Cover

Title Page

Dedication

To Stephen Herrington

For the idea

The Box of Flames

The Box of Flames

1

The world is not dead. The world is alive and breathes. The world is the whim of God, and her journey is forever.

Litany of the Makers

THE SEVEN MOONS were all in the sky at once. Tonight they made the formation that Galen called the web: one in the centre – Pyra, the small red one – and the others in a circle round her. They glimmered over the tree-tops; it was a good omen, the sisters’ most perfect dance.

Raffi stared up at them with his arms full of wood. As an experiment he let his third eye open and made tiny purple filaments of light spray from the central moon to all the others, linking them in a flaring pattern. After a while he changed the colour to blue, managing to hold it for a few minutes, and even when it faded a faint echo still lingered. He watched it till his arms were tired, then humped the wood more carefully and turned away.

That had been better than last time. He was getting quite good at it – he ought to tell Galen.

Or maybe not.

Gathering up more of the crumbling twigs, he moved through the dark trees resentfully. It was no use talking to Galen. The keeper was in one of his bitter moods; he’d only laugh, that short, harsh laugh of contempt.

The wood was very dry, rotting on the forest floor. Huge ants scurried out of it, and the armoured wood-grubs that chewed slowly. He flicked a shower of them from his clothes.

The forest was quiet. Two nights ago a pack of woses had raged through here, tearing great holes in the leaf-canopy; the wreckage still lay under the oaks. In the green gloom of the night insects hummed; something whistled behind him in the wood. It was time he was getting back.

He pushed through hanging ivies and across a clearing deep in bracken, alert for snakes and the venomous blue spiders, but only shadows shifted and blurred among the trees, too far off to see or sense. He’d come further than he’d thought and in the shafts of moonlight, red and pale and rose, the path looked unfamiliar, until the trees ended in a bank of dead leaves. He waded through them to the hillside, seeing the vast black hump of the cromlech and Galen’s fire like a spark in its shadow.

Then he stopped.

Somewhere behind him, far behind, something had tripped one of the sense-lines. The warning tweaked a tiny pain over one eye; he recognised it at once. The lines were well above ground; whatever it was was big, and coming this way. He listened, intent, but only the night sounds came to him, the insect buzz and the flittermice, the crackle of the fire.

Scattering wood, he ran down quickly.