Fire World

by Chris D'Lacey

Is something wrong?

  She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Rr-rrrh!” she replied. We can’t find the tapestry.

  At this point, Mathew knocked on Aunt Gwyneth’s coffin (to gain attention, not entry) and said, “Erm, is this a private conversation or can anyone with feathers join in?”

  “It’s private,” said Rosa, very moody, very definite. If she had possessed feathers, they would have been somewhat ruffled just then. Once again she looked at Mathew and said, rather cryptically, “You need to shave.”

  “What?” he said, a little taken aback. Why throw such a remark at him when Harlan and Bernard were equally unshaven?

  But Rosa would offer no explanation and her brief conversation with Mathew ended there. Laying her fingers over the marks on her arm, she made a sharp whistling noise. Within moments, a white light at the doorway heralded the arrival of her unicorn, Terrafonne.

  Everyone present, David excepted, stood back in awe of the perfect white horse.

  With a snap of her fingers, Rosa bade the unicorn kneel to let her mount him. “Talking of flying things,” she said, “I haven’t seen Angel since … the Icelands. You might like to tell our guests what to expect.” She turned Terrafonne through a half circle. The horse reared up and drummed his hooves on the boards. “I’ll do what I can about Strømberg. Come and find me.” And with that, she whooshed away on a trail of stars.

  Mathew whistled. “Wow, she is some girl.”

  Just for a moment, a hint of resentment might have entered David’s eyes. Harlan, trying to avoid any trace of bad feeling, directed his son to another topic. “Who’s Angel, David? What was that about?”

  “I know! I’ve seen her,” Penny said, bouncing. “She’s a little girl. Littler than me. She wears a white dress and a daisy chain on her wrist.”

  “A little girl?” Eliza looked shocked. “Well, where is she? And who’s looking after her?”

  “Angel kind of takes care of herself,” said David.

  “She’s got wings,” said Penny.

  “Wings?” said the travelers from Alavon.

  To which Penny added, rather pointlessly, “She flies.” Just another everyday occurrence in the librarium of many surprises, was it not?

  The ark rocked a little, left to right, which seemed to set the mood even again. A trumpeting cry in the distance prompted Bernard Brotherton to ask, “Who tends to the animals, David?”

  “The ark also looks after itself,” he said. “I’ve only been through a small part of it so far, but it seems to be providing for the animals in every way. If you treat them with respect, there’s no reason you shouldn’t move safely among them.”

  “So it’s a living entity,” Harlan said in wonder. “The quan:tum mech:anisms controlling it must be —”

  “Harlan, stop,” said Eliza. “We don’t want any seminars. We’re agreed that Aunt Gwyneth isn’t … going anywhere. So I suggest we all get some rest. That eye needs redressing, poor Bernard is exhausted, and, frankly, you all need a bath. Can we get hot water, David?”

  “And food?” said Bernard, who looked ready to eat an ark.

  David said, “The boat responds like the librarium, Mom. Let it guide you to where you need to be.”

  “Thank you,” she said, drawing Penny to her side.

  “So, are we leaving Grandma here?” said the girl.

  Eliza tidied a sprig of the Aunt’s brittle hair. “Until Counselor Strømberg arrives, yes.”

  “So be it,” said Harlan. He looked up at David and noticed that his son’s gaze was deeply focused on the dragon’s claw. Tapping it lightly against his palm, he walked over and pressed it into David’s hand. “Meet me here at dusk. We must speak privately.”

  “Are you going to write something?” Penny asked her brother, pushing her tongue between her lips (a trademark trait of concentration in the family).

  “I need to understand this first,” David said. But already it was singing to him of long-forgotten histories and dangerous futures — and a deeply tragic present. He could feel Harlan’s auma imprinted on the claw, echoing with unresolved grief. But now was not the moment to delve into that. Placing the claw into his jacket he said, “Mom’s right. Relax and enjoy the voyage — wherever it is we’re going.”

  With that, he began to make his way from the room. Somewhere near the doorway, his mother bade him stop. “Is everything all right — with Rosa?” she asked quietly. “You looked a bit concerned back there.”

  “Everything’s fine,” he told her, and felt the claw buzz against his heart. Was it reacting to what it knew was a lie? “She’s … misplaced something. I need to help her find it.” Thankfully, Eliza didn’t pursue this, and David was grateful for that. For it would have been hard at that point, trying to explain to his mother what the Tapestry of Isenfier was, and why Penny Merriman was pictured on it.

  And why Mathew Lefarr was, too.

  2.

  Despite the scale of the transformation the librarium had gone through, there were a large number of rooms that did not house animals but still contained books. It was in one of these that David eventually tracked Rosa down.

  She was sitting alone in the middle of the floor, forlornly clutching a book to her chest. “Look at them,” she said, as David stumbled in. “What are we going to do about this?”

  He crouched down among them, shaking his head. He picked up a book, but having nowhere to put it simply tossed it aside again. “Is it the same in other rooms?”

  “The ones with books, yes. If Mr. Henry saw this, he’d be so unhappy. If someone had put this room into a sack, shaken it up, and spilled out the contents, it couldn’t have ended up in a worse mess. It’ll take forever to sort out. I love the animals, but the books are my life. And now … well, we don’t even have a librarium anymore.”

  “I s’pose not,” David said, just as his gaze was taken by a movement outside. Through the window he could see a bright orange firebird circling in the sky. Quite a number had appeared since their aerie had changed. They were mostly seen hunched up together, perched on the deck rails, or occasionally exercising their wings in flight. Like the books, their future seemed undecided. “How have the birds reacted?”

  “How do you think? Aleron is miserable. I’ve sent him looking for Strømberg, just to take his mind off it.”

  “Tell me about the tapestry. When did you know it was missing?”

  Rosa tilted her head. Her dark hair fell forward in an unwashed bundle. “After we zapped Aunt Gwyneth, I rode Terrafonne back to where I thought One Hundred and Eight would be. I found Aurielle flapping about in a panic. The whole floor’s been transformed into a woodland glade. It’s beautiful, but the candlesticks, chandeliers, and feathers are all gone. And there’s no sign of the tapestry, anywhere. Aurielle and Azkiar are searching for it.”

  “What about Agawin’s book?”

  “Gone.”

  David clapped his hands around his nose and sighed. “I don’t understand this. How can we have come this far and have both these things go missing? This can’t be what Agawin intended.”

  “Maybe they transformed?”

  Perhaps they had. This was an outcome David hadn’t considered. It would have needed some powerful auma to create the glade and its organic plant life. What if that was now hiding the mystery of Isenfier? Or Terrafonne, for instance, was The Book of Agawin?

  For a moment, the only sounds that filled the room were the creaks of the ark as it sliced through the water far below. Then Rosa moved the dialogue sideways, saying, “It’s Mathew on the tapestry, isn’t it?”

  David took his mind off the transformation theory and stared at the books around his feet. “I don’t know. He looks more handsome than the image I remember.”

  “Da-viiid …,” she said. “Come on-nn. Even with the fuzz on his chin, he’s clearly the man shown standing next to Penny. Are you going to tell him?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a bit pointless without the evidence in front of me. I might tell Dad a
bout the tapestry later.”

  Rosa rocked back and forth, rubbing her arms. “I think it’s spooky that everyone who was in that picture is turning up on the ark. Who is Angel, David? Where did she come from? It doesn’t bother me that she flies like a bird or talks to Aunts as if she’s known them for hundreds of spins, but it does make me weak to see her wearing the daisy chain I made for you. She’s got your eyes.”

  “She’s got your hair and mouth.”

  “Er, yeah. And the wings?”

  “Azkiar.”

  “What?!”

  “His fire. My tears. Your daisies — your love. She’s part human, part fain, part firebird — oh, and part clay. That was Mom’s doing. The little girl we call Angel is Agawin’s vision of the perfect species. She’s more advanced than any of us.”

  Rosa screwed up her face. “And how do you know this?”

  “I absorbed it — from the Higher. A lot happened between the start of the flood and us facing Aunt Gwyneth. While you were discovering Terrafonne, I was being drawn toward a perception matrix called the Is.”

  “You met the Higher? Here? On the ark?” She pointed vaguely upward.

  David glanced into the middle distance. “The Higher can exist anywhere,” he said, “here, there, the spaces in between. It’s just easier for us to think in terms of ‘up.’ In Central, they massed in a dome on the roof of the librarium because the air was clear of other traces of auma.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “They don’t look like anything. The Higher are a strain of humans that evolved beyond the need for a physical body. They’re a collective of pure fain that oversees Co:pern:ica and has influence in other areas of the universe as well. Sometimes they simply call themselves The Fain. They taught me a lot of interesting things, mainly to prepare me for the confrontation with Aunt Gwyneth.”

  “Why did they put us in the cold like that?”

  “They imprinted the Icelands of the North around us so that I could appear in a more favorable environment.”

  “You — or that bear thing?”

  “Me and the bear ‘thing’ are one and the same. If it’s any consolation, I don’t fully understand it either. When I asked the Higher to explain it to me all they said was, ‘The bears are a story waiting to be written.’ Maybe Dad will shed some light on it. He’s itching to tell me something. He was holding back downstairs, because of Penny. I’ll find out later. Right now, I’m going to take a look around. Let me know if Aurielle comes back or Strømberg turns up.”

  She looked him up and down and nodded. “David?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can that dragon claw do anything about this?” She swept a hand across the jumble of books.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. And right there and then, he did. As his positive intent poured into the claw, an idea immediately came to him. He glanced through the window at the boats dotted on the water and said, “Don’t touch the books. Leave them where they are. They don’t need to be in order anymore.”

  “Why, what are we going to do with them?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “David, you’re being annoying. Tell me now.”

  He backed away. “Uh-uh. Not until I’ve thought it through. Get the firebirds together. As many as you can.”

  “Firebirds? Why?”

  “It’s what Mr. Henry would have wanted,” he said. And he walked out of the room, whistling a tune — much as the old curator would have done.

  3.

  Later that day, on his way to the rendezvous he’d planned with his father, David had a surprise encounter with Angel. He had spent most of the afternoon checking the animals, eventually going right to the top of the ark where the air was cool and the horizons were large and the Higher were easy to commingle with. On the way back down, he found himself being taken through the glade that had once been Floor One Hundred and Eight of the librarium. And there, beneath the canopy of a beautiful old tree, he saw her.

  She was sitting on one of the exposed and mossy roots, quietly reading a book.

  “Hello, Angel,” he said.

  She looked up and smiled. A miniature Rosa in a plain white dress. “Have you come to read to me, Daddy?”

  “If you’d like me to,” he said. “What book is it?”

  “Yours, silly.”

  “Mine?” he said.

  She nodded freely. “One day, you’ll remember.” She held it out for him to take, the daisy chain prominent on her wrist.

  “Snigger and the Nutbeast?”

  “You’re the nutbeast.” She laughed.

  “And who is Snigger?”

  Angel thought for a moment, then snapped her fingers. A confused gray squirrel appeared at her feet. It saw David, did a double take, sat up on its fluffy tail — and smiled.

  David opened the book and read the first line. “It was a beautiful autumn morning in the library gardens….”

  From the trees, several red leaves fell.

  “Yes,” said Angel, paddling her feet.

  Chuk! went Snigger.

  ‘Library.’ Not ‘librarium,’ David thought.

  The same, but different, Angel commingled. “Read some more, Daddy.”

  David blinked and his thumb slipped off the first page. He pried the book open at a dedication. For Lucy Pennykettle (aged eleven today). “Lucy?” he muttered. He felt the dragon claw buzzing against his heart as the name began to resonate with him.

  Angel pointed down the clearing. Among the falling leaves, a floating image of part of the Tapestry of Isenfier appeared. It was Penny, kneeling down.

  The same, but different, David thought.

  Angel smiled. “Snigger’s got something for you,” she said.

  The squirrel was digging frantically in the dirt, uncovering what appeared to be a small piece of bone. Angel jumped off the tree root, picked up the bone, and handed it to David in exchange for the book. He cleaned the bone against the edge of his jacket and looked at the now-familiar markings. “Sometimes,” he said.

  Angel put out her wings. “Sometimes it will be Lucy,” she said.

  And sometimes it will be Penny, David thought. “When is it Gadzooks?” he asked.

  Snigger leaped off the ground and dissolved with a spray of stars into the book.

  “When the bears come,” she said, with a glint in her eye. “I have to go now, Daddy.”

  “Angel, thank you for this.” He held up the bone. “What does it do?”

  “That will help you find Zookie,” she said. “But only when you’re ready to see him.”

  And in a flash of light she was gone.

  A few minits later, David swept into Aunt Gwyneth’s room. It was not quite dusk, but his father was already there. “Any change?” he asked, peering at the body.

  “None, as far as I can tell,” Harlan said.

  David sent a quick rrrh to the guarding firebirds. One of them reported no activity, the other just jolted itself out of sleep.

  “Where are the others?” David asked his father.

  “Mathew has set off on a tour with Penny, to map the ark’s layout and log as many species as they can. She’s found a delightful book, a guide to animals great and small. I’ve no idea where it came from, but she’s thrilled with it and it’s given her a much greater interest in the boat. Bernard is hobbling about on the middle decks somewhere observing the movements of some small buzzing creatures Eliza calls ‘bees.’ He developed a fascination for them after one landed on his collar while we were eating. A small swarm went past while he was cleaning his dish and that was it, he was away. Eliza is relaxing at the prow of the boat, reading. I haven’t seen Rosa, but then I’ve been asleep for a while.”

  “How’s your eye?”

  “Improved, thank you.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear it. Now, what is it you want to tell me?”

  Harlan slipped his hands into his pockets. During the day, all the men of Alavon had changed out of their robes into more
conventional clothing. For Harlan, this meant a pair of casual pants and a white collarless shirt. The look, though relaxed and informal, appeared to have done little to stabilize his nerves. “I’m still concerned about our corpse. On the boat, Mathew heard her say that her body was broken but not her will. She knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote that message, David. She aims to survive. I used the claw myself in the Dead Lands. Its effect was immediate. So why isn’t something happening with her?”

  David drew up a chair, and sat astride it with his arms resting on the back. “The wisdom from the Higher suggests that Aunt Gwyneth’s auma has been successfully reassimilated into the dark energy of the universe, where it should have no ill effect — though they still recommend we observe her, for reasons I’ll come to in a moment.

  “Everything you’ve said about the claw is correct. It is a relic from Agawin’s time, torn from the foot of one of the most potent dragons known to the Higher, the creature you called Gawain. Strictly speaking, anyone can wield it, but the greater the individual’s resonance with dragons, the more dramatic the outcome will be. It’s capable of complex acts of creation.”

  “Like the ark?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Can it be used to manipulate negative intent? The last time I saw the claw before Aunt Gwyneth got it, it had been stolen by a firebird possessed of an alien force called the Ix. Eliza told me how you dealt with that danger by the way. That must have been quite impressive.”

  David smiled wistfully. “Something to discuss with Strømberg,” he said, “the transformation into the bear. To go back to your initial question, because dragons were essentially spiritual creatures — Gawain, in particular, was highly revered — the claw would react against any form of direct malice. This is how Aunt Gwyneth was defeated. She was attempting to destroy a sensory matrix called the Is, which the Higher control. The claw rejected her harmful intent. That’s how she ended up in the water. But the message she wrote in the boat is different. Any malevolence there was hidden in ambiguity. The claw would respond to a positive plea for life.”