Cloudland

by Lisa Gorton

  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.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Lost and Found

  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.

  CHAPTER NI
NETEEN

  The Cave

  White light and a vast silence pressed on Lucy’s eyes. For a long time, she lay still. Her hands felt swollen, full of broken glass. Are they my hands or not? She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t move them. Just as she was thinking that, her right hand lifted and pushed the whiteness back. A metre above her, she saw something drab-coloured and solid. She gazed at it a long while. Cloud, she thought, and sat up.

  She was in a low room, no bigger than a tent. There was a cloud coat piled on top of her. ‘Where am I?’ she whispered. The light was so dim she couldn’t be certain she was awake. It might be a dream, she thought, though when she brushed her hands across the ceiling it felt rough and ice-cold.

  Daniel will know whether I’m dreaming, she thought, and called out for him. Her skin ached with cold. She looked around the little room. ‘You!’ An arm’s length away, Fracta sat cross-legged with her back against the wall.

  ‘Where’s Daniel?’ cried Lucy. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Shadow-mongers got him,’ Fracta answered without blinking. ‘Got them all. They’ll be in Alkazia now.’

  ‘In Alkazia?’ Lucy felt herself shrinking. ‘You saved me? And left them to the shadow-mongers?’

  ‘You don’t sound all that grateful.’

  Lucy suddenly hated that impassive little face, those pallid eyes. She lunged at Fracta, but she had forgotten the ceiling, low overhead. Striking her forehead, she staggered, floundering in shame and rage.

  ‘What are you doing here, anyway? We left you in the Citadel.’

  ‘I know.’ Fracta’s face wrinkled into a smile. ‘You thought you’d escaped. But they are foolish in their pride, those Arcarals. They go in a rush and call themselves the fastest creatures in the sky. On a cloud board, flying day and night, we Stratus can keep up with them.’ Fracta shrugged. ‘It was the snow geese told me a Megalith saved you from the Varactor in Altovia. Simple to assume the Megalith would guide you through its tunnel to the Mist. Where the two met, I waited for you.’

  Lucy nodded, suddenly so tired her flesh felt grey. ‘I saw you, I think, when we were going down those steps. Then, of course – you had your cloud board to save you when we fell out of the Mist. I saw you that time, too – only I thought you were a bird or something.’

  ‘Yes. Like your friends, you see the Stratus and yet you do not see us.’ Fracta pronounced friends with a long hiss.

  ‘Why save me, then?’ flared Lucy. ‘I wish you hadn’t!’

  Fracta only looked bored. ‘You are hungry,’ she said. ‘You’ll feel calmer if you eat.’ She held out a piece of Comclo.

  Lucy snatched it from her and started gnawing. ‘You don’t care about the others. You’re like a machine.’

  Fracta shrugged. ‘Affection is a luxury of the leisured classes.’

  ‘Why save me, then?’ persisted Lucy.

  ‘Not for affection!’ Fracta snorted. ‘You are the Protector, and therefore useful. The sky creatures will follow you.’

  ‘But I told you – I’m not the Protector.’

  ‘And I told you, what you are does not matter. If they think of you as their Protector, it will suffice.’

  All at once, Lucy saw her opening. A pulse kicked in her throat. ‘You need me, then!’ Fracta didn’t answer, but Lucy had seen her eyes flicker. She waited.

  ‘What is it you want?’ said Fracta at last.

  ‘Help me rescue the others!’

  ‘No. Our first objective is to defeat the Kazia.’

  Lucy didn’t move. She understood now that, without her, Fracta was alone and helpless – just another Stratus, invisible in the hierarchy of the clouds.

  ‘Foolish!’ spat Fracta. ‘If we’re caught . . .’ In that small, freezing cave, the two of them glared at each other. Fracta’s mouth twisted as though she had eaten a stone. ‘As you say, I need you. At least, I need the illusion that makes you worth more than you are. If I help you rescue your precious friends, you will accept the title Protector? You will lead the sky creatures against the Kazia?’

  Lucy nodded.

  ‘You will keep this promise?’ Fracta held her face within an inch of Lucy’s. Her eyes burnt through Lucy’s skin. Finally, she sat back and nodded. ‘We’ll go now. At night, shadow-mongers carry the Kazia over Cloudland. We’ll find your friends in the Great Hall, no doubt, with all the other prisoners. We’ll have to be quick to cut them out before the Kazia comes back.

  ‘Here. Take this.’ Reaching into a pouch she wore tied to her waist, Fracta handed Lucy a tool like a chisel made of glass. It had a blade so fine it was almost invisible. Lucy raised her hand to test her thumb against its edge.

  ‘No!’ Fracta seized her wrist. ‘Try it against that wall.’

  When Lucy rested the blade against that hard-packed ice, it slid through it like a knife through water. Lucy drew back her arm and stared at the blade in astonishment.

  ‘An ice-razor,’ said Fracta. ‘A cloud the size of a city compacted to make that blade. It will cut anything in the clouds.’ She looked at Lucy. ‘Including you.’ She handed Lucy a sheath. Lucy was still fixing it around her waist when Fracta cut a gap in the cave wall.

  They stepped into the dark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Alkazia

  Above them, the sky was fierce with stars – pure light smashed across its empty reaches. Lucy couldn’t stop shivering. Alkazia was a dark shape against the sky, a door into some other world. While Lucy stood there, gazing at it, the moon slid over the top of Alkazia and the whole plain shone. For one moment, Lucy was suspended, part of the sky, feeling the stars burn in her own flesh. Then Fracta tugged at her arm and they started walking.

  The silence was astonishing. Lucy could hear tiny crystals grating against each other under her feet. What she felt, above all, was the unreality of fear. She might have been suspended an inch above her body, noting with curiosity how her hands were shaking, how her bones felt hollow.

  Fracta signalled the entrance was on the far side. They walked around Alkazia. The entrance was a cutout square, darker even than the walls. Holding her ice-razor in front of her, Lucy walked into Alkazia. Inside, it was dead cold. Moonlight, glimmering through the door, showed Lucy she had stepped into a vast hall, its ceiling and corners lost in shadow.

  Fracta tapped against Lucy’s back and pointed at one wall. Then she pointed at her chest, and the opposite wall, and scurried away. Splitting up, they edged along opposite sides of the hall. The wall showed Lucy’s reflection – her face, distorted on the uneven surface. When Lucy stepped closer, her reflection rose and blossomed, opening as she leant towards it, until she leant into her shadow. Then her reflection vanished. Where her face had been, she saw someone else’s face.

  Her cry echoed in the silent hall. It was the Heir, like him in every way; only there was no life in him at all. The ice gave his skin a marble sheen. He had his hands raised, fingers splayed. For a moment Lucy was in the aeroplane again, watching him press his fingers against the window. Then the memory faded and Alkazia gathered around her again.

  The Heir was in a cell cut into the wall. A layer of ice held him, its dirty translucence pitted with bubbles of air. He was frozen; she could not save him. Still, she couldn’t bear to leave him there, staring at nothing. Her ice-razor sliced easily through the wall.

  He was surprisingly light. Lucy lifted him easily from his cell. His flesh was so cold it froze to her fingers. She had to blow on them to ease them free. She suddenly imagined finding Daniel like that, and felt the cold glaze her own skin. Setting the Heir down, she took another step and peered into the wall. Again, her reflection blossomed and vanished. Again, where her face had been, she saw another’s face. It wasn’t Daniel; it was the face of a Cloudian, his plump cheeks stretched with pain. Stepping forwards, she saw another Cloudian, and then another. The hall was a gallery lined with true images of suffering.

  Lucy searched the length of the wall, looking into stricken faces until her nerves dul
led. At the far end, she came upon an oversized staircase, with every step an ice-plank wedged into the wall. She looked up at it and dark filled her eyes. Some part of her longed suddenly to see the Kazia, face to face.

  Fracta tapped on Lucy’s shoulder. ‘I have found them. The two Cloudians I have cut free, but your Earth friend is awake and I would not shock him.’

  ‘Daniel’s alive?’

  ‘You must be quick to cut him out.’ Fracta glanced up at the door. ‘Already, the moon is sinking.’

  Lucy was running. Fracta had propped Wist and Jovius beneath their broken cells. Jovius lay spreadeagled, just as he had been. In the next cell, Daniel slumped against the back wall. When Lucy rapped on the ice, he didn’t even blink. Four slashes, and she pulled the ice wall out.

  ‘Daniel!’ She reached into the cell and wrapped her hand around his wrist. His skin was so cold it felt like laminex. ‘Come on, quick!’

  ‘I’m so tired.’ Daniel’s voice sounded like a slow-motion recording.

  ‘Cold’s all through him,’ said Fracta, behind Lucy. ‘You’ll have to drag him out. I’ll get the others.’

  ‘The Heir, too,’ remembered Lucy. ‘Near the door.’ She was straining to lift Daniel. His arms and legs flopped. ‘Come on,’ she pleaded.

  Daniel kept staring at some point a hand’s breadth in front of his face. When his left foot caught on the side of his cell he tumbled forwards. Lucy’s knees gave way under his weight. He crashed down on her; he hadn’t even put out his hands to break his fall. Rolling him off her and grabbing him under the arms, she started lugging him backwards across the hall. She was sweating and her lungs hurt. Halfway, she had to stop and catch her breath. Her gasps tore at the silence.