The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (23 page)

As the first drops of rain prickled her face, a noise came from somewhere up above, something between the discordant notes of a bagpipe and a gut-reverberating pipe organ, and a current of air passed over her head. Something big alighted heavily just yards away from her, something all metal thorns and serpentine lengths that glinted in the dimming moonlight.

The wyvern
...

She didn’t know how or why it had come here, but that didn’t seem to matter right now. Dana felt for it with her mind, reached out for it with one hand, and it came forward to her. She took hold of one of the metal spines on the back of its neck. Right at the point where its neck and wings joined its body, there weren’t any spines. Probably it had been designed that way because they would interfere with its smooth articulation. She could sit there... that was where it
meant
her to sit.

It was a struggle to get up. Dana pushed against the wall and pulled with one hand on the spine and the other under the opposite wing. She got her foot up over the neck, and then her knee, and then the wyvern bent its legs and dipped under her, and slid her into place. When it stood upright again and began to walk, it felt horribly unstable to be sitting up on the shoulders of this half-mechanical thing, whose metal surface did not make a secure seat.

The wyvern crouched at the edge of the roof and jumped up onto the wall. Even though Dana had been ready for it, it still startled her and threw her forward on its neck, and she had to grip with knees and hands to stay balanced. The wyvern swayed as it adjusted the grip of its talons. Dana felt dizzy again, and sick. She could make out the texture of the meadow grass far below in the moonlight. If she passed out again now she would fall.

The door flew open and a man burst out onto the roof. Dana froze.

With a sound like a hundred knives being unsheathed at once, the wyvern opened its wings.

The man turned and saw them there. It was Sanderson, and he let out a shout. She felt the wyvern’s sides tauten, down where her feet were. She turned her head to face forward, aware of what was to come next. The wyvern crouched again, and pushed forward by straightening its legs. The motion threw Dana backwards and she clung on grimly. The first stroke of its wings forced her down hard against its back. She crouched over its neck and wrapped both arms around as it began to beat its wings steadily, and to rise towards the massing stormclouds.

Fork lightning started from the dark skies to the horizon, and thunder followed a few seconds later. A squall of rain pummelled Dana’s shoulders and trampolined upon the wyvern’s wing membrane. The cold sensation and the fresh scent of rain-wetted undergrowth and soil carried in the updraught went some way to reviving Dana from her thick-headed vertigo. She adjusted her seating a little, settling her centre of gravity forward and finding chinks in the armour covering the wyvern’s neck to use as handholds.

Light flickered upon the wyvern’s silvery sinews for a fleeting instant as the lightning came again, and thunder was not far behind it this time. Dana thought she caught sight of something else in her peripheral vision, something at the lightning’s source. At the instant of the strike, the flash had uplit something else, a dense clump at the heart of the storm, as though an enormous fortress floated up there.

Dana was getting dizzy again. She wanted to close her eyes and rest, just for a minute. She tried to stay alert, to keep focus on the clouds swirling ahead of the wyvern and the damp air that pressed thickly against her skin. When would they be able to land?

The wyvern didn’t understand the question, but it was transmitting a fear that this place was not safe, that the greater the distance between them and it before they stopped, the better.

The next lightning strike came, followed by the crash of thunder, and behind it Dana fancied she heard distant squawks of crows, and the feeling of many signals. She sensed the wyvern’s fear increase, its body tensing and wings beating faster. Dana held tight and chanced a look over her shoulder. She could make out many dark shapes, following them. Birds. What would the birds do to them?

One time Dana had gone to Pauline’s aunt’s farm, and a hen had flown up in the air and thrown itself at the back of her head. The aunt had apologised afterwards, and explained that it was because the hen was a rare breed that was bred for fighting, and she had chicks and must have mistakenly thought Dana was a threat to them. Despite the explanation, Dana had never much liked chickens afterwards, excepting the ones that were roasted and covered in gravy. She could still remember the panic and the sensation of whirring feathers and hard sharp claws on the back of her neck and scalp as she had fought to get it off.

When the lightning came again, she distinctly saw something this time in the clouds, a shape that was obviously man-made. Yet it wasn’t an aeroplane, for it had no wings, and although she was sure any judgement of scale from this distance must be impossible, it looked
huge
.

Whatever it was, it clearly hadn’t come from the Emerald Forge, and she wasn’t picking up any bad vibes about it from the wyvern. She urged it to fly closer, to the point where she’d glimpsed it in the lightning’s root.

The undersides of clouds glowed with a blue luminescence. A brief parting in the dark sky revealed the moon, and its light was enough to give definition to a silvery flank wreathed in towering stormclouds. As the wyvern made for it, she recognised an insignia engraved within a raised circular area: a stylistic representation of a pair of old-fashioned balancing scales.

The Meritocracy’s symbol... and just as the recognition hit her, she sensed another signal, this time definitely from a computer, but far more complex than any ordinary computer. She tried to decipher it, but exhaustion and the signal’s complicated encryption were too much for her. This had to be an ANT, an Array of Neurotechnology. She had heard of them many times, and how the Meritocracy relied on their raw computing power for analysing the many public referenda which without the country could not be run, but she had never before encountered one, for it was understood that ANTs were all kept in secret locations around the country, and only the Spokesmen and scientists with a licence to use them knew their locations and were able to access them.

Her attempts to decipher it were to no avail, and she thought directly to it, in desperation,
Please help us
.

Not far ahead, she spotted an open gap, a hole in the wall of the sky ship. Dana urged the wyvern towards it. The wyvern skimmed past the reflective surface and plunged for the gap. Dana caught a brief impression of a sort of airlock room, before the wyvern crashed into the wall and exhaled with a loud pipe-organ sound. She pushed herself back into position and looked around as the outer door slid shut, and an inner door opposite began to open.

Three men in dark uniform burst into the airlock. The one who had entered first stared, wide-eyed, at the wyvern and then at Dana sitting on its back. His ancestors must have come from India or some distant place of that sort, because his keen eyes were very dark brown, and his hair was as black as a panther’s pelt. Something about him jogged a memory at the back of Dana’s mind that she couldn’t quite pin down.

He trained the nozzle of a heavy black gun supported by a shoulder strap on the wyvern and started to say something Dana couldn’t make out, and mid-sentence his voice distorted to a squeaky pitch. Dana tried to hold on to the wyvern’s neck, but her hands had gone numb, and when she looked down the bandages on her arms were stained dark red from the pressure of hanging on in flight. Her backside was sliding sideways and she was slipping, but she seemed to have lost all sense of balance and her legs didn’t respond when she tried to grip tighter and right herself. The floor was coming up to meet her. The man dropped his gun and fell forward on one knee to catch her. Dana’s last moment of awareness was the dim sensation of her head hitting his chest, and then she remembered nothing more.

-9-

D
ANA
could feel a mattress under her, and bars of dim moonlight striped the floor and gave contour lines to the sheets and furniture. Were they back in the hospital? “Gamma?” she said, and her lips moved, and the voice from her throat, though hoarse, was her own. She was still in her own body, and Gamma was gone, at least for now. Out of her head. And she wasn’t in the prison-hospital, she remembered, because the moonlight fell in vertical stripes there, from the bars at the windows. The stripes she could see now were horizontal, from Venetian blinds.

Gamma’s gone
, Dana told herself.
Remember
,
I escaped from the Emerald Forge
.

She pressed her head onto the pillow and crumpled the sheet in her hand, taking comfort in their ordinary, physical feeling. And yet, though Gamma was gone, she had been aware of someone else in the room with her ever since she had woken; perhaps from the implacable sound of breathing beneath the limits of her conscious hearing, or some other biological stimulus. She raised her head, and she saw him, sitting there on the side of her bed, in the gap where she’d bent up her knees. He was facing away from the window, his broad back contoured with zebra stripes, but even in the strange moonlight, she could not mistake his face — his straight nose with his spectacles halfway down it, his curly hair flattened into a neat centre parting.

She could scarcely believe it, and yet she clung to the moment, willing against all else for it to be real, for this not to be a dream. “
Ivor?
”

“Don’t try to sit up, Dana. You need to rest.”

“Ivor, is it really?” Dana tried to reach for him, but her forearms were bound up in something, and movement set up a tense pain in the side of her wrist.

Ivor grasped her hand and pressed it back down. “Rest.” She felt his weight shift off the mattress, and he lay down alongside her, putting his arm over her. His familiar smell, so memorable to her after the years since she’d last seen him, was still the same, although obscured behind some kind of aftershave or deodorant. She clutched his hand in both of hers, although his fingers didn’t feel quite so big compared to hers as she remembered, and his wedding ring was missing. The strap of his watch felt cheap and plastic, and she could tell from its signal that it was just a mass-manufactured digital one, not his real one that she remembered.

The mess she’d made at the school and with Eric, the wyvern, what Gamma was doing in the Emerald Forge, everything that had happened, it no longer mattered. All she wanted was to be here, right now, because Ivor had lived and he had not made the wyvern or the other horrors in the Emerald Forge, and he was safe, and nothing bad could happen any more now he was here with her.

“Don’t ever leave me alone again!” she gasped.

His fingers tightened gently on her hand. “You have to rest. You’re making yourself agitated.”

“Keep talking to me.”

And so he spoke to her softly in Gaelic. Dana couldn’t understand a word he was saying; perhaps it was a story, perhaps it was just gibberish, but the sound of his voice after all this time was so very reassuring. A deep sense of peace descended over her, and as she sank back into sleep, his voice filled her dreams, dreams that were strange and wonderful, and so safe and secure.

*

Dana woke in a white-sheeted bed in a bright, unfamiliar room. The walls and ceiling were painted a clean, fresh white, and there was a closed door in the wall facing the foot of her bed. Another bed, empty, stood to the other side of the room. An expanse of bright blue sky showed between the slats of the Venetian blinds. Through the open windows came the sound of birdsong and the slightest breeze.

She turned her head to see a bag on a stand next to the bed, with a tube coming out of it that reached down into the bandage on her arm. The bandages were fresh, without blood seeping through, and the cuts and scratches on her hands had been washed. A disjointed flurry of recollections tumbled through her mind. The Emerald Forge, the wyvern...

Dana sat up in bed. “Ivor?” she called. “Ivor!”

The door opened, and in came a broad middle-aged woman with a big bottom and a big bosom. She had short hair of an artificial red colour, and wore a lab coat with a stethoscope draped around her neck. Dana looked past her into the corridor. “Ivor!” she shouted.

“Well, good morning!” The lady greeted her in forceful, cheerful voice. She picked up a clip-board hanging from the end of Dana’s bed and wrote something on it with a green pen from her lab-coat pocket.

“Where’s Ivor? The man who was here in the night” Dana pointed to the crumpled sheets. She looked at the floor, and at the table beside the bed, where there was a tray holding two fuses, a watch with a cracked face, and a small nondescript electronic device.

The lady frowned, considering for a moment. “There’ve not been any men come in, not since the
Stormcaller
landed and the Commodore brought you in.”

“The what?” Dana looked in confusion at the bandages covering the wounds Sanderson had put on her forearms, and the small plastic tube that disappeared under the edge at her elbow. She tried to recall what had happened, but she couldn’t clearly separate what had been real from what had been dreams.

“Air Commodore Rajani? He’s the one who brought you in. He said he found you and that... thing... when he was out on the
Stormcaller
.”

It came back to Dana hazily. Air Commodore Rajani must have been the man in uniform, and the
Stormcaller
— that must be the thing in the thunderclouds the wyvern had flown up to.

“I’m Jane Tarrow. Everyone calls me Tarrow.” The woman reached over the bed, offering her hand. Dana grasped it weakly, and then let go.

“I’m Dana Provine; everyone calls me Dana.”

The woman laughed.

“Has there been
someone
in here? Anyone?”

Tarrow frowned, not taking her eyes away from the vigorous strokes she was making on the clipboard with her pen. “Only Doctor Blake in the night.”