The Last Dragon Chronicles: The Fire Ascending (24 page)

Just then, three ravens settled on thechair. They folded down their wings andeyed me with distrust. The fourth birdlanded on Gwilanna’s shoulder. Althoughone raven looked much like another, I wasquite sure this was Crakus. He hopped tothe chair arm and opened his mouth. Adragon’s claw dropped into the sibyl’s

lap.

She picked it up, laid it on her palm and stroked it. “About time,” she said, eyeing it greedily.

Craaark!
 
went  Crakus,   demanding

payment.

“Oh, very well.” To my disgust, she imagineered worms on her chair. The ravens plucked them off anywhere they wriggled, gulping them down their black throats, whole.

“So, boy, I suppose you’d like to know where this came from?” She lifted the

claw to the level of her chin, testing the

springiness of its point.

“It’s   Gawain’s.”   His   auma   was

unmistakeable.

“Correct,” she said smugly.

“How did they get it?” The claw was too developed for a wearling’s body. It had to have come from him when he was

grown, though it seemed unlikely that a cowardly raven could get close enough to rip it from a dragon’s foot. And wasn’t he supposed to have turned to stone?

“They stole it,” Gwilanna said, matterof-factly, “from the Inook community near to the island.”

I looked at each of the thieves in turn.

One of them scraped its beak against theice, leaving a smear of blood against thewhite. Another was shaking and holdingup a foot, probably injured during the raid. Crakus was grooming his sleek blackfeathers. But the raven on the highest partof the chair had turned its round eye into

the breeze, as though it was aware of something approaching. It paddled its feet a couple of times, uncertain of whether it should raise an alarm. I swept the ice with Galen’s   sensors.   The   wind   was

quickening,   the   ice   field  rumbling. Something
 
was
 
coming.   Something… heavy.

“How did you know the Inook had it?”

“I travelled along the timeline, of course.” She sighed, as if she expected more of me. “I moved among the Inook as softly as a shadow and watched their history unfolding like a flower. They revered the dragon throughout his short life. When his eye finally closed they organised  a  pilgrimage.   They  went foraging for keepsakes and found his

isoscele and one of his claws. He’d

detached them before he’d turned to stone.

A last gesture to remind this world thatdragons were once a dominant force. The Inook, with their usual superstitious zest,treated the claw as a holy relic and put itaway. A pathetic waste of its powers, ofcourse. It was a simple matter to send mybirds on a mission to retrieve it.”

The bird that was shaking suddenlycollapsed and fell off the chair arm, dead. Gwilanna paid it no heed, but both Crakusand the bird that had been cleaning itsbeak swooped down and began to peck atthe corpse.

“What are you planning to do with theclaw?”

“Well, that’s where you come in.”

At that moment, the raven on lookoutgave a frightened call.

The whole ice field shifted again.

The sibyl sat forward. “What wasthat?” The grin had quickly dropped fromher face.

To my right, the far horizon hadvanished. A slow-moving cloud wasrolling toward us.

“Fly!” cried the sibyl. “Find out what itis.”

The raven on lookout backed away. And all of them proved to be as fickle totheir sibyl as they were to their brethren. For they simply took to the air, circledonce and promptly turned back towardsthe island.

Crouching, I put my hand to the ice.

“They’re coming,” I whispered. I could

feel their auma.

“Who is?” said Gwilanna, twisting to

see.

The Fain said,
 
A multitude. Answering

to his name.

The followers of Ingavar.

“Bears,” I said.

“No!” The sibyl squawked in rage. “Not bears. Anything but
 
bears
 
!” Shejumped up quickly. Her imagineeredclothing dropped away and she reachedinto her old Taan robe – for the tornaq.

Now was my chance. In one movement I swept up the ice chunk and hurled it ather. It had no points or spikes to it, nothingthat could skewer her or take out an eye, itsimply struck her temple and broke into

shards. The impact sent her stumbling sideways. The precious tornaq dropped from her hands. I saw my chance to preserve history and stop the sibyl meddling with time. All I had to do was recover the charm.

If I had still been a humble cave

dweller, a nimble-footed boy with no auma enhancements, I would have done no more than snatch up the tornaq, shake it thrice and leave Gwilanna fuming for all eternity. But that was not the way of it. My act of aggression – the throwing of the ice – had caused the dragon within me to flare. A conflict set in. I wanted the

tornaq; he wanted the sibyl. He planned to destroy her. And his will was strong.

My eyes swivelled as he locked in on

me. The sibyl’s body scent flooded my nostrils. Blood rips appeared at the corners of my mouth. One of my damaged teeth fell out. A tremendous pressure passed through my knees as he squeezed the long muscles in my legs and propelled me into a forward leap. I crabbed my hands. My knuckles cracked. My uncut fingernails stretched in their beds. The pain that this caused was sharp and horrendous,  though  nothing  like   the agonies Gwilanna would have suffered if armoured claws had grown out of my hands. I saw a real glint of terror in her eyes. Even she, with all her sibyl powers, knew she might be cut down in a stroke.

But her blood did not tint the ice that

day.

Two things saved her life.

First, the tornaq changed. The strangetranslucent bird emerged – and flew awayfrom my grasp. But the real damagehappened when Galen attempted to makeme fly.

I fell face down, howling so loudly thatany creatures swimming below the icewould have turned their fins in terror and

fled. My imagineered clothing dissolved and I lay in the cold in the robe I’d grown up in. Along my back, following the line of my shoulder blades, the flesh had opened up in two long rips. The fabric had split, but no wings had emerged. Only muscle, blood and a great deal of pain.

“Fool,” Gwilanna hissed. Her hand came down and picked up the tornaq. It

had changed back into its bone form again. Why? I wondered. Why did it favour her over me? Beyond her, the bears were fast closing in. I could see their faces poking through the mist, overlapping one another as their spirits took form. And I thought I saw something else as well. Just behind the sibyl, a ghostly image of a young boy. He looked for all the world like a smaller

David. I mouthed the name, believing it tobe him. But the boy shook his head as if tosay ‘No, I am not David’. Then the sibylkicked me in the ribs for good measureand I felt her hand take a tug of my hair. The boy disappeared. The bears and theice merged into a blur. The sibyl shook thetornaq and
 
whoosh!
 
we were Travellingthrough time again.

We landed on a bed of warm, hard rock,breathing air that was thick with dragonsmoke. I was quickly gripped by a strangekind of dizziness that had nothing to dowith the cuts in my back or the soreness inmy damaged ribs.

Where are we?
 
I said to the Fain. The

words seemed to hover outside my mind. And when at last the thought beings answered, they spoke as if my ears were expanding bubbles.

Kasgerden
, they replied.

Terror gripped my soul.

A breeze blew across the face of the

mountain. The smoke cleared. A familiar

scene unfolded. There was Voss, hovering in his darkling form. There was I, about to dip my knife into Galen’s fire. But from

that point onward, everything changed. Gwilanna raised the claw of Gawain and

drew the symbol meaning ‘sometimes’ from three wisps of smoke. “Goodbye, Agawin,” she said. In an instant, my two ‘selves’ merged and my awareness was all with the physical body of the boy I had been. But this time I was not about to

triumph over evil. As I tried to throw the knife, Gunn ran at me early. His brute force shouldered me over the cliff. A rock

shower followed me down. Gunn teetered

on the edge of the shaky precipice. He leered at me, fat and ugly in his triumph. Then the edge gave way and he fell with a scream that rang around the mountain long after he was silent. Once again, Gunn had plunged to his death.

But Voss had survived.

And I was surely going to die.

I fell and I fell, with no tornaq toprotect me. But my life did not end at thefoot of the mountain. It simply took adifferent   course   again.   Gwilanna’sdishonest use of the claw had sent signalsrippling through the fabric of the universe,signals which travelled infinitely fasterthan a seer’s apprentice could chance tofall. As the darkling rushed away from mysight, three other creatures filled the spacearound me. Firebirds. One green, one red,one a beautiful cream colour with apricotflashes around her ear tufts. It was she

who spoke to my consciousness saying,
 
Agawin, we are monitors of time and the agents of Gideon. Do not be afraid.

Joseph Henry is with you.

Joseph Henry?
 
I asked. My voice hadthe texture of thickened mud.

But all the firebird said was this:
 
You

have been chosen for illumination. You will die and live again, through the auma of Gawain
 
.
 
All you have to do is give yourself up to it.

I do not want to die.
 
Panic gripped my

heart.

It is a change,
 
she said.
 
Simply achange.

I was floating now, less aware of mybody. All around me, the tiniest stars wereglittering.   I  felt  that  if  I  let  myconsciousness touch one, I would instantlypop into another life.
 
What of Galen?

He will always be with you
.
 
In your

new form, he will not hinder your

progress
 
.

What is the new form?

A hybrid of human, dragon and Fain.

But that is what I am now
.

This time, the energies will be fullycommingled. You will go back, to observe Gwilanna. Joseph Henry has decreedthis. You will be hidden from the sibyl –but always within her sight
.

How? How is that possible?

Choose a star
, the firebird said.
 
Thereare many probabilities. Let your instinctguide you.

So I reached out in search of a different

life. And in a timescale I could not

measure or estimate, I found the star that was right for me, at a point on the timeline

of huge significance, located at a place called Wayward Crescent. I chose, for my dominant form, to be human. And I chose to be born to a very special mother, one who had cause to be close to Gwilanna.

The last thing I remembered before Itouched my mother’s star was the memoryof the child I had seen on the tapestry. Andat last I understood her purpose and herwords.
 
Sometimes, we will be Agawin
,she had said.

But from now on, we would be called

Alexa.

Part Five

In the Librarium

The first time I truly saw Joseph Henry, hewas sitting cross-legged on a deepwindowsill of the 97th floor of the

Bushley Librarium – the firebird eyrie inthe heart of Co:pern:ica. Up until then, Ihad only ever seen the building in visionsor dreams.

Even in silhouette with his back turned

to me, Joseph looked like a very young David Rain – a fact he acknowledged in his opening sentence.

“There was a time when the ice was

ruled by nine bears.”

After a moment a reply came to me, perhaps inspired by the dusty shelves of antique books that seemed to be holding up every wall. “And one of those was a

bear called Ragnar.” I wasn’t sure how I remembered this, but we were quoting from David’s book,
 
White Fire
, one of only two my father had written before his ill-fated journey to the Arctic. It felt like a kind of security test, as if Joseph needed to be sure of who I was. His next two

words were far more welcoming.

“Hello, Agawin.”

“Hello, Joseph.”

“How do you like being Alexa?”

He turned, like dust rearranging itself. He was dressed in a robe of shining white, which shimmered with the promise of dragon scales. He had shoulder-length hair and delicate hands and skin as smooth