Aurora (23 page)

The gypsea scholar raises an eyebrow at the incomer’s imperious tone.

‘No one knows for sure,’ he responds nonetheless. ‘Some say he is a Siberian hermit in a mountain cave. Or a ghost in the airwaves telling the tales of what has been and what is to come. Others say he is a secret rebel in New Jing. Whoever he is, his midnight broadcasts have set the world alight.’

The sturdy fisherwoman jumps to her feet, pointing to a flotilla of gondolas that sweep like dark arrows up the moonlit fjord.

‘The palace guards!’

‘At last,’exclaims Oreon.

He drops a handful of pearls on the table with thanks and the grateful fisherfolk make a grab. Oreon shakes hands with Greyfus, gathers his windwrap around him and hurries towards the end of the harbour.

The fisherfolk watch nervously.

‘There are claw emblems on their helmets,’ one whispers. ‘The palace guards should wear the moon crescents of the Pontifix!’

The claws adorning the helmets of the guard fleet are burnished gold in the moonlight. But Mara can only think of one thing.

Oreon cannot leave. She can’t let him disappear with his watch, the watch with the voice, the only chance she will ever have to find –

What am I doing?
Mara stops dead, heart pounding.
But it’s not for me
, she tells herself.
It’s for Lily.

A scream rips through the rockways.

A creature scampers from the dark alleys out on to the harbour rocks.

Mara sees pointed ears, a long snout, amber eyes and sleek fur glistening in the moonlight.

The wolf pauses, lifts its nose in the air as if sniffing out an escape path, then darts from rock to rock as a rabble staggers out of Ale Alley on the hunt.

‘Wolf!’ the human pack yells. ‘Kill the wolf!’

SEA WOLF

A crack of gunshot. A bullet clangs off a rock. Mara ducks behind the stack of kayaks.

Run!
she wills the wolf as it bounds past. A sudden sense of kinship with this unwelcome intruder from the mountains makes her root for it. But now the wolf is stranded on the outermost rocks of the harbour.

The hunting crowd jeers. Weapons glint as the rabble move in for the kill – then halt as people spot the fleet of guards in the fjord.

Oreon turns. He looks at the wolf. Two bounds, Mara sees, and the wolf will be on his neck. But Oreon smiles. A surprised, amused smile. He raises his hand. A weapon like a silver dagger gleams in his fist.

A thin bolt of light shoots from the weapon.

The wolf gives a loud yelp then crashes into the harbour water among the crush of fishing boats and the incoming gondola fleet.

The lightning-bolt weapon silences the hunting pack. They draw back from the lethal stranger and creep away fearfully to the rockway bars, muttering amongst themselves. When Mara looks around the fisherfolk are gone too, their shacks shuttered up, the table dark, the lamp snuffed out.

Oreon leaps into a gondola. Only once the fleet have surged back up the fjord towards the palace, and the harbour is quite empty, does Mara emerge from her hiding place in the kayaks. She walks towards the spot where the wolf hit the water. She knows what she saw.

The light-bolt did not hit the wolf. Oreon deliberately misfired and hit the rock behind. The wolf
leaped
. And there’s something else Mara is quite sure of . . .

She peers down at the dark water in between the harbour rocks and shifting fishing craft. Nothing. But she waits, holding her breath until . . . at last the surface of the water breaks. Mara lets out her breath in a great gasp as the head of the wolf appears, spluttering.

‘You!’ she cries

The wolf clambers from the water, panting, seawater dripping from its coat. When it reaches Mara it lifts its snout to the moon as if about to howl again. But from under the wolf head, another pair of eyes sparkle.

‘Me,’ says the wolf.

Wing grins and lifts the dead wolf head from his own. He throws off the wolfskin and grabs Mara in a sodden hug. She holds him tight, then holds him at arms’ length.

‘Where is she, Wing? Is Lily safe?’

Wing points towards the sea.

Mara puts her head in her hands, distraught. ‘She’s gone to sea? How could you let her go? Why did you let her come here at all? You
know
this city – we were all lucky to get out alive before. I’ll never find her now.’ A great sob bursts from Mara. ‘I can’t bear it.’

‘Not stop Lily,’ says Wing, stroking Mara’s hair. ‘Lily is like Mara. Wing try keep her safe.’ His head droops. ‘My wolf save me – see?’

He shows Mara the arrow lodged in the dead wolf’s head and the small red wound on the hairline of his brow. Crashing into seawater has reopened the wound and blood is trickling through his hair and down his neck. Mara takes the cloth foodwrap from her bag to bandage him up.

‘My wolf take arrow – bang!’ Wing explains. He points to his head. ‘I dizzy, fall in sea. I see hunters take Lily.’

‘Oh no.’ The fear that has swirled inside Mara ever since Lily disappeared now takes the shape of the vicious hunters who once captured her in Ilira. ‘Is she – Wing, please tell me she’s—’

‘Wing watch.’ He pulls his telescope from his belt. ‘Wing see.’ He points with it to the glimmering palace on its islet in the fjord. ‘Lily
there
.’ Now he touches his head. ‘Head sick from arrow. Wing lie on rocks long time then swim for Lily – men chase me. We go find Lily now!’ he finishes, shaking with emotion.

Relief sweeps through Mara.

Lily is alive. That’s all that matters. She is not lost, far across the ocean.

‘That’s Tuck’s palace,’ she tells Wing. ‘Yes,’ she says to the astonished wolf boy, ‘Tuck is alive. They call him the Pontifix. He changed this city and they talk as if he owns it – and half of the Arctic seas.’ Her eyes harden. ‘But he doesn’t own my daughter.’

‘Guards, Wing warns. ‘All round palace.’

Anything is possible, Mara tells herself. Tuck survived a mountain landslide. Fox found a way through to her, sending his voice across oceans and time. There is always a way.

Hurrying back to the kayaks, she begins to heave one of the narrow boats across the harbour rocks towards the sea.

WEAVE WEAPONS AND DREAMS

Lily clicks open the globe. Clumsy with tiredness, her trembling hands no longer feel as if they are her own. They belong to Tuck, who controls what used to be her life.

Here in her prison in the belly of Tuck’s ship, the chain around her feet lets her walk no further than a water pot or slop bucket or the rough sealskin that is her bed. She is only unchained to work. She must sleep when Tuck says so, and she does; it’s her only escape.

Still, his voice reaches into her dreams.

Go, search, find . . . Tell me . . . what do you see?

Tuck sits across from her at the long table where he has assembled a collection of sea-battered relics. Mysteries for her to solve.
What was this in the old world? What was its power? What did this do?
But rummaging for answers in the ruins of an unreal world is like searching for a single needle on a pine forest floor.

His breath is hot and hungry. His face is too close. Lily slips on the halo, avoiding his parched eyes.

Day and night he preys on her, peering as she scribbles in the globe. But her fingers are too fast and furtive for his weak eyes. The Weave spell is the only thing she still owns in the world, except her thoughts. She will not surrender either to Tuck.

Her head is heavy as a rock. She has no idea if it’s day or night. Time has mulched into one long dimness here in the depths of the ship, as it did in her winter burrow, except there she belonged to herself.

Lily snatches at memories as her old life begins to feel distant, unreal.

Midsummer nights, when the sun moves like a halo around the top of the world, swimming far out on the lake with Wing.

Warm sleepy heaps of little Corey and Coll snuggled up beside her at the sundown fire.

The mournful bellow of reindeer at summer’s end, the saddest sound in the world.

‘Weapons,’ Tuck reminds her.

He wants to know about the weapons of the old world. Weapons are harpoons, knives, spears, arrows, sometimes teeth and fists – but Tuck wants to know about bolts of light that will melt a man and shells full of death that raze cities to dust. Lily must ransack the Weave for lost knowledge of the drowned world that will give Tuck a deadly new power in
this
one.

‘Go,’ he orders her.

And once again she dives . . .

. . .
into the Weave, hurtling down the boulevards, senses on alert, pretending to do Tuck’s bidding – but intent on her own desperate quest.

She keeps a wary lookout for Pandora, but the venomous snake-girl has never appeared again. The only presences have been the weird scuttling creatures of the junk heaps. Lily begins her work, foraging among the sparking ruins, then halts, sensing movement deep within the boulevards. She slips into the shadows and spies a procession of whispering creatures pass between the crumbling Weave towers.

Whatever they are, whatever they’re doing, they’re her only hope.

The procession moves down through the boulevards between ranks of towerstacks at various stages of collapse. Lily follows at a wary distance and watches the creatures enter a dark alleyway. Once the boulevard is empty, she creeps up to the alleyway and sees a bolted door beside a pulsing blue sign. Is this where the whispering creatures went?

DREAM the pulsing sign commands.

An unlit S droops upside down at the end of the word. Lily turns the hanging curve of the S the right way up and it clicks satisfyingly into place.

The bolts slam back. The door springs open.

Lily stares in surprise. So that was the key to open the door?

She steps through the door into a dark passageway. It leads into a hidden wasteland fortressed by the walls of the crumbling towers. The whispers are now an industrious hum – like bees in summer, thinks Lily, clambering over fizzling heaps of rubble towards the huge crowd in the wasteland.

She creeps closer, heart thudding, unable to believe her eyes.

The Weave creatures are gathered around the snake-girl and – and –

A fox!

A fox with vivid eyes and a flame-bright coat.

Noise erupts overhead. Lily glances at the electronic sky. Does the Weave have storms? But the ether is dark and calm, apart from shooting stars of decay.

‘Commander Tuck!’ bellows a voice.

BY TURN OF THE TIDE