The Last Dragon Chronicles #4: The Fire Eternal

by Chris D'Lacey

  Liz looked through the kitchen window and saw snowflakes beginning to pattern the lawn. She dipped her eyes for a moment in thought. “If you feel it again, try to track it,” she said. Then she continued washing dishes.

  Meanwhile, in Zanna’s room, Gadzooks and G’reth simultaneously noticed what dragons called “a guttering feeling,” the strange sensation of the fire within flickering, as though a wind from another world had blown through their auma. Neither could deduce a reason for it, and when Gadzooks asked Gretel if her spark had been similarly affected, all she did was give an irritated snort and suggest he change position — or find somewhere less drafty to sit than the windowsill.

  Gretel had been busy watching Alexa drawing another picture of the dragon she called G’lant. This time she had sketched him from the reverse angle, looking the opposite way. Again, the structure of the eye was prominent, but her efforts had been concentrated on the rounded speck of blue-green detail that seemed to form the dragon’s point of focus. It was a planet. The Earth. Gretel was sure of it. She’d seen pictures of their so-called “home world” before. But if that was correct, then where was G’lant positioned if he could frame the whole world in his eye? She was about to ask Alexa this very question when Gadzooks reported his fiery flutter. In the time it took Gretel to turn around and answer, Alexa had pushed aside her drawing of G’lant and started on another picture, this time with a pale yellow pencil.

  What’s this? hurred Gretel, disappointed at the shift.

  “A nun-nooky,” said Alexa, her face almost flat to the pad.

  A what? said Gretel.

  And Alexa said, “A boley pear.”

  All this time, Lucy was upstairs lost in music and Zanna was in the front room reading Tam’s poetry. Later, she would remember a sudden shudder, as if someone had walked across her unmarked grave. But it was chilly in the den after dinner that evening and all she did was rub her arms and call to Gwillan, who immediately flew to the curtains and closed them.

  Only one human in the house truly and fully noticed the blip. That was Arthur. He was in the Dragon’s Den, where he had been meditating for an indefinite period. His mind was the lake. His awareness was the fish. When the two came together, his eyes opened with a start. On the shelves to either side of him he sensed a collective hum among the dragons. And Bonnington was near, turning agitated circles. “Be calm,” Arthur whispered and reached out a hand. Bonnington trotted forward, nuzzling furiously, keen to commingle and share any knowledge. Arthur suddenly had a vision of the frozen north and for a moment felt its coldness spreading up his spine, just as if the cushion underneath him were an ice floe. “Something has happened,” he said below his breath, speaking to himself as much as to Bonnington. He uncoupled his legs from the lotus position and sat loosely, pressing his thumbs together. “Something has happened,” he repeated quietly. He scooped up Bonnington and stroked the cat’s head. “Come, we must visit Lucy.”

  It wasn’t often that Arthur and Lucy spoke, not truly spoke, in a manner that might be described as conversational. Their daily exchanges were cordial enough, but each had rarely engaged the other beyond the necessary domestic grunts.

  It hadn’t always been like this. In the beginning, when Lucy had been a wide-eyed adventuress, excited at the prospect of meeting the man who had secretly claimed her mother’s heart, the romance of living with an enigmatic, dragon-saving monk had entirely swept her away. But the crushing reality of life with him was harsh. Arthur had arrived a wrecked and troubled man. Blind, confused (often gabbling mathematical formulas), and as vulnerable and weak as a newborn puppy, he had needed almost constant care at first. It took months of fetching, carrying, and feeding before he could be truly self-reliant again. In those months, Lucy often read to him: children’s stories, mostly. Anything from her bedside shelves. Eventually, a morning came when she found the courage to pick up Snigger and the Nutbeast. She was halfway through the opening chapter when Arthur raised a hand and said, in a bone-chilling fashion, “What became of David? Did he escape the Fain?”

  She remembered shuddering, losing hold of the book. A chasm of despair opened up inside her as she began to tell him all that she knew, how she’d been abducted by the sibyl, Gwilanna, taken hostage to the Tooth of Ragnar, and what she had seen on that dreadful, final day in the Arctic. And Arthur did something she could neither handle nor predict: He wept openly.

  And so did she.

  That incident, far from bringing them together, had drawn a dysfunctional line between them. So she was remotely surprised when, on the evening before Zanna’s intended consultation with Tam, Arthur knocked on her bedroom door and stepped inside to make himself seen.

  Lucy pulled out her earphones, filling the room with a tinny hiss of music. She thought about closing down the e-mail she was writing. Tam’s address was in the header. But Arthur couldn’t see it, so what did it matter?

  “Are you busy, child?”

  He often called her “child.” A throwback to the early days. She still found it endearing. It was ridiculous to think he could ever be her father, but … “No.” She switched off her iPod and swung her chair to face him.

  His knees found the edge of the bed and he sat. “Would you do something for me?”

  She shrugged — then remembered such gestures were pointless, but they all did that with Arthur now and then. “Sure. What?”

  “Would you send a message to my friend Brother Bernard?”

  She found herself nodding. Roly-poly Brother Bernard. The monk who had first brought Arthur to the Crescent. She remembered him: a jolly man. A Friar Tuck. Kind. “Why me? I thought Mom normally wrote your letters?”

  “A text message,” he said. “I’d like it to be instant.”

  “A text?” She almost laughed. “Do monks have cell phones?”

  “Bernard does.”

  Touché. Pointless arguing with the best brain in the universe. She picked up her phone, all the while glancing back at Arthur. He was weird sometimes, full of secrets. When he cradled Bonnington in his arms like this he reminded her of a James Bond villain. “OK. Shoot.”

  Arthur stroked Bonnington’s head a few times, all the while commingling with the Fain-being inside him. Through hazy, almost monochrome feline vision, he noted Lucy’s yawn and saw the swing of her foot. She was impatient to return to the computer, of course. He saw the flicker of the screen but none of its content.

  “My dear Bernard,” he began.

  Lucy put her thumb on hold. “Um, you do know you’ve only got, like, a certain number of characters in a text? They’re normally kind of snappy, Arthur.”

  “The message will be short. Please enter what I said, and do not truncate the words.”

  “It’s on auto-complete. Already done it. Go on.”

  He allowed himself a smile, then dictated slowly, “My dear Bernard, at last our ruminations may have come to fruition —”

  “Ru — min — what?” she asked.

  He spelled it for her. And “fruition.”

  “Did you feel the eye of the universe open? If so, great wonders are upon us. Vincent.”

  “Vincent?” she queried. It was the name he had taken as a monk at Farlowe Abbey.

  “When in Rome,” he said. “Thank you. Is it done?”

  “Number?”

  “Of course.” He spoke it clearly.

  As she tapped it in she said, “Eye of the universe … what’s that about?”

  “It’s a spiritual metaphor,” he replied evenly — concealing everything, confessing nothing.

  “Right,” she said. Monk-speak. She didn’t pursue it.

  Arthur turned Bonnington to face the computer. “What are you doing? Homework?”

  He immediately saw her hesitate. She was wondering how he knew the computer was on. Her expression softened as she reassured herself he could still detect areas of glowing light. Plus he could hear the cooling fan humming.

  “I’m … updating David’s Web site. Will Bernard reply? T
o your text, I mean?”

  Arthur tweaked Bonnington’s left ear. A signal for the Fain to adjust the cat’s lenses. Bonnington blinked. His gaze zoomed in. Not a Web site. E-mail. Why was she lying? “Yes, when he is not at prayer. Tell me, was this a sudden impulse — to update the Web site, I mean?”

  She snapped the phone shut and put it aside. “I do it once a month. It was time, that’s all.”

  Interesting. She was showing no sign of sensing any presence. For one who had been so close to David, Arthur found that strange. Was it real, then? His vision? That sense of connecting? In that meditative state he called the alpha phase, were desire and delusion interchangeable? The universe moved in mysterious ways. Was it possible he was being misled by his mind? “You must miss him?”

  She exhaled deeply.

  “My apologies. That was a ridiculous question.”

  But a test all the same. A gentle dig. She was prickly, edgy, hiding something. The images from Bonnington swam and pulsed, making Arthur feel slightly restless and giddy. Lucy’s shoulder was covering the flat screen now, removing the temptation to delve into her secrets — though the temptation was great indeed. “How is the site coming along?”

  “Cool. Lots of hits. They’re zooming up. David’s really popular right now. Lots of people want to know about stuff.”

  Bonnington began to purr steadily.

  “What kind of ‘stuff’?”

  “Just stuff,” she answered guardedly, wishing he would go. “Are we done here? I’m s’posed to be helping Mom in the kitchen.”

  Suddenly, with a dizzying flash of movement, Bonnington meowed and refocused on another part of the room. Gollygosh had landed on Lucy’s dressing table. Even with reduced, nictating vision, Arthur could tell that the healer was energized.

  “What’s with you?” Lucy said to him in dragontongue.

  The dragon blinked at Arthur.

  “He’s embarrassed. He’s late for meditation,” Arthur said. “It is Gadzooks, I take it?”

  “No, it’s Golly,” she said, twisting a finger inside the neck of her top. “I’m going now, OK?”

  Arthur coughed and patted his chest. “With your permission, I’ll rest here a moment.”

  She glanced back at the computer, burning secrets, burning energy. “Yeah, whatever.” She flapped a hand and hurried out.

  Gollygosh spread his turquoise wings and made as if he was going to go after her.

  “Wait,” said Arthur.

  The healer folded down and gave a polite little hrrr?

  “Were you coming to me or to Lucy?” Arthur’s aptitude for dragontongue was not the best, but David’s special dragons could interpret him with ease.

  The dragon gulped. I was flying to the den, but heard talking, he said.

  Arthur nodded. “You feel something, don’t you?”

  Gollygosh tilted his head back and searched. His eyes were bursting with violet wonder, as if he’d seen an angel parting the clouds. His toolbox clanked as he squeezed the handle. Is it … the David? he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Arthur, steepling his fingers — but there had to be a strong possibility of it. For years, he and his old friend Bernard Augustus had been hoping for contact, testing the boundaries of sensory attraction through the practice of coordinated visualization. Together, they had “dreamed it,” as Elizabeth might say. A gateway into a parallel universe. A channel that they hoped David Rain might cross. A conduit of spiritual union. Hope. But this feeling, this ripple, suggested something more. A visitation. A return. A physical presence. Arthur thought about his sudden vision of the Arctic. The barren ice cap. The restless wind. The souls in the sky, outnumbering the stars. Lately, he and Bernard had visualized Ingavar, the bear that David idolized in print, the Nanukapik returned to save his species from the ravages of hunting and planetary abuse. Might that have tipped the balance? Was he seeing the North through the eyes of a bear? And how did this relate to the spatial shift that Bonnington had seemingly witnessed in the garden? Oh, for clarity, for greater understanding. Oh, for the power he’d had on the island, when he’d been in possession of a dragon’s claw …

  The computer beeped. Bonnington instinctively turned his head toward it, flushing screen images back through Arthur’s visual cortex. Arthur at first tried to blank them out, for in his heart he knew it would have been dishonorable to read anything that Lucy had received in private, but he could not avoid noticing the banner that popped up at the bottom corner of the screen. It was an e-mail flag, and though it was gone too quickly to catch the sender’s name, he did see the subject of the message.

  re: David’s parents

  The banner dissolved. At the same moment, Bonnington arched and jumped to the floor, plunging his master into blindness again. “No, wait,” Arthur called, but the cat was gone.

  “Are you still there?” Arthur asked in dragontongue.

  No reply from Gollygosh either.

  Arthur stood up, deep in thought, circling his foot to activate the blood flow in an aching left thigh. Was this meaningful? he wondered. Who would ask a question concerning David’s parents? And more importantly, what would Lucy reply? Did the “re:” before the subject header indicate a dialogue? If yes, why did that make him nervous? For what could she say that would be of any consequence? She would have to answer no, and that would be the end of it. He brought his hands together in prayer, remembering a common biblical passage. Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days might be long upon the land … But as he shuffled from the room and pulled his way along the landing, he was already rewriting the commandment in his mind. Honor thy father and thy mother, he repeated, that thy days might be long — upon the ice.

  16

  NORTH

  No,” Gwilanna squawked again, pounding her feet. She tottered around foolishly in her cube of ice. She even tried to peck at Avrel’s black claws, but only succeeded in falling over. “Crush me, furball. Stamp me out. This cannot be him! It can’t be him!”

  “Guard her,” said David to the still-confused Teller, and moved away toward the sea goddess, Sedna, who was thrashing her tail and reminding everyone that payment had yet to be given for her services.

  David crouched down and looked at the fingers of Sedna’s father, dropped by the raven king before their fight. The severed ends were glazed with cherry-black blood. The knuckle joints were cracked. The nails were blue. They were as old as a legend, but still twitching with life.

  Sedna slithered forward. “Who are you, spirit? Where is Oomara?”

  “He is here,” said David, in guttural Inuktitut, and his face changed fleetingly to the taut, round shape of the hunter and back. “You saw what you wanted to see. He promised you fingers and here we have eight.”

  Sedna stared at them doubtfully. “When you were Ingavar, you said I would die if I touched these … ghosts.”

  She gurgled at Avrel, who in turn glanced at Kailar. The fighting bear was snorting and shaking his head, not knowing what to make of all this.

  “Avrel, come near to me,” David said.

  The Teller glanced at the raven named Gwilanna. She was still lost in her petulant dance. He padded forward and awaited a command.

  “Search your memories. How many hands held the kayak paddle that broke Sedna’s fingers?”

  Avrel pictured her father wielding it. “One,” he replied.

  David turned his blue eyes onto the fish-woman. “Then four of these fingers are from the hand of evil, and four will serve you well. Choose carefully, Goddess.” He stood up, saying in a bear’s tongue to Avrel, “We take the eye north. Kailar will carry it.”

  “Wait!” Sedna squealed, running a tendril of kelp around his ankle.

  David looked over his shoulder at her.

  “How do I know which to choose, shaman?”

  The wind howled, tearing up a mist from the ice. As it curled and made voiles in the air again, the figure of David shifted with it, into the body of the ice bear, Ingavar. “When Sedna was a
girl, did she ever kiss her father’s hand?”

  “I … I cannot remember,” said she, spreading pools of slime as she fidgeted and thrashed.

  Ingavar shook his paw. The kelp snapped away, and where it landed on the ice, the surface cracked, tipping the fingers into the ocean. “Try,” he said.

  “No!” screamed Sedna, scrambling to the place where the fingers had been. The water bubbled and surged as she thrust her hideous face below its surface. She withdrew a moment later with a frantic splash and skated back to her emergence hole.

  Ingavar called to her, “Watch them as they sink. Four are touched with your innocence and love. They are lighter than the others and will take an eye’s blink longer to reach the ocean bed. Only then will you be certain which of them to choose.”

  “A-yah,” wailed Sedna, and dived into the water.

  As the lapping waves settled, Avrel said to his master, “I was taught by my mother that the ocean is as deep as the sky is wide. How long will it take her?”

  “Forever,” said the voice of Gwilanna. “Don’t you see what he’s doing, you pathetic lumps of blubber? He wants her out of the way so that he commands the ocean. He’s up to something. You!” She turned and almost spat on Kailar’s snout. “You don’t trust him, do you? I can see it in your eyes. Go on. Say it. Ask him how he got here. Ask him how he came to have the power of transfigur — oof!”

  With a flick of his paw, Kailar took the liberty of batting her aside. He fixed his gaze on Ingavar and said, “You gave me life when I thought I had none. Whatever you are, I swore to serve you. But I tell you this: I have little respect for men — or birds,” he added with a scornful glance sideways. “This rock that you sent the goddess to claim? What use is it to us, to bears?”

  “It is sacred,” said Ingavar.

  “What?” said Gwilanna, who had yet to see the contents of the bag.

  “Will you tell us more about the dragon?” asked Avrel.

  “Dragon?” squawked Gwilanna, slipping in slush. She steadied herself and wobbled back to stand in front of Avrel. “What’s this dog brain talking about?”