Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  Broom and Candle stare at Clay, aghast.

  ‘Why did you never tell me all this before?’ cries Broom.

  Clay shrugs. ‘You prefer the fairy story.’

  ‘Why did you never tell me,’ erupts Candle, ‘that I was marrying a pirate!’

  Clay looks guilty at that.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Candle remembers. ‘He knows about Mara – and there’s a storyteller in a box and he does too. And—’

  The kitchen girl who has been sitting in rapt silence gives a gasp. When she leans across the table into the glow of the lamp Candle sees she has soft, rounded features like Clay and Broom. Her eyes are beautiful in the lamplight and they meet Candle’s boldly. The new wife of the Pontifix straightens her back and glares at the girl. No kitchen slave should dare to look at her like that.

  ‘Tuck stole the globe from my mother,’ the girl declares. ‘I want it back. And the halo. He’s just told me,’ she shoots Clay a furious look, ‘Tuck’s got that now too!’

  Candle tries to stare down the impertinent girl with the too-bold, too-beautiful eyes.

  ‘This is Mara’s daughter,’ says Clay, sounding as if he needs to take a great gulp of air. ‘Lily Longhope from Candlewood in the mountains.’

  Candle keeps her eyes on the girl. She doesn’t want to look at Clay. She has heard all she wants to know about Lily Longhope in Clay’s breathless voice.

  ‘The globe and the halo belong to my mother,’ Lily is insisting. ‘I want them back.’

  ‘Candle will help us,’ says Clay, still sounding as if he is holding his breath. ‘She’ll get them back for you and we’ll get out of here, all of us, and escape to the mountains.’

  Candle turns to him in amazement. ‘The mountains? What about all your ocean dreams?’

  Now Clay looks torn.

  ‘We must go home to our own people,’ says Broom, her face flushed with the thought. ‘Come with us, Candle. You can’t stay with a pirate who killed your father.’

  Candle stands up, feeling uncertain and lost. ‘And leave Tuck with everything that belonged to my father? Everything that should be mine! You want what Tuck stole from your mother, don’t you?’ she challenges Lily. ‘Well, I want what he’s taken from my father.’

  Lily appraises Candle, then nods.

  ‘Then maybe we can help each other,’ she suggests, but the other girl has already turned to leave. ‘Wait, Candle – the storyteller? In a box, you sard? He knew Mara? But who is this storyteller? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ says Candle wearily. ‘And I don’t care any more. I need to sleep. My head’s thumping.’

  ‘I must go home, Candle,’ Broom quietly persists. ‘Lily’s people are mine. Clay’s father is one of them. I thought they were all dead but they’re alive, in the mountains. Can’t you—’

  ‘Can’t you all stop yapping and hounding me?’ Candle bursts out. ‘I can’t think. You’re still my slave, Broom, and you won’t go anywhere unless I let you.’

  Clay frowns at his almost-sister, his eyes turning hostile and hard.

  ‘Gone to your head, has it? Marrying Tuck Culpy, living in a palace. You’re sounding like Rodenglaw’s daughter now, aren’t you, Candle – desperate for money and power. You’d really stop my mum from being with her own people? After everything she’s done for you? You know how unhappy she’s been all these years.’

  What about me? Candle wants to shout back. Haven’t I been unhappy too? Don’t turn against me now – all because of that girl! But if she speaks she’ll cry, and she will not cry in front of Lily Longhope.

  She has been stupid. The globe has some secret power that Tuck and Lily seek. Yet she held that power – the halo, the very thing that would unlock the globe’s magic – in her hands. And she gave it away to her husband like a silly, unthinking girl. Well, she will never give away her power so easily to anyone ever again.

  Lily whispers to her but Candle pretends not to hear and runs up the steps, anxious to escape with all her churning feelings and be alone in her bed with the furs drawn over her head.

  She can get rid of Lily Longhope any time she likes, she tells herself. The guards would deal with a palace intruder, intent on stealing the Pontifix’s treasures, in the blink of an eye.

  But Candle’s heart is heavy. Is Clay right? Has she inherited her father’s brutal greed? If the palace guards tossed that girl into the sea, would she care? But Clay would. She can’t bear to lose him and Broom. How could she stand this life without them if they were to run away to some faraway place in the mountains that Broom has never known but calls home – and she never sees them again?

  She has a chance to escape this glass prison and she should grab it, Candle tells herself – but Ilira is her home and the injustice of Tuck getting away with murder, looting what is hers by right, fills Candle with an injured fury that all her father’s cruelty never did.

  Am I Candle or Tartoq Rodenglaw? Do I belong with Broom and Clay or is my destiny here in Ilira? What is my life to be?

  She has only been alive for fifteen Great Darknesses; she might live another fifty or more. What will she do in this barren, empty palace on a rock? Candle sees the years like relentless tides of the ocean, rolling over her, wave after wave.

  As she runs through the palace the words of Lily Longhope’s last, brazen whisper seem to hiss from the steam geysers in the rocks.

  ‘Don’t you want to be free?’

  THE LETHAL NECKLACE AND THE LOST SPELL

  Lily lifts her sleepy head from the kitchen table. She yawns and rubs her eyes. Snoring softly on the floor under the table is Clay. Broom has gone to her bed and the rest of the palace is quiet.

  This is her chance, Lily tells herself. All the talk about Clay’s lost and found father has intensified her desire to find her own – and make at least some good of the horrendous mess she’s landed herself in.

  She grabs a plate of oysters from a kitchen shelf and creeps up the stairway cut into the rock.

  At the top of the steps Lily finds herself in a maze of glassy corridors. Which way? She hurries along dim-lit winding passages, until she almost trips over a group of palace guards sprawled out on the floor. She feels a blush spread all over as they eye her languidly from the legs upward.

  ‘So who’s this out wandering in the dead of night?’ drawls a young guard.

  ‘I’m lost,’ says Lily breathlessly. ‘I’m the new kitchen maid and I’ve to take the Pontifix some oysters and I – I got lost.’

  ‘The Pontifix sleeps in his ship,’ yawns a second guard.

  ‘Uhuh,’ says Lily, thinking fast, ‘but he wants an early breakfast set out in his room. All I know is that I’ve to take him oysters then get back to the kitchen and do three washings before sunrise.’

  ‘Work you day and night, do they?’ an older guard shakes his head.

  Lily nods wearily. The fatherly guard takes pity on her. He gets up and steers her past the others, around a bend in the corridor, then points to a flaming torch on a wall beside a doorway.

  ‘In there.’

  ‘You supposed to be guarding it?’ Lily asks, with a smile. She raises the plate of oysters to the helpful guard.

  ‘What the Pont don’t see, he don’t know,’ laughs the guard.

  He winks at her and steals the largest oyster. Lily walks up to the doorway. If Tuck sleeps in his ship then she is safe. For now. She slips through the sealskin curtain that hangs across the doorway and steps into a large, dim, circular room and looks around at the strange objects set in the thick glass walls and upon the rocks that are the furniture of the room.

  In the centre of the room is a large stone table. Lily peers through the dim light of a sputtering oil lamp and sees a jewelled casket there. And beside the casket – she can barely believe her eyes – lies the crescent of her halo and a small, moon-like globe.

  Her mother’s stolen globe!

  Six quick steps is all it takes. Lily runs soundlessly across the furs that carpet
the floor, stuffs the globe and halo into her pocket.

  Just as she is about to make her escape her eye is caught by another object on the table. A book! There is only one book in Candlewood. Lily has never seen another in her life, except the stack of tough, wood-pulp paper on which Gorbals writes stories and poems.

  She picks up the book and reads the title.

  NATURAL ENGINEERING by C. D. STONE

  She flicks through the fine, soft pages full of pictures and diagrams.

  Something flashes in front of her face. Lily drops the book, too shocked to scream, as a cutlass blade curves like a lethal necklace around her throat.

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ her captor hisses in her ear. ‘Or you’re dead.’

  The blade presses on the side of Lily’s head, nicking off a glossy coil of hair.

  The cutlass slips from her neck but she can feel the point of it digging in her back as she is prodded towards the door. Around the bend in the corridor, the guards are yawning and telling raucous jokes.

  The cutlass point in her back nudges her in the opposite direction. Lily walks through the palace corridors, her heart jumping with fear. She tries to turn her head to see who her captor is – it can’t be Tuck; he’d surely have called the guards – but is shoved into a room.

  ‘Candle!’

  Lily lets out a shuddering breath.

  Candle points the tip of the curved cutlass at Lily’s nose.

  ‘Give them to me.’

  Lily sighs and pulls from her pocket the halo and globe – but just as Candle is about to grab them, Lily snatches them away.

  Candle jabs the cutlass at her stomach.

  ‘You’ll kill me?’ Lily challenges. ‘Really? Go on then. It’s not just Broom and Clay who’ll never forgive you if you do. You’ll never forgive yourself.’

  ‘No?’ Candle’s sharp little eyes shine like splinters of jet.

  ‘No! You need me alive or Broom will never get home to her people. Clay will never meet his father – and you’ll never know what the wizz does because I won’t be here to show you. And if you knew what it could do you’d have power over Tuck – because I doubt he knows.’

  Candle draws a breath between her teeth.

  ‘He’s the Pontifix – of course he knows,’ she jeers at Lily. ‘Tuck sees magic in it – look!’

  Candle points at the vivid storms that swrrl around the globe in Lily’s hand.

  ‘That’s all it does without the halo,’ says Lily.

  ‘The globe gave him visions of Ilira’s bridges!’

  ‘Oh, really? Not that book on his table?’ says Lily drily. ‘Tuck can’t work the wizz even with the halo if he doesn’t know its secret spell. And I doubt he does. Only my mother knows it – and me. I didn’t even remember it,’ she adds, ‘until now.’

  She learned the spell, Lily remembers, along with the letters of the alphabet when she was small. It was an old language, Mara told her, a lost language. Her Granny Mary had passed down the Weave code that unlocked the cyberwizz and Lily should know it, said Mara, because if it hadn’t been for the wizz and its secrets Lily would not exist; she would never have been born.

  Mara had been trying to tell her, Lily sees now, about Fox. But when her mother came to the next part of the story Lily didn’t want to hear and ran away.

  Yet the spell became part of her. Lily carved it into the earth burrow walls in winter, on to her favourite trees and rocks when the sun came back. She’d scribbled the old code all over Candlewood like a secret signature and imprinted it in her heart, as if it had some mysterious power to keep her safe.

  And maybe it does, after all.

  ‘Do the spell then,’ orders Candle, jabbing the cutlass at her nose again.

  Lily is suddenly scared, remembering the tales of Mara’s strange adventures in the Weave. Can a whole world really exist in a globe that fits in her hand? What if she gets stuck in the Weave and can’t get back? But of course she won’t, she reminds herself. It’s not real. It’s only the strange computer magic of the old world and she must use it now. Besides, what choice does she have?

  Lily steps back from the glinting cutlass and slips the halo on to her head – then looks uncertainly at the globe.

  ‘So you don’t know! Ha!’ Candle grabs the globe and copies what she saw Tuck do with a finger and thumb. The globe springs open.

  Lily sees the round screenpad and small wand inside, and smiles.

  The little wand slips in her nervous fingers as she begins to write on the screen. The patterns of the Weave spell flow through her and she tingles with excitement. Is this really happening? Can she find the amazing world of the Weave where her mother once met Fox?

  ‘Self or avatar?’

  A smooth voice from the globe makes both girls jump.

  ‘Avatar?’ Candle screws up her face.

  ‘What’s an avatar?’ Lily shrugs. ‘Self?’

  ‘Body scanning in progress,’ says the voice of the globe.

  The round screen blinks at her like an eye. Nothing else happens. Then Lily remembers she must pull the halo over her eyes.

  Candle and the palace vanish as Lily is sucked by a wave of pure energy through a vast, flickering force. The wizz is wholly in control, as if it knows exactly where it’s taking her, hurling her now towards a wasteland of glittering ruins with such incredible speed it’s impossible to –

  ‘STOP!’

  Lily crashes to a painless halt among the ruins of tumbledown towers that stretch as far as she can see.

  SNAKES AND RUINS

  The wrecked towers flicker as if they are the keepers of the last embers of a great fire.

  Lily stands near an intersection of the ruins. BOULEVARD OF BREAKING NEWS says a sign that buzzes high in the darkness above her. She looks down the dark boulevard and cannot see its end. The strangest creature, made of a motley assortment of legs, is scuttling across the intersection. It screeches to a halt when it spots her. Lily draws back into the shadows and the bizarre creature scuttles away into BOULEVARD HABERDASH. Lily follows nervously and sees crooked towers, propped up by the squat Hostel for Pedlars of Quantum Mysteries. The scuttling creature has vanished into a fizzling heap of junk that spills from the doorless entrance to the hostel.

  Lily wanders into BOULEVARD OF NOTIONS, past the Clandestine Cafe, Club Paradox and Inklings Inn. OPEN LATE FOR NIGHTHAWKS says a sign at her feet. She looks up and sees it must have crashed all the way down from – she strains to read the flickering sign high on the tower – the OVERNIGHT LODGE FOR INSPIRATIONS.

  Is this what a city was in the old world? Lily tries to imagine the vast Weavescape as it might have been before it crumbled to smouldering ruins. Yet nothing here is real. It’s all make-believe magic of the wizz. A computer weave of all the stuff of the old world made by the Earth’s people before the great floods. Lily knows it from the stories of her childhood, as if she has visited it all before in a dream. This is where Mara was stalked by the fox.

  ‘I said stop! Can’t you read?’

  Lily looks around nervously. Someone did, she realizes, shout ‘stop’.

  The cross voice comes from the ruins but all Lily can see is a snaky presence, like a trail of green smoke. The snakiness wraps itself around a flashing red sign sticking out from a pile of rubble.

  ‘What does THIS say?’ the voice demands, as if talking to a stupid child.

  ‘STOP,’ Lily reads. ‘Well, I have.’

  ‘Now you have,’ says the voice, which, Lily is now sure, belongs to the green snakiness. ‘But you were starting to wander. This is private territory. No Weave-ghosts, lost trolls or anyone else allowed here without permission.’

  The thing comes closer and Lily sees intelligence in its green eyes. She edges backwards through the rubble.

  ‘Who do I get permission from?’ asks Lily.

  ‘Me,’ says the snake. The voice is that of a girl; a bossy, bad-tempered girl. Lily has had more than enough of bossy, bad-tempered girls, including the one br
eathing down her neck in realworld. ‘So? Weave-ghost? Troll? What are you?’

  ‘I’m just a girl,’ she replies, trying to step through the snakiness that has coiled around her legs.‘I’ll move on and get out of your way.’

  Lily reminds herself that all she has to do is yank off the halo to get out of this weird world, so what is there to fear? She is desperate to explore the vast forest of towers that buzz and spark as if there’s a small lightning storm in each one.

  She ventures a question before she goes.

  ‘You, um, haven’t seen a fox?’

  The green snake grows intensely still.

  ‘Fox?’

  The word is a venomous hiss.

  Lily tenses, scared. But what can a wispy green snake do to her in a place that’s not real? She spies the scuttling creature emerge from the sizzling junk heap and hurry towards them on its jumble of legs, reels of broken numbers frothing from its mouth. With a flick of her tail the snake zaps the creature, which flies apart. A smouldering stump of leg lands with a clang nearby but immediately the limb scuttles back towards the junk heap in search, Lily supposes, of its other missing parts.

  So that’s what a wispy green snake can do.

  ‘What,’ demands the snake presence, ‘do you want with Fox?’

  ‘It’s private,’ Lily retorts. She’s not going to confide her deepest secrets to a bossy snake-stranger. Except she’s desperate, and there’s no one else to help. ‘I’m looking for my father,’ she confesses. ‘His name is Fox. He met my mother here, years ago.’

  The snake rears up, dangerously. Lily jumps back as a forked tongue lashes towards her face.

  It can’t hurt you, she tells herself, closing her eyes. It’s not real.

  ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ hisses the snake.

  Lily opens her eyes. The snake stares back.