Last Dragon 6: Fire World Read online

  “Agawin,” Thorren Strømberg said.

  Agawin. Rosa repeated it to herself. The name had an interesting chime. “Who’s he?”

  “I’m hoping you and David will find out.”

  She looked worriedly at the boy. His condition hadn’t changed. “How?”

  “Through your work, that’s all. Through patience, diligence — and faith. I don’t believe it was coincidence that brought you two together or that made you discover the location of this book or that made the firebirds point you in the direction of dragons. I think they want answers just as much as we do. I want you to change your intention, Rosa. From now on, when you’re putting the books into order, ask the librarium for something else. Ask for guidance about this author and for the means to translate this text.”

  Rosa blew a short breath. No pressure, she thought. “What language is it? Do you know?”

  Strømberg bobbed his head. “Well, it only ever appears in other books about dragons. So … Charles, do you want to tell her?”

  Mr. Henry cleared his throat. “We believe it’s evidence of their existence, Rosa. We don’t know, of course, how the creatures would describe it, but we like to call it ‘dragontongue.’”

  20.

  At the same time that the rain had begun to fall on Rosa outside the Bushley librarium, it was falling on Eliza in the Dead Lands, too. It was the final irony, she thought. Abandoned, lost, endangered by memories (if Aunt Gwyneth was to be believed), and now getting soaked as well. The only thing that seemed to make sense to her was the piece of clay in her hands. As the rain came down and droplets ran off its smooth gray surface, Eliza let her fingers instinctively work it, using what she needed of the rain to help her. Slowly, an object came together in her hands, though it seemed to possess no useful shape. It wasn’t even circular, more … what was the word she’d heard Harlan use to describe graf:ical data of unequal distribution? “Lopsided.” That was it. The thing was lopsided. Fatter, more globular at one end than the other. Imbalanced, but somehow perfect for it. And once she’d settled on the basic shape, it seemed right to her to want to make dents, or pits, all over its surface, until each pit had a smooth finish she could only describe as … She squeezed her eyes shut. Her equilibrium rocked. Her fain-free mind was working so fast that her head literally shook as she tried to identify the unfamiliar images flashing through it. All around her she could feel the Dead Lands responding, pulling at her senses, wanting what she knew. Her thumb passed over the object again, reexamining its textured surface. And suddenly, the word she was seeking came to her. “Planished.” The surface of the object was planished.

  At that moment, something began to happen with the rain. Suddenly, it wasn’t just falling anymore, but sweeping across her from any number of different angles. It was bulging and swirling and slapping at her sides as if she had somehow offended the clouds and they were bent on driving her away from underneath them. Each fresh eddy was accompanied by a terrifying sizzling noise and an unmistakable flare of heat. The effect was so pronounced that as the pressure of air around her body increased, it soon became clear that it was not really water striking Eliza’s arms as she raised them, but vaporized water. Steam.

  Amazingly, she felt no pain. Only terror. As she began to look about her, not for rabbits and ducks upon the surface of the land, but for something large in the howling skies, she noticed a monster banking through the storm. Monster. A word most Co:pern:icans had long forgotten. But there it was, in a muddling, vaporous form. A creature so hideously beautiful that its improbable existence would have torn apart the mind of anyone who looked upon it unprepared — unless they already had a memory of the beast. Somewhere in Eliza Merriman’s consciousness she was able to put a name to the wraith. Dragon. She was seeing a dragon.

  And not just one.

  The ghostly images of a dozen or more crossed one another time after time. Now and then, she would catch a glimpse of an eye. Jewel-like. Complex. All-knowing. Magnificent. Wings shaped like the edges of holly leaves, so dark that they tented out the light as they approached. Tails, supple and immensely strong; a single flick would have the creatures swapping direction or rolling on their backs at any moment. Claws like the talons of firebirds, but ten times, twenty times bigger than theirs and with danger oozing from every tip. Fire that exploded a million raindrops and caused the air around them to bend to its will.

  Dragons.

  Eliza stumbled back and forth, trying to make sense of it. There was no time to think if they might be attacking her or how she might defend herself or where she might go. All she could do was experience them. On and on and on they came. Swooping, glaring, showing off their power. Until, in time, the bizarre thought struck her that the real enigma here was she, and not they. At that point some unforeseen confidence rose inside her and she reached up her hands and cried, “I AM ELIZA!”

  Immediately, the creatures ceased their strafing. The rain settled back into vertical patterns and the dragons hovered in a dome-shaped arrangement around her.

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?” she called out. She swept around, staring at these ghosts in turn, until one of them put itself forth as a leader.

  It was smaller than the rest, and there was something about its slimly built frame that made Eliza shudder to her core. Its body was more like the size of a man’s. Less scaly. Definitely boned (there was next to no covering at the ribs). But the notion of a man with the face of a dragon and the wings of a bird (a gigantic bird), was not something her auma could cope with. She looked away rather than look it in the eye.

  Eliza, hold up your hands, it said.

  The voice was in her head. A growling, primitive sound that reminded her of the roar that David had sometimes made during his dreams.

  Shaking wildly, she turned and faced the thing. “What are you?” she whispered.

  The eyes, she could swear, despite their strange triangular slant, were those of a man.

  Your hands, it said again.

  And so Eliza raised her hands in the shape of a cup. Only then did it occur to her that the object she had molded was still within them. A burst of white light suddenly engulfed it. The shock wave traveled through Eliza’s arms and onward to every extremity of her body. Her knees buckled and her breath expired. For a blink of time her constructed heart stopped. She collapsed unconscious, onto the Dead Lands. The object she had made from clay rolled from her hands.

  When the firebirds found her, she was still in a heap. Six of them came. Three were dispatched into the skies above to either keep watch or to trace elements of the ethereal activity that had drawn them to this place. One, a green-and-orange beauty not unlike Runcey, attended to Eliza’s auma and general body warmth. The red bird responsible for the attack on David stood guard.

  The last to arrive was the cream-colored bird with the apricot tufts that had visited the daisy fields outside the librarium. As before, it occupied itself just strolling around, investigating the scene. At one point, it hopped onto Eliza’s shoulder and was immediately shooed off by its red companion. There was an element of good fortune about this dismissal. For when the cream bird landed on the earth again, it stumbled across a jewel every bit as impressive as the flame it had found embedded in a teardrop outside the aerie. And it was not just its eye ridges it lifted when it saw it. Every feather on its body stood on end. It let out such a startled rrrh! that the red firebird gave an irritated squawk and poddled over to see what all the fuss was about.

  The two birds gulped and looked at each other. There in the dying grass was something never before seen outside the aeries.

  An egg.

  21.

  Two days after his chat with Rosa, Thorren Strømberg arrived at the Ragnar Institute to meet Harlan Merriman and Bernard Brotherton. He was immediately escorted to a secluded ground-floor laboratory and into a square, windowless room. In the center of the room was a piece of apparatus that resembled a large horseshoe (although horses were long extinct, the symbol associated with them was no
t; a common irony on Co:pern:ica). The apparatus was serviced on either side by two dormant com:puters. In front of the “shoe,” as Bernard called it, was a dark observation screen. It was behind here that Thorren Strømberg was directed while Brotherton set about priming the device.

  “So innocuous a setup,” the counselor said. A number of lights flickered on around the shoe, coating the ceiling in a warm blue haze.

  Harlan nodded. “Less than four dec:ades ago, the equipment you see here would have taken up the entire institute, and more. Developments in molecular tech:nology have enabled us to not only reduce the size of the hardware, but vastly increase the speed of our research. This inoffensive piece of gear is close to creating dark matter. One day, in this very room, we will make — and analyze — the glue that binds our universe together.”

  “And today?”

  “Today we find out what tore it apart, briefly, in your clinic.”

  Strømberg gazed through his reflection on the screen. The blue lights were now chasing each other around the shoe and a thin, distinct hum had risen from it. “Do you have clearance for this, Harlan?”

  The professor turned his gaze to a screen at his right, adjusting the position of a crosshair marker. “It’s my job to investigate spatial enigmas.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Is it safe?”

  Harlan Merriman pushed his tongue between his lips. “Since I last spoke to you, Bernard has run over a thousand simulations. The rifts produced by them have all been stable. The only means of activating a rift is by direct physical intervention.”

  “Stepping through?”

  Harlan smiled. “Don’t worry, Counselor. This is just a test. In transference terms, it couldn’t tele:port your outgoing breath, let alone your body. Bernard, how’re we doing?”

  Brotherton walked in front of the device and made a final check on the second console. White coat. Balding head. Drainpipe pants. The caricature of a scientist, Strømberg thought. “Another minit,” the tech:nician said.

  Harlan primed his com:puter. “How’s David?” he asked, flicking switches. “You said you were going to visit him soon.”

  “I did,” Counselor Strømberg replied. Keeping his auma even he said, “He was sleeping soundly all the time I was there.”

  “No more dreams?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Harlan nodded silently.

  “You look disappointed.”

  Harlan shook his head. “I can’t help thinking that if David was able to access his dreams, there wouldn’t be a need for what we’re doing here.”

  “Are you having second thoughts about the procedure? It’s not too late to abandon this.”

  “This is science,” Harlan replied. “As long as we have a need for answers, there will always be a need for procedures, Thorren.”

  Bernard joined them at the observation area. “All set,” he said, with a nervous breath.

  Harlan laced his fingers together and stretched them. “Well, gentlemen. Let’s see if we can find out what bothered my son. Ready?”

  Strømberg and Brotherton nodded.

  “Then behold the universe in microcosm.”

  And he lowered his hand toward the controls.

  In that same time frame, in the Dead Lands, Aunt Gwyneth had returned to find a trail of stones where Eliza had been, each of them dropped ten paces apart. The trail stretched over the nearest rise. And even when the Aunt had crested that, the stones continued well into the distance. Far ahead, but still within walking range, the old woman could see a small and dreary group of hills. From the way their contours caught the light, she knew there would be caves among their slopes. And that was not all. When she poked her disagreeable nose into the air, the elemental scent of wood smoke entered them. From then on, her new aspirant became of far greater interest.

  Eliza had learned to light a fire.

  With her ability to move quickly, Aunt Gwyneth was at the end of the trail in barely the time it took to imagineer it. Her sudden appearance drew several fingers of smoke from the fire and sent a pother of cinders flying into the cavemouth. Eliza was not visible right away, but the products of her time spent waiting were. On every rock that bouldered the cave sat a sculpture of a dragon, made from clay. Each was no bigger than the size of a fist. And though there was no color or life in them, their snarling jaws and grasping talons were enough to make the Aunt grit her teeth in disgust. All the sculptures were pointed toward the cave approach, guardians of the slope she was standing on.

  But that was not all.

  “What heresy is this?” the Aunt hissed, and cast her glance farther, beyond the fire.

  Eliza, surrounded by miniature dragons, was sitting cross-legged just inside the cave, her red hair falling into her lap. “I’m sorry, Aunt. I had no need of you,” she said. “I found out by myself what my family’s anomaly was.” And she held out the bundle she’d been cradling in her arms.

  It was a baby girl.

  Simultaneously, on a floor of the librarium not visited by humans for countless spins, the cream-colored firebird — Aurielle was her name — was pacing the length of a relic left behind by those same humans: a polished oak dining table. In the center of the table were two wide-necked candlesticks. On top of one stick, still perfectly intact and possessing more than enough buoyancy to keep it upright, was the flame of the firebird Azkiar, preserved in the teardrop of the boy, David. On the second stick sat an even greater conundrum: the egg, made from the clay of Co:pern:ica. Lying on the table between the sticks was the circle of violet-colored daisies that Aurielle had picked up with the teardrop, purely because its beauty intrigued her and its auma spoke of love.

  A tear.

  An egg.

  A circle of daisies.

  And a lot of kerfuffle.

  What did all of this mean?

  From a nest of dust and feathers on the bookshelf opposite (there were many such nests on the upper floors), a tired voice went rrrrrrh.

  Aurielle stopped walking and looked across the room to see Azkiar jiggling his tail.

  Would she please stop pacing? he begged her. The scratch of her claws was setting his ear tufts on edge.

  Rrrh, she went back. It was all right for him. All he did was fly about and make a nuisance of himself. He didn’t have to make sense of things.

  Blowing dust motes out of her nostrils, the female firebird opened her wings and fluttered to her perch: a high mound of books at the far end of the table. It was not the most reliable, as perches went (books slid away if she landed too hard, or someone — not thinking of any red bird in particular — decided to pull one out of the stack), but it faced the wall upon which the great tapestry hung. In Aurielle’s opinion, there was no better post in the entire aerie.

  She looked at the woven picture and sighed. The tapestry was so beautiful, with its wide green hills and its dragons flying gracefully around the valley. And yet so menacing, too. It seemed to tell the story of a great battle — “Isenfier” as Aurielle knew it. Emerging from the tallest hill was a dark apparition, which firebirds through the centuries had labeled the “Shadow of Ix.” It towered over the humans on the cloth. And everyone or everything pictured beneath it was shying away in fear, especially the white, horned horse and the dragons flying nearest its center. Only the kneeling child, who held a small dragon in her hands, seemed unafraid. A faint white halo lay around the girl, marking her out as a savior, perhaps. As for the dragon. Well, that was the biggest conundrum of all. Aurielle was very familiar with dragons as a breed. They were pictured all around the aerie (if you knew where to look). But the dragon in the hands of the girl was different. Spiky. Green. Slightly comical, really. And if the scale was correct, smaller than a firebird. And yet it had paws — an unmerited improvement on firebird anatomy that always made her huff in envy.

  But how, she wondered, had the tapestry gotten here? When, and by whom? Why had firebirds always protected it?

  And what did it mean?

  Suddenly
, her thoughts were interrupted by a squawk from the window.

  A blue firebird, Aubrey, was calling urgently for help.

  Azkiar was off his shelf in a moment.

  Rrrh! said Aubrey. Portal. Come. And he shimmered his feathers and entered light speed, which would take him to Harlan Merriman’s time rip in less than a sec.

  But as Aurielle and Azkiar prepared to follow, there was a jolt and the whole world turned. The last thing Aurielle remembered of it was the sound of two identical clatters and a white flare behind her. Just as if two candlesticks had fallen over and whatever was upon them had come together in one small but significant fusion of light….

  Rosa and Mr. Henry would feel the jolt as well. The whole of Co:pern:ica would. For Rosa it would come after two more days of putting books in order and renewing her intent, none of which would bring her any closer to unlocking the door to Floor Forty-Three. Mr. Henry (or rather Thorren Strømberg) had overruled Aunt Gwyneth and allowed her to keep the glossy dragon book, which she had read from cover to cover when Strømberg had gone, and reread to David a dozen times already. Despite her early uncertainty she now regarded it as a wonderful treasure, with many excellent illustrations and several vivid accounts of how dragons had lived (and died). But the remedy wasn’t working. Nothing was working. The door remained locked. The mysteries of Agawin stayed unresolved. And David, despite the occasional twitch of an eyelid, continued to sleep.

  But Rosa did not lose faith. She had become a minor expert in “dragon:ology” by now. She knew their anatomy, their habitats, their spiritual significance (though some of the concepts confused her), and their legends. There was also a possible clue to why the red firebird had singled out the book. One of its pages showed a dragon in “hibernation.” She’d had to run this term past Mr. Henry and his reference books before she understood that it meant a kind of deep sleep. More importantly, a short paragraph later in the book described how a dragon’s fire could induce a prolonged “stasis,” which usually wore off over a period of time. How much time the book didn’t say. But it was encouraging all the same. Mr. Henry praised Rosa’s diligence and passed the information on to Counselor Strømberg, who sent an e:com saying, Excellent. Keep watch. There was a little more to the e:com than that. It was, in fact, quite a detailed composition on the possible pheno:typic associations between firebirds and dragons. But all of that was kept from Rosa (and Aunt Gwyneth), whose only real interest was David anyway.