The Last Dragon Chronicles #4: The Fire Eternal (10 page)

A piece of snow dripped from her open beak. “Bergstrom?” she said, for the first time sounding unsure of herself.

“Sometimes,” said Ingavar, moving
his jaw in what might have been a smile. “The shaman you knew as Dr. Bergstrom and whom these bears encountered as Thoran is gone.”

“You killed him?” she said with an agitated squeak.

“I took his auma.”

“You —?” She gave a comical, almost puzzled twist of her beak. And now the longer she stared at him, the wider her round eyes opened with fear. “Only those touched by the auma of a dragon could
perform such magicks,” she said with a hiss.

Avrel glanced at the bag with its eye of gray stone, then searched the face of the blue-eyed Nanukapik. “What does she mean?”

Ingavar put his snout to the sky as though he were engaging with an unseen force. Then he sat, columnlike, lowering his head into the center of his chest. Suddenly, the ice all around him came alive. Crystals swirled on every
hump and hollow. The wind streaked and polished the contours of his body, gradually reshaping him into a man.

Kailar staggered back, blustering furiously.

“Who
are
you?” said Avrel, his curiosity beating as fiercely as his heart. For the figure before him was not Oomara. He was younger, lighter-skinned, and yet still dressed in Arctic furs. In his eyes shone a light from
another world, as though
he were carrying a star inside him.

“Stand me up!” spat the raven, who had been knocked over by the transformation. “Right me, you waddle-bellies! Stand me up!”

Avrel tipped her back to her feet.

“Impossible,” she squealed, looking at the man that Ingavar had become. “How can
you
be here, among
bears
?”

“In truth, I never really left,” he said. “But I have journeyed through the realms of dark
matter, along with the spirit of the ice bear, Ingavar, to do what must be done to protect this ice.” He turned to the bears and spoke to them together. “Avrel, Kailar, I am your servant as much as you are mine. You should call me Nanukapik.” Then he turned to the raven again. “And you, sibyl, you may call me David.”

I
t was as if a small fish had risen to the top of a tranquil lake and pushed its nose through the surface of the water. The ripple was faint. Distant. Subtle. As slight as the delicate motes of time that mark the imperceptible movements of planets. Even so, the effect was still felt in certain parts of the house at 42 Wayward Crescent. In the kitchen, for instance, the listening
dragon stirred.

Elizabeth Pennykettle put down the saucepan she’d been scouring and said, “What is it?”

The dragon sat up.
A signal,
it hurred. It tilted its head a little, letting its ears expand to their widest and panning them around like radar dishes.

“Dragon?”

The listener blinked uncertainly.

“Close or distant?”

Gone,
it said and gave a noticeable shudder. It sat back, looking slightly
disturbed.
Not dragon,
it said,
but it felt like it.

Liz looked through the kitchen window and saw snowflakes beginning to pattern the lawn. She dipped her eyes for a moment in thought. “If you feel it again, try to track it,” she said. Then she continued washing dishes.

Meanwhile, in Zanna’s room, Gadzooks and G’reth simultaneously noticed what dragons called “a guttering feeling,” the strange
sensation of the fire within flickering, as though a wind from another world had blown through their auma. Neither could deduce a reason for it, and when Gadzooks asked Gretel if her spark had been similarly affected, all she did was give an irritated snort and suggest he change position — or find somewhere less drafty to sit than the windowsill.

Gretel had been busy watching Alexa drawing another
picture of the dragon she called G’lant. This
time she had sketched him from the reverse angle, looking the opposite way. Again, the structure of the eye was prominent, but her efforts had been concentrated on the rounded speck of blue-green detail that seemed to form the dragon’s point of focus. It was a planet. The Earth. Gretel was sure of it. She’d seen pictures of their so-called “home world”
before. But if that was correct, then where was G’lant positioned if he could frame the whole world in his eye? She was about to ask Alexa this very question when Gadzooks reported his fiery flutter. In the time it took Gretel to turn around and answer, Alexa had pushed aside her drawing of G’lant and started on another picture, this time with a pale yellow pencil.

What’s this?
hurred Gretel,
disappointed at the shift.

“A nun-nooky,” said Alexa, her face almost flat to the pad.

A what?
said Gretel.

And Alexa said, “A boley pear.”

All this time, Lucy was upstairs lost in music and Zanna was in the front room reading Tam’s poetry.
Later, she would remember a sudden shudder, as if someone had walked across her unmarked grave. But it was chilly in the den after dinner that evening
and all she did was rub her arms and call to Gwillan, who immediately flew to the curtains and closed them.

Only one human in the house truly and fully noticed the blip. That was Arthur. He was in the Dragon’s Den, where he had been meditating for an indefinite period. His mind was the lake. His awareness was the fish. When the two came together, his eyes opened with a start. On the shelves to
either side of him he sensed a collective hum among the dragons. And Bonnington was near, turning agitated circles. “Be calm,” Arthur whispered and reached out a hand. Bonnington trotted forward, nuzzling furiously, keen to commingle and share any knowledge. Arthur suddenly had a vision of the frozen north and for a moment felt its coldness spreading up his spine, just as if the cushion underneath
him were an ice floe. “Something has happened,” he said below his breath, speaking to himself as much as to Bonnington. He uncoupled his legs from the lotus
position and sat loosely, pressing his thumbs together. “Something has happened,” he repeated quietly. He scooped up Bonnington and stroked the cat’s head. “Come, we must visit Lucy.”

It wasn’t often that Arthur and Lucy spoke, not truly
spoke, in a manner that might be described as conversational. Their daily exchanges were cordial enough, but each had rarely engaged the other beyond the necessary domestic grunts.

It hadn’t always been like this. In the beginning, when Lucy had been a wide-eyed adventuress, excited at the prospect of meeting the man who had secretly claimed her mother’s heart, the romance of living with an enigmatic,
dragon-saving monk had entirely swept her away. But the crushing reality of life with him was harsh. Arthur had arrived a wrecked and troubled man. Blind, confused (often gabbling mathematical formulas), and as vulnerable and weak as a newborn puppy, he had needed almost constant care at first. It took months of fetching, carrying, and feeding before he could be truly self-reliant again.
In those months, Lucy
often read to him: children’s stories, mostly. Anything from her bedside shelves. Eventually, a morning came when she found the courage to pick up
Snigger and the Nutbeast.
She was halfway through the opening chapter when Arthur raised a hand and said, in a bone-chilling fashion, “What became of David? Did he escape the Fain?”

She remembered shuddering, losing hold of the
book. A chasm of despair opened up inside her as she began to tell him all that she knew, how she’d been abducted by the sibyl, Gwilanna, taken hostage to the Tooth of Ragnar, and what she had seen on that dreadful, final day in the Arctic. And Arthur did something she could neither handle nor predict: He wept openly.

And so did she.

That incident, far from bringing them together, had drawn
a dysfunctional line between them. So she was remotely surprised when, on the evening before Zanna’s intended consultation with Tam, Arthur knocked on her bedroom door and stepped inside to make himself seen.

Lucy pulled out her earphones, filling the room with a tinny hiss of music. She thought about closing down the e-mail she was writing. Tam’s address was in the header. But Arthur couldn’t
see it, so what did it matter?

“Are you busy, child?”

He often called her “child.” A throwback to the early days. She still found it endearing. It was ridiculous to think he could ever be her father, but … “No.” She switched off her iPod and swung her chair to face him.

His knees found the edge of the bed and he sat. “Would you do something for me?”

She shrugged — then remembered such gestures
were pointless, but they all did that with Arthur now and then. “Sure. What?”

“Would you send a message to my friend Brother Bernard?”

She found herself nodding. Roly-poly Brother Bernard. The monk who had first brought Arthur to the Crescent. She remembered him: a jolly man. A Friar
Tuck. Kind. “Why me? I thought Mom normally wrote your letters?”

“A text message,” he said. “I’d like it to
be instant.”

“A text?” She almost laughed. “Do monks have cell phones?”

“Bernard does.”

Touché. Pointless arguing with the best brain in the universe. She picked up her phone, all the while glancing back at Arthur. He was weird sometimes, full of secrets. When he cradled Bonnington in his arms like this he reminded her of a James Bond villain. “OK. Shoot.”

Arthur stroked Bonnington’s head
a few times, all the while commingling with the Fain-being inside him. Through hazy, almost monochrome feline vision, he noted Lucy’s yawn and saw the swing of her foot. She was impatient to return to the computer, of course. He saw the flicker of the screen but none of its content.

“My dear Bernard,” he began.

Lucy put her thumb on hold. “Um, you do know you’ve only got, like, a certain number
of characters in a text? They’re normally kind of snappy, Arthur.”

“The message will be short. Please enter what I said, and do not truncate the words.”

“It’s on auto-complete. Already done it. Go on.”

He allowed himself a smile, then dictated slowly, “My dear Bernard, at last our ruminations may have come to fruition —”

“Ru — min — what?” she asked.

He spelled it for her. And “fruition.”

“Did you feel the eye of the universe open? If so, great wonders are upon us. Vincent.”

“Vincent?” she queried. It was the name he had taken as a monk at Farlowe Abbey.

“When in Rome,” he said. “Thank you. Is it done?”

“Number?”

“Of course.” He spoke it clearly.

As she tapped it in she said, “Eye of the universe … what’s that about?”

“It’s a spiritual metaphor,” he replied evenly — concealing
everything, confessing nothing.

“Right,” she said. Monk-speak. She didn’t pursue it.

Arthur turned Bonnington to face the computer. “What are you doing? Homework?”

He immediately saw her hesitate. She was wondering how he knew the computer was on. Her expression softened as she reassured herself he could still detect areas of glowing light. Plus he could hear the cooling fan humming.

“I’m
… updating David’s Web site. Will Bernard reply? To your text, I mean?”

Arthur tweaked Bonnington’s left ear. A signal for the Fain to adjust the cat’s lenses. Bonnington blinked. His gaze zoomed in. Not a Web site. E-mail. Why was she lying? “Yes, when he is not at prayer. Tell me, was this a sudden impulse — to update the Web site, I mean?”

She snapped the phone shut and put it aside. “I do
it once a month. It was time, that’s all.”

Interesting. She was showing no sign of sensing any presence. For one who had been so close to David, Arthur found that strange. Was it real, then? His vision? That sense of connecting? In that meditative state he called the alpha phase, were desire and delusion interchangeable? The universe moved in mysterious ways. Was it possible he was being misled
by his mind? “You must miss him?”

She exhaled deeply.

“My apologies. That was a ridiculous question.”

But a test all the same. A gentle dig. She was prickly, edgy, hiding something. The images from Bonnington swam and pulsed, making Arthur feel slightly restless and giddy. Lucy’s shoulder was covering the flat screen now, removing the temptation to delve into her secrets — though the temptation
was great indeed. “How is the site coming along?”

“Cool. Lots of hits. They’re zooming up. David’s
really
popular right now. Lots of people want to know about stuff.”

Bonnington began to purr steadily.

“What kind of ‘stuff’?”

“Just stuff,” she answered guardedly, wishing he would go. “Are we done here? I’m s’posed to be helping Mom in the kitchen.”

Suddenly, with a dizzying flash of movement,
Bonnington meowed and refocused on another part of the room. Gollygosh had landed on Lucy’s dressing table. Even with reduced, nictating vision, Arthur could tell that the healer was energized.

“What’s with you?” Lucy said to him in dragontongue.

The dragon blinked at Arthur.

“He’s embarrassed. He’s late for meditation,” Arthur said. “It is Gadzooks, I take it?”

“No, it’s Golly,” she said,
twisting a finger inside the neck of her top. “I’m going now, OK?”

Arthur coughed and patted his chest. “With your permission, I’ll rest here a moment.”

She glanced back at the computer, burning secrets, burning energy. “Yeah, whatever.” She flapped a hand and hurried out.

Gollygosh spread his turquoise wings and made as if he was going to go after her.

“Wait,” said Arthur.

The healer folded
down and gave a polite little hrrr?

“Were you coming to me or to Lucy?” Arthur’s aptitude for dragontongue was not the best, but David’s special dragons could interpret him with ease.

The dragon gulped.
I was flying to the den, but heard talking,
he said.

Arthur nodded. “You feel something, don’t you?”

Gollygosh tilted his head back and searched. His eyes were bursting with violet wonder,
as if he’d seen an angel parting the clouds. His toolbox clanked as he squeezed the handle.
Is it … the David?
he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Arthur, steepling his fingers — but there had to be a strong possibility of it. For years, he and his old friend Bernard Augustus had been hoping for contact, testing the boundaries of sensory attraction through the practice of coordinated visualization.
Together, they had “dreamed it,” as
Elizabeth might say. A gateway into a parallel universe. A channel that they hoped David Rain might cross. A conduit of spiritual union. Hope. But this feeling, this ripple, suggested something more. A visitation. A return. A physical presence. Arthur thought about his sudden vision of the Arctic. The barren ice cap. The restless wind. The souls in the sky,
outnumbering the stars. Lately, he and Bernard had visualized Ingavar, the bear that David idolized in print, the Nanukapik returned to save his species from the ravages of hunting and planetary abuse. Might that have tipped the balance? Was he seeing the North through the eyes of a bear? And how did this relate to the spatial shift that Bonnington had seemingly witnessed in the garden? Oh, for clarity,
for greater understanding. Oh, for the power he’d had on the island, when he’d been in possession of a dragon’s claw …

The computer beeped. Bonnington instinctively turned his head toward it, flushing screen images back through Arthur’s visual cortex. Arthur at first tried to blank them out, for in his heart he knew it would have
been dishonorable to read anything that Lucy had received in private,
but he could not avoid noticing the banner that popped up at the bottom corner of the screen. It was an e-mail flag, and though it was gone too quickly to catch the sender’s name, he did see the subject of the message.

The banner dissolved. At the same moment, Bonnington arched and jumped to the floor, plunging his master into blindness again. “No, wait,” Arthur called,
but the cat was gone.

“Are you still there?” Arthur asked in dragontongue.

No reply from Gollygosh either.

Arthur stood up, deep in thought, circling his foot to activate the blood flow in an aching left thigh.
Was this meaningful?
he wondered. Who would ask a question concerning David’s parents? And more importantly, what would Lucy reply? Did the “re:” before
the subject header indicate a
dialogue? If yes, why did that make him nervous? For what could she say that would be of any consequence? She would have to answer no, and that would be the end of it. He brought his hands together in prayer, remembering a common biblical passage.
Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days might be long upon the land …
But as he shuffled from the room and pulled his way along the landing,
he was already rewriting the commandment in his mind.
Honor thy father and thy mother,
he repeated,
that thy days might be long — upon the
ice.