Firespark (15 page)

They walk in a hobbling army of threes, then they are made to sit on the ground for what feels like hours. Ruby is on one side of her, Molendinar on the other. The dark lifts at last but a cold, blinding fog has engulfed them and Mara still can't see where they are. All she knows is that there are rocks and pebbles, strands of frozen seaweed, underfoot. The thunder of the waterfalls is a faraway growl. She can't make sense of what is happening.

“Pollock was right,” murmurs Molendinar. “The lights were a trap.”

Now Mara understands. The stone giants lured them to the false harbor lights and the lights lured them onto
the rocks. The ship was wrecked, and they've been captured by their wreckers.

Is everyone safe
?

She searches for Rowan's shaved blond head and finds him. Gorbals's darker head sticks out above the rest. She tries to make out heads and faces in the fog, mentally checking off a list of who is here, safe, if not sound. Caddie, Fir, and Tron are bunched together. She can't see the urchins, but she can hear Hoy yelling an indignant “oy!” every time a whip lands on him. What about Wing, her own special urchin? Is he safe? Little Wing, who once saved her. Wing is a wiry survivor, as all the urchins are. Surely he'll be all right? She can hear Pollock muttering frantically behind her and Possil whispering back. Mara scans the mass of heads yet again. Where's Broomielaw and baby Clay?

Mara earns a whip sting as she looks over her shoulder.

“Broomielaw?” she whispers to Molendinar.

The answer is a sob.

The icy wind is bitter. Mara shivers, gripped by a deeper chill. Broomielaw must be safe. She would have saved little Clay if it took her last breath.

“Pollock?” Mara hisses over her shoulder, not caring if it earns her another crack of the whip. “Broomie and Clay?”

The whip stings her ear but she hardly feels it; she cannot believe what Pollock is saying.

Lost
.

Pollock's eyes look bruised. His mouth is set hard. He can't mean it. But his face tells Mara he does.

Broomielaw and Clayslaps, Pollock's baby son, are lost.

Mara could lie down on the ground and weep, but there's no chance of that. She is hauled to her feet, bound
to the march of this bedraggled army. Even if she stopped, the others would pull her along whether she liked it or not.

Molendinar gives another sob. She and Broomielaw are as close as sisters. Mol helped deliver little Clayslaps into the world.

“We'll find her,” Mara whispers. “Broomie would never let anything happen to Clayslaps. They'll be all right. They'll have washed up somewhere.”

“She can't swim.” Molendinar forces the words through chattering teeth. “Candleriggs made us all learn but Broomielaw wouldn't, refused to get in the dirty water.” Mol gives a hard laugh. “You know what a fusspot she is, everything has to be spick-and-sp—”

A deer clatters across the pebbled shore.

“No tok!”

The deer rears up as it pulls on its harness and a whip cracks over Molendinar's head. Mara turns and sees the stocky, hard-faced herder on the deer is a woman.

“Our friend—” she begins, hoping that a woman might be kind, but she's wrong. The woman kicks her so hard she falls, almost pulling Mol and Ruby down with her. Ruby yanks her to her feet as they are herded onto a fleet of long, narrow skin boats.

“Merien?” croaks Mara. She's crammed hard against Ruby. “Is she—?”

Ruby nods to a boat that has already pushed out from the shore. “I thought I saw her. I'm not sure.” Her mouth twitches and Mara realizes with a shock that Ruby is close to tears.

“She took me under her wing. All my family died,” Ruby murmurs.

Mara hesitates. “So did mine.”

For the first time, Ruby glances at Mara without her usual sneer.

Mara returns the glance with surprise. It's a truce of a kind. And something more. Mara is sure she saw a softening of Ruby's sharp eyes. Being human, thinks Mara, is maybe all they have left.

An oar lands on Mara's lap and she obeys the signal to row almost without thinking, as the others do. As the boat pulls away from the shore they pass the bruised white hull of their ship, keeled over on the rocks. It looks almost peaceful, as if it's only resting awhile. As they leave it behind, Mara glimpses its name for the first time.

Arkiel

How many others from the
Arkiel
are lost? Mara looks over at the other boats, feeling sick. Lost, she tells herself. That means they could have washed up somewhere. Her mind reels back from the word “drowned.”

They row in and out of fog drifts. Suddenly they enter a clear patch and Mara can see where they are.

It's a vast fjord. Mountains loom high on either side and far in front, enclosing the channel of sea. The boats make a winding route through ice floes, islets, and skerries, the rocky humps of land that clutter the fjord. Their precarious journey through the fjord is like a giant pinball game, thinks Mara, and she glances across at the back of Rowan's head. Her arms are aching from the rowing, but Rowan was gray and trembling with exhaustion on the ship. What state is he in now?

Beside her, Molendinar is scanning every islet and skerry, desperate for a sign of Broomielaw and baby Clay. Alongside them, a long boat is heaped with booty plundered from the
Arkiel
—all the stuff the urchins looted from the museum in the drowned city. There are swords,
spears, shields and axes, bits of armor, musical instruments, jewelry, engines, cogs and wheels and microscopes and compasses, jars of pickled brains, and, sitting atop the huge pile with a crown on his head, Scarwell's stolen apeman.

The waterfall thunder grows louder, so loud it seems to thrum in the bones. The boats slow up as they approach a wide, rocky bay.

Mara stares around her, sullen and furious. No one knows where these people are taking them, why they've wrecked and captured them, or what they intend to do with them, yet everyone is mindlessly doing what they're told.

There must be thirty refugees in this boat alone. The handful of whip-cracking wreckers are well outnumbered. Surely, even with tied hands and feet, if all the refugees act in a surge …

Mara spots a gun in the belt of a wrecker. But do they all have guns? She glances at each one in turn, but can't be sure. How many bullets does a gun hold? If they overpowered their captors quickly enough, they could turn the guns on them.

They are close enough to struggle ashore. All Mara needs to do is shout at the top of her voice and rouse the others, command them to fight.

But they won't trust me. Not after I've landed them here in this mess
.

She looks around and catches the eye of one of the men from the
Arkiel
, tries to hold his glance but he looks away. Mara takes a breath, opens her mouth.

“Don't you dare.” Ruby's voice is murderous.

“Mara,” Molendinar whispers on her other side. “Have you lost it?”

“I'd say so,” grunts Ruby, and kicks Mara so hard she almost yelps.

Mara kicks back. “There are a lot more of us than them,” she hisses. “Why are we acting like lambs?”

Molendinar looks puzzled. “Your backpack,” she whispers.

Mara feels as if she is falling through the floor of the boat.
My backpack
. It's not here. How could she not have noticed? She's kept it with her ever since she left her own island.

“All your precious things,” murmurs Molendinar.

Mara can't speak.
Where is it
? She tries to remember when she last had it. It must have been wrenched off her when the ship went down, when she was thrashing about, struggling to reach the surface of the sea. Her arms follow the movements of the oar, though she feels ill with shock. Her backpack has the cyberwizz zipped inside, safe and watertight, though what good is that if it's lost on the seabed, along with the wrecked ship?

It's her only connection with Fox and it's gone. Mara feels sick to her soul.

Mol squeezes her hand, hard. “It'll wash up somewhere. So will Broomielaw and Clayslaps.”

Guilt stings Mara. The loss of two precious people is much worse than the loss of her cyberwizz, she knows it is. Yet deep down she knows she can survive their loss because she has survived even worse, the worst there is: the deaths of the people closest to her in the whole world. Losing Broomielaw and baby Clay and even Fox is not worse than that. And Fox is still alive; it's only her connection with him that's lost. But to lose him and know he's not dead; to know he's out there, forever unreachable—how will she bear that? She has imagined them an ocean
apart yet together always, meeting on the Bridge to Nowhere, no matter what the future may hold.

“Mol, I can't bear—”

“No tok!”

The wire whip cracks across her back but Mara hardly notices. Hopelessness has fallen upon her like a rock.

They have steered into a rocky enclosure, a rough harbor cluttered with boats. The wreckers begin to mass the refugees onto a shore stacked with boulders. Mara sees Molendinar mouth something at Gorbals as they are herded across the shore.

Gorbals stares, stumbles, almost falls.

“
Broomielaw? No
…”

The words hang frozen in the air. Mara closes her eyes but not quick enough. Gorbals looks as if he's just stepped off the edge of a cliff.

Torrents of icy water crash from the mountains, frothing the sea in the bay. Some waterfalls are so high their beginnings are lost in cloud. A ray of sun shoots through the mist and lands with a flash among the waterfalls. Another breaks through, then another. The rays merge into one broad, strong sunbeam that begins to burn away the mist.

Mara stares at the flashing mountain that looms above. Peaks jut into the sky in violent exclamations of rock.

She hears Rowan behind her, a crack of amazement in his voice. “Up there, are those—they can't be … doors?”

Doors
? Mara looks up and blinks.

The mountain is studded with them. She studies those nearest the ground. Their cracked and faded colors have a metallic sheen. And now, as the blur of mist burns away, she can make out what seems to be stone dwellings, each one fronted by a door, carved out of the rock face. There are more doors set into mounds of rock, stone-built
versions of the igloos pictured in her Greenland book, perched precariously on ledges all over the mountain. Mara screws up her eyes and sees that each stone mound is wrapped in chains. The stone igloos are fastened to the mountain by chains.

Near the heel of the mountain there's a metallic flash as an opening door catches the sun. Someone steps out and there's another flash as the door shuts. The person ties a rope around their middle and swings expertly down a sheer mountain rockway. The figure reaches a ledge and disappears into the open mouth of a cave. A moment later a doleful bell clangs in the cave and echoes all across the bay.

The bell detonates an explosion of flashes and bangs across the foot of the mountain, as a multitude of doors open and shut. A moment later the mountain is alive, crawling with movement, as people spill out, swinging down the rockways, attached to ropes.

The people of the mountain reach the ground and unharness their ropes. The bay fills with human noise and the bellow of the sea seems to recede. From caverns and rocks they drag out the apparatus of a marketplace and in the time it has taken for the sun to burn away the last tatters of mist, the empty bay is transformed into a racketing metropolis.

The shipwrecked refugees are whip-cracked into a raggedy line and bullied along the shore toward the metropolis at the foot of the mountain.

The gang of wreckers halts on the shore in front of a stone giant. The giant's arms are wide open in greeting. Dangling from them is a motley collection of litter and driftwood signs.

One of the wreckers points to the stone man, grinning. He cracks his whip on the ground.

“TAMASSA!” he announces and the others laugh. They stand in front of their captives, hissing the word,
tamassa! tamassa
! whips flicking like the tongues of a nest of snakes.

Mara stares at the stone giant's signs. The word TAMASSA is hung around the stone man's neck, and dangling from his right arm on a slab of cracked driftwood are the only words she understands:

WELCOME TO ILIRA
PLACE OF FEARFUL AWE

One of the wreckers shouts and the rest fall into a sudden hush. They're tense now, whips flicking nervously on the pebble shore. “
Scutpak
,” they mutter, and the word crackles among them like the rock lichen underfoot.

Scutpak
? What's that? Heart thumping, Mara stares around, but can't see why the wreckers are so fraught.

Something bright up on the mountain catches her eye. Mara looks up and sees a huge clock face with no hands. Instead, a pattern of fiery words radiates from the clock like sun rays. The word rays are the same gleaming amber as the bottle of Irn-Bru she gave Rowan on the ship. Like the welcome sign, the words are strange and unknown but reaching up to the sky at the point of midnight, Mara spots the word “Ilira” again.

Ilira.

A place of fearful awe, said the scrawled sign. Mara's spine prickles.
Fearful awe
? It sounds like somewhere out of a fairy tale, not this bleak, harsh place.

Above the clock a great broken bird with smashed wings and tail is wedged between the mountain and a great thumb of rock.

“What
is
that?” Mara murmurs over her shoulder.

“A plane,” Rowan whispers back. “A real plane. Remember? They were in Tain's
World Encyclopedia
. They used to fly through the skies like giant birds, all over the world. This one must have crashed way back …”

Mara stares at the smashed plane. It looks nothing like the pictures in Tain's book, more like one of the crumpled paper birds she made to amuse the urchins on the ship. A great lassitude engulfs her. The mountains might be full of giant birds, giant men, fiery clocks, strange signs, flashing doors and windows, all kinds of miracles and wonders. Mara doesn't care.