Read Online Priests of Ferris by Maurice Gee - Free Book Online

read, and when it was finished he said, ‘It was a hundred turns ago. I don’t see what good it does us now.’
    ‘We’ve got to trust Jimmy. He says it doesn’t matter how much time’s gone by.’
    ‘He’s dead,’ Limpy said. ‘Unless he went to Earth, like you.’
    ‘We’ve got to go and find out,’ Nick said. ‘And I want to see Mount Nicholas.’
    ‘My sister will be dead by the time you get back.’
    ‘How many days have we got?’
    ‘Twenty-three.’
    ‘We can do it. If there’s a chance of finding Jimmy we’ve got to take it.’
    ‘What chance is there?’
    ‘Verna …?’
    ‘You must trust him. If he dreamed he would be there then he’ll be there. He dreamed you would be coming back, remember.’
    ‘Yes. Limpy, will you come? Please. We need you. We’ll save your sister, I promise you.’
    ‘You must travel into the land of the Birdfolk,’ Verna said. ‘If I send a messenger they will be ready to help you. You will be at Mount Nicholas in five days.’
    It took them a while to persuade Limpy, but when he had agreed Verna sent out the messenger. She rolled the parchment and tied it with new cord. ‘There is something else in the box. You did not take it.’
    They looked where she was pointing, in the corner. Nick thought it was a pebble, but Susan knew at once what it was. She picked it up reverently. ‘My stone-silk gloves.’ She rolled them out and smoothed them on the table. ‘I gave them to Brand. He’s given them back.’
    ‘He must have thought you would need them,’ Verna said.
    Susan drew the gloves on. She felt them enclosing her hands, fitting like skin, and she shivered as she remembered her climb across the stone ceiling in Otis Claw’s throne-hall. Nick ran outside and brought in a stone. She held it in her hand, then turned the hand over. The stone remained where it was, fixed on the silk.
Let go
, Susan thought; and the stone fell. Quietly she peeled off the gloves and rolled them up. She put them in her pocket.
    ‘Thank you, Verna. I’ll look after them.’
    ‘Use them to pull the Temple down.’
    ‘Yes,’ Susan said. But the thought of Jimmy gave her more confidence than the gloves. If somehow Jimmy was alive, she would manage. If he was not … She would not let herself think about it.
    They slept that night in Verna’s house. Susan dreamed of great white bears, and climbing, and falling, and a figure that would not come out of the shadows. Was it Jimmy? Or was it a priest, dressed all in black? In the morning they changed their clothes for Woodlander cloaks. They said goodbye to Verna and shouldered their blankets and packs of food and started out. Dawn was their guide. She would travel to Mount Nicholas with them.
    They went south and east through the forest and climbed through the hills cutting Wildwood off from the Yellow Plains. At midday on the second day they filed through a pass and saw the plains burning white in the sun. Far north, beyond the dust and haze, lay Morninghall and Mount Morningstar. But they were going south, across the tundra to the frozen tip of the continent where a block of mountains stood against the sky. They saw a white gleaming in the cold air, and turned towards it, travelling along the side of the hills, then breaking down into a plateau above the plain. Rivers tumbled from it but they turned their backs on them and pressed on south. The land rose gradually, covered with spiky grass and trees lying close to the ground, smoothed into cobblestones by the wind. They made their evening camp in a hollow. Nick and Susan lay in their blankets watching the strange constellations and inventing names for them. Then Limpy told their real names, and Dawn pointed out a yellow star Woodlanders said was the sun of Earth. ‘Children sometimes call it Susan’s star.’
    Limpy shivered. ‘The priests would say that was heresy.’
    ‘And they would kill these friends who come to help us,’ Dawn said. She pointed in the northern sky and they