Fire Star (24 page)

O
nce, in his childhood, temptation had turned Brother Bernard’s head. In Mr. Suneet’s, the convenience store, before the modernization had happened and electronic eyes had recorded all movement, he had stolen a tube of candy. He remembered the occasion well. How he had waited by the magazine rack, until the chubby Mrs. Vickers had come down the aisle and stopped to examine the birthday cards, blocking the view from the payment counter. In that instant, he had turned away from righteousness. Away from his parents. His Sunday School. From good. Pocketing the candy had been the easy part. Leaving with them was a different matter. His legs, powered by a burning rush of guilt, had raced him too fast toward the door. He had bumped Mr.
Cardle, the blind man with his dog. The collision had produced a variety of sounds, but the only ones Bernard remembered were the candy, rattling like pellets inside their tube. “Hey!” Mr. Suneet had called. And Bernard had run. At twelve years old, he had become a thief. He had never been caught and the evidence was spilled down a drain within minutes. But his punishment was harsh and would last his life long. His mind was stained with indelible shame — and he could never go back to that shop again.

He was thinking of these things as he slipped into Abbot Hugo’s office in the early hours of that February morning. If caught here, his life would be all but over. For this was Mr. Suneet’s shop again. Only now, the risks were so much greater. Beyond this island, there was no shelter. No place to run. No drain wide enough to swallow his guilt.

But the questions in his mind would not die down. Throughout the five long days of prayer and meditation, the motive for the creature’s attack on Brother Terence
had dogged him. Its chilling accusation that the raven was involved cast a shadow far wider than the common viewpoint, a consequence he dared not contemplate too far. And what of his own irrational decision to send a message to Wayward Crescent? What was he hoping to achieve by that? It made his head spin just to think about it, writing to a
character
in a book? Vincent. He must be allowed to talk to Brother Vincent, even though it meant breaking into his cell. Between them, they must formalize effective measures to persuade Abbot Hugo that these incidents required a level of scrutiny beyond narrow-minded bigotry. Everything must be brought into the open. Everything.

He clicked on a flashlight, panning its weak beam over the wall until it struck the metal safe where the keys to every part of the monastery were kept. Bare-footed, he crossed the room and opened the case as quietly as he could. The key to Brother Vincent’s cell would be on the bunch with the bright orange tag. Locating it proved less than easy. The safe was never locked, but the contents
were often moved around. In the flashlight’s glare, every tag looked the same. Steadying his hand, he sifted through them, wincing if a loose key scraped the casing or tangled awkwardly against its hook. What should have taken seconds was moving into minutes when he at last identified the correct group of keys, dropped them in his pocket, and turned for the door.

That was when he knew he was not alone.

An intruder. Down at floor level. Small claws catching against the boards.

Bernard shuddered and clicked off his light. If this was a mouse or, heaven forbid, a rat, he did not want to draw its attention.

But the visitor was neither mouse nor rat. To Bernard’s astonishment, a squirrel entered the veil of moonlight filtering in through the tall arched window. It sat up on its haunches and twitched its nose, trying to focus on a scent of some sort. Twice it half-turned and poked its nose again. Then, with an effortless burst of agility, it leaped up onto the abbot’s desk.

Bernard watched with a kind of dazed fascination as it hopped toward the box drawers and reached up to sniff at them. It scented the frame of each drawer in turn but seemed most drawn to the central one, the one containing the dragon’s claw.

By now, an idea was brewing in Bernard’s mind that he was not the only thief in the room that night. But the outcome of this fantasy seemed so ludicrous that, even when the squirrel gripped the painted wooden handle and began to twiddle it as though it were an acorn, he still did nothing to intervene. There was a pause. The squirrel rested and flagged its tail. Then, with hardly a space between the actions, it clamped the drawer knob between its teeth, yanked it open, and leaped inside.

“No!” gasped Bernard and lunged across the room.

Too late. A stream of bright gray fur poured out of the drawer with a dragon’s claw clamped tight between its jaws.

“Stop!” Bernard shouted.

The squirrel skidded to a halt on the corner of the
desk.
Chuk!
it throated, its dark eyes popping at the sight of human presence. With a whip of its tail, it turned in a flash and leaped off the desk.

Bernard went in pursuit. But the race was never on. His shin collided with the corner of a footrest, knocking it over with a dreadful clatter. He reached for it, slipped, and shoulder-charged the shelves of perfume bottles. There was a crash of glass. Something pooled in the doorway. The nimble-footed squirrel leaped over it and was gone.

Suddenly, a light went on. Bernard froze in terror. Abbot Hugo’s face stared out of the doorway. His eyes panned the room, taking in the key safe and the drawer slid forward and tilting down. He inspected it. Empty. “Replace it,” he said.

Bernard covered his face.

“Replace it!” roared the abbot.

“I don’t have it,” Bernard wept. This was madness. A nightmare. The claw, literally squirreled away. How could he explain it? How?

The abbot turned, hearing footsteps close by. Brother Malcolm appeared, still tying the cord of his nightrobe. “I heard voices, breaking glass …” His words tailed off into disbelief.

The abbot plunged his hand into Bernard’s robe pocket and pulled out the keys with the bright orange tag. Were they being taken or being returned? He threw them into Malcolm’s hands. “Check that Brother Vincent is still in his cell.”

Question marks appeared in Brother Malcolm’s eyes, but he knew not to argue with the abbot’s will. As he hurried away, Hugo turned his ire on Brother Bernard again. “What were you hoping to achieve by this?”

“The truth!” Bernard cried, sinking back against the desk. “There are things occurring here that
you
refuse to see. Things that could change our world forever. The creature you have bound and treated so badly may be closer to God than you or I or any church ever built.”

“This is a sickness,” said the abbot, appalled. He crossed himself. “First Vincent. Now you.”

“Since when was the truth an illness?” shouted Bernard.

The abbot turned his head. Brother Malcolm had returned, pale-faced. “I cannot rouse him.”

The abbot’s gaze narrowed. “Is he dead?”

Malcolm gulped and shook his head. “He is sitting cross-legged by his window, praying. I cannot shake him from the pose. He seems taken — by some kind of trance.”

“He must be working without the claw,” muttered Bernard. “Bending the universe by his will. It must have been him who sent the squirrel.”

The abbot seized him by the neck of his habit. “Stop babbling. What have you done with it?”

“I have done nothing,” Bernard said, his cheeks growing red with rage. “The claw has been taken by a force you could never comprehend. But my guess is that it will not be long before you know precisely what became of it.”

For if the claw was not on its way to Vincent, then it was surely on its way to the dragon.

In this, Brother Bernard was correct. Even as the thought had entered his mind, the squirrel was scrambling across the courtyard into the shadow of the stable block. In a blink it had wriggled beneath the padlocked door and bounded into the dragon’s pen. The creature, sensitive to any warm blood, lifted its head and twitched its nostrils. Although it could not see the small gray messenger, the cargo it carried raised every flexible scale on its body. It growled and punched its head forward. Lively and fearless, the squirrel swerved away and dived between the dragon’s open legs, taking care not to brush the talons with its tail. It dropped the claw as close to the injured back foot as it could. Then it turned and whisked back into the dark.

A quietness came upon the hooded prisoner. Somewhere here was a shadow of the past. The scent of history. A trace of greatness.

Instinctively, its feet moved toward that place, claws spreading wide above the dank and rotting straw. Like a compass needle, the claw of Gawain jumped and flickered, aligning itself with the toes of the foot. The
dragon, Grockle, set his foot down. And just as the tooth of the ice bear Ragnar had melded to the jaw of his descendant, Ingavar, so the claw of the last great dragon, Gawain, joined the body of his distant son.

With it came a tingling sense of belonging. Connection to the Earth. Wisdom.

Power.

S
he liked to read in bed. Magazines, mostly. Something glossy. Homes and gardens. Although she had never been particularly house-proud, and the garden was defaulting to a “wild” state, Elizabeth Pennykettle liked to imagine that something better could always be achieved.

That night, however, the night the Fain invaded her home, she had been unable to settle. The magazines lay unread on her blanket. Her cup of hot chocolate had already cooled leaving a milky skin on its surface. For an endless time she sat among her pillows, staring at the wall, worried about Lucy, terrified for David.

Gwillan was the first to notice the change. He gave a short
hurr
of surprise and flew from her table to the small corner bedpost, arching his wings and tufting his ears.

“What is it?” Liz said, sitting forward. She, too, was aware of something now. She gazed at several abstract places, before deciding that the presence she could feel descending was centering itself around the Dragon’s Den. Throwing off the blanket, she leaped out of bed, wearing nothing but a pair of blue cotton pyjamas.

Gwillan called out again as the air filled with an urgent sense of pressure. Perfume bottles rattled on the dressing table. Books fell sideways on their shelves. The lights went out, then pulsed back in. There was a breakage somewhere in the Dragon’s Den.

“Hide!” Liz shouted to the terrified puffler, and ran, barefoot, along the landing.

The wave hit her the moment she opened the door. She screamed and was thrown back against a rack of shelves, bringing it and many dragon sculptures crashing down around her. A picture of Lucy flew off the mantelpiece and crossed the room tumbling like the blade of a propeller. Several items on the workbench were swept to the floor. The anglepoise lamp took a sharp
uppercut, banging back against the wall and snapping its springs. The lightbulb popped and fell from its housing. Chips of broken clay were everywhere.

Suddenly, there was a mighty roar and Gruffen grew to three times his size. This had always been a planned defense against any kind of break-in or attack. Built into the guard dragon’s auma was a key which allowed him to manifest a magnified image of himself as the fire-breathing monster the human race fondly assigned to his species. But the enemy here was far from human.

The Fain twisted into him, and finding nothing but a minimal outflow of auma, stole his fire as quickly as a wet thumb puts out a candle. The guard dragon lapsed into his solid state and fell to the floorboards, snapping his tail. The door clattered and the air in the den became still, though elsewhere in the house the whirlwind continued.

“What’s happening?” Liz cried to any dragon who could answer. She crawled across the floor to her beloved Gruffen and was met there by a shaken G’reth.

Hrrr,
he explained in a trembling voice. The Fain he had brought back into the house was being chased by a larger, evil one.

Liz wiped a bloodstained hand across her mouth. “Close down. All of you. Now.” And staggering to her feet, she hurried downstairs.

The outcome of the chase was never in doubt. All the master Fain was seeking was a suitable host to drive the upstart into for a time. To lock it away until the work at the north of this planet was done. Then to return and punish it properly.

It found what it sought in the Pennykettles’ kitchen. A fur-covered quadruped of low intelligence, whose auma was now in gradual decline.

All Bonnington had ever wanted was a quiet life. A warm basket. A tickle of the ears. The occasional bowl of Chunky Chunks. When the young and terrified Fain flew into him and was locked into his cells by its more advanced pursuer, all prospect of serenity ended. Yowling wildly, he bolted around the kitchen before trying to
throw himself out through his catflap. He missed and hit his head against the plastic frame, knocking himself out cold in the process.

Trinnnnnggg!

The doorbell rang.

Rap! Rap! Rap!

Someone walloped the panels.

“Mrs. P.!” cried a voice. “Are you all right?”

“Henry, go back home!” Liz shouted. She was in the hall now, trying to sense the location of the Fain.

“Heard noises! Sounded like you might be in trouble —”

His voice stopped abruptly.

“Henry?” Liz called. “Henry, are you all right?” She slid back the bolt and opened the door a crack. “Henry? Agh!”

He was inside in a moment, examining his hands, rolling his shoulders. A blue light swirled around the pupils of his eyes. “Aged,” he said, “minimal power.”

“No power whatsoever. Let him go,” Liz said.

His arm came up and took her by the throat, forcing her backward down the hall. “You have many connections,” said the Fain.

“I’m not your enemy,” she croaked, as he stretched her neck fully till her head went back and made contact with the wall.

“You have history with the dragon in the north. You are hybrid to its auma. And you have
offspring.
”

“Please,” Liz said, though the word was barely audible.

“I sense the dragon’s fire in this place.”

Liz waggled a hand towards the kitchen. “Take it. In the cold box. Go.”

“Minimal. Where is the rest?”

“Don’t know,” she said, trying to shake her head free. Something cold and inhuman spiked her brain. She cried out in terror, her fingernails gouging paper from the walls.

“You speak the truth,” said the Fain, then chillingly added, “yet you still have something to protect.”

“No!” she squealed, as his left hand came up to cradle her skull and make a full circuit throughout her head.

The human eyes blinked. “Your … creations have touched my world. They are working for a master. Where is he?”

“He went away. Please, leave us be.”

“Where is he?” growled the Fain, using the masculine edge in the human host’s voice.

“I can take you to him,” a quieter voice said.

“She’s lying!” Liz cried, recognizing the voice of the betrayer.

“Sleep,” said the Fain, and threw her, collapsing in a heap, to one side.

The figure of Henry turned around to see a small clay dragon, sitting on the stairs.

“I know where he is,” she said, and proudly displayed her bouquet of flowers.