An Artist's Eye (Dica Series Book 5)

by Clive S. Johnson

  She remembered Falmeard’s comment. “I hope you’ve got a low enough gear in this thing,” she added, her mind more on Falmeard than the appraising look her words drew from Phaylan.

  “It’s not called the craulena for nothing,” he said, casting an enquiring look at Nephril who only smiled back. “We weren’t foolish enough to bring just any old naphtha-lorry,” but he seemed to regret saying it.

  He faced forward, staring out through the window. For a moment, the whole craulena seemed to hold its breath, both man and machine alike, until Phaylan called out, “Hold tight,” and stoked the engine hard.

  Despite the cacophony, once under way Prescinda reckoned a fast-running man could easily have outstripped them. Although slower than she’d expected, she knew nothing of the engine’s heavy flywheel, the very thing that gave the craulena its irresistible urge.

  When they hit the abrupt rise of the ridge, the craulena’s long arms flexed and screeched in protest, trying to keep the body above its fast-rising wheels. For a moment they failed, the carapace burying it nose deep into the scree, throwing up a great grey fan that momentarily darkened the view ahead.

  The noise was savage, the impact jarring, but the scree gave way enough to leave the craulena unbowed as it legs finally heaved its nose from the dirt.

  The soft wheels continued to scrabble against the loose surface, clawing their way up the slope. The craulena now faced the horizon of the ridge top, the severe angle pushing them back against their seats.

  The crew, less cossetted, slid to the rear amidst yelps and curses and clatter. Their flailing limbs failed to find purchase, leaving them in a bruised and far too intimate pile.

  Unperturbed, the large flywheel did its job. It kept the wheels decisive and unhurried, making the best use of their loose grip on the slope. They lifted the craulena surefootedly, eventually edging them almost clear of the uppermost block.

  Phaylan waited for the right moment to move across but the craulena seemed to gain a mind of its own. It slid that way itself but too soon, a rear wheel catching the corner of the block.

  The whole carriage shuddered as a tearing sound rent the air outside, but Phaylan ignored it. He won back control and drove the craulena faster up the firmer slope, up towards the dark underside of the overhanging road now directly above them.

  Prescinda heard the crew climbing back, clearly eager to witness their fate. Their language was rich, although no more so than a tavern full of fishermen.

  The harbour at Grayden came to mind; the smells, the warmth, the sound of the gulls. Why had she let Nephril drag her away again? she wondered, before her mind shifted to memories of Blisteraising Farm, of her small dark bedroom tight against the cliff.

  It wasn’t the cliff she saw but the darkening of the craulena’s windows. Prescinda stifled a cry, then noticed Phaylan again heaving on the controls, his shadowed face darkly intent, determined.

  Brightness flooded in and Prescinda squinted, barely seeing the offside wheel scrape against the underside of the overhanging road. They’d come out from beneath its dark and forbidding shadow, out under a clear emerald sky. Her ears now filled with the reinstated scrabble of soft leather on loose rock.

  The craulena began to jerk and bounce, as if fighting to hold on, finally dislodging a small yelp from Prescinda. She grabbed her seat and leant forward, nearer the windows.

  Against the tightness of a thumping heart, her fearful eyes caught sight of what now held them back. That same offside wheel clawed fruitlessly at a low wall at the very edge of the road above.

  “ALL CREW TO THE REAR, AT THE DOUBLE!” the steermaster yelled beside Prescinda’s ear, her other again hearing the scrape and slide of bodies fast retreating behind.

  Soon her stomach turned to jelly and her chest to a host of butterflies for the craulena had begun tilting back, away from the slope. It soon pointed skywards, where Prescinda noticed the glow of a pale and gibbous daytime moon.

  “Oh, Leiyatel,” she invoked, “preserve us all.”

  The craulena’s wheel lazily spun in mid-air, spitting out slivers of rock and dirt like a Catherine wheel, no longer slapping at the wall. The rear wheels, though, could now push them that little bit higher, and soon yet higher still. They teetered on the very edge of toppling back, balanced like a pin upon its point.

  “ALL CREW FOR’ARD!” this time smote Prescinda’s ear as the steermaster again cried out.

  It left her ear ringing but she could still hear the scuffle of climbing seamen, their shifting weight tilting the craulena back towards the slope. It slowly moved the moon out of view, leaving only the wheel visible, slowly lowering out of sight itself beyond the roadside wall.

  It felt like an age before it began to grab and slip and slither, before it found weight and grip enough to help pull them up. Everything then seemed to happen all at once.

  Prescinda was still holding firm to her seat when the craulena’s engine dropped to a burble, the view through the window now stationary and the right way up. She hardly remembered those lurching seconds; the kick as each wheel cleared the wall and the final settling rock as they came to a halt on the road.

  Phaylan had by now thrown his head back, his hands slowly sliding down his face to reveal a wide-eyed stare. His hands carried on until a bloodless mouth appeared, from which a long sigh escaped.

  “Well,” Nephril calmly said through an amiable smile, “it would seem thou didst chose well enough, Steermaster Phaylan. Clearly now a master of land as well as sea! What a rare Galgaverran thou hast turned out to be.”

  Prescinda, although too stunned to speak, had enough presence of mind to notice a glint rise in Nephril’s smiling eyes. Eyes she’d always thought too ancient to brim so full of fondly held memories.

  Perhaps it was only the flood of her own relief, fast sluicing through her, but she felt sure she saw poignancy there as well. The more she stared, however, the more convinced she became, enough to squeeze the beginnings of a smile from her own dry and tightly pressed lips.

  46 A Lasting Legacy

  There should have been jubilation but nerves were too fraught. Survival, or the contemplation of its failure, had proved to be a sobering affair. It left them all staring mutely through the craulena’s windows, each thankful in their own way.

  The view they looked out upon revealed a long and gentle arc of leaden wall. It ran away from them around the rim of the ridge to the west, on its long circumnavigation of what Falmeard had called a caldera.

  They’d not seen the wall from below, being so close in, for it sat well back from the inner edge of the ridge and rose little higher than two or three storeys. Prescinda knew it couldn’t go all the way round for Eastern Walk had come through no such wall, and then she remembered Falmeard and wondered how he was faring.

  She now noticed how the craulena sat at an angle across the last few yards of the road they’d so fearfully fought to gain. Its abrupt cessation and fearful drop lay to the craulena’s right, the dark entrance to a wide tunnel a little way off to the left.

  “It were coming out o’ t’dark into t’bright light that foxed Breadgrinder,” Dialwatcher startled her by saying. “In a bit of an ‘urry to escape t’darkness ‘e were, as though it rattled ‘im some.”

  He stared at where the road had once passed onto the long-defunct bridge. “Foolhardy haste, one that put us right in t’shit.”

  Phaylan finally stirred. “Best not dally I suppose,” he managed to say, blood clearly coming back to his face.

  “Remember t’debris we clipped on t’way through, though,” Dialwatcher said, and Phaylan nodded, stoked the engine and turned them towards the tunnel. Only now, as the wall’s eastern arc came into view to their left, did they feel the rhythmic slap of peeling leather, quite evidently coming from the damaged rear wheel.

  “Damn,” Phaylan cursed, by which time they were already entering the tunnel. “I’ll leave it until we’re back in the light and can have a proper look.”

  He’d ar
gued it couldn’t get much worse, not in the slow mile or so through the wall, but he’d been wrong. As they drew near the end of the tunnel, the wheel suddenly locked up, its driveshaft snapping.

  At the noise and the awful jarring, Phaylan yanked on the brake and brought them to a halt.

  “Hmm, maybe I should have stopped and had a look earlier,” he confessed, and was about to make a quick dash to do just that when Dialwatcher volunteered.

  The door slammed shut behind him and the craulena soon began to jerk and rock. Clearly Dialwatcher was busy trying to force something free.

  “I’ll go see if he needs a hand,” Phaylan was saying when Prescinda let out a scream.

  “There’s someone out there. Look. There,” and pointed. “It’s ... it’s a child! How, in Leiyatel’s name...”

  “Ah, yes, of course,” Phaylan said as he sat back down, “I forgot all about them.”

  “There is life here then,” Prescinda breathed, her eyes wide and staring.

  “Err, well, not quite.”

  She glance at him, a frown forming, but couldn’t long keep her gaze from the figure. It stood to one side of the road, just into the morning sunlight that streamed across the tunnel’s exit.

  Nephril also stared but his eyes were narrower, having listened more closely to what Phaylan had said. “Not quite?” he asked.

  Phaylan didn’t have a chance to answer for the child’s head jerked around and looked at them. At first Prescinda’s heart raced, then began to soften, threatening to melt. Something, though, in the way the black-eyed face jerked from side to side caressed the nape of her neck with icy fingers.

  The child stepped off the kerb and began walking towards the craulena, its long, stilted strides at odds with its childlike form.

  “Where’s Dialwatcher?” Phaylan hissed as he rose from his seat, but then the door jerked open and the man himself clambered back in.

  “There’s one o’ them there kids coming at us again,” he said then realised they already knew.

  “I need to pull us back,” Phaylan said, sitting back down.

  “Thee’s alright, I’ve cut a loose end of leather off so t’wheel should spin free. I’m not sure about t’driveshaft, though, so take it easy.”

  Phaylan did, cautiously reversing the craulena away from the approaching child. The long length of leather that Dialwatcher had removed came out from beneath them, lying in the middle of the road.

  When the child stopped to inspect it, Phaylan was relieved to be able to bring the craulena to a halt, given the poor visibility behind.

  The child’s head had angled down, rocking back and forth as though measuring. It bent and clamped the leather between its outstretched arms.

  “That bit o’ t’wheel were almost too heavy for me to lift,” Dialwatcher told them as they watched it very slowly being raised off the ground. Haltingly, the child turned around, then determinedly carried the leather back towards the bright world beyond the end of the tunnel.

  “Strong little blighters,” Dialwatcher said, “although,” and he watched the child more closely now, “I’m sure it’s slowing down,” and it was. It managed to make it to the last foot or so of the tunnel’s dark shadow before finally grinding to a halt, the heavy leather still held aloft.

  “Why’s it stopped?” Prescinda asked, but no-one knew, although Nephril quietly asked Phaylan to drive them nearer.

  The craulena came to within a few feet of the child, near enough for Nephril’s close scrutiny. Too near for Prescinda, though, already convinced that true life had never coursed through its lanky limbs.

  They faced the strange figure’s flat profile, now quite evidently unlike that of any flesh and blood child. What had appeared to be eyes from a distance were nothing more than sunken holes, but what lay within couldn’t be seen from the side.

  The look of its skin made Prescinda’s own creep, gave her fingertips that grubby, sticky feel of having touched a spider’s web. Somehow, its covering looked raw and exposed, but dry, almost papery, its dull lustre like the dried skin of a dead frog. Only its bald scalp looked alive, possessed of a satin sheen as deep and succulent as a peeled plum.

  “It be well scoured by dust,” Nephril mumbled as he squinted through the glass. “Well tattered and worn at the edges.”

  “Can we leave it be,” Prescinda urged, “and just get on? It’s creepy.”

  “Err. Yes. I suppose we must,” Nephril absently answered but remained peering intently through the window. “It be extremely intriguing, though, I must say, especially now the sunlight dost fall upon it. Hast thou noticed how the strong light makes its scalp so much darker, almost as though...” but he started away from the window. “It moved again.”

  The child’s head very slowly rotated until it stared in through the window, directly at Prescinda. Deep within the shaded holes that were its eyes, something silver glinted, flickered almost, as though behind them the spokes of a tiny wheel spun rapidly around.

  She yelped when the holes narrowed, and shrank back when the head cranked to one side, seeming to stare thoughtfully into her eyes. Although nothing else about it changed, she was sure it grinned, menacingly.

  The craulena growled like a ferocious dog but then lurched away in reverse as Phaylan told them to hold tight. “It’s turning towards us,” he added. “Don’t want our wheels being messed with again, not when we’ve only got three left to rely on.”

  Prescinda watched the child stagger after them, the leather debris still in its arms. However, when the craulena had gone about fifty yards, the child faltered and finally came to a halt once more. Its head then slowly scanned the space between them.

  Phaylan again brought them to a halt.

  “I do not think it can see us any longer,” Nephril said, watching the child turn back towards the morning light.

  They all stared after it, saw its strengthened pace carry it and its leather burden from the tunnel, out onto a sunlit pavement beyond. There, it stopped by a hole in the wall, at about its own shoulder-height. Into it, the child carefully fed its leather prize, a difficult task it appeared, although they couldn’t see why.

  Eventually the child turned, dusted its hands together and finally marched off, away from them along the pavement. Before long, it smartly turned into an alleyway and disappeared from view. Stunned silent, they stared after it until a movement drew their gazes back to the hole.

  Very, very slowly, the leather began to reappear, as though the hole were poking its tongue out. The tongue then lolled and snaked free before coiling itself contentedly onto the pavement below. And there it lay, likely forever, atop a small pile of other such disparate debris.

  Nephril burst out laughing, his eyes soon watering, his voice plainly beyond all marshalling.

  “What’s so damned funny then?” Prescinda demanded, but Nephril couldn’t speak, not until he’d wheezed and coughed away some of his humour.

  “Forgive me,” he managed, but then succumbed to giggling. At last he harrumphed and gathered his senses until a smirk threatened to spoil it all.

  “Come on, Lord Nephril,” Phaylan pleaded, “what’re we missing?”

  “Ah, forgive me, but it be such a rum thought.”

  “You’re beginning to annoy me. Do you know that, Nephril?” Prescinda warned, quickly bringing sobriety on its heels.

  “Ha. Very well, but dost thou not see? Dost thou not warm to the jest?”

  This time even Dialwatcher showed impatience. “Jest. What jest?”

  “Testament to life’s own noble pursuit, to its lofty ideals and self-importance, eh?” and Nephril chuckled. “A worthy lasting legacy to life’s presumptuous purpose. Dost thou not agree?”

  “What is?” Phaylan asked, but Prescinda had already jumped ahead.

  “Street sweepers,” she said as levelly as she could, before the irony truly hit her. “It seems the only thing life has left behind,” and now she tittered, “is an army of street sweepers. You know? To keep the place nice and
clean and tidy,” but by now she could hardly keep a straight face.

  She’d no chance once she let her eyes fall to Phaylan’s face and saw the look upon it.

  How long must it have been, she thought, since this place last heard such laughter, since its long parched air could steal such a wealth of wet tears?

  Too long by far, she realised, too damned long.

  Even then she still couldn’t stop laughing, especially not when Dialwatcher innocently answered, “And us of course, Dica and Nouwelm. There’s all of us an’ all.”

  But, she thought, will we prove to be of any more use? Well, will we, ultimately? Or are we just fooling ourselves, in our usual gullible way?

  47 Paltry Hopes of Privacy

  They took it gently now the craulena had only three working wheels, although the fourth seemed happy enough to hobble along. Their high position made a more direct descent from the ridge, south towards the ketch’s berth, much easier to find.

  The prospect also amazed Prescinda when she saw the vast spread of buildings that encrusted the mountainside. They raised a hope in her heart that her mind knew would never be fulfilled.

  The long main road, by which the craulena had first arrived at the ridge, now led them back down. It eventually became too steep and so veered away to the west, across the flank of the mountain range. Turning south again, it ran along the top of the ridge towards the gaping mouth of the tunnel that would soon swallow them, down to the docks.

  Before sliding from the noonday light, Prescinda stared out at what she’d been told would be her last high view of the empty desert below. She tried to imagine the lights of Eyesgarth, lights that had so clearly enthralled Falmeast all that time ago.

  She couldn’t see them, though, not the bright canyons, nor the spread of towering buildings. All stark, he’d said, beneath a night sky’s myriad stars. But then the darkness of the tunnel engulfed her.