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  David put Grace down on the table. Her bright green scales were beginning to fade to the same washed-out gray as Gwillan’s. Her wonderful ears, normally so upright and alert, were bent and fixed forward. Gruffen flew down from his perch on the windowsill and landed beside her. He tapped her snout. There was no response.

  “She’s shed her tear,” said David. He nodded at the counter where Groyne had just materialized, holding it. “I’m sorry, Liz. I couldn’t prevent it.”

  Bewilderment tore at the lines of Liz’s face. She turned Grace left and right, then stood up quickly and went to Groyne. “Why has he got it? What on Earth happened? For a healthy dragon to shed its tear it has to be deeply —” She paused midsentence. “Sophie.” She fixed her former tenant with a harrowed look. “No.” She backed away, flapping her hands. “Not my beautiful Sophie. No.”

  “Sophie,” said Alexa, as if she’d just picked up a piece of a puzzle. “Oh.”

  David kissed the tips of his fingers and touched them to the top of the little girl’s head, then he went straight to Liz. Fighting to steady her flailing arms, he shook her and made her look into his eyes. “There was nothing I could do. She was dead before I arrived in Africa.”

  There was a sudden thump in the hall doorway.

  Lucy had just fainted in a heap on the floor.

  Gretel brought her around with a delicate potion of lemon balm, lavender, and almond essence. For several minutes, all Lucy could do was sit with her head against her mother’s palm and sob. Eventually, she turned her gaze toward David, who was standing with Alexa, holding the child’s hand.

  I’m sorry, she mouthed, tears bunching at the corners of her eyes.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  “But if I’d told you about the e-mail sooner?”

  He came over and placed his hand on her forehead, letting it slip to support her cheek. “It’s not your fault.”

  She squirmed around to look at Groyne. “Will Grace be OK?”

  “I hope so,” he said. “Why don’t you go and lie down for a while? I need to talk to your mom. Gretel.” He snapped his fingers. The potions dragon landed on Lucy’s knee. “Take her upstairs and make her calm. Lexie, you go, too.”

  “We can do stories,” Alexa said, slipping her fingers into Lucy’s.

  The pale-faced teenager looked at her mom.

  “Go on,” Liz whispered. “I’ll be up soon.”

  When the girls were a creak of footsteps on the landing, David dropped into a seat at the table and explained the events in Africa to Liz.

  Her eyes picked out a tile in the center of the floor. “This is awful, David. You must be devastated.”

  He passed a hand halfway through his hair. It still carried the scent of smoke and death. Haunted by the image of Sophie’s face, he let his gaze and his thoughts dip solemnly toward Grace. “I knew she would cry her tear. If I’d tried to interrupt I’d have lost concentration and given the raven a chance to absorb her grief. So I instructed Groyne to turn invisible and catch the tear, knowing it was Grace’s best chance of survival. She might not thank me for it. Without Sophie, there will always be a gray shadow in her auma.”

  Liz pressed her lips together and cupped one hand around Grace’s body, as if she might warm her back to life. “I remember the day I made her,” she said, unable to suppress the wobble in her voice. The usual sparkles of green in her eyes were all but misted over and lost. “It was a beautiful August afternoon, the year before you came to the house. She was unusual because I already had the listener on the fridge and I could see no reason she should come into being. But she seemed content enough just to sit in the den and meditate, as they do sometimes. I could tell she was waiting for someone special. I thought when you came it was going to be you. But she told me on the first day you were not the one. She knew, David. She knew Sophie was coming. And now these creatures have …”

  She broke down freely then. David gathered her into his arms and held her till her grief had subsided. When she was ready he said to her calmly, “I’ve instructed Grockle to hunt the birds down.”

  “Grockle?”

  “Yes. He’s at my command. He’ll trace them and destroy them. I owe Sophie that.” He sat again, holding his face in his hands. “It may not seem like it, but at the moment these ravens are acting without real purpose, compelled to follow their quest for dark fire by the memory of what they saw on Farlowe. What troubles me is how they latched on to Grace. An isolated dragon was always going to be an easier target than any in the Crescent, but I think I unwittingly led them to her.”

  “How?” said Liz.

  “When Zanna went to Farlowe I ordered Groyne to track her. He took a fix off your listener and another off Grace. Anyone with the means to eavesdrop those signals could have easily identified Grace’s coordinates.”

  “Would these birds be capable of that?”

  “I don’t know,” David said, musing on it. “Maybe they had help. The man I spoke to, Mutu, told me he thought he saw a woman at the center, just before the blaze began.”

  “Gwilanna? In Africa?”

  “She did threaten us at the church. And she has the isoscele of Gawain, remember. That gives her a direct conduit into every dragon you’ve ever created. Grace would have been a little beacon of his auma. Not difficult for a sibyl like her to detect.”

  Liz sighed and shook her head. “Brutal destruction is not Gwilanna’s way.”

  David picked up a place mat and tapped it against the tabletop. “She wants illumination to a dragon, Liz. Maybe she’ll do anything to get it? Anyway, the answer to the problem is pretty basic: What we need to do is remove the prize. If we neutralize the dark fire in the obsidian, we won’t have to worry about any more negative outcomes.”

  “Neutralize it? How would that affect Gwillan?”

  Before David could answer, the front door opened and Zanna came sailing into the kitchen. “Liz, can I borrow your scissors, please?” Knowing she needed no real permission, she went to the utensils drawer and yanked it open. With a brief, slightly puzzled glance at Groyne, she whipped the scissors out and bumped the drawer closed with her hip. “Short vacation. Lousy tan. How was your girlfriend, David?” Sweeping back toward the hall, she told Liz she’d have the scissors back within the hour. She’d put one foot across the floor bar separating kitchen from hall when David said quietly, “She’s dead.”

  Zanna froze. She turned around and stared at him. “Dead?”

  “Please,” Liz begged. “You two. Not now.”

  David got up and slid his chair under the table. He picked up a modeling stick and drilled it into the unworked clay. He nodded at Groyne, who dematerialized with the fire tear. “Bring the icefire up to the den,” he said to Liz. And picking up Grace, he brushed past Zanna without another word.

  A few minutes later the door of the Dragons’ Den creaked open and footsteps sounded across the wooden floor.

  David was sitting at Liz’s workbench. Grace and Gwillan were on the bench in front of him and Groyne was on the potter’s turntable, enjoying the sensation of pressing his toes into a loose bit of clay. He was still holding the fire tear.

  The visitor, Zanna, perched herself on a tall wooden stool just within David’s peripheral vision. “Liz has told me, briefly, what happened in Africa. I’m sorry — about Sophie. And for what I said.”

  All around the room dragons shuffled their feet. Bonnington, lying on a shelf on a roughed-up blanket, moved his ears forward then went back to sleep.

  “The ravens are growing in confidence,” said David, as far away as his gaze implied. “It’s possible Gwilanna is controlling them. If that’s so, sooner or later the kind of devastation I saw in Africa is going to come here, unless we’re united against it. I’ve put some procedures into place to deal with the threat. The best apology you can give me is to help me see them through. I need you on my side, Zanna. We all do.”

  A small lump formed in Zanna’s throat. She gulped it down, half-hop
ing he wouldn’t hear it, half-hoping he would. Stretching her body shape long and slim, she stared at the lonely gray figures of Gwillan and Grace. On the shelf beside her, G’reth the wishing dragon was pressing his wonderful paws together. Gollygosh, right next to him, was sitting on the special tool kit he carried. “All right, I’m willing to work with you. But I want a few answers first.”

  David leveled his gaze at her.

  Her perfect mouth trembled a little but she said, “You can begin by telling me why my daughter appears to have wings growing out of her back….”

  21 ABOUT ALEXA

  She’s a messenger,” David said, as casually as if he was telling her the time or remarking on the weather or bending down to tie his shoelace. He seemed to have been expecting the question for weeks.

  “A messenger?” The scorn returned to Zanna’s voice in a flash.

  “Alexa is a synthesis of dragon and human — or rather, illumined Fain and human. People will look at her and see an angel. She will be a symbol of harmony and hope.”

  “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.” Zanna stood up and walked a full circle, digging her hands into her jeans’ back pockets. “Where on the curriculum of motherhood was this?”

  David swung around to face her directly, allowing himself a moment to observe how stunning she looked whenever she was tense. “She knows what she needs. Just follow your instincts.”

  “Oh, easy for you to say, Daddy. Bringing up an angel isn’t exactly top of the list in parenting class, you know! How’s she going to live in this world? She’ll be an outcast. She’ll be …”

  “I told you, this world is changing,” he said. “The Earth is ready to accept a new species.”

  Zanna fixed him with an ice-cold glare. “My daughter is not a species. She’s not something to be put into a jar, or poked or prodded or classified for scientific reference. I thought you were talking about dragons anyway?”

  “Dragons are hardly new,” he said. “This is their world. It always was. When everything is ready, they will colonize again. Only this time, things will be different.”

  “Oh? Surprise me?” She folded her arms.

  Now it was David’s turn to stretch. With their body language almost mirrored he said, “The last human dragon era didn’t end well. Any day now, The National Endeavor will remind the world of that.”

  “The National Endeavor? Tam Farrell’s magazine?”

  “Rupert Steiner is ready to publish his interpretation of The Last Dragon Chronicles.”

  Zanna looked as if she needed to pinch herself. “You’re working with Tam?”

  “Let’s just say he’s part of the team; you learned as much on North Walk, I think.”

  “Oh, I’m learning a lot of things,” said Zanna. She swept back to the stool again. “In fact, I’ve got a small revelation for you. When the Wicked Witch of Scrubbley was last around, healing Liz of the obsidian poison, we had a revealing sibyl-to-sibyl chat. She told me it was your kind who bungled the last age of dragons.”

  “My kind?”

  “Oh, sorry, didn’t you know? She refers to you as a Fain ‘construct.’ That was pleasant, by the way — for me to learn I’d had a child by someone who wasn’t completely human.”

  “Alexa isn’t human — completely,” he reminded her. “But you love her — the way you loved me at the time.”

  “Don’t play that game with me,” she said, grinding the sentence into spittle. “The pledge I just made is entirely platonic. Never lose sight of that.”

  He held up his hands. “So what do you want to know?”

  “Oh, let me think.” She snapped her fingers repeatedly by her ear. “A word beginning with E …?”

  Everything? hurred G’reth, just beating Gruffen to the answer.

  “Thank you,” Zanna said to the wisher. “Well?” She glared at David again.

  “How much did Gwilanna tell you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I want to hear it from the dragon’s mouth. The full story, not the spaces in between. Particularly the bits that concern my angel.”

  David ran his hands along his thighs, patting them as he reached his knees. “OK. The history is straightforward enough: When the Fain commingled with the earliest humans they made a terrible error of judgment. They had no idea that their hosts would compete against each other for superiority, then turn on the indigenous community of dragons and try to wipe them out. From that aggression the Ix were spawned. There has been darkness in this sector of the universe ever since. The Fain are attempting to put things right. By recolonizing the Earth with a new dragon population, they plan to draw the Ix back to their point of origin — and deal with the problem once and for all.”

  “So this Arctic wheeze is a trap?”

  “In a sense.”

  “What happens when they throw back the mist?”

  G’reth rolled his eyes toward David.

  “We open the Fire Eternal and the transformation of the Ix begins.”

  “Transformation?” Zanna’s gothic eyes flashed like knives. “Why don’t I like the sound of this?” She got up and turned away, nodding tautly. “So what are you going to do? Drill a big hole in the Arctic ice cap and sweep the nasty thought-beings down into a barbecue at the center of the Earth while the human race looks on and goes ‘ooh’? Is that it?”

  “Nice image. Bit more complex than that.”

  “Too right,” she said, making her ponytail kick. “I may not have your Fain insights, but I’m smart enough to know that you can’t defeat evil, you can only rise above it. It’s part of what keeps the universe in balance. Ask Arthur about the fifth force sometime.”

  “Arthur and I are united,” said David. “And you’re right, the Ix can’t be defeated as such — but their negative auma can be transmuted.”

  “Oh, yeah? Tell that to Lucy. She’s still scared out of her wits by them.”

  “I have talked to Lucy,” he said. His gaze drifted sideways, compressing into bitterness. “She was attacked by an Ix:risor, a highly intensified Ix grouping, sometimes called a Comm:Ix or a Cluster. When they’re concentrated into a conglomerate like that they become almost impossible for the human mind to resist. But that’s exactly the state we need them in: one huge cluster. It’s getting them there that’s the difficult part.”

  “And whose finger will be on the trigger when you do? I’d never seen that mangy crone Gwilanna scared until she talked about you meddling with the Fire Eternal.”

  “It won’t be me,” he said, and looked at her hard.

  Slowly, the implication in his gaze began to register. “No,” she said, covering the scars on her arm. “If you put Alexa in any kind of danger, I’ll —”

  “Alexa is already in danger,” he said, with a calmness she found unsettling. To her deeper dismay, she realized she was trying hard not to cry.

  “Listen to me,” he said, his eyes as violet as Gruffen’s or G’reth’s. “Alexa’s been protected since before she was born. Her auma has been watched over by many guardians. The reason the ravens didn’t go for her on North Walk is because the Ix have no idea what she is.”

  “But Gwilanna does,” Zanna said pointedly, the graveyard threat still ringing in her ears.

  David nodded and drew himself up. “Gwilanna is a menace. But she’s not stupid enough to sell her soul to the Ix. She wants to bond with a dragon, not a darkling. It’s far more likely she’ll provoke the conflict to bring the dragons into play. That was always her aim on Farlowe.”

  “And in Africa?”

  “I don’t know yet if she was even there. I think that sibyls around the world are being drawn to sites of activity because they can sense the dragon auma in the North. But Gwilanna could still be a real threat. I want you to trace her again for me. It would be good to know which bit of the ointment my fly is in.”

  Zanna gave a disgruntled hmph. “I’ve tried. She’s wise to me, David. She’s marked me up like a piece of spam. But I can promise you this: If she goes near Alexa, I’ll kill her. Stone dead
.”

  “Then you might have to get in a line,” he said. “And I’m not just talking about me and you. Alexa is the key to everything. She will be the light that people will be drawn to, a new breath of life for this ailing planet. The Ix are not the only threat to human development. In the last forty years, the Earth has undergone dramatic environmental changes. We believe the climate scientists have got their predictions seriously muddled. If things are allowed to go on as they are, you might not see the Arctic ice melt away gradually in thirty or forty years, it could happen suddenly, within as little as a twelve-month period. The results will be cataclysmic, and the real sadness is that the human race is beginning not to think about preventing the melt, but how they’re going to cope with the aftermath. The dragons can change all that. Once people come to terms with the benefits of having a dragon culture here, the human race — and Gaia — will enter a new phase of spiritual evolution.”

  “Assuming it all goes to plan,” Zanna said. “What’s to stop mankind attacking the dragons like they did before?”

  “Alexa.” He glanced at the dragons around him, blowing their smoke rings and swishing their tails. “She was … imagined,” he said carefully, “to be a bridge between the two cultures. For humans, she represents the promise of what can be achieved —”

  “A race of six and a half billion angels?”

  David shook his head. “Only a small fraction of humans will ever achieve Alexa’s level of illumination.”

  “And what happens to the rest?”

  “In time, the same thing that’s happened to the polar bears.”

  Zanna squinted at him, not unlike a bear.

  “They’ll enter Ki:mera,” he said.

  22 A HAMMER BLOW

  Ki:mera? The Fain world?” Zanna stared at him blankly. “Every single bear has been taken there?”

  “Not taken. Crossed over. Into another dimension. When the climate is stable, as many bears as want to will return. It’s a journey into freedom, Zanna. Whatever good mankind, or bearkind, can imagine — in Ki:mera, they can achieve it.”