“End of Days?” said the Teller, his heart racing. For he could speak in volumes of all things past, but the future was as foggy as the blizzards they journeyed through, and blizzards could sometimes hide great dangers.
But again Ingavar would say no more.
And so the three of them walked on for another two days, through a storm of souls and scintillating ice specks, in an arrow formation with Ingavar leading. As tradition dictated, Ingavar kept Avrel, a son of Lorel, at his left and Kailar, son of the fighting bear, Ragnar, to his right. But with every step they took, Kailar’s patience began to grow as weary as his feet, and when they next paused to shelter among a jumble of ice blocks, he finally voiced his concerns to the Teller.
“We’re going around in circles,” he said, his words catching in the punishing wind and being snatched from his mouth on fragments of sighs. From the depths of his lungs he issued a great blow, then bit into a snow crust to slake his thirst. The eye of Gawain, still in its bag, but now secured around his neck like a clumsy pendant, thumped against a jutting point of ice. He growled at the nuisance and shook the eye aside.
“Be careful with that,” Avrel said. He glanced anxiously over his shoulder for Ingavar. The Nanukapik had lain down farther away, with his blue eyes closed and his head held level in the semi-hibernation state he often adopted. He was already covered by a skin of drifting snow.
“What is the point of this?” said Kailar, the eye swinging back and forth against his chest. “You know the patterns of the stars as well as I do, Teller. We are walking, but we are not heading north.”
Avrel retracted his claws and counted them, something he did when he was nervous or afraid. “We are following our Nanukapik. What else matters?”
Kailar stared at him as though he were a fool. “This thing is heavy. So is your brain. Surely it must have occurred to you by now that the bird may never come back? And what if it does? What if it leads us to this place of fire? What happens then? What does our so-called Nanukapik want with us?”
Avrel winced and looked away into the distance. In the time of the nine great ruling bears, such talk would have cost a bear his place as a pack leader. He shook away the ice lines above his eyes. “My brain may be heavy, but it does at least work. Let me tell you a story, nanuk.”
“Don’t belittle me,” said Kailar, curling his lip, “unless you wish to end up dead or scarred.”
“Listen,” Avrel whispered, drawing close. “I have learned a great deal from these spirits that have come to us. What Ingavar said is true: Thoran, the first white bear, was made so by a dragon. He put his claws into the creature’s fire and it turned his pelt from the color of earth to the color of ice.”
Kailar let a rumble escape from his throat.
“This is no mere den story,” Avrel said crossly, half wondering if he dared give the fighting bear a cuff. “This is your history. Listen and learn. In Thoran’s time, the ice was as wide as the sky. It reached out to many stretches of land. Before long, other bears walked onto it. They grew pelts to match Thoran’s, to protect them from the cold. They mated and became the first true ice bears, living off seal and sometimes going back to the land in the summer. Thoran mated as well. Three times, with separate females. From these matings came three great bears: the first Nanukapik, Aluna; his Teller, Lorel; and your ancestor, Ragnar. All three of them were sons of Thoran. All three were bound to the fire. They sheltered in its auma, as you and I now do. That stone you carry around your neck should be as precious to us as Thoran is. Without the dragon, we would not be here.”
Kailar grizzled and snorted again. “Yet we saw Thoran die.”
“Not die,” said Avrel, “become one with Ingavar.”
“But he’s a man.”
Avrel’s black tongue swept around his teeth. “No, he has the power to become a man — because he has the dragon’s fire within him.”
Kailar raised his head until their snouts were almost touching. “And when did you or I last turn into men? If we have the fire, why can’t we perform such trickery, son of Lorel?”
Avrel grimaced and pulled away. The fighting bear’s breath was as rank as walrus dung. “I don’t know,” he said, and he thought back briefly to Ingavar’s puzzling conversation with Gwilanna about the still unexplained “others” called the Fain. No inspiration came to him, however, and so he said to Kailar, “But I do know this. The ice is changing. The dragon’s power is not as great as it was. Every winter, our territories grow smaller. The ice is melting, pulling farther from the land. I have memories, Kailar, recent memories, of bears becoming stranded, swimming in search of land that never comes, swimming until they tire and drown.”
Kailar dismissed this with a cursory snort. “Some bears are weak,” he said, but he could not conceal a slight discomfort in his growl.
Avrel shook his head. “Not weak — helpless. And if you don’t listen to me, one day the ocean may defeat a bear even as strong as you. Ingavar knows this. He is here to make a change, and when he does, you and I will be there beside him — you and I … and many others, I think.”
“If you mean these ghosts,” said Kailar, swatting one.
“I mean bears,” said Avrel, pointing his snout. “All around us. Distant, but closing in. That’s why we’re turning circles. I think he’s drawing them to us.”
Kailar looked over his shoulder, and back. “He’s forming a pack?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps.”
Kailar stared at him hard.
“I don’t know,” Avrel repeated with a hiss.
This was too much for the fighting bear. With an incredulous grunt, he pounded up the nearest cluster of ice, sending chips flying outward as he scrabbled to the top. Once there, he took scents from three equal points. “I don’t have them.”
“You’ve been in too many fights,” Avrel said, envying the scars on Kailar’s snout all the same. “Your senses are dull. And Lorel’s kin were always more sensitive, remember?”
Kailar tried again, breathing in even harder. “How far away?”
“The strength of it varies.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know,” Avrel said, with growing impatience. “It’s just a feeling, but …”
Kailar shifted his weight. The ridge he had climbed was showing signs of collapsing under his weight. He dug in like a cat, but the pressure only hastened the impending break and he crunched, rump-heavy, to the surface again. “But what?” he asked, punching a small prop of ice aside.
Avrel’s words were stayed by a fluttering sound. Both bears turned and saw Gwilanna, claws splayed, coming in to land on Ingavar’s back.
Kailar, showing none of his earlier doubts, immediately abandoned the conversation and ran straight to his Nanukapik’s defense. Hearing the approaching thump of paws, Gwilanna screeched and took off again, only missing being bitten by a radius of sweat on Kailar’s snout.
“Typical!” she spat, leaving a wet yellow dropping on the back of his neck. “I come with news and this bone-brained blubber mound tries to eat me!”
“What can you tell us?” Ingavar said, tiny glaciers of snow falling off him as he stood.
“That you’re walking in circles for one thing, shaman.”
So it was true. Avrel glanced respectfully at Kailar. The fighting bear had cannoned off a shoulder of ice and was nursing one paw with loose, round movements, all the while training his eye on the bird.
“I’ve seen it,” Gwilanna said, spiraling around Ingavar. “I landed on the place where the power lines meet. I felt its power. It’s where she got the icefire from, isn’t it?”
“She —?” began Avrel.
Ingavar stayed the question with a glance.
“It was Bergstrom who gave it to her, wasn’t it?” said the bird, zooming over Avrel and making him duck. “Why? Why Elizabeth Pennykettle? I could have done anything with it. I —”
“You will lead us there under my command,” said Ingavar, cutting her off with a roar that
seemed to make the sky jump.
In defiance, Gwilanna soared even higher. “And what’s to stop me from flying away, shaman?”
“Your vanity,” he said. “When would Gwilanna, sibyl of the ages, ever miss the opportunity to witness the release of The Fire Eternal?”
The bird circled them one more time, then came swooping down to land again on Ingavar’s back. She poked her beak into his small, hooped ear. “All right, I’ll help, but on three conditions. You keep that brute of Ragnar away from me, you tell me what you plan to do with the fire, and, more importantly, you tell me how you came to be here.”
Ingavar gave a solemn nod.
“Good. In that case, you need to turn left.”
Ingavar signaled to the bears to walk.
“That’s better,” said Gwilanna, bobbing up and down to the rhythm of his stride. “It’s about time I was given some respect. Caark! Well, whenever you’re ready, David. I think it’s time you talked….”
21
IN THE DAYS OF THE PREMEN
Let’s begin,” said Ingavar, in a bear’s voice, “by reviewing what happened to you, sibyl. You were incarcerated, alive, in a block of ice. Your auma was put into perpetual stasis. Why don’t you tell Avrel how that came about?”
“I don’t parley with bears,” she squawked.
With a growl that made her feet vibrate, Ingavar said, “If I were you, I’d keep your insults down. Unless you want Kailar over here again?”
The fighting bear was eyeing them suspiciously.
“Animal,” Gwilanna caarked quietly at him.
He squinted back at her with murder in his eyes, and she was grateful when the wind seemed to take her side and draw its cold, icy curtain between them. Shuddering, she looked away to her left, where Avrel was padding along, nudging closer. “Your Teller is eavesdropping anyway — as usual.”
“Everything you say, you say to both of us,” said Ingavar. “Tell him a story, sibyl. He’s eager to learn. Tell him what you saw on the day you were imprisoned.”
“I saw the Tooth of Ragnar come down,” she said, and for the first time there was sorrow in her croaking voice. “A whole island, the last resting place of Gawain, destroyed. The dragon was broken, sent to the ocean bed in lumps of stone. And I could do nothing but watch from that ice block.”
“How were you put there?” Avrel asked.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Gwilanna said meanly.
“Try him,” said Ingavar, glancing at his Teller with the same intensity he had used when refusing to answer the raven’s questions a few days earlier. Avrel saw the blue eye shimmer like a star and felt as if his mind had widened slightly.
Gwilanna grizzled and cocked her wings. Then, in a voice so patronizing that even Avrel was tempted to swipe off her head, she said, “Oh, very well. I was attacked by a life form called the Fain. It took away my powers and fused me with the ice. There, Teller, what do you make of that?”
Avrel narrowed his gaze.
“See!” the raven taunted him. “He hasn’t got a clue. Why don’t you run away and build a den, furball? This is way out of your —”
“Lorel knew them,” Avrel muttered.
“What?” Gwilanna snorted, suddenly thrown.
“He encountered them, the Fain. But the memory isn’t clear.”
“That’s impossible!” Gwilanna almost hooted. “The Fain wouldn’t trouble themselves with ice-shovelers like you.”
As if to call a truce, the wind swept down in a shallow, hard-edged front from the north. Avrel bowed his head and swerved away a little. On Ingavar’s back, Gwilanna flapped giddily to keep herself upright.
“You’re wrong,” Ingavar told her bluntly. “Avrel’s ancestor, Lorel, was the first of the Tellers, whose ability to remember was inherited from the Fain. It wasn’t just humans the Fain explored, Gwilanna. They entered all organic life.”
Avrel twitched his ears and felt unusually cold. He gave his supple, round shoulders a shake. “Entered? What are these creatures?”
Ingavar raised his snout to the wind. As he breathed in, he seemed to calm the air around him. For a moment or two, time slowed down and every snowflake that fell across Avrel’s snout appeared to him in its unique perfection. As the crystals turned in their spellbinding orbits, Ingavar’s voice seemed to sparkle off their points. “There are many forms of life in the universe, Avrel. Some of them exist in planes of reality that are difficult to comprehend. The race of beings called the Fain function in the realm of thought and all that thought encompasses: dreams, imaginings, memories, consciousness. They have no physical body, but may inhabit any material form they choose. They can alter your mind in many skillful ways and make you perceive them in any way that you imagine. They came to this planet at the dawn of its evolution, seeking a particular geological environment and an organism that might be adapted to their needs.”
“It wasn’t bears,” sneered Gwilanna.
“They chose men,” said Ingavar. “Human bipeds, already questioning their sense of self-awareness and the nature of their thoughts. The Fain selected individuals they considered of interest and joined with them by a process called commingling. This was, in part, a beneficial development. The Fain quickly enhanced their hosts, making them see ways that they might progress, guiding them in the creation of tools and the willingness for invention. These commingled hybrids called themselves the Premen, to set themselves apart from uncommingled humans. The Premen ruled the planet as bears now rule the ice.”
Avrel nodded gently as he took these words in. His clever brown eyes were almost on fire. “Why did they come here? What were their needs?”
“To breed dragons, of course,” Gwilanna said unkindly, looking back through a distant window of her mind. “This rock was the perfect place for them. Oxygen, water, clay. Fire at its core. There was nowhere else in the universe anything like it.”
“But why dragons?” Avrel pressed. “What is their significance to the Fain creatures?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, stop asking ‘Why?’!” Gwilanna caarked. “He’s like a child! He’s making my feathers curl. Can’t we spare the history lesson and just move on?” She raked a claw down Ingavar’s neck. “I want to know how you became involved with the Fain.”
“Scratch me again, and I’ll chew off your head and spit it far into the ocean,” said Ingavar. He exchanged another glance with his Teller. “The Fain consider dragons their perfect hosts, Avrel. In time, you will come to learn why. For now, be content just to gather what you can from this bird and her ramblings. She’s going to improve your memories of the Fain. She is a survivor of their time on this Earth. She considers herself well above humankind, but she is hiding a truth.”
“What are you talking about now?” Gwilanna jabbered.
Ingavar looked at his Teller again. “This creature, this woman locked into the shape of a bird, is a hybrid.”
“I am not! I am NOT!” the raven screamed.
But Ingavar set himself squarely and said, “Spare my ears, sibyl. I can read you with ease. You had a human father and a Premen mother. She was highly attuned, on the brink of being illumined to a dragon called Ghislaine. She gave you the longevity and magicks you possess, and he —”
“Was a brute! An animal!” she screeched.
“Who cared for you when the Fain departed this planet.”
“He slayed dragons! He helped hunt them down!”
“Driven by envy and fear,” said Ingavar.
“My mother was a Pri:magon, a priestess,” she snarled. “If they had allowed her to live —”
“She would have been an outcast. Just like you were in Guinevere’s time. A cave dweller. A hermit, brewing herbs.”
Avrel’s ears by now had almost doubled in size. So much knowledge. So much history, in and around and between the words. As the argument paused, he considered his options. There was too much in this dialogue to comprehend now, so he posed the most pertinent question he could: “Lord, why did the Fain withd
raw?” He looked around him as if unsure they had. He saw glimpses of the ghost world again in the grayness and wondered, briefly, if death was just another place to be.
Ingavar blew a great puff of air. “For three generations, the Fain remained commingled to their human hosts. More and more children were born to the Premen. But what the Fain did not realize, until it was too late, was that a strange kind of fusion was taking place. The offspring of the Premen could not be easily uncommingled; their minds were holding permanent traces of the Fain. What’s more, they’d been ignited with a lust for power and the cleverness with which to attain it. Soon there was chaos. Battles for supremacy. The situation escalated out of control. The Fain masters, knowing there was no hope of reversing the aggression, abandoned their breeding program, destroyed any Premen child they considered too advanced —”
“One of them being my mother,” snapped Gwilanna.
“— and returned to their home world, a time dimension called Ki:mera. But the portal they opened, the fire star they created to make the journey, was raised to a frequency only wide enough for them to pass through and not the dragons they had bred. The dragon colonies were left behind, for fear that their auma had been corrupted. And it was them, not their masters, who were left to fight a war of confusion and suspicion with the human race.”
“I have a memory,” Avrel interjected suddenly, as though the sun had just breached the horizon in his head, “of a dragon involved in a battle. This is recent, just four or five winters ago. It comes from the memories of a female bear who was present when the Tooth of Ragnar was destroyed. She was sent there by Thoran to protect a human girl.”
“Girl?” coughed Gwilanna, trying not to make her thoughts (or her guilt) transparent. But it was clear to her when Ingavar spoke again that he knew she had abducted Lucy Pennykettle and attempted, unsuccessfully, to use the girl to raise the sacred dragon, Gawain, from the dead, from his resting place in stone on the summit of the island.
“She’s alive,” he said. “Little thanks to you.”
The Fire Eternal Page 14