Aurora Page 6

  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

  Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world

  seek each other, so that the world may come into being.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  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

  Fox hears the scream and rushes to a tower window. He sees the flash of Pandora’s blue silk dress as her coracle skims across the water like a leaf in a storm. Horrified, he sees the thing that looks as harmless as a log, close behind. But no log moves at that speed.

  Swamp dragons.

  And there’s another, camouflaged on the slippery mudbank at the foot of his tower. The beast raises its long snout, scenting the approach of fresh meat.

  Fox gallops down the twisting stairway. Grabbing a sword and an axe from the weapons rack at the foot of the stairs, he hauls open the huge oak door.

  The coracle spins from the water, up on to the mudbank.

  ‘Pan!’ roars Fox, and he jabs his sword towards the dragon she has not yet seen.

  Pandora spills from her coracle and sprawls in the mud, finally spotting the swamp dragon that awaits her. The first dragon, having chased her across the lagoon, now lunges from the water. Pandora gives an agonized cry, and seizes up the coracle as a shield, seeing herself trapped between the two beasts.

  He won’t reach her in time! Fox skids on the slippery mud as the squat beasts use their legs like paddles to slide on their bellies at amazing speed. He hears the creak of a dragon jaw as the jagged teeth open wide in expectation.

  This is not the war they are meant to fight! They won’t lose their lives here, Fox vows, as inglorious suppers for the swamp dragons.

  Pandora stands still, as if in thrall to the beasts. She turns a heartbroken face to Fox.

  ‘They can have me. I don’t care. I see your eyes when you look at me now. I’m not me any more, I’m just one of the empire’s mistakes and you hate me!’

  Would I be out here saving you if I hated you?’ With seconds to spare Fox must break the death-spell that grips her, ‘Come on, Pan – move!’

  She drinks in his words for one lethal moment, green eyes glittering with tears. Then as the dragons lunge she hurls the coracle at one and spins around to fire the round pie tin she clutches hard into the wide-open mouth of the other. That beast gurgles and slithers to a halt, the pie tin stuck fast in its throat.

  But the other dragon shunts aside the light coracle and slithers up from the water’s edge. Fox slides down the mudbank, feet first, and kicks the dragon’s tail. The beast flicks the huge armoured tail – a swipe could kill him – but Fox is on his feet, and ready. Sweat pours down his face as he taunts the dragon with his sword, poking it, dancing around it, risking another flick of the tail, one that will swipe the legs from under him – and then he’ll be gone in a snap.

  A shadow moves across them and the netherworld vibrates with the rumble of an airship. It unnerves the dragon. The beast raises its snout and swivels up its tiny eyes. Fox takes his chance and plunges the sword deep into the unarmoured flesh of the dragon’s throat.

  He reclaims his sword and clambers up the mud towards the other beast, still choking on the pie tin and slaughters it too. Then he stands gasping for breath as Pandora flings her arm around him, sleek and cold against his hot human body.

  ‘You saved me,’ she whispers ‘When you love someone, you save them. There’s no greater love than that, you said.’

  ‘So no more silly talk,’ he says gently, and peels her off him.

  ‘Can we save my pie too?’ she asks.

  ‘Your pie?’

  He bursts out laughing and the tense moment breaks. He wipes the sweat from his eyes and scans the mudbank and the lagoon.

  ‘I can do better than a stinking old pie. We’ll have dragon for supper.’ He raises his axe and begins hacking at the nearest one. ‘Keep watch, Pan. There’s sure to be more.’

  THE SURGE RISES

  Fox bolts the door of the tower and climbs the winding stairs with two huge dragon steaks, dripping hot blood, skewered on his sword. Pan has the fire ready and he flame-roasts the steaks on the tip of the sword. Once he’s eaten his fill of the rich, tangy meat Fox finds his godgem and in the guise of his old fox avatar he connects to the Noos . . .

  . . . and leaps into a virtual universe of brilliance and chaos: a frenzy of imagineering, ideas-wheeling and dealing, cyber-trading news and data. Fox travels through maelstroms of energy, ever-changing cyberpatterns and links, as the global Supermind of the Noos endlessly expands and re-creates the miracle of itself.

  It’s as if the sky people, so close to the heavens, peered into the mind of the universe and captured its neverending spirit of creation in their Noos.

  Spellbound by their own magic, the sky citizens have no need to wonder about the world outside, as Fox knows all too well: he too was caught in the trance of the Noos, once upon a time. It’s that global trance he has worked so hard to break.

  Deep in the rumpus of Noospace are doorways to secret clubs. It’s here that young Noosworkers flock after long shifts of cybertrading and imagineering the endless products and technologies – galaxies of invention – that are the engine of the empire and create lives of sizzling luxury for the sky citizens.

  In the rowdy gatherings of the clandestine cyberclubs a raw, rebellious energy beats hard and fast. The police rooks ban them if they find them – but the Noos has grown so vast and complex it’s impossible to police it all. No sooner is a cyberclub shut down than it springs up again in another shady corner of the Noos, and the boisterous brilliance beats on.

  These restless young spirits weave a chaotic dark energy all through their beloved Noos. Forever adding new links and patterns, endlessly spinning ideas – just to see what happens – each bestows their own random gifts to the virtual universe.

  It’s here that Fox found rebels who ask the same hard questions about the world that he once did. They have become his Surgent allies, working up a revolutionary spirit in the dense jungles of Noospace. Its a gift of purl rebel energy from the Noos weavers who want to see what happens when all systems crash and everything is rebooted in the real world. The best of human nature, Fox has realized, exists deep within an empire built on the worst.

  We are creeping along a ledge of history, Fox tells the young rebels in the Noos. Are you ready to jump with me into the unknown?

  Fox zips through the beautiful tangle of energy, the hairs tingling on the back of his neck. At last he finds the outlaw den he seeks, deep in the undergrowth of a simmering electronic jungle.

  ‘Kitsune?’ he hisses.

  The eyes of an old friend shine through the thick cyber-foliage. ‘About time. What happened to you?’

  ‘Unexpected rescue mission,’ says Fox. ‘Early invasion of swamp dragons. I thought we’d be gone by the time they came, but the heat – it’s so early this year.’

  ‘Hottest spring ever known,’ Kitsune responds. ‘About the other invasion,’ he reminds Fox. A turquoise fractal of data spins by, ruffling the electronic foliage. Its mutating patterns glint in Kitsune’s warm, excited eyes. ‘I was updating you before we were so rudely interrupted by your dragons.
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  Fox checks the shimmering cyberjungle for snooping presences, then burrows deeper into the foliage beside his greatest ally and friend. Kitsune is his most trusted Surgent, a secret rebel at the heart of the empire in the powerful sky city of the Eastern oceans, New Jing. Noosrunner rivals in their youth, he and Fox are bonded in friendship and name. In old Eastern legends, Kitsune is the sly thickster fox.

  So well hidden is the trickster fox that only his cyber-eyes can be seen.

  ‘Sky fleets have been landing at various places in the Northlands,’ Kitsune reports. ‘At Coldheaven in the Far North, inland of Narwhal Sword Bay in the west, and now at Fort Aurora in the east. The Arctic pirates are scouting their activities. But that’s just the start,’ he warns. ‘You know what’s to follow – fortresses all over the North, slave camps to mine for resources, domed cities for the empire-builders . . .’

  ‘My father is making a huge stake in the Northlands,’ Fox agrees ‘But he’s so desperate to grab power from the eastern cities, sent away so much guardpower and weaponry in the airships, he’s left New Mungo weak.’

  ‘Other cities have rushed to follow,’ Kitsune continues. ‘They all want their stake. All the cities of the northern hemisphere have left themselves open to attack. But what we do here will shake the whole empire. The global Surge is ready to fight for high lands all across the planet. The empire is too overstretched to cope with attacks on so many fronts. You’re right, Fox. This is our best chance. It’s now or never.’