Кэтрин Фишер: Sapphique

‘It’s all an illusion. There’s a patchbook like it. A man steals fire from the gods and saves the people with its warmth.

They punish him by binding him with a great chain for ever.

But he struggles and squirms, and at the world’s end he will come back. In a ship made of fingernails.’ Then he smiled at her sadly. ‘I’ll miss you, Attia.’ Jared reached out and touched the chalked door with the tip of a dragonclaw. Instantly it became real, and opened, the door falling inwards with a great clang, leaving a rectangular darkness in the floor.

Finn stepped back, bewildered. At his feet too the floor had swung down. The pit was black and empty.

Jared led Claudia gently to its edge. ‘Go on, Claudia. You’ll be there, and I here. We’ll work together, just as we always have She nodded, and looked at her father. The Warden said, ‘Master Jared, may I have a word with my daughter?’ Jared bowed and moved away.

‘Do as he says,’ the Warden said.

‘What about you?’ Her father smiled his cold smile. ‘My plan was for you to be Queen, Claudia. That was what I worked for. Perhaps it is time I did some work here, in my own realm. This new regime will need a Warden. Jared is far too lenient, and Incarceron too harsh.’ She nodded. Then she said, ‘Tell me the truth. What happened to Prince Giles?’ He was silent a while. He stroked his narrow beard with his thumb. ‘Claudia...’

‘Tell me.’

‘Does it matter?’ He looked at Finn. ‘The Realm has its king.’

‘But is he?’ His grey eyes held her. ‘If you are my daughter, you will not ask me.’ She was silent too. For a long moment they looked at each other. Then, formally, he lifted her hand and kissed it, and she gave him a low curtsy.

‘Goodbye, father,’ she whispered.

‘Rebuild the Realm,’ he said. ‘And I will come home at intervals, as I used to do. Perhaps from now on you will not dread my coming so much.’

‘I won’t dread it at all.’ She walked to the edge of the trapdoor, and glanced back at him. ‘You must come to Finn’s coronation.’

‘And yours.’ She shrugged. Then, with one last look at Jared, she walked down the steps of darkness inside the door, and they saw her climb up into the room of the Portal, Finn catching her hand and helping her Out.

‘Go on, girl,’ Rix said to Attia.

‘No.’ She was watching the screen. ‘You can’t lose both your Apprentices, Rix.’

‘Ah, but my powers have grown. Now I can conjure a winged being into life, Attia. I can bring a man from the stars. What a show I’ll take on the road! I’m made, for ever.

However it’s true I can always use an assistant. .

‘I could stay. . .’ Keiro said, ‘So you’re scared then?’

‘Scared?’ Attia glared up at him. ‘Of what?’

‘Of seeing Outside.’

‘What do you care?’ He shrugged, his eyes blue and cold. ‘I don’t.’

‘Right.’

‘But Finn needs all the help he can get. If you were in any way grateful . . .’

‘For what? I was the one who got the Glove. Who saved your life Finn said, ‘Come Out, Attia. Please. I want you to see the stars. Gildas would have wanted that.’ She stared up at him, silent, and made no move, and whatever she was thinking there was no trace of it on her face. But Jared, with the eyes of Incarceron, must have seen something because he came over and held her hand, and she turned and stalked down the steps of darkness, and into a strange shiver of space that twisted so that suddenly the steps were leading upward, and as Jared’s hand left hers another came down and hauled her up, a scarred, muscular hand with a scorched palm and a steel fingernail.

Keiro said, ‘Not so difficult, was it?’ She stared round. The room was grey and calm, it hummed with a faint power. Outside the door in a ruined corridor a few bruised men watched, sitting slumped against the wall.

They looked at her as if she was a ghost.

In the screen on the desk the Warden’s face was fading.

‘Not only will I come to the coronation, Claudia,’ he said.

‘But I will expect an invitation to the wedding.’ And then the screen was dark, and it whispered in Jared’s voice, So will I.

There was no way down so they climbed up the remains of the stairs to the roof.

Finn took out the watch; he looked at the cube a long moment, then he gave it to Claudia. ‘You keep this.’ She let the silver cube lie on her palm. ‘Are they really there? Or have we never known where Incarceron is?’ But Finn had no answer, and holding the watch tight, she could only climb after him.

The damage to the house horrified her; she fingered hangings that fell to pieces and touched the holes in walls and windows uncomprehendingly. ‘It can’t be possible. How can we ever put all this together again.’

‘We can’t,’ Keiro said brutally. He led them up the stone steps, his voice echoing back. ‘If Incarceron is cruel, Finn, so are you. You show me a glimpse of paradise and then it’s gone.’ Finn glanced at Attia. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘To both of you.’ She shrugged. ‘As long as the stars haven’t gone.’ He stood aside for her on the final step. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They haven’t.’ She stepped out on to the stone battlements and stopped, and he saw it come into her face, the shock and the wonder he remembered for himself, and she gasped as she stared upwards.

The storm had swept the sky clear. Brilliant and fiery, the stars hung in their splendour, in their secret patterns, their distant nebulae, and Attia’s breath frosted as she gazed at them. Behind her Keiro’s eyes were wide; he stood still, transfixed by magic.

‘They exist. They really exist!’ The Realm was dark. The distant army of refugees huddled round campfires, flickers of flame. Beyond them the land rose in dim hills and the black fringes of forest, a realm without power, exposed to the night, all its finery as shrivelled and battered as the silk flag with its black swan that fluttered, shredded, over their heads.

‘We’ll never survive.’ Claudia shook her head. ‘We don’t know how to any more.’

‘Yes we do,’ Attia said.

Keiro pointed. ‘So do they’ And she saw, faint and far, the candlepoints of flame in the cottages of the poor, the hovels where the Prison’s wrath and fury had brought no change.

‘Those are the stars too,’ Finn said quietly.