Firespark (36 page)

Anything is possible
, she reminds herself. It was something she once believed.

Mara is not here. It was only a trick of hope on the back of his fever-dream
.

The emptiness of the Bridge to Nowhere leaches all his hopes. His plans are a waste of time. He has lost Mara for nothing. A one-man revolution is just a joke and he's not sure he could stomach what a revolution really means. Candleriggs was right. He should take Pandora and go home. He will risk the wrath of his grandfather and the rooks and try to change his world from the inside
.

He'll leave behind a fox-phantom, a dream of himself, to guard the broken bridge. A fox that will bay each night at midnight, its cry echoing all down the boulevards of the Weave. But he can't keep coming back here, night after night, to a bridge that leads nowhere at all. He will exit this ghost existence and find his real life again
.

But he's not giving up on Mara. He can never do that. The fox is the guardian of his last flint-spark of hope and he'll leave it here on the bridge. If she does come, the fox will alert his godgem, wherever he is, however far from now
.

The ether is full of nervy static, as if he has infected the Weave with his mood
.

A light flashes high over the bridge. Fox scans the network for flying cyberdogs or one of the other venomous creatures that mutate out of Weave-rot. But there's nothing he can see. He's about to exit the Weave when there's another flash of light. He looks up
.

A moon falls into the boulevards
.

A silver glow illuminates the ruins, too strong for a solitary moon
.

Another moon shoots over the bridge
.

The peekaboo moons
!

Fox watches two more moons zip out of the empty ocean of cyberhaze that lies between the defunct Weave and the sizzling cyberuniverse of the Noos. He watches them land in exactly the right place. How many have come? How many moons have answered his call
?

Time to act or time to go? Now, Fox doesn't know
.

But he leaves the phantom fox on the broken bridge and zooms through the junk heaps and the towerstacks, heading for the place he first spotted Mara when they were both just kids who knew nothing of the world and played among the rot and ruin of the Weave
.

Fox zips across the ether onto his boulevard of broken dreams
.

Just to see
.

The Earth turns five thousand times and more
.

Sunups and sundowns rise and fall
.

In the long polar nights of the Far North many suns

never rise or set at all
.

Days pile on days and lives are lived
.

In Candlewood, the tree lamps wink and shiver. Winds burrow through the forest, as fleet as Arctic hares. Above the Lake of Longhope, a cutlass moon sharpens its blade on the eastern mountains, its watery twin broken into pieces on the waves. The stars are so fierce their reflections fizzle on the lake.

Deep in the mountains, winter still grips. But on the shores of the lake at the top of the world, the sun is winning the battle against the longest night, unfastening the fingers of winter, one by one.

There's a rip in the texture of the night. A shift and crack that is nothing to do with the rupturing sky lights of the magnetic Pole. A roar and bellow like a dying iceberg, but this is a voice that is deeper, older still.

The voice of the Earth.

In the moon-windy rockways of Ilira, no one hears the Earth speak.

No one hears in the umiaks, the fleet of long walrus-skin boats moving fast as darts up the snaky channel of the fjord. The sea and the banshee wind are too loud.

The tide is with the umiaks and the waves rush them home. The rowers are grateful. Their arms ache after a long shift salvaging bridge metal from the sunken wrecks around the jutting sharks of land where the fjord becomes open sea. As they turn the last bend, the rowers pass under the network of bridges that connect the inner islets of the fjord.

Moonlight makes a glistening weave of the bridges. To Clay, in the umiak at the tail end of the fleet, it looks as if a spider's web has been cast over the wide bay.

A lamplit procession is moving along the unfinished Culpy Bridge. The Pontifix has promised it will be the greatest of all the bridges, an astonishing wonder of metal-weave suspended right across the fjord before it widens out into the bay. The coiling pillars at each end and the graceful weave and sweep of the bridge make Clay
think of the sea melodies the wind-pipers play in the market caverns, frozen in midair.

Clay pulls on his oar, his eyes following the moving procession of lamps.

“Eyes on your oars!” roars the scut at the head of the umiak. He snaps his whip and his cutlass winks at the moon, while the moon winks on the metal crescents that brand the Culpy Bridge. Clay lowers his head but chances a sly glance upward just before his boat passes under the bridge. The whip tail cracks on his head but Clay doesn't care. What he just saw was worth twenty whips.

The Pontifix was standing on the Culpy Bridge. Clay knew it was him by his wind-straggled hair, the color of a winter sun, and his bright blue windwrap emblazoned with silver crescents and the crossed wings of a Great Skua on its back. He was examining the bridge's wirework with his silver eyebox. As the umiak fleet passed underneath him, the Pontifix leaned over the bridge to watch. Clay could swear the silver eyebox looked right down at him.

The Pontifix, Bridge Master of Ilira and Keeper of the Globe, looked through his eyebox into Clay's upturned face.

That's something to tell his mother. It might bring a smile to her weary face.

Up in the mountains the Earth is roaring and shifting but Clay is racing home to harbor, the world's wind is in his ears, and he doesn't hear a thing.

Fox is fast asleep at last.

Pandora kneels on the floor beside the bed of shredded books, heaped with ancient clothes from the museum. She pulls on one of the long, grubby dresses, the first that comes to hand, strokes the tawny hair that's strewn with fine threads of gray like cobwebs on autumn leaves, and steals a kiss from his dreams.

He's exhausted from a long night's work in cyberspace, outrunning the rooks that are forever on their track. Since Caledon died, New Mungo has lost its dominance of the New World. New forces are rising, says Fox, things are shifting. Insurrection and dissaffection vibrate in the ether. Finally, he says, after all these years, our time has come.

Pandora lifts the lid of the jeweled casket they found years ago among the museum's armor and swords. It's where he keeps the godgem with its headgem that is the same green as her eyes. He's always telling her it's not a toy, but she knows that well enough. The game they play is a deadly serious one.

Pandora creeps out of the tower room and runs down the narrow winding stairs. When at last the stairs end, she bursts out through a small door and only stops to rub a stitch in her side. Now she's running through the great halls of the museum, barefoot, long dress rustling, the night air of the netherworld seeping through the smashed window panes and coating her unwieldy tangle of hair with beads of dank mist.

She finds the hall with the huge stuffed elephant and crawls underneath, resting against the thick trunk of its back leg. It's her favorite place and he never finds her here.

Her presence disturbs an owl perched on the elephant's head. It flies off with an indignant
who you
! to join the ghostly hosts of owls hooting and hunting all across the netherworld. Pandora puts on the godgem. The green gem on her forehead looks like a third eye. She gives a happy sigh as she takes a cyberleap to join a night hunt in another ruined world.

Now she's zipping through the ruined boulevards, no longer Pandora but a green cybersnake, hyperspeeding far faster than she can ever run through the museum's halls. Behind her is the broken bridge where a forlorn fox bays night after night for a mate that never comes. Pandora doesn't bother about him. She is too busy snaking through the flickering towerstacks to play her own furtive part in events that will shake the very foundations of the New World
.

And there they all are, waiting for her in a puddle of moonbeams, in the wrecked boulevard where dreams are forged
.

In Candlewood, no one hears the Earth roar.

Not those gathering for supper around sundown fires, nor Lily, racing through the trees in the face of the wind. Her hair streams behind her, glinting in the lights of the tree lamps like the tawny tail of a fox.

Beyond the trees, on the edge of the Lake of Long-hope, Wing is perched halfway up Candlewood Spire. The huge rugged spire of rock points straight to the Star of the North. Wing is studying the night with his telescope, a grounded star sailor on a stone mast. When the Earth trembles, the thick down of hair on his skin bristles. His hackles rise as he hears the faraway crack and roar.