by Patricia Bow
That was a terrible moment. It was the first they knew there were dragons here, too. Was there any world anywhere not overrun by dragons?
Then today this big red one. It wouldn’t be long before more dragons came. Next time they’d be ready to flame.
The Hall of Gates — Pier’s name for it — was high and bare. The walls were more air than stone. Tall, narrow, round-topped holes showed where windows used to be. Only six windows still held glass: coloured shapes held together by strips of metal to form pictures. Sun poured through them and splashed the floor with ruby and purple and leaf-green light. The colours were warm, but the stones were always cold in here, no matter how hot it was outside.
Most of the windows showed men and women fighting with griffins and harpies and other monsters. One showed a boy climbing a hill towards a starry sky, and reaching up as if to pluck a star. Pier liked that one. The boy had a kind face, she thought.
I wonder where the people are that made the windows?
The one where the Casseri had entered this world now stood dark and lifeless. She’d been able to do that for her people at least — break the passage so that no dragons could follow them through.
Maybe breaking things is all I can do.
Pier faced the one window that really mattered. It showed a man on horseback aiming a spear at a huge, green, coiling snake. The warrior’s coat was blue, the exact colour of the gate when it was fully formed and just before it dissolved into the passage between worlds. Not that Pier had ever reached the passage stage with this gate.
Or with any gate, by my own skill. She shoved the thought aside, climbed up on the wooden box set there, and reached in over the deep sill. She had to stretch to get her hands on the glass. Her shoulders ached.
The green snake darkened, the warrior and his horse faded from sight. Blue light flared. Branching shapes that looked like glass and glowed like sapphire, but weren’t either, tangled where the window had been. Pier closed her eyes and held her breath and moved her fingers. She’d done this so often in the last three days that now her fingertips knew every twist and turn.
Beneath the surface, in some place as far from her fingertips as the earth is from the stars, Pier’s thought swerved through mazes of blue fire. Dipped and twisted and swooped, swift and sure, towards the other side, towards where it opened … into … the … passage ….
Ten heartbeats. Twelve. When she got this close, sometimes she forgot to breathe.
The sapphire light dimmed and faded. Pier’s arms fell like sticks of lead. She didn’t bother to look, didn’t need to. The gate was gone again. She had failed. Again.
She rested her head on the stone sill. Eyes still closed, she pictured the shining thing that waited — she knew it — in the world beyond this gate, the thing that would save her people. The great Prism of legend.
To sense it, that was the dream of every seeker. To find it, to wield it, that was the work of a master. But now all the seekers were dead, including Seeker Kwan. All dead but Pier, the youngest and least. Pier, who had never actually opened a world gate by herself.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. Thanks to heaven that Yulith didn’t know how Pier had failed them all, just now, out on the ledge.
That dragon, it got inside my mind. It saw. It knows.
The dragon flew as far as the tangled lands before she allowed herself to sink. Not back to Sissarion, not like this. There were rivals who would smile at her weakness. At least one would snatch at the chance. He would not win, of course, but she wanted no strife, not just now.
Here. This was a good place. Deep in a gully, a dry river bed, where the cliff leaned out at the top and screened her from the sky. The smooth red stones still gave back the sun’s heat. She crawled under the overhang and crouched. She wrapped her wings around her body.
There was pain. That could be endured. But this metal thing in her armpit, that must come out. She clenched a clawed fist around the shaft and pulled, hard and quick.
Then she studied the thing. A metal stick with a barbed head meant to rip flesh. Demon work for sure. Her blood had pitted and blackened the metal, but not badly enough. It could be used again, if found.
She tossed it onto the rocks outside the overhang and exhaled fire. The bolt glowed red, twisted, and fell into bits. Good!
Now, sleep. Heal. But not too long. Something must be done about these two-legged invaders, these ardini. Especially the small pale one, with her head full of painful light. She meant murder, that one.
Wrong to call them demons, even so. Must remember that. They were human. They were like Amelia.
Amelia. Amelia, where …
The dragon dreamed.
CHAPTER 2
SWEAT AND DUST
Amelia woke. The yellow walls of her bedroom glowed with morning light. The breeze drifting in the window smelled of dust and gasoline, mixed with the honey scent of alyssum planted in pots on the sidewalk. The hum of traffic on King Street, below her window, mixed with the soft roar of tumbling water in the Dunn River gorge, just beyond the buildings on the other side of the street.
It was already hot. The sheets were damp with sweat. Her tank top stuck to her body.
She dug her face into the pillow and blotted tears. Just a dream, again. The first one in more than a month. She’d thought all that was over and done with. Guess not.
Not fair! I’ll never see Mara again, or the Ruby Kingdom, but I can’t get them out of my dreams. It’s like I keep losing them again, over and over and over.
“It felt awful darn real, though,” she said aloud.
She realized then that her right hand was closed in a tight fist, and it hurt. She opened her fingers.
Stared at what was there, biting into her palm.
Clenched her fist again. Leaped out of bed, burst out of her room into the corridor. Slammed into Simon’s room and crashed the door against the wall.
He wasn’t there. Annoying as ever, dear cousin Simon had made his bed and squared all the magazines and papers on his desk, like it mattered how neat his desk was, and left.
Kitchen. He was always there, eating something. The amount he ate, it was amazing he wasn’t fat as a pig. But no, the kitchen was deserted, the dishes washed and drying in the rack. The air smelled of toast.
A sheet of notepaper torn from a spiral notebook lay on the table. In Grandmother’s flowing handwriting it said, Enjoy your first day of vacation, lazybones. I’ll be in the shop. You know how to crack an egg. C.
A blue sticky note stuck to the sheet. In small, careful printing it said, Gone to track. S.
“Nine metres thirteen!” Ike called. He let the measuring tape slither back into its case. “Not bad! Nowhere near as good as with the cantaloupe, though. And you stepped outside the circle again.”
“Again!” Simon wiped sweat from his face with his T-shirt sleeve.
He and Ike were practising shot-put on the dirt track behind Dunstone and District Secondary School, where he and Ike would be in grade nine in September. The high school had the only running track in town.
They’d started at seven, in the cool of the morning. The cool was gone now. As Simon trudged towards where the five-kilo dumbbell had thudded down, he kicked up puffs of dust with each step. At least there was nobody watching him except Ike. Nobody to laugh when he tripped over his own feet for the twentieth time, or landed the weight in the wrong place entirely.
Not that Ike didn’t laugh, sometimes. But they’d been friends long enough that that was okay.
Simon glanced at the two-storey building next to the track. The cantaloupe was up on the roof. He and Ike didn’t have a regulation four-kilo iron shot, so they’d had to practise with other things. They’d borrowed the dumbbell from Melissa, who worked at the Dunstone Independent.
Dust and sweat and humiliation. Was it worth it?
This past year, Simon had finally — finally! — discovered something athletic he was good at. He could put the shot farther than anybody else at Duns
tone Public School. He’d worked hard at it, too. Lifted weights three times a week, put the shot for an hour every day after school.
Here, at last, was a way to prove to himself, and to certain other people — like … well, just as a completely random example, like Dinisha Rajeev — that he wasn’t some pencil-necked geek, all brains and no brawn.
Only, he kept stepping out of the circle. Every part of him was focussed on making that iron ball fly, except his feet. His feet never did get in the game.
“Thing is,” he said to Ike as he picked up the dumbbell, “in the Weird Games we don’t know how big the circle will be. There might not even be a circle. Or it might be tiny.”
“There probably won’t even be a regular shot,” Ike agreed. “Last year it was tomatoes. The year before it was bowling balls. Doesn’t matter. You need control no matter what.”
“Easy for you to say.” Ike was a shrimp, but he ran the way a bird flies and he could change direction on a pinhead. His feet never played tricks on him. He’d actually won silver in the 400-metre race at the Regional Middle School Track and Field Meet last month.
Ike’s supreme ambition, however, was to win the Hec Manning Trophy in the Dunstone and Area Weird Games (DAWG), which took place at the end of June each year. That was also Simon’s supreme ambition. They were planning to win the trophy as a team.
Simon had hoped that his cousin Amelia might be part of their team. She would only be here for another two weeks, and kept telling him how she couldn’t wait to get home to Vancouver. That was where she’d lived all her life, until her engineer parents had flown to Peru last December to help build a water treatment plant. They’d decided, against Amelia’s protests, that the best thing for her would be to stay in Canada with Simon and their grandmother, Celeste, for the next six months.
Now the six months were almost up. In July Amelia would be flying back to Vancouver, though not for long. She and her parents would be moving east to Toronto in August so her parents could take jobs with a big engineering company. “I feel like a yo-yo,” she grumbled.
Simon realized, to his surprise, that he was actually going to miss her. Unlike him, Amelia was good at breaking rules and getting away with it. That, too, was what the Dunstone and Area Weird Games were all about. But she rolled her eyes and muttered “Mercy!” whenever the games were mentioned.
The main thing was not to let Kevin Purcell win again. Kevin was a year ahead of them, and he’d won the senior DAWG last year. Before that, he’d won the junior DAWG two years out of three. And he never let anybody forget it.
Simon trudged back to the circle they’d marked in the dirt of the track. Stepped into position. Nestled the dumbbell next to his right ear. Stuck out his left arm. Now: big step back, skip, turn —
He caught his heel on nothing much and sprawled. The dumbbell thumped to the ground half an inch from his ear.
Ike bent over him. “You okay?”
“Sure.” Simon climbed to his feet and whacked dust from his pants. “But, you know? I’m never going to get good at this, no matter how much I practise.”
“Never mind. Too hot now, anyway.”
The air above the playing field quivered with heat. Simon picked up the dumbbell and they trudged across the turf to Queen Street.
It was even hotter here. A couple of sweating men were fastening up a long white plastic sign across the street between the hydro poles. Simon and Ike stopped to watch.
“WELCOME — DUNSTONE AND AREA WEIRD GAMES (DAWG) — JUNE 28,” the banner proclaimed. At each end it showed a picture of the Hec Manning Trophy, which looked something like the Stanley Cup.
“Yes!” Ike punched the air. “Tomorrow we conquer!”
“Don’t jinx us,” Simon said. Actually he thought they had a pretty good chance of winning. He just didn’t think it was wise to say so out loud.
They walked south on Duke Street to Maple Leaf Convenience, just short of the corner of Duke and King, went in and bought bottles of orange juice, then stood outside glugging the drinks. Simon stayed in the shade of the green-and-white-striped awning, but Ike planted himself on the sun-hammered sidewalk.
“I wonder how long I’d have to stand here for my sneakers to start melting?” He lifted one foot to touch the rubber sole. “Is that tacky?”
Simon felt it. “No. Let’s go swimming.”
“In the Dunn? We’d just get our ankles wet. Let’s go to the mall, where it’s cool.”
They started around the corner to King Street. “Okay, after we take this dumbbell back to Melissa.” Simon hefted it in front of him. “Then — oof!”
Something blurred around the corner of the building and crashed into Simon. “Ow!” it shouted, and staggered back. It was Amelia.
“Simon!” She lunged at him and grabbed the front of his T-shirt in two fists. “Simon, I had a dream. Mara needs me! She wants me back on Mythrin!” Her eyes beamed like blue searchlights. Her whole face shone.
Simon pried her fingers out of his shirt. “Okay, but, um, you dream about Mara all the time.”
“Yeah, you keep telling us,” Ike said.
“This is different. This was a dragon dream.” She started back along King Street, hands fisted in the pockets of her grubby shorts.
They knew about dragon dreams — what Amelia called true dreams — because she’d shared Mara’s dreams last winter. To dragons, dreams were real. “More than real,” Mara had said. Real things happened in them. Shaping dreams was a skill young dragons took years to learn.
“You can’t be sure it was a dragon dream,” Ike said. “I mean, it’s not like Mara’s even in the same world as us now.”
“Ike’s right,” Simon said.
“Oh, yeah?” She swung around and shoved a fist in front of his nose. She opened her fingers. “Look!”
Something red glinted at him. He squinted to get it in focus.
It was a ring. The band looked like old bone. The stone was smooth and dark, with a wink of blood red deep inside.
It was the ring of the Urdar chiefs. Last seen on the clawed thumb of Marathynarridin, on the day she reclaimed the Ruby Kingdom.
Simon touched it with a fingertip. “Where did you get that?”
“It came through the dream.” She tucked it back in her shorts pocket and pushed it down deep. “That proves it was a true dream, a dragon dream.” They couldn’t argue with that.
She told them about the dream while they walked along King Street. That is, Simon walked, lugging the dumbbell, and Ike ambled. Amelia kept trotting ahead, as if itching to get somewhere quick, and then turned and waited impatiently for them to catch up.
“I was flying,” she said. “I mean, it was Mara flying in her dream, and I saw what she saw.”
East she’d flown from Sissarion, city of the Urdar. Over the tangled lands, with their sharp, red peaks and deep ravines. Far ahead rose a smooth, grey ridge. Up, up, and over — and on the other side a sudden green valley, and people running in panic.
“Wait a minute.” Simon grabbed her arm. “People? That can’t be right. There’s no people on Mythrin.”
“No. Maybe that part was just nightmare. Here’s the important part. There was a building there!” A tall, narrow, stone building like a cathedral stood on a cliff overlooking the valley. The roof and the tall windows were rounded. The walls were more air than stone, the windows gaping.
“But the dragons have buildings, don’t they?” Ike said. “Remember the library? What’s the big deal?”
“Dragons don’t build things like this.” She tossed him a scornful look. “They didn’t build that library, Mara told me. They didn’t build this, either. But that’s not what’s important.”
Not all the windows were empty. A sapphire spark gleamed in one of them. It grew into a glowing, glassy panel, a tall arch blue as a twilight sky.
“And then I heard Mara say: Like breeds like.”
The window swallowed her up, wings and all. She fell through endless blue.
&nbs
p; “So it was a gate,” Ike said. “She was showing you where the gate was.”
“That doesn’t help us much,” Simon said. “If we don’t know where it comes out on this side.”
“So we have to find it, right? And soon!” Amelia scanned up and down the street, as if she might spot the gate in one of the shop windows. “I’ve got this feeling we don’t have a lot of time.”
Time: that was the problem. Six months ago, they’d found out that time in Mara’s universe was not the same as time on Earth. It moved — or seemed to move, Simon wasn’t really sure which — at a different pace.
Last winter they’d spent, as far as they could figure, eighty minutes in the library-museum that housed a gate on Mythrin. Then they’d come home and found that only eight minutes had passed. Ike groused about not being able to study the difference properly, but they’d roughly worked it out. An hour on Earth was ten hours on Mythrin, and vice-versa.
Simon thought he could guess what Amelia was thinking now. The ring in her pocket was the most precious object in the Ruby Kingdom. Mara wouldn’t have sent it through the dream just to say “Hi, miss you, come visit.” There had to be a very good reason. Some emergency, some disaster.
And time on Mythrin was running away like water.
There are other doors. That was almost the last thing Mara said to Amelia, the time they parted, last winter. But the only way to get to Mythrin from Earth, as far as they knew, was through a door hidden in a cave halfway up the side of the Dunstone Gorge. And now the cave was full of broken stone from a rock fall, the result of repeated freezing and thawing — or so the parks director said.
(“But that doesn’t explain why some of the stones have scorch marks,” Simon told Amelia at the time. He didn’t ask the parks director, because he already knew how the rocks got scorched. In Mythrin, the dragons had burned a mountain to bury that door.)
“Like breeds like,” Amelia said now, while Ike went into the newspaper office to return Melissa’s dumbbell. “That was in the dream. It meant something.” She clawed at her short brown hair as if that would help her think.