Web of Fire Bind-up

The Dreamwalker's Child

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Nine

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Twelve

Thirteen

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Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

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Twenty-one

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Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Acknowledgements

Author Biography

The Web of Fire

Also by Steve Voake

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Acknowledgements

THE DREAMWALKER'S CHILD

STEVE VOAKE

For Tory, Tim and Daisy

‘When the Dreamwalker's Child walks in Aurobon, then shall the East be in the ascendant; a plague shall descend from the sky and the Earth will fall into shadow… but the Dreamwalker's Child shall rise up against the Darkness.'

Book of Incantations

THE DREAMWALKER'S CHILD

When they are first born, most people find the world a fascinating, magical place. It is a place full of colours and sounds and wonderful things that they have never seen before. There are metal boxes that move up and down the street, bags of sweet powder that fill your mouth with explosions of delight, soft barky things that jump up and lick your hand, tall giants with rustling leaves and little feathery objects that fly around in them singing songs.

Everything is new and exciting.

But as time passes, people come to believe that these extraordinary magical things are not really magic at all, but just ordinary things with ordinary, dull names like car, sherbet, dog, tree and bird.

So after a while, they stop noticing them.

They forget how to look.

Which is why the grey speck on the corner of Sam Palmer's bedpost would have gone unnoticed by most
people. Most people would be too busy looking at televisions, magazines or each other.

They would never notice something so small and colourless.

Sam, however, was an exception. He had never grown out of his fascination with the world, and what interested him most were the small things that most people never see.

Ever since learning to crawl, Sam had followed woodlice to the cracks in the skirting board, knelt by ants as they cleaned up spilt sugar and watched bumblebees bouncing from foxglove to forget-me-not. Where most children ran away from wasps, Sam ran after them, watching them hunt among the long grass and listening to the faint scrape and scratch of their jaws on the wooden window-frame as they chewed it into a pulp for their papery nests.

But just recently, he had noticed something else.

At first he had thought that it was just his imagination. But the more he looked around him, the more he began to believe that it was true.

The insects were starting to follow him.

It seemed that wherever he went, the wasps went too. Not great swarms of them – just one or two, following him everywhere. Yesterday, walking up the lane on his way home from school, he had seen several of them hovering above his head like small helicopters. It was getting more noticeable, and since moving out here into the country, he had found himself becoming obsessed with insects.

He glanced up at his bedroom walls, covered with the pictures of flies he had carefully copied from illustrations and photographs. Strewn across the floor were the books about insects that he had borrowed from the library and on his desk was an unfinished diagram that he was sketching, showing the mouthparts of a mosquito. He stared at the pictures with a mixture of fascination and disgust.

What was happening to him?

The sun edged its way up over the horizon and in the early morning light Sam sensed the silence and stillness of the air that hangs over fields and woods before an unusually hot summer's day. In the distance, a wood pigeon called softly from the trees at the edge of the meadow that lay behind the house. A gentle breeze stirred the hedgerows and Sam briefly caught the scent of wild honeysuckle before the air was still once more.

He stared out of the window at the dry, parched lawn and thought of the Saturdays he used to have before they moved: riding his bike into town, buying drinks and gum from the shop and then cycling off to meet his friends by the bandstand in the park. They used to play Russian roulette together – shaking up a can of fizzy drink, mixing it up with all the other cans and then taking it in turns to open one up next to their heads. He remembered how Chrissy Johnson had been practically blown off the bandstand and Bobby's sister Kayleigh had laughed so much that she'd had to run home to change.

Good times.

But now they were gone.

Sam sighed and turned back towards his bedside table, where
The Field Guide to European Insects & Spiders
lay open at the ‘Bees, Ants & Wasps' section.

He reached out his hand to pick up the book, and at that moment his eyes fell upon the small grey shape on his bedpost. Moving slowly and carefully, he crouched down to take a closer look.

It was a grey, thuggish-looking fly about the size of his thumbnail, with a slight speckling of the abdomen. Its wings were smoky brown and on either side of its broad head were slightly bulging, brightly coloured eyes. Protruding from the front of its head were sharp, blade-like mouthparts shaped like a V.

Sam recognized it immediately as a horsefly.

Keeping a watchful eye on it, he picked up the insect book and flipped through the pages until he found the section entitled ‘Horseflies (Family
Tabanidae
)'.

Beneath a small illustration he read: ‘Female horseflies need a meal of blood for their eggs to develop. Their bite is painful, and they readily attack people in the absence of livestock. Their preferred habitat is near woodland, streams and marshes.'

‘You're in the wrong place,' said Sam.