For some reason Falmeard’s own face impinged, although how Prescinda had seen it - there, back behind the engine chest - she’d never know. His expression hadn’t altered but his eyes had. They’d clearly seen something beyond what the Cold Angel now saw, something to shock, something to raise rare mastery from unaccustomed compassion.
Geran had dropped to the ground as though her bones had blown away but the Bugatti too had vanished, although its roar hung on. A roar indeed, but a roar from much further back, from the far side of its previous wide arc. This time that roar gave out, as though spent of breath.
Prescinda realised her legs were still pushing her on, still pumping hard towards her sister’s prone body. She saw Geran lying crumpled on the ground, but also - out of the corner of her eye - the mass of metal fast slowing on its third but now final approach to the gate. She even saw Falmeard’s shock, somehow, despite the distance.
This time the Bugatti came to a gentle halt only a few feet from the sisters – once again together. Prescinda carefully lifted Geran’s head onto her own bended knee, lovingly stroking her hair until an eye opened and stared up.
It didn’t see Prescinda, only gazed at Falmeard now standing over them, confusion on his face but word’s crowding his lips. “I ... I know you,” he said, again lifting the hairs at the nape of Prescinda’s neck. “Know you, but not why I do.”
“It was a bloody good job you saw her, though, wasn’t it?” Prescinda growled before lowering her own lips to kiss Geran’s forehead. “You’d have run her down else,” but she knew she’d get no answer.
“Come on,” he said as he lowered a hand to them. “We need to get off before the Bugatti’s oily owner catches up with us.”
“What do you mean?” Prescinda asked.
“No time to explain I’m afraid, not without more meddling. Jump in quick.”
He dragged Prescinda up by the hand and together they got Geran standing, if somewhat unsteadily. They helped her to the Bugatti and settled her in the back seat.
“I’ll sit with her,” Prescinda said and climbed in.
This time at last, the frustrated contraption finally made it through the gate, but Falmeard quickly brought it to a stop.
“Which way?” he shouted back.
“Which way what?” Prescinda replied.
“To the Towers of the Four Seasons of course.”
“I don’t know! I’ve never been there, and Geran certainly won’t have.”
“What! Don’t tell me Drainspoiler’s the only one who knows.”
“Probably, and only you seem to know where he’s got to, and you’re obviously not saying.”
There was silence now, other than the burble of the Bugatti, until Geran’s small voice piped up, “But the towers are pretty noticeable aren’t they. You pointed them out to me from the coachbank, do you remember, Presci, you know, when we were leaving Uttagate?”
Prescinda did remember, although in common with most other Dicans, that had been the sum of her knowledge. How they could be reached, on the other hand, pushed her far into uncharted territory.
“Drainspoiler made it sound like they were somewhere above us didn’t you think,” Geran said, “maybe hidden behind the rise of the mountain? Perhaps if we just...”
“Leadernac obviously knew the way,” Falmeard interrupted, “despite me thinking it was his first time in Dica. I wonder if I can remember.”
The sisters again stared questioningly at each other, Geran repeating, “Leadernac?” Falmeard, though, only stirred the Bugatti to a roar, crunched the engine to the wheels and then turned right - to the south - as they lurched away from the gate.
When they got to the end of the flagged square, just before the next terrace of properties, a side road ran to the west alongside the college campus. It took them beyond and into the tight and convoluted ways of a long deserted district behind.
Despite a few occasions where they feared the Bugatti might not fit through, Falmeard seemed to find his way without any problems. They steadily climbed past ancient inns and cottages, old tithe barns and common halls, the Bugatti’s rumble dislodging dust and tiles and flaking render in its wake.
Eventually, Prescinda could turn and look back down the hill to the campus, the college and its grounds appearing neatly manicured at the distance and so far below them now. She saw the great west window rising up the height of the nave, beneath the green dome and its effigy of Leiyatel.
Somewhere to the north of them, the bare cliff face looked back towards the college, its carved eye staring at that upper landing where Prescinda and Falmeard had not long ago stood.
Whilst she tried to untangle what had happened there, Falmeard drove them up a final steep hill onto a vast terrace along which a broad road ran. Here, a dense, wooded expanse stretched away to a shallow dip before rising again to a brow above. On their own side, rusted gates lay almost as a stain across an entrance, before which Falmeard soon brought the Bugatti to a sputtering halt.
The sisters saw a broad smile break out across Falmeard’s face, the first in a very long time. “Banalata!” he enthused, a sparkle coming to his eyes. “The old lake. Ha! What a beautiful memory to have return.”
He stared at them with a hint of the old Falmeard trying to squeeze through. “Come on,” and off he went, lifting red dust from the rusted remains of the gates as he strode across them and down into the park, the sisters close behind.
They soon sank into cool shade, swallowed by a wall of trunk and bough. Surprisingly, the ground beneath their feet stayed clear and firm, little growing beneath the wood’s thick canopy. They steadily dropped towards a distant patch of light, the only sound the rustle of old, dry leaves beneath their hurried feet.
The growing glow ahead steadily pushed back the shadows, the air becoming suffused with the sweet, soft smell of water faintly splashing ahead. Prescinda caught sight of rippling sunlight and realised they had indeed come to Falmeard’s Banalata Lake.
Before long they came to its bank and here each stared into its cool, clear depths. They watched the silver flashes of small fish, the plumes of bubbles rising from its leaf-silted bottom, and water boatmen rowing their way across in their mercurial craft.
It was so tranquil Prescinda and Geran felt the need to lie down, to rest on its bank and here listen to the cascade’s soothing fall. Only Falmeard seemed alert, a salutary memory floating to the surface of his mind, although as vulnerable as a fly on an evening’s calm waters, but waters well-stocked with fish.
He led the sisters around the lake to a half-hidden path up the steep side of the cascade and here guided them to the start of a long and arduous climb. Slipping and sliding, they all pulled themselves away from the lake’s heavy air, up and up until they came out into the bright light of a vast flagged terrace.
Some half mile away on the far side stood four incomprehensibly enormous towers, each broad, smoothly tapered and surmounted by a huge crystal dome. Southernmost, the Spring Tower’s once citrus-tiled flanks were long-dulled to grimy ochre. Alongside it stood the Summer Tower, its original verdant brilliance now faded to sad jade. Next came the Autumn Tower, its carmine bricks blackened by age to dirty brown, rising beside which the northernmost Winter Tower still shone out its virgin white glory.
Before either sister could pull her startled gaze away, Falmeard had already stridden some way across the terrace towards the towers. He soon became little more than a hazy silhouette against the Winter Tower’s snowy glare. As they watched, his dark and wavering form steadily dissolved to a few threaded weaves of wispy smoke that simply seemed to slip from sight between Spring and Winter.
38 Steersman’s Static Store
Countless voices, countless wishes, countless sentiments, yearnings, fears and hopes, an amassed repository of longing and loathing, all gathered here from ages past. “...hope the rain comes or the cows will lose their milk ... please make me more beautiful for him ... keep the winds to westerlies ... trade must hold to Belforas for we
need the timber...”
Long wrought by engers of the ancient world, all Dicans had forever had their thoughts close-heard by elemental ears, listened to by the dust of Leiyatel’s most fundamental form. How, though, could Falmeard hear them now? The hearing made the harder still against such strident storm of words?
How could he also now see such timeless needs abound about his head when naught else impinged upon his staring eyes? Only a wavering stream of lights flowed past; sinuous trails telling tales and mumbling moans, overt oaths fast tumbling past, forever on, forever circling through their own eternal years.
What is this place?
Amidst the mass of arcing thoughts, Leadernac’s own came free somehow and fluttered down to alight once more in Falmeard’s mind. They spoke of a yearning from a different time, of an unrequited need, one only sated at the end of an endless life.
As unseen then as now, Falmeard held a key, a key to knowing. It had been a ring, a band of leaden weft and weave of her who held their world intact. A key for Leadernac to force her hand to throw him back beyond that time, to one long past in ages gone, and so arrive before the trap of immortality was sprung.
However, in that other world they both had shared, Leadernac’s need had been for a freely given ring, a key returned despite the bearer’s reborn knowledge. Ill had been the original deed he’d forced upon Falmeard, for he’d been a simple soul. Such wily need had Leadernac that he’d shown his friend scant mercy, and so by it gained naught but shame.
Somehow, drawn from the swirl about Falmeard’s head, more of his own thoughts soon came to settle in his mind. They brought with them a knowing of the man he’d once been, the man Leadernac had at first called Francis, so long, long ago. The memories then had freed his finger of its ring-borne burden, and by it freed them both; Leadernac to eternal rest, he to return to a time and world he’d long forgotten.
“Your ghost brings me here today, Leadernac, do you know that?” Falmeard shouted. “Perhaps fortuitous, perhaps repayment in giving anew from memories old. What must I yield this time, though, I wonder. What have I now that should be owed to Leiyatel?”
Like a flock of startled starlings, the thoughts about his mind fair flickered as their mass swirled on. They swept from Spring to Winter then back again, around and around and around, forever locked within their ever-circling space. No single voice would ever whisper loud enough for Leiyatel to hear, only the mass of self-same wants could guide her along Dica’s providential path.
“I see so few of my own most recent thoughts,” Falmeard was saddened to say, “but so many from that other time when Leadernac did live, a time I thought before this story. Grey, sullen and sad they are, those dusty memories, ones bearing but a homeless heart’s poor pining.
“Of course!” he now cried out at a rare and recent thought. “Time! Yes, time. Leiyatel’s need of her own loosed time to parry Nature’s own. So clear it is, I see it now, how she had her own good cause to call me back.”
And there it was, the knowing of what he’d now become; a scion of The Living Green Stone Tree, a cut, a slip, a graft of weft and weave, a small wrought cloth to give him means to master time.
“Now I remember folding our own true world, although but mere tucks in its own vast fabric. Leiyatel may have cast Leadernac and I through millennia, but I at least can manage some few moments now, perhaps an hour at most - something Drainspoiler can this day no doubt avow.”
He thought of Geran.
“Poor lass. How on earth did I manage to lay such false past upon her, and all those about?”
He reached out to search for an answer amongst the wail of words only for a cold, dark shape to steal across his vision. His newfound knowing remained but trapped within black ice, held frozen about his soul. That darkness brought isolation, a drawing down to deepest depths of his own true self.
Falmeard’s body bore him out to the terrace once more, but only his mind felt the towers re-form behind him as the mirage they were. His legs carried him across the flags as his sight returned, revealing two sisters waiting by the park.
They neither waved nor called. Maybe he’d become the dark figure itself, the cold form now leaving frost-prints on the flags behind.
His body – finally at the command of the Cold Angel itself – turned and put the Star Tower’s glistening rise before him, but a few short miles away.
Leiyatel loosed memories of Geran upon him, as though a parting gift to thaw his heart at least. Timid memories of a gentler, slower and more reticent world. A world to bring tears to Falmeard’s now entombed eyes but only dry, mechanical purpose to the Cold Angel’s own.
39 To Rise to the Occasion
“What are we going to do, Prescinda? He’s been gone ages.” Geran peered forlornly through the greying light at the four towers but only for a moment, then looked away.
“I know, Sis, but I was so sure he’d come back here, and to be honest, I’ve no better ideas.”
Prescinda had been standing for a while massaging warmth and life back into her backside, the park wall having robbed it of both. Meanwhile, the wind had risen, heralding rain, rustling through the canopy of the park’s now gloomy rise.
“But we can’t stay here when night comes, Presci! Surely?”
“You’re right of course, Sis, but I just don’t know where we can go.” Although a finger of fear naturally scratched at Prescinda’s neck, despondency and helplessness weighed more heavily, so the thought of moving on made her feet feel leaden.
Falmeard’s abrupt departure, to Leiyatel knows where, had been such a shock. He’d been their guide through uncharted seas after all, and so they now both felt marooned. Something had to be done, Prescinda realised, for both their sakes, and to which end she began searching around for ideas.
The park’s trees hid the view down onto Cambray, or out towards recently occupied Uttagate. To the south, the sky had become darkened by rain where Mount Esnadac’s flat shoulder ran to its fall at the Scarra Face. The rest of the Upper Reaches obscured the emptiness of the Eyeswin Vale beyond.
The steady encroachment of leaden sky had faded the Towers of the Four Seasons even more and so encouraged no lingering stare that way but seemed instead to push her eyes on towards the northwest. There, the grey air looked somewhat brighter behind the Star Tower’s glittering rise, making all before it appear yet darker still.
“I suppose we ought to make our way off the terrace at least, and try find somewhere a bit more sheltered.” Prescinda looked about again, trying to decide for the north or south, when she caught sight of a glint set against the towers.
Geran saw it too. “It’s not Falmeard is it, Presci?”
“I ... I don’t know.” Prescinda stepped towards the glow, towards the towers, but felt the same reluctance she’d suffered before and so stopped after only a few hesitant steps. Whatever she’d seen, it steadily and smoothly grew taller, some twenty paces away.
Geran hadn’t tried to move but now stared in hope. “Falmeard?” she called out, a little warily. “Is that you?”
No answer came, and she still didn’t move.
The glow had by now become a tall but barely lit box, unmoving at last against the darkened towers behind. Something stood on its floor and rapidly flashed, but it was hard to say what. It did, though, draw Prescinda’s heavier feet at least a few steps nearer.
She could now see what appeared to be a crystal bottle or flask. The box on whose floor it stood was about the same shape as the coffins long popular in Grayden, the very thought keeping her feet fixed to the spot.
Inside the bottle something shiny plainly spun at speed. She noticed another such glint within, but at right angles and spinning less quickly. “What on earth...” A faint hiss interrupted her, the box smoothly lowering beneath the flags of the terrace, so keeping her silent as it steadily returned the darkness.
Geran shouted questions at her, but Prescinda only half heard. A strange conflict took place in her mind - intrigue set against
an unrecognisable reluctance.
Her feet won out, and with a mind of their own, began to turn her away but that same faint hiss came again, stopping her. The box once more grew from the flags, Prescinda almost falling over as she spun back to stare. She therefore swayed a little when Nephril’s head appeared above his rising body as he smoothly appeared from the dimly lit depths below.
40 To Meet a Man Upon a Task
Nephril’s hand gave scale to the glass bottle, revealing it to be far larger than Prescinda had at first thought. His body did the same for the box from which he now carefully stepped.
The relief was too much for Prescinda. “Nephril?” she called, making him jump then stare wide-eyed into the gathering gloom before him. He glanced back at the safety of the box, a look that urged her on.
“Nephril? It’s only Geran and Prescinda. I’m here but Geran’s back there by the wall.”
“The Cold Angel ... err, Falmeard be not with thee by any chance?”
“No, Nephril, no, we’ve not seen him for hours.”
“Oh. Thank goodness,” he sighed, “at least this thing seems to be working,” and nodded at the bottle still in his hand, lifting it slightly. “Thou had me worried for a while.” He stared at the spinning vanes then flicked his eyes towards Prescinda.
“He led thee here I take it?”
She nodded. “He did, from the Royal College.”
“Ah, yes, makes sense. Following the hint of Leiyatel’s exposed flesh no doubt.”
“He’d ... he’d begun to remember things, Nephril, as though the old Falmeard was awakening, but...”
“I think not, mine dear. More likely the Cold Angel just found better use for his memories. So, thou were still awaiting him here then?”
The sisters - Geran shouting from where she still stood by the wall - described how they’d watched Falmeard dissolve away before their very eyes, and how they’d then been at a loss for what to do next. Nephril held the bottle level and stared into it again, watching its vanes.
Cold Angel Days (Dica Series Book 4) Page 14