Chasing the Valley (26 page)

 

 

 

It's past dawn when we reach the wastelands.
Empty plains stretch out before us, barren and dead in the morning light. My legs ache from trekking down the side of the mountain; my calf muscles aren't used to moving at such an angle.

I don't want to imagine what lies ahead. The wastelands. I'm heading into the wastelands. The thought sends a queasy jolt into my gut, like I've swallowed a fistful of rotten cabbage. What will we face out there? Unexploded alchemy bombs? An unstable landscape? There could be magical residue in the sand, in the stone . . .

I glance back up towards the mountains. The peaks rise high behind us now: stone and snow against the sky. Despite my earlier resolve, a cowardly part of me wants to turn around. To dart back into the wilderness and follow our song east to the Magnetic Valley.

‘We're coming back,' Clementine says. ‘After we deal with the airbase, we're coming back to the Knife. This journey isn't over.'

Her words are resolute, but there's an odd sort of quaver in her voice. I think she's trying to convince herself more than anyone.

At the bottom of the slope, we stop to assess our route ahead. The ground itself looks gritty, like wet sand, and frosted over in places. It isn't hard to imagine sinking entirely into the muck. I see no signs of fresh water to drink, so it's lucky we've filled our stolen wineskins with snow. There are gentle undulations – mounds of dirt and rocky plateaus – but compared to the mountain range behind us, the landscape looks flat.

‘We won't have much cover,' says Teddy.

‘We'll just have to keep to the shadows,' I say. ‘You know, lurk around the edges of plateaus and stuff. Avoid the empty patches of rock.'

No one else seems keen to go first, so I force a confident expression onto my face and stride out into the muck. It's reassuring that the ground doesn't explode as soon as I stand on it. Perhaps stories of the wastelands' horrors have been exaggerated. It wouldn't be the first time that a scruffer rumour took on a life of its own.

We cross several kilometres of gritty moorland. Nothing much happens, apart from the itching in my neck. Clementine tells me off for scratching it (‘You'll scar yourself before you get your proclivity tattoo!') so I settle for munching candied nuts to keep my fingers busy.

Then Maisy shields her eyes. ‘Do you see . . .?'

I follow her gaze. There's a strange sort of shimmer around the next cluster of rocks: a haze of heat and steam that rises from the earth. We venture forward to take a closer look, and a noxious stink curls up into my throat.

‘Blimey,' Teddy says, coughing, ‘that's worse than my grandpa's old socks.'

The smell reminds me of Rourton's restaurant bins in summer: a piercing combination of rotten fruit and mouldering eggs. I pinch my nose shut and blink away the water in my eyes, straining for a better look at the source of the odour.

It's a shallow pond, its liquid a murky grey. Steam rises in stinking spirals, plinking with sharp little pockets of darkness. A daytime echo of stars: black spots against a sunlit sky. It's our first real sign of magical corruption in the wastelands.

‘Come on,' Teddy says. ‘Let's get going before our nostrils explode.'

The stench fades quickly once we're past the pond, as though it's incapable of lingering on normal air. But even so, I don't breathe easily until the liquid – and its winking black stars – are far behind us.

About an hour into our trek, I spot an overhang on the edge of a vast plateau. I lead the others across to walk beneath its eaves. It feels much safer here in the shadows. The darkness is oddly comforting on my skin, and after a while my itching starts to subside. Occasionally I spot a shimmer in the distance – a twist of strange smoke, or a glint of abandoned metal beneath the sun. But these sightings are few and far between, and this shadowed pathway feels as dependable as any other route we've taken. Step by step, our footsteps converge into a rhythmic trudge.

‘So, how are we gonna destroy this building?' says Teddy eventually.

‘If we could get a fire going nearby,' says Maisy, ‘I could redirect it towards the biplanes. If those planes are loaded with alchemy bombs . . .' She leaves the sentence hanging.

Teddy lets out a low whistle. ‘Gee, we'd want to be a long way off when that lot goes up.'

I turn to Maisy. ‘How close would you have to be?'

‘I don't know. I think it depends on the severity . . . If we could get a big fire going, I might be able to link into its power from further away.'

There's a pause.

‘If we're gonna do this,' Teddy says, ‘we'd better do it soon. Those hunters are still after us, and we left a pretty obvious trail coming down the mountain. And once they realise we're out here . . .' He gestures grimly at the flat expanse of the wastelands. ‘It's gotta be tonight, I reckon, if we want a hope of getting back to the Knife in one piece.'

We nod in agreement, although Clementine doesn't look happy. ‘I still don't see how we're supposed to start this fire.'

I mentally run through the items in our packs. There are clothes, food, sleeping sacks and cook­ing pots. We have only one match left. There is nothing that could set fire to a plane from afar. Nothing except . . . ‘The flare!'

‘What?'

‘The second flare, from the guard tower in Rourton! Which pack was it in?'

‘I don't know,' says Teddy.

We pull to a halt and throw the packs down. I scrabble to open the closest one, hardly daring to hope. I'd almost forgotten about the flare since I removed it from my trouser-leg, back in the forest outside Rourton. What if it was in one of the packs that went over the waterfall?

‘Here, I've got it!' says Teddy, yanking the flare from a side pocket. ‘Do you reckon –?'

‘Worth a try, isn't it?' I say. ‘We know these flares can bring down biplanes. If we can shoot one into the building, and Maisy extends the firepower just before it hits –'

‘Then we'll get a damn big boom,' Teddy says, grinning.

I examine the flare. It's been partially crushed by its days in the pack, and the tubing is a little flaky. Will it still work after being dunked in water several times? I don't know, but it's the only plan we've got.

‘We'll need a high point to launch it from,' I say. ‘Somewhere for Maisy to see what's happening, to control the fire. One of the plateaus, maybe?'

‘I reckon that'd do it,' says Teddy. ‘Hey, it'd be pretty ironic to blow up this place with one of the palace's own flares, wouldn't it?'

I nod. ‘Like shooting down that biplane, but on a bigger scale.' I deliberately avoid mentioning Lukas's name. At this point, it seems easier to pretend he never existed.

We wrap the flare in a protective bundle of clothing and place it back into the pack. Then we hoist our packs on again and continue walking.

Just before midday, we stop to rest beneath a pocket of boulders. We allow ourselves a generous swig from our wineskins and a fistful of broken biscuits. But despite my physical exhaustion, I want to keep moving. It's a strange sort of disconnect between body and mind: one yearns to rest, the other to push onward.

I think the others feel the same; there's a new light in their eyes, and a flicker of hope in their voices. I'd put it down to the sugar in the biscuits, but I think it's something more than that. The simple fact that we have a plan – even a rudimentary one – provides a new burst of energy. We have
hope
, we have a
purpose
, and that's better than anything else we've experienced in days.

As morning fades into afternoon, we set off again towards the fortress. We stick to the shadows of a plateau's overhang, and pass the time by sharing tales of life in Rourton. Teddy has fun relating some of his most daring heists – often to the mock horror of Clementine and Maisy, who are personally acquainted with many of the burglar's victims. I join in with tales of mishaps in Rourton's dodgiest bars, and soon we've almost forgotten the danger we're in. And all the while, the fortress grows closer: first a shadow, then a silhouette – and finally a distant building, with contours clear against the sky.

Suddenly, Clementine shrieks. I'm in the middle of a laugh when it happens and it takes me a couple of seconds to register that anything is wrong. By the time I spin around, Clementine's knees are sinking rapidly into the mire.

Teddy swears and grabs her under the arms. Maisy and I each seize a hand and pull, but our efforts make Clementine scream in pain. ‘You're tearing my legs off!'

‘You're sinking!' says Teddy. He gives her a more violent yank and Clementine screams again. This time, though, terror cuts the sound off short.

‘Stop pulling!' says Maisy. ‘Clem, you've got to relax. Take it slowly.'

Clementine looks about as relaxed as a lobster in a richie's cooking pot, but she nods. She takes several deep breaths, then lets her limbs slacken.

‘Good, that's good. Now just lift your legs out slowly. Don't fight the sand, just slip around it.'

We help support Clementine as she slides herself upwards into our arms. It's slow and hard – my own knees buckle from the strain. Clementine isn't a heavy girl, but the added bulk of her pack is enough to make the weight unbearable. It only took a few seconds for her to sink to her knees, but it seems to take forever to wriggle out again.

‘That's it!' Maisy staggers under her own share of the strain. ‘You're almost there. Just stay calm and stay slow.'

There's a final slurp of suction as we pull Clementine free. We tumble back onto the rocks, wheezing and gasping in exhaustion.

‘What the hell was that?' manages Teddy.

Maisy shakes her head. ‘It's quicksand . . . but there can't be quicksand here. It's not geologically possible – the earth is half-frozen.'

‘Yeah, but this is the wastelands,' I remind her. ‘This was where the palace tested all their earliest alchemy weapons. Clementine might've just stepped in the wrong place and set off an unexploded spell.'

‘Well, I'm not walking on any more sand,' says Teddy. ‘I reckon we'll be safer up on the rocks.'

I shake my head. ‘We'd be too exposed. We're a lot better hidden down here.'

‘So what? We'd be a lot better hidden if we were six feet under the quicksand, too, but I wouldn't call that a happy ending.'

‘Do you really think there's more than one quicksand trap around here?'

Teddy nods. ‘I reckon that's what the smuggler's song is on about.'

‘How the dark swallows light,'
says Maisy. ‘The ground was trying to swallow her.'

‘Yeah, exactly. And you know the next line –
When the glasses of hours hold on.
Well, it fits, doesn't it? Hourglasses are about timing things, right? Being quick? And hourglasses are full of sand, so if you put the clues together . . .'

He's right. Quick and sand. Quicksand. I mentally kick myself for being stupid. We shouldn't have taken the song for granted. We knew that those middle lines were about physical locations, but I never bothered to stop and decipher them properly. And as a result, Clementine could have died.

‘All right,' I say. ‘We'll stay away from the sand.'

We wait about ten more minutes, until our breathing returns to a normal pace and Clementine looks strong enough to walk. She winces with each step, and I feel a surge of guilt for our initial yank against the quicksand. It's lucky we didn't break her ankles.

‘Come on,' says Teddy. ‘Don't put your feet on anything that's not solid.'

We clamber along the sides of the plateau, grabbing for handholds and places to plant our feet. In any other circumstances this might seem like fun: a troupe of crabs, scrabbling sideways along the rock face. But now, with unstable sand to catch us if we fall, it's terrifying. My pack feels heavier than ever. With every swing of my arms, it seems to drag me backwards towards the sand.

‘This isn't working,' Clementine says. ‘We've got to get up on top of the plateau.'

I shake my head. ‘But we'll be in plain sight – there's no cover up there.'

‘Can you make an illusion to cover us, Danika?' says Teddy.

‘Not while we're moving. I can only do it if the magnets are still.'

‘Well, maybe we should stop,' says Maisy. ‘We could hide under an illusion until it gets dark.'

No one else has a better idea, so we agree. Despite our earlier burst of energy, the terror of Clementine's accident has leached our strength. I think we're all secretly keen for an excuse to rest. We scramble up to the top of the plateau and surround ourselves with the magnetic circle. I cast the strongest illusion I can muster. The air shimmers and I know the magnets have caught it.