My stuff is up on Youwriteon.com, or at least a sample from the start of the book is. The lowest marks I get from there are always for structure and pace, with people often telling me that it jumps around from character to character too much. I've previously looked at it and thought that I didn't know how to change this and still make it work for myself, so done nothing. Today, however, I looked at it again and thought I'd just change it round an bit and see how it worked. Surprisingly for me, though probably not for those who've been telling me that, it works well and I haven't lost the things that I thought I would by the edit. I'm posting the newer version below on the off-chance of getting some comments back about it.
Prologue
My name is Gaia, and this document my testimony of the Last Days and the Resurrection to come.
You will not find me in these pages. This is the story of Grandfather and those he saved. The tale is told in their voices, and so of them you will meet many. One might say a legion.
What was for them an adventure was, for my family, the beginning of our history. So this is, in many ways, an indispensable part of my story and that the reason why I must introduce myself. My achievements are not modest; still, I do but continue the Great Work of saving and converting which Grandfather and my parents began.
Ours is an uncommon chronicling, as we are an uncommon family, so I will commend to you the words of Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote, in The Advancement of Learning:
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties”.
For those who tell you this tale did not know all of its twists, and what they knew, they did not always tell clearly. Moreover, I am my Grandfather’s grandchild, and we spin stories as spiders do webs.
McLeod watched as the two settled back onto the couches and were helped into helmets. Despite himself, he felt unease on seeing his daughter’s face covered by the visor. It made her look an insect-headed alien, and, in some way he couldn’t have explained, made the sticking-out wisp of her brown hair look stolen. The techs jacked them both to the central unit and reclined the couches to the horizontal.
Then the guy beside him spoke.
“Okay,”
A hushed voice, not whispering, but as if at a bedroom door and not wanting to disturb the occupant.
More respect than that bloody suit showed.
“Here we go.” The tech tapped his touch-screen and both reclining figures took small, sharp in-breaths, followed by soft sighs.
Like her falling asleep.
The tension McLeod hadn’t been aware of holding released as both bodies relaxed.
“Well then Mr. McLeod, that’s about it for now. The first stage will take about fifteen to twenty minutes for her, perhaps a few more for him, then they’ll have their day. She’ll be back with you in…” He wiggled a hand in a ‘more-or-less’ gesture, “…fifty minutes to an hour. She might have a bit of jet-lag, because of the time difference.”
“It’s that unsure, is it?”
“It’s case by case. We’ve usually found kids are quicker to connect, so we’ll probably have to hold her back a few minutes while he catches up. The compression is set for a half hour, though, that part’s certain. Once we’ve got them both logged in, we’d be able to do this again in about thirty seconds. And the commercial version will compress much more than this, of course.” He grinned, “No one wants to wait for as long as half an hour to live a day nowadays, eh?”
“Was it like this with the others?”
“Well, not the characters, no.” His eyes glanced back at some memory, while his mouth twisted to suggest a tangled situation. “They all took a minimum of a weekend. Some of them two. But those had to be much more detailed readings, being as we don’t have them available real-time, like this. But we’ve all been in there, and for us, yeah, I suppose, pretty much like this. You’ll have to try it yourself some time.”
“Not really my thing; having my mind read and all.”
“Oh, take my word for it, it’s a blast in there, you’d love it. You’ve read the books, I take it?”
“The first two as bed-time stories. After that she read them herself, and I got all the details over the table at meals.”
“Yeah, mine’s nine and we’re at that stage with her too. Well, there’s nothing much more to see here, erm, would you like a coffee or something while you’re waiting?”
“Aye, that’d be grand.”
They left the room. Another tech watched, impatient, ‘till they’d exited, immediately changed the compression factor on both screens, initiated the simulation, and then left as well, his mind on something stronger than coffee. The two on the couches slumbered on, unsupervised, save by the machine.
A watcher might have noticed the girl’s touch-screen reading flicker, and, like a malevolent stagehand removing a vital prop, the character assignment figure change from 1001 to 321. But you are the only watcher, dear reader, and your observation does not collapse any wave form. It will not change the story back.
For, in that moment, history altered. No, please don’t think that melodramatic. I’ve thought about it very, very carefully, and that statement isn’t exaggeration at all.
Day One
Adam
It was night. For some reason, I’d been expecting a storm, but, although very dark, it was warm and pleasant. I was standing near the top of a vertigo-inducing set of stairs. Somewhere outside; in a city with traffic noise. Somewhere with stone walls, cobbled streets and perhaps a faint smell of after-the-pub-piss. I had a moment of thinking I knew this place before the memory clicked and I realized it was the Dog Leap Stairs, going down to the Quayside. Newcastle? Was that right? Was it supposed to start here, or was that just because it was me doing the crossing?
Someone touched my arm, and I got an impression of there being several other people with me. The one nearest ushered me on towards the stairs and started a low chanting. Something about the rhythm made it sound familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d heard it before.
It lasted for only a moment, seconds at the most, but there was an odd sense of the tone persisting after the voice had stopped. Something like a finger round the top of a wineglass, but right at the edge of hearing. Then the scene straight in front of me broke, pixelated and flowed away, like watching sand fall through an egg-timer from above. Someone walked into that warp in the air, melted and swirled to nothing.
The hand touched me on the arm again, urging me forward. A voice, a man’s, the accent Northern Irish, said, “Don’t worry, just walk straight into the Gate, you’ll be grand.” I didn’t understand why, but I believed him and walked on before thinking, of course I’d be alright, how could anything here hurt me?
As my foot touched the edge of the swirl, it broke up and flowed away. That wasn’t just what I saw; it was exactly how it felt. I’d have pulled back with the shock, but I had no time. Before I could do anything, I’d become a million grains of Adam, flowing and falling, but somehow doing it straight forward. I'd have screamed, but my throat had gone. Then my mind fell away and there was nothingness.
The grains of sand crashed back into each other and somehow became me again. An improvement on being nothing, yes, but not an experience I could enjoy. My skin was trying to crawl off my body and my stomach up my throat. Both feelings went quickly, but I didn’t feel good. Some aspects of verisimilitude could easily be cut, to my way of thinking.
I was now standing in daylight on a grassy hill. Somewhere off in the distance was the glint of early morning sunlight on water. I tottered forward to where a Scot was saying to come and sit down. There were others, adults and kids, coming out of the thin air behind me. No one crashed into anyone else, but everyone had the same kind of bedsprings-recovering-from-an-orgy look to them.
I flopped down on the grass, propped myself up on an elbow and thought, 'Oh,________'.Ah, the ____ nannyware. I couldn't even think a good curse. The grass, anyway, felt good; it felt real. Really grassy grass stalks tickled and gently prickled at my hands and the back of my neck. There was a smell in the air of full summer. I was preparing to lie down on that real grass and feel even better, when something offered me a drink.
It was a dwarf. There’d have to be some here, though, wouldn’t there? Pun completely intentional, but it’d be a minimum. This one was about a metre tall with muscles like a small wrestler. Clean-shaven, and dressed more like a coffee-shop waiter in charcoal grey than an extra from Lord of the Rings, it… he, held the tray towards me and mumbled, “Dringim.”
I took a cup and sipped at it. The taste was a lot like rooibos, which I drink to escape endless cups of green tea, but the effect was incredible; I was instantly clear in the head. It was obvious everyone else around was feeling the same. There were a few ‘wows’- but not ‘like wow’s’, which the kids all say now. A small thing, but it registered as a neat touch. You hear it everywhere; the kids in Kyoto were ‘like-wowing’ before I left, but we never used the expression back then.
A last figure flowed out from the thin air of the Gate; outlined on this side by standing stones covered in runes. It became a tall, lean, dark-haired man, dressed all in black- jeans, shirt and some kind of trench coat. His collar was open and he looked as if he hadn’t shaved or slept, except perhaps in the clothes, for a few days. His eyes were bloodshot, with bags and black circles beneath them. Looked like he'd escaped from the lead role in a Hollywood blockbuster. He blinked, shook his head as if to clear it, and picked up a cup with a mutter of “Thanks, Gava.”
He took a long swig from the cup, and I swear the red in his eyes faded away while he was drinking. When he lowered the cup and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the stubble was still on his face and the creases still in his clothes, but the signs of exhaustion had vanished. He gave a sigh and a healthy sounding belch and said, “Ah, better.” It was the voice from the other side of the gate.
He moved in front of the bodies sprawled on the grass and addressed us.
“Seekers. Welcome to the Land. I know the first Crossing is not a pleasant thing, but we have to press on. From here we must walk to the river. Then we’ll take boats to get us to the City of Black River Bridge. There you’ll undergo your Initiation - the Ceremony of Opening.” He paused and looked around at us.
“For some of you, that’ll mark the end of your stay here,” That was said seriously enough to make it sound like bad news. “While for others it’ll mean the beginning of your training.” That somehow didn’t sound as if anything more cheerful was in store. “To all, I wish you well, I wish you well. Now please,” he gestured, “To your feet. The walk to the river will take about two hours. You’ll be so kind as to follow the Mages.”
There was a thing about him; what he said, you did. This guy was a lot like Uncle Steve - a leader; you could read it in every line of him. Not a violent man, at a guess, but one who was very confident in his own abilities and both used to giving orders and having them followed.
I stood up and realized I reached only as tall as the middle of his chest. Before I had time to think he was some kind of a giant, I noticed a boy standing slightly to one side of him. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve, more likely eleven. He was the same size as me; possibly a little taller. I was eleven years old again.
Take my word for it, when I say it’s the sort of thing that can ruin your day, I’m not joking at all. I’d known it was going to happen, yes, but as a fact like something I’d read in the Zeppelin's in-flight magazine. You know the thing, 90% of Dubai’s buildings have been green-roofed, oh isn’t that interesting? It’s very different to feel it in your suddenly-much-smaller bones. I worked hard and managed a 'Damn' - a whispered one. It wasn't nearly enough.
Hah! Believe me sonny, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The walk down to the river did take about two hours. No one was wearing a watch, which we did then and I do now, and yes, I knew better than to expect Tatches tattooed onto wrists. Even now, in Japan, that’s more a Tokyo or Osaka thing, oddly not popular in Kyoto. But no one had a mobile even, which kids of this age would have had, so I could only guess from the height of the sun.
The track was a dirt pathway through countryside that reminded me of Northumberland, out near Hexham. Rolling hills, clumps of trees, cattle or something like them in small groups. A blue sky with cotton wool clouds like the lid on a chocolate box. The weather was like late May or early June when I was a kid; more like late March nowadays.
Between the flowers and the butterflies the meadows looked as though someone’d got bored of green and used the rest of the rainbow to over-paint every scrap of it. Walking past caused clouds of Persian miniatures (well, they weren’t cabbage whites) to lift and ground - so many the fields looked like landing strips for magic carpets. The air was country clean and fresh and there were none of the modern British summer’s palette of burned browns.
I spotted some Sweet Cicely on the way down and snacked on seeds from it. Delicious. Uncle Steve had taught me about it and nettles and dandelion leaves when I was a kid. My flat-mates had appreciated the knowledge during the Year Without Summer. Even with the rationing, damn near all we could get by way of greens was what we found growing wild. All before the Swiss dumped the salt, and the Vertical Farms and the People’s Supermarkets with their vegetable factories started up, of course.
No one talked much on the way. For myself, I was uncomfortably aware of being a kid again and not sure how to speak to the others. Most of the kids seemed overawed by what had happened to them. They couldn’t know each other, so’d be unsure how to start conversations. They probably also still felt a bit sick; I did. Though what was I thinking, they just hadn’t been given any lines to say, had they?
The Mages, the adults, were at the very front and very back of the group, and their body language said they were watching, not just strolling. I overheard a conversation between one of the taller boys and a Mage, where the boy asked why we didn’t fly or go on runners to the city. The reply, in a very dry Yorkshire accent, was none of us could fly yet and no one was going to risk us falling off runners. That conversation stopped there, but it did prompt a girl to ask how would we fly when we learned, on broomsticks?
“Oh, no my lovely, never have anything to do with broomsticks for flying.” This was from a slightly older, well-upholstered Welsh woman. “Tried that when I first came here, I did. Witches never rode broomsticks without they stuffed a couple of nice soft cushions down the backs of their knickers first. I’ll never be persuaded otherwise, see. Barely walk, I could after, and that was only ten miles as the crow flies too. And balance on that thin bit of stick? Tuh, Old wives’ tale about flying on broomsticks, in my opinion. You stick to cloaks my lovely, and your bum will thank you, see?”
The tall Irishman, grinned at this and asked, “Didn’t young Richard say if you just used the broom part, you could do things on a broom that made it far superior to a cloak? A comfortable seat, your hands free? Surfing the sky, I think he called it.”
“Don’t you start me on the wit and wisdom of the amazing Tricky Dicky Banister, Niall Ferguson. Bristles up the backside is the least of the things I wish for that young man. Still cleaning spirit voices out of my toilet after his last clever scheme I am”. She sniffed in disdain. “Pass an Initiation he may well have done, but he’s every inch a fool and terrible tall for his age that boy. And there’s not a Mage in the Land can argue the point with me neither.”
“Argue with you Megs?’ said the Yorkshireman. ‘There’s not a Mage in the land as'd dare. All too keen on waking up same shape as they went to bed the night afore.”
The last of the Mages, a lean, muscular-looking woman with a mild Jamaican accent, tutted at this last. “An’ I will ask you to stop the scandalous remarks about my friend in the presence of all these minors Jacob. It is not seemly to suggest she can or will witch them into small creatures if they back answer her, however true it might be.”
That, give or take a snort of laughter from Megs, more or less put an end to talk from the Seekers. The Mages settled back into walking silently and we went on like that. I did see something in the Irishman’s eyes as he looked at the Jamaican and thought… but no. They were characters, weren’t they? There couldn’t be anything going on there.
I had a feeling that whole scene was deliberate, though. He’d been getting at someone when he wrote it, making some kind of point, but I couldn’t think who or how. I wondered if this was his first chapter, or just a way it’d start for someone coming in like me. This might have been the way he introduced his protagonists. If so, it read like an old joke, a bad old joke – there was an Irish man, a Welsh woman and a… - without a punch line. Confusing if, like me, you didn’t know what was going on. I’d have stopped reading by now. I’d have wanted something more than this. But then, I wouldn’t have cracked the cover in the first place.
Twenty minutes later, both Niall and the Jamaican stopped to look at some birds flying towards us from the distance. They were big and an odd shape.
She looked a question at him. “You think?”
“Unusual to see them so far over,” he nodded, “Best check”.
She reached into a bag slung over her shoulder and pulled what looked like a crystal ball from it. I saw the ball fog as she peered into it, eyes narrowed to slits.
“How many, Niall?”
“Five.”
“Four here. What formation?”
“Standard V.”
“I’m missing the point; it’ll be the leader.”
Without another word, and still gazing intently into the crystal, she reached out her other hand. A ball of electric blue light formed in it. Then she turned to the birds, her eyes leaving the fogged ball in one hand just as the light ball left the other. I’d say she threw it, but it didn’t move like an ordinary throw – there was no rise and fall. It went through the air like a ruled line, dark blue on sky blue, and exploded by the first of the odd-shaped birds, which squawked and dropped like a drunken sycamore seed – falling and twisting, but incapable of doing it elegantly.
Everyone went over to where it lay, motionless, on the ground. The Yorkshireman kicked the obvious corpse onto its back with a toe and grunted, “Ridden.” It was statement rather than question, but the Jamaican nodded confirmation.
“Shielded. The crystal couldn’t see it.”
The thing he had kicked had wings with a span of over two metres, but the body of a cat. It was oddly and massively muscled over the shoulders, but otherwise next door’s ginger tom with eagle wings. Until you looked at the face. That belonged to something that’d chew through your chest and then rip your heart out through the hole. This thing didn’t go in for saucers of milk and tickles behind the ears.
“What is that?” someone asked.
“Chimereagle.” The reply meant nothing to me or the kid who’d asked.
“They’re always half eagle and half something else, depending on local environment. This one had been sent to spy on us.”
The kids all looked at each other, eyes wide with excitement or fear. The adults, I noticed, did the same, though their expressions were of guarded puzzlement. Then the Yorkshireman shrugged.
“Nowt more to do with this, is there?”
He looked at us and nodded his head to one side.
“Walk on.”
I picked up a feather that had fallen from the thing. It was perfect; barbules locking into each other and a pattern of cat camouflage making it look pretty. What had its owner been coming to do? The thought occurred that this world had teeth in it. I worked up a 'damn' much easier this time. I stuck the feather in my back pocket and fell in with the rest.
Bugger.
Meganwy
I’m sure, if you’re a dance teacher, or something of the kind, you can look at any random person and take a guess at their potential as a dancer. Even a fairly quick look would show if they had natural poise, or grace in their movements, ennit? Bottom line, of course, is you could teach them something. But as you watched them, you’d know if this one might ever be great, or’d only just learn to tell the difference between their left and right foot, that sort of thing. Same for anything else you know well; you know what to look for, ennit?
It’s both similar and different for us, see. A Mage can spot someone who has Potential just by looking at them, in the Land or out of it. Those who haven’t - well you can’t teach them anything, try as you might.
Explaining how we know is a different matter though, ennit? It’s like saying, ‘She’s the one in the pink dress’, to someone who’s colour-blind, see? Potential doesn’t have a colour, any more than colour has a smell, but a Mage knows it’s there. It's not auras neither, though I can see auras. It's what we do and you don't.
So I can tell you we could all ‘see’ young Brendan had massive Potential, but I can’t tell you what it was that told us. I’d have put money on him being one of the Chosen of the Land, but no one would’ve taken the bet. They could all see it too.
Strange to be back in the Land, it was. I’d been away for about a month and I suppose I’d got used to the other world. Coming back was like opening a cupboard of memories I hadn’t looked in for a while. Some of the things in there I’d nearly forgotten I had. Didn’t really notice till we got to the boats and I had to call up the sails, but I felt that way a few times over the next few days. Can’t recall ever feeling like that before.
Sharp, he is, Jake. The Seekers would go for that line about spying, but the rest of us knew better. You want to spy, you send a familiar. Sent to attack us, those beasts were. Take a pride leader and you get the rest of the pride, see, with chimereagles. What he goes for, they go for too. Far more dangerous to the mage if a familiar gets hurt – hospitalise someone, you can if you kill their familiar, while you only give ‘em a bad headache if you drop the beast they’re riding - and much harder to organise a large group. My Morgan, see, flies as a sparrow, fights as a wildcat and spies as a mouse. Niall’s Satsuki flies and fights as an eagle, spies as a housecat. Even getting them to travel together is hard, ennit?
Sloppy attempt, whatever it was designed to do. He must have put it together in a desperate hurry. We know chimereagles only come from places where there were big magic battles in the last war. Fallout, ennit? And they are all on his side of the island now. They were bound to look odd flying in Duergar lands. Now what would prompt that?
Phoebe
I woke up in a bed. I’d expected something more dramatic. The Seekers would come to the Land through a Gate and I thought I’d be a Seeker. I couldn’t remember what Silvester had said, but it looked like I was already there. Something felt bad though. I had a bit of a headache and a cramping pain in my stomach. I had to pull back the bedclothes before I could see what it was. Blood on my pyjamas, down between my legs. Yada.
I knew what it was, of course, even though it was the first time. Auntie ‘Lexie had told me all about it, and Dad had been getting me books and stuff about it for just forever – to help me prepare. My friend Sara had already had hers and all the girls had been talking about it, you’d guess, innit? Didn’t mean it wasn’t just mecha gruse. It was. Well, for a second.
Then I thought I could tell Dad and he’d let me have the party he’d promised for it. He’d said it was a change I should celebrate. I think he read that line in a book. Then, of course, I realized Dad wasn’t here, I was well off the range of a GPS tracker, and I couldn’t have a party until I got back. Which made me wonder.
A girl couldn’t get into the Land until she’d started her periods. Everyone knows that. So maybe this wasn’t real, and they’d just given me one to make me feel like I was ready, even though I knew I really wasn’t. And (far, far away ikky) even if this was my first time, it wouldn’t be hers. It’s tres freak to feel you’re having someone else’s period, believe me if that’s never happened to you before, and my day was about to go glom when a Duergar came in through the door.
I nearly leapt out of bed and danced around the room! This wasn’t like watching them on a DIV. This was real. Right there in the room with me, carrying a tray. She looked me up and down (mostly up of course) and saw the bloodstains. She nodded and said, “Ah. Me thingim allsame. Me bringim this one for Mma. Makim you better mor. You go cleanim youseleva en dringim thisfella.” She nodded at a door and passed me a cup of something. I got up and sort of hobbled to the door, trying not to let my legs touch. Yada. Big, big ya.
You had to slide the door to the bathroom. I remembered and didn’t try to push it. The bathroom looked just like the ones you see in the DIVs. There was a big, deep, circular tub made of wood, set into the floor, full nearly to the brim with steaming hot water.
I knew you had to scoop water out of the bath and wash yourself first, so started to strip off the pyjamas. I jumped when I saw the dark skinned woman out of the corner of my eye, but sussed I was looking into a big, steamed-up mirror. Then I nearly squealed. I was Malaika!
There’s a line in Book One where someone asks if Malaika is good-looking, and the answer is she’s too busy being gorgeous to have time left for just good. And there she was looking back at me. From the steamy mirror. With no clothes on.
I really had to look away. I mean, Malaika is tres, tres hot, with a bod to just die for or from, but I was like staring at it. I felt myself blushing hotter than the bath water. It would take a while to get used to that being me. I took just a small peek again and thought, ‘Oh I wish!’
I could get used to it. I could suffer that.
I mean, I have got brown hair and brown eyes and when Dad tells me I am going to be a stunner at sixteen and he’s going to buy a club to keep boys away he always sounds like he means it. That’s my dad though. He once told a friend of mine he was really Tony Blair, and he’d escaped from prison by digging a tunnel with a bent teaspoon.
We didn’t completely believe him, but that was ‘cos we didn’t know who it was. We had to go wiki the name up on a pokkecom to read the history and find out Blair was still in prison. Well, we were only eight at the time. What did we know?
Anyway, the point is; it isn’t impossible I could look nearly as hot when I’m older. But that nearly would be just like Earth to Moon near, not Earth to Sun near. Sort of comparatively nearer than Sara could get, ‘cos she’s blonde, but not close enough to whisper in an ear kind of close. I’ll never pwn boys.
I grabbed a towel and covered myself a bit and took another look at my new face. I pushed a strand of hair back behind my ear and grinned and just … Like wow.
I had a drink from the cup before starting to wash and the effect was like magic. (Duh!) The headache and cramp just vanished. The stuff must have been chia, but it tasted like the milky tea Dad always makes for me. I still wasn’t keen on getting into the bath after washing – I didn’t think the bleeding had stopped too and just didn’t want to lay there in it. Far, far away gruse – so I towelled myself dry and went back to the bedroom.
The Duergar had gone out, but there was underwear and a set of loose, dark grey cotton pants and a top laid out on the bed. Apart from a sanitary pad, it was all senior Mage clothing. I had a feeling I had to get ready for something formal going on.
Then it came to me. I was being dimmy this morning. Naturally, the Seekers would be coming and I’d have to go and take part in the Opening. All this would have to start with Brendan going through his Initiation, even if I wasn’t doing one. Of course, he’d pass and the Light of the Chosen’d shine from him, but it all needed to happen so Senior Niall would know he was capable of great things. I dressed as quickly as I could.
Good. She’s accepted who she is. Maybe this time things will work out as I want them to.
Getting to the hall from my bedroom was a piece of good luck. I turned the right way down a corridor, went down some stairs and through a door that lead into the Main Hall. Adults and kids sat at tables, eating and chatting. I went to a serving table and helped myself to a bowl of muesli, some kind of red fish and some chia, then looked for somewhere to sit.
“Lai! Hey, over here!” Oops, Aki, Malaika’s best friend in the Land. How was I going to carry this one off?
I sat down beside her and she looked me in the eye. “Ah yes, Gramma said it was so. Sorry to tell you friend, but it shows. Drink lots of her special chia and don’t bite off any heads, some of them never use shampoo and they will taste foul.”
The accent was dead right and it was just like being with Eriko Yamamoto. I nearly asked for an autograph.
I grinned and sat down next to her. “We have to go to the ceremony today, innit?” I asked, “What time should we set off?” I thought this was a bright thing to say, ‘cos I wasn’t sure how I’d get there by myself.
“Ah, that’s so, eh?” replied Aki, carefully looking at anything in the room except me. “I do have a small favour to ask of you there. Nothing that will be too much for my very best friend in the universe to understand, of course, but I have agreed to go with someone else.” She gave me a quick look that had triumph in it, and I guessed. Well, I’ve read all of the books is one thing, and I’m a girl is another. It could only be one person.
“Daniel!”
“Yes, but keep it quiet please. We are going to set off early and walk part of the way there. He thinks we are going to pick medicinal herbs, but I have no such plan.”
My eyes must have widened, ‘cos she tapped me on the nose.
“Talking child! Talking! Well, mostly talking. He may be the cutest thing here, but he has a terrible problem with commitment. He is going to say some important things today, though he does not know this yet.”
She gave me a look asking if it really was okay with me, so I told her, “Tres, tres okay.” That only got me a puzzled look. Stupid! The books never use modern teenspeak. She wouldn’t know that expression.
“I mean, no problem.”
That was something Malaika says all of the time, though only olds like my dad ever say that now. I ate and Aki sort of drifted away into thought, so nothing much was said through the rest of breakfast. I made some mental notes. Some things I say, people here wouldn’t. Some things I knew, ‘cos they happened in the later books, people here couldn’t. Lots to remember.
No one knows how things turned out between Aki and Daniel, and if they ever got over the row, ‘cos the last book never got written. I think they would, but Alistair Cameron always said there’d be surprises at the end of the story, and he wasn’t going for a happily-ever-after kind of finish.
Though, with me only being here for today, I wasn’t going to be around for the argument and couldn’t change things much anyway. Mind, I was a bit impressed to know they got together on the day Brendan entered the Land. That isn’t written down anywhere and I’d thought it was much later. When I finished my breakfast, I put the bowl away, wished Aki a good day, and headed out.
There was a large cloak room just before the front door of East Gard’s Hall. The two long walls had lines of hooks with cloaks on them. I found a hook with Malaika’s name and picked up the cloak.
I knew about this bit and was half looking forward to it - half afraid I’d wee myself. I put on the cloak and fastened it with the shiny brass clasp. It slightly hugged my shoulders when wrapped around me, but I could throw it over my back and get it out of the way. Tell the truth, I wanted a mirror, to see how it looked on, ‘cos Malaika looks serious good in a cloak, but there wasn’t one around.
I walked out through the door. It was like the DIVs. There was a gravel driveway going to a gate in the distance, with gardens on either side. I knew people did drive up that gravel, in carriages pulled by draft beasts or riding on runners, but I was going to use it for my runway, just like I’d seen Malaika do. I wondered about flying wearing a sanitary pad. Maybe I should be using tampons? No one tells you that sort of thing, do they?
It’s lucky there’s a long bit about this in Book One, where Brendan and the other Apprentices are taught to fly - you don’t see it in the DIV though. I was still quite little when Dad read it to me, and I can remember practising take-offs in my bedroom with a towel over my shoulders.
Well, no one was watching, so… I re-slung the cloak and held it out like bat wings. It wrapped neatly around my arms and gripped them, like it was holding them up. It was much longer than my arms, but the end part still stuck out like there was something underneath it. I walked forward to let it billow out behind me and then ran, flapping, just like I did when I was little. You see some of them just sort of leap and take off in the DIVs, but I wasn’t ready for that yet, so I took a long run-up.
I was feeling far gone harpic, but suddenly the cloak took over the flapping and I was struggling to run fast enough. I think I might have shrieked when the ground fell away from me, but the cloak just kept on doing the flying, flapping my arms for me. In less than a second, I seemed to be higher than the trees. Two seconds later I knew for surely, ‘cos I was at the end of the driveway and was flying over them.
It still felt a bit low, so I just thought about going faster and the cloak flapped harder. I angled myself steeper and shot up into the sky. It tells you in Book One that East Gard is at the top of a steep-sided valley on the road to the coast. Well, in a few seconds, I was high enough to see that. I was heading north, with the road running west and east below me. The cloak felt to be stuck to my back and down my legs as far as my ankles and was holding all of my body up. I felt like I was lying on some enormous swing fastened tight to the sky, and falling out of the sky was like...like no chance; I was far away secure. I stopped pumping my arms for a minute and did a gliding turn. And there was the city, with its wall and castle. There was the river, with the bridge and boats.
I can’t describe the feeling that filled me then. It was like last year when Sara and me went on a roller coaster. We squealed and screamed all the way through the ride; not ‘cos we were scared, but just ‘cos we were so excited. I squealed and screamed again now and pumped myself higher and higher into the air, then swooped down and up again until I looped overhead in a circle. Then I corkscrewed down towards the ground, pulling out into another rising glide.
I don’t know how long I flew. I was a bird, I was just pure flight, and I was strong. The cloak was doing all the work. It lifted me up into the sky with just me thinking about moving my arms, but when I pulled hard I felt myself rocket through the air. And when I glided… I could just close my eyes and feel the wind against my hands, knowing the littlest movement of my fingers would send me swooping in a great circle.
The world was beneath me and I was above all of it. I could see forever and there was nowhere I couldn’t go. I felt… I felt…there’s no words for what I felt.
I got up above a cloud and wanted to just fly all day exploring the top of the clouds. I think I would’ve done too, ‘cept I flew over a gap in the clouds and saw the city again. Black River Bridge! I knew what it looked like from Jack Hughes’ illustrations in the Encyclopaedia of The Land, and I couldn’t wait to walk on its streets for real. And I’d get to meet Senior Ferguson, my favourite character in all of the books, more even than Brendan Earle really. I just had to go there!
Prologue
My name is Gaia, and this document my testimony of the Last Days and the Resurrection to come.
You will not find me in these pages. This is the story of Grandfather and those he saved. The tale is told in their voices, and so of them you will meet many. One might say a legion.
What was for them an adventure was, for my family, the beginning of our history. So this is, in many ways, an indispensable part of my story and that the reason why I must introduce myself. My achievements are not modest; still, I do but continue the Great Work of saving and converting which Grandfather and my parents began.
Ours is an uncommon chronicling, as we are an uncommon family, so I will commend to you the words of Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote, in The Advancement of Learning:
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties”.
For those who tell you this tale did not know all of its twists, and what they knew, they did not always tell clearly. Moreover, I am my Grandfather’s grandchild, and we spin stories as spiders do webs.
McLeod watched as the two settled back onto the couches and were helped into helmets. Despite himself, he felt unease on seeing his daughter’s face covered by the visor. It made her look an insect-headed alien, and, in some way he couldn’t have explained, made the sticking-out wisp of her brown hair look stolen. The techs jacked them both to the central unit and reclined the couches to the horizontal.
Then the guy beside him spoke.
“Okay,”
A hushed voice, not whispering, but as if at a bedroom door and not wanting to disturb the occupant.
More respect than that bloody suit showed.
“Here we go.” The tech tapped his touch-screen and both reclining figures took small, sharp in-breaths, followed by soft sighs.
Like her falling asleep.
The tension McLeod hadn’t been aware of holding released as both bodies relaxed.
“Well then Mr. McLeod, that’s about it for now. The first stage will take about fifteen to twenty minutes for her, perhaps a few more for him, then they’ll have their day. She’ll be back with you in…” He wiggled a hand in a ‘more-or-less’ gesture, “…fifty minutes to an hour. She might have a bit of jet-lag, because of the time difference.”
“It’s that unsure, is it?”
“It’s case by case. We’ve usually found kids are quicker to connect, so we’ll probably have to hold her back a few minutes while he catches up. The compression is set for a half hour, though, that part’s certain. Once we’ve got them both logged in, we’d be able to do this again in about thirty seconds. And the commercial version will compress much more than this, of course.” He grinned, “No one wants to wait for as long as half an hour to live a day nowadays, eh?”
“Was it like this with the others?”
“Well, not the characters, no.” His eyes glanced back at some memory, while his mouth twisted to suggest a tangled situation. “They all took a minimum of a weekend. Some of them two. But those had to be much more detailed readings, being as we don’t have them available real-time, like this. But we’ve all been in there, and for us, yeah, I suppose, pretty much like this. You’ll have to try it yourself some time.”
“Not really my thing; having my mind read and all.”
“Oh, take my word for it, it’s a blast in there, you’d love it. You’ve read the books, I take it?”
“The first two as bed-time stories. After that she read them herself, and I got all the details over the table at meals.”
“Yeah, mine’s nine and we’re at that stage with her too. Well, there’s nothing much more to see here, erm, would you like a coffee or something while you’re waiting?”
“Aye, that’d be grand.”
They left the room. Another tech watched, impatient, ‘till they’d exited, immediately changed the compression factor on both screens, initiated the simulation, and then left as well, his mind on something stronger than coffee. The two on the couches slumbered on, unsupervised, save by the machine.
A watcher might have noticed the girl’s touch-screen reading flicker, and, like a malevolent stagehand removing a vital prop, the character assignment figure change from 1001 to 321. But you are the only watcher, dear reader, and your observation does not collapse any wave form. It will not change the story back.
For, in that moment, history altered. No, please don’t think that melodramatic. I’ve thought about it very, very carefully, and that statement isn’t exaggeration at all.
Day One
Adam
It was night. For some reason, I’d been expecting a storm, but, although very dark, it was warm and pleasant. I was standing near the top of a vertigo-inducing set of stairs. Somewhere outside; in a city with traffic noise. Somewhere with stone walls, cobbled streets and perhaps a faint smell of after-the-pub-piss. I had a moment of thinking I knew this place before the memory clicked and I realized it was the Dog Leap Stairs, going down to the Quayside. Newcastle? Was that right? Was it supposed to start here, or was that just because it was me doing the crossing?
Someone touched my arm, and I got an impression of there being several other people with me. The one nearest ushered me on towards the stairs and started a low chanting. Something about the rhythm made it sound familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d heard it before.
It lasted for only a moment, seconds at the most, but there was an odd sense of the tone persisting after the voice had stopped. Something like a finger round the top of a wineglass, but right at the edge of hearing. Then the scene straight in front of me broke, pixelated and flowed away, like watching sand fall through an egg-timer from above. Someone walked into that warp in the air, melted and swirled to nothing.
The hand touched me on the arm again, urging me forward. A voice, a man’s, the accent Northern Irish, said, “Don’t worry, just walk straight into the Gate, you’ll be grand.” I didn’t understand why, but I believed him and walked on before thinking, of course I’d be alright, how could anything here hurt me?
As my foot touched the edge of the swirl, it broke up and flowed away. That wasn’t just what I saw; it was exactly how it felt. I’d have pulled back with the shock, but I had no time. Before I could do anything, I’d become a million grains of Adam, flowing and falling, but somehow doing it straight forward. I'd have screamed, but my throat had gone. Then my mind fell away and there was nothingness.
The grains of sand crashed back into each other and somehow became me again. An improvement on being nothing, yes, but not an experience I could enjoy. My skin was trying to crawl off my body and my stomach up my throat. Both feelings went quickly, but I didn’t feel good. Some aspects of verisimilitude could easily be cut, to my way of thinking.
I was now standing in daylight on a grassy hill. Somewhere off in the distance was the glint of early morning sunlight on water. I tottered forward to where a Scot was saying to come and sit down. There were others, adults and kids, coming out of the thin air behind me. No one crashed into anyone else, but everyone had the same kind of bedsprings-recovering-from-an-orgy look to them.
I flopped down on the grass, propped myself up on an elbow and thought, 'Oh,________'.Ah, the ____ nannyware. I couldn't even think a good curse. The grass, anyway, felt good; it felt real. Really grassy grass stalks tickled and gently prickled at my hands and the back of my neck. There was a smell in the air of full summer. I was preparing to lie down on that real grass and feel even better, when something offered me a drink.
It was a dwarf. There’d have to be some here, though, wouldn’t there? Pun completely intentional, but it’d be a minimum. This one was about a metre tall with muscles like a small wrestler. Clean-shaven, and dressed more like a coffee-shop waiter in charcoal grey than an extra from Lord of the Rings, it… he, held the tray towards me and mumbled, “Dringim.”
I took a cup and sipped at it. The taste was a lot like rooibos, which I drink to escape endless cups of green tea, but the effect was incredible; I was instantly clear in the head. It was obvious everyone else around was feeling the same. There were a few ‘wows’- but not ‘like wow’s’, which the kids all say now. A small thing, but it registered as a neat touch. You hear it everywhere; the kids in Kyoto were ‘like-wowing’ before I left, but we never used the expression back then.
A last figure flowed out from the thin air of the Gate; outlined on this side by standing stones covered in runes. It became a tall, lean, dark-haired man, dressed all in black- jeans, shirt and some kind of trench coat. His collar was open and he looked as if he hadn’t shaved or slept, except perhaps in the clothes, for a few days. His eyes were bloodshot, with bags and black circles beneath them. Looked like he'd escaped from the lead role in a Hollywood blockbuster. He blinked, shook his head as if to clear it, and picked up a cup with a mutter of “Thanks, Gava.”
He took a long swig from the cup, and I swear the red in his eyes faded away while he was drinking. When he lowered the cup and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the stubble was still on his face and the creases still in his clothes, but the signs of exhaustion had vanished. He gave a sigh and a healthy sounding belch and said, “Ah, better.” It was the voice from the other side of the gate.
He moved in front of the bodies sprawled on the grass and addressed us.
“Seekers. Welcome to the Land. I know the first Crossing is not a pleasant thing, but we have to press on. From here we must walk to the river. Then we’ll take boats to get us to the City of Black River Bridge. There you’ll undergo your Initiation - the Ceremony of Opening.” He paused and looked around at us.
“For some of you, that’ll mark the end of your stay here,” That was said seriously enough to make it sound like bad news. “While for others it’ll mean the beginning of your training.” That somehow didn’t sound as if anything more cheerful was in store. “To all, I wish you well, I wish you well. Now please,” he gestured, “To your feet. The walk to the river will take about two hours. You’ll be so kind as to follow the Mages.”
There was a thing about him; what he said, you did. This guy was a lot like Uncle Steve - a leader; you could read it in every line of him. Not a violent man, at a guess, but one who was very confident in his own abilities and both used to giving orders and having them followed.
I stood up and realized I reached only as tall as the middle of his chest. Before I had time to think he was some kind of a giant, I noticed a boy standing slightly to one side of him. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve, more likely eleven. He was the same size as me; possibly a little taller. I was eleven years old again.
Take my word for it, when I say it’s the sort of thing that can ruin your day, I’m not joking at all. I’d known it was going to happen, yes, but as a fact like something I’d read in the Zeppelin's in-flight magazine. You know the thing, 90% of Dubai’s buildings have been green-roofed, oh isn’t that interesting? It’s very different to feel it in your suddenly-much-smaller bones. I worked hard and managed a 'Damn' - a whispered one. It wasn't nearly enough.
Hah! Believe me sonny, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The walk down to the river did take about two hours. No one was wearing a watch, which we did then and I do now, and yes, I knew better than to expect Tatches tattooed onto wrists. Even now, in Japan, that’s more a Tokyo or Osaka thing, oddly not popular in Kyoto. But no one had a mobile even, which kids of this age would have had, so I could only guess from the height of the sun.
The track was a dirt pathway through countryside that reminded me of Northumberland, out near Hexham. Rolling hills, clumps of trees, cattle or something like them in small groups. A blue sky with cotton wool clouds like the lid on a chocolate box. The weather was like late May or early June when I was a kid; more like late March nowadays.
Between the flowers and the butterflies the meadows looked as though someone’d got bored of green and used the rest of the rainbow to over-paint every scrap of it. Walking past caused clouds of Persian miniatures (well, they weren’t cabbage whites) to lift and ground - so many the fields looked like landing strips for magic carpets. The air was country clean and fresh and there were none of the modern British summer’s palette of burned browns.
I spotted some Sweet Cicely on the way down and snacked on seeds from it. Delicious. Uncle Steve had taught me about it and nettles and dandelion leaves when I was a kid. My flat-mates had appreciated the knowledge during the Year Without Summer. Even with the rationing, damn near all we could get by way of greens was what we found growing wild. All before the Swiss dumped the salt, and the Vertical Farms and the People’s Supermarkets with their vegetable factories started up, of course.
No one talked much on the way. For myself, I was uncomfortably aware of being a kid again and not sure how to speak to the others. Most of the kids seemed overawed by what had happened to them. They couldn’t know each other, so’d be unsure how to start conversations. They probably also still felt a bit sick; I did. Though what was I thinking, they just hadn’t been given any lines to say, had they?
The Mages, the adults, were at the very front and very back of the group, and their body language said they were watching, not just strolling. I overheard a conversation between one of the taller boys and a Mage, where the boy asked why we didn’t fly or go on runners to the city. The reply, in a very dry Yorkshire accent, was none of us could fly yet and no one was going to risk us falling off runners. That conversation stopped there, but it did prompt a girl to ask how would we fly when we learned, on broomsticks?
“Oh, no my lovely, never have anything to do with broomsticks for flying.” This was from a slightly older, well-upholstered Welsh woman. “Tried that when I first came here, I did. Witches never rode broomsticks without they stuffed a couple of nice soft cushions down the backs of their knickers first. I’ll never be persuaded otherwise, see. Barely walk, I could after, and that was only ten miles as the crow flies too. And balance on that thin bit of stick? Tuh, Old wives’ tale about flying on broomsticks, in my opinion. You stick to cloaks my lovely, and your bum will thank you, see?”
The tall Irishman, grinned at this and asked, “Didn’t young Richard say if you just used the broom part, you could do things on a broom that made it far superior to a cloak? A comfortable seat, your hands free? Surfing the sky, I think he called it.”
“Don’t you start me on the wit and wisdom of the amazing Tricky Dicky Banister, Niall Ferguson. Bristles up the backside is the least of the things I wish for that young man. Still cleaning spirit voices out of my toilet after his last clever scheme I am”. She sniffed in disdain. “Pass an Initiation he may well have done, but he’s every inch a fool and terrible tall for his age that boy. And there’s not a Mage in the Land can argue the point with me neither.”
“Argue with you Megs?’ said the Yorkshireman. ‘There’s not a Mage in the land as'd dare. All too keen on waking up same shape as they went to bed the night afore.”
The last of the Mages, a lean, muscular-looking woman with a mild Jamaican accent, tutted at this last. “An’ I will ask you to stop the scandalous remarks about my friend in the presence of all these minors Jacob. It is not seemly to suggest she can or will witch them into small creatures if they back answer her, however true it might be.”
That, give or take a snort of laughter from Megs, more or less put an end to talk from the Seekers. The Mages settled back into walking silently and we went on like that. I did see something in the Irishman’s eyes as he looked at the Jamaican and thought… but no. They were characters, weren’t they? There couldn’t be anything going on there.
I had a feeling that whole scene was deliberate, though. He’d been getting at someone when he wrote it, making some kind of point, but I couldn’t think who or how. I wondered if this was his first chapter, or just a way it’d start for someone coming in like me. This might have been the way he introduced his protagonists. If so, it read like an old joke, a bad old joke – there was an Irish man, a Welsh woman and a… - without a punch line. Confusing if, like me, you didn’t know what was going on. I’d have stopped reading by now. I’d have wanted something more than this. But then, I wouldn’t have cracked the cover in the first place.
Twenty minutes later, both Niall and the Jamaican stopped to look at some birds flying towards us from the distance. They were big and an odd shape.
She looked a question at him. “You think?”
“Unusual to see them so far over,” he nodded, “Best check”.
She reached into a bag slung over her shoulder and pulled what looked like a crystal ball from it. I saw the ball fog as she peered into it, eyes narrowed to slits.
“How many, Niall?”
“Five.”
“Four here. What formation?”
“Standard V.”
“I’m missing the point; it’ll be the leader.”
Without another word, and still gazing intently into the crystal, she reached out her other hand. A ball of electric blue light formed in it. Then she turned to the birds, her eyes leaving the fogged ball in one hand just as the light ball left the other. I’d say she threw it, but it didn’t move like an ordinary throw – there was no rise and fall. It went through the air like a ruled line, dark blue on sky blue, and exploded by the first of the odd-shaped birds, which squawked and dropped like a drunken sycamore seed – falling and twisting, but incapable of doing it elegantly.
Everyone went over to where it lay, motionless, on the ground. The Yorkshireman kicked the obvious corpse onto its back with a toe and grunted, “Ridden.” It was statement rather than question, but the Jamaican nodded confirmation.
“Shielded. The crystal couldn’t see it.”
The thing he had kicked had wings with a span of over two metres, but the body of a cat. It was oddly and massively muscled over the shoulders, but otherwise next door’s ginger tom with eagle wings. Until you looked at the face. That belonged to something that’d chew through your chest and then rip your heart out through the hole. This thing didn’t go in for saucers of milk and tickles behind the ears.
“What is that?” someone asked.
“Chimereagle.” The reply meant nothing to me or the kid who’d asked.
“They’re always half eagle and half something else, depending on local environment. This one had been sent to spy on us.”
The kids all looked at each other, eyes wide with excitement or fear. The adults, I noticed, did the same, though their expressions were of guarded puzzlement. Then the Yorkshireman shrugged.
“Nowt more to do with this, is there?”
He looked at us and nodded his head to one side.
“Walk on.”
I picked up a feather that had fallen from the thing. It was perfect; barbules locking into each other and a pattern of cat camouflage making it look pretty. What had its owner been coming to do? The thought occurred that this world had teeth in it. I worked up a 'damn' much easier this time. I stuck the feather in my back pocket and fell in with the rest.
Bugger.
Meganwy
I’m sure, if you’re a dance teacher, or something of the kind, you can look at any random person and take a guess at their potential as a dancer. Even a fairly quick look would show if they had natural poise, or grace in their movements, ennit? Bottom line, of course, is you could teach them something. But as you watched them, you’d know if this one might ever be great, or’d only just learn to tell the difference between their left and right foot, that sort of thing. Same for anything else you know well; you know what to look for, ennit?
It’s both similar and different for us, see. A Mage can spot someone who has Potential just by looking at them, in the Land or out of it. Those who haven’t - well you can’t teach them anything, try as you might.
Explaining how we know is a different matter though, ennit? It’s like saying, ‘She’s the one in the pink dress’, to someone who’s colour-blind, see? Potential doesn’t have a colour, any more than colour has a smell, but a Mage knows it’s there. It's not auras neither, though I can see auras. It's what we do and you don't.
So I can tell you we could all ‘see’ young Brendan had massive Potential, but I can’t tell you what it was that told us. I’d have put money on him being one of the Chosen of the Land, but no one would’ve taken the bet. They could all see it too.
Strange to be back in the Land, it was. I’d been away for about a month and I suppose I’d got used to the other world. Coming back was like opening a cupboard of memories I hadn’t looked in for a while. Some of the things in there I’d nearly forgotten I had. Didn’t really notice till we got to the boats and I had to call up the sails, but I felt that way a few times over the next few days. Can’t recall ever feeling like that before.
Sharp, he is, Jake. The Seekers would go for that line about spying, but the rest of us knew better. You want to spy, you send a familiar. Sent to attack us, those beasts were. Take a pride leader and you get the rest of the pride, see, with chimereagles. What he goes for, they go for too. Far more dangerous to the mage if a familiar gets hurt – hospitalise someone, you can if you kill their familiar, while you only give ‘em a bad headache if you drop the beast they’re riding - and much harder to organise a large group. My Morgan, see, flies as a sparrow, fights as a wildcat and spies as a mouse. Niall’s Satsuki flies and fights as an eagle, spies as a housecat. Even getting them to travel together is hard, ennit?
Sloppy attempt, whatever it was designed to do. He must have put it together in a desperate hurry. We know chimereagles only come from places where there were big magic battles in the last war. Fallout, ennit? And they are all on his side of the island now. They were bound to look odd flying in Duergar lands. Now what would prompt that?
Phoebe
I woke up in a bed. I’d expected something more dramatic. The Seekers would come to the Land through a Gate and I thought I’d be a Seeker. I couldn’t remember what Silvester had said, but it looked like I was already there. Something felt bad though. I had a bit of a headache and a cramping pain in my stomach. I had to pull back the bedclothes before I could see what it was. Blood on my pyjamas, down between my legs. Yada.
I knew what it was, of course, even though it was the first time. Auntie ‘Lexie had told me all about it, and Dad had been getting me books and stuff about it for just forever – to help me prepare. My friend Sara had already had hers and all the girls had been talking about it, you’d guess, innit? Didn’t mean it wasn’t just mecha gruse. It was. Well, for a second.
Then I thought I could tell Dad and he’d let me have the party he’d promised for it. He’d said it was a change I should celebrate. I think he read that line in a book. Then, of course, I realized Dad wasn’t here, I was well off the range of a GPS tracker, and I couldn’t have a party until I got back. Which made me wonder.
A girl couldn’t get into the Land until she’d started her periods. Everyone knows that. So maybe this wasn’t real, and they’d just given me one to make me feel like I was ready, even though I knew I really wasn’t. And (far, far away ikky) even if this was my first time, it wouldn’t be hers. It’s tres freak to feel you’re having someone else’s period, believe me if that’s never happened to you before, and my day was about to go glom when a Duergar came in through the door.
I nearly leapt out of bed and danced around the room! This wasn’t like watching them on a DIV. This was real. Right there in the room with me, carrying a tray. She looked me up and down (mostly up of course) and saw the bloodstains. She nodded and said, “Ah. Me thingim allsame. Me bringim this one for Mma. Makim you better mor. You go cleanim youseleva en dringim thisfella.” She nodded at a door and passed me a cup of something. I got up and sort of hobbled to the door, trying not to let my legs touch. Yada. Big, big ya.
You had to slide the door to the bathroom. I remembered and didn’t try to push it. The bathroom looked just like the ones you see in the DIVs. There was a big, deep, circular tub made of wood, set into the floor, full nearly to the brim with steaming hot water.
I knew you had to scoop water out of the bath and wash yourself first, so started to strip off the pyjamas. I jumped when I saw the dark skinned woman out of the corner of my eye, but sussed I was looking into a big, steamed-up mirror. Then I nearly squealed. I was Malaika!
There’s a line in Book One where someone asks if Malaika is good-looking, and the answer is she’s too busy being gorgeous to have time left for just good. And there she was looking back at me. From the steamy mirror. With no clothes on.
I really had to look away. I mean, Malaika is tres, tres hot, with a bod to just die for or from, but I was like staring at it. I felt myself blushing hotter than the bath water. It would take a while to get used to that being me. I took just a small peek again and thought, ‘Oh I wish!’
I could get used to it. I could suffer that.
I mean, I have got brown hair and brown eyes and when Dad tells me I am going to be a stunner at sixteen and he’s going to buy a club to keep boys away he always sounds like he means it. That’s my dad though. He once told a friend of mine he was really Tony Blair, and he’d escaped from prison by digging a tunnel with a bent teaspoon.
We didn’t completely believe him, but that was ‘cos we didn’t know who it was. We had to go wiki the name up on a pokkecom to read the history and find out Blair was still in prison. Well, we were only eight at the time. What did we know?
Anyway, the point is; it isn’t impossible I could look nearly as hot when I’m older. But that nearly would be just like Earth to Moon near, not Earth to Sun near. Sort of comparatively nearer than Sara could get, ‘cos she’s blonde, but not close enough to whisper in an ear kind of close. I’ll never pwn boys.
I grabbed a towel and covered myself a bit and took another look at my new face. I pushed a strand of hair back behind my ear and grinned and just … Like wow.
I had a drink from the cup before starting to wash and the effect was like magic. (Duh!) The headache and cramp just vanished. The stuff must have been chia, but it tasted like the milky tea Dad always makes for me. I still wasn’t keen on getting into the bath after washing – I didn’t think the bleeding had stopped too and just didn’t want to lay there in it. Far, far away gruse – so I towelled myself dry and went back to the bedroom.
The Duergar had gone out, but there was underwear and a set of loose, dark grey cotton pants and a top laid out on the bed. Apart from a sanitary pad, it was all senior Mage clothing. I had a feeling I had to get ready for something formal going on.
Then it came to me. I was being dimmy this morning. Naturally, the Seekers would be coming and I’d have to go and take part in the Opening. All this would have to start with Brendan going through his Initiation, even if I wasn’t doing one. Of course, he’d pass and the Light of the Chosen’d shine from him, but it all needed to happen so Senior Niall would know he was capable of great things. I dressed as quickly as I could.
Good. She’s accepted who she is. Maybe this time things will work out as I want them to.
Getting to the hall from my bedroom was a piece of good luck. I turned the right way down a corridor, went down some stairs and through a door that lead into the Main Hall. Adults and kids sat at tables, eating and chatting. I went to a serving table and helped myself to a bowl of muesli, some kind of red fish and some chia, then looked for somewhere to sit.
“Lai! Hey, over here!” Oops, Aki, Malaika’s best friend in the Land. How was I going to carry this one off?
I sat down beside her and she looked me in the eye. “Ah yes, Gramma said it was so. Sorry to tell you friend, but it shows. Drink lots of her special chia and don’t bite off any heads, some of them never use shampoo and they will taste foul.”
The accent was dead right and it was just like being with Eriko Yamamoto. I nearly asked for an autograph.
I grinned and sat down next to her. “We have to go to the ceremony today, innit?” I asked, “What time should we set off?” I thought this was a bright thing to say, ‘cos I wasn’t sure how I’d get there by myself.
“Ah, that’s so, eh?” replied Aki, carefully looking at anything in the room except me. “I do have a small favour to ask of you there. Nothing that will be too much for my very best friend in the universe to understand, of course, but I have agreed to go with someone else.” She gave me a quick look that had triumph in it, and I guessed. Well, I’ve read all of the books is one thing, and I’m a girl is another. It could only be one person.
“Daniel!”
“Yes, but keep it quiet please. We are going to set off early and walk part of the way there. He thinks we are going to pick medicinal herbs, but I have no such plan.”
My eyes must have widened, ‘cos she tapped me on the nose.
“Talking child! Talking! Well, mostly talking. He may be the cutest thing here, but he has a terrible problem with commitment. He is going to say some important things today, though he does not know this yet.”
She gave me a look asking if it really was okay with me, so I told her, “Tres, tres okay.” That only got me a puzzled look. Stupid! The books never use modern teenspeak. She wouldn’t know that expression.
“I mean, no problem.”
That was something Malaika says all of the time, though only olds like my dad ever say that now. I ate and Aki sort of drifted away into thought, so nothing much was said through the rest of breakfast. I made some mental notes. Some things I say, people here wouldn’t. Some things I knew, ‘cos they happened in the later books, people here couldn’t. Lots to remember.
No one knows how things turned out between Aki and Daniel, and if they ever got over the row, ‘cos the last book never got written. I think they would, but Alistair Cameron always said there’d be surprises at the end of the story, and he wasn’t going for a happily-ever-after kind of finish.
Though, with me only being here for today, I wasn’t going to be around for the argument and couldn’t change things much anyway. Mind, I was a bit impressed to know they got together on the day Brendan entered the Land. That isn’t written down anywhere and I’d thought it was much later. When I finished my breakfast, I put the bowl away, wished Aki a good day, and headed out.
There was a large cloak room just before the front door of East Gard’s Hall. The two long walls had lines of hooks with cloaks on them. I found a hook with Malaika’s name and picked up the cloak.
I knew about this bit and was half looking forward to it - half afraid I’d wee myself. I put on the cloak and fastened it with the shiny brass clasp. It slightly hugged my shoulders when wrapped around me, but I could throw it over my back and get it out of the way. Tell the truth, I wanted a mirror, to see how it looked on, ‘cos Malaika looks serious good in a cloak, but there wasn’t one around.
I walked out through the door. It was like the DIVs. There was a gravel driveway going to a gate in the distance, with gardens on either side. I knew people did drive up that gravel, in carriages pulled by draft beasts or riding on runners, but I was going to use it for my runway, just like I’d seen Malaika do. I wondered about flying wearing a sanitary pad. Maybe I should be using tampons? No one tells you that sort of thing, do they?
It’s lucky there’s a long bit about this in Book One, where Brendan and the other Apprentices are taught to fly - you don’t see it in the DIV though. I was still quite little when Dad read it to me, and I can remember practising take-offs in my bedroom with a towel over my shoulders.
Well, no one was watching, so… I re-slung the cloak and held it out like bat wings. It wrapped neatly around my arms and gripped them, like it was holding them up. It was much longer than my arms, but the end part still stuck out like there was something underneath it. I walked forward to let it billow out behind me and then ran, flapping, just like I did when I was little. You see some of them just sort of leap and take off in the DIVs, but I wasn’t ready for that yet, so I took a long run-up.
I was feeling far gone harpic, but suddenly the cloak took over the flapping and I was struggling to run fast enough. I think I might have shrieked when the ground fell away from me, but the cloak just kept on doing the flying, flapping my arms for me. In less than a second, I seemed to be higher than the trees. Two seconds later I knew for surely, ‘cos I was at the end of the driveway and was flying over them.
It still felt a bit low, so I just thought about going faster and the cloak flapped harder. I angled myself steeper and shot up into the sky. It tells you in Book One that East Gard is at the top of a steep-sided valley on the road to the coast. Well, in a few seconds, I was high enough to see that. I was heading north, with the road running west and east below me. The cloak felt to be stuck to my back and down my legs as far as my ankles and was holding all of my body up. I felt like I was lying on some enormous swing fastened tight to the sky, and falling out of the sky was like...like no chance; I was far away secure. I stopped pumping my arms for a minute and did a gliding turn. And there was the city, with its wall and castle. There was the river, with the bridge and boats.
I can’t describe the feeling that filled me then. It was like last year when Sara and me went on a roller coaster. We squealed and screamed all the way through the ride; not ‘cos we were scared, but just ‘cos we were so excited. I squealed and screamed again now and pumped myself higher and higher into the air, then swooped down and up again until I looped overhead in a circle. Then I corkscrewed down towards the ground, pulling out into another rising glide.
I don’t know how long I flew. I was a bird, I was just pure flight, and I was strong. The cloak was doing all the work. It lifted me up into the sky with just me thinking about moving my arms, but when I pulled hard I felt myself rocket through the air. And when I glided… I could just close my eyes and feel the wind against my hands, knowing the littlest movement of my fingers would send me swooping in a great circle.
The world was beneath me and I was above all of it. I could see forever and there was nowhere I couldn’t go. I felt… I felt…there’s no words for what I felt.
I got up above a cloud and wanted to just fly all day exploring the top of the clouds. I think I would’ve done too, ‘cept I flew over a gap in the clouds and saw the city again. Black River Bridge! I knew what it looked like from Jack Hughes’ illustrations in the Encyclopaedia of The Land, and I couldn’t wait to walk on its streets for real. And I’d get to meet Senior Ferguson, my favourite character in all of the books, more even than Brendan Earle really. I just had to go there!
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