The Seventh Tide (31 page)

‘We already answered that!’

‘You’ve wasted the last question!’

‘I WANT TO KNOW!’ Eo bellowed. ‘Every one of us, put your hand in your pocket and bring out what’s there!’

One Jay responded immediately. She made an elaborate show of reaching into her pocket, bringing out a clenched fist and opening it to show them all what was in it.

Nothing.

She looked as sorrowful as the real Jay would have, at the thought of a wasted chance, but Eo ignored her.

‘Now the rest of us. All together!’ In an undertone, he added, ‘Trust me.’

So they did. They put their hands into their pockets, drew out their clenched fists and slowly opened them…

… and let the sand trickle through their fingers.

Three players with sand from a prehistoric beach in their pockets and one without.

The Kelpie didn’t change. It stayed as Jay. It walked over to the right-hand door and pulled it open. Just before it stepped through, it looked back at them and said, ‘Say goodbye to the Professor for me, will you?’ in a voice so full of sorrowful Jay-ness, they were
all three
swept with an instant of doubt. Then, still gazing at them over its shoulder, it stepped forward into the darkness and dropped from sight.

Eo walked over and peered through the doorway. A hot wind from the depths of the earth ruffled his hair. He stepped back, and quietly pulled the door to. Then, without another word, the three went to the other door and opened it. One by one they filed through into the place beyond, stopped and stared.

They had found the Dry Heart.

18
The Dry Heart

The Heart filled the space almost to the walls, and towered over them in a great circle of multicoloured globes and clouds of sharp-edged light that wheeled round each other in complicated orbits, trailing luminous tracks behind them, like cosmic snail trails. It was as if the internal workings of a gigantic clock had exploded and the bits had formed themselves into galaxies, dancing round each other, criss-crossing and interweaving in space. Faceted shapes passed by, over, under each other, almost touching but never colliding, and everywhere scattering shards of light.

Every time two worlds drew close to one another, a flickering translucent wall would appear, like the Northern Lights or a particularly pretty electric fence. The worlds would flirt right up to their edges but were each time turned away. They didn’t break through.

The movement and light were hypnotic and bewildering, confusing the eye. Without realizing it, the three took a
step closer, and another, drawn like moths to the moon – until a sharp-edged world suddenly swept past, just catching Adom on the arm. He cried out, shocked at the slit in his sleeve and the line of red that bloomed suddenly on his skin.

‘Adom!’

‘It’s all right,’ he said, as they hurriedly pressed back against the wall again. ‘It’s just a scratch.’

‘They all say that,’ muttered Jay, but when she examined the cut she saw it was true. All right, you’ll live. It barely
touched
you, though, and that’s tough cloth. That thing must have been like a razor!’

Adom grunted. The thought of getting close enough to
mend
this Heart was making him feel queasy.

Backs to the wall, they stared intently at the whirling motion.

‘Doesn’t
look
broken,’ Jay murmured after a while.

‘How would we know?’ said Adom.

Eo shook his head in wonder. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in my whole life.’

‘
I
saw a thing once,’ said Jay, still not taking her eyes off the moving Heart. ‘It was really old, from what used to be China, and it was a white filigree ball thing, with a pattern carved out, and inside it was another ball with another pattern carved out of that, and inside there was another, and another. That was a bit like this.’

‘So, how would you fix one of the inside balls, say, if it broke?’ asked Eo.

‘No idea,’ said Jay.

Eo sighed. ‘I was afraid you’d say that.’ He straightened up and stood away from the wall. ‘Stay here. I’m going to have a nosey round.’

‘We’ll come too,’ said Adom.

‘No. Stay here. I’ll be back soon.’ Eo headed off, keeping as far away from any rogue planets as he could, and peering intently up into the Heart.

‘He’s changed, hasn’t he?’ said Jay with a sigh.

Adom gave her a sidelong look. ‘Why does that make you sad?’ he asked.

‘Sad? It doesn’t make me… well, I guess it does. Or maybe just lonely.’ She glanced at him. ‘Growing up. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re crazy for it, and then you get it, and it just feels like stuff ending.’

There was a moment’s intense silence. Then,

‘I –’ Adom began, but before he could say anything more, Eo had returned.

‘I found it,’ he said. He sounded grim. ‘Round here.’

They followed him, hugging the wall, not speaking.

At first they didn’t see what he was talking about. There was so much dizzying movement, it was hard to focus.

‘There,’ said Eo, pointing. ‘Up there!’

And then they did.

A few metres in, two small worlds hung, one blue and one black, frozen in close proximity. The wall of light between them was motionless too. There was a darkened area on it, like a bruise, with a small black hole at the centre.

It was hard to imagine anything more inaccessible than this. Flickering lights and glittering clouds and the eccentric orbits of crystals and spheres swirled and danced between them and their task.

‘Oh, boy’ said Jay.

‘Doesn’t look good, does it?’ said Eo.

‘Look out!’ Adom shoved them all back as the razor-edged world swooped by again.

‘That thing’s out to get you, my friend!’ said Jay with a whistle. Then she frowned. ‘Do you think they’re all diamond cutters in there?’ She nodded at the Heart.

‘Let’s not try and find out, OK?’ said Eo. ‘Let’s just assume.’

‘Don’t panic. All we have to do is think it through. That’s what the Professor would say.’ Jay slapped her cheeks, trying to get her brain into gear. ‘So there’s a hole. So what do you do with a hole? You plug it, right? OK, what did you tell me, Adom? You were plugging up the holes of your boats, in your time, back before you came to me, right? What were you using for that?’

‘Ox tallow,’ said Adom. ‘Stinks like crazy. But I didn’t bring any with me.’

‘OK, OK. What else could you use to seal a hole? Come on, think!’

‘Mud and stones, if you’re a beaver,’ said Adom. ‘I didn’t bring any of them either.’

Jay made a face at him. ‘There are all sorts of sealants at home, but
I
didn’t bring any, and even if I had, most of my stuff got left two levels back from here. What
do
we have?’

‘This.’

They hadn’t noticed Eo ratching about in his bag, but now he was holding something out to them in his hand. Lying on his palm was the small, bloodstained lead ball. The thing that had killed him, all those Tides before.

‘That?’ exclaimed Jay, but Adom nodded slowly.

‘It’s the last thing,’ he said. ‘It’s all we’ve got left. So that must be it.’

‘That’s how I think it works,’ Eo agreed.

Jay was not convinced, partly because the sight of the horrible little bit of metal made her skin crawl, and partly because there was one glaring difficulty with the idea.

‘It’s no good,’ she argued. ‘We can’t get it there. There’s no way we can
throw
it into all that, not with any hope of getting it to land in the right place. The rip’s just too far in, and there’s too much going on in between.’

‘But maybe that’s because we’re looking at it from the wrong angle,’ said Eo. Adom, let me get up on your shoulders.’

He clambered up Adom’s back and balanced himself lightly on his shoulders.

Jay giggled. ‘You look like the ferret!’

‘Very funny. Move over a couple of steps, Adom. A little further. Stop!’ He bobbed his head about, looking more like Hurple by the minute, and then hopped down.

‘I’m pretty sure I can see a way’ he said. A straight line between the rest of all the activity.’

‘But even if there is a way through, how can you possibly throw the ball as
straight
as all that?!’

‘I can’t. I was thinking more along the lines of a marble run.’

‘But of course, just wait till I unpack mine!’ snorted Jay.

‘Ha ha. Here, help me lay this out,’ said Eo.

‘Lay wh– EO!’ she squealed.

He was bald. His hands were full to overflowing with beautiful fair hair, which he was laying out on the ground in a line.

‘What have you done?’ rumbled Adom.

Eo looked up, surprised. ‘What is it? Oh, the hair! We’re going to use it to make a U-shaped channel for the ball to roll down – you know, like in a marble run – and I’m going to get back up on Adom’s shoulders and feed it into the Heart, so that the far end is in the hole, and then we drop the ball on to
this
end and let gravity do the rest!’

‘But, it’s
hair
! protested Adom.

‘Yeah, but it’s
G
hair. It’s very biddable. I just lay it out the way I want it, and then I’ll change its molecular structure so that it’s not so floppy, and then we can shape it to make the run. Really. Trust me.’

‘Oh,
Eo
! It was all Jay could find to say, as she bent to help. At first she couldn’t bear to look at his hairless head, but then, when she did, she saw something amazing. There was already a haze of fluff covering his skull.

‘It’s…’ she gasped. ‘It’s growing again
already
?!

Eo just grinned at her. He began laying the hair out in overlapping sections about ten centimetres wide and several metres long. Then, working with fingers and thumbs, he bent the sides up into a U shape all along the length of it. The hair held the shape of a long runnel, but was not yet completely rigid.

‘I’m going to have to stiffen it as I go,’ said Eo, climbing up on Adom’s shoulders again and getting into position. ‘Feed it up to me now, Jay, and I’ll start sending it in.’

The hair was uncannily warm and felt like silk as she began to hand it up to him. Eo steadied his stance and, using his G knack to stiffen the length of hair into a run, he began to slide it into the midst of the Dry Heart. Carefully, carefully, he fed the cumbersome length forward, until…

‘There,’ he breathed. ‘Jay?’

Jay reached up and handed him the bloodstained ball, then watched, open-mouthed, as Eo placed it on to the run.
Go! Go
! she whispered to it inside her head. Obediently, the ball began to roll, slowly at first, and then faster, and faster as it approached the hole in the divide between the worlds.

Just then the razor-edged crystalline world came swinging past again. They all yelped. It sliced through the run as if it were a sheet of paper. Most of the stiffened hair disintegrated, flying up into the air and hiding everything for the moment in a golden fog. The other end of the run dropped out of Eo’s fingers as he scrambled down from his perch.

‘Careful!’ warned Adom as Eo leaned dangerously close to the perimeter of the Heart, peering intently inside. He took hold of Eo’s sleeve.

‘Come on, come on,’ Eo muttered, but for long moments the glimmering fragments of his hair continued to spread out, screening what they were all desperate to see.

‘Did it work? Can you tell?’

Jay was clutching his other arm so hard it hurt. Adom had shut his eyes and was praying again.

‘I can’t
see
,’ Eo fumed, moving his head back and forth as if to peer between the obscuring particles. ‘I can’t –’

There was a small
ping
, and the ball rolled out from under the Heart and came to rest at their feet.

They all three stared at it in despair.

‘It didn’t work,’ whimpered Jay, and then in a shout,
‘IT DIDN’T WORK
!’

She picked it up and swung on her heel, ready to throw it away in a fit of rage, when Eo grabbed her by the wrist.

‘Let me see,’ he said in a peculiar, tight voice.

Jay was all at once too tired to argue. She let her fingers fall open – and there it was, lying in the palm of her hand. The rough surface of the metal gleamed in the glow of the Heart. It looked utterly insignificant, and yet they’d pinned such hopes to it. It hadn’t looked like much when it came out of Eo’s body either, even though it had his life’s blood on it. Strange how that blood had stuck to it through all the other Tides and now, the ball looked all shiny clean and new again. Shiny clean…

‘Where’s the blood?’ said Adom. ‘It was stained before.’

As one, they turned and looked into the Heart. The bruise between the worlds was gone. There was no hole. A flickering translucent wall made a safe divide as the globes resumed their elliptical dance.

‘It wasn’t the ball we needed to seal the hole,’ said Jay. ‘It was the blood. Eo’s blood.’

‘Heart’s blood. To mend the Dry Heart,’ Adom agreed.

Eo didn’t say anything. He made a sort of croaking noise. He reached up with one hand and rubbed the fluff on his skull. He backed up against the solidity of the wall. Then his knees gave way and he slid quietly to
the floor, a small smile arriving on his face as if from a long way off.