Aurora (25 page)

Tuck lies face down in an awkwardly crumpled heap on the harbour rocks.

‘Get up,’ says Oreon, unnerved at the sight of the Pontifix of Ilira sprawled at his feet. ‘There’s no need to beg – your life will be spared. My brother doesn’t want you dead; but he won’t allow you to steal his power. Work with us, Tuck. A great man like you shouldn’t be my brother’s prisoner but that’s what will happen if we can’t agree.’ Oreon’s warrior facade breaks again to reveal an awestruck and eager young scholar. ‘I want to learn from you!’

Mara struggles in the grip of a guard.

‘He’s not begging you for his life,’ she shouts at Oreon. ‘Can’t
you
see?’

With a shaking hand Mara points to the blade that has ripped through Tuck’s windwrap and protrudes from his back like a silver fin.

‘He fell on his cutlass!’

Mara tears free of the guard and runs over to Tuck.

He lies with his face twisted towards her. His wide-open eyes are glassy as watch-faces and the flickering reflections of the burning ship seem to flash the hour, the minute, the very last seconds of his life. Mara pushes away the moon-pale hair from Tuck’s face, feels his neck for a pulse. She puts her mouth to his ear.

‘Hey, gypsea,’ she whispers.

‘Mara,’ Tuck murmurs. ‘Getting dark now.’

And he is gone.

Mara cannot believe it. All these years she thought he was dead, she couldn’t bear to think of him, though some nights he’d steal into her dreams and she’d wake full of desolation, plunged back into that searing moment of betrayal when he vanished into the mountain with her globe. Now, she lays her head against his, overcome once again by a furious sense of loss.

‘He always took whatever he wanted.’ Mara raises her head to look up at Oreon. ‘He took his life from
you
so he could keep it as his own.’

Oreon’s shocked silence shatters. He drops down on his knees beside Mara with an anguished cry, transfixed by the deathly silver fin in Tuck’s back.

‘My brother wants him alive.
I
want him alive! There are things only he knows. The secrets of the globe . . .’

He looks at Tuck in horror, as if he has let a precious relic slip through his fingers and smash on the ground.

Shaking, Mara seizes her chance.

‘The globe is mine,’ she tells Oreon. ‘Tuck stole it from me years ago. I know all its secrets. I know who the Midnight Storyteller is. I know where he must be. I know about the sky cities too. I’ve been
inside
one.’

Oreon drags his eyes from Tuck’s body to Mara.

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you everything,’ Mara persists. ‘Things a scholar of the world
should
know, secrets that can help your brother’s war – but only if you help me find my daughter. She’s being held here somewhere . . .’

A hot wind blasts across the harbour as fire rips through the
Great Skua’s
masts. In the light of the blaze Mara finds what she seeks.

The solitary figure of a girl is running along the deck of the ship.

Mara screams. It’s a scream to kill the moment, to stop it happening, as a flaming branch of the masts droops, breaks and slowly tumbles towards the girl with fox-fire hair.

SURGE

CREEP TO THE SKY

‘
Pan!
’

Fox digs a paddle into the sludgy water of the netherworld sea and heads his canoe towards the broken bridge. The dark path left in his wake lasts a bare moment before the parted green slime slides back so seamlessly it might have lain undisturbed for a thousand years.

Phosphorescence glimmers on the sky towers, sending a magical glow across the netherworld. Somehow everything seems possible at twilight.

Pandora is skateboarding down the great severed arm of the bridge. She skids around a wrecked bus towards a rusted pile-up of traffic near the waterline where the bridge collapsed long ago. The ancient wreckage seems to come alive as she races towards it. A nest of baby swamp dragons, their coppery-green scales in camouflage with the slimy rust heaps, scuttle out. They raise snouts to the sky. Their jaws open. Hungry eyes gleam at Pandora’s approach.

The tiniest wrong move, a mistimed twitch of a muscle or a moment’s lapse of will and she is supper for a family of swamp dragons. Fox holds his breath, and his tongue.

Pan flips the skateboard with a slam of her heel and somersaults over the heads of the reptiles to land neatly on her feet on the crushed shell of a car. She catches the skateboard deftly before slamming it down on a sly dragon snout that pokes from the car’s empty windscreen.

‘See
me
? See
that
!’

Her yell of delight ricochets off the trunks of the sky towers and echoes across the netherworld.

‘Beautiful,’ Fox shouts back.

And she
is
beautiful, standing on the wrecked car like a warrior queen on a battered chariot. Her armoured tunic, made from the bronze scales of an animal called a pangolin, belonged to a Japanese samurai of ages past. She is even wearing a golden crown. Pan has prepared for war as if it’s a game, practising daredevil tricks and weapon skills, forever rummaging in the museum for the perfect battle costume and weapons belt.

‘Kitsune says go,’ shouts Fox. ‘Right away. They’re about to blast the walls!’

Pandora whoops and jumps back on to the skateboard, outwitting the swamp dragons again. At the edge of the broken bridge she skids to a halt to meet the canoe.

Fox stares at her.

‘Where’s all your hair?’

The soft crown on her head is a cluster of curls. The long, tangled mass is gone.

‘Chopped it off,’ says Pan. ‘Can’t go to war tripping over my hair.’

She looks, thinks Fox, like the Botticelli angel in the painting he found caked in mud, as he once found Pan herself.

The helmet and weapons hooked on to her belt clang against her pangolin armour as she jumps into the canoe and sits facing him, flushed and ready. Fox ruffles her sweaty curls – then remembers her betrayal and his hand stiffens on her head. His heart and his mind are burning. What he discovered last night in the Weave has changed the world for him.

‘Ready?’ he says, trying to focus on the moment.

Pan straps the skateboard on her back and checks the lethal armoury of small weapons hooked on her belt. The little brass bugle is strung on a rope around her neck.

‘I was ready moons ago,’ she retorts, and points to a sinister ripple in the water. ‘Dragon!’

Fox digs his paddle into the murky sea and speeds the canoe through the forest of towers that have begun to sparkle with lumenergy, as if the dusk has sprinkled them with frost. He stops at one of the spots where giant swamp creepers climb out of the water into the spiregyres – the air chutes that coil down the sides of the towers, expelling stale air from the sky city into the netherworld, like great lungs.

Nature has forced its way up into the city and no one has noticed.

Fox cranes his neck to map a path up the strongest limbs of the creeper then hauls himself on to the first branch.

‘Come on!’ he urges Pan, who is staring at the city walls.

‘I want to see the walls come down!’

‘It’s not a game, Pan. Climb!’

Fox’s nerves are strained to breakpoint. He rains a ferocious stream of curses down on Pan’s head and she grips the creeper, staring up at him with a look that makes him take a steadying breath. She knows nothing of the world. Now that the world is bursting in, of course she wants to see.

‘Wait till we get into the spiregyres,’ he urges.

‘Just
one
bomb,’ Pan pleads.

Her wish is granted as light splashes across the dark water and a thunderous noise fills the netherworld.

‘Get above the waves!’ Fox yells.

His ears pop. His heart booms. His skin prickles as the blast from explosion after explosion washes over him and bombs tear holes in the night. He takes a stunned second to look back down at the netherworld and sees ragged gaps in the city wall, as if giant fists have punched through.

The ocean crashes in with a roar. Waves break against the towers, soaking him in great thrashes of sea. His eyes sting, he can’t see.

Where’s Pan?

Fox shakes saltwater from his face. But there she is, clinging to the creeper below. Is she high enough to be safe from the surge?

‘Hold tight!’ he yells down.

She looks up, face dripping, eyes full of sea. The incoming ocean is too loud for him to hear the sobbed words on her mouth. She points across the water and in the flash of an explosion, he sees.

The old tower has crumpled and fallen to its knees. The huge cone of the spire tilts forward then breaks off the tower with a death-moan. The spire splinters into pieces and crashes into the water as if made of twigs, not ancient stone.

Sea rushes upon the fallen tower and raids it. A torrent of books spills into the netherworld. The surge reaches deeper into the museum halls and drags out a motley wreckage of paintings, an exodus of stuffed animals, suits of armour and dinosaur bones. The bright tunics from the Chinese room swirl like water lilies on the seething waves.

Pandora begins to climb furiously now, rushing away from the terrible wreckage of their home. Fox lets her go ahead. Her face tells him what’s wrong. Her imagined fantasy of war has been trashed by ferocious reality.

They climb until Fox’s head crunches into Pandora’s feet. She has come to a sudden halt above him.

Fox reaches out and touches the only part of her he can reach – her foot.

‘Steady now, Pan. We’ve got allies in the city, remember. We’ll get through. There’s a new life ahead.’

‘Where?’ Pan demands. ‘With me or with
her
?’

‘Who?’

‘You know who,’ Pan hisses. ‘The Lily girl.’

Fox stares at Pan’s long, webbed toes as they curl around the creeper stem. What happened last night in the Weave still seems like a dream. There’s been barely a moment to think about it but there will be time a-plenty in the long climb ahead.

Pan is scrambling up the creeper again.

‘You said they were
dead
,’ she cries over her shoulder. ‘But I saw you in the Weave. I followed you. I saw you on the bridge with her and I heard what you said. You’re going to dump me in the city and go North for
them
.’

Fox slips on a slimy limb of creeper. He clutches at the sinewy branches with a yell, unable to get a grip. Pan’s heel juts in his face and he grasps hold of it, steadying himself as he looks up at the girl’s hurt, furious face.

‘I said our
connection
was dead. I thought they might be. There’s been no time to talk since –’ He secures himself on the creeper. ‘But you’ve had time, Pan. When were
you
going to tell
me
? You found my daughter, Lily, in the Weave, didn’t you? My
daughter
. Yet you never breathed a word.’

Sirens scream. Flashlights sweep the sea below them. Sky patrols are swarming down from the towers. Gunners on skybikes let rip on the mass of vessels from the boat camp that are now surging through the bombed walls.

Light strikes their tower. An angry buzz fills the night as sky patrols drop from above.

‘Into the spiregyres!’ Fox yells. ‘Quick!’

Startled owls flap in their faces. A dark rush of bats and reptiles scatter in fright as he and Pan scramble up into the shelter of the air chute. Once out of the reach of the searchlights, they pause for breath. Fox wipes the sweat from his face, emotions colliding as he watches the invasion of the netherworld.