Fire Star

  But before he could, his attention was drawn by a commotion in the corridor. “What is this?” he demanded, whirling in his seat as the door burst open.

  Brother Peter stumbled in, collapsing to one knee. “Wickedness,” he panted, reaching for his heart, which seemed in imminent danger of seizing. “Brother Terence …”

  “What of him?” the abbot said, going to Peter and catching him before he could fall any farther.

  “Blinded,” he gasped, gripping Abbot Hugo’s habit so tightly that the cloth was ripped apart at the collarbone.

  “By the creature?”

  Peter nodded and fell into a faint.

  “Attend to him,” Abbot Hugo said, and swept out of the room.

  In the corridor, monks were running back and forth, calling for aid and medical supplies. Two cells away, behind a locked door, Brother Vincent was shouting to be released. In the stable block, no doubt, the baby dragon was being stoned with the vilest of words, if not rocks themselves.

  And yet Brother Bernard somehow knew that, for the moment, his place was at the abbot’s desk. He squeezed the pen again and a new and bizarre impulsion came over him. From the pigeonhole above the paper supply he removed a matching envelope. He looked at Brother Vincent’s manuscript. On the very first page was the name of a character and his address:

  David Rain,

  42 Wayward Crescent,

  Scrubbley, Massachusetts

  U.S.A.

  This he wrote on the envelope and sealed the note inside it.

  Then he went to the aid of the dragon.

  53 STABLE BLOCK, MIDDAY

  Four monks were clustered around Brother Terence where he sat, propped against the outside of the stable door. Brother Cedric, a retired physician, was holding a cotton pad against his eyes. Bright red blotches on his cheeks and neck suggested he’d suffered some kind of burns. Something yellow (was it vomit?) was splattered down his habit which was wet with copious amounts of water. One leg was twitching uncontrollably. A mumbled prayer was issuing from his lips. There was a halo of deep-rooted fear around him.

  Bernard caught the arm of Brother Sebastian. “What happened?”

  “The creature spat at him.”

  “Was it provoked?”

  “Does it matter? Our brother, Terence, may be blinded. He cannot open one eye; the other is clouded by the creature’s vile discharge.”

  “Has he said nothing of the incident at all?”

  “He is mumbling prayer and will not respond to questions. I tell you, this thing should be removed from our world and sent back to the pits of hell it arose from.”

  Brother Bernard nodded, but said nothing in agreement. He patted Sebastian lightly on the shoulder, prayed for healing to be sent to Brother Terence, and hurried along to the stable block.

  “Approach with care,” the abbot said, from several yards to the right of the dragon. His voice was calm but his manner solemn. Brother Malcolm, standing slightly forward of him, had the mood and posture of a drag-onslayer. The creature itself had withdrawn into a shadowed corner of its pen. Only the occasional blink of light glinted off its leathery green scales.

  “I cannot understand this,” Bernard said. “I was with the beast not minutes ago and it was perfectly calm. It made no attempt to attack me.”

  The abbot took no heed of this. Raising his hooked nose he said to Brother Malcolm, “Find a large sack.”

  Malcolm immediately searched the pallets where wheat and barley had once been stored.

  “What are you planning to do?” asked Bernard, feeling a sense of unease creeping over him.

  “Do you pity this beast so much?” asked the abbot.

  Bernard laced his fingers. “I don’t believe it’s a demon.”

  The abbot turned slowly to look at him. “Brother Terence would not agree.” And it seemed to Bernard there was a sight more malice in the old man’s eyes than he’d seen in any parlay with the dragon.

  Malcolm reappeared, shaking ears of straw from a dusty sack.

  The abbot pointed to a loose stack of wood. “Choose a piece of board. Something large enough to shield us from any further spittle.”

  Bernard looked in horror at the sack. “You plan to hood it?”

  “There is a monk outside who may never see again. Neither will the beast, for now.”

  “Abbot, this is monstrous.”

  “The wood,” he growled.

  “Allow me,” said Malcolm, throwing the sack into Bernard’s midriff, who caught it as though it were his prison issue.

  “You intend to kill it?”

  “I am waiting for an emissary,” the abbot said. “He will decide what is to be done.”

  “Is he part of the brethren?” Bernard asked, nursing a feeling of nervousness. He had not shaken off Brother Vincent’s warning: danger, a wind from another world.

  “That is not your concern,” said the abbot.

  “But if the Order has always been exclusive to the island, then why —?”

  “You worry me,” said the abbot, cutting him off. “Increasingly, I find your mood infected by the same misguided sentiments that have addled Brother Vincent.”

  “The creature should not be tortured,” Bernard snapped, switching the emphasis back to the dragon.

  But the abbot merely turned and addressed Brother Malcolm, who was holding up a sizeable piece of board. “Advance with caution. Brother Bernard seems not to fear the beast. Let him stand close enough to cover its head.”

  Brother Malcolm lifted the shield, showing forearms bruised with naval tattoos. But as he set off, Bernard stopped him and said, “I will do this alone.”

  “What? Are you deranged?”

  “The creature has intelligence,” Bernard said grittily. “Already, it cowers in the comfort of shadows. If I spring at it suddenly from behind a board it may attack again. Protect yourself if you must.” He stepped into the open.

  The yellow eyes watched him fearfully. He took two steps forward. The dragon reared its head. Another step and its talons ratcheted the ground. One more. Its ear scales lifted. “Do not resist,” Bernard whispered in the tongue, matching his voice to the level of its growl.

  “They will kill you if you try. Trust me. I will help you.” And he opened the sack and in one fluid movement ran it over the dragon’s head.

  The baby creature bucked against its chains. Zaaaannnnnaaaa, it cried, sneezing, almost blowing the sack away. The material caught against its scales and held.

  “Brother, step back,” the abbot shouted.

  But Bernard had a question of the dragon first. “Why?” he asked. “Why did you spit at Brother Terence?”

  And the answer was both confusing and frightful.

  Biiirrrrdddd, the dragon whimpered.

  Bernard swept around and looked at the gable.

  There in the window was the raven again.

  “Come away,” the abbot insisted.

  Brother Malcolm drew Bernard clear.

  “This place is forbidden,” Abbot Hugo said. To Malcolm, he added: “Have it well guarded.” To Bernard: “You may leave.”

  “Abbot, this dragon —”

  “Go, Brother Bernard.”

  Bernard looked once more at the pitiful creature, then bowed his head and hurried outside, almost fainting as the colder air hit him. He staggered over to a disused water trough and sat upon it, panting, clutching his side. What was happening in this once holy place? Dragons, ravens, burnings, torture. And here he was at the center of it all. He pulled the envelope from the pocket of his habit and stared at it as though it were a sentence of death.

  “Brother, are you hurt?” Cedric came up and laid a hand upon his shoulder.

  Bernard shook his head. “How is Brother Terence?”

  “Not as bad as I feared. The injury is more in his mind than his eyes. I believe he saw something which greatly disturbed him before the creature chose to attack.”

  “Has he spoken of it?”

  “I cannot say;
his jabberings are meaningless.”

  Bernard let out a beaten sigh. Something must be done here. Something which might persuade the abbot to review this creature in a sympathetic light. He tapped the letter against his thigh. “Has the boat arrived from the mainland yet?” Once a week, on this day, a small boat came to bring supplies.

  Cedric nodded. “Yes, it moored half an hour ago. Brother Ferdinand and Brother Rufus are helping it unload, taking care to make sure that any visitors are kept well away from our secret.”

  Our secret. His own inclusion made Bernard want to retch. “I missed prayers this afternoon. I must go to the chapel. Would you grant me a request?”

  “Of course,” said Cedric.

  Bernard handed him the letter. “Please add this to the postal collection….”

  54 POINT SCARROW, CANADIAN HIGH ARCTIC

  The bear was in the road, waiting for him. Sitting. Staring. Squinting through the snow. Every aspect of its body shape spoke of provocation. It was here to mount a challenge. To make itself known.

  Something in the natural order had changed.

  He brought the pickup to a halt and switched off the engine, but left the headlights blazing at the bear. Five miles on the odometer. Five miles south of the polar research base. He glanced at the radio and opened a channel.

  “Russ.”

  “Anders?”

  “Got a situation.”

  “Don’t hear your engine. You broken down? Don’t say those relays have burned out again?” “It’s a bear, Russ. Down near Scarrow.” “Jeez, what’s a bear doing there at this time of year?” “Don’t know. I’m about to take a look. You might want to come down with the can.”

  “You got time for this? What about your flight?” In his pocket, the narwhal talisman buzzed. It sensed danger. Very great danger. Bergstrom looked behind the seat at the loaded rifle. “Bring the can,” he said, and cut the radio link. Then he stepped out of the pickup, unarmed. Snow danced in the warmth of the headlights. Silhouetted by their lazy beam, he walked forward at a nonaggressive pace.

  Ice clouds dusted around the bear’s paws. It altered its stare, but not its position.

  Ten yards from contact, Bergstrom stopped walking. The bear twisted a forepaw, flexing the claws. “Heavy,” it said. “Powerful, but cumbersome.”

  Not a bear, then. A being inside a bear.

  “You are Fain,” said Bergstrom.

  “And you are … interesting,” the ice bear said.

  “How did you come through the portal early?”

  The bear blinked as if the question wasn’t worthy of respect. “I am tracing a young Fain which broke the continuum. You have been close to it, shaman. You radiate Fain.”

  A break. G’reth. What had the wishing dragon brought back with him? Bergstrom stayed his breath. “What is your purpose with the young Fain?” he said.

  “To retrieve it. To punish it. Then to cleanse this world of dragon. No image of Godith will travel back to the Fain.”

  “Why?”

  “That is not important. Where is the fire of the dragon called Gawain?”

  “Hidden.”

  “Speak the location — or die.”

  “Why can’t you detect it?”

  The squint shortened. “I will find it, shaman. And come back and burn your body to ash.”

  The wind shifted, rolling the snow. Bergstrom moved a hand and the lights of the pickup shrank to black. In that moment, he threw himself forward, changing in the blur to the shape of a bear. His teeth sank into the neck of the Fain. But it was strong and crushed the air out of his lungs with one gigantic closure of its paws. As he slid to the road, the Fain hit him with a blow across the back of his head that neither man nor bear could have possibly withstood.

  When Russ found him, twenty minutes later, his fur had been shredded with bloody lines and the airstream falling out of his snout was less measurable than the weight of any snowflake.

  The lights of the pickup were on once more, drilling softly through the night.

  The vehicle’s driver was nowhere to be found.

  Russ radioed a major alert. Dazed, he stood over the wounded bear, aiming a handgun at its head. Compassion demanded that he end its suffering. But though his firearm shook and his trigger finger shortened, curiosity stayed his hand. Might they learn more with the bear alive?

  He put away the handgun, and returned to his truck for a tranquilizing gun.

  And it was then, while his back was turned, that something squeezed out from beneath the stricken body and rolled a short distance across the road. It was a piece of bone, cut long ago from a narwhal’s tusk. The etchings on it were moving rapidly, trying to detect further traces of the Fain. But the being had gone, to continue its search. And so the talisman obeyed its primary order: In emergency, turn into the dragon, Groyne, and seek out David Rain….

  55 ABBOT HUGO’S OFFICE, FARLOWE ISLAND, 1:35 A.M., FEBRUARY 12TH

  Once, in his childhood, temptation had turned Brother Bernard’s head. In Mr. Suneet’s, the convenience store, before the modernization had happened and electronic eyes had recorded all movement, he had stolen a tube of candy. He remembered the occasion well. How he had waited by the magazine rack, until the chubby Mrs. Vickers had come down the aisle and stopped to examine the birthday cards, blocking the view from the payment counter. In that instant, he had turned away from righteousness. Away from his parents. His Sunday School. From good. Pocketing the candy had been the easy part. Leaving with them was a different matter. His legs, powered by a burning rush of guilt, had raced him too fast toward the door. He had bumped Mr. Cardle, the blind man with his dog. The collision had produced a variety of sounds, but the only ones Bernard remembered were the candy, rattling like pellets inside their tube. “Hey!” Mr. Suneet had called. And Bernard had run. At twelve years old, he had become a thief. He had never been caught and the evidence was spilled down a drain within minutes. But his punishment was harsh and would last his life long. His mind was stained with indelible shame — and he could never go back to that shop again.

  He was thinking of these things as he slipped into Abbot Hugo’s office in the early hours of that February morning. If caught here, his life would be all but over. For this was Mr. Suneet’s shop again. Only now, the risks were so much greater. Beyond this island, there was no shelter. No place to run. No drain wide enough to swallow his guilt.

  But the questions in his mind would not die down. Throughout the five long days of prayer and meditation, the motive for the creature’s attack on Brother Terence had dogged him. Its chilling accusation that the raven was involved cast a shadow far wider than the common viewpoint, a consequence he dared not contemplate too far. And what of his own irrational decision to send a message to Wayward Crescent? What was he hoping to achieve by that? It made his head spin just to think about it, writing to a character in a book? Vincent. He must be allowed to talk to Brother Vincent, even though it meant breaking into his cell. Between them, they must formalize effective measures to persuade Abbot Hugo that these incidents required a level of scrutiny beyond narrow-minded bigotry. Everything must be brought into the open. Everything.

  He clicked on a flashlight, panning its weak beam over the wall until it struck the metal safe where the keys to every part of the monastery were kept. Bare-footed, he crossed the room and opened the case as quietly as he could. The key to Brother Vincent’s cell would be on the bunch with the bright orange tag. Locating it proved less than easy. The safe was never locked, but the contents were often moved around. In the flashlight’s glare, every tag looked the same. Steadying his hand, he sifted through them, wincing if a loose key scraped the casing or tangled awkwardly against its hook. What should have taken seconds was moving into minutes when he at last identified the correct group of keys, dropped them in his pocket, and turned for the door.

  That was when he knew he was not alone.

  An intruder. Down at floor level. Small claws catching against the boards.

&nb
sp; Bernard shuddered and clicked off his light. If this was a mouse or, heaven forbid, a rat, he did not want to draw its attention.

  But the visitor was neither mouse nor rat. To Bernard’s astonishment, a squirrel entered the veil of moonlight filtering in through the tall arched window. It sat up on its haunches and twitched its nose, trying to focus on a scent of some sort. Twice it half-turned and poked its nose again. Then, with an effortless burst of agility, it leaped up onto the abbot’s desk.

  Bernard watched with a kind of dazed fascination as it hopped toward the box drawers and reached up to sniff at them. It scented the frame of each drawer in turn but seemed most drawn to the central one, the one containing the dragon’s claw.

  By now, an idea was brewing in Bernard’s mind that he was not the only thief in the room that night. But the outcome of this fantasy seemed so ludicrous that, even when the squirrel gripped the painted wooden handle and began to twiddle it as though it were an acorn, he still did nothing to intervene. There was a pause. The squirrel rested and flagged its tail. Then, with hardly a space between the actions, it clamped the drawer knob between its teeth, yanked it open, and leaped inside.

  “No!” gasped Bernard and lunged across the room.

  Too late. A stream of bright gray fur poured out of the drawer with a dragon’s claw clamped tight between its jaws.

  “Stop!” Bernard shouted.

  The squirrel skidded to a halt on the corner of the desk. Chuk! it throated, its dark eyes popping at the sight of human presence. With a whip of its tail, it turned in a flash and leaped off the desk.

  Bernard went in pursuit. But the race was never on. His shin collided with the corner of a footrest, knocking it over with a dreadful clatter. He reached for it, slipped, and shoulder-charged the shelves of perfume bottles. There was a crash of glass. Something pooled in the doorway. The nimble-footed squirrel leaped over it and was gone.

  Suddenly, a light went on. Bernard froze in terror. Abbot Hugo’s face stared out of the doorway. His eyes panned the room, taking in the key safe and the drawer slid forward and tilting down. He inspected it. Empty. “Replace it,” he said.