by Patricia Bow
Pier ignored her. “Nothing will stop me.”
“But you don’t really need us to open that gate. You could use, like …,” he picked at his T-shirt, “a piece of this.”
Amelia’s nails dug into his wrist. “Idiot!” she hissed at him. “You had to say it!”
“That was our plan,” Gram said gently.
Simon’s stomach curled up inside him. We’re just as much use to them dead, he thought.
Amelia tugged on his wrist. She was trying to nudge him towards the building with the windows. Everybody watched them. Nobody smiled. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Not even the children who peered from behind the grownups.
“Um, but, you,” Simon stammered, “you said that was your plan.”
“Not mine,” Yulith growled. “We do not make war on our own kind. Not for time out of mind have we done that. We fight dragons. Not humans.”
“To use you so, or your people,” Pier added, “that would be war.”
“Okay, good,” Amelia muttered in his ear. “Let’s go!”
“Wait.” He pulled his wrist free. “Let me look.”
Amelia sighed.
The sun was almost up now, the sky above the valley was blue over a band of gold. He could see every face.
He saw a crowd of ragged people with not an ounce of spare fat to share among them. They looked as if they had been living on mint tea and stale bread for weeks. The children weren’t so bone-thin, but none of them were fat, not even the baby one of the warriors was holding in her arms.
Many of the Casseri were old, or looked old, their eyes small, dark pebbles in wrinkled hollows. Still more of them were very young. Some of the warriors looked younger than anybody you’d expect to see holding a weapon. Like that boy in the too-big leather shirt, he’d be fourteen at most, Simon was willing to bet — but even he had half-healed scars on his face.
Always at war, he thought. For thousands of years, always fighting dragons. With crossbows! It’s a wonder there are any of these people left.
He looked at Gram, at Yulith, at Pier. Pier was studying his face like a book. “How many are you?” he asked.
“Two hundred and thirty-one,” Pier said. “Last midwinter day, in Cassar, we were twice that number.”
“Are there more people on your Earth? Or are you the last?”
“There may be more,” Yulith put in. “There is no way to know. The people are cut off from each other. The dragons rule there now.”
Amelia was scowling at her hands, being very careful not to look at the faces. Simon poked her on the arm. “You see?” he said. “We’ve got to help them. If we don’t we’ll be just like murderers.”
CHAPTER 7
PIER VANISHES
The moment Amelia saw the baby in that woman’s arms, it was all over. What will happen to that little kid when the dragons come? she thought. What will happen to all of them?
“Of course we’ll help them!” she snarled.
“All right,” Simon said. Then, and not a minute too soon, he showed a speck of caution. “But what is this Prism? What does it do? You never said.”
“I … do not know. No one knows for sure. It opens doors, the stories all say.” Pier tiptoed between words. “The dragons in this place are so many and so strong, and we are so few. The Prism will give us a chance. Maybe it will open the door for us to a world without dragons.”
She flicked her eyes at them, and Amelia had a sudden mental picture of something terrifying. Like a light that could blind you at a glance. Or a blade that could cut you at a touch. Then the image was gone, as if Pier had slammed a box down over it.
What had Mara said, back in that meadow? She holds a terrible danger in her mind. I fear her. Who was this kid? When had Mara ever feared anyone before?
Amelia jammed her hands in her pockets. “You think it’s something that’ll kill dragons. Don’t you?”
Pier offered a look clear as glass. “I have no idea.”
“All right, then, we’ll go.” Simon looked Pier over. “Where are your things?”
“I have no things to take. I am ready.”
Yulith gave Amelia a chainsaw stare. Then she set herself in front of Pier, hands on hips. “You will not go alone, child!”
“Two would be too many. And I am not a child.” Pier stood as tall as possible, which was not very tall. “I am the Seeker. This task is for me.” Her fists at her sides trembled.
Scared to go, and who wouldn’t be? But she’s going anyway, Amelia growled under her breath. It was impossible not to admire the kid. She hated that.
A lightning slide down a sapphire sky, then a hard and dusty landing. Simon was almost ready for it this time. He staggered up, rubbing his elbows. Looked at his watch first thing. “It’s just two o’clock!”
Amelia was already up. The stained-glass window was still in its frame. She touched it. “See?” The dragon did have a ruby ring on one claw.
Pier climbed slowly to her feet. She was staring at nothing. As if it was the most fascinating nothing you could imagine.
“We’re here,” Simon told her. “What … um … what do you see?”
Her eyes snapped into focus. “Nothing clearly. But I feel it.”
She gave the window no more than a glance, even when Simon told her it would soon be gone. Instead, she stared around, amazed, at the pale plaster walls and wooden steps. She ran a hand down the stair railing. “So much wood! Easy to see there are no dragons here at all. They would burn all this up.”
“Is that what they did on your world?”
“Always. So we lived in stone. Wood is for small, precious things.”
Simon led the way down the stairs. “I’ve been wondering,” he said over his shoulder. “You’re from another Earth, but you speak English. How come?”
“English? I speak Casserine. So do you, in a way.” She snuffled the air, then made a face. “This place, it stinks.”
“Sh!” said Amelia. She led the way down to the first-floor landing. Voices sounded beyond the stairwell door, but not near. “We’re incredibly lucky,” she whispered at Simon. “I thought for sure we’d be cau—”
The door burst open. Ike’s father shouldered through. Pier shrank back, and Simon didn’t blame her. It had to be a shock to come face to face with Oscar Vogelsang suddenly and for the first time. He looked like a grizzly bear, if a grizzly happened to have reddish fur all over its head and face, black-framed glasses on its snout, and a vast T-shirted chest crisscrossed with the straps of two small leather cases.
Right now he held a pen and spiral-bound notebook in one hand, a large flashlight in the other, and a digital camera in both, and was squinting at the camera. When he saw the three of them he dropped the flashlight. Pier snagged it out of the air.
“Cripes! Where’d you two spring from? You three, I mean.” He goggled down at Pier from almost twice her height. “Who’s this? New kid in town?”
Pier held out the flashlight but kept her eyes down.
“Not telling, eh? Very wise.” Oscar stuffed his gear into pockets and cases, pulled open the door, and scooped the three of them out of the stairwell ahead of him. The main floor of the library was deserted, but the front door stood open and voices and engine noises came from outside. “We’ve been scouring the place for hours! Began to think you’d vapourized. Where were you hiding?”
“Um, not hours,” Simon said. “It was only half an hour.”
“Well, the salvage fellows aren’t happy, I can tell you. They had to stop work on that window while the hydro boys look for the live wire. Or whatever caused that blue flash.”
“That wasn’t our fault,” Amelia muttered. Simon caught her eye. “It was,” he mouthed at her.
He wondered how they could possibly answer Oscar’s questions. But there was no time to worry about that, because next moment he herded them out the front door into the smoggy sunlight and soupy heat of the summer afternoon. Smells of dust and gasoline invaded Simon’s nose. He sneezed. Then he got
a look at what was outside. “Uh oh.”
Amelia laughed. “Wicked!”
Pier made a sound like she’d been hit in the stomach.
Oscar waved both arms over his head. “Hey! Celeste! Look what I found!”
Park Street outside the library was chock-a-block with trucks and people, or so it looked at first glance. At second glance there were a fire truck, a hydro truck, an Ontario Provincial Police cruiser (one of the new black-and-whites), and a couple of dozen people on the opposite sidewalk, standing around in little knots, talking. There was Bruce, of Bruce’s Coffee and Doughnuts, in his white apron. There was Ike, jumping up and down and yelling, and there (Oh, no!) was Dinisha and a bunch of her cool friends, all of them staring and some of them snickering.
And, yes, there was Celeste. She’d been standing beside one of the firemen with her arms crossed, frowning at the library. Now she settled her John Lennon glasses on her nose in a determined way, tossed her silver braid over her shoulder, and started pushing through the crowd.
Pier backed into the open doorway. Oscar grabbed her arm. “Whoops! No, you don’t. Where’re your parents?”
She shook her head from side to side and sucked in air. Sweat trickled down her moon-white face.
Poor kid, Simon thought. It’s all too much for her. “Hey.” He reached for her hand, but she hid it behind her back. “Hey, it’s okay!”
Then several things happened at once. The truck that had been parked behind the library rumbled along the lane and out into the street in a cloud of dust. A red Camaro zoomed down Park Street from the east end, its sound system thumping like a herd of line-dancing elephants. It squealed to a stop inches from the truck’s front bumper. Horns blared. And right on top of that, somebody in the fire truck flipped the wrong switch and started a terrible banshee wailing and a flashing of red and white lights.
Nobody was watching Pier. With a gasp she ducked under Oscar’s arm, leaped off the steps, sprinted across the lawn, and dove between two kids with bicycles.
Simon yelled, “Pier, wait!” He jumped after her, took a step, and caught one foot behind the other. When he’d picked himself up and pushed through the crowd on the sidewalk, there was no sign of her.
Twenty minutes later, the fire truck and the hydro truck were gone. Most of the people were gone, too. The salvage workers had gone back to working on the stained-glass window. Another big, dusty truck had arrived and three men in yellow hard hats and no shirts were putting up a plywood fence around the front of the library.
Six people stood in a circle in the shade of a chestnut tree across the street. The police officer said, “She could have been squatting in the library for weeks, sneaking out at night. That’s probably why nobody saw her.”
“But somebody must know who she is,” Celeste said. “A child doesn’t just pop out of thin air, not in a town this size.”
Ike brightened. “Actually, she did. She’s from another universe.”
Celeste frowned at him. “Cut the nonsense. Where were you? Simon?”
“Well, we, um,” Simon began. He was terrible at making up convincing lies, so he never tried. But the truth wouldn’t go down well this time. “We were in there. Just, um, looking around.”
“Actually,” Ike said, “they weren’t in there at all. They were in another world. You know that blue flare? That was when Ammy and Simon opened the gate betw— ow!”
Oscar had rapped a knuckle on his head. “Goofy! For that alone I should ground you.”
OPP Constable Lisa Nader closed her notebook and suppressed a grin.
“The three of you were darn lucky,” Celeste said. “You could’ve been electrocuted or buried under collapsing timbers or arrested for trespassing!”
“But we weren’t, were we?” Amelia rocked from her heels to her toes in a bored way. “Can we go now?” She kept looking up and down the street. Trying to spot Pier, Simon guessed. He was doing the same, but not so brazenly.
“No, you can’t!” Celeste snapped. “You’re grounded.”
“What?!” Amelia yelped.
Simon’s heart sank to his shoes. Ammy’d had to open her big mouth. Now Celeste had that look on her face.
“But we have to find Pier!” he pleaded.
“Pier. Is that her name?” Celeste studied his face.
“We have to find her. It’s important!” Important for us to find her first, he added mentally. Before the police do.
Celeste’s face softened. “That’s my Simon. Of course we’ll search. A child that age shouldn’t be homeless.”
“Okay, let’s go!” Amelia took a step, but only one, before Celeste caught her by the back of her tank top and hauled her back.
“The police will search. You’re still grounded!”
Ike was grounded, too. As soon as he got home he phoned Simon and got the full story of what happened on Mythrin. All about Pier and Gram and Yulith and the Casseri, and Amelia being kidnapped by a dragon, and Pier’s search for Wayland’s Prism.
“So, you see,” Simon finished, “we have to help her find this thing. And we only have two days, because Mara gave them twenty days Mythrin time.”
“Two days? Yowsers! We’re going to be busy. Helping Pier save her people and winning the Weird Games.”
“The games? But —”
“It’s tomorrow! You mean you forgot?”
“Ike, the games aren’t important. Finding Pier is!”
“But maybe she doesn’t need our help so much. She’s been a, what did you call it? A seeker. For years, right?”
“Yes, but ….” Simon heard the apartment door open and Celeste’s quick step in the hall. He whispered rapidly, “but not if she gets caught. The Children’s Aid will send her away somewhere, for her own good, and she’ll never find the Prism, and the Casseri will never find the right door to the right world, and the dragons will come and kill them.”
“Mara wouldn’t let them do that, would she?”
“I dunno. I hope not.” Celeste walked into the kitchen. “Gotta go.” He hung up.
Celeste gave him a searching look. “You hope not what?”
“Um, hope I’m not still grounded tomorrow. There’s the DAWG.”
“We’ll see.”
CHAPTER 8
SEEKING
Pier had never been good at spells. That was weavers’ work, anyway, and she’d had her plate full studying to be a seeker. But she’d figured out that what a seeker did was a bit like spell-weaving, only backwards. Un-weaving — unbraiding the twined strands of blue fire in the gates.
There was one spell that everyone knew. When Pier escaped from that place of terrible noise, she did what she’d been taught to do from earliest childhood when danger came. She found a hidey-hole and crawled into it and wove a screen in front to fool unfriendly eyes. It was meant to baffle dragons, but it worked on humans, too.
She curled up as small as possible in her stony niche and made no sound. That woman in the dark blue shirt, the one who looked like a warrior, passed her twice and looked right at her and never saw her. After a while these people would get tired of looking, and then she would crawl out and go and get it.
What an awful place this was! Pier curled up tighter. Those flashing lights, like dragon eyes, and those horrible wailing, roaring, thundering things — machines, they must be, but they were everywhere, moving on wheels by themselves, without anybody to push them. Booming and clanking over the bridge above her, squalling and blaring at each other in the streets.
And the air stank, and coated her skin with greasy dust, and stuck in her lungs. She could hardly breathe. It took all her willpower not to cough and cough.
The air was full of sound, too. Not just the loud machine sounds: this was something else. A soft buzz at the edge of hearing. In fact, she couldn’t actually hear it, so maybe it wasn’t a sound at all. But she could feel it. It made the fine hairs on her arms prickle, it made her spine tingle. It threaded through everything, spiderweb-fine, crisscrossing, braiding.
After the sun went down, the sky was still full of light — not starlight or moonlight, but light reflected from below. All the buildings that she could see from here sparkled and blazed. She wondered if the buzz in her head came from all that light.
Pier closed her eyes tight and tried to see it, the way she saw the twining threads inside the gates. This buzz was a bit like that, only it was not blue but greenish and fine as a cloud, and it was everywhere, like algae in pond water.
Somewhere in that cloud, she couldn’t tell where, Wayland’s Prism floated. In her mind it shone like a blade sunk deep in the ocean. It turned slowly, shooting rainbows of light through the green murk. Where? Where? Not far. Surely in twenty days she would find it.
Joy washed over her. I can do this! I will find it, this wonderful Blade of legend, and bring it back to the people. I will save them. Me, Pier! Youngest and least.
Pier couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept the night through. The last few months before they passed the gate, the Casseri had been constantly moving and hiding and fighting, never two days in one place, always on the track of the gate Seeker Kwan was sure he’d found. And in the days since they’d passed that gate, Pier had spent almost all her time trying to open the one leading to the Prism World. She’d napped, or fallen into a daze, but there hadn’t been time for real sleep.
Now, at last, there was time. One hour, Pier thought. Or maybe two. Then, when they’ve got tired of looking for me, I’ll go and find it.
Pier slept. She dreamed of her mother. She never thought of her mother when she was awake, because it hurt too much, but in her dreams her mother was there, alive, holding out her arms, and all the hurt was gone.
Amelia ate two chili dogs with extra cheese at the picnic table on the roof of the Hammer Block. She had brought her laptop up, and as she ate she checked her e-mail. Ding! Here came a message from her mother, who refused to use instant messaging and probably still thought e-mail was hot.
Sweetheart, we’re so looking forward to seeing you again. Just two more weeks! It could be sooner if things here keep on going smoothly. Huaculamba has been wonderful, especially the people, but it will be great to get home. Are you excited about the move to Toronto in August? We’ll look for a house beside the lake, okay? Dad sends his love. By the way, how’s Silken? You haven’t mentioned her for a while.