by Sam Hall
“You were going to say pinkies, weren’t you?” Tess asked with a smile, looking over her shoulder at the prince.
“I–”
“It’s OK, some of your men have already slipped. It seems you think we are some kind of primitive animal, like a pig or something.”
“I would never–”
“C’mon, Your Highness, don’t ruin this,” she gestured to the view, “with a lie.”
“Well, I admit, until I met you two ladies, I did labour under an unfair assumption about humans,” he stammered out.
“And now you’re cursed to look just like us, to teach you a lesson. Am I right?”
“Well,” the prince paused and looked into her expectant eyes. I’m pretty sure Mellors and I both held our breaths, though I wasn’t sure if it was for the same reason. “I don’t know if that was the intent of the Assembly, but yes, I have found the change incredibly illuminating.”
That seemed to be enough for Tess. The two of them rested their arms on the wicker edge of the basket, the prince frequently pointing to landmarks for Tess to coo over. In return, she peppered him with a million questions, about the purpose of the buildings, of the flocks of animals we could see dimly below–apparently, they were wild pinkies–and the different parts of the huge estate. The gap between them grew thinner and thinner as their conversation became more animated. I knew because I eyed it closely, lurking in the back of the wicker basket that creaked and twitched with the gusts of wind disturbingly.
I was not enjoying this at all. The design of the basket seemed ridiculous as well as unnecessarily cruel. Suspending the basket of cables meant that every decent breeze sent it swaying. Looking up at the aerowhale I could see the body of the beast had a series of wires crisscrossing its girth and the aeronauts used them to make their way around the animal, which made me shudder. Then it happened. A great gust buffeted the basket, leading to us all being shaken about in the breeze. The walls were tall enough not to worry about falling out, instead, I found myself lumbering drunkenly around, trying to recapture my feet. Until I heard the scream. I dropped to the floor and looked up to see my sister half over the side of the basket, her mouth wide as she wailed.
I went to scuttle towards her, but the prince jumped into action, grabbing Tess around the waist and dragging her inside, the two of them falling in a heap as another gust shook it. “Milady Pendragon!” the prince gasped, holding her shaking body to his manly chest. She had gone white as a sheet, tears running down her face as the prince drew her close. “There, there . . .,” he said, stroking his hand down her cheek. “Mellors!” he snapped as Tess’s breathing began to settle.
“At once, Your Highness,” Mellors said. But he didn’t respond immediately; I realised as I looked up at the wolfish man, he took a split second to arrange his muzzle into an appropriate snarl before looking upward and snapping at the nearest aeronaut scrabbling up the aerowhale’s side. “Get down here at once!”
I had thought the aeronauts were also wolf people, like the rest of the prince’s entourage but it became apparent that they were more simian. Overly long arms, wrapped in lean, wiry muscle and slender fingers were used to drop down from the aerowhale’s hide and into the basket. Instantly Mellor's hand went around the simian’s throat, the poor thing beginning to bleat a rapid response that quickly died away into a strangled yelp as Mellors’ claws dug in. I got to my feet shakily and looked across at where the prince held Tess and shook my head slightly. His Highness’s eyes narrowed in response and I saw a flicker of refusal in his bright blue eyes, an immediate offence taken at the advice from another, but he thinned his lips and mastered himself. “Do not torture the beast in front of the ladies!” he snapped.
“Of course, Your Highness,” Mellors said mildly, then flipped the aeronaut out of the basket. His scream dropped away rapidly as he fell to the earth below. Please have a parachute, please have a parachute, I hummed to myself. I never found out. I crept over to the back of the basket and looked behind but could see nothing but the distant view of the estate. Tess began to cry again, great racking sobs, she seemed to be fighting to catch her breath. The prince took full advantage of the situation, caressing her face like a kitten’s. Her eyes started to close, tears still leaking from the sides but then flared open and met mine in an instant. She knows what he’s trying to do, I realised.
Tess’s body didn’t have the soft, languid look of someone who had surrendered to hysterics. The prince held her awkwardly, her neck hanging at an uncomfortable angle, her arm crushed against his chest. She struggled to move, just a little wiggle to at least get into a slightly more comfortable pose, but the prince’s arms tightened. He was having his moment and it didn’t matter how Tess felt about it. He had his role, and she had hers and they were going to play them out. I stood there, hands balled into fists. We were hundreds of feet up in the air, with two bigger, stronger guys who were just as likely to toss us after the aeronaut if we proved worthless. I shook my head slightly, unable to watch her eyes go wide with fear as her struggles grew more pronounced and his grip grew tighter. She was my sister, no matter what had happened, I couldn’t just let him just maul her, no matter where we were. I took a deep breath and took a step forward.
“Storm!” one of the aeronaut’s shrieked. Our heads moved as one, seeing instantly the great wall of storm grey cloud beginning to cross over the far horizon of the estate.
“Get us down!” Mellors shouted with an unearthly growl.
“Told you, this is storm season! Come from nowhere. Should never have come up! Where’s Leven?”
“If he was the ginger-pelted one, he’s long gone from this world. You need to get us on the ground right now!”
“He was the navigator!” the aeronaut screamed back, its long fingers wrapped so tightly on the aerowhale cords, his brown skin looked almost white.
“Mellors!” the prince said. I turned to see he had finally let Tess go to crawl up to the basket’s edge. “We’re blowing off course!”
“Get this beast under control, now!”
The simian’s face went still, its brown eyes flashing with fury. “Close the mouth!” he called, his request echoing across the beast’s body. I saw several spidery figures make their way to the front of the aerowhale and then slowly, forcibly, the animals winched a guard that covered the whale’s mouth in a series of interlocking metal parts. The effect was instantaneous; we began to drop like a stone. The prince leapt for his parachute, the precipitous fall leaving him hovering in the air for a moment before slamming down on the basket’s bottom. The whale wailed in response, its sounds somehow both muffled and louder due to the mouth guard. I crawled over to Tess, who clutched at the basket in a daze.
“Tess!” I said, pulling my parachute from my back, “here!”
“No, no!” she cried, both trying to push it back on me and to feel wildly around for her chute.
“Get this on!” Mellors snarled, the only one of us able to stay semi-upright as we began an erratically swirling descent. His long claws dug into the wicker, weakening it to my terrified mind, but he slung her chute over to her, so it slammed into her face. She blinked wildly, but I slid behind her, tugging the bastard thing on and latching it around her.
“Do we jump?” I screamed at the two men, wondering how the hell we did that, since we were pushed so hard against the basket.
“Open the mouth two increments!” the aeronaut cried and then whoomph! As if shoved from below, the aerowhale swept upwards for a moment, then settled into a gentler coast as of before, though much closer to the ground.
“We may be able to coast down to the border, hunker down until the storm passes and then make our way back,” the aeronaut said. I watched how he carefully remained high enough on the ropes that he was out of Mellors’s reach. This didn’t stop the wolfman from snarling at the aeronaut. The prince shifted quickly to the other side of the basket, eyes wide.
“Do what you have to, but we must keep away from the estate border!�
� he said, trying for authoritative and just sounding panicky.
“You heard His Highness, turn the beast around,” Mellors snapped.
“But the—”
“Don’t give me excuses, man! You have your orders, make it so.”
I watched the simian climb back up the ropes, the chittering that followed obviously a discussion of the change of plans. It didn’t sound like it was a positive one. I saw an aeronaut look back at us, eyes wide and then they all began to move, swarming around the aerowhale’s body. Fuck this, I thought and made my way over to my sister. “Let’s make sure the parachute is on properly,” I said, checking her straps one by one.
“This was a mistake, wasn’t it?” she asked in a half whisper. “I should never have come here. We’re going to end up tossed over the side. . . .”
“Let’s get the parachute on first, then we’ll worry about the future,” I said.
“How do we know these even work?” she said. “They operate using pre-industrial technology here.”
“I was rather scrupulously trying to avoid thinking about that,” I said. “Right now, I’m hoping belief is enough because that’s all we’ve got.” The wind around us was now beginning to whine, the basket shifting more violently in response to the increased air movement. We both yelped when we were laid flat by a huge gust that had the basket swinging almost in a circular motion. It didn’t really settle, either. Each time the swaying began to slow, another blast of wind and then another would send us shifting again. Slowly, we could see the basket being pushed back further and further so that now we hung at an angle beneath the aerowhale’s belly.
“I swear to all the gods, if I get out of this alive I am heading straight home, to the portal, to my home, Mum and Dad,” Tess began to mutter.
“You have no idea how glad I am to hear that,” I said through gritted teeth.
“I’m so sorry!” Tess wailed, “I was being a total dick to you and now you might get killed, all because I wanted an adventure!”
“Tess–” She launched herself at my shoulders and then began to sob in earnest. I wrapped my arms around her and held on tight. It felt like an age since we’d done this. We’d been floating along on a weird little cloud of fairytales and failed retail enterprises. The last time Tess really cried on my shoulder was when Nan died. I didn’t like the circumstances, but for a moment, all I could feel was something that I hadn’t realised I’d been missing: feeling wanted. For a second, I was the big sister again, I could provide all the answers, could soothe away the tears. I squeezed tighter, as if the pressure would somehow take my fear away as well.
I felt hard fingers curl around my arm and I was wrenched, lurching to my feet. Mellor's yellow eyes bore into mine as he kept me admirably on my feet. “What are you doing?” he hissed.
“Pretty much bending over and kissing my arse goodbye,” I snapped back.
“Isn’t comforting Tess the role the prince is supposed to play?”
“He’s over there quivering, so I suspect no, not right now.”
“You are trying to usurp him.”
“The beast can’t be turned,” a voice broke in. Both of our eyes jerked upwards to see all of the aeronauts clustered above us, clinging to the upper ropes. “Best we can do is force a landing by closing its mouth again. You’d better make the jump.”
“This is not acceptable! You will not endanger the crown prince’s life this way!”
“We’re abandoning ship, milord; you’d best do the same. Winch it shut!” the monkey shouted. Several of his comrades scurried to do his bidding, the rest began to test the wind, reaching out to reveal a large flap of skin–like a Sugar Glider’s–appearing between their arms and ribs which caught the wind. Tess's fingers grabbed at my leg, and I dropped to the floor as the whale’s mouth was shut again and down we fell.
“We’ve got to get to the edge,” I said, through the teeth-chattering judder of the falling basket, “and jump out.”
“I can’t!” Tess yelped. I watched the simians peel away one by one, limbs spread like a starfish, the membranes between their arms and legs catching the wind and sending them down in a slow, lazy spiral.
“If we stay here, we die!” Tess looked at me, the blind terror on her face shifting for a moment and she nodded her head.
“We’re getting close to the estate boundary,” the prince said, hiding in the corner of the basket and peering over the rim. “Mellors, we can’t reach the boundary! I will turn into a pile of ash if we are even a millimetre over!”
“I know, Your Highness. Your parachute is secure?”
“Yes, yes!”
Mellors turned to us and said, “Jump over the side and pull the handle on the left to deploy the chute.”
“What do we pull if the chute doesn’t work?” I said.
“I have no idea, we’ve never had that happen. Now, Your Highness. . . .”
That was all the assistance we were going to get evidently. I just dragged Tess over to the side and saw the earth rushing towards us. “Together!” I said, we had no more time for pep talks. “One, two. . . .”
She threw her leg over the basket and hauled me afterwards and then we felt the truly eerie sensation of stepping out into nothingness. We dropped, it felt even faster than the basket; the wind roaring in our ears. “Pull the cord!” I screamed at Tess; my voice whipped away. I watched her hands struggle to find the handle and then up she went, a great big oiled canvas chute blossomed over her head. I pulled my own; my hand was resting on the handle waiting for Tess and felt the yank of the chute as it opened. I felt like we still were descending way too fast, but we managed to land, admittedly in a messy stumble, without too much more than jarred and sore limbs.
“Never, ever, ever again,” Tess swore.
“I know,” I said, looking around me and wondering where we were. The storm was now beginning to roll over the estate proper and I could smell the scent of rain on the wind. Everything looked too bright, too harsh and my ears were ringing for some reason. I stepped out of the parachute, unclasping the buckles, glad to be free of the weight and dropped the goggles to the ground.
“This is not the shit they tell you about in fairy tales,” she said. “I thought it’d all be magic forests with trees made of candy canes and sentient bunnies.”
“Jeez, Tess . . . this is a complete society, just like any other. They have hierarchies and despots and sociopaths, just like anywhere else.”
“I know, I know, Miss Political Science, but don’t you sometimes wish that the fairy tales are real, that’s there’s somewhere magical aside from all that crap?”
“Your Judaeo-Christian, Paradise Lost slip is showing,” I said.
“God, Ash! Do you have to be so bloody analytical all the time? How do you live like that? Always measuring and assessing . . . We just survived an aborted flight on the underside of a floating animal!”
“Yeah, well, right now I am assessing the risk of us getting drenched in the rain that’s coming and its high. There looked like some kind of folly or something over this way I think. We better haul arse if we don’t want to spend the day shivering and wet.”
My lecture seemed to do the trick. We piled one of the parachutes roughly back into its pack and I strapped it to my back. At the very least it could become shelter if we needed it. We started off walking through a bunch of trees, struggling to get past the whippy branches and were rewarded when we stumbled out onto a path. The tall boundary fence of the estate was behind us, so surely, the trail would lead us to something. Our heads jerked up as the wind picked up, great rumbling rolls of thunder sounding overhead. “We’d better find somewhere soon,” Tess said and we both took off at a faster clip. The sky was purple as a bruise and roiling above us when we came across what I thought I had seen. It had been little more than a white blur as we fell, but it was now apparently a circular arrangement of spindly cast metal arches, the gaps between them filled in with decorative stained glass. We both scurried inside, the interior
much warmer for letting the former sunlight in without the whipping wind.
“It might blow over,” Tess said, looking out through the doorway of the folly at the sullen clouds. “The wind that was pushing it at us seems to be moving it over the estate.”
“Maybe.”
“I wonder what happened to the poor aerowhale?” she said, looking up at the sky as if to look for signs of it.
“Tess–”
“Do you think it might have been light enough to stop from crashing, once we were out of the basket?”
“Tess–”
“Well, do you?”
“Tess, we’re in a cruel and unusual world, a lot like our own. The prince is a rapist and a sadist. He tried to rape me several nights ago; apparently skinny jeans really are a natural deterrent. The only thing I could do to persuade him not to was to say I would help him get you to fall in love with him. He beat Gabe to unconsciousness; right now I don’t know if he’s in a coma or is brain dead. He was returned to us completely brutalised and covered in faeces, causing God knows what infection. We brought guns with us, but they have taken them. We’ve got bikes, but they have been locked up, too. I don’t know how and I don’t know when, but we need to get the fuck out of Dodge, as soon as we can, before this raving narcissistic psychopath kills or maims another one of us irreparably. That’s what we need to focus on, Tess, not this, not the fucking aerowhale.”
She stayed standing in the doorway, looking up at the sky, as if she’d heard nothing I’d said. The storm boiled in the background, a dramatic contrast to her implacable stillness. “I know,” she said finally. She pushed herself off of the doorframe and came inside, though her eyes didn’t meet mine. “Well, I didn’t know the details, of what had happened to Gabe, to you . . .” Her arms wrapped around herself and she shook her head. “This isn’t like the books.” She snorted at this, “Of course, this isn’t like the books. I sound like a moron saying it, but . . . well, what else did I have to go on? If Nan had a portal to alternate dimensions in her shop, I’m sure others do, but no one is going on 60 Minutes and doing a tell-all about it. There’s no handy Portal Management for Dummies guide printed yet. Perhaps that’s a job for me when we get home,” she said with a pained smile. “But I just wanted this to work; I wanted the books to be right so much–”