Cloudland (10 page)

Seven cloud fragments, like stepping-stones, dropped from the edge of the tunnel into a sunken sea of mist. Lucy strained her ears, trying to hear words in its secretive murmuring.
Just mist
, she told herself, but she had an eerie feeling the Mist was waiting to swallow them.

Wist took a coiled thread from his pocket. ‘Keep hold of this. And keep together.'

Lucy took the almost-invisible line. Wist stepped onto the first cloud fragment and the thread tugged in Lucy's hands. Something shapeless expanded in her chest, pressing up against her throat until it hurt to breathe.

Daniel glanced at her. Then he followed Wist onto the first step. The little thread tugged again. Cold needles stabbed into Lucy's spine. Somehow, she was standing next to Daniel on the first step. It gave way a little under their weight. Another step, and another. A white scrap flickered at the corner of her eyes. She thought, unaccountably, of Fracta. The Mist was reaching for her with clammy fingers. She took one more step and sank slowly down.

The Mist wreathed around her shins, past her knees. Twining around her waist, it stretched cold filaments across her chest. They quivered across her neck and face, down her arms, and wound between her fingers. She was floating, suspended in grey nothingness. She felt as if her bones were melting into the Mist's lifeless life, its pale drifts and opalescent strands.

‘Stop! I can't breathe.' Her voice sounded like someone else's voice. She couldn't see her hands, not even when she lifted them to beat at the Mist in front of her face. ‘We have to go back!'

‘Can't go back!' Wist's voice sounded hollow.

‘But I can't breathe!'

‘Hold my hand.' Daniel's voice floated from the Mist. Lucy saw a grey hand in front of her, but when she clasped it, the bones drifted apart in her fingers.
She screamed, and even her scream faded into the Mist's soft whispering.

‘No, slide your hand along the thread,' said Daniel.

With her breath tearing at her throat, Lucy felt along the thread's taut line until she found Daniel's hand.

‘Ouch, you're pinching!' he said.

Relief burst open in Lucy's chest. She started laughing, the sound shaking out of her body like sobs. The laughter went on and on. It sounded terrible, crazy, in the Mist's endless murmuring.

‘Try eating something.' Daniel pressed some Comclo into her hand. She put it to her mouth. Still, she couldn't stop laughing. Her teeth chattered against the Comclo's hard surface with the sound of bones. All the same, as the sweet taste spread through her body, the hysteria drained out of her, leaving her stunned and tired.

‘Wist? Jovius?'

‘Here,' Wist answered her. They waited. Keeping hold of Daniel's hand, Lucy groped with her other hand in the Mist until she touched something that did not fade from her fingers.

‘Jovius?' She bumped his arm. ‘Are you alright?'

‘Hmm? Oh, yes! Yes.' The Mist blurred his voice.
‘It's rather lovely, actually, this picture of our city: all the streets opening around our Pattern Wheel . . .' He kept talking but his voice, faded already, softened until it merged with the sound of the Mist.

‘It's copying my thoughts.' Daniel spoke in a low voice. ‘I keep seeing grey fires.'

Lucy had shut her eyes and retreated into the close dark of her head. Looking once more into the Mist, she saw it swirl and form itself into a floating face. As she watched, the features settled, and anguish struck a blow to her chest. It was her mother's face, made huge, as though Lucy were a child again and could fold into the warmth of her mother's arms to be comforted and safe. The memory of that lost time coursed through her body, sweet and aching, unbearable, until it exploded in her mind as rage.

‘That's not yours!' she screamed. Her voice echoed back to her:
yours . . . yours . . .

‘Look!' said Daniel. ‘The Mist is drawing back.'

He was right. A gap had opened, made of vapour as insubstantial as her breath on winter mornings. The gap kept opening and widening. Soon, she could see Daniel, Wist and Jovius, floating up to their necks in a lake of Mist, with the ghost of a sky low overhead. With a dazed expression, Jovius was turning his head, searching for the lost image of his city.

Daniel pointed. ‘Over there! Something's coming!'

It looked like a grey snake slithering into air. Made of Mist, it hung still a moment. Then, with a quick, flickering movement, it formed itself into a bright shape. Before Lucy could speak, it had twisted itself into another shape, and then another.

‘They're letters,' she whispered. ‘Like sky writing.'

They stood in silence, watching the Mist-snake coil into forms that held, bright for one moment, against that backdrop. Daniel whispered the letters: ‘I-N-T-H-I-S-M-I-S-T-Y-O-U-M-A-Y-G-A-T-H-E-R-T-H-E-L-O-S-T-T-R-E-A-S-U-R-E-S-O-F-U-N-N-U-M-B-E-R-E-D-L-I-V-E-S –'

‘Just let us go!' shouted Lucy.

The Mist-snake paused, a half-formed letter hanging still in air. Then it coiled and sprang at Lucy's face. She flung up her arms but it passed straight through them, through the skin of her face, and burned a cold line through her mind.

After it passed, Lucy remembered what she had entirely forgotten: the way her mother used to fold her into bed at night and sit beside her, a soft shape in the dark. She felt again that sleepiness and security; the pain in her chest was so great she had to crouch and press her palms against her ribs. Curling into
herself, she understood all at once the nature of this place. It was the past, everlasting. Not a graveyard but a limbo: a place where lost things remained, no more solid than mist. In this place, even the Megaliths could not die. Lucy's past clustered around her like a horde of ghosts, clutching at her face and plucking at her arms.

Lucy opened her eyes. Daniel was bending over her, frowning into her face. She noticed the small drops strung along his eyelashes. ‘It went right through you,' he whispered.

‘This place: it wants to keep us always, feed on our memories . . .' She tried to explain but it was so cold.

‘Wist! Wait!' Jovius's cry startled them. Wist was floundering across the lake, trailing a V-shaped ripple.

‘Look!'

A figure had climbed from the Mist. Wist stumbled towards it, his hands, outstretched, opening and closing. Gaunt, long-limbed, the figure stood on the surface. It was the colour of the Mist. Lucy saw with a shudder that it was made of Mist.

Jovius pressed his palms against his cheeks. ‘Aurus,' he said. ‘The image of him.'

‘Who's Aurus?' Lucy had to jolt Jovius's arm.

He looked around. It took a moment for his eyes to focus. ‘You remember I said the Cirrus live as lookouts, floating high over cities? When they start to fade, they ask an albatross to find their successor. Aurus sent for Wist. Teacher and student, they lived two years together until at last, Aurus faded entirely into sky.'

‘That's how you die?' whispered Daniel.

Jovius nodded. ‘Unless we freeze.' He shivered. ‘Better to fade . . .'

Wist huddled in the Mist at the figure's feet. The figure kept pressing the air with trembling fingers until it found Wist's hand and held it, creeping fingers up his arm and fumbling over his face. Kneeling, it rubbed its forehead gently back and forth against Wist's hair.

Jovius clasped Wist's arm. Wist didn't notice. The figure kept fumbling its fingers over his face. Its eyes passed unseeing over Lucy. She looked up at the Mist's fake sky.

‘Megaliths!' she shouted. ‘Get us out! We're going to fight the Kazia –' The whispering of the Mist built up like a storm wind. At the edge of the lake a wave rose. Slowly at first, it came towards them, massing up until it filled half the sky, crashing over their heads with such force Lucy thought her flesh would break apart.

In its grey wash and tumult, she glimpsed white forms lumbering towards her. If she looked at them
directly, she could hardly make them out, but from the corners of her eyes she saw faded Megaliths gathering around her, burrowing under her feet. A blank opened in the Mist beneath her. Daniel grabbed Lucy's elbow while she caught hold of Wist and Jovius. Side by side in a tangle, they slid down through Mist on the shoulders of the Megaliths. The Mist's grey walls rose around them, closing over their heads while, beneath them, the bunched, vague forms of the Megaliths kept digging down.

All at once, with the look of sheets in the wind, the Megaliths billowed up. Lucy and the others spun out from the Mist into empty air. They turned a somersault on nothing. Lucy felt the sky had turned around them while they held still. A wind current tugged them sideways. Then they dropped straight down.

Lucy left even fear behind. She was simply falling, conscious only of existing where the cold stung her hands and face. After a time – a second or an hour, she could not have said – she became aware of the others clustered around her: Daniel's hair pulled back, his face tight against the wind. Far below, she saw a shape, a white bird perhaps, carving arcs through air.

‘Wist's carpet!' Her scream streaked into their
slipstream. Daniel must have guessed what she meant. He started fumbling with Wist's coat. Wist had closed his eyes. His face looked glazed with an almost ecstatic expression. He threw his arms wide. The wind caught his coat and it opened with the sound of a whip crack.

Daniel clung to the shuddering edge of Wist's coat. Lucy fought along Wist's arm until she could reach his pockets. The first held a roll of cloth, which unfurled, looping upwards, and tangled around Daniel's legs. In the second pocket, she found the carpet.

It opened with a low boom. Daniel caught its far edge and rolled onto it. His weight forced it flat and wide. At once, the raging of the wind stopped. They were drifting in an immense space of air. Only Jovius kept falling, a white line of wind speed. He spun over. Lucy saw him staring up at them. He was struggling, fighting to open his arms.

‘Jovius!' she screamed. Her cry trailed into nothing. Over the edge of the carpet, she saw a dingy cloud plain, perhaps a hundred metres down. Dark cracks marked its surface. Lucy's mind blanked out. She felt a kind of vertigo when she tried to imagine the end of that plummeting fall.

‘What happened?' Daniel had drawn his knees to his chest. He was breathing fast through his mouth.
Wist lay between them on the carpet, arms splayed. ‘In the Mist. How did we get out?'

‘Remember in the tunnel, that Megalith said they went into the Mist to die? When that snake ate into my mind, I realised – they couldn't ever die, not really, not there. The Mist wanted to keep everything just as it was, forever. So I asked the Megaliths to help us, whatever was left of them. They dug us out.'

‘You can't even see the Mist now,' said Daniel. In the sky, wide above them, they saw only an odd twisting of light, like a bubble in old glass.

‘We should wake Wist.' When she shook his shoulder his hands clenched and opened – but he only moaned and rolled onto his stomach.

‘We're about to crash!' cried Daniel.

Lucy twisted to look over the edge of the carpet. When they had been high up, she had thought they were drifting, almost motionless. Now she saw how the cloud rushed to meet them.

‘Jump before we hit,' said Daniel. They stood up, half-crouching, as the carpet tipped and swayed. The wind stung Lucy's eyes.

‘Now!' They flung themselves into empty air. After a sickening pause, they crashed onto frozen cloud. The shock sent a jolt up Lucy's spine. Everything hurt.

‘Lucy?' Daniel prodded her ribs.

With a moan of protest, she rolled over and sat up. ‘Alkazia,' she breathed. All this time, she had been imagining it as a palace, ornate and magnificent, but she knew Alkazia now with absolute certainty. Brutally simple, it hulked against the sky: a tower with no windows, no doors, nothing to break its surface. Lucy's flesh felt like glass. She couldn't move. Her mind kept repeating:
Alkazia, Alkazia
. Its shadow stretched across the plain like a road.

‘The Protector and her army,' muttered Daniel, gazing around them at the horizon. ‘What do we do now?'

Lucy kept seeing the Citadel, the pale crowd of Cloudians rushing towards her. ‘Wake Wist, I suppose,' she said. ‘Find Jovius.'

When she turned Wist over, his arm swung out. With a start, she saw that his eyes were open. He stared past her at the sky. ‘I was weak in the Mist,' he said. ‘I thought –' He broke off, so fierce in his humiliation Lucy felt embarrassed, and stepped back.

‘Can you get up? We need to find Jovius.'

‘He's over there.' Daniel pointed at a scrap, half-hidden behind a lumpy mound in the plain. Jovius lay spreadeagled with his coat open around him. One
of his boots had come off. His pale hands turned up to the sky. They stood looking at him.

‘My fault,' said Wist. ‘If I hadn't – if I'd been watching.'

‘Look at these cracks.' Daniel pressed at the cloud plain with his boot. ‘He must have hit pretty hard.'

‘Don't!' Lucy turned away, pressing her palm against her mouth, trying to hold down the nausea rising through her body in waves. In her mind, she kept seeing Jovius spin away from them. Miserable, distracted, she didn't notice how the air was shuddering with cold until she felt Daniel plucking at her sleeve – but when she saw his face, bone-pale, her blood stopped.

Above them, the air was black with shadows loosed from things and clustering. Soft clots of dark, they floated on nothing; they crawled down air with hunching shrugs. Lucy was back at the beginning, in the plane, helplessly watching that dark shape swallow the cloud boy. She couldn't turn her face or even raise her hand. Something tugged at her wrist. Then the light closed around her.