“And whose finger will be on the trigger when you do? I’d never seen that mangy crone Gwilanna scared until she talked about you meddling with the Fire Eternal.”
“It won’t be me,” he said, and looked at her hard.
Slowly, the implication in his gaze began to register. “No,” she said, covering the scars on her arm. “If you put Alexa in any kind of danger, I’ll —”
“Alexa is already in danger,” he said, with a calmness she found unsettling. To her deeper dismay, she realized she was trying hard not to cry.
The danger for the whole family continues to increase. Even Sophie (David’s first girlfriend) e-mails from Africa to say that she thinks something is amiss with her “special” dragon, Grace. The tension builds; breaking point is imminent.
Back at Scuffenbury, Lucy succeeds in awakening the dormant dragon there, but with drastic effect and at great cost to herself and those around her. Tam is missing, several others are dead, and although David sends Grockle to help her, she finds that that help may be too little and too late.
When she looked again, Glissington Tor had broken into four distinct mounds, and rising from its smoking center was the most terrifying dragon she had ever seen.
It was green, savage, and at least three times the size of Grockle. When it threw out its wings it blocked the sun and seemed to draw the landscape around it like a blanket. From nostril to tail it must have measured half a small field. For a moment or two it kept its head folded into its chest, but when it raised its snout and Lucy saw the redness in one eye, the bones at the base of her spine turned to jelly. The dragon had been horribly attacked at some time. Or maybe something had failed with its fire tear? Or the eye had become diseased in some way? She couldn’t tell. Nor could she bear to look at it for long. But little did she know she would soon be forced to. For just as the unicorn had sensed her presence, suddenly the dragon seemed to scent her as well. The scales around its neck came up in a frill and black smoke gushed from its long, narrow snout. Paying no heed whatsoever to Grockle, it turned its damaged gaze on Lucy. At first she told herself it couldn’t have seen her. She had to be a mile and a half away, at least. But with a wallop of wings that tickled the blades of grass around her feet, the thing took off and headed their way. In mid-flight, it uncoupled its jaw and let out a squeal that sounded like a pig being forced through a grinder. Lucy saw Grockle tense. The squeal gathered force and grew into a roar, which seemed loud enough to shatter the dome of the sky. Lucy covered her ears and screamed.
Lucy meets her destiny
The arrival on the scene of darklings and hordes of Ix entities intensifies the situation even further and a full-scale battle commences in the skies over Scuffenbury.
Dun-dun-dunnnn … You know what to do to find out whether Lucy — or any of the other characters — survive or not. What happens to Liz’s child — if indeed it is a child? What fate has Gwilanna brought upon herself?
What is the new species that is to be introduced into the world, according to David? Will Mother Earth herself turn against its human occupants if the Ix win the battle and an inversion occurs? Will the light of the world turn finally to an eternal dark …?
Without giving too much away, the dramatic conclusion to the battle at Scuffenbury Hill sees the story take a sideways step into another dimension — literally.
Co:pern:ica, the “Fire World” of the title, is an experimental world created by the Fain using templates of humans from Earth. Thus, the people of Earth have counterparts on Co:pern:ica, “constructs” who are similar but not identical to themselves. The Co:pern:ican versions may differ by name or relationship, but have largely similar roles to play in their respective lives. All the regular characters from the first five books are here, but not as you’ve known them before. For example, Anders Bergstrom, on Earth a mentor to David Rain, becomes Thorren Strømberg, a psychological counselor to David Merriman. The people who inhabit Co:pern:ica have the ability to “imagineer” — to materialize objects from thought and intention alone. The idea behind the manifestation of this world was to create a society whereby everyone had access to all they needed, within certain limits set by the Higher (as the Fain are collectively known on Co:pern:ica).
Problems first occur when David, then twelve years old, begins to imagineer outside the Grand Design. This becomes apparent during his sleep cycles, when he has nighttime disturbances so severe that he is taken by his parents, Eliza and Harlan, to see Counselor Strømberg, who films him while asleep. The film reveals a surprising and frightening development.
For the first few frames, David lay on his back with his hands tucked under his therma:sol sheet. Then, just as if a pin had been stuck into his foot, his head twitched away from the camera and came violently back, making an audible whack against his pillow. He drew up his knees. His back arched slightly. His hands began to push the sheet away.
Suddenly, the screen flashed as if a light had popped. At the same time, David jerked up in bed with his jaws wide open and his lips curled back. Two of his teeth seemed slightly extended. His eyes, normally so placid and round, slanted sideward and briefly changed color from their usual deep blue to a strong shade of brown. With both hands he clawed wildly at the space in front of him, though nothing appeared to be occupying that space. And out of his throat came an uncommon noise. A roar, not unlike the sound of an engine.
On replaying the film at a slower speed, it becomes evident that David (morphed into a polar bear) was fighting something. Even more strangely, firebirds, the only creatures other than katts on Co:pern:ica, were involved in allaying the danger.
This time, as the colors slipped through the blinds, it was possible to see them re-expand into the familiar long-tailed shapes of the creatures that inhabited every part of Co:pern:ica. Firebirds. Four of them. Green, cream colored, sky blue, and red. They flew to David’s bed and hovered in the region of his flashing hands. It was then that Harlan witnessed something even more extraordinary. Just in front of David, over an area approximately two feet long, the air was rippling in a vertical line, as if the fabric of the universe was being torn apart.
“In the name of Co:pern:ica, what’s that?” Harlan muttered, and watched in fascination as the firebirds went about sealing the rift with bursts of the white-colored fire that was sometimes seen to issue from their nostrils. When it was done, they went back the way they’d come….
Harlan buried his hands inside his pockets and let his worried gaze drift back to the screen. The image of David remained there for a moment before Strømberg hit a button and cleared it. “He could be a danger to us all,” he said.
So how could a young boy morph into a polar bear? And what was he fighting? Counselor Strømberg asks David’s father, who is a scientist, a Professor of Realism, to investigate. Harlan subsequently discovers that the rift is a portal to another dimension, but within the same time frame. The disturbing conclusion from this is that something from another world has tried to contact David….
Thus, for his own safety, it is decreed that David be taken to Bushley librarium, to help calm him down. The librarium is a huge museum of books, and the largest firebird aerie on Co:pern:ica.
It rose out of the flowers like a great gray monolith. A single tall building with an uncountable number of floors. The upper floors were lost in wisps of cloud and the whole structure seemed to be bending backward as though it had reached a critical mass and was ready to topple over at any moment. Fine red sand (or something like it) was raining down from the joints in the brickwork and being taken away in skirts on the breeze. At ground level there was just one door. It was made of wood (unusually) and was twice Harlan’s height. It was already halfway open, despite the fact that a small sign badly attached to the door frame invited visitors to R NG THE BE L. Harlan moved forward to do just that and stepped on something that had spilled out of the doorway. It was a large-format book. He reached down and picked it up. It must have been thirty spins since he’d seen one. He smoothed a fi
lm of the red sand off the glossy cover and handed it to Eliza.
“The Art of Baking Cakes,” she read.
Harlan shrugged. “Welcome to the librarium.”
Eliza opened the pages and looked at several of the ancient digi:grafs. “Why do we keep this stuff? I could easily imagineer anything in this. I don’t understand what use this is to anyone.”
“Historical value,” Harlan said. He took the book from her and flipped through its pages. He showed a digi:graf of a chocolate gateau to David. The boy’s eyes lit up and he quickly imagineered a miniature version. He gave it to his mother.
Eliza smiled and de:constructed it. “Bad for your purity of vision,” she said.
“I think books are rather quaint,” said Harlan. “And they’re real, of course, not constructs.” He closed the book and laid it back in the doorway. “Our ancestors would have relied on these things.”
Eliza shook her head and looked up at the building. “Is this real, do you think?”
Harlan touched the brickwork, feeling its roughness, though that in itself was no proof of authenticity; anyone on Co:pern:ica could imagineer a brick. “Yes,” he said. “I’d be surprised if anyone had enough in their fain to put up something as large as this and still be able to maintain it.”
Eliza sighed and put her hands on David’s shoulders, pulling him back toward her a little. “Why would Strømberg send him to a relic like this?”
“Well, let’s begin the process of finding out.” This time, Harlan did press the bell.
To their surprise, the bell is answered by a girl named Rosa, who quickly becomes David’s best friend. Rosa is his age and the assistant of Mr. Henry, curator of the librarium. Her job, and now David’s, too, is to put the books into order, both by subject matter and alphabetically. This sounds a thankless — and deadly boring — task, but David soon finds out that books are not only fascinating things for all the information and entertainment they can provide, but also that these particular books, along with the building itself, are alive and filled with auma — energy. The only small niggle in David’s and Rosa’s idyllic lives is that they can never find a way to get beyond Floor 42, into the levels where they know the firebirds live.
All continues well until Harlan, while trying to recreate the rift in his lab, inadvertently causes a time-jolt and he and everyone connected with him ages eight years, instantly.
For this “crime” he and his assistant, Bernard Brotherton, are banished to the Dead Lands, a huge area of abandoned wasteland beyond Co:pern:ica Central’s city limits. Here, they find that isolated pockets of survivors are scratching out an existence for themselves, and the two men are sheltered by one such group, calling themselves Followers of Agawin, a mythical man-dragon of legend. Near to the group’s camp is a hill called the Isle of Alavon (it used to be surrounded by water). On the peak of this hill is a tower. Legend has it that the tower was the home of Agawin and is protected by a wraith. Harlan decides to investigate. Along with Bernard and two other men from the group, they reach the tower and find a large stone dais inside it….
Suddenly, Mathew Lefarr cried out: “Harlan, look up!”
There, in the circle of light above, was the apparition they had all imagined but never made flesh. A terrifying beast with wings like giant sheets of canvas. Eyes of yellow oil. Teeth like daggered rocks. It twisted and hissed and roared at the men, all the while lashing its dark red tongue…. The creature twisted its ingenious neck (every scale readjusted in one flowing arrow) and aimed its snout downward. Squeezing its nostrils tight, it sent forth a column of blue-white fire. The point of the flame struck the center of the dais. It burned for a sec in a crown of light, then was sucked back into the nostrils of the dragon. In its wake, something extraordinary followed. There was a grinding noise at the center of the dais, and the spot marked by the image of Agawin began to turn and work its way upward. At first it appeared that a plug of pure stone had lifted from the structure. But as Harlan’s eyes readjusted to the light, he saw that it was a receptacle of sorts. A cylinder, about the length of a man’s hand, made of a glistening, trans:lucent matter. With cinders in his hair and uncomfortable traces of singeing in his nostrils, he took a breath and closed his hand around it. The outer structure vanished as if it were dust, but when he pulled his hand away, inside it was something from another world.
Lefarr was too awestruck to speak at first. “What is it?” he asked eventually.
Harlan ran his thumb along the curved and jagged surface. “Something beyond our reality,” he whispered. “I believe it’s the claw of a dragon.”
Meanwhile, back in Bushley, David, hearing of his father’s arrest, has gone back home. To make matters worse for Rosa, two unethical “Aunts” named Primrose and Petunia, representatives of the powers-that-be on Co:pern:ica, arrive at the librarium. Under the orders of the Aunt Su:perior, Gwyneth (Gwilanna by any other name — oh, dear …), they attempt to steal the auma from the books to boost their powers of imagineering. Rosa finds the machine they are using to do this:
It was a thin flat pad, about half the size of a standard book cover. It had a sleek black screen, which appeared to have a number of thumbprints on its surface. Flashing lights were jumping back and forth across the bottom, as if the device were waiting for an input. Rosa had never troubled herself with elec:tronics and hadn’t sent a single :com in her life. Even so, she picked up the pad and pressed her finger to a likely area of the screen. It lit up at once. A message invited her to SCAN OBJECT. She looked at Aurielle. The firebird frowned. Object? thought Rosa. What object? And then it struck her: the books, of course. She picked one off the bed and slowly brought it into contact with the pad. To her horror, the pad came alive. Numbers. Lights. Menus. Colors.
The machine asks Rosa whether she wants it to absorb the collected energy, but instead she hurls the pad across the room and runs to the nearest shelf of books. She pulls one down and opens it —
For one moment nothing happened. But as she tilted the book, the periods, the commas, the question marks, and eventually the words themselves all began to slip from their places on the page until they were falling like ash around her feet.
“No,” she wailed. She sank to her knees, clutching the book to her heart.
They were dead, all of them. She knew it at once. Their auma taken. Their power destroyed….
Rosa looked tearfully over her shoulder. The Aunts were waking. She narrowed her gaze.
Good.
A tussle follows and the machine accidentally disgorges its auma into a strange three-lined scratch on Rosa’s arm. Not only can Rosa now read dragontongue, the language in which the mysterious Book of Agawin is written (maybe Agawin is not just a legend, after all?), but she can also understand the firebirds when they communicate. Invited onto the upper floors by them, she and David discover an egg (which looks as if it is ready to hatch) and a tapestry allegedly made by Agawin. They get a huge surprise when they discover that they (or rather, their Earth counterparts) are among a group of people depicted on the tapestry, along with a small dragon, holding a pad and pencil…. This is Gadzooks, of course, as you will know if you have read Dark Fire. The tapestry shows a scene from the Battle of Isenfier, a vision from Agawin’s distant future. Eventually, David and Harlan discover that Gadzooks has stopped the battle by suspending time and that a beacon or distress call is being sent out across the universe — to them.
Tapestry of Isenfier
Meanwhile, by her usual devious means, Aunt Gwyneth has gotten hold of the dragon’s claw which Harlan found in the Dead Lands. Taking the form of a katt so that she can enter the librarium undetected, she commingles with a firebird infected by the Ix and learns it was they who came through the rift in search of David.
We will answer your questions, they said weakly.
“Very wise. Tell me more about David Merriman. How can he have the auma of a dragon when no such thing exists on this world?”
The Ix paused. He is between worlds, they
said.
“There are three Davids?”
Negative, said the Ix. There is one entity, varying at quantum speeds between the time points. His auma alternates across the planes. This is a primary condition of the nexus.
“Is his life on Earth different — when he’s there?”
Yes, but his purpose remains the same. Only the connections vary.
“Connections? What connections?”
The Ix took a moment to consider this question. The mammal in the book is one.
“The squirrel? Why would an insignificant creature mean so much to someone like him?”
On Earth, he has resonated strongly with them. We do not know what their function is.
“And where do I, Gwyneth, fit into this?”
You are another connection.
Suddenly, the tic around the eye was back. “Are you telling me that I have another life — on Earth?”
We must Cluster to answer that.
“Do it,” she snapped, flashing the katt’s tail. “Try anything and I’ll neutralize you all.”
We accept this, said the Ix.
She let them regroup. After several moments of neural activity, they reported they had an answer.
“Well? What is it?”
At the time of Isenfier, Gwyneth does not exist.
“What?” The katt’s teeth began to chatter fiercely.
On Earth, you are called Gwilanna. You die before Isenfier begins.
“How? In what circumstances?”
Fear, they said, buzzing around her brain. Fear of the Shadow. Fear of the Ix.
Gwyneth instantly decides she must change the timeline so that “she” does not die after all. But by doing that, she will change not only her own life on Earth, but also those of everyone else in the tapestry.
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