Cloud Castles (19 page)

‘Believe me, I am. So you can’t tell me just what it was Lutz was up to? What this rite of his was all about?’

‘I would need to know more of it, that rite, its settings, its language, its symbols. I can tell you he was keeping tryst with ssomething, forging or reaffirming some link with forces from Outsside. From near the Rim, I guess; for there is great power in play.’

‘Another near-absolute, you mean? Like the Graal?’

‘Unlike. Even a slight step beyond the Core good and bad become more disstinct. You have felt it yourself, the turmoil it sets within uss, pulled this way and that by our mingled natures. The farther out one ventures, the sstronger each grows, less dilute; the weaker element iss purged, by time and circumsstance, till only the fine hot metal remains, radiant and sstrong. Good, in the Graal; in the one the
vojevode
seeks … other. There are many such powerss, some never yet concerned with this corner of the Core. But many turn their gaze this way; which is this I cannot tell you. Not without knowing more of
the rite.’

‘Well, I can hardly ask Lutz for a free demo.’ I shivered – then snapped my fingers. ‘That room – the floor! It was inlaid, marble with what looked like precious metals; it must have cost a fortune. All kinds of patterns and characters, that sort of mumbo-jumbo! None of them looked accidental, either. Suppose you’d photos of those, would they tell you anything?’

‘They might,’ she said, quite soberly. ‘Or they might not. It might not matter, when the getting of them is suicidal. If there is anything of value there, be ssure it will be guarded.’

‘By Lutz’s security agency? I could get past them if I had to, I think.’

‘By them as well, no doubt,’ she said sourly. ‘They are no great peril, they would only kill you. But otherwise – no. It is too great a risk, just for photographs that might not come out, or show the last essential detail. Better that I see with my own eyes.’

‘No, Katjka!’ I protested, appalled. Jyp sat up so sharply he all but overturned his stein. ‘You’ve no idea, I couldn’t take you into foul places like that—’

‘I might know more of them than you guess.’

‘Hey now!’ barked Jyp, sounding as horrified as I felt. ‘Belay that, for a start! That’s not for you, girl, you know that’s well as I do! Forgotten just what this could be – what it could lead to? Just what the hell it is you’re risking? Look, Steve don’t even know the half of it and you’ve gotten him half-crazy worryin’ ’bout you already! You stay right here in this tavern, and that’s an order! While we go fetch up Mall.’

She nodded calmly. ‘That we sshould do, yes, for she is powerful in these matters. But even sso, I will come with you none the less.’

‘Look!’ I protested. ‘Both of you, what’s this
we?
One man – I know this agency, I know their alarms, we’ve got them all over C-Tran. And I can remember the way well enough. I could just slip into the house and slip out again. Just me. Nobody’d ever know I’d been there.’

‘Ssome might. Though it might be no body.’

Jyp pounded his fist on the table. ‘Damn! God damn!
No!
’

‘Katjka, look!’ I put in desperately. ‘He means it. I mean it. This is my fight, if anything ever was! I don’t want to risk a friend.’

Katjka, calm as a slightly used Madonna, took my face between her hands. ‘What are friends for? And are you sso sure thiss fight is yours alone? But be sure of one thing, Sstefan, without
me you will accomplish nothing. To whom elsse will you take the pictures? Who elsse dare you trusst? And suppose I saw something in them that required my presence, what then? You might make it into that place once, never twice. You get only thiss one chance.’

I looked to Jyp, but this time he said nothing. ‘And there is more,’ she said, her voice remote and cold. ‘I will have one advantage, where otherss might have none. If what I ssuspect is true, the evil that might threaten you has already touched me. I will have power againsst it that you never could, not even your friend that great mare, sshe with her inner flame.’ She slid easily out from between us. ‘I will go to get my coat, and some other things.’

‘Satisfied?’ growled Jyp, as she vanished into the darkness.

I snarled right back. ‘Come off it, Jyp. You can’t stop her any more than I can stop you. She’s got us, and you know it.’

‘Yeah, suppose I do. But – ah, the hell with it. We’re going in this whirlybird of yours?’ That thought seemed to cheer him up a little. ‘Okay, we’ll stop off for Mall
en route
, I’ll guide you in.’

‘Great. We can leave whenever. But, listen, these Wardens of yours, shouldn’t I see they get told about all this?’

‘You already have. Katjka’s one; and what she learns goes to the rest.’

‘
What?
’

‘Not something she advertises. A privilege and a penance both, tied to this place and this tavern for year after year, to set a balance straight. Using her powers to balance some of the evils she did with them, and in the getting them – and from all I’ve heard that was quite a heap. That’s how it is with a lot of the Wardens – ol’ Sir, for one, he’s another. But he’s free to move around, within limits. Katjka – well, you’ve taken her from here once, you saw what happened. Time, guilt, grief, loss, a double dose, all descending on her in one go. Oh, she can stand it, sure – for a while. But …’ He looked around, then leaned over to me quickly as he heard her steps returning through
the almost empty bar. ‘We’ve got to ride shotgun, look after her every inch of the way, you, me, Mall. She’s risking worse than that, a whole lot worse, Steve. If I’d my druthers—’

‘But you do not,’ she said quietly. Trenchcoat and beret made her look more like Lili M. than ever, though mercifully not the Dietrich version. ‘And the time for argument is done. Come!’

Jyp stood up jerkily. He wasn’t the type to waste any more time on hopeless argument; but he drained his beer, and tipped the dregs into the fire. The logs sizzled and steamed. ‘Okay. Let’s go get Mall.’

As the tavern door shut softly behind us Katjka unobtrusively took my arm; and as we touched the lowest step she leaned on it. She reached the car without much effort, but she sank down into the deep back seat as if she’d run a mile. On the way out of town to the heliport Jyp reverted to his normal self, bouncing around in the car like an eight-year-old, one minute demanding I go faster, the next insisting I slow down to look at how some place or other had changed since last he’d passed that way. Katjka, though, I could see in my mirror. She let her head loll against the rest, eyes half shut, looking neither to left nor right till the harsh floodlights of the airport fell on her. She jerked her head away and raised a shadowing hand, but not till I’d seen the sudden deepening of lines, the hollow eyes, the seamed, papery skin stretched taut across her cheekbones. Not an old face, exactly; a young face wasted. I was glad when I could pull into the darker side lane that led to the heliport, here a stretch of the old original military airstrip still set among living fields. When I opened the car door for her she slid out as lithe as ever, and her face, as usual, didn’t look a day past twenty-nine – assuming you could pick up that much experience so early. She lingered as we walked over to the little terminal, gulping down the wet grass-scented air in breaths that shook her whole body, and as the doors slid shut behind us she echoed their sigh.

What the security check made of us I can’t imagine – especially Jyp, dressed in his usual black pea-jacket and sea gear, and twice as hyper at the prospect of a helicopter flight. Just as well we didn’t have to bother with passports these days; his and Katjka’s would have made interesting reading. But as before they knew me, and let us through easily enough, to the bays where surly late-shift mechanics were still running out and refuelling. This late there was no problem about slots, and once a night flight was clear we were free to go. Katjka, after
a startled oath at the noise of the engine, gave a tooth-gritting shriek as we lifted off and grabbed the back of my seat, then jammed the headphones I gave her hard over her ears and sat back sulkily. Jyp sat rigid in his seat, his long white teeth flashing in a grin – rather fixed, but definitely a grin. Even here, caged in this noisy trap of modern technology, I caught his excitement, something of the same exhilaration and exaltation of setting sail with him, when a breeze from beyond the sunrise bellied out the sails, and the bows dipped deep and lifted higher, high above the horizons of the Core, over the airs of the earth.

He tapped my arm, and pointed; I looked up, expecting to see the cloud archipelago open before us, as ever. But the gusty wind was rapidly scouring the sky clear to reveal a brilliant moon. Rags of low cloud shot by us like storm-shredded sails, and we scudded among them like a shark among a shoal of silver fish, flashing from moonlight to mist and back again by the minute, a wild disorienting ride. I sent the little machine swinging away westward, following Jyp’s excited directions as best I could, and saw on the horizon, mottled by the racing clouds, the steely glitter of the open sea.

Apart from constantly trying to leap up in his seat and lean out of the window, Jyp seemed perfectly at home, though when he realized what the airspeed indicator read he turned slightly pale. Out towards the coast and beyond he directed me, navigating with the same casual confidence as when he steered ships, in an extraordinary series of twisting and turning vectors in and out of the clouds. They made no sense that I could see, but they must have left some cryptic squiggles on the coastal radar traces.

‘You’re sure you can find her?’ I shouted into the intercom, eyeing my fuel gauges nervously.

He pointed. ‘She’s only a week out, that-a-way. Can’t miss ’em! From Zakynthos to Hyperborea via the Pillars of Herakles and Folkestone – that’s where Mall left me word. Head north a point, maybe. Say, you got radar on this rattletrap?’

I had, but only for other air traffic. I brought her down as close to the water as I dared: over these featureless waves you really had to keep an eye on your artificial horizon, or you might find yourself angling down into them by mistake. The radar sweep showed up a surprising number
of images, some of them probably ghosting from the wavecrests; but Jyp took only a second to choose one. ‘Try that,’ he said, and it never occurred to me to doubt him. Not, at least, until we actually made visual contact with the trace. At first I felt sure it was the back of a whale, low, dark, gleaming wetly in the moonlight; then, as we banked down towards it, even lower now, it looked disturbingly like some weird centipedal sea monster, crawling its way across the shining surface with a host of slender legs wiggling under its carapace.

‘Jyp, what the hell?’ I shouted into the intercom. ‘What is it, one of those jasconey things?’ He’d told me horror stories about them, the island beasts on whose broad backs mariners might land and build a fire, only to be dragged down as they submerged. Totally mythical, of course, only this was the Spiral.

‘Take her in and have a look!’ he yelled back. ‘Oughta be able to land on that, eh?’

I swallowed, and swung the ‘copter around. ‘You’ve got to be joking!’ But I eased back the stick, and as we sank down towards the thing, very gingerly, I saw that the carapace was flat, completely. It was a deck, wide and level, without rails or gunwales, so it did look a lot like an undersized aircraft carrier. But it was polished planking, that deck, rich dark wood; the whole thing was wood. It knifed across the waves with a faint fluid jerkiness that gave it that look of being alive, not artificial, like a pulse. Not legs, oars, three banks of them, moving with easy strength and flawless co-ordination. The thing was a gigantic trireme.

Jyp was still excitedly motioning me down. None of the oaths I could come up with felt adequate, so I bit my lip and concentrated grimly on bringing us alongside, matching speed and sidling in. As we got close enough to be heard below decks the rowing seemed to falter slightly, and no wonder: oars tangled, and one snapped like a twig.

‘We’re not going to be that popular!’ I sang.

‘Wouldn’t fret about that!’ Jyp called back. ‘Could be they’ll feel a whole lot meaner shortly! You ever going to land or just hang around till the gas runs out?’

I groaned, and slipped the cyclic stick a fraction sideways, eased off the collective and fishtailed us in with the rotor. We hung, swinging slightly, above that deck – was it going to take the weight? As I was looking for some sign of a
cross-member, Jyp huffed impatiently and unclicked his seatbelt, then slid back the door and swung himself out onto the skids and down, dropping lightly onto the deck frog-fashion, as if he’d been doing it all his life. He stamped hard, gave me the double thumbs up and backed off hurriedly with his hands over his head as I cut back the throttle and let the ‘copter settle. The deck creaked alarmingly, but held. As Jyp straightened up, our welcoming committee appeared in the form of a short bald type in tunic and sandals who came barrelling up out of a hatch, waving his hands. One of them had a bow in it.

‘
Bυγγερo
!
’ he yelled, or words to that effect, and who could blame him? But he ignored my urgent wave, and the drooping rotors almost rendered him a great deal balder, from the neck up. As he hopped back, another figure came bounding up behind him, a full head taller – and a head much fuller, of long blonde curls that streamed back like golden foam in the failing draught. The shoulders it bared were as broad as mine, but the figure was unmistakable in its feline grace; so was the heavy broadsword, and the golden belt it swung from, bouncing at the curve of a thigh. I piled out of my seat, ducking past the still slowing rotors, and ran to meet her.