by Fahy, James
The Auroracraft tilted sharply. The ravaged wing had been badly damaged and the craft was listing wildly. Woad, with surprising self-control, had gripped the bellows and was attempting to keep them level. “How is Strife here?” Robin yelled.
“The important question is, how did he track us so quickly?” Karya said, staring wide-eyed at their pursuers.
There was no time to answer. The struggling craft was getting closer to the immense cloud, and the skrikers banked, as though in formation, coming around for another pass.
“They’re coming back!” Robin said. “They’re trying to take us down.”
He ran to the front, skipping over the broken floor, and all but throwing himself on the console.
“Can’t we make this thing go any faster?” he shouted, staring at the incomprehensible dials and levers.
One of the dark beasts swooped over them again. Robin ducked instinctively, but it was gone, long claws raking the broken wing again and sending up a riot of feathers.
“They’re tearing the boat apart!” Robin cried.
“The boat is made of wood,” Karya yelled from the rear. “I could tear us through – to the human world, I mean.”
“Bad idea, boss,” Woad said. He was still straining with the boat’s bellow-rudder. “We’re very high up.”
Karya ground her teeth. “Damn! You’re right. No good turning up in the human world half a mile above the ground. We’d be just as dead as if we stay here!”
Another of the skrikers had drawn level. It growled and took a swipe at Woad, trying to snatch him away from the bellows. The faun ducked nimbly beyond the creature’s reach, hissing at it like an angry cat and rolling to the other end of the boat to land at Robin’s feet.
With a frustrated roar, the skriker swooped off, slashing at the side of the boat as it banked away, tearing a great splintering chunk out of the lovingly-made craft.
“Help me, Woad,” Robin said, staring at the dials. “There must be something…”
Before Woad could reply, a voice like a cold knife cut through the air behind them.
“Thus ends the chase, young ones,” Mr Strife said, eyes wide in their sunken sockets, his usually neat hair whipping about his head in the wind. “All this fuss. You merely delayed the inevitable. You should have come quietly, boy. No harm would have come to you.”
“Yeah right!” Robin yelled back, struggling to keep his footing on the wobbling boat. “What was the big knife for, eh? A present?”
“Not for you,” Mr Strife insisted, smiling like a shark, his dead eyes roving over the ship as his skriker flew alongside. “Just them,” he indicated offhand, as though Karya and Woad were of no consequence to him.
“Tell me, Scion. How many more people will you allow to die for you? Your Grandmother, your poor demented aunt and her bumbling servant. Then your human friend, and the satyr.” Strife’s face contorting into distaste. “And now these two…” His eyes narrowed with malice. “How many more innocent bystanders will you sacrifice to save your own skin?”
“Henry and Phorbas are alive!” Robin cried, fear surging in him. “You’re lying! You wouldn’t dare!”
“Do not be so unwise as to dare me, boy,” he sneered, raising his hands. “You will find there is very little I would not dare, very little indeed.”
The skriker banked away, and as it did so, Mr Strife raised a strange dark tube, which for a mad second Robin thought was a gun. “A parting gift. I will educate you as to what happens to those who defy my Lady Eris. Allow me give to you the gift of grief.”
He put the tube to his lips, and turning toward Karya, he blew.
With a yell and a wince of pain, the small girl’s hand flew to her neck.
“Karya!” Robin yelled in alarm.
Mr Strife wheeled away. “Finish them,” he barked to the creatures. “Spitak! Siaw! Take them down.”
“Boss!” Woad wailed, ignoring the creatures wheeling around them. Karya had collapsed, her hand still clutched to her neck. Her eyes rolled backwards in her head until only the white showed. Robin stared in shock, rooted to the spot with horror as the scarecrow figure of Mr Strife wheeled away into the air. A large vicious-looking black barb was sticking from Karya’s neck. Oily with some dark fluid.
A blowdart, Robin thought in panic. Poison.
Before he could convince his legs to move, a skriker barrelled into him from behind, clawing through his shirt and sending him flying to the ground. The creature didn’t close in for the kill, however. It turned and leapt out over the side, reaching out with dark claws, and tore the one good wing clean off.
The Auroracraft lurched immediately into a swift nose dive. Robin forced himself onto his knees, ignoring the pain in his back, gripping the side of the boat for balance.
Cool thick fog suddenly enveloped them, damp and cold and instantly blinding. Their falling craft had pierced the vast cloud.
“Karya!” he shouted, barely able to make out the shadowy figure of Woad cradling the girl only a few feet away.
“Pinky! The boat! We’re going to crash!”
Robin turned, fog and wind whipping furiously against his face. The massive clouds parted suddenly as they broke through the veil. What Robin saw took his breath away. Inside the cloud was a mountain. A monumental craggy shark’s tooth of grey-green rock. It hung suspended before them – unreal, impossible and weightless.
The floating mountain was scattered with patches of scree and heather, clumps of trees growing from damp crevices and gullies dotting its surface. Moss and barnacles smothered its lower slopes, as though from time to time the immense rock dipped into the ocean.
“The Isle of Winds,” Robin said in awe. He had a brief moment to glance toward the peak and glimpsed a city, hidden behind a tall golden wall. There was no time to see anything else. No time to think or move. They hit the mountainside with a shattering crunch of splintering wood. The noise and impact were deafening, and then, mercifully, there was only blackness.
Chapter Twenty Three –
The Isle of Winds
Robin’s eyes snapped open.
He was lying flat on his back in a patch of incredibly thick damp moss. Woad was leaning over him, shaking him by the shoulders.
“You’re alive!” the faun yelped. “I thought you were gone for good there!”
“You can stop shaking me now,” Robin said groggily.
He tried to sit up as Woad released him, and his head swam alarmingly. “Ouch,” he said, with feeling. “I must have hit my head.” His entire body ached. He looked around at the silent rocky landscape. After a moment he added. “We crashed?”
“Yep, right into the mountain,” Woad affirmed. “The only solid part of the entire sky and we bash right into it.”
Robin noticed that Woad’s jaw looked angrily bruised. “There’s this moss growing everywhere. It could have been worse, we could have hit the rocks,” Woad continued. “A tree slowed us down, we took off most of its branches.”
“Karya…” Robin shook his head to clear it. He struggled to his knees. His left arm didn’t seem to do as he wanted.
The ruins of the Auroracraft lay all around them. The hull was mostly still intact, on its side and wingless.
Karya lay sheltered in this shell, laid out on the bed of moss. She looked terrible, her skin white against the green carpet of lichen.
“Is she…?” Robin couldn’t finish the sentence. The word stuck in his throat.
“She’s alive, but I can’t wake her, Pinky,” Woad said, stumbling over to the fallen girl. The moss was slippy and springy underfoot. “Strife’s dart was full of poison. Blackwort, if I’m any judge. Really bad stuff.” He wrinkled his nose in disgust.
“Can’t you help her?” Robin said, limping slightly as he looked around the steep and rocky mountain slope. “I don’t know anything about poison. Aren’t you supposed to make the person be sick? Or is it that you’re supposed to make sure they’re not sick? I can’t remember.” He pushed his wet hair
off his forehead, wincing as his back complained.
“Wouldn’t do any good. Only cure is the antidote.” Woad knelt beside Karya, his hand on her forehead. “Boss is cold,” he announced.
“But she’s alive, right?”
“Not for long,” Woad said sadly, brushing the hair from Karya’s temples. “Boss is strong, much stronger than she looks, but even she can’t withstand blackwort.”
Robin glanced around at the bare mountainside. They appeared to be close to the summit. Here and there scraggly trees had managed to find purchase and gripped the steep slopes for dear life. It would be easy enough to climb up.
“There’s a town up there,” he said, “I saw it when we broke through the cloud. There might be people, someone who can help.”
“You lead the way, I’ll bring boss,” Woad said.
“We should be able to carry her between us,” Robin said. “As long as…” Woad, however, had already picked Karya up and slung her effortlessly over his thin shoulders.
“Never mind,” he finished, picking up his backpack with his good arm. “Come on then.”
* * *
Eventually, they reached the large flattened summit. A smooth wall loomed over them, stretching away on either side. It was made of beaten bronze, shining in the misty sun like dulled fire.
Before them, directly at eye level, a single word was carved into the metal in bas-relief.
AEOLUS
“Well, at least we know we’re at the right flying mystical mountain then,” Woad said breathlessly. They passed through the shining archway and into the city.
The streets within, they soon discovered, were utterly deserted. They found themselves in an empty square with a raised stone platform at the centre. Large buildings rose up on all sides, carved from great blocks of grey blue stone.
There was not a soul in sight – no sign of a single living being. Only silence and soft rustling wind. Everywhere streets branched off, some winding away into shadows between the buildings, some of them little more than cobbled alleys. Across the square, the main thoroughfare led deeper into the silent town.
“Where is everybody?” Woad said, looking around. His voice sounded unnaturally loud.
As they made their way across the wide square, Robin saw that the buildings were mostly derelict, windows dark and doors long rotted away.
Many were crumbling, the roofs fallen in or choked with ivy. They were just empty shells. The Isle of Aeolus was dead. Abandoned and empty.
“This is a ghost town,” he said. “There’s no one here, Woad. Look at the state of the place.”
“Whoever lifted this place into the sky didn’t hang around for long,” Woad said. “I can’t smell any life at all, nothing apart from birds and worms.” Woad scratched his nose. “Could be worse, I suppose. At least I can’t smell revenants.”
“What are revenants?” Robin asked, peering down the desolate, haunted streets. The mountaintop town must have been beautiful once. Now it was just unsettling in its emptiness.
“Bad things,” Woad said, not very helpfully. “Revenants like abandoned places. Ruins and places gone bad. You don’t want to meet any of them, trust me. Don’t worry though,” he said with a reassuring grin. “I’d know if there were any here. They stink.”
He took a deep breath through his nose to prove the point and stopped, wide-eyed.
“What is it?” Robin asked.
“I just got a whiff of … I smelled…” Woad sniffed the air again and peered up the long wide thoroughfare. “Human!”
He sniffed again. “Definitely, Pinky!” he said. “I know this smell! This is Henryboy! Henryboy is nearby!”
“You’re sure?!” Robin asked. He grabbed Woad by the shoulders, almost causing the excited faun to drop Karya’s lolling body.
Woad nodded, grinning. “This way!” he said, setting off at an impressive trot considering his burden. Robin followed eagerly as the faun disappeared down a dark alleyway.
Robin had to admit, this was the perfect place to hide something you didn’t want anyone to find.
They eventually emerged from a dusty side street into a large open space. An agora, according to Woad, with a derelict temple on the far side. It had a sloping triangular roof, densely carved with figures, all supported by a row of tall columns.
“In there,” Woad said breathlessly, shrugging Karya’s limp form on his shoulder.
Robin raced across the empty square.
“What is this place?” he asked Woad, as the blue boy caught up.
“A temple to the winds, I think,” Woad hazarded. “An air shrine.”
They scanned the statues and carvings, but time and wind itself had worn them down, eroding them into faceless ghosts.
“If Henry and Phorbas are here, we have to get them before Strife catches up with us,” Robin said. He ran up the steps and stopped abruptly at the top, looking to Woad, confused. “I thought this was a way in,” he said. “It’s just a recess in the stone.”
Robin was correct. There was no entrance, just a hollowed out cube of stone which looked like a doorway from afar. It had probably been used to house some great statue at one time.
“There has to be a way in! Who would build a temple without a door?”
Woad eyed the stone before them in the flickering light.
“Look here,” he said. “This isn’t real.” He nodded towards one of the stone slabs which made up the wall in front of them. Someone had carved a tiny rudimentary eye into the stone, small enough to miss if you weren’t looking for it.
“What is that?” he asked.
“This is a glamour,” Woad said. “A pretty powerful one at that.”
Robin frowned, unconvinced. He rapped the stone with his knuckles. “Feels pretty real to me.”
“This symbol was always carved wherever a permanent glamour was set,” Woad insisted. “They aren’t tricks or sleights of hand like one of your human world card tricks. They’re powerful magic. Once a person succumbs to a glamour, it may as well be real. There’s no wall in front of us, but that doesn’t make any real difference. We’re trapped in the glamour, the only way to move forward would be to dispel it.”
“I’ve seen glamours before,” Robin remembered. “Aunt Irene cast one on Erlking Hall for me at Halloween. It was pretty convincing, but just a trick, right?”
Woad nodded. “If you like, but if you’d touched a broken window, you probably would have cut your finger.”
Robin considered this. “That’s mental,” he said after a moment.
Woad smirked. “The only way for you to have broken that glamour would have been if you’d touched the old lady’s mana stone,” he explained. “Direct contact with the mana of the caster will always break the spell.”
“There has to be some other way,” Robin insisted. “Whoever cast this is long gone.”
“Well, there are certain glamour-dispelling herbs and potions,” Woad said thoughtfully. “Trusight is a concoction which some apothecaries stock, but it’s hard to come by. Other than that, we would need glam roots. But they have to be steeped in moonlit water for thirteen nights before we could grind them up and…”
“Wait a minute,” Robin said. “Glam roots? Are they from a plant?”
Woad looked at him curiously. “Well, a fruit actually, but I don’t think this is the best time to give you a lesson on Netherworlde botany, Pinky.”
Robin ignored the sarcasm, dropping to one knee and rooting through his backpack on the floor.
“What are you looking for?” Woad asked.
Robin pulled out a large jar from his bag. “This,” he said triumphantly. “Hestia’s supplies. It’s the last of our food.”
“Is that … a pot of jam?” the faun asked carefully, in tones which suggested Robin had lost it completely.
“Glam-glam jam!” Robin said.
Woad grinned, snatching the jar. “Pinky, you may just turn out to be a genius,” he declared, unscrewing the top.
He sniffed
the contents delicately. “Yes, there’s definitely glam fruit in there somewhere … and orange peel and crushed strawberries, I think, but it might still work.”
“So what do we do? Eat it?” Robin asked. Woad shook his head.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “We smear it on our eyelids. It should clear the glamour from our vision.”
Robin dutifully held still as Woad smeared the clear jam gloopily onto his eyelids. It was an odd sensation, swift and light, and strangely familiar.
“Right,” the faun announced a moment later. “Open up.”
Robin opened his eyes. He looked at the flat wall in the shadowy recess in front of him expectantly. To his amazement, it wasn’t there anymore.
Robin stumbled inside, blinking rapidly. Once inside he wiped the jam from his eyes with his tattered sleeve.
“Ugh, this stuff is horrible,” he said.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Woad said, trailing behind with wet eyes. “Stop complaining.”
They found themselves in a ruin, gloomy after the brightness outside. There was rubble everywhere, toppled columns lying in wedges. A portion of the high roof had caved in at the far end. Slanted sunbeams poked through the shattered roof, falling on a raised dais thick with creeping vegetation and opportunistic flowers. Atop this, the centrepiece of the temple, there was a statue of a woman, carved from translucent alabaster. She had long flowing hair, frozen forever in stone. Her billowing robe flowed around her in artful curves so that her solid dress seemed always on the verge of motion. In one hand she held a carved spear, and the other a shield decorated with an emblem of a bird.
From her back sprouted four enormous wings, two spread wide and two seemingly caught in a downbeat.
“Who is that?” Robin asked in a hushed whisper.
“That’s Aeolia, daughter of Aeolus,” Woad said as they made their way carefully through the huge room.
He stopped suddenly. “Look!”
At the base of the statue lay a slumped figure on the floor, half-hidden by creeping vines. His clothes were ragged and dirty, his head bowed, unconscious. There was a manacle around his bare ankle fixed to the dais. The shackle looked like a very recent addition to the shrine.