The Last Dragon Chronicles: Fire World: Fire World (23 page)

“This is an agent of the universe,” they said.

Oh
, thought Aurielle.
 
That was better.

“This is not its true form.”

“May I see its true form?”

There was a humming sound within the Is. “It can only be a moment, a shimmer intime. It will be here but not here. Seen but

not seen.”

“I  understand,”   said  Aurielle.   A glimpse was all she wanted.

A glimpse was all she got. Right before her eyes, the ‘bone’ stopped moving and physically changed shape. It happened so quickly that she almost sneezed and blew the apparition to the far side of the dome. But there, so faintly trans:lucent that it was almost lost amongst the pulsing stars, Aurielle saw a hint of how her kind would

evolve. Not into larger birds. Not even into dragons. But a creature somewhere between the two. The image was there in a blink and gone. She barely had time to take it all in. But the one thing she couldn’t

fail to notice was a feature she had always envied  in  dragons. A  physiological improvement on the firebird anatomy that filled her with the greatest excitement ever. She paddled her feet in the Is and was joyous.

Someday, firebirds were going to have

paws
 
.

12

One thing Aleron had not explained to Aurielle during their conversation about Rosa was how the Aunts were treating thebooks. Thankfully, he had not been thereto witness Aunt Primrose savagely tearingout random pages, but he had found theshocking results of her wickedness whenhe’d flown by the blocked up windowspace. What a terrible thing it was for acaring firebird to register the distress ofripped up words, crumpled in their paper,dying and forgotten. He’d found a ball ofthat paper lying on the ground at the edgeof the daisy bed and had straightened it outas best he could. But it was never going tobe as clean and sharp as the day the words

had been put onto the page. There, in those wrinkles, was the sadness of the eyrie in microcosm. Aleron had burned it, to relieve it of its suffering, and blown the ashes over the daisy fields. One shred of paper, at least, was at peace. But the books could not tolerate much more stress.

Rosa had been coming to that same conclusion. She too was not immune to the sadness around her, but had so far sat back and done nothing about it. But as time went by and the librarium’s mourning seemed to be growing worse, she began to wonder what the Aunts were up to. To her relief, they had not gone round the building wrecking shelves or tearing down books. She was grateful for that, but she was still suspicious. They had practically ignored her since that first day

of scrubbing and had kept themselves confined to the room she had cleaned.

What, then, was the nature of their ‘re:assessment’? What could they assessfrom one small part of a building as hugeas this?

On the third day, curiosity got the betterof her and she crept downstairs toinvestigate. Most rooms in the librariumhad no doors, and those that did wererarely closed. The Aunts’ door was notonly closed but had a large ‘KEEP OUT’sign hanging off the door knob. For thefirst time, it occurred to Rosa that theblocking of the window had nothing to dowith draughts or cold. The Aunts just didnot want to be seen. She stooped downand put her eye to the keyhole. It wasstuffed with paper. She raised her fist to

knock, then thought better of it; if they were this keen on secrecy they weren’t going to let her in on a whim. Politeness, then, was not an option. But how could she, a girl with no fain, possibly distract two powerful Aunts?

She took the problem to her hammock that night. As she tossed and turned between half-sleep and worry, her mind seemed to fly around the walls of the librarium as if she was spinning on a carousel of books. For the first time in her life, she realised she was dreaming. Or was it that the building was leading her somewhere? It had done this many times in her waking life, but that had always been in response to her intent. This time the intent seemed to be that of the building. And so it proved to be. In the middle of

the night, with the moon outside her window, she woke with a start, swung out of her hammock and started to run. She arrived breathless in a room on Floor 11

and skirted the shelves, almost tearing down the books until she found the volume she was looking for – the title the building had put into her mind:
 
The Properties of Mushrooms
 
.

Mushrooms. She had heard Mr Henrysay something disparaging about thesethings once. How they were prisoners ofthe dark and grew in damp corners in themuggy cellars beneath the librarium, onlyfit   for   consumption   by
 
Aunts
, whocouldn’t get enough of the horrid things,apparently. Rosa had been very young atthe time and had not understood this little

rant, but she
 
had
 
taken note of it. Aunts

liked mushrooms. And now here she was with a strange book about them and two scheming Aunts in a room downstairs. But what did the building want her to do? As if it sensed her confusion, a sudden breeze swept through the room, rapidly turning the pages of the book. Three firebirds (Runcey being one) had just flown in. They looked at Rosa and she at them. “You too, huh?” she said, knowing full well they’d been drawn here, as she had. She glanced at the open book. On the page was a glossy digi:graf of a basket made from woven grass. In it were a number of strange grey objects with spongy stalks and purple spots on their rounded caps. Rosa read the caption beneath.
 
Purple spotted mushrooms are edible
 
,
 
but will induce drowsiness if eaten in quantity
 
.

She smiled and patted the librarium wall. Suddenly, a plan had formed in her mind.

“These. Where will I find some?” shesaid. She turned the book around andshowed it to the birds. They looked at oneanother and exchanged a few
 
rrrhs
 
. “Tonight,” she said, tapping it. “It has tobe tonight.”

The following morning, Rosa returned tothe Aunts’ room carrying a tray. On it wasa pie, oozing tails of steam from a cross inthe centre of its pastry crust. Beside thepie were two large spoons.

She knocked on the door.

Predictably, a voice said, “Go away.”

“It’s Rosa, Aunts.”

“We know who it is.”

“I’m sorry for my absence. I want to

make it up to you.”

“We don’t need you. We’re busy in here.”

“I thought you might be hungry. I’ve cooked something for you.”

“ Go
 
away
, girl. We can imagineer anything we want.”

Rosa chewed her lip. Not for the first time, she wondered about the wisdom of what she was doing. If it all went wrong, the consequences would be dire. She steadied herself. Brave. She must be brave. “It’s mushrooms, real ones, baked in a pie.”

There was silence on the other side of the door. “Mushrooms?” said a voice.

One Aunt to the other.

“They grow… erm… at the back of thelibrarium. I’ve had some myself. They’re

very—”

The door whipped open a crack.

“—tasty.”

Aunt Petunia’s dark gaze scanned the tray. “It is a pie,” she hissed back over her shoulder.

“I can smell it,” said Primrose.

Aunt Petunia’s nose began to twitch. Rosa could swear that the old woman’s

bow tie was trying to spin.

“Bring it in,” said Primrose.

“Not you,” said Petunia, extending a forbidding hand towards Rosa. “Give me the tray and be gone from here, girl. You can pick it up later and then clean the dish – twice.”

Rosa held the tray out. “Do you needany help? What exactly are you doing inthere, Aunt?”

“None of your business,” the old woman snapped. And she snatched up the tray and forced the door shut.

Rosa stared at the blank brown door for

a moment. That hadn’t gone quite the way she’d hoped, but the Aunts had taken the bait nevertheless. She wiped her palms, one across the other. “Enjoy,” she whispered with a smug little grin. And gathering her skirts about her knees, she went and sat primly on the stairs.

In the shadows behind her, the firebirds waited.

For several minutes they listened to thegreedy clink of spoons. Then there came aloud, rather crude spell of burping. Then abrief spell of silence. Then the mosthideous, laboured snoring, so potent that itmade a loose board on the stairway hum.

“I think that’s done the trick,” Rosa said, jumping up. “OK, guys, how do we get in?”

If she was expecting that the birds would speak some kind of dragontongue and open the door in the way David had done upstairs, she was wrong. This one was locked by a regular key. The only way in was via the window. Aleron reached it first and began to pluck out the pieces of paper. But this was all taking too long for Azkiar. With a loud and impatient
 
RRRH!
 
he ordered Aleron out of the way, then launched himself, feet first, at the wall of books. He hit them at tremendous speed. With a bang, they collapsed inwards. Rosa ran forward and cleared the remainder, then climbed through the window and into the room.

The Aunts were laid out in the middleof the floor, each with a spoon in hand. The pie dish was on its side and empty. Apart from that, there seemed to benothing amiss. The books were mostly inplace on the shelves. And though they’dbeen moved around or laid down flat, theydid not appear to be damaged in any way.

“What are they doing?” Rosa mutteredto herself. It occurred to her then that the Aunts might have simply been
 
reading
 
thebooks and that she had misjudged theirintentions horribly. If that was the case, ohwhat a trial she had to look forward to.

Knocking out a pair of Aunts for no reasonwas sure to see her banished to the Dead

Lands for life.

Rrrh
, went a voice across the room.

Aurielle had landed on a bed in the

corner, where she had found some kind of flashing device. Rosa made her way over, stepping across the legs of both Aunts to get there. (Azkiar and Aleron were perched on the Aunts’ chests, guarding the women, their ear tufts lifting every time the Aunts snored.)

Aurielle nudged the device with her beak. It was a thin, flat pad, about half the size again of a standard book cover. It had a sleek black screen, which appeared to have a number of thumbprints on its surface. Flashing lights were jumping back and forth across the bottom, as if the device was waiting for an input. Rosa had never troubled herself with elec:tronics

and hadn’t sent a single :com in her life. Even so, she picked up the pad and pressed her finger to a likely area of the

screen. It lit up at once. A message invited her to ‘Scan Object’. She looked at Aurielle. The firebird frowned.
 
Object?
 
thought Rosa.
 
What object?
 
And then it struck her: the books, of course. She picked one off the bed and slowly brought it into contact with the pad. To her horror, the pad came alive. Numbers. Lights. Menus. Colour. They all appeared on the screen at once. At its centre was a window more active than the rest. And

though the data stream was moving far too quickly to gauge what it was, Rosa was sure that the device was uploading the contents of the book. A great wave of anger rose inside her. But worse was to come. For that was not the end of the process. Suddenly, the pad gave a little beep and a new question appeared on the

screen:

Rosa pulled the book away in aninstant. The device immediately asked ifshe wanted to cancel the procedure. Shescreamed and hurled it across the room,then ran to the nearest shelf of books. Shepulled one down and opened it. For onemoment nothing happened. But as shetilted the book, the full stops, the commas,the question marks, and eventually thewords themselves all began to slip fromtheir places on the page until they werefalling like ash around her feet.

“No,” she wailed. She sank to herknees, clutching the book to her heart.

They were dead, all of them. She knewit at once. Their auma taken. Their power

destroyed.