‘Hang in there,’ she whispered. Then she half-laughed, unsure which version of herself she was talking to. ‘Hang in there, Shilly. It can't be all bad.’
She almost believed it until, with a sound like a thousand candles all going out at once, the charm's golden fire suddenly died and she was plunged into darkness.
The first thing Kail saw when he opened his eyes was the small pouch he normally wore around his neck. It was lying two metres away from him in the snow, barely visible in the darkness. He didn't know where he was or how he had got there, but he knew the pouch was in the wrong spot. He needed to put it back around his neck, where it belonged.
He lay on his side in the snow. Cold had seeped into his bones, making energy hard to muster. He lifted his head, then tentatively stretched out his right arm; his feet kicked out, moving him forward a little, then retracted and kicked again. He moved thus, in tiny increments, until his gloved fingers touched the pouch, gripped it, and pulled it close.
Relief flooded through him. Nothing seems to be broken, he thought, then wondered why he had thought there might be. Questions about what he was doing lying in the snow reared up again. Lying in the snow and worrying about cracked bones and skull.
He sat up in several painful stages and slipped the pouch's thong over his head. It caught in his pack, which he found he was still wearing. His hat was missing. A length of rope hung from his belt. He reeled it in and discovered that the far end was frayed. Something was on the verge of coming to him. He could feel it nudging at his conscious mind, trying to get his attention.
Something about falling…?
‘Are you all right?’ a woman asked him. She stood less than three metres from him, but he hadn't heard her approach. He hadn't, in fact, even noticed his surroundings beyond the pouch. He appeared to be tucked into a sheltered niche at the intersection of two near-vertical snowdrifts. To his right, a steep slope led up from the bottom of the niche into darkness. Above him was nothing but the black night sky. There were no stars. For a moment he wondered if he was back under the Hanging Mountains.
‘Did you hear me?’ The woman came a step closer. He struggled to focus on her, aware that he was shivering much more than seemed healthy. Her face was partly hidden behind a deep hood. Her black robe looked decidedly out of place against the crisp white snow.
‘I heard you,’ he said. ‘I just didn't know how to answer your question.’
‘Fair enough, I guess.’ She took another step. ‘Let's take one thing at a time, then, and see where we end up. Do you need help standing?’
He could see the sense in moving, even if his bones cursed the idea. Sitting in the snow much longer would only see him dead, sooner rather than later. He had to get up.
He got one leg under him, then, with her help, the other. His head ached and spun, but he did manage to stay on his feet.
‘You're taller than you looked,’ she said, edging away.
He resisted the impulse to say that she was shorter than she looked. ‘The only way I could hurt you would be by falling on you.’
‘What are you doing out here? You don't look like one of the Ice Eaters.’
‘The who?’
She smiled faintly. ‘I guess you're not one of them, then. You must be with the others.’
He rubbed his temple in puzzlement. Slowly the veils were parting. ‘I think—I think I fell.’
‘Not from the balloon. You weren't aboard when we left the tower.’
‘No. I was climbing, then flying. We took a short cut past the Old Ones. There was a bright light. I woke up here.’ He clutched the pouch tightly in his right hand.
Her face had become very serious. ‘So, Tatenen is sticking his nose in again, huh? That probably means Pukje is lurking about somewhere.’
‘Pukje?’ The name triggered a whole chain of memories. ‘Yes, Pukje. We were riding him up into the mountains. He took us to Tatenen. He had a plan.’
‘He always does. That's the one thing about him you can be sure of.’
He frowned at her. ‘How do you know who Pukje is?’
‘I never exchange stories with someone whose name I don't know.’
‘Habryn Kail,’ he said, taking off a glove and holding out his hand.
She took and shook it. ‘Call me Ellis. Your fingers are freezing. I think you've been out here a little too long for your own good. We should get you to shelter.’
‘What about you?’
‘Oh, I'm fine. This robe is much heavier than you'd guess.’ She put an arm around his waist and took some of his weight. ‘Come on. I know somewhere you can rest for a while, get your strength back. It's not far, but we need to get moving before you freeze solid.’
He didn't have the strength to argue, even though all he wanted to do was lie down again and go to sleep. His gait was little more than a shuffle at first, but slowly, painfully, his muscles began to work. Every joint ached, and he became aware of a throbbing in his neck and back that hadn't been there before. But at least he could still move.
‘I think I'm lucky to be alive,’ he said as they followed the niche into a ravine that had been completely invisible from his supine position. Its walls grew steeper and closer together until there was barely enough room for the two of them to stand side by side. ‘We were pretty high when I fell.’
‘Did Pukje throw you?’
‘No. There was an explosion of some sort out over the lake, then a terrible wind.’
She nodded. ‘That would be Gabra'il trying to get out of the Tomb. He'll have to be cleverer than that if he ever hopes to succeed.’ When he looked askance at her, she dodged the unspoken question. ‘It doesn't matter. Just keep walking.’
Something she had said earlier came back to him. ‘You were on the balloon?’
‘Yes.’
‘With Marmion?’ He wondered then if she was from Milang, one of the Guardian's ministers who had come along for the ride.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He was busy elsewhere.’
Kail frowned, remembering the fragmentary communication Sal had received from Skender as they had left Tatenen. Something about an attack. ‘Where is he now? What happened to the balloon?’
‘Save your strength, Habryn Kail. You'll find out soon enough.’
A suspicion began to nag at him, but he kept it unspoken. Soon enough indeed, he told himself. If she had wanted to kill or overpower him, she could have easily done so earlier, before he was moving.
The ravine became little more than a crack slicing into the side of the mountains. When it was too dark to see, the woman called Ellis produced a mirror from under her robe and shone its light ahead of them.
The ravine plunged downward for twenty metres, and Kail was forced to concentrate on the icy and treacherous rocks beneath his feet. By the mirrorlight, he could see the tracks of the woman's original ascent, and no others. She had clearly come this way alone, but for what reason? What could possibly bring her back to such an isolated, forbidding place?
He found the answer to the question around a slight bend in the ravine. It widened and became an icy hall whose walls glittered and gleamed in the mirrorlight. Skender stalactites hung down from vast buttresses that reached in graceful curves up to a distant ceiling of solid ice. A ragged hole had been torn through that ceiling, and as his eyes adjusted to the new scenery he saw a black scar stretching down one wall. What lay at the base of the scar was hidden for the moment behind a mound of old ice and fresh snow. Only as Ellis led him along the base of the ravine and around the mound did it come into view.
The wreckage of the balloon lay nose down on the floor of the ravine. Nearby lay the gondola, tipped on one side and in only slightly better repair. Uncontrolled chimerical discharge had burned large sections of both gasbag and gondola to ash, exposing the skeletal structure beneath. They were crumpled and bent like the wings of a crushed moth.
On sight of it, his heart froze in midbeat. Without thinking, he shrugged free of Ellis and ran forward to check the go
ndola. Its interior was blistered and burnt, but not completely destroyed. The rear was relatively intact and might have provided shelter for anyone still aboard. Snow already dusted parts of the wreckage, indicating that it had been there for some time.
The bodies he had feared to find were absent.
‘You can shelter here,’ said Ellis. ‘It should be safe enough, now. I'll go find the others and—’
He didn't give her the chance to finish that sentence. In two paces, he had her in a headlock. With the advantage of height and mass, he overpowered her as easily as he would a child.
‘Who are you? What have you done?’
She squirmed. ‘—choking—me—’
He eased his grip, but only slightly. ‘I'll do worse than that if you don't answer my questions.’
‘I already told you who I am. Ellis Quick. I didn't do anything.’
‘I think you're lying. Did you steal the balloon? Did you crash it?’
‘Of course not. It was going to crash whether I wanted it to or not, smacked out of the sky by the same thing that brought you down. I didn't kill your friends.’
He tightened his grip. ‘Are they dead?’
She squirmed like a fish on the deck of a boat.
‘Are they dead?’
Her head wrenched from side to side.
‘For your sake, I hope not.’
He let her go and pushed her off balance. She fell to the ground and coughed violently, clutching her throat. He stood over her, feeling feverish with anger and worry.
‘You're going to tell me everything,’ he said, ‘or—’
It was his turn to be surprised. With one swift, efficient move, she kicked his legs from under him. He went down with a startled sound and somehow found his arm twisted up behind his back and his face pressed into the snow. Ellis's left knee came down hard on his back, pushing him deeper. Cold powder went up his nose and down his throat, and started to choke him. His body convulsed, to no effect.
‘Lie still, you big bully,’ she hissed into his ear. ‘I already told you I didn't do anything. If you can bring yourself to believe that, I'll let you go. If not, I'll have to knock you out again and leave you here—and I don't think you'll survive another stint in the cold, even with the wreckage to shelter you.’
Humiliated and weakened, he let himself go limp.
‘Now I'm only going to say this once. I'm not your enemy. I'm an ordinary woman. I just know a few things, that's all, and if you listen to me you might learn something important. I didn't crash the balloon but I knew it was going to crash, and I was able to guide it to where it needed to be. I knew roughly where to find you, you see, even though I didn't know who or what you were, and I knew you'd need me—just like I knew what Shilly was trying to do back in the tower, and why she had to be stopped. It all folds together if you look at it just the right way. One thing leads to another. If we follow exactly the right path we'll end up at a safe place. If we don't, well, the big bad wolf is waiting. And neither of us, I think, wants to be eaten.’
She eased the pressure, and his head came up out of the snow.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me how to find the twins.’
His face was numb. He couldn't tell if the moisture on his cheeks was from tears or melted ice. ‘I don't know where they are. They should have been with Marmion, in the balloon.’
‘They weren't. It was just Shilly and Tom and the King.’
‘And you.’
‘And me, yes. We've already covered that. Back to my question, please. I didn't ask you where the twins were. I asked how I can find them.’
‘I guess they'll be where Marmion is. Why don't you know? I thought you knew everything.’
‘Not where they're concerned. They're unpredictable, two lives in one, with world-lines so knotted and tangled only they can separate them. Besides it's much harder to unpick the threads out here in the thick of it all. In Sheol, it would've been easy, but I couldn't have done anything. I would have been an observer, like my so-called sisters.’
She stopped talking as though bringing herself into check. He didn't prompt her to continue, figuring she'd do so when she was ready.
The crash site was silent for a moment, apart from the dripping of melted water.
‘I know what you carry around your neck,’ she said in a very different tone. ‘You mustn't lose it, no matter what happens.’
Then her weight came off him, and she was running lightly across the snow, back into the gloom of the ravine, her robe flapping in her wake. He went to sit up, thinking to follow her, but the pain in his back and neck was worse than ever. By the time he opened his pack and got his mirrorlight out, she would be long gone. Only her tracks would remain.
He rose, groaning, to his feet. Some parts of the wreckage were still glowing, and he could see well enough by their light to find his way closer to the site of the accident. His intention wasn't to rest, as the mysterious Ellis had suggested, but to look for something he had only glimpsed earlier.
The woman's tracks were visible, and others, too, as he had thought. Many sets of feet had tramped over the disturbed snow: more than just the four he should have found: Shilly, Tom, Vehofnehu, and the mysterious Ellis Quick.
She had said that there were only three others in the balloon apart from her, so either she was lying or more people had visited the site since the crash. His priority was to find Shilly, not follow strange women around the lake in pursuit of the truth, so he chose to presume the latter option and follow the tracks to their conclusion.
When he was ready, he told himself. First, he needed to gather both his thoughts and his strength. The encounter with Ellis had profoundly disturbed him, even more so than falling from Pukje's back. He had a lot to process.
I know what you carry around your neck. You mustn't lose it, no matter what happens.
Kail didn't think she was referring to the letter from Vania, the lover he had left long ago and so very far away.
As he lowered himself gently onto a portion of the wrecked gondola that looked likely to hold his weight, a voice spoke out of the red-tinged darkness at his feet.
‘You will not find that position comfortable.’
He literally jumped, then put a calming hand to his chest. He knew that voice. ‘Mawson, you very nearly killed me.’
‘You very nearly sat on me.’
‘And that wouldn't have been dignified for either of us. I apologise.’ Kail pulled at the wreckage and uncovered the stone bust that had at one time been Sal's family heirloom. He was lying on his side, half buried in snow. With a wrench, Kail managed to prop him upright. ‘What are you doing here? No, don't tell me. I can guess. You were on the balloon when it crashed. Ellis and the others mustn't have noticed you.’
‘The Goddess,’ Mawson corrected him.
‘What about her?’
‘The being you speak of is usually referred to that way.’
‘What being?’
‘You used the name “Ellis”. That is not her real name, although she went by it for a time. She is properly called Nona and is, at this instant you call “the present”, the sole remaining Sister of the Flame.’
‘The Goddess was on the balloon when it crashed?’
‘Yes.’
An indefinable sensation swept up Kail's spine, part disbelief, part fear, part wonder, part sheer terror. He didn't for a second consider that Mawson might be joking. Man'kin weren't known for their sense of humour.
He looked around for somewhere to sit. All the strength had gone out of his legs. ‘The Goddess was talking to me, and I tried to strangle her.’ He felt faint. ‘She probably could've stopped me at any time. Why didn't she just tell me outright as soon as I touched her?’
‘She didn't lie to you. She is a woman with extraordinary capacities. But away from the Flame many of those capacities are closed to her. She must rely on other skills.’
He was reassured to know that he had been felled by someone with superior ‘capacities’,
but there was very little other comfort to be found.
‘What was she doing here?’ he asked his stone companion. ‘What does she want with the twins?’
‘I do not know, Habryn Kail.’ Mawson looked uncharacteristically forlorn. ‘It pains me to say so. I am at the juncture my kind has feared for so long. The future is clouded. I am unstuck in time.’
‘And I'm stuck in space.’ Kail looked around the ravine, seeking the other way out. The second set of tracks led deeper into the mountains, away from Ellis and the lake—and, presumably, the rest of his people.
When he looked up he could see nothing but darkness in the sky. He had no idea what time it was, but dawn seemed a very long way off.
‘I think I'm going to have to leave you here,’ he told the man'kin. ‘I'm sorry about that, because no one's likely to see this wreck from the air. But you're too heavy for me to carry, and I'll need to get moving soon. Those Ice Eaters the Goddess talked about might come back.’
‘I do not fear being alone.’
‘Well, good.’ Kail reached across and patted the bust on its head. ‘Even so, I'll come back to get you just as soon as this mess is sorted out.’
‘I fear that it will never be.’
Kail leaned back and watched Mawson for a long time. He had never heard a man'kin speak of fear before. Fear assumed a degree of uncertainty over what might come next. If the man'kin truly didn't know, anything at all could happen.
They said nothing as the wreckage continued to cool, ticking faintly to itself like a giant and very peculiar bug. When Kail supposed that he was as rested as he was likely to be that night, he put on his pack and set out after Shilly.
The knife at her throat was made of bone but it felt as sharp as steel. That single thought occupied Shilly's attention with a single-mindedness for which she was perversely grateful. If she was afraid, she couldn't cry, she couldn't wonder what might have been and she couldn't berate herself for failing so badly and letting everyone down.
The Devoured Earth Page 17