Fascinated, he quickly doused the engine and stepped forward to peer more closely through the spray-shield windows.
Where more glints now twinkled in the distance, Phaylan could just make out a number of shapes, all picked out by the dying sunlight. They looked like fingers jutting up above the mountain range, all afire for a short while before the sun’s setting finally doused them, but Phaylan had seen enough.
He knew those shapes, knew them from the engers’ drawings, the ones faithfully captured from the lofty vantage of the floating balloon.
30 A Byte or Two
She would have loved to have stood outside and watched the sunrise over the mountain ahead, but Prescinda had been denied that pleasure. It would, she knew, have helped her decide. Better so than sitting, sipping tea at the table.
If they really did have to walk back from beyond Leiyatel’s gaze, through foul air, then she would likely face Sconner’s fate. She knew that now. She’d never met the man but the look on Falmeard and Nephril’s faces when they’d touched on his fate as a warning had said more than enough.
“Damn the climb,” she hissed, making Falmeard turn from his washing up, one of their breakfast dishes dripping soapy water to the floor from where he held it in his hand. Damn Falmeard and his lack of foresight, she now thought, but soon realised the unkindness. He hadn’t known. “If only...” but then her eyes widened as their stare met Falmeard’s own.
“You all right, Sis?” he asked, making Nephril look up from his book.
Prescinda’s eyes had narrowed. “You said we’d used more than you’d planned for. More naphtha?”
“Err, yes, I did. We have, but I never thought we’d...”
“Because of the extra effort it set the engine to, I think you said, and ... and the thinning air making it have to work harder?”
“Yes. You see, the mixture has to be richer to...”
She lifted a finger. “So, if I understand it right, the engine’s suffered like we would, you know, when we climb a hill. We’re more out of puff at the top than ... well, than we are when we get back down to the bottom.”
Falmeard was clearly thinking hard for he looked uncomfortable.
“Well?”
He rubbed the back of his head a few times and peered at the camper van floor, but then lifted his eyes to her. “Ah! Yes, I see what you mean. You’re right.”
“What be Prescinda right about, Falmeard?” Nephril asked, putting his book down.
Falmeard turned him a smile. “We’ve been blithely assuming we’d need the same amount of naphtha each way, haven’t we? But we won’t. Prescinda’s right.” He gave a short laugh. “We won’t need anywhere near the same amount going back down.”
“Ah, yes, indeed, I suppose not,” and Nephril too smiled.
“We’d certainly need the engine for the level bits, and maybe for getting us going on the slopes that aren’t that steep.”
“We are not sure yet, though,” Nephril said, “how far we still have to go for the city, but it would mean that we could afford to use more than half the naphtha getting there.”
Prescinda stood up. “I’ve decided. We carry on.” She’d said it so emphatically that both men knew it would be pointless arguing otherwise, and so they only nodded, grimly, and turned back to their washing up and reading.
Her decision had lifted a weight from her heart despite the remaining risks. A sense of victory and elation seemed to stir her, and at last, when she sat back down, she found herself relaxing, breathing more deeply. Something still niggled her, though.
“Nephril?”
“Hmm?”
“How does your weft and weave make the air so much sweeter in here?”
He glanced at Falmeard’s back, where he still stood facing the sink. When he didn’t react, Nephril firstly coughed and then explained how their weft and weave made them both a part of Leiyatel.
The Certain Power can never be made less than whole, he revealed. If something were to threaten that then Leiyatel would use her winnowing of Nature’s fundamental ways to bring good fortune, and by it keep herself whole. “It be her very nature, mine dear,” he said as he stared absently through one of the windows.
His voice softened, a little harder to hear. “The dust that our world be made of,” and he leant forward now, to lay a hand gently on hers, “doth normally pursue a course wholly determined by Nature’s own random chance. Leiyatel, however, has long been wrought to intervene. Whereas Nature would decree that both fair and foul dust be within this campervan, Leiyatel overturns such a decree.”
He looked satisfied, as though he’d brought forth great illumination.
“Just take me through that again, Nephril, if you would, but slowly this time.”
Falmeard clattered the last dish into its rack, turned and wiped his hands dry before saying, “To keep herself whole, Prescinda, Leiyatel needs to preserve the two of us, Nephril and I, or at least those bits of her currently woven within us. She’ll stop the air about us from containing the dangerous gases ... err, well, the dangerous bits of the air, or the foul dust as Nephril calls it. Do you follow?”
Prescinda nodded, but uncertainly.
“Instead of the air in here having the same largely bad mix as outside, Leiyatel will only let the good parts in. Do you see? The randomness removed? The dust winnowed?”
This time she nodded more vigorously as understanding finally dawned. She smiled. “So, that’s why we don’t have to seal the campervan, not seal it tight anyway.”
Nephril now smiled and lifted his papery hand from hers at last. “Thus be the way of Leiyatel, mine dear. Long has she winnowed Nature’s random choices to deliver only fair within her embrace, whilst losing the foul to the bowels of the earth beneath her.”
“Well,” Prescinda said without really thinking, “that doesn’t sound at all natural,” but blushed when she realised just what she’d said.
“’Tis Nature’s purpose to reduce all to chaos, Prescinda...”
“As entropy,” Falmeard meaninglessly added.
“...that be her only aim, and life’s own to thwart it. Leiyatel be but an instrument of life, an expression of that knowledge only life can carry, and with which it holds back the very end of all worlds.”
Prescinda stared into Nephril’s eyes for what seemed like an age before her brows lofted. “If you say so, Nephril. I’m sure you’re right. It doesn’t get us anywhere, though, now does it? Like ... to the city?”
“Ha, thou art right, as oft be the case.” Nephril pushed himself up from the table, returned the book to his robes but then slapped Falmeard on the back. “Time dost truly wait for no man, nor beast. Take off thy pinafore, Falmeard, and get thee to thy driving seat. We have a view to seek today, and a distance the better to judge.”
***
Come late afternoon, as the sun once more sank towards the distant sea and they’d climbed yet higher, shadow began to fill the valley’s shallower spread ahead. Earlier, the hazy view of Dica had slowly slipped from sight behind the valley’s southern slope, the absence weighing heavily on Prescinda. It had made her nervous, as though she could feel Leiyatel’s gaze now pass ineffectually above their heads.
The view ahead had contained little of any real interest; the glare of a clear blue-green sky darkening the valley’s tedious trough of dry, brown tints. The interest of each had long shrunk to the road alone, so Prescinda almost screamed when she realised there was something new to see, the greater part of which looked eerily familiar.
Falmeard must have seen it too for he yanked on the brake, bringing them to a halt. “Flippin’ ‘eck,” he marvelled, “eight skyscrapers, just like the drawing, but all in a circle,” although Nephril soon corrected him.
“Not eight, mine friend. Nay,” and he pointed, squinting. “Look thee closely, for sixteen they are. Eight close pairs in a ring, a ring of fingers indeed - a digital ring. Eight pairs upon a circle, upon a ring, round and round they go, binary, and fixed below. Eight pairs
, sixteen fingers, but all one serving the one. Sixteen bits to the word, one sixteenth of the whole, of the whole word below, at its centre.”
Falmeard stared hard at Nephril, hard and long but said nothing.
Prescinda on the other hand had no handicap of half remembered memories. “You what, Nephril? What are they?”
Clearly too overcome, Nephril didn’t answer, not immediately anyway, not whilst his gaze seemed so consumed. As though a powerful memory of his own hung before his mind, his words just couldn’t get past his lips, couldn’t even climb from his fast drying throat.
31 A Mountain’s Grasp
The dawn light, it seemed to Phaylan, had matured so quickly into bright morning sunshine that he fretted to be on their way. The towers he’d seen the previous evening no longer stood out. He could see them still, knowing where they were and if he squinted hard enough against the clear blue-green sky.
“What had the steward hoped for?” he wondered as he stared from the wheelhouse, a second cup of tea in his hand. “What gain did the guilds see in this venture?”
“Thee know what?” Dialwatcher said from behind him, abruptly turning Phaylan, the man’s approach a surprise. “I reckon it’s more than trade they’s after, more than t’chance to conjure up yet more useless fripperies.”
“Fripperies?”
Dialwatcher narrowed his eyes, his gaunt features drawn back as he came to stand beside Phaylan and from where he peered out at the mountains. “They may say they want to expand they’s market, but it’s summat else if thee ask me.”
It again struck Phaylan how much of the look of Storbanther there was about the man, but the fact they were having a conversation at all intrigued Phaylan more, never mind its content. “You had duties to Grunstaan in Nouwelm didn’t you, Master Dialwatcher? It must have been a wrench leaving it all behind when you came away with us?”
Dialwatcher didn’t at first answer, only peered harder at the distant towers, as though lost in thought. When he flicked his eyes briefly at Phaylan, their look guarded and unsure, his words almost seemed to fight their way past his lips. “I watched over Grunstaan, aye. It were mi purpose in life.”
“I was so young when I went there,” Phaylan said. “So green,” and he tried to recall the journey. “You’d been serving her a long time if I remember right. To be kept away from your own Certain Power when the pass closed behind us like it did must’ve been hard on you. I’m now old enough to understand just what you must have gone through.”
The phrase a stick of a man came back to Phaylan from those times. It had been a description Nephril had often used when referring to Storbanther, but that now also seemed appropriate for the man beside him.
This present stick of a man appeared to relax. “Thee’s from Galgaverre thesen so should understand better than most. Ripped t’meaning from m’life it did, aye, it did that. Hundred and forty four years of tending to her gauges, regular like, day in day out. Aye, t’were a wrench, and some.”
He grasped Phaylan’s wrist surprisingly strongly and drew near, his voice dropping. “Took mi ring, that Lord Nephril did. Without leave, mind. Threw it away into t’firey pit. Destroyed mi connection wi’ Grunstaan, as well thee saw thesen.”
Venom had entered his words, hissing and spitting, and a sparkle lit his normally pallid eyes. Yearning also lit them, a brief grasp of hope it seemed, before he let go Phaylan’s wrist and turned his gaze back to the mountains.
“Steward’s after bigger fish,” he said, levelly this time, “more than he lets on. Him and his engers ‘ave a purpose I reckon, beyond that o’ guilds.”
He looked surprised, perhaps at his own loose tongue. “Aye, well,” and the light in his eyes dimmed. Without a further word, he hurried to the hatch, squeezed past the first mate coming up from the mess, and vanished back down there himself.
“Steermaster, sir?”
“Aye, First Mate,” but Phaylan’s eyes still followed after the stick of a man.
“All’s well with the engine, and there’s still plenty of naphtha in the tank, sir.”
“And the crew? Are they all fit and well?”
“That they are, sir, at least as well as this foul place allows their spirits to be.”
“Good,” but Phaylan looked through the man for a moment until snorting a laugh. “Very well. Can we cast off then?”
“By your leave, sir.”
“By my leave, eh? Indeed. Very well, First Mate, press on. The less time we spend down here behind the mountains the better.”
Little at first changed as the engine enforced a leisurely progress north along the canal, its waters still crystal clear, the desert just as empty. Only when the sun had risen to its zenith behind them did Phaylan encounter a choice ahead. They drew nearer a branch of the canal, one that headed northeast.
He called for Breadgrinder, who squeezed himself from the mess with some difficulty. He seemed groggy, as though he’d been asleep. By the time he came beside Phaylan they’d passed the branch, but evidence of ancient foundations could be seen along its banks.
“They look like they used to be the same kind of buildings we passed before reaching the cutting,” Breadgrinder said.
By now they were looking aft towards the starboard beam, watching the branch slip away behind. However, Phaylan noticed more foundations along their own bank, and yet more up ahead when he turned back that way.
When another branch appeared, with even more evidence of massive buildings, Phaylan said, “I reckon this place was once some kind of harbour or dock. A huge one, mind. Just look at the expanse coming up, and on the port bow too.”
Sure enough, more and more branches appeared, all as broad as the canal itself, some still with the ground floor walls of once stout buildings. They even spotted a shallow dome some way off, within the midst of what must have been an extensive dockland area.
The view remained largely the same for most of the afternoon, by which time they’d drawn noticeably closer to the mountains. The higher ground they’d seen from further south had long been lost from sight, hidden beyond the mountain range towards which the canal seemed unerringly bound.
Come evening, the mountains had begun to close in around the ketch, dark and forbidding. On the port beam, to the west, a steep ridge - as steeply sided - rose from the plain, reaching up northwards to the range it now partly obscured.
To the east, the mountain range itself slipped steadily down onto the plain, vanishing into its dust, far away to the southeast. Between the two - the close western rise and the start of the range’s south-eastern tumble - a curved wall of seemingly sheer mountainside reared oppressively before them.
It seemed impassable, and clearly barred the canal’s own way. All three - Phaylan, Breadgrinder and a now once more aloof Dialwatcher - had silently watched as the mountains closed their grasp about the ketch. Its journey’s end was clearly coming within sight, where the canal finally opened out into a large pool.
More buildings appeared to have survived the ravages of time here, as though they’d gained the shelter of the mountains, as though they’d huddled back against its enfolding rocky rise. It made the place more eerie, though, for the hollow shells of buildings rose like resurrected corpses from their dry desert graves.
Heads kept bobbing up from the mess room below, their quiet gasps the only sounds competing with the engine’s incessant but subdued chatter. A sense of being watched overpowered them, kept them each mute as serried stone bodies of a bygone age silently slipped by. Finally, when Phaylan doused its burners, the engine itself held its voice, leaving only the close and heavy press of that bleak and empty land.
When the hull slowly scraped along the quayside, it brought movement in the wheelhouse, but only Phaylan’s gentle nudge at the tiller to bring them carefully alongside. Even he had difficulty finding his voice.
“First Mate?” but he had to clear his throat and call again. A small commotion at the hatch finally freed the man, but the view kept his prescr
ibed rejoinder at bay. He stood with the others, still and quiet, and stared out through the windows.
Tightly packed on the steeply rising banks, hundreds of dusty, time-pocked properties stared one to the other, or out across the canal. Short and tall rubbed shoulders there, all wearing grey and lifeless expressions; worn down faces made wan by the desert’s scouring dust.
Above their roofs rose the Towering flanks of the mountainside; grey and naked, dirty brown and long-baked ochre, sometimes burnt dark as umber. Great folded seams swirled across them like the swell of a frozen sea, a long-trapped tempest, the breath of a storm in aspic. Buildings lapped at their feet, a once great city having long denied time the dust it was so clearly owed.
On the far eastern side, to starboard, where the slope down to the canal’s broad pool lessened and so allowed the buildings more space, the city’s testament fell foul of the mountain’s remove. Gradually, their more exposed stands diminished to weathered stumps and lonely gable walls.
“Shit,” Dialwatcher spat. “Still so far to go. I’d hoped we could’ve got a lot nearer than this, at least while we were still afloat.” When no one spoke, he added, “I just hope thems engers know what they’re about, and their craulena does what it’s supposed to.”
No one replied, all too enrapt.
He then spoke directly to Phaylan, his voice now more menacing. “And if we don’t find out pretty damned quick, young fella m’lad, then we’re likely to breath our last down ‘ere in this Leiyatel forsaken place. Does thee not remember then, eh, Steermaster Phaylan? Does thee not remember t’warning?”
And Phaylan did at last. “Do not fall to the close shadow of any mountain,” he recited from rote. “Do not remain where Leiyatel cannot gaze, nor spill her preserving embrace.” He slowly lifted his eyes to the sheer mountainside and wondered how in the blazes they were ever going to get the craulena all the way up there.
An Artist's Eye (Dica Series Book 5) Page 13