A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  Fortunately there was only one of the things, and it was both slow and awkward. Nibulus remembered Methuselech’s bow. It took him mere seconds to rip it from its fastenings on the horse, fit an arrow and (while the others left him to it and hastened on down the path) let fly at the beast’s huge swivelling eyeball.

  The arrow struck the rock at least a foot from the creature’s left wingtip and shattered into splinters. With a cry of surprise, Nibulus saw the creature, now only an arm’s length away, detach itself from the cliff and fall towards him. In the instant before he leapt back he saw that it possessed no legs, but it was still by only an inch that he managed to avoid the noisome shroud of birdflesh that sought to envelop him. Scrabbling madly away, he rejoined the others further down the path, and they all hurried on their way.

  They continued for several miles without encountering any more of the winged creatures. The air became even stiller, the light gloomier and the path narrower with each mile that passed. Zhang, normally as stolid as any of them, was becoming increasingly agitated and several times simply stopped dead, casting his head about this way and that while raising his snout to smell the air.

  ‘Look! What’s that ahead?’ Wodeman, taking the lead as usual, whispered back and pointed out something ahead of them on the path. What was it? Smoke? Someone’s campfire, perhaps? Another party of adventurers following the same path?

  But no, this was steam. Steam bubbling from a crevice in the rock just around the next corner. It was not quite a geyser, but clouds of noxious vapour billowed fiercely from the cliff and out over the path. Even from a distance they could hear the fierce gurgling hiss as lava-heated gas met cold air and condensed into droplets that spat out over the path, covering it with a slick yellow scum. It was as if a hateful serpent trapped within the rock was spitting its venom out into a world it could not reach.

  Wodeman went first again. He ventured out close to the very edge of the drop, treading carefully upon its slippery surface, risking a fall rather than the touch of that steam. It was not fear of being scalded but rather the unnatural smell that seemed to unsettle him.

  Sure-footed, he reached the other side, turned and waited. Paulus went next, without care or hesitation for he had no fear of burning or poisonous liquids. Then Finwald. He pulled his bearskin collar up over his ears and tilted his wide-brimmed hat towards the steam then, keeping well away from the drop, darted nimbly through the spitting cloud.

  ‘Take the horse through now, Bolldhe,’ Nibulus ordered, fitting an arrow to the string of the bow he still clutched. ‘I’ll guard the rear in case any weirdling comes along. And be very careful; we don’t want to lose Zhang.’

  Bolldhe nodded, gripped the horse by the reins, and – with Appa still on top – took a position to one side. Hearing a certain note in Nibulus’s voice, he felt his throat constrict oddly; the Peladane’s concern was not simply for the baggage the horse carried, or the priest who sat on him, but for Zhang himself. During this quest they had all grown very fond of their beast of burden, especially on this last cruellest part of the journey while trekking across Melhus. They would not, any of them, lose him now.

  As a final precaution Appa hoisted his left leg up out of the way of the steam, and sat side-saddle. This meant he was directly facing the horrendous drop just inches away from him, and also had a considerably more tenuous grip.

  ‘Ready?’ Bolldhe asked him. Appa nodded.

  So, placing himself also dangerously close to the edge of the cliff, Bolldhe propelled the three of them into the cloud of steam.

  Out the other side they emerged, partly scalded and gasping. The ordeal was over almost as soon as it had started.

  No sooner did they stop to wait for Nibulus than a terrific clattering broke out immediately beside them. Visions of rock falls or armies of darkness clashing spear against shield flashed through Bolldhe’s mind. He froze, his whole world filled with dark flapping shapes, then realized that it was only a flock of birds. Disturbed by the travellers, they came pouring out of an unseen window right alongside the steaming fissure. Bolldhe observed, with startling clarity, a flurry of leathery wings, toothed beaks, six legs, Zhang rearing with a snort of panic . . . and Appa being pitched off the horse’s back.

  The priest wailed in terror as he flew backwards through the air, only to be yanked back like a rag doll, as his foot snared in one of the straps securing the baggage. Dangling helplessly from the stamping, panicked horse, his head hit the ground.

  Bolldhe instantly tightened his grasp on the reins, then realized with horror that Zhang was pushing him towards the edge.

  ‘Get back, you idiot horse!’ he yelled, loosing the reins and shoving hard against the animal’s flank.

  Then Zhang finally bolted, dragging Appa, screaming shrilly, down the path after him by the foot. Bolldhe teetered on the edge, swayed a moment, then disappeared over into the abyss . . .

  ‘NO!’ cried Red Eye in a voice that filled the entire fjord with a crack of thunder, at the same time flinging his arms out as if to push the tumbling man back onto the path.

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ came the voice of Fate, a voice without sound that caused no thunder but was still immeasurably more powerful. Red Eye gasped in pain and snatched his hands back . . .

  Bolldhe, after an unreal moment in which it seemed the fjord around him exploded with thunder and he himself was held miraculously suspended in mid-air, plunged down the steep slope. It was not a sheer drop but not far off it. Smoothly, impossibly fast, with no rough edges of rock to snag or slow him, he careered downward.

  Boulder chute! The thought came to him in a flash. He was barrelling down one of those steep grooves used in olden days to send boulders crashing onto vessels below.

  Time slowed sickeningly, and Bolldhe the human cannonball became strangely aware of everything around him. His eyes widened, his lips curled back, and a hoarse moan issued weakly from his mouth. The edge of the cliff raced towards him; he had just one second to do something or face certain death.

  Instinct took over. Kicking out savagely at one side of the chute, Bolldhe somehow succeeded in flipping himself onto his belly. At the same time his hand found the leather-bound grip of the grapnel – Elfswith’s gift – slung at his side. Then, just as he yanked it from his belt, his one remaining second ran out –

  The scraping rock was no longer beneath him; Bolldhe was in mid-air with nothing below him but a thousand-foot drop to the water below –

  The grapnel came down, bit hard, sending sparks and dust into the air –

  And found purchase right on the upcurved lip of the chute. With a bone-wrenching tug that almost ripped his arm from its socket, Bolldhe came to a swinging, swaying halt. How long he hung there he could not tell. Time seemed to have stopped altogether, and the world became very still. Everything was as a dim, puzzling dream.

  It was quiet as he hung by one arm from the grapnel, with only the peaceful sound of the wind floating down the fjord. For a moment he fancied he was back on the Tabernacle Plains, rising from slumber inside the shelter of a nomad’s tent, listening dreamily to the muffled but comforting sound of the breeze outside as it snapped hessian covers hither and thither, soughed through the tall grasses and moaned through the treetops of some distant forest.

  Lazily, only faintly aware of the dull pain in his arm, he swung round and found himself facing the Maw. Whether it was some fancy of his desperate brain or the gods taunting him with one last clear view of that which he would never reach, but it appeared to him with the clarity allowed only to the dying; every wall, gate, portcullis, balustrade, buttress and tower could he see in detail – as clear as the Gates of Death to a dying man.

  Then he became aware of a dry tickling feeling on his face, almost as if he were being caressed with a feather. But his eyes stung, and the sound of some commotion could be heard. Louder it became, and the stinging sensation increased. Then time came gatecrashing noisily into his reverie, and he was back.

  The dry ticklin
g turned out to be a rivulet of sand trickling down the chute and onto his head, and the hubbub was the voices of his companions, shouting somewhere above. The next instant he felt a hefty blow on his left shoulder. He cried out in pain, let go of the grapnel . . .

  . . . but did not fall. Something was tugging him slowly but firmly up by his thick garments. It was Nibulus’s grapnel, which he had hurled blindly over the edge of the chute on the end of its rope. Chance or Fate had guided it true, smacking it into the heavy pelts Bolldhe kept fastened about his person, and now, suspended precariously, the choking traveller was hauled back over the lip of the chute and up onto the cliff path.

  Nibulus helped him to his feet and eyed him up and down, shaking his head in disbelief that Bolldhe was back with them.

  ‘Nifty with that hook, aren’t you?’ Bolldhe wheezed, panting heavily.

  ‘Not half as quick as you,’ Nibulus responded, realizing how Bolldhe must have saved himself.

  Neither said another word, for no words were needed. There was a look of mutual admiration in the eyes of both of them, for they would both now go down in legend as ‘the fastest-grapnel-hook-in-the-North’.

  Finwald was not quite so calm and collected, however. He sat on the pathway with his back to the cliff wall, his face buried in his hands, rocking back and forth like a lunatic.

  Of the others, there was not a sign.

  ‘C’mon, Bolldhe,’ Nibulus suggested. ‘Better go and see where that horse of yours has taken the little guy.’

  It was not long before they caught up with the others. Wodeman, the fastest of them, had sprinted hare-like after the terrified animal, with Paulus close behind, both desperate to halt the horse before he charged off the edge of the path, taking all their precious baggage with him.

  As it happened, they need not have worried about Zhang or the baggage: he was a slough horse. When they caught up with him, he was just standing there, swishing his tail and looking about rather sheepishly, as if having decided that it was rather silly to have overreacted like that.

  Appa, though, was another matter. The old man was sprawled on his back on the ground, kicking furiously at the strap that still held his foot. Whether it was the shock or because he felt Melhus to be so far out of Lord Cuna’s jurisdiction that it did not matter, he was letting rip with the juiciest and foulest curses his long years had taught him.

  It took a full five minutes for the others to calm him down. Fortunately his body had been shielded from the worst of the ordeal by the pelts that he kept tied so tightly about his person with lengths of hairy string. His head, however, was a mass of cuts, grazes and bumps that were going purple even now and swelling visibly with each minute that passed.

  ‘Bloody, bloody, bloody animal!’ he ranted at the horse (who looked innocently down at the little old man as if to say, Who? Me?). ‘I’ll bloody walk from now on!’

  It had been a miraculous escape, and not only for Bolldhe and Appa. Zhang, now casually looking about for something to eat, carried every bit of food they had, all their rations for the next ten days. Even if all went well for them in the Maw, they knew they would have to hunt for more before getting off Melhus. They should surely be able to lay their hands on some seal meat once they reached the causeway, but before that – well, Bolldhe worried that it might be his dear old friend Zhang for the pot. He could not hope to protect him from Nibulus or Paulus, with their fighting skills. And, after this little episode, he wondered just how far their affection for the pack animal actually went.

  Maybe it won’t come to that, he tried to reassure himself. Perhaps some will die in the Maw, and there’ll be more rations to go round.

  He looked to Wodeman, hoping to find in those green-brown eyes some measure of sympathy for their loyal beast of burden, but all he saw there was a glint of ice.

  So on they went. By now they were a good deal lower, and at last they began to discern the sound of the sea below. It had a disturbing quality to it, like the murmur of unquiet souls. Now and again it was punctuated by the shrill strangulated cawing of the six-legged birds that wheeled around looking for heaven-knew-what food amid this desolation.

  Once they saw one of the larger legless birds circling above the water on a level with themselves. Spotting them, it moved in a wide curve – for they truly were the least agile of birds – and winged straight towards them. Luckily, even at this distance it did not have a tight enough turning circle, and crumpled into the cliff face several yards behind them. Laughing, they turned to look, expecting to see the creature lying dead or at least dazed upon the pathway, but apparently that was how these foul avians landed; having no legs allowing them to perch on the rock face, they instead dived straight at the cliff and simply stuck to it like a lump of grey-black putty, using their wings to crawl in whatever direction – up, down or across – they wanted.

  Curling their lips in distaste, the travellers hastened on.

  The path now forked, one branch continuing in a gentle slope while the other plunged more steeply down.

  ‘Nibulus?’ Wodeman called back.

  After a pause, the Peladane replied, ‘The lower one, I reckon; the sooner we get down off this cliff, the better – we’re far too exposed here. Bolldhe, think that Aht-Kazar of yours can manage it without tripping over its hooves?’

  Bolldhe frowned at the Peladane’s derogatory reference to his steed. ‘Aht-Kazar’ was used by the sedentary dwellers of the Tabernacle Plains (they alone hunted horses) to describe Zhang’s kind. The term meant coarse horse.

  But Zhang did not miss a step. And once, when Nibulus lost his own footing on the scree and skidded uncontrollably down the path, it was only the ‘coarse horse’s’ solid backside that stopped the Peladane from carrying on over the edge and joining his ancestors in their watery tomb at the bottom of the fjord. After this the path levelled out a little but grew alarmingly narrow, hardly wider than a goat track. And it looked unstable, liable to crumble beneath them like the dried bones of a corpse.

  ‘Seems the closer we get to that damn fortress,’ Appa ranted, ‘the deader everything becomes. Looks like it’s sucked the very life out of the ground itself.’

  ‘Go back and try the other way, Nibulus?’ Finwald suggested.

  ‘No, I don’t want to waste any more time. It’ll be nightfall by the time we reach the Maw if we fiddle around here much longer. And I don’t fancy scrambling up that steep bit behind us. Let’s just carry on and if it gets really bad we can always turn back – maybe spend the night in one of those old guardhouses or whatever.’

  As they went on they were forced to shoulder much of Zhang’s baggage themselves and pile the rest of it up higher on his back so as to make the load no wider than his unburdened flanks. Thus adjusted, they let him pick his own way forward, while they flattened themselves against the cliff – almost like those no-legged cliff-hugging atrocities – and worked their way on, gripping the rock with ungloved hands.

  The extra weight they carried threatened to topple them over the edge, and the wind, hardly noticed until now, suddenly grew stronger. It pulled at them as if trying to pluck them from their precarious perch and send them plummeting the same way the rock crumbling underfoot was going. Tenaciously they held on, their eyes closed, and negotiated their way forward by feel alone.

  ‘This is madness!’ stammered Appa, the slowest and most ungainly of them all. Paulus, two places behind him, spat in contempt and occasionally tried to urge Finwald on quicker with curses and threats. Even Zhang, who alone of them was born to this, was wide-eyed with fear.

  The closer they drew to the Maw, it seemed, the closer Death grinned at them in welcome.

  Not long after that something else was grinning at them, something altogether more immediately tangible than Death.

  Still flattening himself against the rock face, Appa paused briefly to draw a few breaths. He rested his chin against the cold stone, glanced up, then cried out at what was lurking immediately above him. The company froze, followed his g
aze up, then they too froze in dread and repulsion.

  In the likeness of a spider it was (actually, it was a spider) but the like of which none of them had ever beheld before. Long, multi-jointed legs it possessed, partially covered in thick spiny white hairs that bristled. On every joint of the legs was a gap of naked pink flesh that crawled with ticks and throbbed. Its two foremost legs were raised towards Appa, as if feeling for him, and from the mass of mandibles and eyes that made up its face came a thin wailing followed by an almost cat-like hiss. Grey-yellow liquid dripped from its open jaws onto the pathway, where it smoked and stank horribly.

  ‘Polar spider,’ Bolldhe breathed as if he had actually encountered one before. ‘Get away from there, Appa, before it pounces!’

  The polar spider vibrated its abdomen rapidly for a moment, a truly menacing sound, then began its crawling descent. All the while it kept growling threats in a hateful, gurgling squall that kept Appa petrified.

  ‘For Jugg’s sake, can we just get on?’ Nibulus growled impatiently, putting his gloves back on and squashing the little arachnid’s abdomen under his thumb.

  They continued down the steep path, stopping only for a moment as Nibulus, flinching, scraped the bristling mess off his gloved thumb. It had begun to burn through the thick leather and, as he wiped it onto the rock, they could smell the pungent odour of the creature’s disintegrating remains.

  Minutes later they reached a stretch of path that was thankfully a little wider, more regular and actually possessed steps. These were clearly discernible even beneath a crusty layer of detritus, and along this section appeared another series of open doorways and windows. From these rooms emerged a whistling wind, as though they went deeper than the chambers they had passed earlier that day. Nevertheless the company pressed on, preferring to head for the Maw’s main entrance rather than risk investigating these eerie openings.