Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  “We’re going to follow the border until we come to the river. Then follow it up to the plateau,” Eap added, glancing at Arapahoe and Selah.

  Arapahoe nodded. “A fine plan. Is this plateau where we look next for your fugitive?”

  “Indeed,” Eap said. The shift in Arapahoe’s expression—the sudden solemnity, the respectful nod at Eap, brought my anger back. I was doing my best. Couldn’t people give me a break?

  “Selah,” I made my voice sharp and commanding, “get the guns in good condition. Arapahoe, make sure the cloakers are working.” Glancing up at the giant glimmer that hid our balloon, I amended, “They’re working, but make sure they’ll continue in good working order. Our plan hinges on surprise.”

  “As usual,” Arapahoe said, the firm lines of his long dimples popping out in his planed cheeks as he smiled at me. He swatted Selah’s rear, and she gave him a dirty look, a pinch to the cheek, and strode away.

  A wave of relief swept over me. Apparently we were putting this behind us. I managed a smile in return. So easy? Really? “Yes, as usual.”

  “Let’s man those newfangled machinery guns as well,” Arapahoe said. “I’ll let Selah know.” The emphasis on I’ll had my face warming again, but I simply nodded.

  “Machine guns?” I asked after he left.

  “Another improvement,” Lil replied, not bothering to turn and look at me. She was staring at the mist as if it might reveal something profound, like she was trying to make out shapes. She reached out, whirled her hand in it, and a spot of color bloomed there, then receded.

  “But machine guns and cannon balls aren’t going to do anything to blyks,” she added. “Come on. We’ve got to strategize. Eap and I have some ideas, and I’m sure you’ll have some, too.” She regarded me seriously, her bright eyes glimmering with intelligence and sheer brains. It’s like I could see her neurons firing. Frightening, when Lil gets her neurons firing.

  The three of us, Me, Lil, and Eap, walked back together toward the cabins.

  Chapter 15

  Lil lead us to her cabin, the room she’d claimed was the tiniest of the staterooms, right next to mine.

  Eap sat at a little table in the middle of the room—remarkably like our kitchen table.

  This room was definitely Lil’s comfort zone. Bright colors, impressionist images frescoed into the walls. Surreal imagines in frames on the walls, clashing with the impressionist, and on the floor, a mosaic made of ceramic tiles that depicted everything from improbable beasts with hands instead of hooves to precisely drawn and labeled specimens of Madagascan plants.

  The bed was familiar. A giant hammock, suspended at four corners, full of colorful, velvet pillows and beanbag poufs.

  A mural of Satie stretched the full length of the room, head up, eyes twinkling maliciously, tail curled coyly around her back legs. On the ceiling was a collection of ragged-looking moths, circling the ceiling light like they were attracted to it.

  I shuddered. I hate moths. Lil, though, has a fascination with them. Especially the Madagascan Sunset moth, which is virtually indistinguishable from a butterfly. I don’t even know why they call it a moth when it’s clearly a butterfly. Lil and I have had a dozen inane arguments about it.

  I sat down at our kitchen table, complete with too-tall stool and plastic chair with uneven back legs. I chose the chair. Lil chose the stool. Eap was already seated in the only good chair, the one we usually give Mom.

  Mom.

  For a moment, I couldn’t quite breathe in. I missed her. Badly missed her. Like someone who wants to come in out of the winter misses the warmth of the house.

  “We need to make a straight cut,” Eap said, pointing to yet another map lying on the table.

  I was getting sick of that crescent. This one had some newer markings. In addition to the asterisk where Grandeur had been—now drawn through with a thick black line—there were more asterisks and names to go with them. One of them was Xanadu. “Like in the poem?” I asked, pointing to it.

  “The poet,” Eap said, regarding me, “can see sometimes even through crust. Coleridge told of this place even before he passed into it.” Eap tapped the map with the blunt end of his fountain pen. “I’ve tried to remember where all the oldest . . . the oldest of the tellers, the old countries once were. It’s possible we’d find remnants there. Things that our Grimms haven’t bothered to un-tell, simply because they’ve been told so many times they’ve been made nearly as solid as the world on your crust. And two men intent on taking over a great deal would consider it a waste of resources to actually dissemble a city stone by stone, rather than simply cover it with Grimwoods.”

  “Like the mountains,” Lil said. “The plateau.”

  “Yes. Things as remarkable as a 20,000 foot plateau that has stood for centuries? Not easy to tell others not to see it. Or to un-see it yourself.”

  “So there’s Xanadu,” I said, keeping my finger on the asterisk near the center of the map. It was southwest of the plateau, which Eap had marked Mt. Babette.

  “Weird name for an ancient mountain.” Lil pointed to it.

  “It’s Hans’ name for it,” Eap said. “He used to go on a trip there every year, in the golden age of Grandeur. Came back with a hundred improbable tales each time of what he’d seen—children floating down rivers in the sky. Glittering silver fish, red-bellied beasts. Now, of course, it makes some sense. He was seeing the underside of you.” Eap studied us narrowly in turn, then refocused on the map.

  There were other names—Eden, Ur, Valhalla, Yves. “The placements are mere guesses,” Eap said, “based on tales told me secondhand.”

  Lil pointed to an asterisk near the upper tip of the crescent that had a line of script curved along the shoreline: Atlantis. “Really?”

  “Really,” Eap replied. “At one time. The point is, these places may have strongholds, places to hide not known to our enemy. In Grimwoods, pure Grimwoods, there is no place to hide, because every tree is a piece of them. They know each particle of that forest. But what they’ve covered with their woods, what they may not have unbuilt . . .”

  “There has to be some places,” I said, “if Hans has been hiding somewhere.”

  “Your grammar is unlaced, but precisely,” Eap said. “Pure deduction gives us this answer. Thus, my trying to remember what is quite old and solid that may yet lie under Grimwoods.”

  “So we have more places to look.”

  “Yes. Dear Lord,” Eap touched his pen to the paper, allowing a small blot of ink to swell through the fibers, “I hope we do not have to make many trips inland, however. And Lil’s right; once we find shoreline, we must cut straight across to Mt. Babette.”

  I looked blankly at him.

  “The plateau,” Eap said, an edge of impatience in his tone. “Where sky meets water. Sky above the Caldera, water in your river. Where Hans spent his time. Where he sent his nightingale through.”

  “I knew what you meant,” I replied somewhat testily. “I just didn’t understand how you expect us to find him. We can’t just depend on luck. Are we combing every inch of this plateau? Are we . . . telling up bloodhounds? What are we doing?”

  “Hans,” Eap drawled. “It’s Hans. We’ll find him. He can’t resist improbability and romance. His tellings have never been small or hovelly.” He lifted his brows slightly at the last word, and Lil rolled her eyes.

  “He’s got the world’s biggest imagination,” she said, coming to Hans’ defense, “and you expect him to not use it.”

  “I expect people who have seen as much life as that man has to grow wise,” Eap said. “But I should be wise enough now to no longer be surprised when they aren’t. We go as fast as possible over Grimwoods, following the river, and hope to gain the element of surprise once we make the border. The hope is that they will not detect us right away, and if they do, we at least have a head start. But we must have alternative plans. Places to flee.” He pointed to Xanadu. “This is a likely place.”

  “What if it is comp
letely gone?” I asked.

  “We shall have to stand our ground and fight.” He looked up at me. “This is . . . the end.” He shrugged. “If you desire to get back to your hoary crust, we cannot spend all our time hiding in border mist.”

  I blew a gust of air through my lips. “Do we have much of a chance on our own? The three of us, without Hans?” Images of wolves crept up on me. And Dane.

  Eap was quiet.

  “No,” Lil said. “I mean . . . maybe. There are three of us, to two of them. But— “

  “But you are children,” Eap said. “And the two we are fighting are clever, cunning, brilliant—brothers who share a mind, a body. Who work perfectly in sync, who are practiced at tempting and terrifying, and who have the essence of at least a hundred tellers at their disposal, in their hoard of blyks.”

  I looked at him, sitting there in the wooden chair Lil had yoinked from our apartment. It was old. My grandfather had made it for my grandmother when she was a young wife. Eap’s overlarge coat spilled out over the handles onto the floor, and the legs of his trousers bagged around his ankles. His face was hollow, yellow, and the black patch made it worse. His fingers even shook slightly, as he clutched his fountain pen.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay. But from what you’ve said about Hans, I don’t see how he’d help much.”

  Lil scoffed. “Logan, you don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “And you do?” I looked at her. “He ran, Lil. He left you behind.” I pointed at Satie, climbing up one of her braids, like half a gold crown on her head, with its halo of blond flyaways. “He left you a sign. Satie was dead. Clay. He doesn’t want to help.”

  “Hans is a ferocious teller, in his way,” Eap said. “And his stories have weight. They have been remembered by many. Retold. You’d recognize most of them, Logan, and there is power in that. And Hans has survived the Grimwoods for years. The man may be a coward, but . . . we must allow him one or two qualities.” Eap sighed and set the pen on the table. “Prissy as a maiden aunt, timid as a wallflower he may be, but he does have something none of the rest of us have kept. An iron core of virtue, and the sour funk of self-righteousness to go along with it. And a pocket of jewels he can scatter, to the gasp and hail of just about any European audience since the turn of the century. A century, mind you,” he wagged a finger, “that I have not participated in on the crust. And yet, I hear. And yet, I,” he gestured to himself, then the surroundings, “here.” He laughed wheezily at his own homonym pun and stood.

  “Isn’t Hans just going to run when we find him? If we find him?” I asked.

  Eap and Lil exchanged glances. “We have a plan for that,” she said.

  I raised an eyebrow, waiting.

  “Too much backstory to go through right now,” Lil said, waving her hand.

  “I’m all over backstory. You’ve read my stuff.”

  She rolled her eyes and her lips quirked. “And some of it’ll attract attention we don’t want if we start telling it all over the place, Lo. Plus, it’s kind of brutal. You wouldn’t be able to handle it.” She leaned forward, coming almost nose-to-nose with me. Satie, not liking the closeness, hissed.

  “Great,” I said. “Fine. I’ll just stumble along behind you guys, trying not to get hurt.”

  “Once we see land,” Eap repeated, ignoring me, “we’ll find the river’s mouth. Then we’ll be following the river,” Eap said, tracing the waving line that lead into the scrawl of trees. “Following it into Mt. Babette, where it originates. Straightforward. Shouldn’t be trouble, so let’s not look for it, eh?”

  “Where are we going to look once we get to the mountain? How are we going to find all this romance and . . . things that will tell us where Lil’s Grey Man is?”

  “We’ll start at the top.” Eap shrugged. “Spread ourselves out on its surface, and work our way down the cliffs to the bottom.”

  “Great.” I leaned the plastic chair backwards on its hind legs—they were bent from my doing this all the time at Mom’s kitchen table. It was, probably, why the chair wasn’t balanced. “Sounds like a lot of fun.”

  Eap went to Lil’s window—it took up all of one cabin wall, with a peaked arch framing the top. “And there it is. The river’s mouth,” he said, pointing. “Euphrates. New Danube. Ellendell.” He gave me a small smile. “Nobody has agreed to a name for it, but it’s been called all these things and more. It was told a long while ago indeed, and it’s something to see. Come.”

  We walked over to look. There it was, a dark mass of land half-under us, split by a run of water. Where it traveled inland, it shaded to jade green, then sapphire blue, a glittering string like silver blue jewelry glowing against the ragged black landscape. Around it, not well-disguised by the overgrowth of trees, were a series of round, waving hills. The river ran over some of them. At the edge of land, it widened and descended over a series of a dozen stair-like plateaus. Falls on falls on falls, white, frothing, with chunks of dark island here and there in the pools and mist. At the edge of the land, it poured out into . . .

  Nothing. Mist.

  But even as I was surprised to see a river flowing into nothing, what I expected to see began to form, to spread like frost, under us. A sea surface. Grey-blue, with fluffs of white wave.

  A sea. Water, along the shoreline. Rapids, where river mouth met ocean.

  “The edge of the firmament,” Eap murmured. “Stop telling new things, Logan. You’ll attract attention.” He waved a hand and my spread of hazy sea disappeared, leaving clean mist.

  “How did you do that?” I asked fiercely. “Lil says you can’t un-tell things.”

  Eap gave me a side-eye. “You can’t easily un-tell. You have to replace tellings, displace them. I am well acquainted with emptiness. You could call it a talent.”

  “Tell Marco,” Lil said to me.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” I grumbled, and left to tell Marco. He simply nodded, and turned us north, the great turbines shifting, the wind hitting me sideways as I walked back across the deck and into the corridor.

  Back in Lil’s room, we all stood at the window and watched the black tide of land approach, then move under us as the ship turned and we lined up with the river. We followed it, riding the air miles and miles above it.

  “There,” Lil said, pointing. There was a sort of hill in the distance—no, a series of hills, regular, lined up, covered with trees. “Xanadu?”

  “Xanadu,” Eap agreed.

  “Should we go down and hide there?” I asked. “Just to buy some time . . . come up with a plan that’s more . . . detailed?” It was quite spooky now, the woods under us. I was being told the tale. I was feeling it, the sinister darkness in the trees; they wanted to reach up toward us and—No, I reminded myself as the shadows below shifted slightly. Don’t let your mind run away with you.

  “Never mind, let’s hurry.” I rubbed at the back of my neck. I was uneasy, prickly. “I feel like we should hurry.”

  “I agree,” Eap said. “We shall come upon the plateau in the next few hours. These admirable cloaking mirrors should keep us shielded from the view of any below. In the day we’ll be blue sky, in the night we will be an odd, dark shape reflecting the dark land. An interruption in constellations, nothing more. I doubt a blyk has the presence of mind to notice, and the Grimms will expect something rather more spectacular.”

  “From us?” Lil raised a blond brow.

  “A driver only sees a screw,” Eap replied vaguely. “A few hours, and we shall be in the thick of it again, children. We should each plan for the worst. Gather a few potent tellings and keep them in your quiver if the unfortunate should happen.”

  He left the room. Lil sat on the table, swinging her legs. She frowned at me. “If you die, I’ll feel pretty bad.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And if you do, I’ll try hard not to feel vindicated.”

  She cracked a grin at this. “C’mon, Logan. It’s pretty cool, right? This airship of yours. I mean, we could end up— “
>
  “Trapped, bodiless, tortured, and eternally mad,” I interrupted.

  “Yeah. But it is kind of fun, isn’t it?

  I swung up onto her bed. “One nice thing is, I’m not worried about what’s real or not anymore. I’m not worried about . . . seeing things. That is, I guess, a nice break.”

  “Yeah. I thought it would be.”

  I scowled at her. “Don’t gloat too much. I’d still rather be home.”

  She kept, wisely, silent. I could feel her watching me as I lay down there in the middle of her garish pillow explosion. I closed my eyes, feeling the slight swing of the hammock—it was soothing—and thought. And thought. And thought. I went through all my stories, all the pictures Lil had drawn, her creatures and jungles, her strange, impressionist sketches, her venture into cubism and wild, bloody, post-modern oil painting. What would she have to use as a defense, if it came to it? I’m sure Lil could come up with something terrifying. Something startling, unusual, that would set an entrenched, overconfident pair of tellers back on their heels. And Eap, he was unsettling anyway. He was unusual. And obviously, powerful. And, I thought, glancing at the dark patch on his face, completely reckless.

  But me? All I could really think of, right now, were the usual things. Dragons. Giants. Vampires. Aliens . . . spaceships.

  Aliens. Spaceships. I realized something. Something perfect.

  These Grimms. They probably didn’t have a whole lot of experience with aliens and spaceships. Or with anything else modern—imaginary or real. How long had they been away from the crust? They had no idea about anything like . . . well, the frag grenades from my favorite video game, for instance.

  I closed my eyes and began to make up a story about a well. A magma well that had a gun on its very top, a ray gun of pure magma pumped through an upward pipe straight from the earth’s mantle. I told it over and over, until I had it in my head: the exact towering shape of the well, its scaffolding, the fat, diamond pipe that wouldn’t melt even with the hottest magma. The huge, bulbous gun which could pivot and angle. The chunks of magma that would spray up into the sky, sparking and steaming and as the beam met land catching trees, wood, rock and dirt immediately on fire. The flames, soaring up like pillars into the sky, pouring out clouds of white steam and grey smoke. The dead-black crater it would leave, the seal of hardening lava rock as the magma cooled—impenetrable. Immobile. Sterilized permanently with fire.