space.
“I suppose congratulations are in order,” he said. “When’s the unhappy wedding taking place?”
“Do not mock me,” the Shadow Prime hissed. His tail swung upwards. For the second time that day, David found himself leaning away from a sharp object close to his throat. “A scratch is all it takes to
begin your inversion. And I can make it very unpleasant. Even an illumined Fain construct couldn’t fight the spread of the Shadow through its auma.”
David rolled his eyes sideways. The barbed end of Voss’s tail was stirring the air beneath his left ear. “So, you know a
few things about me…Voss. But where exactly do
you
fit in?”
“You’re looking at Gwilanna’s father,” said Zanna.
“Silence!” barked Voss.
Zanna lowered her head.
“So, you
are
human,” David said. He
moved the tail aside with the back of his
hand. “Or you were.”
Leaving David with a lingering look of contempt, Voss drew away and stalked towards Rosa. “So this is the clone?”
“Technically, yes,” David said, following after him. He signalled to Rosa not to speak back, though the sight of Voss had all but muted her. “All the more
remarkable because she’s not a
Co:pern:ican construct. She’s a natural-
born. Quite a rarity in her world. They could almost be twins, don’t you think? Except one of them is… ” He smiled at Zanna, who looked, for the first time, slightly uncomfortable with Rosa present.
Voss raised a hand to Rosa’s cheek.
Out of what used to be fingers came a setof bedded claws. Rosa screwed her eyesshut and turned her face away.
“Let her go,” said David, coming tostand at Voss’s shoulder. “She’s no threat
to the Shadow. It’s me you’re after. Why
do
you want us – me, by the way?”
“Tell us where Alexa is,” Zanna said bluntly.
“Ah, yes. Alexa.” David raised a finger. “Our lovely daughter. Lucy’s only niece.”
Lucy stared ahead without evenblinking.
“Well?” said Voss, turning towardshim.
David opened his hands. “I don’t
know.”
There was a pause. Gazes flickedacross the chamber like lasers. Voss was
the first to speak.
“Take the girl to the upper ledges.”
Lucy and Tam grabbed Rosa’s arms.
“What? Hey! No. Let go of me! David!”
“All right, stop!” he cried.
Voss gestured them to halt.
David took a breath and ran a hand
through his hair. “Alexa is illumined. She
could be anywhere in time.”
Tam pulled on Rosa’s arm again.
“She was at Scuffenbury with you!” David said, putting himself in front of the commander. He grabbed Tam’s wrist and turned the palm uppermost. “
Find the bear inside you
,” he whispered, before Tam threw him off. “Why were you three ‘selected’ and not her?”
“She wasn’t there,” said Zanna. “Something moved her.”
“Not me,” David said, as sincerely as he could. He opened his jacket as if to prove he wasn’t hiding her. “I swear, it wasn’t
me
.”
“Take the clone,” said Voss.
“No!” David shouted. And this time, he
tried to transform. He flickered between
the shapes of Ingavar and Grockle before collapsing, exhausted, to the rock floor:
human.
In his prison above the lava pile,
Gawain roared.
David looked up, hearing Rosa’smuffled shouts. She was being draggedaway, with Tam’s hand clamped hardacross her mouth. David lowered his
head. His hair fell forward. “What will
you do with her?”
Voss suppressed a chuckle. “Do you really have to ask? You have until nightfall to think of all the interesting ways I could kill her. Tell us where the child is
and the clone will be spared.”
“Spared? For what?”
“She will be inverted.”
A look of fury swept across Zanna’sface. “Inverted? That wasn’t what we
agreed.”
David propped himself onto one elbow, laughing. “Oh, dear. Now, that
is
rich. A darkling demonstrating signs of jealousy. Unless, of course, it’s the human inside her still fighting to get out?”
Voss responded to this by opening his mouth and issuing a jet of dark fire. David rolled away from it just in time. When he looked back at where he’d been lying, the surface of the rock had been eaten away, leaving a shallow bed of steam.
“Final warning,” the Shadow Prime said.
“I didn’t take Alexa,” David repeated. He stood up, loosening his collar. “There are other explanations. She was holding Gadzooks; he could have moved her.”
“I told you,” said Zanna. “The time shift erased the Pennykettle dragons.”
David shook his head. “I very much doubt it. The dragons weren’t an act of random creation. Liz made them with
definite intent. A record of them must exist
within the Is. They could be in this timeline, just not in that form. Then there’s Joseph Henry, of course.”
Voss looked at Zanna. “What’s he
talking about?”
“Elizabeth Pennykettle’s unborn son.
He transferred his auma to one of her
dragons. It was at the hill with us.”
“Clever little soul,” David said. “Powerful enough to turn a fully-fledged darkling back to the light. Also unaccounted for… right?”
Voss stamped forward and pushed hiscallused face near to David’s. “Your
threats mean nothing to me, Fain. Where was this unborn spirit when the Shadow was taking control of the Earth?”
“That’s a very good question,” David said, quietly. “One you should give some serious thought to. What exactly do you want with Alexa?”
Voss stood back, cracking his joints.
“Show him what we found.”
“Is that wise?”
“I said
show him
.”
Zanna gave an obedient nod andstepped out of sight for a moment. Shereturned carrying a large old book. “Whenwe overran the Fain we discovered their
secret.”
She showed David
The Book of
Agawin
.
Trying not to betray anything more thancasual interest, he reached out to take it. “Where did you get this?”
Voss’s tail came down with a thwack
across the cover. “You know of it?”
David shook his head. “I knew a boy ofthat name once. A seer’s apprentice. Hewas taken by Gwilanna just before timechanged. I don’t know why. I assume youdo?”
“The boy had a nasty fall,” Voss said. “Off the slopes of Mount Kasgerden.”
Agawin, dead? David bit back his anger. “I don’t know this mountain. Why would Gwilanna take him there?”
“To resurrect me. To give me
life
.”
“At Agawin’s expense?”
The Shadow Prime levelled a weary
smile. “A minor sacrifice to aid the rise of
the Shadow.”
David backed away, throwing out ahand. “That’s what all of this is about?
She altered time to save
you
from death?”
“What child does not grieve for itsfather?” Voss snapped.
David looked at Gawain. The dragonwas silent now, moodily tenting his wingsagainst the heat. “And yet she’s subdued inthe body of your enemy. How did thatcome about?”
“Voss, he’s asking too many questions,”
said Zanna.
“And what can he do with the
answers?” he sneered. “Our poor,
weakened agent of the Fain?” He turned away from David and bellowed at Gawain. “She was a disappointment to me. She brought me back believing she could take her revenge for being made into the child she was. But the claw she had
used dissolved to ash and she was
powerless against the Collective. Even then, I offered her a chance of retribution. Because she had held the dragon’s claw, her auma resonated powerfully with the beast. She was able to be close to him
when he died.”
“So she did catch his tear?”
Voss gave a quick snort. “When themoment arrived, she was fearful, penitent;she tried to use magicks to keep us awayand send the fire tear back to the core.”
Gwilanna? Penitent? David shook his
head. This really
was
a bizarre timeline.
Voss’s dark eyes blazed with triumph. “We captured the creature in its dying semi-stasis, moments after the tear was shed.”
David glanced at the crestfallen dragon. Now that the rage had died away, thesadness in him was crushingly apparent. “And what did you do with Gwilanna?”
“She was a traitor to the Ix. She had to
be punished.”
“You killed her? You killed the
daughter who’d saved your life?”
“I gave her what she craved, what she
dared not take herself.”
“We extracted her auma,” Zanna put in,
as if to offer some attempt at remorse.
“And the body?”
“Weak,” Voss grunted, “unsuitable for
inversion.”
Thrown away, pecked at by ravens
,thought David. For the first time, he pitiedthe crazed old sibyl. “How did you bindher auma to Gawain? True illumination
requires both physical bodies to be
intact.”
Voss dismissed this with a wave of his
hand. “The Shadow performed a
trans:morphic implant.”
“So, her auma drives his physical body?”
“Controlled through my command,” said Zanna.
“
Your
command?”
“Her sibyl tendencies are still intact.
Gwilanna obeys my greater will.”
“No.” David laughed this off. “Hewon’t remain stable. Not for long.”
“Long enough to do my bidding,”snarled Voss. “Let me tell you the bestpart, Fain. When the dragon was turned,the tear’s journey was suspended. Wefound it here, in this hollow in the island. We used its power to hasten the inversion. And now it’s leading us straight to thecore.”
David looked at the pool of lava. Heshook his head in confusion. “I’m sorry,but all this talk of betrayal has made medrift off the point somewhat. Satisfy mycuriosity, Voss: Why does the Shadowwant to destabilise g’ravity, disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field and bring the entire
galaxy to the point of collapse?”
“We come from a world of fire,” said
Zanna.
“I’ve… ” ‘read that’ David was going to say, until he realised that Zanna had quoted from
The Book of Agawin
. His blood ran cold. “What do you mean?”
“W hat’s
the
unanswered question, David? And before you come up with your usual, fatuous response, I’ll tell you. How did a universe as large as this appear from a singular microdot of space? Where did all this
Is
come from? And please don’t tell me you believe that nonsense about Godith. That was a story generated by the Fain to keep their inquisitive Premen at bay.”
David steepled his fingers – a prop for
his rather vacant expression. “So… ?”
“We’re living in a microcosm. A blip that bubbled off from an infinite sea of
white fire. The gateway to all creation is here. Right at the heart of this inconspicuous but rather special planet. It’s all in the book.”
Then why didn’t I read that?
he wasthinking. And his mind flashed back to thegreat librarium, the last place he had seenthe book. That thought reintroduced him tothe firebirds and for some odd reason, Joseph Henry. “I wouldn’t believeeverything you see in print.”
“Funny,” she said. “Maybe this willchange your mind.” She turned to amarked page and opened it for him.
And there was a picture of a child with
wings. Beside it, a squiggle of
dragontongue. It said:
ALEXA. GATEKEEPER. PROTECTOR OF
HUMANKIND
.
“Gatekeeper,” said Zanna. “When we have her, we’ll be able to open the core. The dragon is simply preparing the way.”