Fire World

by Chris D'Lacey

  “There’s no need to go,” she said. “Whatever was in the egg won’t harm Penny.”

  “Uh?” he spluttered. “How do you know?”

  “I can feel your auma all over the shell.” Bizarrely, she could feel hers on it, too, though she chose not to admit that to him. Instead, she looked at Aurielle and asked, “Where did the egg come from?”

  Aurielle shook her tail feathers out, sending two more spiraling to join the others. She pottered toward the center of the table (steering a course around The Book of Agawin), leaving a trail of prints in her wake. Briefly, she explained how she’d found the egg in the Dead Lands and how, during the time jolt, it had merged with David’s tear and Azkiar’s fire and —

  She never got as far as the daisy chain because David pointed at Azkiar and said, “His fire was trapped inside my tear?”

  The red firebird spat out a dry feather shaft.

  “I saw a flash when he attacked you,” Rosa said urgently. “That must have been what it was.”

  “So what’s come out of it?” he said.

  Rosa stared at the shell and laid it back on the nest where she’d found it. “I don’t know. But all I’m getting from it … is love.”

  “Well, I need to be sure,” said David.

  “No,” she said angrily. “You can’t go. Not again.” Two small words that ripped into his heart.

  A moment or two passed. Glances were exchanged all around the room. High above, a window shutter creaked. Azkiar, who had flown to a shelf to shake himself down, looked up from his preening, perhaps wondering if there was something he needed to investigate. Aurielle, meanwhile, had let out her own jittery plea for David to stay. For once, it needed no translation.

  “Anyway, the book’s here,” Rosa said, hoping that would reach him if her heartbreak couldn’t. “This is what we were looking for, isn’t it?”

  “All right,” he said. “But first, tell me what you make of this.” Gripping her by the elbow, he plowed through the feathers and maneuvered her toward the far end of the room. Aurielle skittered down the table after them.

  “It’s called a ‘tapestry,’” said Rosa, already studying it as they approached. “I read about them once when I was ordering books on Floor … Hang on, is that …?”

  “You and me? Yes. And that figure in the corner, cradling the katt, looks like an older version of Penny. I don’t know who the guy standing next to her is. But you see the little girl in white who’s kneeling? You see the dragon she’s holding, the one that has a pencil?”

  “It looks like one your mom might have made.”

  “Um. It is. Its name is Gadzooks.”

  Rosa looked sideways at him and frowned. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been seeing him in my mind — ever since I got the name. Think about what happened with the reading dragon.”

  “G-A-D-Z … ooks?”

  “Exactly. And that shadow coming out of the big hill in front of him is probably the daddy of the Ix Cluster I fought.”

  Rosa ran her gaze across the tapestry again. This time there was a glint of fear in her eyes. “Is he controlling it?” she asked. “Or creating it?” There was a spike of darkness extending from the tip of the dragon’s pencil back into the body of the shadow.

  “I don’t know,” David said. “See what she says.” He gestured at Aurielle. The firebird clicked her tongue and stepped forward.

  And so began a long discussion, in which Rosa learned that the tapestry predicted a battle called Isenfier and that firebirds had always protected it. How long it had been there Aurielle couldn’t say. But she was clear about who had made it.

  “Agawin,” David guessed.

  Rosa nodded. “She says it’s a vision of his future.”

  “And we’re in it?”

  Rosa lifted her shoulders. Her beautiful face was blank for once. “Maybe we’ll learn something from the book.”

  “Did you ask about the little girl holding Gadzooks?”

  “Yes. She doesn’t know who she is. They just call her the ‘angel.’ Oh, and there’s something else. She wants you to look at the dragon’s notepad.”

  David squinted at the tapestry. “I can barely see it.”

  “Apparently, she knows a way.” She gave a quick nod to Aurielle. The excited firebird flew to a panel beside the tapestry and struck the tail of a small dragon that had been carved out of the wood. Immediately, a door slid open and a brass-colored tele:scope sprang out on a long and wobbly crisscrossing extensor. David took hold of it and drew it to his eye, adjusting the rotating lenses until their focus was on the dragon’s pad. Amazingly, he could see something on it. He studied it for a moment and extended the tele:scopic arm toward Rosa.

  “The sign,” she breathed. It was the same three-lined mark that had opened the door to Floor Forty-Two. The one she also seemed to carry on her arm. “He’s writing ‘sometimes’ on his pad. Why would he do that?”

  David sighed and shook his head. “I wish Dad was here. He’d love all this.” He bounced the tele:scope back toward the panel and walked down the room, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Remarkably, The Book of Agawin had escaped the fallout of dust. Laying his hands on the table beside it, David stared at the book for a few slow heartbeats, as if he knew that once these pages were opened, his life would never be the same again.

  Rosa, sensing the enormity of the moment, stroked a hand down his arm and said, “Strømberg told me you have to read it from back to front.”

  David turned the book over. He ran his fingertips across the title, letting them trace the indents of the words. The book seemed to hum in appreciation. The sound it made reminded him of a lullaby his mother used to sing to him when he was a child. “Time to wake,” he whispered, and opened the cover.

  The paper was the color of Aurielle’s feathers and felt pleasantly warm to the touch. The upper half of the opening page was covered with a host of unfamiliar symbols — all manner of curving marks with wild strokes and dashes flying off like sparks from the centers of the characters. And something Rosa hadn’t noticed before, maybe because of the light downstairs.

  “It’s all in green,” she muttered.

  David nodded. He could sense the auma of dragons in the script. “Ask Aurielle if she knows how it got here.”

  “Does it matter?”

  He found her inquisitive eyes. “You thought Mr. Henry had hidden it. So who put it on this table if we’re the only humans to break the code to Floor Forty-Three?”

  This made Rosa look over her shoulder, as if she half-expected the ghost of Mr. Henry to glide out of one of the shadowy alcoves. She passed the question on to Aurielle. The firebird chattered a strange reply.

  “She says it came by itself. It appeared a few days ago. She thought we’d sent it.”

  David thought about the book he’d seen moving on the shelf, but chose to say nothing.

  “What’s that?” Rosa asked. She pointed to a solitary word at the bottom of the page. (Aurielle tilted one eye toward it.)

  “His signature.”

  “That squiggle says ‘Agawin’?”

  “In dragontongue, yes. And this” — he waved a hand at the denser text — “is a summary of what the book’s about. Do you want to hear it?”

  Rosa put a fingertip to her lips. “No, I think I’ll go and count the daisies.” She thumped his arm (hard), making Aurielle clatter back. “Of course I want to hear it, dummy.”

  David looked down again. The reflected symbols danced like flames as his eyes scanned the page and he started to translate. In a quiet voice he read, “We come from a world of fire.”

  “We? Co:pern:icans?”

  “Not sure. It doesn’t say.” He read the line again. “We come from a world of fire. This I have witnessed in the beauty of creation. This I have beheld in a … glint — I think — of time. All that is, is within us and without us. The fire of the dragon. The eternal breath of life.”

  “Is that it?” Rosa screwed up her nose in di
sappointment.

  David turned to the next page, where there were two large symbols about a third of the way down.

  “What does that say?”

  “ ‘The Flight of Gideon.’”

  Rosa did her best to translate this for Aurielle. It clearly worked, for the firebird paddled her feet in excitement and responded with a whole flurry of words. (Azkiar gave a squawk of annoyance as yet more dust floated into the air.)

  “She knows of him,” said Rosa, interpreting the squawks. “A golden firebird they’re all descended from. She wants to know if it’s true that he came from another world.”

  David let his gaze come to rest on Aurielle. She looked so comical, her body still blotched with choking dust and one rogue feather attaching itself to the side of her neck. “Let’s check on Mom and Penny, then I’ll read it all, OK?”

  Rosa passed this on.

  “I can tell you one other thing,” David said. He flipped to another page like the last. “It’s split into parts. The Flight of Gideon, The Battle of Isenfier, The Isle of Alavon, The Icelands of the North, and …” He practically heaved the book over to reach the last part. “The Ark of Co:pern:ica.”

  “Ark?” said Rosa. “What’s an ‘ark’?”

  The words had hardly left her lips when the building responded with a shuddering lurch, as if something had suddenly struck into its base.

  Both firebirds were in the air in a moment.

  Rosa spun around. “What happened? What’s that noise?” From deep within the body of the librarium they could hear the grinding shift of stone, as if some sleeping giant had woken. Rosa put her hand on the tabletop and felt it vibrating. One of the candlesticks toppled over.

  “The windows,” David said. “Look at the windows.” The shutters were banging back and forth, in danger of breaking free of their fixings. Suddenly, a jagged light ruptured the clouds, lighting up the room in bright blue flashes.

  Then the rain came down, like a volley of roaring drums. Rain in quantities that no one living on the world of Co:pern:ica had ever witnessed before. A phenomenon way outside the Grand Design. The plausible impossible. A tempest.

  A storm.

  David was staggered. He had once discussed storms with Mr. Henry after coming across some scenes in a book of meteorology. The curator, while admitting that his knowledge of atmos:ferics was limited, had reassured the boy that storms could not happen on a world where there were no great bodies of water (he called them “oceans” or “lakes”) and so much of the surface was devoid of plants. (The daisies, he told him, were a small miracle of something he called “nature.”) Nevertheless, David had carried the pictures with him and seen, on paper, what a bad storm could do. It could lead to devastation, homelessness, and fear. And the single most striking image of all.

  Flood.

  9.

  Both humans immediately ran to a room where they could peer straight out of a window. Rosa arrived half a sec before David and was first to see the impact the rain was having. Far below, at a frankly dizzying drop, the daisy fields had turned dark green and sodden, their flower heads swaying in a current of rising water. The speed of the transition was staggering. And although it was impossible to see or measure, Rosa formed the idea that the rain was falling considerably farther than the limits of the Bushley librarium. Where was all this water coming from? And how high would it ultimately go? A great spume suddenly erupted from the well, spraying the southern face of the building. Rosa squealed and jumped back in shock. “What’s happening?” she cried. “David, what’s caused this?”

  He truly had no idea. But he could feel a growing tremor in the boards beneath his feet and a fundamental change in the auma of the books. Something monumental was about to happen. And Penny and his mother must be right at the heart of it.

  “Come on. We’ve got to find the others,” he said.

  But the librarium had its own ideas about that.

  As they dashed for the lower floors, Rosa stumbled (for the first time ever) on the laces of her boots and happened to look back toward the tapestry room. To her astonishment, the arched doorway had changed. It was taller. Greener. Its frame sweetly dressed with twists of leaves. The old wooden clock had disappeared from view, replaced by a kind of rotating vent through which a dial of sunlight was passing (sunlight, yes, despite the rain). The fraying bellpull was no longer hanging from the ceiling. But in the place where it would have made a shadow on the wall, something organic was moving. A small and incredibly beautiful creature with patterned yellow wings as fragile as paper was fluttering about there. Rosa beckoned David to come and see, unaware that he’d taken off in the opposite direction. Suddenly, the building lurched again and she was thrown, facedown, to the floor. It seemed to take an age to complete the fall (she had the strange impression she was gliding through a rainbow made of stars) and in the time that it did, many things changed. She would have been expecting, for instance, to collide with a hard, unforgiving floorboard. Instead, the blow was cushioned by a thick expanse of flower petals, dried leaves, moss, and twigs. Scent and taste were the first two senses she recovered and both of them told her she had struck earth. As she rose to her knees she understood why. The whole structure of the room — the posts, the shelves, certain parts of the ceiling — had merged together and morphed into an area of woodland, a landscape Rosa had seen (and admired) in several books. As if this weren’t strange enough, the marks on her arm, the scratches inflicted by the cruel Aunt Petunia, were glowing blue and drawing the rotating light toward them. Through the doorway, she heard a neighing sound. A spiraling breeze stirred up the leaves. And from their dappled center came a pure white beast that tore Rosanna apart with love and wonder in equal measure. She cried out for David to come. But David was long gone by then.

  He was calling out to her, in fact, wondering why she wasn’t at his shoulder, all the while trying to make sense of the changes taking place around him. He had just burst into a room where the shelves had formed an assembly of crisscrossing branches. Among the finer branches, an animal was hiding. It had a gray furry body and a comical face. The patches of black around its slightly bugged eyes made it look as if it were wearing a mask. Dropping down in a long J shape behind it was a tail composed of equal-sized rings of black-and-white fur. The animal’s keen eyes took David in, then darted toward another room, in a direction he hadn’t thought to go. The sounds of heavy purring were drifting out of it. His nose was also quick to detect a strong variation of the ripe deposits that Boon left in the gardenaria at home sometimes. He stepped toward the door and looked in. Prowling a floor of sawdust and bark was the biggest katt he had ever seen. It was the color of sand (another lesson of Mr. Henry’s) and had a mane of brown hair around its head, which ran in straggles down its shoulders and back. Another katt, of similar size, but maneless, was lying on its side in the corner of the room, licking its paws. The katt on its feet grunted and raised an imperious gaze. It flicked its tail and allowed a low growl to escape from its throat. Then it snorted and padded toward the visitor. David stood quite still. The big katt twitched its nostrils twice, then let its head rest against his hand, pushing against his palm just as Boon would have done. David cupped a hand around its soft, warm ear. “Where did you come from, eh?” he whispered. But in some ways the question was no longer relevant. He was deeply aware by now that he was not in control of his destination or of the changes taking place in the building. He had run away from Floor One Hundred and Eight with the sole intention of heading downstairs. But one glance through the window of the room he was in told him he was being taken higher. Far below, even the daisies had joined the transition. They were collecting into groups, describing unusual shapes in the water. Streamlined bodies with triangular fins. Tails as flexible as a man’s hand. Creatures that moved as easily through water as firebirds could zip and pitch through air. Amazing. And so David acknowledged the presence of the animals and surrendered his consciousness to the librarium. All he could do now was follow its will �
�� and pray that Rosa and his family would be safe.

  As it happened, his sister was more than safe. Indeed, Penny would later come to learn that it was she who’d been the catalyst for the transformation about to rock the whole of Co:pern:ica, not merely the great museum of books at the center of it.

  Shortly after David and Rosa had left her, she had set about finding a new book to read. (She had looked again at The Twonks and laughed at the pictures, but had left the reading dragon on the shelf as a marker while she examined the other books.) It was a daunting proposition. There were thousands to choose from. More than Penelope could possibly count. So for a while she’d done nothing but roam back and forth, reading the titles of any that looked interesting. (Aleron had wisely jumped off her by now because he kept sliding every time she tilted her head.) In time, not surprisingly, her neck began to ache. The titles blurred. The sheer quantity of them began to overwhelm her. That became a barrier to making a choice. She sighed, wishing David could be there to do the choosing. It was surely more fun, when you knew nothing about books, to have one recommended by someone who did. Strangely, as this thought drifted through her mind, she felt that the books were responding to it. Two or three times she glanced nervously around her, thinking she could hear them murmuring something. But that was just silly (wasn’t it?). More likely she was hearing a breeze from the window, stirring up the ancient dust. She went over to the window and leaned forward on tiptoe, supporting her body on the deep recess of stone so she could get a good view out. A few light raindrops were falling. Her eyes grew wide with delight. Rain was something she had never seen before, though her mother had taught her how in certain areas of Co:pern:ica water fell from the sky sometimes. Penny stretched a hand and caught a cool drop. It twinkled in the center of her palm for a moment. Then with a gentle pop! it burst and its light traveled over her shoulder, flaring as it entered the darker librarium. She whipped around to see where it had gone. And there, to her astonishment, three-quarters of the way down the aisle between the shelves, stood a little girl, slightly more than half her own height.