Cloudland

by Lisa Gorton

  She had to hold the ice-razor in two hands to keep it steady enough to cut through the wall. Her breath caught at the top of her throat as they stepped outside into wide daylight. Night had given Alkazia a floating quality. Now, its sheer weight pressed on Lucy. She imagined the Kazia waiting there like a spider in a web of cold.

  Fracta’s troop of Stratus – perhaps sixty of them – hovered on cloud boards a foot above the plain. They didn’t look left or right. At a word from Fracta, they divided. About ten of them fanned out and lined up behind Daniel. The rest swung behind Lucy. Close overhead, the snow geese circled. The sound of their wings echoed strangely in Lucy’s ears. All those hours in the cave, she had been waiting, expecting this. Still, now, she could hardly believe it had started.

  Daniel climbed onto a cloud board with one of his Stratus. ‘Have you all got the liquid?’ he called. The Stratus lined up behind him raised both hands in a silent salute. They each held two flasks. In response, Daniel raised the matches. They made a rattling sound. Lucy took a little comfort from the fact his hands were shaking, too. She felt as though she was about to throw up.

  ‘As soon as one of you runs out of fuel, the next takes over. No spills, no gaps,’ he ordered, and the first Stratus eased off, flying close to the plain. The line stretched out. Lucy watched them go, feeling strangely bereft.

  Fracta pulled Lucy onto her cloud board. Lucy’s nerves were stretched so tight Fracta’s touch sent shivers over her skin. She looked across the still, watchful faces of the Stratus. The light glinted on the blades of their ice-razors.

  ‘No-one speak!’ she said. Her voice sounded loud and distant, with the reverb of someone speaking through a microphone. ‘Work in pairs. One cut the prisoners free, the other carry them to the entrance. Wist will use his carpet to ferry them out of Alkazia.’

  They skimmed towards Alkazia. Lucy tasted blood in her mouth. She had dug her teeth into her lip. They swept through the entrance. Lucy and Fracta stopped in the middle of the hall. Immediately, the Stratus broke into pairs and spread out along the walls, where they worked steadily and without pause. The silence was strange. Lucy could hear only little clinks as the Stratus set ice rectangles on the floor and carried the prisoners to the entrance.

  Beside Lucy, Fracta kept twitching. She’s afraid, thought Lucy. Then she noticed how the Stratus kept flicking glances at her – Fracta was directing them all with tiny hand signals. Wist swept from Alkazia with the first prisoners stacked on his carpet. A moment later, he swept back through the entrance and started piling on more. Lucy thought of Daniel, working around Alkazia, spreading the clear liquid that would explode soon in colour and light. Only she was useless. The Protector! she thought, and hollowness spread through her. All the others were connected, held together by their tasks as by an invisible thread. Only she was floating.

  Minute by minute, she became more conscious of the stairs, rising behind her. Soon they were all she could see. She slipped from the cloud board and crept across the hall. At first, she meant just to look at them. Then she thought she would stand on the first step. It was slippery; the stairs had no railing. She concentrated on the next step, and the next. The cold drew her irresistibly on. It made no sense, what she was doing. She knew that. Still, she kept climbing. She felt all those lost afternoons at home, waiting in her armchair, gather in her chest until she ached with longing – not to be useless, not to be alone.

  At the top of the stairs, she looked back across the hall. The Stratus had gathered at the entrance. They must have finished cutting the prisoners out. Now they were passing them along a line, out of Alkazia. They had not noticed she had gone. In front of her, there was a grey door. It had no handle. I’ll just look, she thought, and then turn, climb back down the stairs.

  The door opened. In front of Lucy, a room glittered so brightly it hurt her eyes. In the middle of the room, there rose a chair as big as a throne. On it sat a creature made entirely of ice, so still and radiant the light itself looked frozen in her depths.

  Lucy’s blood drained through her feet. She was emptied out, unable to move. Even the Kazia’s hair was made of ice. It hung down her back in fine strands, each as sharp as a nail. Where her fingers should have been, she had icicles. She was holding her hands to a blaze of coldness, a fire of ice, with blue-white flames that did not flicker, though they hissed and spat. Beside the blaze, a Megalith crouched, shivering miserably, with a stack of blue-grey shards at its side.

  ‘More ice,’ said the Kazia. The Megalith flicked some shards onto the blaze. Cold poured off it, heavier than smoke. It struck Lucy, making her gasp. Fine cracks ran across the Kazia’s ice flesh, the surface of her shoulders and neck. The ice strands of her hair clattered against each other as she turned her head.

  The Kazia’s face was massive and perfect. Her lips and cheeks were made of ice with blue depths behind its surface reflections. Her eyes were white, but deep in each eye there shone a light that was pure cold. As Lucy watched, flakes spread across the Kazia’s cheeks. The surface of her face cracked and froze into a new shape; her lips pulled back to reveal sharp-edged, translucent teeth.

  ‘The Earth one! The one they name Protector? When they see me, they cry out for you. This Megalith holds you as its last hope.’ The Kazia laughed with a sound of shattering glass.

  Her laugh formed a white vapour, an ice-wraith, that drifted into Lucy’s face and bit like acid. Everything turned white for a moment. Lucy heard the sound of wind trapped in pine trees. A moment later, she recognised her own voice, crying out. Flinging up her hand, she scattered the air in front of her. The ice-wraith broke into wisps that faded to nothing.

  ‘Run!’ The Megalith lunged forwards, scattering shards across the floor. ‘If you are the Protector, run!’ Stopping between Lucy and the Kazia, it reared up on its hind paws and beat at the Kazia’s face.

  The Kazia’s cry struck the Megalith full in the face. In the midst of its movement, the Megalith stopped. Ice spread across its flesh. It struggled for a moment, its muscles rippling like the tide beneath a frozen lake. Then, with a hissing sound, the ice sank into its flesh. The Megalith was frozen as though it had never lived.

  Lucy heard the sound of something breaking. The Kazia was standing up. Her chair split. One armrest hit the floor in a smash of light. The Kazia’s foot swung up. A chunk of floor broke away and shattered. She was stepping around the Megalith. Her torso was a column of ice, formed around the twisted bodies of three Cloudians: Stratus, forced upright with their heads dragged back. They stared blindly, their faces distorted with pain.

  The Kazia towered over Lucy. Cracks ran across her cheeks as she drew back her lips. Lucy saw the smooth grey hollow of her throat. It was impossible to breathe. She was falling down a black tunnel, her ears filled with roaring. At the end of that tunnel was the Kazia’s face.

  Lucy clutched her ice-razor. All her awareness gathered at the edge of its blade. Automatically, her arm swung back. All the terror of the past days, the floating loneliness of the last year, drew together in her mind as her muscles tightened. A pause, as the Kazia’s ice-face printed itself on Lucy’s mind. Then with all her force, she catapulted her ice-razor at the Kazia’s face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Breaking

  With a sound that split the light, Lucy’s ice-razor stabbed into the Kazia’s eye. A crack jagged across her cheek. The rest of her face held still. Only her lips pulled back in a mocking smile as if she felt no pain. She took a step.

  Lucy shrank back, terrified. But the crack kept growing across the Kazia’s face. It broke into smaller lines: a cobweb on her temple. Then a strand of hair snapped off and speared the floor. The Kazia jerked her head sideways, looking for what had made that sound. With the sudden movement, half her face broke off and smashed. With her one eye, the Kazia stared down at the litter of ice. Then she turned her ruined face and screamed.

  The ice blast flung Lucy back. Half-blind, the Kazia had missed her by inches. Lucy heard the wall
beside her crack. In her rage, the Kazia flung out one arm. Her icicle fingers slashed at Lucy’s chest. Lucy flung herself out the door, slipping over the first stairs. Ice shattered behind her. The Kazia had smashed the door. A fragment struck Lucy’s forehead. Warm darkness ran into her eye and she slipped. Pain stabbed into her knee and the light reeled.

  She was falling. Out of the confusion of noise and terror, Fracta’s face loomed, unnaturally large. Her mouth was open. She was shouting. Lucy couldn’t hear. Fracta grabbed her shoulders and forced her up. The grey blur settled into definite shapes. They were not falling; they were skidding down air on a cloud board, wind-rush all around them, towards a rectangle of daylight.

  The Kazia was blundering downstairs, flinging ice blasts with each breath. The steps held for a moment under the onslaught and then splintered off, falling around her.

  ‘Now!’ screamed Lucy, as they swept out the door into open sky. Almost before she had finished speaking, fire exploded at their backs. Its force spun the cloud board up, turning sky and flame together.

  Lucy only realised the full force of that fire when they had landed and she stood beneath it on the plain. Terrible and exhilarating, it flung great scarlet fists at the black, slow smoke that drifted over it. Beneath its roar, she heard the whirr of its white heat, that almost invisible line along the plain where it changed liquid into fire.

  Lucy thought of it as hunger, loosed from every living thing into its own existence. Though she couldn’t help cowering from its heat, something in her leapt up in response to it. While she watched it, she could not remember terror, or how the cold had eaten into her nerves. The fire filled her with its own exultation. She had escaped. More than that: they had won. She felt no fear – not even when she saw in the smoke’s veils the shadow-mongers’ darker forms. Whenever one broke from shelter, snow geese screeched towards it. Beating their wings, claws outstretched, they tore and harried it until it shivered back into the smoke. She could hardly believe this rage, this vast existence of fire, had burst from a little box of matches.

  ‘Daniel!’ she called and started searching. Everywhere she looked, a crowd of prisoners shuffled, blank-faced and silent. They pressed past each other and then paused, one foot half-raised, and started in another direction. Watching them, Lucy’s exultation faltered. Shielding her eyes, she turned and stumbled over a grimy heap, stranded in a puddle of melted ice.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ it said, in a tired voice. It was the Megalith from Alkazia. Lucy crouched in the puddle beside it. Parts of its flesh had burnt away, leaving it pitted with blisters. Where its paws had been, Lucy saw blunt remnants. Its eyes had melted down its face like plastic tears.

  ‘You saved me,’ she whispered.

  The Megalith raised the shell of its face, searching for her, forgetting it could not see. ‘Protector,’ it rasped. ‘And the Kazia, ended?’

  ‘Trapped in the fire. She can’t get out.’ Lucy pressed her hands together, but still, shivers ran up her arms to her shoulders. Her eyes stung with tears but she couldn’t cry.

  ‘I was so cold,’ said the Megalith. ‘My thoughts, even. Then the Protector. It is warm now. I have climbed into the sun, I think.’

  Someone tugged Lucy’s shoulder. It was Daniel. She stumbled as she rose to meet him. He caught her elbow. He was already scattering words. He didn’t notice the Megalith.

  ‘Fracta’s looking for you. Wist says the Varactor’s coming. We can’t find the albatross. And the Kazia: she keeps screaming. Fracta thinks she’s planning something . . .’

  While he spoke, he dragged her away from the Megalith, through the wandering crowd of prisoners to where the Stratus waited, in two lines, behind Wist and Fracta. As Lucy reached them, Fracta raised her arm and pointed.

  Slow, silent, the Kazia rose out of the flames. Around her, the shadow-mongers had gathered. With a perpetual rippling, they dragged her up through air. The Kazia’s legs had broken off. One of her arms was shattered at the shoulder, the other had melted into a flat-edged club. She was the colour of old marble, everywhere cracked and glossy with ice-melt. But her one eye, staring from her broken face, held a look of triumph.

  Five snow geese wheeled and rushed at the shadow-mongers. Their cries sounded over the roar of fire. Lucy watched, not breathing, as the smooth half-mask of the Kazia’s face pulled back. She screamed once – the snow geese stopped in the middle of a wing beat. For one instant, they hung in air. Then they dropped, wing over wing, into the flames.

  ‘The Varactor will shelter the Kazia!’

  Daniel grabbed Lucy’s arm and swept up his other hand to point at the sky. With the loose, swaying movement of something in water, the Varactor sank out of the high air, and the Kazia rose to meet it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Rising

  Lucy’s first feeling was disbelief. This must be a trick. No! No! her mind kept repeating. ‘Wist,’ she gasped. ‘Your carpet.’

  She lifted her hand, which felt as heavy as metal. ‘Ice-razor,’ she said to Fracta, as Wist flung out the carpet with a snap. The sound propelled Lucy forwards. She was moving in a blur. Somehow, she and Wist were on the carpet and it was rising.

  ‘Wait!’ Daniel caught its edge. ‘Take these!’ he said, flinging the matches and a flask. ‘Make a bomb!’ He was running, dragged forwards by the carpet’s speed, but it was soaring now, leaving him behind. ‘Make a fuse!’ he called.

  And all at once, he was a small figure on the plain. They banked in front of the flames, spiralling up and clear. The smoke burnt Lucy’s lungs. They saw the Kazia, perhaps fifty metres ahead; her face was turned towards the Varactor and glittering in its greenish light.

  The albatross wheeled around the carpet with the antenna in its claws. Though Lucy’s whole body was pounding, when the albatross fixed its eye on her, her throat tightened with something like joy. Calling out once, it swept past them and started to climb the sky.

  Lucy used the ice-razor to cut a strip from her shirt. Her hands felt clumsy and enormous. Twisting the strip of cloth, she forced it into the mouth of the flask so it stuck out like the wick of a candle. All the while, they kept climbing. Wist, with his arms tucked behind him, leant into the wind. The carpet shuddered with speed. They were gaining on the Kazia, but slowly.

  Lucy thought how small the albatross looked now, rising against the Varactor’s mass. Close, close – the Varactor’s tentacles flared and, like sheet lightning, a blue-green light spread across the sky.

  The albatross cartwheeled sideways, wingtip over wingtip. The antenna, spinning from its grasp, glinted and then dropped straight down. Lucy kept waiting for the albatross to steady, to arc its wings, but it kept falling, shuddering as the wind plucked at it.

  ‘Keep going!’ Lucy struck Wist’s back. He had folded into his grief; the carpet was tipping. When he glanced back at her, she saw lines cut into his cheeks as his mouth stretched open in a soundless cry.

  ‘Keep going!’ she screamed again, and rattled the matches: such a small sound! With his mouth still gaping, Wist nodded and the carpet kicked forwards again. In the air next to Lucy, something flared. It was Daniel, riding an Arcaral. He held the antenna in one hand like a spear. The Arcaral made no sound as it passed. Daniel looked back, the Arcaral’s mane streaming around him, and called out something she couldn’t hear.

  The Kazia was so close now Lucy saw how the ice-melt on her back had frozen in windblown shapes: frills and spines that caught the Varactor’s light. Ten metres from the Varactor, Daniel raised the antenna. Barbed wire pierced Lucy’s spine as she watched. Five metres away, then two . . . the Varactor shrugged its tentacles wide.

  The Arcaral spun backwards. Turning a loop, it surged straight up into the dead centre of that wheel of light. A soundless explosion: the Varactor slammed its tentacles together and the sky broke into white and green flames.

  Lucy’s body seemed to collapse in on itself. From the bottom of all that flaring light, she saw one plummeting line. The Arcaral was fall
ing so fast she could see its slipstream. Fear ripped at her throat. One straight line down; and then, astonishingly, it turned. The Arcaral swept out of its dive. She saw Daniel, his arms stretched out like wings.

  Above him, the explosion shrank into a cluster of light, which flickered once, then vanished. The Kazia had stopped in mid-air. She was swinging back and forth, staring up at that emptiness where the Varactor had been.

  Lucy’s fingers fumbled with the matches. The small flame trembled and almost died, but when it touched the fuse, it leapt up at Lucy.

  ‘Now!’ she called. Wist swept the carpet over the Kazia, who tipped her head and looked up at Lucy with one blank, astonished eye.

  Lucy dropped the burning flask and watched it break apart in her face.

  The explosion flung Lucy back. She had a sense of quiet, of the sky rolling away from her. Far off, she saw a shaking out of black and scarlet sheets; and she saw the wind streaming past her, full of grey lines like fishing wire. What a tangle, she thought. How will I unknot it? But she didn’t feel worried, only a little puzzled. She waited, and the answer came to her. I’ll just pull on one end, she thought. Then she settled into drowsiness, and a pleasant feeling of warmth.

  All at once, she slammed back into her body. The noise was unbelievable, a physical pressure on her eardrums and ribs. Her hand was freezing – no, that was heat. Her hand was on fire. She saw flames, real flames, dancing on her fingers. It felt like having needles pushed under her nails. She beat at air. The flames leapt higher. She seemed to see faces in them, laughing at her.

  Lucy pitched off the carpet, landing face down on the plain. When she rolled sideways, aching exhaustion in her muscles, she saw she had extinguished the fire on her hand. The skin on her finger was purple-red and already blistered. Two of her nails were lumpy and black. Her whole hand throbbed with pain.

  She was perhaps a hundred metres from Alkazia. The Cloudians swarming around it looked no bigger than her forearm. Beside her, the carpet was a tattered scrap.