Zenith (37 page)

The Pontifix was standing on the Culpy Bridge. Clay knew it was him by his wind-straggled hair, the colour 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 harbour, 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 grey 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 jewelled casket they found years ago among the museum’s armour 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 favourite 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 Longhope, 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.

He has heard that voice before. Once, when he was small, on the journey through the glacier gorge when the mountain swallowed Tuck. It’s the voice of the Earth.

Wing sweeps the telescope over the rock faces of the mountains, but there’s nothing to see. The tremor came through the rocky pass behind him, carrying ice echoes from the glacier gorge that cuts through the mountains in the world beyond the lake. Often, the land slips and slides and deadly spring tides of snow rumble down from the
peaks. But what he just heard is something much darker and deeper than that.

When Lily comes, he’ll tell her. Once the stars wheel around the North Star, their anchor, and the great lake throws morning up into the sky, he and Lily might sneak off into the mountains to track the voice of the Earth.

He knows Lily. She’ll want to go.

Just to see.

The great waterfall has crashed into sudden meltdown. The huge force of it tears at a weakness in the rock. The land cracks and breaks and a vast slice of the mountain hurtles into the glacier gorge.

The Earth roars as an old ice wound reopens.

A green wind blows over the mountains, fresh from the trees around the lake. It rushes into the opening and snakes through the dark salty air of the tunnels that worm deep into the mountain and lead to Ilira, and the world beyond.