Firewing (7 page)

There was nothing there. His eyes snapped open and he looked around in confusion, sending out a barrage of sound. Maybe it had just gotten away. But there was no sign of it. He’d felt it in his wing, then in his mouth….

He tried again. This time, he locked onto a freaky-looking
moth, overtook it and, with painstaking care, curled it from his left wingtip into his mouth. He felt the gauzy fabric of its wings against his skin, then brought his jaws together. There was a quick pulse of light, a faint pop, and the bug melted away. Gone.

Panting, Griffin tried to land, missing the branch on his first approach and nearly plummeting to the ground. The second time he shakily gripped the bark.

The bugs were not
real.

They were just little bits of sound and light. What else wasn’t real here? What about those odourless trees? His eyes darted anxiously across the branch, noticing the leaves. There were buds just unfurling, others fully grown, and some hard curled dead ones, still clinging on. It was spring, summer, and fall all at once here. It wasn’t normal. This place was
not normal
.

Then he saw her.

Maybe it was her distinctive upstroke, or her sleek profile as she streaked past—but he knew. “Luna!” he cried out.

She shot him a quick backwards glance, then came around for a better look. As she flew closer, his heart leapt. It was definitely her, no question! She roosted at the end of his branch, staring at him in amazement.

“How did
you
get here?” Griffin exclaimed, words pouring out of him in sheer, giddy joy. “This is the weirdest place, Luna! Have you seen the trees and the leaves—and the bugs? Bizarre! These huge spiny bugs that you can’t even eat! And the other bats here, have you talked to any of them yet? They’re kind of unusual, to say the least. They keep telling me I’m glowing!” “You are,” she said.

“Oh.” He felt taken aback. “You can see it, too? Because I can’t, you know. I can’t see anything glowing at all.”

“It’s like you have starlight trapped in your fur.” He paused to catch his breath, and noticed the shiny patches of scar tissue on her wings. But her fur didn’t look too bad. He couldn’t believe how quickly it had all healed. All those potions the elders had must be amazing.

“You’re all better,” he said, overwhelmed with gratitude and relief. “Everyone was really worried about you. Mom said they were afraid you were going to die.”

“What’re you talking about?” Luna asked, frowning. He blinked. Maybe no one had told her how badly injured she’d been. Made sense, he supposed. No point scaring her when she needed to be calm and rest.

“Well,” he said, “I’m really sorry about everything. You know, it just happened before I could even think. I just—”

Her look of total confusion stopped him. She had no idea what he was talking about. Had the accident wiped out her memory or something? For a second he was almost glad. At least this way she wouldn’t remember the horrible accident, the fear and pain—and how it was all his fault.

Didn’t matter. Now that Luna was here, everything would be all right again. She would know what to do. Even if she didn’t know the way back, she would have a plan. She always had a plan.

“Luna, it is so
good
you’re here. I was beginning to panic. I know, I know, I always panic. But this time, I was
really
freaking out. I didn’t even have to imagine a worst-case scenario, because this one was taking care of itself just fine.”

“Who
are
you?” Luna demanded. “And how d’you know my name?”

Griffin laughed. It was just a joke, but there was a hardness in her face, a wary crease in her forehead. Maybe she
did
remember
what had happened and was angry with him. Punishing him a bit. Well, he deserved it.

He forced another nervous little chuckle from his throat. “How did you get down here, anyway?” he asked. “Did you get sucked down that tunnel, too? After the earthquake?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She seemed so serious that for a moment he wondered if this bat only
looked
like Luna. But no. Her voice, her name, the scars on her wings…. It was definitely her.

“Come on, Luna—”

“How do you know my name?” she demanded. Could she have lost so much of her memory that she didn’t remember him at all?

“Look, Luna, we’ve got to figure out how to get home.”

“This
is
my home.”

“No. We’re from the northern forests. From Tree Haven,” he told her, hearing the quaver in his voice. “There was an earthquake, and we got sucked down some tunnel and ended up here.” Slowly Luna was backing away from him. She looked scared. “I don’t know you,” she said, “and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do!” Griffin shouted, so overcome with dismay and frustration that he began to cry. It wasn’t fair. He was in this freaky place where the trees didn’t even know how to be trees and the bugs were nothing but air. And his best friend didn’t even
know
him. He turned away from her, trying to hide his tears.

“Why are you glowing?” she asked. She must have edged towards him, because her voice was very close. He cleared his throat. “I don’t know.”

“It’s kind of interesting. It has a sound,” she said. “Can you hear it?”

He shook his head, turning. Head cocked, she was listening intently. “It sounds like …” For a moment her face had a faraway look. “I don’t know. Something familiar.”

He was glad she hadn’t left, glad she’d moved close to him; he longed to jostle wings and shoulders with her, feel the comforting warmth of a body near his. “You okay now?” she asked. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“I’m sorry you’re lost. If I could help you, I would, but I’ve never heard of any of those places you mentioned.”

Griffin felt a lightning charge of fear spike his fur on end. His claws clenched deep into the bark.

“What’s wrong?” he heard her ask, as though from a great distance.

She had no smell.

Before he could stop himself, he unfurled his right wing and, with its tip, touched Luna on the chest. He jerked back as if he’d been seared. But she wasn’t hot. The opposite.

She was colder than any living creature could be. “You’re—”

But Griffin couldn’t say it, because he was suddenly mute with fear, and in that moment he finally understood. The bugs, the trees, all those bats …

Dead.

And Luna, too. “What’s wrong with you?” he heard her ask.

Griffin blinked, trying to focus.

Can’t breathe, no air, everything’s dead.

Up.

That was all he could think. Up.

Away from here. He’d come from the sky, he would go back
to the sky. It made no sense, but instinct had taken over and his body told him to fly high. It was harder than he thought. As he rose above the forest, the air did not want to keep him aloft. Pounding his wings, he felt as if there was nothing beneath them, nothing to push against. And how heavy he felt! Sweat beaded his eyebrows, prickling his fur. He remembered the fierce pull that had dragged him to earth. This world, whatever it was, was greedy. It didn’t want you to fly, didn’t want you to escape.

High above the trees, he could see how big the forest really was, and realized it was set into some kind of vast crater. Beyond, on all sides, stretched desert.

Thoughts fluttered anxiously through his mind: Luna, how cold she was, no scent, dead, dead. His fault. And now she was in this terrible, terrible place, and she didn’t even know she was dead. None of them did. They thought
he
was the ghost.

Keep flapping!

But what was he hoping for? You fly into the sky, and then what? You had the sky, then the stars. Just air and more air and then nothing! You couldn’t fly all the way to the stars! It was crazy, but maybe if he flew high enough, something would happen and magically he’d be back in the tunnel, or even back in Tree Haven, and all this would be over.

He didn’t know how much longer he could fly, fighting against the immense pull of gravity and his own exhaustion. But the stars, he realized, were definitely becoming larger and brighter and—

He nearly hit them.

He hadn’t been paying attention with his echo vision, and with a choked cry he braked, flaring his wings and almost pitching over backwards. The sky had suddenly ended, and above him was a dome of solid black rock. What he’d thought were stars
were deposits of blazing stone embedded in the shell of the sky.

He dug in with his claws and hung, panting with fatigue. Even now the hungry backwards pull of the world tore at his knee joints, making him wince. He knew it was only a matter of time before he’d have to let go. Frantically, he sprayed sound across the stone. So this was what he had fallen through, thinking he’d been spat out into the heavens. Hope pulsed at his temples.

If he could find the hole, he could heave himself in, claw his way back up into the real world.

The opening must be here somewhere. Upside down, he scuttled across the stone sky, every step making his knees and wrists bark with pain. If only he’d noticed when he’d first come hurtling through, taken his bearings—but he’d been so scared and disoriented. Wasn’t this roughly the right place? But his barrage of echoes painted only a wall of solid light in his head. Not so much as a crack.

When he peered back down through the cloudless sky he saw the great stone planet slowly turning. With a sick heart he realized that as the world shifted, so too did the sky overhead.

His crack could be anywhere in the vastness of all this stone sky.

He kept looking, anyway, dragging himself inch by inch, trying not to cry so he wouldn’t blur his vision and hearing.

No one knows where you are.

Keep looking!

You told no one.

Maybe it’s just over here a little more.

No one will come for you.

“Help!” he cried out, hoping that maybe some little bit of his voice would echo back home. The words were instinctive, wrenched up from his belly. “Mom! Help, please!” He pushed his
face into the stone of the sky and noticed that it had a smell. The cold, gritty scent of rock, normally unappealing, was now everything he had lost: the smell of the living world. And he breathed it in as if it were the perfume of honeysuckle, the fragrance of his mother’s fur.

Don’t go, he thought. Don’t.

He had to keep looking. But with a grunt, his knees buckled and he fell, sucked viciously earthwards. He unfurled his wings, fighting the pull, trying to guide himself back towards the forest crater. Where else was there to go? On all sides was only desert, rolling out to the ends of this terrible dead world.

Without night or day, moon or sun, it was impossible to keep track of time, and Goth had no idea how long he’d been dragging himself across the cracked plain. Eventually, after many failed attempts, he managed to take flight, only for a few seconds, before the ground dragged him back down. Was he just weak, or was the earthward pull stronger here than … than where? Where he used to be?

And so he carried on, hoping he was going in a straight line and that he would eventually reach something—or someone who could explain this new world to him. If he was indeed dead, then this must be the land of the dead, the Underworld of Cama Zotz. He remembered that much at least: the name of his god. But he had always assumed the Underworld would be teeming with the dead. Where were they?

And where was Zotz?

A flurry of wings caught his attention, and he called out, “Stop!” but the bats, perhaps a dozen of them, continued on over the plain, heedless of his cries. Anger seethed through him. He
would’ve flown after them, broken their necks for their insolence, but his limbs were still too weak. Would he always feel this way?

On and on he scrambled and flew, for hours or perhaps nights, until at last he saw that the land appeared to drop away in the near distance. Hopeful of a vantage point, he hurried on and reached the very edge of the desert, where the earth simply plunged straight down into a cliff. Goth stared for a long time, his eyes blazing with the reflected brilliance of what he beheld.

There was a lake, and in the lake was an island, and from the island rose a city more glorious than any he had ever seen.

Impulsively he launched himself off the cliff, wings extended to their full three-foot span. For several seconds he plunged, before his strokes became powerful enough to pull him out of his dive. Dazzling starlight shattered the placid water as he beat a course for the island. Dense rainforest grew up the steep coastline, and Goth laughed delightedly at the growing cacophony of toucans and macaws, the shriek of spider monkeys.

The entire island rose to a central plateau, and from a distance the city built upon it looked like one great gleaming pyramid. Closer Goth flew, and he could see it was actually composed of innumerable buildings of pale stone, beautifully smooth and luminous in the stars’ glow. Stretching through the city’s middle was a monumental plaza paved with jewelled flagstones, and flanked by pyramids, each taller and more magnificent than the one before. All were crowned with an enormous tablet bearing a glyph of a majestic bat with jagged open jaws, tongue extended hungrily, nose flaring upwards into a spike. Cama Zotz, Goth knew instinctively.

Ornamental pools ran the length of the plaza, pulsing with tall geysers of steaming water. What a grand place this was, Goth thought. Was this like the place he came from? There was
something familiar about it: the pyramids, the rainforest, the shriek of animals. But surely no place could be as magnificent as this.

Goth heard the bats before he saw them. An explosion of wings, like a crack of thunder, preceded them as they burst from the pyramids. Billions there must have been, like a single many-headed serpent coiling darkly through the air and into the jungle to feed.

Goth was still high in the air, too high to be noticed by them, but he could tell they were all his kind. Vampyrum Spectrum—there, the name came back to him now. Nation upon nation of the dead, gathered over the millennia to live here in the splendour Zotz had created for them. He felt a profound rush of kinship with them, but something more, too. A sense of power over them—but why?

In the distance, at the head of the plaza, rose a mountain, and Goth inexplicably felt drawn to it. But as he flew closer, he could make out terraces of luminous stone and realized with shock that this was no mountain but yet another pyramid, the highest of them all.

To reach its summit was his one desire now, but he had exhausted himself with so long a flight, and it was all he could do to make a clumsy landing no more than halfway up. He could understand why he had mistaken the pyramid for a mountain. Miraculously, a rainforest grew from the stone of the terraces, trees whose trunks opened into a canopy of vast leaves. Giant ferns sprouted everywhere. Creepers and vines twisted over the stone, bearing fleshy flowers, some of which snapped open and closed as if hungrily seeking air, or prey.

For just a moment, the rock beneath Goth’s claws seemed to quiver, and he staggered off balance. He wondered uneasily if the pyramid itself was a living thing. He shook his head, feeling dizzy:
it was merely fatigue. The terraces were broad and steep, and Goth found he could flap up only one at a time, resting frequently.

Up and up he leapt, and finally he could see the summit. A huge protrusion, like a flared wing, curved high over the pyramid, trailing thick vines that cascaded down to the luminous stone. Thousands of bats roosted here, and Goth felt an overwhelming sense of homecoming. Leaping into the air, he was determined to make a graceful entrance, and he soared towards the roosting bats.

“My fathers, my brothers and sisters, it is I, Goth! I am here to join you!”

He got no reply except for a few snorts and muttered words he couldn’t make out. Four large Vampyrum dropped from their roosts and swirled around him. A female, a mighty crest of fur atop her skull, swept in close. With immediate dislike, Goth noted that she was even larger than him, with muscular shoulders, and savage eyes that glinted in the starlight.

“Goth, you say?”

“Yes.” He stared at her teeth in shock. They were not bone white, but black, as dark and lustrous as obsidian. He glanced at the other three Vampyrum and saw, embedded in their jaws, the same black, chiselled fangs.

“Excellent,” the female said to him. “We’ve been awaiting your arrival with great anticipation.”

“You have?” asked Goth, allowing himself a smile. Clearly his instincts were correct. He
was
someone of status here.

“You’re to join the work crew,” the female snapped.

“Work crew?”

“Shackle him,” the female told her companions. Before Goth knew what was happening, the three Vampyrum had knocked him to the pyramid’s summit and were cinching a
vine around both his ankles. This was no ordinary vine. Rivulets of pale light streamed over its braided surface, and it seemed to move of its own will, knotting itself with an eerie speed and strength. On his back, enraged at this indignity, Goth struggled, but the other bats easily overpowered him. And the vine held tight. Then, hauling at a second gleaming vine with their teeth and claws, the Vampyrum hoisted him, ankles first, up into the air towards the multitude of other roosting bats.

“Release me!” Goth roared.

“You speak as if you had authority,” the female said mockingly.

“Who are you?” Goth demanded, volcanic anger pounding at his temples.

The female thrust her face close. “Phoenix. Chief Builder, under direct orders from Cama Zotz. This is all his bidding.”

“I have committed no crime!”

“Is that so?” Phoenix laughed.

Goth lunged for her throat. But the female recoiled easily and smacked him across the face with her right wing, sending him spinning from his vine. He glared at Phoenix, enraged that this creature had struck him and even more disgusted by his own helplessness. He thrashed against his restraints, but seemed only to pull the vine tighter around his ankles.

“Let me give you some advice,” Phoenix said. “Rest while you can. Your shift will be starting soon.”

She withdrew with her three Vampyrum guards. Goth looked about through the jungle of vines and realized that all these bats were imprisoned like him, tethered by the ankles to what seemed to be the same colossal length of luminous vine. With surprise he noted that most were not Vampyrum, but other species of bat, most of them significantly smaller than himself, with fur of varying brightness and thickness. His resentment grew: why was he
being herded together with these slaves and weaklings, creatures whom he had feasted on when alive? He should be among the millions of free Vampyrum he had seen earlier, bursting from the glorious pyramids, streaking over city and jungle. Clearly the Vampyrum tethered here had also displeased Zotz in some way. He looked around at this huge assortment of bats, united only in their misery. Their flanks rose and fell as though they were recovering from some great exertion. They looked more than exhausted; they looked defeated.

“What work is this?” he demanded of the large-eared bat closest to him.

The bat stared at him dully. “You’ll see soon enough.”

Goth bristled at this disrespect, but said nothing more. He was too fatigued and perplexed. With difficulty he bent his neck towards his feet and managed to get his jaws around the vine that bound him. He bit, and his teeth sang with pain. It was harder than stone.

“Only the guards can cut the vine,” the large-eared bat informed him.

Goth grunted, remembering their obsidian teeth.

So why, then, was he here? Surely this was some terrible mistake. But how could he be certain? He scoured his memory again and saw only flashes of things. A giant stone tablet with a hole in its centre, the sun blotted out, a sacrifice about to begin, and then—

The rest would not come.

He hung in a kind of stupefied limbo, staring at the enormous stars. They seemed close enough to touch. As they drifted slowly overhead, he noticed in the heavens a vast dark circle within which no stars shone. He blinked. It seemed that some kind of dust or rubble was raining from this circle, glittering in the starlight as it fell. Like the stars, this colossal circle of darkness was
moving across the heavens, and its path would bring it directly over the pyramid.

“Take wing! Take wing!” shouted an army of Vampyrum guards, and at once, the thousands of bats around him began to stir. Goth looked up and saw the first of the workers lurch into the sky, followed closely by the second, the third and on and on, all tethered together by this endless vine, flying heavenwards in a giant chain. They seemed to be beating straight for the huge dark circle in the sky’s fabric. And as Goth stared in amazement, he saw a second chain of shackled Vampyrum descending from on high, as if they’d issued from this very same void.

There was a sharp tug at his ankles and now he, too, was being dragged skyward. He spread his wings, though his own strokes seemed almost unnecessary, for the chain was moving with surprising swiftness and he was being carried along by sheer momentum. He was the last in the chain, and overhead burly Vampyrum guards swirled, making sure no one broke ranks.

“Faster!” he could hear them shouting.

“You’re off course!”

“You, Deadweight!” Phoenix’s face was suddenly against his, and Goth flinched in surprise. “Flap harder! You’re dragging the line!”

Goth increased his power strokes, hating Phoenix but refusing to be the weak link. Apparently satisfied, Phoenix flew upwards to supervise another section. Goth turned his attention back to the descending column of bats he’d seen earlier. Their flight path was now almost parallel to his, not more than a hundred wingbeats distant. Their wing strokes were laboured as they lurched down, fur coated in grit and their eyes and nostrils heavily rimmed with dust. What was it they were doing? What work could possibly be done in the sky?

Was it an illusion, or were the stars getting bigger and brighter? The bodies of the other bats ahead of him were gleaming more brightly than before. Upwards they flew.

A fine dust blew into his face, and Goth blinked it away in irritation. With his eyes, he could see only the stars and, beyond them, the eternal emptiness of the heavens. But when he cast out sound, his echoes bounced back at him. In alarm, he swept his sonic eye heavenwards again and again, and somehow, inexplicably, the sky was coming to an end.

The sky was stone, the stars nothing more than deposits of glowing ore. Was the Underworld some enormous cavern, then, and this was its ceiling? Above he saw the leading bat in the chain disappear into the great circular void. Then the second bat disappeared, then the third—swallowed up one by one into darkness. Goth shot sound into it, and this time no echoes bounced back.

A tunnel, Goth now realized. But where did it lead?

He could see the opening now, hundreds of wingbeats across, its rim roughly hewn as if it had been laboriously gouged by millions of claws. Bat claws. He understood now. The bats had made this, had hewn it from the sky itself.

Finally he was pulled up inside. Without the fake starlight it was instantly much darker. He switched over to his sonic vision. The walls of the shaft led straight up, ridged with ledges from which roosted Vampyrum guards, watching over the workers as they continued their ascent.

The speed of the line slowed dramatically. A long stone bridge jutted halfway into the shaft. As each bat in the chain neared it, he roosted for a moment, and a Vampyrum guard stationed at the edge would shove something into the worker’s mouth. A rock, Goth realized as he drew closer. The worker bats would take the rock between their jaws so only the tip was protruding.

Goth flew past the ledge, refusing to roost.

“Take it!” the guard roared at him, but Goth would not have a rock shoved into his mouth. The guard did not pursue him, as Goth had expected, but simply shook his head with a grim laugh. Finally the tunnel dead-ended, and as Goth approached he could see the thousands of worker bats scattered across the ceiling, still tethered together. Goth flipped over and made an awkward landing, hanging upside down. All the others had swung their bodies up flat with the rock, using their thumbs and rear claws to hold tight. With the rocks in their mouths, they were already busily chipping away at the stone. A constant drizzle of shards and grit rained down from the ceiling, down the shaft, down to the earth below.

They were miners, digging this shaft deeper and deeper. Or was it higher and higher? How could they endure this forced labour, the indignity of using their heads as tools?

“Where’s your rock?” Phoenix demanded, roosting beside him.