The Fire Ascending

by Chris D'Lacey

  “Ganzfeld,” I said. “Why did he tell me?”

  “He wants you to lead us to Ingavar. Since the exchange of ears and snow, bears and dragons have been allies in all things.”

  “But how does knowing his name help me?”

  “To speak his name is to know his power….”

  “Ganzfeld!” I shouted, while Avrel watched. “Ganzfeld! GANZFELD!”

  The universe hummed — and I woke with a start. I sat up in a room with deep red walls. I was panting and frightened, a little confused. I felt Elizabeth’s arm on my shoulder. She crouched down and held me. She was almost in tears. “Oh, Agawin, what have you done?” she whispered.

  On the floor stood a row of dragons. I looked at them in turn and knew their names.

  G’reth. Gretel. Gruffen. Gollygosh. Gwendolen. Gwillan.

  Gadzooks.

  He was at least another foot taller than David, his overall shape defined by a mass of swollen muscles that seemed to have burst through the bag of his skin — not red in color with the blood of a man, but a glistening turquoise-black, host to the Shadow in his corded veins. He walked on two legs, as humans did, but the weight of his brawny wings — which seemed burdensome, even in their folded state, despite the support of a collar of muscle high up his neck — suggested he’d prefer to crawl on four limbs or at worst scratch along with the gait of a bird. His strapping tail helped in this respect. It worked in the way that a dragon’s did, aiding balance during vigorous movement. It was never quite still, the tail, twisting and turning and pointing at objects as if it possessed a life of its own. A serrated isoscele glimmered at its tip, a constant reminder of the Shadow Prime’s menace. What remained of Voss’s face was fiendishly distorted. Helical shells had replaced his ears and his chin had grown down to a sharpened point. His nose was large and wide like an arrowhead, his teeth just a circle of badly spaced fangs. Flaring out of his slightly concave temples were two strange horns that gave him the look of a curved-claw hammer. David suspected that some of these changes were imagineered for demonic effect. But there was no mistaking the coldness in the eyes, like looking into swathes of endless space.

  “I suppose congratulations are in order,” he said. “When’s the unhappy wedding taking place?”

  “Do not mock me,” the Shadow Prime hissed. His tail swung upward. For the second time that day, David found himself leaning away from a sharp object close to his throat. “A scratch is all it takes to begin your inversion. And I can make it very unpleasant. Even an illumined Fain construct couldn’t fight the spread of the Shadow through its auma.”

  David rolled his eyes sideways. The barbed end of Voss’s tail was stirring the air beneath his left ear. “So, you know a few things about me … Voss. But where exactly do you fit in?”

  “You’re looking at Gwilanna’s father,” said Zanna.

  “Silence!” barked Voss.

  Zanna lowered her head.

  “So, you are human,” David said. He moved the tail aside with the back of his hand. “Or you were.”

  Leaving David with a lingering look of contempt, Voss drew away and stalked toward Rosa. “So this is the clone?”

  “Technically, yes,” David said, following after him. He signaled to Rosa not to speak back, though the sight of Voss had all but muted her. “All the more remarkable because she’s not a Co:pern:ican construct. She’s a natural-born. Quite a rarity in her world. They could almost be twins, don’t you think? Except one of them is …” He smiled at Zanna, who looked, for the first time, slightly uncomfortable with Rosa present.

  Voss raised a hand to Rosa’s cheek. Out of what used to be fingers came a set of bedded claws. Rosa screwed her eyes shut and turned her face away.

  “Let her go,” said David, coming to stand at Voss’s shoulder. “She’s no threat to the Shadow. It’s me you’re after. Why do you want us — me, by the way?”

  “Tell us where Alexa is,” Zanna said bluntly.

  “Ah, yes. Alexa.” David raised a finger. “Our lovely daughter. Lucy’s only niece.”

  Lucy stared ahead without even blinking.

  “Well?” said Voss, turning toward him.

  David opened his hands. “I don’t know.”

  There was a pause. Gazes flicked across the chamber like lasers. Voss was the first to speak.

  “Take the girl to the upper ledges.”

  Lucy and Tam grabbed Rosa’s arms.

  “What? Hey! No. Let go of me! David?”

  “All right, stop!” he cried.

  Voss gestured them to halt.

  David took a breath and ran a hand through his hair. “I mean it, Voss. I really don’t know. Alexa is illumined. She could be anywhere in time.”

  Tam pulled on Rosa’s arm again.

  “She was at Scuffenbury with you!” David said, putting himself in front of the commander. He grabbed Tam’s wrist and turned the palm uppermost. “Find the bear inside you,” he whispered, before Tam threw him off. “Why were you three ‘selected’ and not her?”

  “She wasn’t there,” said Zanna. “Something moved her.”

  “Not me,” David said, as sincerely as he could. He opened his jacket as if to prove he wasn’t hiding her. “I swear, it wasn’t me.”

  “Take the clone,” said Voss.

  “No!” David shouted. And this time, he tried to transform. He flickered between the shapes of Ingavar and Grockle before collapsing, exhausted, to the rock floor: human.

  In his prison above the lava pile, Gawain roared.

  David looked up, hearing Rosa’s muffled shouts. She was being dragged away, with Tam’s hand clamped hard across her mouth. David lowered his head. His hair fell forward. “What will you do with her?”

  Voss suppressed a chuckle. “Do you really have to ask? You have until nightfall to think of all the interesting ways I could kill her. Tell us where the child is and the clone will be spared.”

  “Spared? For what?”

  “She will be inverted.”

  A look of fury swept across Zanna’s face. “Inverted? That wasn’t what we agreed.”

  David propped himself onto one elbow. “Oh dear. Now, that is rich. A darkling demonstrating signs of jealousy. Unless, of course, it’s the human inside her still fighting to get out?”

  Voss responded to this jibe by opening his mouth and issuing a jet of dark fire. David rolled away from it just in time. When he looked back at where he’d been lying, the surface of the rock had been eaten away, leaving a shallow bed of steam.

  “Final warning,” the Shadow Prime said.

  “I didn’t take Alexa,” David repeated. He stood up, loosening his collar. “There are other explanations. She was holding Gadzooks; he could have moved her.”

  “I told you,” said Zanna. “The timeshift erased the Pennykettle dragons.”

  David shook his head. “I very much doubt it. The dragons weren’t an act of random creation. Liz made them with definite intent. A record of them must exist within the Is. They could be in this timeline, just not in that form. Then there’s Joseph Henry, of course.”

  Voss looked at Zanna. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Elizabeth Pennykettle’s unborn son. He transferred his auma to one of her dragons. It was at the hill with us.”

  “Clever little soul,” David said. “Powerful enough to turn a fully fledged darkling back to the light. Also unaccounted for … right?”

  Voss stamped forward and pushed his callused face near to David’s. “Your threats mean nothing to me, Fain. Where was this unborn spirit when the Shadow was taking control of the Earth?”

  “That’s a very good question,” David said quietly. “One you should give some serious thought to. What exactly do you want with Alexa?”

  Voss stood back, cracking his joints. “Show him what we found.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “I said show him.”

  Zanna gave an obedient nod and stepped out of sight for a moment. She returned carrying a large o
ld book. “When we overran the Fain we discovered their secret.”

  She showed David The Book of Agawin.

  Trying not to betray anything more than casual interest, he reached out to take it. “Where did you get this?”

  Voss’s tail came down with a thwack across the cover. “You know of it?”

  David shook his head. “I knew a boy of that name once. A seer’s apprentice. He was taken by Gwilanna just before time changed. I don’t know why. I assume you do?”

  “The boy had a nasty fall,” Voss said. “Off the slopes of Mount Kasgerden.”

  Agawin, dead? David bit back his anger. “I don’t know this mountain. Why would Gwilanna take him there?”

  “To resurrect me. To give me life.”

  “At Agawin’s expense?”

  The Shadow Prime leveled a weary smile. “A minor sacrifice to aid the rise of the Shadow.”

  David backed away, throwing out a hand. “That’s what all of this is about? She altered time to save you from death?”

  “What child does not grieve for its father?” Voss snapped.

  David looked at Gawain. The dragon was silent now, moodily tenting his wings against the heat. “And yet she’s subdued in the body of your enemy. How did that come about?”

  “Voss, he’s asking too many questions,” said Zanna.

  “And what can he do with the answers?” he sneered. “Our poor, weakened agent of the Fain?” He turned away from David and bellowed at Gawain. “She was a disappointment to me. She brought me back believing she could take her revenge for being made into the child she was. But the claw she had used dissolved to ash and she was powerless against the Collective. Even then, I offered her a chance of retribution. Because she had held the dragon’s claw, her auma resonated powerfully with the beast. She was able to be close to him when he died.”

  “So she did catch his tear?”

  Voss gave a quick snort. “When the moment arrived, she was fearful, penitent; she tried to use magicks to keep us away and send the fire tear back to the core.”

  Gwilanna? Penitent? David shook his head. This really was a bizarre timeline.

  Voss’s dark eyes blazed with triumph. “We captured the creature in its dying semistasis, moments after the tear was shed.”

  David glanced at the crestfallen dragon. Now that the rage had died away, the sadness in him was crushingly apparent. “And what did you do with Gwilanna?”

  “She was a traitor to the Ix. She had to be punished.”

  “You killed her? You killed the daughter who’d saved your life?”

  “I gave her what she craved, what she dared not take herself.”

  “We extracted her auma,” Zanna put in, as if to offer some attempt at remorse.

  “And the body?”

  “Weak,” Voss grunted, “unsuitable for inversion.”

  Thrown away, pecked at by ravens, thought David. For the first time, he pitied the crazed old sibyl. “How did you bind her auma to Gawain? True illumination requires both physical bodies to be intact.”

  Voss dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “The Shadow performed a trans:morphic implant.”

  “So, her auma drives his physical body?”

  “Controlled through my command,” said Zanna.

  “Your command?”

  “Her sibyl tendencies are still intact. Gwilanna obeys my greater will.”

  “No.” David laughed this off. “He won’t remain stable. Not for long.”

  “Long enough to do my bidding,” snarled Voss. “Let me tell you the best part, Fain. When the dragon was turned, the tear’s journey was suspended. We found it here, in this hollow in the island. We used its power to hasten the inversion. And now it’s leading us straight to the core.”

  David looked at the pool of lava. He shook his head in confusion. “I’m sorry, but all this talk of betrayal has made me drift off the point somewhat. Satisfy my curiosity, Voss: Why does the Shadow want to destabilize G:ravity, disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field, and bring the entire galaxy to the point of collapse?”

  “We come from a world of fire,” said Zanna.

  “I’ve …” Read that, David was going to say, until he realized that Zanna had quoted from The Book of Agawin. His blood ran cold. “What do you mean?”

  “What’s the unanswered question, David? And before you come up with your usual fatuous response, I’ll tell you. How did a universe as large as this appear from a singular microdot of space? Where did all this ‘Is’ come from? And please don’t tell me you believe that nonsense about Godith. That was a story generated by the Fain to keep their inquisitive Premen at bay.”

  David steepled his fingers — a prop for his rather vacant expression. “So …?”

  “We’re living in a microcosm. A blip that bubbled off from an infinite sea of white fire. The gateway to all creation is here. Right at the heart of this inconspicuous but rather special planet. It’s all in the book.”

  Then why didn’t I read that? he was thinking. And his mind flashed back to the great librarium, the last place he had seen the book. That thought reintroduced him to the firebirds and for some odd reason, Joseph Henry. “I wouldn’t believe everything you see in print.”

  “Funny,” she said. “Maybe this will change your mind.” She turned to a marked page and opened it for him.

  And there was a picture of a child with wings. Beside it, a squiggle of dragontongue. It said,

  Alexa. Gatekeeper. Protector of humankind.

  “Gatekeeper,” said Zanna. “When we have her, we’ll be able to open the core. The dragon is simply preparing the way.”

  “You have until nightfall,” Voss said darkly.

  “For the last time, I’m telling you the truth!” David barked. “I don’t know where Alexa is.”

  “Then we move to our second option. One that might bring her out of hiding.”

  Zanna closed the book. Gawain let out a roar.

  “We put you in the dragon’s den,” said Voss, gesturing toward the lava pool. “We sacrifice you instead.”

  They were intrigued by me, that was plain from their unified stare. But the one they clamored for, of course, was Elizabeth.

  “Oh dear,” she sighed. She lowered herself, cross-legged, among them. She was pleased to see her dragons, but saddened, too.

  They flew to her, making their hurring noises. G’reth and Gruffen each landed on a knee, from where they could reach up and touch her face. Gwendolen flew to the slope of her shoulder and started making braids of her growing red hair. Gollygosh picked up the hem of her smock and gently caressed a green paint stain. Gretel and Gadzooks simply stood before her, stretching their oval eyes to the limit. The other dragon, Gwillan, she picked up and held in the shadows of her lap.

  In perfect dragontongue she said, “You know you shouldn’t be here, don’t you?”

  Hrrr! went Gretel. She pointed at me.

  “Yes, I know. Agawin shouldn’t be here either. But he’s a special case. It’s not your time.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I found Ganzfeld —”

  Hrrr!

  All the dragons ducked.

  “Sorry,” I tutted, remembering now what Avrel had said. To speak his name is to know his power. But I didn’t understand his power.

  So I asked.

  “Very well, I’ll tell you,” Elizabeth said. She signaled Gretel to be quiet. “Ganzfeld was made by the will of Gaia.”

  “From stars,” I gushed. “I saw it in a dream.”

  G’reth raised an eye ridge. He seemed to like the idea of dreams (and stars).

  “He has special significance,” Elizabeth went on, “because he was the first of his kind on Earth, the first to be touched by the passing of Gawain.”

  Hrrr … Seven little chests deflated.

  “Now, now. No fire tears here.” She stroked Gwillan, who seemed the most upset. Gollygosh, likewise, was looking a little moist. With a sad-sounding hurr he put down his toolbox. An asterisk of light imm
ediately flew out and formed itself into a small handkerchief. He put it to his snout and blew into it hard (leaving two scorch holes at its center).

  “That’s better,” said Elizabeth. She went on with her account of Ganzfeld’s influence. “The listener, like all of you, had a special power. He could ‘listen,’ of course, we all knew that. But if he listened hard, very hard indeed, he could lose himself in the auma of the universe, in the energy field after which he was named.”

  I noticed Gadzooks doodling on his notepad. Spiderwebs connected by dozens of stars. His impression of the energy field, perhaps.

  Elizabeth pressed her fingertips together. At the same time, a tele:screen flickered into life. It put up a picture of the listening dragon slowly turning through starlit space. None of the dragons appeared to have noticed.

  “You all know about the auma of the universe, of course.” Elizabeth looked at each of them in turn. “You use it when Gretel makes a potion from her flowers, or Gollygosh imagineers something from his toolbox, or a wishing dragon grants a fall of snow.” She smiled at G’reth, who put his famous paws together and blushed.

  Meanwhile, on the tele:screen, the same voice that had described the evolution of the firebirds began to babble about something called “neu:trinos,” particles so tiny they could pass between the spaces in “atoms.” A small animation faded up. It showed a band of neu:trinos flowing through and around a number of “solid” objects: a kettle, a table, a refrigerator door …

  “Hey, did you see that?” I nudged G’reth. He twizzled his snout and looked at me blankly.

  “Up there,” I hissed. I pointed at the screen.

  The neu:trinos were passing through a polar bear now.

  G’reth looked over his shoulder — and shrugged. Like the rest of the dragons, he seemed oblivious to the tele:screen, as if the pictures were only in my head.

  “Then what?” Gretel asked impatiently. “What happens when Ganz — the listener gets lost?”

  Just as Elizabeth started to reply, Gruffen paddled an ear with his paw. Gretel checked it for signs of unusual auma. Finding none, she told him not to interrupt.

  “Gretel, behave yourself,” Elizabeth said. She stroked Gwillan’s back. He shivered and seemed relieved to be in her hands. “The answer is very simple, really. Once Ganzfeld had entered the energy field he could begin to make connections.”