Cloud Castles

by Michael Scott Rohan

  ‘Why? Mall’s lived longer!’

  ‘Aye, free to roam across the seas of the Spiral, to seek out all the hidden corners of the Earth! Free to grow!’ Mall, still leaf-crowned, made no move to look up. ‘She had to live out hers within the compass of a little tavern in a lesser port, seldom straying and that not far, roaming only in the length of her long sight. Yet that she endured, sooner than founder again in the slough she came from. Now she has.’

  ‘Well, can we get her out? Get her back? We’ve got to, dammit!’

  Mall’s eyelids fluttered closed. ‘I see scant chance of that. She is gone back to the Brocken.’

  ‘The Brocken, the Brocken! It’s just a mountain, blast it! Is this something happens there, or what?’

  Mall wiped her hair back, and shuddered. ‘Just a mountain, aye. But mountains cast shadows like aught else, and this one – blacker than most. Places there are – not many – where the powers from the Rim may reach inward, even to the very borderland ‘twixt Spiral and Core. Some such you have trodden, many a time. Such is the Borobodur. Such is the City of the Graal, such is the mountain. The pentacle over the map was a gate thither.’

  Nobody said anything, but the wind swirled outside, and sang a song of cold and emptiness. A few drops spattered across the windshield. Mall’s blazing eyes were dimmed. ‘Even in my day ‘twas a name known. From the earliest times it has been a dark hallow, a place of power, and this is no accident; since the forebears of Frank and Saxon first came wandering out of the east, since Germania’s Urwald held at bay the mightiest marchings of Rome, since the coming of the younger kindred of men drove back the Elder to the mountains in the wake of the Great Ice. Deep within that shadow something settled and made its habitation and its strength, some force that had followed those first of true men on their Volkwanderung. Followed, as the wolf follows the herd.’

  The day was coming, but it was still far from light enough for me. A fine drizzle wept across the windshield. ‘What kind of force?’ I demanded sharply.

  Jyp snorted. ‘Hope you never get close enough to find out. Those who do, don’t tell – like Katjka. Or can’t. I hope to Hell – because that’s what spawned it, for sure.’

  Hell wasn’t something I’d ever believed in. ‘Something from outside? Something from out near the Rim, like the Graal? Something that was human once?’

  The sound Mall made was not a laugh. ‘Like, yet so very unlike. And as to human – if so, it took sorely against the condition, for it has long wrought havoc upon humankind, joying in pain, spreading malice and disruption where it may. And yet,’ she added, suddenly thoughtful, ‘it might well be that it once wore flesh, for it seems obsessed with it, both to revel in and to excoriate, pleasure and pain always to excess …’

  ‘Sounds like a classic sadist,’ I said, and shivered slightly at the thought. ‘Only writ large.’

  ‘Writ, and in letters of blood and fire,’ said Mall. ‘The panics over witchcraft that struck so hard through Europe in my time and earlier, they were but shadows. For the most part witches danced only in the addled pates of witch-hunters deranged or evil, greedy for pain to inflict or goods to confiscate. Oh, here and there ‘a might find some misremembered shard of old heathendom, maybe, or harmless hedge-wizardry; but they were nothing. And yet there was a core of grim truth, little though the hunters made of it; a terrible timeless focus of ancient evil. A power that sought to ensnare humanity to its service, dangling strange knowledge and arcane arts and pleasures as a lure; and by awful ceremony and the misuse of those arts in malice and revenge, it bound them.’

  Again, that bitter negative of a laugh. ‘Does aught happen there? Aye, a happening indeed, a thing of dread, a work without a name, timeless, without beginning or end – the Grand Sabbat of all the witch cults. Once Katjka walked that path, longer and harder than most, until the same strength that had sustained her along it led her to break free and seek atonement. Many times she visited it, suffered much but learned much, and received many powers. Now she has been dragged back there, not for a brief passage but sans let, sans release. Dead she may be, or far more likely tossed back into that fearful cauldron and lost in it, victim and perpetrator both. If so, ‘twill never loose her more. There may be some with power to help her, but this I know, that I do not. It is not in me. She is lost to us.’

  I couldn’t speak, not for a moment. My eyes stung, and if it hadn’t been for the iron concentration that flying develops I might have broken up entirely. For me that was rare. There was a time I’d managed to convince myself I didn’t need anyone else, that I was better off with casual sex and no entanglements, that I didn’t give the old proverbial damn. And then, all of a sudden, the warmth of the Tavern had wrapped itself around me, Jyp and the old couple who ran it, and Katjka. She’d been at once the most accessible – not to say available – and the most remote, a voice out of the shadows, a warm hand on your neck, a brush of the lips and a hooded glance that said everything and revealed nothing at all. Her intimacies were strictly on a cash basis, though she occasionally hinted otherwise, and there was no more forbidding defence than that. All I’d ever learned about her was from others, or from reading between the lines of her rare unguarded remarks. Her powers she seldom revealed except when a good friend needed them – and more than once that had been me. The Tavern without her seemed hardly possible; that stuffy little room under the eaves, with its clutter of odd old-fashioned balms and unguents and its enveloping feather bed …

  I wrestled savagely with my helmet. If ever you catch the delusion that you don’t have a heart, try carving someone out of it and see. ‘You were right, Jyp,’ I managed to say, almost steadily. ‘It’s my goddamned fault.’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘No, it isn’t. Sure, I wasn’t happy about her coming along; but I clammed up, didn’t I? If it’d been just your own private quarrel, maybe I wouldn’t have – but the Graal, now, that’s big. That’s something that’ll affect all Europe and the world, in the end, Core and Spiral both. You’re not to blame. We needed our answer.’

  ‘And we have it!’ I stabbed savagely at the starter, which coughed and missed. ‘Thanks to her. We know it’s this thing on the mountain behind Lutz, and probably Le Stryge as well, and C-Tran’s tied up in it somehow, it’s all part of a wider plan. And – and – the hell with it!’ Anger welled over my grief. ‘It’s too wide for me! I’ve been blundering about too much! I’m not putting my friends at any more risk!’ I stabbed the starter. The engine spluttered and fired, the rotors swished to life, growing stiff and straight, slicing into the chill dawn.

  ‘So what’re you going to do?’ yelled Jyp, reaching for his helmet.

  ‘What I should’ve done in the first place. Go right back to the City and get things straight with them, risk or no risk. I won’t take the Spear back, I won’t so much as touch it. They can damn well send their own guards or Knights or whatever to fetch it. Let them deal with this Brocken thing, and Le Stryge! And after that,’ I breathed hard, and thought of what I’d like to do to Lutz, ‘we’ll see! Jyp, you said the City was hard to find. But you have the course I took before, and the time. If anyone can find it, you can.’

  He glanced up at the grey sky, and the equally grey navcom screen. ‘Well, no law ’gainst trying.’ He swung himself over into the front seat, and peered around. The clouds were massing into great peaks and columns, vast forbidding fortress walls, the same in any direction; but he gave me a heading at once, and a corridor. I gunned throttle and collective, caught the tail rotor with the pedals as it tried to overswing into the trees, and tilted the main rotor assembly to send us wheeling away upward towards the clouds. Behind us, dwindling in the dawn, burned a patch of bitter floodlit brightness, and my curse went with it. I hadn’t finished with it, or its master, yet.

  We moved from cloud to cloud, with Jyp’s keen eye flicking from my instruments to the shifting patterns of grey beyond. Which gave him the more guidance I couldn’t tell, but he seemed to feel there was something
ahead; there was a quiet excitement in his voice altogether unlike his normal boisterous enjoyment, and after a while even Mall seemed to catch it. She leaned over our shoulders, shedding damp leaves, and when I glanced up I saw her face losing its lines of weariness and despair, growing keen again at the prospect of seeing this place. That gave me an odd lift, in its turn; these strange friends of mine had seen so much and lived so long I felt like a child beside them. But now, ahead of us here, was somewhere that impressed even them, somewhere I’d found for myself. I looked at the cloud-peaks ahead, and saw them flush and lighten with the first faint light of the hidden dawn. Completely different from the ones I’d first encountered, of course, random as any cloudscape; and yet that didn’t seem to matter. There was a familiarity in their pattern, a consistency, as if I was seeing the same landscape from a different angle. ‘I think we ought to turn a little here,’ I suggested. ‘Westward …’

  Jyp swung around to look at me. ‘Gettin’ to be quite a navigator yourself!’ he shouted. ‘I was just about to suggest that – westward a point it is.’

  I eased off the tail a little and pitched the rotors to steer us around. My compass settled easily enough, but the satellite navigation display was behaving oddly, and I half expected to hear the Frankfurt controllers demanding what I thought I was playing at; as far as they knew I’d never made that unscheduled landing outside town. I wished I never had –

  Mall’s shout resounded even over the engines, and her out-thrust arm almost ripped out my intercom cables. But I didn’t blame her when I followed her pointing finger, and saw far ahead, in the midst of a wide pool of blue this time, the pair of gigantic spires that topped the Hall of the Graal. I leaned on the pedals, tilted the stick, and swung us away towards the billowing slopes of cloud, away and down. ‘I’m not going near that place in the air!’ I explained. ‘No knowing what they’d think. I’ll land and walk in, like before.’

  Jyp nodded, and watched in excitement as the clouds thinned suddenly, and the valley he’d named the Heilenthal sprang to life below us. The sky was clearer, and the dawn sun blazed on the rough white stone of the cliffs and the greenery at their feet; the rivers shone like steel and bronze, and down their long stair-falls rainbows glowed. Mall’s hand clutched at my shoulder as she saw the walls of the city appear round the edge of the mountain, then sagged in disappointment as I hastily pulled back and down, careful to stay out of sight. We fell towards rougher ground than I’d sought out before, but better sheltered. At the margin of the forest a clearing opened, at its centre a roofless ruin whose bare gable toppled at the touch of our downblast; a mighty cloud of fireweed fountained outward as I brought us in to land, glittering white in the sun. I eased the ‘copter down, stilled the engines and threw the door wide even as the rotors whistled to a stop.

  We sat, and let the sun warm us, and the air of the place blow around us; and I marvelled. I’d felt something before, some sense of wonder at this place. But how could I have failed to sense the fullness of it, when even the very air seemed to carry some special benediction of its own, given without grudge or question? It took the grief and anger and desperate worry within us, that crisp dawn air, and without in any way diminishing it it somehow lightened the impact, and the weight. I could bear it now, and look to its ending. The sun warmed the tensions out of us, soothed our bruises and our weariness, left us content simply to sit and rest. It was hard to rouse myself up for the long walk ahead; but I knew I had to.

  ‘You two can wait here,’ I told them, and overrode their protests. ‘Look, it makes sense. First, if something does happen, then you know where I’ve gone; second, I’ll look more harmless alone – and be a smaller target; and third, with you two here I’m a lot happier about leaving the machine. For one thing, I’m less likely to find Le Stryge lurking round when I get back.’

  Mall smiled. ‘An we see him, we’ll e’en convey him your love and benedicite.’

  ‘Do. On the end of a long sharp stick would be fine.’ I swung myself down into the deep growth of the old clearing. Fireweed and thistledown erupted around me, hanging in the air like a slow snowfall. ‘If I don’t come back, play it by ear. If these people are all you say they are, you ought to be safe enough. But, for God’s sake, be careful, okay?’

  ‘’S funny,’ drawled Jyp. ‘Just what I was gonna say to you. They’re good people, sure, but these are hard times, and you ain’t exactly endeared yourself to them already.’ He tossed me one of the forgotten lunch packs we’d laid on. ‘Long walk. Enjoy yourself, Steve.’

  Strangely enough, I did. I followed one of the likelier streams down, and the air took hold of me, and lightened my step. It didn’t feel long, that walk; I wanted to linger over every moment of it, even though I was ravenous before I’d gone a mile. Partly it was playing tourist, because there were things to see here; strange old standing stones and dolmens, half-hidden ruins that looked distinctly Roman, and once an entire village standing empty. I thought at first they must all be in the fields, till I saw the sagging shutters and decaying thatch, and the empty millrace from which the wheel had fallen. On the far side of it I stopped by the river, and washed down my sandwiches with great draughts of the Stream. I slopped it over my head and neck and managed to forget the amount of sleep I hadn’t had lately. It was icy meltwater, clear and fresh, and even more than the air it set heart in me – not by any mysterious virtue I could detect, but by its very ordinariness. Plain water, but the best plain water there could be, without taint or infection, without even the natural staining of some soils, yet with all the full flavour of an ideal mineral content. The more I thought about that, the more miraculous it did seem, after all. If you could bottle this stuff it would knock every other mineral water off the market – but that idea threatened to spoil it. You couldn’t bottle this valley, the air, the trees, all that went with it; the water was only one part of something greater. Something that didn’t seem to go with deserted villages, though …

  I sat up. I’d dropped off – only for twenty minutes or so, by my watch, but I felt amazingly refreshed; I’d had less restful nights than that. Through the trees the wall and the towers looked closer than I’d expected. I felt better about facing them, too; the sooner it was over with … I climbed to my feet, and went on.

  As often happens, they weren’t quite so close as they looked. It wasn’t far short of three hours’ walking before I reached the last rise, and long before that I’d noticed something was different. There was nobody about, no beasts in the fields, or even on their way to them, and this in the middle of the day. The roads, when I reached them, were empty, and I felt conspicuous as an ant on a tablecloth. As I came within clear sight of the walls I ducked back under the trees again. This was worse than I’d bargained for.

  I couldn’t just walk up to the great gate, as I’d planned to, and talk to the sentries. It was shut tight, and above it was the first sign of life I’d seen – heads pacing back and forth along the walls, a network of sentries. As if they were on a war footing, preparing for a siege, even. That could make them very, very jumpy indeed; I wished I’d brought something to make a white flag. Moving carefully, keeping my eye on those slow-pacing watchers, I ducked through the trees towards the wall. I couldn’t get very close, but at least it was in hailing range. I took a deep breath and stepped out into the open, waved my hand and called out. My leg muscles were taut springs ready to hurl me back into shelter, but I raised a hand and waved, as naturally as possible, and called out.

  The reaction was instant. The parapet sprouted rifles, and I had to fight my urge to run like a rabbit. From above a hard voice drifted down. ‘Wer da? Halten sie zuvor!’

  ‘Freund!’ I yelled back, keeping my hands in clear sight. ‘Ich bringe gute Neues! Ich will mit ein Offizier sprechen! Darf ich hereinkommen?’

  There was a hurried conference on the walls. ‘Bleib’ da!’ came the answer. ‘Man soil’ der Kapitan hohlen. Steh’, und kein Spass, sonst bist du Rabensfutter!’

  As mu
ch as I could expect, though I didn’t like that bit about food for ravens. I crossed my arms and stood waiting, until a small wicket in the great gate opened, and out of it stepped two men in black uniforms, crisp and military in an ornate, flamboyant style that hadn’t been seen in the Core for a century or longer, redolent of a world that ended in blood, mud and extremism after 1914. Silver buttons fastened the long jackets, encircled by a Sam Browne-style belt in white leather; silver piping encircled the high tight collar and heavy cuffs, and ran in double braids down the seams of their riding breeches. Swords clanked by their sides, ornately sheathed sabres, but they both carried sidearms in their hands. The bigger one, taking the lead as they stalked up to me, had a Mauser machine pistol, a jewel of engineering that looked far too modern for the late nineteenth-century product it was. His hair was cropped almost to nothing under his black enamelled pikelhaube helmet, and his moustache was waxed into upturned spikes – a caricature Hun, ridiculous in pictures, but a lot more formidable in front of you and well armed. The younger man was lean and bony, with longer gingery hair and a small-eyed, clean-shaven face, but he moved with an athletic, self-assertive swagger that was threatening in itself. I didn’t like the look of either; but if anyone was in the wrong here, I was. Time, decidedly, to be polite.

  I raised my hand, and we disposed of a few courtesies. The Hun turned out to be a Hauptmann Dragovic, not a Hun after all, the other a Leutnant von Albersweg, officers of the City Guard of Heilenberg, and they were obviously impatient or edgy. When I told them I had news about a recent disappearance, though, news important enough to be brought to these Knights of theirs, their entire manner changed. The captain gave me one sharp look, and then impressed me by holstering that fearsome gun; the lieutenant only lowered his, but the captain gestured and he followed suit. ‘Best that you come with us,’ the captain said in passable English. ‘You have the right of it, such news should be told at once. Come!’