Dark Fire

by Chris D'Lacey

  “Very,” said Liz, watching Gwendolen stroking the pictures. “So the question is, why did Gadzooks come and give you this word? All my dragons have special abilities. His is to inspire through writing.”

  “Well, it’s obvious,” said Lucy.

  Steiner deflected his attention to the girl.

  “David sent him. You must be important.”

  “Lu-cy!” Liz’s cheeks shot up the thermometer scale.

  The girl threw up her hands in dismay. “I wasn’t being smart. There’s got to be a connection, hasn’t there?” She flapped a hand northward. “Y’know. David. Dragons. The mist and everything.”

  “Of course!” exclaimed Steiner, slapping the heels of his palms to his forehead. “Oh, what a dummkopf I’ve been.” He pressed his hands together beneath his nose.

  Before he could give any reason for this outburst, a bell tinkled and Steiner lurched toward the door. Wagging a finger in promise he said, “Excuse me, that will be our refreshments.”

  No sooner was he out of earshot than Liz threw her full force at her daughter. “Will you please behave yourself!”

  “What have I done?” Lucy said hotly. “I thought we were here to check out Zookie? He left a message about a place where a dragon died, Mom. He wouldn’t do that for nothing, would he?”

  “She’s right,” Arthur said, speaking in his best defusing tone of voice. “Though what I find most intriguing is why Gadzooks chose to write in dragontongue, not English.”

  “Yeah, way to go,” Lucy said, who liked it when the genius of the family took her side.

  Professor Steiner laid a tray on the table. The delicate clink of china plates made Gwendolen want to fold her ears. She was careful to stay solid while a middle-aged gentleman with neatly parted hair stepped forward carrying a silver teapot and a three-tiered cake stand. The lower tier was filled with crustless, domino-sized sandwiches. The upper ones displayed a spread of fancy cakes.

  “Will that be all, Professor?”

  “Yes, thank you, Hollandby.”

  The man drifted away without a glance and closed the door softly behind him.

  “Is he your servant?” asked Lucy (just slightly impressed).

  Rupert Steiner smiled. “By college tradition, there are certain privileges an academic of my status is allowed. To be waited on is by far the most pleasurable and important.” With Liz’s help he spread the cups and offered out the sandwiches.

  Lucy bit into a salmon-and-cucumber rectangle. A little rich for her taste, but certainly preferable to wild mushrooms.

  “You mentioned this mist in the Arctic, Lucy.”

  The girl paused midchew. Steiner was pouring the tea like a clown, giving the cups a comical amount of height. Some drops splashing freely over the tray found their way to Gwendolen’s snout. The dragon quickly licked them off. She liked tea (the hotter the better) when she could get it.

  “I don’t know if you saw it, but there was a news report yesterday in which an Inuit hunter claimed to have penetrated the mist and seen a great bird.”

  Lucy exchanged a glance with her mother.

  “We heard it on the radio,” said Liz.

  Steiner selected a sandwich for himself. “Given everything we’ve talked about today, I’m beginning to think the man saw a dragon.”

  “And what if he had?” said Arthur.

  Professor Steiner looked wistfully at Arthur, as if he dearly wished his old friend could see him now. “I was right when I said I’d seen this writing before.” He nodded at the parchment. “I can’t be certain until I go into the college archives, but I believe there may be more examples of this dragon language down there.”

  “Really?” gasped Lucy.

  “Possibly,” he cautioned her. “Your reference to the Arctic fog has triggered a memory which I’ve been struggling to bring to mind about this writing. What I’m about to tell you won’t present a motive for Gadzooks’s message, but there are connections to the Tooth of Ragnar and some strange parallels with the experiences of the author you mentioned, David Rain.”

  Lucy’s clothing seemed to crackle as she sat up to listen.

  Steiner took a bite of his sandwich and set it aside. “In the early part of the last century, a party of Norwegian scientists and explorers ventured out on an expedition to a place called the Hella glacier, which is geographically in the same region as the Tooth of Ragnar. The mission was cut short when one member of the party disappeared in mysterious circumstances, thought to have been mauled and dragged away by a polar bear. Apparently, he’d encountered the same male bear the day before and had distracted it by placing his pocket watch on the ice, cleverly making his escape while the animal pored over the ticking object. Tragically, he returned to the area the next day in search of his watch and on this occasion wasn’t so lucky, for he was never seen again. I’m sorry, this must sound terribly gory. Let me continue to the relevant part.

  “The scientist who disappeared was a brilliant young man with an exceptionally promising future — geologist, archaeologist, even physicist, I think; he had no fixed specialization. The day before his ill-fated demise he’d been exploring the mountains through which the glacier ran and had taken photographs of rock formations there. When the film was developed, some of the photographs highlighted a series of unusual marks in the rocks. They were thought to be simple stress fractures at first or smudges caused by water erosion, no one could really tell — and by this time, of course, the man who’d shot the film was missing, presumed dead.

  “Several decades later, the photographs were sent to me — in a plain brown envelope with no return address and a short note saying what they were and where they had been taken. The sender expressed a hope they might be ‘useful.’ I had just published an academic paper about Inuit mythology and somehow this man had latched on to it and found me. I was puzzled by the photographs, enough to do some background research on the history of expeditions to Hella, and discovered the material was indeed genuine.

  “My immediate impression was that I was looking at some form of writing, but despite months of effort I could find no way to interpret it.” He reached forward and picked up the sheet. “Thanks to you, the door has now opened a crack. If these photographs turn out to be recordings of what you call ‘dragontongue’ burned into the rocks, then everything we thought we understood about our history might have to be reassessed.”

  “This correspondent,” said Arthur, “the one who sent the shots? Did he leave any clue to his identity?”

  “He signed the note,” Rupert Steiner said. “But all I could make out were his initials: HB.”

  “Hhh!” gasped Lucy. “I know who it is!”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Liz. “There must be millions of people with the initials HB.”

  “Not with a room full of books about the Arctic who lives next door to us, Mom.”

  A glint of interest lit Professor Steiner’s eyes.

  “She’s referring to our neighbor, Henry Bacon,” Liz explained. “He’s a librarian and a collector of books about the Arctic.”

  “David and Gadzooks used to stay with him,” said Lucy.

  “And I happen to know,” Arthur said quietly, drawing on the memories that David had exchanged with him, “that Henry Bacon’s grandfather was a surviving member of the party that explored the Hella glacier.”

  “Good Lord,” said Steiner. “What an amazing series of coincidences.”

  Arthur leaned forward, gazing blindly into space. “Rupert, you need to find those photographs. If there is dragontongue written in the Hella mountains, we need to know what it says. Gadzooks has come here to give you the key to translate that discovery. I suspect that you are meant to publish what you find, so that the academic world will give credible weight to the idea that dragons are not a myth.”

  “There must be more to it than that,” said Liz. “Gadzooks could have written an alphabet on that sheet. Why did he choose that particular word: ‘Scuffenbury’?”

  “
That will surely come out in the translation,” said Arthur. “But in the meantime, I think we should run this by someone who’ll know far more about the subject than I will.”

  “Not …?” Lucy dropped her shoulders and sighed.

  “Yes, Zanna,” said Arthur.

  5 A MEETING WITH DAVID

  Back on Wayward Crescent, Zanna was blissfully unaware that her name had been praised by Arthur — or taken in vain under Lucy’s breath. Intrigued though she was by the trip to Cambridge, Zanna had chosen to stay at home and catch up on some domestic tasks, one of which was bathing her daughter, Alexa.

  The five-year-old loved water and had learned to swim at the age of two. The only things allowed to swim at bath time, however, were Alexa’s impressive collection of toys. Dolphins, fish, mermaids, and turtles all shared the tub whenever she got in. Each had a name. Each had a story. Today it was the turn of Dempsey, the duck.

  “Where do you think Dempsey’s voice is, Mommy?”

  Zanna closed the bathroom cabinet and came to kneel by the side of the bath. The story of Dempsey, the duck who’d lost his quack, was Alexa’s latest creation. Zanna picked up a sponge and dipped it into the water. “Oh, I don’t know. Trapped in a soap bubble?”

  Alexa scooped a few into her palms. “No,” she said, splatting her hands together.

  A rogue bubble splashed across a female dragon sitting by the taps. She flicked the suds away and gave a moody snort. Her name was Gretel. Her ability was making up potions from flowers. At the moment, she was simply monitoring the tea lights that Zanna had set up around the bath.

  “Perhaps it went up one of the spouts?” said Zanna. “It might whoosh out if we turn on the taps.”

  Alexa picked up the unfortunate mute and sailed him down toward her feet. She shook her head.

  “Well, how about … the sponge? Sponges are full of tiny holes and tunnels. Lots of places for a voice to hide. If we squeeze it, you might hear a quiet quack.”

  Alexa’s eyes grew very wide.

  “I’ll need to hold the sponge to your ear, of course.”

  The child moved her dark curls out of the way.

  “Ready, set … squeeze!” said Zanna, emptying a cascade of water over Alexa’s head.

  “Oh, Mommy! Plurrgghh!”

  “Sit up.” Zanna laughed. “Let me wash your back.” She lifted the sponge again, but as she brought it close to Alexa’s neck her attention was caught by a rivulet of water running down the little girl’s shoulder. She stopped the bead with a prod of her finger. “Lexie, have you been scratching?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Zanna picked up a towel and pressed it against the rose-white skin. Concentric to the curve of the child’s shoulder blade was a faint pattern of reddish blotches. They were present on the other side as well.

  Zanna traced a finger slowly along them. The texture of the skin was distinctly bumpy and the tissues underneath moved like gel when she applied even modest pressure. Water vapor swelling the pores, perhaps? “Does this hurt?”

  Alexa shook her long black curls.

  “Is it itchy?”

  “Only when I’ve got a sweater on.”

  A clothes rash? An allergy to wool, perhaps? Zanna laid the towel aside. “Well, we’ll put something on that when we’re done.”

  Ten minutes later, once her hair had been washed, Alexa was in her Peter Rabbit robe with her hair tied up in a soft blue towel (because all the women in the house did that). Dempsey’s quack had thankfully turned up in the linen closet. Leaving Alexa playing with him, Zanna went downstairs to find some cream to apply to the girl’s back. Zanna owned and ran a “New Age” shop and therefore knew a wide range of natural remedies. Confident she might have some chickweed balm that would soothe Alexa’s itching, she was on her way to her room to get it when she stopped abruptly at the entrance to the hall and looked down it into the kitchen.

  David was sitting at the table, reading a paper. Faded leather boots, stonewashed jeans, battered black coat, shoulder-length hair. Take away the X-Files T-shirt and he might have passed as a modern Doc Holliday. He even had the chain of an old-fashioned fob watch dangling from a pocket of his dark blue waistcoat.

  Zanna steadied her nerves and came to the doorway. “Well, well. The wanderer returns. And how did you get in?” She darted a glance at the listening dragon that sat on the fridge top, wondering why it hadn’t sent a message to Gretel. It twitched its uncommonly large ears and blew a hesitant smoke ring.

  “Interesting article,” David said.

  Zanna glanced at the paper as he put it down. She frowned when she saw that what he’d been reading was a story about Apak’s “vision” in the Arctic. Part of the headline was obscured by a fold, but the word “dragons?” was bold and prominent and there was an artist’s impression of what Apak had seen. It looked frighteningly realistic. But what really took her breath was the name of the journalist who’d written the article. Tam Farrell. The man who’d tried to investigate David’s disappearance and just about stolen Lucy’s heart in the process. Tam. The irony was almost chilling.

  “I repeat,” she said, scooping up the paper and throwing it into the recycling bin. (She didn’t want Lucy seeing that.) “How did you get in?”

  David moved his hand palm down across the table and lifted it to reveal a key. “I used to live here, remember?”

  She stared at the key as if she’d like to melt it. “It would have been polite to knock.”

  “I did. Gruffen let me in. He was on the windowsill by the door — where Gwillan used to sit.” He nodded at a small dragon sitting on the table. Unlike the others, it was gray and lifeless.

  Zanna threw open a cupboard door, glad to put a screen between them for now. Like it or not, he still scooped hollows out of her heart. She brought down a box in which Liz kept a basic first-aid kit. Band-Aids, scissors, antiseptic ointments. Nothing she’d ideally use for Alexa, but useful props to maintain her composure. She closed the cupboard door and turned to face him. That moment of hidden calm had helped.

  “Mommy, are you coming yet?” Alexa’s voice drifted down the stairs.

  “In a minute, sweetie, just stay there.”

  David’s gaze settled on the tube she was holding. “Problem?”

  “She has a rash on her back. Don’t act like you care.”

  “She’s my daughter, too, remember?”

  A small volcanic rush of emotion tried to escape through Zanna’s mouth. She clamped her tongue and let the anger out physically, pushing the first-aid box aside, almost knocking over a wooden block of knives. “The front door sticks. Make sure you close it tight when you leave.”

  She turned abruptly, but had hardly taken a step when he said, “I couldn’t help what happened to me, Zanna.”

  Somehow, his voice seemed to clamp her to the spot.

  “I went to the Arctic to protect you and Lucy. How could I have known what was waiting for me there?”

  Shivers. Why did he make her shiver? She turned fiercely and addressed him again. “Five years you were gone.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Five Christmases, five birthdays, five Father’s Days, five … Valentine’s.” Five letters, she was thinking bitterly, remembering how she’d always written one to him on that day in mid-February, the anniversary of his apparent “death.” “And then you just turn up out of nowhere?”

  “I couldn’t help it,” he repeated. “The Fain took me back. Into the world they call Ki:mera, a place where time is meaningless.”

  “Not to me.” She forced her pretty face forward. “Just go, David. Disappear into your weird Fain world. Leave me alone to look after my child.”

  “I can’t. She’s part of this.”

  “Part of what?”

  At that moment, the cat flap opened and Bonnington trotted in. With a purr of recognition, he leaped onto David’s lap.

  Zanna scowled at the cat,
and briefly again at the listening dragon, as if they had both betrayed her trust. “Is this what you are, now: king of beasts? Dominion over dragons, polar bears, and cats? What’s it like being up there on a level with Gawain?”

  “Like breathing in several degrees of the sun,” he said. He stroked Bonnington’s head, smiling as the Fain being trapped inside the cat came to commingle in joyous greeting. “This world is on the edge of a change, Zanna. There isn’t time to explain the history or the reasons but the planet is ready to accept a new species; I have to make sure that the wrong species is not allowed in.”

  Zanna shook her head. “What brand of science fiction is this?”

  “Neither fiction nor science,” he said, evenly. “Think about it — you live in an extraordinary household. A physics genius. Two women descended from the last known dragon on Earth. A daughter with the power to draw the future. A cat that can shape-shift into any feline species it chooses. You — a young sibyl — capable of all kinds of magicks.”

  “And your point is?”

  “My point is you can’t keep it out of Alexa’s life. But you can help me keep her away from danger. No matter what you feel about me as a parent, isn’t her safety our first priority?”

  “Mommy?! Are you coming?”

  “Yes, darling! I’m on my way!”

  Zanna folded her arms. Several bangles clinked around her wrists. “All right, what is it you want? You didn’t come here to talk custody agreements.”

  “I need to know where Gwilanna is. My sources tell me she took his fire tear.” He nodded at Gwillan again. “He’s not dead, Zanna, he’s in a kind of stasis. I intend to help him, but first I need to know all the facts. I understand you fought the Ix here? Tell me what happened.”

  Zanna sighed and touched the wall beside her. That day in the garden. That dreadful day. So often she’d tried to blot it from her mind, so often it came back to haunt her dreams. “Lucy came to us, possessed by the Ix. She had a knife with her, made from obsidian. She claims it was the heart of a creature called a darkling, some monster the Ix had forced her to make. She scratched it right across Liz’s back. Liz was poisoned. We thought she was dead. Gwillan saw her body and was deeply traumatized. He shed his fire tear and it seemed to transfer itself into the knife. I don’t know how. I threw the knife away not knowing what it was. It broke into three clean pieces. One of them had the tear inside it. Gwilanna took it and disappeared. That’s it. End of story. That’s all I know. Now, if you don’t mind, my — our — daughter needs my attention.”