The Fire Ascending

by Chris D'Lacey

  “How did you know the Inook had it?”

  “I Traveled along the timeline, of course.” She sighed, as if she expected more of me. “I moved among the Inook as softly as a shadow and watched their history unfolding like a flower. They revered the dragon throughout his short life. When his eye finally closed they organized a pilgrimage. They went foraging for keep-sakes and found his isoscele and one of his claws. He’d detached them before he’d turned to stone. A last gesture to remind this world that dragons were once a dominant force. The Inook, with their usual superstitious zest, treated the claw as a holy relic and put it away. A pathetic waste of its powers, of course. It was a simple matter to send my birds on a mission to retrieve it.”

  The bird that was shaking suddenly collapsed and fell off the chair arm, dead. Gwilanna paid it no heed, but both Crakus and the bird that had been cleaning its beak swooped down and began to peck at the corpse.

  “What are you planning to do with the claw?”

  “Well, that’s where you come in.”

  At that moment, the raven on lookout gave a frightened call.

  The whole ice field shifted again.

  The sibyl sat forward. “What was that?” Her grin quickly dropped from her face.

  To my right, the far horizon had vanished. A slow-moving cloud was rolling toward us.

  “Fly!” cried the sibyl. “Find out what it is.”

  The raven on lookout backed away. And all of them proved to be as fickle to their sibyl as they were to their brethren. For they simply took to the air, circled once, and promptly turned back toward the island.

  Crouching, I put my hand to the ice. “They’re coming,” I whispered. I could feel their auma.

  “Who is?” said Gwilanna, twisting to see.

  The Fain said, A multitude. Answering to his name.

  The followers of Ingavar.

  “Bears,” I said.

  “No!” The sibyl squawked in rage. “Not bears. Anything but bears!” She jumped up quickly. Her imagineered clothing dropped away and she reached into her old Taan robe — for the tornaq.

  Now was my chance. In one movement I swept up the ice chunk and hurled it at her. It had no points or spikes to it, nothing that could skewer her or take out an eye, it simply struck her temple and broke into shards. The impact sent her stumbling sideways. The precious tornaq dropped from her hands. I saw my chance to preserve history and stop the sibyl meddling with time. All I had to do was recover the charm. If I had still been a humble cave dweller, a nimble-footed boy with no auma enhancements, I would have done no more than snatch up the tornaq, shake it thrice, and leave Gwilanna fuming for all eternity. But that was not the way of it. My act of aggression — the throwing of the ice — had caused the dragon within me to flare. A conflict set in. I wanted the tornaq; he wanted the sibyl. He planned to destroy her. And his will was strong.

  My eyes swiveled as his triggers locked in. The sibyl’s body scent flooded my nostrils. Blood rips appeared at the corners of my mouth. One of my damaged teeth fell out. A tremendous pressure passed through my knees as he squeezed the long muscles in my legs and propelled me into a forward leap. My knuckles cracked as my fingers swelled. My uncut fingernails stretched in their beds. The pain this caused was sharp and horrendous, though nothing like the agonies Gwilanna would have suffered if armored claws had grown out of my hands. I saw a real glint of terror in her eyes. Even she, with all her sibyl powers, knew she might be cut down in a stroke.

  But her blood did not tint the ice that day.

  Two things saved her life.

  First, the tornaq changed. The strange translucent bird emerged — and flew away from my grasp. But the real damage happened when Galen attempted to make me fly.

  I fell facedown, howling so loudly that any creatures swimming below the ice would have turned their fins in terror and fled. My imagineered clothing dissolved and I lay in the cold in the robe I’d grown up in. Along my back, following the line of my shoulder blades, the flesh had opened up in two long rips. The fabric had split, but no wings had emerged. Only muscle, blood, and a great deal of pain.

  “Fool,” Gwilanna hissed. Her hand came down and picked up the tornaq. It had changed back into its bone form again. Why? I wondered. Why did it favor her over me? Beyond her, the bears were fast closing in. I could see their faces poking through the mist, overlapping one another as their spirits took form. And I thought I saw something else as well. Just behind the sibyl, a ghostly image of a young boy. He looked for all the world like a smaller David. I mouthed the name, believing it to be him. But the boy shook his head as if to say No, I am not David. Then the sibyl kicked me in the ribs for good measure and I felt her hand take a tug of my hair. The boy disappeared. The bears and the ice merged into a blur. The sibyl shook the tornaq and whoosh! We were Traveling through time again.

  We landed on a bed of warm, hard rock, breathing air that was thick with dragon smoke. I was gripped by a strange kind of dizziness that had nothing to do with the cuts in my back or the soreness in my damaged ribs.

  Where are we? I said to the Fain. The words seemed to hover outside my mind. And when at last the thought beings answered, they spoke as if my ears were expanding bubbles.

  Kasgerden, they replied.

  Terror gripped my soul.

  A breeze blew across the face of the mountain. The smoke cleared. A familiar scene unfolded. There was Voss, hovering in his darkling form. There was I, about to dip my knife into Galen’s fire. But from that point onward, everything changed. Gwilanna raised the claw of Gawain and drew the symbol meaning “sometimes” from three wisps of smoke. “Good-bye, Agawin,” she said. In an instant my two “selves” merged and my awareness was all with the physical body of the boy I had been, only this time I was not about to triumph over evil. As I tried to throw the knife, Gunn ran at me early. His brute force shouldered me over the cliff. A rock shower followed me down. Gunn teetered on the edge of the shaky precipice and he leered at me, fat and ugly in his triumph. Then the edge gave way and he fell with a scream that rang around the mountain long after he was silent. Once again, Gunn had plunged to his death.

  But Voss had survived.

  And I was surely going to die.

  I fell and I fell, with no tornaq to protect me. But my life did not end at the foot of the mountain. It simply took a different course again. Gwilanna’s dishonest use of the claw had sent signals rippling through the fabric of the universe, signals that Traveled infinitely faster than a seer’s apprentice could chance to fall. As the darkling rushed away from my sight, three other creatures filled the space around me. Firebirds. One green, one red, one a beautiful cream color with apricot flashes around her ear tufts. It was she who spoke to my consciousness saying, Agawin, we are monitors of time and the agents of Gideon. Do not be afraid. Joseph Henry is with you.

  Joseph Henry? I asked. My voice had the texture of thickened mud.

  But all the firebird said was this: You have been chosen for illumination. You will die and live again, through the auma of Gawain. All you have to do is give yourself up to it.

  I do not want to die. Panic gripped my heart.

  It is a change, she said. Simply a change.

  I was floating now, less aware of my body. All around me, the tiniest stars were glittering. I felt that if I let my consciousness touch one, I would instantly pop into another life. What of Galen?

  He will always be with you. In your new form, he will not hinder your progress.

  What is the new form?

  A hybrid of human, dragon, and Fain.

  But that is what I am now.

  This time, the energies will be fully commingled. You will go back, to observe Gwilanna. Joseph Henry himself has decreed this. You will be hidden from the sibyl — but always within her sight.

  How? How is that possible?

  Choose a star, the firebird said. There are many probabilities. Let your instinct guide you.

  So I reached out in search of a different
life. And in a timescale I could not measure or estimate, I found the star that was right for me, at a point on the timeline of huge significance, located at a place called Wayward Crescent. I chose, for my dominant form, to be human. And I chose to be born to a very special mother, one who had cause to be close to Gwilanna. The last thing I remembered before I touched my mother’s star was the memory of the child I had seen on the tapestry. And at last I understood her purpose and her words. Sometimes we will be Agawin, she had said.

  But from now on, we would be called Alexa.

  The first time I truly saw Joseph Henry, he was sitting cross-legged on a deep windowsill of the 97th floor of the Bushley Librarium — the firebird aerie in the heart of Co:pern:ica. Up until then, I had only seen the building in visions or dreams.

  Even in silhouette with his back turned to me, Joseph looked like a very young David Rain — a fact he acknowledged in his opening sentence.

  “There was a time when the ice was ruled by nine bears.”

  After a moment a reply came to me, perhaps inspired by the dusty shelves of antique books that seemed to be holding up every wall. “And one of those was a bear called Ragnar.” I wasn’t sure how I remembered this, but we were quoting from David’s book, White Fire, one of only two my father had written before his ill-fated journey to the Arctic. It felt like a kind of security test, as if Joseph needed to be sure of who I was. His next two words were far more welcoming.

  “Hello, Agawin.”

  “Hello, Joseph.”

  “How do you like being Alexa?”

  He turned, like dust rearranging itself. He was dressed in a robe of shining white, which shimmered with the promise of dragon scales. He had shoulder-length hair and delicate hands and skin as smooth as pale pink silk.

  I was five years old, almost six. A sweet little girl in a plain white dress. I had Zanna’s dark hair and David’s blue eyes. Neither of my parents were ever aware that I had once been Agawin or that my life had been saved by firebirds. The boy that had been the seer’s apprentice had disappeared out of the Isenfier timeline, just as Gwilanna had correctly suggested. Now I was Alexa Martindale. And though just a child in mannerisms and speech, I had developed wings and the power of flight. I could speak (and think) in fluent dragontongue. I knew the enchantments of time.

  And yet, as I thought about Joseph’s question, I couldn’t work out at first what had happened. I blinked and had a memory of a battlefield, where I was kneeling and holding Gadzooks. Then the first significant timepoint came to me. “I was at Scuffenbury Hill,” I muttered.

  “And before that, Wayward Crescent,” he said. He moved his hand as if parting a mist.

  Straightaway, my mind began to fill with scenes from my five years growing up in the Crescent, sharing a house with the Pennykettle family and their clutch of amazing dragons. The kitchen table where I’d sat and drawn pictures of a mammoth. Bonnington, the cat, eating food from his bowl. The listening dragon who’d sat on the fridge. The “fairy” door in the garden rockery. I remembered how the house had been swollen with grief, because David had disappeared in the Arctic, allegedly killed by the Ix assassin Gwilanna had openly crowed about. And as I sped through the years I remembered his return, until I finally arrived at the sequence of events that had led us to the battle at Scuffenbury Hill. I remembered a trace of dark fire, trapped in a misshaped block of obsidian. And how the obsidian had broken open and the fire had escaped and gone into Elizabeth Pennykettle’s body. And how we feared for her life and that of the unborn child she was carrying. This child. Joseph Henry.

  “Shall I tell you something about that?”

  I sent him an inquisitive look. He could read my mind; he was simply being polite.

  “I am responsible for what happened to my mother.”

  “I don’t understand. What did you do?”

  “I drew the dark fire into her. I felt its presence in the room as soon as the obsidian was broken. I drew it to my mother because I knew the only chance of transforming its evil was through the auma of Gawain. I had to leave her body to enable that to happen. I left her, Agawin. I went into the shell of the house dragon, Gwillan, and stole powers from the other Pennykettle dragons. I left my beautiful mother unguarded and went to fight darklings at Scuffenbury Hill, believing I was doing the Earth a service. But David could have handled the conflict with ease. I was vain, boisterous. I wanted a fight. But I should have been in the Crescent protecting her. And now …”

  “What?” I asked. “What happened to Liz?” And Arthur, her partner, for that matter.

  He lifted his face. Tears were filming his sparkling eyes. “Just tell me your side of the story,” he said. “I can visit anywhere in anywhen, but if I try to go too close to my mother’s timepoints I am tied to her auma and the events become fuzzy. I need to know what happened just before you flew to the hill with Gadzooks.”

  So I concentrated for him and it quickly came back to me. “I was outside, in the garden with Bonnington. We were watching a squirrel playing on the rockery. All of a sudden it faded from view.”

  “Like an untended construct.”

  Yes. Like a construct. I realized then that the squirrel was false. “At the same time, one of the dragons came out. I don’t remember which. It said Agatha Bacon had come to the house and that Zanna had left to join David at Scuffenbury.”

  Agatha Bacon was the sister of our neighbor. A trusted friend. A good sibyl.

  “I ran into the house and went upstairs to Elizabeth’s room. There was blood. Your mother was on the bed, injured. Agatha wasn’t there, but Gwilanna was. She lay dead on the floor. There were two small dragons on the dressing table. They were anxious to tell me what they knew….” I shuddered as their terrified voices came back to me.

  “Continue,” said Joseph. “Gwilanna arrived in the guise of Agatha Bacon and tricked Zanna into leaving the house. What happened then?”

  “Gwilanna believed you were still in your mother’s body. She tried to deliver you. The dark fire escaped. The dragons say Gwilanna died of fear.”

  “And the fire?”

  “It found a portal through the dressing-table mirror. I summoned Gadzooks and followed it to Scuffenbury. When I arrived, the darkness had infected a unicorn, which had plunged itself into the Fire Eternal and tainted it to produce an Ix Shadow. The Shadow turned on us as soon as we landed. But Gadzooks was quick. He wrote the ancient mark on his notepad. The enchantment favored by unicorns.”

  “‘Sometimes,’” said Joseph.

  “Yes. When the Shadow struck his pencil it could not cope with the infinite ambiguities suggested by the word. So time was suspended and a call for help was sent across the universe …”

  “And picked up here, in Co:pern:ica,” he said.

  Yes. By David and Rosa. My earliest memories were all coming back.

  My mind began to puddle with dozens of questions. I had never understood the mirror world, Co:pern:ica. Why it was created. How it linked to Earth. The “alternative” templates — like Rosa, for instance.

  Joseph, hearing my turmoil, said, “It was a project, Agawin. A failed attempt by the Fain to imagineer a paradise for humans to migrate to, while leaving the Ix in isolation. One day, you will understand it fully.”

  “How did David and Rosa cross the nexus?” I knew Rosa had her unicorn, but the enchantments of time would limit her movements to those lines common to Co:pern:ica. “How did they come to Earth?”

  “I created a fire star for them,” he said. “It was impressive. A beautiful ocean of fire. They couldn’t really miss it. They had to step through.”

  “You wanted them on Earth?”

  He pressed his fingertips together lightly, making a rainbow of color arc over them. “Let me tell you something about Gadzooks.”

  I sighed, thinking he had drifted off the subject.

  He hadn’t.

  “There was more to his mark than you might have realized. One of the powers I stole from the dragons was Groyne’s abi
lity to move through time. As you know, he transforms into a tornaq, marked by the unicorn symbol you saw. Gadzooks’s cry for help was also a coded instruction to the universe to free Groyne from the Scuffenbury timepoint. In other words, freeing me. I’ve been working with the timeline ever since, finding a way to resolve all this.”

  “Then it was you who allowed Hilde to have the tornaq?”

  “And me who brought David and Rosa to Earth. And teamed them up with Gretel. I had to put her somewhere in the timeline to make her think she was being useful. She would have caused a dreadful nuisance otherwise. What’s the matter, Agawin? Why are you scowling?”

  “You moved the tornaq out of my grasp when I was fighting Gwilanna,” I said. I remembered the shadowy boy on the ice, and also seer Brunne’s words in Taan: The tornaq is not the sibyl’s to command. It will leave her when its work is done.

  “I know you’re a little … upset,” he said. “But if you had taken the tornaq then, it would have ruined or delayed the course of events. Trust me, Agawin. It’s complicated. I can see resolutions that you can’t.”

  Trust him? A little upset? I was deeply incensed. “You allowed Gwilanna to throw me off a cliff! And you changed me into this.” I looked down at my body.

  “Don’t you like being Alexa? You never did answer.”

  And I couldn’t find the words to answer it now.

  “The trouble is,” he said, before I could snap, “everyone has the annoying habit of using their … free will to get involved. David would have tried to cross the nexus without my assistance before very long. He had good cause, once Gwilanna had possession of the dragon’s claw.”

  “I don’t understand that,” I said. “Gwilanna was dead when I saw her in the Crescent.”

  “On Earth, but not here. Not on Co:pern:ica.”

  “Did her mirror-form hear Gadzooks’s beacon?”

  He shook his head. “When Gadzooks suspended the timepoint, pressure was exerted on the membrane of space between Earth and Co:pern:ica. A small Ix:Cluster managed to break through it. They invaded a firebird, turning it black. The bird found and stole a claw of Gawain that had been hidden on this world long ago by the Fain. When the firebird and Aunt Gwyneth commingled —”