed.

Realworld zings with emptiness too. Unseen presences of bats, cats, and rats haunt the tower. The ghoulish screams of owls echo across the netherworld sea. The only signs of life are the white cargo ships that slip through the gate in the great wall. In their wake comes a blast of sea-police sirens and a tide of rank sewage from the boat camp outside the wall.

Fox's only company is the fire and the luminous moon-moths in the twig lantern. Candleriggs is fast asleep. The old woman sleeps a lot; she's missing her Treenester people badly. Awake, she dedicates all her dwindling energy to teaching Fox survival skills, as if she's thinking the same
as he is: that she is increasingly frail and winter is on its way.

There's a lot to learn. Weather is a shock after the sky city's mellow air. In summer, says Candleriggs, the netherworld bakes under the metal grill of New Mungo but winter is cold and stormy and they need to prepare. Now Fox knows how to make fire, where to find food and fresh water. It takes so much time and effort to survive, he's often too exhausted to make any progress in the Noos. No wonder his battle with the New World has stalled.

Yet tonight, when he can't sleep and could be working, he wanders the tower room, wondering what's happened to Mara and restlessly flicking through books before feeding them to the hungry fire.

A page flutters onto his lap. In the instant before he tosses it into the flames, some words catch his eye.

I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me
.

Fox saves the page and stares dumbfounded. He finds the book it belongs to: a little black book that just fits the clasp of his fingers.

Pocket Psalter
.

He puzzles over the title, picked out in faded gold. Pocket Psalter? What's that? Sounds like a pocket of salt. Fox opens it to the first page.

A pocketbook of sacred songs
.

He opens the book at random and his heart skips a beat.

let me not sink

neither let the deep swallow me up

And suddenly, in his mind's eye, he sees Mara's ship on a heaving ocean, in the blast of the North Wind. “
Let her
not sink, neither let the deep swallow her up
,” he murmurs. There's a gentle power in the words, like the rise and fall of a calm wave.

A gnarled hand appears on his arm.

“Books are good for feeding fire. But some have fire tucked away in their pages. Be careful.”

Fox shakes off her hand and slouches over to the window. He's suddenly sick of the old woman, always at his elbow, telling him what to do, what to eat, how to think.

Outside, the netherworld sea is as black as oil. Fox tenses and stares. Something glints in the sea between his tower and the shadow of a small hump of land topped by trees. What
is
that in the water? A lumen light? Down here? Wind ripples the dark sea and touches his face. The lumen shivers. So does Fox. A glint catches the corner of his eye and he looks up. Another one! A crescent lumen, just like the one in the water except it's sharp and steady, not fretted by the waves. It can't be the moon because the moon is round. Fox shivers again, but this time it's not the chill of the wind, it's because the shining crescent reminds him of the halo of Mara's cyberwizz.

The crescent in the sky illuminates something that sits on the tip of one of the spires of the drowned buildings that spike the netherworld sea. Fox peers at the glinting thing. It's a ship with masted sails. The ship sits upon a globe and turns slowly in the wind, catching the light of the strange halo in the sky.

“Candleriggs?”

She's huddled down by the fire, yawning, but his urgent whisper brings her to his side.

Candleriggs follows his puzzled gaze at the lumenlike lights in the sea and sky.

“It's only the moon,” she says, “and its reflection in the water.”

Fox shakes his head. “The moon's round.”

“Only when it's full. The crescent moon grows into a full moon every month.”

Now Fox feels stupid. “The New World only has a full moon.”

“Ah, but everything's plentiful up there, isn't it?” Candleriggs squeezes his arm. “The netherworld moon is thin and hungry, eh? But it'll soon grow fat and strong.”

Fox points to the slow-whirling ship. “Why is the ship on the globe?”

“That's a weathervane,” says Candleriggs. “Tells you which way the wind blows. Look, there are lots more on the drowned roofs and spires. This was a trading city, long ago. Once upon a time ships sailed all across the oceans from here, all over the world. Well, they still do.”

They watch a white cargo ship steal across the netherworld sea. It steers a careful path between the small islands and rooftops of the drowned city and docks at the foot of one of New Mungo's vast towers. Candleriggs hugs her cloak around her and glances at the weathervane. “A bitter North Wind. It'll be a hard night out on the ocean.”

Let her not sink
, Fox prays.

There is no point in pretending anymore. Candleriggs is as worried as he is. She knows when he has met Mara and when he hasn't. She can tell by his mood.

“She didn't come again tonight,” he says quietly.

“Ah.”

Candleriggs's face sets like stone as she turns back to the fire.

The crescent moon and the sailing ships blur as unwanted tears burn in his eyes. Fox scrubs them away.
The whole world carries echoes of Mara. He is beginning to feel haunted by her in this lonely place. She's there in the crescent-moon halo that peeks through the towers and the ships on the weathervanes. Her presence ghosts the bookstacks. Sometimes he thinks he hears her sigh or whisper as she leafs through a book, though he knows it's only the wind and the birds. The white ships that dock in New Mungo remind him of her. She even called to him through the words of the book he almost burned.

Something tugs at his memory.

Fox unseals the waterproof wallet attached to his belt. He takes out a piece of thick, pulpy paper he almost forgot he had. Just before she left, Mara gave him Gorbals's netherworld poems. He picks up the lantern. The clumsy charcoal scribbles are hard to make out in the flickering moonmoth light.

THE STARS ARE NIGHT DAISIES
TRAPPED IN HIGH BRANCHES

Fox looks up through New Mungo's sky tunnels to the sparkling heavens above. A smile breaks on his face as he sees what the Treenester poet saw. The writing is rubbed and faded in places but three words jump out at him:

PLAY PEEKABOO MOON

Fox stares at the words, breathless. Then glances up at the moon playing peekaboo between the sky city's towers. It has given him a glimmer of an idea. Has Mara left him the very clue he needs to kickstart his plans?

Watch over her
, he begs the moon. His heart beats hot and fast as he puts on his godgem and leaps into the Noos.

Thin moonlight lands on a battered sign wedged between two rocks. Mara can only just read the faded letters: TIKERAK. She sounds out the strange word under her breath. Even whispered, it has the same harsh crack as her captors' whips.

Her hands are bound tight, her feet tied just loose enough to let her walk. If she doesn't move fast enough, if she stumbles, the sting of the whip lands on her back.