Firewing

by Kenneth Oppel

  Beneath Shade and the four Pilgrims, the hills trembled, swelled, then began heaving themselves up into mountains. They rose with unreal speed, thrusting from the bones of the earth in a geyser of rubble and dust. A hundred wingbeats ahead of them, a sheer cliff face reared up, blocking their path.

  “No!” Shade shouted, as he caught sight of Java, nosing upwards to gain altitude. “It’ll take too long to go over!”

  “What, then?”

  “Straight through.”

  “How?” cried Yorick in disbelief.

  “You’re sure?” Java asked uncertainly.

  “Yes!” Shade swallowed. He wasn’t sure at all. He stared at the rock face they were streaking towards. It looked so real, so dense.

  Just sound. Only sound. Bend it. Ten more wingbeats would slam him into its surface. He drilled into the rock with sound, and plunged ahead. The noise was deafening as he bored his way through the mountain, the tunnel walls hurtling past all around them, solid as real stone. Inches before his nose, the rock melted against his sonic barrage.

  Behind him, he could hear Yorick bellowing in terror. Shade’s throat was so raw he tasted blood, but anger held his exhaustion at bay. He would not be held back; he would push and push until they came out the other side. And near the Tree, Zotz would have no power.

  His ears popped as they blasted through into open air.

  Before them was the Tree.

  Griffin took a wide berth around the trunk, waiting until he could approach the knothole in a direct line. He didn’t like the idea of skirting past all that blazing bark, didn’t want to feel the heat, or get caught in one of those erratic spurts of flame. Also, he didn’t want Luna any more scared than she already was.

  There. Dead ahead was the knothole, and he was sure he could feel a slipstream, drawing him in.

  “We’re going now,” he told Luna.

  “Don’t tell me anything else, okay.” Her eyes were still tightly shut. “Let’s just do it.”

  “Once we go in …” he began, and didn’t know how to finish. He didn’t know what would happen or where they would go, but he suspected it would be to different places.

  She edged closer, pressed her cool cheek against his.

  “Thanks, Griffin. For bringing me all this way.”

  “I think you brought me, mostly.”

  “I’m going to see you again. Remember, all the people I love will be there. You said that.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.”

  “Maybe not right away, but soon.”

  “Griffin!”

  With a shock of delight he turned and saw his father, flying towards him.

  “Dad!” He led Luna in a slow curve towards his father. “This is so good,” he said. “It’s so good you’re alive! And here!”

  “My son,” said his father, and then his fur seemed to shimmer and slip, peeling away from his body, even as it enlarged monstrously.

  “Dad?” Griffin screamed.

  And then his father, who was not his father, was upon him.

  “No!” Shade bellowed from above, flapping so hard he felt his wings would wrench his chest apart. He saw Goth, his sonic disguise rupturing, sailing towards his son, calling out his name—and Griffin was going to him. “Griffin, don’t!” Shade bellowed, but it was too late. Goth had his son in his talons, jaws clamping into him, wrenching. Luna was veering wildly around Goth, striking at the cannibal bat, but the Vampyrum paid no attention, so intent was he on his murderous work.

  “Goth!” Shade roared as he pelted downwards. He had never in his life felt such fury. He was screaming and did not know what he was screaming; the world was nothing but insane noise, threatening to implode his skull. He needed to be faster. Two words only in his head:

  Let me.

  Dazzling light suddenly swirled out from his son’s body with a pure, transfixing wail. Shade gasped as it coursed across Griffin’s fur, his limp wings, his pinched face, and then began to rise off him like a luminous plume of smoke—and Shade knew it was over.

  Goth reared back, and his son’s body fluttered earthwards like a tattered leaf, leaving the intense, beautiful bundle of light and sound swirling in the air.

  His son’s life.

  What Shade saw next was the most terrible thing he had ever witnessed—more terrible even than the actual murder. Knocking Luna aside, Goth swirled around the pulsating mist of sound and light, gathered it in his wings, and hungrily shoved his snout right into it.

  “No!” Shade cried, rage pouring from his eyes and throat like lava.

  Goth opened his jaws, and his chest swelled massively as he sucked the light and sound into himself. Inhaling Griffin’s life. In went the light. In went the sound. Into Goth’s body. “Done!” Goth roared when he had gorged on the last flicker. “We will catch him!” Java shouted off Shade’s left wingtip, but Goth looked up and saw them all plunging towards him. He had a life in him now, but it was the life of a weakened newborn, and Goth must have known it would not be enough to triumph in battle now. He whirled towards the inferno of the Tree and streaked for the knothole.

  Shade angled himself to cut Goth off. He would catch him and take him by the neck and wrench Griffin’s stolen life out of him, tooth and claw. He swung down behind Goth, not ten wingbeats away, and felt a powerful current pulling him headlong towards the knothole. “Goth!” he shouted.

  With one final stroke, Goth accelerated towards the Tree at a speed that no creature could naturally achieve. To Shade’s eyes and echo vision, he became a blur as he blasted through the knothole and instantly disappeared. Gone. Shade braked sharply, fighting the Tree’s current with all his might, and pulling away just in time. The flames scorched his belly and the underside of his wings.

  He circled, muttering to himself, staring at the knothole, not quite believing he’d lost Goth. Then he turned and flew back to the place where he had seen Griffin’s body fall.

  Griffin opened his eyes to find his father beside him, face pressed against him.

  “You’re glowing,” Griffin told him groggily. His father nodded, and Griffin felt the strange warmth of his tears.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, confused, and then he saw Luna off to his right, and four other familiar bats whose names he couldn’t recall just yet.

  “I’m sorry,” said his father. “I wasn’t fast enough.” Griffin looked at the massive fiery column of the Tree, towering overhead. They weren’t far from its base, the earth mounded high around the trunk, some of its flaming roots arching up through the soil. He could feel its heat. He saw the knothole, remembered how close he had been to entering—and now felt the first tectonic stirring of panic within him. He forced himself to listen, and sensed no beating of his heart. His heartbeat stolen by Goth. He was dead.

  Pain awoke in his neck and chest, and he winced, looking at his wounds. He would not be going home now. His mind kept shunting the thought aside, not wanting it to get too close, not wanting to understand its full, terrible shape.

  “Dad?” he said in alarm. “What’s going to happen?”

  “It’s all right,” his father said. “Everything’s going to be all right. We’ll get you home. Wait here.”

  Griffin nodded, then a chill seized the place where his heart used to beat. He hooked a wing around his father.

  “Dad, don’t do it, okay?”

  “It’s all right, Griffin.” Gently Shade pulled away.

  “Don’t go.” Griffin was shaking, his voice weak and desperate. “I wanted to go home with you.”

  “Do what I tell you now,” his father said to him firmly. “Wait here and be ready.”

  Still, Griffin clung to him, wings tight around his chest, but Shade shook him off a second time, and flew before his son could clutch hold. Too weak to take flight himself, Griffin watched helplessly as his father flew away from him, higher and higher, until he was just a dark wrinkle silhouetted against the flaming canopy of the Tree.

  Shade flew higher stil
l, counting his wingbeats, wondering how much altitude he’d need. Finally he levelled off. This was good.

  This would be enough. He looked down, plotted his trajectory, and then took a huge breath, held it, listened to himself, tried to feel every part of himself, as if to store it away in some place he could always find it.

  I’m sorry, Marina.

  He folded his wings against his body, and pitched forward into a free fall.

  Griffin saw his father plummeting, like a star flung from the heavens. The impact was almost silent, a soft final thud, but in Griffin’s head it exploded like thunder and left him gulping in shock. With Luna’s help he dragged himself over and looked at his father, broken on the ground, wings tangled, the bones of his wrists and fingers jutting through the membrane. There was blood around his nose and ears, matted in the fur of his face.

  “Oh, no,” Griffin moaned, shambling closer. “No, no …” he repeated until the words became the sound of one long wordless moan.

  There were little embers of light flaring in the tips of his father’s fur, and then, it was as if he’d been ignited. With an ecstatic burst of music, light welled up from his father’s body, swaddling him in a cocoon before separating itself from his flesh and coalescing into a swirling pillar. The sound and sight of it was so impossibly beautiful, Griffin laughed through his tears. His father’s life. What could be more alive than that symphonic blaze?

  But slowly it began to lift, drifting towards the Tree, ushered by the knothole’s powerful current.

  Griffin saw Yorick flutter tentatively towards the dazzling swirl, sniffing, a look almost of hunger on his face. At once Murk was beside him, wings flared in warning.

  “No,” the cannibal bat said to Yorick, and the misshapen Silverwing looked ashamed and nodded, dropping quickly away.

  “Griffin,” Luna was saying beside him, “you know what your father wanted you to do.”

  He swallowed, knowing, but still shaking his head.

  “Take it!” said Luna. “He did it for you. That’s yours.”

  Griffin looked at her. “Yours, too.”

  “There’s not enough.”

  Griffin looked at all that light and music his father had left behind.

  “There’s enough,” he told her.

  They flew up to the light together, Griffin groaning with the weight of his new dead body. But the sight of his father’s life hovering there gave him the strength he needed. He made it, and opened his mouth and breathed it in: the sound and the light; and he felt it filling him and he smelled all the things he loved—the balsam, the pitch, the earth, his mother’s and father’s fur—and his lungs swelled inside him until he was coughing and choking, and his heart gave a lurch and broke into a startled gallop and suddenly all the sound was gone, and the light, too. His father’s life coursing through him.

  Panting, he looked at Luna in surprise. She stared back, breath held expectantly.

  “Am I?” she whispered.

  “Both nice and sparkly!” Nemo shouted out happily from below.

  Together Griffin and Luna swirled to the ground, and he nuzzled against her and smelled the warm scent of her fur, felt the excited beat of her heart.

  “I’m alive!” Luna shouted. “I knew it! I could just feel it! It feels different, doesn’t it, right away?” She fell silent. “Thanks, Griffin.”

  “I didn’t do anything. It was my dad.” He pulled himself over to his father’s body, still warm. “How long until he wakes up?”

  “You didn’t take long,” Luna said. “Just a few minutes, really.”

  “We’ve got time,” Nemo said. “Doesn’t seem like Zotz can harm us near the Tree.”

  Griffin followed the Foxwing’s gaze to the mountains ranged around the valley. Their stone bulk throbbed angrily, as though something wanted to break free from them, but couldn’t. He settled down to wait. Gradually he felt his father’s body cool, and it seemed so still that he began to despair it could ever become animate again. How could this cold shell ever contain any part of his father?

  Shade’s wings twitched, and Griffin yelped.

  “Dad?”

  Slowly his father’s eyes opened. For a long time he stared at Griffin, saying nothing.

  “It’s me, Dad. Griffin.”

  His father nodded. “Good,” he said, looking at him and Luna. Griffin could see, in his father’s weary eyes, the reflection of the glow that clung to them. “Both of you. That’s good.” He stirred, trying to gather together his broken wings.

  “Heavy,” he said. “Everything feels incredibly heavy.”

  “Only for a little bit,” Griffin told him, wanting to be useful, wanting to fix things somehow, even though he knew this was something he could never fix. His father’s gaze strayed to the four Pilgrims with whom he’d travelled across the Underworld.

  “You should get going.”

  “We’ll go together,” said Java. “I can lift you to the Tree.”

  “Thank you,” Shade told them, “for helping me find my son.” Griffin helped shift his father onto Java’s back, and climbed on beside him with Luna. The Foxwing lifted off with a grunt.

  Up they rose towards the knothole. Griffin lay nestled close to his father, not knowing what to say. Within minutes they’d be there.

  “When—” he began, but his voice collapsed on itself and he couldn’t continue. He coughed, fought the tight grip around his throat.

  “Everything will be fine,” said his father. “You and I can never really leave each other. One way or another we’ll always be together.”

  Griffin nodded, feeling no consolation.

  “You’ve had quite an adventure,” his father said with a grin. “I’m starting to wonder if this wasn’t some way to outdo me.”

  Griffin couldn’t even laugh. “Mom’s going to be so angry with me.”

  “Of course she won’t.”

  “It’s my fault. All of it. If I hadn’t hurt Luna, if I hadn’t got dragged down here and made you come after me so that now—”

  “Griffin. It was an accident. You did the best you could, and you brought Luna with you, and you made it to the Tree. Without my help.”

  “But I wasn’t brave!” he blurted out. He didn’t know why this was so important right now, but it was. “I’m not like you. I’m a coward.”

  “No,” said his father.

  “I was always scared. Always.”

  “That’s right,” his father told him. “Being scared but doing it, anyway. That’s brave.”

  Griffin stared in surprise, and his father pressed his cheek against his son’s. “I’m very proud of you,” he said into Griffin’s ear.

  “Ready?” Java asked, looking back over her shoulder at them.

  “Ready,” said Luna.

  Shade nodded. “I guess,” said Griffin.

  The others went first—Yorick, then Nemo, then Murk, hurtling straight for the knothole and disappearing so quickly it was hard to believe they’d ever been there. Griffin held on tighter as Java too was gripped by the cyclone current and pulled in fast. He saw the blackness of the knothole race towards him, shimmer, and then—

  It was difficult to keep things straight.

  Speed was what he was most aware of, the teeth-rattling, eye-jarring speed as they were hurled up through the blazing trunk of the Tree. His sight, his echo vision, was a shuddering mess, and he could catch only smears of things. Java, he noticed, wasn’t even really flapping anymore; in fact, she had folded her wings in against her body. The speed made him want to scream; he wanted it to stop. He wanted off. They were flying straight up, and with his thumbs and claws and everything else he was clinging to his father and Luna and Java, all at once. The cool of his father’s fur, the warmth of Luna’s. They would be dashed to pieces, burned, whirled into dust!

  Ahead of them, he saw a circular portal of flames, and beyond that a great network of flaming passageways, and he realized these must be the Tree’s maze of branches spreading across the sky. “Dad,
” he said through his wobbling mouth. “Dad?” “I’m here,” came his father’s reply, close to his ear.

  They shot up into the tangle of branches, and something tugged hard at Griffin, jarring him from Java’s back. He felt his father’s fur slip through his thumbs. Griffin looked, and his father was gone. “Dad!”

  He tried to slow down, to see where he had gone, but there was no stopping, no changing course. He was being propelled by some hurricane force, and it was all he could do to hold his own body together.

  “Luna!” he wailed, for he could not see her, either.

  He was being hurtled down one branch after another, shunted, smacked, twisted, until he simply closed his eyes, flattened his ears so he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. He tried to hold on tightly to himself, afraid that he would die, afraid that he would never get—

  HOME

  Home.

  Goth circled above the jungle canopy, gazing down at the ruins of the royal pyramid. In the many months since his death, the rainforest had reclaimed the heap of scorched and shattered stone, enveloping it with giant ferns and creepers and mist and leaves so that he had almost flown past. This place had once been the sacred temple of Cama Zotz and home to millions of Vampyrum Spectrum.

  Keep going, a voice whispered within him, and he flew on, south, deeper into the jungle. He stopped only to drink from a stream and feed on a nest of macaw hatchlings, and he felt his strength swelling through him. When he’d first burst out into the Upper World, he was weak as a wounded newborn. But the mere sight of familiar constellations and the homeland had invigorated him.

  He flew all through the night, and just as dawn was breaking saw a gap in the misty canopy. He plunged into the forest and there, veiled by jungle, was another pyramid. He had to hack his way through a wall of vegetation to find an opening in the upper temple. The inside was a nest of cobwebs, and he slashed his way through and roosted on the wall. Casting out sound, he saw, barely recognizable through the dust, carved markings: the jaguar, the feathered serpent, the eyes watching him from the corners of the ceiling.