Aurora (9 page)

For the first time in her life Lily imagines her mother as a girl of her own age – one with no father or mother, no family or home; all of it lost to the ocean. She must have been terrified, and so brave.

Lily’s nerve steadies – and her resolve. She
will
have this adventure. She will do something brave and grand, something that will gleam down the years and be told as a fireside tale one day. Something worthy of a girl descended from the likes of Caledon and Fox and Granny Mary and Mara.

The globe Tuck stole might be well and truly lost, buried deep in the gorge, but it can’t be the only wizz in the world! If there are others, if she can find just one in the world at the other side of the mountain . . . well, she has a halo. She
might
still find a way to connect with her Fox father. So she must get through this mountain. It’s her only chance. She will never know her real father if she turns back now.

The halo’s crescent glows in the dark like a brave smile as Lily steps into the unknown as her ancestors once did.

THE WORLD’S OCEAN

Amazed, Lily clings to a rock. She gapes at the astounding night they have plunge into on the other side of the mountain.

The world’s ocean is terrifying! It roars and tears at the land like a ravenous black bear. Endless hills and valleys of silvered waves stretch as far as she can see, like a landscape of living rock. None of the stories, not even the worst storm on Lake Longhope, has prepared Lily for this.

How did her people ever cross such a fearsome thing?

Wing stares out into the ocean blast.

‘You know where we are?’ Lily yells.

Her courage shreds in the wind when he shakes his head.

Inside the mountain, as the scent of the ocean became strong, Wing rushed on, ignoring the firestone trailblazers, tracking the salt wind instead. Lily feared they’d be lost forever as they stumbled through a neverending maze of dark tunnels for what seemed like long nights and days. But Wing led them at last to the ocean. Yet they emerged from the blunt darkness of the mountain into this billowing black night in a place he did not seem to know.

Lost and confused, Wing searches for bearings and scents. They clamber over rocks, Lily keeping close as he turns away from the open ocean, following the waterline as it cuts sharply inland around the heel of the mountain to form a wide inlet of sea.

Wing stops with a sharp cry. Lily follows his gaze down the great sea fjord.

‘Great Skua!’ she gasps.

Moonlit pathways criss-cross the winding black channel of sea.

‘What is it?’ Lily clutches Wing’s hand.

‘Bridges,’ he whispers.

The only bridge Lily has ever seen is a coarse wooden one across a stream. These are brilliant, silvery, dreamlike creations, weaving this way and that across the sea fjord that snakes between the mountains.

Wing studies the jagged peaks around them and gives a satisfied grunt.

‘You know this place?’

‘Ilira,’ he says.

‘Ilira?’ Lily shakes her head, recalling her people’s stories of the mountain city with its tumbling waterfalls; a bleak, brutal place. ‘Ilira doesn’t have bridges.’

But Wing nods, wonderstruck.

‘Ilira,’ he insists.

As they move deeper inland, the an fills with a strange rumbling and the moonlight reveals the shoulder of a great mountain at the far end of the winding fjord, studded with lantern lights. Now Lily sees that Wing is right This
is
Ilira! The moon glistens on the doors to the cave-dwellings of the mountain people and silvers the waterfalls that thunder into the sea from great heights. The ghostly billows of masts loom out of the dark from what must be a ships’ harbour near the neck of the fjord.

Ships that cross the great oceans!
Lily’s heart beats hard at that thought.

Wing has climbed down to the edge of the sea and throws his wolfskin and the rest of his ragged clothing on to the rocks. He dives smoothly into the wafer. Moments later, Lily sees him leap like a fish among the heaving waves and hears his yell of joy. She reaches out a hand to feel the froth of a wave and gasps. Her heart might stop in sea as cold and wild as that! But Wing’s tough, sleek-haired skin, webbed hands and feet and fish-like gills give him powers beyond ordinary humans.

When he drips back across the rocks he has a bundle of dark pebbles in his hands, strung together with seaweed. He splits a pebble open on a rock and shows Lily the nugget of meat inside, then slurps it in a gulp. A blissful grin spreads across his face.

‘My food when I lived in sea,’ he says.

Lily’s stomach groans. She’s hungrier than she has ever been in her life. She breaks open the sea pebbles and gulps mouthful after mouthful of tangy ocean meat. Thirsty, she climbs down to the waterline and scoops up a handful of ocean to drink. Wing bursts out laughing as she splutters and retches. It’s vile! Nothing like the pure, clear water of the lake.

No fire
, Wing warns. He closes his eyes and his face softens as he falls, like a wolf, into instant sleep. Deep shivers run through Lily. She’s gripped by cold now they’re no longer on the move. Who is there to spy a tiny blaze? The mountain city of Ilira is away at the head of the fjord.

Lily scrabbles around in the dark and finds a small miracle – a gnarled limb of dry wood wedged between two rocks. Now she is grateful for those long evenings Ibrox spent so patiently teaching her the one thing, he said, every child of the Earth should know – how to make fire. As always, it takes her ages, but Lily coaxes a tiny fire from wood and stone and snuggles under Wing’s wolfskin. Her eyes grow heavy as the flame blurs into a half-dream of the summer sun, hot and red above Lake Longhope.

A jolt startles Lily awake. Wing has sprung to his feet, his animal senses always on alert, even in sleep.

‘What’s up?’

He stamps out the fire, growling under his breath at some threat. Lily scans the fjord but all she sees are moonbeams and reflections of the bridges, wriggling upon the black sea. Then a sleek shadow slides across a ribbon of moonlight. Then another and still more.

‘Boats,’ whispers Wing.

The scrape of a boat on the rocks below sends them scrambling away from the darting shadows that are suddenly moving all across the rocks.

A shout close behind makes Lily stumble with fright. She falls sideways and lands hard, wedged between two rocks. Wing yells her name, but she’s too winded by the fall to shout back. A cold wet weight falls over her. A net! Someone breathes, hot and hard, in her face as he binds her in the net. Lily kicks and struggles but she’s trapped, can’t break free, can’t see Wing, and the hunters’ shadows are closing in all around.

SUNDER

DRAGONS’ TEETH

Squeezed knees to chin in her cup-shaped coracle, Pandora paddles across the netherworld sea. She keeps a wary distance from the huge trunks of the sky towers. The security sensors will set off shrieking sirens if she gets too close.

A sign with a
P
for Pandora marks the place she wants. The old sign lies deep in the water by the broken bridge, where the rest of the bridge was lost to the sea long ago.

The tide is low, the dusk glooms, and the underwater city glows with phosphorescence

Pandora dives into the lagoon, deep down into ghostly drowned streets. The soft gills on her neck flutter open as she swims through dense algae bloom where the sea is so green and murky she can barely see.

But there it is! Pandora lunges towards the mysterious
P
.

Crops of seaweed shiver as she swims through phosfurred heaps of wrecked vehicles until she finds the lorry that hoards the treasure she wants. She dives into the blind-dark body of the lorry where the only light is a silver ray of fish and rummages in slimy seaweed until she feels the cold roundness of a tin.

Pandora breaks back through the surface of the lagoon. Clambering back into the coracle she wipes the slime from the tin with the ends of her hair and looks to see what she’s got.

Classic Pie
, says the rusted lettering. Pandora’s empty stomach rumbles approval.

A long, strangled shriek in the swamp grass at the foot of a sky tower almost makes her drop the pie tin. Pandora scans the netherworld. She looks up at the giant towers of New Mungo, at the web of sky tunnels that connect them, a network of streets in the sky.

No sea police or sky patrols. The shriek wasn’t human. It was the sound, Pandora reckons, of a creature being eaten alive.

Her quick, green eyes scan the steamy surface of the netherworld sea.

Could it be . . . ? Dragons? So soon?

She begins to paddle back across the lagoon, dread prickling her scalp. The hot, swampy heat sneaked up on them suddenly this year, hard on the tails of the winter storms. It’s still too early, surely, for
them
. . .

But the planet has lost its old patterns. Summer stampedes across the world with barely a lull between the North Wind’s winter storms and the tides of heat that sweep up from the wide swelter of tropics around the middle of the Earth. There, the sun is a deadly fireball that no human, even in a sky city, can bear.

The dragons follow the sun, swarming North with the summer seas, and swim into the netherworld through underwater tide shafts in the city wall. Night after swampy night, they prey on the boat refugees then swim back in through the wall, haunting the gloomy lagoon with a reptilian gleam as they digest their suppers on the mudbanks and seaweedy roofs that emerge at low tide.

Only now does Pandora see that the fishing nets that hang from the broken bridge are in shreds.

Dragons’ teeth!

A ripple disturbs the water. Pandora sees it out of the corner of her eye but there’s no time even to aim her spear.

The swamp dragon lunges towards her. Pandora screams, slamming her paddle into the water and the coracle hurls across the lagoon.

THE WRONG WAR