Pathfinder (37 page)

“Mara, Mara!”

Gorbals lurches into her arms. Mara hugs him tight and feels him flinch.

“Are you hurt?”

“It doesn't matter,” he assures her, but he is suffering from some pain or injury, she can tell. And he is changed: shaven-headed, thin, and utterly exhausted looking. “I'm so glad to see you, Mara. But no,” he corrects himself. “No, I'm not! If you're here then it means they've taken you as a slave too.”

“No, Gorbals. I'm free and soon you will be too. We're going to get the other Treenesters and all these people and children and escape onto the ships. There's no time to explain—we have to go now. Listen, everyone!” Mara raises her voice to make sure she's heard above the mass of fearful, excited voices. “The city is in breakdown. We're going to escape and make for high land in the far north of the world. We need to get to the ships in the legs of the great towers. Everyone—spread the word and follow me! Grab anything that can be used as a weapon—bricks, tools, anything—and be ready to fight for your lives. Now let's go!”

Grabbing both Gorbals and Wing by the hand, Mara
races back along the sea bridge, into the great arm of tunnel that leads to the nexus, followed by a seething mass of slaves. They have to fight through a posse of guards. Gunfire ricochets off the walls, and Mara hears people scream and fall around her as they are hit, but the mass of slaves—brutal with desperation, makeshift weapons at the ready, their eyes used to the darkness of the open sea bridge—have the advantage over the shocked and confused guards.

They climb the steeply rising tunnel that connects the bridge to the city and head for the maze of the nexus. Mara must find the nearest air vents, as quickly as possible. She tried to memorize their positions on the way in, but there was light then. Now, apart from the glow of her halo, it's pitch dark.

At long last, her halo alights on a vent. With the help of Gorbals and some of the others, she kicks the metal grille until it hangs loose and can be yanked from the tunnel wall. Then, at top speed, she hands out the watertight packages that contain the navigation disks and their penciled instructions.

“We must escape down the spiregyres!” Mara yells. “The sea bridge is too high to jump from and too far from the ships, and the city's electrics have crashed so the lifts won't work. Look for more air vents and jump in! Once you're down, swim for the ships in the tower legs!”

People begin to race along the tunnels in search of escape routes. Mara begins launching people down the spire-gyre.

Gorbals stares into the coiling air chute in horror.

“No, Mara, no! I can't.”

“You must, Gorbals! It's the only way. You'll never see Broomielaw or any of the others again if you don't. Once
you hit the water, swim to the Hill of Doves and I'll meet you there. Quick—go! You're almost free!”

Mara gives him a fierce hug then pushes him brutally into the chute of the spiregyre. She waits a moment, then, with another fierce hug, launches Wing. Then herself. Feet first, she begins the immense helter-skelter on a cushioning blast of waste air down the great spiregyre that coils the entire length of New Mungo's vast towers.

The hurtling spin downward is so petrifyingly violent she is sure it will kill her. Mara screams as she crashes off the sides of the chute, falling through echoes of her own terror, as her voice rebounds through the coils of the spiregyre. She is being spun and battered out of her body, out of her own self.

When at last she shoots out into thin air it's worse, a timeless moment of nothingness, of helplessly falling forever, it seems—until it ends in a colossal black crash of such force she is sure she
is
dead, now. This vast, cold, drowning weight of darkness she has plunged into must be death. All around her are ghostly, glimmering things.
Necrotty
. The word filters into her stunned head, just as she realizes that it's not death but sea. The darkness parts and now, free and light of its dragging weight, she bursts back into the world, up into the miracle of air. She gulps huge greedy breaths of it until at last her body reclaims her self and she is Mara once more, half-drowned, drenched, and reeling—but alive.

The first thing she thinks of is Fox. Has he survived this? All around her people are crashing into the water from the spiregyres, choking and struggling, thrashing and shouting. Wing will be all right, she's sure. He is as much at home in the water as on land. But Gorbals?

“Mara!” A voice splutters above the noise.

“Gorbals! Over here!”

They struggle through the mass of thrashing bodies, toward the sound of each other's shouts.

“We're alive!” he gasps. “I thought I would die!”

“Swim hard!” cries Mara. She doesn't want to think about that terrifying spin down the spiregyre ever again. “Swim to your island. Oh, but which way is it, which way?”

“Look, there's the arm of the broken bridge,” Gorbals splutters, as a wave hits him in the face. “I know where we are—this way!”

The world is erupting all around them. Alarm bells are clanging, shrill and harsh, and gunfire hammers the air as tens, hundreds, thousands of crying, yelling, screaming men, women, and children, the captive army of New Mungo's slaves, crack the city open and rush upon the waters of the netherworld in a mass breakout, a human explosion of trapped rage.

“What have I done?” Mara cries in panic. “Oh, what on earth have I done?”

“Mara, you haven't done this.” Gorbals swims closer to her, bewildered at the cascade of bodies around them. “This is immense, it's—it's …”

Mara is numb with the shock of what she has unleashed.

“Keep going, Mara, keep swimming. Look! Here's a raft.” Gorbals hauls and pushes her onto a metallic junk vessel and swims behind, holding on for support.

Mara wants to flop, trembling, into the junk raft but she sees how Gorbals is struggling and realizes how weak he must be from the shock of release and from his harsh term of slave labor. And he was in pain too. So she begins to use her arms as oars and now they move more steadily across the dark waters toward the Treenesters' island. Mara can still hardly believe that she has found Gorbals
and Wing, that she actually rescued them, as she set out to do. Gorbals looks so unlike himself with his head shaven and his strawlike locks all gone. But he's alive.

“Can you see Wing?” she cries. It's almost impossible to see anything in the thick dark of the netherworld.

Gorbals peers through the water, his owlish night vision stronger than hers.

“Over there! It's the ratkins! Look at them go!” Gorbals exclaims.

A mass of urchins surge past, moving across the dark water in an arrow-flock, like birds or fish, as if they know exactly where they are going.

Mara can't tell if Wing is among them; she can only hope he is.

The raft hits land and they stagger onto the Hill of Doves, up to the clearing where the Treenesters have hidden themselves among the branches. A mass of huge eyes stare down in shock at the chaos that's been unleashed in their world. There's a cry and Broomielaw jumps down from a tree. She seizes Gorbals in a fierce, frightened embrace, then Mara. Her amazed eyes say what she is too overcome to put into words.

“Mara, what's happening?” cries Molendinar, landing on the grass beside her with a thump.

One by one the Treenesters drop down from the trees.

“There's no time to explain but you must all hurry and follow me to the ships in the city towers,” Mara declares.

“Ships?” gasps Broomielaw. “You mean you've made it happen? We are going to be free? Then this really is the stone-telling?”

“And you really are the Face in the Stone!” declares Gorbals. “I knew it.”

“All I know,” says Mara, trying to keep a cool head, “is
that we need to move very fast, if we want to escape. Now hurry, everyone!”

“Candleriggs! Quick! Come down! Mara has saved us!” Broomielaw yells up to the greatnest. Then she reaches into a tree nook and pulls out a twig lantern cage.

“See! I looked after him for the ratkin. Did you rescue him too?”

Mara looks inside the twig cage and instead of moon-moths there is the sparrow—Wing's bird friend.

“Yes, and I just hope he's still safe. Look after his bird, Broomielaw, and we'll try to find him. Now, quick! Everyone to the rafts.”

“
They come! They come in glorious march!
” Gorbals is chanting in wild delight. “
As they dash through skill's triumphal arch, or plunge mid the dancing spray
. That long-ago poet saw all this too, Mara.”

But Mara is in a panic, piling everyone on the rafts and helping Ibrox to push them off onto the waters. What's keeping Candleriggs and Broomielaw? Baby Clayslaps is clinging around Pollock's neck, whimpering for his mother.

“Stubborn old woman!” Distraught, Broomielaw runs down the Hill of Doves. “Mara—please go and talk to Candleriggs—she says she won't come. All these years she's waited for the stone-telling and now it's happening, she won't be part of it!”

Mara rushes back uphill to the greatnest.

“Candleriggs!” she cries in panic. “You must come now! This is our only chance.”

“The stone-telling was never for me, Mara,” the old woman's voice calls down from the branches of the oak. “It's for you and the others. That's your future. My place is here. Go now.”

Mara remembers Tain's refusal to leave his island home
and wonders what she can do if the old woman really has made up her mind to stay.

“Listen to me!” Candleriggs shouts down, straining to be heard above the clangor of New Mungo's alarm bells. “I am the last woman of a generation of Earth people who no longer exist. I have lived a life no one else will ever live. Soon I'll fall from the world like a leaf from a tree. I will be as I am until the very end of myself. But Mara,” the old woman's voice drops so that Mara can only just hear, “just tell me one thing. Is he still alive?”

“Yes,” Mara calls up. What else should she tell?

Candleriggs is peering down through the branches, watching the thoughts flit across Mara's face.

“He never forgot you, Candleriggs. He wears a white lily right next to his heart—it's the symbol of the New World. He wants to shine its image from the moon.”

The old woman looks up through the branches of the great oak to the vast city in the sky.

“Well, then,” she says at last, and Mara will never forget the world of emotion in those two words. “He's in his greatnest and I'm in mine. Each as stubborn as the other, neither of us forgetting the other. But I could never have lived in that tree, Mara. I could never enjoy its necrotten fruit.”

“No,” says Mara.

“Go on now. I'll stay right here. This hill has been my home my whole life and why would I leave it now?” There is a pause, then: “Despite everything, I wish I could see him just once before our time in the world is gone.”

“You want to go back up to New Mungo?”

The idea of this gnarled, owl-eyed ancient in her tattered earthen clothing standing amid the gleaming chambers of the Nux is too outlandish to imagine. And could she really
bear to meet Caledon again, after all that's happened? A sudden thought strikes Mara. Maybe Candleriggs
should
stay here in the netherworld.

“Candleriggs, look in the old university. You might find someone there who has searched a whole universe for the truth but only you can give him the answers he needs. I just hope he's gotten there safely.”

Mara's voice breaks with fear and Candleriggs's eyes grow even larger.

“His name is David,” continues Mara. “My Fox. He's Caledon's grandson. You're the only one who can explain his grandfather and the story of the past to him. And maybe you can help him with the future. He's a rebel just like you. He wants to revolutionize the New World. If anyone can do it, he can. But he's all alone, Candleriggs, and I—I can't stay.”

Through her own tears, Mara sees the painful splinter that's been stuck in the old woman's heart all these years melt like ice. The meltdown fills her eyes and streams down the deep lines on her face.

The old woman reaches into her nest. Two things land with thumps on the mossy ground.

“Take these, Mara Bell!” cries Candleriggs. “They look just your size. I've kept them clean and polished all these years, and never once wore them. Maybe I was keeping them for you.”

Astonished, Mara picks up a pair of the most beautiful shoes she has ever seen—gleaming red leather shoes that look as good as new.

There's a clunk and a glug as something else lands on the grass.

“Take that too,” calls Candleriggs. “Drink to me in your new world. But go now! Hurry!”

Mara picks up a tall glass bottle full of a fizzing amber liquid. She can just make out the words on the bottle's scratched metallic screw cap: Irn-Bru. With no time left for questions she zips the bottle and the shoes in her backpack.