Far beneath his feet the Maelstrom engines began to wind down and Kite's eardrums pinched with a sudden sharp air pressure change. He swallowed three times to chase the discomfort away, wishing all the while he could do the same with his fears.
“I don't think Fleer's this way, Ember,” Kite said, looking at the hatch they'd come to. The hatch was like the ones on the Phosphene and he was certain it led to the outer hull. “We should go back.”
Once again the Umbrella Man ignored him. The automechanical seized the wheel-lock and with one mighty twist it spun free and the hatch door seal sucked apart.
Retina-burning light poured in. Kite shielded his eyes, while a discordant noise, like a thousand turbines all beating out of a sync, rushed at his ears mangled with alarms and urgent announcements.
The Umbrella Man pointed eagerly.
“Didn't you hear me?” Kite said, squinting. “We have to Fleer first.”
But the Umbrella Man's new mistress was cruel and impatient. Out there was the Cloud Room. Nothing was going to hinder Ember's mission now. The Umbrella Man seized Kite's arm and shoved him painfully through the hatch and into the blinding light.
For a moment Kite couldn't see a thing. He blinked furiously, chasing away the white and silver blobs in his eyes. And slowly he began to focus on thousands of hexagons shimmering with an intense glow. A great dome, arcing over a perfect ocean of ivory clouds.
How high was he? Leagues and leagues above the Undercloud that's for sure. Higher than any Askian or scavvy had been before. But that boast that gave him little comfort. Moored next to the Vorticity were the aft sections of three mighty Cloudguard ascenders, all lined up like silver cliffs with sterns extended over the sea of clouds.
Kite took a step forward, but the stupid rubber shoe slipped on the slush covering the gantry. He reached for the rail to steady himself and immediately snatched his hand away. The metal burned, cold as...
...Cold as ice and dry as fire.
There was only one place Kite could think of this far above the world. He'd seen it once on a flickering screen in Shelvocke's dingy cabin. Even then the sight of it had stolen his breath. The weather machine - the Ether Shield.
And somewhere down there, beneath the perfect clouds lay Fairweather. A deathly chill crawled across Kite’s skin. He dug the mempod from the boiler suit pocket, its soft pulse warming his palm. All he had to do was toss it over the rail. End this madness now. Why should he be the one to still carry this burden?
Klunch.
The Umbrella Man secured the hatch, buckling the metal frame around it like he was merrily crimping a pastry. The answer was there. Without Ember Kite was powerless. He'd never find his way back to Fleer alone.
The gantry shook as the Umbrella Man stamped over. Kite quickly hid the mempod. “Well, I hope you know they way, Ember,” he said.
The Umbrella Man nodded stiffly and gave him an impatient shove. Kite let himself be ushered to the bow, negotiating the scaffold of gantries to a ladder that took them to the top deck where pools of melt-water sparkled in the white light. The climb had been mercifully short but the effort sapped at his energy. The air was thin. His muscles seemed frayed at the edges, like they were coming undone. Ember didn't seem to understand the limits of the human body. She kept urging him on, pushing and shoving him carelessly. And soon they reached the bow.
Kite took in the Ether Shield’s vast sky harbour. Cranes and hoists cluttered the wharf, swinging palettes of equipment and stores. Loading bays stacked with white shipping containers, all arranged in perfect rows, spread like a settlement to the foot of a cliff-high control tower. Uniformed crew and longshoremen scattered like coloured beads between them. It was a city itself.
A silver light flashed in his eyes.
A jangling clump of Weatheren soldiers were shuffling along the Vorticity's top deck toward them, sunlight reflecting off their immaculate armour and giving them away.
Without warning Kite was plucked off the deck and dropped on the Umbrella Man's back. He had barely enough time to lock his hands around the metal neck before the Umbrella Man broke into a lumbering run.
Kite clung on, his legs kicking the air. Each giant step a jaw-numbing shock. The dome see-sawed, blurring with rows of nodding harbour cranes beyond the bow rail. Panic bubbled in Kite's belly. The bow rail was getting closer and closer. And the while the Umbrella Man's stride was growing longer and longer. He wasn't going to stop. Kite tightened his grip and hoped Ember knew what she was doing.
With a pneumatic crunch the Umbrella Man sprang over the rail. For a moment Kite was weightless. Then his stomach lurched and he was falling, cool air rushing by his ears.
Krang! The Umbrella Man landed on a harbour crane's narrow boom. The jolt unlocked Kite's fingers and slid sideways but the Umbrella Man caught him and hoisted him on his back once more. Kite glanced down and immediately wished he hadn't. A hundred feet, maybe more. Down to the wharf, in the shadow of the Vorticity's anvil bow, where the harbour workers gawked and dozens of armoured Weatherens had been mobilised.
Kite swore loudly. He trusted Ember, he had no choice, but he didn't see how she could possibly fight a whole army. Even with the Umbrella Man at her command.
Then they were moving again. This time Kite was ready. He knotted his arms and dug in with his knees, but riding the Umbrella Man was worse than flying a stormwing in a crosswind. Arms out like a demented acrobat the Umbrella Man inched along the boom. Guy lines twanged under their combined weight. Then the Umbrella Man nimbly jumped to the crane's cabin and clambered down its supports, descending to rows of containers branded with the Foundation’s watchful eye.
Kite watched the Weatheren army tracking their descent. Among them he spied the Corrector. She’d gotten her sharp voice back and was putting it to use, barking out commands, ordering her men to keep their distance.
Don't target Beaufort.
Don't use shockguns.
Kite guessed her strategy. The Corrector wanted Ember. She didn't want to risk damaging the mempod with an electrical charge. Despite everything she still planned to take it for herself.
Another weightless plunge and a jaw-crunching landing and they slammed onto the containers. Kite held on for dear life. He had a giddy flashback to that last day in Dusthaven, chased across the container tops. Only this time instead of fleeing from him he had the Umbrella Man on his side. Then as now the Umbrella Man didn't stop. He’d set his sights on a gigantic tunnel, one leading off into the bowels of the weather machine.
Suddenly an ear-thumping siren shattered the air. Warning lights spun wildly, dousing the harbour in amber light. Kite realised what was happening.
“Ember, the doors!” he said, pointing.
From the tunnel walls huge blast doors began to shunt together. At the last container the Umbrella Man dropped to the deck, thumping down in front of a wall of armed Weatheren soldiers.
“Beaufort, stop!” the Corrector said, hobbling to the front of her men.
The Umbrella Man halted.
Kite began to panic. Had some deep part of the automechanical's brain, a part where Ember hadn't penetrated, recognised the Corrector's voice?
“Get a grip, Ember,” Kite whispered.
Slowly the Umbrella Man straightened his back. Kite's arms took the strain. Then, when he couldn't hold on any longer, he let himself and drop and hid behind the Umbrella Man.
The Corrector stepped closer. The Umbrella Man didn't react.
“Beaufort, you must come with me,” the Corrector said hoarsely, holding out a shaking hand. As she spoke Kite realised she wasn’t talking to Beaufort…she was talking to Ember. “That place you are seeking...you know the one...I can take you there...I know what you want...just come with me...”
Kite glanced at the blast doors sliding closer together. Soon they’d be sealed inside, at the mercy of the soldiers eagerly waiting for the order to shock him to death.
“Snap out of it, Ember!” Kite said. “The doors remember?�
��
The Umbrella Man let out an indignant snort. He bent his knees and charged, slashing the umbrella like a sabre, and Kite ran with him. Giving desperate squeak the Corrector leapt out of their way while the Weatheren soldiers scattered. But one of them panicked and let fly with a bolt. It exploded against the containers, spitting blue fire in all directions. Kite covered his head and stumbled though the smoke and stink of mosfire.
“Cease fire, you morons!” hollered the Corrector, waving her men back. “We'll trap them in the tunnels.”
The blast doors had almost closed. The huge metal teeth were grinding together. The Umbrella Man nudged Kite aside and wedged the umbrella in the gap and with his enormous strength prized the teeth apart, enough for Kite to dash through and into the tunnel beyond.
The Umbrella Man widened the gap further and tried to squeeze himself through. First a spindly leg, then a spindly arm. But all the while the pistons in the walls were whistling with tons of pressure building behind them and the umbrella was starting to rattle and bend.
“Hurry, Ember!” Kite said, pulling on the Umbrella Man's arm.
With a snap the umbrella burst free and scythed over Kite's head. The blast door's teeth crunched together, chomping on the Umbrella Man's leg, trapping him. But the Umbrella Man seemed more annoyed than in pain. He tugged furiously at the trapped limb, trying to wrench it free. Cables popped and fabric ripped and the mangled limb tore off below the knee, leaving a stump of twitching wires. The Umbrella Man hopped madly on his one leg, gyroscopes all unbalanced and fell pathetically against the blast doors.
Kite couldn't help but feel sorry for the crippled machine. He hurried over to the warped umbrella and tried to lift it but the thing weighed a ton so he had to dragged it instead.
“Use this, Ember,” Kite said, helping to wedge it under the Umbrella Man's arm.
Once again Ember was impatient to be on her way. But in her haste she misjudged the Umbrella Man's handicap and he toppled sideways again.
“One step at a time,” Kite said encouragingly, but wisely he kept his distance. “This way, come on.”
Thump-scrape.
One tentative step, then another.
Thump-scrape.
Lumbering off down the tunnel, bleeding black oil all over the deck, the Umbrella Man began to move. Kite didn't know how long the thing was going to last in that shape. Long enough, he hoped, to find a way out of this metal maze and back to Fleer Nightborn.
60
Into Darkness
Thump-scrape.
Kite ran alongside the hobbling Umbrella Man, both driven on by Ember's compulsion to find the Cloud Room. The tunnel seemed to stretch for leagues. Intersections and passageways in all directions. All blocked by armoured shutters. Every now and then Kite passed doors sealed with keypads. But Ember didn't pay them any attention. And all Kite could do was follow.
Thump-scrape.
Occasionally they passed stranded workers, men in overalls and hard hats, trapped in the lock down. Thankfully no soldiers had been left amongst them and none of the men dared to challenge him with the Umbrella Man present. A wise decision. Even crippled the Umbrella Man could pulverise their bones. And Kite had seen enough Weatheren blood to last him an age.
The tunnels stretched on and on. Kite couldn't even begin to guess the scale of the weather machine. But the noise of it terrified him. It vibrated under his feet and droned through the tunnel walls. Turbines and pumps and venting gasses, all thumping and hissing together like a dying beast struggling to breathe. Something this vast had to have a mind. A mind more powerful than any fulgurtine or ascender. A clever computer to regulate the systems and keep its place in the sky. And the more Kite thought on that the more it made him nervous.
Thump-scrape. Thump -
The Umbrella Man halted by one of the locked doors. A door much the same as the others, lying between two sealed off passageways. There was a keypad on the wall beneath a strobing red light.
“Is the Cloud Room in there?” Kite asked, doubtfully.
In response the red light turned amber. One by one bolts slid back inside the wall. The Umbrella Man went first and Kite followed, finding himself in narrow metal stairwell leading into the guts of the weather machine. Kite covered his nose. The chemical-laced air stank like sharply of hot salt and acid. A sickening mix that reminded him of a dry morning in the Thirsty Sea.
They pressed on. Soon coming to a forest of fat pipes and twisting ducts bubbled with foul liquids, filling vast silver silos, each one labelled with death's head hazard signs. Kite could only guess what the contents of those vats were used for. Chasing away clouds? Creating rain? Or maybe they were being pumped into the Undercloud after all.
The Umbrella Man missed a step and sprawled noisily on the gantry. Kite kept his distance, not wanting to be cut in half by a flailing arm. Ember dragged the sluggish, ruined thing up and relentlessly drove him on. Kite couldn’t help but feel sorry for the Umbrella Man. His wound was still leaking oil, leaving a silver trail in the dark. His inner workings clicking miserably with each laboured step. Kite reckoned the poor machine wasn't going to last much longer at this rate. And what would happen when he failed altogether? Would Kite have to carry the mempod on alone?
Down another level. Always down, Kite noticed. Each blind step taking him further from Fleer. Sometimes he'd catch a glimpse of her face, in that place where the edges of his imagination blurred with the shadows. Then his veins would flood with all kinds of emotions. More than once he'd considered doubling back, leaving Ember to go on alone. But how far would he get without Ember's puppet to protect him? However uncertain he knew he had to go on.
Kite was deep inside the Ether Shield now. The infernal noise of turbines had receded, replaced by the cold hush of long-dead machines. Parts of this section seemed salvaged from another time. Patchworks of riveted steel instead of machined skymetal. Low-voltage light-bulbs instead of mosfire strip lights. Silent engines, succumb to corrosion and dust, once driven by cogs and clockwork.
Kite frowned, realising these old machines must have been part of the original weather machine. The one the Foundation had put in the sky during the Fairweather-Skyzarke War. The one they'd built from the knowledge Mercurius Lux had stolen from the Patriarchs. No wonder Ember had guided him here. Kite imagined the Cloud Room like a flickering beacon in the dark, tormenting Ember, forcing the Umbrella Man ever onward.
At the end of a long, narrow passageway they came to a dark door. The frame had been welded and reinforced with inch-thick crossbars. There was no keypad or warning light. No wheel-lock. Not even an a simple keyhole. Whoever had ordered it sealed had never meant for it be opened again.
“There must be another way, Ember,” Kite said, looking back down the passageway.
The Umbrella Man remained still, his innards tick-ticking in the silent shadows like a barometer of Ember's rising frustration. Then the Umbrella Man shoved Kite aside and hurled himself at the door, smashing his body against it. Kite covered his ears, flinching at each thunderous blow. Surely the Weatherens would hear them now. They could probably hear the racket in Dusthaven.
The Umbrella Man tore at the door. Metal ground on metal. With one last blow the welds burst and the door fell away, landing with a heavy crunch. Dust settled and through the breach stood the silhouette of a giant.
Kite froze, unsure if this was some new enemy. But the giant didn't move, not even an inch.
Eventually the Umbrella Man snorted dismissively and moved forward, dragging his broken lopsided body. Kite paused then cautiously followed. The giant was an ugly marble statue set in the middle of a deep alcove. The old door had been hidden at its back, plastered over and long forgotten.
Kite gave the statue a short look. A sour-faced Weatheren carved out of luxurious marble, clutching a book and a lightning bolt, looking imperious and self-important. Kite sneered. Even made of fancy stone they looked like a bunch of fools.
The Umbrella Man had stopped, seeming
ly lost in thought. Ember had made a right mess of him. His smart coat had been reduced to rags and bits of mangled metal jutted out of the rips. His mask had been warped down one side, giving him a melted, forlorn look. Kite pitied him, even now.
Cautiously, Kite leaned out from the shadowy alcove. He couldn't believe his own eyes. Crimson carpet stretched in all directions like a tide of blood. Dozens of alcoves, more statues sitting or standing or otherwise posed inside. Indignant stone faces stared at him from the hollows, with marble flesh flickering in the glow from mosfire sconces. And above it all was an endless blue sky, with fluff ball clouds and swarms of little winged babies carrying sunbeams.
“Is this is it, Ember?” Kite asked. “Is this the Cloud Room?”
The Umbrella Man stared at the painted sky. Kite had no way of knowing what was going on behind that broken mask. But it wasn't hard to imagine Ember lost in her memories.
A soft clatter.
Kite spun around. An old man in a white robe cowered by one of the columns, a pile of fallen papers scattered at his feet. He had two faded blue spots on his bald scalp and milky, squinting eyes. But he looked harmless enough. In fact he looked terrified.
“A G-Grey?” the old man stammered, his liver-spotted hands starting to shake. “Here?”
Kite raised his hands in a calming gesture. He could hardly blame the old fool for being frightened. An Askian prisoner and a bashed-up automechanical in a crooked high-hat - they must have looked like they'd flown in from another world.
The old man squealed and hitched up his robe. He fled across the hall, his cries echoing in the hollows. Kite swore and dashed after him, hoping to stop him raising the alarm. But the old man fled into a white corridor, his cries drawing out more of his kind from offices and private rooms.
The Immortal Storm (Sky Chaser Book 1) Page 24